It’s funny and a bit face palming to look through my concept notes for my game WARP WORLDS. For example I totally forgot that I was going to make the World 1 pink enemy jump! That would have been so easy to do and would have made World 1 a LOT better!  

I guess that’s the downside of me getting such a solid and complete idea for my LD30 game so fast that I was really happy with, as it meant that I barely looked back at my notes which is largely why I missed such an obvious and major feature as the World 1 enemy jump (also a lack of sleep hahaha). Another reason is that I only had about 12hrs out of the 48hrs to work out the concept and build the game do to work and family commitments (and little to no sleep).

I’ll be kicking myself for quite a while for forgetting that feature but I’ll add it in to the game post LD30.

I spent a bit of time tonight checking out and rating some of the great games submitted and had a lot of fun playing most of them. After that I played my game for a while and ended up smashing my High Score.

If you think you can beat it, it’s very quick and easy to grab a Windows .exe version of the game from:

http://blue-thumbs-gaming.itch.io/warp-of-the-worlds-fight-and-flight

If you do get the chance to play it, please take a moment to rate it and/or leave a comment. I’m especially keen to get some feedback from anybody who plays the game with their kids aged 4-8, which is the target audience I’ve gone for with this game.

Cheers,

Ben.

Sadly, our game ( the team’s ) wont be ready before the deadline, but this compo, making this my third failure, gave me an idea for something that I will make however. What I plan to create is a game framework for SDL, in which you can easily create 2D games for competitions like this, that way you won’t be caught up on making the basis for stuff (which is always the case for me, I seem to always have some trouble regarding animations). So good luck to the rest of you LD’ers who are still in the compo, may the force be with you.

Fhuh, it wasn’t easay. I hope I can make you laugh with this extremely quickly made game. Sadly, there’s no gameplay that makes any sense, but instead, there are lotsa WTF things.

Actually I’m sad that I couldn’t make a masterpiece like several other guys does in every Ludum Dare events, but hey, it’s about fun, isn’t it?

Try my entry here.

Play the game here – comments and ratings appreciated!

This was a firstie in many ways. It was my first ludum dare, my first game jam, my first finished game, and the first game I ever created without the intention to recreate/immitate an existing game mechanic. About a year ago, I would never have expected to even participate in a game jam like Ludum Dare anytime soon, and here I am with a (more or less) finished entry.

The original idea was to create two worlds, nature and human civilization, coexisting in a subtle balance that could be disturbed by gathering too much natural resources (trees/plants/animals) and other things. I planned to do this visually as well but that turned out to be pretty time consuming, and knowing the mechanics I wanted to implement, I decided to finish these instead. I also wanted to add disasters but I couldn’t add them for the lack of time. The game’s design was inspired by dwarf fortress.

I worked so quickly as I’ve never did before. I cut out a lot of features for the sake of getting some gameplay finished. The menu and credits were extremely rushed and created during the  last hour or two. It turned out to be a very interesting game that can be extended for more in-depth gameplay. Possibly you cannot even win it…

It also has been quite a learning experience. I’ve learned some lessons in AI creation making the commands for the workers. A lot of fun I had making these small sprites (I really loved doing them) and got in touch with a new approach and method to make games. I’ve worked with alot of static variables to design the map and map objects and applied some of my knowledge in memory effective 2D rendering. It was an interesting jam to say the least.

I am looking forward to play all other Ludum Dare entries to check out what others have made during 48 hours. And of course, this will not  be the last time I participate in a game jam too!

Tags: 48h, final post mortem, post-mortem

I’ve added a linux build out of request. I don’t have a Linux setup myself so can’t test it though.
If anyone can test and report back would be delighted.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=14709

finally everything is coming to shape.

10 hours to go

A Confession From a Non-Pro

I’m sad to say but I think I’ll have to give up. I thought I’d take the time and try to keep going for the jam but I’ve hit a bit of a wall and I’m not sure the game will be playable in the ~11 hours I have left.

That said unlike the last Ludum Dare where I couldn’t quite settle on an idea which then, quite obviously, affected my ability to make the game, in this one I managed to come up with a game that I think could be quite viable and interesting. I see this as a positive as it gives me something to work towards in my spare time.

What Went Wrong

• Scope Creep – Originally the game I had in mind felt quite simple and viable for a short 48 hour competition but the more I worked on it and the more I struggled to think how to implement the few features I had the more I realised that it would probably be a bit dull. With that in mind I started to think up ways to make it more engaging and more features slowly appeared. Sadly this also made the game feel less theme appropriate and I ended up trying to shoehorn features into the original concept I came up with for the theme.

• Spending Too Much Time on UI – This is actually a double problem.

1. I always focus too much on the entry point experience, this isn’t so bad when you’re working to a less than tight deadline but in a 48 hour competition it’s killer. This stems someways because I always start 100% from scratch
2. Using the wrong UI technology. For the type of game I’m trying to create I decided to just use Swing UI elements rather than rolling my own “gamey” UI. I thought it would save time in the long run but turned out that even for such a simple game style it caused its own problems. This may be the first thing that changes should I decide to continue this project outside of the jam.

• Lack of Focus When Coding – I kept jumping from class to class, half-implementing features and never quite finishing any of them. This is another thing I do a lot and it’s something I’m trying to improve on. In some ways it’s a good thing, it means you’re in theory never not coding but it is also a bit of an enabler for scope creep and unintentional coupling as you jump between classes that work together then another that will help and another and another.

What Went Right

To be honest not a whole lot went right but that’s OK. As… some people say if things never went wrong you’d never learn anything.

• A variation of ideas based on the theme with time to think on them and choose one
• An hopefully interesting idea for a game
• A game model that should teach me some things that I haven’t encountered so far in other games I’ve tried
• The above model will help me develop

Anyways I’m a bit bummed about my 2nd “failed” Ludum Dare but I’m optimistic that something useful will come of it. I hope this post was an interesting insight into a project gone wrong. If you’d like to see if and/or how I develop this further, follow me on my Twitter @drentsoftmedia.

I was stumped by a bug in my coding but I realized I had completely left out a line of code that I thought I’d put in. Oh well at least I got my music sorted. The music in my game is different between the two worlds but also transitions smoothly. Also I made a creepy ghost boy.

Hi all

Here’s the video timelapse for my entry The Ghosts You Left Me, which can be played here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=11137

This is not 100% complete as there were times when I stopped Chronolapse and forgot to turn it back on (and forgot to turn it off too at times), but it has most of it.

Screenshots taken every 60 seconds. Total time spent on the game 17 hours – for a more precise breakdown on what time was spent on, see the game page ^

TIMELAPSE:

Tags: timelapse

Hello gents! I made a game this weekend, and it was glorious. Specifically, I made a little text adventure about a man on a spaceship. Here’s how I did it:

Step One: The Preparation

I actually had no intention of participating in this Ludum Dare, truth be told. I technically didn’t even know it was going on until two days before it started, but whatever. I made an “I’m In!” post, detailing my tool I would use, a text adventure designer called Quest. I told people that I was making a game to keep myself accountable, and on the day of the competition I made sure to have enough rest, make sure my tools worked, and then the theme was announced. Connected Worlds. I didn’t have any ideas at 9:00 P.M., and my roommates were watching The Princess Bride and Clue that night (both of which I do not regret watching), so I decided to sleep on it. I woke up and started work about 13 hours in, ready to begin coding.

Step Two: The Brainstorm

After taking a shower, I began to think of ways I could use Connected Worlds to make a game. Immediately, my mind went to sci-fi themes. I began concocting a story about a guy on a spaceship looking at a planet. “Okay,” I thought to myself, “lets run with that. Why is the man on a spaceship? Why is the spaceship hovering above a planet?” I decided that the spaceship could’ve been for the last remnant of humanity. The man had been on the spaceship either as an engineer or a passenger himself. Yet, he was locked in an observatory floating above a barren planet. The spaceship was above the planet so to be close enough to actually have humans ferried to it to be rescued. Obviously, something must have happened as it seems he was the only human there.

“Okay, so I have a basic premise, how will that fit with the theme?” I needed a way to implement the “Connected” in “Connected Worlds”. I’m not exactly sure why, but at the time I couldn’t get the picture of a gyroscope out of my head. So, why not use that to go to other places? I added a gyroscope, some string to wind it up, and more background and flavor text to the single room the man was in, now I just needed the mechanic.

Step Three: The Undertaking

I decided that, for this simple game, I wouldn’t need that much gyroscopic logic. I added a Use function that basically said, “If the player and the gyroscope are in the same room (either by inventory otherwise), add both the string and the gyroscope to the inventory. Then, if the player is in the observatory, move him to the research lab.” It was simple, and it could only be used one-way for now, but it was good. So, I needed a research lab to get this party going. I created another room, gave it flavor text and research equipment, and added a journal of research notes the player could interact with. I figured the gyroscope mechanic could work by shifting the player between different sets of related memories, thus he was connected to this world he was floating above. It never explicitly states that the player went to the planet below, but I think it might be able to be inferred…? Maybe.

Anyway, I had the basic mechanic down, and I had a new place for the player to explore. I created a hallway connected to the lab, a greenhouse, and the lobby, which was locked down with a keypad. The player could explore the greenhouse, which was filled with dead plants (which I later added in that you could eat, because reasons.) and had a bulletin board by the door with notes, one of which was a keycode. Boom! First puzzle down! I was on a roll. By this time, it was about 6 hours into my actual work, most of which involved writing flavor text to everything. I enjoy that. I added the correct code to the keypad, and went to work creating the lobby.

Step Four: The Fatigue

I have to admit, I was getting pretty fatigued though. There was so much stuff that could potentially be interacted with it overwhelmed me. Thus, I didn’t add many things in the lobby, not at first anyway. The only thing you could actually interact with was an id card on the desk, which triggered a set of flashbacks designed to blatantly tell the player the horrible things he had done. I’m not very subtle, which my roommate pointed out to me while playtesting. Everything important to the player had interaction text along the lines of “This looks vaguely familiar to you, but you can’t quite place it.” So basically most things the player could interact with had that flavor text. I contemplated ending the game right there at the lobby, polishing it up on Day Two and submitting it, but I decided against it. I needed sleep to clear my head from all the work I had done.

Day One Progress:
Five rooms, 18 interactable objects. I’m not sure how many words I wrote. That would be a nice feature, actually.

Step Five: The Finish Line

It had been nearly 36 hours since the competition started, and I went to church that morning. I got back with only about 8 hours to actually do anything. I began adding a few more rooms to the game, specifically a barrack for the scientists in the lab, a bathroom for said scientists, an airlock next to the observatory, and a bridge that would later be the end of the game. I changed most of the flavor text based on my playtester’s decisions to eat dead plants and break everything, as well as his premise of my blatant familiarity complex. Things were looking good, but I as suffering from more fatigue. I had just “finished” everything up to the bridge at about 4 hours left when I decided that I needed a break. I quickly coded in an ending at the bridge (“Does this smell like chloroform to you?”) giving off the impression that the protagonist was not alone on that ship, and played the game some more to check that there were no obvious grammatical or game-breaking errors. In the end, I had a lot of fun making this game. Thanks for reading this, folks!

Final Count:
Nine rooms, 26 interactable objects, six objects you can take with you, an entity in both the bathroom and the bridge, and two endings. Stay away from dead plants, folks.

So, what exactly went right?

My game is about connection between the player, the cellular automaton (Conway’s Game of Life) and a world of a simple bacteria.
This is a zero-player game. This is not a causal game for kids, it’s casual game for geeks

More info at http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=41177

Tags: cellular automaton, game of life, pixel art

I can’t believe how tired I am today. I went out of coffee this weekend and I was too tired to buy some more today – thats how tired I am

Anyways. I made a game, using Unreal Engine 4 this weekend. Not everything went as planned for my first LD entry, but I am happy with it.

The Game

You control a UFO with lunar lander type of controls, only one engine to apply thrust upwards and you have to cancel each movement out with a counter thrust, so you basically fly like a helicopter.

The goal is to grab a bit of building material and deliver it into the building zone of the bridge until it is finished. So far so good, I had the theme down.

link: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=40589

The World

The world consists of many small to medium sized floating islands. I planned to populate them with a species that struggled to visit their friends and families that lived on another island. But I had to cut the population for time reasons (only indicators are the hot air balloons).

The Good Things

• I like how challenging it is, I love challenging games in general, gives you a bit of satisfaction beating them.
• I made something that looked good, for me as a software engineer, art is always the hardest part.
• I MADE A GAME AND RELEASED IT

The Bad Things

• you guys don’t seem to like the controls or how challenging it is
• I had no time to build up a proper communication with the player. I can not tell you why or how you are supposed to build a bridge. With the knowledge I have about Usability and User Experience, I am not happy with the result.
• I had to cut a lot of cool gameplay mechanics due to time reasons 😛
• The building material makes no sense at all, you basically grab rocks and throw them at a bridge to build it 😛

Conclusion

For my next LD, I will probably do something smaller, probably 2D to implement a bit more stuff. But actually I am really happy with the outcome of this one, even though it has it’s flaws.

Timelapse

I recorded pretty much every second (minus the hour my internet crapped out) and I made a little timelapse. 30 hours of work compressed to 18min.

I couldn’t make is shorter, it is already way too fast to not get headache watching it 😛

Tags: postmortem, timelapse, ue4, Unreal Engine 4

It seems we’ll just stick with this name – probably because we’ve somehow ended up with having Oculus Rift in our game.

Meanwhile, one mysterious nightscape.

I was about to participate in this LD, but I didn’t prepare it well enough. I wanted to try the libGDX library/game engine, but I didn’t set it up before the compo started. So day 1 I was mainly busy getting this fixed, thinking of a game concept and partly recovering from friday’s party. At the end of the day I had nothing but the result of a quick tutorial.

Day 2 I couldn’t bring up the motivation to continue with the challenge, so I continued on my own pace and took my time to learn about the libGDX framework and game design.

First… LINK TO MY GAME PAGE: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=41234

Whew, what an experience. This is my first “real” game I’ve made on my own, and it was a great lesson in managing time above anything else. Here’s some screens… I’ll say my excuse for complete crap assets was “it’s art, you don’t get it:”

(I spent way too much time on creating a Noe-esque, Enter the Void-style intro because why not)

Art assets = almost nonexistant. But trust me, there’s something going on behind the scenes here. I think. Maybe.

What is “MMOCRAFT: A CONNECTED WORLD”? You play as a man. I think he’s named Bob. It’s open for interpretation. Don’t worry. You wake up in your room. You can explore your room. Your world is bland and unmoving. But if you explore, you’ll soon discover you can log into your computer, and play WORLD OF MMOCRAFT. You can go on quests. You can grind. You can get frustrated in PVP. You look for a group to run a dungeon, but you might have to re-queue since nobody needs DPS and you should feel bad. You try to get to endgame. Why? Because that’s what you do – shuddup don’t question the MMO format. It’s abstract and weird. I had some big, scripted, meta sequence at the end that reflected on the actions you took to get there, and if it really was a game, and if it really was a connected escape to another world or just a monkey-banging-on-a-typewriter-simulator. It was supposed to happen if you could grind to level 60 under a certain time period, but I had trouble triggering it – maybe I can patch in the REAL end in a game-of-the-year edition steam release. Someday. Right now, it serves as an artistic reflection on the act of leveling in an MMO, and if connecting to a virtual world really is an escape for us, or a masochistic beating.

Things I learned because I suck (or am I awesome?) at making games:

1. Creating a game almost completely in Java in libgdx is verbose compared to modern tools I’ve seen (but haven’t used). Fun for programming – not fun for quick iterations.

2. Wasted a ton of time creating my own text handling and text outputting classes, utilizing my own font I created. Looking back now, I bet there’s a library out there that gives me the flexibility and animation I needed for text output – I just dove right in and thought I could make it myself.

3. Don’t wait for the last 20 minutes to create your art – I should have left out some features and made it a little prettier to look at. Wanted to teach myself to create solid pixel art – didn’t happen.

4. Think small, iterate larger – Have a core concept for your game that you can spin off quickly and expand upon. I just dove right the fack in.

If my girlfriend doesn’t kill me, I definitely want to do this again in december – and find some easier tools to use beforehand! I guess I have internal ethical issues when creating a “generic” game – I need my game to critique and make you feel. Perhaps next time I’ll let Dong Nguyen influence my design decisions 😉

Feel free to download HERE and check out my github sauce HERE. I might push out a quick hotfix later today or tomorrow to deploy it on a website somewhere so it’s easy to experience it!

Tags: connected worlds, LD30, mmocraft

Hi

Playdot is a game distribution platform for indie developers.
We want to help in hosting Ludum Dare 30 games. All developers are welcome to publish LD games on Playdot.
It’s very simple to upload your game, just choose “Ludum Dare 30” category for it.

Also, recently we’ve added our embedded player function so it would be easy for you to publish your game on any other sites or blogs.

Stay indie!

This is the demo for the carton level and the basement of the realistic level.

Also the difference between the real and cartoon characters.

Wow, it was a really intense week-end !

So, there is my entry for the LD: Kill ME.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=29053

I hope you’ll enjoy it !

I’ve been working furiously over the weekend to finish this for the jam.

The concept is that a machine from the future has found its way into your possession, but without the ability-enhancing implants of the future, can you access its contents?

The game (“cybernetics diagnostic”) tests the players’ multitasking while representing the gameplay with a number of secondary data visualizations.

Token screenshot, and back to work!