First, thanks to “Theunlosing Quint” steam user for the idea of a Bangai-O level.

This will be one of the Endless level available in the game. Yes, is a bit hard and challenging but also addictive and fun!!

The level is inspired on Bangai-O Missile Fury. Here you can see a  youtube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSlQRd7C1to .

Hope you like it!

–

Links to follow the project
—————————–

Official page: http://dev.kronbits.com/myghtyretrozero

TigSource Devlog: http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=42252
Gamejolt Page: http://gamejolt.com/games/platformer/mighty-retro-zero/29923/
IndieDB: http://www.indiedb.com/games/mighty-retro-zero
Steam: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/308914920

Tumblr: http://dev.kronbits.com/
Instagram: http://instagram.com/matriax
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kronbits
Twitter(Official): https://twitter.com/Kronbits
Twitter(Personal): https://twitter.com/DavitMasia

So it’s been a few weeks since I released SLIMILIZATION, a Ludum Dare 30 game:

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

The Ludum Dare theme is Connected Worlds. At first glance, SLIMILIZATION doesn’t seem to match the theme, but the game actually has a secret. Basically, it connects player into the same world. Everyone is playing on the same map, starting at different random location, like in the game Sid Meier’s Civilization.

More details here: http://jacklehamster.wordpress.com/2014/09/06/slimilization-the-big-reveal/

Just released the Post-Compo version of our game!

Play it here

Tags: #LD48 #LD30

Web | Android | Chrome | Amazon | Firefox | Source

And here is my blog post with all the details

So after playing thousands of games the plots of which were centered around bacons starting an uprising, I’m confident to say that one of the most interesting ones was “The Bacon Uprising” by this Tigro guy (any similarities between his and my username are absolutely coincidental). So yeah, you should check it out:

While bacon uprising is more and more prevalent of a theme in modern indie games, this man managed to squeeze more of the topic providing a captivating plot and 16 hours of juicy gameplay. Grab it while it’s free, rumor has it it’s gonna be greenlit soon and increase in price to $80 with DRM.

So, recently I started learning basic console Java, plus developed a few basic Android apps. Now I want to move into real Java desktop games. Can you guys recommend something good? I target 2D games (tried LWJGL but OpenGL stuff is what kills me). I can remember LOVE2D a engine that really suited my style.

Thanks for any help!

We had a lot of fun on the Ludum Dare with Parallel Rift, and I’ve decided to take the project forward to a fully fledged game!

What kind of things would you like to see in the final? Obviously more levels, bigger levels and more gameplay! Let me know what you would like to see!

Check out the compo entry here, and let me know your suggestions for the future!

Bloom World

If you haven’t already, give “Parallel Worlds” a try! Feedback is welcomed!

Try and Rate “Parallel Worlds”

Now’s my turn to announce my postmortem on my edition of “Parallel Worlds!”

GOOD THINGS

Map system:  Although I spent most of my Saturday on the map system, I’m happy to get that working and designed. I came up with three worlds, each with it’s own map, style, and song. The portals are working as they should: to take you to the next world in sequence.

Mechanics: Having just a labyrinth where you move eight directions overhead is not so innovated in my opinion. Therefore, I decided to add a gravitated side-scroller in one of the worlds. My initial thought is to add different mechanics to most worlds; although, I only came up of two. Likewise, I’m glad to get two different mechanics in the game to show my idea.

Graphics: I wanted to design an game reminiscent to an ATARI 2600 game but with a background/overlay reminiscent to Magnavox Odyssey. The map is full of big blocks while the background is a detailed, pixelated environment.

Audio: This is my first ever LD entry that featured audio! 😀 I’ve done both sound and music with OpenMPT. The sounds didn’t take me too much time to complete as I only have one. The music was a challenge for me to create in such a few hours. I’m not an avid musician, but I do enjoy making chip-tunes. I was amazed to come up with 3 songs in under 2 hours time.

Smooth play: This is my second game made in Flash, but I used Flixel this time. My previous Flash game was nicely done, but it suffered from laggy performance; but I manged to get that resolved later on. This time, however, this game ran smoothly during development and remained that way by its release. Flixel has helped make game development easier and efficiently in little code.

BAD THINGS

Feature creep: My initial thought was to add enemies to add a more arcade-style game rather than a standard labyrinth with portals. You will notice some rooms have particular designs. Those were designated for enemies — which, unfortunately, is what I didn’t have enough time on. Therefore, the game ended up as a maze with no combat, which is not what I planned initially.

Not enough experience with Flixel: I’m still rather new to Flixel, still learning what it has to offer and learning how to handle its objects. Most of my time was spent on experimenting and trial and error — which could be the blame for the time it took to get the map system working well. Game programming is nothing new to me and game programming in Flash is certainly not a new thing to me, but Flixel is still something I need to learn more of. Eventually, I’ll come up with tricks to take advantage of Flixel’s objects and come up with something in shorter time.

Portal system: The portal system works as intended, but not to what I planned. Sure, the portals will take you to the next world or to the first world when you’ve reached the maximum world, but I wanted an option to choose a specific world to teleport to. While that idea is already achieved in the game when you keep entering the portal, that idea leaves a better way to use the yellow keys. Currently, yellow keys allow you to access the portal in a world. My initial idea is to have each world contain keys to unlock every world (other than the world they are currently in). Any collected keys would actually not be carried on to other worlds. For example, I you are at world 2 and you wanted to go to world 1 or world 3, you will need to find keys to world 1 and world 3 somewhere in world 2. Those collected keys would only remain in world 2. This is the best as I can describe about my initial idea.

Sprite Details: Most objects in game are designed to make them obvious to what they represent — e.g. key. My only issue is the green block representing you — the player. I didn’t have much time to come up with a design and I couldn’t think of a design that would fit the style since there isn’t a story. So, an ordinary block (a la Odyssey) is what I thought best fits the game, and I made it green so it stands out better in every world.

IN CONCLUSION

I do see this game having a future. The different mechanics definitely add variation, so I would certainly develop more interesting rules. I like to hang on to the Atari 2600 + Magnavox Odyssey presentation, but with more details. A story would add meaning and thought once I come up something compelling. I really want to add enemies, even bosses, to make this game an action game with a point and life system. With enemies, you can punch and kick them and destroy them accordingly. I have an interesting idea for how the enemies are eliminated, but it’s too complicated to describe. It might be easier to explain once I post the game footage or a prototype.

So, I would definitely like to continue working on “Parallel Worlds” — under a different name. I’ll post details on Twitter, so check out my Twitter account for the latest! (@jprogman)

See you all next time!

Tags: LD30, ld48, postmortem

Here is a post mortem for my LD#30 Compo entry: Connected Pylons

It was my first Ludum Dare contribution. Here in France, the start time was Saturday 3am, so Wednesday, I decided to go to bed early for being in fine fettle. After wake up, I’ve looked at the theme and… damned no inspiration! I took my breakfast, no inspiration. I went for a walk in the woods near my home, no inspiration. I searched “connected worlds” with Google and Google image, no inspiration.

Finally, I gave up. At last I decided to use my time for fun and create an old school Pengo clone.

And then, inspiration come, it was 4h after wake up!

At first, I created an empty project with Unity3D and put some cubes and spheres to visualize the concept.

The green player will have to push cubes to create a connection between an enlighten pylon and a dark one, and then the newly enlighten pylon will connect the player to the next world (level). If I have enough time, I’ll implement bad red guys.

It tooks me the first day to create the base code for the player and the cubes management on a square by square basis.

www.aftermoon.net/LD30/Test1

I took 30 minutes to implement smooth movement before going to bed.
www.aftermoon.net/LD30/Test2

The second day was dedicated to the creation of a few levels, the transition between levels (I’m very proud of it) and some testing. My initial goal was to generate the levels procedurally. But I’ve renounced to it because I wasn’t sure to obtain something satisfying before the end of the weekend. So there were a few manually created level patterns, and only the bad guys are added procedurally in an increasing quantity. At midnight, the game was near finished, but without the bad guys.
www.aftermoon.net/LD30/Test3

I’ve spend the last 3 hours to add the bad guys (deadline was Sunday 3am in France). My goal was to implement a simple predictive AI: the “Goufy” follows the left wall, the “Regular” follows the right wall.
The players can crush them with blocks or change their paths by modifying the labyrinth.

At last, 30 minutes before the deadline, all was OK except there was no sound. I’ve spent the time left to create a few sound with SFXR.

The project was uploaded 5 minutes before the end of the time!
www.aftermoon.net/LD30/LD30Final

Finally I was happy with my game, I can even play it myself and take some fun. When some kind comments have started to fill my entry page I was even more happy and motivated to go further.

After the hard start with lack of inspiration, all went good during this weekend. I’m used to Unity3D, but I have learned a lot again. The webplayer was of great value, it has allowed me to easy share and get comments on the intermediate states of my game with the LD community on IRC channel.

At last I’ve found the only feature I really miss by reading comments on my entry page. The GF of  a commentator has played the game for several hours, up to the level 46, where she was stuck. I have missed to save the current level in PlayerPrefs, so players have to restart from level 1 each time they come back to play. I’ve added load/save features a few days later, and like I was not sure about LD compo rules, I have hosted this final release on a separate page. And yes, the level 46 is beatable, you just have to not being discouraged, being quick, and finish the level before all bad guys spawn!

www.aftermoon.net/ConnectedPylons

Thanks Ludum Dare to hosting this event
The next step for me will probably be on Kongregate and Google Play Store…

First of all: congrats to all who have finished.

The good:

I was pleased with the idea, the visual and the music.

I found the theme a bit hard: the theme was just shouting at me: ‘planets and trade!’ and ‘two world platformer where one  influences the other’. I found these ideas a bit obvious and I thought I would drown in a sea of similar but better excecuted ideas.

After some hard (and pretty long) thinking I decided to join the world of the smallest scale to the world of the biggest scale. I even had a (love) story.

I kept the graphics simple. Animations were bad, but overall it looked OK, especially considering the amount of work done.

ugly but functional

The music was simple, hardly any editing, but did seem to fit the theme pretty well. Also I used Aques Tone for some ambient singing, which I think worked well. Because  Aques Tone is Japanese  you’re limited to Japanese syllables (I used Google translate for the words Earth and Love, but have no idea if it’s right).

Using existing code. I have a habit of writing everything from scratch which takes much too much time. This time I used some frameworks, public code and some code I had made myself a year ago (and had posted online, so I could use it, lucky break!).

Preparation: I did a warm up weekend!

The bad: 

Framework: I used the Starting Framework. I tested it in the warm up weekend but it still threw some unexpected curve balls, which made me doubt if I could finish the game on time. In the end I made it work but at first a bug made it so slow, nobody would be able to finish it, it would have taken hours, now it can be done in minutes.

RSI: it influenced a lot:

• I had to keep graphics simple (which turned out to be a positive) and could not spend the time I would like to spend. Therfore I ended up doing the Jam, because I couldn’t finish in 2 days.
• I kept the music minimal. I did a simple one take chord sequence on guitar and a one take improvisation on guitar. They turned out pretty nice, but I wanted to have a bit more layering.
• I couldn’t play as much games from the compo as I wanted to and couldn’t play them for very long.
• I couldn’t play test my game as much as I wanted to (should have) . Which led to the biggest BAD:

It was not finishable for  the first week. In the last few hours I made a desperate attempt to make the shape recognition work, but because testing takes a lot of time and keyboard use, I had to post the game not knowing for sure if it was finishable. I turned out not te be.
My apologies to people trying to finish my game.

I wanted the story to be about connecting the small and the large world, about making small changes with big consequences, but it meant players would have to zoom in and out a lot.   As a playing experience it was not ideal.

It’s HARD.
I made a hint page at some point, but I haven’t heard of anyone winning the game. And I think people would want the world to know, because it is an achievement. I did it myself so I know it can be done.

The ‘don’t know’:

I made my own system for shape recognition. I looked at some publicly available code, but couldn’t figure out if it was legal to use and maybe I wouldn’t able to figure it out. If that was a good choice? I have no idea!

If you want a zen game to slowly create a winning state: play my game

Why this game ?

I had this idea for almost a year(initially a board game) but wasn’t getting an occasion to develop it(probably because of other games(college projects)).

What this game is about ?

As the theme for ludum dare 30 is connected worlds, I tried my best to make the game as per the theme.

The game depicts a fight between three worlds. Three worlds fighting with each other to decided who’s superior.

The tokens can only move to the world’s which are connected to the block it’s already in/

Problems Faced

The initial(and primary) problem was the user input, I was not able to find a solution on how to move the tokens.

Solution – Created the red blocks for each block and turned them into buttons with each button hard coded with a function (there was no time for experiment).

The player turns were not in proper cycle. e.g. if all the tokens of a player are removed and his turn comes, he cannot move his tokens, hence, the game wouldn’t progress.

Solution – Solved using Boolean values and permutation & combination.

Link to the game – Triple Threat

Hi there.
I exported a few assets I designed to construct all the backgrounds of my ‘GET Connected‘ entry. The software I used was Flash. Moreover, I updated a new Post-Ludum version with more contents and a bit longer story. I have too many ideas for other backgrounds as Earth or other planets, but it would take so much time (design + level-design + integration). Maybe one day.

Discover my game:
‘GET CONNECTED‘

Next time, I’ll post characters assets.
More infos on my website if you are curious about my entry. :]

Sephy.

I suppose a post-mortem is a bit overdue for my game, I’ve Got the World On a String. You can play it here, if you want. It’s okay. Thanks in advance if you do play.

My initial goals were pretty tame: Make a game jam game in Unity, and spend more than a few hours on the audio. Making a fun game was also a plus. As it turned out, I only met the Unity goal, since that one was pretty much a given just by deciding to do it. I did technically spend about five hours on audio, but I threw away the boss theme I had worked on because it was bad. Oh, and I don’t find the game terribly fun, though it might have some potential.

Hits:

• I’m pretty pleased with the music. It’s nothing spectacular, but for being churned out in under 2 hours, it’s not bad.
• The concept for the game was one that I tried (and failed) making a long time ago, and now I can check it off of my to-do list, as it were.
• I think the player ship sprites turned out pretty good. They read well, at least.

Misses:

• I spent maybe 4 hours on the rope in the game, which is purely cosmetic, iterating through various physics-based approaches that failed in various ways before realizing I could just use a particle system. I also spent most of that time during the first night, and I know better than to focus on aesthetics before the core gameplay is in.
• I wanted to have more enemy types and more bosses, especially some bullet-hell-esque ones to really bring out that core concept of being a shmup with no shooting. This time was instead spent on a rope.
• Not using physics for the player ship really hurt later on (especially with the rope…), and I think the movement would be better if it had a bit of inertia to it. It would also be easier to line up the ship with the centers of planets, so scoring would be more reasonable.
• The mix of 2D sprites with 3D objects and particles muddles the visual style, which wasn’t very strong to begin with.
• Again, the rope. I was hoping it would feel like a rope in Scribblenauts, with basic physics doing most of the work, but I shouldn’t have spent so long trying to tune the various versions when they ultimately weren’t right.
• It doesn’t feel very fun…thought it’s had a few moments for me. Maybe it’s okay.

World 1 of post ludum version

Befor the Jam 

The combo started for us on 2 o’clock am on Saturday. We started to think about the theme on Friday.
I personally has preferred “growing” for a puzzle game. But when the final voting starts “planet”, “space”, “worlds” came up.
I also translated  the themes in swissgerman and ask my son’s (9) for a game in mind.
The best was chaos = cleaning the Child’s Bedroom.
For Connected Worlds it was something with a elevator.

Inside the Jam

Saturday
We start on 8 o’clock. While  I was driving to Sammakko, the closing elevator door was spooking around in my mind.
Our goal was every-time a working game.
So we started with 3 screens (intro, game and end-screen) and keep them running.
We think about using  Tiled for our main tool to build the worlds without knowing anything about it [-], a big mistake.
The end of the first JAM day was on 2 0’clock in the morning.

Sunday
I was creating the animation live on twitch the hole afternoon [-].
Loosing a lot of time.

Monday
Normal working until 4 o’clock pm, then starting to build content until 1 o’clock.
During the night I ask [+] dark3zz if he can help us with a matching background music from his archive. He gave us this beautiful peace of music.
**Thank You**

résumé

[-] never played around with the Tiled Map Editor
[-] never created a animation with Pyxel
[-] not jamming with kids around you

[+] ask dark3zz for background music
[+] Teamwork
[+] Keep the game running

It was a funny and very interesting experience.

World 3 of the post ludum version

Tags: postmortem

Thanks everyone for your great comments on my game. I wanted to make a game with great emphasis on the music, and indeed the music plays a core role in Dear Sister, both for amplifying the emotional story, and as a key gameplay element. Based on all good feedback I decided to publish it on the web.

I have updated the entry page with links to spotify as well as a direct mp3 download. Though I would really recommend you to first experience the music in-game for a stronger reaction.

After confLINKted’s postmortem, it’s that unscheduled time again! In this new edition of The SM Selection I get to pick my favorite entries of the 30th Ludum Dare competition! The winners of each title get a new level, enhancing their Dev Support by 1 and their Overall Awesomeness by 50.

So who is worthy of such title? Check them out!

The Sidereal Mindbreaker title goes to…

Galactic Dump

Never have I ever played a stage based puzzle game like this one. The gameplay is simple enough: draw lines between the planets and the little satellites, and calculate the best connections based on the satellites’ orbit path. The 15 levels it includes are total brain teasers, ready to dare you to figure them out.

Play Galactic Dump @ Ludum Dare

The Spectral Malevolence title goes to…

Schrodinghost

Schrodinghost takes the somewhat known theory of Schrödinger’s Cat and twists it in an interactive game similar to Ghost Trick. Players control of Maru, a cat stuffed in a box. His main goal is to seek revenge on his master, Schrödinger, by escaping from his lab. To do this he must find the exit as discretely as possible, as the scientist is always strolling around and any glimpse from him will make Maru say goodbye to freedom. Maru can also change into a ghost to interact with things from a distance and manipulate the environment to help him escape. Although it lacks a bit more emphasis on the LD’s theme, it’s a really charming game nonetheless.

Play Schrodinghost @ Ludum Dare

The Sinister Metagame title goes to…

Titania

Hiding in a retro style platformer lies a game with a message that at first is not that clear, but at the player progresses this message starts interfering with the environment in ways players won’t expect and maybe even notice. I will not spoil the actual message, because it’s something to experiment by oneself. What I do love about the game is the take on the theme and the atmosphere, that gives you a great impression even though it makes use of little resources. You don’t wanna miss it.

Play Titania @ Ludum Dare

The Stylish Millipede title goes to…

Starpiercer

A visually stunning game where players won’t stop flying around from one world to another. The main objective is to stay (at least) on one piece as long as possible, while avoiding spiky pieces of debris and red-eyed enemies. Very interesting use of lighting and time-manipulating mechanics on this one.

Play Starpiercer @ Ludum Dare

[Honorable Mention]

The Slim Metaphor? title goes to…

Noodle Feeling

Become a noodle and connect little beings to yourself, then offer yourself to the giant worm that wanders around your planet. The game keeps throwing you to randomly generated levels where you need to battle not with enemies but with the game’s physics. Does it have much to relate to the compo’s theme? Not really, but not that it really matters. Become a noodle and learn to like it.

Play Noodle Feeling @ Ludum Dare

That’s all for now folks! Did you actually check out my entry, confLINKted? Be sure to rate it and I’ll rate your game as well!

Well, I’ve been wanting to write this since the first day of the judging, but I have kept not doing so. Because there is only just over a week left, I decided it’s time I finally made my post-mortem.

My Goals:

My goals were to:

– Not work on ideas that I end up scrapping: I did a good job on this one, didn’t add things that were too big that I ended up not using.

– Add HTML5 support: unfortunately I couldn’t get this working so stopped trying after about 10 mins and decided to just go with windows.

– Add online high scores: This didn’t really fit with my game, and I still don’t know how to add 100% so I didn’t bother.

Thoughts on the game

If you haven’t played my game yet, please check it out here

This was my second LD that I’ve finished a game and this game is a lot bigger then my previous. I managed to spend a lot more time on it and that’s good. Connected Worlds has also been getting some pretty good reviews.

The Good

– Made a much more fun game

– Much better graphics because I had a friend do it.

– More fun to make as I had a friend over.

– We came up with a good idea

The Bad

– Because my friend didn’t come over for a while after theme was announced, we didn’t get started for a while.

– We spent ages coming up with the idea and didn’t start development until 6 hours after theme was announced.

– We were up too late (4:30am) on the first night not really doing a whole lot and were tired next day.

– Had a few annoying bugs (I need to comment the code more to stop this)

– Spent a few hours going out to a university open day for a few hours so we lost time.

If we had had more time, we also would have been able to fix the few bugs/glitches in the game.

Thanks for reading this and good luck with the final ratings everyone!

Since most people that rated our game did not download the (almost) obligatory Android app, (hence not being able to rate properly) we made a video explaining our game.

You can find it here:

Space Trader Video

Or check this short impression gif (since its what all the cool guys do):

Short impression video gif

Find the Ludum Dare entry here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=29549

Full video here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EnUFow3pRFg

Phew! It was a hard LD! For long time I had this idea of making a game in which you would play in real world(basically use photos as background/map). The connected worlds theme was great excuse to do that. Generally this Jam was definitely one of the better Ludum Dares I took part in.
What went right:
-Idea for a game(distilled over ~2 years, this had to be good)
-Speed of level design(when I made first photo level, the rest of them was finished in~1 hour, Tiled is great for that purpose)

What went ok:
-AI, my first finished AI that is at least somehow dangerous
-Audio, my first attempt was really smooth(~30 mins to implement+create sound). Sadly the sounds are a bit too plain.

What went not right:
-I wanted to make a jumpy platformer. Then I made main character leg-less robot on tracks. I didn’t have time to add some kind of rocket-y jumping, so the lore is a bit edited to adress that.
-Collisions and movement, I had to pause game game before every level since the tunneling is really bad if I don’t. Now I know that this could be easily subverted by using more constant timestep.
What went wrong:
-Using my own, untested in real scenario library(had to hot fix it 2 hours into a LD)
-Tile level design(not colorful, not enough tile variants, rooms feel empty)
-Graphics, the main enemy is well… weird, the protagonist is blocky and not detailed enough.
Lessons i have learned:
-TEST YOUR LIBRARY
-IF YOU ARE NOT AN ARTIST: DRAW YOUR PIXELS, NOT ART

Tags: post-mortem

I made a game. Then (accidentally) I made a Post-Jam version …with:

Rockets can now reach moving targets, animations are smoother and the game is hopefully bugless.

I tried to base them on a unique (in some way) idea, so solving them’ll require different strategies! Cool?..

Yes, I removed that wall of text. Tutorial is a way more interactive and friendly now.

You now have something to do there.

Feel free to play some <your favorite AAA game>, or have a nap, or something. Your progress is saved!

Play?

Tags: post-jam

Hello! Designer/programmer/artist here. Here’s a little write-up on my Ludum Dare Jam entry, Honko’s Worlds.
It is a dungeon crawling game where you shoot enemies with beams, collect gold, potions, special weapons and keys.
It plays a lot like one of those top-down zelda games.

You can try the game here:
HONKO’s WORLDS

I started making the game planning it to be a competition entry, but decided to make it a jam entry halfway through the second day when it became clear the game wouldn’t have enough content by the 48 hour deadline. On the third day, now that it was a Jam game, CBoyardee offered to make music for it, and made three great tracks.

I am very happy with how the game looks, and with many of the game’s enemy encounters. Those I think are its strongest points, it turned out really good.

But many, many issues came from a lack of foresight and planning in general while I was doing this. I only had the vaguest idea of what the game should be during the first day, I was like on autopilot. I knew I wanted to make some sort of top down dungeon crawler, but that was it. Most of the ideas came together through pixel art: I was just drawing game-ey things (monsters, tiles, keys…) and imagined how they could fit together as I did em. I should have stopped and should have taken a walk or something, to get those thoughts straight and order up some more solid idea.

The biggest mistake, a consequence of this improvisation thing, was planning a much bigger maze than what I had time to finish and polish. Once I was done making a basic shell of a game, I started sketching up a plan for the dungeon’s maze, and made it really huge. I always underestimate how much time it takes to actually put those rooms together, even when the rooms are simple.

Here’s a map of the game I was planning:

That maze I drew up and then proceeded to implement is about three times bigger than the final entry’s size (which is already pretty big!!)
Most of that larger maze actually works gameplay-wise and is filled with enemies and items, but I didn’t have time to give it any tiles/graphics! When there were just a handful of hours left, I blocked off the unfinished 2/3rds of the game and focused on adding to that first third instead.
As I mentioned in the original post though, you can actually visit that huge unfinished section of the game by exploring the finished section completely and finding two gold keys (their locations are marked with two Xs in the map above)
The unfinished area starts just north of the two consecutive gold gates. Of course, without tiles to see where the walls are, that area is more or less impossible to explore. If you reach that unfinished area at all, you can consider the game beaten!

One of the biggest consequences of all those cuts to the game’s maze is in relation to the theme (the theme of the Ludum Dare competition was “Connected Worlds”). The gold keys you can find in the current maze were supposed to be hidden in “side worlds” with their own enemies and visual styles, but I had to cut all of that. The idea was to have this castle be a “hub level” of sorts, from which different worlds were accessible.
To access a new world, you have to find silver keys within the hub level, which opened the way to one of the side-worlds.
To make progress in the overall game at a higher level, you need to collect gold keys in those side-worlds. This would let you access a larger portion of the castle. Those gold keys mark your overall progress in the game.
Its quite frustrating to see how many hours I spent laying down walls and enemies for those unfinished sections. If I had kept the maze small, the game would have had a lot more content, could have been a lot more complete!

One good consequence of cutting off so much of the big maze however: I could take the unique enemies I designed for the cut-off areas and place them all in the smaller game, making the enemy encounters feel very diverse. My original design, by comparison, was probably way too repetitive with its enemies.

Some other regrets with the result:
–The subweapons. They are pretty generic, they don’t have much diversity, just extra damage, some spread shots and some projectiles that fly a bit further. I thought of the subweapon thing on the second day of the jam, but only started to implement them in the final few hours, so they’re not really elaborate. Ideally, I would work on them further, to make them feel more like magic spells. Something that is exciting to find, where collecting a lot of them feels like you are really expanding your inventory of actions. Some weapons could have non-combat applications, like freezing a lake to allow passage or breaking through a weak wall. Some could have special effects over the enemies hit, or have defensive applications. But this would also mean I would need to add some means of managing your subweapons inventory. Perhaps you could only hold 10 of those weapons at any given time, and could store them in some storage space accessible at save points. Speaking of which…

–Save points. The game has no saving or checkpoints, and that’s a huge bummer. I just didn’t have time to implement those. I was already cutting off so much from the idea and had so much more to fit in, saving was just never on my radar throughout the jam. I need to make saving a higher priority in my jams in the future, it really sucks to lose 20 minutes of exploration all of a sudden!

–Gold. There is absolutely no use for it in the game right now, its just some sort of score. Of course I thought it would have some use at some point, but it never coalesced during the jam. I would definitely add a shop that sold unique subweapons and potions, or could maybe upgrade your main weapon, or raise your maximum life.

All in all, I am pretty happy with this game despite all the flaws, and with some more work, it could turn into a solid little indie title. I have a lot on my plate right now, but I might revisit and spruce this up a bit sometime in the future.

I also put up a time lapse of the entire process of making the game: The pixel art, the design, the programming and even the last-minute sound effects.
You can watch it below:

TIME LAPSE VIDEO

Tags: honko, map, pixel art, postmortem

PLAY CONVERSATION!

Hello everyone! I’m Arhan, a young game developer from Turkey and this is my third Ludum Dare entry so far. So far, it’s been a pleasure creating games along a lot of creative people who loves video games as much as I do, and for my third success in Ludum Dare, I feel like I managed to come up with a unique idea, albeit coupled with ugly, boring graphics.

After consecutive flops in Ludum Dare 27 and Ludum Dare 29, I knew that I had to produce something in this summer edition of my favourite game jam competition. I was awake at 9.00am in EET, which is five hours after the theme was announced. Connected Worlds, you say?

GOALS

I had a couple of goals that I wanted to accomplish for this edition of the jam. These were:

• Game should only use mouse movement and LMB. I wanted the game to have simple controls for a possible future mobile port. I succeeded in my goal, and the game will be playable with only one finger when I eventually port it to Android.
• I should not use the first idea that pops up in my mind regarding theme. Connected Worlds! Space! Planets! Aliens! Controlling characters in different worlds! That was just the first 60 seconds of me thinking right after I saw the theme and I immediately put all these elements into my “forbidden” list. Don’t get me wrong, space is cool, aliens are awesome, I enjoyed every entry with multiple different characters stuck in multiple dimensions. It’s just that I knew these ideas were going to be overused for this theme, and I didn’t want my game to feel like “that other game you played, but with worse graphics”. Although it’s worth noting that my game could easily be themed into a space game.

WHAT WENT RIGHT

• The Idea: Basically, in this game, you’re trying to keep a group of people together by conducting successful conversations in pairs between them. I won’t get into details, but the idea and the gameplay concept is, in my personal, biased opinion, a solid one. I feel like I have succeeded in making all game mechanics feel natural and related to the story. A good conversation keeps people together, while a bad conversation makes them repel each other. Characters which are too close to each other collide and push each other away in order to protect their “personal space” in a way.
• Prototype: I was quick to put the first prototype out and to decide that the core idea is fun enough to pursue for the rest of the weekend. This was something I was unable to do in the first two succeeded attempts of Ludum Dare for me.
• Time Management: I briefly followed Pomodoro principles to use my time more efficiently during the weekend and I feel like they helped me a bit.

WHAT WENT WRONG

• Time Distribution: While I believe I managed to use my time efficiently, I insisted too much on implementing a few more gameplay elements (some of which went to garbage afterwards), resulting in a lack of attention in all the other details of the game, which will follow this entry.
• Graphics: Couldn’t find the time to draw decent faces for the characters, a decent conversation line, animations for all kinds of events related to getting and losing points, and so on. Heck, those lousy eyes, nose and mouth were added to the game literally in the last hour.
• Gameplay Polish: My game lacks polish in every aspect of it, but gameplay is the most critical of them. Currently, the game is hard as hell and controls are rarely well understood among players. Moreover, the game is boring in my opinion, because I wasn’t able to tweak the gameplay to make the player feel like he’s/she’s accomplishing something. This could’ve been easily avoided with more attention to detail and less attention to additional elements that ended up not making it in the game.

CONCLUSION

I’m happy to put out yet another successful entry for Ludum Dare. I feel that I’ll get rather low scores thanks to lousy graphics and rather boring gameplay which is also hard as hell. However, I’m really happy with the core concept and I’m thinking about taking this game further and making a better version of it at some point.

It’s been an awesome game jam, big thanks to all the gaming community here and the organization. See you later in December for Ludum Dare 31. Keep playing!

PLAY CONVERSATION!

LD #30 was not only my first participation in Ludum Dare, but also a first time when I published a game to a wide audience. I learned very much when I was making new game and when I was getting ffedback after I submitted it. If you would like to play my game, it can be found here: Constellation  – the game about restoring and destroying connections between worlds.

I’m not an experienced game developer and don’t have much programming bachground, and making games is just a hobby for me. About an year ago I started to explore this area, at first – for practical purposes (I need to make several simple games for a website of educational organisation, where I work), and then I saw, that I can use it to express my own ideas. Mostly I work using Stencyl 3.1 with its visual programming, but work on developing my programming skills beyond this level.

Tools used:

Stencyl 3.1

Paint and Inkscape on PC and InfinitePainter on tablet

sfxr

Good things: 

– I made a finished game, that has a plot with the beginning, the end (actually, two endings, although with only small difference) and something inbetween. I also added some interesting details, like two wearpons, that differently affects on different enemies.

– I managed to make instructions and explanations part of the game (so people can understand, what is happening, even if they don’t read the description)

– I am confident with graphics I made in short time (I expected that it woud be more difficult and will take much time)

– Using Stencyl 3.1 really saved me much time at initial stage of making a game. The only problem with it is that compiling a project takes long (several minutes). But it turns into a nice working rhythm: while it compiles, I draw sprites or backgrounds, then check the result of compilation… than add what I’ve drawn… etc. So it was nice for working solo.

Bad things: 

– I choose the idea, that cannot be fully realized in 1 or 2 levels. To clearly show the idea of restoring right connections between worlds to form a constellation, I need more levels: initially I planned to made 5-6 words with two levels in each, but this was unrealistic. So I finished 3 worlds (one of them presented with 2 levels, others – with 1)

– I didn’t have enough time to make sounds and music. I see, that music can add much to the mood of the game, and have a tool to make it (Music Maker Jam), but just didn’t have time. So I managed only to add two sounds generated with sfxr – one in the intro and one when the player loses life.

– I also didn’t have time to draw animated sprites.

– Some people reported in comments, that the controls in my game aren’t very good. I think I need to read some documentation about Stencyl and Box2D to find, what is the problem. (As for me, controls aren’t ideal, but they don’t make game too hard or boring or unplayable)

– Two-wearpon system was good idea in general, but some players commented, that they finished the game using only one gun. Now I see, how to made the system more balanced, and maybe use this idea later.

What to do next?

I don’t know now, if I will make improved version of my game Constellation or not. I made a version where I fixed some bugs and typos, mentioned in the comments, but I don’t know, if I want to spend time on polishing it (adding music, more levels, better graphics. improving controls etc.) Probably, yes (at least, music and animations), because it is always sad for me to leave ideas in such half-embodied state. Probably, not now, because I have some other projects to work on. In any case, I hope I will have time to took part in next LD, because this was a great experience for me, and I found several other creative ideas for later use, when I was working on this game. I also had wonderful experience playing and rating games made by others. Thanks to all, see you at next LD!

====Some links:====

My game

Post-LD-version (no new features, just several small fixes) (direct link)

My blog (it is in Russian, but maybe somebody here will be interested :))

Tags: post-mortem

Hey guys! Guess what? I’ve made a game. I hope you play, comment, rate and like it!

Click HERE or here or HeRe to play it!

Hello, In addition to creating Games, I also record YouTube Videos. I started a new series this week for Ludum Dare 30 Games, it will run until September 15th. Each week I will have videos for at least five games.  The release Schedule is Mondays at 3pm PST.

Youtube Playlist

Week 3:

Week 1:

Introduction

Connected we Run by Sandcrawler

Alter Axis by sylarisbest

Shadows by apiotrw

They Were Just Pixels by Ohems

Taxi Space by DrCicero

Week 2:

Provider Bob by Cryunreal

Pilgrimage by Follett

Groups of Seven by 7Soul

Intergalactic Delivery Services Corporation by sP0CkEr2

This Way! by Accidental Rebel

Tags: Videos

Ludum Dare #30 was my fifth successful Ludum Dare, which brings me to a 50% success rate. Yay! Time for a post-mortem.

By the way, you can also play my game.

What went right

The engine. I wrote the engine in C++ this time, and took notes from an article called “Programming M. C. Kids” Iz-Tavares and Chang. The platformer physics turned out rather well, and the game feels responsive but not crazy. There was even enough time for some tricky shader effects, and I’m going to show those off in a GIF:

Dreamless Gameplay

Core gameplay. Once the gameplay concept got to its final, simplified form, I could focus on implementing it and writing levels. The level format was just ASCII text, so I could crank them out pretty quickly, and I ended up with 9 levels.

Sound effects. Just a couple hours with a microphone (and some music software) were all it took. There are 13 sounds with an average of 5 variations each, and the engine picks a variation at random each time a sound is played. The effect is rather nice, especially for the footsteps.

Dialogue This was the last piece of code implemented, but it gives crucial context to the game. The writing isn’t great, but I’m really glad it’s there.

Analytics. I keep a record of every time a level is beaten or restarted, along with a couple other things. Here’s a chart of the statistics for each of the 9 levels. You can see that about 60% of the players who start the game finish it, and players who get to level 8 restart it 2.5 times, on average.

Analytics for “Dreamless” by level

What went wrong

No tutorial. The game doesn’t exactly throw you into the deep end, but it does very little to tell you what you’re expected to do. This was painfully obvious once I watched someone else play the game. For everyone who played my game: thank you for taking the time to figure things out!

The worst part is the double jump. I was careful to make it so you could beat the game without the double jump, but there are some places where you have to restart if you don’t know about the double jump.

Slow start to the project. Looking at the commit logs, the game didn’t even respond to input until 16 hours into the contest, and jumping didn’t work until 21 hours had passed. I spent the time refactoring, messing with base code, and other things that don’t make games.

Not enough time on graphics and music. With only an hour and ten minutes left to go, I cranked out a music track and a bunch of sprites. I spent less than 10 minutes on music, and that’s including the time it took to start up the sequencer. I picked out two chords (Cm9 and Gm9), hit record, and rendered the result to disk without editing it at all. I even used the default patch you get when you start a new song!

Special Thanks

Special thanks to Obsolete Entertainment, who put footage of gameplay for Dreamless on YouTube. In general, thanks to everyone who posts videos of the games they play!

Tags: postmortem

Well,  instead of Ludum Dare I did OrcaJam.    It was my first real-live game jam and it was great!  I met some awesome like-minded people for the first time in my life and I made a pretty cool game in 48 hours too.

For some reason I make a lot of games that are about drugs and beating people up…   I may need help.

Click here to check it out on OrcaJam.

Walkthrough (Click it to see in full!)

Need some help? Sure you do! I’ve made a walkthrough for my game to give you assistance on finishing the game — but try to use it at the last resort because it’s more funner that way! For your convenience, I’ve added the walkthrough as a screenshot to the game’s description page so you don’t have to find this post for it. 😀

Haven’t tried or rated “Parallel Worlds?” Now’s your chance!

–Try and rate Parallel Worlds here!–

Thank you very much for your support!

Tags: ld48, walkthrough

I’ve been working on some software that is meant to reduce the effort it takes to test native applications. I’m sure many of you know how most native games here are released – they’re packaged together in an archive that has to be opened and fully extracted before running the game. Many people are possibly turned off by the amount of work it takes to run a simple game, some might even avoid testing such games.

To tip the scale towards native games (in the name of the undisputedly superior experience and technological variety such games can provide), I’ve developed an application that can generate a self-extracting archive. But it’s one that supports building custom user interfaces and doing background extraction of game files so that games can be opened with just one click.

This is how the interface can look (it’s fully customizable):

First game package ever built (Windows version of my LD30 game: Connected Worlds – The Adventure) (Dropbox mirror)

More info (source, SDK, backstory) at blog.sgscript.org.

Hello all!

I have noticed something while playing games this Ludum Dare. A lot of people are making web games. And one of the reasons this is, is for simplicity. If you click on a link to a game, you can start playing it! But sometimes you need something like Unity, or Java, and some people don’t have those things. I have made a tutorial on basic Web Game Development that you can watch here. This uses pure HTML5 and JavaScript. It is very simple to use and understand, can be distributed very easily, and is very useful when participating in Ludum Dare! If you haven’t learned web development yet, and you want to compete in December, watch this video! You may find it is easier than it seems!

– Gandalf1209

I had a ball taking part in my second Ludum Dare this year. More than anything, I’ve been impressed and humbled by the great quality of games on display. I’ll write another post soon to enthuse about my favourites but first I thought I’d say a little about my own experiences.

Right from the start, I eschewed any thoughts of doing anything clever or complicated with the theme and just went for a very straightforward and literal approach. The Veiled World is therefore the story of four stereotypical characters who stop a cliched monstrosity from taking over a generic fantasy world. Once I’d boiled the story down to it’s raw materials, I found I could have a lot of fun by just being as stupid as I liked with the details.

Similarly, the gameplay is nothing new. Jump, shoot and flip between parallel dimensions. It’s hokey but I tried to make it as extreme as I could to turn the hokiness into a virtue. I think it worked in some ways better than others…

THE GOOD:

– I tried to give the combat a Vlambeer-style crunchiness and I think it worked pretty well. The screenshakes and hit physics give the right amount of feedback and make the fights feel satisfying. The variety between the four weapon types also worked well.

– The sound effects. I did everything with my mouth or objects found on my desk (tweaked in Audacity) and it worked surprisingly well. It’s amazing how forgiving the brain is when it has a visual cue to go along with a sound. The sped-up sound of a man blowing a raspberry suddenly seems the perfect noise for an axe hitting flesh once you put it in context.

– The voice-overs. I had fun with these. Most of the positive reviews I’ve had have mentioned my pronunciation of the characters’ names.

– The art style. I’m loathe to call it art really but I think it worked out well in the context. It looks appropriately old-school and it works that way, especially with so much blood splatter on the screen.

THE BAD:

– Opinion has been divided over the control system. I quite like it but then I spent a long time playtesting and getting used to it. A lot of players have found it too twitchy and difficult to manage, which I think is fair comment. I changed it quite a lot for the post-comp version.

– Many people have found the game to be frustratingly difficult. Again, I overlooked this because I’d spent so long playing it as I went along. I knew where all the platforms were so didn’t have to put up with frustrating falls and long climbs up again as many players did. The enemy AI was also a little too vicious.

– No music. A little music would have gone a long way, I think, but I lacked both time and talent in this regard.

– The title screen and cutscenes are pretty awful. Nothing much to be proud of where presentation is concerned.

– The font is hideous. Time ran out before I could change it. That said, it has a sort of goofy appeal of it own, I guess, if you’re in a forgiving mood.

THE UGLY:

– There was a bug which caused all the gnomes to fly up into the air if you pushed the up arrow. It was stupid of me to overlook it but kind of fun when someone pointed it out to me.

Terrible font…

***

POST-COMP VERSION:

Altogether, I was happy with the way it turned out and happy enough to think of expanding it into something a bit fuller. So the post-comp version has better controls, special abilities for all four characters, an endless arena mode and a few coats of extra polish. It’s the game I had in my mind when I started but didn’t quite get to make within the time limit.

The wizard now dispenses Hot Facts

Are you not entertained?

The post-comp version is available here: http://panurge.itch.io/the-veiled-world

Any feedback will be welcomed with open arms.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 9th, 2014 at 11:27 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.

Hey everyone! We are the Button Masher Bros!

Judging draws ever closer… you know what goes good with judging?

IT’S LUDUM DARE TO BELIEVE! Ep. 9!

With so many submissions, there was absolutely no way we could play them all.

Special thanks to our friends at Reddit, twitter, and youtube who all stepped up to give us suggestions – you guys are the BEST!

If you like the games you see, be sure to check them out of Ludumdare.com and let the developers know what you think!

**Today we will be highlighting**:

Title: Heart Star
Category: Comp Entry
Creator: Adventure Islands

Title: Savior: Saver of Souls
Category: Compo Entry
Creator: John Drury

Title: The Lion’s Song

Category: Jam Entry

Creator: LeafThief

Finally, we’d love to hear what you think!

You can comment on the episode linked above, comment in this thread, or tweet us at:

@ButtonMasherBro – Show

@MathBlasterRitz – Chris

or @jwowBMB – Josh.

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

This post is originally from here.

Spirit Shift was made in 3 days for the Ludum Dare 30 game jam, based on the theme of ‘connected worlds’. After a couple of hours of discussion we worked out what we were going to make: an infinite runner where the player can (and has to) phase-shift between worlds rapidly. Since this was the core mechanic of the game we wanted it to look fluid and not confuse the player. I had done some GameMaker tutorials a few years prior and remembered a little about having multiple viewports, so I knew it would be possible and a lot easier than coding it by hand. It took a day and a half.

Tunnel Vision

Once I’d done a couple of GML tutorials and read through some of the documentation (something I’d be doing a lot of over the jam), I got some basic platforms generating and moving across the screen. Turns out GameMaker doesn’t support having multiple rooms active, so I ended up having 3 separate ‘lanes’ spaced vertically across a single room. When the player shifted worlds it would just be a case of moving them up or down to the appropriate lane.
After mucking about with views for a while I knocked up the following prototype:

This is how we originally pictured the world portals. The idea was that you’d almost be going through a tunnel, as each world shift caused the next one to expand out and fill the screen. At this point the shifting only worked the first time, so in the following demo video I have to restart the program each time:

The main (yellow) world expands out of view, the next (cyan) world expands to take its place, the last (green) world follows suit, and a temporary fourth view expands from nothing in the centre to take last place. At least, that’s what seems to be happening. In truth GameMaker doesn’t allow a viewport to be larger than the window, so to get the main view to expand I actually keep it the same size and shrink the game area it represents, essentially zooming in. Having now worked it out, this trick became very useful later on.

A world of problems

With the prototype in place we started working through the design issues apparent in the way I was doing things so far.

1. Having the portals in the middle of the screen drastically limited the play-space. Although GameMaker supports sprite depth, views themselves override this. Even if the sprite depth for all of the cyan platforms is set so that they appear in front of the yellow ones, the viewport itself takes precedence and completely covers everything behind it.
2. It’s ugly. Having the viewports overlap each other minimizes the total area they take up, while giving us the ‘tunneling’ effect of going into the screen as they expand. Unfortunately it just doesn’t look good with those hard edges. We could have had clever bordering artwork to smooth the transition, but a hole in the world is a hole in the world.

Addressing the first issue was pretty easy. All I’m doing is linearly interpolating between the position and size of each viewport to its target position and size, meaning I can actually place them any way I want and the transition will still smooth out over the same (arbitrary) time period. Here’s the expansion demo again, this time coming from the top-centre of the screen:

The sticking point is that second problem: it’s still ugly. The artists on the team were (rightly) concerned about what the backgrounds were going to look like overlapping in that way, or if we would even want backgrounds with a system like this.

A fresh perspective

After some more discussion we agreed on a kind of roulette system, mocked-up here by one of the artists:

Not only is this much better aesthetically, it actually improves the gameplay too. Since each viewport has the same width but different heights, I had to widen the area of the game world shown in each port in order to preserve aspect ratio. This had the knock-on effect of allowing the player to see further ahead in the world they’re about to shift to, helping them plan ahead.
The final breakdown for the portal heights had the main port taking 5/8ths of the window height, the next port with 2/8ths (1/4) and the last one with 1/8th. These are roughly the same proportions as the mock-up.
The only downside to this approach was that it made transitions more complicated: I now had to morph not only the viewports but the areas they represented too. Here’s what happens when the player shifts:

• The main viewport slides down off the screen.*
• The next viewport slides down, expands vertically and zooms in to replace it.
• The last viewport slides down, expands vertically and zooms in to replace that.
• A temporary fourth view slides in from the top.* Once the transition is complete, the temporary view is disabled and what was the main view now takes last place.

*Sort of.
In much the same way that GameMaker doesn’t allow viewports to be larger than the window, it also doesn’t allow them to occupy space outside the window. A ‘sliding’ viewport is actually vertically shrinking or expanding while zooming in or out. This is functionally similar to the expansion zoom trick from earlier. As one of my lecturers likes to say: in videogames programming, everything is a hack.

Above is a screenshot from the final game. Below is some footage of the transitions, with the time per transition increased fourfold for clarity. Below that is gameplay of the final game, so you can see how it ended up.
The last thing I’ll say about the viewports is that whenever you shift you’re actually discarding that world and generating a new one at the top. Having a temporary fourth lane was too much hassle for a jam game, so once the transition is complete you can actually see the new world pop in over the old one at the top. Since the backgrounds are detailed and the player isn’t focusing on the top of the window at that time, I think we get away with it. Look out for it in the videos below.

Ro-bat was a game I made originally for a last-day-of-the-year Jam (nothing official) on 31 December 2010. A few months back I started working on an iOS version with extra stuff, and that game just went live on the App Store!

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ro-bat/id892389144

This is my first “commercial” game!
For those of you wondering what happened to my entry of last years october challenge then, well, I wasn’t able to finish it in time, but I PROMISE it will be finished for this year’s october challenge. (It’s almost finished)

I tried to do this thing earlier, and Ifinally found some motivation to write it. As someone who never wrote a post mortem before or even competed in this jam, it might be interesting to reflect the things I did well, not so well and simply bad.

The idea was pretty simple: a connection between the old and new world. I started with making a moving boat, a sea and some islands. I didn’t have a real plan of some sort, because i hadn’t enough time to work out my idea. I continued coding, making art and doing other stuff until I ended up sunday night with the current game: galeas.

WHAT WENT WELL:

• Artwork. I’m not good at making pixel art, but i managed to make some decent sprites in quite a short time. I had some code lying around that i made for another game, which i recycled to make some cute particles to make the world more alive. It was also an excuse to not having to animate my sprites.
• people told me the game feels polished. one advice: screenshake, menus and particles!
• Simple sound effects are great for making a game feel more alive. thank you sfxr!
• Well, I finished it! This is probably the most important thing for me and it feels great. Congratulations to you if you made it too!

WHAT WENT NOT SO WELL:

• balancing combat is hard! the combat is pretty simple: you have 6 cannons which you fire all at the same time, and need some time to reload. the range is quite short, but the enemies have a pretty long range. You have to get close to the towers to hit them, but that makes it harder to evade their shots. The thing is that players try to kill all the towers, but there aren’t a lot of reasons to kill them! Anyway, you should try to figure out a good strategy for the combat, because it can be pretty rewarding to kill a lot of towers.
• Music. I need to learn how to make some sweet tunes.
•  I had to make a few, maybe a few to many bugfixes post compo.
• Releases. my game only has a download for windows. I should have made a OSX build. the problem with love2d is that it’s not possible to make a web release.

My scribbles. Most of them are to-do lists, because I like crossing out tasks.

that should wrap it up. thanks for reading!

you can try my game here!

Play/Rate the game here!

In general I’m really happy with how APOLLO turned out, and I’ve gotten some great feedback on it already Just thought I’d do a quick summary of how things went this time around, how I improved over previous LDs and hope to improve in the future.

What went well / improvements made:

• Aesthetic – I was able to nail the feeling I was going for with this game, through the look, sound, and how it plays. One of the things I’ve noticed in the past is how I stay deep in my comfort zone when it comes to visuals for my jam games, but I think I did an ok job of pushing things a bit further this time around.
• Sound – Though I didn’t compose original music for the game (it uses a track called “Past the Edge” from incompetech.com), I’m proud of what I did with the sfx. In the past I’ve fallen back on basic SFXR noises, and though I did use SFXR in my workflow, I think I did a much better job this time of creating sfx that fit into the mood I was attempting to create.
• Gameplay and originality – My 2 previous LD games suffered from a lack of originality imo, they each ended up being somewhat similar to gameplay mechanics that already exist. I feel like with APOLLO I was able to create a game that was entirely about my idea, and didn’t need to borrow gameplay concepts to round out the experience. I’m sure there are games out there it’s similar to, there almost always are, but I think I created a much more unique game than my previous LD entries.

What didn’t go well / areas to improve:

• Perceived complexity / learning curve – I wouldn’t say APOLLO is an especially complicated game, but due to the UI and presentation it can come off that way. The main problem is that a new player is bombarded with a lot of information, and for some people this is pretty hard to process. I didn’t want to make a straight up tutorial, as I wanted part of the game to actually be about learning how to navigate the world and use the actions available to you, but some easing the player into the world would probably have helped a lot.
• Visual clutter – Mainly, too much text. Kind of ties in with the previous point, there is just a lot of text onscreen at any given time. I personally like the aesthetic that this gives to the game, but to a player it can certainly be overwhelming. A goal I’ll set for the future is to try and do better at only showing the player what they need to know, and create better focal points on the screen.
• Pacing – I actually really like how slow-paced the game ended up being, but I’m marking it as an area to improve because I think it’s important for a jam game to be really easy to jump in and start playing right away (something that I think really helped NXTWPN10). I think it would have been possible to do this with APOLLO without sacrificing the slow, looming feel, by doing more to grab the player’s attention right at the start and not forcing them to hold up and analyze a quite dense screen’s worth of information before making their first move.

That’s basically what I’ve been thinking about regarding APOLLO since the jam finished! Making it was a really fun experience, and of course getting to see people’s reactions to it was even more fun. Many thanks to everyone who gave it a try!

Tags: postmortem

My Entry into Ludum Dare 30 is a little game called Connected We Run. It is an endless platformer game, that you control both characters using the same controls.

What Went Wrong

• Lack of theme inspiration, some themes you can get really excited about, and others just fall short. This was definitely one of the themes that lacked excitement for me.
• Clouded direction, the resulting game suffers from a lack of solid direction. Initially the game was going to be a platformer that you would control the two characters to reach their goal platform/door (similar to Beyond The Horizon by Lazdo) I ended up scrapping that idea really early because it resembled two of my past entries to much (Through The Blue Sea LD23 and its “sequel” I Threw The Red for mLD34) At that point I thought about Endless runners, and decided to go in that direction.
• Platform generation, The first day of the game I spent a good chunk of time getting the platforms to behave the way I wanted them. I wanted the dark and light characters to only collide with their respective colored platforms. A platform not of the matching color you would simply pass under. In the end it never felt right, the light character could jump up into the dark platforms, but it served limited purpose to do so. Then on Sunday morning I decided that the player should just be blocked into their respective sections. And that led to the breaking of my platform generation. (Up to that point you could jump ontop of any platform)
• Platform generated except the first five, nobody has mentioned it in a comment but it is one of the things that has bothered me, the first five platforms were positioned by me to fill the time before the generated platforms reach the player. I did it this way to simplify the player spawning (There is none, and that is why the Restart button didn’t work)
• Speed of the platforms, The speed was intended to start slow and slowly build up speed. It does build up speed, but at such a slow rate it is hard to notice.
• Title screen, While the title screen show a lot of good information, it could also be improved visually. I really like on the end screen where the text is mirrored. I am glad that I found time before the end to add in a title screen, because what it was in the initial submission was barren and white.
• Restart Button on the end screen, initially there was one but when I updated it before the compo ended (adding music, sound, and a title screen) I had to remove the restart button because it was not functioning at all. So I inserted a message in its place to refresh your browser to replay, I didn’t think it was a big deal in a 48 hour Ludum dare game, but several comments have mentioned it.

The initial title screen when first submitted

What Went Right

• Global Leaderboard was a great idea for this style of game, I have used them in the past, and always declare the base code for one, but it has been a while sense using it. The Leaderboard as several people have pointed out has no semblance of security, its just a page that gets queried with your name, score, and the game ID.  I have never had the response to any of my past entries that I have had to this one, so I have never bothered with any attempts to secure my Ludum Dare leaderboard. That may change soon.
• The score, although there have been some criticism of it seeming to be random, I enjoy the range of numbers that it produces. The score is calculated based on the times of the character. The first of the two characters that go out becomes the multiplier. Then when the second character goes out the score is calculated. (Lowest Time * (character 1 time + character 2 time)) So while you can continue to play after one of the characters is out, your score will ultimately be lower than someone who took both characters farther.
• Music and sound was a last minute addition, in fact I submitted before there was any music or sound, and ended up finding some time after to add them in. I think they both add a lot of the game, and it wouldn’t feel quite the same.

Gameplay begining screenshot

Other Thoughts

• One of the other criticism has been that when one of the characters fall out the game should end. I made the decision to keep the game going and to use it as a scoring system because of how I defined connected worlds. There was a blog post that I saw early on (I didn’t save the link) that showed several different images of connected worlds. The post looked at the definition of Connected worlds, and how it differs from a mirrored world. I then came up with my definition of how the connected world works, and build from that. The platform generation is independent and different in each world, so I felt that the characters should be able to function independently of one another.

Future

I think I almost always say I am going to continue the game in my postmortem, and then I rarely do. But I’m going to say it again, I will be making a postcompo version of the game, with fixes and improvements largely to the title screen, platform generation, leaderboard, and overall increasing the speed of the game. What is going to be different this time is that I will be making a Youtube video series of the improvements to the game. The series will start on Monday September 22nd, after I finish up the Ludum Dare 30 Games series.

Tags: postmortem

Why this game ? I had this idea for almost a year(initially a board game) but wasn’t getting an occasion to develop it(probably because of other games(college projects)). What this game is about ? As the theme for ludum dare 30 is connected worlds, I tried my best to make the game as per the theme. The game depicts a fight between three worlds. Three worlds fighting with each other to decided who’s superior. The tokens can only move to the world’s which are connected to the block it’s already in/ Problems Faced The initial(and primary) problem was the user input, I was not able to find a solution on how to move the tokens. Solution – Created the red blocks for each block and turned them into buttons with each button hard coded with a function (there was no time for experiment). The player turns were not in proper cycle. e.g. if all the tokens of a player are removed and his turn comes, he cannot move his tokens, hence, the game wouldn’t progress. Solution – Solved using Boolean values and permutation & combination. Link to the game – Triple ThreatHUD

So, here we are! The final Week! 😀

I want to thank you Ludum Dare, because this type of competition stimulates (me and other 2000 people) to create something unique and push out creativity without thinking too much.
It is something that we can’t do with our long run project, so this is an amazing way to unplug for a while.

This is my second LD so far, and in this round I’ve made something new and challenging to me:
A game that tells a story.

And this is the result: Bipolar World!

Bipolar World

A story about a Bipolar boy and his eternal fight between Anger and Happiness. 

Click and Play Bipolar World!

I know it isn’t perfect, but it’s finished, so I’m happy anyway.

Thank you Ludum Dare and good luck to Everyone!
I hope to join even the next one!

–Alessandro

I’m posting this in the hope that it will make my jam entries show up in my author page.

Here is my game: Contested Systems

Please leave a comment if you give it a go.

Thanks!

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

PLAY THE GAME HERE

What went right:

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

What went wrong:

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

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

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

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

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

Read the rest of the blog post…

Play & rate the games

Oscar’s Game: the HEROES quest

My Game: LyftOff!

Time Lapse

Oscar’s Game (youtube)

My Game (youtube)

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

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

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

Mood:

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

Humor:

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

Audio:

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

Graphics:

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

Theme:

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

Innovation:

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

Overall:

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

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

Background

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

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

The good

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

The inconclusive

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

The bad

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

End notes

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

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

Thanks for reading!

Tags: post-mortem

4 days remain so here goes some nice entries:

1. Cluster Struck – katamari goes intergalactic

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

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

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

3. Flicker – interesting puzzle game

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

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

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

5. Triple Threat – 3-player checkers

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

6. Starpiercer – really pretty

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A. First LD – LD #29

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

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

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

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

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

B. LD#30

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

improve the experience.

C. LD thoughts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Post mortem for Videogame Hero

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

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

I really liked the game I’ve made.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tags: hero, LD30, Mortem, Post, videogame

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

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

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

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

PLAY & RATE ONANIGAN (web win mac lin)

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

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

Hey everyone! We are the Button Masher Bros!

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

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

With so many submissions, there was absolutely no way we could play them all.

Special thanks to our friends at Reddit, twitter, and youtube who all stepped up to give us suggestions – you guys are the BEST!

If you like the games you see, be sure to check them out of Ludumdare.com and let the developers know what you think!

**Today we will be highlighting**:

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

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

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

Title: Superdimentional
Category: Compo Entry
Creator: Pixelmind

Finally, we’d love to hear what you think!

You can comment on the episode linked above, comment in this thread, or tweet us at:

@ButtonMasherBro – Show

@MathBlasterRitz – Chris

or @jwowBMB – Josh.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Play Here

Here is the timelapse of how we made Space Rails:

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

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

Will we ever learn?

Tags: jam, LD30, timelapse, unity, unity3d

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What went wrong

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

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

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

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

What went right

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

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

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

Difficulty – Challenge vs. Frustration

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

Closing words

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

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

Tags: javascript, LD30, phaser, post-mortem

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let us begin:

Mood:

Stories in the Sky – frosty

Humor:

Hey Lucky Lucky – GreyShock

Audio:

Dreamshift – AgentParsec

Graphics:

Shooty Space – Thaum

Theme:

MMO God – Nichii

Fun:

Galactic Dump – SoulGame

Innovation:

+46 – kristoffer zetterberg

Overall:

Uninhabitable – Slikker

Some other cool games to check out:

Danger Zones – skullum

Outer Shooterr – KrisDevelopment

Contraband – sprawl

Connected – vogon101

Two Empires – Tosic (myself :D)

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

//Tosic is out

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

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

Read the help, it might… Help!

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

Dan

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

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

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

Lucid :D

Look at spooky circles…

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

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

After you have read my plea, have a pie:

Note that large part of theme coverage comes from Boulevard of Broken Themes entry, which is why it has separate positions in the pie-chart. Note that “non-Boulevard” here means “is covered by something else than Boulevard”, not necessarily “isn’t covered by Boulevard”. Also, some special links were added, marked as [B]. Obviously, it stands for “basement” and has no relation to the game mentioned earlier in that paragraph.

Themes that have strong coverage found are bolded, while themes with weak or no coverage found aren’t (no coverage can be recognised by lack of linked games). I decide whether coverage is weak or strong arbitrarily, but there’s some measure decisive in most cases: if theme usage needs explanation, it means that it’s probably weak. Also, if there’s at least one game with strong coverage found, the ones with weak coverage won’t be linked (unless it’s one of weirder theme usages in Boulevard). Additionally, if there are many games that cover the given theme strongly, only the most noteworthy will be picked.
Additionally, themes that made it to the final round of voting are italicised. Just because.

Enjoy~!
(and beware of random links; they’re very random)

• Alchemy
• Another World [B]
  • An Otter World [LINK]
• Artificial Intelligence
• Brainwashed [LINK]
• Break It, Fix It
• Break The Rules
• Chaos
• Choose A Path [LINK]
• Connected Worlds [1] [2] [3] (I sure do enjoy overly literal intepretations every once in a while)
• Day and Night [1] [2]
• Destroy The System
• Do No Harm [LINK]
• Don’t Save The Princess
• Don’t Stop Moving [B] [LINK]
• Dreams And Nightmares [1] [2]
• End Of The Road [LINK] (well…)
• Everyone Is A Monster
• Experimentation [LINK]
• Flow [LINK]
• For Science! [LINK]
• Forces Of Nature [LINK]
• Forgotten [B]
• Fortress [LINK]
• From The Ashes
• Glimpse Of The Future
• Growing [LINK]
• Human Stupidity
• I For One Welcome Our New Robot Overlords [LINK] (I guess some people do…?)
• I Think It’s Alive [LINK] (isn’t it? ^^”)
• Illusion [B] [LINK]
• Infectious
• Isolation
• It’s A Trap!
• Knowledge Is Power
• Labyrinth [B] [1] [2]
• Limited Capacity
• Limited Control [LINK] (but it works well enough)
• Loot [LINK] (well, he gathers some goods along the way? O.o”)
• Losing Control
• Lost In Space [B]
• Love [B] [1] [2] (seriously, if I were to list every entry that strongly uses this theme of ~150 I played, I’d do quite a lot of linking…)
• Manipulate The Environment [B] [LINK]
• Maps [B] [LINK]
• No One Can See You [B] [LINK] and you’re dead
• No Return
• No Way In, No Way Out
• Nothing Is Real [LINK]
• Off The Grid
• On The Edge
• The Other Side [1] [2]
• Points Of View [LINK]
• Potato Salad [B] [LINK] (someone had to…)
• The Power Of Machines
• Randomly Generated [LINK]
• Rise And Fall [B] [LINK]
• Shadows [LINK]
• Something’s Out There
• The Space Is Getting Smaller
• Speed [LINK]
• Strange Physics [LINK]
• Strength In Numbers [1] [2] (I need you!)
• Supply And Demand [LINK]
• Survive
• Things Are Not What They Seem
• This Happens To Me Every Day [LINK] (really glad to see such outlandish theme somehow got covered! XD)
• Time Travel [LINK]
• Transformation [B]
• Trust No One
• Under Pressure [B]
• Unexpected Side Effect
• Unlimited
• What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
• What Is That In The Distance? [B]
• Where No One Has Gone Before [LINK]
• Wonderful Apocalypse
• You Are Already Dead [B] [1] [2] (boo~!)
• You Are The Weapon [LINK]
• You Can Never Have Too Many [LINK]
• You Can’t Fight Back [LINK] (except when you can)
• You Must Leave It Behind [B]
• You’re Not Supposed To Be Here [LINK]

Some of the themes found recently were actually quite ; perhaps if I had enough to play all 2500+ entries, I’d indeed find game for every single theme out there? ^^”
But I’m just a single person. If you spotted non-Boulevard coverage of any theme beside, please do mention it (best with a link). I’d like to catch as many as possible.

There have been some amazing games produced — as usual — during this season’s Ludum Dare competition. And usually I don’t bang my own drum. But!

If you want a game that’s easy to play but hard to master, doesn’t take itself seriously, and is basically an old-school arcade game juiced up on mind-altering drugs and a soundtrack that’s so good even I had trouble believing it was made in 72 hours, then you, my friend, want to play Sun God Star Bridge.

Get some. The ending will leave you … er… breathless. Okay, that’s a space pun. I’m sorry. Post is over. Next!  😀

Here is a list of some really cool games (imo) to take a closer look.

Mansion on the Hill – BuffaloPhil

Power the Planets – FrozenCow

Stratera – highlyinteractive

Worldly Traveler – MrTedders

Jeru’s Tower – ncannasse

Hello Worlds – dustyroom

Shattered – guimonpa

Awe – Oddly Shaped Pixel

Computer, Open That Door! – pLaw

If you haven’t already ported your game to some mobile platform you probably should. It really pays off. A week ago (actually 5 days) I published ICE on Google Play and at the moment there are nearly 550 ratings (average 4.3) and more than 10.000 downloads. Quite awesome, huh? Right now I’m polishing ports for iOS and WP.

You can download it from here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.queader.ice

And remember to rate here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=19913

Play Taxi Space! a HTML5 Canvas game

Serve funny passengers and drive from world to world to find out why so many people suddenly need space taxis.

“zzzZZZ” – Taxi driver

“Hey wake up, you got a passenger!” – Boss

Ludum Dare ended and next one is (probably) in April,

so if you want go on some GameJam in November:

I created GameJam which:

• starts on 29th November (beginning of Saturday)
• ends on 3rd December (end of Tuesday)
• voting ends on 10th December (end of Tuesday)
• will be on Game Jolt
• have theme (something like here)
• have 3 rules for game (like theme, but a bit complex)
• theme and rules voting will start 22nd
• have 4 challenge rules (like rules for Ludum Dare)

If you want to suggest theme or rule just do it here.

For more info go on that page.

If you don’t understand something, please, say it here or contact me on any way.

Tags: game jam

Near the end of the Ludum Dare 30, but maybe you don’t play in our game!)

I recommend play on your mobile device! Google Play’s link attached)

Link: Provider Bob

Link: Provider Bob

This was first LD experience. I have had many game ideas in the past, but save for some little games, such as a Breakout clone, in high school I made, I’ve always had trouble starting AND finishing games. I participated in LD in part hoping to actually finish something for once.  It was a mix of fun, interesting, nerve-wracking, why-isn’t-working. Here is what I learned from this:

What Went Wrong

• LD30 was held right before the new semester and classes started. I did not plan ahead for this as thoroughly as I should have. As a result, my post-submission porting and support/maintenance has been lacking. Time-management for this project in general was kind of bad. The fact that I indicated this post-mortem would come up soon after I posted the game, and am only now getting to it shows how bad time management for this game was. Another example would be…
• I wanted to do something different from what all the other participants were going to do was probably going do. So many of my initial ideas were scrapped. I eventually settled on…maneuvering a love letter though space. Wait, that doesn’t sound like my game? That’s because I scrapped the idea I settled on Saturday afternoon! Even after I already made a graphic for it. So “development” of UnThread didn’t technically start until the night of Day 1. Speaking of art…
• While my game did not have that many assets (and those assets are incredibly unpolished), I was still coding and doing vector images at the same time. I was incredibly concerned with “game feel” when I should have gotten the system down it was supporting first.

What Went Right

• Once I figured out and nigh completed the core of game (“unthreading, or unwrapping the dimensional thread holding the gates together”), the rest of development the next day was mostly a breeze.
• There were very few nasty bugs during development. And those bugs did not consume a huge chunk of development time.

Overall, I ended up enjoying the experience and will probably participate again.  I wish I supported the game better after I posted it. I got several comments about bugs and issues that I need to attempt to fix now. I am proud of my work (though in hindsight I would make it the game little easier/clearer what’s going on). Though, it probably won’t rank high compared to other participants’ great games. Finishing the game felt amazing, and I’m glad I participated. Now I have bugs to fix, awesome LD games to play, and studying to do.

Play Thinkings

It’s a puzzle game about understanding quotes through the life of 2 creatures in a clean aesthetic environment.

The game appeared to be harder than I expected, but the solution is given (with anti spoiler) so that you can go through the entire story even if you don’t get the enigma =)

Have Fun !

Play Thinkings

Space Delver is a game where you play as a space merchant. It’s a game of space exploration, advancement and micromanagement spiced up with a little bit of story.

What can you do in the game?
– Fly around as much as you can with the amount of fuel you have.
– Gather resources from asteroids and planets by using your mining laser.
– Land on planets, explore the planet, communicate with many different races living on them.
– Trade on your home station, on cargo ships, on federation space stations, on other merchant’s space stations and on planets .
– Upgrade your ship to be better at controlling your ship, mining, defending your ship against pirate attacks, increasing your cargo capacity and so on.
– Call for help if you run out of fuel, only by taking the risk of getting the attention of a pirate ship. If you run out of money and fuel together, the game is over for you.
– Follow the federation news, actively participate in events happening around galaxy or use business opportunities wisely.
– Choose the hard way for earning a lot, hunt bounties with your merchant ship.
– Travel to other solar systems with your warp drive or a warp gate, discover new resources hidden in the depths of space.
– Buy new ships, enlarge your station hangar.
And many other things that we may come up with in the following days.

From now on, we have a development blog here >> http://spacedelver.wordpress.com
We are working hard to flesh out the game we wanted after the jam.

You can play very limited jam version here >> http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=39580
Please don’t hesitate to rate and comment. Every single idea helps us in development process.

Our game: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=22050

What Went Wrong:
– We started with 3 people and good ideas, but the ideas proved to ambitious and 1 person quit, so we only really started after about half the time had already passed.

– A lot of people thought our game was too hard. We can both beat it easily, along with a few other people, but most people struggled with it.

– The game is pretty short, which is partly why we wanted to make it so challenging. We didn’t end up with enough time to make the entire game that we had planned, so we had to settle for limiting the game to one area, instead of implementing a whole story with multiple areas.

– We didn’t have time to make custom audio. The sound effects actually turned out pretty well (we didn’t make them ourselves), but there was no music. For our game from the last competition we had time to make an entire custom soundtrack with multiple tracks. Here is our last game if you’re interested:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=22050

What Went Well:

– The game is pretty well polished. Despite not being able to complete our entire idea, when we realized that we wouldn’t have time to add much more, we dedicated the last few hours to polishing what we already had.

– The mood turned out very well. We added flickering lights and eerie sound effects that really contributed to the creepy mood of the game. People have said our game is scary, and we’re glad to have been able to achieve that with simple looking enemies (shadows) and without adding any gore.

– Despite many people thinking it was too hard, we think the game mechanics themselves were actually pretty innovative. Many people did games with the idea of pressing a button to go into another world, but our game has a bar that shows how far into the other world you are and if it fills up you lose. This, along with the flashlight mechanic that drives the shadows away, makes for very interesting and unique game-play.

– There is a Nick Cage Easter egg somewhere in the game.

The Future

We had a good idea for this game and it turned well, but we would like to release a post-compo version sometime in the future. This would include many more areas and possibly some of the story that we didn’t add. The difficulty level would also be changed. Many people thought that the flashlight didn’t do much to stop the shadows even though it actually slows them down considerably. Therefore, we’ll try to make it FEEL as if the flashlight does more and possibly make it actually do a little more. With a bigger game we could also have more progressive difficulty, so that people would get used to using the flashlight in easy areas before it got to difficult. We’re also planning to add many other features like lit-up areas that would act as safe-zones and a lantern with limited uses that would drive away shadows if you are surrounded.

Praise the Sun!

Tags: LD30, post mortem postmortem, post-mortem

This quick, simple and easy to use screen lapse application for Mac OSX makes it easy to create time-lapse images. Simply start it up, choose the rate per frame, choose the directory, and name the folder and watch it work like a dream! Your endless search for a screen capture program for Mac OSX is finally over! Get QuickLapse today!

Video

GameGrape Studios

After powering through around 20 games in the last couple of hours, I finally got to 100 played games, so now its my turn to recommend some of them!

Go play and rate them before it’s too late! They’re all compo entries.

Planetary Replan

The best multiplayer game that I tried this jam (out of 3). Pull a friend over to your computer, and have a quick strategic battle.

I always think that it’s the good kind of ballsy to make a multiplayer game for Ludum Dare, since you sacrifice amount of people who will play your game, in order to create what you feel like making.

13 minutes of light

A gripping story with a unique sense of interaction and player influence. I sat at the edge of my seat playing through this, truly hoping that it would end well with my help – and it did, and I was extremely relieved. Go have your own experience:

Clashing Galaxies

Strategic warfare in jam-style at its best. When minimalism gives you a sense of grandiosity:

HopSlide

No doubt the most innovative game I tried this Ludum Dare. It’s that kind of idea that I  had during my brainstorm, but dismissed because I told myself I wouldn’t be able to make a well designed game out of it. Managore managed to do just that, now go wreck your brain:

Flicker

My favorite game out of the 100, a brilliantly simple puzzler, with beautiful, ensnaring visuals, surprisingly varied gameplay, and a soundscape that sounds like a lush, robotic rainforest. I will return to this many times more, I expect.

And lastly, my own game, Twist and Weave, a minimalist chain-simulator with true challenge and movements as smooth as a newborn’s buttock. I’ll love you forever if you rate and comment it 😀

Thank you everyone for being awesome and making games that I can enjoy squeezing into my spare time. See you next Ludum Darre!

Tags: 100 club, recommendations, TwistAndWeave

Finally, post-mortem.
Been very busy lately. But better late than never, right?
I find Shift Keeper is quite decent. Seriously, I think this is my best entry with all past Ludums.
Hopefully the growth will continue. Especially I like my new tool, Unity. It is very cool, and I am more and more get control.
Soooooo, I am generally satisfied with the result, and here’s why.

Good.
• Finish. Made a playable version that runs and looks good about any monitor in full-screen. It’s good by itself to do something just complete somehow %)
• I managed to work out a general view of the characters and the styling of the two locations. In fact, it’s how to make two different games.
• I learned something, which did not know before. For example, several different cameras in one project. Also came up with a cool way to animate the shooting.
• Also, I am very pleased to play with particles. I understood their power as a tool for visualization. This smoke is in the second world made ​​only one source of particles. And the salute from the magic balls, and stuff that fall from the skeletons. Very nice tool, particles.

Bad.
• My time management disappoint me. So, I do not have time to do animation and polish balance. I have devoted too much time scalability also. To make the game like “stretching” I spent all second night. This frazzle me out, and I did not have time to make a delicious pieces, such as animation, or skills.
• I did not prepare before Ludum. I should had stretch my brain and recall skills before Ludum.
• Also, on the eve before Ludum I did not hardly sleep at night. So I passed out right in the middle of the first day of LD.

• The last point. Do not drink before the night of programming! I allowed myself to have a couple of Long Island with my friends in honor of the victory on the local Ludum, and it was absolutely unnecessary. Everything just fall out of my head %) Only sober after-party before coding, really.

So that’s it. Hope you overcome this wall of words, and get something helpful.
Play Shift Keeper, and stay good game creators, my friends %)

My puzzle game for LD30 is now available on Android. I also made a postcompo version.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=18943

The main goal of the postcompo version was to simplify the rules a little. Until now, every powered tile could be moved.
This was never the goal, most levels can be solved by moving only the Supernova.
But without the possibility of moving other tiles my random level generation could produce impossible levels.
I have now fixed my random level generation, so there is no need to move other tiles around.

Here are the changes :
Slight change of rule : only the supernova can be moved around
Progression (last level unlocked) is now saved
Random levels Hard & Unknown better balanced
Last level completely remade (less difficult)
Better UI

Tags: compo, LD30, post-mortem

This was the first Ludum Dare that Paperbox Studios had ever participated in, we had a great time making our game Kid Got Lost and were quite pleased with the feedback that we had received for our entry. When the theme of connected worlds was revealed we knew that the obvious choice was to make some sort of turn based strategy or a 4X game since this type of game play would fit in so naturally to the theme of connected worlds.

After lots of brainstorming we eventually came up with the idea of creating Kid Got Lost, a maze game at its core but we implemented a mechanic where you could shift from one dimension to another, this is where the theme of connected worlds played its part in our idea.

The goal of our game is to find a key and then precede to finding the door, sounds easy enough but you need to look into the other dimension in order to be able to see different objects such as the key, traps, portals and the door. You are not alone in the other dimension though, you need to be wary of ghosts who can sense your presence when in the other dimension and will come after you.

Sound became quite an important element within Kid Got Lost, initially we just wanted sound and music for the sake of actually having those elements within our game. Our amazing sound designer had other ideas though, in a few hours he had managed to create amazing atmospheric music and eerie sound effects that turned our game into quite a chilling experience. The sounds also play an integral part, as the player will  be able to listen to the howls of the ghosts near by, acting as a warning of when it was not safe to swap between dimensions.

After we had published our game on Ludum Dare, we began to receive some feedback. Most of the feedback received were positive, commenting on the unique concept and mechanic, complementing the art style and the sound effects as well. Although we intended from the beginning that we wanted Kid Got Lost to be a difficult game, the idea of the game was to challenge the player until they finally made it through the maze and the aftermath would be a sense of satisfaction.  may have gone a bit overboard with the difficulty, as many users commented on how hard it was. We ended up making it slightly more forgiving to hopefully be more appealing.

All in all Ludum Dare was a fun and amazing experience for the whole team, we learnt a lot of lessons but at the end of the day were happy with our product. We played some amazing games from other developers and were amazed by so many great submissions that were made, it’s just so intriguing to see what other developers came up with working within the same time and theme constraints and how they went about making it. We are definitely looking forward to the next Ludum Dare Jam but until then guys keep making great games, keep innovating and have a great time.

Tags: jam, LD30, Ludum Dare, post-mortem

Here is the postmortem of Grow Your Planet. Before you read it, go and play it!

And skip to the conclusion is you find it too long!

What Went Right

For our first Ludum Dare, it went really well, actually. Following is a list of what we are really satisfied:

The Main Idea

We found the idea of making planets grow in a pot at home quite easily, and we found it really cool. Moreover, it fitted the theme very well, while remaining original (we didn’t want to make a platformer with two overlapping levels or such other quite obvious ideas).

The Graphics

We aren’t so good at pixel art, and hand-drawn graphics add a personnality to the game (I think so, at least). People seemed to like the style, Ylang did a really good job here. Many thanks to her!

The Programming

Stencyl is a wonderful tool that I’ve been using for some while, so everything went quite smoothly. No bugs, no unsolvable problems, no features that needed to be removed due to their complexity… The main challenge was the use of the image API, for the “taking pictures” part of the game, but here again, it wasn’t that hard.

What Went Wrong

Nothing Just kidding. Actually, nothing went really bad. Some things could have been better, though:

The Platformer Levels

To reinforce the “connected” part of the theme, we decided to add levels of some sort—and we chose platformer ones—to make the planets interact which each other. Sadly, this decision was made too late, and I ended up not having the time to make them. As a result, I made a small, poorly implemented one that can be completed in 5 seconds, and duplicated it to make three levels. This is the main thing to rework in a post-compo version.

The Polish

The game is not polished enough: it lacks transitions when you unlock a new planet, and the ends abruptly. For the next time: do not finish 30 seconds before the deadline!

The Communication

I am quite new to this, so I did not really communicate about the game. This is a thing to improve for next time, to gain more visibility.

What Went Neither Right Nor Wrong

The Music

Maple did a quite good job here, but the music was made at the end, too quickly, we did not have the time to record it and I implement it poorly in the game. Next time, we should begin to work earlier on this aspect of the game.

Time Management

We slept enough (too much?), and we respected the delays we fixed ourselves for each of our goals. We took it maybe too easy and relaxed, which caused the not-so-good platformer levels. It is strange to say that, but we’ll need to sleep less next time!

Conclusion

We had a lot of fun and are very satisfied with our first Ludum Dare game. We could do almost everything as planned. Just need to sleep less and to communicate more. Beside that, we did quite well, I think.

I’ll post a timelapse soon!

Tags: postmortem

So I entered the LD30 compo with my game Universe Connector, and this time I captured my progress and made this cool timelapse for you to watch!

Play (and rate): Universe Connector

Timelapse software: Chronolapse

Music: I made an updated version of the music from the game.

If you wanna here more about the progress I also made a Post-Mortem you can read

Tags: compo, LD30, music, timelapse

Having taken part in 5 Ludum Dare events now (from LD26-30), I think I’ve gotten the hang of making a game in such a short period of time (kind of). I’m just going to say straight away that I’m actually quite happy with the game I’ve made this time around, but it still could be better.

The Good:

Time Management

You know, time management is strangely one of my strong points in Ludum Dare. I somehow managed to fit everything in, even after feeling incredibly tired by the end of it. There was plenty of time for all the art and music that I wanted to go in (kind of).

“The Art of Screenshake”

If you know of Vlambeer, you’ll know their games are incredibly polished, and they put a lot of work into “game feel”. When I saw Jan Willem Nijman’s presentation “The Art of Screenshake” I made sure that I used his tips and tricks, and made them my own to make sure the game I made was really enjoyable and felt really nice to play, even if the graphics or gameplay mechanics weren’t exactly special. I feel I achieved that, as not only in Bounty of Corruption, but also my last LD game “Flesh Hunter” I got many comments about how well polished the games are. Ultimately, I think that a polished game that is fun to play will do so much better than a game that follows the theme word for word. Speaking of Vlambeer, a lot of the comments on the Ludum Dare page say that it plays a lot like Nuclear Throne, made by guess who? Nuclear Throne was a huge inspiration for this game, and it’s clear to see that.

The Bad:

Theme

It was clearly going to be “Connected Worlds”, but I was almost completely unprepared for this (in the end, I personally think that the game is miles away from the theme). I wanted to either make a dungeon crawler (hooray for originality!) or a big space game where you have to travel to different planets, both of which were based around randomly generated levels. Both of which are also probably the most common type of game made for Ludum Dare with a theme like that… This was my greatest weakness. They say that you don’t need a good idea to make a great game/app, but I don’t have any idea, let alone a single, terrible one (same with names)

“Kind Of”

While the game was very polished, and I’m happy with the content that was added, it’s missing a lot. I feel like this game needs more variety in gameplay, more enemies, different weapons (upgrades even?), etc. It also has a half-assed introduction and outro, but if I’d spent time making those really nice, I would’ve spent less time on other things that are more important for a 48 hour game making competition.

Post-compo Version:

Like all the games I’ve created for Ludum Dare, I plan to add loads of features, but most of which never get finished, or even started sometimes. For some reason Bounty of Corruption feels a little different, as if there’s an urge to add things for some reason. Anyway, here’s a list of stuff I’m going to try and add:

• Networked Multiplayer (I’ve got a super basic prototype already functional! 😀 See below for video)
• An introduction/outro, as mentioned earlier
• More enemies, such as a final boss.
• Balancing. Yep, while the game’s balance isn’t that bad, it’s definitely harder for people who have never played it before, as there isn’t enough ammo spawning in. Also, some random generation needs fixing, cacti can spawn on top of the enemy portals…

And there you have it folks, a game I’m proud of, and what I could have improved upon. I recommend you check it out for yourself, you might be pleasantly surprised!

Rate my game here! http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=20850

Tags: postmortem

Hey everyone! Cake the artist here! Hope everyone has been having a good time rating and playing games so far. 😀 Better late than ever, but I really wanted to share the timelapse for our game, “Hypnagogia”. The game is about decisions, life, and death mixed with a little bit of dungeon-crawling elements in there. I hope this timelapse gives you a good idea of my thought process behind the game.

Be sure to check out our game! We’d love any last-minute comments or ratings! www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=10976

Tags: LD30, timelapse

Who would have figured Hal 9000 for a cheaty space cheater at Rock Paper Scissors? At least he can sort of help us fire the Genesis Rocket.. Dangit, who opened up an inter-dimensional portal filled with puzzles?

The Games Showcased:

[The Edge of Earth 5000] by Hypno Hustla

[Tangled Mini Worlds] by Lars Kristian

[Trappy Tomb] by Jimmy Paulin

Tags: Chupacabra Showcase, game reviews, Video Showcase

With less than a day left before judging ends, I figured I’d share the timelapse recap I made of the livestream of my friend and I making Melody’s Long Ladder Home using Stencyl. It’s just the entire 12-plus hour livestream (done over three days), condensed into less than 23 minutes.

If you still want to try our game, you can try it here.

Tags: jam, LD30, postmortem, stencyl, timelapse

A bunch more progress with my Post-Compo Ludum Dare release, and a demo available (by demo I mean it’s incomplete-final release will still be free).

Elements-a major part of the final experience are still missing as I ran into constant issues with the system and decided to work around it for now, balancing out the rest of the game.  So you can now progress through the worlds by defeating boss enemies-which spawn after defeating a certain amount of minions, and you’re able to choose which stat to invest in (which will be able to complement your play style more so when elements are added).

Below you can see a video showing the latest progress.

It’s incomplete but it’s at a good point to start receiving feedback on the current experience, so if you’d like to try it out you can download this demo here for PC – https://www.dropbox.com/s/i3q8mm0dbv6kek9/RageDOWPostCompoDemo.zip?dl=0

—Controls (keyboard | controller)–
Movement—  w/a/s/d | Left Joystick
Camera—  Mouse | Right Joystick
Invert Vertical Camera Motion— Middle Mouse Button | R3
Swing Attack—  Left Mouse Button | R2
Strike Attack—  Right Mouse Button | R1
Jump—  Spacebar | L1

—Gameplay Notes–
This shows your combat data indicators – http://i.imgur.com/mJTzMIY.png
This shows you what chests are available to get and how they help you – http://i.imgur.com/aRvDg1p.png
Currently there is no ‘end world’, however the final build is planned for you to only combat 5 worlds before facing the final enemy. It’s intended to be a challenge to reach that point and your score will be based upon how many enemies you defeated.
Currently you intentionally don’t die, so that you can continue forward and balance the difficulty growth of enemies throughout each world/how the stat increases balance, etc, without worrying so much about death. It’s more a test of how it feels currently.

I really hope you enjoy this latest update to the project and I look forward to rounding out the experience further for its completion soon

EDIT: A small update but one worth mentioning, made some balance changes and spiced up the variety in boss battles, now you’ll begin to face enemies who can only be damaged by the boss’s attacks. I’ve replaced the video here and updated the download with the latest build, hope you enjoy the changes.

Why this game ?

I had this idea for almost a year(initially a board game) but wasn’t getting an occasion to develop it(probably because of other games(college projects)).

What this game is about ?

As the theme for ludum dare 30 is connected worlds, I tried my best to make the game as per the theme.

The game depicts a fight between three worlds. Three worlds fighting with each other to decided who’s superior.

The tokens can only move to the world’s which are connected to the block it’s already in/

Problems Faced

The initial(and primary) problem was the user input, I was not able to find a solution on how to move the tokens.

Solution – Created the red blocks for each block and turned them into buttons with each button hard coded with a function (there was no time for experiment).

The player turns were not in proper cycle. e.g. if all the tokens of a player are removed and his turn comes, he cannot move his tokens, hence, the game wouldn’t progress.

Solution – Solved using Boolean values and permutation & combination.

Link to the game – Triple Threat

Last Day of rating time left, folks!  Get playing, get commenting!

And after you’ve played my game, you can ponder these stats:

This shows what percentage of contestants have commented on others games.

I had suspected that a lot of players comment in quick succession on different games, suggesting that they hadn’t actually played them in any depth.  However, thankfully, the stats really don’t back that up.  There are some examples, but really surprisingly rare.  People really don’t sit down and speed-rate and comment a lot of games; lets hope for the best that they are playing them instead 😉

As my game relies on people commenting, I’m eager to get everyone commenting.  Here’s my game’s penetration:

We are tracking the location of 721 LD30 contestants.

524 contestants have successfully used the game, entering their user name and looking at the map; that’s 20% !!!

56% of these have been back more than once!  The median is 3 repeat visits!

450 contestants have updated their location in the game; the other 74 were satisfied with the game’s guess.

But, here’s the kicker, only 324 have rated my game

And only 202 people have have commented on my game.  A handful are not contestants, but the rest … I can’t see you light up on my map  Here’s how my map is lit up when I check it now:

I would like you all to go comment on other people’s game, not just my own!

Last Day Now… you know what to do!

Now Go Play and Comment!

Out of all the themes this LD, the only one I had a solid idea for was “Lost In Space.” I had even made a detailed design document with all of the controls, mechanics, level design and goals outlined. So when I found out that the theme was “Connected Worlds” I had no ideas; all I could think about was my “Lost In Space” idea. So I repurposed my idea to work with “Connected Worlds.” Basically you play as a single astronaut in a ghetto spaceship that was sent on a mission to reconnect two planets by deploying a communications satellite. These planets used to be connected by a single satellite but it broke, disconnecting these planets from each other.

I made this game in Unity in around ~35 hours.

What Went Well:
-Physics! Unity’s physics is a key part in this game!
-The Satellite controls. Deploying the satellite and manoeuvring it is very lifelike and a lot of fun.
-The Spacescapes. They are pretty awesome, if I do say so myself.
-The Satellite Model. I really like it!
What Didn’t Go Well:
-Physics. Sometimes the ship’s physics glitches and it starts spinning and flipping. This is really cool for the player inside the ship but it ruins the game.
-Textures. Why do spaceships have so many textures!
-The glass effect on the window. I needed something to make the windows look windowy. This did the job but I don’t like it very much.

Now, if you haven’t played Satellite yet you can play it here!

Tags: connectedworlds, lostinspace, postmortem, satellite

I posted some thoughts about the LD48 midgord vikings blog post. It’s pretty cool how adjusting simple things (like character controls), the game becomes much more playable. In the original version, it’s clear that scrolling the screen is a problematic. I made changes so that you move only one character, and camera moves alongside.

That alone makes the movement much better.

No post compo version available yet, but feel free to try out the original jam entry: available here.

I know the results are coming soon, and because of that I decided to publish a playthrough of my entry, PitBall, which is also my second participation, in case you are looking for more games to play and rate before the rating time ends. If you want to play quickly, there’s a web version.

Play now!

Hi! There is only 8h left for voting! Please, rate our game. Just look at the dog, isn’t he cute? 😉

I have been working on the post-compo version for some time. It’s been a lot of fun in making a small 48-hour compo work into a bigger version.

Indeed, I learned a lot of new stuff in expanding this game. And when I say “Learned a lot”, it means I encountered a lot of weird problems and killed an army of nasty bugs.

Yeah, I have to say I’m really lucky to not face them in the compo time. Just 1/3 of them and I will be bound to fail in submitting a playable game.

Anyway, please take a look at what I’ve made until now, and I will be very grateful if you could give some suggestion and feedback

Play the post-compo version here  or tmpxyz.itch.io/universal-gravitation

Oh, almost forget to mention: I have prepared a cake here by the tradition, LOL, just kidding.

Hi there! Thanks for rating us, this ludum dare has been hectic!!

With less than 8 hours to go you can still rate our game here:
Rate Alice Anxiety now!

Rate Alice Anxiety now!

A post-compo version is on the way, probably will be posted after the results go live. Check us again later for more info!

Some of you may remember during LD29 I had a crack at predicting some of the highest rated entries using machine learning. Specifically, I dumped out a list of entries predicted to be in the top 10th percentile based on Overall score, using only words in the comments (adjectives and adverbs) that were predicted using K-nearest neighbour classification based on a model trained with LD15-LD28 comments and scores. Phew. Deep breath.. I never did the followup post to look at just how many I got correct.

It turned out in my rush to do something before judging ended last time, I’d made some errors when training the model (mostly to do with dealing with Overall(Jam) vs. Overall scores and unrated entries). Embarrassing, but hey, it’s a work in progress, Caveat emptor :). As a result, this list is different to the original one I posted (with some overlap) .. however since ratings were available, I could see which of the predictions were actually correct:

Correct predictions, LD29 compo and jam combined (128):
These were correctly predicted to be in the top 10th percentile.

Hypnohustla, DannyG59, ApoorvaJ, Alex Rose, Zarkith, Snowflower, Tomski, rubna, Overkill, PlasterPhantom, snapman_GT, Lama, ix, Robinerd, Eirikir, Gabriel, GamerTaters, Mental Atrophy, Solifuge, GertJohnny, xdegtyarev, ilovepixel, TeamInCharge, Pierrec, bitserum, petey123567, Nition, Cambrian_Man, flrn, quill18, GarethIW, 01101101, IAmSpencer, Lyje, _Rilem, voidqk, HacksawUnit, SaintHeiser, Xaychru04, Mikhail Lyubimov, Maschinen-Mensch, 7elephants, Andrew Shouldice, Elisée, savethejets1, baykush_figtree, orangepascal, geekdrums, Helopol, Danman9914, Frump, TijmenTio, Ellian, Hemuuuli, SecondDimension, Mase, Yword, bvanschooten, Double Zero One Zero, oatsbarley, TheGreenTie, DragonXVI, zillix, Benjamin, TobiasW, Evilion, ZYXer, Mr. Jif, quickfingers, KickBack, j_peeba, Ditto, Dreauw, dukope, Jezzamon, Wolve, TeamPurpleDolphins, Raiyumi, Knighty, nka, StudioWolfox, deepnight, Draknek, Miltage, arkeus, CryoGenesis, UltimateWalrus, Turnipnose, DrPrettyPatty, 01010111, Ludonaut, Oddly Shaped Pixels, Bekokstover, oostap, Pixlexia, lajos, jsmars, Toki Anholmes, Dr_V, Zednaut, DDRKirby(ISQ), Romko Pidstryhach, Make A Game, torcado194, Managore, SteveSalmond, NickZangus, EpaceGames, rpgwhitelock, Jools64, TeamFlare, Cake&Code, jahlgren, mark.goetz, radmars, InfectionTeam, greysphere, BumbleBirds, Diptoman, Flai, Almost, Catman, _adamturnbull, Valandre, Split82, lucienpro, SimonLarsen, Aomeas

Incorrect predictions, LD29 compo and jam combined (162):
These were predicted to be in the top 10th percentile, but weren’t.

gigitrix, X54321, SonnyBone, elefantopia, SunShiranui, brofist56489, Beavl, d__adee, hampa, eteeski, Otrora Interactivo, kiririn51, Agecaf, Indie Squid, halfmage, Snoother, Photon, Coin Flip Games, TheElephantSeal, Glint Games, Gap, haloflooder, Tuism, ToOB, joe40001, TowelKing, Christina Antoinette Neofotistou, cwkx, Ithildin, javierecf, Zelun, mr_tag, conormn, Robotic, tylerb1, jackolondon, enderosc, NeiloGD, Liens, zn01wr, Dualhammers, Jakub Koziol, Sparrow, Lerc, tacs, teambrookvale, MrShoestore, rico.albe, Nik Sudan, mir007, John Drury, eufrik, Chinchilla, Secret_Tunnel, Colorvade, thinkster, grozamorei, Tweak, admung, allurious, Kino333, praporomsk, Akz-, Woftles, NoahC_, AhNinniah, Bruno Massa, Cawrtz, BillToWin, Striwx, ErikU, SalamiChild, CitrusPossum, lightsoda, FGM, NiceAlexanderAS, nddrylliog, Mapboy, Figglewatts, goerp, Thomas Ingham, abrie, malmazuke, Zekronz, harleylaurie, wimnea, Mlle Eole, Recursiveanomaly, berareu, AgentParsec, Noah Ratcliff, Lrnk, Erfeo, Rahazan, Magdev, madjackmcmad, Joe Williamson, DarkMeatGames, Stuffie, angelk, twelveplusplus, Colthor, camlang, magicspark, DNA Yarn, LazyParia, Zampi, suurin, Linus Lindberg, Joshua_Burr, eastes, BlazeCell, Zutty, myachin, Sodaware, WhiteWolf93, TheMarvellousTeam, PriorBlue, Christophe, Hyoga-3D, StoneMasters, mcapraro, iossif, Exeneva, Kyatric, Dark Arts and Sciences, Typedeaf, Balloonsfor600, tenpn, ShivanHunter, Nuclear_Hammer, TheH, td1801, Dailydo, WetDesertRock, DarkUser, Benn, mortus, sockfolder, lief, jtpup0, petrih, MintArcade, LTyrosine, sirdorius, Nizar89, FistBumpGames, archaeometrician, jurnacsr, Pent, Cherno, brother.byto, Thijsku, Muu?, Kevlanche, louis.denizet, SuperIzzo, geounknown, BuKaneerz, daandruff, BrothersT, Detocroix

Summary: It looks like I can use the comments on entries to guess if any one entry will be in the top 10th percentile with about 50/50 chance of getting it right.

Next post … LD30 predictions using the same method !

Tags: predictions

Ludum dare is almost over… Well.. If you don’t played parallel worlds yet, click on image and try it!

Thank to you dear player.
Thanks to everyone who rated my game.
Thanks to other developers for amazing work.
and…
Thanks for the ludum dare.
I’ll be back on #31 !

Ludum Dare is awesome. A welcomed challenge every four months. In order to improve my skill at design, I spend most of my time creating simple prototypes to learn what does and doesn’t work. This has benefitted me immensely and I remained convinced that it is the right route to becoming a better designer. The downside to this practice is that I don’t have much to show for it. Raw prototypes don’t show off very well. However, Ludum Dare gives me the opportunity to release a game, even if it’s a short web game. It’s nice to be able to show people something with a little bit more polish to it.

For Ludum Dare 30 I created 100 Days. You are the EAS Indomitable, the first human vessel to explore deep space. Disaster strikes and you must survive for 100 Days before home base can warp the Indomitable back to safety.

100 Days Entry

What went right?

Scope

When the theme was released at 6pm I did not go anywhere near a computer. Since I have been making it a habit to design on paper every detail that will be in my prototypes, I didn’t see why I should do it any different for a LD game. Especially given the short time limit, I wanted every aspect of the game thought out upfront. If I missed some detail then I would consider that a failure. Before touching a computer I had the actions listed, the resources that would be used, the costs of moves, combat details, and even had drawn what I wanted the UI to look like. Because of this upfront effort, there were less surprises and I had a pretty good idea of what needed to be done by when.

Though knowing when features needed to be done didn’t mean they would be done in time. I also executed the features in scope efficiently. As a programmer, it’s really easy to get caught up in doing things the “right” way. Spending the extra time to make sure architect is clean or making sure the code runs as optimally as possible. KISS: Keep it simple stupid, especially for a game jam. The gains you get by doing it “correct” is not often worth the time spent.

The world generation for 100 Days is hardly optimal or even elegant. In a 200×200 space, random worlds are created based off of a probability curve which decreases the further away from the origin. Then another pass marks worlds that are connected to the origin world. Yet another pass will then walk from each world that isn’t connected to the origin and walk towards the origin until it hits a world that is connected. To make sure that the player can traverse at any depth a circle of worlds is created every 10 nodes. Finally, to keep options open for the player, random worlds are selected and additional worlds are generated walking away from the selected world.

Now I have very little experience with procedural generation. I do not know any common practices, algorithms, or techniques. My approach to the world generation was simply the most obvious option that came to me. I am absolutely sure that there are far more calculations than necessary, probably even redundant calculations, but I do not care. I had the entire world generation code completed before I went to the bed on the first night. A huge part of what I needed in the game, completed in a few hours. The negative impact of my straight forward obvious approach? 2.5 seconds. According to my analytics, the average load time for users was 2.5 seconds before they can play the game. I can live with that. To further drive this point, the AI uses limited DFS to find the player. I didn’t even attempt to use a heuristic which would not have been hard since I know where the player is. I didn’t need to. The game ran at 60 fps with the simple searching.

Though more than just programming features contribute to scope. Content is expensive. It takes time to build a diverse world, write an interesting script, or to have a wide variety of challenges. That’s not to say focusing on any of these for a Ludum Dare is a bad idea. We all want these things for our games, but it’s easy to forget or underestimate just how costly content can be. 100 Days was kept purposefully simple. The story was brief, only a few enemies and they all behaved the same way, and no sprite animations were created. Keeping an eye on how much content I’d have kept creating 100 Days in 48 hours possible.

Time Management

I see a lot of people who sleep little or none at all and work themselves past the point of exhaustion. This is not the way to handle a Ludum Dare. I understand why this happens, you only have two or three days to complete a game. Time is precious and you have very little of it. It’s easy to think that you need to spend more and more hours to complete your entry. I’d argue that doing this hurts your output and you can get more quality work completed by spending less time working on it. I make sure to get a full night’s rest every night, I regularly take breaks, and I’ll try to make sure I have a wind down period where I’ll do something else before going to bed. The thing is if I’m tired I’ll make mistakes. If I make mistakes I’ll get frustrated. If I’m frustrated then I’ll make more mistakes. The worst of it is if I’m frustrated then I’m not having fun. If I’m not having fun then I don’t want to participate. Sleeping and taking breaks both improved my output and made the whole competition more enjoyable.

Polish

In my opinion polish is the single most important aspect of a Ludum Dare game, in terms of being judged. I have seen otherwise uninteresting games receive high praise because of how polished the entry was. This isn’t really surprising. When most players only spend a few minutes on an entry it’s critical to leave an immediate impression and that’s where polish shines.

However, polish isn’t free and takes time to do. So it’s important to pick your polish battles carefully and even more important to pick your tools carefully. Leveraging cheap polish techniques can make your game feel much more complete without a huge time cost. For 100 Days I heavily leveraged tweening. For everything from moving, combat, to zooming the camera. Carefully picking an easing function for your tween can give your animations more flavor and improve the general feel of the game. Particle emitters are another great tool for creating quick and effective polish. In 100 Days the engines and explosions were created using very simple particle emitters.

What went wrong?

Understandability

This is problem that just continues to haunt me and it reared its ugly head for 100 Days. It’s a goal of mine to make the interaction with the game intuitive enough to not require a separate tutorial screen. As a player I am annoyed when its necessary for me to look at instructions outside the actual game itself. To combat against needing a screen outside of the game, I implemented a help section in the UI that prompted text when the player hovered over an object. However, that only works if players realizes it is there and understood how to make use of it. Some noticed and figured it out, others didn’t. Those who didn’t struggled to grasp the resource aspect of the game leading to a degraded experience.

To improve on the understandability of my games, I think using more assets to be as clear as possible about how the interactions with the game works. I didn’t want the player to learn that they die if their fuel hits zero. I wanted the player to learn how to prevent their fuel from reaching zero. Using simple art assets to clearly show the next valid movements or larger icons for resources on planets can go far for understandability. It may not be elegant, but having a prompt that the player must click through that explicitly stated that additional help text is supplied on hovering could have made 100 Days much more approachable.

Grammar / Typos

This one is pretty embarrassing. The typos I really have no excuse for. The grammar I can at least claim ignorance, for what that’s worth. Luckily the typos are an easy fix that really comes at no cost. I need to write all my content in a proper word processor that can detect misspelled words. Easy. Grammar is trickier but a problem I want to solve. Writing more and having people proofread will help me with grammar. This postmortem has an excellent exercise on its own, and yes, I have a friend who has been proofreading it for me. Though he didn’t have time to check out this final version, so we’ll see how it goes.

Analytics

This probably seems like an odd entry for a Ludum Dare postmortem but it’s certainly an area I came up short. Earlier in this postmortem I wrote, in great length, about implementation efficiency and time management. So why would I even be concerned about adding analytics to my game when it takes time? Because information is power. A big reason I participate in Ludum Dare is that it gives me a chance to try new ideas and when I try out an idea I want to learn from it. Analytics is another tool to help with learning about your game’s successes and failures. Anything that helps me learn is worth my time.

However, analytics only helps you learn if you gather actionable data, with actionable being the key word. I didn’t really have a plan when I started placing analytics into 100 Days. I basically decided to record as much as I could and hope that it was useful later. Some of the analytics worked out alright, as I mentioned earlier it took an average of 2.5 seconds for players to load my game. That was useful to know because it justified my decision to not optimize the world generator. But most of the data didn’t help me out in the end. Knowing that over 2000 extractions have occurred in my game is cool but not useful. What would have been useful? Analytics around the user experience. How long did it take before the player hovered over an item to read the help text? How often did the player do it? I knew fuel was the most important resource to manage, how many attempts did it take for players to learn this? Hindsight makes it easy, but these were the important questions.

My whole approach on how to add analytics to a game needs to change. Much like designing, this is going to require me to step away from the computer and truly think about. I need to sit down and ask myself what is it that I really want to know? And if I can learn the answer, what can I do about it? Once I have the questions that lead to actionable answers, I can start figuring out what data would help me answer the questions. As good analytics can help me improve everywhere, doing this correctly is perhaps the most important thing I can take away from this Ludum Dare.

Here’s my predictions for the LD30 top 10th percentile, as part of my ongoing pet project to use machine learning to predict ratings from comments (first post, code).  These entries are predicted to be in the top 10th percentile based on Overall score, using only words in the comments (adjectives and adverbs) that were predicted using K-nearest neighbour classification based on a model trained with LD15-LD28 comments and scores. I’ve split them up into compo and jam, but the underlying model is trained on all comments combined (which may or may not be a good idea). Here we go:

LD30 Compo predictions, ranked ~149th or better (208 total):

meeech, b5cully, hectormorlet, Ludorverr, Xaychru04, ENDESGA, teoacosta, 7Soul, Corné Dorrestijn, mactinite, Peping, headchant, bentog, Managore, Sanguine, Ping78, plash, muriel, Lord Draficus, InfamousIntellectual, EMAK, ReactorScram, brokenbeach, egor-idiot, NostraDamon, Kiwiboi, Conk, MerlijnVH, Domantas, Aru Nyan, Robinerd, Fanatrick, commanderstitch, gillenew, Logan, JetL33t, TheMorfeus, pusheax, PaperBlurt, pythong, StrideWide, Joe Williamson, 01010111, NiceAlexanderAS, pinkmonkeyhead, vinhuman, manabreak, ShaunJS, MagnesiumNinja, CRAZEERUSKEE, hungyg, xviniette, thedeadlybutter, Hozar, ice cold muffin, AdventureIslands, Tom 7, varun, DJWizardCop, From Smiling, Jaloko, Dietrich Epp, Bronaldplo, atomic_swerve, Skills641, primaerfunktion, SteveSalmond, Cherno, MintArcade, Steve, nonetheless, Cell, jurnacsr, Donar, Hypnohustla, Lvyn, neosam, Digiraze, ncannasse, bazld, Jace_Fyrestorm, Aaants, Bernte, JaJ, bigbadwofl, siat, remmy, Gareth Jenkins, sockfolder, Kavehes, jellonator, Ditto, anserran, Miziziziz, alastairbreeze, EndingChaos, smizmeal, jwin, rooter4, renatopp, Josh H, badlydrawnrod, Lyszie, tillrobby, DragonXVI, suve, rynti, khahem, Ellian, cardboard, Draknek, pirate-rob, Damian Schloter, TobiasW, Lars-Kristian, Pat AfterMoon, Nuclear Napalm, yodamaster, ratking, Turkey, duncankeller, lectvs, Alexandre Szybiak, Sequenceko, pfeyffer, boddiul, Otopkin, 0x0961h, Xgor, Ervin, markusfisch, elliottd, pekuja, Jellycakes, Nanofus, gardenhead, esayitch, jimmymcmillan, Healthire, Vandash, Inateno, v23v, Silveryard, zillix, GreenyUk, TrickFishPie, zatyka, HawkSandwich, ShadowStryker, jahlgren, vicious_br, eatsleepindie, rubna, Lazdo, synchingfeeling, technocf, cleitoneldorn, ianh, SaintHeiser, lucienpro, MRvanderPants, Zylann, Jogy34, MentaL13, Larzan, frosty, Jake Coxon, TautNerve, deepnight, PapaCheech, Krimble, FurtherForm, tatmos, BuffaloPhil, hate-marina, donut345, Split82, kaitokidi, vandriver, Namide, Kedume Bits, diamondgfx, modbox, Gaeel, Andrew Shouldice, KingBolonzo, Martins, Whoosy, Teesquared, simonnaus, PixelMind, xrm0, Laralyn, AdamHarte, NickZangus, BinRoot, Jezzamon, invi, kebabskal, Josh Riley, whalebot, Pirate Hearts, shimage, OnlySlightly, nesis, capsizedmoose, meishijie, AncientAvocado

LD30 Jam predictions, ranked ~106th or better (169 total):

Finlal, Cryunreal, stasss, SecondDimension, Animefrikis, catchthefloaty, Talvara, danbo, jgthespy, Cad, PaperboxStudios, Cryovat, dustyroom, mtrc, McFunkypants, Liz England, phasebeta, BoaHeck_ArtGent, Andrew Adams, OrangeeZ, MicroChasm, Yword, bytegrove, AtomicVikings, rogueNoodle, chrupp, Vidd, Allchimik, TGL, hadesfury, riv_roy, Evil Scotsman, RhythmLynx, commodoreKid, oakus, sandbaydev, InfectionTeam, IsaacL.Balogh, leafo, bluemaroo3, Creative Sectors, RawboSaurX, Spang, Magdev, Stals, TeamEagle, kristof, Shide, Oxeren, SkyWolf, borgi, Wertle, ix, ponk, Squidtank, chas, jimmypaulin, mysterycjgamer, sprawl, Matt Thorson, ColdBrain, danidre14, mechabit, tove, Dayko, orbitantlers, Zathnic, Robotic, PowerSpark, ZYXer, Will Edwards, Ted Brown, radmars, Two Scoop Games, Bognet Team, Seraphic Media, SoulGame, gnx, Cheesefork, pokepetter, Fre, 3CGames, graebor, Razoric, reecpj, hbocao, oxysoft, bushmango, Once Upon a Team, Kojan, Yoni, braqoon, Robber, PillowPigGames, guimonpa, Follett, Floko, KevinZuhn, Oddly Shaped Pixels, Adam Thompson, Nooner Bear, LeafThief, Hemuuuli, spotco, jjhaggar, 01F0, akolokgame, leafarz, Patacorow, spolsh, Budda, Tesrym, ticlekiwi, RevoLab, Literal Games, akymos, Lianne Booton, 01101101, Carduus, rustybroomhandle, Volute, Cosrnos, dook, ExtreLime, ponywolf, GrooveMan, Thepattybeast, Schrodinger Games, Jon Fisch, Benjamin, NikB, OxyOxspring, Lissar, Danman9914, jordanbloemen, Crosstales, nerd burglars, brookman, RandomNameGenerator, Simplexcity, toinfiniityandbeyond, George, BradSmallPlanet, _Rilem, bluesky, villhest, samooJAM, popcorn897, imaginarymonsters, Snoother, sudorossy, Team Klappermann, Arakade, Slikker, Kerdelos, pansapiens, Raphy, goosetickler, Jean Phenix, MunkeeBacon, moomoo112, banana4life, TravisChen, liquidminduk, nataku92, stink123456, Traumendes_Madchen, BasmanovDaniil, Mase

Based on the previous real-world test, about half of these predictions should be correct.
If your name is here, chances are people made really positive comments on your entry, irrespective of where it finally ranks. My own view is that everyone who finishes a game is a winner – some just have a little more win than others

Tags: predictions

The results are coming in soooon :>. In the meantime, anyone wanna play a fast paced twin-stick shooter (The keyboard is one stick, the mouse is the other so I think it counts) ?

 Glitched

Wanted to make a gif of the gameplay, but I messed that up :<

Countdown is running and time is flying so I’ll just take advantage of the 6 last hours to make some advertising for Alienscape.

If you’ve always wanted to play a platformer while working on you spatial geometry skills, this game is for you.

You have two 2d views to reconstruct the 3d environment and escape from the aliens that captured you !

Will you be bold enough ? Let’s try this out : http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=30088 !

Commander, it has come to our attention that the Empire of Waaagh, The Council and even the Simian Alliance are gathering troops near our planet!

We must act now!

We must strike first!

We must do this for the God Emperor!

ONWARDS TO VICTORY!

(Commander, if you are reading this, please click on the UEF logo.)

Tags: #rts #awesome #lastchance #moosefly #empire

…but first invite a friend or two. It’s dangerous to go alone!

The rating period is slowly but surely nearing its end, and I thought it cannot hurt to write a postmortem for the game I made three weeks ago. I wish I would’ve promoted the game more (it’s my first online multiplayer game after all!) and I wish I could’ve played more games, but my master’s thesis was jealous and demanded I spent more time with it. That being said, I have a free minute now, so here goes nothing!

Design

Three weeks ago, when I was still young and inexperienced, I thought that “Connected Worlds” lends itselfs perfectly well to making an online multiplayer game. (Nevermind that I never did one before, haha.) That being said, there are some obvious design problems that I needed to solve – and that ultimatly led to the current design:

• LD rating is 3 weeks, and people likely won’t play all at once. To tackle that, the game should a) be able to be finished single-player too.
• Even if people are online at the same time, they probably won’t arrive at the same time – and likely don’t want to wait either. For that reason, I made the game drop-in/drop-out: The first player to join starts a new session that ends when the last player leaves or the game is won/lost. Any player that arrives in the meantime just spawns next to the torch. (I briefly entertained the idea of one permanent session, but I wouldn’t want to do the level design for THAT, phew. Also I highly doubted that players would come back often enough for that to be interesting.)
• Synchronisation is hard. So, uh, nothing twitchy. More slowly. With tiles to walk on.
• Synchronisation might not work correctly. I have no idea what I’m doing after all. So, better do a co-op game and nobody gets pissed that the enemy had an advantage.

Okay, so a scalable drop-in/drop-out co-op online multiplayer game. This is basically what I spent my complete first day on, and I had no idea what I actually wanted to do gameplay-wise yet. I implemented a chat though: Just text that appears on top of player’s heads.

After a good night’s sleep, I arrived at the idea spawning from the Olypmic torch relay: A flame had to be transported from A to B – in this case between two kingsdoms. Slowly everything clicked together: It was dark, hence the flame is important. If you drop it, it’s not protected anymore and slowly dies down, and you have to drop it sometimes because it’s heavy as hell. And there are multiple obstacles that you have to dig through or build across. You can do it alone if you react fast, but it’s stressful always to drop the flame, dig/build a little, pick it up again, transport it, drop it etc. – it’s much better with friends helping you! So yeah, here we go – a game that you can play alone or with “any” number of friends.

Implementation

The game is made in Unity and with the SDK from (and hosted by) Yahoo Game Networks. Free hosting for up to 5000 daily users? Yes please.

There is a server, but it doesn’t do much – it mainly keeps track of the users, items on the floor and already dug-out rocks so that it can inform new players. It also distributes events. The only thing that it is really authorative about is when an item is spawned, picked up or dropped to avoid item duplication.

On the client side, you are the only player that moves directly – and you send messages to the server how you move. Because movement is between tiles, those messages are few, and they will arrive in roughly the same interval in which they are send, so on the other screens you move the same way, just with a delay. Each player object has an event queue – move, dig, build bridge etc – that will be executed in that order with the appropriate delays, so it’s no problem if messages arrive to quickly either.

Making the server mostly non-authorative and using that message queue system is what helped me be able to finish the game in such a short time, I think.

What didn’t go so well?

• No sound effects. I wish I had some, but I finished the level itself in last second, and well – that was a bit more important, I guess.
• Nobody invites their friends to play. I wish I knew why. It’s super easy – just share a link – but many people commented that they had to play alone. I suppose they do have friends, right? Maybe even game developer friends?

Apart from that, I’m actually largely content! Sure, there’s not that much gameplay, but it’s fun – and sure, the graphics could be better, but hey! 48 hours and first time online multiplayer! I’m certainly not complaining. Which leads me to…

What went well?

• Online Multiplayer in 48 hours, that’s what!
• The whole thing is surpringly stable, if sometimes a little laggy. I would’ve expected to have more problems with an online multiplayer game.
• Development wasn’t as hard as expected. I was always a bit wary of networked multiplayer in any form, but it turns out that it wasn’t that bad to always have a server and often two windows running. Might be because it was only 48 hours and a small-scoped project with no necessary security though.
• The Drop-in/Drop-out is cool. And it also has the side effect of allowing people to spectate games. Apropos drop-in/drop-out…
• The game is a lot of fun with streamers! Allowing for a variable number of players that can join anytime, and streamers having an audience already made for great fun a lot of time.
• The chat is refreshingly different. Having text appear on top of the heads is cool, but seeing it being typed live is surprisingly even more fun!

Tips

• Trust in the process. Seriously, don’t worry if your design is not complete yet. I didn’t have any core gameplay ideas until 12 hours before the end and I still finished with something. Just work towards that goal until then.
• Keep a ToDo list. Workflowy is superb for that. Helps me stay on course and motivated.
• Keep your design simple and modular. Especially if you do something big technology-wise that you haven’t attempted before. If you finish early, you can still add more features! I would’ve loved to have enemies and defending each other, or wind zones where you have to keep the flame safe, and… but time ran out, and the current state is very playable.
  
• Test early. I started testing long before I had actual gameplay. I guess networked games are special in that regard though.

In Conclusion…

…I’m quite happy with the result, and I’m seriously considering doing a game with online components for next LD too. So much inspiring online stuff this LD, damn! And maybe I’ll even get a chance to gather more networked multiplayer experience by then, but knowing me, I won’t and I’ll just dive right in. Wouldn’t have it any other way, really.

Do you have any questions? Feel free to ask them in the comments or on Twitter!

And maybe you have a free minute or two and want to try my game? (And maybe ask a friend to join you! Friends are pretty cool.)

Thanks for reading! I’m done here, goodbye.

Tags: post-mortem, postmortem, tips

Hey everyone! Voting is about to end soon and I’m getting excited. So many talented people!

After some time of absence, I’m really glad I could participate again. It was a rather spontaneous decision, and I also stepped out of my comfort zone this time around. But all the more did I learn!

I wasn’t too familiar with tools like Blender or Unity, but I really wanted to make this happen, so I just went for it. And it went surprisingly well! However, within the final hours I ran into problems exporting the game (that’s what you get for using unfamiliar tools, haha), which wasted all the extra time I saved for adding sound effects and actual enemies. But I’m still satisfied with the result, and I hope you’ll enjoy it too

Play the game