Hi everyone,
As I said in previous posts I joined this Ludum Dare along with 3 other friends. We shared space, food and drinks but worked on our own compo games.
So here they are:
IN BETWEEN:
A Roller-Skating A-List Odyssey:
Conflicting Landscapes:
Oooover the double rainbow (Baldaquin IV):
What we did
We made a-maze-ing game. (And a lot of bad puns as the tiredness levels neared fatal.) We found an idea that we all liked quite quickly. The concept was a maze game where the character has to navigate and do tasks in a maze that exists in parallel worlds.
Rei actually knew how to create art for the game and immediately started illustrating it. We thought out the storyline and implemented world generation. Then we started working on the levels.
In the end we almost completed our goals, at the cost of many many bugs despite of which you can still occasionally play the game.
What went well:
* We knew right away what kind of a game we wanted.
* We had art from Rei who seemed to work non-stop from dusk til dawn.
What could have gone better:
* The haste caused the code to become quite unmanageable which resulted in a lot of bugs. (Refresh often fixes most of them.)
* Our framework was not quite ready and tested in time.
* We had some issues with hardware which caused unnecessary stalling.
What will be redone:
* Bug fixes, refactoring code.
* Adding art that we forgot about…
* Complete ambitions. (And more.)
Here is the game i’ve made for this Ludum Dare :
You can find out here on the account of the Nice Penguins : http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=28578
This is my crew for making videogames : http://nicepenguins.tumblr.com/
Striwx
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=40304
My friend and I are proud to have finished our first Ludum Dare game ! It was a really great experience and we had a lot of fun creating this little game. We used C++ with the graphic library SFML and the audio library fmod. There’s a whole presentation of the game on the link below the screenshot. There isn’t any rate yet, so it would be really cool if you tried it and rate it ! We would be really thankful
Feedback
What went right
– We had way enough time to finish the game. In fact we finished Sunday, and we had the whole Monday to work on a good music and sound effect
– We had enough knowledge of C++ and SFML
– We still learned and create a lot of new and useful classes
– We think the game is complete
– Friends who tested it thought the concept is fun
What went wrong
– We pretty much suck to create the graphism
– We aren’t better to make fluid animations
– Turned out we couldn’t make a Web version, which is pretty bad, considering it’s way easier to test games
– Neither had we a Mac to compile it and make a Mac version
Overall we had a ton of fun and already plan to take part in the next Ludum Dare !
It was quite the experience to participate in Ludum Dare, very fun and intense. It is also very cool to see what amazing ideas and games people have come up with. We made an action platformer game called “Sunborn: The tale of connected worlds”. Hopefully you will find it fun!
Description
““Sunborn is a Action RPG following a mighty hero with a quest to stop a wizard who is attempting to take over Earth with the power of dark worlds. You journey into the deep hells of the castle where the wizard resides and put an end to his existence.”
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=25586
The LD30 is over, and I’m quite tired because this time i participated alone and made huge mistakes managing my time. In the end i have created something interesting but not very playable at all. That the reason why i wanted to write this postmortem now my ideas are fresh and i clearly know what went right and what went wrong 😛
What went right : IDEA & GRAPHICS
The theme & goal: My first idea for the “connected world” theme was a time connection involving our own planet. It quickly evolved and included some enviromental concerns and climate change awareness. I sticked to it and im happy with the idea and its implementation.
The graphics: After polishing my idea, i had to pick a style. Since I worked alone this LD, I quickly decided for flat low poly style, which is a good decision.
The terrain editor & procedural effects: It works well and im quite happy with the result. I can color vertices depending on some factors and i also can raise and lower water level. It is enough to generate some climate change effects.
What went wrong: TIME MANAGEMENT
The graphics: Yes, graphics also went wrong because its implementation consumed most of the time, and it is a huge mistake. The reason is im a bit greedy and exigent and it’s my first time using 3D. So….. i decided to make a spheric procedural deformable terrain. Yeah, fuck logic, i should have stick to conventional horizontal terrain. I started to fight with 3D maths, meshes, vertices, shaders, etc… and quickly it become a tough war which consumed all my time.
The gameplay: My main idea was a “god simulator” where you can build and populate your present world. Then, depending on the balance of the resources you used, some climate change and world destruction would happen to show you the future consequences of your creation. In the end I hadn’t time to implement this desired gameplay, so I ended putting 4 buttons just to show some of the planned effects (there was more designed, but far more complex to implement).
The GUI & the sound: None. I had to put some unity ugly GUI during last 10 mins just to have something i could upload. The sound was even less fortunate.
Conclusions:
I’m very happy because i’ve learnt a lot. I’ve never touched 3D before and now i have a basic knowledge and i’ve lost my fear to it. Also, now i have a code-base to build a funny “god simulator” without the pressure and time restrictions of the Ludum Dare.
Still, i need to learn to manage time way better. Hope the next time i can make a complete playable game. Cya!
And it’s surprisingly pretty.
Alright so looking back I have never yet gotten around to posting any thoughts on my games. After the event is over I tend to kind of forget about the whole thing. But I’ve remembered this time so I’ll make some notes.
WARNING: KINDA LONG AND RAMBLY
Overall this game was me having another go at a tile-based platformer. Each Ludum Dare I try to do something I haven’t done yet, or something I feel I haven’t done properly. I’ll look at what things I did the last few times and set rules for myself to try and either avoid making the same mistakes or to simple keep things fresh and interesting.
For Ludum Dare 28 (Theme: 10 Seconds), I made a platformer with the restriction that you can only press one button at a time. Overall, a bit of a restrictive mechanic that didn’t work that well in practice, but the main issues I had was that I felt I hadn’t had a proper go at level design, since I completely ran out of time and scrapped half the planned levels in that one. The issues were basically all stemming from poor time management. I spent a bit too much time implementing extensions to the platforming behaviour which in turn didn’t get enough levels to be used. On top of that, the levels were all made manually within Construct, which was slow and tedious and inefficient. I should have either gone with a different approach or used an external level editor.
This time round I didn’t quite get it perfect either, lots of room for improvement, but hey, I only had 48 hours, and I did a few things differently. All the levels still weren’t done very efficiently (notepad), but I got a system in place for the game to create the tiles and things from stored data rather than manually placing things within construct. Also, getting it to automatically place the correct tiles for borders and things so I could simply specify which blocks were solid and which weren’t.
Another key thing this time round was the graphics. Specifically, I quite like the rift effect and how it affects the gameplay. Visually it was something I was tossing around last LD (Theme: Beneath the Surface), and while last time I decided it was too ambitious and went for something simpler (and more boring, bad idea), this time I decided the concept fit the new theme just as well, if not better. If I were to extend the game any further, I could potentially add more “layers” to the game, though I’d also remove the time limit and expand the view.
The tiles and sprites were pretty quick (probably an hour for the lot of them, tops), so that wasn’t something that a lot of thought was put into. Backgrounds are the bane of my existence. Should probably have gone with something other than a single static image, since I simply didn’t have the time to make something that didn’t look like scribbles. But then with the room-based levels I couldn’t really do parallax.
So overall, I’d say that a level-based game design doesn’t really suit me for a Ludum Dare. I’m glad I had another go at it and I’m happy with the progress I made, but the amount of effort that goes into level design does not translate into a lot of time playing the game, so next time I’ll consider something with more replay value. The graphics are something that was simply an afterthought this time, so that’s also on my list of things to focus on improving, and I suppose sometime I should try making a game with more audio quality than simply having shitty sound effects generated with sfxr.
In any case, the Ludum Dare was a lot of fun this time round, and I look forward to number 31 in December!
Alright, after playing a little I got a few questions/dilemmas regarding games scoring.
1. If I use n/a, does it mean that this aspect isn’t rated, rather than is treated as worse than 1 star? It’s particularly important in regard to the games that don’t work; it says not to score unrunnable entries, but I’m not sure if leaving everything as n/a and using the rating comment box does count as “scoring” (since it seems using the comment box just below ratings increased my coolness). ^^” It’s particularly relevant in cases of ratings that might not quite apply, especially “Humour” one (how one does rate a “humour” game if the game apparently isn’t meant to be humorous at all?).
2. If “rating” an unrunnable entry with all n/a’s doesn’t affect its ratings too negatively, is it fair to “rate” it and get coolness rating for that? On one hand, it seems like a “cheap” way to get this, on the other it’s not one’s fault if the program doesn’t run, and they *did* take an effort to get the game and play it; it’s just that they couldn’t play in the end.
3. How to rate “Audio” if the game has no sounds? Contrary to game-dependent Humour, Audio in most cases *improves* the game. Therefore, I’d rather use 1 star instead of a neutral n/a (if it indeed is neutral); otherwise the developer that took an effort (and much needed time) and made some decent, but not outstanding sounds, could be “punished” by getting below-average rating instead of unaffecting n/a.
Hopefully someone more experienced in LD voting can provide some insight here; I guess it might be a matter of personal practices, but still it’s good to know other’s thoughts on that. ^^”
This is my first time joining Ludum Dare, and thus my first post mortem. I successfully squeezed a game out of Processing.js, and it seems okay based on the comments I get.
Here we go:
What went right (beginner’s luck haha):
– I managed to create a game in 48 hours
– time management was okay
– got some audio, to my surprise
– game looks good and the idea was correct
– got a good excuse for the theme 
What went wrong:
– got punished and forfeited a few hours of expanding the game
– slept too much
– graphics was not as I imagined
– got stuck about whether to use noStroke() or not
– some problems with GitHub
– initial background music took too long to load, so had to remove it
Anyways, if you have not played my game yet, go check it out!
The Two Sides of the Rio Grande is a Sim City like game that takes place on the border of Juáres and El Paso.
I was able to get quite a bit done in the allotted 48 hours, the rudiments of a Sim City like game with different characters (Mexicans and Americans) that have different AI strategies. A number of different terrains (roads, houses, jobs, river etc).
The night before LD30 I created a couple of new Open Source projects to be able to use some of my old libraries. Specifically, one for creating Behaviour Trees in C# and one for managing bitmap atlases in XNA/MonoGame.
This was my first LD and I spent it at Isotop, who kindly let us sit in their offices – they even gave us Pizza for the night. Big thanks to Isotop!
I would have liked to have time for sound, but alas, there were bugs up until the last moment. Also, my graphics sucks, drawing is hard!
Well… This is my… Post… Mortem
Click to play ;)
Hm… I am really satisfied with my entry because my recently games was just interactive storytelling. This is my first good “GAME” . This game also helped me with finding my ideal art style. Few of my friends told me : “Ha! This look really Druidish!” and here on ludum dare? In almost every comment people praising this style! And that never happened to me!
I try to make more games with this style!
Also, time management was pretty good too 😀 I had breaktime every two hours and still managed finish the game all alone!
There are a few things what went wrong 😀 Bad collisions, some bugs like opening doors and cabinets after death and some people don’t know what to do (but they still trying!, and that is good!)
Next thing is really bad tileset 😀 Everytime when i building a map, finding good tile take a while.
Tileset
Windows (UPDATED VERSION, Gamejolt) | Windows (ORIGINAL VERSION, Gamejolt)
This is it, folks! My game is finished! My first LD game! I dunno if it fits the theme perfectly, but i’ve done the best i could! Great experience, learned a lot and had a lot of fun too!! 😀
The main idea of the game is to keep going through dimensions/levels (each one with a different esthetic), but if you’re not skilled enough the game is a constant loop. You must break the circle!
Have fun!
Every comment and rate will be welcome. And if you detect a bug/glitch, tell me and i’ll try to fix it as soon as possible 😉
Also the updated version contains:
-Instruction section added, for knowing what to do.
-Little clarification in the goal of the game.
-Reduced the volume of the sfx.
Still, if you want to play de original game made in 72h, download the original version 😀
Don’t to leave a comment and rate! http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=40130
Why this game ?
I had this idea for almost a year(initially a board game) but wasn’t getting an occasion to develop it(probably because of other games(college projects)).
What this game is about ?
As the theme for ludum dare 30 is connected worlds, I tried my best to make the game as per the theme.
The game depicts a fight between three worlds. Three worlds fighting with each other to decided who’s superior.
The tokens can only move to the world’s which are connected to the block it’s already in/
Problems Faced
The initial(and primary) problem was the user input, I was not able to find a solution on how to move the tokens.
Solution – Created the red blocks for each block and turned them into buttons with each button hard coded with a function (there was no time for experiment).
The player turns were not in proper cycle. e.g. if all the tokens of a player are removed and his turn comes, he cannot move his tokens, hence, the game wouldn’t progress.
Solution – Solved using Boolean values and permutation & combination.
Link to the game – Triple Threat
So now that I’ve had some time to digest my experience with Ludum Dare, I thought I’d do a brief post-mortem.
Check out WORLDS 2D if you haven’t already.
This was my first Ludum Dare, and overall I’m pleased with what I was able to accomplish. Obviously there were a few things that I didn’t get to finish before the deadline, and there are a few things I would do differently next time.
What I was able to finish:
Core mechanic
Graphics, including an animated character, transparency effects on worlds, fuel gauge, “return to menu” icon, and end screen animations
Sound effects and music
Collision detection at world edges
Title and ending screens
Tutorial levels
What I wanted to do but didn’t have time:
More levels (I was just getting started)
Glyphs at the end of each level instead of the “goal reached” message.
Level selection on the main menu
Option to switch to fullscreen
Make the music quieter
Indicator for when a world is within range
Title music
Endgame music
Vanishing worlds (like ghost worlds except they fade out completely, killing the player. They do fade in again)
Unstable worlds (worlds that shake more and more furiously as they dissolve, have to get out before they dissolve completely, but are only triggered when the player enters them)
Non-numeric timer for unstable worlds
What I did right:
Finished key features and debugged them before moving on to the next item.
Spent some time at the beginning planning and making a list of tasks to complete.
Kept my normal sleeping schedule – I am far more productive when I’m not sleep-deprived.
Divided tasks up appropriately – focussed on core mechanics and getting the basics down on Day 1, then spent Day 2 adding sounds, music, levels and polish.
Spent the last couple hours making sure the repository was working right, that I understood the submission procedure and that there would be no complications at submission time.
Things I would have done differently:
I spent far too long trying to add obstacles within the worlds. I got bogged down trying to get the collision detection working for them. Thankfully I did eventually abandon in-world obstacles to focus on more important things, but I should have given up on it sooner or just put it on the list as an “if there’s time” feature.
I spent a bit more time than I should have polishing the end-game screen, but I wanted to give the player some reward beyond just a “you won” message.
I should have spent a bit more time designing and adding levels.
Finally finished at 1 AM last night, had a great nights sleep and now that i can actually type properly without hitting anything other than letters ill share with you guys what ive made.
Mouse control supported, Keyboard controls are <^> Arrow
keys or Left Click to move and Z and X to interact (Or Esc and Enter). Shift allows the player to sprint whilst moving.
Game produced in RPG MAKER VX ACE. Produced within 72 hours and submitted to the Jam.
You play as a Rogue Artifact Hunter.
In search of riches you set out to explore the galaxy, venturing far and wide. After your last expedition you took near fatal damage and returned home safely. Get your ship back in order and explore the galaxy once more and search for minerals and Artifacts of both Rarity and Value.
Hi, this was my first Ludum dare and I have learnt a lot. I tried to make a game with both multiplayer and singleplayer but due to the time limit I don’t think the multiplayer works (I’m not sure I haven’t really tested it out). There is probably a huge list of bugs but oh well, can’t do any thing about it now. The game was originally supposed to be dinosaur riding cowboys vs bandits but ended up changing. In the end I managed to implement:
Anyway it was great fun and I will be sure to participate in the next one as well work on my project a little more. Maybe next time I will try to be less ambitious. Here is the link to play the game.
Well, this was my very first LD.
And all i have to say is. WOW. This is much harder than i previously thought. I really didn’t think it was this difficult to come up with a concept, and then do the art and coding in such a tight deadline.
And it really made me think about the way i approach my game design, especially level design, which is my weak spot at my current level of being a gamedev.
All in all, i regret a lot of decisions made during the process. I think i have a playable game, but that’s it. The concept, mechanics and the level are all really weak. And seeing that some of you guys made in the same amount of time, was very humble.
I hadn’t had any time to optimize my game, or to polish at all.
HTML5 version is only working on firefox, since it’s been a while i tested elsewhere. Sorry about that, but as per rules, i won’t fix before the voting ends. And i hope to expand on the game after.
But all in all, i had a ton of fun entering this LD and i will enter other times. If not for anything, it really keep my chops in check and is a great way to spend a weekend.
If you want to check my game:
Mage’s Tower is a text adventure game involving portals leading to different worlds. It’s not completed, but I decided to submit it because I did spend my weekend trying to put something together. Even if I failed, I’d like to know if my general idea was interesting for anyone.
To the point
I did submit a game. This is good. The bad thing is that I didn’t manage to finish it, so the experience is incomplete. This is fairly important for a Twine game, so I’m a little heartbroken, especially since I took another day to work on it (I could use only a couple of hours out of it though) and had to submit it as a Jam entry.
You can play my game here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=5431
As I said, it’s not going to be a complete experience, but if you fancy similar games, you can at least look at what I tried to do.
Theme
Can’t believe I’m going to write this, but the theme was actually okay. Right from the start I had this idea for a text-adventure game, and while I wasn’t sure how to start, I knew that I wanted to use Twine and/or some custom JavaScript. At some point I knew I wanted a random way to transfer the player between different places, and maybe this is where I actually should have started in the beginning, because I wasted waaay too much time on the not-very-important beginning of the game.
Tools
It turns out that Twine is a very good tool to make choose-your-own-adventure style games. This was my first time using it, and in the end I was surprised how interestingly complicated things you can do using such a simple tool.
I’ve had some problems with it at the beginning, though. Using a lot of community-made macros, it turned out some things look different under different browsers (Firefox vs. Chrome vs. mobile browser), and I really wanted for the game to be consistent. In the end, some transitions don’t work as they should in Firefox. And I’m reassured that developing something for the web (HTML5+CSS3) is still a hellish experience. Some of the macros were outdated and I tried to fix them, with little success.
Coming close towards the end of the Compo, I even managed to implement some simple JavaScript to manage player’s inventory. This helped a lot, but the original idea was to use extensive JS to have even more interaction (think canvas elements on some of the paragraphs) – this wasn’t really realistic though, given my fairly poor knowledge of JS (on top of how TiddlyWiki works, and Twine too).
Also, not knowing Twine did come with a price. It took me too much time to think about how to organize things like dialogs, quests, inventory – I actually started to figure things out towards the end of the competition, and some experience here would have helped.
Learning
I learned a lot – maybe not in terms of technical knowledge, but more about my limitations. I learned that creating a compelling story in English is not as simple as I thought it might be (mainly because I’m not English), and I gained a lot of respect for IF creators in general. Maybe reading more books in English would have helped.
Also, it’s not enough to know some MilkyTracker to create something that sounds okay (hence no sound in my game, which is a bummer because I did spend some time on creating some very bad music and I did adapt Twine to play it).
There’s this saying that “a picture is worth a thousand words”. I know exactly what it means now.
While I was really crushed when Compo ended knowing that I might not be able to finish any game even under Jam rules, I’m glad I did submit something in the end (otherwise my weekend would have been wasted). I’m not satisfied with my work, but Ludum Dare is a good time to take risks.
Effect
After you’ve visited all 9 worlds, and tried to get all 3 achievements (involving repeatable actions), there’s not much more to see, so there’s no point playing after that. Sorry.
It should be playable on mobiles, though all the effects work as intended only in Chrome.
TL;DR
Anyways, congrats to everyone that did finish a game this weekend!
Tags: post-mortem
