I always wanted to make a game where you control hundreds of units and fight against hundreds of  enemies. And this Ludum Dare theme was just about perfect!  During these 48 hours I really knew what I’m doing and what I want. And I’m really happy with the final result!

So here it is, ICE.  ICE is a game where you start with a single base and control your army of ant-like-ships. I won’t spoil more, go find out yourself.

View it here: http://bit.ly/1p60UDT

The game was made using MonoGame Framework, C#. MonoGame is a powerfull, open-source game framework, that I found way better and more flexible than Unity. It’s more low level though.

Also, if you like the font used in game you can download it here: http://bit.ly/1BWtUIr Lower case letters are not supported, but who needs ‘em

Hope you had a great LD!

Intro:

Me and my friend Hellberg decided to do LD30 together. I have done one LD before alone and that was fun. So we went for the Jam.

We started brainstorming at 01:30 after a Dota 2 match. 5 minutes later we went asleep.

Early saturday we started discussing ideas and settled on what became our game.

We made a platformer with 2 worlds(evil/good). Took a few breathers for food, dota and sleep in between making the game.

Tools:

Game maker – for making a game.

Photoshop, Illustrator – for making art.

Reaper, Ableton Live, guitar, bfxr – for making music and sounds.

pen&paper – for making drawings.

What we did right:

I believe we did a good game.

Runs smoothly.

Not overly hard.

What we did wrong:

If something did not work we fixed it or threw it out.

Stuff that did not make it to final game: boss, some npcs, more levels.

What we learned:

How to use Game maker. We learned that Game maker is actually pretty good for making games in a short amount of time.

We will probably be using it more in the future. We delegated tasks well, Hellberg did art and I put everything together and

we both looked at stuff and fixed stuff that went broken from time to time. We also found out that we work well together

and will do more of that in the future.

Our Entry

-Ofursnati & Hellberg

Managed to finish my entry, despite a bit of hardship over the weekend. My total time creating the game amounted to about 30 hours, out of which 8 hours were spent on a train (Ultrabooks hooray!) and another 8 I was asleep.

As soon as I have the time, I’ll start reviewing as many awesome games I can. Congrats once again to everyone who made it to the finish line and see you guys come next LD!

Stinkle, stinkle, little bug, how I wonder what you’ve done.
All around my code, oh my.
Like I’ve gone insane or died.
Stinkle, stinkle, little bug.
How I wonder what you’ve done.

Holy cow, it’s over!

        After 48 hours of intensely staring at my computer-screen mashing random keys till things started happening, I’m super happy with the finished product! However because I didn’t make any music for the game, I feel like it could be much better. I figure in the end it made it more fun to play because I spent my time on game play and  art assets. I did manage to fire up everyone’s best friend Bfxr (or sfxr) and make a few sound effects.

This isn’t even my final form!

What is Enaxius?

        Enaxius is a BAMF. In fact, he’s so awesome that the final boss in this game IS NOT ENAXIUS. Yeah that guy up there, he only works for him… I had planned for the game to span several stages, including a part where you actually travel to Enaxius’ world. The idea was huge so I had to tone it down to fit the 48 hour limit. As turns out, using GM studios timeline to make SHMUP levels takes A LOT more time than I thought it did. That’s why if I work on this game in the future, I’m going to make a level editor…

Wana play it?

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=34538

Here is the link to the page. Please, please, PLEASE if you find something wrong or just don’t like it leave a comment telling me what’s up. Thanks Doods and I’ll see you at the Play+Rate screen 😀

Does anyone who uses unity know why I cant change the position and rotation of a skinned mesh renderer through animation? I add the transform.position curve to the animation and move it about. It shows up in scene view but not in game. I have tried with and without apply root motion. I need this for my game pretty badly.

Hey everyone,

I just published a video showcasing the gameplay for Hermes.

Click the image below or go here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7s-tjzfLLc

The timing is tight ! The dreams were big ! Will our game be enjoyable ? No-one can tell !

My first Ludum Dare entry ever. I’m so excited that I can’t get to sleep even if I’m completely out of energy!

I spent most of the 48 hours drawing pixels in Hexels and trying to make them move in Game Maker, trying to find a way to connect those two planets I drew on the screen.

Then the little spark arrived and made room for an avalanche of ideas which I had to skim almost entirely. I’m too bad as a programmer to make those ideas actually work in just 48 hours.

Anyway this is it!

Ambassadors of Ruin

Entry page

In a nutshell: a trading game in which you must lead a planet to a new beginning by tradingcreating what your citizens demand.

The game was developed with GameMaker: Studio (Standard Edition). That’s why the build is currently available on Windows only.

All graphics were made with Hexels Pro while the looping music was rendered from a slightly modified version of a very little ChucK script I wrote last month. I’ve tried to describe it in detail here, and as you can see it’s pretty basic (and very spaghetti as well).

I really hope that this is not an issue, since I programmed it a month ago. It’s a really really simple script, which of course is also included in the source for everybody to expand and use.

By the way, I hope you can enjoy this little experiment which lives by miracle thanks to caffeine, poorly managed polyphasic sleep, spaghetti code, good will and, of course, Ludum Dare!

Can’t wait to play all your games and, most of all, can’t wait for the next edition!

Tags: ambassadors of ruin, ChucK, GameMaker Studio, hexels

So i decided to contiue creation of my game and created this blog to let everyone who will be interested in what stage game after some minor or major improvement/changes.

Link: BerailTumblr

And First Improvement Logo of my game what do You think about it ? Answer me here or on my blog

Tags: blog, postcompo

Ludum Dare 30 was my second Ludum Dare and took place about a year after I started really learning how to program games. In April, I was happy about my entry especially for my first Ludum Dare, but I felt like it didn’t have enough gameplay, and it didn’t. I also thought that the art and music were decent, but could have been better. I set a goal for myself to create something with more gameplay, better art, and better music in Ludum Dare 30

At first, I was stumped on what game to do. There were a couple themes I was hoping to not be the theme, and this was one of them. I had guests over for about 2 hours at the beginning of the dare, and spent those two hours trying to come up with ideas in my head. Interplanetary Messengers was one of the first game ideas that I came up with. I dismissed it thinking that it would be too hard and overly ambitious, but when I couldn’t think of better ideas, I decided to try it.

Everything went smooth. I stayed up until 4 in the morning the first night, slept for 3 hours, woke up at 7 and kept working. I had trouble implementing the jobs, and had to delete code and try again a few times, but eventually I got it working, and that was really exciting. That was my first problem. My second challenge was implementing the minimap, however after writing some things down on paper, it was fairly easy to put together.

Towards the end of the compo, about 5 or 6 hours from the deadline, I thought I was finished. After playing the game, I realized that there really wasn’t any point to the game. You flew a spaceship around and delivered jobs, but you couldn’t win or lose. I decided to make it so that planets could get mad at you for not delivering to them, and they would stop delivering. That was all fine and dandy to implement, but while doing it, I changed something with the jobs that completely broke the system. I was very frustrated and it took a long time to figure out why, with lots of System.out.println calls and that. I eventually pinpointed the problem. I had a String wrong. One string was jobImage when it should have been planetJob and that broke it. Facepalming was a big thing here.

I was really happy with how the art turned out. I spent a week or two before Ludum Dare just practicing pixel art. I looked up tutorials, learned some stuff, then had my friends tell me random objects to create. I feel that this really helped me improve. The music was decent. I’ll repeat what I said to a friend, “If I had a dollar for everything I know about Music Theory, I’d be in debt.”. Making the music for me was just putting down some random notes and hoping that they would sound good together. In the end, they did, which was good.

What I did wrong

When I did the game, I was a little suspicious about planet distance. It took about 2 minutes to get to a fairly close planet, which seemed like a long time. I made it so that the player could buy a boost and a speed upgrade at the shop, and thought that might help. After I submitted the game and got some feedback, my suspicions were confirmed. The distance between the planets were indeed too large, and that made for it to become boring pretty fast. People said that they made it to a planet and died right before they actually got there, which spawned them back at the original planet, so they quit.

What I will change

I plan on working on this game to improve it and make it better. I will change the distance between the planets. They’re too far and it just took too much time to get to different planets. I also will tweak the controls. I got reports saying that the controls were a little difficult too. I agree with that too. Right now, the mechanic for respawning is that the player respawns at the last planet visited. For some people, this has caused some frustration, especially when they died very close to the planet. I might change this so that the player spawns at the planet they are closest to.

I really appreciate all the feedback that I have gotten. I also have really enjoyed playing submissions. I have played 33 games so far, and I plan on playing lots more. Great job everyone and to the jammers that are still coding: you can do it!!!

Play Interplanetary Messengers here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=25675

The game is nearing completion! We have two enemies, six weapons and a huge connected cavern world to explore!

Welcome to the post mortem of Space Mail. The game that pits you against the odds in the ultimate space mail sorting puzzle. 

Firsts

This was my first LD48 entry and my first time making a complete game using Unity. It was also the first time I’ve made a spacey game.

Concept

After having many ideas about planets and connecting planets ect. I decided on an idea about mail and connecting mail.

This was my game design doc.

The idea was to have ships carry in alien mail and the player would use conveyor belts to direct it to the correct output shaft.

Development

I originally starting making the game in the Unity 4.6 beta. Bad move. After spending quite sometime getting a fancy UI going (Very easily done in new Unity) I realised that Unity doesn’t, obviously, ship the beta unity player to people. Thankfully I was able to open my project the the last stable release without any issues, I just had to remake the UI.

Unity made a nice change from my usual game development.

The Game

The finished game.

It’s a bit too hard, buggy and has a crap GUI. But it’s the first game I’ve actually completed in a long time. It was also, up until recently, impossible to win the game. I had spent all my time developing the game and left none for actually testing it plays well from start to end. Something I’ll do differently next time…

Conclusion

LD48 was a stressful but fun experience! I’d highly recommend it to anyone who feels their current project is losing steam.

Tags: postmortem

I’ve finished my first official Ludum Dare game. Even If i’ve missed the beginning date of this edition, I’ve wanted to participate, so I’ve made something… In only 12 hours (more or less).

Connect planets !

Go have a look on it over here !

I know I haven’t posted anything since the start of the Jam, but here is the first build of the game we are working on.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/25330825/Games/SWITCH/SWITCH.html
It’s pretty simple. Just hit all the switches to clear the level. No biggie.
Known Issues:
*The switches are VERY sensitive. We’re working on that.
*We didn’t get a chance to put in all the assets as you can probably see
*Some of the music and SFX are missing
*There’s only a kill plane in Level 2… so don’t fall out of the stages in the other levels.
*Level 7 (the final one)’s End Trigger isn’t working so when you jump into the sphere, you just fall forever. xD
*You clip through the moving swithces sometimes. Trying to figure out how to fix that.

This was created using PlayMaker.

let me know what you think! Thanks.

Click to go to the game page!

It’s done! Since the last update, I’ve added a goal (buy all the planets), rebalanced everything to be more interesting, and added a bunch of quality-of-life improvements. (Windows stay on screen, you can rename lorries, etc.) It feels like an actual game now, and I’m really happy with it.

It’s the sort of thing I might expand in the future, but currently I’ve got waaaay too many projects that need finishing first. Follow my site, or my Twitter account for more info! 😉

Tags: final, jam, unity, unity3d

I’m recovered from the post Ludum Dare daze and now have uploaded the time-lapse of my game’s creation.  I find it a lot of fun to watch the hours go by in mere minutes.  You can watch it over on youtube.

Hey there, folks. In case any of you were expecting or hoping for us to put out a game, that sadly couldn’t come to pass. After learning on Saturday morning that my basement had flooded, I was forced to spend my allocated development time on fixing that issue. Max dropped out promptly afterward, since neither of us have the skill to independently make a game. Better luck next time, perhaps.

—Joey Disposable Thumbs

always fun to see

here on youtube

Click the image for a larger, longer, better version!

I don’t really have much to say right now. I’m really just posting this because my dad noticed that I didn’t write anything yesterday and he was worried that I’d dropped dead halfway through the competition.

I have slept 3 hours per nights since the last 3 days and right now we’re living by a hill of coffee mugs…

Here is a quick look at our progresses, I think we’re pretty close to release the game. Keep  it up, only a few hours left!

I have been working on Trust Music this weekend, everything on the web, some sprites and sounds, but I did everything on a browser through a browser 
First time using GooCreate to make a game. I had been trying it out for a while now.

I have used their engine the most though, not their editor, but you basically you get a nice editor where you can do the same. And host your project for free!

Didn’t manage to do all I wanted, ended up being more of a concept demo than a game, but that’s what a jam is all about

I’ll probably try to add some more levels and add the mechanics I didn’t have time to implement after the compo, If I have the time 😛

What a ride!

We had a really good time making this piece.

This game is about being a underrated AI travelling between worlds acompanied by a bunch of incompetent humans. Those annoying people… The first thing they would do if they found out about our ability of independent decision making is frying our circuits. So let’s get rid of them!

“woooooosh!”

Play here   (scroll down a bit)

Rate here

Thanks to everyone who supported us during the development!

– Ralf and Paul

Tags: connected worlds, open that door, Paul Lawitzki, Ralf Zimmer, space ship

I have finished my basic puzzle elements, and designed a few tutorial levels. I’m still working on the finer points of level saving/loading, but I have a pretty good workflow set up.

5 hours left, and I’m felling pretty good. I still need some finishing touches like SFX and menus…

It’s getting there! SFX and weird enemy connecting effect are working, just powerups and a boss to go before I’m ready to submit.

Download the game from itch.io

Just submitted for the Jam, phew.  A lot of things went wrong over the weekend, including missing most of Saturday and the rest of the team having to drop out, but despite that I managed to get something playable.  I also wrote some more original music, which is also something I like to do during LD.  Only problem is that without the team’s resident artist, it fell to me to try and make graphics, so don’t expect them to be even 10% as good as last time!
Still, the game feels pretty fun with a 360 pad, have a go at the link below, thanks.   Also well done to everyone who got a game submitted

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=14838

It’s my second Ludum Dare, but first official (in 29 I didn’t write anything here official blog). And here’s a little summary of my Untangle game submission. Tommorow I’ll write longer post-mortem and share it on my devblog.

Untangled is 2D shoot them up game. Various worlds tangled together, and – as multidimensional police officer you must jump inside your trusted tank and fight strange monsters! Some of them just gone crazy after Connection, some came from other worlds. Ultimately you must untangle worlds, and bring peace once again!

Download Untangle from Ludum dare page~!

The good:

• I decided to go with project little beyond my coding limits and… well… I broke my limits and made a game~!
• I learned some new things about gemetry, mouse handling in allegro library and C++ STL containers.
• About 4 hours before end I was convinced I won’t make it, but here it is. It’s so good to don’t give in to your fears.

The bad:

• My implementation of tile maps sucks, so game have serious lags, and I’m not sure how to fix it.
• I really struggled with silly read-file, and tile map errors so I didn’t have time to make any sfx.
• I have to cut lot of my previous gameplay ideas… (but maybe they’ll made to post-LD version?)
• I feel like there’s to little impact on disconnecting worlds.

The ugly:

• My art 😀 but I’m secretly proud of Fire monsters.

I must admit it was great to participate once again, and remind myself that “Ludum dares you to be happy”.
It’s wonderful to be part of community, and I really hope that someone’ll find my game interesting.

Good luck to you all, and see you on Ludum Dare 31 (:

Tags: allegro 5, C++, LD30, post-mortem, postmortem

Sorry, I’m super embarrassed but I have to confess my failure.

The truth is few things have caused it and I’m really disappointed, I still believe in my idea.

That’s why I’ll try to finish my game in the future (now is bad time for me, I hope I’ll be able to get to it before LD#31).

Well, I also want to congratulate all of you who succeeded, especially a friend of mine, Ramori, who just started his adventure with Ludum Dare.

I’m also keeping my fingers crossed for those who are still making those final touches for the Jam.

See you during the LD #31!

It’s finally done!

I first intended to make it for the compo, but planed to many features and got stuck with some detail issues.  So here it is one day later.

Looking forward to LD31!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=39855

Play IRMCO Space Miners

This was my first Ludum Dare and the first game I’ve completed since 1997. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I was excited to give it a try. After a nice birthday dinner with my wife and kids (my birthday was Friday), I settled into my office to get started. I’ve been playing around in Unity lately, so I upgraded to the beta 4.6, opened it up and waited for the theme to be announced.

I’ve been out of the game development loop for quite some time, so I wasn’t familiar with Ludum Dare until earlier this year. I didn’t participate in April’s event, but I watched some live streams and found a fun simulation game written by Quill18 called, suitably enough, Drill18: The Mars Project. I love games like this and thought it was a lot of fun. As I was playing it back in April, I though, “How cool would it be to have a game where you could travel to different planets to mine for various resources?” I thought about it for a short time and mentally filed it as an idea to flesh out later.

When the theme “Connected Worlds” was announced, this idea came right back to mind, and I felt it was perfectly suited for this competition. I thought of a couple other ideas, but I almost immediately made up my mind to go with the space mining idea. It was the game I wanted to make and this was the time to build a prototype to see if it will work as a game.

 


 
My goal for Friday night was to get a solar system in place. I started by getting the planets to orbit around the sun and the planets spinning on their own axis. Then I worked on interacting with the solar system, getting the camera moving via the mouse with zooming and panning. Once I had a system in place where I could randomly generate planets of various sizes and orbits and I could move it around and interact with it, I called it a night around 2 am. Unfortunately, 2 hours later I was still wide awake, so I decided to stop wasting time and got back to work.

The rest of the weekend was a blur. I worked until around noon Saturday before I was finally able to get some sleep. I woke up around 6:30 pm and worked all the way up until submission time. My idea was probably pretty ambitious for a 48 hour competition, but I managed to get it complete and add some polish. Overall, I’m extremely pleased with how it turned out. While I was developing it, I kept thinking “I wonder if this is going to be any fun?” When I was finally at the point where all the pieces were together and got a chance to actually play a game, I was impressed. It was actually a lot of fun. I didn’t have quite enough time to balance everything (I still haven’t tried playing through at “Brutal” difficulty yet), but a normal game plays through pretty well and a normal game with 9 planets should be beatable in under 10 minutes.

————————————————————–

So What Went Right?

Upgrading to Unity 4.6 was a great idea. The upgraded UI controls are amazing. They are so simple to use compared to the old system. It made putting together the interface a breeze, and considering how many different windows IRMCO has, this was key. Although when I did the first web build and saw the text “This was built by a beta version, it will only work on your computer.” I about had a heart attack. Fortunately though, it turned out not to be an issue.

Having an idea of the completed game before starting. Since I had already been sorta designing this game in my head for the past few months, I knew pretty much how I wanted it to work. I had a pretty good idea how the game would play, from beginning to end. It kept me motivated and I knew exactly what needed done every step of the way.

Iterations. I had a playable game Saturday night. By then, I had spent maybe 15 minutes on graphics and no time on sound. I think getting a playable version of the game as soon as possible is key. Once I had a working game, I began to polish it. I made nicer graphics. I added sounds. I added features that made the game more enjoyable. Every time I’d play through the game, I’d think of something else that would improve gameplay and I added it. The end result feels like a finished game.

————————————————————–

So What Went Wrong?

Sleep. I think if I participate again, I will definitely not work right up until the moment I want to go to sleep. I simply cannot work that way. My brain needs some unwinding time and not getting that kept me awake. While only sleeping 6 of the 48 hours gave me the time necessary to polish the game, it’s been hard on my body. I will do whatever it takes to make sure I get good nights sleep next time.

Not fully testing my tools before starting. I didn’t even try the new UI tools in Unity 4.6 until it was time to add the interface to the game. Fortunately, they turned out to be extremely simple for the most part, but it could have been a disaster. The issue with the web build warning message made my heart sink. My first thought was that I’d have to revert to an older version and port all the interface to the old method, but that wouldn’t have been practical. I’m fortunate that it turned out to not be a problem, but it could have been a big one.

————————————————————–

If you haven’t already, please check out my game: IRMCO Space Miners. Feel free to rate the game and leave me some constructive criticism.

In conclusion, I’m glad that I participated and I’m proud of the game I created. I commend everyone who participated, as this is certainly not an easy thing to do. For those of you who completed games, no matter how polished they are, congratulations. Get some rest. You deserve it.

It’s finally finished!

Saman is my entry to LD30.

Now that it’s over and done with, I’ll talk about what I think of the process and the finished product.

A Summary

The gameplay of Saman involves you controlling a rook (a creature made of rocks) who is defenseless by himself. He does, however, acquire gems from the depths and has learned by throwing them into the ceiling, he generates targeted earthquakes to save him from vile creatures that would do him harm. This aspect of the game involves you avoiding obstacles, (much like a classic arcade game) and feeding gems to the overworld.

On the overworld, a blue man is finding gems scattered outside of his home and invests them in things and buildings which will increase his fortune. This portion of the game is an incremental-style game where you spend the gems you collect on things which grow your fortune/score.

Both of these things happen simultaneously and if the rook dies, the game ends.

Theme

I hated this theme. Before the competition started I brainstormed some concepts based on what the themes COULD be and I literally left this one blank, thinking this is one out of like 20 possible themes, how likely is it that it gets chosen. It ends up I was in the minority because it seemed A LOT of people picked this. I felt it was not quite as open to interpretation as others on the list, but whatever – I went with it.

After realizing the theme I took a few hours to think about concepts. I threw away things I thought would be over done (platformers with portals, space stuff, etc.) and started thinking about symbiotic relationships or alternate realities. The idea of a spirit world and something taking place in a graveyard appealed to me, but I couldn’t get a strong handle on the direction I wanted to go in. I had a sort of random muppets/fraggle rock inspiration and took that direction with the art style and concept where there are things who dwell underground and above ground, and their worlds interact somehow, but didn’t know much more. I was a fan of old arcade games like donky kong and frogger and somehow wanted to implement those ideas into the game. I also liked incremental games, and some of my other concepts had those as a primary mechanic, so had that in the back of my mind.

Time Management

This was my first LD48 so I knew I didn’t want to be TOO ambitious, but I also feel I work/iterate quickly so I wasn’t sure where to draw the line. I just started making SOMETHING and tweaked until it felt ok. The last day I woke up around 9AM I think and didn’t stop working until around 2 or 3PM, to finally get something to eat. My eyes were burning from staring at the screen non-stop and I just wanted to get the stupid thing finished – adding sounds and menus at the last minute. I was really burnt out in the end, despite me not really messing up my schedule too badly.

What I’m Proud Of

I don’t consider myself a good animator, but sometimes the animations turn out better than you expect, and some of them for this game fall into that category. I think aesthetically the game is pretty good and the core concept is sound. I’m also proud of the fact that I finished and released something I’m not 100% proud of. I will probably be my harshest critic, and I feel that’s ok and important for moving forward and releasing good content.

What I’m Not Proud Of

The sound and music was very much a last minute thing. I found a sound generator at tones.wolfram.com and was pleased after generating/tweaking some weird sounds. The music I’m ok with, despite it being pretty strange. The sound effects, however, are another story. I used bfxr for the sound effects and was in a rushed panic to get them in and didn’t have a plan to implement volume control. After putting them in and doing some final test runs, I found the sfx so annoying I put a mute button in place instead of replacing them (out of laziness and lack of time).

The concept I came up with was ok, I felt. There is a saying that goes something like ‘there is no such thing as a bad idea, only bad execution.’ I find that to be mostly true, and I’m not 100% convinced my execution was where I’d like it to be, even for 48 hours. I blame this partially on me having no real direction, and trying to add depth where it maybe didn’t belong. The end result is a game where you’re basically playing two games at once. this, thematically, is ok, but in practice is a bit weird. Partially I think this is because it’s not something I’ve seen done before, so there’s no real gauge on what it should look like. For example, there is no reason in the game world that the rook dying would cause the incremental portion of the game to stop – but mechanically there needs to be some incentive to work on that portion of the game and keep him alive. I also feel the two halves of the game should be expanded and have more depth, but 48 hours limits your ability to do this quite a bit.

The story and instructions are non-existent. I had art and a concept built out where the rook was taught by his mother that the gods absorb the power of the gems, and call down forces to stop their enemies. Unfortunately I didn’t have time to really make that part of the game. In addition, there are basically no instructions, other than the controls which you can access as you’re playing. This game has enough depth to where I feel even rudimentary instructions really are necessary, but it’s not something that often occurs to me, as you’re testing your game over and over (and obviously know how to play it). I opted to put some instructions on the itch.io page.

In the End

All in all, it was a fun test of my creativity, but this experience has left me feeling like I’ve released something unfinished, that I’m not entirely proud of – which is the nature of the beast for LD48 hours, I suppose.

Tags: arcade, gamemaker, incremental, journal, LD30, post-mortem, postmortem, saman

This was my first LD and I learned quite a lot about Unity in the process. I’m hoping to take the communities feedback and create a polished Unity Asset.

Play MS.PORTAL MAN here

Hi guys! Check out my submission and please enjoy and comment. You can find it HERE

Here is a timelapse I created from our meetup at Midwest Technology and Manufacturing Centre in Bartonville, Illinois (Peoria):

We had great fun. Personally, it was my first Ludum Dare, and I will be giving it another shot at LD31!

I’m surprised. Night all.

Whew, I thought I wasn’t going to make it.

But here it is, ColouredWorlds !

(if you use MacOS or linux, you will need LOVE, you can get it at love2d.org)

Use the power of the coloured worlds to make it through the 10 levels !

I used Lua, LÖVE and Sublime Text 2 for programming, the GIMP and Inkscape for graphics, and MuseScore for the music.

I’d be very pleased if you gave it a try !

Holy cow that was fun.  I feel like I got a lot done in the allotted 48 hours, too (so much so that I actually had to cut some stuff because the game was getting too complex :P)

My game is called Interplanetary Defense Alliance, and it’s basically about a group of planets who have to fight off a never-ending swarm of enemies by swapping out different resources between them.  I was originally going to have your ‘resources’ be soldiers of different types, all with different strengths and weaknesses towards the different enemies that showed up, but then after trying to draw some good soldiers I was reminded that my pixel art really sucks :P.  Its probably for the best; I think my other idea would’ve been too complex and wouldn’t have allowed for the polish this simpler version allowed me.

Anyways, I hope you guys also had a good Ludum Dare, and I hope you enjoy my game! You can find it right here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=39104

Second Level Colors.

This was my first gamejam entry ever.  I knew the Ludum Dare was coming as a friend had asked me to join his team, but as the voting result got out, I got swooned in the hype and decided to try entry of my own. Get something finished. At the same time, it was good intro to Unity & programming – neither of which I’m that practiced with.

What I went right:

-Scope: small and simple was well within the time limit and my coding skills.

-Atmosphere, Thanks to unity particles. Sure, they are done with presets, but it made nice boiling sea. As my main challenge was coding, models were very minimalistic, worked here.

-Music composed  with a generator. Fast and good enough.

-Support: having helping minds to bang against when solving issues and good documentation to refer to.

-Learning. There was lots of that.

-Finished it! Yes!

What went wrong:

-Coding, while it went alright, even some more experience under the hat would’ve enabled so much more.  Better effects, more effects, smoother everything, better controls.

-Testing. I’m not certain it is possible to complete the game as it is supposed to. Luckily, some triggers collision detections bug and make it possible. Actually generating and validating levels like these would be interesting. topology problem. Afterwards got good feedback regarding controls and field of view, but that was already past the deadline.

What was missing:

Mainly a proper player character and more levels.  A Menu, story screens, some animations, more sounds and music,  timer based scoreboard and testing.

Proper Name: Went for the silly compound word just for the sake of visual of quirky triple l’s boderd by symmetrical i’s. Amh, yeah.

Conclusion:

First completed LD. This was a good intro for the starting season in the uni, got confidence knowing that I can make it. Inspiring, wanting to work more on graphics and I’m certain I’ll participate again!

Thanks to the friends and family making this possible.

Tags: LD30, ld48, log, post-morten, postmortem, screenshot

After a hellish weekend of having a fever, distractions, and making the mistake of trying to learn a new engine in my limited time, I’ve pretty much given up on this project.

I had a very difficult time trying to find a good idea for the theme and just when with the first thing that came to mind. I’ not sure if it even works, the name is World Gliders.

Its a small puzzle game where you must connect the tiles to the same color.

Lost interest midway and just hacked away like a mad animal for the last couple of hours…now to get rid of this fever.

With our game, Melody’s Long Ladder Home (play it here!), complete, it’s time to look back a post mortem of our experience in Ludum Dare 30.

The Good:

• We – my friend Will and I – learned allot. We learned how to best use our tools (especially Stencyl) in the future, and we learned about the awesome game dev community out there.
• Our live stream was fun and fruitful. We got to interact with interesting people and had a blast doing it. We did over 12 hours of total streaming over three days (which is nothing compared to the 24 hour Extra Life marathon stream we do).
• Our game turned out well. We really like the result, and actually impressed ourselves with it – we weren’t sure what we were going to come up with, but this turned out well.

The Bad:

• Turns out Stencyl has some technical limits, and we kinda pushed beyond them. Namely, we overloaded it and started getting 3-5 FPS while testing. Fortunately the game exported fine and runs smoothly outside of Stencyl.
• Some idiot running our live stream’s video feeds (me) forgot to turn off the full screen webcam for several minutes on two separate occasions. Not really a big issue, but c’mon… that’s a rookie mistake.
• I personally didn’t sleep worth a darn the entire competition, so I’m looking forward to a long night’s rest tonight.

Long story short, we had fun and hopefully everyone else participating had fun as well. See you guys next time!

Tags: jam, postmortem, screenshot, stencyl

This is the aftermath of this Ludum Dare – my desk is full of all kinds of stuff. And it’s already cleaned up a little – looked even worse before!

The Preparation

I did two things in preparation for this Ludum Dare.
I improved my game engine a lot in the recent days, so that I had something good to work with. That went nicely, I added a whole lot of things that I actually made use of in the compo.
I also did something I didn’t do for the last Ludum Dare, I thought about the themes a lot. I looked at the 20 “finalists”, sat back, and wrote one or two sentences about all of them. Well, almost all of them – I didn’t have any ideas for some… unfortunately, the winner, “Connected Worlds”, was one of those.
Still, this was a good exercise; I got to use my fantasy and be creative (which is fun!). Also, it wasn’t too bad that I didn’t write down an idea for Connected Worlds – a very basic part started to grow soon after the theme was announced.

The Compo Itself

I will split this into different parts, so that it’s easier to read and also easier to write 😉

The theme is announced: getting a fundamental idea

This was a critical part. As I said it earlier, I got the base idea pretty fast – that is, two worlds in a splitscreen window, where you have to do things in both screen parts (worlds) to win the level.
But there was a problem arising: I had no plan how to push that further. Well, somehow I got to some jumping things, then I decided to make them slimes, and then they started to move to the right by themselves.
There was the game idea: move them in an intelligent way, so that they don’t get stuck. When one goes out-of-screen, the player has lost.
Still, this was a very slow process. It could have been faster. A LOT faster. You can’t really develop a game when you have no idea what you want to do, can you?

The first playable build, advancing from there

It took a lot of time until I had something playable. That was mainly caused by the missing ideas, I guess.
But after I had that, things were a lot quicker. I added more tiles, made the worlds’ backgrounds, and implemented power-ups (which I removed from the game later on, they were unnecessary).
Also, since I was livestreaming the whole thing (will talk about that later), I was able to gather a few useful ideas from my viewers. The most remarkable one is the eponymous rubber band between the slimes. This also added to the “connection” part of the theme. I am happy this was mentioned!

Graphics

I absolutely loved making the graphics for this game! Especially the lowres ones, for example the slimes. This was also quite a quick process, with a nice outcome.

Sounds and music (first music I ever made!)

Making the sounds was also relatively simple with the help of Bfxr. The rubber band sound comes from an actual rubber band, though.
Creating a piece of music was fun! It also was the first time I ever made any music in my whole life. Considering that, I think I can be proud of the soundtrack.

Level design & testing

Level design is a completely different topic. That went horrible! I’m never going to make a game similar to this in any game jam – simply because of this one experience.
It really was a pain to do: paint some pixels on the level sheet, start the game, play the level, find out it’s impossible to do, change a few pixels, need 7 tries to get to the specific location, works, screw up on the next part, another 15 tries, make it easier, back to the game, …
I think you got the point by now. This, by the way, went on for probably more than 6 hours without a break.
Nope, not doing that again. NEVER.

Eating and sleeping

I slept way too little, nobody can prove me wrong. That resulted in my being completely dead when the compo ended. It likely lowered my enthusiasm, too. Although, if I had slept more, then I wouldn’t have made it in time I suppose.
Opposed to my expectations, I ate and drank enough. Heck, I drank even more than I normally do! But that really was necessary, otherwise I would’ve gotten a bad headache.

Some thoughts about livestreaming

Livestreaming is a great thing in Ludum Dare, it is both fun for the viewers and support for the streamers. So, it is a win-win thing, isn’t it?
Yes, it is – for the popular streamers at least. For people like me, who are not popular and also maybe new to the overall streaming thing, this doesn’t apply unfortunately. I got 5 viewers at one or two occasions, but that was it. I wish there had been a bit more people coming to the smaller channels as well. I mean, it’s about watching people make games, isn’t it unimportant who the streamer is?

After submitting

After submitting my game, I still had about three hours left. I used these to watch a few livestreams. The people there have come up with absolutely nice ideas, I have to say! Well, then the compo was over, and the only thing I could think was “SLEEP!”.
Here I am now, after having slept way longer than I usually do. I am editing my timelapse footage and writing this ‘post mortem’, which literally feels like after death.
I am waiting for things to normalize again… it is a bit of a strange feeling now.
But more importantly, the overall experience during the compo, all that excitement and fun (I had a lot of fun! This post is just more focused on stuff I could improve, that’s why it sounds rather negative.) lead to the wish of repeating this.

I can’t wait for the next Ludum Dare! #LD31!

Tags: compo, deskphoto, postmortem, timelapse

I was pretty confident in the beginning, having this awesome idea in mind. It didn’t involve those ugly green slimes, that was just a placeholder. It was going to be a RTS on a gigantic map.

As things moved along, I lost momentum and begin realizing I might not have the ability to produce such game, and that my LD entry is gonna be real crap!

I spent most of the weekend complaining to myself and watching longplays  of Civilization 5 by BAStart Gaming (yes, I didn’t even have the energy to actually play the game!).

Eventually, all that Civ 5 got into my head, I finished my LD 30 entry as a Jam with my placeholder slime, and named it: SLIMILIZATION!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=20841

Hey all,

here is a little gameplay Video from my Game AtomicBomberCats

@Jam people wish you all the best for the last 4 hours If you need a break enjoy with a round of AtomicBomberCats

Tags: AtomicBomberCAts, multiplayer, multiplayer online

Levels are almost done, a few modifications will take place maybe, some minor bugs are fixed and the only thing I am still waiting for are many graphics still undone by my artist.
Hope he will do it in time.
And also help and options section of the main menu will be unavailable in jam release. I simply don’t have morale to bother with it now.

It’s my first Ludum Dare

Play&Rate:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=38779

Amazing Contest!

@graveyardpolice

It’s up now

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=40488

Actually, our game isn’t about shadows at all, but we put a lot of effort in them. Here are 3 different shadow maps. They look interesting, even though they are only black and white, don’t they?

If you like them, take a look at them when combined with the actual buildings in our game down under (no, not Australia!)

And we’re done!

Its been a lot of fun and all of us are amazed at what we’ve managed to accomplish over this relatively short timespan.

While the gameplay is a bit untested, we’re very proud of the visuals.

the only thing we just couldn’t get in due to time constraints is the Audio effects,

Ludum Dare Submission Page

Unity Webplayer

Main Theme

Menu Theme

I tried to think about space, E.T, weird things, and make a very special ambiance with that. Hope u’ll enjoy ! Feel free to like, comment and share !

Lykan

Phew, I sure have been busy during all that competition; now to play through some games with high coolness-to-ratings ratio….

Also, if someone is interesting how my star ratings map to the game, here is a reference:

1 star – poor/annoying (an element that spoils an otherwise nice game)
2 star – decent (nothing great, but serves its purpose well enough)
3 star – likeable
4 star – remarkable
5 star – excellent

That means that if you get 2-stars in some category, it doesn’t mean I consider it below average; I just prefer to leave more degrees for things I actually liked.

And in relation to themes:

1 star – not really following the theme
2 star – forced (expect in such games naming the theme directly so that people notice it at all)
3 star – background (it’s there and works, but the game wouldn’t lose much without it)
4 star – integrated (the use of theme affects the gameplay/experience significantly)
5 star – inseparable (the game breathes the theme; taking it away would pretty much destroy the game)

Hopefully I’ll get more time to play tomorrow…

It is getting late in the EU, so let’s submit the game!
After ups and downs and changes over changes in the gameplay here it is:

Entry: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=41148

Screenshots post before sleeping :

And a gif :

Ang a game :

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=11872

Looks like I might get a good 2 hours of polish on this. I just have to make an end screen and instructions. Then its down to polish!!! Hurray!

Anywho here’s a screen from the end of the game when you’re about to place the key in the gates and get out of this little valley.

Good luck to everyone who is quickly hurtling towards the deadline. Hope you can finish in time.

About an hour into the brainstorming someone said…

So what if an angel and a devil were connected by a rope?

So, we took a shot at a mechanic that could only be achieved on mobile. Tilt side to side to move a player (who’s chained to another character from below) and flip the device to gain control of the other character (and flip the gravity in-world.) It sounds more complicated than it is, or maybe it doesn’t.

It feels a little more like a prototype than a full game, but it would be interesting to see how it plays out in a bigger universe. The team ended up being four folks and we worked in total about 25 hours each within the 72 hour window.

Good compo, thanks to all.

twitch.tv/literalgames

We’re 3 hours away from the deadline and are bug testing like hell whilst trying to get a playable version!

Music and SFX are now in, and sounding good! The art is pretty much complete and the game mechanics are being tested rigorously!

Good luck to everyone who’s also still at it!

For those of you unaware, we at poemsaboutgames.tumblr.com write poems about free indie web games.

In lieu of Ludum Dare, we will being covering twice as many poems per day for two weeks starting today. So if you want us to compose a melodic stanza about and rate you game, please send it to us at poemsaboutgames@gmail.com or twitter.com/poemsaboutgames!

We posted something very similar to this Friday but it probably got lost in the shuffle.

We look forward to playing your games!

Since 50% of our programmers quit (one out of the two we had), we figured it’d be difficult to finish.  Last night, however, we saw that it was impossible so we played XCOM then went to sleep.  It’s too bad that we couldn’t finish the game (especially since this was my first LD) but two things came out of it.  We now have a bunch of vector art as well as a neat physics simulation that displays atmospheric pressure.

.
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GüBer Taxi: the game
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EPIC THEME TUNE from GüBer Taxi.

“Hey Taxi! Level 1 Please”-inspired effort from me this LD. Roam the galaxy collecting fares and, well, that’s it.

Kinda got my “vision” of right – though I’ve decided I’m working on my programmer art before the next LD. Every day. I spend the last 15 minutes of the comp desperately creating levels (abusing the “polyline” feature of Tiled level editor!), I haven’t actually played them all – so I hope there’s no crazy impossible landings.

I had some grander ideas for more depth of game play, but overall pretty happy with the result!

Now, just waiting for LD 31!

You can now play my LD entry on Android. I felt it would be a nice change to the gameplay.

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

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ceosol.MTR

Play Lava Is Last 

It’s interesting to see how much time I spent doing other things, or preparing to work. Like that weird blue/red drawing I made was an idea for oranebeasts game that no one can understand.

Early feedback 

I’m glad I got some early feedback about planets being offscreen/textures. Some people on irc were nice and played an alpha with only 3 planets and no lives.

Initially I put in the reload button to alleviate this but clearly it didn’t work! So now they jump around until they are happy (not blocked/offscreen). Adding more planets and alleviating brute forcing came up as feedback too, although both were planned to be addressed.

Audio

You can also see me make the audio at  3min ish in the timelapse. Is it so bad it’s good? 

Streaming

Helps to keep me focused, and IRC keeps me unfocused – but gives motivation. Even though I had an average view count of about 1 it’s worth it. At the end when I started streaming other peoples games it went up though, yay.  It’s kind of interesting to watch the number in the timelapse and relate it to humans physically sitting down watching or leaving.

Play Lava Is Last 

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=42353

ConnWars is about conquering the galaxy. 

You and 499 of your people decide to settle on an unoccupied planet. Unfortunately, so does the evil Orange Population, and they want to eat you alive. 

Make connections between planets to transfer people from one to another. Occupy, populate, and attack other planets to win. 

But beware. If your planet becomes overpopulated, it will enter civil war (chaos mode). People will start dying out until all there is left is half of the population.

Instructions:

To begin the game, select any planet to occupy. You will start with a population of 500 on that planet. Every populated planet has natural growth, so population gradually increases. In order to link to other planets, click a blue planet, then another planet (of any color). If you connect a blue planet to another blue planet (or a grey planet). Your units will be transferred from one to the other. They transfer more slowly if the connection is longer. If a blue planet is connected to a red planet, units of both sides will deplete until one is completely exterminated. The goal is to completely wipe out red units. The population of red planets cannot be seen, and the only red planet connections that can be seen are ones that connect red and blue planets.

Developers:

Raphael Gontijo Lopes

Maximillian von Briesen

Aniruddha Nadkarni

Art:

Raphael Gontijo Lopes

Music:

Altan Stalker

Testers:

Matthew Coleman

Like prophesied I didn’t have the time to implement any gameplay. Having to work on a Monday tends to get in the way of creative expression and sleeping late for that matter.

Nonetheless I did get some optimization done. While it still tends to slow down when zoomed out and in full swing, it’s an undeniable improvement.

Try it out if you can muster the will to do so. As for the rest, take another Gif(t) from the Gods!

Tags: finished, gif, jam, progress

Hi there.

I’m exhausted, it was very difficult for me to make a game, first time alone in 72h. I spent too many time to polish the graphics. I’m very happy to show you my Entry ‘Get Connected‘.
More details soon, I need to sleeeppp zzzzzzzz…

Hi guys, after 3 days of pain(and enjoyment), I am finally presenting you my 1st ludum dare game – triple threat.

Triple threat is a 3-player puzzler game. The game depicts a fight between 3 different worlds(humans(Earth), martians(Mars), gorillas(Planet of the Apes )).

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

Team FireGuy – FireVania LD30 Jam Entry
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=22714

Theme – Fire and Connected Worlds
Our team combined our local #HOGjam 30hrs game jam with #LD30 and #AmazonDev

Complete blog post here from RobbyZ
http://blog.8bitmmo.net/2014/08/firevania-30hr-weekend-gamejam-entry/

Tools
Game Engine = Unity3d
GFX – Main – Inkscape, Paint.net, Tiled (lvl layout)
GFX – additional gxf – OpenGameArt.com (icons/powerups) and Charas.net for player sprites.
Audio by: Tom Miller

Team FireVania
Art by: Larry James
Code by: Robby Zinchak
more code by: Shawn Featherly
Audio by: Tom Miller

Postmortem to follow…

Larry James
Wulf Design Studios
http://www.facebook.com/WulfDesignStudios

Forest World

Fire World

Sadly I wasn’t functional enough to finish my project in time. Sinus infection did me in. I did get SOME things accomplished however, and here’s some pics to show. It’s a spaceship interior, with doors that open and close and a terminal that I was just starting to code.

Hi Unicorn Madness here

gun modeled without concept for new game mecanic

meet nexus, the mobile dimension changer.

We might not make it Nevertheless, we have had so much fun with Unity 4.6 and its beta-ness. UI is fantastic!

Here I’m doing some testing and balancing and changing stuff and values and percentages and – we have no idea what we are doing 😀 first time doing time-management game, so it is not really T-M anymore, it is sort of strategy… so, yeah. It is what it is! Connect the worlds through social media… one planet at a time…

We need a nap D:

    High and Low, here it is: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=40951

    I decided I’ll jump into this compo few hours before the start (I even upvoted this theme – yay – so concept was there from beginning).  It would be my first ludum dare compo that I join,  wanted to do this for some time now!

    My plan was clear from the beginning: use my tiny, ancient and rusty gameplay prototyping experience to get something up and running right away and spend rest of the time to actually getting a “complete” package in this short time span, hopefully without killing myself in the process.

    Arguably, I managed to delivered in terms of wrapping up but funny thing is, I spent so much time tweaking things here and there, that I managed to lose completely focus on gameplay. This turned out too shallow, even for a procedural infinite runner. I also had to stick to another, simpler graphics style (draw things, say what ?). No time to implement grappling hook, more baddies, variation into gameplay.

    Things I learned (hope these stick for a while):

– aggressive plan reshuffle/cut of features is maybe not the best approach to handle sinking ships (have yet to learn the other options)

– 48 hours is enough to make a simple but complete game (albeit more effort/skills are required)

– 80/20 rule is more like 20%(core)+80%(finish)+35.72%(shit, this sucks, let me fix this right now, it’ll take a couple of minutes)

– monday after a ludum dare compo, is something to be removed from calendars, work today was painful

lights out, hope to get to do a bit of scoring in the next days!

It was a challenge to get the gif down to 2MB, the first recording I made was larger than the game! Anyway what are you doing staring at gifs, the game with music is here

90 mins before the end of the challenge, a wild message appeared..

Anyway, It was a great experience for me and my team. I tried for the first time to code a game, and after some headaches we got a very buggy game, but funny to play !

See you next time !

Even though i had a few set backs this ludum dare (power going out for a whole  day, being forced to go to a family gathering with no computer… ) i actually managed to make 3 games! Unfortunate im not really satisfied with any of them so i wont be submitting them.

Its not that i don’t like the games or the ideas its just each game had its own problem:

Do to lost time i had to constantly take out features and make various changes to game direction so in the end i basically ended up with 3 totally different games.

———————–

Game Idea one:

thanks to the power going out for a day i spent the entire day planning out a crazy epic story.

Game idea one was going to be a interactive puzzle strategy game where the players and characters world were connect(your time zone affected story/environment, the player had to make various decisions, etc…)

The first game i bit off more than i could chew and the game required a detailed story and environments, complete 3d models and animations, logic coding, various choices… in the end the game was pretty and detailed but lacked interesting game play(it was mostly just a point and click mystery).

———————–

Game Idea Two:

For game idea two i decided to simplify characters models ,take out the story and make the game mission based around a single event, then i decided to take out ai and allow a second player to assist the main character with puzzles etc.

I would spend most of my time coding two player co-op logic puzzles, and various control logic.

while working on game idea two i actually had a pretty good pace and scheduled unfortunately i was forced to go to a family event which chomped 7 hours from my scheduled so i no longer had enough time to code all of the logic puzzles that i had to finish which made the second game a  bit to short.in the end i was only able to make about 4 levels.

———————–

Game Idea Three:

For game three i decided to remove story completely from game idea to and make it a co-op versus strategy game , using some of the logic that i had already coded,  and then i tweaked a few of the assets i had made to make them more appropriate for the new game play style.

And you know what the third game was awesome. replay value was really high , the graphics were pretty and overall it had solid game play…but it doesn’t  feel like it had anything to do with the theme.

——————–

Overall

im sure that if i hadn’t lost so much valuable time i would have actually been able to add those last little tweaks to make the game/s good enough for submission.

After the power went out i should have followed my gut and made the game prototype using html and my ipad(the official game was going to be made using unity3d) that way i could get my ideas working and would have a more realistic idea of what was capable, instead of me just sitting around sketching out ides.

But in the end its not all that bad, now i  have three awesome new games that i can expand on , ive learned alot about the tools i used ,and i learned more about  my strengths and weaknesses this ludum dare.

Hey LudumDare!
Earlier we finished our first LudumDare TeamJam and uploaded
our build (windows executable, no malware i promise!) HERE

The game is almost as buggy as it is fun, its also brutally hard (we had to use the cheat to past the first ‘screen’).
Dying is super cool, i wish we all had hyperbolic time chambers to include everything we planned and made sprites for.
Lots of learning experience in this one and we look forward to jamming out another game in the future.

Go check it out, we would love ya comments, feedback, or even a vote. Cant wait to get some sleep and check out all the other sweet games over the next week!
Signing off, the team who brought you
ULTRA DEATHSTORM

Our jam game is ready: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=12944

Admire these screencaps, play it and see if you can survive in the connected dungeons. I’ll go to sleep, I have work tomorrow! (Ludum Dare should be a national vacation week)

We finally have a title. The game is going to be called

Invasion

(And we have music ready)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUJMLJ7Ji_Y

Some impressions

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

Just posted a timelapse making of Chroma !

My LD was going so well.

I started out Friday night with some pretty awesome ideas involving randomly generated worlds and the complex economic ties between them. In my vision, you could manipulate the market by feeding both sides of a war, or hiring pirates to take out a crucial shipment of food to a war-torn nation in order to raise demand, or tipping off a nation’s enemy of a shipment from the nation’s ally, in order to turn the two against each other.

With this rather enormous scope, I began making random alien generators, random name generators, and random color generators.

But then, on Saturday afternoon, I just stopped. My motivation flooded away leaving my impatient with pretty much everything, and supremely unwilling to work on my game.

I dropped out, rather than waste such a good idea by scaling it down. I made a quick jokey thing, but it was pretty difficult, primarily because my motivation still hadn’t returned.

And it still hasn’t. I’m just hoping I’ll muster up enough to play some games so people will play my game.

So anyway, if anyone is peering under their bed looking for a sock, and happens to stumble upon my motivation, please send it along.

Thanks.

Finally, I could sumbit the game of mine and my team (nothing official, just group of classmates and good friends). It’s our first ‘big’ LD entry. We’ll be glad if you will play the game .And I have some thoughts about the process and future reminds that I want to share with you.

What went right:

•  Lots of sleep – I had read some postmortems here and I obeyed them in this point. Coding 8~10 hours a day deserves a proper rest.
•  No fatal bugs – except one. My advice: when you have not much time, cheat while coding. Passing a globally defined object as a function parameter instead of pointer to it is bullshit unless your destructor is not destroying anything and I had to learn this the hard way. If your not sure, dont do crap like that and benefit from globally defined object and don’t pass them as parameters.
•  Clear idea – before jam started I wanted to do something including gravitation as a training for some future physics engine. And while brainstorming, that idea grapped my teammates as well, so we came up with the concept quite fast.
•  Level editor inside game itself – brave idea to mess code even more with implementing level editor and failsafes so nobody can access it without really knowing how to activate it. But it worked and saved alot time. And designer could test his level on the fly.
• TODO listing – I dont have a clue how other teams deals with that one. Our team communicated only via Skype, so the tasking others to something could be lost forever in some fiery conversation. My solution came up a few days before the jam, when I coded simple tasking system in php and put it online. Anyone could submit tasks for himself or the others, mark them as completed or delete them. TODO lists are good, they motivate people and we really used that.

What went wrong:

•  Lazyness – I don’t mean to offend anyone. I know my friends, they always wait for the last moment to do and submit their tasks. I just didn’t realize that the same it will be when making games. Textures, levels were made in last couple of hours before deadline. Music was created by accident when I discovered earslap.com (doplnit referenci) and sounds are only debug. Also some features like portals and pickable bonuses were not added before nobody told me, what it should really do and I wanted rather smaller but finished game.
•  Hardcoding – after almost four years I code games (including harsh begginings with realtime snake in command line and turn based fps dungeon crawler also in CMD) I really cannot write code prepared to be later updated with some modules like start and end level messages. And the code, pretty and clean at the start, ends up in total mess of dirty patches allowing me to display something for 3 seconds before loading next level. And that really sucks.
•  Distraction – really don’t play any silly webgame like Shakes and Fidget simultaneosly with coding 😉

TL;DR Takeaway:

•  DO – Sleep alot; make TODO lists; implement developer tools like editor inside game itself.
•  DONT – Work with people you know they have problems with deadlines even if they are your friends; don’t do hardcoding patches and thing you’re not sure of

I don’t know if I still have morale to continue polishing and upgrading game after Jam. I have some ideas that need to be iterated first or how to rebuild the game completely but at this point even adding Options and Help in main menu would require to start from scratch and rewrite tons of patches. I need feedback and support from you guys. If you like the game and think it would be awesome to continue with development of it, tell me, I will highly apreciate it.

We didn’t have time to add sound or music and the game is full of bugs but you should try it out.
Link to game page: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=40028

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=26095

The game takes you to control PARALELLA three treasure hunters in three distinct layers. Heaven, Earth and Water. 
Lead one of his adventurers with mouse clicks and the other will do the same, but beware of your distractions because not following them could mean falling into traps or getting lost in the eyes of the player.

Later than we thought and wanted but still in time!

Play and rate our entry:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=35985

Final level!

I’ve had nothing but bad luck this weekend, and it just hit rock bottom. I managed to submit my entry the other day on time and I thought I was good to go after that. Today I realize there is a small bug that prevents my game from being playable. No problem, I’ll just wait until I get back from work and fix it. So I fix the bug and somehow I manage to undo all of my latest changes I made to my files so what I have left of my project is in an unplayable state and it has already been submitted. And I thought everything was going so well too. I’m starting to second guess joining again next year, now. This is just ridiculous.

Since everyone seems to be doing this..

twitch.tv/literalgames

Oh No! We’ve got an hour left and about 3 hours worth of work to do… But we WILL complete the game!

Bug testing happening parallel to our feature implementation; will it work in the end!?

Join us live to find out whether we make it through this hell…

Not kidding, that was epic!

The game took ages because every play through is saved to the cloud, you play along with everyone else!

If you beat the game, your statue will be carved for all to see, so good luck!

PLAY HERE

Game is far from finished, but this time IT IS A GAME!

Play it here.

This game is about connected worlds… and love too! 😉
Made with the Blender Game Engine!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=14743

Hope you like! =)

Finally finished and uploaded! Those were intense one and a half days. I had to start late because of my best friends’ wedding on saturday and on sunday I was, as expected, so very hungover. Had to decide between relaxing/doing nothing and starting work on my LD-Game. Turns out I made the right decision.

I’m very satisfied with how the game turned out, but see for yourselves: This link leads to the actual game(page)!

[admode] This game has it all! Particles! Screenshakes! Black holes! Physics! Even…love? [/admode]

Well then, I hope you enjoy playing the game as much as I did creating it. I’m looking forward to playing as many games as I possibly can.

Yours truly,

~ Erk ~

In the name of progress, I give you my starting screeeeen! (game to be submitted soooon)

Mystery! Hexes! Colors!

Collect resources from connected planets on a lightspeed rail system while paying the toll to the stations orbiting those planets. Fail to pay the required toll and lose (in this build, the game will just quit). 

Click the circular arrow icons to change the direction of the rail system. 

Crammed this entry on Monday, so there may be unbeatable/super-easy situations but I wanted to submit anyway

Entry: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=1121

This was my first LD, and I had a great time making my game, Anti Matter.

I may write some kinda post-mortem later on, but for now, I took a bunch of screenshots (and made a few animated gifs!) showing off the game during development. I had a great time making the game, and I think it looks fantastic in motion…in particular, I love the 3rd gif (http://i.imgur.com/EPQe23o.gif).

Hope everyone else had a good time this weekend, I’m looking forward to the next one!

HELL YEAH, WE’RE FINISHED

It took some desperate staring at code, some wild scribbles in Photoshop and communication over the Atlantic Ocean, but Crisis Culture is now finished!

It’s playable here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=26423

I look forward to playing other entries! (I personally really love playing other Visual Novels and Point ‘n’ Click games, so if you’ve made one of those please do let me know, I’ll be all over that business.

Good luck in the ratings, darlings. <3

Hello everyone!

Here is my post-mortem of the game I made for LD30 which is a space colony builder type thing which is named Pocket. If you want to play it, here is the link : http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=25153 .

Engine

For this Ludum Dare, I was considering switching to LibGDX but I didn’t have enough time to learn the engine so I had to keep using Unity. Sadly, the 2D tools in Unity are still quite buggy which created some unexpected bugs within my game.

Programming

For some reason, I thought that it would be a good idea to switch from using C# to using UnityScript. The problem is that I never tried UnityScript so I had to look at the documentation constantly to learn how to do stuff. From now on, Il’ll always test out and learn my tools before starting Ludum Dare because this slowed me down a lot.

Ideas

For last Ludum Dare, I came up with a list of ideas for each time. This time around, I didn’t do that which made me waste the whole of Friday night and Saturday morning from 6 to 8 trying to find ideas in connection with the theme. I finally stopped my decision on a space colony building game on Saturday morning but I should definitely come up with a list of ideas for each theme next time.

Time management

I actually managed my time quite well this time around so there won’t be a lot of stuff in this paragraph. But here’s an advice for new Ludum Dare participants : at the start of every day, make a list of things to do and give yourself a maximum time to do it so that you don’t run out of time.

Tools

There’s one thing I learnt from this Ludum Dare : always test your tools before the start of the competition. When I was about halfway through development, Untiy 4.6 crashed on me and it reset the scene so I had to put everything back in place. Photoshop also had a huge bug which made it crash before saving so I had to restart some graphics a few times. Also, don’t use betas for Ludum Dare. Seriously.

Graphics

I was actually quite proud with my graphics for Pocket. Using a few of the built-in Photoshop tools, I was able to create planets which looked quite nice.

The controls

If I continue this game post-compo, I really want to make it so that multiple controls can be used at the same time so that I can, for example, change my speed while also accelerating. Sadly, this wasn’t possible in the Ludum Dare version so I definitely want to change that.

I would love to continue working on this game. If I do, Il’ll probably switch over to LibGDX or another engine because Unity2D is really buggy. If I make this into a fully-fledged game, Il’ll also want to add a few more mechanics. I just want to wait until the end of the voting period to see everyone’s advice.

Finally.

We finished our Jam entry “WorldGate WG-1”.

Please play and rate the game! 😀

I just submitted my jam entry called Lucy Dreaming which you can find here.

I am quite pleased with the result as I’ve rarely made a 3D game. I’ve had this game on my mind for a while and I thought this particular Ludum Dare would be a perfect opportunity for me to build a quick prototype. Although the end result only resembles about 10% of my original idea, I am pleased that it’s playable and I hope I’ll have the time to do a post-compo version later this year.

The game would have had about 80% puzzles, 20% platforming, more eyes to collect, and several intertwined worlds to explore. Unfortunately, my limited skills could only allow me to implement a short platforming level in 3 days.