These are implemented or done:

– One more spaceship
– Asteroids with random color tone, velocity, angular velocity and spawning location, mining asteroids
– Federation newspaper (unfunctioning for now)

Today we are going on with the list we made. Some of the crucial things are;

– Store transactions after docking at station
– A federation newspaper that includes the story. The story will affect the space market.
– Buying materials and spaceship parts in federation market station
– At least 4-5 more planets
– Functioning federation newspaper with random issue per day
– Security for federation stations (if you are caught with illegal material on you or if you attack them)

By this point the game will be playable but there are also extra stuff we are planning to add if we can manage to finish these;

– Cargo ships that move from market to market and that you can shop on if you dock
– Other merchants with their own stations moving around
– Pirates (enemy AI and combat)

You can watch the development stream here: http://www.twitch.tv/dinoemirikol

Here is another spaceship with double lasergun weapon and the first issue of Federation News. I guess federation didn’t bother to pay for a graphic designer

Soooo many things left to do !!

-Dmeat

While all the compo entries are in, we’re still streaming the development of our jam game, so pop in and say hi!

twitch.tv/literalgames

Meanwhile, we’ve completed the first sprite sheet (which seems a little late at almost 50 hours in!)

It’s all coming together, although we’re not sure how far we’ll get…

Wish us luck, and good luck to everyone else!

Hello everyone. This is my entry for the Ludum Dare 48. I wanted to create a platformer where dying let you travel through dimensions. Then see yourself moving around and being able to use yourself as a block.

 

Aside from that I also wanted to add typical platformer items such as platforms, falling blocks, some enemies… but I didn’t have enough time Therefore I focused a bit more on Level design and added some levels that shoudl take you some time to solve.

PLAY

Tags: #LD48 #LD30, connected, die, platform, platformer, posva, Worlds

New graphisme!

I couldn’t finish my game, but at least I submitted something “playable”.

DUAL Adventure: LD page | Play it (Web, HTML5)

This is also my best attempt at the platformer genre, so I’m happy with what I’ve achieved given that I only had day an a half.

Anyway, see you next LD! Now is time to play games!

Our team for the LD 30 Jam is still going strong, 15 hours to go. The game is about – you guessed it – connecting worlds by building bridges. The cultures that live on the worlds evolve based on the resources you provide them access with. Simultaneously, the evil enemy culture is growing without your influence, and your goal is to nurture the friendly cultures to a level where they can defeat it.

The evil red empire is growing! Nurture the other empires to defeat it!

Can’t wait to see what everyone else has done with the topic! But first, the UI and controls have to be finished and the game be balanced. Also we encountered some interesting ideas and techniques which might make it into a postmortem.

Tags: jam, LD30, progress, unity

 

unfinished. working tomorrow until 17 hours from now so it’s impossible for me to finish in time

pac man tribute/reboot

play two “worlds” at once using the same controls

turn based

lose points for inefficient moves (ramming into walls and allowing enemies a free turn etc… this happens a lot if you don’t take care, considering the maps are different)

when powerups are in they will probably be able to be shared between the “worlds”

C&C appreciated

As usual i spent too much time on aesthetics. It’s built in Fusion 2.5 and to be honest I don’t think it was a great choice. enemy pathing was hindered by a nasty bug  for about 10 hours due to complex workaround for the lack of hierarchical structure in fusion 2.5

the images are GIFs, please click through

I had lifts in there about a day ago, then took them out temporarily. Since reworking it, I found they provide a nice extra mechanic in the levels, especially if you have to rely on them to get to certain areas of said level.

Elelator go down the hooooooole…

Now with lifts! And they go up and down.

Time for a post-mortem.

Preparation

This #LD I’ve decided to use the framework I made last time: for a point-n-click game.

Before the competition I decided to add some more features, like a dialog system and a way to play sound. Also the Javascript should now work correctly on iOS and Android as well.

Theme…

NO! I didn’t want Connected Worlds… I had some great game ideas with other themes, but not this< theme. What should I do? Well, I went for a short walk outside and imagined two worlds close to each other. What if the worlds are very close, but not yet connected? How about a love story? Yes! A love story! This is the basis of my game.

The puzzles

When making a point-n-click adventure game one of the most important things to have is: good puzzles. If the puzzles are too obvious people will make their way through the game in a matter of minutes, if the puzzles are too complicated people will quickly give up and hate it. This is the moment I panicked, I was again clueless and had no good puzzle ideas. That is when inspiration came from my living room… the Mythbusters. My love story was featured around building a rocket. And where did I learn everything I know about building rockets? The Mythbusters. That is why they just had to become part of my game (and they did!).

Drawing! Drawing! Hand cramp.

The biggest drawback of making a point-n-click adventure is the visuals… I love playing the genre and want to bring back the fun I had with games like Gobli(ii)ns, Monkey Island, Larry, DOTT etc.

Instead of drawing on the computer I decided to use something new (for me):

1. Draw on paper (using pencil)
2. Make photo with phone
3. *instant dropbox sync*
4. Open in GIMP
5. Play with threshold
6. Do digital coloring
7. (optional): Turn layers into animation with sprite GIMP plugin

The amount of drawing to programming was 90/10, maybe even 90/5/5 if you include making music and sound effects!

In the end I decided to also push my hand-drawn artwork on Github, you can check it our here.

Music & sound fx

For the music I decided to use SoundHelix. It took me a while to figure out how to change the settings to get something which matches the scene I was working on, but I love the result.

The sound effects where all quick hacks, shouting at the microphone. I’m especially proud of my lions roar, which turned out much better than I anticipated.

Fun!

I’m very pleased with the result, it is much better than the first LD I finished. It makes me feel so proud when people say it reminds them of the fun they had with the good old point-n-click adventures. It is my duty to make you laugh and have a good time!

To play my game, click here.

The finished game PhaseShift

With this game, my 4th ludum dare concludes. PhaseShift turned out to be a arcady bullet-hell game about colours and bullets (obviously) and it’s the first time I would call a LD game of mine finished!

What went right

Pretty much everything.

The idea

Since the theme ‘Connected Worlds’ came out with about 600 votes more than any other theme in the final voting round, I started thinking about ideas on friday. This was a slight gamble but it worked out well for me. Normally I take ages to find an idea I like, so being able to think on the idea earlier was very helpful and freed up lots of time.

Luckily I came up with a very simple idea for the game which really played to my strengths: Simple geometric shapes as visuals, gameplay that does not require levels, no fance mechanics that take ages to implement.

Because of this simplicity and headstart I was able to implement almost all of the mechanics during the first day. I did spend a few hours adding some progression to the game on sunday, but overall the choice of the right idea enabled me to do lots of polishing and also include music for the first time!

Polish

The most important lesson I learned during this LD was that visual polish goes a long way in making your game look and feel better.

As an example, compare these two screenshots. Overall they are only about 4 hours in work time apart:

The visuals after the first day

Visuals after some polish

Simply adding a gradient in the background and moving the score to the middle already made a huge difference in how nice the game looked.

Another helpful way of making the game look nice was Paletton with which I spend most of my first day finding a good colour palette for the game, and I think it really helped making the game look nice.
(Pro tip for Paletton: First select a few nice colours through one of the “composition” modes, then change to custom and fine-tune your colours by holding shift. This really helped avoiding some colours just completely blending in with the background.)

Even more polish with Tweening

Because I’m bad at animations and I am using simple geometric shapes, I had to add responsiveness and  juice via tweens. In this game almost everything is tweened, from the rotation of the cannon barrel to the portal “animation”.

It was also a great way of making the game feel more responsive by tweening the size of the bullets every time something happened in the game, in this case when the player collected a bullet or a new bullet was shot. This, in addition to some camera shake, made the game feel alive.

Music and sound effects

This was the first time I was able to include my own sound effects and a background track in my game. I spend about 4 hours just on composing a track in LSDJ (which is also the first track I ever finished in LSDJ!). I think that gave the game a complete feel and made it really responsive.

Making all the sound effects in LSDJ also had the advantage that I could re-use sounds from the background track for the sound effects. This made the overall sound design a bit more cohesive.

Use shortcuts and hacky code

Another important lesson I learned this weekend that I can totally write hacky code for a jam. Adding some of the later features in quickly became a big ball of callback functions and uncaught exceptions, but in the end it all worked out well!
Additionally, I was able to reuse some of my code quite nicely which saved time. Instead of making a nice-looking title screen, I simply duplicated most of my game code, applied a blur filter on the level (which took longer than I thought, but I learned a lot) and put some text on it. With just a few modifications I had an interesting title screen without adding much compexity!

Conclusion

Overally this was the best ludum dare for me so far. I got to complete a full game with visuals, decent gameplay and sound, and all that without being overly stressed.
I also learned to use new tools, such as Paletton, improved my knowledge with others (HaxeFlixel, LSDJ) and got closer to knowing what I’m good at and what kind of games I am able to make.

If you want to see all of this in action, you can play and rate my game here.
You can also follow me on twitter @KeyMaster_ where I post about my ongoing game development projects.

Thank you for reading and until next time!

KeyMaster

I never have worked before with AppWarp or Unity Animator,so I learned a lot this LD30.

Today I learned how to make the chat with AppWarp and the animation transitions with animator.

This is a great day, I have finished the basic game mechanics, but still need how to synch network objects like rigid bodies shared between players. In PhotonCloud is easier, I was searching in google but only found the old way to do it, like we did with socket messages, and i dont like it, so i opened a ticket in appwarp support service to learn how to sync rigidbodies using network views as easy as photoncloud does.
Anyway, so tired, i need to eat XD

Tags: appwarp, game server, learning fast, multiplayer online, photoncloud, servers, unity, zen

These are implemented or done:

– Scanning the area by radar (upgradable) and showing the materials on planets
– Minimap icons, icons of planets according to the materials on them
– Docking to home station and being able to open station menu window
– Spaceship stats show on screen, fuel gets consumed, cargo gets full, materials get gathered
– Zooming by scrolling middle mouse button
– Federation market station for shopping purposes
– Moving at light speed
– A complete world map that can be toggled
– Shooting by laserguns
– Upgrading the ship after docking at station if required materials are satisfied
– Asteroids, one more planet, missile launcher, laser cannon

Today we are going on with the list we made. Some of the crucial things are;

– Store transactions after docking at station
– A federation newspaper that includes the story. The story will affect the space market.
– Federation fuel station, buying fuel
– Buying materials and spaceship parts in federation market station
– At least 4-5 more planets
– Explosive material that reacts to heavy damage on ship when carried
– Security for federation stations (if you are caught with illegal material on you or if you attack them)

By this point the game will be playable but there are also extra stuff we are planning to add if we can manage to finish these;

– Cargo ships that move from market to market and that you can shop on if you dock
– Other merchants with their own stations moving around
– Pirates (enemy AI and combat)

You can watch the development stream here: http://www.twitch.tv/dinoemirikol

Here are the new graphics done, will be screenshots soon:

 

 

I was making a game about planets, but I started over on sunday so now I have this.

Hey guys!

I started a little late but did it anyway: I entered LD for the second time! However, I must say I’m less satisfied with the result than I was the first time, but this time I worked only about 8 hours on it. (oh, and Game Maker crashed when I hadn’t saved my file for 2,5 hours… *cries*) If I had more time I would improve the levels because I think they’re not really interesting right now. I would also improve the graphics, especially those ugly ‘button’ tiles, and add some sound effects. Big inspiration for me was Fancy Pants Adventure; the drawn-like character and animations, and the music in some way, too.

The mirrored effect really really confuses me when I try to play my game. I can’t even make it to the end myself :’) But I hope you can! So if you like cats like me, give my tiny little game a try!

 

 

special thanks to rubna for answering  a few stupid noob questions about GM!

 

 

It’s my third Ludum Dare, and it’s first time when i was using Unity3D. I was very excited about this one,  not whole weekend was free for me, but when i was not in my home, i was creating ideas. The idea of this game was much more explanded than it is now, as always i try make too big game in 48 hours.

“Virtuoso” ludum dare page

Virtuoso screenshot:

 

What went wrong:

• Graphics. In this kind of game i really do not need tons of graphics, but i just ran out of time.
• Ideas. I had so much more ideas about story, mechanics, but i spend too much time on not that important mechanics.
• Animations. Game have only few animations, but i planned to do lot of them to make good game feel, but once again, i had no time.
• Music. I used generators, then edited it, but it was not what i wanted. Anyway, in my other games i have even worse music, so this one is not that bad for me.

What went right:

• I can’t say main mechanics is very good, but it’s what i was expecting.
• Game story. It’s not very good, but i never had any kind of story in my other games, so i am proud of it.
• Sound effects. Personally, i love those sound effects, have no idea how to describe it, so just try it .

Conclusion:

Not good as i expected, but better than ever before. Waiting for Ludum Dare 31 and going to play all other games made in Ludum Dare 30!

 

 

I’ve been developing my game, Flipside, on Mac OS X and everything compiles fine. I’ve been trying to compile it to windows however I keep getting compiler errors not due to the code but because I am inexperienced with compiling on Windows. My previous Ludum Dare Entry (28) did compile on windows but that was only a 2D SFML game but this time round, I’ve made a 3D entry.

The game is programmed in C++11. The libraries I used were SFML 2.1, OpenGL, glm, glew.

If someone could compile this to work with windows, I would be so grateful as I am having some problems compiling on Windows (dll hell). 

 

 

Tags: help, help me!, Windows, windows build

I’ve always wanted to make something that simulated a social network, but just as a short and silly project. For this ludum dare I only had one day available so it was a good opportunity to try this idea. First I was going to make some kind of “choose your own adventure” with the context of using a social network, but I had played something similar not too long ago.

I started creating an activity feed to create the mood of using a social network. I added a photo of Phil Fish and wrote a couple of quotes to test the mechanic. And that’s when I thought:”Hey, this could be funny with more characters and quotes.

So I included 9 more characters and someone suggested me over twitter to generate random quotes, which was a great idea. Once I had finished adding more content I made a few tweaks and added some links to twitter and my website(disguised as FAQ and Pivacy Policy).

I added a button to share the game on Twitter, but then it hit me, it be more awesome to be able to share something cool you saw on the activity feed. So I did a small patch to save quotes and share them over Twitter.

By then I was out of energy and with a pair of hours left. When I was going to submit my game I found out that, once compiled, the twitter button is buggy as hell, and I had to spend another hour trying to do a messy fix.

So it’s done and ready to “play”, let’s see if players have a few laughs with it 😀

Play “Ultra Realistic Social Network Simulator”

Ultra Realistic Social Network simulator recreates the whole experience of using a social network. You can’t win or lose, just waste your time watching the activity feed.

Features:

-Watch random updates from different characters.

-Over 70 pre-made status updates plus lots of randomly-generated quotes.

-Mark your favourite quotes and share them on twitter.

-Pop-ups with warning messages.

-No annoying chat sounds.

-Procrastinating has never been easier.

-94.9% more random than your average game.

 

 

Everything was built in the 48 hours, humans, guns, buildings etc, using Unreal Engine 4 and Blender.

Fully dynamic lighting, time of day, textures etc. The demons have 30k triangles and feature realtime Sub Surface Scattering and animated polygon/texture damage.

On the very very high likely hood that your computer can’t handle it (I barely get 40fps on my GTX 760 and I can only record at 10fps), here’s a video where I beat the game [3:01 minutes].

 

And the game download. Making of + Timelapses coming soon  =)

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=36798

In Labyrinth Challenge you navigate a multi-dimensional maze trying to find the treasure.

Each maze consists of three worlds, the top one has grass floor, the middle one dirt floor and the bottom one stone floor. The teleporters connect the worlds. Blue teleporters will bring you to the world below the one you are currently in and the orange ones will bring you to the world above.

The mazes are randomly generated. Once you have beaten a maze, the difficulty increases and the next one will be bigger.

Here’s a gameplay screenshot.

Play

• Web version (requires WebGL)
• Desktop version (requires Java)

• Please rate and comment on my game on its Ludum Dare page here.

Controls

• Arrow keys to move.
• Space to use teleporters.
• For the desktop version:
  • F2 saves a screenshot next to the jar file.
  • F11 toggles fullscreen mode.

Screenshots

Source code

The source code can be downloaded here as a zip file containing the LibGDX project and git directory. To import the source code, extract the contents of the zip file, open Eclipse and select File – Import… – Gradle – Gradle Project, then select the extracted folder, hit build model, select all projects and click on finish. If this does not sound familiar to you, please follow some LibGDX tutorials, because your computer needs to be set up correctly for development with LibGDX.