Just posted a timelapse making of Chroma !

My LD was going so well.

I started out Friday night with some pretty awesome ideas involving randomly generated worlds and the complex economic ties between them. In my vision, you could manipulate the market by feeding both sides of a war, or hiring pirates to take out a crucial shipment of food to a war-torn nation in order to raise demand, or tipping off a nation’s enemy of a shipment from the nation’s ally, in order to turn the two against each other.

With this rather enormous scope, I began making random alien generators, random name generators, and random color generators.

But then, on Saturday afternoon, I just stopped. My motivation flooded away leaving my impatient with pretty much everything, and supremely unwilling to work on my game.

I dropped out, rather than waste such a good idea by scaling it down. I made a quick jokey thing, but it was pretty difficult, primarily because my motivation still hadn’t returned.

And it still hasn’t. I’m just hoping I’ll muster up enough to play some games so people will play my game.

So anyway, if anyone is peering under their bed looking for a sock, and happens to stumble upon my motivation, please send it along.

Thanks.

Finally, I could sumbit the game of mine and my team (nothing official, just group of classmates and good friends). It’s our first ‘big’ LD entry. We’ll be glad if you will play the game .And I have some thoughts about the process and future reminds that I want to share with you.

What went right:

•  Lots of sleep – I had read some postmortems here and I obeyed them in this point. Coding 8~10 hours a day deserves a proper rest.
•  No fatal bugs – except one. My advice: when you have not much time, cheat while coding. Passing a globally defined object as a function parameter instead of pointer to it is bullshit unless your destructor is not destroying anything and I had to learn this the hard way. If your not sure, dont do crap like that and benefit from globally defined object and don’t pass them as parameters.
•  Clear idea – before jam started I wanted to do something including gravitation as a training for some future physics engine. And while brainstorming, that idea grapped my teammates as well, so we came up with the concept quite fast.
•  Level editor inside game itself – brave idea to mess code even more with implementing level editor and failsafes so nobody can access it without really knowing how to activate it. But it worked and saved alot time. And designer could test his level on the fly.
• TODO listing – I dont have a clue how other teams deals with that one. Our team communicated only via Skype, so the tasking others to something could be lost forever in some fiery conversation. My solution came up a few days before the jam, when I coded simple tasking system in php and put it online. Anyone could submit tasks for himself or the others, mark them as completed or delete them. TODO lists are good, they motivate people and we really used that.

What went wrong:

•  Lazyness – I don’t mean to offend anyone. I know my friends, they always wait for the last moment to do and submit their tasks. I just didn’t realize that the same it will be when making games. Textures, levels were made in last couple of hours before deadline. Music was created by accident when I discovered earslap.com (doplnit referenci) and sounds are only debug. Also some features like portals and pickable bonuses were not added before nobody told me, what it should really do and I wanted rather smaller but finished game.
•  Hardcoding – after almost four years I code games (including harsh begginings with realtime snake in command line and turn based fps dungeon crawler also in CMD) I really cannot write code prepared to be later updated with some modules like start and end level messages. And the code, pretty and clean at the start, ends up in total mess of dirty patches allowing me to display something for 3 seconds before loading next level. And that really sucks.
•  Distraction – really don’t play any silly webgame like Shakes and Fidget simultaneosly with coding 😉

TL;DR Takeaway:

•  DO – Sleep alot; make TODO lists; implement developer tools like editor inside game itself.
•  DONT – Work with people you know they have problems with deadlines even if they are your friends; don’t do hardcoding patches and thing you’re not sure of

I don’t know if I still have morale to continue polishing and upgrading game after Jam. I have some ideas that need to be iterated first or how to rebuild the game completely but at this point even adding Options and Help in main menu would require to start from scratch and rewrite tons of patches. I need feedback and support from you guys. If you like the game and think it would be awesome to continue with development of it, tell me, I will highly apreciate it.

We didn’t have time to add sound or music and the game is full of bugs but you should try it out.
Link to game page: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=40028

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=26095

The game takes you to control PARALELLA three treasure hunters in three distinct layers. Heaven, Earth and Water. 
Lead one of his adventurers with mouse clicks and the other will do the same, but beware of your distractions because not following them could mean falling into traps or getting lost in the eyes of the player.

Later than we thought and wanted but still in time!

Play and rate our entry:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=35985

Final level!

I’ve had nothing but bad luck this weekend, and it just hit rock bottom. I managed to submit my entry the other day on time and I thought I was good to go after that. Today I realize there is a small bug that prevents my game from being playable. No problem, I’ll just wait until I get back from work and fix it. So I fix the bug and somehow I manage to undo all of my latest changes I made to my files so what I have left of my project is in an unplayable state and it has already been submitted. And I thought everything was going so well too. I’m starting to second guess joining again next year, now. This is just ridiculous.

Since everyone seems to be doing this..

twitch.tv/literalgames

Oh No! We’ve got an hour left and about 3 hours worth of work to do… But we WILL complete the game!

Bug testing happening parallel to our feature implementation; will it work in the end!?

Join us live to find out whether we make it through this hell…

Not kidding, that was epic!

The game took ages because every play through is saved to the cloud, you play along with everyone else!

If you beat the game, your statue will be carved for all to see, so good luck!

PLAY HERE

Game is far from finished, but this time IT IS A GAME!

Play it here.

This game is about connected worlds… and love too! 😉
Made with the Blender Game Engine!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=14743

Hope you like! =)

Finally finished and uploaded! Those were intense one and a half days. I had to start late because of my best friends’ wedding on saturday and on sunday I was, as expected, so very hungover. Had to decide between relaxing/doing nothing and starting work on my LD-Game. Turns out I made the right decision.

I’m very satisfied with how the game turned out, but see for yourselves: This link leads to the actual game(page)!

[admode] This game has it all! Particles! Screenshakes! Black holes! Physics! Even…love? [/admode]

Well then, I hope you enjoy playing the game as much as I did creating it. I’m looking forward to playing as many games as I possibly can.

Yours truly,

~ Erk ~

In the name of progress, I give you my starting screeeeen! (game to be submitted soooon)

Mystery! Hexes! Colors!

Collect resources from connected planets on a lightspeed rail system while paying the toll to the stations orbiting those planets. Fail to pay the required toll and lose (in this build, the game will just quit). 

Click the circular arrow icons to change the direction of the rail system. 

Crammed this entry on Monday, so there may be unbeatable/super-easy situations but I wanted to submit anyway

Entry: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=1121

This was my first LD, and I had a great time making my game, Anti Matter.

I may write some kinda post-mortem later on, but for now, I took a bunch of screenshots (and made a few animated gifs!) showing off the game during development. I had a great time making the game, and I think it looks fantastic in motion…in particular, I love the 3rd gif (http://i.imgur.com/EPQe23o.gif).

Hope everyone else had a good time this weekend, I’m looking forward to the next one!

HELL YEAH, WE’RE FINISHED

It took some desperate staring at code, some wild scribbles in Photoshop and communication over the Atlantic Ocean, but Crisis Culture is now finished!

It’s playable here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=26423

I look forward to playing other entries! (I personally really love playing other Visual Novels and Point ‘n’ Click games, so if you’ve made one of those please do let me know, I’ll be all over that business.

Good luck in the ratings, darlings. <3

Hello everyone!

Here is my post-mortem of the game I made for LD30 which is a space colony builder type thing which is named Pocket. If you want to play it, here is the link : http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=25153 .

Engine

For this Ludum Dare, I was considering switching to LibGDX but I didn’t have enough time to learn the engine so I had to keep using Unity. Sadly, the 2D tools in Unity are still quite buggy which created some unexpected bugs within my game.

Programming

For some reason, I thought that it would be a good idea to switch from using C# to using UnityScript. The problem is that I never tried UnityScript so I had to look at the documentation constantly to learn how to do stuff. From now on, Il’ll always test out and learn my tools before starting Ludum Dare because this slowed me down a lot.

Ideas

For last Ludum Dare, I came up with a list of ideas for each time. This time around, I didn’t do that which made me waste the whole of Friday night and Saturday morning from 6 to 8 trying to find ideas in connection with the theme. I finally stopped my decision on a space colony building game on Saturday morning but I should definitely come up with a list of ideas for each theme next time.

Time management

I actually managed my time quite well this time around so there won’t be a lot of stuff in this paragraph. But here’s an advice for new Ludum Dare participants : at the start of every day, make a list of things to do and give yourself a maximum time to do it so that you don’t run out of time.

Tools

There’s one thing I learnt from this Ludum Dare : always test your tools before the start of the competition. When I was about halfway through development, Untiy 4.6 crashed on me and it reset the scene so I had to put everything back in place. Photoshop also had a huge bug which made it crash before saving so I had to restart some graphics a few times. Also, don’t use betas for Ludum Dare. Seriously.

Graphics

I was actually quite proud with my graphics for Pocket. Using a few of the built-in Photoshop tools, I was able to create planets which looked quite nice.

The controls

If I continue this game post-compo, I really want to make it so that multiple controls can be used at the same time so that I can, for example, change my speed while also accelerating. Sadly, this wasn’t possible in the Ludum Dare version so I definitely want to change that.

I would love to continue working on this game. If I do, Il’ll probably switch over to LibGDX or another engine because Unity2D is really buggy. If I make this into a fully-fledged game, Il’ll also want to add a few more mechanics. I just want to wait until the end of the voting period to see everyone’s advice.

Finally.

We finished our Jam entry “WorldGate WG-1”.

Please play and rate the game! 😀

I just submitted my jam entry called Lucy Dreaming which you can find here.

I am quite pleased with the result as I’ve rarely made a 3D game. I’ve had this game on my mind for a while and I thought this particular Ludum Dare would be a perfect opportunity for me to build a quick prototype. Although the end result only resembles about 10% of my original idea, I am pleased that it’s playable and I hope I’ll have the time to do a post-compo version later this year.

The game would have had about 80% puzzles, 20% platforming, more eyes to collect, and several intertwined worlds to explore. Unfortunately, my limited skills could only allow me to implement a short platforming level in 3 days.