Hi all.

Im not gonna waste your time by a long post all i wanna say is that It was my first game jam of all and we really worked hard and tried to make a fun game. This is a multiplayer game called fire & ice.

I guess it worth ‘s a try.Hope you like it.

I wrote a quick postmortem of my LD30 entry, Phase Shift, over at my blog.

tl;dr: Procedural graphics & levels FTW, Ableton rules, I should go easier on the caffeine in the future, and this is probably the last time I’ll use raw C++/D3D in a game jam. (Although I said that last time, too…)

I worked a lot harder on this Ludom Dare then the last one. Did it pay off? Well, I think it did… I mean, my game is kind of amusing, and longer than my last entry. But there are still some things I would like to have worked on more, or added.

The Good

I kept on schedule through this LD. Everything I did took as much time as I thought it would. Friday, I started the project. I came up the concept for my game, and once I got back from dinner with my family, I made a few sprites, and a background. I also started music. I finished the fight scene on the Saturday, and even made some extra sounds and graphics for Sunday. On Sunday, I finished the intro and handed in the game!

I came in luck with the music. I can’t make good music, no matter how hard I try. I tried fake music generator, but it wasn’t generating the type of music I needed. And I couldn’t make what I wanted on Otomata, (which is a really cool music device btw), so I went to Abundant Music. It generated a super slow song, that had potential. I sped the song up (a lot), on Audacity, and boom! Nice background music, (well I think it’s nice)!

I figured out how to check if the player is walking on ground in Unity2D, for the first time. I also made it so he has to jump over a gap, which was pretty good.

I learned the more about the differences between OnTriggerEnter2D, and OnCollisionEnter2d, which is great because I always seem to have trouble with collision detection in Unity2D, and not knowing the difference between the two, was probably was part of the reason!

Graphics were pretty good. I’m not very good at making them, but thanks to the powers of Gimp, they didn’t look to shabby!

Screenshot!

The Bad

Difficulty. The game was way to easy. For some reason Unity had this glitch where, some of the mirror beams would travel faster than I coded them to when I ran the game in the editor, (thank God it doesn’t happen in the build)! This made it harder for me to win when I was testing, so I thought the game was harder.

The intro was too long, and the game was to short. I should have made the intro faster, and more interactive, and the game longer, and harder.  I find it sad that my game didn’t have a lot of gameplay, because that was what I was trying to focus on this competition!

I should have made it so you are able to skip the cutscenes. They really get annoying after a while.

Controls were a bit funky. You have to press the down arrow to go duck, and the down arrow to get up again. I used to have it so you press the up arrow to get up, and up arrow to jump once standing. But I found that made it harder to jump over the mirror beams , (especially with Unity  making them super fast). So I made it so you can press the up arrow to jump when ducking, and the down arrow to stand when ducking. It’s kind of confusing to press the down arrow to get up though. It’s actually ironic in a way…

Animation wasn’t the greatest, but I do suck at graphics, so how good could it have been?

I had to make a lot of sprites. One for each deformation of Alex, in jump pose, duck pose, and stand pose. What I should have done was make four different versions of his head, each with a different deformation, and moved them whether he was jumping, ducking or standing. But oh well, what can you do?

In the scene where Alex’s mirror breaks, I should have made the text “My reflection.”,  fade out faster. And I should have made the scene after fade in, because it all of a sudden just appears!

My Overall Feelings

Overall I think this was a pretty good LD. I learned some things, and found some cool new tools that I might use in the future. Though my game is short, and there wasn’t that much game play, it’s crazy, and funny, and I had fun making it!

Timelaspe

And finally if you want to play my game, you can find it here.

Tags: postmortem, timelapse

Hi there,

Here is my @Laguna_999 ‘s Postmortem Video for WorldGate WG-1

The game can now on the following sites:
http://runvs.io/Games/worldgate
http://gamejolt.com/games/strategy-sim/worldgate-wg-1/33341/
http://runvs.itch.io/worldgate
http://www.kongregate.com/games/runvsgamedev/worldgate-wg-1
And especially interesting for german gamedevs: http://pewn.de/game/?id=17736

Best,
Laguna

Infinity space!

Random funny monsters!

shop with 16 weapons!

Android version!

Upgrade weapons!

Ability to save progress!

Fun!)

—–>Play!<—–

So, Insomnia52 just finished and I was exhibiting Super Rude Bear Resurrection there. I love Insomnia, but I was a bit upset to find out it was the same time as Ludum Dare.

So whatever – I did both. My game wasn’t as good as usual but I refuse to break my spree.

Here was my setup. Luckily my friend Nate lent me a mouse.

I already knew I was going to do an JRPG going in, because this is the seventh Rude Bear, and there was no way RBVII wasn’t going to be a Final Fantasy parody.

I kinda needed to sketch everything up myself for this since I wasn’t with my housemate, and it would’ve been too much work for him, so I made the world really roughly.

I started out by doing the battle system, using puppets like the original Rude Bear, because there was no chance I’d get assets in time. My housemate later redrew these.

The whole battle is entirely realtime. This can be confusing, and hard to control, and I should’ve really implemented controller controls, but that would’ve been super slow to use for a start in comparison to getting good with the mouse, but also I only had one xbox controller there and it was plugged into SRBR.

Puppets are fun because they’re almost entirely trigonometry (which I really enjoy). I mean, everything in the game uses the magic formula:

Position += (finalpos-currentpos)*speed

And a bunch of trig. I just take a lot of anchors and use kludges.

I saved time on large attacks by just making one particle system and reskinning it for the various spells. A few of the attacks are bigger.

Initially everything was based on elements but I couldn’t think of symbols for element indication so I ended up just wiping that. Also you could originally heal yourself with your group attacks and stuff like that but it was getting too convoluted. In my friend Nate’s words, “Keep it simple, stupid”.

I started out with the world by sketching it (but I’ve lost the sketch unfortunately).

For the theme, I both wanted to make a bunch of worlds like a volcano, tower, desert, forest etc. and also connecting lots of worlds of games I enjoy. I started out by making Pallet Town:

As well as Crono’s house, Oak’s lab, a crypt etc.

I threw together two tracks from Earthbound and Oak’s lab, and adapted three old tracks I’d already charted by ear from Chrono Trigger, Pokémon and Super Mario RPG.

From home my housemate drew the art we used for puppets. Unfortunately I had no internet connection, so I could only grab art now and then either by tethering or going to the LAN hall (which I did a couple of times because some kids were being really loud at 4am on the campsite and I wasn’t getting any work done).

I slept around 4 hours every night. I was up till about 6 mosts nights just coding. We drank a lot every night so I was pretty alert (especially on the last night, we had an open bar).

We didn’t manage to get rooms this time so I had to camp. Extremely cramped in there with a laptop too but this is pretty much the setup I was working with.

Eventually I got the whole world done:

And just stuck colliders on everything. The movement’s a very simple rigidbody2D, and all menus are just activated with raycasting.

I was basically jamming everywhere, trains, bars – it took all my restraint not to get out my laptop during the pub quiz. I was worried people would think I was googling the answers or something.

Eventually I adapted a shader from Super Rude Bear Resurrection to make Earthbound looking battles.

It just loaded in the background of the previous area each time.

My friend SonnyBone and I were running an optional theme, “Marilyn Manson” too, and I promised to put the character Rad Boar with a Mohawk and sunglasses in too.

Things I would’ve liked to have implemented:

• A fourth character (Red Beard, a lion that was going to be in the volcano)
• Status menu
• Element indicator and left elements in
• Explanations
• Sound Effects
• Controller controls
• More story

But given I was at Insomnia and showcasing my game at the same time, I couldn’t really. On the last night just before I went to bed I made a list of everything I needed to do at home, and streamed the last 6 hours (which was the implementation of the snakes, volcano monsters, pyramid monsters, cyberdemon and final boss).

I’m pretty happy with the amount of dialogue, 15 moves, an entire world and 14 monster types each with a different attack pattern.

Then I had some problems with my server, which was very stressful, but overall I’m pretty happy with it.

I’m sure I’ll learn of more problems as more comments appear.

But yeah, enjoy.

You can play it online in a browser here, download it for Windows here, and the LD48 page is here.

My twitter.

Originally posted on my dev blog.

Ludum Dare it’s my favorite game JAM, i love follow the progress of other game developers and play his games it’s the best part. I hope you like play our game too.

Star LORD is a classic action plataformer. You control Star LORD and your mission is neutralize SPACE LORD before he destroys the planet.

Hope you like it.

I’m sorry for delay.
See you in the next JAM <3

Play and give us your feedback! It’s important!

CLICK HERE TO PLAY! =)

Here is a link to my time laps https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcHlRNjVuYw&index=1&list=PLp7zleVz6coT1VKWT5LZhfRVxKzlK9bGv&channel=UCntAP9M24nTIgSpZQWEbMfw enjoy

A quick update. Improves AI and framerate. There is also a simulation speed toggle for those interested.
Still no gameplay though. Should get more onto that now.

Also no gif this time. Will do one when there is more action between the factions.
It will be glorious! (for some sides of the conflict…)

Give it a try.

Tags: new version, progress, update

The timelapse for the making of my game GalactiTrader can be seen below:

Play/Rate GalactiTrader HERE

OS/X | Windows | LD30 | Source | Timelapse

I decided to write a proper post-mortem on the development of ‘Reminisce,’ especially on the experience of using cgame (my rapid game development engine/tool) to make a game. For more information on the design philosophy behind and the implementation of cgame do check out the paper (slightly outdated — from May — also links to a poster) I wrote on it for independent work at university.

Editing the title screen in cgame’s in-game editor

Concept

When the competition actually began at around 7 pm I was out with some friends for dinner and was brainstorming game ideas. I thought maybe something modelled after Avatar, with a fire, water and earth realm, respectively with traps/enemies that utilize fire power (lava or flames), water power (flooding) and earth power (puzzles involving bushing blocks). Thus gameplay would have a different focus in each world, one on combat, one on speed and the third on puzzles. The idea was ambitious, but I wanted to start with a large concept and simplify it as I went, so that I wouldn’t have to grasp for ideas if I actually had the time later.

Eventually I dropped the combat (you don’t have weapons and just run away from monsters) and the water world entirely, and the game became mostly puzzle-based with later puzzles stretching across both hell and earth. To make it make sense story-wise I thought, “Ok, so you’re a dude going through his memories and they’re good and bad, hence the two worlds, and hence the title.”

Code

cgame made coding really easy with the entity-system model and live-coding. To add a new element to the game, say a door, I drew the sprite in the atlas, added a new entity with a sprite system, set the sprite atlas rectangle, created a new door system in the code, added the entity to it and saved it as a prefab. All this could be done without ever exiting and restarting the game, seeing changes live — as soon as I added the open property to the door system in code it appeared as an editor property in-game.

Then to add doors in a level later I just hit ‘.’ in the editor (which means ‘create from prefab’) then type ‘doo’ (or even ‘do’ — it’s an autocomplete field) hit enter and I have a door! To tie it to a switch I just select a switch and hit the ‘set’ button in the door system inspector, because cgame figures out that it’s an entity-type property and allows me to select the switch visually.

Live-coding the door system (code on bottom right)

Ideally I would split the door logic into a generic door system which just exposes an open property and reacts accordingly, and a specialized door_switch system which would have a switch property and sets the door system open property based on the switch. Then you could have generic doors which may or may not be switch based — maybe have a door triggered by a scripted event instead of a switch, for example. But since this was a 48 hour compo and I was in a hurry I just put the switch property in the normal door system and went on to work on other things.

After adding the ‘switch’ property which can be set with point-and-click; also the new code

The prefab system also made it easy to construct objects in code. For example, the Lua statement that creates bullets in the quad-shooter enemy system is as simple as follows:

cg.add {
    prefab = prefab_dir .. '/hell-bullet-1.pfb',   -- the prefab is preset with the sprite etc.
    transform = { position = p + 0.7 * obj.dir },  -- position the bullet in front of us
    bullet = {
        creator = cg.Entity(obj.ent),              -- bullets like to remember their creators
        velocity = 8 * obj.dir,                    -- make the bullet go forward
    }
}

The cg.add function allows easy creation of entities in code, specifying systems and properties in Lua tables.

cgame’s built-in serialization capabilities made game save/load super easy. This is in fact how the portals worked — when you walked through a portal it would save the state of the exited world, then load it back when you came back, thus creating the illusion of time having paused when you left. I never had to write explicit save/load code for any of the gameplay entities, cgame handled it all automatically.

Art

cgame’s sprite system uses an atlas image, so I drew all the sprites into one big atlas. I used Pyxel Edit for drawing. Staying true to its live-editing philosophy, cgame listens for changes to the atlas file and automatically reloads sprites in game. So you can draw/edit sprites in the atlas and they’ll just update in-game without you having to exit and restart. This was great especially for editing the quad shooter animation:

Drawing the quad-shooter animation in Pyxel Edit and watching it update in the game/editor live

Level Editing

I built the levels with cgame’s in-game level editor. This generally went pretty smoothly, except for two issues which I found to be pretty relevant from a practical level editing standpoint and would like to tackle before the next game project:

1. If you make a level and then go back and edit a prefab, how should cgame propagate the property changes in the base prefab to all its intances? Right now changes aren’t propagated since the prefab link isn’t remembered (prefabs are basically like copy-pasting without any additional links). Unity, for example, has instance properties override prefab ones only if explicitly set, and so properties that aren’t explicitly set will get the new values from the updated prefab.
2. If I play a level a bit and stuff has moved around, then I edit some parts of it and want to keep the changes, how do I merge these changes back into the original level situation given that things have moved due to gameplay? For Reminisce I would always load back the starting level scenario before editing.

The editor’s duplication and box select functions allow quick level editing

The cgame editor interface takes a lot of inspiration from vim, emacs and Unity. It aims to be fully scriptable and is thus pretty easy to extend. For example, the physics system in cgame provides a visual polygon shape editor. This is simply written as an additional ‘mode’ for the editor (like modes in vim) and is not in the editor core at all. You could write your own such mode for systems you create — this could be useful for a camera track system for example to draw spline paths. The editor GUI itself is built with entities in the GUI system, so you could edit the editor GUI in the editor, or add editor buttons to physics if you really wanted to!

Sound

cgame has a sound system too, and the play_sound() utility function I wrote in the game code is as simple as follows:

function play_sound(file)
    cg.add {
        sound = {
            path = sound_dir .. '/' .. file,
            playing = true
        }
    }
end

So I just create an entity that’s in the sound system. You can see that I’m again using the cg.add function I talked about before. cgame doesn’t discriminate, anything can be done this way! And sound properties can be edited in the editor too — you can change sound gain, set loop state or seek around while it is playing in-game! The actual sounds in Reminisce were generated using cfxr, which is a Mac version of the popular sfxr tool.

In all, I learned a lot from this experience. The biggest thing I figured is that I was often really my own enemy more than cgame — just being tired, sleepy, stupid or lazy. cgame’s strengths played pretty well in a game jam scenario with all the live editing and coding. You’ll see many pauses in the timelapse, all places where I go, “Oh, wow, that worked out quicker than expected… Umm, what do I do now?” and ponder for a bit before moving on. I think it could work really well in the hands of an inspired, motivated and experienced developer, much like the ones churning out great games here at LD. This is why I hope to write some documentation on it soon and record video tutorials and such. I loved my first LD experience as a participant, and am looking forward to many more to come. Thanks for reading!

Time-lapse of the 48-hour creation of my entry for the 30th Ludum Dare, based on the theme “Connected Worlds”.

18h06m16s of total working time played back at x64 speed.

“Transforce” is a prototype game where forces transfer between levels.
Each level down, time passes at 1/10th the speed of the level above it.
Partially inspired by the movie Inception.

You can try it here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-…

Engine – LÖVE2D
Editor – Sublime Text
Graphics – GIMP
Audio – sfxr and Audacity

The awesome wallpapers I used for each day were provided by:
Day1 – http://twitter.com/7SoulDesign
Day2 – http://twitter.com/TwoScoopGames
Day3 – http://twitter.com/PixlWalkr

A Text-Adventure at Ludum Dare. That might be rare. But anyways we did it. If would like to play a text adventure go this way.

>Play the Game<

At this game you have a conversation with a player character and you can make him do something  for you. It comes with hopefully funny dialogues and some hidden gimmicks.

This game connects 6 different games created at the same location. At certain points you should play one of these games to go on. Anyways, if you dont like to play them there are spoilers that gives you the passwords to go on.

Have fun

Tags: adventure, text, text adventure

Space Delver is waiting for you to play it!

We wish we could implement a combat & AI system but you know how long it takes for that kind of stuff.
Instead you can mine, sell, buy, upgrade, explore and so on.
We will be coming with a post jam game later on and maybe even with a full release one day.

Don’t forget to rate and comment.
Hope you all like

PLAY SPACE DELVER HERE

Hi guys.

I have a fast paced multiplayer game. There are too few people rating at a time to actually have two people playing at the same time.

I’m going to be playing the game online for the next hour. Please join the Reyn-Server. [ Woops I went to bed, you missed the game, you can still however host your own game, thanks for all the comments]

Unity web based. Here is the ->link<-

Please go ->here<- to rate

Thanks

Hi, I’m noc,

Making the bad guys was much more easy than hero, but I drawn a lot of sketches just to be sure it would be easy to animate in a 2D game.

If the character is easy to understand in a quick-made sketch, it’s sure it will be easy to animate

I use watercolors to see very quickly the concurrences between the different characters. The main difficulty was to have a color harmony between them and be sure that the player can recognize  which enemy it’s  keeping focused on the shrimp and the next star it has to reach.

more sketches soon, it’s time to play.

Tags: gagabu, LD30, noc, shrimp, sketch, star, Team

So, here I am after my first Ludum Dare. For the occasion, Zhyr & I teamed up to save some time and have some fun instead of coding alone. Here are a few humble comments about the whole process.

Theme

I have to say that we both down voted the theme “Connected Worlds” because we thought it was too accurate to be really permissive and emergent in term of concept and game design. But once it was announced, we forgot about our own taste and decided : “What the hell, let’s make a game with a theme we hate!”

Concept

It came after 45 min of throwing random ideas : Zhyr proposed to simply create connections between planets to make them rotate around each other without colliding. We decided very quickly that game’s rules should be very simple and not involving complicated physics rules. I think we stuck to that pretty well.

Some examples of fake formulas we didn’t need to use in our game :

Development

So around two hours after theme release, we started coding… I will spare you some details and give you a short sum up :

• Day #1 : Boring interface & general stuff for me, maths & physics for Zhyr and his compiler Brain. First prototype works, but ugly game.
• Day #2  : Engine fix, polishing, victory/defeat handling, drawing planets, first levels designed. Zhyr & Argl : “”OMG we have a GAME!”
• Day #3 : Level editor added, Zhyr use it all day to create levels. He also adds zoom out for big levels while I kept polishing, composing the background music, adding sounds, settings, etc.

Universe by Zhyr

All along those steps we managed short pauses composed of : 3 hours sleep, Coffee, Tea, Nutela, Brainstorming, Bagels, Zap de Spion (french zapping) and random food to fuel the brain machine.

Conclusion

The game is here, as we planned! Amazing! Ideally we would have added a few more features (like destructible meteor and more levels) but we are really proud and happy to have actually finished something in time.

We worked approximately a total of 100 hours. I personally broke my but on a wooden chair while getting my right hand atrophied by thousand of stressful clicks. Zhyr started singing weird Canadian songs during night coding, probably due to the twelves cups of coffee he had that day.

But overall, we are incredibly happy about participating to this jam. It was pure fun, even during insane working sessions and now sharing our works with you feels really great. We reviewed 60 games so far, posting large comments, trying to bring some thoughts into them and we also enjoy reading each of your reviews guys, so thanks!

Try out our game if you haven’t yet : PLAY GALACTIC DUMP

So, before you get all angry at the title, please. Hear me out. It was my birthday on the release of theme (It was released a 3am for me) So I couldn’t spend the day doing it, as I had family around and all that social stuff that I don’t like to engage upon. And well, I didn’t actually have a pc. Nope, I know. I was infact building one, for the rest of the time. It doesn’t take a whole or two too build a pc? No, it doesnt. You’re right, but considering I actually had problems with the hard drive. Which is well, important in a pc. By the time it was working, there seriously wasn’t any point in participating. So I thought, yeah. Lets do it now.

It’s unfair you say.

I can see why you’re saying that, had a few more days to think of something, develop it without us knowing. Yeah, I could off. But I didn’t. Luckily the website still has the theme, ’cause I only just found out what it is (and that was to post this) So no, I havent had extra time. And if you want proof it’ll be done in 48/72 hours, hop onto my twitch.tv/cmnatic to watch it live, and visit the timelapse afterwards.

Thanks guys,
CMNatic

(EDIT: these submitted games are looking groovy)

There was so much we wanted to accomplish… yet only so much could be done. Even though we have a little bit of experience in past Ludum Dare Jams, we again aimed for the skies and fell very short from what we wanted to accomplish. However! we are not dead yet. With the awesome momentum we’ve picked up over the past few days, we’ve decided to continue development and make this game a reality.

After getting in the core basic mechanics in, we can now move to adding a bit of flare to our graphics. Check out or progress and keep an eye on us as we will be releasing more updates in the “post-Jam” link.

Link to Gimbal Fighter!

While I sot out more of our game components, we’ll also get some of this awesome artwork incorporated as well.

Kumoi

I fixed one error in my game, so try it again.

My plan:

Connected Worlds:

Mixed genre – Few types of levels (which have different genre)
+ Mini Worlds – In levels to make character stronger, etc.; different genre
+ Connection – Story: in mission to connect Worlds in war
Final Match – End of the level; like Mini World but bigger

Level types:
|e|t|m| e-enemies t-traps m-Mini Worlds[1-the smallest; 4-the biggest]
|1|4|3|+ End platformer – Have platforms, you must reach END POINT
|3|2|1|Killing platformer – Have platforms, you must kill amount of enemies
|2|3|4|End shooter – More enemies than platformer, you must reach END POINT
|4|1|2|Killing shooter – More enemies than platformer, you must kill amount of enemies

Final match types:

Boss – one big enemy, and few small enemies; must kill big one
Final wave – many small enemies; must kill amount of enemies
Cleaning – rest of enemies that survive will be aginst you

+ Platformer:

Enemies types:

+ Jump-aware – you can jump on them and kill them
Jumpers – you can jump on them
Fallers – they can hurt you only if they jump on you
+ Normal – you can kill them only by shooting
Spikes – you can’t kill them

Comparing this game and previous LD game:

This game has story previous doesn’t.

This game has level chooser with 50 levels (+story) previous have only start button.

This game has one working level (other 49 are fake) previous have one infinite game loop.

This game has 5 types of enemies previous 4.

Two of this game enemy types have automatic shooting.

In this game you have one weapon (laser) in previous too (fishes).

In this game you are earning more laser entering the Mini Worlds in previous by eating fishes.

I put one dialog in this game, no dialog in previous.

In this game you can enter main menu from game in previous you can’t.

This game has sounds previous doesn’t.

This game has 32 used pictures previous only 10.

This game has 3 sound files, 2 tilemaps and 1 ttf file previous none of these.

This game has 907 code lines previous only 317 (blank and comment lines doesn’t count).

What went good:

– I finished game

-I create great game plan

-I created some really good art (for me)

-I created story

-I had main menu and so on before Ludum Dare started (I send link to my source code)

What went bad:

-Game was to slow in the end

-I created only one level

-Map is a bit of buggy

-Some transparency bugs

-Only one level type

-Only one Mini World type

-No Final Match

Tags: post-mortem