Hi all. At first – I’m bad in english so I’m sorry if someone can’t understand me =(

I made the game for the LD again and ready to tell how to.

My game called “Ordinary Weekdays of Tech Support of Parallel Worlds”.

The main rule is “Be simple”. I well expirienced, so I always knew how meny time I spend on each game component.

As always, I  started with game idea. I spent about 1-2 hours on this. The best practice is to write down all ideas and thinking about “What of them will not realize anyone else”. Then I choose the best idea by criterias: “simple to do” and “interesting to play”.

I like exploration games and made two on last LD. But at this time I had less time so I stopped at simple idea with minimum level design. Yeah, level design – most complex part in exploration games.

In next 2 hours I’ve been programmed game mechanic basis. There is also XBOX gamepad support. And then I started with graphics. It’s easy part for me because I’m expirinced graphical designer. Also wih pixel-art animations. I like animate sprites and can spend slightly more time for this. In time stricitions I always used minimum frames. Often It looks coller than smother ones.

This is example of main character running animation.

Rest of the day I spend on game logic. It’s the portal travel system, port’s connecting, level generating, weapons and bonuses. Also one of complex parts is interface. There are many screen-text which overlay each other. And minimaps on two sides. This idea came to my by a random way when I’ve been thought about screen resolution in my game. At the end of  first day I did the huge part of the game. Except enemies. I prograamed they logic but haven’t time to test it. Only one thing to make in the game at this state was port connecting:

The next day’s morning I stated with enemies. I created four enemy types with special ability, except first dude. First enemy just walking. Here is he:

ONLY FOUR FRAMES!!!
The second enemy was a blob who exploded on eight bullets when die.

Third enemy can shoot. And last one teleports on short distance.
When enemies was ready, the game got second gameplay element. This is PORTS PROTECTING.

When game logic was completed I started with audio. I expirioenced in music creation so it was easy part for me. I made three soundtracks: menu, wrong side and right side. The last one I made from wrong side soundtrack. So they are using same notes =)

The situation with sounds was poor. I had to make ABOUT 50 sounds as total! Then I started to assault BFXR. This is genious tool. I made sounds easily and tested them. About four hours.

The next part is “level design”. I tested the game with “special cases” which I wrote. But game needed gameplay and difficulty curve. So I decided to make few difficulties. The differences was in the map generation algorithm and some stats.

The rest part was menu and spalsh screens (intro, win, fail). I made them within 1 hour. Then I reach my deadline… but plans changed and I’ve got extra few hours! So after small rest I started to polish game with extra sounds, bug catching and visual improving.

That’s all, I haven’t thigs that “went wrong”. But I slightly miss with gameplay. It should bew more ACTION. With many and many enemy waves at the same time. But this needs mpre balancing and another ammunition type.
I’ll expand this game at future to make it as this should be.

Intergalactopol retrospective

Well, my team and I shipped a game that I was pretty pleased with this Ludum Dare. Check it out!

The time has come to dissect the game (and the process) and look at how it worked—I hope you find this interesting.

The Good

I was very pleased with how the sound turned out in Intergalactopol. Having got tired of the identical-sounding sfxr noises, I did the sound effects in Logic Pro, and made sure to keep all the sound effects centred around the key of E, so that they would fit with Mr. Simon Porter‘s music.

The sound of the tractor beam is actually a choir sound taken very low, and most of the “hits” are drumkit or drum machine noises. The music brought it all together.

This time we were working as a much smaller team. Usually we have a team of at least four; it was just Olly and me for this Ludum Dare(plus Simon for the music on the last day). It’s a quite different experience. Much quieter, certainly, though much more immediate. The absence of our game designer and overlord Aaron was felt quite strongly—more on that anon.

Once again we turned to the superb libGDX to power the whole thing. libGDX has recently switched to using Gradle for builds, which means (among other things) builds are much easier to automate. This time around I had Travis CI set up to automatically push builds to my server, which saved a lot of time—in our previous efforts it’s always been a pain having to take a moment out when the non-programmers on the team need a build.

We kept the scope very focused this time around and as a result were effectively finished on Monday morning. We’ve never had this much polish time before, and I think the game feels pretty good as a result of the extra time we were able to spend on the little things.

The Bad

There is a classic problem in game development—as a developer, you know your game too well. If you have the difficulty about right for you, it is way too hard for anybody else. Since my hubris knows no bounds, I thought that even despite that golden rule the game was about right. I was wrong.

The control scheme of the game involves just the mouse: you right-click and hold to grab a planet, and left-click to shoot at a target. This sucks. In fact one bit of feedback that I got was from someone who found the easiest way was to not swing around the planets at all: just to shoot and pray they didn’t crash into anything.

Quite a few people suggested a forward cannon rather than mouse-aiming, but this doesn’t play well. If we’d had more time and more testing (and, let’s be honest, more Aaron), we’d have figured out a control scheme that doesn’t drive you insane—maybe spacebar to latch to the nearest planet and the mouse just for aiming and shooting?

The other problem which I didn’t get time to solve was size. The jar is ~24MB, which is ridiculous given the size of the assets inside. It includes a lot of superfluous libGDX code which I didn’t find a simple way of removing. ProGuard seems to be the standard jar optimising solution, but I couldn’t get it working at all.

In Conclusion

Difficulty with controls aside, I think Olly and I managed to ship a pretty neat game for this Ludum Dare. Let me know what you think about the game and what you think we should have done differently—and I hope this has been an interesting read!

My game can be summed up perfectly by gnx’s review: “Click things and numbers get bigger“. 

I have been very pleasantly surprised by the reviews. I thought the game wasn’t going to be much fun, but people tend to be enjoying it.

Some good quotes:

• “Very fun and addictive game”
• “a nice fun game”
• “Well done balance and execution”
• “Having a fun time with this one. :)”
• “Played it for a long time, not sure why, but I had fun.”
• “the different buttons have nice thought out synergies”
• “I enjoyed it even though there is not much of a challenge “
• “…but I like idle games and this one is cool!”

Some criticism:

• “Aaaah, my poor fingahs. I played that for a lot longer than I meant! “
• “I felt like a rat on a wheel after a while”
• “I would’ve liked to see some visual representation…”
• “I was missing was some sense of reward”
• “Fingers hurt”
• ” idle games aren’t really fun and full of creativity…”

What Went Wrong

• No Time — I had very little time over the weekend, so I only had ~6 hours on Sunday and a few hours on Monday after work. Although I usually submit to the 48-hour competition, I had to submit as a Jam. More time would’ve meant there would have been a lot more features and maybe some nice-looking icons.
• How it all fits together — I also didn’t have a clear vision of how the UI would look or how the synergies would work between the different currencies (money, customers, satellites, etc.). A lot of it was developed on the fly.
• Full Testing — I didn’t test the game all the way through until the very end. It made me realize that the game got a bit boring after a while; even I never played all the way through to unlocking all the planets.

What Went Right

• Work with a known Gameplay style — I knew I wouldn’t have that much time, so I decided ahead of time to create an idle Cookie-Clicker-esque game. I had done this kind of game before for a mini-LD (Conspiracy Clicker), so I knew I could borrow the general concepts and maybe a few lines of code (it’s open source on GitHub). Picking a small scope and a gameplay I was familiar with was the only way I would’ve had a chance at completing anything playable in such a short amount of time.
• New Last-minute Feature — After the bulk of the development was done on Sunday, I knew it wasn’t much fun. My girlfriend played the game and commented that it was missing “things to buy” like I had in Conspiracy Clicker. At the last minute I added in the Engineers and the Marketing, which help to add another element to the gameplay. Without them, the game would be even more tedious.
• Exponents — If you’re going to make an idle game like this, make sure you don’t have a linear progression, but instead have some kind of exponential difficulty and growth. I added Math.pow() in pretty late, but it definitely helped.

Enjoy! http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=17861

The first day of the Ludum Dare we explained the project and made three teams. Our team is the number two compose by Silverio Cardona Rodríguez, Carlota Texeira Saavedra, Estanislao Castro Nieblas, Francisco Montesdeoca Vega and Israel Fleitas. Once formed the team, each one assumed his role inside the team being set that Silverio and Estanislao were programmers, Francisco the artist, Carlota was support and Israel help the others members.

Before the competition I posed the question, “What if our team submitted an mobile only game?”

Really, due to the long approval time for Apple apps, that meant, “What if our team makes an entry that only works on Android?”

Our concern was the tool-chain we use for everyday development which targets iOS/Android (and targets them well) may limit the number of players and therefore the number of reviews. We received mixed responses via LD comments, Reddit and Twitter to the question with almost as many saying “don’t bother” as people saying “I’d play it.”

In the end, we came up with list of three rules for what we wanted to see out of our Android entry:

A good reason to be mobile.

We decided early on, whether it was touch, tilt, camera, etc., our entry needed to be designed to be played on a mobile and not just a mobile version of a desktop idea. We chose a tilt to move, touch to jump platformer with a twist. You control two characters who are chained together and–depending how you have your device turned–you control whoever is on top and drag whoever is on bottom. Flip the device and the roles (and gravity) flip as well.

Easy to download and play

We posted the APK on our own server and posted it on the Google Play store, making sure that no permissions were needed to download and play. We also targeted Android 2.3.3 and limited the frame rate to 30fps. So, outside of needing hardware accelerated OpenGL, the system requirements remained very low. Th game played just fine on a $50 Samsung Reverb. Some respondents also mentioned adding a QR code to the google play link which we did in our main screenshot.

Show me… something

We pushed a YouTube video (which I’m currently re-building) the second we pushed the entry, in hopes that people who couldn’t play would see (and maybe share) our entry. After three days we have 75 views so we are seeing some traction there.

Results

I’d say we are pretty happy so far. We rated about 15 games a day, off and on and would get about 10 ratings a day. Comments are pretty positive, even from those who only watched the video. Friends and family drove our download numbers up, with about 40 total downloads as I’m writing this.

So if you have an Android device lying around, check us out.

In Trappy Tomb the ghosts of all who’ve journeyed into the tomb are replayed simultaneously as you try your luck against the traps bats and boulders… When you die you can leave a message for everyone else to see and if you win… Well a statue is erected in your honour for all time!

The comments from this wonderful community have been humbling to receive, I can’t tell you how much they mean and how much fun it is watching all the in-game messages people have left – you guys crack me up!

The lava is not nearly as hot as my rage

Amazingly over 500 ghosts are now present, forming a ghostly river of doom- if you’d like to join in please do you immortal soul will be most welcome! And of course, I’ll enjoy trying your game too- exceptional standard this LD

PLAY HERE

LD30 aftermath

This was my 3rd Ludum Dare and my time was very limited. During the whole competition I could only work a few hours each day.
That’s why I decided to join the jam and use Unity (in contrast to LibGDX the last two times). I had never used it and in fact installed it only three days before the contest.
The preconditions were far from ideal but my conclusion is:

EVERYTHING WENT BETTER THAN EXPECTED

Unity was really simple to work with and the integration with Blender is neat. After the first two days I had my the mechanics, game-play, graphics, menus and a prototype level running.

The last day I could use to create more levels, add some eye candy (bloom shaders FTW!) and make everything smoother. Fortunately my friend atombrot contributed with a kick-ass chiptune soundtrack.

Improvements for next time: Allocate more time!

Here a short gameplay video:

Play Signum!

the making of deep orbit

deep orbit was my first game I have ever made from beginning to the end

I just uploaded a timelapse for my game Saturday Night Symbiosis.
If you haven’t played the game yet, you still can find it here : http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=1874

Tags: timelapse

Click the link bellow to play:

Windows / Mac OS Game

Extra fun when you protect the Earth !

This time I did my first 2D game in Unity.

For fear of stumbling on a level I didn’t set an ambitious task. The game was simple and elegant.

The last two days I’ve figured out how to port Unity to my phone. The first time it is always difficult for me. Finally all the problems are behind us. And I’m glad to present you my game on Google Play!

Maybe someone you know children will find this game transistors funny. I would be glad if you take a picture of someone playing my game and put his photo in instagram with #connectSimilar tag.

Find and select the same transistors in two threads.

Tags: 2d unity, android, connectSimilar

Hi there o/

I’m currently working on the post-compo version of my LD#30 game which did not receive any polish during the week-end..

I wanted to start with animations, but was kinda disappointed by the current state of Synfig Studio. I use Inkscape and it is awesome.. until you want to animate your drawings. I took a quick look at other animation software, but they either are not free, not available on linux or lack Inkscape’s ergonomics.

So I coded a small tool in Haxe to let me animate things easily in Inkscape: a preview of the current animation at the right framerate, updating itself instantly each time I save my svg file.

juxtapose
is an interactive experience in a small world, divided in two.

four travelers are stranded on two halves of the world.
their lives are in danger.
you can help them.
you can explore.
you can simply rest, and do nothing.

all actions will eventually lead to an ending.
their story can end in eight ways.

discover them all.

My timelapse video of this Ludum Dare (#30). It has an awesome and chill Drum n Bass Song :3. Also i want to say that i made my first RTS (Real Time startegy) AI (Artificial Intelligence) Ever :DDD

I decided to do a post mortem for my game Dead Land. If you haven’t played it you should definitely give it a go. Plus there’s MAC LINUX AND WINDOWS versions so you have no excuses!

THE GOOD

• Low poly graphics turned out extremely well and almost as easy as my usual pixel art.
• The characters were quite interesting.
• I have a base that I could use to make a longer game in the same style.
• The phasing mechanic worked well (eventually).
• The music changed nicely between worlds.
• The game was my most polished so far.
• There are Windows Mac and Linux versions.

THE BAD

• I wasted much of day one trying to create my own first person controller in unity because it was originally going to be more of a platformer. I settled with the basic unity one in the end and resigned to do a puzzle game.
• I also wasted much time on the first day trying to switch between two levels keeping the players velocity etc… but ended up just switching between two places in the same world.
• Unitys mouse look script is a pain to work with and I’m becoming increasingly aware that some people find the default sensitivity to be too high. I have to make an option screen for that in case of future use.
• I wasted time making my own font and used it for the instructions screen, it was hard to read so some people didn’t know quite what to do.
• Other problems with the font.
• music was slightly repetitive
• Puzzles were simple give character A item A , Give character B item B etc.. But I’m proud of what I managed. An inventory/ item combos would be cool and more items/ things to use items on. Also a few items that have no use to add an extra level of thought to the game too.
• There were no sound effects.
• The cursor displayed on screen at the same as a cross hair causing confusion over which one to use.
• You can solve a puzzle without hearing the problem. Groove man suggested: maybe let the player click through their request until you can give them the item.
• The name was poopy. 

IN CONCLUSION

I learned so much this time and one year on from my first ludum dare I’m only beginning to come to grips with time management and scope on ludum dare projects. In future I must improve my user interfaces and find someone to test it near the end to give me an idea what might be problematic for them. I hope I can participate again but by the looks of things this year is going to be pretty study filled (I hope) and the only hope I have is if the next one is during my Christmas holidays which based on the dates last year it has a good chance of being.

LUDUM DARE! I LOVE YOU ALL!!!

IRMCO Space Miners

Play and rate IRMCO Space Miners here!

I’ve had a few people mention that this would be a good game to port to Android, so I spent some time today porting it over. Please keep in mind this was a quick hack job of a port. The touch interface for zooming in and out of the solar system works, but it’s not as smooth as I’d like. The game also needs optimized. I managed to play a full game on my Galaxy Note 3, but it started getting laggy and choppy near the end of the game. If you have an older android device, it probably won’t work well. I would also suggest sticking to tablets. It was hard to push some of the buttons on my Note 3. Any smaller than that and I don’t think the game would be very playable. If you try the android version, please let me know how it works for you.

I really enjoy this game and want to develop it into a full game, so I’ve been working on that. The new version should be mobile friendly and I’ll be sure to post here when it’s finished. Thanks to everyone who has played my game and gave me your feedback!

Hey folks, remember Duke Dashington? My entry for Ludum Dare 27 and Overall 5th ranker? it’s been a while, but I have been slowly developing the game since that Ludum Dare and the finished game is finally getting a full release on mobiles! The game will first come out on iOS, with Android version coming little after. Unlike the compo entry that had single temple and 11 rooms, the full game has 4 different temples to explore and over whopping 100 different rooms of fast-paced puzzling and dashing! The game will be out the 4th of September, in the meanwhile, check out the game’s trailer:

Aaaaand RELEASE! Damnit… Ok this one NOW! Damnit… Ok surely OH COME ON!

So Good News Delivery Co. has been very well received, but one fairly consistent bit of feedback is that it’s ridiculously difficult.

So with a few minor tweaks I’ve released a post-48hr compo version and released a web-only build version of it which you can find here (link also available in the original webplayer link).  The changes you can expect:

• The Pirates have slept in and won’t bother you for a whole minute of gameplay.  After which expect them to warp in frequently as time goes on.
• More good news is that in their hurry they haven’t managed to activate their shields so you can now destroy them by hitting them fast enough with something, be it your ship or your cargo.
• I’ve also coated the ship in some experimental substance that makes it really bouncy, which should stop you getting stuck so easily when you hit a planet.
• The galactic trading standard has lowered the fine for destroyed cargo from $100 down to $50.
• Cargo should now be pulled in by gravity a bit better, making it easier to release cargo from orbit and have it land correctly.
• Improved shipping regulations mean that cargo’s tougher than before.  It can now survive two shots of pirate laser fire before being destroyed.
• Also cargo will now NEVER be destroyed if it hits its destination planet at any speed, so SLAM DUNK IT HOME.

Obviously when rating the game please judge the original version.  This one’s more for if you’ve played the original, but felt you couldn’t enjoy it properly due to the difficulty.  Hopefully this set of tweaks makes it a bit fairer and helps get the general scores people are getting higher than the average QI episode.

So yeah. Here’s the link again and Here’s the link to the original page.

Safe shipping everyone!

Hey everybody I need your opinion.

The comments to my game showed me that my game crashes in a specific situation. I didn’t notice that in time.

It came out, that I came up with a stupid and way to complicated function after a long hours of coding in the middle of the night.

Now it took me 5 minutes to locate the problem and another 5 to fix that.

I read on the ‘my game’-page that it is allowed to fix gamecrashes wich come from typos or simple misstakes.

Do you think it would be ok to upload my updated version? It 100% identical to the old version with exeption of that stupid function.

What do you think?

Please notice: Being fair is a big deal for me.

thx

sorle

First off, this Ludum Dare has been a lot of fun. It is fortunate and unfortunate that so many people have participated. The good side is that you get such a vast array of talents all coming to the same place. The unfortunate side is that you can’t play all of the games. The ones I have seen so far have been awesome. Great job everyone!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=34411

So Musical Trade Routes… It was a little crazy putting this thing together. I am sure everyone feels the same way about their own games I am actually shocked at the positive feedback I have been receiving. All of the cool stuff that people seem to like were afterthought things that I threw together in the twilight hours of the competition. I wanted to make my game have an abstract approach to the theme – so far most have not noticed it. I wanted to connect the worlds of poetry and music together. As I knew this would be an abstract theme, I placed in a more obvious connecting trade routes between worlds.

Development:

With only a couple of hours to plan on day 1, I could not think of anything to do with this theme. I came up with some views on how to address the theme and posted them around, but that was the extent. I went to bed a little sad that I would not be participating. When I woke up the next morning, I decided to start looking into linking poetry and music and to make a little space game, just so I would have something to submit. The plan was to work on planning each for a few hours and then see which seemed like a better path. As I continued doing both, the idea of a piano ship evolved. I quickly made some piano music and did my best to make a flight simulation. I had never done either one before, so I am extremely happy with how they came out, even though it is not perfect.

I then began to create planets. I was going to leave half of them unnamed and just white circles. Before moving on I convinced myself to just finish naming and coloring so I could say something was done. I threw in some lines between the planets and made it so each planet (0-9) would display its own lines to connecting planets. I finished up the day by making a “difficulty” variable that I assigned to each planet.

Sunday morning I woke up and just started banging out some poetry. Haikus seemed like the easiest way to go. All I need was 120 syllables and all ten planets were done:

I started working on enemies, but just quickly made some meteors. I decided to get done the space combat system. Simplest solution was random spawns based on the difficulty variable. I felt this would make it more interesting because it might interrupt whatever song people were playing and create a new song entirely. I got a chance to play test it quite a few times, so difficulty was adjusted here and there. A few of the polish things that I was hoping to add were a hard mode, music playback and a sonnet. Those who have played it might not have realized that the title screen was a sonnet

The good:
Music playback – This has been a favorite for most of the people who have played the game. At the end of each level, you get to hear the music that you played while in flight.
The poetry – Not many have commented on the poetry, but I am actually happy with how it came out. Also at the win screen, you get to read the planet’s Haiku while your own music is playing in the background.

The bad:
Enemies – I wanted so bad to have a lot of enemies, space ships, curving asteroids, other music coming in. That would have been so much fun.
Free Piano – I added this in post-comp. I received feedback early on that a more realistic piano would have been better. In the post comp, I added in more key sets for playing and opened the option for multiple key strokes at the same time. I have not taken the time to make a music playback for free-piano mode, though.
Graphics – I am not an artist. I know the graphics were not fantastic.

Future of the game:
I totally want to continue this project. I think it would do well in the mobile market. I even tried putting it on the google play store (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ceosol.MTR). Its free to download. If anything, at least you’ll have a little music creator on your phone or tablet
I want to add more to the piano, for sure. Maybe you could swipe left or right to go up and down octaves. You could purchase new ships that have different instruments.
A suggestion was also made with the free piano mode that spawn times could be decreased and you would have faster action happening.

Thank you again to everybody who has tried it out. I was so burnt out at the end that I was thinking the game was absolutely horrible. I am delighted by all of the feedback, good and bad. Keep it coming!

Tags: journal, post-mortem