It’s a fail but it was funny 😀 

This game isn’t finished. It is “playable” but there is no end and monsters can’t be killed. 
This must be the shitiest submission ever done but I had to. By respect for my girlfriend to let me participate despite our busy weeked and for the work done (graphics!). 

At first I tried to simply focus myself on a classic WTF game but I quickly bored myself turning around with stereotypes. When suddenly I found The thing, a game, with only cliche ! 

 And here comes “She”. The all mighty and lovely Viking warrior, with a huge breast and a magic bow that throws fireballs (and other things). 
 You must help her to protect her igloo in antarctica against bad kamikaze zombies aliens villains. 

 

 

 

Why I failed ?

The project was too ambitious and with less than 10h of work, according to my actual skills, I could not hope for a better result.

I will do the next LD more seriously.

In fact I’m pretty happy to have experienced all of the pgtech workflow. It was a good test.

In an enhanced version I will add some laser beams and T-Rex. And maybe animations, sounds … and feedbacks and … dammit !

 

See you next LD 😉

Hi all,

First thanks to all that have tried my game and rated it.

As many have mentioned the flotiness of the controls, I thought I would share a video of me playing the game to show, what I think is a good play/run. In the video I get a time of 128.8 seconds which is 20 sec over the maximum difficulty which is reached at time 100 sec.
After the 100 seconds you are you own worst enemy, because of the wrapping around of space letting your bullets hit you in the back

Hope this shows that the game isn’t suppose to go on for more than a minute or two.

Hope you enjoy. 😀

Now, go make games 😉

Tags: compo, LD30, ld48, video, youtube

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=10263

GOAL : Reach the hill

MEAN : Kill enemies by weakening them with opposite rhythm to increase your “cable” length and increase your reach

COMMAND :

Left world :
————
wasd : movement
Left ctrl : action
Combat : 1,2,3 in rhythm

Right world :
————-
arrows : movement
Right ctrl : action
Combat : 6,7,8 in rhythm

Made with Unity 4.6beta

 

 

It was a long and tiring 72 hours but I really had fun making my entry. To those who want to see three days of game development condensed in a few minutes, then click on the image below:

Go here to play and rate my game!

Hey everyone ! Here is the post mortem of my game Linked Colours. 

As always, you can click here to play and rate it.

WHAT WENT RIGHT

Idea and development

As last time, I had the idea pretty quickly and stick to it. Thankfully I didn’t encountered big design issues and if I doubted that I would be able to create many levels, random generation came to my rescue, so I didn’t even needed to create levels manually other than the two tutorials.

In addition to Daneel, the framework for CraftStudio I created and which is the base of all of my projects, I was able to borrow quite some code from other projects of mine, so that I could focus on gameplay instead of reinventing the wheel once again. Having so much code already ready is what made me enter the Jam and not the Compo as the previous times in the first place.

But having an extra day prove very useful as even with a simple idea and lots of  ready-code I hadn’t much at the end of the second day in term of gameplay (but visuals where almost final).

Visuals

Let’s say it with some pomposity: linked colours is the best-looking game I have ever created in my entire life, so far ! Look at this beauty ! I am not even an artist, or am I now !?

Well, not quite, but it’s what I am most happy about, the game looks really great, especially compared to my previous games (improvements, yeah !).

Random generation

At the end of the first day, I wanted to add a level editor so that anyone could have created levels. I have one almost working for another game but I ditched the idea even before beginning the second day, where I worked mostly on visuals. Instead I spend some time working on random generation, and it did go surprisingly well.

The generation is pretty simple : on a 5 by 5 grid, it picks a square, then picks a color, then finds another square nearby and sets a color the previous one can connect to. It repeats that until there is no more colorless squares on the grid. Then it picks the squares that are not connected to any one and change their color so that they can connect to a nearby square. Then it finds squares with 3 or more connections (3 is rare, 4 in really unlikely to happen, 5 or more never happens) and sets them as squares with a required number of connections.

And that’s it, and it produce pretty nice levels, with actual mixed difficulty. I just wished I had time to tweak it a little and have some variations in the grid.

Web Player

Web players are very convenient, so I really wanted to produce a game that is playable that way. Unfortunately, CraftStudio‘s web player is sometimes a WIP and some things that works great in a desktop build just doesn’t in the web player, forcing me to find workaround when they exists. This was mostly what prevented me to release a web player build of Snale Driller, my entry for the last Ludum Dare.

But this time, I hadn’t had to add a single line of code to make it work in the web player ! It literally just worked… So, hooray !

Also, thanks to the web player, the game works great on Android (tested on a Motorola Moto G LTE running Android 4.4.4 and Chrome 36), even if the controls are tedious because the squares and links are tiny compared to my fingers.

WHAT WENT WRONG

Time

Once again I didn’t worked that much since I only spent 22 hours (9+7+6) on the game.

And even if the game definitely looked nice at the end of day 2 I really didn’t had any gameplay but the two tutorials. It took me the “whole third day” (6 hours…) have proper gameplay and fixes.

Also time-related I hated the shortcuts I had to take with the scenes and code in order to finish what I wanted in time. But I guess that’s expected in jams to have not-optimal code (and general organisation).

For the same reasons, the game lacks feedbacks. I wanted to add more “juice” but I just added some sounds almost at the last minute. The inputs could have been improved too, like allowing to link by clicking and dragging the mouse instead of clicking every times.

CONCLUSION

Definitely more rights that wrongs this time, plus a successfully shipped game, nice looking and full of gameplay !

That’s a very nice addition to my portfolio, I am happy I was able to spend the time on this Ludum Dare !

See you next time !

Tags: craftstudio, jam, puzzle game

…I do too, so I made one

Here are my favorite LD games so far. They all deserve to be played, so go ahead!

Twist and Weave: A fun puzzle game where you have to connect your circle with other circles and they build a chain. The catch is that the circles cannot move through walls of their color. Tricky at times, but feels always fair.

Fragments: A puzzle game where you have to build paths in order to restore the memory of the protagonist. Has a great atmosphere that adds even more depth.

Yonumbo: Yonumbo is very minimalist, all you have to do is click on the little squares with numbers in them to add to the number or subtract. The game shows you which mathematical operation you do next and all squares have to be 0 when you used up all your actions. So simple, so much fun. A very rewarding experience.

The Lion’s Song: A point and click adventure where you play as a composer sitting in a house in the mountains trying to get inspiration when suddenly the telephone rings. The game features awesome graphics with a very unique style and it’s very well written, too.

Color Worlds: A PuzzleScript game where you have to combine colored blocks to get the color black. Sounds simple, but gets very difficult quick, as you can also split the blocks up again, as you can only push blocks through walls of another color.

A Sneeze a Day: Another PuzzleScript game where you literally sneeze the boxes to their destination. It’s both hilarious and clever.

Ordinary Weekdays of Tech Support of Parallel Worlds: A cool shooter game where you have to maintain a server and protect it from virus attacks. Awesome pixel art and music!

On the Edge of Earth: I think this was my favorite of all. You’re the only one on a space station and you have to operate several machines in order to calibrate a laser beam that can create life on dead planets. Very funny and atmospheric game.

Heart Star: The most polished game I played so far. You play two cute characters living in parallel worlds and you have to switch between them in order help them both to get to the exit. Awesome graphics, sound and controls!

 

So what were your favorite games? Which one should I play? Please comment!

Hello fellow LD’ers, looks like it’s time for a post mortem of my game, drink the Ink / drInk / drINK. ( They’re all good names )

I just want I didn’t want this theme, I think it’s pretty bland. IMO, Isolation or most of the themes in the last vote would have been far more exciting. But anyway, it was 2AM here when it was announced and I woke up in the middle of the night to check itAt first I thought about making some kind of planetary rythm game where you played a satellite that jumped from world to world if you pressed a button at the right time in the orbit. I even made a mockup:

It quickly dawned on me that this kind of aesthetic would be the single most overused one in all of Ludum Dare. So I scratched that. Instead, I took a less literal approach to the theme and went with connecting the worlds of visible and text. The initial vision was of having full 2D world that the player could control through the choices in the text world, but as per use, it was too ambitious. So I just opted to have this top-hatted scribe guy on the top half of the screen,  just writing the story the player’s playing and interacting with him once in a while. ( I spend a ridiculous amount of time on animations for this)

Anyway, I went with the plan and drew this mockup:

as you can see, most of it ended up on the final game.

The tools I used:

– Gimp 2 for all the sprites,

– Audacity to record the music on my Cort X2 guitar,

– My white board to plan out the story and its branches,

– And Unity in 2D mode, of course.

 

.

. uglyuglyuglyuglyugly

 

What went wrong:

. Unpolished pixel art was used because I started animating too soon.

. Too much time spent brainstorming / changing my mind on what the story would be, very little writing it.

. The whole text adventure architecture was half-assed and brute-forcish in approach. I could’ve done it much more elegantly, but time constraints and all… The user end is still fully functioning, with the exception of trying to put the ink away. What should take you back to the previous screen just restarts the text adventure. Oh well…

. A lot of my time was wasted on googling, not finding, and proceeding to despair for answers I’d find roughly 1 hour later. Several times.

. My unfamiliarity with unity didn’t help me be as productive as I wanted to. I spent way too much time figuring out how to use 2-dimensional arrays to store all my text and references between sections, as well as learning about ways to customize the Unity UI

. I devoted a lot of time to small details like the timing of all the Scribe’s animations and sound effect cues like the writing, or flipping the pages.

 

. It turned out fine :3

What went right:

. Even though the pixel art wasn’t the best it could’ve been, I’m very happy with all the little quirks and animations I managed to print on the Scribe, as well as the whole mood of the game;

. The music was surprisingly fast to finish ( although crappy );

. Best name(s) ever. (drInk)

. The story’s concept :

I really, really like this. Being trapped in a dungeon is classic game 101. Escaping the dungeon is classic game expectation 101, so I wanted to make it impossible to escape. Paired with the image of the Scribe inking away at the book of fate, sealing the player’s tighter with each page, I think it makes for a powerful experience. Which is exactly what I wanted, a game about determinism, the inevitability of one’s fate and breaking the illusion of hope and success. To make the player feel the obligation to succeed and at the same time powerless in such a way that they resort to killing themselves to escape.  The game is too short to fully convey the intensity I was going for, so I’ll have to redo this, perhaps in 3D, with little text. But this Ludum Dare I stumbled upon an experience I’d very much like to make.

. I learned a lot about unity and the workflow in it, so I won’t have to waste this much times on these particular things ever again!

 

In short, I learned a ton about Unity and making games and myself.  Succcessful Ludum Dare is successful.

 

So, I started off my first day full of ideas and energy, and started work on an amazing HD, high FPS, hundred-level super-platformer. By the end of the day, I had a little guy on wheels who jumped about in a physically realistic world.

 

By the next day I had realised I wasn’t going to finish, so I scrapped most of it and just decided to make a slightly retro infinite flying game.

😛

Check it out here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=39482

Hi all,

I’ve now rated 50 #LD48 games, and are having so much fun playing the games and seeing what you have all created

I definitely hope to be able to do LD31, LD32, and so on. Great experience, and rough.. You DO feel the pressure, even though the only one pressuring you, is… You. .

Most fun so far have been “Zanlings Match” by Franklins Ghost, only game that have made me laugh out loud. Great humor. 😀

Most moody and aesthetic pleasing graphics I’ve seen, was “juxtapose ” by zillix.

Have fun playing LD games

Now, go make games!

– Henning

Here, have a timelapse of my desktop computer (the laptop one didn’t record for some reason):

As always, I had a lot of fun this Ludum Dare

Although I initially liked the theme, it was kinda difficult to choose what I wanted to do with it. At first, I wanted to make a Lukasarts-style adventure about a girl who visits other worlds, but that stalled when I realized I didn’t know the right graphics tools for the job (Blender would have been it, adding it to my to-do list now). Next, I thought I would make a strategy game where you manage a space port – kind of like Sim City, but with a space port theme. By then it was Sunday, and I had begun playing around with a third game. This was/is Killbot’s Last Adventure. Because I wanted to actually deliver a (somewhat) finished game, that of course meant going for the Jam, again.

Killbot is a recurring character in most of my LD entries, and once again I wanted to tell a story in adventure mode.

The Good
Did I mention it was fun? Besides that, a game got completed. More or less. I’m pleased with the graphics, especially on the early screens, when time pressure wasn’t as high.

I am relatively pleased with my music this time. Part of it is due to the fact that I recently switched from GarageBand to Logic Pro, which was quite the upgrade. The soundtrack of the game, while not always entirely appropriate to the scene at hand, came from an inspired place

I made most of the tracks before I even started programming, and then listened to them as I coded the game.

The Not-So-Good
Almost no sleep, and almost no IRC or blog activity. During this LD I finally wanted to integrate with the community, but I found it too distracting. Bummer, I guess I’m remaining an outsider for a little while longer.

The game itself, well. It’s mostly a slide show, to be honest. I just didn’t have the time to put all the puzzles and animation elements in that I wanted. There was supposed to be an action mode where you could steer Killbot from above running through dungeons, killing things. But this, too, didn’t get finished and never became a part of the game.

Killbot’s final adventure is also too short, even from a story-telling perspective. The story could have been good, but sort of fails due to (the lack of) narrative timing. I wish I could have given Killbot a more worthy sendoff, but as endings go, I guess it’s not a bad one. Maybe I’m too critical 😉

Things to Do Differently
Next time, everything will be different! Next time, I’m going to challenge myself more by making a game that is outside of my comfort zone. No more half-hearted adventure and strategy games! I want to make a jump’n’run or something. Also, maybe pixel art, finally. Things I haven’t done before!

Also, not being a game developer by trade, I’ll have to seriously expand my tool knowledge. Just showing some images with CSS here and there isn’t going to cut it, and I know that.

Check it out: Killbot’s Last Adventure

Wow, what a weekend, I’ve played some great entries and I’m totally impressed by the level of quality I keep seeing in some of the games.

So, this was my first Ludum Dare, we  made a game jam in Beijing, China and it was a blast to get my first taste of games design (I usually only make pretty things haha)

In the end we created a twitch platformer called Parallel Rift

The Idea – Connected worlds

So, for a while all of us sat around a table and blasted off a few ideas, the board was covered in interesting directions, then Sam mentioned TimeCop (the old Van Damme movie) and how when the same person came in to contact with their past self, they went boom boom!! I totally loved this idea, but the other guys went off to do their own things (all of them turned out really great) so there I was, sitting there with a great idea in my head, with no programmer… Luckily Andrew Li came to the rescue, and we started our jam!

Day 1: We started at around 12 O’clock

So, I explained the idea to Andrew, and layed down the basic gameplay for him. I then got Peter Long to help with character design while I concentrated on environment. Unfortunately, I didn’t know that for the jam you could use pre-made assets, so we created everything from scratch!

The backgrounds were actually made in full 3D, I then used a cell shader to get the mood I was going for, and rendered it out to be a static background. Then I added the dynamic 3D objects (the vortex / platforms / particles) to create the scene you see below

During this time Peter was sketching out the initial ideas for the character, and I gave him some examples of the style I was aiming for, then he moved on to the basic animations. All this time Andrew was getting the development side done

Day 2: Music and putting it all together

I wanted some trippy, catchy music to go with the visuals, so I opened up my audio software and got down the track in a few hours, unfortunately, now I constantly have it playing in my head (so I guess my job was done), I now hate it! More coding, polish on the art assets and finalizing all of the character work! We got some basic UI in and working and prepped for the next day of bug squashing and polish.

Day 3: Bugs / Polish / Bugs…

We had a few problems with collision of the shadow characters causing a game over (we were moving the characters instantly away in the x axis) we figured out that even though it was moving instantly, it could still hit the player character and cause an unexpected GAME OVER, this was a simple fix of translating in the -Z axis instead! A few more issues, balancing the level / speed / jump height and we were pretty much done!

What went wrong?

It was pretty smooth all together, as Andrew and I work together on a daily basis, but it would of been nice to add a little more depth to gameplay. Unfortunately time wasn’t on our side. We also wanted to implement a High-Score board.

What went right?

The platform mechanics worked very well pretty much from the start, there were a few issues with the wall jump but that was magically fixed by Andrew. Peter’s animations suited the mood perfectly (overly stylized poses and motions) and we were pretty happy with the final result!

 

What’s next?

We’ll definitely be doing more Ludum Dares in the future, it was a great experience for me (first time designing a game), we’d like to push Parallel Rift forward, I think it would make a great tablet experience with lots of polish and more levels of complexity

 

Most of all thanks to all of you for sharing your games, I’ve had a blast playing them, and it’s given me inspiration to continue doing game jams!

 

Enjoy the game HERE!

 

Daniel Arnold-Mist

What does all of this mean? And how will ranking be formed in the end? I mean… based on what?

D = Default = R – C, except not quite that simple
R = Ratings = how many ratings this entry has received.
C = Coolness = how many entries this user has rated
L = Loser = someone who games the coolness ranking. It’s the honor system, people. Everyone might think you are cool, but in your heart of hearts, you will know that you are a loser.

The R and the C of course I understand but I don’t get the D and the L. And I don’t see how a winner can be chosen based on these numbers. Is it bad if you rate more games than the number that rate you? And does it matter if you rate just anyone or specificly the ones that rated you? Will there be only one mention or a list per category?.. My first time so I don’t know these things sorry. 

Spaceway Transportation Incorporated is a transportation company devoted to transporting aliens safely and happily from planet to planet.   But, as a Spaceway pilot, you must be aware of flying objects and enemy ships that don’t want you near their planets. 

Play it here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=33942

Timelapse/gameplay video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSkU-nWH2B4

Spaceway Transportation has gotten some feedback already – saying it was too difficult.  What’s wrong with super difficult games?!?  I can understand the level generation system at times can glitch and spawn an almost impossible object, of course, but the game is supposed to be difficult!  Anyways, to the post-mortem now.

Good:

I completed the game and *almost* everything I wanted to.  I even had time to implement an unplanned endless mode.  For writing a random interval-based level generation system in 48 hours, it turned out good (despite some impossible random things that happen once in a while).

The control system is great, and my OOP skills have grown very much.  More importantly, it is FUN (to me, at the very least)!

Bad:

The theme.  Really the only way for this game to fit the theme is if you play the Campaign mode and follow the story, so I wish I could have implemented the theme a bit more, but it still works.

GRAYSCALE – some people seem to like the grayscale graphics, but I don’t really like them.  I couldn’t change them, though, because I settled on a grayscale software-rendering engine, written during the 48-hours.  Either way, the graphics still look kind of neat (for my art skills, of course).

Better:

A lot could have been done better in this game.  The theme could have been implemented a bit more, and I wish I had time to REALLY tweak the level generation system.

Final Note:

I finished a game, it is fun, difficult, and looks pretty good!  Play it now!

Play it here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=33942

Timelapse/gameplay video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSkU-nWH2B4

Dungeons ‘n’ Diapers

We were pretty happy with the theme, and decided we would do a platformer game based on shadows and the imagination of a very small child. Everything else came about by exploring the basic idea of one player having two roles/worlds to interact with, in parallel.

The concept behind the game is that Zeno, a baby, sees real world objects as monsters he can fight. His imagination is reflected by shadows.

Play Dungeons ‘n’ Diapers

Tiled: our level editor of choice.

So by using the shadow warrior and interacting/attacking the other shadows, Zeno interacts with the real world, so your shadow is responsible for creating a safe path through the level. For example, a tree can be felled to bridge gaps by defeating its corresponding shadow, the skeleton.

As you can see we got some of the mechanic down, but naturally our vision entailed a lot more than we could achieve. For instance, the shadows should attack the players shadow, but they pretty much just stand there. Also, we had a ton of ideas for puzzles, and some end of level bosses… Alas we may save them for a post dare version.

Bugs

Moon walking:

During testing we found that certain key combinations caused the shadow to moon walk. Not necessarily a bug, just some missing logic in the control code. We decided to leave this in, it was kind of fun.

Earthquake:

This bug prevented you from progressing from level 1. The result can be seen in this video below:

Turns out I hadn’t cleared the data out when loading the new level, so there was an extra baby spawned just below at the old level’s start position. As the camera was set on the baby it was wildly oscillating between the two instances of the same object.

I’ve tried implementing this effect before using combinations of sine and cosine, but this is by far the best result and the simplest. I’ll be experimenting with it to see what sort of control/effects I can achieve with it.

Things that didn’t make it

• Enemy attacks/AI and more enemies in general (i.e. puppy with a wolf shadow).
• More puzzles (with ladders, light sources).
• End level boss.
• Achievements (for Moon walking).

In any case the whole thing was a massive learning experience for all of us, and as always it’s been great being part of a large collective of like minded people striving for a common goal. It’s almost like having 2500+ people over for the weekend (I don’t think there would be enough coffee).

LD30 was my 3rd jam only, my 2nd Ludum Dare, and my 1st one in solo. Just for the context, a bit of shameless self-promotion:

1. Choppy Fox for the Flappy Jam
2. From the Under for Ludum Dare #29 with RadStar
3. Delta Spaceline for Ludum Dare #30

What went wrong

• I used external assets, what’s forbidden by the compo rules. I discovered that when about to post at the compo deadline. When ticking the ‘jam’ box in the post form, I cancelled my post…
• …and then actually went for the jam to give myself 72h cause 48h were not enough for me. My game wasn pointless therefore uninteresting at the jam deadline. It lacked 2 of the 3 key features: there was trading goods, but weren’t neither passengers nor 10,000 credit-objective.
• I’m not sure Haxeflixel actually made me save some time. I’d have needed a lib, not a framework.
• A lot of UI, no prior design, so I wasted a lot of time positioning things.
• I almost gave up at the middle of day #2 because of the pointlessness of the game, and because of UI bugs due to Haxeflixel…

     
Sprites by Arachne
Music Space Machine A by Kevin MacLeod

What went right

• …but since I’m stubborn, I insisted, at least not to feel ashame. I quickly fixed the bugs thanks to a refactoring I had actually nearly completed.
• Having 1 more day game me time to add the 2 more key features I spoke of above. I then found an interest in playing my game when I noticed I could lose some time when testing! My very critical wife tested it, and after a few minutes of incomprehension, understood the concept and approved it!
• This ‘What went right’ section seems a bit short, but I am globally satisfied by both process and result, and I learnt a lot during this jam. I generally enjoy those intense work-session, who can be very productive rewarding.

What’s next

• I’ll post Delta Spaceline on various portals to have more feedback. I need to work on the proportion, 960×480 doesn’t fit, at least on Kongregate.
• If feedback’s positive, I could go for some more features:
• more goods
• energy for the ship could be a good (it was at the beginning, but I had to simplify)
• bounty hunting (a planet ask you to go to another planet to capture a criminal to bring him back, it would cost weapons, but offers good rewards)
• ship upgrades (more cargo, engine more efficient)

Next Ludum

• More design at the beginning. Design UI could help conceptualize.
• Then get a fully playable prototype asap, and keep UI and graphics for the end.
• Get more feedback sooner.
• No use of Haxeflixel, or only some side-feature, not the framework in itself. I wanted to experiment Phaser, but got to check if it can be used as a lib only.
• No waste of time on graphics. Tiny sprites. Details only at the end.

Hey there babe, yeah you at the computer, you lookin’ fine tonight.

My names Harrison and with the help of two close friends we made Galilei, an ~arte~ game

Here is a full playthrough in action.

(play/vote on it here)

Anyway, I felt like I should talk about  the somewhat downwards spiral that was Galilei and why it happened.

 

Initial Idea was too vague

Initially we wanted to make a space game as the artist really loves modelling sci-fi ships and etc, the theme fitted it perfectly but left little to the imagination.
We didn’t really think past that for a little while and went through a few ideas over the course of 24 hours before we settled on the final idea.

Most ideas were dumb

I really wanted to play around with lighting for this, I love minimalist art-styles and wanted to toy with shadows and all that junk, this lead to us starting off with an exploration game that would take place within an asteroid belt around an unknown planet, you would find audio logs and discover that previous ships had been trapped here after being sent through a wormhole.

that is fairly dumb and we spent too long on it, though some of the basic ideas stayed in but were changed artistically to fit, such as audio logs changing to gems and the reset function being based on a wormhole opening up and dragging you back (kind of i just went nuts making that to be honest)

I had no idea how to explain the art-style

I’m a programmer and designer, I was recently funded to start my own company.
I have a lot of knowledge about game design.
I suck at the art.

I’m bloody terrible at making art, I just can’t wrap my head around physically modelling/spriting/painting, I just don’t jive with that.

In my head I wanted a low poly art-style, that alone is very vague and explaining it to Nicholas was an immense task, eventually he figured out what a tired and slightly drunk me was trying to say and made magic.
Thanks Nick.

I ended up hating the art-style on the last day

Well, I do love it but I spent almost 18 hours coding new things and fixing old things once they handed me the final art assets, So I sat there looking at it for all that time and it got stale to me.
This didn’t really cause any problems I’m just not entirely happy with how it turned out due to how I had to cut quite a lot of things to make it look any good in time.

 

Now I need to talk about the good things

 

I’m surprised with what we made

I’m a very fast coder, I work fast and expect art assets to be done just as fast which is sometimes impossible
My initial code in prototypes is pretty bloody low, they work well but looking at them is ugly

I am incredibly impressed at what we made in the time period.
I know loads of people who study game design and all that junk who have made final projects for their classes that look and play worse than this, and they have passed, and while that might say something about the places they are studying at I prefer to say that we just did something good here, even if I’m disappointed that it’s not what we set out to make.

People adore the art

While I’m not the artist on this (Nick and Cameron made the art) it makes me incredibly warm and fuzzy inside to hear people compliment the art-style, I spent so long trying to explain it and it was made almost perfectly and people love it.

Some fairly important people have seen it now

I have had this problem where I like to prototype things, people love them and then I get bored of them.
I work on a project to learn a specific thing and then I drop it once I have learned what I set out to learn.

That means that a lot of what I make never sees the light of day and I’m never comfortable showing it to people who might want me on their project.

Seeing that Michael O’Connor (_PipeDreamer_) favourited a tweet I made about finishing Galilei made me happy, even if he’s just looking at whats happening in Ludum and saw that I finished.
If you see this Michael, you pressing a button made someone feel better about themselves.

Cameron also has some ties to Interceptor Entertainment, and according to him Frederik Schreiber enjoyed it, even if it’s not a “game” as much as it is a dumb ~arte~ piece.

 

Ending statement about LD30

I absolutely adore all of you, I attempted to do LD28 and had some serious problems with my house at the time and had to drop out.
This has been an amazing experience.

We are most likely going to continue working on Galilei as we all enjoyed the weekend even with the incredible lack of sleep.
We will be changing quite a bit up, most likely removing the spaceship aspect as it had its problems, and without a dedicated QA team we had no chance of ironing that out in 3 days.

Keep a lookout for it, It’l show up in your feeds again soon!

By the way, if you are still reading I love you.
Marry me.

Tags: Galilei, LD30, LD72, post-mortem

What wen right

Graphics

I’m not a pixel artist, so before the competiton started I was looking for someone to team up with. As I didn’t find one, I decided to do pixel art myself. And It wasn’t bad at all! I didn’t spend too much time on it, but I managed to finished it and make it look acceptable. Oh, and I probably should thank David Capello for making Aseprite, it was really helpful.

Theme

I liked the theme a lot and I spent just 10 minutes thinking about the type of game I wanted to do. I didn’t changed my mind at all so that’s cool.

Overall

I’ve been all year trying to make games, and I finished one in 48 hours! I think that’s the most amazing part of all and you should all be very proud of it. And play other people’s games and watch them play your is always awesome 😀

What went wrong

Coding

At first I tried to make good, clean and reusable code. But when I started running out of time, I stressed out and I did  a lot of copy-paste, useless functions and hardcoded stuff that could have been implemented waaay better. But the game works and I’m not planning to touch that code anymore so… yeah.

Music

I didn’t even try but I would have liked to create something to cheer the game up. Maybe for the next time.

If you haven’t played my game yet, here is the entry page: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=28965. Hit me on twitter and I will play yours!

One simply cannot create a game with placing/breaking blocks, time travelling, time paradoxes, crafting system and sandbox genre with an end goal. But I did. Kinda.

What the game’s about?

Planet rescuers is a sandbox-style game, where you play as a robot who was departed to an unknown planet with a time travelling machine. Your mission is to change future in order to get rid of strange creatures who will cause some problems.
Gameplay: You can break and place blocks in a 2D world. In the center of the map there’s a time machine which can send you to the future or to the past. The block that you placed in the past will stay when you’ll go back to the future. Metal will rust, trees will grow. Look at this comparison picture:

But if you break a block that was destroyed in the future, you’ll get a paradox. Paradoxes highly destabilize planet, so try not to create lots of them. Also, robot needs energy to move/jump/travel through time/craft/place blocks/mine blocks. Soon you will start running out of given energy. At this point you will need some generators. (currently, there are only 2 working generators: solar (place it with no blocks above) and heat (place it underground as deep as you can to get more energy).

After making this game I can say that the hardest part for me was GUI. This time I spent a lot of time on it, and it still looks awful. Also had no time for an sounds/music, so feel free to play your own music while playing my game 😀

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=34143

Thanks for taking your time reading this post

My first Ludum Dare. Barely slept and I couldnt do the entire weekend. But I made the most of it and I am happy with the game I made.