This MiniLD was a lot of fun. I managed to finish a small fun game that is not the worst thing I’ve ever made.

I challenged myself to reverse my game development process, meaning

1. I started by creating music,
2. made a design document,
3. pumped some sound effects out of bfxr,
4. created all the art for the game,
5. wrote a TO-DO list
6. and finally started programming the game.

Good things that happened:

– No silence: By making the music first, my game finally wasn’t silent because I usually drag this out to the end and then I totally forget/scrap it.

– Small but finished: The game is actually finished, because I decided to not take the first thing that came to my mind and think about all the cool things I could do, but instead kept the scope small and concentrated on one single core mechanic.

– emehT: This is probably the first time I made something that fit the theme, instead of ignoring it or just tangentially relating to it.

Bad things that happened:

– Bad Art: The art is really bad, as always when I do the art myself.

– Bad Music: The same goes for the music, but at least it’s better than silence… right?

– Rather shallow: The game is only fun for a short time, the novelty wears off quickly and then it’s rather bland.

Tags: MiniLD57, pre-mortem, pre-postmortem, reverse

I’m proud to announce that this years Ludum Dare GDC Gathering will be at a brand new venue: GitHub!

Do you Game Jam? Then join us for an evening of war stories, chatting, chillin’, and whatever. There’ll be food and drink (Pizza and :D). And yes, for the first time, there will be Vegetarian and Vegan options. 😀

Have a game you want to show-off? Bring it along too!

Monday March 2nd, 7:00 PM – 11:00 PM
88 Colin P Kelly Jr St
San Francisco, CA 94107
(about a 15 minute walk from Moscone)

EDIT: The Ludum Dare Wallpaper/Poster from the party can be found here:

http://ludumdare.com/…/LudumDare32.png

I am really looking forward to starting this MINI LD two days ago (wut?? :0)

everything went AMAZING I obviously came first (lol) and all the ideas were just sooo good.

WHAT WENT WELL:

I came first (even though there are not places)

my friends said my game was amazing (this is actually relatively likely)

WHAT WENT BADLY:

uuuummmm….

probably a lot of stuff.

Hope you had fun everyone!!!!!!!!!!!!!

!emag ym tuoba stnemmoc evitispo hcus teg ot gniog saw i wonk ton did I

:llew tnew tahw#

gnihtyreve ton-

:gnorw tnew tahw#

gnihtyreve tsomla-

This was my first Mini LD, and despite all obstacles, I’m very satisfied with the final result. The idea of creating a MMORTS using AR and the capability of traveling backwards in time seemed far fetched, but in the end it all went very well.

The Good:

• It went pretty well. It actually went so well that Google is now interested in buying it, go figure!

The bad:

• Accidentally killed my past self, and now I’m painfully fading away. But no worries, I’ll just go back in time to stop myself from killing myself by killing myself and thus saving myself from being killed by me.
• It is alleged that some players lost the notion of what’s real and what’s virtual, some even had to be hospitalized with advanced stages of dementia.
• I might have broken the sole fabric of existence
• Accidentally brought Hitler to the present.

Love all your entries.

Peace

Tags: MiniLD57

Creating my game ‘Replay’ was an awesome experience. I hope it’s a sidescroller you’ll also like.

I’ve learned quite a bit. For the first time I used WebGL in a game jam after I ported one of my games to WebGL only half a month ago to learn how to use it (the port isn’t finished yet, because I just had to do this jam, but if you want to take a look: unfinished WebGL version, finished WebGL-free version). This is the first game which isn’t as static as my older games. I’ve got fancy animations and cool parallax scrolling.

Things that went great:
* getting all those images into WebGL as textures worked without a hitch
* finally some animations and parallax scrolling!
* the game has a really cool ending
* came up with a name really early

Things that went bad:
* I wanted to use free sprites for my character and environment, but couldn’t find images for everything and had to do some art on my own (every good looking image is not made by me ;))
* Couldn’t use the whole week because there was some really annoying disturbance that prevented me from working on my game
* didn’t have time to add a start to the game, so you have to start at the ending

Please play and comment on my game

While, that just about wraps it up.  This is the first jam I’ve competed in and it went… all right.

The idea is that you are going back in time to reverse the effects of time travelling hooligans.  Or something like that.  Maybe you are the hooligans, it’s not really that clear yet.  Either way the program is in it’s infancy and your job is mostly to sneak into different places in the past and steal information and technology while attracting as little attention as possible.  And for god’s sake don’t kill anybody!  The time scientists are having enough trouble trying to untangle the timelines without cleaning up after you.

Oh, and you don’t get a choice.  You are a clone, one amongst millions, surviving in a pocket protected from the ravages of the timelines.  If you do not comply, their are plenty others who will…

That was the plan any way.

Tags: MiniLD #57

Introduction: This is my 3rd game jam and my very first ludum dare or mini ludum dare. I have participated in 2 global game jams before and have enjoyed them thoroughly. This will be my first game in unity but I have worked with XNA in the past. I will be working with a group with one other coder which is more experienced with unity than me and an artist.

The idea:
The game is similar to Touhou and is a bullet hell styled game with a twist. In the game you will have a shield that rotates around you that reflects bullets. These reflected bullets are the way you kill enemies. It contains multiple bosses each with their own unique challenges.

What went well

• I actually got some sleep 😀
• Pretending we did well before we even started

What went wrong:

• We didn’t end up having music if anyone wants to join us in making music particularly looking for some boss music you can contact me on (Dont be shy)
  Skype: logan.k2
  Steam: http://steamcommunity.com/id/logon_13
• Pretending we did well before we even started

Hi everyone !

This is DESERVER post-mortem, also my first one.

Very interesting themes, it was very inspiring from the start ! even the game’s tittle was set before it even begins. Lynch-like stuff + Chinese Astrology really gave good/weird ideas from the start !

Maybe a little too much because at very first i didn’t know if i was going to try to make a braid-platformer-like thing, an adventure game with weird storyline (i would love to make one someday), and it ended as often, as an old school shmup !!!

This was decided because :

I’m currently working on this game style since month now with no regards for others, and i have my “game-engine” (made with GMS) project barely working ;

So while i’m updating this engine made at first for the last 2 LDJAM events, why not trying it with a different approach and gameplay ?

I first tried some lines of code, very basic, before the jam started. Some very simple “sinus” function to make some AI movement like classics, i mean Parodius/Xenon 2 etc… This worked from the start, the simpliest stays the simpliest, so i told myself hey ho let’s go.

What went right :

I tried stick to the plan this time and not to implement improvised stuff.

Starting from the end forced me have a workflow/limits.

I made a post Mortem.

Good occasion to take a fresh breath.

I’m ok with the tittle

What went bad :

Barely nothing, perfect week i was super-lucky and made super awesome things.

Music was a mess but that’s how i have fun.

I’m bad at level-designing and wasted some-time because of the use of a non stable engine at the start (mine!) instead

Undpredictable things.

Still needs polish.Always needs polish.Forever needs polish.

Wish i had more time to fully exploit theme But hey ! i have time !!!

And it all began like this :

and you can try here as everytime i’m yearning for feedback suggestions and opinions… Give a shout !

Cheers :]

Franck.

Well this was my first entry here at LD. I would love to say I learned some things, but I probably didn’t.

Overall, I had a great time. I seemed to have struggled the most with the theme. For the life of me I couldn’t come up with any concepts or any ideas.

However I still managed to crank something out. It definitely needs more work, a direction would have helped exponentially during this whole process. But I’m happy with it, I think…

Tags: 5, 57, 7, ld, mini, MiniLD

I was originally not going to enter this MiniLD, but then I decided it would be good to hopefully finish a game.

What Went Right:

I came up with a new Idea and deleted my old post-mortem from the day before before it was posted
I made a game
I meant to make this game before, but never got around to it
I had fun making beautiful pixels

What Went Wrong:

The music was less than perfect
The sound was BFXR again
My microphone still does not work
I kept switching ideas, so I may not even make this specific game

I hope to play some good games in this next week!

mini LD 57 was fun. the theme was “reversed”. i made a game about a maverick scientist who has invented a reverse evolution ray and uses it to devolve birds back into dinosaurs.

• it’s not really much fun
• not enough time to draw and animate a variety of birds and dinos
• sounds, as usual, is lacking

• i got to draw some dinosaurs

You can find it here : http://ludumdare.com/compo/minild-57/?action=preview&uid=16100

It is kinda fun small and simple, to read more about it check the entry.

this isn’t really a postmortem but i finished my game early so I’m writing it now.

i made level zero, a rpg where you level down instead of up and get weaker as you progress.

Good:

i finished the game!

core mechanics are fun and work well

Bad:

level design is not great

programmer art

not many sounds

this was good preparation for LD 31!

(DISCLAIMER: I took the post seriously and I am writing this before making my game, so it’s a joke post, I will post actual news on my game later)

When I saw the theme I wanted to create something clever and original for this mini-dare, and my original plan was spawned from thinking about “What would it look like to watch a game of Super Mario Bros played back in reverse??”. The resulting game is… Well, it’s interesting, you can check it out for yourself. I only with I had been given more time to complete it, what with school and all that. Maybe I’ll continue working on it beyond this! (Probably not though).

– Connorses

This is my post-mortem… I thought about The Unsolver when I was watching the very cheesy trailer for Mini LD #57. The goal was simple, make a game where the player has to unsolve a level for the next challenger!

The Easy:

Thinking about it

The Difficult:

How do you unsolve a puzzle?!

Well now’s the hard part… undeveloping this game…

After all this coding and debugging of my latest MiniLD entry – Revertris – I’ve decided to write up this post-mortem.

A quick recap of the game first, just to clear my sleep addled brain and get some creative juices flowing;
Revertris is a game of reverse Tetris, you start off at the end game screen of the tetris game. Once the game starts you get a ghost-image of the latest block that was placed and you have to quickly find it a place before it’s pulled up and off the board. When the block disappears off-screen then score is calculated by the number of pieces in the same color you managed to fit onto it, using powers of two. So for a 2×2 square with three red and one green block in it you’d get 8 points, 1 for the green, 1 for the first red, 2 for the second red, and 4 for the third red.

What did I do right?
– Had a full game idea and mechanics sketched out in advance.
– Managed to talk myself out of clinging to some vague and unexplainable hope that I’d be able to do sounds or music.
– Decided to forego UI completely, since I seem to be balls at it.

What did I do lef- I mean less right?
– For some godforsaken reason I decided to dive into the deep end of a new toolset I’ve never even compiled before, called OpenSceneGraph. I’ve never even used a scene graph before.
– I ended up throwing away all the debug databases by mistake, so lost a lot of time rebuilding the entire toolset.
– As usual I put up way too lofty goals for the final product, so I had to cut away lots of features I really wanted to cram into it.
– Built the game around the hot-seat concept of having one person playing Tetris before letting the second player take over with Revertris.
– For some reason I spent far too much time on an AI that played a fake game of Tetris to fill up the board, ended up losing lots of time for that.
– Started coding far too late to have enough time to learn my new toolset properly, much less get a well made game from it.

So for my ending words I guess I’ll just have to hope that the rest of you have had as much fun (and coffee) as me during this little MiniLD, and I hope we’ll all have just as much – if not more – fun when the next full Ludum Dare Compo/Jam comes around.

// Ace

Tags: C++, MiniLD #57, why am I still awake

Hey there!
Some time ago I started producing electronic music and it is royalty free, so you can download and use it in your projects, trailers, gameplays, games/everything for free, just credit me.
If you want – check my new music blog for latest tracks, maybe you’ll find something for you.
Thanks! ;]
https://muciojad.wordpress.com/

Tags: creative commons, music

I thought I’d have plenty of time this weekend, but it didn’t work out as planned, so I only really started making anything today. Here’s a gif of the main character, Jake:

ANIMATION

The way he is drawn is pretty much how everything will be drawn in the game. Naive and childish, with mish-mash colors, and probably only two frames of animation for everything. I’m partly doing this because it fits the theme and partly because I can’t really draw

Hope people’s games are coming along nicely or disassembling nicely, or whatever you do in this reversed jam.

Tags: screengif

And so I decided to partake in my first Mini Ludum Dare, because apparently I don’t have nothing that I should be currently studying just so I can get to the Uni I want. Anyway, my game. Main idea of ‘Hey! Where’s my Guy’ is that while your Guy starts at the left side of the level, the camera starts at the right side. And while Guy moves right, camera moves left. That’s an idea I’ve never heard before, so I went for it.

So, the things I did properly:
– I actually managed to finish the game! Yay!
– My graphics, with exception of the Guy doesn’t look that bad.

And things I didn’t do properly or didn’t do them at all:
– Wanted to make this game in Unity. As always ended up doing it in Game Maker Studio.
– I’ve started way too late, like two days in.
– The Guy doesn’t look that good.
– I could have added more content.

So, for now it’s all. I’m actually going to study now.
Bye.
Yonish

Tags: MiniLD #57, Yonish