So, during the weekend I created the game I.A.N (Interdimensional Administration Network). In the game you’ve become the administrator of I.A.N, which is a network used by different dimensions to send data between them. Your job is to make sure that the data is transferred between the dimensions, which are represented by nodes on your node map. You swing between the nodes by tethering to them, and have to deliver data packages between them.

I really enjoyed creating this game, for several reasons. Number one is probably that I developed this game in dart, a browser-based language which compiles to Javascript. I’ve never worked with dart before, and it felt great, since it was something new and refreshing. I used the render engine pixi.dart, which worked out great in the end. I had the idea of creating a game that was really difficult even before this Ludum Dare. So when the game got the level of difficulty that I was looking for I was really pleased. The game is frustratingly difficult, but you still want to keep playing it, I can’t stop playing it myself, and my friends has told me the same.

What was difficult during the development?

Of course there were obstacles I had to climb in previous Ludum Dares, but not as much as this one. In the previous ones I’ve used Java and LWJGL which I’m familiar with. For this game I used Dart language and pixi.dart. Which are both new to me. This was also the first time I created a browser-based game. I had some problems with pixi early on, since I didn’t know much about it, and I did things inefficiently. The main problem with pixi was the it wasn’t as fast as I’d hope, and about six hours into development I considered switching to a different rendering engine.  Luckily, I was able to resolve my performance issues.

Another challenge I had during development was the physics for the swinging mechanic. It involved math I’ve never done before, so I tried a lot of different solutions, but none of them worked the way I wanted to. When I finally was able to figure out how to do it, the final solution was a lot simpler than my previous attempts.

After the first day, I released a playable demo on my website (http://goudagames.com/), unfortunately the playable demo was unplayable. I had performance issues, and these issues would when you got the third node. This time, the perfomance issues wasn’t graphical. Something in MY code was slowing the game down severly, so I spent the whole morning of the next day to optimize the game. And I think the performance was raised by (at least) 300 %. Now I had a game that ran smooth and got all the gameplay it needed. I’d decided to keep the graphics simple, so I didn’t want to change them either. I considered myself done, except for audio.

Audio was one of the issues I couldn’t solve, mostly because it wasn’t anything I could do. Basically, the current version of darts implementation of web audio is working horribly. The sound is crackling and just sounds horrible. I know that it wasn’t just my game, since I looked at other implementations of darts web audio, and they all had the same crackling, so I decided to remove audio completely from the game. I decided that I would submit another silent game.

Now, I thought, I was finished. But then I got the idea of implementing a highscore feature, so that the globally highest score would always be shown on the game page. Unfortunately, I was unable to do this because of my inexperience with web development. I knew about HTTP requests, but my POST request didn’t work properly, and I wasn’t able to solve it, so I decided to scrap the highscore idea too.

How do you think the game turned out?

I had the idea of the game the whole time, and I knew that I wanted the graphics to be simple, and the gameplay smooth but difficult. I’m really, really happy with how the game turned out, even if I don’t get a high rating. The game started out as an idea, and the final product was exactly how I’d imagined it the first hour of development. I stuck with the same idea throughout development, and kept it simple, which is what I think made the difference between this entry and previous Ludum Dare entries. In both of my previous Ludum Dares I started out with an idea, but the game that came out of it wasn’t as I’d originally planned, and therefore I wasn’t as happy with them as I was with this game. It felt great to see your idea materialize in front of you, with no changes or tweaks. I personally love to play it, and I’m more than happy with this entry.

I would write more…

I would continue writing this post mortem even more, but time is ticking and I’ve got to go. Go play I.A.N and leave a comment saying what you think of it. Don’t forget to rate!

Until next time, goodbye!

We just finished up Parallel Rift

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=37631

Have fun!

This entry was posted on Monday, August 25th, 2014 at 5:31 am and is filed under LD #30. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

This ‘game’ leans on the ‘not a game’ category because its primary feature is the social experiment that it contains.  Coated by a skinner box, Cookie Clicker mechanic,  this #LD48 entry explores what sort of story all of us game developers would create if we all could only write one word every 20-ish minutes or so, depending on your mining facilities.

Nearing the 24 hour left mark I had a rather large change in direction because I was thinking “this sh*t sucks, wtf am I making.”  I had a pretty nice looking intro (Im a programmer so it was nice for me), and  some boring game mechanic that just didnt make me happy.  I was sitting in the shower thinking how can I make this even slightly interesting within the next 24 hours.  I always wanted to do some sort of social game like Twitch plays pokemon, or the like, so I changed the intro sequence text slightly to make the plot make sense.  Busted out a rather large chunk of networked code, a database, and turned this terrible cookie clicker into a terrible story generator.  Yay!  And this shitty story generator is recruiting you,  yes YOU, to be the driving force behind it.

–On a slightly more real note, it has been particularly fun to watch the story grow live as it sits running on my second monitor.  So thanks to all who have participated so far!  And hopefully more will join and before you know it, THE FINAL NOVEL will be complete!

–I have done solo LD48 now quite a few times and will be looking for a partner next time!  Get in touch on twitter fellow gamedevs, even if your not interested and stay connected!  Gamedev is my world and I want to meet as many people as I can who share a similar love in the craft! https://twitter.com/TeddyNashor

Only few hours before the Ludum Dare end. I have certainly deserved my Ludum Burger!

I’ll publish my entry at the end of the challenge.

World Traveler

It’s the first build. We will add more contend until deadline.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=39425

Collisions are finicky little beasts. Especially when what you need is not a collision but an overlap.

But hey, we are back on track! If we finish this in time (and it looks like we may do just that) it will probably be one of the wildest saves of this ludum dare. Realizing halfway through the jam that we don’t know how to implement our idea in Phaser, changing the platform to something totally different, that we have even more vague idea about and completely changing the game concept. On top of that Delta has some errands to run back at his place, so for the last hours he will have to work remotely. Now using a git, even with some problems with merging stuff earlier, turns out to be one of our best ideas for this LD

Gotta stick those planets together man!

To all compo participants that just couldn’t make it in time, and to all fellow jammers biting their nails in fear right now: Don’t ever give up. LD is over when the timer ticks to 0, not when you think it’s over!

Hey!

Since my entry “The Beginning” appeared to be a bit hardcore, I think it’s a good idea to make a video walkthrough for those who don’t have enough patience to beat the game

So, here we go! Spoiler alert!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsDNMcukSpg

I finished my game! Well, I didn’t really finish it. The levels are set up poorly, lots of coding didn’t get done, there’s virtually no main menu graphics, there are numerous bugs and I made the music in about 25 minutes as opposed to the several hours I had planned. But hey, it was submitted on time!  It feels good to have successfully participated in my first Ludum Dare. I will await more comments before I dive into fleshing my game out too much.

It’s a simple one button runner with jumping, wall jumping, and auto scrolling. I took a colorful approach to the theme (literally). I didn’t do a very good job tying the two together but the idea was that there are different worlds of color and you alter the world with the colors you find. Here’s a list of some of the things I wasn’t able to accomplish due to time constraints:

– Sensible level design

-Multiple color switches per level (I thought I would get this for sure, but didn’t leave myself enough time to make a playable build)

-Objects that kill you in the levels (besides falling off the map)

-Buttons to control colors on the fly (wasn’t 100% if I wanted this but wanted to at least test it)

-Controls for choosing whether or not you wanted to activate a color switch

The last bit definitely should have been included, I even had it working but sort of forgot about it in the heat of the moment. I submitted within the final 10 minutes of the contest.
That’s all for now!

Hi !

Level 1 is done !

Now we just have to do sfx, music, more levels, more tiles, a menu, …

It’ll be done soon !

DarksteelPenguin, Coldman07, tchassin

Tags: 2D, C++, jam, progress, screenshot

Hello guys, need to write this story.

My theme

Okay, so the theme. I was hoping for this one so hard, when it comes out, I was so happy. All the vote week, it was the one i was thinking to be the better prepared for. Just because “Connected Worlds” speaks to me like “Do something with space in it”, and I freaking love space stuff.

So here I am, Saturday 3:00 am (I’m in France, UTC -1), stream on twitch ready to go. With a great idea : make a lite-Civilization, with planets instead of cases.

Limit the ambition… kinda

Of course I knew I couldn’t make a Civilization-like in 48 h. So I start to focus only on the combat system, with a simple system of Attack/Defense gathering. I don’t wanted to make a static map, because Universe is random, you know. I love recursive system so I try to plan a graph/tree oriented system, to generate a map, and verify connection between planets. Also, I prepare the fact than, the player is not alone, and need an enemy in this random universe.  So I planed something terrible : An AI. Yeah.

Running out of time

Last time i’ve done the Ludum Dare was for the 28. It was pretty lame because, I remember during the vote week, I was like “if <You Only Get One> goes out, i’m so dead i’ve no idea”. So you can understand why it was so “special”. Anyway, last time, I was so stressed, I’ve work all the weekend, with just 6-10h of sleep divided on 3h naps. So this weekend, I was like “take it easy bro”. I just worked until Sat 5am, goin to sleep almost 10h, woke up at 3pm,  take my time to eat, doing the dishes, do some shopping, make my dinner, all that stuff, work like 8-10h on the LD for all the saturday. And I woke up at 2pm on Sunday and I was like “there is so much work to do, that will be impossible…”.

Plus, It was very different on Unity than the stuff I usualy do on it. Like, I’ve never do some generation, graph system or RTS view in Unity3D. And It was a very long time since i’ve worked seriously on it (like 8 month).

So on Sunday, at 11pm,  the AI wasn’t finished, and the graphics was just some white textures with “SUN” and “GAZ” in block capitals on it.

But I made it. At 3am, I’ve posted the “final version” of my game. Not a sh** game this time. A bugged game but still a game!

My AI wasn’t debugged, so I just let it capture planets, not fight. My biggest regret.

Results

So,
– My AI does one third of what it had do at start (Capture instead of Capture/Defend/Attack).
– I’ve never find some time to create some cool GUI interface with images and stuff.
– The commands are hard, rigid, not naturals.
– There is still some bugs I’ve never figurate why there here.

But I’m proud of myself. Because, that was a big project, and if I hadn’t took my time on Saturday, maybe I would finish it on time, and make a big surprise for anyone who tests it. And it’s much much […] much better than the last game i’ve made for the LD28 x). And it’s good looking. I love the effect on the planets I’ve made.

Yeah, big experience.  Thank’s to the “Ludum Dare” team once again, i’m now completely burn at work in this monday morning x). But I can’t wait until the LD31 now :D.

So, see you next time guys, take care!

Cheers

[link to game]

PS : My game is dedicated to Sid Meier btw, that’s why the name is in Swahili language, like Baba Yetu, the song from Civ IV main menu :).

Tags: LD30, post-mortem, postmortem, unity3d

I didn’t know where i was going when i started, but here it is.

I finished my Game.

Orbital Expansion

Orbital Expansion is a Space conquest clicker game, try it here if you want.

Well, my 4th Ludum Dare entry has come to an end. This time I made a Box2D game with LibGDX called The MillionWood.

The basis of the game is that every now and then, another screen with another character is added to the game, and you have to control all of them simultaneously. All characters start at the same level, so soon enough you’ll be trying to finish old levels and new levels at the same time – and the farther you go, the more of the characters will reach the really trick levels! And if one character dies, the rest of them go down as well, so you’ll have to be careful.

The fact that this was my first time fully implementing Box2D has me very pleased that I got something working this well. I should probably have eased up on the polish, though – I was done with the game well before sleeping time, but my drive to add “just this little detail” had me going almost all the way to the cutoff point at 3 AM. Still, I’m very happy with the end result!

With all that said, good luck with your games everyone! I’ll start rating within the week. : )

You know things are going good when you’re spending more time in your level editor than the codebase because it. just. works.

That’s a beautiful thing. The base mechanics of the game are pretty much finished. It was a little tricky to get it right because I’d never done anything with interconnecting maps and portals before. By leaving it very generic and letting the data from the level editor speak to the engine, it became almost academic.

Now it looks like there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. I just might get this finished and packaged up before the Jam ends. No matter what though I came out of this with a good game engine that I didn’t have only 2 days prior.

Now here’s some more screenshots. I finally locked in an objective based on my own interpretation of the theme. Connected Worlds, almost immediately to me, went in reverse and I thought: okay, so two worlds are already connected. How do I disconnect them?

With bombs of course. The objective is to go through all of the portals to the other side, get a bomb, plug it into the computer port for that portal, and get back through before it blows.

Somebody set us up the bomb!

Plug the bomb into the computer port that controls that portal.

Get out of there!

At this point it’s a straightforward platform puzzler (platzler? pluzzler?) You could play it as-is and probably even have some fun. I’d like to add some enemies that can provide further obstacles and a reason you have a health meter, along with ammo crates.

Mixing multiple tilesets from different sources seems to be working well so far. I had to scale up and sprite the bomb and the computer port though (they’re both animated).

And I still don’t have a name for it yet. Any ideas? I’m open to suggestions.

Hello all!

I am writing a bit of a rushed post to tell you about our experience with this (ongoing) Ludum Dare Jam! If you go looking, you will not find a “We are in!” post like we usually write, and for a very good reason : we did not originally plan to participate.

We all had a busy weekend, and felt it was safer to give this one a pass. Until saturday, of course… When we learned the theme, some ideas started forming in our heads, and a simple question, worded as “Say, why are we not doing the Ludum Dare again?” was enough.

The catch : we decided to start around 4pm (Central European time, so like 12 hours after the start of the jam), one of us was away for the remainder of the saturday afternoon, and due to the short notice, we decided to do the jam with only 2 of us. Oh, and we both work today, so that is almost a full day lost again (and for one of us, the evening will be otherwise occupied too), in addition to forcing us to go to sleep on sunday at a reasonable time.

What could possibly go wrong, right?

First progress pictures we shared on Twitter. At that point, we could already switch map, had our movement system in place, and the dialogs were starting to work.

As far as genres go, our game can be categorized as a light puzzler/adventure game. We decided early on that we wanted Zelda-style controls and separation by screen, so we went with that. We also divided the duties between us : one would do the coding, level layout and the music, while the other would draw all the assets (neither of us being artists by trade :p) and help with the puzzle design. So far, this is turning out fine! We have all the assets for our scaled-down (this IS a jam, after all :D) goals, and most of the things are already in place. The levels are more or less design, so we only need to get to town with our tile-based layout tool!

We even have music in the game!

We should be able to finish the game as we envisioned it, since we basically have a little mechanic (buttons that, when you stand on them, open doors, oooooh) to do, and the rest is the level layout. Good times.

Oh, and a name. We still have not decided on that!

And just to give you some more info on our take on the theme, you will play inside 2 “worlds”: the physical, real world (pictured in the screenshots in this post), and a digital world, connecting various parts of the first one. You will have to juggle between 3 characters while doing so, and use all that to solve a couple of very mild puzzles. We of course had more ambitious plans at the beginning (like combat and such), but you know how plans go during a LD : they quickly go out the window :D.

Hopefully, we will be able to post a playable version tonight, and you will all get to enjoy it Good luck if you are still jamming, and get some well-deserved rest if you submitted your compo entry already!

-GSM Productions out!

The City, making up the bulk of the “real world”, and the first protagonist of the game.

I’m happy to say everyone who’s played my game so far has loved it. It’s such a good feeling to know people are enjoying something I’ve made! Please check out my game too, I’d love to hear your feedback

Downloads available for web, PC, Mac, and Linux.

Title
Matters of Perspective

Link
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=2726

Description
Hit E to swap between the worlds of 2D sidescroller and FPS to work your way through a mind-bending maze. (And click to hit buttons, but that’s made a little obvious in-game :p)
In-game notes have overtones of the connections felt in relationships, treating each person as their own world, with their own perspectives and views that enable positive connections with each other.

Oh boy, after a minor fixing we now have a full world filled with planets and stars and black holes! Since we have collisions solved already, getting the planets to collide with the rest and trigger either a planet destruction or a gameover will be a nice and easy thing to do. Since we can’t figure out how to keep our current background static, we may opt to use a tilemap of star specks on a blueish background that will be randomly generated to fill the whole world.

Ath’krtubhath will be proud.

These are implemented or done:

– One more spaceship
– Asteroids with random color tone, velocity, angular velocity and spawning location, mining asteroids
– Federation newspaper (unfunctioning for now)

Today we are going on with the list we made. Some of the crucial things are;

– Store transactions after docking at station
– A federation newspaper that includes the story. The story will affect the space market.
– Buying materials and spaceship parts in federation market station
– At least 4-5 more planets
– Functioning federation newspaper with random issue per day
– Security for federation stations (if you are caught with illegal material on you or if you attack them)

By this point the game will be playable but there are also extra stuff we are planning to add if we can manage to finish these;

– Cargo ships that move from market to market and that you can shop on if you dock
– Other merchants with their own stations moving around
– Pirates (enemy AI and combat)

You can watch the development stream here: http://www.twitch.tv/dinoemirikol

Here is another spaceship with double lasergun weapon and the first issue of Federation News. I guess federation didn’t bother to pay for a graphic designer

Soooo many things left to do !!

-Dmeat

While all the compo entries are in, we’re still streaming the development of our jam game, so pop in and say hi!

twitch.tv/literalgames

Meanwhile, we’ve completed the first sprite sheet (which seems a little late at almost 50 hours in!)

It’s all coming together, although we’re not sure how far we’ll get…

Wish us luck, and good luck to everyone else!

Hello everyone. This is my entry for the Ludum Dare 48. I wanted to create a platformer where dying let you travel through dimensions. Then see yourself moving around and being able to use yourself as a block.

Aside from that I also wanted to add typical platformer items such as platforms, falling blocks, some enemies… but I didn’t have enough time Therefore I focused a bit more on Level design and added some levels that shoudl take you some time to solve.

PLAY

Tags: #LD48 #LD30, connected, die, platform, platformer, posva, Worlds

New graphisme!

I couldn’t finish my game, but at least I submitted something “playable”.

DUAL Adventure: LD page | Play it (Web, HTML5)

This is also my best attempt at the platformer genre, so I’m happy with what I’ve achieved given that I only had day an a half.

Anyway, see you next LD! Now is time to play games!

Our team for the LD 30 Jam is still going strong, 15 hours to go. The game is about – you guessed it – connecting worlds by building bridges. The cultures that live on the worlds evolve based on the resources you provide them access with. Simultaneously, the evil enemy culture is growing without your influence, and your goal is to nurture the friendly cultures to a level where they can defeat it.

The evil red empire is growing! Nurture the other empires to defeat it!

Can’t wait to see what everyone else has done with the topic! But first, the UI and controls have to be finished and the game be balanced. Also we encountered some interesting ideas and techniques which might make it into a postmortem.

Tags: jam, LD30, progress, unity

unfinished. working tomorrow until 17 hours from now so it’s impossible for me to finish in time

pac man tribute/reboot

play two “worlds” at once using the same controls

turn based

lose points for inefficient moves (ramming into walls and allowing enemies a free turn etc… this happens a lot if you don’t take care, considering the maps are different)

when powerups are in they will probably be able to be shared between the “worlds”

C&C appreciated

As usual i spent too much time on aesthetics. It’s built in Fusion 2.5 and to be honest I don’t think it was a great choice. enemy pathing was hindered by a nasty bug  for about 10 hours due to complex workaround for the lack of hierarchical structure in fusion 2.5

the images are GIFs, please click through

I had lifts in there about a day ago, then took them out temporarily. Since reworking it, I found they provide a nice extra mechanic in the levels, especially if you have to rely on them to get to certain areas of said level.

Elelator go down the hooooooole…

Now with lifts! And they go up and down.

Time for a post-mortem.

Preparation

This #LD I’ve decided to use the framework I made last time: for a point-n-click game.

Before the competition I decided to add some more features, like a dialog system and a way to play sound. Also the Javascript should now work correctly on iOS and Android as well.

Theme…

NO! I didn’t want Connected Worlds… I had some great game ideas with other themes, but not this< theme. What should I do? Well, I went for a short walk outside and imagined two worlds close to each other. What if the worlds are very close, but not yet connected? How about a love story? Yes! A love story! This is the basis of my game.

The puzzles

When making a point-n-click adventure game one of the most important things to have is: good puzzles. If the puzzles are too obvious people will make their way through the game in a matter of minutes, if the puzzles are too complicated people will quickly give up and hate it. This is the moment I panicked, I was again clueless and had no good puzzle ideas. That is when inspiration came from my living room… the Mythbusters. My love story was featured around building a rocket. And where did I learn everything I know about building rockets? The Mythbusters. That is why they just had to become part of my game (and they did!).

Drawing! Drawing! Hand cramp.

The biggest drawback of making a point-n-click adventure is the visuals… I love playing the genre and want to bring back the fun I had with games like Gobli(ii)ns, Monkey Island, Larry, DOTT etc.

Instead of drawing on the computer I decided to use something new (for me):

1. Draw on paper (using pencil)
2. Make photo with phone
3. *instant dropbox sync*
4. Open in GIMP
5. Play with threshold
6. Do digital coloring
7. (optional): Turn layers into animation with sprite GIMP plugin

The amount of drawing to programming was 90/10, maybe even 90/5/5 if you include making music and sound effects!

In the end I decided to also push my hand-drawn artwork on Github, you can check it our here.

Music & sound fx

For the music I decided to use SoundHelix. It took me a while to figure out how to change the settings to get something which matches the scene I was working on, but I love the result.

The sound effects where all quick hacks, shouting at the microphone. I’m especially proud of my lions roar, which turned out much better than I anticipated.

Fun!

I’m very pleased with the result, it is much better than the first LD I finished. It makes me feel so proud when people say it reminds them of the fun they had with the good old point-n-click adventures. It is my duty to make you laugh and have a good time!

To play my game, click here.

The finished game PhaseShift

With this game, my 4th ludum dare concludes. PhaseShift turned out to be a arcady bullet-hell game about colours and bullets (obviously) and it’s the first time I would call a LD game of mine finished!

What went right

Pretty much everything.

Since the theme ‘Connected Worlds’ came out with about 600 votes more than any other theme in the final voting round, I started thinking about ideas on friday. This was a slight gamble but it worked out well for me. Normally I take ages to find an idea I like, so being able to think on the idea earlier was very helpful and freed up lots of time.

Luckily I came up with a very simple idea for the game which really played to my strengths: Simple geometric shapes as visuals, gameplay that does not require levels, no fance mechanics that take ages to implement.

Because of this simplicity and headstart I was able to implement almost all of the mechanics during the first day. I did spend a few hours adding some progression to the game on sunday, but overall the choice of the right idea enabled me to do lots of polishing and also include music for the first time!

The most important lesson I learned during this LD was that visual polish goes a long way in making your game look and feel better.

As an example, compare these two screenshots. Overall they are only about 4 hours in work time apart:

The visuals after the first day

Visuals after some polish

Simply adding a gradient in the background and moving the score to the middle already made a huge difference in how nice the game looked.

Another helpful way of making the game look nice was Paletton with which I spend most of my first day finding a good colour palette for the game, and I think it really helped making the game look nice.
(Pro tip for Paletton: First select a few nice colours through one of the “composition” modes, then change to custom and fine-tune your colours by holding shift. This really helped avoiding some colours just completely blending in with the background.)

Because I’m bad at animations and I am using simple geometric shapes, I had to add responsiveness and  juice via tweens. In this game almost everything is tweened, from the rotation of the cannon barrel to the portal “animation”.

It was also a great way of making the game feel more responsive by tweening the size of the bullets every time something happened in the game, in this case when the player collected a bullet or a new bullet was shot. This, in addition to some camera shake, made the game feel alive.

This was the first time I was able to include my own sound effects and a background track in my game. I spend about 4 hours just on composing a track in LSDJ (which is also the first track I ever finished in LSDJ!). I think that gave the game a complete feel and made it really responsive.

Making all the sound effects in LSDJ also had the advantage that I could re-use sounds from the background track for the sound effects. This made the overall sound design a bit more cohesive.

Another important lesson I learned this weekend that I can totally write hacky code for a jam. Adding some of the later features in quickly became a big ball of callback functions and uncaught exceptions, but in the end it all worked out well!
Additionally, I was able to reuse some of my code quite nicely which saved time. Instead of making a nice-looking title screen, I simply duplicated most of my game code, applied a blur filter on the level (which took longer than I thought, but I learned a lot) and put some text on it. With just a few modifications I had an interesting title screen without adding much compexity!

Overally this was the best ludum dare for me so far. I got to complete a full game with visuals, decent gameplay and sound, and all that without being overly stressed.
I also learned to use new tools, such as Paletton, improved my knowledge with others (HaxeFlixel, LSDJ) and got closer to knowing what I’m good at and what kind of games I am able to make.

If you want to see all of this in action, you can play and rate my game here.
You can also follow me on twitter @KeyMaster_ where I post about my ongoing game development projects.

Thank you for reading and until next time!

KeyMaster

I never have worked before with AppWarp or Unity Animator,so I learned a lot this LD30.

Today I learned how to make the chat with AppWarp and the animation transitions with animator.

This is a great day, I have finished the basic game mechanics, but still need how to synch network objects like rigid bodies shared between players. In PhotonCloud is easier, I was searching in google but only found the old way to do it, like we did with socket messages, and i dont like it, so i opened a ticket in appwarp support service to learn how to sync rigidbodies using network views as easy as photoncloud does.
Anyway, so tired, i need to eat XD

Tags: appwarp, game server, learning fast, multiplayer online, photoncloud, servers, unity, zen

These are implemented or done:

– Scanning the area by radar (upgradable) and showing the materials on planets
– Minimap icons, icons of planets according to the materials on them
– Docking to home station and being able to open station menu window
– Spaceship stats show on screen, fuel gets consumed, cargo gets full, materials get gathered
– Zooming by scrolling middle mouse button
– Federation market station for shopping purposes
– Moving at light speed
– A complete world map that can be toggled
– Shooting by laserguns
– Upgrading the ship after docking at station if required materials are satisfied
– Asteroids, one more planet, missile launcher, laser cannon

Today we are going on with the list we made. Some of the crucial things are;

– Store transactions after docking at station
– A federation newspaper that includes the story. The story will affect the space market.
– Federation fuel station, buying fuel
– Buying materials and spaceship parts in federation market station
– At least 4-5 more planets
– Explosive material that reacts to heavy damage on ship when carried
– Security for federation stations (if you are caught with illegal material on you or if you attack them)

By this point the game will be playable but there are also extra stuff we are planning to add if we can manage to finish these;

– Cargo ships that move from market to market and that you can shop on if you dock
– Other merchants with their own stations moving around
– Pirates (enemy AI and combat)

You can watch the development stream here: http://www.twitch.tv/dinoemirikol

Here are the new graphics done, will be screenshots soon:

I was making a game about planets, but I started over on sunday so now I have this.

Hey guys!

I started a little late but did it anyway: I entered LD for the second time! However, I must say I’m less satisfied with the result than I was the first time, but this time I worked only about 8 hours on it. (oh, and Game Maker crashed when I hadn’t saved my file for 2,5 hours… *cries*) If I had more time I would improve the levels because I think they’re not really interesting right now. I would also improve the graphics, especially those ugly ‘button’ tiles, and add some sound effects. Big inspiration for me was Fancy Pants Adventure; the drawn-like character and animations, and the music in some way, too.

The mirrored effect really really confuses me when I try to play my game. I can’t even make it to the end myself :’) But I hope you can! So if you like cats like me, give my tiny little game a try!

special thanks to rubna for answering  a few stupid noob questions about GM!

It’s my third Ludum Dare, and it’s first time when i was using Unity3D. I was very excited about this one,  not whole weekend was free for me, but when i was not in my home, i was creating ideas. The idea of this game was much more explanded than it is now, as always i try make too big game in 48 hours.

“Virtuoso” ludum dare page

Virtuoso screenshot:

What went wrong:

• Graphics. In this kind of game i really do not need tons of graphics, but i just ran out of time.
• Ideas. I had so much more ideas about story, mechanics, but i spend too much time on not that important mechanics.
• Animations. Game have only few animations, but i planned to do lot of them to make good game feel, but once again, i had no time.
• Music. I used generators, then edited it, but it was not what i wanted. Anyway, in my other games i have even worse music, so this one is not that bad for me.

What went right:

• I can’t say main mechanics is very good, but it’s what i was expecting.
• Game story. It’s not very good, but i never had any kind of story in my other games, so i am proud of it.
• Sound effects. Personally, i love those sound effects, have no idea how to describe it, so just try it .

Conclusion:

Not good as i expected, but better than ever before. Waiting for Ludum Dare 31 and going to play all other games made in Ludum Dare 30!

I’ve been developing my game, Flipside, on Mac OS X and everything compiles fine. I’ve been trying to compile it to windows however I keep getting compiler errors not due to the code but because I am inexperienced with compiling on Windows. My previous Ludum Dare Entry (28) did compile on windows but that was only a 2D SFML game but this time round, I’ve made a 3D entry.

The game is programmed in C++11. The libraries I used were SFML 2.1, OpenGL, glm, glew.

If someone could compile this to work with windows, I would be so grateful as I am having some problems compiling on Windows (dll hell). 

Tags: help, help me!, Windows, windows build

I’ve always wanted to make something that simulated a social network, but just as a short and silly project. For this ludum dare I only had one day available so it was a good opportunity to try this idea. First I was going to make some kind of “choose your own adventure” with the context of using a social network, but I had played something similar not too long ago.

I started creating an activity feed to create the mood of using a social network. I added a photo of Phil Fish and wrote a couple of quotes to test the mechanic. And that’s when I thought:”Hey, this could be funny with more characters and quotes.

So I included 9 more characters and someone suggested me over twitter to generate random quotes, which was a great idea. Once I had finished adding more content I made a few tweaks and added some links to twitter and my website(disguised as FAQ and Pivacy Policy).

I added a button to share the game on Twitter, but then it hit me, it be more awesome to be able to share something cool you saw on the activity feed. So I did a small patch to save quotes and share them over Twitter.

By then I was out of energy and with a pair of hours left. When I was going to submit my game I found out that, once compiled, the twitter button is buggy as hell, and I had to spend another hour trying to do a messy fix.

So it’s done and ready to “play”, let’s see if players have a few laughs with it 😀

Play “Ultra Realistic Social Network Simulator”

Ultra Realistic Social Network simulator recreates the whole experience of using a social network. You can’t win or lose, just waste your time watching the activity feed.

Features:

-Watch random updates from different characters.

-Over 70 pre-made status updates plus lots of randomly-generated quotes.

-Mark your favourite quotes and share them on twitter.

-Pop-ups with warning messages.

-No annoying chat sounds.

-Procrastinating has never been easier.

-94.9% more random than your average game.

Everything was built in the 48 hours, humans, guns, buildings etc, using Unreal Engine 4 and Blender.

Fully dynamic lighting, time of day, textures etc. The demons have 30k triangles and feature realtime Sub Surface Scattering and animated polygon/texture damage.

On the very very high likely hood that your computer can’t handle it (I barely get 40fps on my GTX 760 and I can only record at 10fps), here’s a video where I beat the game [3:01 minutes].

And the game download. Making of + Timelapses coming soon  =)

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=36798

In Labyrinth Challenge you navigate a multi-dimensional maze trying to find the treasure.

Each maze consists of three worlds, the top one has grass floor, the middle one dirt floor and the bottom one stone floor. The teleporters connect the worlds. Blue teleporters will bring you to the world below the one you are currently in and the orange ones will bring you to the world above.

The mazes are randomly generated. Once you have beaten a maze, the difficulty increases and the next one will be bigger.

Here’s a gameplay screenshot.

Play

• Web version (requires WebGL)
• Desktop version (requires Java)

• Please rate and comment on my game on its Ludum Dare page here.

Controls

• Arrow keys to move.
• Space to use teleporters.
• For the desktop version:
  • F2 saves a screenshot next to the jar file.
  • F11 toggles fullscreen mode.

Screenshots

Source code

The source code can be downloaded here as a zip file containing the LibGDX project and git directory. To import the source code, extract the contents of the zip file, open Eclipse and select File – Import… – Gradle – Gradle Project, then select the extracted folder, hit build model, select all projects and click on finish. If this does not sound familiar to you, please follow some LibGDX tutorials, because your computer needs to be set up correctly for development with LibGDX.

With all my previous attempts I’ve tried to get something done within the 48 hour time frame.
This time though my Sunday was booked ful with family stuff so I wasn’t able to make it.

What amazed me though, is that I’ve never came as far within the 48 hours of a complete game.
All the mechanics are there, it’s just a matter of allowing the player to use them via UI.

There is still some art polish to do, sound and – as stated – loads of UI.

Switching to the Jam and see what I can do with the extra time

Good luck to all and have fun playing and rating!

Tags: jam

So I initially planned on entering the 48 hour tournament… but then I found out about the limitations on art and music and other such things. The fact that I had to make all that myself threw a bit of  wrench in my plans. So I thought I’d jump on board the 72 hour jam.

However, right now, I don’t even care about it. The game I’m making is a bit more complicated then I had originally intended and I don’t know if I’ll actually make it to submission, but I’m going to try my best.

It is, as the title above suggests, a game about endings. Where the choices you make as a player affect the perspectives of the NPC’s you control. And as the perspectives change, the world itself changes. The choices you make can lead to any number of endings. Both good and bad. And some endings even affect other endings. There’s no way to know for sure. But this is the kind of game I want to make, and even if I can’t make it to submission, I hope I can finish it soon.

Thanks Ludum for giving me a different perspective for a new game.

First of all I want to congratulate all the compo participants in finishing, and I have to admit that I feel a slight envy.

But what’s going on with my jam? Well, I’m just building and I am curious where this will take me.

Driving

Docking

~12 hours left. Good luck all jammers

Finished my second Ludum Dare.  Checkout the game.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=26052

What great fun to feel the compo deadline go zooming by me!  No stress that my little synth soundtracks will disturb people from the graves!  Boy what a dooming 24hr reminder that is though; i’m used to the 48 burn now so the extra 24 is MADNESS.  These are the hours where the greatest mistakes are made by trying to cram MORE into the title but NAY, stay your hand from spilling new code!  Instead look to making every little part of the whole that much better.  Five percent improvements across 10 things is a good step!

Just witness from BROgrammer art:

to PROgrammer art!

Ignore the little assets but you get the picture!  From cold rock to livable surface!

Last shut-eye before the Jam deadline so get some good rest ya’ll.  Peace from our team!

First thing I want to say: I’m lazy and while I do browse through submitted games, it would be cool if you tweeted your games to me, @MaddeMichael, and I’ll play, rate an comment on them and wotnot. I’ll probably also tweet about the game too!

Anyway, other than that, I think I finished my game, “of Light and Dark“. While it is short, and the puzzles aren’t the greatest, I managed to finish it to a reasonable standard, and even added a 9 second background audio loop, which I spent about 3 hours making while trying to figure out how to use Anvil Studio, as well as compose it.

A more detailed post on the game can be found here.

Anyway, good luck everyone!

We’re almost done! Just need a menu now. We didn’t manage to implement highscores though

My name is safa. I am one of Bluesky’s guys. We are working hard to show you some thing new and perfect.

Waiting for our game…

We finally finished. We used Game maker to make this beauty.

It was great fun and I can’t wait to start playing what everyone else made.

We made a little platformer game.

link to game: My game

We will do more LD in the future, this was great fun.

-Ofursnati & Hellberg

Well I submitted something. Didn’t give myself enough time though the idea was a bit ambitious for twelve hours.
Its not really a game in this state but you can play it here.

I just realised I read the the wrong. I thought it was ‘Multiple worlds’ not ‘Connected worlds’. Oh well. That’s what I get for briefly looking at the theme at 2am, not checking the site since then and not starting for another 36 hours.

Actually my entry to LD23 would have been a much better game for this theme, I even decided I wanted to revisit it and take it further, but a new compo needs a new idea…

Congrats to everyone who submitted a game for the compo and good luck in the last few hours for the jammers out there! 😀

I submitted my compo version last night, you can find it here: PLAY

Also I’m streaming me working on the post-compo version as well as rating some games here:

http://twitch.tv/jesosk

Well, as a lot of people finished and LD48 is over, we are still working on our game called Flipper. At the beginning, we didn’t know we will even participate, but here we are, with nearly completed game. It is our first platformer and first LD game, but it isn’t such bad. It all looked so easy, when I was creating basic game classes. But then, the first problem showed up – the FPS counter didn’t work on my PC. OK, half an our for fixing does not hurt too much. We are writing a game, so what should I do next? Write a menu! Menu is very important, you know. So basically, I was working on menu for like 3 hours. And we didn’t have anything visible but menu for next +- 7 hours. What a good time plan. All the time we were creating “low-level” stuff like texture manager (which obviously wanted to irritate us as much as it could) on one side, because we didn’t want to use any “framework”, so we are using only LWJGL and Slick-Util, but on the other side, we were preparing for the real gameplay, we had blocks and all that stuff. And the code was becoming more and more “blobbed”. We were stuck for few hours just because we had mess with positioning. The math is like “one here, one there, some offset to this…”. The rendering and updating is written in a very strange way, but why not, it works. And one of the biggest problems – collisions. Hate them. Why not to use Death screen as Win screen as well. But the problem that rules them all is resources. We are such terrible at drawing, so we had to look for resources on the Internet. And editing them wasn’t better. I just can’t use GIMP 😀 But despite it all, we (nearly) made it. It remains only to create levels and do some minor tweaking.

Next time, I will force him to use libGDX or something similar, because solving “simple problems” like rendering texture for two or more hours is just bad. And we need to get some artist for the textures. And maybe change programming language. And maybe change developers. If there will be any “next time”.

During my seventh Ludum Dare competition the theme was Connected Worlds. I started around 05:30 CEST on Saturday and submitted it around 03:00 on Monday. I worked thirty-six hours on the game, slept ten hours (2 + 8), used three hours for writing down a concept, drew sixteen hours, used around eight hours for creating the game’s logic and six hours for music. The other time was used for play testing, blogging, eating and quick breaks.

Play the game! Rate the game! Read about the game! Original blog post!

Concepting

First things first, before you can start making your game, you need an idea and plan. Thus I started with brainstorming. Writing down related and interesting keywords around the theme “Connected worlds”. I figured most people would go for a space or island settings, which is attractive but I wanted to create something different, more unique. I made some small trips and played with ideas related to abstract, race and relation types of connected world and decided to settle down with something from my favorite theme: Cyber Punk, most notable worlds like Ghost in the Shell.

Prototype

When I finished writing down a small synopsis of my brain twists I started to lay down simple visual world and adding the elements. When I got a small world I proceeded with testing and adjusting the concept bit by bit until I was satisfied.

Drawing

Once I had the prototype of the actual gameplay I could start drawing the game world.

Game level and icons

This included a background, network node icons, guard icons, citizen icons and more. I spread this in several stages, every stage ending up more detailed. I swapped between drawing on the game level and icons and the prologue and epilogue scenes. Which allowed me to take a break on a drawing and look at it again after an half an hour with a “fresh look”.

Prologue & Epilogue

The prologue and epilogue were a bit different from the art I had to draw for the actual game. The prologue and epilogue are a timed story without interacting but with moving assets. This took the most time to draw. I planned six scenes with several large moving elements like humans, hands or walls.

Music

Audio is one of my worst development skills. I don’t work with audio often or I have a composer making the actual audio. For the simple sounds like button pushes or other quick sounds I used simple tones, combined, altered just to give a small beep. For the actual music I decided I was going to use a combination of audio generators and Audacity. It took me a while before I had the desired sound which didn’t get annoying after the initial 30 seconds.

Submission

To make sure the game was submitted on time (before 03:00) I already submitted it around 02:30 on Monday. That was before I found out the submission deadline was till 04:00. The good thing about hosting it online you can post a link and update it. So around 02:55 I wrapped everything up and ended with a good stretch. I was a bit stiff from hanging above my drawing tablet 😉

So?

Everything done and submitted, I’m happy about my schedule and work. I didn’t really have timing issues but some things did take longer than hoped. The concept seemed easier than it was. And of course the concept took some more fine tuning to make it actually challenging.

Play the game!

Rate the game!

Read about the game!

Original blog post!

Tags: audacity, connected worlds, gamecreator, how did I do it?, islandworks, LD30, ld48, Ludum Dare, post-mortem, rex van dorp, strong99

Devlog #1

Devlog #2

——————

PLAY IT HERE

—————–

After struggling with Google Drive and then Dropbox yesterday night, i did manage to submit and now have my third LD behind me.

Coded until 2am, one hour before the deadline, which was quite the contrast to last time, where i finished about 10 hours or so early. As a result, i now have my so far most fleshed out submission. I focused on getting some details right that i got wrong last time. Easily readable text, quick restart that doesn’t take you through the whole intro again, and faster gameplay. While my first LD was a Wario-Ware type of game, or rather the poor try of creating one, my second one an isometric shooter, i now came up with a puzzle game. I love Ludum Dare for this. Making me try out very different concepts.

Visually i have stayed close to my last entry. Low Poly, flat-shaded 3D.

I love that art style, and i used only a slightly modified version of my Perlin-Noise Script from last time to animate the water of my planets. I also used Perlin-Noise to generate the land-masses. That works so well with the low-poly style it is really awesome. It also means that every round played looks a bit different, even though the terrain isn’t actually relevant to the gameplay in this case.

What i did not have to do this time was to actually model any assets. I only needed the generated planets plus some 2D buttons to get the exact look i was going for. I try to achieve a visual style as effective as possible for Ludum Dare, as there is simply not enough time to properly model or even animate assets. Spending hours doing so will hurt the game in the end.

Coding this thing was, typical, a matter of realizing in the last minute that my i’m-just-gonna-copy-and-paste-all-this-code-mentality does, in fact, not work. I underestimated the complexity and amount of variables i needed, and thus decided to just “quickly” copy and paste that little bit of code for every single turn of the game, and “quickly” adjust the variables for it.

After that ate up 1.5k lines of code,the smart boy that i am understood that this is not the way to go, and automated it all. Which turned out to be not only more effective, but also so ridiculously easy that i must wonder why i ever even had the idea of copy-pasting in the first place. Oh well. Ludum Dare Code. It really is typical.

“I am sure i will be smarter next time”, he said and moved on.

So far the reactions have been really positive.

But, to not only talk about myself, but about the whole fun that is Ludum Dare, here are some games i have enjoyed especially much so far, and that i strongly recommend you to check out. No, really, this is a good list:

Light Year Wars 

by nicotuason

Close Your Eyes 

by nonetheless

APOLLO 

by graebor

Tin Can Internet 

by fserb

Sideline

by Vandash

John and the Arbitrary Gem Hunt

by SteveSalmond

48 Hours & lots of swearing later, Good News Delivery Co. was finished. This post’ll cover in vague details how it was made, the problems that nearly killed it, and thoughts going forward. Lots of in progress shots & code/art discussion inside!

The Theme

“Connected Worlds” wasn’t my favorite choice of the themes this time.  There were a few near ideas I had for others (one involved jam-based weaponry) but come Saturday Morning I was kinda left curious what to do.  The obvious choice was a dual world mechanic of some sort, or something where you warp between different worlds Stargate-style.  In the end, quickly decided on something involving Space.

The Art

DragonXVI’s noddy guide to basic planet graphics in Paint.net

All my spaceships look like they were designed by a 5 year old.

Luckily, Space is one of those popular settings in games where it’s fairly easy to generate something quite nice looking with minimal effort.  Above is my standard process for making simple planets.  A starfield can just be black + noise + contrast + clouds for nebula too.  The planets in GNDC actually split the lighting & atmosphere layers above so I can ‘dynamically’ light them so they’re lit from the sun.

First day early progress: Basic space graphics & ship movement

The Development

Originally I’d set it up so the planets orbit the sun or each other (for moons), and they’re dynamically ‘lit’ according to their position.  This was abandoned early on (anyone checking the source will not the ‘Orbiter’ script still exists but is disabled for most planets) as I didn’t want the game ‘level’ moving about too much.  Keeping everything still makes it easier to navigate and balance for gameplay.

With a ship flying about it needed something to do, and then came the idea of ferrying cargo back and forth between planets – ala Connected Worlds.  The obvious inspiration was Futurama’s “Planet Express”.  So I whipped up some cargo graphics, dropped ’em into the game and coded up a way for the ship to collect them and attach them to the last point in a chain, connected using Unity’s 2D Hinge joints.

And at this point it was unplayable

Difficult to control snake of cargo wobbling your ship about? Sure might be some game in that, let’s go for it.

Spent much of the 2 days arguing with Unity’s physics engine, tweaking masses & torques & the effect of the planets gravity fields to try and get something reasonably fair (jury’s out if I actually managed that :p).  The next big problem was getting around – The solar system was quite sizable and I wanted quite a few planets, so I decided to implement a minimap.

No idea what the thing in the middle was supposed to show. I only used the top bit.

Minimaps are quite simple once you get the deal.  Basically it takes a central point (The player’s ship on the left, the sun on the right), and calculates each important game object’s position relative to that.  Then we divide that by a ‘range’ (the left minimap’s range is shorter than the right) and multiply that final offset by the size of the minimap graphic and hey presto!  I also multiply the ‘blips’ alpha by the distance-from-focus / minimap-range so things fade out as they reach the edges of the minimap.  Didn’t mean to have two minimaps, but didn’t know what else to put on the right hand side and quite liked the symmetry of it.  I figured a full solar-system map might be quite useful?

Still in a GUI mood, I decided to whip up a quite text log to print out current objectives and keep the player notified on what’s going on.

The randomly generated cargo names were quite fun. Essentially {Storage-type} of {adjective} {nouns}

Nothing special there, just a list of 4 strings that scroll as they’re added and work a bit like a queue.

Last thing on Day 1 was a bit more navigation aid.  The Minimaps weren’t brilliantly useful stuffed down in the bottom corners of the screen, so I decided to do a good ol’ guide arrow.  I wanted to make it quite flashy, so it points in the direction of your current goal when far away, then switches so it hovers over the target when close by (This is fairly old.  I think even the first GTA’s objective arrow did this) and animates nicely between the two states.  This wasn’t the last of the blatant TELL THE PLAYER WHAT THEY NEED TO DO visual feedback I ended up including, as later on I also made the destination planet pulse bright green too.

Day two began with morning sound & music creation.  The music was quickly whipped together in FL Studio after figuring out the Chorus on the first night.  It’s a fairly simple ‘catchy’ dance-track thing.

What FLStudio looks like when you don’t name anything ever or use proper automation or anything.

Since this was on the clock, the whole thing was made in 1 hour and uses a fair few default drum loops shipped with FL Studio (Which is the audio equivalent of Photoshop lens flares, but DON’T CARE NO TIME! :p)

With music & sound out the way I still hadn’t actually got a working game.  You couldn’t lose and you couldn’t make any money, so I quickly shoved in a score & a timer.

I *really* like Unity’s new particle system. If it wasn’t obvious.

Also added some better feedback into what cargo is within pickup range, since before this you just had to mash the pickup button and hope you were close enough.  This bit of UI alone improved the game about 3 times over at this point.

At some point I also wanted to add a Black Hole.  Did the visuals for it, but in the end these ended up as harmless ‘gravity wells’ that just pull your ship in a bit.  Didn’t have time to implement any special way of throwing stuff into it, but for a brief time they were a valid destination for delivering cargo to.

A big purple swirly thing in space.

Before tweaking the various physics parameters, these guys could actually pull you in with such force that ships carrying more than 4 cargo couldn’t escape at all and you had to eject cargo and pretty much leave it.

At this point, most f the game was in & functional, but I had two other things I wanted to get in since flying between planets and dropping stuff off was fairly simple.  I wanted obstacles & enemies! I wanted asteroids & PIRATES!

I didn’t end up getting to do the asteroids.

But the pirates?

Yar har, fiddle-de-dee.

The pirate ship graphics is pretty much just the player’s ship with some bits added & painted blue.  The turret tracks independently in a similar way to Hot Diggity’s laser turrets.  The pirate AI is pretty simple:

• Pick a random patrol point.
• Fly towards the point. If you reach it, pick another one.
• If the player gets too close, start chasing them.
• If the player gets too close to the guns, start shooting the turret.

I tried plugging in some planet-avoidance AI, but after 5 minutes of that I just thought “BUGGER IT” and let them plow into planets and immediately respawn elsewhere.  The pirates represented a massive step up in difficult, as they can completely ruin a massive haul of cargo with a well placed shot.  Ideally I’d have made them warp in after 1 minute of gameplay and maybe increase the number as time runs down, but I didn’t think of that soon enough…

A view of the scene in Unity’s editor, showing planet locations & gravity fields & patrol points for pirates. Note this visual was actually used in the games logo too, behind the main text.

The Horrible Bugs

So finally I built the thing and ran it in the Unity Webplayer.

DISASTER! The controls were utterly broken – The ship spun around uncontrollably. What the hell?

A quick Unity Editor update highlighted the problem – Sometime between Untiy 4.5.1 and 4.5.3 the 2D physics has had a hefty change to how it calculates torque & angular velocity.  Even after fixing the ship’s steering, carrying lots of cargo made the ship utterly uncontrollable – with 3 hours to go!

Not having enough time to deal with it, I quickly hacked in a few things – reduced the power of the gravitational pull of planets, and reduced the mass of cargo while it’s being carried so it doesn’t toss your ship about like a leaf when you’re carrying it.  The final result isn’t perfect, but it’s reasonably playable.

So y’know.  Make sure you’re using the latest version of something before you start. :p

The Takeaway

This is my second Ludum Dare after the (absurdly successful seriously thanks guys!) Hot Diggity earlier this year.  This is another physics based frantic arcade-y thing and I think I might take a break from ’em next time.  Fiddling around with physics engines is only so much fun when y’could be doing a nice simple platformer or something a bit easier to control.  Things I need to try for next time:

• Stop making your games so ridiculously difficult.  Not asking for a tutorial or anything, just a decent difficulty curve.
• Try something a bit more friendly and less machinery/metallic.  Drillers & Spaceships’re a bit too “boys-toys”-ey, so might go for something a bit different next time.
• Put more effort into the GUI, Intro & Outro scenes: Seriously the outro is horrible. Like plain (ARIAL!) text on a black background.  And the GUI’s got obvious aliasing all over it.
• Maybe try Flash again? I’ve alternated between Flash/Flixel and Unity for games jams before.  Might try it again? Will see.
• Maybe try 3D? I’ve done 1 3D game for a games jam. Mostly avoid this because my modelling skills are a bit pants, but can manage some decent results with basic geometry.

Anyway, that’s it for me.  Time to play some other games!

As always you can find my game HERE! Don’t forget to rate it! 😀

Hi!

I´m so happy to finally be part of this amazing thing called Ludum Dare.

For years I´ve been playing amazing games from incredible developers around the world and now Awake is part of this.

I haven´t done so many games and yet people has been really warm with it and I couldn´t be happier.

My regards to everyone participating and I´ll be checking as many games as I can!

Hope to be here next time

Jupitron

First of all, I’m really glad to have participated in this LD : now I can say that I finished my first game and my first game jam !
This was intense and challenging. Now it’s time for a recap !
>> here’s the entry

What I learned :

•  I discovered Construct2 and learned how to use it.
  I chose this software to avoid struggling with code for my first participation and focus on creating something. It allows to spend more time on the graphics, as it is the part of game development work I enjoy the most. However, as I have some programming knowledge, I might use Löve next time to learn further !

•  I forced myself to make some quick design choices to get to the goal.
  It obviously applies to the visual part of it (you don’t have much time in 48hours to change the “art direction”) but also to the choice of the type of game : as an absolute beginner, I settled for something I could finish, with simple mechanics quick to set. This is why it ended with a scrolling shooter on the river Styx !

•  Working on the sound effects is a lot of fun !
  As I’m no musician, it is something I usually don’t do, and creating some basic effects and background score was reaaally great. It’s really rewarding to see your project gain some atmosphere ! I used Bosca Ceoil and Bfxr to set them, and it demands no particular skill.

•  I should make more prototypes !
  I directly began by creating some visuals, and worked on the mechanics in a rush. I could have done a way better job by prototyping early with simple shapes, and then creating the matching sprites. I created some graphics I finally didn’t use, because the features they correcponded to to didn’t had the time to be implemented !. Same goes sith little sprites I made for features I finally didn’t implemented !

• Next time, I should be more methodic when working on assets
  It went good this time because the project is really simple. But instead of working directly on sprites of the right size, I made them big and then sclaed them down in photoshop, adding some polishing work each time. I could have saved a lot of time and effort by making them right directly.
  I even resized them in Construct sometimes, using unnecessary memory.
  The free version of Construct only allows 4 layers, wich was a really good thing to keep me focused on efficiency. Coming from photoshop and after effects, I tend to multiply layers a lot. If Construct allowed me to do so, I would have had to redo all the layer system at the last minute to not end with a mastodontic file size !

What now ?
I think I’l take sme time to polish it a little bit, and release a second version of it

Tags: compo, entry, post-mortem, styx

Most of you are already writing your post-mortems while I’m still chewing through the code. Puh…

Only got 11 hours left, I have no idea how I’m going to make that.

Either way here is some ingame footage (CLICK FOR ANIMATION!):

Tags: gif, ingame

>:)

Hi Everyone!
This is my first time in LD and first game I ever made. I submitted it last as it was for compo.
I’m not programmer, so I had lot of work with Unity documentation

I had to think of a game which will  be not so hard to do but effective and connected to theme  of course.
So I made labyrinth. Unfortunately, I didn’t have enough time to make more levels, but game is fully playable and apart from sounds(which do not work), it rather has no errors.

I hope You like it <3

Thank you for great fun, spending time by making games with all of you, and I am looking forward to play some nice games from others.

Cheers!

It’s funny and a bit face palming to look through my concept notes for my game WARP WORLDS. For example I totally forgot that I was going to make the World 1 pink enemy jump! That would have been so easy to do and would have made World 1 a LOT better!  

I guess that’s the downside of me getting such a solid and complete idea for my LD30 game so fast that I was really happy with, as it meant that I barely looked back at my notes which is largely why I missed such an obvious and major feature as the World 1 enemy jump (also a lack of sleep hahaha). Another reason is that I only had about 12hrs out of the 48hrs to work out the concept and build the game do to work and family commitments (and little to no sleep).

I’ll be kicking myself for quite a while for forgetting that feature but I’ll add it in to the game post LD30.

I spent a bit of time tonight checking out and rating some of the great games submitted and had a lot of fun playing most of them. After that I played my game for a while and ended up smashing my High Score.

If you think you can beat it, it’s very quick and easy to grab a Windows .exe version of the game from:

http://blue-thumbs-gaming.itch.io/warp-of-the-worlds-fight-and-flight

If you do get the chance to play it, please take a moment to rate it and/or leave a comment. I’m especially keen to get some feedback from anybody who plays the game with their kids aged 4-8, which is the target audience I’ve gone for with this game.

Cheers,

Ben.

Sadly, our game ( the team’s ) wont be ready before the deadline, but this compo, making this my third failure, gave me an idea for something that I will make however. What I plan to create is a game framework for SDL, in which you can easily create 2D games for competitions like this, that way you won’t be caught up on making the basis for stuff (which is always the case for me, I seem to always have some trouble regarding animations). So good luck to the rest of you LD’ers who are still in the compo, may the force be with you.

Fhuh, it wasn’t easay. I hope I can make you laugh with this extremely quickly made game. Sadly, there’s no gameplay that makes any sense, but instead, there are lotsa WTF things.

Actually I’m sad that I couldn’t make a masterpiece like several other guys does in every Ludum Dare events, but hey, it’s about fun, isn’t it?

Try my entry here.

Play the game here – comments and ratings appreciated!

This was a firstie in many ways. It was my first ludum dare, my first game jam, my first finished game, and the first game I ever created without the intention to recreate/immitate an existing game mechanic. About a year ago, I would never have expected to even participate in a game jam like Ludum Dare anytime soon, and here I am with a (more or less) finished entry.

The original idea was to create two worlds, nature and human civilization, coexisting in a subtle balance that could be disturbed by gathering too much natural resources (trees/plants/animals) and other things. I planned to do this visually as well but that turned out to be pretty time consuming, and knowing the mechanics I wanted to implement, I decided to finish these instead. I also wanted to add disasters but I couldn’t add them for the lack of time. The game’s design was inspired by dwarf fortress.

I worked so quickly as I’ve never did before. I cut out a lot of features for the sake of getting some gameplay finished. The menu and credits were extremely rushed and created during the  last hour or two. It turned out to be a very interesting game that can be extended for more in-depth gameplay. Possibly you cannot even win it…

It also has been quite a learning experience. I’ve learned some lessons in AI creation making the commands for the workers. A lot of fun I had making these small sprites (I really loved doing them) and got in touch with a new approach and method to make games. I’ve worked with alot of static variables to design the map and map objects and applied some of my knowledge in memory effective 2D rendering. It was an interesting jam to say the least.

I am looking forward to play all other Ludum Dare entries to check out what others have made during 48 hours. And of course, this will not  be the last time I participate in a game jam too!

Tags: 48h, final post mortem, post-mortem

I’ve added a linux build out of request. I don’t have a Linux setup myself so can’t test it though.
If anyone can test and report back would be delighted.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=14709

finally everything is coming to shape.

10 hours to go

A Confession From a Non-Pro

I’m sad to say but I think I’ll have to give up. I thought I’d take the time and try to keep going for the jam but I’ve hit a bit of a wall and I’m not sure the game will be playable in the ~11 hours I have left.

That said unlike the last Ludum Dare where I couldn’t quite settle on an idea which then, quite obviously, affected my ability to make the game, in this one I managed to come up with a game that I think could be quite viable and interesting. I see this as a positive as it gives me something to work towards in my spare time.

What Went Wrong

• Scope Creep – Originally the game I had in mind felt quite simple and viable for a short 48 hour competition but the more I worked on it and the more I struggled to think how to implement the few features I had the more I realised that it would probably be a bit dull. With that in mind I started to think up ways to make it more engaging and more features slowly appeared. Sadly this also made the game feel less theme appropriate and I ended up trying to shoehorn features into the original concept I came up with for the theme.

• Spending Too Much Time on UI – This is actually a double problem.

1. I always focus too much on the entry point experience, this isn’t so bad when you’re working to a less than tight deadline but in a 48 hour competition it’s killer. This stems someways because I always start 100% from scratch
2. Using the wrong UI technology. For the type of game I’m trying to create I decided to just use Swing UI elements rather than rolling my own “gamey” UI. I thought it would save time in the long run but turned out that even for such a simple game style it caused its own problems. This may be the first thing that changes should I decide to continue this project outside of the jam.

• Lack of Focus When Coding – I kept jumping from class to class, half-implementing features and never quite finishing any of them. This is another thing I do a lot and it’s something I’m trying to improve on. In some ways it’s a good thing, it means you’re in theory never not coding but it is also a bit of an enabler for scope creep and unintentional coupling as you jump between classes that work together then another that will help and another and another.

What Went Right

To be honest not a whole lot went right but that’s OK. As… some people say if things never went wrong you’d never learn anything.

• A variation of ideas based on the theme with time to think on them and choose one
• An hopefully interesting idea for a game
• A game model that should teach me some things that I haven’t encountered so far in other games I’ve tried
• The above model will help me develop

Anyways I’m a bit bummed about my 2nd “failed” Ludum Dare but I’m optimistic that something useful will come of it. I hope this post was an interesting insight into a project gone wrong. If you’d like to see if and/or how I develop this further, follow me on my Twitter @drentsoftmedia.

I was stumped by a bug in my coding but I realized I had completely left out a line of code that I thought I’d put in. Oh well at least I got my music sorted. The music in my game is different between the two worlds but also transitions smoothly. Also I made a creepy ghost boy.

Hi all

Here’s the video timelapse for my entry The Ghosts You Left Me, which can be played here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=11137

This is not 100% complete as there were times when I stopped Chronolapse and forgot to turn it back on (and forgot to turn it off too at times), but it has most of it.

Screenshots taken every 60 seconds. Total time spent on the game 17 hours – for a more precise breakdown on what time was spent on, see the game page ^

TIMELAPSE:

Tags: timelapse

Hello gents! I made a game this weekend, and it was glorious. Specifically, I made a little text adventure about a man on a spaceship. Here’s how I did it:

Step One: The Preparation

I actually had no intention of participating in this Ludum Dare, truth be told. I technically didn’t even know it was going on until two days before it started, but whatever. I made an “I’m In!” post, detailing my tool I would use, a text adventure designer called Quest. I told people that I was making a game to keep myself accountable, and on the day of the competition I made sure to have enough rest, make sure my tools worked, and then the theme was announced. Connected Worlds. I didn’t have any ideas at 9:00 P.M., and my roommates were watching The Princess Bride and Clue that night (both of which I do not regret watching), so I decided to sleep on it. I woke up and started work about 13 hours in, ready to begin coding.

Step Two: The Brainstorm

After taking a shower, I began to think of ways I could use Connected Worlds to make a game. Immediately, my mind went to sci-fi themes. I began concocting a story about a guy on a spaceship looking at a planet. “Okay,” I thought to myself, “lets run with that. Why is the man on a spaceship? Why is the spaceship hovering above a planet?” I decided that the spaceship could’ve been for the last remnant of humanity. The man had been on the spaceship either as an engineer or a passenger himself. Yet, he was locked in an observatory floating above a barren planet. The spaceship was above the planet so to be close enough to actually have humans ferried to it to be rescued. Obviously, something must have happened as it seems he was the only human there.

“Okay, so I have a basic premise, how will that fit with the theme?” I needed a way to implement the “Connected” in “Connected Worlds”. I’m not exactly sure why, but at the time I couldn’t get the picture of a gyroscope out of my head. So, why not use that to go to other places? I added a gyroscope, some string to wind it up, and more background and flavor text to the single room the man was in, now I just needed the mechanic.

Step Three: The Undertaking

I decided that, for this simple game, I wouldn’t need that much gyroscopic logic. I added a Use function that basically said, “If the player and the gyroscope are in the same room (either by inventory otherwise), add both the string and the gyroscope to the inventory. Then, if the player is in the observatory, move him to the research lab.” It was simple, and it could only be used one-way for now, but it was good. So, I needed a research lab to get this party going. I created another room, gave it flavor text and research equipment, and added a journal of research notes the player could interact with. I figured the gyroscope mechanic could work by shifting the player between different sets of related memories, thus he was connected to this world he was floating above. It never explicitly states that the player went to the planet below, but I think it might be able to be inferred…? Maybe.

Anyway, I had the basic mechanic down, and I had a new place for the player to explore. I created a hallway connected to the lab, a greenhouse, and the lobby, which was locked down with a keypad. The player could explore the greenhouse, which was filled with dead plants (which I later added in that you could eat, because reasons.) and had a bulletin board by the door with notes, one of which was a keycode. Boom! First puzzle down! I was on a roll. By this time, it was about 6 hours into my actual work, most of which involved writing flavor text to everything. I enjoy that. I added the correct code to the keypad, and went to work creating the lobby.

Step Four: The Fatigue

I have to admit, I was getting pretty fatigued though. There was so much stuff that could potentially be interacted with it overwhelmed me. Thus, I didn’t add many things in the lobby, not at first anyway. The only thing you could actually interact with was an id card on the desk, which triggered a set of flashbacks designed to blatantly tell the player the horrible things he had done. I’m not very subtle, which my roommate pointed out to me while playtesting. Everything important to the player had interaction text along the lines of “This looks vaguely familiar to you, but you can’t quite place it.” So basically most things the player could interact with had that flavor text. I contemplated ending the game right there at the lobby, polishing it up on Day Two and submitting it, but I decided against it. I needed sleep to clear my head from all the work I had done.

Day One Progress:
Five rooms, 18 interactable objects. I’m not sure how many words I wrote. That would be a nice feature, actually.

Step Five: The Finish Line

It had been nearly 36 hours since the competition started, and I went to church that morning. I got back with only about 8 hours to actually do anything. I began adding a few more rooms to the game, specifically a barrack for the scientists in the lab, a bathroom for said scientists, an airlock next to the observatory, and a bridge that would later be the end of the game. I changed most of the flavor text based on my playtester’s decisions to eat dead plants and break everything, as well as his premise of my blatant familiarity complex. Things were looking good, but I as suffering from more fatigue. I had just “finished” everything up to the bridge at about 4 hours left when I decided that I needed a break. I quickly coded in an ending at the bridge (“Does this smell like chloroform to you?”) giving off the impression that the protagonist was not alone on that ship, and played the game some more to check that there were no obvious grammatical or game-breaking errors. In the end, I had a lot of fun making this game. Thanks for reading this, folks!

Final Count:
Nine rooms, 26 interactable objects, six objects you can take with you, an entity in both the bathroom and the bridge, and two endings. Stay away from dead plants, folks.

So, what exactly went right?

My game is about connection between the player, the cellular automaton (Conway’s Game of Life) and a world of a simple bacteria.
This is a zero-player game. This is not a causal game for kids, it’s casual game for geeks

More info at http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=41177

Tags: cellular automaton, game of life, pixel art

I can’t believe how tired I am today. I went out of coffee this weekend and I was too tired to buy some more today – thats how tired I am

Anyways. I made a game, using Unreal Engine 4 this weekend. Not everything went as planned for my first LD entry, but I am happy with it.

The Game

You control a UFO with lunar lander type of controls, only one engine to apply thrust upwards and you have to cancel each movement out with a counter thrust, so you basically fly like a helicopter.

The goal is to grab a bit of building material and deliver it into the building zone of the bridge until it is finished. So far so good, I had the theme down.

link: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=40589

The World

The world consists of many small to medium sized floating islands. I planned to populate them with a species that struggled to visit their friends and families that lived on another island. But I had to cut the population for time reasons (only indicators are the hot air balloons).

The Good Things

• I like how challenging it is, I love challenging games in general, gives you a bit of satisfaction beating them.
• I made something that looked good, for me as a software engineer, art is always the hardest part.
• I MADE A GAME AND RELEASED IT

The Bad Things

• you guys don’t seem to like the controls or how challenging it is
• I had no time to build up a proper communication with the player. I can not tell you why or how you are supposed to build a bridge. With the knowledge I have about Usability and User Experience, I am not happy with the result.
• I had to cut a lot of cool gameplay mechanics due to time reasons 😛
• The building material makes no sense at all, you basically grab rocks and throw them at a bridge to build it 😛

Conclusion

For my next LD, I will probably do something smaller, probably 2D to implement a bit more stuff. But actually I am really happy with the outcome of this one, even though it has it’s flaws.

Timelapse

I recorded pretty much every second (minus the hour my internet crapped out) and I made a little timelapse. 30 hours of work compressed to 18min.

I couldn’t make is shorter, it is already way too fast to not get headache watching it 😛

Tags: postmortem, timelapse, ue4, Unreal Engine 4

It seems we’ll just stick with this name – probably because we’ve somehow ended up with having Oculus Rift in our game.

Meanwhile, one mysterious nightscape.

I was about to participate in this LD, but I didn’t prepare it well enough. I wanted to try the libGDX library/game engine, but I didn’t set it up before the compo started. So day 1 I was mainly busy getting this fixed, thinking of a game concept and partly recovering from friday’s party. At the end of the day I had nothing but the result of a quick tutorial.

Day 2 I couldn’t bring up the motivation to continue with the challenge, so I continued on my own pace and took my time to learn about the libGDX framework and game design.

First… LINK TO MY GAME PAGE: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=41234

Whew, what an experience. This is my first “real” game I’ve made on my own, and it was a great lesson in managing time above anything else. Here’s some screens… I’ll say my excuse for complete crap assets was “it’s art, you don’t get it:”

(I spent way too much time on creating a Noe-esque, Enter the Void-style intro because why not)

Art assets = almost nonexistant. But trust me, there’s something going on behind the scenes here. I think. Maybe.

What is “MMOCRAFT: A CONNECTED WORLD”? You play as a man. I think he’s named Bob. It’s open for interpretation. Don’t worry. You wake up in your room. You can explore your room. Your world is bland and unmoving. But if you explore, you’ll soon discover you can log into your computer, and play WORLD OF MMOCRAFT. You can go on quests. You can grind. You can get frustrated in PVP. You look for a group to run a dungeon, but you might have to re-queue since nobody needs DPS and you should feel bad. You try to get to endgame. Why? Because that’s what you do – shuddup don’t question the MMO format. It’s abstract and weird. I had some big, scripted, meta sequence at the end that reflected on the actions you took to get there, and if it really was a game, and if it really was a connected escape to another world or just a monkey-banging-on-a-typewriter-simulator. It was supposed to happen if you could grind to level 60 under a certain time period, but I had trouble triggering it – maybe I can patch in the REAL end in a game-of-the-year edition steam release. Someday. Right now, it serves as an artistic reflection on the act of leveling in an MMO, and if connecting to a virtual world really is an escape for us, or a masochistic beating.

Things I learned because I suck (or am I awesome?) at making games:

1. Creating a game almost completely in Java in libgdx is verbose compared to modern tools I’ve seen (but haven’t used). Fun for programming – not fun for quick iterations.

2. Wasted a ton of time creating my own text handling and text outputting classes, utilizing my own font I created. Looking back now, I bet there’s a library out there that gives me the flexibility and animation I needed for text output – I just dove right in and thought I could make it myself.

3. Don’t wait for the last 20 minutes to create your art – I should have left out some features and made it a little prettier to look at. Wanted to teach myself to create solid pixel art – didn’t happen.

4. Think small, iterate larger – Have a core concept for your game that you can spin off quickly and expand upon. I just dove right the fack in.

If my girlfriend doesn’t kill me, I definitely want to do this again in december – and find some easier tools to use beforehand! I guess I have internal ethical issues when creating a “generic” game – I need my game to critique and make you feel. Perhaps next time I’ll let Dong Nguyen influence my design decisions 😉

Feel free to download HERE and check out my github sauce HERE. I might push out a quick hotfix later today or tomorrow to deploy it on a website somewhere so it’s easy to experience it!

Tags: connected worlds, LD30, mmocraft

Hi

Playdot is a game distribution platform for indie developers.
We want to help in hosting Ludum Dare 30 games. All developers are welcome to publish LD games on Playdot.
It’s very simple to upload your game, just choose “Ludum Dare 30” category for it.

Also, recently we’ve added our embedded player function so it would be easy for you to publish your game on any other sites or blogs.

Stay indie!

This is the demo for the carton level and the basement of the realistic level.

Also the difference between the real and cartoon characters.

Wow, it was a really intense week-end !

So, there is my entry for the LD: Kill ME.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=29053

I hope you’ll enjoy it !

I’ve been working furiously over the weekend to finish this for the jam.

The concept is that a machine from the future has found its way into your possession, but without the ability-enhancing implants of the future, can you access its contents?

The game (“cybernetics diagnostic”) tests the players’ multitasking while representing the gameplay with a number of secondary data visualizations.

Token screenshot, and back to work!

Last weekend I participated in my second Ludum Dare ever. Completely different from last time, I knew what engine to use and what to expect. Does that mean everything went smoothly? No, not really. Am I unhappy? No, not really.

Engine choice: as opposed to last time, I actually decided on my engine beforehand. After seeing what some people could do with Unity, I decided to put myself over the fact that Unity uses the worst naming conventions ever (well… not really, but you get my point if you are a frequent C# programmer and know the Unity conventions) and give it a try. I only had time to do a simple tutorial and play a little bit around myself before the compo to refresh my Unity experience, so I knew in advance I would spend a lot of time figuring out trivial things. In the end, it did not turn out as bad as I expected. I got to know Unity a lot better, have learned to appreciate how it works and will most likely use it again next time.

Concept: I came up with several concepts that would cover most themes in advance. ‘Connected worlds’ was not one of them. This meant the first step was to come up with one. To prevent a situation like last time where it took a long time before coming up with a concept, I made a decision fairly simple. The concept I chose was fairly ambitious, but I deemed it possible. However, in my hurry to get started, I did not work out the concept far enough. I came across a lot of not-yet-made decisions during the implementation. I lost some time in that, which I could have prevented by thinking through the concept better. Deciding how the game should feel and where it should go to should preferably be done before the first line of code is written.

A good thing about the concept is that it is very scalable. It needs some critical mass to be playable and fun, but it is fairly open-ended and the critical mass is relatively easy to reach. As opposed to my previous Ludum Dare, this game’s fun-factor does not rely solely on level design, which means a lot less time has to be spent on generating content for the game.

Graphics: the graphics of the game suck. However, this time I knew in advance they would. I need a lot more practice to be able to make acceptable programmer art, and thus to justify spending time on making the game pretty. That is why this time I decided in advance to not spend a lot on time of graphics. Last time I spent a few hours on making sucky graphics, this time I spent a few minutes on making sucky graphics. Sounds like a fair deal to me.

Audio: while the music isn’t great, audible-music.com is a great way of getting rid of the silence and using some default drum loops in Garageband I can very easily flesh the music out a bit. I might consider practicing a bit with Garageband to make very simple tunes, as I think Garageband is a very understandable program and allows for not-so-bad-music to be made in a short timespan.

Overall: there are probably a lot of things I forgot to talk about, but I am sure the weekend as a whole counts as a very good experience. Considering it is only my second Ludum Dare, and my first time using Unity for real, I am not too unhappy about the result. I have definitely shown myself capable of applying my experience of the previous Ludum Dare to improve myself. From what I can tell, I have not made the same mistakes again. My goal is to participate in every Ludum Dare from now on — circumstances allowing. I am definitely looking forward improving my skills even more, and hopefully one day I will be able to participate competitively.

I just love to see what other people create as well. I feel very encouraged by all the people making a game in the same timespan, and the short period makes it an ideal distraction from the daily #gamedev obligations. Only by looking at livestreams and reading the updates I can enjoy myself and learn a lot of things, but participating adds another layer on top of that. Thanks guys, for being awesome.

If you are interested in my entry, you can check it out over here. Any feedback is of course much appreciated. If you wish to follow my other projects, you can follow me on Twitter as well.

Cheers!

Tags: compo, postmortem, unity

… but I had a ton of fun making the game!

This is my first Ludum Dare – and spent way too much time writing code and not enough time:

• keep continuing to scope down objectives
• simplifying, simplifying, simplifying
• making time for assets
• making loading screens when game wasn’t cached
• testing, tuning, testing, tuning…

On the other hand, learned lots:

• Had fun with writing a full blown game in javascript + phaser.io
• Writing component + entity systems + motivation systems with Bartle’s types
• Getting stuff set up hosted with a domain name and storage

Kudos for Abstraction for the amazing LD30 music and the incredible sxfr tool!

Here’s my attempt,  Crossover Survivors:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=40070

I will give my Combo Game After Life a try and expand it to a big game.

The game concept it self has the ability to grow in multiple directions,

but puzzle will be the right genre to go i think.

If you have any ideas to expand this entry just leave some comments

and I’ll pick the best ideas into the final game.

My target platforms could be : Windows / Mac / iOS

Hello guys !

Here the timelapse video from my entry (around 14h recorded)

Enjoy and rate it : Accelerated-life

In case anyone didn’t see it earlier, any games that are tweeted to me (@MaddeMichael) I will play, rate and comment on them, and probably tweet about them to. What are you waiting for? Tweet me yo’ games!

It would also be cool if you could check out my game, “of Light and Dark“, and gimme summa dat feedback!

Hello, I am Tosic and I am an 11 year old who participated in LD#30 and I made a 3d adventure game called Two Empires!

Here is the link to the game page (if it doesnt work, click on my name above and click on Ludum Dare 30 Entry :D):

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=35464

And some screenshots, of course:

Please rate it and comment! 😀

I wrote 8 songs over the weekend exclusively for you guys! They span from chill ambient to chiptune to upbeat to aggressive. You can find them all right here.

If you use them, be sure to let me know so I can check out the game! 😀

INTRO:

Two Lives is an adventure game in which you control a character through their waking life and their dream life, seeing the differences that each has on the other.

At least, that was the initial idea. I planned for you to be able to travel around a small area and you got to choose what to do during the day. The options were going to be; going to your office job, staying inside playing games, or going out with people. After you spent time at any location, you would play through a dream sequence that was affected by your decision. If you played games the dream would look like a fantasy RPG, if you chose to hang out with people then the dream would include weird dialogue from the “friends” you made, and if you chose work your dreams would be kinda bland and include your boss. You had three days to choose different options and the dreams would change based on what permutation of the three things you did during those three days.

If it sounds crazy and over ambitious, it’s because it was. This was my first Ludum Dare and I grossly underestimated how long each thing would take me to do.

To play it click here

TOOLS USED:

I used Flash CS5 and ActionScript 3 to code the game, and all the art was drawn in GIMP.

WHAT WENT RIGHT:

-I came out of the Ludum Dare with a finished “game”

-I created a cohesive art style for the game

-There aren’t any bugs (that I know of)

-I had a lot of fun!

WHAT WENT WRONG:

-As this was my first Ludum Dare, a lot went wrong and I was way too ambitious with my idea

-I never got to create animations for the character you play as

-I wanted to change your sprite based on the dream you were in, but I never got around to drawing the different sprites

-I threw an ending together after realizing that I would only be able to make 1/3 of my original idea

-The code is super sloppy and with some smarter planning I could have wasted a lot less time and maybe gotten closer to my original vision for the game

-I probably spent more time on art than necessary and not enough on coding

CONCLUSION (WHAT I LEARNED):

All in all, I’d say my first Ludum Dare was a huge success. Not necessarily from a “making a good game” standpoint, but I had never gone from a game idea to released game before. So this was sort of my first game and also my first Ludum Dare. I had great fun making all the art for the game, and since I was sort of in a months long art block  I was surprised at how easy and fun it was.

Above all I learned that next time I’ll definitely have to limit the scope of my idea a lot more so that I can finish the entire thing and put more polish on it. Then I can definitely make a game that can break top 50%! (Though voting isn’t even close to over yet so who knows what will happen)

Click here to play the game!

Tags: 2D, as3, flash, LD30, post-mortem, postmortem

Here you are, directly from Vine
See Ivy Demo – Vine

Tags: connected worlds, demo, ivy, multiplayer, online

After 62 hours of work we have an Alpha version of our game. We have everything ready except sounds, music and controls screen. There are also a few bugs, but we hope we will get that game ready for deadline! 😀 Continue reading for some info about the game.

What is our game about?

Three districts of Derp nation decided to join forces and invade your world. They want to connect it to their own so that they can capture your territory. You play as one of the warriors sent to defend the “Core Tower”. Electric core held inside the tower is generating an inter-dimensional shield and it’s the only thing that’s stopping Derps. It’s already getting weaker and Derps managed to connect some parts of their world to yours. If the core gets destroyed, there will be no hope left…

Screenshots

I wanna play it RIGHT NOW!

As you wish. Here is the link for an alpha version of the game:

http://firelinegames.com/files/ludumdare/LudumDare30Alpha.zip

(Remember to leave feedback!)

I completed my game Space Vikings. The journey was interesting and started off pretty terribly. This is my second Ludum Dare and I was pretty psyched for it initially, but when the theme was announced I had a stint of writers block… Which lasted 15 hours! That being said, I started with a viking and just ran with it.

What Went Right
This Ludum Dare turned out pretty great! I loved how everything came together in those last few hours. I wrote my framework from scratch (just like last time) but I made few modifications: specifically with event handling. That was a great design decision, having most everything be driven by events. In the end, my framework (JavaScript/HTML5) was just over 300 lines of code – which is pretty small, all things considered! By making everything in the game a “Drawable”, it was very extensible and easy to use. This contrasts with my last attempt where I had separate classes for the “Scene” and the “Sprite”.

I decided to have a bit of fun and add some music. It turned out to be way easier than I thought it would be. With the power of audacity, my terribly untrained vocals, and a shoddy job at playing the Ukulele, I was able to actually piece together a pretty full presentation auditorally speaking. The music and effects added a je ne se quois to my game and made it seem way more complete. This is something I will definitely be focusing on in future ludum dares.

What Went Wrong
Next time, I hope I can be in a more productive state of mind. My initial faltering led to a less polished game than I hoped for, but despite that I was pretty happy with how it turned out. In the future, even if I am struggling with a concept, I think it would be wise to at least use my time in a more productive manner. I wish I would have added some more features to my game engine or produced music during those first few hours.

Additionally, I realized all the sounds I added to my game were incredibly quiet. Maybe I just had my volume up really loud when testing it, but I think I stifled the presentation by programmatically lowering the volume of everything and just doing a generally sub-par job with recording.

Conclusion
I am happy with how this turned out and, although I actually considered quitting during the first half of the competition, once I had an idea everything seemed to fall into place.

If you’re interested, you can play my game here: Space Vikings

Tags: LD30, post-mortem, postmortem

So my first LD is over and here’s my conclusion..

The game ended up being a rush job and super buggy, but at last there is a slight chance that some players might be able to finish it without seeing the ugly side of it, with that out of the way…

Brainstorming – I should have spent more time brainstorming what kind of game to make instead of just starting work after 20 minutes of throwing around ideas.

Initially the first ideas I had were for puzzle games which were very similar to a lot of other entries for the theme and since I already expected that some people might do something like that I ended up using the idea that I got after seeing the theme pop up in the votes, mainly because I just wanted try and making something like that.

Problems – Didn’t predict how much work the idea would require and ended up dropping a big portion of the game, which in return means that the game doesn’t make a lot of sense in terms of the theme as it was heavily depending on set dressing for the story which is nowhere to be found in the “finished” game.

That ^ and also a lot of other problems could have been easily  solved by simply planing out what to make and how long it might take to do so I’ll try to keep that in mind for the next LD.

Conclusion

Overall I’m happy with the 48h – had a lot of problems, but also got to play around with a lot of great tools and try out new things.  Certainly learned a lot and hope that I don’t forget this until the next LD. Will also try to fix some of the show stopping bugs just so that people can actually play through it and try to look up some fancy ways to do music as I didn’t really get to play around with that a lot.

Looking forward to the next one, thanks!

Check out the game  and drop a comment

Some peace and quitet at last. I think I’ll take a nap. But first let’s have a beer. Just one, I promise!

I’m going to write a summary of what happened in past two days, but not just yet. Maybe tomorrow.

Tags: relax

(Note: Pictures will be added when I am not blocked from twitter and the images I posted there)

So this dare, Ludum Dare 30 was my first time submitting a game to the competition. Not only that, it’s also one of the first times I’ve tried to make a game on my own. Most of my previous work was either very simple and not much of a game, or it’s been in a team of some friends. I had such a clever idea too, make a platformer that progresses from a hellish place, to paradise as the player works off their sins. However I never made such an elaborate game, I started 5:30 am on Saturday and planned to possibly stay up all night and work on it Sunday. As I worked on it, I eventually realized that my engine was going to be far too slow and I quickly jumped to libGDX. I got up and running pretty quickly. Then I hit a brick wall, I’ve never made a platformer. Ever. Not even a side scrolling, or tile based game of any sort.

[Picture of progress at that point]

I quickly decided that I would give up the scrolling movement and do one screen sized levels. Then it came to collision detection, collision detection was simple, I already had the code for the bounding boxes done, but I didn’t know what to do. How do I handle the intersection of player and npc, or player and moving platform or still platform even. So I took a glitch in one of my attempts to do the calculation, turned it into the win mechanic and cleaned up the background a bit. I finished the game about 12-1am and woke up very tired on Sunday to finish homework

[Picture of finished product]

So while I resign myself to learn platformers, and improve my graphics abilities and the like, it shows a clear lesson to be learned. Have a basic kind of game in your ability to make, know basic physics and collision code, don’t write an engine if you need alpha compositing to be complicated.

[Picture of work environment]

I don’t know what I’m going to do next competition, maybe I’ll try to make it with Unity, which I am not a fan of because I can’t use C++ and don’t really know how it actually works internally. I might use a C++ framework like SFML to handle the higher speed I need. I will definitely be able to do physics and a platformer in any language, but I may try and embrace some of the “magic” provided by engines that abstract away the actual work of programming.

Expect a better game next year, and please post comments of your favourite articles on physics, collision detection and handling, and platformer creation. The more language agnostic the better.

Hey guys, this is my first LD. This is also my first time doing a post mortem. I’ve done other jams in the past but never done a post mortem so sorry if it’s brief. Overall it was okay.

Right, I thought people don’t really have all day to read long posts, so I did a quick sum up in a 3 minute video:

Watch here!

Cheers everyone, and well done to you all.

These guys really deserve some creds! Below are my favorites so far (no special order):

In Phase

This 2-player puzzle adventure has a really neat feeling with cute graphics and simple but lovely story-telling. The puzzles require some brains but the great learning curve gives a really smooth experience! Can also be played alone if you want to.

Blueprint Dude

An amazingly well-polished puzzler. Stunning graphics, and the audio has some great effects going well with the gameplay. The puzzle design and game mechanics are really clever.

Like AntiChamber

A really well made antichamber clone. I’m a great fan of anti chamber, and this entry really captured the fun in anti chamber with a new touch and fresh puzzles. A great challenge, but in case you get stuck check the comments for some hints.

Have you seen any other games that I really should try out? Leave a comment and I’ll try them right away!

Finally, if you have time, I would really appreciate to hear your feedback on my entry.

It is short and quite easy, but be prepared, it’s pretty emotional.

My entry: Dear Sister

Most assets done, there are left only a few sprites to go.

We’re quite proud of what’s becoming of our game. We won’t be spoiling much, but there is a good amount of content comming

First show:

It’s still in deep dev!

http://crabscrew.ru/game.html

Tags: SiberianGameJam

Aaaaaaa!!!!!!

Tags: SiberianGameJam