Hello guys, how is my first Ludum Dare, and this is the first game I do for him, well … this game has a ball and you must use the orange bar to hit the ball with that you should make the ball collide with the blue cube, and at the same time you have to protect the ball from the guns.
Please download and play it, and then classify as this helps a lot! :3
Link: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=38629
Thanks :3
The Concept
Immediately upon hearing the theme I knew what I wanted to make: a twin-stick shooter where you’re fighting off waves of drones who have been sent to your dystopian future apartment to murder you because you’ve been labeled as a subversive. There were going to be sweet powerups and I was going to record a bunch of funny answering machine messages that would play while you were fighting and the whole thing was going to be boss.
So I fired up Game Maker and got a gray circle moving around. The movement didn’t feel satisfying, though; what I wanted for some reason was rollerskate movement. Why is your character on roller skates? She’s getting ready for her job as a rollerskating waitress. Easy enough. I made the gray circle move around like it was on roller skates and started spriting the main character.
I’m not particularly fast or skilled at pixel art, so just making the basic idle sprite was taking a long time, and I began to wonder if I actually did want guns. For one thing, I’d have to draw the PC holding a gun, which sounded time-consuming. For another, I’m always meh on guns. Literally five hundred percent of all video games have guns (or swords), and it’s more interesting to me if I can make something different. So I decided, okay, there’s all this furniture in your apartment, and you’re moving it around to crush the robots.
Or, wait, maybe you’re not at your apartment, maybe you’re at your job, and what you’re crushing robots with are tables and chairs with customers in them! I flashed on a mental image of an NPC in a chair with a hamburger in a speech bubble over its head being pushed across a room, continuing to demand a hamburger. This was really funny to me, so I coded up a pushable table, then moved on to robots.
Which was where I hit the snag. I’d gotten GameMaker’s grid-based pathfinding to work in the past, but now I had these robots running around in weird circles, and I couldn’t figure out what I was doing wrong. I made a quick time budget and estimated that if I spent the time trying to fix the pathfinding, I would not have a finished game by the end of the jam. My best bet was to come up with a completely new game concept using what I already had: a rollerskating waitress and a pushable table. No pathfinding allowed.
A few weird brain jumps later I had an idea for a real-time Sokoban puzzle game about a rollerskating waitress in a wizard diner.
The Bad
This was my first Ludum Dare, and I didn’t manage my sleep very well at all, so instead of 7 PM Mountain Time, the deadline on Sunday wound up being “how much later can I physically stay awake without passing out and breaking my arm like my ex did when he stayed up for 32 hours playing Dwarf Fortress?”
This meant a lot of things didn’t make it into the game that really should have. Balance, for one, I really should have balanced for difficulty. Also, I should have provided instructions. I got lots of awesome feedback from people and the gist of it was “this game is way too hard and it took me a really long time to figure out how to play it, but other than that it’s really innovative!” I pretty quickly regretted starting the game with too many wizards, and not writing an algorithm that would check for what food you needed and throw you a bone.
I felt this especially hard after asking Taunia Sabanski to play the game on Twitch, which she gamely did, and then got just the most terrible possible board and did not have an amazing time. Which, probably that happened to a lot of people, and I could have easily ameliorated it by changing a few numbers to different, friendlier numbers. So that’s something I learned, I need to leave more time for balancing and adjust things to be easier than I think they should be at first.
The Good
I made a game! It’s still got a long way to go before it’s really finished, but I haven’t lost momentum on it, and I think eventually it’ll shape up into something I’m proud to have made. Which feels awesome.
I also learned that a good way to get things done is to focus on the throughline and be willing to get rid of ideas and cut back the scope when necessary. I suffer from terrible Scope Creep Disease, so the external time pressure was really helpful in preventing me from, like, coding dialogue options for the shrubbery.
The Game
Is over here if you’re interested. If you do play & rate it, and are interested in trying a better-balanced version afterwards, here’s the latest post-comp build.
Thanks and have fun!
Jenni
Hey everyone!
We’ve made a YouTube video for all of you who can’t run our game. CAUTION: Contains spoilers!
Also, there’s now a linux build.
So, enjoy and be sure to rate!
Let me tell you a story about making of Ghoul Rush. It might not be the most enticing story in the world, but I need to write it, and hopefully some people would find it useful.
Everything started with #GamesJamMicrosoft here in Moscow. It’s a local competition, organized by Microsoft, that was specifically timed to coinside with Ludum Dare. Contrary to LD, this event was offline, with everybody working in one place; it also had a number of prizes. The moment we heard of it, we decided to try taking part. Where “we” are Chaos Cult games – a group of like-minded people all working in gamedev, and goofing around with indie development.
When we arrived at the event, we had not a slightest idea about what kind of game we wanted to make. Just that we wanted to work on Ludum Dare theme – and the theme was pretty unexpected. The day before, I’ve been basically sure that ☃ would win; but it did not. To find a good idea, we started a formal brainstorm; complete with a designated facilitator, writing down ideas and formal voting. I’m pretty sure we were looking extremely professional there! While doing that, we were joined by two new people – a programmer and a 2D artist. The latter was especially fortunate, since we had not had any 2D skills in the “core” team.
We created a whole list of nice ideas; some of those I still hope to implement, or at least prototype someday. It’ fun now to see a lot of games on LD use ideas that we had and rejected; often, these games take these ideas to new, unexpected places, making us go “Oh, why didn’t we think of that!” In the end, we settled on a final design: make a game about zombies, where player controls all zombies on-screen simultaneously, and the goal is to zombify everyone. It was almost perfect – interesting gameplay, easy to demo, easy to explain, and simple enough to make in just 2 days (the games jam event was limited to 2 days, unlike LD.) The only actual drawback was pretty tenuous connection to the theme – yeah, the game was technically single screen, but that’s not enough… we still decided to run with it, though.
The first problem we had was with internet. More than a hundred people in the same coworking space, all furiously hacking away… the wifi coverage was spotty at best. We had troubles accessing source control, and using Unity Asset Store was downright impossible. And the store was a vital part of our strategy! We had to send one person back home, where connection was good, and work with assets there. Meanwhile, the rest were battling with poor connection and quirky human AI that wouldn’t behave properly. Our would-be-zombies were either spinning around like crazy, or stopping entirely, content with being eaten. My own memory goes a bit spotty at this moment too – while I was coding all the game mechanics, the other programmer hacked at AI, and everyone else seemed to be producing content somehow. I went home late at night, to try and find us some sound – which required good internet connection. Our new team members actually stayed, and were hacking the whole night through – that’s some dedication!
The next day was pretty short – all teams had to build a playable version and prepare a presentaion demoing their game to the judges. We’ve added sounds, more-or-less fixed the AI, and fleshed out a single game level – the one that is now the last. Doing the actual presentation was hard. I have basically no experience with public speaking, and going out there before the audience was quite scary. It’s good to go out of one’s comfort zone and aquire new skills – that’s why I did it – but it’s does not make a very good impression. In addition to my own ineptitude, we somehow managed to botch audio – it seemed to work on windows sounds, but our game was silent. That was kinda discouraging – if you played Ghoul Rush, you know that sound add a lot to it! All in all, our demo was not the best… but not the worst, too.
We did not win any prizes, however. Maybe because of bungled demo, maybe because the judges were confused (and they were – you try looking through 60 projects in a couple of hours, and judging in several nominations!). Maybe the others were plain better, although personally I think we were the best! ((-8
The project did not end there, however. There was still time for Ludum Dare’s third day!
Even though monday is a work day and everyone had their jobs to attend (everyone except me. I only work part-time, so I had monday for myself), we still went on improving the game. Most work was spent on putting level content in place – after the weekend, all levels but the last were made of simple gray boxes. And LD version required all four levels, in order to have some learning curve. I’ve also rewrote all AI code from scratch… a couple of times. It became better, but I can’t say it’s “fixed” – AI behaviour is hard, no matter how you put it. By the way, that’s why the end boss is so mercilessly hard: we added him on monday morning, and he was more-or-less balanced then. Hard, but fair. However, I changed his (and others) behaviours at the last minute, and difficulty increased indirectly – the boss aquired the ability to back off from your zombies, and became much harder to kill. Game design is tricky like that – change one thing, and everything changes. Late on monday night (technically, it was tuesday already) we finally built and uploaded the game, and submitted to LD, with fingers crossed. Until now, it’s been doing pretty great!
Now, as is expected of post-mortems, a few things that went (especially) right or wrong.
The good:
The formal brainstorm in the beginning. We’ve generated loads of great ideas, and chose the best (or at least one of the best.) We did pretty good estimation of how much we can do over 2-3 days, and scoped the project right.
Using Unity Asset Store. We’ve opted out of “Graphics” category, because we used tons of asstes from there; and the game looks positively gorgeous; especially for a weekend project. There are certainly better-looking games on this Ludum Dare, but Ghoul Rush is a solid competitor… and we had no professional game artists on the team! (Our 3D artist actual job is in QA, and 2D artist is designer/illustrator, not a game developer at all)
Going to local Games Jam event. That’s where we met two new people to expand the team, and their help was invaluable. Without them, we wouldn’t be able to do what we did.
The bad:
Messing up game balance at the last minute. We really should’ve played through a couple of times more before submission (-8
Mixing up two different events. On the weekend, we were making a 2-day project (even less, actually) aimed at impressing the judges. On monday, we switched to 3-day project aimed at Ludum Dare developers. I think that sticking to one of those (preferably the latter) would’ve been better for the project.
…I feel the need to add “The ugly” caption here, but can’t really think of anything (-8
Anyway, please play our game if you haven’t yet; it’s here:
http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=47349
And, if you’re interested, check out our competitors from the #GamesJamMicrosoft event – many of them submitted projects to Ludum Date too!
The Mosquito Effect
(http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=11984) – best Unity game, best VR game
Houston, we’ve got a problem!
(http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=44988) – special prize from the coworking space
TV-Show
(http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=44958) – gran-prix
Tags: jam, ld31, post-mortem, unity3d
Here are the result from our equip to Ludum Dare 31th.
Please, check it out.
http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=47305
Yay, I finally got my internet working well enough that I could upload the video! It’s kinda long, didn’t think that it would be that long, even at 60fps 😛 My apologies
Hello consumer! FYI TODate the spacebook has been rate dby 42 Players who generated 46,385,0392 BP/s, 362,30580,04883 Likudos, and 376.483.2889 STARmarks. It has been rated by TheZiggy who is the biggest celebrity next to MAtthew McConaughey. THIS IS NOT ENOUGH THE SPACEBOOK NEEDS MORE DATA BY WHICH TO AGGREGATE. PLEASE
Here’s the thing: This week we ask our readers to help us. To protect our independence, we will never run ads. We survive on donations averaging about 15 datas.. Only a tiny portion of our readers give. Now is the time we ask. IF EVERYONE READING THIS RIGHT NOW GAVE 3 DATAS., OUR FUNDRAISER WOULD BE DONE WITHING AN HOUR. THAT’S RIGHT, THE PRICE OF A CUP OF COFFEE IS ALL WE NEED. PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS HOLY GIVE US THE PRICE OF A CUP OF COFFEE. IN DATAS.
gO please to this website: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=23194 then take out your wallet and throw your identification card at the screen and scream your social security number so loud the neighrbors will hear and right down your spocial security number and pass it along in such fashion until it reach spacebook corportate headquarters thank you goiod night and good luck -_- -_- -_- (<–OPTICAL ILLUSION)
After testing of game mechanic in compo version of the game Alice:nightmare , i’ve decided to create a full version with full storymode.
I’ve decided to opt out of coarse-grained graphics, and made it more accurate. Also i redrew all graphics and changed Alice’s dress color 
Here is new game screenshot.
Its about flowerpots and tables:
Play it: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=14064
Don´t get lost on your way back home tonight.
Play and rate “You Are Lost” while waiting for your presents.
No download needed 😉
Dear “Lududum Dare” people!
We whish you all the best and a delicious meal! 😉
If you find some time, please play and rate our x-mas themed game:
Thank you and happy time!
P.S the record ist still at 7100 points – beat it!
This is the the final song after you got through all levels.
happy x-mas to all
OST- Snowmään! Factory
If you wan’t to play our puzzle game… Snowmään! Factory
Tags: ldjam, song, soundcloud
I had a go at a trailer for our LD31 Jam entry.
You can play it at:
http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=20364
Our LD31 entry is online only, meaning that you need a friend on another computer (Mac or PC) or someone else to play with.
So, we decided to set a time to play with people who may want to rate our game online.
The counter is on our game’s page.
If you are interested, we’ll be online!
Update: Over for today! See you next time! Probably, tomorrow!
Tags: ld31
Merry Christmas, LudumDare Community!
In LD30 compo, As my first LD entry, I made a physics game called “Universal Gravitation”. I had a lot of fun in making it!
After that, I decided to take a try to make it into a full-length indie PC game, so I have put several months of work in this project since then.
Every Friday, I upload new maps and fixes to Kongregate to collect feedback from players. The rating has been slowly rising, that’s a good sign.
However, the game has only received 30+ ratings and 1200+ plays by now, that means it’s not yet eligible to be picked up by Kongregate’s recommendation system.
So, I’m here to request help from the LudumDare community, please give a hand to play & rate an indie game, your support is VERY IMPORTANT for my development.
(Current game might take 2~4 hours to beat through, your progress is auto-saved in browser, you can also jump to specified levels if you lose the saves file)
Hey everyone! We are the Button Masher Bros!
First off – HAPPY [INSERT HOLIDAY OF CHOICE HERE]!
A few more strong contenders in this Ludum Dare Competition! It’s Ludum Dare to Believe Part 10!
With so many submissions, there was absolutely no way we could play them all.
Special thanks to our friends at Reddit, twitter, and youtube who all stepped up to give us suggestions – you guys are the BEST!
If you like the games you see, be sure to check them out of Ludumdare.com and let the developers know what you think!
Today we will be highlighting:
Title: 90 Second Portrait
Category: Jam Entry
Creator: Simon Larsen
Title: Ab Intra
Category: Jam Entry
Creator: Yarek
Title: Photobound
Category: Jam Entry
Creator: PIXEL^3
Finally, we’d love to hear what you think!
You can comment on the episode linked above, comment in this thread, or tweet us at:
@ButtonMasherBro – Show account
@MathBlasterRitz – Chris
or @jwowBMB – Josh
Thanks Everyone and HAPPY LUDUM DARE!
About Doom Zone
Doom Zone is a top down shooter with Smash TV reminiscenses (360º aim & shoot, power ups, traps, great number of enemies, etc) solo and multiplayer oriented.
Nothing too complicated to achieve with 2 persons and 72 hours, or that is what we thougt.
The Team:
Idea’s Birth:
having in count the LD’s theme, our Idea was kinda simple (maybe too simple?), but effective:
DAY ONE (Visual development):
DAY TWO(Code development):
DAY THREE (Last Day):
What went right:
What went wrong:
The Future:
The game is in a state that we can polish, improve and convert it into a more interesting game. So is a matter of time we launch a post-compo version of this game Soon.
You can play and rate Doom Zone Here
Itchy Games Twitter: @ItchyGames
Tags: ld31, ldjam, postmortem
(Sorry for all possible language mistakes in this message)
Ok, I guess it’s time for my first post mortem.
It’s the first time I tried myself on Ludum Dare and it was intense. I never did something like that, that was the whole new experience and it was fun (including not-sleeping and not-eating parts =)).
Thank you all for your reviews and time spent in my game, when I published it I wasn’t expect any good comments – it still hadn’t story or normal user feedback.
That was so fun playing your games, reading your comments.
It’s a post about creation of Whole life on one screen.
How did my work process look like? (long post + bonus)
1. Idea. Well, it was strange. I have a big time difference with Ludum Dare “official timezone” and for me theme was announced at 6 a.m. At 6 a.m. I just opened my eyes, took my phone and checked it. I had no alarm or something, I just woke up at 6 somehow, with no intentions to sleep. After reading theme I start roaming around furniture and form the game idea in my head. I had only one (yep, this one) and I panicked a lot because of this fact. I even woke up my husband and told him my concept to check is it sane and ok for a game.
2. Code. The game is made with ActionScript 3.0 in Flash Develop. I used Starling + Feathers (it gave me a lot of UI opportunities). It was interesting to use something familiar and discover new parts of it (I even found a bug in feathers). At first my code look nice but at third day I was desperate and was rushing questionable classes and code parts into it, well, I’m not very sorry about it, I will rework it anyway.
3. Graphics. I have a new wallpapers (not kidding, I set this picture as my windows background). I’m not an artist and I’m really happy I managed how to spend minimum time on making something that doesn’t make people scream. I love this MMO icon. In general, it took about 1 minute for each icon so it didn’t take any extra time and was fun. Like, look, it’s me, drawing icons =D
4. Texts. English is not my native language so I was frustrated from idea of writing a lot of messages on it. First pack was made for chat – it was easy, chat messages was based on idea of standard not-readable mmo messages like “wts GGD 5kk tp RD” so I quickly made a full chunk of this code with small amount of sane speech (messages about Mark was a reference to “Gamers” btw). For correct spelling all other messages I should say big THANK YOU to my US friends – Tami and Felipe, they checked everything came to my 2 a.m. insane mind and fixed a lot of ‘bugs’ in it.
5. Story. In my mind all this started from the story *sigh*. It should be game about guy who spent too much time in games and Internet and start loosing his friends and girlfriend. But at the end his best friend comes back with intervention and you decide what to do – skip raid or stay at home and lose last friend. Yep, it could be depressive and hard. Luckily or not but I hadn’t enough time for it and I just made a basis for game and tried to make it playable.
6. Planning. Nope. Obviously for my first game I wasn’t prepared and had no idea how much time will all the parts take. I failed at timing but not so much. At least I had enough done (and courage… or madness) to publish it. I’m so happy I made intro (tutorial part), without it, it looked weird and hard to play.
Result
I will definitely 1. finish it, 2. participate in the next Ludum Dare. It’s so much fun, so much adrenaline and three days that you will hardly remember (who needs alcohol, hah?).
Thank you all for reading this, for playing the game. Thank you, Ludum Dare creators for this experience. It was awesome.
Now, bonus for those who read this. Some blog themes from game (<theme>: <post title>):
[Themes that came from working]
“Droid OS”: “How to run Droid on your toaster”
“Jyawa”: “Jyawa memory leak on calculators”
“BrainThink”: “BrainThink as a main language”
[General]
“Politics”: “Some politicians got together. All taxes raised”
– “War somewhere. Everyone concerned”
“Cooking”: “Masterpiece with potatoes and cheese in the microwave”
– “Coffee as an universal meal”
“Gadgets”: “Smart robot as an excuse to stay in bed”
– “Watching movies on the tiny screen of your smart watch”
“Search inc” (check its logo on search page): “Search inc bought a new project. And an island”
– “Search inc. Thinking about future. Sometimes”
“Blogging”: “New blog engine. Try another set of bugs”
– “Earn money with banners. Make people hate you”
“Money”: “Investing into potatoes”
– “Storing your bank accout data on your desktop” (;))
It’s only half of all possible themes, so keep posting =)
Tags: bonus, fun, post morem, thank you
In addition to releasing Episode 10 today! CHECK IT OUT HERE
We have a bonus spotlight video of CELL 09!
Now I know what you are thinking… “Button Masher Bros! Why does Cell 09 have a special video?!”
Well the answer is two fold –
1) The version we are playing for this version is the post-compo!
Why are we playing the post-compo?
2) THEY PUT US IN THE GAME! =DDDDDD
Basically, We needed to give this game special attention because it gave us special attention! We are egotistical bastards like that! Being included in someones game was a stretch goal for us here at the Button Masher Bros.
We always dreamed it might happen, but never really expected it to happen!
Today we proudly present our play through of Cell 09!
Title: Cell 09
Category: Jam Entry
Creator: 01010111
If you enjoy what you see, show us that you care!
Be sure to Like, comment, subscribe and all that cool stuff!
