Behold, my game Rift Knight in glorious GIF format!
I think it looks better in motion than in static screenshots.  This would have been up sooner, but it has taken me a week to get this GIF to work here on the blog, for reasons I just cannot figure out.  Oh well, it works now, give it a try at the link below:

PLAY THE GAME HERE

What went right:

• Time management. I’m really glad that I never felt like I was rushing the game. I got a lot done and managed to get a good nights sleep for both of the nights!
• Mood. I watched the first three Star Trek films and the 1972 film Silent Running prior to the competition. I was really hopped up on sci-fi and I think I conveyed that into a game pretty well.
• Animations. I decided to try a new (for me) animation technique for pixel graphics and I think it looks pretty fluid. There’s still room to improve so I think I’ll use it in the future also.
• Audio. I recorded a lot of button sounds with my Super Nintendo and I think it sounds very crisp. Also loving Unitys 3D sound system, makes the whole ship feel more alive with airshafts that actually get louder when standing under them.
• Pooping.

What went wrong:

• Lack of tutorials (not counting the hand book for the station). I didn’t think that I’d need to add instructions since the game only uses arrow keys. A lot of players still didn’t realize that you can run by holding down arrow. My bad! I did add a tutorial for it in the post-compo version.
• Ending. I should have made it a bit more climatic. I had the time for it so there’s no excuse for it. I made up for it in the post-compo version. 😉
• Theme. I was really uninspired by the theme. So I kinda had to force it in. It’s not as bad as it could be but still a bit far fetched.
• Polish. I’m playing a lot of good games made for this LD and I wish I too had taken more time to just add that extra little polish. Maybe next time I’ll turn the scope down and just polish the shit out of something smaller.

That’s all I can think of! A big thanks to everyone who has rated the game and offered nice comments and critiques.  And if you haven’t played it yet, there’s still time!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=20803

Oscar and I participated in our third game jam, Ludum Dare 30! The theme of the game jam was “connected worlds” and both of our entries were for the 48-hour competition.

Once again, we had a blast! It was frantic and crazy and that’s part of the fun. We also learned a lot, which I think is a big part of the “jam” format.

Read the rest of the blog post…

Play & rate the games

Oscar’s Game: the HEROES quest

My Game: LyftOff!

Time Lapse

Oscar’s Game (youtube)

My Game (youtube)

I think this time of all I have joined the Ludum Dare has been the one that has taken me the most time to reach the “100 played & rated” games number. Also, each time, reaching 100 games is a lower percent of all the games submitted.

This time, instead of a mere list with my top 5 games, I’ll chose one game per category with this conditions: I can pick a game only once even if it deserves recognition in more categories and I won’t make a difference between jam and compo entries (next year, if I’ve got more time to play more games, I’ll try to make two lists).

So, here they are my games of choice, for each category:
______________________

Mood:

The Lion’s Song by LeafThief
This game has a great atmosphere, that translates you to a lonely room in the Alps. An interesting story about inspiration and the struggles to find it.
______________________

Humor:

Mor by Ditto
Very, very dark humor fills this adventure of a fetus trying to escape your mother’s body full of drugs, beer, cigarettes while your twin blames you for its death and tries to kill you.
______________________

Audio:

On the edge of Earth: 5000 by Hypnohustla
The sound effects and music of this entry seems enough to give a high rating in audio, but anybody who implements the silence of space deserves the highest of ratings. Enough said.
______________________

Graphics:

Schrodinghost by Carduus
An interesting little adventure game about the revenge of Schrödinger’s cat. The art and light effects are very nice, but the cat walking animation inside the box is just perfect.
______________________

Theme:

Connecting LD30 to the Real World by Will Edwards
It might seem a tool more than a game at first glance, but you will be hooked to discover the world map (while at the same time you are playing and commenting other LD games) in a blink of an eye. This game surely make you connect with other worlds.
______________________

Innovation:

HopSlide by Managore
It’s better if I don’t say why I’ve chosen this game as the most innovative, but instead you try it yourself. Trust me, it will surprise you.
______________________

Overall:

This Little Piggy… by InfectionTeam
Cute 3D graphics, nice music, a story you won’t regret playing and bacon. A very fun and complete game, indeed.

This was my first LD entry, so I thought I’d write a short post-mortem.

Background

I had been wanting to create a 4X game for quite a while, and when the theme for LD 30 was announced to be “Connected Worlds”, I thought it’d be a great opportunity to do something about the idea, as well as trying to actually finish a game for once

With a lot of ideas I wanted to include and limited time, I needed to scope things down heavily. Long story short, I submitted my entry with a few hours to go, and have reflected on what worked and what didn’t.

The good

• Choosing to make the game in plain javascript – a language I code in daily at work – definitely sped things up. Mixing drawing to a simple canvas context, as well as using simple HTML overlays styled with CSS worked great to get something up and running quickly.
• I made a quick music loop just to have some music, as I figured something was better than nothing. I was expecting some comments from people playing/rating the game – as I know that the style of music I make is kind of a niche – but most of the comments I ended up getting about the music were positive.
• I have a really hard time making my own graphics, and was expecting comments pointing this out. In practice this wasn’t something people commented on, which leads me to believe I made the right choice not spending more time on them than I did. Spending them on gameplay/features seemed like better use of the limited time.

The inconclusive

• My original vision was a turn-based game, but during development I’d let the ticks run automatically to speed up testing. I ended up liking the pausable real-time gameplay, and kept it like that. Friends and co-workers thought this was something that made it pretty original, but many of the commenters here thought the game was too fast and chaotic. I assume most of these players didn’t know about the pause key though (which wasn’t very well documented – more about this in the next section.)
• If I had more time, I would have liked to balance and tweak the gameplay before submitting a lot more. There were some pretty obvious balance issues, but all in all I’m pretty happy with how it turned out.

The bad

• My game is somewhat complex, and I didn’t include very detailed instructions. I had some simple tooltips in-game as well as a short toggleable instruction text, but things like what buildings did what weren’t very well explained. A lot of people commented this, and I could probably have given them a better experience if I had explained more of this at the time of submission. (The post-compo version has tables detailing building bonus numbers and research effects.)
• I had a button that was pretty important to gameplay, that unfortunately wasn’t very obvious if you didn’t read the instructions (and most didn’t). Some people found it by accident, but I should definitely have made it more clear that it was clickable and what it did. (The button in question is the one that opens the research screen – a window that adds a lot of strategy and choices to the game, and kind of makes or breaks the gameplay.)

End notes

I had a lot of fun making the game during the compo weekend, and reading peoples’ feedback is very humbling and rewarding. As a conclusion I have to declare my first LD entry a personal success – if nothing else – for finishing my first game in a long time 😉

You can play my original entry here, or the improved post-compo version here.

Thanks for reading!

Tags: post-mortem

4 days remain so here goes some nice entries:

1. Cluster Struck – katamari goes intergalactic

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=35779

2. Chipset-0 – great mechanics + really cute robot

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=2982

3. Flicker – interesting puzzle game

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=24705

4. Universal Love – kill enemies with love… or missiles

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=25025

5. Triple Threat – 3-player checkers

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=41447

6. Starpiercer – really pretty

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=39357

7. Planetary Marriage Counseling – two planets want to get a divorce

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=30802

8.Alien Gift Exchange – humorous point’n’click

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=2362

9. Connecting LD30 to the Real World – map of LD competitors, see how big LD is.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=10313

Probably you have tried most of these titles but I wanted to expose those that for some reason gave me that wow! feeling.

———————————————————————————————————————————————

This was my second LD. It went much better than first one.

A. First LD – LD #29

It was terrible. I was at BBQ at my friend’s house and got too drunk. I woke up at 3.a.m.(second day) and was rushing to finish.

Wasted plenty of time doing great menu and background. The result was that halfway-through I event didn’t start doing

gameplay. Once I was finished I was ashamed of my work. I was even wondering if it was worth sending to LD. The idea for the

game that was supposed to be “so great” turned out to be rather boring. I still believe that mechanics could be used but as

minigame in bigger point’n’click game, not as solo game.

B. LD#30

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=34334

When I heard the topic I was at first: “great topic!”  and then I was “sh*t I don’t have any ideas what and how to do it”.

I thought of oribitals(not sure of the name) and wanted to do something similar. I started with doing gameplay using

templates of graphics. Then I went on to do graphics. For last one came menu, instructions,ending and NG medals.

What didn’t work out is gravitation of enemies. Enemies were supposed to be drawn to players but there was strange

bug that sometimes pushed forcefully enemies away from players instead towards them. I think it was because gravity wasn’t

updated with every movement step. As I started doing it 3-4hours before end of LD I decided to drop the idea. The game wasn’t

rushed so I could do some more graphical effects(like pulsating stars). It wouldn’t take a lot of time but it would highly

improve the experience.

C. LD thoughts

The main problem for me is how big this contests is so there is good chance that your game will be send and not viewed by anyone.

Comments are too nice. It seems that nobody gives positive criticism – pointing out what could have been made better. It’s always

“I really like your game” etc. In this kind of environment you are not really sure if your game is worth anything. It’s contest made

by programmers for programmers. What we are missing is footballer-jock steroid type of guy who would be like: “That’s cool!”,

“Tits, nice!”, “This game is worthless sh*t” because we always look at things from “how much work did it take to make it” perspective.

I will most likely participate in next edition because as there are many bad things I can tell about LD in the end it’s addictive fun.

Sorry if this post is written in strange manner but it’s my first post here.

Post mortem for Videogame Hero

Thats the game:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=14551

This was my fourth time participating in Ludum Dare, I think it’s the first time I write a Post Mortem.

I really liked the game I’ve made.

It took me like half an hour of thinking to get to my idea for the teme. I was sure I could do everything I wanted in time for the 48 hours compo. I decided to begun what I knew it was going to be harder to do: the Platform section, and then I would move on for the second harder (The racing section), then all the other 3 sections I knew would be easy to do. Then I’d add the hub to connect all the worlds and code the energy bar / energy recovery system (But I’d already “prepare” the worlds I was coding to work with all this). I actually had first thought about changing worlds by pressing F1-F5.. then I though about an animation screen showing your “hero” moving from one world to another, like in a map… and then I thought “Hell, why not make the map a playable part of the game?”, and that’s how I came up with that hub.

Then for the first 3-4 hours, I worked on the basis for the Platform section. And boy, how I’d like to be able to draw. Someone made a nice comment about the graphics for the game, but I must admit, I have absolutely no drawing skills. The main hero in the platform section has just 2 frames of animation, and still it took me like 2 hours to draw its animation properly (If you can call that “proper”).
I finished the base for that world and went to sleep. What I had was the main hero moving and jumping properly, the blocks being generated at random, the arrows being shot at the player the way I wanted (And getting faster as the game goes by – there’s a “global” clock counting the gaming time, so difficulty raises as you keep playing). There were moments when the blocks would appear too far and there was no way to reach any blocks, but I was going to fix that later, as I needed some sleep.
In the next day, I had a big problem at my house that took me around 6-8 hours to solve. This took a lot of development time, and I ended up removing lots of features I wanted to have in the game. I just rushed to code the base of every world, make everything work, and then I’d add features as long as I could before the deadline.

For the base of the game, what really gave some headaches was finding a balance in the platforms spamming so there would be *always* a way to keep moving up without having to fall down. I think I did this very well, but I am not 100% sure there aren’t moments where’s just impossible to keep moving up. Also the racing part, I wanted to have some AI with the CPU cars, they had to be able to make turns and avoid each other, but it was getting so hard to make it work properly that I just added the possibility of they blowing up if they touch each other or the track, and left whatever of the AI I had already coded in there. It was not a bad decision at all IMO. The shmup, DDR and brick-breaker sections gave no problems at all and everything went very smooth there. Then I coded the hub, added the power ups on each section. On each world you need to make a certain amount of points to make the power up to appear. I had alredy written down in a paper a way to make each world energy to be recharged on at least 2 worlds. I then quickly coded the “world travel” screen… I wanted to do something different, I coded a routine in like 2 minutes, and the effect was actually differnt from what I wanted… and way cooler. So I kept it like that.

Then I went to add all features I wanted in each section. Like I said, I had less time for coding than I thought I would have, and I had to cut a lot of stuff. What’s really funny is that I think the game is actually *better* without most of those features, since they would make the game more complicated and less fun to play.

The features I wanted to add and I didn’t:

Platform Section: Bricks that would span spikes from time to time and hurt the player. Springs that would make the player jump higher. Bricks that would appear and dissapear from time to time. (This would make the game harder for no reason)

Racing Section: Cars that would move left and right to make the game harder. (Again, it would just make the game harder for no reason)

Shmup section: A proper boss fight (it would kill the flow of the game)

Brick-Breaker: Power ups like enlarge your paddle or triple balls. (Now those could be nice additions I guess)

Hub section: A random power up that would recharge every world energy (I thought this would be pointless really)

What I *actually* managed to add in the last 4-5 hours.

Platform Section: Moving platforms. (I *really* wanted that, and it was the “later-feature” that took the longer to do, as I had to make them work together with the spamming of normal bricks and not make stuff appear on top of each other and break everything)
Racing Section: Background scenery (They look crap, but make the game more alive)
Brick Breaker and DDR sections: Nice background animations (I actually loved the DDR background animation).

I then wrote a music very quickly on Ejay, added some sound effects for the game, and I spent the last 90 minutes trying to balance how often the power ups appear on each world so the game didn’t turn impossible to soon but also couldn’t be easily played forever. This was really hard to do and I don’t think I did it properly, but giving the development time, I was pretty satisfied with how I managed to do it.

In the last 10-30 minutes for the deadline I saw a bug with the track in the racing gaming “dissapearing” in the bottom of the screen. I had no time to fix that, so I just draw a big green rectangle on that spot on screen and called it a day.

The Platform section ended up being to hard, the player slided too much with inertia, so I fixed that on a pos-compo and the later HTML5 version.

I’d like to balance the way power-ups appear on each level, as its clear some levels are easier to mantain than others, and I know most people avoid the platform level as much as they can, because its harder than all others. This could be fixed, but other than that, I am really satisfied with the game and I personally love to play it.

If you read all this and haven’t played the game, I hope this sparks some curiosity and you go check it out. It’s playable as a Windows EXE and on HTML5 Web Browsers

Tags: hero, LD30, Mortem, Post, videogame

My objective was a platform game where you are able to walk everywhere, like a spider, like a mountain climber. You jump and get hooked to the wall, the gravity always pushing down (as usual).

The mechanic took me a lot of time and between coding & testing I did get pretty good at it. And this was part of the problem, getting good at my game somehow blind me about how other players would adapt.

Also, even when I did try to teach the player with design, I was not good enough, the game gets pretty hard pretty fast. This plus the learning curve plus some little bugs makes the gameplay unfinished.

But, I love this game, it’s my 5th Ludum Dare entry, my 5th game ever, and as a prototype I believe I can polish and design a better version (I have a big list of ideas also). You are invited to watch the playthrough or play the game! Thanks for reading this!

PLAY & RATE ONANIGAN (web win mac lin)

As the judging draws to a close this weekend, I’m going to be moving my focus away from games with high coolness and default scores and onto games with virtually no ratings against their name.
Everyone deserves ratings, even if they didn’t give any themselves. They put the work in over the LD weekend and in my opinion that entitles them to reviews as much as the next man.

So, please join me in these last few days in peeking into the more unexplored corners of LD30. Who knows, we might discover an overlooked gem.

Hey everyone! We are the Button Masher Bros!

Our coverage of Ludum Dare 30 is coming to an end. Be sure to stick around to the end, we’ve included a special message for you!

IT’S THE LUDUM DARE TO BELIEVE SEASON 2 FINALE!

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: Good News Delivery Co.
Category: Compo Entry
Creator: DragonXVI

Title: John and the Arbitrary Gem Hunt
Category: Compo Entry
Creator: Steve Salmond

Title: These Cosmic Chains
Category: Compo Entry
Creator: Ploogle

Title: Superdimentional
Category: Compo Entry
Creator: Pixelmind

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.

See you next week for the final week of Ludum Dare to Believe! Good luck everyone!

What Went Right
1. Spending time writing some library code before the contest
Is it the fastest? No. Does it have the most features? No. Is it well written? Probably not. But I knew every bit of it. If any problems came up it was obvious where. If anything needed to be changed there was no problem ripping things out or quickly throwing them in as I knew what problems could happen.
Knowing everything that was possible with it, and knowing how it was built also made it much easier to choose a design. My previous entries were made using existing ActionScript libraries and often I would spend a good portion of time trying to see if something was possible or attempting to fix some small problems I would run into that required code changes in the library.

2. Minimal art
Being primarily a coder making any sort of sprites or recognizable characters is time consuming for me. However I can put together decent particle effects, which ended up being on of the main graphical effects used. The only other part, aside from the menu buttons, were the connections. These are generated at run time and are the visible aspect that took the most time to get right.
I’m not too happy with the colors though. Was going for something that would be color blind friendly since it is a big part of this game. Since there’s supposed to be four identifiable colors this constrained my choices.

3. Healthy living
A good nights sleep and non-junk food do wondrous things for productivity. In previous LDs I would sometimes get caught up in making stuff and stay up too late on Friday night which meant I was exhausted the rest of the weekend.

What Went Wrong
1. Game is too confusing
Lots of people mentioned it in the comments and I knew it was going to be a problem. It’s hard to tell how close you are to actually beating a level, and I also feel like the goal isn’t entirely clear. Going for a minimalist art approach with no hud hurt me here as it would have been very easy to put some sort of meter or bar that let the player have this information.
It’s one of those things that could have been fixed with more time. But that’s part of the fun of Ludum Dare, sometimes you just have to go with what you have and see how far you can push it.

2. Level design and difficulty tuning
While I have gotten better at it I still lack an intuitive grasp of how difficult things will be. The levels are built with a series of lessons in mind going from the least to most difficult. From the comments it seems people were either too confused about what they had to do, or found the levels too easy.

3. Not enough play testing
The above two could have most likely been solved if there had been more eyes on it. As it is the only other person who played it before it was released was my wife, but she was privy to the entire development process so already knew what to expect.

Parting Thoughts
Thanks to those who read this far. But I have a question for you. Should I continue development on this? I always feel a little guilty letting my projects just sit on my hard drive.

Play Here

Here is the timelapse of how we made Space Rails:

We really enjoyed making it, but as with our other games (Macro Marines, Mighty-chondria and ❏♥❀) we spent a lot of time working on a complex system and not so much time working on the gameplay.

This time the complex system was the ability to draw rails freehand in space, and have the trains follow and branch different ways.  Also the supply/demand economy of the different planets has a lot going on behind the scenes.

Will we ever learn?

Tags: jam, LD30, timelapse, unity, unity3d

Everybody seems to be using some wise-sounding latin shit for their titles so I decided to jump on the bandwagon. My creative process was generally divided into six phases, each of which can be shortened to a quote banging in my head back then so that’s how I’m going to present them:

Phase #1, Saturday morning
“Am I going to make a sequel to The Last of Us or would Uncharted be enough?”

Oh the horror of coming up with an idea. Using my previous experience, I decided to distinguish three main ideas I may have and then THROW THEM ALL TO SHIT. Because that’s exactly what the other billion people thought. Not being the fan of the theme (by the way, everybody hates it so who the hell voted for it, eh?), I decided to just go wild and think something so absurdly over the top that it be interesting in itself. And so the idea of bacon strips starting an uprising against humans to be a pig once again was born.

Phase #2, most of Saturday until evening
“Which will look better on the walls of the yacht I’ll buy with the money from my masterpiece – pounds or dollars?”

I did pretty much nothing, watching track and field and shit. Cause I got this, right? All is right in the world.

Phase #3, Saturday late evening and night
“What’s the meaning of life?”

It struck me. There were overwhelming piles of stuff to be done and as soon as something was done, the other went to hell. The most creative phase cause some 50% of the ideas changed labels from “crucial to the project” to “you know what? Fuck it”. Finished the first of the four minigames you’re playing and started to lay the foundations for the second one. All using placeholders cause I’ll have plenty of time to do graphics the next day, ain’t I? OK, so lemme just polish the second minigame a bit mo… BAM, 5 AM ON THE CLOCK BITCH, SCRAM TO YOUR BED YOU DUMB FUCK, CHOP CHOP.

Phase #4, Sunday morning till ~2PM
“Which is less painful – a razor or a handful of pills?”

Zombie right from the morning. Devastated by how much of everything is still untouched. Yet another 25% of things get thrown to garbage cause there is no way I’ll be able to finish them. Think about quitting every five minutes, stop counting after the nine thousandth idea to give up and decide to force myself through it and see where it leads. The second minigame is finished, the third starts to look like a game.

Phase #5, Sunday afternoon
“OK, it all starts to fall in pl… JESUS FUCKING CHRIST IN A SANDWICH THERE ARE NO GRAPHICS YET”

Power through the remainig minigames, the penalties for making mistakes set to more or less random and non-consistent figures. What was meant to be a candidate for Venus de Milo of our times is a steaming pile of shit fixed to a humpback whale using duct tape and bonobo monkeys. Fire up Illustrator and get to graphics. Fuck the menus, lemme make them in one minute. The art looks inconsistent as can be, combining smooth vector edges of bacon strips and ugly tiled background but I don’t have time for this, let’s just pack it all together… YEAH RIGHT MOTHERFUCKER, WHAT ABOUT THE SOUND. Fire up Garage Band and make something souding bearably to fill the silence. OK, ready to pack it up again – I think…

Phase #6, Sunday evening
“At least it works”

That’s pretty much the whole thought process after being able to finally submit. The whole process was painful as fuck, the results but a mere percent of what I wanted them to be but it works so hey – that’s something!

Hope you enjoyed the honest poste restante. If you wish to check out what came out of this fight, remember to check out The Bacon Uprising:

TLDR: The end result is not what we imagined when we started to work on the game, but overall the experience was great, and we are really happy we keep participating. Go and play the game! (BEWARE: Frustration guaranteed)

Here is a little gameplay video. Sorry for the bad quality, but when I realized it was too late. While recording this gameplay, more than ever I felt how the game is damn frustrating and urged me to burn down my computer a couple of times. Anyone up to beat my score? 😛

What went wrong

It was friday night here when the theme was announced. We were at a pub with some friends. Everyone was talking and making suggestions of what game we could make. While that’s great, having a lot of ideas dancing in your head is sometimes not that cool. We were suffering an “idea overflow” and every idea seemed unoriginal or not doable. The same night we picked the best looking despite doubts, and started working on that one saturday morning.

We couldn’t get to the point of our original idea. The game was intended to contain “dream objects” as obstacles. Each level should have been aesthetically different, resembling a escape from different connected dream worlds: Level 1 should have been vectorial art, level 2 pixel art, level 3 doodles, level 4 realistic objects and so on (with some effects and transitions in between). We were running out of time so we ended up using photoshop filters over the same sprites, getting not good results. PLUS the game goes so fast, that anything but the player is noticeable. I guess that’s why the link with the theme might be weak to nonexistent for anyone playing.
+ More time would have bought us a much polished game with less coding horrors (and better level design, and better everything). I guess this can be improved a little doing a couple of “warmups” and exercising so everything is “fresh” when LD begins.

Nobody but us tested the game before submission. I guess by doing that we could have seen how the game runs in different machines, and how frustrating the game and each level could be.
Our record for the entire game is ~9 minutes (the first times ranged 15-20), but there is a noticeable unbalance in some levels.
For example these are the marks for each level:

I’m sure little to none people other than us finished the game.

What went right

We knew we wanted to make a “little fun game” with simple mechanics and controls beforehand.

Being friends and getting together a whole weekend to make a game is great. LD is a great excuse to reunite, share meals, drinks and enjoy moments doing what we like to do

We made a great level editor, that allowed us to visually place every element, and  export / import as json.

Difficulty – Challenge vs. Frustration

What draws the line between challenge and frustration? There are a lot of readings and thoughts on the topic and this experience was a trigger to further learn on that game design topic.

Closing words

Thanks to everyone in the LD community that helped and contributed with cool feedback, games and stories.

Hopefully in some near future we will get the time and motivation to fix and improve all the things that were wrong with the game, but meanwhile you can play it get frustrated here.

Tags: javascript, LD30, phaser, post-mortem

We are developing Space Delver further. Right now we are working intensely on interface visuals and functions.
This includes maps, upgrade screen, symbols, ship stats and so on.
To follow the development you can check my Twitter account.
To play the Jam Entry version click here.

Please click on the image to see it in real size. And tell us what you think about it

Not only am I disappointed and sorry, but I am mad that I didn’t even finish something for LD30. But I honestly strongly disliked the theme, so that’s pretty much why. But when is the next MiniLD? I WANT TO MAKE A GAME IN TIME! WITH A THEME! Cheers!

This was my first LD, my first game jam, and in fact, my first completed game. I’ve only been developing games (if you want to call it that) for a couple of months now. I had an excellent time and was really proud of myself for actually finishing a game (something I’ve never done before).

Everything went really well, I’d have to say, only I accidentally made the game (nearly) impossible. Most commenters said they couldn’t pass the first level. Strangely enough, the only person who can beat it (besides me) is my brother, who saw the game for the first time just as you folks did. I haven’t done much testing besides on my computer, but I suspect it’s running differently on different systems and as a result is even more difficult.

I don’t have screen capture capabilities, but hopefully I can get my brother to make a video of himself beating it so you all can see the rest of it (and that it is, in fact, possible to beat)

EDIT: Here it is! My brother beating it: http://youtu.be/y71ajUP1Xks

(Follow him on twitch! http://www.twitch.tv/thetacticaldonut)

Anyways, if you’re some kind of insanely determined (more like stubborn) completionist. Try your luck! If you can beat it, you’ll have done something only 2 other people in the universe have ever done!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=39200

I will be making a much larger (and less impossible) post-compo version. Instead of a hexagon, the player gets to be this weird ostrich-dragon guy I’m working on. So look for that in the future!

Sidenote: Like the music? That’s what I do. check it: https://soundcloud.com/jadecupmaidhands

That is right my name is Tosic and I have rated 100 games!

So I’ve decided to share some awesome games other people made (the best one for each category)!

Let us begin:

Mood:

Stories in the Sky – frosty

Humor:

Hey Lucky Lucky – GreyShock

Audio:

Dreamshift – AgentParsec

Graphics:

Shooty Space – Thaum

Theme:

MMO God – Nichii

Fun:

Galactic Dump – SoulGame

Innovation:

+46 – kristoffer zetterberg

Overall:

Uninhabitable – Slikker

Some other cool games to check out:

Danger Zones – skullum

Outer Shooterr – KrisDevelopment

Contraband – sprawl

Connected – vogon101

Two Empires – Tosic (myself :D)

Enjoy in this games (as I did) and good luck to all of you in the LD #30 results!!! 😀

//Tosic is out

Wow! It’s been a crazy few weeks of playing, I’ve found so many great gems! I’m going to try to play as many games as I can this weekend.

In the mean time, please check out our FIRST Ludum Dare entry, Parallel Rift, let me know what you think!

Read the help, it might… Help!

Thanks so much for all the great games, there’s not enough hours in the day!

Dan

Finally got a web deployed version of Lucid working. :)

It has a low FPS detector, so it will automatically let you know if your browser will be able to run it at full speed. If not, it recommends either the “Quick Play” option or the desktop version (no install needed). Chrome seems to work best so far.

On GameJolt, the “Download” button will provide links to the 48-hour version, the 48-hour source code, and 72-hour version. Please note that the web version is the 72-hour version.

Lucid :D

Look at spooky circles…

Hop around at speeds slightly faster than that of a typical bird.

Dramatically overshoot your objective, and pretend it was all part of the plan.