Blue Screen is a cyberpunk game, inspired by System Shock, where you travel between the real world and cyber space. Blue screens serve as the boundary between these worlds. I might have bitten off more than I could chew for this one, so it’s pretty short, but I hope that the central conceit works.
Simplify what is and translate it into latin. For Example: Subaqeum Craquem = Yellow Submarine for last years LD
I programmed from 10AM – 9PM straight today. It was worth it. The game turned out very good, despite my decision of having grayscale graphics. It surprisingly still looks pretty good, though! The GUI looks pretty neat too, and the campaign and endless modes are working perfectly. Wow, that was a long weekend. Check out the game: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=33942 works on the browser and on desktop, for any OS! It was a great learning experience, once again!
It’s been three times in a row that I spent all my time to polishing first, and I have no gameplay at the end.
While I admit that the visuals are not bad, nothing can compare to the fact that there is no game. So I’m a failure as a Game Developer.
I think there’s a lot of things to learn from for next time.
I submitted Elyseus!
Play it! http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=36237
And now…. time to sleep!
Tomorrow I’ll try to write something about it. Hope you have fun with it!
You should play it, I’m rather proud of it http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=21576
I had a good time making it. Time to go sleep I guess. See you next time!
I didn’t have as much time as I like to spend on LD this weekend, but I’m super happy to have been able to finish a game in something like ~20 hours of development time! In the last hour I had to rush copy/paste a lot of my event code, and so that aspect is much less interesting and diverse than I wanted… but at least it functions and (so far) doesn’t crash.
Now my next big goal needs to be to actually get a bunch of judging done this time around. This has always been a huge problem for me due to how LD always falls on the calendar, and I doubt this year will be an exception – Last week was the first week of school, and as a teacher I’m super busy trying to get things off to a good start. I’ll do my best though!
Here’s the game project page! http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=3911
Final Development screenshot of The Bifrost Project, my LD#30 entry
Tags: awesome, Bifrost, connected worlds, done, game, html5, javascript, LD30, luthwyhn, progress, submitted
My first LD was a succes ! I made a game only with my fingers (using love2D game engine).
Only 5h of sleeping, because I knew that my game was too ambitious. The storyline is almost full.
So I ‘m happy.
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=37076
LD30 submission
The difficulty is a little bit too high, even for the EASY version. I was out of time to equilibrate totally this game (Management/Fight). Next time, I will try to create a shorter game if it’s possible because this game is, may be, too complicated to understand for a beginner.
I learned a lot anyway! I hope you’ll try my game, even though you don’t like it!
Thanks !
So I ran out of time but I’ve decided I’m going to keep going ad try and finish the game for LD30. I’ve been working on Geometric designs for the Platforming sections, which are looking quite pretty.
Basically the story is, each Planet has a beacon you must activate to save the Planet. Planets can be visited in a Ship through an “Overworld” like galaxy view( eg Star control 2). When all 4 planets are brought back to Life, the Sun’s Spirit is re-awakened.
Well, despite feeling like I was on top of things, I ended up just submitting on time. It was a lot of fun, and I’m glad I did it. My game is about controlling trade routes between civilisations and is designed to be about quick thinking, rather than long thoughtful contemplation.
You can find my submission here
I challenged myself to make some music this weekend. I don’t have the programming chops (yet) to make a full game over the weekend, but music is something I can do.
All of the songs below are free for you to use (with attribution) and designed to loop perfectly in whatever project you have. There’s a wide variety of styles and genres. I’m really pleased with how this batch turned out. Going to work on filling out a few of them more.
Happy creating! <3
First Track – Super chill and relaxed, good for towns, menus, etc.
Second Track – Upbeat, distorted, raw. Battle or boss music maybe?
Third Track – Dark and spooky, made from a request from a participating dev 
Fourth Track – Upbeat and energetic, great for a shmup!
Fifth Track – Contemplative piano improvisation. Some bitcrushing and extra effects to create a nice ambient soundscape.
Sixth Track – Spacey piano track. Kind of new age.
Seventh Track – Funky Chiptune jams!
Eighth Track – Big orchestral prelude kind of thing.
Ah! I am finished, that was an intense 48 hours. This is my second Ludum Dare and my first 3D Ludum Dare.
The story – Galaxy Savior. The galaxy has been taken over by enemy pods! Defeat as many as you can and clean the galaxy of floating pesky asteroids!
Blowing up asteroids and enemy pods will give you points. Have fun!
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=37164
So, that was fun! I can’t wait until next time when I’ll have all the time and might enter the jam with a friend. Also, Unity will be used most definitely. Monogame and porting was not a fun project. So, 4 months to learn C# in the context of Unity! See you in December
Success at the following
1. Tile maps
2. Tile map loader
3. Physics
4. Character
5. Entities
6. Enemies
7. Game play and mechanics
8. Bullets
9. Ray casting
Failure at:
1. Game Idea
2. Art Assets
I have failed this year to come up with an idea . I ended up writing a really good platformer engine that could easily be turned into anything. Will probably shoot for jam, but I will likely not follow the theme. Also I suck at art and was unable to get good enough art into the game. . I guess my productivity juices were flowing but my creativity pipes were clogged. I didn’t sleep the entire time and plan on not sleeping until after the jam. Fueled by amount 30 cups of tea and 2 * 25 minute power naps.
What I have so far: http://i.imgur.com/xFhRlgw.png
Having participated in the game jam for the last two Ludum Dares, I decided this time that I’d go all-out on the compo. I even made my own font from my handwriting for the text! (…my handwriting’s terrible. sorry!)
It’s been a fun 48 hours. You can find my entry – Drift – here. Let me know what you think! I’ll be back in just a bit to start rating games
Check it out: Light and Dark
So once again I had to submit my game with a limited number of levels, no music, and no sound. On the plus side, I’m pretty happy with the graphics, even if they are relatively simplistic.
This time around I did all my coding at my treadmill desk, either walking or just standing up. I had the treadmill mostly set at an incline, since I made my desk too high to type comfortably, so I need to be higher to use it. It’s a better workout, anyway, so no loss there. Here’s my stats from the treadmill (I kept a spreadsheet):
Time: 9:15:05 hours/minutes/seconds
Distance: 16.88 miles
Calories: 3436 (almost made it to a pound of fat)
Vertical gain: 7329 feet
Not too bad I guess, but as you can see… there’s a lot of slacking off in there (only about 19.27% of the time spent programming (assuming I only programmed and didn’t surf Bandcamp, cause I totally surfed Bandcamp for new tunes)). I had my graphics station elsewhere, and I spent a lot of time there too, but that’s also my gaming laptop… which accounts for more slacking off. Still, I got up to around 1100ish lines of code (really basic code count, like “find src/ -iname ‘*.hx’ | xargs wc -l” type stuff here). That does pale in comparison to my previous LD entries (I think my first Love2d entry was around 2500, but I had to add a lot of boilerplate stuff that HaxePunk handled for me).
Though considering I’d only done a few tutorials with HaxePunk prior to this, I’m happy with my progress. That’s a good mark for HaxePunk in my book… I only really had to search for help a few times. And I didn’t really have to pull my hair out getting collision detection to work properly, so there’s that.
I did the graphics in Inkscape, and had some semi-rigging going with the little avatar, which was nice. I think the graphic style fits good, but that’s probably because I made it, so of course it looks good to me. Better than some of my other Inkscape ventures at least.
I’m also really glad I decided to just go with Flash exporting. Really easy to get that packaged up and going, and then you can just play it in the browser. Kinda sucks though cause I couldn’t get it to not fill the screen (supposed to be 640×480), but it doesn’t affect gameplay much. It would work better if I had a place to host the files, but I’m too lazy for that.
Well now, off to play some Dishonored for the rest of the night (five bucks on Steam, can’t beat that). As long as WINE cooperates, that is.
That was a great LD, though I didn’t have access to virtually unlimited amounts of Dr. Pepper this time.
I really need to upgrade my 8GB of RAM. My style of multitasking for these things was just too much for my computer and I’ve had it grind to a halt several times.
Lastly, today also happens to be my last day of summer vacation before I start my senior year of high school. Really great way to spend it and I’m pretty happy with how my game turned out.
I’ll be writing a postmortem later, here’s a link if you feel curious
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=35904
Hello all,
This was my second LD compo (first was #29). I wasn’t even going to join until my friend told me the theme behind it. The second game I ever created (years ago now) was a story-driven avoidance game where I first learned what it meant to “break the fourth wall” (by a commenter on my game). With the theme being “connected worlds”, I decided it was time to return to that idea.
With a late start and work today, I had to keep the concept simple, so I decided that a Pong remake would be the best option for the base game. The point of the entry is the story anyways. I decided on three parts to the story and thus three levels to the game. The game aspect was completed yesterday. Last night, I added in the dialogue (was going to also do the ending scene, but never got around to it).
Originally, the idea was to add in the music and sound effects this morning so that I’d have time for the voice-overs afterwards. However, it was not meant to be. This was my first time ever using cgMusic, so it took some time to learn (and then figure out how to convert the file). I didn’t know about its existence until a friend mentioned on my livestream (I was taping the entire process).
In the end, I’m mostly pleased with the end result. I could have done a better job with the music if I had learned how to use it faster, and the lack of voiceovers is disappointing as it would have added a lot to the mood, but that was a stretch goal right from the start. I did get all of my main ideas in it, so it certainly feels more “complete” than my LD 29 game. I’ll be interested to see if I can do better with this game over that one.
If you want to play/rate it, please visit the game page (the game is on Kongregate, so it’s easy to be able to play it). Thank you!
At long last, my /compo entry “Chris and Roddy” is done and submitted! I must have spent 45 minutes just trying to figure out how to do that though.
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=41004
I hope the Stencyl Source I submitted is good enough. I’m sure I could redo it if I did it wrong.
And that is that. I had a lot of fun. And I’m reasonably happy with how things went.
My game is called ‘W4’, and it’s a physics puzzle platformer.
play now at http://gamedevhost.nfshost.com/ld30/game.html
Good things that happened:
* reasonably ambitious game
* learned about / improved on using these tools: tiled editor, sfxr, abundant-music.com, espeak
* learnt a bit more about HTML5 canvas
Bad things that happened:
* didn’t implement the physics carefully enough first time round, and wasted a lot of time re-doing things (still not perfect)
* code lost a bit of structure towards the end (I guess inevitable)
Looking forward to playing some of your games over the next few weeks!
The simplest and worst logo you’ll ever see.
So, that’s it, yep, I’ve sort-of-finished another game under 48 hours. It’s a really gratificant thing to do, I don’t even finish games outside LudumDare. So it’s a great thing for me, as for many other mentally or motivationally frustrated gamedevs out there.
But at least I think this game has a unique thing, some physics game is there calling on you to play it, even if it’s got its bugs (don’t judge me, it’s been made in under 48h), but they’re funny too. I like the overall game, even its bugs, it’s perfect on my eyes.
So LudumDare stage 2 (participate) has been done. Now I’ll go to this Rate button thing and I’ll rate your games, because I’m sure yours are AWESOME too, right? And I’m motivated to play a large amount of them, yeah, because it’s a thing. Ludum Dare is about the community! It’s great to see more and more game devs every year, seriously, it keeps getting magical somehow.
And yep, that’s it, I will not leave you without a screenshot of my game aaaand ofcourse a link to my entry page. HAVE A GOOD NIGHT EVERYONE, it’s been awesome.
48 hours later and I’m done. I might write up a longer post-mortem later, but here’s my “Game is shipped” post.
With under 2 hours to go, I was inspired by people in IRC to add audio and also a very basic economy aspect to the game. I managed to get it in just in time, and I think both additions were definitely worth the last-minute rush!
Overall I’m reasonably happy with the final result. I had a bunch more ideas that I could have included, but I managed to stick to a core set of features that I was able to get reasonably polished.
Just finished up the last tweaks before the compo deadline.
The game is called “TimeWarps Inc.” and it’s about tossing objects through portals back in time to alter the present. The intro explains it pretty well, but that is just about all the content there is! A tutorial level introduces the concept and it works kinda neat with the time warp effect, but wow is this game short and easy. Maybe it’s worth developing into a more complete product, who knows.
What I do know is that making a non-arcade game with story and characters and stuff is a whole great big ludicrous amount of work.
Try out TimeWarps Inc. while you’re waiting for the microwave!
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=31734
The super-luminal baryon accelerator.
This is the game I’m working on. It is about a slime who is very much a dreamer. He goes between his dream world and reality, gaining courage on the way.
I’ll be adding audio tomorrow.
As always, I’d have loved to add more to it. However I am pretty pleased with how much I was able to get done considering I didn’t get started until Saturday night. Would’ve loved to add some SFX or music, and a bunch more levels. But at least it’s done, and is pretty close to what I had imagined it to be.
Terrible Coder Art Ahead:
Play here:
http://koti.kapsi.fi/~anssipe/ld30/
Entry here:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=40527
Signing of for now…
fyuse is available to play now!
Play here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=25322
Done and done,
Actually packaged it a bit early, didn’t know about the submission hour and figured the site would go down.
Whew! Finally done…or at least as done as it’s going to get, heh.
This was a lot of fun, and considering this was my first time in the compo I’m pretty happy with how it turned out.
Check out my game here!
Any and all feedback is appreciated, thanks!
Hey all!
They said it couldn’t be done-
Well, not really. No one said it couldn’t be done, but they did make exasperated faces and sigh knowingly as they wished me luck. My plan for a 48-hour MMO was pretty ambitious, considering my lack of experience with netcode and server administration in general. But, well, here it is! What a way to spend my 1-year anniversary of LD!
My only disappointment with Stellation is that I wasn’t able to get it working in the browser. There’s this whole thing about cross-domain exploits and…I just wan’t able to figure it out in time. So we have an executable instead, sorry.
Anyways, download the game and just leave it open! The more the merrier, until we reach the hard-coded limit of 5000 players of course. I dare you to reach that limit. Double-dare, even.
There is two worlds connected together by invisible, incomprehensible, inconceivable force.
Collect all singularities to overcome adverse effects this world’s have to each other.
You can play it now here http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=5699!
There seems to be some issue with my hit detection for attacking, the last boss is really hard to hit, yet the normal enemies seem to be working fine.
I passed out with five hours remaining… woke up with 30 minutes left and rushed through creating the final level and adding functionality to the boss and last text message for the alien.
I tried to generate random music for the game, but nothing really felt right. I figured it was better to have no music than music that sounded off.
I also ran out of time for sound effects; I was going to add in some more, but passing out ruled that out.
All in all, I’m pretty happy with what I created this weekend.
Things I learned :
So here it is: the space exploration/empire building/moral quandarying game that is Fall of Man.
Had to have a big rethink of the core mechanic about 14 hours before the deadline, so my dedicated graphics & audio time…didn’t really happen – but I’m really pleased with the gameplay that came out of the rethink. Also had to stop streaming on day two, as my capture client went haywire and started consuming about 90% of my CPU :-S. But overall I think that went well, even accounting for time taken coming up with new idea to not horribly overlap with everyone else.
Looking forward to trying everyone’s games, and in the meantime, here’s mine:
So I’ve finally completed a Ludum Dare. And while I didn’t exactly get everything finished I would have liked to, with a lack of background music, a very much unfinished level design and some last minute chopped features that would have been nice to have.
I did however end up with something somewhat playable, with most of the core mechanics in place and working, and some programmer art done to the best of my limited abilities. Hopefully what I did manage to finish implementing will give a reasonable impression of what I was going for with this idea.
So feel free to check out my attempt at http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=41401. Any and all feedback is welcome. The web player link may not work due to me using the Unity 4.6 beta release, but there are platform downloads available.
Anyway, it’s 3 AM so I think its about time I sleep! I look forward to playing everyone elses submissions! 😀
Andy
Things I can’t handle:
And just for a teensy bit of positivity, things I can handle:
Definitely jammin’ next LD I enter. I figured I’d go for the easy idea that didn’t require real art and try the compo one last time, but it isn’t worth the extra prestige when my game isn’t fun.
Check out my entry!
I quite proud of the soundtrack. Turn up the volume and let the mood set in.
Gather minerals from the neighboring planet and bring it back to Earth.
Still red boxes.
Play it here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=36267
Tags: completed, interstice, progress, update
Finally!
Well I was rushing the entire last few hours to finish up this “game!” It has lose/win conditions, which was the plan, a game that is at least finished. At the last good bit of programming I made the decision to make it half RPG/ half shoot ’em up, since the time was too short for my ambitious original plans. Nonetheless this was a fun first LD! Good luck!
I can’t wait to see you all’s entries!
Okay, I finished this wonderful LD30!
As aways, entered a bit late, but here it is!
http://t.co/6GOn9eZ060
In 48 hours I managed to finish my first attempt at a puzzle game using LUA and LÖVE. Here’s the link if you’d like to check it out:
I’d also like to offer detailed and honest feedback to anyone who wants it! Comment on my game’s page, or this post, with a link to your game and if I have time I’ll play it through and leave you my thoughts. If I don’t like your game, I’ll tell you, and I’ll do my best to explain why. If I love it, I’ll do the same! I’m also totally open to hearing your honest opinion on my game.
I could swear I wasn’t gonna pull it yesterday, but I managed to finish and submit the game in the last ten minutes of compo!
I wasn’t able to create all features I had in mind (namely a boss fight), but I’m very happy with how the game turned out and I’d like you guys to check it out!
Link: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=40635
And some footage (Brought to you by Fraps):
(Can anyone recommend a better program to capture footage?)
It’s amazing! I’m really happy with what I finished in 48 hours. Starlight is a happy space exploration game. You’ll run into old friends and make new ones, and most importantly re-unite two star-crossed lovers. Two planets have gravitated away from each other, and you’ve been assigned the delivery of a love letter! What are you waiting for??
Play Starlight! (use Chrome for best performance)
Time to relax. The tally:
– 10 beers
– 3 coffees
– 1 frozen pizza and assorted snacks
– 6AM bedtime
– One large earthquake
Here’s the LD link, if you’re interested in leaving feedback
Starlight is browsed based so it’s easy to get started!
Play Starlight now, I promise it will make you smile.
Like I said when I posted to say that I was entering the compo, I’m brand spankin’ new at this. I was hopeful that everything would go my way and by some miracle I’d submit. That didn’t happen.
The bottom line is that I spent a lot of time learning how to do what I want with the programs that I’m using. I don’t consider this lost time in any way. I’ll keep learning, I’ll get better. I’m going to finish this game, come hell or high water. It’ll be my teacher.
The submissions that I’m seeing below my post look really awesome. Congrats guys!
And thanks Ludum Dare for the challenge!
Well part of it anyway,got only 12 levels in but i’m still happy with it.
Gameplay gif from the second level(also the solution)
Good night everybody looking forward to playing your games tomorrow : )
Here it is:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=14720
30 minutes until end of submission.. GAME-BREAKING BUG!
My fourth Ludum Dare, got really stressed out… Didn’t have enough time for fancy graphics or effects, apart from the ORB which I’m pretty proud of.
After horrible fight with memory leakges in broken game engine we have almost working game. It’s a bit simplier than we planned.
Game mechanics won’t change. Now we have only to work on aestetics and fix compatibility issues to be sure that game will run on as many systems as possible.
Here are timelapses from first and second day:
BTW it’s a shame that no one else from whole community noticed the mistake in theme name. We could not resist to CORRECT it 😀
I done my first solo game jam.
It isn’t easy but I worked quietly. And I‘m finally happy with the result.
This game is a multiplayer’s game where you need to choose to cooperate or fight.
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=34682
When does voting start?
My first ever Ludum Dare! I was dared by a coworker to enter and make a game on Friday!
Enjoy playing Jacob’s Ladder here!
Jacob’s Ladder is an attempt at meeting my goals here.
I have had many successes through the last two days!
[x] Intro Splashes / Animations
[x] learned to make materials / textures / normal maps
[x] GUI Buttons
[x] city maze : Jacobs Ladder level
[x] Audio, Music, Sounds
[x] Credits
[x] Secondary Main Menu / SubMenu
[x] how-to-play / controls / input
[x] footstep sounds triggered when walking
Didn’t get around to adding :
[ ] skybox
[ ] Cross Maze Level (from brainstorming session at start of LD30)
I surprised even myself on what could be done it such a limited amount of time. I learned a lot and can now add the scripts I created to a personal script library to use in other game dev projects!
Ludum Dare For The Win!
Here’s N427 and I’s Jam game. It’s called Planetoid and it’s the first game either of us has ever coded that has any semblance of RTS elements to it. Here we go…
Click on the picture to give it a go, and PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD read the instructions ingame!
SURVIVED MY FIRST LD!
Brillium – LD 30 – Connected Worlds
BrilliumI wanted to do a quick mini post mortem to sum up my thoughts directly after submitting.
LD30 was my first ever Game Jam, I have never made a game in such a short amount of time, and it was quite the experience. I knew going in that 48 hours would be tight, but tried to be prepared for anything.
I wasn’t too thrilled with the theme, but tried to go with it anyway. I ended up trying to make a game where you have several planets comprised of fluid-like matter, and you can drag this matter to other planets.
Then the goal of the game is to sustain life on each planet using the given starting resources. The worlds being connected via their need for each others matter.
I knew this would be a programming challenge for me as I had never created any fluid-like systems before. But I figured I had no better ideas, so I’d give it a shot.
In the end I did spend most of my time fighting with my janky, messy code, but I got it mostly working. I have 3 pretty (or at least I think so) worlds, and you can drag the resources between them.
I ran out of time and had to add game play later than I wanted. This ended up costing it, you really just have to drag resources quickly between the worlds before time runs out.
It really didn’t end up being all that fun or rewarding. So I’ll definitely take that as a lesson.
Anyway, try it out if you want, any feedback is much appreciated!
It’s finally finished and uploaded 😀
I wanted to do way more than I could with the time, so it’s a short game, but let’s hope you guys find it sweet. Lot’s of dark humour and darkness in general.
You will probably finish it in 5 minutes so play it through in one sitting :3
Still working on mine for the Jam. After switching tilesets and going to a camera clamping system, everything just started working. Now I can have maps of variable sizes that can stay centered on the player, something of a holy grail for me. While that other tileset was nice, it just had way too many problems and I didn’t have the time to try and fix them.
A few things I’ve learned so far:
Even if I can’t submit by the Jam’s deadline, I’m already calling this a personal success. The number of technical problems I’ve solved has made this all worth it.
Using a new tileset made a big difference.
Because of celebrating my birthday this weekend I decided to go for a small concept with not so much gameplay to implement. Instead I focused a lot on story telling, intensified with rich orchestral music.
While the story builds up, so does the music.
I think it turned out pretty well, but there may still be some issues. If you want to help me out I appreciate all your feedback, both about what went right and what I should improve. This will be great material for my postmortem.
Above all, I’m glad to finish on time and still have plenty of time for celebrating my birthday! In short, I had a lovely weekend!
I submitted the game on the submission hour but I’m not sure If I should have posted it here. Just in case, here it is the game. http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=37194
* The page of the submitted game should have the time when it was published.
This LD I had a very unproductive first day, which set me back and put a dampener on my spirits. I wasn’t satisfied with the looks and kept re-doing things.
But a good nights sleep & Sunday turned that around for me again – Still liked my concept and found inspiration in a slightly adjusted background & story which I could fit in.
Alas, even with a day of hard work, the re-hashing of the visuals cost so much time that I did not finish in Compo-time, so I am going to make it a Jam, and see how far I get.
Indentured Exile – Teaser:
You are sent through the gate with just some food and a scattering of tools. Criminal exile: it is an dump & forget solution, but they may be light at the end of several gates!
Survive in alien lands and keep your not-so-savory workers in line, while you progress through increasingly harsher worlds.
Progress so far
Looks like I decided to go for it after all! It wound up being just a crappy demo, but I’m glad I found the time to make something at all. I had a lot of fun and learned much about HaxePunk in the process (which I picked up recently and am loving).
Now, let’s see how many thousands of submissions will be like the one I wanted to make. 😛
PS: This post’s lack of a link to my game is not an accident.
I lost the first day trying to figure out what to do, so I didn’t make it on time.
I also switched from my Java-based environment to a Flash-based environment with FlashDevelop and FlashPunk.
I won’t be able to finish it for the jam as well… But I’m still developing this game, since it’s becoming something nice.
Below the animations I just got working:
The protagonist and her sword.
Good luck for everyone that are still in. =)
I finished ‘Constellation’, a relaxing little game about transporting a strange assortment of goods between star systems.
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=25909
Here are some screenshots:
Let me know about any balance issues.
Wow, this Ludum Dare was quite the experience — in many ways.
-Origin Story-
My history in programming actually started out in middle school when I discovered Qbasic and its “sample games” Qbasic Gorillas and whatever Snake game was there. Since then I always like programming and games in general. However, I haven’t in all these years complete many things, save some old Tetris 2 game in Qbasic.
I studied C and C++ on my own, but nothing much came out of it. I -was- however always following the programming scene, watching what others have done and how the game making process works. Because of this, I have a lot of information I didn’t do much with. Only recently in the past couple of years have I started to try to take my experience and make something become of it. Of course, I’ve only taken up game programming as a hobby.
Last Ludum Dare I thought I was gonna get my first finished game. I picked a poor time with school getting heavy at that point — I couldn’t finish anything. This time it’s different.
I got a horrible-looking SHELL of game, but it’s there anyway! I certainly want to get -legitimate- graphics into it and change the design. Music and fine tuning are required, too. I think I did a great job in not putting too many features in the game.
The scope of the game is what got me. I was trying to go for a story and I realize that it can easily get out of hand in a 48-hour competition. I think I’m really good at ideas, but implementing them is a different story — let alone in a short time table.
I think with better artwork and some design tweaks, I think it can be a compelling experience, even without more complicated programming. Still good, though. I’ll definitely do more contests.
If anything, my goal of getting a basic game out was accomplished.
Rough screenshots of first LD submission
I have some more quick progress! Tile drawing now supports images, and I mastered jumping, in both dimensions.
Best of luck to the other Jammers, and good job all those who have finished the competition!
First forgive me my bad English. I will try to express a synopsis of my game.
This game chronicles the journey of a last lapse of energy (perhaps a spirit, a conscience, a soul), who wanders into a mind in coma , trying to re-establish the connections to the higher layers of consciousness.
The player must drive this lapse in the moments that connect the conscious and unconscious. In constant oscillation, the game proves challenging.
Have Fun!
My first Ludem Dare+Unity game finished!
Our game for the Ludum Dare 30. Data-Man trying to honor to giant Pac-Man.
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=23927
This is my entry for the Ludum Dare 30 – 48hr Compo, the theme of which was “Connected Worlds”. This game was made in the 12 hrs free time I had during the 48hrs of the competition. It’s a very simple 1 button game for kids aged 4-8, that switches between 2 connected worlds:
Here’s a quick gameplay video:
You can download it here: http://blue-thumbs-gaming.itch.io/warp-of-the-worlds-fight-and-flight
I hope you and/or your children have as much fun playing this game as I had making it.
Cheers, Ben.
My entry for LD30 is up! This marks the third time I have entered into LD48, but the first time that I felt confident enough with the tools I was using (Unity and Blender) to really be proud of what I made.
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=29019
Secondary themes I decided on for “Connected Worlds” were as follows:
–Hierarchy I interpreted the theme to represent hierarchies and pecking orders; each individual in a hierarchy has a connection to those above/below but can live distinct experiences. I loosely based each level (even the ones I hadn’t the time to make) on an individual’s actions in a corporate structure.
In terms of the mechanics in the game:
–Network the console represents the gateway for the connection between worlds, and the idea that things online can have a tangible effect to things offline. Connections + Network = CONET.
–Contrast/Opposites There are only three colours in the net (excluding the console) blue, red and green. blue doesn’t change, but red and green can be, and are treated as opposites.
The game mechanics are as follows:
I am happy with how CONET turned out, I would like to have made some more complex levels to better use the mechanics I had made, but it turns out that designing them has a few challenges, as does my flaky process of setting them up.
The aesthetic meets what I wanted and everything looks reasonably sharp, though I had to get lazy with some of the models. I never made the time put in sound effects, which is disappointing, because its always fun recording popping noises. I also never implemented the door’s swing animation, so it just disintegrates, but I am very happy with the other transitions I made; namely the shrinking cube and the moving elements.
My code has its ups and downs, I had a bit too much fun making the script for moving elements and ended up re-writing it three times, but I had to have some fun. The code isn’t as flexible as it could be; a lot of things are hard-coded with different tags for example, despite me storing the level number and other relevant info, whereas each ‘net’ level has the same tag but still teleports correctly when you fall off (which I was surprised to find out after forgetting I wrote that in). There are also too many scripts for the amount of work that gets done, but it seems to work with stability so I won’t complain.
There is also no real end state/fail state. ~
In conclusion; yes this is my best LD yet. Until next time!
I believe I mentioned earlier that I would try to time lapse this.
I did. So now I can post them.
Time Lapse – Day 1
Time Lapse – Day 2
Time Lapse – Day 3
Overall, I think I did well this time around. Once again, I tried to do too much (let’s reprogram the map generation sequence, add a non-standard grapple mechanic, and rewrite the gravity system…) so that’s why I don’t have too much to show.
I’m rather happy with the consistency of the art style. It doesn’t look too bad for being hand-drawn by me… I’m obviously not practiced as an artist.
I’ll admit I used more tools than I mentioned at the beginning of the compo. I used Excel for random calculations and Notepad++ as my comfort editor (with regex capabilities). Vim is wonderful, but sometimes I don’t mind going back to a true GUI application.
Here is my game http://www.stencyl.com/game/play/27958. It was published under the 48 hour compo. It’s a platforming game
with a bunch of cool stuff, check it out.
This is the logo of my game.
Story: Humans and Martians(species for Mars) have to team up to save their planets from aliens outside the solar system called Galectous.
We did!
A Jam entry game made on 24h!(ok ok, we use one day more to make this better!)
This is a introspective game, about how music connect people, places, all the universe. Different sounds, styles, with a flat art and easy way to play. It was a experimental game. The first we made with this purpose. We knew that will be a lot of games with planets and universe. And than I think “Hey, why we don’t make the comum idea with different flavor?”
And that is Universal Feeling.
Feel free to play ^^
Perplexing Wormholes is a top-down puzzle game where you have to solve puzzles using the tools you find laying around and switch between two worlds while doing it.
There are three short levels, total play time is about 5-10 minutes.
Well, we have finished our Ludumdare game. It took us an extra hour to publish it unfortunately but we have a team here so have the 72 hours per the Jam rules anyway. I can’t believe we came this close to publishing it in 48 hours. Here’s the demo/tease trailer we made for Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqA2H4SbyEk
It’s on Kongregate as well: http://www.kongregate.com/games/seraphicmedia/gravity
We’re probably going to throw it up on the Google Play Store real quick while we’re at it.
We hope you enjoy it as much as we did check it out and vote with us.
So, I had a bug today that I couldn’t skip. When I started my game, it filled up my PC’s memory completely in about a minute, breaking literally everything that was running. I had to fix it to continue.
8 hours of hacking at this problem.
I just fixed the bug. It was with Scene2d.ui’s function Table.drawDebug(). If you set debug, apparently it runs this blindingly expensive operation that constantly creates new objects. Yay.
I followed a tutorial telling me to do this. And who would guess that something that draws literally a few lines on a screen would break my whole computer lol
8 hours of not actual game developing haulted… due to a single line of code I would have eventually taken out anyways….. FFFFFFUUUUU–
Long story short, my LD time is done. But now the bug is fixed, I’m going to continue my game to see if the fun factor is there or not. I think I definitely came up with an idea at least worth exploring and finishing an alpha.
Here’s a final LD screenshot of the game. See you guys at the next LD!
In Sender, you fight off gelatinous beings like flubber, that are invading through portals. In order to make progress, you seal off the portals with blocks that you have to charge with energy collected from killing the flubs.
My initial idea was to do sort of a platforming tower defense. What was the tower? I wanted to make a 2d Ico, where you protect someone, you hold their hand and lift them up on platforms fighting back monsters and making your way through some sort of dungeon – that’s something I’ve wanted to do for a while, but I gave up the idea after thinking about the pathfinding involved.
Tools
Game Maker
It’s been a while since I’ve looked at Game Maker, I decided before hand I would try the free studio version. Physics was a nice addition, they should update the room editor, at least a bucket fill, and different shape tools for tiles and objects would be nice. 24 hrs in I found out that i was limited to 10 scripts, 32 hrs in I found I was limited to 15 game objects. If I had known I probably would have picked up Unity. In hindsight though, being limited was probably a good thing during the jam – – maybe.
Used bad coding practices, shameful variable names, a lot of copying and pasting because of the limit on scripts. Fixing bugs was fun, which was just taping the code together till it worked. I don’t think either of those are bad per se during a jam, getting over myself and letting things not be perfect are probably what got me through the weekend – there are also some cool things that happen as a result of not being entirely in control. Like the enemy ai, the scripts pretty simple, move towards player on the x axis, if player is above, jump – the way I implemented the shooting, there’s a slight kick up to the player, which results in the enemy dodging shots – so I went with it.
Grafx2
Saved my ass on the autotiling ground. I learned about the tilemap fx when Arachne posted her tile templates on the tigsforums. I’ve since been using feature for creating custom templates and tiles for vagante. So what is the tilemap fx? Basically it runs through your image finding matching tiles when it turns on, when tiles match, placing a pixel will update all instances of that tile. Another cool thing about grafx2 is how you can use patterns from your image as brushes, x y z will rotate/flip the brush – there are a lot of repeating pixels in the tileset.
Photoshop
I’ve been using photoshop for modular animation for vagante, so I’ve amassed a handful of animations files, that takes several source images as various body parts and accessories. They are linked to the psd file as smart object layers, if I update the source file, it gets reflected across all animation files. I’ve writtened a script also to export spritesheets from all open documents. I think technically these count as content generators as per the rules of the Jam. The source image looks like this:
I use 1px drop shadows set to “screen”, with an adjusted contour in the animation files for the linked smart objects, to get nice outline. I do this because if you rotate a smart object that has the outlined pixelated, the outline gets broken.
Bfxr
Game Maker won’t play the sounds I generated >:
Moving Forward
I’m really happy with the end result of Sender, this is the most I’ve done on a game solo, and want to continue working on it during the weekends I have off and make it something good. There are a lot of ideas I have floating around that don’t fit the structure of Vagante that I want to play around with in Sender. I’m looking forward to also working with a close friend on this, I think we’ll have something nice in a couple months.
And now I’m gonna plug Vagante’s kickstarter, because it’s happening. Considered it plugged. We weren’t sure whether it was a good idea to do this LD, but we did it anyways and it was a nice break honestly from the 8 months we’ve been staring at it. Speaking of which Eugene completed his entry also for the 72 hr compo, Irdencore. It’s an online multiplayer team based king of the hill style space shooter, done with vector graphics – it’s pretty fun, grab a friend.
Thanks for reading! You can Play Sender here
I made a time lapse of my gamedev process to make “One“, my compo submission. I hope you’ll find it interesting!
CLICK THE ABOVE PICTURE TO PLAY!
-ENDESGA
(p.s. I’m in)
I’m really happy with how it turned out. I didn’t get everything that I wanted into the game. But I still achieved my goal and ended up with something functional!
Feel free to try it out here: goo.gl/79tcGJ
We finished! We are both pretty happy with how it turned out. It took many hours of hard work, but here it is. One of us has work tomorrow, and the other class, so we are uploading tonight. Check it out if you have a chance! We appreciate any feedback.
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=28108
We are done! And the game is pretty good.
Drive a car and switch between two worlds to instantly change the geometry. It got very hard, then we made it harder! Can you beat it?!
This is: Glenn – A Driving Saga
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=7478
Actual Gameplay Footage
Woohoo! Submitted my second Ludum Dare game on-time
Overall, I feel like this was a much more streamlined process that my original game, which I’ll elaborate on in my post-mortem. The confirmation that I’ve learned enough to do it better the second time is a nice feeling. I’ll have to wait for the scores to see how people like the game compared to the first.
Complete development timelapse:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bXQk3RG7ag
Copulus is a 2D God Game in which you have to help your subjects populate their little world. In order to achieve this you need to balance their need for social interaction (and copulation) with the need to survive. I decided to try and stream line the “god game” mechanics and let the player focus on only a few tasks, as opposed to regular god games where you have to manage many different needs (housing, hunger, peril, happiness, loyalty, security, etc). In order for your population to survive and expand you only need to make sure they are feed, safe and can interact with each other. I even took this approach a bit further and merged survival/peril with hunger satisfaction. Before I go into the, regular, What went Right, What went Wrong topic I would like to present my approach for this entry:
Limitations breed creativity
Before the theme was announced I already established how far I can stretch things. I know from previous experiences how hard it is to stay on track of the initial design and how many features end up being thrown away in order to finish “something” before the time runs out. So for this edition of Ludumdare, I’d like to say I came prepared. Here are my, self-imposed, limitations:
Three rules in total. Three rules that, once the theme was announced, helped me establish a clear goal. For example, the small resolution and tile-based approach helped me establish the art style, level and user interface design. Working on a 256×384 screen I could only fit 8 / 12 tiles (32×32) on the screen, or 16/24 tiles at 16×16 pixels each. The AI requirement weighted in favor of the strategy genre and, it’s subclass, the god game genre.
From here on, I went with the entire map being confined to a single screen (in order to have a good view of your population, and not have to hunt for them everywhere). This also affected my User Interface Design and Experience, since It had to take as little screen space as possible. Little screen space for UI implied having only a handful of buttons during game play which, combined with the god-game thematic, had me limit what tasks the player could focus on. A small amount of tasks for the player to perform required me to streamline the entire “god game” approach and make it as minimalistic as possible (the soul experience as I like to refer to it). You can see how things developed further on.
What went right
What went wrong
Conclusion
I feel that with each Ludumdare event I partake in I can quantify my progress as a Designer. My first entry required the player to quit the game in order to restart the level and featured only mechanics but no clear goal (also no Ui of any kind). In my last LD (7DRTS) attempt I finally had a entry with no missing UI options and a clear navigation path. You can see where I’m going with this. But all in all, I’m glad that with each submission I end up acquiring new knowledge. As far as limitations go I believe that it’s better to know what you should not do as opposed to not knowing what to do. Hopefully my next LD submission will blow this one out of the water.
You can play and rate the game here. Linux, Mac and, hopefully, Android coming tonight. I’ve also uploaded it to itch.io and, in the weekend, will release a post-compo version that has sound and the features that were cut off.
Tags: Copulus, god game, Limitations, weight lifting, Zapaman
This is so much better than my second game! I was able to complete most of the tasks I set for myself. I’m very, very happy and proud!
My Last LD was kind of disappointing for me, although i managed to finish my games, but was not happy with it (it was a depressing game). This time i decided to do a fun game (my first LD after i moved into my own indie studio. Monster Brain Games ). After sketching some complicated strategy puzzle game where you connect the worlds and share its resources, but felt it was too complex and less fun.
Hence with the same kind of idea and a simpler gameplay, i decided to make a game about connected planets and dragging them to avoid the incoming asteroids. And just before finishing up, giving it a heavy name ( a cheap ref to recent marvel movie ?). Was happy with the results i’ve managed to achieve. The below GIF (a little jerky) explains a bit about gameplay. Hope you enjoy it. (Try the Easy mode if you like)
(Comments, suggestions, criticisms are most welcome & is greatly appreciated – Monster Brain Games)
Woohoo!
New High Score for my game WARP of the WORLDS!
Think you can beat it?
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=39189
I need sleep ;.;
Windows build: Download
To understand this post, you should play the game first.
LSD/acid graphics seems to fit to this abstract game and seemed like a good idea to my melted brain (from tiredness, not acid).
The first idea was that there will be a fixed area and goblins would come in and want to destroy the object in the middle. The object in the middle at first was supposed to be a shoe. Just for fun, i’ve made a video after about 5 hours of work. The final game looks quite different, but the idea hasn’t changed. I wanted to make a bit of an emotional game. I also don’t know how to write stories or how to make graphics, so I’ve decided for the “abstract” look. Naming the game Abstrakt was just a matter of 5 minutes.
After about 36 hours, all the main features were finished. I devoted my time from that point to polish stuff. I was also a bit afraid, that people will try to play the game without even reading the text and that they’ll see some meaningless stuff going on and that they’ll post hate comments. That’s one of my worst nightmare. When I’ve started receiving first comments, it turned out that people quite understand it and like it 
(hurray!).
I knew that the graphics might hurt someone eyes, but while having only about 2 hours to deadline, redesigning about 100 sprites seemed to be a wrong idea. Besides, the graphics should correspond to the title, right?
There is a longer description on the game page, there are some instructions, story, etc..
Also I’ve made a full walkthrough video in case someone won’t understand the game, but still want to see the game in action.
I hope you are all satisfied with your entries Once again, you can play this game here.
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=20788
It’s a glorified Lunar Lander. Had to abandon original control scheme halfway through day 2, which was fun (!not), the final engine control is much more how I think the Apollo mission retro controls worked, setting power and time then firing a burn.
Of course you have to do it repeatedly for this, but it is a game…
I used Construct2 this. Also spent far more time than usual on look and feel, which I think was a good decision, though as a typical programming-first developer I do find it tough to admit that visual polish is important and the ‘brilliant’ idea will just vanish into the murk without it (not that this is an original idea ofc.) I found time spent was about 20% each for design, coding and testing/bug-fixing and 40% on graphics and polish.
All the planets are based on an iPhone photo I took of a weather windowsill tile out the back. Gimp filters ftw!
Built with Construct2, Gimp, BXFR, Audacity and a (small this time…) amount of piano playing.
Testing with 4 hours to go late last night (UK timezone) found a few minor things – and I realised that the harder levels were fine on Touch devices, but bad on with Mouse control… so added keyboard shortcuts, updated the help & other pipeline stuff… sigh. Three releases in final minutes, just one more thing Columbo.
As always thank you for the fun LD and see you next time!
My game did not like me towards the end of the comp. But I still submitted what I could do. Oh and for the people who can assess my source code there is a secrete somewhere in the file.
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=33944
Well, I can’t get my game to export properly, and it’s not finished.
I think this is where I call it. It sucks a lot that I can’t enter… especially when I put so much time into the project.
does anyone know why JarSplice doesn’t make Slick2D’s file referencing work properly? It keeps saying that it can’t find the image file referenced by the tilemap, when it obviously can in the regular .tmx.
actually maybe that’s the problem, it’s pointing at the wrong tileset in it’s original folder.
but schools starting for me tomorrow morning so I really don’t have time to deal with this.
I’m trying to get more votes so I thought I’d post a post-mortem on my entry: Portal Patrol.
Not a real ending, is it?
So no, I didn’t finish. I honestly didn’t think I’d finish all of my ideas in this game, but I did think I would’ve gotten further than I did. I spent so much time on making the game open-ended that I didn’t really incorporate any of the core mechanics of the game itself. Yes, this is interactive fiction, but to me it feels like less of a game and more of an introduction to a game. In fact, that’s exactly what it is. Right when the action is about to start, you get the “To Be Continued” screen above.
However, I am proud of what I came up with. My fear was that I would procrastinate and play Marvel Puzzle Quest or watch YouTube videos or lurk on reddit or maybe even hook up my PS3 and play games. I didn’t do any of that stuff, and I am proud and hopeful because of it.
My new fear is that I won’t continue development of this game. So many times I’ve made a prototype of a game and then thought “I don’t want to go back to that code”, or “I’ll come back to that… some day.” My driving force right now with this game is that it is truly incomplete, and I won’t really know if I want to complete it until I implement the core mechanics that I had originally planned for it. I don’t have the 48-hour deadline to light a fire under my behind anymore though…
I honestly don’t know how I could’ve improved my development before final submission. I feel like if I spent too much time pre-planning instead of agile development, I would’ve done more planning than actual development. I also feel like although limiting player-choice would’ve allowed me to speed-along faster, it wouldn’t have been the game that I want to make. So many times I was tempted to give a 1.2.3.4. or a)b)c)d) menu with specific branches, but I wanted the player input to feel more natural. Instead of “1) Enter portal”, the player can input “portal” or “enter portal” or “jump into the portal” or “dive into the portal”, etc.
I do feel like I bit off more than I could chew in regards to the 48-hour deadline. With so much focus on open player choices, there was no way I’d get anything close to a finished product done in time. I think I offset that with honesty, though. There is nothing on my entry that says “This game is complete” or “Experience all the action and thrills…!” An attentive player will know going in that the game is unfinished. I didn’t want to NOT submit anything just because it was unfinished. I may be wrong, but it is my opinion that it is better to submit something that at least gives a good idea of what to expect from the game than submit nothing at all.
I did give myself about an hour to play-test the game after my coding frenzy. I constantly iterated towards the beginning of development, but towards the end, there was a long stretch of time when I was just coding, saving, coding, saving without actually running the code. In that hour of play-testing, I came across a lot more bugs than I had expected (which should have been expected). I’m happy that I gave myself that time, though, or else the final submission wouldn’t have just been incomplete; it would have been completely unplayable.
The biggest thing I learned during development of Portal Patrol was how to implement binary serialization. Yes; Portal Patrol has persistence (which you would discover if you tried restarting the game without having died first). I felt like persistence adds to the overall play-ability of the game, and it would have been unacceptable to not at least try to add some sort of persistence. I spent my entire first night of what I thought would have been development solely on learning binary serialization. I wrapped my head around it, even though there were times where it felt like I wouldn’t. I think that has been my biggest immediate reward from this project.
In conclusion, I’m pleased and proud to have participated in my first Ludum Dare compo. I created something that I truly want to expand on, and I learned binary serialization, which will help me with game development in general in the long run. I still have a long way to go, but Ludum Dare 30, in it’s own ways has helped me move towards my life goal of becoming a professional game developer. Baby steps. Frantic baby steps. Thank you for reading my post-mortem (this is the first post-mortem I’ve ever written, by the way), and I hope you enjoy Portal Patrol!
These Cosmic Chains – Soundtrack
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=25844
I had an absolute blast with this Ludum Dare! Thank you to the organizers for continuing to host our crap.
@graveyardpolice
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=39421
Had so much fun making this. Wish I’d had more time!
It’s like an ant farm but in hyper space. And instead of a magnyfing glass you have an entire space ship at your disposal.
Fun time being a computer going berzerk.
Still under development: www.twitch.tv/zaubersee
Computer, open that door!
18 hours left of the Jam, and I still have nothing. I got a bit ambitious and ended up losing interest and confidence in the project five hours in. Since then, I’ve gone back to what I normally do with my free time; researching AI and neuroscience. Then it hit me… what if I create a game where you play as someone’s Prefrontal Cortex? Other parts of the brain send you vague messages and you need to make decisions solely based on that! Maybe I can finish it in time with this new idea. First though, I need to get to bed. It’s nearly 2 AM.
Please try the game and don’t forget to comment about *ANYTHING* you want
the game Is a mix between two genre (2d platfomer & 2d shooter) which it got mixed togetherall the time. When i started the design of this game i wanted to make sure that the player can easily see the transition between the two worlds, more details on my blog.
Thank you 😀 !!!
Hey, here is my game: ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=26780
It has some mechanics of crafting & building and teleport system.
This LD was my 3rd one and as previous ones it was fun.
Random progress screenshots:
Thank you!
Tanner
