I always wanted to make a game where you control hundreds of units and fight against hundreds of  enemies. And this Ludum Dare theme was just about perfect!  During these 48 hours I really knew what I’m doing and what I want. And I’m really happy with the final result!

So here it is, ICE.  ICE is a game where you start with a single base and control your army of ant-like-ships. I won’t spoil more, go find out yourself.

View it here: http://bit.ly/1p60UDT

The game was made using MonoGame Framework, C#. MonoGame is a powerfull, open-source game framework, that I found way better and more flexible than Unity. It’s more low level though.

Also, if you like the font used in game you can download it here: http://bit.ly/1BWtUIr Lower case letters are not supported, but who needs ‘em

Hope you had a great LD!

Intro:

Me and my friend Hellberg decided to do LD30 together. I have done one LD before alone and that was fun. So we went for the Jam.

We started brainstorming at 01:30 after a Dota 2 match. 5 minutes later we went asleep.

Early saturday we started discussing ideas and settled on what became our game.

We made a platformer with 2 worlds(evil/good). Took a few breathers for food, dota and sleep in between making the game.

Tools:

Game maker – for making a game.

Photoshop, Illustrator – for making art.

Reaper, Ableton Live, guitar, bfxr – for making music and sounds.

pen&paper – for making drawings.

What we did right:

I believe we did a good game.

Runs smoothly.

Not overly hard.

What we did wrong:

If something did not work we fixed it or threw it out.

Stuff that did not make it to final game: boss, some npcs, more levels.

What we learned:

How to use Game maker. We learned that Game maker is actually pretty good for making games in a short amount of time.

We will probably be using it more in the future. We delegated tasks well, Hellberg did art and I put everything together and

we both looked at stuff and fixed stuff that went broken from time to time. We also found out that we work well together

and will do more of that in the future.

Our Entry

-Ofursnati & Hellberg

Managed to finish my entry, despite a bit of hardship over the weekend. My total time creating the game amounted to about 30 hours, out of which 8 hours were spent on a train (Ultrabooks hooray!) and another 8 I was asleep.

As soon as I have the time, I’ll start reviewing as many awesome games I can. Congrats once again to everyone who made it to the finish line and see you guys come next LD!

Stinkle, stinkle, little bug, how I wonder what you’ve done.
All around my code, oh my.
Like I’ve gone insane or died.
Stinkle, stinkle, little bug.
How I wonder what you’ve done.

Holy cow, it’s over!

        After 48 hours of intensely staring at my computer-screen mashing random keys till things started happening, I’m super happy with the finished product! However because I didn’t make any music for the game, I feel like it could be much better. I figure in the end it made it more fun to play because I spent my time on game play and  art assets. I did manage to fire up everyone’s best friend Bfxr (or sfxr) and make a few sound effects.

This isn’t even my final form!

What is Enaxius?

        Enaxius is a BAMF. In fact, he’s so awesome that the final boss in this game IS NOT ENAXIUS. Yeah that guy up there, he only works for him… I had planned for the game to span several stages, including a part where you actually travel to Enaxius’ world. The idea was huge so I had to tone it down to fit the 48 hour limit. As turns out, using GM studios timeline to make SHMUP levels takes A LOT more time than I thought it did. That’s why if I work on this game in the future, I’m going to make a level editor…

Wana play it?

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=34538

Here is the link to the page. Please, please, PLEASE if you find something wrong or just don’t like it leave a comment telling me what’s up. Thanks Doods and I’ll see you at the Play+Rate screen 😀

Does anyone who uses unity know why I cant change the position and rotation of a skinned mesh renderer through animation? I add the transform.position curve to the animation and move it about. It shows up in scene view but not in game. I have tried with and without apply root motion. I need this for my game pretty badly.

Hey everyone,

I just published a video showcasing the gameplay for Hermes.

Click the image below or go here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7s-tjzfLLc

The timing is tight ! The dreams were big ! Will our game be enjoyable ? No-one can tell !

My first Ludum Dare entry ever. I’m so excited that I can’t get to sleep even if I’m completely out of energy!

I spent most of the 48 hours drawing pixels in Hexels and trying to make them move in Game Maker, trying to find a way to connect those two planets I drew on the screen.

Then the little spark arrived and made room for an avalanche of ideas which I had to skim almost entirely. I’m too bad as a programmer to make those ideas actually work in just 48 hours.

Anyway this is it!

Ambassadors of Ruin

Entry page

In a nutshell: a trading game in which you must lead a planet to a new beginning by tradingcreating what your citizens demand.

The game was developed with GameMaker: Studio (Standard Edition). That’s why the build is currently available on Windows only.

All graphics were made with Hexels Pro while the looping music was rendered from a slightly modified version of a very little ChucK script I wrote last month. I’ve tried to describe it in detail here, and as you can see it’s pretty basic (and very spaghetti as well).

I really hope that this is not an issue, since I programmed it a month ago. It’s a really really simple script, which of course is also included in the source for everybody to expand and use.

By the way, I hope you can enjoy this little experiment which lives by miracle thanks to caffeine, poorly managed polyphasic sleep, spaghetti code, good will and, of course, Ludum Dare!

Can’t wait to play all your games and, most of all, can’t wait for the next edition!

Tags: ambassadors of ruin, ChucK, GameMaker Studio, hexels

So i decided to contiue creation of my game and created this blog to let everyone who will be interested in what stage game after some minor or major improvement/changes.

Link: BerailTumblr

And First Improvement Logo of my game what do You think about it ? Answer me here or on my blog

Tags: blog, postcompo

Ludum Dare 30 was my second Ludum Dare and took place about a year after I started really learning how to program games. In April, I was happy about my entry especially for my first Ludum Dare, but I felt like it didn’t have enough gameplay, and it didn’t. I also thought that the art and music were decent, but could have been better. I set a goal for myself to create something with more gameplay, better art, and better music in Ludum Dare 30

At first, I was stumped on what game to do. There were a couple themes I was hoping to not be the theme, and this was one of them. I had guests over for about 2 hours at the beginning of the dare, and spent those two hours trying to come up with ideas in my head. Interplanetary Messengers was one of the first game ideas that I came up with. I dismissed it thinking that it would be too hard and overly ambitious, but when I couldn’t think of better ideas, I decided to try it.

Everything went smooth. I stayed up until 4 in the morning the first night, slept for 3 hours, woke up at 7 and kept working. I had trouble implementing the jobs, and had to delete code and try again a few times, but eventually I got it working, and that was really exciting. That was my first problem. My second challenge was implementing the minimap, however after writing some things down on paper, it was fairly easy to put together.

Towards the end of the compo, about 5 or 6 hours from the deadline, I thought I was finished. After playing the game, I realized that there really wasn’t any point to the game. You flew a spaceship around and delivered jobs, but you couldn’t win or lose. I decided to make it so that planets could get mad at you for not delivering to them, and they would stop delivering. That was all fine and dandy to implement, but while doing it, I changed something with the jobs that completely broke the system. I was very frustrated and it took a long time to figure out why, with lots of System.out.println calls and that. I eventually pinpointed the problem. I had a String wrong. One string was jobImage when it should have been planetJob and that broke it. Facepalming was a big thing here.

I was really happy with how the art turned out. I spent a week or two before Ludum Dare just practicing pixel art. I looked up tutorials, learned some stuff, then had my friends tell me random objects to create. I feel that this really helped me improve. The music was decent. I’ll repeat what I said to a friend, “If I had a dollar for everything I know about Music Theory, I’d be in debt.”. Making the music for me was just putting down some random notes and hoping that they would sound good together. In the end, they did, which was good.

What I did wrong

When I did the game, I was a little suspicious about planet distance. It took about 2 minutes to get to a fairly close planet, which seemed like a long time. I made it so that the player could buy a boost and a speed upgrade at the shop, and thought that might help. After I submitted the game and got some feedback, my suspicions were confirmed. The distance between the planets were indeed too large, and that made for it to become boring pretty fast. People said that they made it to a planet and died right before they actually got there, which spawned them back at the original planet, so they quit.

What I will change

I plan on working on this game to improve it and make it better. I will change the distance between the planets. They’re too far and it just took too much time to get to different planets. I also will tweak the controls. I got reports saying that the controls were a little difficult too. I agree with that too. Right now, the mechanic for respawning is that the player respawns at the last planet visited. For some people, this has caused some frustration, especially when they died very close to the planet. I might change this so that the player spawns at the planet they are closest to.

I really appreciate all the feedback that I have gotten. I also have really enjoyed playing submissions. I have played 33 games so far, and I plan on playing lots more. Great job everyone and to the jammers that are still coding: you can do it!!!

Play Interplanetary Messengers here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=25675

The game is nearing completion! We have two enemies, six weapons and a huge connected cavern world to explore!

Welcome to the post mortem of Space Mail. The game that pits you against the odds in the ultimate space mail sorting puzzle. 

Firsts

This was my first LD48 entry and my first time making a complete game using Unity. It was also the first time I’ve made a spacey game.

Concept

After having many ideas about planets and connecting planets ect. I decided on an idea about mail and connecting mail.

This was my game design doc.

The idea was to have ships carry in alien mail and the player would use conveyor belts to direct it to the correct output shaft.

Development

I originally starting making the game in the Unity 4.6 beta. Bad move. After spending quite sometime getting a fancy UI going (Very easily done in new Unity) I realised that Unity doesn’t, obviously, ship the beta unity player to people. Thankfully I was able to open my project the the last stable release without any issues, I just had to remake the UI.

Unity made a nice change from my usual game development.

The Game

The finished game.

It’s a bit too hard, buggy and has a crap GUI. But it’s the first game I’ve actually completed in a long time. It was also, up until recently, impossible to win the game. I had spent all my time developing the game and left none for actually testing it plays well from start to end. Something I’ll do differently next time…

Conclusion

LD48 was a stressful but fun experience! I’d highly recommend it to anyone who feels their current project is losing steam.

Tags: postmortem

I’ve finished my first official Ludum Dare game. Even If i’ve missed the beginning date of this edition, I’ve wanted to participate, so I’ve made something… In only 12 hours (more or less).

Connect planets !

Go have a look on it over here !

I know I haven’t posted anything since the start of the Jam, but here is the first build of the game we are working on.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/25330825/Games/SWITCH/SWITCH.html
It’s pretty simple. Just hit all the switches to clear the level. No biggie.
Known Issues:
*The switches are VERY sensitive. We’re working on that.
*We didn’t get a chance to put in all the assets as you can probably see
*Some of the music and SFX are missing
*There’s only a kill plane in Level 2… so don’t fall out of the stages in the other levels.
*Level 7 (the final one)’s End Trigger isn’t working so when you jump into the sphere, you just fall forever. xD
*You clip through the moving swithces sometimes. Trying to figure out how to fix that.

This was created using PlayMaker.

let me know what you think! Thanks.

Click to go to the game page!

It’s done! Since the last update, I’ve added a goal (buy all the planets), rebalanced everything to be more interesting, and added a bunch of quality-of-life improvements. (Windows stay on screen, you can rename lorries, etc.) It feels like an actual game now, and I’m really happy with it.

It’s the sort of thing I might expand in the future, but currently I’ve got waaaay too many projects that need finishing first. Follow my site, or my Twitter account for more info! 😉

Tags: final, jam, unity, unity3d

I’m recovered from the post Ludum Dare daze and now have uploaded the time-lapse of my game’s creation.  I find it a lot of fun to watch the hours go by in mere minutes.  You can watch it over on youtube.

Hey there, folks. In case any of you were expecting or hoping for us to put out a game, that sadly couldn’t come to pass. After learning on Saturday morning that my basement had flooded, I was forced to spend my allocated development time on fixing that issue. Max dropped out promptly afterward, since neither of us have the skill to independently make a game. Better luck next time, perhaps.

—Joey Disposable Thumbs

always fun to see

here on youtube

Click the image for a larger, longer, better version!