Hi there.

These are my last words before the end. I was very happy to contribute to this great 30th Ludum Dare experience. I would like to thank the 114 people who have rated my game ‘GET Connected‘. For my part, I rated 84 games!

To conclude this awesome adventure, I drew a piece of digital paiting to illustrate the ending of my post-Ludum game.

If you are interested by my game (or my work), I centralized my Ludum Dare contents on my website.

Big-up to all of you. See you next time!
End of transmission!

Sephy.

And with that, our 30th event has ended. Here are the results:

How did I do?

You can view your results here:

My Results: ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=me

The individual category results are just above your comments.

Top 100 Games

Check out winning competition and jam games here:

Compo Top 100: ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=top
Jam Top 100: ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=top&cat=Overall(Jam)

Winners are decided by the Overall category.

Congratulations to all the winners.

Category Winners

Here at Ludum Dare, being the best overall game isn’t the only way to win. Games are rated in 7 additional categories, with a special “Coolness” category highlighting people that went above and beyond to be sure you got a vote.

Categorical Top 25’s: ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/

*NOTE*: You can click on the titles of the categories for Top 100 lists per category.

Survey!

Sorceress organized a survey! You can check out the results here.

Ludum Dare 31 – Coming December 5th-8th 2014!

We’ve got one more event left this year, our big Winter event in December! Follow us on Twitter or join the mailing list to stay informed.

The Future of Ludum Dare

If you were linked directly here, you missed out on a VERY IMPORTANT VIDEO from me, talking about the future of Ludum Dare. Go check it out! Only two minutes of your time (plus 30 seconds). Thanks!

Thanks again everyone for making Ludum Dare great!

– Mike Kasprzak (PoV)

First things first: my English is not too good, so i hope this will be clear enough.

I didn’t want to wrote a whole post-mortem. Since, while thinking about it and try to find stuff to put in it, my mind stop at one thing that, I think, was my principal “revelation”. Astroz turns out to be a kind of action-puzzle game. I define Action Puzzle to be a puzzle (game with a dominant strategy) with an execution difficulty. Portal is probably the best known (and made) kind of action-puzzle game.

I’m not a level designer. So when I first realize that my game turn out to be a puzzle game, my thought was : “Ouch, I need to make at least one level per mechanic in my game, plus some other here and there to let the player practice the mechanic. And, one or two final levels, the icing on the cake.

I made 15 levels. I think some people made it through the twelfth. In the last hour of the LD, I just create a last level, put everything in it, try it, and thought” mey… that should be feasible”…

After all this, my approach of dividing each mechanic in a separate level, I think, was good. But since it’s an action-puzzle, I think it’s also important to create level just for understanding one puzzle mechaninc, but then, there must be another level just to practice execution.

So, in a way, if your solution is hard to find, it should not be difficult to execute. And, if it’s hard to execute, it should not be hard to find. Except maybe the last level (or last chapter, or last level in a chapter… well you see the logic here). What’s important is to isolate the resolution component from the execution component most of the time. And, combining both should be only to test the player in the end of a series, like an exam or midterm exam, to make sure that your player is competent enough to the next chapter, series or what ever you want to call it

In the end, it seems obvious. But I think it’s still a good rule of thumb when you’re in the final rush and you have the wonderful idea to make a action-puzzle game.

Hi All,

I made a tool for downloading the LD30 raw data.  I’ve posted it as CSV and JSON on my website here:

https://smashware.com/articles/2014/09/15/everyones-ludum-dare-30-results

I also made a tool for analyzing results, which you can access here:

https://smashware.com/articles/2014/09/15/results.html

Here’s a screenshot:

Happy analyzing!  Let me know if you find any bugs…

~voidqk

Hello, In addition to creating Games, I also record YouTube Videos. For the voting period following Ludum Dare 30, in addition to rating games, I also recorded videos of 20 games. I released five videos each Monday, below you can find Week 4 videos embedded, and links to the videos for weeks 1-3. The finale video is a 10 second compilation of all 20 games.

Youtube Playlist

Week 4:

And the Finale

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

Week 3:

Warp Paint by zatyka

Dear Sister by Robinerd

Matters of Perspective by nesis

NOODLE FEELINGS by Magdev

Swich! by swich

Tags: 10s videos, Videos

I’ve been doing Ludum Dare for a couple of years now, but this is my first post mortem, so bear with me. Oh, and why not play the game while you’re at it

The Good:

• The marble sounds! They were almost an afterthought, but are now definitely my favourite feature of the game. I recorded the sounds using glass marbles on a wooden table, with an iPad mic. After some touching-up in Ableton Live, I was really pleased with how good they sounded, considering they were captured with such an awful mic.
• The difficulty. I tried quite hard to make a gradual progression, and introduce more marbles and holes over time, and it seems to have paid off. A lot of commenters have expressed how the game is challenging in a good way, which I’m very pleased with – especially since it’s not something I’ve been great at getting right in the past!

The Bad:

• Lack of music. I originally wanted some kind of background music, at least for the title screen. In the end I decided it would have been too difficult to compose something that didn’t ruin the aesthetic, so I just left the marble sounds by themselves.
• Marble physics. Thanks to a lack of Flashpunk support for collision circles and a lack of time to implement it, the physics were a very accurate representation of a axis-aligned hitbox sliding around on a block of ice. Unfortunately, marbles are not square; they are round.

The Ugly:

• The graphics. The aesthetic turned out quite nice in the end, but it’s still no where near as flashy as some of my previous games.
• Developing a game without internet access. I wouldn’t recommend it.

Roy, Gee, Biv was a 48-hour compo game that involved three characters meeting up and attempting to free themselves from the world they’ve been constrained in. I had a lot of fun developing it, though it has plenty of issues that would need fixed if I were to ever release this as a completed game.

So let’s get right to it!

Unless you haven’t played the game yet, in which case I’d highly recommend doing so to avoid spoilers!

Play Roy, Gee, Biv Here!

What Worked

This is one I’m definitely proud of! After releasing a dozen+ games I’ve finally started to embrace the idea of a narrow scope. Getting out of the “Oh, but wouldn’t it be cool if I did this too?” mindset is tricky, and there are times where it can actually be beneficial. Overall for situations like this I try to steer away from this mindset, unless I feel the idea can be easily implemented and will complete the game idea rather than bloat it.

I realized recently that proper endings are something that my games tend to lack. Sometimes I’ll do something involving a few lines of text, or player will enter a sandbox room that might say something along the lines of “You Win” or “Have Fun,” but often my games will have no endings at all and just go to the title screen.

I think this has definitely disappointed some of my players in the past, so I’ve been trying to think of ways to create more interesting endings. For this game I wanted to try again with the sandbox theme but add a bit of a twist to it.

Obvious spoilers ahead! If you’d rather see the ending yourself first, please play the game (link is at the top).

I noticed that early in the game’s development I had a lot of fun playing with a random bug that turn into a mechanic: instead of picking up an object, one character would hop on top of it and “ride” it, sometimes even projecting he character upwards in the sky depending on the object’s size. I realized that one thing I love about games is when they break, and how rewarding it can be breaking a game because of how surprising it is. Since this also often means completely altering the previously established rules of the game, it can also give the player more of the game to experience. So for the ending I decided to slightly alter the rules of the game to give the option to break it (more than it already is broken, that is) for the player.

Basically what happens is the characters “share” their abilities and can all do what the others can. As a result they can all fly or ride out of the roofless area they are constrained in and exit the playable game world. Outside there is a big party room with lots of particle effects. There are some rideable platforms and an underground area which is just a 3×5 grid (trying and failing to be clever since the game’s song was written in 15s). The player is free to roam the world or just fall of the edge or whatever.

The sound could’ve definitely used more time, but for what I was trying to accomplish it got the job done. Each character had their own part to the song, there is a bass track tying the other tracks together. If I had more time I probably would’ve added more nuance in the music overall, and maybe have more audio cues to character abilities, doors opening, etc.

What Didn’t Work

I told myself to go really minimal for this game, I wanted more time to troubleshoot any scripting issues since this was my first time using Unity for a short gamejam. While I enjoyed the idea of this, the game just looked a bit sloppy and incomplete overall, and I would’ve liked to spend more time considering the overall aesthetic of the game. Also some really lazy amateur mistakes in my animation (animating the root, the worst part is I knew I wasn’t supposed to do it and I did it anyway) led to floating or sinking characters, which led to me desperately trying to patch up mistakes in scripts before I had to upload the game in time. Overall the game was messy, and that seems to show pretty well in the art.

The game was confusing to many people, and overall I think I did a pretty poor job in teaching the player what the game is about. If I did this again I would have put more time into designing a smoother learning curve. This is definitely one of the biggest challenges for me in game design, since many of my games have very limited tutorials, text-based tutorials or none at all.

I wanted the climax of the game to be around the time the characters could all see each other, but because of this I didn’t feel like I had enough time to really use the characters’ abilities to their fullest and fully flesh out their interaction.  A lot of this was because of how opening doors worked: Instead of using switches to open them, I made them one-way doors that could only be opened by one character. This meant that in order for the characters to get through doors of a different color, they have to wait for that character to open in for them, forcing them to meet very early. In order to fix this I would have to change the doors to open with distant switches, or have players teleport somewhere when they open a door, or something else.

While I’m glad I included the ending, I definitely felt like it wasn’t terribly successful. There wasn’t exactly anything to “do” after the game was won other than wander around, and I didn’t even do much to indicate that the players have gained each other’s abilities. Overall it could have used a lot more substance.

The Wrap-up:

I’m glad I finished the game and achieved all of the basic mechanics that I planned on. However it needs a lot of polish and some reworking of the basic gameplay. I’d like to come back to this again sometime, but it may not happen for a bit. I also didn’t get a chance to play and rate that many games (school keept me busy), which is especially disappointing because that is one of my favorite parts of Ludum Dare. Overall I learned a lot about my current strengths and weaknesses. I have quite a ways to go but jams like this are helping me learn!

See y’all next time!

The results will be out tomorrow in a few hours, and I’ve yet to write my post mortem… >_< Ok, let’s do this!

(also, here’s my timelapse for this LD’s entry!)

Since there are a quite few gifs and images (which add up to almost 2MB), I thought it was best to not keep everything on the main page…

Reason for the delay

On my first compo I used Flixel. It was so easy to use and so similar to the way I wanted to think about games that I’ve pretty much only used it since them. I’ve tried to use Unity a few times, but I always tried to go about it in a structured way (which didn’t quite work out).

Though I’ve already toyed with SDL and OpenGL, since Flixel was enough to me I kept using it. But, when I made the post compo for my LD#28 I started to think Flash isn’t good enough, anymore. My implementation is probably also faulty, but there are a lot of missed inputs in that game, when trying to run it at 60 FPS. Also, rendering is quite slow (since I added an overlay to the whole screen).

I switch to Air or to a newer Flash version with another library (like Axl, which already has GPU support). Or I could even switch to Unity… but this idea isn’t much to my liking.

Well, since I’m a coder and I’ve been meaning to do that for some time, I decided to finally write my own framework in C. I wanted to use SDL2, so I could easily port games to Android and maybe even web (with the Chrome Native Client). Also, it would enable me to work with OpenGL and shaders (which would allow me to do overlays without actually having to render a square over the screen).

Some two months ago, I started to develop that Framework. Unfortunately, by the time of the compo, I was no where near finishing it. It wasn’t even on a usable state. So I had to fall back to Flixel. As soon as the compo ended, though, I went back to work on my framework and on a test game I’d been doing to test it.

I tried to play a few game each day, but I couldn’t quite manage my time. Since I try to write a comment to every game I play, I ended up spending too much time thinking about what to write than actually playing games. As time went by, I stopped playing entries and focused solely on my framework.

At least, now it’s on a usable state (though it’s still missing many features) and I’ve finished that game! I’ll talk about it on a later post. For now, know that I’ll most likely use it on the next LD! =D

On to talk about the actual compo…

Theme and game idea

For some time, “Connected Worlds” has been one of my least favorite themes. As usual, I was kind of disappointed with the theme… but when I started to actually give it some thought, I saw that it’s actually a great theme.

Getting over that small hurdle, I was able to create a nice lil’ story (that barely made into the final game) and how I wanted it to play.

The game was to be able three races from different planets, two of those being sentient and always at war. The other one was to be of creatures that from time to time attacked either of them. The story would move toward either reaching a agreement with the other people or waging war and wiping (or getting wiped) them.

I, for some stupid reason, thought it would be a nice idea to make it a “side scrolling RTS” kinda game. I quickly drew a few sprites and implemented the base of the menu and of the movement…

Then, I decided to add platforms and gravity. Prior to that, you would have to micro manage every unit and use a jump button to actually make it go over platforms.

And this is when everything went down the hole.

Writing a 2D path finder

The idea of implementing a path finder wasn’t all that intimidating. I knew that I was risking wasting too much time on something that could not work, but I thought it was worth it. All I needed was to transform the tilemap into a graph and traverse it. Then I would have to deal with the problem of making an entity actually traverse that path.

I wrote it in a really straight forward way. If I’m not wrong, I traversed the tilemap iteratively and every time I reached a solid tile I would check if it was part of a already found node and, if not, recursively search for its bounding rectangle. I also modified it’s actual height and vertical position to make it take all the vertical space possible, so I would be able to click above a platform and select it. Even thought my implementation worked, I later found out that it was really buggy and had to redo some parts.

For the path finder, I first listed every possible path, that is, every two nodes that were reachable, even if by jumping. To simplify things, I made them bi-directional (which ignored the fact that a character could fall from a platform to the floor below it). Then, when trying to trace a path, I would check from the current node every other node recursively, in a depth-first search, while maintaining a list of visited nodes and the current shortest path and distance, to avoid cyclic paths and to be able to travel the “shortest” (in a kinda random meaning) path. Finally, I simply had to make an entity follow that path.

Pretty simple, right? Well…

yeah, not, it wasn’t. I made lots of typos and small logic errors (like incrementing the loop counter on the while statement [ while (++i < nodes.length)] and at the end). I broke and “fixed” the code a lot of times before I found those stupid mistakes… Just then I was able to make it somewhat working (after some actual fixing).

By then, I had already spent some 9~10 hours on that single problem and had to finish the game on my Sunday afternoon. I also hard coded a few things (like every character speed) into the path find code, so I couldn’t change that without potentially breaking everything. And for some stupid reason, I kept the bullet speed the same as every character speed… yeah… lots of great ideas.

Finishing the game

Time wasn’t quite on my side (totally my own fault, I know). So I kinda rushed things to a complete state. Those drafty drawings I did for the animations are a reflect to that. I draw everything on paper and tried to simply pass it to the computer. Since I wouldn’t have time to make it into proper pixel art, I tried to make it somewhat nice and interesting.

The waves were also decided at random. I made three enemy types and put a few of each every stage. I didn’t test it as a whole, but I (thought I) was sure that every state would properly switch to the next one. Later, I found out that a single typo broke every stage transition, but I fixed it a few minutes (I think) after submitting the game.

And that’s pretty much it.

Conclusion

Well, I had tons of fun. I was able to ignore trying to make the best possible game I potentially could, going for a platformer and avoiding some choices because they would be too hard to implement or too time consuming, and to embraced simply trying to make the game I wanted to. This is why, even thought “The Nether” is one of the worst and most unpolished of my entries, I’m really happy with it.

At the same time, I feel bad for not playing all that many games, not even playing back the games of everyone who commented on my game. This was necessary, though, because I really needed to focus on developing that framework.

I may try to fix the game’s bugs and make a post compo… but there are a few games that I want to make first. So, yeah… that might never happen…

Thanks for reading! =D

Tags: post-mortem, postmortem

I just like to thank everyone who involved in this competitions, and i like to say that this was a big challenge to me, and i so happy to have done, independently from the results.

Was awesome to play several games.

this is the Planet Escape.

See you all in the next time.

I think this is pretty amazing, just based on the fact that some guy is making a game jam based on “Weird Al” Yankovic’s UHF movie. (link: http://jams.gamejolt.io/uhf )

Seeing as Mike has problems keeping his RL while working countless hours on LD, maybe Notch would like to step in as an angel-investor and help in developing LD while keeping it as free and open as possible?!

A new feature that might then be added could be the setup of a pseudonym account which gets merged with a persons real account after the voting period (to prevent ppl like said Notch being trolled while still adding to their ‘portfolio’ after the jam has concluded).

Thinking about it, the whole thing should then probably be done behind the scenes to prevent minecraft fangirls and -boys flooding LD.

So, here is the secret formula then:

Notch + PoV => LD++

Pick up the phone mr. persson, mr. kasprzak needs your help

p.s.: Almost forgot: Goeth forth and codeth

Alright, i reached my goal.

Top 25 Graphics. Done.

Was hoping for it last time already (was #76 in the end), but got it now. 22nd place in graphics. Thats cool.

The rest of the numbers are pretty average to bad. None of my three entries so far have managed to get over an average of 3.0 in the Fun-category. Hm.

Its alright though, not complaining at all. I am not one to fixate on these ratings, or give them too great significance. Disagreeing with your own ratings is easy anyway, disagreeing with ratings on other games probably a bit rarer, even though we will all find games we liked underrated and games we found lacking on the top of some lists. No, the essence of a LD is what you take away from it:

I loved that i managed to pull off my Low-Poly artstyle again. I love that style and plan to continue using it.

I loved that i was able to come up with a concept for a puzzler that actually worked out well. I always love encountering well made puzzlers in LD, they can often represent that brilliant idea people sometimes have in game jams better than any other genre. My concept had one or two minor flaws, but overall i pulled off exactly what i had in my head, and it played just as it played in my head. Thats great.

And when talking about puzzlers, Jeru’s Tower  was my favorite puzzler of this LD, and it ranked #19 Overall. Loved that one. You can give it a play if you are not tired of LD-games at this point.

Lastly, i hope i will be able to catch the december-LD this year, but that is always a hectic time of the year, isn’t it?

However it will be, there definitely will be a next time.

See you then everyone!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=40863

This is my first Ludum Dare so I got terrible ratings.

This morning I woke up and found this :

I wondered what was that weird pink round next to overall. I right clicked on it, save it to my desktop and realized it was entitled “bronze.gif”…

This is so awesome guys, thanks a lot!

We plan to work on a post jam version which would include 50 levels and more features, first for the web then on mobile. Anyway, thanks Ludum Dare for the inspiration and the fun, see you next time 😉

Anyone know when the results are posted or where i got to view them

Me and two friends went into this Game Jam with absolutely no idea what to expect and then BAM!
Out of 1045 entries into the “Jam” category we got:
#3 in the Audio category! (Holy shit, well done Kelton! and thanks Matt for helping edit the voice acting clips)
#27 in Humour! (People enjoyed our voice acting, thanks Kelton, Matt, and James)
#43 in Innovation! (I am so blown away right now.)
#60 in Mood! (Hot damn)

This is definitely my most succesful game jam, and I hope to make a newer and much bigger version of this game!
Thanks guys that worked on it with me, and thanks to all of you amazing LD’ers for being there along the way!
Hopefully you will hear more from a better and bigger version of O.R.B in future! 😀
If you haven’t already, check the LD page here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=28661

#107 Mood(Jam) 3.70
#165 Audio(Jam) 3.52
#295 Graphics(Jam) 3.58
#445 Humor(Jam) 2.27
#554 Innovation(Jam) 2.73
#663 Overall(Jam) 2.76
#677 Theme(Jam) 2.23
#747 Fun(Jam) 2.04

Now that ive had time to reflect on those scores… Im shocked. This was my teams first attempt at ludum dare. I expected our score to be significantly lower, and for some strange reason i still expect them to be lower. Honestly… thank you all who rated us above what I would’ve rated myself. That all said lets do the usual stuff.

What went wrong:
Ok, so interesting thing… alot went wrong. Like insanely wrong.
Time Management – 72 hours is a long time. I didnt realize just how long we had until that last day. now how is this something that went wrong? i was exhausted by the last day to the point i couldnt really do anymore work. Its an incredibly long time to drag out your sleep schedule. I actually wish we only had 48 hours as a team. we may have made a better product.

Art- Our art is beautiful… dont get me wrong on that. but we fell behind on it and had to call in some help the night before to get it finished. I would’ve helped myself but my art skills dont even compare when im well rested(and i was far from that)… unfortunately nobody else on the team could make comparable art either, we had to get backup help. Actually, even though im just a programmer with no art talent… i did animate the last cutscene.

Communication as a team- This is quite possibly the biggest blunder to the project. I figured irritability would eventually cause some issues between us. but i had no idea the team would fight as much as we did. I made us a stronger team i think for the next LD though. and we have ideas on how to prevent such issues next time around.

The Theme – This was literally the one theme i did not want. I refused to do some portal-esque thing. i needed something more abstract and so did the team. we spent almost the whole first night discussing ideas. but the one thing we didn’t want was some portal mechanic or the idea of going between worlds. We eventually had something that sorta fit the theme… in an abstract way. And ultimately we did make the concept we came up with, in full.

Lack of Game elements- Its hard for even me to call our submission a game. during development we discussed this issue. but ultimately we decided any gamey elements would lessen the projects value… something i still stand by. But based on comments… people understood it despite the lack of us telling anything.so despite the lack of a fun score… im happy with it.

Technical issues – this was compounded by all the other issues we had in some form or another. we got some of the art last minute… and because the code base wasn’t automatic… we had to readjust the positions of things like chat bubbles per character. by the time i received the art to do so… i was way too tired. i remember barely keeping my eyes open to finish it off. and it was far from perfect. i needed to adjust certain hit boxes as well afterword… but was too tired to even think about. The lack of good communication also resulted in separate transition screens being handled differently and looking off. But it runs from start to end, so i call it a success.

What went Right:

Art- It looks fantastic. need i say more?
Concept- We finished the concept in full, even if it is rough.
The Last Scene- This was perhaps my most substantial contribution to this. We didnt have to explain it… people just seemed to get it.
Growth- The main reason i pushed for the team to enter LD was so my artist would gain valuable experience making something from concept to a playable alpha. In that regard it did wonders. As a team we learned just how rough LD is, and how many things can just go wrong. Personally, i learned alot in my programming skillset. I had never animated sprites in unity before. I also got to play with the new Unity GUI(which is wonderful btw, try the beta). I also learned alot regard transform child/parents… and a plethora more.

Summary:
Thank you all. I cant wait for December where we are totally going to up our game. Hopefully the theme is something more approachable. lol.

If anybody would like to play our first LD entry… here’s a link

In the three weeks since the Ludum Dare challenge ended, all participants (me included) got the chance to vote on one another’s games. Now, the die has been cast, and the results were in this morning (GMT +8):

The scores somewhat sucked, which I owe to two factors. First, the contention that visual novels aren’t games (which was pointed out by another visual novel maker, Traumendes Madchen, who also participated in the Dare) — little interaction and game play involved and stuff like that. Second, the minimalist graphics and the NVL-style structuring were intended to induce a sense of imagination. The colors aren’t just for show. If any one of you didn’t notice, the blue background represents the boy’s perspective, the pink background represents the girl’s perspective, and the white-gray background represents the climax of the story.

But then, there are some upsides. First, the coolness rating. I got a 100% coolness rating due to the fact that I have rated an estimated 180 games during the voting period. Second, the highest-rated criteria were the theme and the audio. For the former criterion, I promised that I would make so much melodrama out of the theme, and I delivered. For the latter criterion, I did my best in picking the best royalty-free music I could ever find. Music is an integral part of visual novels, anyway.

So there. With that, I look forward to the 31st season.

(Cross-post: http://jollysword.livejournal.com/139900.html)

Yay, i am slightly better than before!

(that colorful numbers are for comparison with the previous LD)

Results are out for my compo game Two Must Become One. This game is my first LD ever, and I have to say, didn’t expect this AT ALL:

Holy bananas! 130th place on the first try!? Yay! Thanks a lot to everyone who voted and commented! I got a lot of very helpful feedback too, and I’ll try to better myself and future LD entries.

What’s interesting is that people’s impression of my game was apparently good enough to make them rate it +3 stars (in other words, most could have felt bad if they gave me 1-2 stars for it).  Audio got the highest rating, despite the fact I added some music literally in the last minute. The song itself I composed ages ago too, but it fit this game perfectly. I am pretty sure my game has gotten much better ratings than it would otherwise have because of the audio.

What also fascinates me is that most ratings are between 3 and 4 stars, and additionally are pretty close together (3.32 Graphics, 3.35 Fun and so on). I guess it made a solid first impression.

The fact that theme only got a 3 star rating is not surprising at all. I was not able to add all features I wanted to add, which could have made a connection to the theme more obvious. This also means I need to tune down on game scale next time, because this game here as is, is pretty in-depth for being made in only 48 hours. Looking back, I’m wondering how the fridge I got it done in time in the first place. But well, I did it! Weee!

The coolness rating came out pretty bad. I admit I didn’t play too many other games this time because I was happy just to be done with it and to have my first LD entry finished. “Winning” or “getting ratings” wasn’t exactly my aim here. This will change next LD competition, though!

Overall, taking part in this competition was a very positive experience, and the only thing I would improve next time was decreasing the scale of the LD entries. And maybe stop recreating things that already exist! I need better ideaass!

Tags: gamedev, GameJam, LD30, ld48

Ratings

Really happy with my results for Humour but had been hoping to get a better result in the Overall category. Didn’t beat my last LD, ohh well maybe next time…

Still plan on expanding on Zanlings Match and have come up with 42 other contestants so far.

Congratulations again everyone on another successful LD and only 80 days till we do this all again.

Tags: LD30, Ludum Dare

Like… really. #27 in humor, wtf :O My plan was to suck just a little bit less than last time and to try to fit in the top 100 of any category and even this seemed like a bold prediction. The final outcome surpassed all my expectations, hopes and wishes. Thank you very much to everyone for their kind words in the comments and generous ratings, I’m happy to see some of you dig that kind of humour as well

To wrap up, here’s a bacon strip riding a pig. Because why the fuck not.

Hot and Cold is now officially #654 game in the world of this compo. Yeah, I was hoping for the top 500, but it’s not bad for a first timer who delivered something not quite finished, okay? Also, I scored top 200 in humor (umm, fine, I’m a hilarious person) and was placed 249 in audio (wait what?). I’m proud!

Now, is there a way to see all the games I rated in these past three weeks or did I firetruck up by not taking a screenshot?

Tags: aftermath

Ignis score:

#140 91% Graphics 3.88
#179 90% Theme 3.76
#363 76% Overall 3.40
#552 64% Innovation 3.16
#564 63% Mood 2.98
#578 62% Fun 3.02
#581 61% Humor 2.28
#674 65% Audio 2.48

-The good-

Graphics:
I knew the graphics are gonna be my game’s strong point, around 30% of the time was spent on graphics, either coding or designing. People liked the intro screen and reflection effect a lot.

Theme:
It took me around 2 hours to brainstorm the idea of the reflected world platformer. In my mind it suited the nature of the theme really well, in the end I was sure I could make a game out of it. This was another part of my game I relied on the most.

Overall:
I polished as much as I could, maybe even went a bit overboard. I believe this score could’ve been higher if I had time to make a music track or two. People liked the concept very much.

Fun:
Considering how hard the game turned out to be I expected an even lower rating after getting some feedback. At first I wanted it to be hard since the time constraint wouldn’t let me make many fun levels, but in the end it made the game much less approachable. Apparently people quit far too early and didnt even give the game a closer look. At least 4 people who left a reply didn’t even bother to notice the main game mechanic being the reflection part of the level, thus leaving comments like “it’s buggy” or “Really love the reflection, but couldn’t get anywhere to experience what it does”. In the end I learned the best thing a game can have is approachability.

-The bad-

Innovation:
Obviously opting in for a platformer killed this score a bit. I still feel the reflection part of the game is fairly neat, however I think it could’ve been pulled off much better if I had the time to do so. I believe I tried to do too much for a 48 hour competition.

Mood and Humor:
I wasn’t doing much to immerse a player in the game. Ignis has nothing to offer when it comes to storywriting, it feels like an arcade game with non-developed character.

Audio:
The game only has around 5-6 sounds and no BGM. I was introduced to the tools people use to make music for jams like this only after the submission period. I expected this, and now I learned what to do in the future.

Although my game isn’t on top 100 of any category, I’m very happy with the results

I think I’m still an amateur guy in comparison with the top 100 and this was my first LD submission (finally, after two failed attempts). But I feel I’m improving my skills compared with my work of a few months ago, especially the graphic part.

I have learned a few things doing my entry and it was a very good experience. Also, I’m glad to have received many feedback. But one of the best parts of this LD was to play the other games… and I played a lot!!

Hope to participate on next LD

First Ludum Dare entry, and really surprised and humbled by the results. I really appreciate the votes  and feedback!

I was under extra tight time constraints due to several other ongoing deadlines and would have loved to add more levels, which seemed to be the thing mentioned most from the feedback. Maybe a post-compo version, if time allows.

Thanks once again to all who voted and commented! Definitely will work harder on Coolness in the future.

am looking for a 2d artist to work on a small funny upgrades game.

The game is a small funny survival/upgrades game, in the game, you are a narwhal that is being attacked by octopuses and other animals.
As you kill the animals attacking you, you earn money that you can use to upgrade your narwhal parts(tail for speed and maneuverability, body for more health and horn for a stronger attack).
The longer you survive, the harder and more challenging the battle is.

I already have a prototype of the game with the basic gameplay ready, but with temorary art only.

I am a c# programmer with over 2 years experiance with unity, making games on my free time(+-10 hours per week).

If you are interested, please contact me at *****

#16 Humor 4.12
#45 Innovation 4.06
#61 Fun 3.83
#363 Overall 3.40
#375 Audio 3.00
#403 Theme 3.44
#922 Graphics 2.50
#1694 Coolness 35%

#16 Humor? #45 Innovation? …#61 FUN?!

Thanks to everyone who played my game despite it being harder than a steel girder.

If you want to play my game without ripping your hair out, do so here: Clicky Click!

I’m so glad my Networkaholics game was well received like this, especially given my last Ludum Dare scores:

Coolness 51%
#254 Theme 3.32
#423 Humor 2.40
#497 Audio 2.52
#660 Innovation 2.65
#728 Fun 2.52
#762 Overall 2.68
#881 Mood 2.10
#903 Graphics 2.04

Thanks everyone. This made my day, week, and probably the rest of the year.

The game is here: Planet Sweepers. Here’s a postmortem.

For Ludum Dare, I’m a firm believer of using the theme for inspiration and as a restriction to stimulate creative solutions – and then ultimately not letting it get between you and producing a good game. It’s a starting point, not a destination. A muse, not a contract with a client. After I discarded all the the two-world ‘puzzle platformer’ and ‘endless runner’ ideas that I felt were too large in scope for the time I had available, my initial idea involved flying a ship around gravity attractors (and repulsors), ideally being able to toggle gravity on and off at will to enable you to ‘swing’ in circular arcs around the planets – I wanted something a bit like the feel of Clu Clu Land or one of the 3D Spiderman games where you swing around the city. Here are my rapidly typed notes after the first ~24 hours and some quick prototyping:

Initial idea – to create a level with gravity attractors / repulsors & have the player navigate their ship(?) around collecting messages in one world and delivering them in another

Mostly trying to get a certain Clu Clu Land with gravity feel.   Change of direction – fixed position satellites, need to fire messages to each other at correct angle to flow through gravity wells. Could work, but initial level design suggested it wouldn’t be fun.  

Firing off a pile of ‘messages’ in all directions looks cool. Instead, what about a sink and a source, where you move the planet attractors/repulsors around to make the flow go from sink to source. Fun eyecandy toy  .. but again with some testing I think level design will be too difficult, game won’t be all that fun (there are a few tricks .. once you know them …)

This was a combination of “start with a system” Will Wright-style game design, and Miyamoto-style Super Mario 64 garden “make jumping fun first” game design. I made hasty system prototypes of the ‘ship navigating gravity wells’ (without the gravity toggle) and the ‘satellites firing messages around visible planets’ ideas. The feel of flying the ship around invisible gravity wells didn’t turn out as fun as I thought (failed the Miyamoto test), and I think I would have needed to move away from a ‘physically realistic’ inverse square law to enforcing circular paths – I decided not to do that this time.

The ‘satellites firing messages’ idea theoretically could have worked – find an angle that gets the message from A to B through the gravity wells, then repeat for B to C etc. But I found it really tough to design a level where you could fire a particle through the planets an have it end up somewhere unexpected (where the receiver satellite would be placed). I was about to embark on a system for generating these levels (endless replayability !), but it dawned upon me why it probably wouldn’t turn out as much fun … you basically couldn’t predict the weaving path the particle would take to end up in it’s unexpected position, so the player would be likely be reduced to using a ‘brute force search’. The aiming wasn’t intuitive like a game of bocce, Scorched Earth, Worms or Angry Birds. So I scrapped that idea.

In the process of exploring how to design these levels, I discovered that the particle bursts migrating through complex gravity wells could be quite beautiful – I resolved to at least make a proper eye candy toy out of it after Ludum Dare, even if it didn’t become part of a game. Then I didn’t do a lot on the second day due to .. having a one year old But taking a break and sleeping on it, and taking one long hot shower gave me a fresh perspective on something I could try … and Planet Sweeper was that thing. Same system, gamified differently. But even then, I didn’t set out to make anything ‘inspired by Minesweeper’ – in fact it was only once I was almost done and was trying to come up with a name that I noticed the similarity in mechanics. I don’t actually like the name Planet Sweeper, but it (a) passed the Google test (no major games I  could find of that name previously published) (b) acts as a tiny tutorial – for those that make the connection to Minesweeper, they immediately have some basic idea of how to play Planet Sweeper.

And of course Planet Sweeper is right on theme … the worlds (planets) are connected by the trade winds of anti-gravitons, and by discovering them you are connecting them to the network of planets in the human diaspora. Occasionally someone makes a game that really nails it theme wise. I’m well aware that this is not that game – but as I say … use the theme for as long as it’s useful … then make a game. IMHO.

Design and gameplay

Although the feedback was generally positive (for a gamejam game), I feel like Planet Sweepers still needs some extra gameplay elements to make it more interesting. The ‘depletion zones’ were designed to prevent one player poaching a planet that the other was narrowing down the location of … but in hindsight I feel like the game might be more fun if poaching was allowed (especially in a two player game). In future versions, I might instead make the depletion zone blocker a limited use special ability.

The scoring system is currently simple – one planet, one point – and I kind of like it that way. However, it’s pretty clear that hunting down small planets, and finding the last few planets, is trickier than hitting a big planet. I feel like there should be some advantage for working to narrow down a small planet … maybe these will drop specials ? I already have a long list of features to try layering on top of the system (decoy specials, random gravity distorting UFOs that fly past) – the challenge in future development will be to trim this down to just the essentials that work well and avoid featuritis.

Technical

It looks like I used a particle effect – and I suppose it is indeed an effect composed of particles … however it’s not actually a “Unity Particle Effect” (eg ParticleSystem). In some of the early iterations while I was trying to find a game in the system, I was only firing off single particles. The multiple particle burst was something I did for testing … then discovered how pretty it looked and realized I needed to use it in the game somehow. As a result, I didn’t go back an rewrite it to use Unity’s in-built particle system since there were no performance issues and optimization would have been premature (especially in a game jam). There may be some performance advantage on the rendering side to using a ParticleSystem, but probably not since (a) the engines batching of draw calls means all of my anti-gravitons that use the same material will only take a single draw call anyhow (b) the movement code will be essentially the same anyhow, since it’s driven by Newtons gravity equations (inverse square law) I’d be ‘manually’ setting positions of the the particles in the Unity ParticleSystem array anyway.

There are no doubt many places I could better spend time optimizing (eg for decent mobile performance), like not using ~500 triangle spheres for particles that render as only ~16 pixels 😛 . Game jam ! Only optimize if it actually runs slow (and desktop GPUs are just stupidly fast, it seems).

Response, feedback and bugs

From the comments (and final ratings), it seems people generally liked it. There were a few inexplicable bugs reported that seem to be due to typical Unity Webplayer issues (ie, not my bug, just the platform). Post submission, I (or rather LDer and Twitch streamer Marekkpie) discovered a nasty bug – if you miss a turn, the AI goes haywire. I’d made a few last minute fixes to the AI turn handling logic, but obviously hadn’t fixed it. Basically I need to rewrite some parts to make the supervising “Game Manager” actually authoritative in handling the logic of who’s turn it is, and make the AI component a little more independent (so it can easily be stopped if it misses it’s turn). At the moment, the AI has some control over switching which players turn it is, which resulted in the aforementioned bug.

Postscript (post-ratings)

Planet Sweeper was ranked (equal) 20th in the Innovation section, out of 1045 jam entries ! Wowzers ! I guess I’d better flesh this one out for a full release in the future – extra game elements, better AI, mobile versions, super-evil IAPs, maybe even two-screen local or proper online muliplayer. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves

(Crossposted on my blog).

Tags: post-mortem, postmortem

I am extremely disappointed. This has been my first Ludum dare and it was here I made my first game, this will be my LAST Ludum dare, and here is why:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=42078

Everyone who played my game and left a comment said the game was good, but my results say that when it came to rating my game isn’t even average in a single category. I worked hard on my game and it is a good game, sure the web port has a few bugs like the fact that it plays in a 1080p frame forcing you to zoom out to see the whole thing, but it was my first step into game development, and I did it alone. I was proud of my game so I played and voted for plenty of other games so my game would be seen by more people, but I don’t even think half of the people who rated my game even played it.

The Ludum Dare encourages participants to rate their competition’s games, and rewards them based on how many games they rated for as well how well their ratings compare with other people. This system rewards people for rapidly giving other games bad ratings, which effectively lower the competition’s rating and boosts their “coolness” at the same time.

I was looking forward to seeing the results of this competition, but now I regret even bothering to check. Who ever came up with the current rating system should be ashamed. Good luck to any future participants, because how lucky you are is the only factor deciding if someone will play your game before they rate it.

48 hour contestants should only be allowed to rate 72 hour entries, and 72 hour contestants should only be able to vote for 48 hour entries. That way they can’t increase their odds of winning by giving bad ratings to their competition. There should also be a system to disregard ratings made by people who consistently give unrealistic ratings to several games. If somebody always gives a rating of all ones their ratings shouldn’t be counted against those games because they didn’t really rate the game the merely spamed the rating system.

We couldn’t be happier about our Silver Medal for Dead Weight. All in all, the game had a strong showing across the board.

We had debated not doing LD30 at all because our Web engine wasn’t quite ready to roll and we thought there wouldn’t be a big enough base of mobile Android users to place in the results. I guess we were wrong, or right depending on how you look at it.

We tried to collect our thinking and approach around doing a mobile only entry in this post from a few weeks ago.

Thanks to everyone who played!

Hi there!

We’re pleased to announce that Ludum Dare is coming to London once again – hosted at Google’s Campus!

We’re really excited to bring you this event, and best of all it’s totally free. There are even Android Cardboards up for grabs for the first twenty people to request them.

If you’re thinking of attending, please sign up using the Eventbrite link: http://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/ludum-dare-31-london-tickets-13154865557 (we need a rough idea of numbers for the catering!) and please share this link amongst your friends so we can get the best number of people possible – we will release more tickets if there is demand for it.

Happy devving!

Tags: england, in person event, ld #31, ld48, london, ludum dare 31

First of a massive, MASSIVE, thank you to all you that took the time to enter your details on to my site, I managed to play every entry, I hope you’ve have a chance to see my plays?

Check out some of my recording here –

 Noaksey

I am more than happy to continue playing entries moving forward.

I am also offering all entries another site to promo your games on!

Come and chat with us in the active chat room and we’ll give you your own forum to share info with other devs and somewhere to promote your entries !

Here my links should you want to offer your games to me 😉

If you want me play your “LD Entry” submit your name and link to your ld entry into the form below.

I will try and play every game entered.

I will be streaming most evenings.

Enter your game link here:

http://noaksey.com/contact-me/

My Stream:

http://www.twitch.tv/noaksey

My Channel:

www.youtube.com/user/NoakseyV1

Tags: Let's Play, Ludum Dare, MGL, My GAmes Lounge, Noaksey, NoakseyV1, stream, twitch

This was my first Ludum Dare, I’m very glad I took part and I’m already looking forward to the next one.

Thank you to everyone who played and rated my game.

I’ve played a lot of wonderful games and got a lot of inspiration.

Now, my awful screenshot:

and my humble ratings:

What went well:

I finished: Something was submitted!

The concept: I think the idea behind my game holds water and although it’s a small idea, I’m rather pleased with it.

Feedback: Thank you everyone who commented. There was some very instructive feedback and it’s good to know that some people enjoyed playing.

Time management: Since I was at work all day Saturday and Sunday, I didn’t have a lot of time, but I got (most of) the bases covered. My to do list was handsomely ticked. Even though it was lacking polish, my game was a game and you could play it.

Napping: A really useful strategy to refresh the mind.

Not so much:

The graphics and general presentation were very basic, as reflected in my scores, and I didn’t have time to do any music at all. I need to think more about the appearance and feel of the game as a whole – and avoid settling for some coloured rectangles and filters in GIMP.

Likewise, the controls were very unpolished. A bit more tweaking and they could be slightly less painful.

I made the game too difficult. Early on I thought it would be too easy, but I pushed it too far the other way.

What to do next time:

Plan in advance to get some time off work over the weekend. Unfortunately though, I can’t take Sundays off during December.

Brush up on my pixelling skills and general beauty-a-bility.

Be more participatory(?).

If you want to play: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=38469

Tags: postmortem

I’m in! I’ve got my crap together and I’m ready to go.

But with a difference.

I’m donating the first dollar to charity, and you should too!

If we all donate $1 to one collective charity (or different charities) imagine the difference we could make.

So I’m doing a October Charity Challenge.

Join me and do the same!

If you want to prepare for next LD I have great thing for you:

96h Jam with rules 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)

It is longer (and easier) than Ludum Dare, so you will have good practice for Ludum Dare.

It’s pretty innovative: it is 4 days challenge and it have 3 rules (I think that no other Game Jam have these things).

It will probably be too small, but you can increase number of participants joining the competition.

And if you don’t want to join, but have great idea for theme/rule: please, suggest theme or rule here.

For more info follow links.

I hope you will join or/and suggest theme/rule or/and play games there.

Tags: game develop, game making, GameJam, games

Hello, I just wanna share that I have 3 cars and 3 levels already done, with car dynamics and so on, so here you are some screenshots right now

It will have a multiplayer game mode too.

PLAY HERE

Tags: adorable, cars, fun, funny, low poly, minild-54, MIniLD54, Race, racing

A spike in my game. If you touch it you die.

One of my characters

An enemy in my game.

Logo

Now that I’ve participated in three Ludum Dares with (mostly) completed games, I thought it was about time I rank them against each other, finding out what’s improving, what’s not, and how to use Excel. Luckily, I quickly figured out how to use Excel.

Scores

  This first chart is comparing my games based on their rankings in each category. A green arrow means my score was higher, a red arrow means my score was lower, and an ‘X’ means that I can’t judge whether it was higher or lower. I would start talking about the differences in my games now, but there’s a much better, more accurate way to represent the data:

Percentages (Compo)

  Percentages! (Coolness isn’t there because I couldn’t find the ranking for my LD28 entry, messing the whole thing up.) Now the data represents the top percentage of games I was in during each compo, and is less affected by the number of games entered. So for overall is LD28, I was in the top 8.50%, or above 91.5% of other developers. To do this, I just divided the  ranking my games had in each category by the number of games in each compo (ex. LD28 had 1283 compo entries, and my game was #51 for theme, so I did 51/1283=3.98). I also made one for overall percentages, as shown below.

Percentages (Overall)

  The strangest thing here is that my LD28 entry actually ended up being the better than my two other entries, except in humor. This is most likely because my LD29 game lacked a difficulty curve and much gameplay, and my LD30 game lacked… well, a lot (I’m definitely never letting myself run out of time again).

I’m not really sure what else to talk about here, so if there’s anything you want to know, ask away in the comments! Alternatively, you can just play the games and find your own conclusions.

Here are links to all of my games:
[LD28 – CHOOSE W1SELY]
[LD29 – Neath: Surf Ace]
[LD30 – Two Worlds]

All that’s left for the project is adding the interface/menus/end-game and death conditions, and it will be complete.
Conclusion so far? It’s super fun! And I’m so happy it turned out as I had hoped.
I’ve been having so much fun playtesting it for hours and making various tweaks to the elements/enemies/gameplay pace, etc, and it’s a brilliant feeling to spend time on a project and have it turn out as intended. It was definitely worth continuing after the Compo to round up the rest of the game.

Below is a video showing the latest gameplay through to stage 4.

All of the gameplay experience is there now, so if you’d like to try it out and give any feedback regarding your experience I’d love to hear it, hopefully you enjoy your time with it ^^!
You can download this build here for PC – https://www.dropbox.com/s/lzk2ttaut6vza6q/RageDOWfinalbeta.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-game’ or death condition for testing purposes (so you don’t need to worry about dying when experimenting), however the final build will have you successfully complete the game upon defeating the 5th worlds boss.

Hi, this is my first time here and i want to give you my experience on the ld30. It’s probably a little late but i didn’t finished earlier.

My idea was a small being that can stitch fissures in the ground to connect peoples. But i totally underestimated the timelimit for the compo as for the jam and just finished a crappy mechanic that kinda worked. so i decided to drop this mess (sorry for those got irritated by my empty entry) and make it at least a small enjoyable experience.

But i have nearly no experience in gamedeveloping so i did concentrate on small things that were not really necessary (like screenshake). Mood is something really important to me when i play, so i wanted to go this in my game too. But i think i didn’t hit it well.

Neverthenless i learned a huge lesson, dont concentrate too long on things like animations in the beginning and try to keep it simple. I think next time i will try to go for the mechanic in the beginning (i did so this time but not exclusively).

So if you want to play “The Stitcher” and maybe leave a comment, go ahead, i would appreciate it.

Thank you for reading and i hope i didn’t irritate too many (=

LINK

Tags: stitcher

Hey!

Did you ever get stuck if you played my LD30 game? Or do you just want to know what it is and some of the core mechanics? You can take a look here to watch the video playthrough! Thanks!

– Gandalf1209

I got a small idea for miniLD, but I will only spend the next few hours, since I don’t have more time than that. I will try to focus on something really basic and do it really fast with unity and very simple 2D graphics.

Play Spanner

Here’s my entry’s percentile ranks in each category: Theme 94%, Overall 86%, Audio 72%, Mood 71%, Graphics 69%, Innovation 67%, Fun 66%, Humor 45%. This was definitely not my best entry and it wasn’t particularly fun to make, but I thought I’d say a couple words about it.

The puzzle mechanic is what I dislike most about this game. The puzzles are not elegant, and you just as often stumble across the solution with luck rather than deduction. The mechanics also allow for a very narrow range between too easy and too hard. I wound up with only four actual levels (after the six quick tutorial screens), but I’m not worried about people finishing it too fast because the last level is simply too hard. I suspect most people did not even make it past the first actual level.

I possibly could have figured out a way to improve the mechanics, but I didn’t even have a level editor until four hours before the deadline, and at that point I needed to finish it up. I briefly considered completely changing the game to be an endless puzzle rather than level-based, but I’m sure the balance would have been terrible.

Anyway, the graphics, sound, and controls came together pretty well (though I had a little trouble with the Web Audio API) so it was somewhat enjoyable nonetheless. But I think next time I’ll leave these until I’m really satisfied with the gameplay.

My team and I were really happy about how well our LD30 Jam submission Back and 4th turned out and we saw a lot of potential in it.  We decided to continue working on it and release it as a full game on Android (and hopefully ios in the future).  This was our first time releasing a game for something other than a game jam and our first time working with Android, but things went incredibly smoothly the past month of development.  We managed to add over twice the amount of gameplay, put in polished menus and UI instead of placeholder ones, and add a full fledged level editor.  Thanks to everyone who played, rated, or commented on our game jam submission as that is what encouraged us to make something more of our game.

Check it out!

Tags: LD30, unity3d, update

Hello, I am Tosic and I just started sixth grade :3 so I wanted to celebrate that, and no other way to celebrate but to make a game!

So I made a game for Mini LD #54!

Go and check it out, it is called “Race Against Time”!

Some pictures:

ENJOY!

//Tosic is out

Over the years I made quite a few tracks for Ludum Dare and other projects. I’m putting them online for anyone to use, so if you find anything you like: go ahead!

> On SoundCloud

Ever wanted tray timer to remind you of the next big Ludum Dare event? Now you have it. I’m giving you small utility for Windows users. Program sits in tray and show you reminding time when you hover with the mouse over tray icon. If you click – small window will appear showing you time to till big event, both beginning and end, can be used for Twitch streams too. Easy to setup for your needs. Enjoy.

Download

Tags: countdown, timer, tools, utility, Windows

I just started learning more about motion graphics.

I found it interesting to use them as intro for games.

What do you guys think ?  

*PS.   sorry for missing sound, that’s totally a different area to explore later on  : )

Hello World?

Hi there! Splotch is a fun frustrating (let’s be honest here) little physics-based puzzle game where the objective is to guide the balls into their portals by drawing lines for them to ricochet off. You’re up against the world to get the six level course completed in the shortest space of time possible. Up for the challenge? 😉

Click here to play Splotch.

Tags: MIniLD54

For october challenge I’m expanding on my take on the classic pencil and paper race game, also known as vector rally or racetrack. It started as my miniLD entry made in only 7 hours, and I have now expanded it with local multiplayer.

This is currently on Kongregate and I’ve been doing some basic promotion in social media. More work on that and possibly more levels and functionality coming up within october.

I will release this soon for Android as well. I can not spend much time on this, but I aim to make it polished enough to sell at about 1 dollar in google play. I already have some small games on there, but I see this as a small and fun hobby project!

More coming soon!

Check out the game so far at my entry page if you wish.

DOWNLOAD FOR FREE

We recived lot of great feedback on LD30 compo about bump da planet,many  of you said to make a mobile version sooooooooooo…

HERE WE AREEE

THE COMPLEXITY OF SIMPLICITY

To play this game you need just to connect the same type of planet with your powerful finger (THIS IS REALLY SIMPLE),
But if you add Asteroids, and a black hole that suck your planet,and a crescent numbers of planet,
You will understand that is not as simple as it looks like
Cool Stuff:

+Random and animated background
+Awesome combo system
+Easy tutorial
+Simple GamePlay
+Funtastic Particles

Hey guys!

I will be competing in the October challenge! I will be making update videos and putting them here occasionally. I have my intro video where I talk about what will be going on, here. I will be selling the game for 25 cents on Itch when the game is finished. Hopefully, I can make 4 sales, and complete the challenge.

Thanks, Gandalf1209

My plan is to do a puzzle game. my first one ever. Doing it over the month. then the plan is to publish it on kongregate, due to it being a flash game.

when i do c++ in the future or c# i’ll do different publishing plans.

I don’t have my website up yet so i’ll probably make dev posts ether on my twitter or in my ludumdare page. tnx.

-commanderstitch

Hi, here we are http://vk.com/octoberchallenge.

Best practice notes for game markets in RUS/CIS region will be posted by challengers

Hello, I recently finished a little physicsy puzzle game about bouncing balls around for September’s miniLD. Anyway, I made a short gameplay video which I thought I’d share here for those interested ^^

Link to the game: http://bit.ly/splotch

Being a busy father of two never leaves enough time to do regular LudumDares. It’s almost impossible for me to dedicate 48 hours straight to anything. That’s why I love the October Challenge. Last year in October I participated in my first LudumDare OC. I made an Android Game called Drone Invaders, released it on Google Play, got about 3000 players and earned some trivial money (about $140). But I learned a lot, especially all about Android development.

This year I plan to build another Android game. Some (say, 60%) of the graphics will be outsourced to artists on Fiverr. Rest of the gfx, programming and sound effect I plan to do myself. I’m still not sure about music. I depends how much time is left when everything else is done.

Last time I used libGDX as bare-bones graphics library, only utilizing Sprite and BitmapFontCache classes. This time I plan to use Scene2D with Stages and Actors. Another big change is that I will make sure that devices with higher screen resolutions are properly supported and all the graphics are crisp clear.

As for the $1 goal, I will stay away from IAP this time. Google Wallet accounts are still not available in my country, and doing it through some friend abroad just complicates things and slows me down. I decided to try AdMod instead. It’s linked with my AdSense account, so there should be no problems with the payments.

As for the game itself, I plan to revamp my Gods of Sparta strategy game. The main focus will now be local, hot-seat game for two players on Android devices. It will be completely free to play, supported by ads. I will reuse some old graphics, but more need to be drawn, especially higher resolution stuff for Nexus10 (2560×1600 pixel screen) I got recently. Also, UI needs to be drastically improved and game rules have to be simplified. To cut the long story short, I need to improve the player experience and make it feel more like computer strategy game and less like paper card game. Here’s some teaser graphics that will be included in the game…

Good luck everyone.

October Challenge

So it’s the first of October and I had an awesome idea at school! Each day I would work on my game, livestream it and then upload it too YouTube. So that’s what I did! If you wanna see the first episode then here it is:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cyvTWC0K0kQ

Ludum Dare 31 – London has SOLD OUT. We are so happy and feel very privileged that we’ve had such an exciting response from the LD community.

We are currently in talks with our hosts, Google Campus, about securing more space and catering so we can extend the event. However, we cannot guarantee anything.

We would actively encourage anyone wishing to attend a real-life event in the UK to consider hosting their own – especially outside of the London area (Birmingham would be pretty good, or Manchester, if you needed ideas).

Thanks again for the support you’ve given us through your amazing, ticket-reserving response.

-The Ludum Dare 31 – London team.

Hi there, after programming This Little Piggy for LD30, a number of people were interested in how the character controller was achieved. I’ve now put together a little tutorial showing how it’s done.

Source code: http://pastebin.com/YBbFGZzD
World model by @danielsound: http://bit.ly/worldModelPackage
Hope you enjoy and learn something 😉

For my first Android project I made a mistake of only testing on a single device. This time I decided to to extensive research to make sure my game looks great on all Android devices from 800×480 to 2560×1600 pixel screens. After two days of research and testing and made this guide for all the Android developers;

http://bigosaur.com/blog/31-android-resolutions-definite-answer

I’m making all the graphics in 6 different sizes, scaled from 100% for 800×480 screens to 320% for 2560×1600. I’m using letterboxing with 16:9 being the base resolution, but instead of plain black background I’m using a filler-background so the whole screen is full with some graphics. The “action” takes place only in the central 16:9 space though. It should cover 99% of devices out there. Here’s my main menu:

I plan to automate most of it with ImageMagick. The workflow would be like this:

1. draw everything for the largest resolution
2. scale images (svg where possible, jpg otherwise)
3. for any overlay text, use imagemagick to add it on the shrinked image using the appropriate font size

As you can see in my blog post 2134×2733 is needed if you simply want to scale the image down to any resolution. This enables you to use the single “scale” multiplier in entire game. Whenever you need a fixed coordinate, just multiply by the scale factor and you’re done. At least, for Sprites. If you’re using libGDX Stage, then you also need to offset each coordinate against the screen center, because libGDX Stage coordinates start in bottom-left corner which might be different on aspect ratios other than 16:9.

Well, I hope this helps anyone who makes 2D games for Android. I still see some very popular games not doing this right. For example I got CubeMen from the Humble Bundle and menus are so small on Nexus 10 that you can barely read text or touch the correct button.

Hey guys!

Yamanu 1.3 is now officially here! I apologize for the recent or now starting confusion on which version is what. The version for Ludum Dare 30 was 1.2. Now it is 1.3, because things were added and changed. I have a sort of changelog/demonstration video here. You can download Yamanu and/or the source code here. Thank you guys for all of your support! I really appreciate it! My Yamanu 1.2 video has over 80 views, and is the most viewed video on my channel. There’s also been a fair amount of downloads, so at least some of you are taking a look! 1.3 doesn’t add amazing features, but it fixed some annoying things, and did add a few cool features. Check out the video for more details. Hopefully I can get 1.4 out before Ludum Dare 31! Again, your support helps motivation, so if you want to see more, tell me you want more! Shoot me an email (gandalf1209@techpandainc.com) and let me know what you think.

Thanks!

– Gandalf1209

Tags: engine, free, game, New, open, source, yamanu

We, Random Abductions are doing a sprint weekend where we implement as many features in our game as humanly possible. Mostly working on randomly generated level design. We are publishing our progress live on twitter. If you like to follow us you can do so by checking out @randomabduction and @RA_siewart. We are working on the following stuff:

• Random generation of levels
• Procedural chunks
• Lots of art is going to be created
• Possibly some AI and enemie code

We will also try to answer any questions you might have via twitter, so don’t hesitate to throw some.

Hope to see you soon. Greets, the Random Abductions Team!

So I decided to tackle the October Challange.

First of all I liked my LD30 game. I didn’t write a post-mortem yet but overall I was very happy with it(even though the scores were pretty low).

I want to fix the problems the game has. The UI is not the best. Players got confused by it more then once.Also I want it to beusable on mobile which it currently wouldn’t be. I want to up the visuals. Add some eye candy and maybe try to use something else besides color to differentiate stuff. The audio needs work too as some sounds are pretty annoying after a little time. Music is fine but I have some ideas to improve that aswell. Finally I’ll build in some little gameplay tweaks and will try to implement a proper Tutorial because most players where overwhelmed by the complexity.

That I think I’m quite able to do. But I am concerned about what comes after this. I am like many others someone who hasn’t properly released a game yet. My only public games are on the Ludum Dare page and one hidden in some forum waaay in the past 😀

So my plan is to release the “final” game on itch.io and the Google Play Store. I’m not sure about pricing to be honest. I was thinking about placing it at 1$ or below on the Play Store and make it free(pay what you want) on itch.io. I’m not sure if this is a good idea. Once that is done I want to make the game visible to as many people as possible. But honestly I don’t know how to do it. I guess I could send my game to some Indie reviewers but it feels strange to be honest. I’ll have to look that up and get some feedback on that topic. Because I really want people to enjoy my game.

Lastly I’m not sure about taxes here in Germany. I haven’t found any infos what you need to do if you start selling games and what costs/paper work are associated with that. If anyone can give me some directions I would be really grateful.

Tags: im in, october challange

Just submitted my October Challenge entry. I hope you all enjoy it. Unfortunately I’ve been spending too much time working on games recently and not enough time working on grad school stuff, so I have more I want to do on this project.

I hope you all enjoy it.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/october-challenge-2014/?action=preview&uid=30603

http://www.tallshrimpcreations.com/arithme.html

October Challenge

Finally got round to uploading the second video – here it is:

Hey guys, I am Nemo one of the game developer within HundredHundred. Recently, well a year a go I decided to start writing up a blog about becoming a better game developer. After submitting my first game for Ludum Dare 30, I was able to learn a lot of positive experience, and I want to share my story and my experiences with you guys, fellow game developers like myself. So if you have time have a read, you never know you might just find it interesting : ]

http://claumpark.wordpress.com/

Tags: game development, game jam, itsNemo, story

Some weeks ago I lost all enthusiasm to continue the game I started in September. Having a day job and being a parent takes most of the time so the progress was very slow.

Lucky me that I found a post about the LD October Challenge, that got me on my feet 😀

So here I come with my wannabe Top Down Arena shooter titled “Karmatron”

I got inspiration from Robotron 2084 and the late Ultratron, but I’m adding a small twist, there is a ‘core’ to protect from enemies.

There isn’t much done yet, but is starting to look like a game. Will be very abstract, since I’m not good with art, and later I will play with some palettes.

Here is a video of the status of the game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsUus1cbhlI&feature=youtu.be

Here is a video of me fixing some bugs yesterday (FF edition, no sound): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgmeA5ttB-4

Next task: Gathering energy for the core.

I’m doing it in Haxe/HaxeFlixel and targeting Flash so I can easily distribute it on any web page.

Hope on finishing it by the end of October.

Cheers!

Eka

PS: Second time posting this, first time got an error 😛

Hi

Have just entered the October competition with my game Tower Block Builder and now I will have to finish this project I thought would take about five weeks. That was about 6 months ago and I am still not finished so I though I would blog about some of my problems and pains ( at one point I abandon the whole idea).

But I want to inspire and help people create games and so I will also detail some solutions and help I found and explain the shear joy of people playing the game you have created.

So to recap. I have created a game in HTML5 using pure Javascript with a little help from JQuery and Box2D. I have always liked the ‘real world physics’ of Angry Birds and wanted to develop a game with similar ‘physics’. While testing and playing with Box2D I came upon the idea of a simple game I called Tower Block Builder. This was to be a simple stacking game and (I thought) would be a quick test game to get to know the code of Box2D.

At this point I am happy with the game engine and graphics and have created 5 of the 20 levels. Easy huh? No. When I started creating levels I realised how the game could be played in different ways. For instance – when staking blocks you could lean on the walls and build more and so score higher. This meant the scores needed for 2 and 3 spanner awards neede to be adjusted. My advice is always get someone to test the game and play it from scratch without any advice from yourself.

This means, although I only have to create 15 more levels, I have to take into account the pass scores and different ways of playing. Hence, I may not make the end of October.

Will give more advice next blog.

Coderfap

I’m making an online multiplayer programming game where you try to hack your opponent’s computer to execute the DAT command, which makes you win the game.

EDIT 1:

Ooo! I’ve got an intro animation:

While testing the math from my previous post, I noticed that wrong set of images gets picked up on some of the Android devices. Those devices have on-screen buttons (home, back, menu) which are shown inside the screen. Luckly, the solution is simple, just enable the immersive mode and buttons would go away and you have the whole screen to your game.

As a side-effect, players would be much less likely to hit the home button at the bottom of the screen and exit your game mid-play, as they would have to drag the finger to make the button appear at all.

The immersive mode is available since KitKat. If you don’t want to bother with the docs, here’s the code you can simply copy/paste into your project:

http://bigosaur.com/blog/32-handle-immersive-kitkat

The code uses a 5 second delay before immersive mode is activated. This is useful in case user lanuches the app by mistake.

If you’re making an Android game, please implement this.

I don’t really have time, as a self-employed developer i need to make ends meet, but…. Finally making an android game and bring it to market is sth. i have been planning to do for quite some time now, but there was always sth. that prevented me from finally doing it, same as right now.

So what?… October is laughing at me? Teasing me for never seeing it through to the end? It is CHALLENGING me, DARING me to DARE a game to the world?!!

CHALLENGE  ACCEPTED

I will make some HTML5 game or another (prbly some simple puzzler), the challenge for me will be to set up all the workflow i need from a HTML5 game to a mobile app (CocoonJS or PhoneGap) for future reference and use.

So, the goals are simply:

• earn 1+€
• learn how to publish my html5 stuff to mobile

(in reversed order obviously)

So, lets find some time then

Goeth forth and codeth…

October Challenge is now and I finally decide to finish one of my project that been collecting dust for 2 years now. It’s a racing game with few different game types, customizable cars and few other things. Here is some old video playlist for you too look at to see what I decide to finish this October.

I’ll be broadcasting most ‘interesting’ parts of the project via Twitch – come along or bring some one, join the chat and watch me doing/failing something. If you have questions about this project, please ask, I’ll be happy to answer. No spoilers, thought.

If you are not afraid, you can play demo here: http://www.indiedb.com/games/the-big-wheels

Project page

Tags: game development, october challange, video

I’m having trouble with making music. Before when I used to make music, it was easy, as I didn’t know much about good music and as long as it sounded fine I was okay with it. Now, I’m getting myself braindead trying to make up music with my OCD kicking in. Whenever I even make a small beat, I can never make up anything good to go with it, as LMMS doesn’t have much to offer. So, I move to Anvil Studio. It made some of my FAVORITE music (Including in An Untitled Story and Generic Man) so I decided to give it a try. It has lots of very good high-quality instruments, and is very versatile. A couple problems though:

1) I have no idea how to import my own instruments

2) The process of making music in it is very long and neck-aching.

I have tried FL Studio, but the free version had little to no to offer, and I’m trying to stay on a budget of, well, 0.00$.

I look at Famitracker, and it can make some very nice making music! (One of my favorites being Rushjet) But it is really confusing to make different sounds that I want, and in the period of a month I can’t cram in learning the 8-bit sound system whilst making a game and trying to get done school!

I would just make the game first and use that as inspiration for the music, but I’ve tried that 2-3 times already, and I just couldn’t make the right tune for the game! I don’t want a mining game with puzzle music!

I feel like all my ideas are drained, and it’s hard for me to make even videos now!

Does anyone have any tips on what I should do?

So, I present lazer(with a Z!), a game made about a year ago in the middle of algebra class. This is made for the TI-84, and  the as a fellow graphing calculator programmer pointed out will not run on the TI-83 (usually TI-84 programs can run on a TI-83) .

In the game you must spin mirrors to bounce a laser(s) into a detecter(s), while passing through portals and avoiding boxes. An epic puzzle game for graphing calculator! Futures 45 levels. (I might get a calculator so.. More levels soon?(I made it on a borrowed TI-84)). It received a 8/10 rating on ticalc.org .

anyway! If you wish to download go there–> http://www.ticalc.org/archives/files/fileinfo/459/45934.html

pics at link!!

Apparently, I released Not a Clone at the same day as the October challenge was announced, so here it is!

Not a Clone
Upon receiving his new smartphone, poor Jimmy downloaded all of the top-selling games that now demands every second of his attention. Help Jimmy play through as many mobile games as possible before the battery runs out!

Not a Clone is a satire on the rampant clones that appears in the mobile game market.

Tags: clone, Flappy Bird, mobile, Satire

I would like to participate October challenge very badly! But one month is not enough. That’s why I started personal October-November-December Challenge! It’s like October challenge, but it last the rest of this year. I have been improving my programming skills since the latest Ludum Dare, so I think it’s finally time to make something actual. Maybe not a full game, but an alpha version (alpha funding is the way to go!).

Here’s the list of my goals:

• Release a paid aplha version by the end of this year(the earlier you buy it, the less you must pay)
• Earn at least 1.00€

Well, two goals are more than one, right? I’m not sure whether I’m going to make a story-driven rpg or a multiplayer game.

I’ll make another post when I get something finished.

Hey all

I’m a musician and I’m looking to get in on the October challenge if anyone is in need of some music! I’ve got plenty of demos up on my website, soundcloud, and newgrounds (under the name DamienFleisch). So if anyone is in need of some music please hit me up

Kyle

Helloo everyone:

I have been designing a game engine for around a year and have recently decided to restart it, i am thinking about doing December’s Ludum Dare, If i use a GameEngine i have built, how does it all work, because i know source code doesnt have to be uploaded anymore, but… as i am using something i have built myself unlike for example unity, is that aloud?

thanks in advance

Have a couple things that I can approach for this years October challnge

Been starting on a top down game, with some minor random map generation, somewhat like a rogue like, but more like an RPG with rogue elements. Going to build it with Phaser to give that engine more of a try.

Another thing is I could work on my LD29 game a bit more: http://projects.agmprojects.com/searchforhope. It’s something I would like to work on more, but i’ve held that off a bit as I’ve been working towards WebGL support in MelonJS.

Not sure which I’ll do yet, but new projects are always fun. Been a while since i’ve started one

Hi

I was wondering if there was any “game jam” style competition but only about 3D modeling and constructing around the web?

A bit like a demoscene but limited in time, not ressources.

Or like a break dance battle, showing off 3D skills and tricks on a short time.

Creating stunning environments and stuff and push it to the limit, use procedural or modular approaches!

About a year and a half ago, during Ludum Dare #26, I created a game called Pix. Pix was a 2D puzzle game that involved getting the blue square to the green exit. It was for the theme ‘Minimalism’ which I think I incorporated pretty well. It reach #100 overall, and higher and a couple of other categories. Click here to view its submission.

Level 27 of the original Pix. Minimalistic style.

I have decided to come back to the original idea and redevelop and expand the game, while keeping the same gameplay mechanics. Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you…Pix 1.5.

Title screen of Pix 1.5.

I have been working on this for about a week now and I have made a considerable amount of progress. All the menus and game systems are in place. About 80-90% of the images/graphics have been made and implemented. I do, however, have a few more weeks of development to go through due to me wanting to polish the butt off of this game.

I am currently working on a level editor which will provide simple and easy to use tools to create interesting and unique stages. I am also working on creating new tile mechanics. There are currently 3 new tiles that were not included in the original Pix, and the teleport system has been re-worked to allow much more flexibility. I also plan on adding a much more complex system to the level editor known as ‘flagging’. This will allow a level designer to assign custom properties to tiles and make them behave in a unique and customized way. The teleporters will be using this flagging system as an example.

Below are a few in-progress screenshots of Pix 1.5 (Click them for full size). Everything is still subject to change. I plan to release Pix 1.5 between 24th of October on itch.io for FREE!! Donations will be appreciated though. More details will be released closer to the time.

First level Pix 1.5 acting as a movement tutorial.

More complex level displaying multiple different tile types.

Example of the new ‘Zone View’ allowing players to view entirety of larger levels.

Thanks for reading!

So, I decided to create a game with romans and an amphitheatre, dummies to train, swords, shields, yeah

I’ve used Google Play services as multiplayer platform, but it is hard to make it work cause I need to test a lot, so ,right now I’m making the basic, run around the amphitheatre, confrontate the dummies, and so on.

You can see it on twitch.tv too.

Tags: amphitheatre, arena, roma, romanos, romans

The first week is coming to a close. Let’s see what I’ve got done already.

Since the beginning of October Challange I’ve been only working on the UI. I made a mockup how the UI could look on mobile. Which looks like this:

Setup

After that I wrote a short TODO list to get a general idea what needs to be done. To make things easier I setup git + bitbucket. After that I grabbed the Unity 4.6 beta because I wanted to try the new GUI for the October Challange. Also I installed the Android emulator Andy so I don’t have to use a physical device to do a quick test.

Progress

I got a little done in through the week. Mostly I’ve been replacing the old GUI with the new GUI which worked mostly like a charm. I got stuck here and there because I wanted to try out some stuff and because I didn’t know that Layouts weren’t under UI in the Component menu… I’m quite happy what I got done with the time I spent.

I’ve got the main menu done with no special art, which I want to change later. Most of the ingame GUI is done with a first draft of the final art(it might actually stay that way). What’s missing is the UI element when you click a planet and the upgrade costs at the Station.

Plans for week 2

I’ll finish my first iteration of the new GUI this week. This should be done before the weekend as most of it is already done. I might replace the main menu art so it all has the same feel.

I’ll have to think about how I want to make the planet UI as I didn’t like the original one. It was unnecessary that you had to type in how many weapons you wanted to sell. In most case you would want to sell as many as possible anyways. Also the information wasn’t where the player was looking. I’ll try to redesign this.

With this the GUI should be done and will need some testing to improve it further. After that I want to add some better feedback for the player to show what is happening. I’m thinking about throwing out some particles whenever something happens, e.g. when a ship sells weapons, when a ship arrives at the station, when a planet gets conquered, when a planet rebels. I’ll try to add effects to everything and if it is too much I’ll tone it down. Also I’ll try to look at the audio. Reiterate over the current sound effects and add new ones to the new effects.

This should be enough for week 2. I’m not even sure I can do all this but I’ll try.

Random Future Thoughts

I have some ideas how a trailer for WoCS will look like. I would love to make a little over the top trailer like BattleBlock Theater did. Short, hectic but the gameplay has to be clear. That’s what I have in mind. I’m not sure if this will happen before the end of october.

I’ll reserve the last week of october for all the organizational stuff like registering for Google Play Store and legal matters.

I’m still not sure how to spread the word about my game. I’ll try to keep up a weekly report on here to get a little visiblity. And maybe make a devlog on tigsource.

Recently, I have discovered Polycode (http://polycode.org/) and so far,  it seems like it will suit me perfectly especially because it uses C++. But I would like to know;  has anybody used it before and if so what are your thoughts on it ?

Thanks! 😀

The first tip is to set your window to adjust to the operating systems’ default GUI text, buttons etc. the way to do this is on the line below.

{

UIManager.setLookAndFeel(UIManager.getSystemLookAndFeelClassName());

}

The second tip is to make a fullscreen window. If you are unaware of how to do so, check below

{

GraphicsDevice vc;

GraphicsEnvironment env = GraphicsEnvironment.getLocalGraphicsEnvironment();

vc = env.getDefaultScreenDevice();

vc.setFullScreenWindow(JFRAME);

}

The third and final tip: Have a gameUtils package. It’s really annoying to rewrite code, so just write it once and access it from a gameUtils package if you don’t already!

Hmm… Not much game mechanics implemented… In-fact non at all! Well i take that back (see list bellow) But one thing ime ‘proud’ of is my GUI (suriusly, its creating an “optical illusion” on my monitor)

About me: Ime an 13 year old male java programmer.

About the game: I made this game originaly for the TI-84 graphing calculator(download here), but now, almost one year later, i decided to make a pc clone. in the game you ” bounce a laser(s) to hit the target(s)” -me. The original got a 8/10 on ticlac.org.

PC version done list:

• Most menus/GUIs
• basic UI(mouse control, dragging level, zooming level)
• some level file reading.

PC version to-do list:

• Better/more mouse control (Id Est … auto move level while zooming … interacting with level)
• finish level file reading
• Sprites
• And more…

sorry for bad grammar ime tired

In the beginning…

When I first started coding ‘Tower Block Builder’ I set about building up the game engine first. This was to check that I could code the game and to see if it was playable, so no graphics were created and the whole thing was wireframe using the basic drawing tools of Box2D (see attached pic).

First problem was compatibility for tablets and touch screens. Most of the clicks worked for both but ‘dragging’ shapes proved more difficult. Searching out problems on Google is always advisable, but you have to trawl around a bit to find the answer you need. Sometimes the answer isn’t out there and it gives you an idea how to solve the problem another way.

Because of the differences in tablet dragging with a finger and using a mouse I had to allow for both and created two sets of control techniques. Luckily Chrome has a simulation mode for tablets that meant it could be tested as I went – but final testing must be done on an actual tablet and I was lucky enough to have access to an Ipad and Android tablet.

A working game engine was completed and a playable level created. That proved the game could work but then I realised the full game would need a start screen and level select screen which needed the game engine embedded into rather than a freestanding ‘one level game’. This meant building a ‘game shell’ from scratch containing various game screens (start, info, passed, failed, level select) and would have saved time if allowed for from the start.

It was when I began to create the graphics and look of all these screens that the enormous task of creating a game hit me. Don’t forget that EVERYTHING that appears on the screen has to be coded in and created from the ‘Start button’ to the ‘Level failed message’.

With this in mind I began to look for a style for the game. More about that in my next blog.

I know players hate reading complex rules, so I tried to make a screen that would explain how the cards work without getting too complicated. Here are the basic rules:

At the start of each game, the players are presented with a deck of 20 cards and they take turns picking one by one until each has 10 in their hand. After that the battle starts.

When the first player picks the card, all the other cards rotate 180 degrees to face the player sitting across. It’s a two-player local duel game.

I released my first commercial title, “Between the Lines”. The game was developed entirely by me, with the exclusion of the Achievement scripts, which were written by Jake Janzen. This game took me about 4 days to develop, it is one of my proudest works, and I’m very happy to release it to the public. I hope you enjoy playing this game, you can choose from playing the demo, which is a slightly stripped version of the original, which has a 10 minute timer. Hope you enjoy playing this game, and if you like it enough, please consider buying the full version, which is constantly updated with new features.

Between the Lines – itch.io

Thank you for reading. Also checkout a community user’s review.

I have made profit from it, so I have competed the October challenge 😀

Greetings, programs!

We participated in LD30 back in August and made a game prototype that we were so happy with that we continued our work on it. That game is Galacto’s Intolerant and below is a record of us making the prototype from scratch. Ed, our artist, was kind enough to cut down 40 hours of footage (which we streamed at the time) down to 75min. Hope you enjoy!

Tags: FWG, fwg game, galacto's intolerant, kiwi soft

I think I’m almost finished with my game  for the October Challenge! It’s a text-adventure I started during last March Break, because I was really bored. I thought it would just be a short little project that I would finish in like a day, but I all I had was the beginning of the story  before the break ended.

The beginning of the story.

I came back to it around August, and fixed, and edited a bunch of stuff. Before I knew it I had a decent plot, and a lot of writing. Now I think I’ve pretty much made it to the end of the story. All I have left to do now is write the end, and edit the story. I plan on putting my game up on itch.io and selling it. I’m not sure how much I will sell it for, but it will probably be under a dollar. This is the first game I’ll be charging people money for. I’m kind of nervous actually. I just hope people will enjoy the story. But even if you don’t like it, I’m planning on donating most of the profits to the ebola outbreak in Africa. So at least you can be happy your money’s going to a good cause!

Here’s a little description I wrote that pretty much sums up what my game, Cheats is about:

Gambling is all about strategy. You know this well. You know when you should bet a little, and when you can play around the rules, to rake in the big money. You play with cheaters, but you don’t care. You’re smarter than all of them. But when one of your own goes over the edge, all of a sudden the stakes are raised, and what used to be money lost, could now be your life.

Random bits of the story.

Yeah so that’s pretty much it. Thanks for reading, and good luck to everyone else who’s participating in the October Challenge! I hope you all succeed!

I finally got a chance to work on my LD30 entry.  So far I have replaced the placeholder primitive shapes with some sprites to make the game easier to grasp.  These are sprites that I sourced from the ole’interwebs, if I continue to work on this I will have custom assets built for me.  I still want to hack together some sort of parallaxing background and clouds for heaven, but before I do that I want to put a nice UI in the game and do some game ballasting based on feedback I received.

The updated build can be found here: Click Me!

Pics:

Update1

Update2

Matt

Here you go!

Let’s the promo phase begin. I’m working on an english version but this should give you a hint. Don’t miss the game on Halloween!!

Tags: ld48, Nevado, october challenge, october challenge 2014, Otrora, runner, trailer

Hey, after my last few..urmm..unsuccessful ludum dare’s using java i thought i would try to learn somthing new. So i tried to learn python and pygame. So today i made a quick game called catch the fruit – its pretty self explanatory. Can somone here please try the game to see if it has been packaged properly? I need this to work especially after my last humiliating ludum dare entry involving a resource error

It should look like this 

thanks in advance

https://www.dropbox.com/s/p4xn57ksz6ez0k5/Catch%20The%20Fruit.zip?dl=0

version 2 test:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/rcqc6mjbk3sqt9k/Catch%20The%20Fruit%20V2.zip?dl=0

A promise is a promise,

Here is english version of the trailer for my October Challenge game Nevado!

What are your thoughts about it?

Tags: 2014, ld48, october challenge

Hi, I’d like to make a post about the newest update my LD October Challange.

Be sure to check out the game’s itch.io page.  Between the Lines

Below you can find a video by my friend. SpaceMyName going over the update.  Check it out.

Here is a text version going over the update.

Update 1.5.6:

• Added new Time-Attack mode.
• Play button now has a sub-menu.
• New Tasks added.
• Menu Sounds
• New Powerup: Bomb
• Added Powerup details at the bottom of the screen.
• Updated Demo
• Joypad support. (Basic)
• Demo is now 5 minutes.