Like to play piano, but all you have is a computer with a browser with ludumdare.com open? There are a lot of sites where Try playing Ad Libitum! Enjoy it and the eternal[citation needed] pun with its name 😀

Previous post talking about why this isn’t a perfect (piano, robots destruction) (game, simulator)

I liked the idea, just didn’t have time to accomplish something closer to what I wanted, but I plan on continuing with this game 😀

I’ve continued to refine the gameplay of my compo entry.

I’ve added Skills, Traps, Treasure Boxes, and sped up combat quite a bit.

You can now only spawn one of each character, but it is possible to set the target that each unit is attacking.

After selecting one of your characters you can target any enemy or treasure box by clicking on it. Gene moves really fast so if you click around fast enough you can actually kite all the enemies around the map.

The difficulty is very easy and there is currently only one level in this new version but I think this has the potential for much more interesting gameplay.

New Version

Original Compo Entry

SPINNICUS! SPINNICUS! SPINNICUS!

Play here!

I thought this was a really nice post on Alpha Beta Gamer about my entry!

http://www.alphabetagamer.com/her-majestys-apathy-bomb-game-jam-build-download/

They also did a playthrough where they complete two of the six possible endings (see below)!

Check them out! And if you haven’t tried my game yet, please do! And give it a rating!

-Ian

click on the image to play

Unlike my two first attempts, for which the workflow was as calm as a windless sea, this third Ludum Dare was an emotional roller-coaster.

• Slept 40 minutes the night before the event, 800 km road trip => Best condition ever to start the jam.
• D1: 12 hours doing a first prototype to finally realize it sucks => Day lost, need brilliant idea
• D2: 18 hours left, came with the final idea. Torch light in the dark? Good, because I don’t have time to work on art. Dark is good, it hide ugliness. The main character doesn’t move, brilliant!! The enemies’ teleport in the darkness? No move animation. What the heck do I wait to start?
• Ho wait, family dinner… A man must eat
• Deadline – 12 hours (3.00 pm): Breath, warm-up… and go !
• Deadline – 6 hours (9.00 pm): I’ll never make it…
• Deadline – 4 hours (11.00 pm): cut this features, and this one, and simplify this… Keep it simple, stupid.
• Deadline (3.00 am): Will I really dare put this game in the compo? Or work 24 more hours and compete against entire teams.

I truly hesitated to post my entry. I had maybe too high expectations for this third attempt, or I was too tired to think clearly.  Maybe afraid of the feedbacks. I had forgotten how friendly, welcoming, and constructive this community is…

What went good

• I finished my little game on time.
• The Pixel art needs polish (a lot) but at least is effective
• The mechanisms are simple yet full of future opportunities
• I create faster, I focus easier on the present task
• I’m not afraid to cut features if needed
• Post deadline promotion.
• Never give up
• I had fun

What went wrong

• That’s the third time I say it, and it will be the last: it miss sound!! Neither time nor skill to implement it. Need to learn. Shame for a game playing on a “creepy” atmosphere
• Waste a day on useless idea : should have took more time at the beginning to sort best ideas (newbie mistake)
• Need more sleep
• I must remember my life doesn’t (completely) depend on it.

Conclusion

It should have been worse. As always, it’s a pleasure to take part in this event. The theme was great, the community as awesome as usual. Can’t wait to do it again.

Ho, you want try my game? This way: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-32/?action=preview&uid=40976

Just tag them [LD32]

https://voat.co/v/IndieGames

We released on Amazon Appstore!

http://bit.ly/3SUMamazon

Also, on Google Play – http://bit.ly/3SUMgame

And, of course, you can PLAY NOW!

Hindsights one of those things that likes to bite you in the bum sometimes,  and driven by that i have began working on a more concept focused version of Swatch.   You can read more on that here (to save me repeating everything) 

I am trying to really buckle down with learning to code more, and pull out some decent ideas, get some working concepts together, it would also be nice to make some solid contacts with other indie dev’s of all skill levels.  I am the only one in my friends circle who is in to this stuff.  So i made a twitter. Would be great to get to know some people, so give me a follow if you like.

Twitter

Blog

I think one of the hardest aspects for me is ignoring graphics, personally as a gamer, i don’t find them to be vital to gameplay, i enjoy many games with “potato” graphics, but this LD, i just couldn’t ignore them, i have taken the last few days to learn how to draw objects with code, and have been playing around with that, creating a kind of “show” game.

I am using a new “core” system to indicate colours, and the relationship between these colours will be an important game dynamic.  Allowing the player to manipulate objects if they share the same core.  The screen shot above shows the player object linking to a block, and pulling it towards their position.

This will allow the player to move certain objects around the screen, there will be blocks who have no core, and therefore no manipulation capabilities, these in effect are static objects, should a jump in the game seem impossible to make, the player will be able to drag a block from somewhere else, into a position which allows them to make the jump.

Here is a brief list of changes to Swatch.

• New core concept, core colour indicates objects relationship in the game.
• Player core is effected by most of the game play dynamics, depleting with use of the player skills, and changing / increasing via in game pick-ups. (The player can collect “cores” via pickups through out the levels, how they use the core and its attributes is up to them. 
• Linking / pulling.  Players are able to “Link” to objects,  This is a system implicated for ease of coding, it changes the games code, as it alters objects cores to indicate proximity to the player.  An circle which is outlined indicates the player is not close to that object, a filled circle indicates the player can interact in some way with that object.  LINKING saves this information, and disables the active checking whilst the player is linked.  This way, all interactions are with the linked object. [Pulling] Allows the player to move objects in the game screen,  they can use this for a multitude of reasons,  Reach hard to reach places. Draw faces out of the blocks. Make a little house, what ever they like haha.
• No orientation, Down is where ever the player has landed.  At the moment this dynamic needs further work as it disorientates to much, I’m thinking of adding a switch, or some type of restriction to it. There will be more on this as it develops.  But consider this to mean (Sticky Player). 
• Swallow & Spit Again this is a fairly new concept so more on that another time. 

Hopefully there are some ideas people can get excited about here.  I’m looking forward to seeing how and where this project goes.

Thanks for reading.  Follow and leave a message ^^

Tags: ld32, Swatch

Hello LD friends,

So this was my first LD and my entry wasn’t exactly a game with lot of items and features.

It was basic,but with a solid mechanic and a pretty fun game play. I didn’t have a lot of time in the weekend so I had to make this in 3 or 4 hours.

Now, Im polishing my game. Some features I added last night:

– Smart pigs. If you are some in place high they can find you!

– Better sound system.

– Fix a bug in Level Logic class (I can’t believe I didn’t see that before :p ).

– Box can fall from the sky containing life for the player(The probability is relative to the level)

It is not much but it is a start..

If you didn’t check my entry,check it out:

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-32/action=preview&uid=49549

Here is the updated game:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/c9j8benrby1leav/game.jar?dl=0

Hi guys!
We love making gifs of everything in our game: new features, bugs, progress, etc, then some months later we check them and have a good laugh. Here are some!

This is how it all started!

First night gif (it was way darker than now)

That wolf movement… it’s a feature, not a bug 😛

Whoops, we can’t jump on the box if it moves like this…

We tried adding some borderlands-like effect, didn’t convince us tho, maybe with some more work it can end up being good!

Our walk animation didn’t seem to export properly

Wtf is up with this button?

Hope you like them!

Play Dusk now!

We added a web version of SNIFF so more people can play it HERE !

HI! A thousand THANKS to all of you for your encouraging comments and feedbacks. It was a huge pleasure to make this game and that’s really the best reward to see you playing and enjoying it.

We take note of everything you tell us and be sure that we will implement and fix SNIFF to offer a better experience.

Actually we just pushed a little bug fix that was really annoying: the mouse look problem. During the JAM we did’nt get the time to implement a smooth Mouse Look when Player is going upside down. It was a pain in the ass but in the rush we let it like this and submitted a buggy version. We just fixed that and we have to say that’s wayyyyy better now.

There is of course a lot more to do but for now we want to let the game as we did it during the jam.

As a few people asked for it and we want to go further, we wil do a post jam version and implement a few ideas you gave us like checkpoints feedbacks, better tutorial, physic corrections, etc…

THANKS again for your support and be sure that we go rate games of each people who posted a comment on our game.

Much love and JAM spirit !

SNIFF is here

Some tips for you!

Here you can see how to kill the snake:

Amazon – http://bit.ly/3SUMamazon

Google Play – http://bit.ly/3SUMgame

And, of course, you can PLAY NOW!

Play it HERE

Hi all,

here is my LD32 game

Get ready to use your soul energy to kill enemies.

Play it here!!!!

I created a trailer for the intro to my jam entry, Hush. Take a peek!

Hush is a music / memory game where you must discover and play bits of songs in order to break the Seals of Silence and return the stolen voices to the creatures of the forest!

Play now!

Tags: hush, jam, ld32, memory, music, trailer, video, youtube

All previous Ludum Dares that I’ve tried to participate in have failed miserably. For the first one I had no experience. For the second I had very little time. For the third I had no good idea.

For this one I had a good plan that I followed through with, and I managed my time well. I didn’t try to make anything more than I was planning on from the beginning.

Due to my inexperience with exporting Java programs, I didn’t manage to export the game with the sound library, so the submitted version has no audio. This is however something that I’ve “solved” afterwards using somewhat of a workaround.

The submitted version can be played here:
Limb by Limb

When I saw the theme I immediately came up with this idea (I don’t really know why). This was probably the first Ludum Dare I’ve entered where I actually liked the theme, and also came up with the concept even before starting to program.

The idea was to not only use an unconventional weapon, but also to use it in an unconventional way; I didn’t just want to make a normal shoot-em-up game and just switch the gun textures for a banana or something. I actually wanted to use the weapon as more than just a weapon. So I used it as both a health system, and as a level-puzzle-thingy.

In the beginning I planned to actually have enemies in the game, but I didn’t manage to add that in time, so I settled for making a puzzle platformer (although a later version of the game probably will include some simple enemies). So I guess I failed in making it a “weapon”, but rather a tool.

I quickly knew that I wanted to use the limbs as a health system, because it added a lot of possibillities regarding level design. I also came up with the idea of only being able to interact with levers if you have arms to further support level design.

In earlier projects I’ve saved all levels using a png file, but it has its limitations. And since the fun part about Ludum Dare is to always learn or try something new, I decided to use Tiled as level editor and implement methods that read json files. Which made level designing a whole lot more fun to do.

I’ve decided to work on this project a bit more, but I want to finish it in a couple of weeks.

Some updates/changes that I plan on making (and have done) are as follows:
– Make sound work (done)- Add a new type of lever, further enhancing level design (done)
– Add falling damage (done) as a comical effect, and also to enhance level design
– Make some new bigger, more difficult, and more thought out levels (done)
– Add some sort of enemy
– Add some sort of trap block
– Add particle effects
– Add usable items (maybe)
– Add more decorations
– Add more cowbell
– Add sound effects
– Add pressure plates (works without arms, obviously)
– Fix the bad platform physics (done)
– Remix the music (I made it in a very lazy way)
– Add fullscreen mode

ps. Some alternate titles I thought about using were “ARMageddon” and “Man at Arms”. Sadly I think that “Limbo” has already been taken…

Tags: ARMageddon, post-mortem

Unconvential Stick Swinging Simulator

Following up with Star Driller Ultra‘s GIF festival, here’s Unconventional Stick Swinging Simulator‘s GIFs, which does an infinitely better job at describing the game than with words.

In other news, I’ll be working on 2 post-mortems soon: the Star Driller Ultra post mortem and the Tech Valley Game Space real-world meetup post mortem. Hope to get those out soon!

Also if you missed it: how to make Star Driller Ultra‘s graphics.

After:

Before:

Quite of a improvement isn’t it? xD

There is still stuff that I want to improve in my game, they can’t be added to the comp version, but I hope people play the post-comp too, both are avaliable at the entry page!

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-32/?action=preview&uid=11311

Tags: postcomp

You can join us at the official server #1. We’ll see you on the battlefield!

Click here to watch our Twitch channel! (live!)

Ludum Dare Page

Let’s start with a GIF, why not.

Play it now

or read on.

Inspiration:

Recently I’ve been playing a lot of Startopia and utterly loving it. As such even before the theme voting started I was positive about working on a management simulation. There were many acceptable themes on the last batch; Grow, Adapt to survive, Harvest, Indirect Control; but alas they were not to be. I went to sleep a bit worried, but after waking up (mere 2 hours later!) I had the plan more or less down. Take Big Pharma, but rather than creating beneficial drugs, this lab would churn out harmful viruses.

The process:

Code, eat, sleep, code, eat, sleep, code, time’s up!
Nothing out of ordinary there. Slept less than in prior jams, but I really didn’t have time to catch any more Zs.

Programming:

Never worked on a management simulation before and to make it even harder I decided to do it the proper, efficient way. Rather than having all entities in a list which would get iterated though every AI update step, they are stored in temporary lists based on their current purpose. Seems simple enough, except coding while sleepy is a surefire way to miss a few of those, now crucial, list manipulations. Forget even one of them at any state change and soon resources are permanently stuck to the floor and the droids fail to update their tasks.

In the initial release that happened a lot. Now after a few days, all the bugs have been squished (as far as I know!).

Future and beyond:

The PostJam version is on the works. First I’ll implement some interface improvements and missing features I had no time to do. After that, time will tell. There are only so many projects I can work on at a time, but this feels like a keeper.

Play it now

or watch the GIF again I suppose?

Tags: bug fixes, gif, post-mortem