Hi everyone, I just would like to make a surprise here,
Great games you’ve made there ! (For those I’ve tested)
I’m working on a post jam version of the game. Trying to finish the polishing.
I’ve made new characters, more unique, more “world”
and here:
Souzou Cliff is a story about a guy named “Edan” who one day got lost and happen to find himself exploring another world. On his way to find out where he is, he met a girl named “Estelle”, a native to that world. The game is all about telling a story of boy meets girl, inocent feelings, promises and getting back together after a few years have passed.
The game features a refreshing storyline, lovable characters, wonderfully crafted pixel art world. With platforming as its base gameplay put together with storyline elements you are sure to relate to and love. Dual platforming with split screen portraying two different worlds at once. Move two characters with a single controller and help Edan and Estelle meet once again!
What went right:
– Finish a beatable game
– Deliver the game story
– Make a beautiful pixel world
– BGMs that blends with the game
What went wrong:
– We ran out of time testing and debugging the game
– There are still some collision bugs
Aftermath:
This is the best Ludum dare experience for me yet, I am well prepared than the past jams and we have a team. The game also receives nice publicity.
Next Ludum Dare:
– We will spare more time for testing and debugging.
– We will invite more game dev peeps into our team
– Need more preparations, specifically on the Audio part.
Hey everyone! We are the Button Masher Bros!
It might be labor day but that won’t stop us! Today we present Ludum Dare to Believe! S:2 Ep. 3!
With so many submissions, there was absolutely no way we could play them all.
Special thanks to our friends at Reddit, twitter, and youtube who all stepped up to give us suggestions – you guys are the BEST!
If you like the games you see, be sure to check them out of Ludumdare.com and let the developers know what you think!
**Today we will be highlighting**:
Title: Sinester
Category: Compo Entry (48 hr)
Creator: Joe Williamson
Title: 1*5
Category: Compo Entry (48 hr)
Creator: Eyeofbri
Title: Our Worlds
Category: Jam Entry
Creator: Davisan
Finally, we’d love to hear what you think!
You can comment on the episode linked above, comment in this thread, or tweet us at:
@ButtonMasherBro – Show
@MathBlasterRitz – Chris
or @jwowBMB – Josh.
Thanks Everyone and HAPPY LUDUM DARE!
I made a video of The Lion’s Song getting made.
Watch me start with graphics, tumbling over my lack of writng experience/skill. Switching back to graphics, because it’s something I’m more comfortable with. Missing the compo deadline. Almost giving up. Deciding not to give up and finishing it as a jam game.
Maybe it’s interesting to watch? I don’t know. I love to see games getting made and thought I’d share. Because why not?
I’ve also decided to make a post-compo version of the game that’ll add story and dialog, graphics and a nice satisfying ending. I’ll keep you up to date. Until then maybe you could check out and rate The Lion’s Song? Thanks ;D
Saturday morning, August 23, 2014. I arrive hungover at the Rhodesfield station to be picked up by Kevin who’s also hungover to design and code up a game in a weekend for Ludum Dare. We’re already 5 hours into LD with no idea what we we’d make.
The theme for the weekend, “Connected Worlds”. Both of us thinking “what an obscure theme”. I, like 90% of the people participating jump straight to thinking about planets. I quickly throw that idea in the toilet to try and come up with a fresh idea that won’t feel common.
After throwing around some ideas we had a basic idea that we’d flesh out as we went along. The idea was that we’d make a 2 player co op game with each player in a different world interacting with each other to achieve a common objective.
I spent most of my time in Inkscape and Gimp focussing on the art and Kevin wrote the game code. We used the Unity 4.6 Beta to play around with the new UI system which was fun but annoying because we were alone in the dark with very little resources to shed light on a few things.
After several arguments, bugs, and cups of coffee we came out with A Hat’s Trick a 2 player (easily playable by one) puzzle platformer.
– Cukia
Hey guys!
My first ludum dare! So please play, rate and leave a comment!
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=38779
It was my second ludum dare, but my first alone.
I live in France, so the beginning of the competition was at 3 am. I woke up, see the theme and returned to sleep.
The morning (I woke up early) I had a super idea, perfect fit to the theme, make a space paperboy where papers were weapons too! (to see what is paperboy ) (amstrad version because I had an amstrad). After two hours, I had a revelation: I don’t know make cool space ship. I returned to bed.
After that I was sad. I decided to make a point n click and made some sketch. But new problem: I don’t know write in english (a friend was agree to correct some text, but a point n’ click is a lot of text…). Sad again.
But there was a sketch I liked: an inspector and a lot of suspects aligned (as in the poster of Usual suspects). And it was, finally, the good start…
What went right:
- the idea: it isn’t perfect, but I played with some friends and always had fun.
- good warm up: I use two things I had never used. phaser (because gre was used it) and sunVox (because jsmars was used it). I only had 3 days to warm up, but I don’t had problems with it.
- I had time: I finish the game early and take time to add some suspects. No stresse. Cool.
- animations: I have a lot of fun with animations: try to make different ways of walking was fun. And suspects are really differents.
- the music: it isn’t good, but it was my first try so I’m just happy to have try.
- it’s a two players game: I like two players game.
What went wrong:
- the theme: Connecting worlds made me think about the mafia: different people from differents “worlds” (I don’t know if it works in english, in french we can call social class “world”) but secretly connected. After that I stopped worrying about it. Finally, it wasn’t a good idea…
- focus problem: I try to correct a difficulty of the game (the focus of the inspector was changing too fast), and I made it more difficult (now it’s more hard to change it).
- rules: I don’t know write rules. The game is simple why my rule explanations are so long?
- settings menu: I had time, but I prefered make more characters than polish my game. So the settings menu is bad (nobody understood that we can choose the number of suspects…)
- it’s a two players game: it’s hard to have a friend near to you when you play at ludum dare games (and I already make the mistake in my previous LD with the copain team); I made an AI so you can play the inspector. But this isn’t the same (and the better (most stressful) is to play the Godfather)…
If I made a post-compo it will be:
- with more suspects!
- with a complice (simple idea to make the game harder for the inspector: a second character lies, but is idiot: he just say the opposite of what he should say)
- with a better focus system.
- with a better menu.
- with asking someone a good music.
play Everybody knows where the Godfather is.
(and sorry for the bad english…)
I made a video of my game: Youtube
It’s a Stargate fangame heavily inspired/ripping off X-Com: Enemy Unknown 😀
Instead of investigating crash sites, fighting aliens and stealing their tech to research, you go through the Space Gate, fight Goa’uld and Jafa, steal their tech to research… you run a Space Gate base, managing staff, resources, weapons, then dial up a planet on the Space Gate, go through and fight some aliens in a turn based tactical combat game 😀
A lot of things were cut, I intended the various alien metals to actually act as a resource (ie: you need $5k + 2 Naquadah to make a staff weapon) but I didn’t have time to implement that, so you just need to research the staff weapon + naquadah, then you can buy staff weapons just with your money. The ‘Staff’ units don’t do anything, they were going to maintain the base, run the cafeteria etc. but now they just consume your funds 😛 I wanted to be able to train more than one unit at a time, and pick what exactly they are training in (earth weapons/goa’uld weapons/generic training/etc), I wanted to have some random invasions where if the goa’uld reach the surface elevator you lose (there are invasions currently, but they only happen if you go through the gate and get a random event, and it doesn’t have that lose condition), I wanted to have a way of storing which planets you have visited so that each planet’s dial code would be the seed to generate that planet – which I did implement, but as I had no way of storing which ones you had visited, you could just find a resource-heavy planet and spam farm it – so I just made the planet dial random seeds. Mostly, I wanted way more variation in what kind of planets you visit, and the things you encounter there. Right now, all you can encounter are:
I wanted to have villages that would trade resources, villages that ask for your help in defending from an incoming attack, more variety in aliens (Unas etc), all that kind of stuff. And the level generation is kind of meh right now, very wide open spaces and not a whole lot of variety. All could have been better, but time limits 😛
Also I guess the medkit/shield/hand device/cloak could be implemented a lot better. Ideally they would give you extra commands you could perform instead of just attacking, but given the time restraints I had to just make them function automatically, which isn’t so great.
(edit: also obviously, better graphics/sounds/music would have been good, but I knew from the start I wouldn’t get to those…)
You can play my entry here: Link
Howdy everyone!
A quick post to invite you to play and rate my game, Delta Space Line, a trading game.
Your goal is to gather 10,000 credits in a minimal number of travels.
To do so, you control a ship with 6 slots (right sidebar) that you can fill with merchandizes and passengers.
Hovering a planet shows you the exchange rate of the 4 types of merchandize (food, metal, weapon, crystal). It should help you making money by buying goods at a cheap price (the current planet market is shown in the left sidebar), then selling them at a better price on planets where the demand is higher.
In addition to goods trading, carrying passengers can help you optimize your moves by filling the empty cargo slots. Passengers pay their journey and take off your ship as soon as they reach their destination.
Counting on you guys for feedback, even negative…
I hope you’ll enjoy!
Tags: cargo, delta spaceline, goods, LD30, merchandizes, passengers, planets, space, trading
Hi guys. I’m very happy with the result of my first ludum dare participation. I start to make games this year, and i like to always start my games from scratch to learn more, and i start my ludum dare game from scratch as well ( i made a base code some hours before compo start, anyway i had to change a lot of things in my tile-map render).
I got the idea to the game faster than i thought, so i think was a really good theme. My idea was connected worlds where you can travel between and solve puzzles to reach somewhere, so you can travel to a different world when reach this place. In my mind the worlds are connected like this: 
I spent some good time on level design, but have some mistakes where the player could get stuck. Make a complex puzzle game in 48h it’s not easy (make a game in 48h isn’t easy).
In the post-compo version i made some performance improvements, i tried to make the player’s movement better, added a nice transition when switch the map, made a new music and i drew a character.
I drew this yesterday:
I really wanted to make more maps and add more features, but now i’m going back to the development of my js13k game. Maybe someday i’ll make a big game with this idea.
Thanks to everyone that gave a feedback about the game, it was really cool! I Hope i can see you in the next ludum dare! 😀
First I want to say “thank you” to artist Alex. All arwork was done by him and this is the best part of game.
You can touch the game via web version (ludum page: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=31999)
What went right
– Simple concept. We had time to think and do what is truly important to the concept itself. “Occam’s Razor” works everywhere.
– Presence. We didn’t want to do focus on the player itself (“or magic glob”). The background and levels should exist by their selves. This has reduced the technical work and fit everything in one scene, even the initial screen is a small element of the gameplay. As well as the final screen. (No triggers , no switching elements and so on.)
– Sound transition effect, as were mentioned above. Enviorenmet exist undependatly from the player. Imagine building. On each floor are discoteques and you shifting between them. I wanted to add some effect like this.
-Verlet trails. Globe has a trail elements, which computed by verlet algorithm. It gives viscosity to the enviorenment. Liquid background.
What went right or maybe not
-Game mechanic. Main idea was that every touch creates wave that has influence on the globe. But phyisically it behaves like slow explosion. Pushing force is inversily to the distance squared between globe and wave center. We’v got a lot of feedbacks that saying mechanic is not obvious.
-Hardcore. Our decision was create maybe not demo, but little acomplished game, and high difficulty was one of the tools, which could help… But very powerfull gravity elements could add random omponents to gameplay and sometimes frustrate the player.
– Music. Honestly saying, music was added at the last moment. We have a really small amount of time and it was like (“Check this out, I think it should be first level” or “I think second level looks like dwar fortress (Thank you mister Edvard Grieg).”)).
Next steps
Revisit all components of the game. Determine target platforms (currently tablets are the main target platforms). And continue to work on it (This is the most important ).
Thank you for reading this article,
Please leave your opinions and feedbacks. We appreciate it very much!
Greetings lords, lordettes, and ladies.
We provide thy highnesses our enhanced version of Schrödinghost, the “Quantic Bawwwls MK II version”.
Added reworked ghost mode effects ( /_\ Caution may cause slime projections thru the screen) , animations, cut scenes, and few sounds.
CLIC HERE TO HAVE SOME LOVE AND PLAY
Theatrical spotlight with powerful monologs:
Dat ghost mode light effect of Doom: Scary !
In this one you can clearly see the addition of sound effects:
Game is phat and takes a little time to load, allowing you to answer your mom on Facebook, Twitt about politics, or continue your intense internet researches about special kind of movies (and I mean there Japanese Samuraï Action Pr0n)
Hope you’ll enjoy doing, or redoing our game and havin’ a super funk time.
And as today quote: “Live for nothing, or die for something”
John Rambo.
For our 8th straight entry in Ludum Dare, we created The Asteroids I Call Home.
“Using your super powered cat spacesuit, bash through those that threaten your home.
Mining ships have invading your peaceful asteroid sanctuary. Defend your home the only way you know how: violently bashing through spaceships.
Fly at highspeeds with the help of your jet pack and the gravitational pull of nearby asteroids.
Stop the minors by breaking their chains, ships and defense droids. ”
The Asteroids I Call Home
You can play our entry here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=12839
What went wrong:
– Rigging problems
Since this was the first time our artist was doing 3D work, we had a lot of trouble
at first trying to rig our 3D model, due to automatic weight painting.
– Unity animation problems
As we were unsure of our animation pipeline, we had some difficulties
with getting our animations into unity. Although we worked it all out,
it definitely took up more of our time than we would have liked.
– Lost day for the artist
Our artist still had work on the Monday of the jam, which lost
us a day of polish and touch ups we would have liked.
What went right:
– Picked a game idea and finished planning out the details quickly
After just a short brainstorming session, we had an idea we both liked,
and quickly made a few nice pages of planning, so we could focus later on
creating the game, and not having to stop constantly to work out details.
– Doing 3D
Although rigging was stupid, and we had trouble with animations in unity for a little while,
we are quite happy with our results of making a 3D game in just 72 hours.
– Completed all the planned features
Although it took a ton of work, we were really happy that we managed to get evertyhing
into the game that we wanted, including timed mode
– Our best entry yet
We really feel like this was our best entry yet. It had more polish than many of our
other entries, and definitely felt a lot smoother and controlled better than
most of our prior work.
Our 256x speed timelapse can be viewed here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-F0_s6mz3Bs
64x speed here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJrYeUrR9Yg
We are having a blast playing the other entries for Ludum Dare 30, and as always can’t
wait for the next competition. Good luck in the voting everyone.
The Asteroids I Call Home death
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=12839
Guess what? If you rush things, you do them wrong.
Who’d have thought, right?
It turns out, that, although I have been uploading bug fixes, I kept forgetting to change the link to the download on the game page, so everyone has been playing the old, bad version. I know, it’s terrible. It should be fixed now, hopefully.
Until the next time I make another dumb mistake, you should be OK to play it this time.
HAVE FUN!!!
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=40978
Hello, In addition to creating Games, I also record YouTube Videos. I started a new series this week for Ludum Dare 30 Games, it will run until September 15th. Each week I will have videos for at least five games. The release Schedule is Mondays at 3pm PST.
Week 1:
Connected we Run by Sandcrawler
They Were Just Pixels by Ohems
Tags: Videos
After giving myself a week to reflect, I’ll say my piece on how my second Ludum Dare went.
I keep a full text log when doing Ludum Dare, and I may publish the entire thing if there’s interest or I feel like it. For now, here are some highlights:
Day 1 – 6:46 PM
Test build worked the first time. I’m not sure if that’s a good omen.
Day 1 – 10:50 PM
So evidently entire matches are getting decided by minute differences in ship position. That’s what I have to assume because I’m getting inconsistent results and nothing else is random.
Day 2 – 11:20 AM
I could never have had this many ships on screen in vanilla Flash.
Day 2 – 1:02 PM
This game is still missing any kind of player interaction whatsoever.
Day 2 – 4:47 PM
Got four power buttons working, but since I only implemented the explosion power, they all linked to that. Proceeded to spend 5 minutes trying to blow up everything with all four copies of the explosion power. Failed.
Day 2 – 9:19 PM
Managed to unravel my game mechanics and successfully allow the player to exit a level. That took more effort than I wanted it to and less than I expected.
Day 3 – 9:37 AM
Sound is done.
Day 3 – 9:44 AM
…unless I decide to change the victory noise to something that’s not an ear-piercing whistle.
Though The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly is a good movie, I think my experience categories during this LD are better described with a different set: What Went Right, What Went Wrong, and What Was Facepalm-Worthy.
What Went Right
-Schedule Once again, I was lucky enough to have a fully open weekend for Ludum Dare. I also like my timezone, as I kind of get three days to work with. Ludum Dare started at 6 PM for me, giving me a fairly relaxed first day where I could just get my basic concept down. Then I had a full day in the middle to really flesh things out, and the last day for polish. At no point during this structure is there any incentive for me to lose sleep, because if I stayed up too late it would just hurt my next day. As things worked out, I was able to get the basic concept down in the first hour, get a working demo by the end of Day 1, get all combat mechanics and powers plus music, graphics, and a lot of menu stuff done Day 2, and have plenty of time the next day for polish, level design, sound design, and finishing the menus. At no point did I find myself wishing for the extra 24 hours I would have gained doing the Jam. In fact, I was extremely relaxed for the last 6 hours, figuring that I had plenty of time to do whatever was needed.
-Code I love Starling now more than I ever did before this project. So much stuff that was convoluted in regular as3, such as angles, object disposal, and event handling was made much cleaner. Texture Atlases are a really convenient way to manage graphics once you’re used to them, and the performance boost is amazing. I was also blessed with a relatively bug-free game – there were a few bugs, but nothing really show-stopping and very rarely anything that took more than 5-10 minutes to resolve.
-Graphics I should focus some time on refining and improving my style, but I think I might be on to something with simple, clean vector graphics. They work really well for Ludum Dare because I can get something decent looking without having to spend too much time. It’s not the most amazing aesthetic, but it works.
-Concept The first thing I do when the theme is announced is open up a text file and start brainstorming (I think better with a computer than with pencil and paper.) I considered doing a game where you played two games simultaneously, but they interacted in a fundamental way, such as if enemies in one world could only be defeated by attacks from the other. My second idea was a more plot-oriented one, where you played in a world being invaded by demons, and to stop them you needed to go through the portals and break the machinery in the demon world. I rejected the first because I wasn’t really inspired and the second because I didn’t think I could do it justice. The idea I settled on, as written in my log, was this:
Alternatively, I could do something totally different and try to find a non-standard definition. Wikitionary gets me this:
(usually with “well-“): Having favorable rapport with a powerful entity.
The idea that comes from this is a game where planets are connected by warp lanes, and send ships down those lanes
to try to capture other planets. Pretty standard stuff, the trick would be that the player doesn’t control any of this. Instead, they are a god that is aiding a particular civilization. This would mostly involve raining divine wrath on your enemies.
I think this one worked pretty well.
What Went Wrong
-Audio I should probably have focused more on this. My composed-in-an-hour Ludum Dare music has gotten mostly negative feedback, and I’m not exactly a master of BFXR. I’m supposing that SFXR and similar are more suited to more ‘retro’ games and that perhaps I should look into other options. Even if the audio’s not to everyone’s taste, I had time to put in mute buttons, so it shouldn’t interfere with the game too much.
-Submission Hour First of all I’d like to point out that I can’t seem to find this mechanic anywhere in the Ludum Dare rules. I legitimately did not know about it my first LD, and found myself scrambling to get the thing uploaded before the main compo deadline. Not having my own website or a good plan, I eventually uploaded to a Google Site and hoped it would work. I hoped this time would be different. My final submission time of 10 minutes before Submission Hour ended says otherwise. I tried the same Google Site, and I am still using it for the download and source download, but after half and hour of failing to pass wmode=’direct’ into the page embedcode so the game would actually show up, I concluded that the effort was going to be fruitless. With half an hour remaining and my stress-o-meter near the point of exploding, I ended up registering for itch.io and putting the game there. Success, but after much more difficulty than I would have liked.
What Was Facepalm-Worthy
-mimeType is case-sensitive. And that’s why my XML import took 20 minutes longer to get working than it should have.
-AS3 Vectors are a feature I should have known about a year ago. I’d been coding in a language for over a year without knowing I could do the rough equivalent of strongly-typed arrays.
-LD29 Since my last LD was LD28, I forgot that I’d skipped one and labelled all my files, project folder, and even the log with “LD29” instead of “LD30.” Took me half the compo before I noticed.
-BFXR I thought I’d somehow lost my copy, couldn’t find it anywhere, and was midway through downloading a new copy when I noticed the desktop icon for it.
Conclusion
Overall, I’d consider this a successful LD from a production standpoint, and I’ve been getting mostly positive feedback – certainly an improvement from last year when most people were complaining about having trouble leading shots (to be fair, it was too hard.) I’d like to thank the organizers for giving me and so many others this opportunity, the makers of all the great games I’ve played so far, and everyone who’s given me feedback so far. You guys rock!
Iter Bellum Deus is available here.
Pily is a kid who has to go for the bread. In the way he can die because to go for the bread has his dangerous, for example spikes or meteors. , if he dies he go to the gray died world (he becomes phantom), the world change and in 3 seconds he resurrect but if he dies in the died world you lose the game.
Play it here : http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=17946
FIRST DAY: FRIDAY
The theme was given at 3 am zzzzzzz. I just thought to watch the theme and going to sleep maybe i can get an idea sleeping :P. I saw the theme and i went to sleep, in the morning i was thinking idea until zzzzzz so when i woke up , i got a new idea!
SECOND DAY: SATURDAY
The idea was a game of a character in 2 worlds (lived and dead) both worlds (they are similar but different) and they are connected in x and y positions for the character so the map design was not easy.
I started with rectangle map papers for doing the map, that was great!, I got 2 maps that it looked match more or less and different..
Next, to know is thhe size of the tiles. So first I decided to do the character size.
I took a paper and I started to scratch. This was a good thing . Because it’s about death, I remembered the grim funny “billy and mandy” cartoon so I decided to do a character with Billy style :D, I called Pilly who loves the bread as much as i do :P, yeah, bread power!!.
I decided to use Multimedia Fusion 2 (MMF2) in this ld because i bought in a humble bundle and i wanted to learn it. The problem i didn’t know how to use it yet :S, so i watched several tutorials for the basic
And i got some problems to get used to MMF2 and implement different features( not normal features) like save position between transactions in worlds and movement controls, collisions stuffs and I couldn’t export to web :(. So next time I will take some days before to know what can i do with the tools.
Anyway I finished the main character and the basic mechanic :D.
SUNDAY
Designning more maps and the mechanics, this day was good, some problem doing the music but i got something funny 😀 haha that match with the game character and the bread.
I got problem with the Artificial intelligence stuffs for meteors with MMF2 and it was given me strange bugs, maybe because the pixel levels..
Anyway i got to finish and I was laughing a lot times when i played, something that few games get on me.
Finally, if someone know something that i can improve and they can give me advices I would appreciate it. Thanks! I hope that you like this post-mortem orr how-to .. thing not sure what I wrote yet 😛 but I looked cool in this way (day per day).
My
Post-Mortem & Story
I know this might be a bit late but I’ve had a busy week, so here goes anyway. This post is divided into three parts (sandwiched with unashamed self-promotion at either end). The first tells the story of the event and what I went through creating it. It’s quite detailed, so if you’re not interested in that bit please jump ahead to the post-mortem and feedback sections, in which I critique my work and reflect on feedback from you guys so far.
For Ludum Dare 30: Connected Worlds, I created a game called Harmony, one of the many space-themed entries that made it into the gallery for the event. The game revolves creating an equilibrium in military (often accidentally spelt with two ‘L’s throughout the game, forgive my sins) and economic powers between the inhabitants of six planets so that they can live together peacefully. This is achieved by the player carefully selecting the geographic properties of the planets each of the six races start on and using various powers throughout the game to influence the rate of growth of the civilisations.
The game essentially takes place over three phases: the setup phase, in which the player creates the planets and settles the races; the pre-space phase, in which the player is given time to balance each of the races strengths pre-emptively; and the final space phase, in which planets start to interact with each other, the results of which can be catastrophic should the player have failed to setup and balance in the earlier points in the game.
You can read the story (with pictures!), post-mortem and feedback after the jump.
Around the start of August, I felt confident I had finally built up the necessary skills (and self confidence) to participate in my first Ludum Dare. Not only would this be my first ever LD, but the first time I’d ever tried to create a game from scratch, as opposed to following a tutorial or working from the results thereof. I was looking forward to the challenge and spent time almost every day floating on the LD blog, picking up whatever precious nuggets of information the kind community were willing to offer via their own blog posts
In advance of the event, I had a good idea of what I was going to do: I was going to work with Unity and, in order to keep things simple, I was going to build a platformer. So, in the few weeks before the event, I spent plenty of time familiarising myself with the new Unity2D system and working with the (highly recommended) Pyxel Edit. In the week running up to the start of the event, although I didn’t create anything for the warmup (which I will try to do next time) I was tentatively confident in my skills both programming-wise and with my chosen software.
That all said, I can’t help but feel I may have left it a bit last minute, which will be discussed later.
Being bang on GMT+0, the event would start at 2am. This meant I was largely torn between going to bed before the announcement and see what my not-a-morning-person self could come up with after a decent night’s sleep or to stay up until 2am, get the theme, jot down a few ideas and then turn in. I unintentionally opted for the latter, having spent some time agonising over the decision between youtube videos, I suddenly realised it was 1am, what could 1 hour more hurt?
So, I sat around and at 2am, lo, the theme was announced: Connected Worlds.
My immediate reaction was that it was not a particularly hard theme and it naturally leant itself to flow networks etc. I ummed and erred for ten minutes of so while lurking in the LD30 irc (the website was practically down at this stage) and came up with two ideas before turning in:
With both ideas jotted down I turned in for the night…
I got up around 9:30 ish the following morning full of excitement and eagerness to get started. However, over a rushed breakfast of cereal, I kept turning both ideas over in my head and couldn’t help but notice some major flaws in the two ideas I’d come up with.
I resolved that if I couldn’t come up with something better by the time I’d finished breakfast I’d roll with the first idea. By the time I’d finished chewing thoughtfully on Cheerios I had it. The idea for Harmony came strolling into my mind more or less fully formed: a game in which you balance the powers of various interacting peoples in order to achieve balance. I turned the idea over in my head multiple times, determined to find fault and could only come up with one…
It wasn’t a platformer game. It wasn’t the exact genre of game I’d been preparing for all this week.
My final LD30 brainstorm
However, I felt far more passionate about this idea than either of my others. So I decided to throw caution to the wind and run with it. Grabbing a fistful of paper and some pens I went back up to my room and jotted down the various mechanics of the game before cracking on with the art. I didn’t want to jump straight into programming mechanics as I wanted to give my mind a while to go through the various design decisions and pick them apart where necessary.
The canvas from Pyxel Edit of the final planet tiles and civilisation rings
As you can see from the above, I initially designed the planets to appear differently depending on the type chosen. Also, I would like to have done more for each planet type, however, time marches on. So, turning back to my paper, I worked out remaining issues for the components I’d be tackling today got on with the unity project and started programming.
Firstly, I started with allowing the player to be able to spawn in planets and settle races on them which suddenly meant I had to look into using the libraries for the mouse as well as creating GUI buttons. This was something I’d not anticipated during preparation earlier in the week, as my original plan had been to create a platformer that didn’t require mouse input. I’d really been thrown for a loop by this and it threw me right of course. My progress became agonisingly slow as it felt like I had to consult the unity documentation every 30 seconds to find out how to do something I felt I already should know how to do.
By the time I’d got what should’ve been very simple functionality implemented, it was approaching 4pm. This was possibly the lowest point in the weekend: over 25% of the time had gone already and all I had to show for it was a clicky button thing. Not good.
The race icons…
and planet icons from the ‘clicky button thing’
I took 20 or so minutes off to try and bleed off some of the frustration before re-engaging with the project. By the end of the day, I at least wanted the planets to be doing the basic job of growing their economy, military and science relative to the type of race and planet combined together. My recollection of the evening becomes somewhat patchy after this as I started programming again, my passion in the game rekindled by the fact that I was now working with the back-end data structure (something I was far more comfortable with).
As day turned to night I completed my target. I was now able to create a planet, settle a population on it and watch the numbers rocket upward thanks to larger multipliers I’d put in for testing purposes.
However, I quickly realised that I’d been reading the numbers out of the unity object inspector the entire time and my end users would have no way of doing that. For all intents and purposes, they’d just see spinning blobs and that would be it. I was very burnt out at this stage as I had now spent nearly 10 hours sat in front of my computer, elbows deep in C# and pixel graphics. I resolved to resolve the problem….after the much anticipated Doctor Who season opening.
One dinosaur and a cafe full of robots later, it was back to the coding and I once again met my goal.
Then promptly went to bed exhausted.
I’d overslept.
Not ‘just 5 more minutes’ or ‘an extra half-hour beauty sleep’.
I’d overslept by three whole hours.
Three whole hours, and I still had to turn what was still essentially a clicky button thing (now with climbing numbers) into a game.
So, today’s objectives in more limited time than I’d intended were:
I allotted 4, 5 and 6 hours for each respectively and am pretty pleased to say I hit all of the deadlines more or less square on. In terms of telling you anything there’s not much to say, as Sunday was definitely a lot less of a bumpy ride compared to Saturday.
My ‘planning desk’ (read: camping table) with all the ideas creation going on. I made extensive use of paper when I was planning or unsure about something, right up to when I finished player powers.
It got a bit stressful toward the end, making sure the game ran well in the web client and with the 2pm deadline rapidly approaching. I ran into a few problems:
I submitted my final piece at 1:30 am, with half an hour to go.
Then I realised there was still a submission hour…oh well.
I wound down the evening, basking in the glow of my own success of having completed my first Ludum Dare and checking out one or two entries by other people. It was lots of fun seeing what others had done with the theme.
So, that’s the story of how I made Harmony. The first in hopefully many games created by me.
The Harmony wall of text …err, I mean, Main Menu
End
Having been well aware of the flaws of my game even during the development process, I’m going to take a critical look at my game. Overall, however I am extremely pleased that I was able to create a functioning game and submit it within the deadline.
Despite my long list of cons here, I’m still very proud that this is not only the first ever Ludum Dare I’ve taken part in but it’s also the very first game I’ve made from start to finish.
Before I wrap up, I’d like to respond to a few comments made by people thus far. Thanks to everyone who has left a comment, I assumed this game wouldn’t be most peoples cup of tea, due to the nature of the game. I’m positively glowing to hear so many of you enjoyed it.
For the many of you that left constructive criticism (you’re awesome):
The general reaction was the UI sucked. Therefore, I know exactly what I’m working with in preparation for LD31.
Thanks again to all you lovely commenters so far.
Finally, and in an attempt to spark some discussion in the comments, Joror mentioned he would like to see a multiplayer version. Although I can think of a few abstract ways of doing this, I can’t see how they’d add much to the game. Discuss 😛
If you’ve read this entire thing, you’re a saint, many internet cookies for you. If you’ve got a few spare minutes please feel free to check out my game: Harmony
LD30 was huge fun, I will continue to lurk until the results and LD31, when you can expect me coming back at full force! Bai for now.
Harmony: Interplanetary peace keeping
Tags: 2D, compo, deskphoto, final, LD30, post-mortem, postmortem, screenshot, unity
The theme, Connected Worlds.
The duration, 72 hours.
The intensity, overflowing!
Developing confLINKted was a thrill ride, both for things that went really well and things that should’ve worked but slapped me in the face.
[Try and rate the game HERE! I always rate all of my rater’s games :)]
Have you ever seen a 2D character moving in a rave-like dance?
Prepare for the worst, after the jump!
Brainstorming: 15% Brain, 85% Storm
For the 30th edition of Ludum Dare, I was thinking of making a little survivor game, like I did with my LD26 entry, Minimal Shifting.
But that game used 2D movement with a somewhat overhead perspective à la Zelda ALTTP, so, in order to avoid repetition, I went with a 2D platformer approach.
My idea was pretty solid “on paper“, having planned the main mechanics and figured out some obstacles to add. My mind was overflowing with ideas when I remember about my experience on 2D platformers in Unity, which was none.
Since I already established that this was a Jam Entry, I dug around for some simple 2D platformer system for Unity, and I found one by Prime31, available for free in their GitHub.
That system, while solid in practice, made me realize another flaw in the plan: I had Unity 4.3, and most 2D things in Unity only run in 4.5 with the Sprite class.
So then I thought to myself: “So, Alberto, you want to make a 2D platformer when you don’t have the specific tools you need to make them?“. I felt like somebody was sarcastically slow clapping in my brain…
So, roughly 45 minutes after that, I got Unity 4.5 and installed it. Got to test P31’s system and everything was great. They used the sprite from the main character in Spelunky so I had to get some sprites. Time to go to OpenGameArt!
This character sheet was probably my life saver, since I don’t consider myself an artist at all… So I started to use them for both characters and they turned out great (as long as they were not animated…).
Adventures with Unity2D™
Aside from the inexperience on making 2D platformers in Unity, I also hadn’t tried Unity2D by itself since I was still using 4.2.
The change from 3D to 2D wasn’t that much of an issue, since most components (BoxColliders, Renderers, etc) translated well in 2D, keeping the most common features intact.
Obstacle needed to vanish as soon as they get out of the screen limits, so I arranged them to destroy themselves as soon as they collide with Obstacle Blockers located outside of the screen. The issue that emerged was that those blockers will only work with other GameObjects with both BoxColliders and RigidBodys, but those RigidBodys would depend on their mass to move, and no matter how much of mass they had, they would be pushed by the obstacles little by little, so they would eventually fall, the obstacles wouldn’t get generated, and the game would be going on with no challenge at all.
I was lucky to catch this potentially game breaking little bug, but I didn’t even reach the surface of what I had to handle next.
To rave or not to rave: Platformer physics and animations
As previously mentioned, I was using Prime31’s platformer system for the game. Luckily for me, this system allowed me to manage collisions by using hitpoints like I did before on Flash, so that was an advantage. I implemented the system on my game scene to the letter without regarding the animations, since they were to be dealt with when the main game would be properly tested. So, when I get to the animations, this happens:
The perplexity of the situation was palpable. I mean, how the fuck was this happening? Animation glitch? Some physics voodoo?
Well, yeah. Apparently the BoxCollider2D uses 4 points on each side to determine what specific collisions are we receiving. I think I found a bug where the player’s BoxCollider2D would be standing on one frame, and since the physics are dependent on a call from the Update() and the current Time.deltaTime, any hint of desyncronization would confuse the collider system and make it think we are actually falling, sending that message to the animation system. We are actually falling constantly, but when we are standing the velocity is almost zero so we need to specify that to the animation system so it doesn’t improvise a 2D rave. This velocity tweak saved me hours of theorizing about the nature of the problem, but it didn’t come easily.
Finishing touches
Being a fan of Soundcloud artists myself, I totally wanted to have some really talented composer to provide the theme for confLINKted! After the chaotic platformer implementation, I had to deal with the audio features on the last 6 hours of the compo, so all I could do was reach some composers whose work I already picked as a possible theme song. Unfortunately, none of them replied in time for me to put any of their songs in the game, so I went with “A Journey Awaits” by lemon42. Even though it wasn’t exactly what I had in mind, I like how the song is not just some cheap chiptune loop and periodically progresses, inviting the players to survive longer so they can enjoy more of the song.
The menus are done with NGUI and iTween, and even though NGUI already has a tweener class ready to use, it’s aeons away from the versatility that iTween has. Totally recommended!
TL;DR, the summary
Like any other project, confLINKted gave me headaches and reliefs. I’ll try to compress all the experience in the inevitable…
WHAT WENT RIGHT:
WHAT WENT WRONG:
All in all, I’m super proud of my new game. It already has a page in my portfolio (like everyone is doing, duh), and it got mentioned in the spanish gaming site AnaitGames (well, they were looking for their reader’s LD entries, but let me live the dream!). The best thing is that I still got ideas flowing about this game, so I’ll try to expand it as much as I can!