Hi!
You can listen to my soundrack
Logic Puzzle – Smiles

from my small game:
http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-32/?action=preview&uid=23120

Have a nice day! =)

I’ve played a lot of games that use Z as (one of) their action keys. For someone using a standard US keyboard layout, this might be surprising to you, but this key is not necessarily in the bottom left corner on your player’s keyboard. As long as you only use one action key, that is okay, because even if the player has to put his finger onto the center of the top row of his keyboard, most should be able to manage that.

But, consider you have two action keys, say “Jump” and “Fire” and you chose to use Z and X for that. Now this is very uncomfortable for everyone with a French, German or alternative Italian keyboard layout, where the Z key is in the top row of keys (and for the German layout it is even moved to the center of the top row, which is almost impossible to use).

Of course, I can just change my keyboard layout to US and that’s it, but not every player has the knowledge or the will to do that and you don’t want to limit the number of people who would be able to easily play your game, right? After all, there are about 2800 other games to chose from, you want to make it easy for your players.

So, which keys should you use? Take a look at this chart:

This is the ISO recommendation for Latin keyboard layouts. The black keys should be fixed on all standard layouts (i.e. not on Dvorak, Neo or de-ergo or Bépo layouts, but I think those are rare enough and their users should be used to changing their layouts regularly). What we can also see is that WASD as direction keys is not necessarily a good idea. It works on US and DE layouts, but everyone with a French layout gets in trouble with that.

So what should you use? In practice, XCVB for action keys has been used a lot and seems to work on many keyboards without Ghosting (another thing to keep in mind) and there are lots of gamers out there who prefer ESDF movement keys, so it should work quite well in practice.

Another thing: Some layouts (like French) can use digit keys only with shift, so better don’t use numerals for important actions.

The best solution would of course be to have configurable keys, but especially in a 48h contest, you will hardly have enough time to add that. I did it in my LD31 entry though and got a bit of praise for that, so maybe it’s a good idea to do if you want to squeeze the last bit out of your Overall score. Whatever you do, consider making it easy for non QWERTY keyboard users. Thanks for your attention 😉

I want to talk freely for who wants to read some stuff about the last Ludum Dare jam (spoiler: it was amazing).

Who was our target audience?

The Ludum Dare Jam is based on a theme voted the days before by the people. After the submission of your game, you should vote for other games made from other devs around the globe to get more visibility for your entry. The target audience for the game are actually developers! There is no any restriction of age to participate, so we had to rely on personal estimations. The feeling we had lurking on past editions was about 20–30 years old people, mostly male and of course all devs. That means that, for example, if you make a clone of Candy Crush Saga they will simply eat you publicly and threaten to burn your house. Just joking, of course (I would do the same, anyway :P). The topic of the 32nd edition was “An Unconventional Weapon”. The first goal was, then, find some great message or some great mechanic for them. Regarding session times, you will not have too much time to review each game: as I said, for each game you review you will gain more visibility. With more “coolness” factor you will receive more precious feedback and more votes. The second goal was that the game should have been fast to play and to understand in a 2 minutes session.

Who are we?

In our case, in Sentendo (a new game development reality we are trying to build here in Barcelona) we are three professionals. Each one of us has many responsibilities at the time, anyway we use to define some role (and responsibility) for internal organization: me the producer, Kostas the programmer and Jordi the artist. We all are game designers, the role is shared between the whole team since we all are good in this field (that means that each one of us sincerely thinks that the other 2 are great game designers, and for us that’s enough). For the Ludum Dare, Jordi was not with us due to a job he has with a client, so we were in two without any artist. The third decision was the roles definition: me as asset finder and adapter and Kostas as programmer. He quickly discovered phaser.io to develop the game in HTML5. This technology is great for a challenges like that, to improve the session time in our game. You don’t have to install anything to play it, just click and play.

The game

Since there were no much time we opted to make something really neat and polished, something which people could enjoy easily and with a simple mechanic to implement. Again, you have only 72 hours to submit your game, and of course you cannot work straight all that time. We needed something with a simple and direct message, since we didn’t find a great mechanic to explore for the topic. The game was based on a book called “Confessions of an Economic Hitman”. One of the arguments of this book is about the high level strategy of some corporate: they buy off their competitors just to close their companies assuring more market share for them. We decided to create a clicker game with a skill factor: click on your competitors to “fire” them with your cash bullets, and click on the coins they throw at you. The market share is represented from a Growth Factor that you and your competitors will have. The score will be the Budget you can amass during your play session. Players will see little people come out from the crushed companies, but they are small compared with the buildings. Another metaphor about the human role in the real context of inspiration.

What went bad

We wanted to make something simple, with a little deep on mechanics, but at the end we also made something difficult to balance on the fly. So the game is basically getting harder and harder and you will lose somehow. You can last more or less in the game, but you will lose. The competitors shot at you with their money to try and that will influence your growth factor. The attacks will be always more frequent and soon will become simply impossible to catch every coin coming at you. You will lose, you can try to achieve a better score, but you will lose sooner or later. That is a mistake for a skill-based game, in my opinion. The first change I would like to make to the game (and maybe I will do it) is to change the pacing to achieve the perfect balance between challenge and chance. You should last potentially forever if you are good.

What went good

First of all, that was tremendously funny. I worked with a real lightness in my head and spirit. The pressure is high and the time is few, but if you know what’s the real goal, the experience is only positive. And that is to have fun, simple as that. Prove that you can make a game, even with the few resources you have. You can make a game with pen and paper if you want. No matter that we didn’t have an artist, I opened my old graphic software on my old PC and start to search for a style to give to the game. That was awesome. Plus, I discovered great qualities in my colleague, Kostas. He has a great taste for animations, for example. Even if you design a game, if you paint some awesome sprite, there is some flavour that only a programmer can put. That is really an important spot for our future together.

Oh, I almost forgot, you can see the game we made here, if you want to give a peek.

Cheers! ☺

Tags: economic, hitman, ld32, sentendo, web

For those who have not yet burn their mosquito … xD

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-32/?action=preview&uid=25215

Otherwise, I like to test your games.
There really has beautiful gameplay innovations! Congratulations to all.

Hi everyone,

So it has been almost a week, the game has been played several times, I’ve witnessed live reactions to it, so I thought it would be a good thing to take some time to reflect on what went right and wrong during the development, and the areas of improvement that I could work on. This was my first LD and second game jam ever, and the community here is great, I definitely look forward to the next one!

What went wrong

• Not enough breaks: towards the end of each day I was exhausted and found that I just couldn’t focus efficiently. Should spend more time with the dog outside for the next ones.
• Not focusing on a single discipline: while coding a feature, I was working on the mechanic itself, then its animation, then sounds, then values, then I was drawing the assets, looking for references… and just going back and forth between all this. Made me feel like losing efficiency.
• Not enough (external) play-testing: there was virtually none.
• Not enough (internal) play-testing: I mostly postponed it to the last moment, but the exhaustion was the worst. In the end I just wanted to sleep and might have rushed the sweet sweet balancing.
• Not enough UI clues: I did try to keep this in mind, but when you’re 200% inside the dev, you just don’t see things the way they appear to people afterwards. My biggest regret is the lack of numerical shortcut to trigger a research.
• Living in Europe: this is more of a joke, but having the theme be only available at 3am was not very practical. I went to sleep for an hour, woke up to check it, then when back for some more sleep. Still don’t know if this was a good idea.

What went right

• Focusing on a simple mechanic: it bred a simple idea and made it possible to finish before the deadline.
• Knowing the tools: I didn’t lose time installing/setting up stuff I didn’t know about. That is not to say I didn’t learn new stuff about development.
• Not focusing on a single discipline: I also put this here because I feel that without this I wouldn’t have been able to create assets for everything.
• Writing the idea on paper: this may sound cliché but it was actually very nice to have a reference laid out from the start. Once a mechanic was implemented, I could check it for “what’s next”.
• Finishing the core gameplay early: now, the game isn’t perfect, but I was able to add smaller features, effects and sounds once the bulk of the game was done (to the guy who noticed the blinking and shooting stars in the background, you made my day!).
• Preparing the logistics in advance: this may sound trivial but not having to think about what you’re going to eat is that much more brain availability for coding 😛

The game

As it stands, the game can be fun, but the consensus seems to be that it’s too slow to ramp up. Should I improve it, my focus would be:

• Tweak the way the difficulty, population growth and damage work: faster beginning with a capped ending for all the values.
• Add keyboard shortcuts to start an upgrade.
• Make the upgrades permanent between each planet, rework their values to fit.
• Add drops to some asteroids that boost research.
• Add a moon mechanic that turns in the opposite direction of your field (this was actually planned, but, you know, 48h ^^)

If you want, you can try the game here.

Thank you for reading!

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-32/?action=preview&uid=39343

Just wanted to tie the game I worked on to this profile somehow.

Nilq submitted in on his user, but I am credited by my name, Asger Horn.

Great fun working on it and all.

Several users noticed that ingame music sounded a bit distorted in Chrome. I’ve fixed the bug (it was really a Chrome thing). So please, try Pocket Squad (and the post-LD updated version) and drop a comment if it worked for you.

Lovely, isn’t it?

‘Ello.

So I tweaked some things in Avian Days, mostly bugfixes and improved visuals for the time being. I am calling it a post-compo version, though I would ideally like to add content for a REAL post-compo version. That, however, is on hold for the nonce.

Here it is on itch.io: Avian Days On Itch.io

And here is a gif, just because I like you:

We are currently working on an iOS & Android-Version of our #ChromaGun!

You can play the LudumDare-Version here (Web and Desktop only so far):
http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-32/?action=preview&uid=52509

Tags: chromagun

Since we lacked the time for adding a proper tutorial in-game, here’s a short video demonstrating the basics of our game
You can try it for yourself here: http://01101101.fr/ld32/

All in all, we pretty satisfied with our result, although a couple thing could have gone better:
– Content. There is not enough levels, no logical progression between them, and no tutorial level like we planned…
– Leaderboards. The scores are saved and the best one is displayed for each level, but anonymously. Obviously we wanted to allow players to enter their name and brag 😉 Also we wanted to have a second leaderboard for times (so you can see how quickly people beat the levels).
– Finishing touches. Although we’re happy with our UI and screens, we didn’t get the time to finish the Win/Lose screen, and there is no satisfying ending to the game.

But like I said, we’re happy with the rest, and those of you who played it seem to agree, so all is well

Thank you for reading and have a nice day!

PS: CAPSLOCK posted the soundtrack on his SoundCloud.

It is a game about Social Dynamics. Yoy are in the middle age and you are just an insignificant guy. In the world you will find some people that can become your friend if you offer them military help, wealth, big meals and others ways to get pleasures.

Play Sociokar here

The original idea that I would like to improve is a game that reflects the complexity of the social dynamics, i mean, why some leaders become powerful? They know how to win each person and to profite the enemity of your enemies. I don’t know how to explain, but we agree that social dynamics are complex and the power of a leadear depends of how to use the people.

Sociokar is a first aproximation.

Hi guys, here is the game artist talking and I wanna have a lill’ speak with you!
I need to thank you for all the feedbacks you guys gave to our game!
It is really important to us!

I’m willing to make some upgrades on the game, such as add sprite animation on the protagonist (actualy, just theenemy have it)

Also, I wanna make some alteration on the scenery 😀
I’m starting to put my hands on Unity to adjust art stuff, but I’m afraid to screw it all (I’m not good with programming). That’s why I’m taking it eeeeasy, step by step 😛
I wanna learn more about particlles and effects cause I love to work on mood and ambientation.
Well, cya in the next post haha (maybe with the alterations done already)

If you don’t know this game already and are interested, take a look on:
Echoes of the Forest

#Bianca

Tags: 2D, EchoesoftheForest, Intimiate Theme, novel, story

Feel curious, is there any pdf game entry other than my pdf game in LD32? I have searched using keyword “pdf” in the search form (in Play and Rate Games page) but didn’t find any pdf game (except mine). The PDF game I mean is a game in the pdf file which can be played using a pdf reader.

Also, this is the example of pdf game “A Knight and A Line” I made as entry in LD32: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-32/?action=preview&uid=20503

:3

Tags: #pdf

The goal of our game Insomnia was to create a game that demonstrated the frustration that someone deals with when they suffer from insomnia. Insomnia is a 2.5D, top-down shooter. You control a character who can shoot melatonin at things that are bad for your ability to sleep: stimulants, stress, and fears. The goal of the game is to get as much sleep as possible between 8PM and 6AM.

The initial goals of this game were to have the game that currently exists now but with an intensive GUI. We wanted to have eyes that opened and closed in the background describing whether or not you were asleep, a slider representing what time it was and how much time was left, and a vector image of a tree that also grew and shrank depending on your wakefulness level. For our melatonin gun, we wanted to be able to have the player collect pickups for their weapon so that their “melatonin level” could be refilled during the game. The melatonin level would be used by holding down the fire button in order to charge the gun to release a larger projectile.

The goals that we were able to meet resulted in our goals but a much simplified version.     We were able to create all of the sprites that we wanted for our game: spiders, cigarettes, coffee, paperwork (symbolizing stress), and the head of a giant boss who keeps spitting out all of these stressors at you. We were able to create the gun that we needed, though it only shoots one size of bullets for the time being. We were also able to create our minimalistic 2.5D world of a funnel. When enemies or insomnia aggravators make it down the funnel of your thoughts, your wakefulness decreases. Right now this is displayed as the Score but that was not supposed to be the case. We have to work more on the way that time is handled in the game before the score can be properly updated. The score should be increased every time that you make it 30 minutes in game without waking up (having your wakefulness become negative).

In the construction of this game, we ended up using three different asset tools. For our sprites, we used Pickle. For our sound effects, we used bfxr. bfxr lets the user play sound clips that are semi-randomly generated to fit a certain category (pickup, hit, laser, explosion, etc) or lets the user customize their own sounds with a strong level of customization. For our background music, we used Autotracker, a tool that again semi-randomly generates songs. We went through several until we found one that fit the feel of our game.

We spent an unexpected amount of time in creating the sprites for the game. It was much more time consuming than we had originally anticipated but we feel that the effect was worth the time invested. There was also a lot more time than expected invested in the creation of the gun and having it interact with our sprites appropriately.

One of the things that broke at the last minute was one of the areas that we invested a lot of time in: the melatonin gun. When putting the files for the game together, it turned out that the gun didn’t work as expected for our sprites. It works perfectly for removing any object with a RigidBody but when it comes to the sprites it’s a bit tricky. We currently have spheres attached to the sprites so that they will move with the spheres while they roll down the funnel. We think that the issue right now is that the hitbox on the spheres connected to the sprites is just too small currently for the bullets to be able to hit it, no matter how accurately the gun is fired.

Four things that we plan to improve in the game over the next two weeks are as follows:

1. First and foremost, we need to fix the gun. The game has no point without being able to defeat the enemies that you’re faced with.
2. We need to implement the handling of time in game, for both the wakefulness score and for displaying to the user how much time is left.
3. We would like to make it possible for the player to kill the boss, an idea that had escaped our minds but that we have heard several suggestions for. We will need to find a way to make this sufficiently difficult though because part of the game is trying to make it through the 10 hours of in game time.
4. We would also like to make the initial start screen much more visually appealing and make the description of controls much more clear. We realized during a play testing session that we didn’t even mention that the player character can be rotated by moving the mouse. It’d also be much more intuitive to have the firing of the gun be controlled from left click instead of “F”

Hello jammers!!

I’ve started a game project that I liked a lot in last LD but unfortunately I didn’t finish during the jam. So I’ve published in Newgrounds. Sometime the words could be mortals! Think about 😉

#gallery-1 { margin: auto; } #gallery-1 .gallery-item { float: left; margin-top: 10px; text-align: center; width: 33%; } #gallery-1 img { border: 2px solid #cfcfcf; } #gallery-1 .gallery-caption { margin-left: 0; } /* see gallery_shortcode() in wp-includes/media.php */

http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/656663

Please play and give me some feedback 😀

 

Tags: art, artgame, haters

There is still time to rate my entry here: SLICK LICKER

A bit from Super Scrap Yard Employee

 

Super Scrap Yard Employee got an upgrade.

It mostly fixes some bugs with the graphics and some of the ugly stuff there was before.

Now sprites aren’t as awfully small as before (though the upscaling isn’t perfect, but we are going to fix it) and the weapons have different characteristics between them (still a bit unbalanced).

The game now looks much better and we had positive responses to the new version. We already have many votes and feedback, we even were able to get someone to stream it.

We are quite happy with the game, but it’s still not perfect, so look forward to the next version 1.2 of Super Scrap Yard Employee.

Play Super Scrap Yard Employee here.

Hi folks,

First, thanks for playing to everyone that have played and comment on our game. Either you liked it or not, it allowed us to learn what were our mistakes (like putting a timer instead of a kill count) or say what your liked in our games (mainly the stupied voices and the randomness of the games).

PLAY HERE

What went wrong:

• During the process nothing went really wrong. The only small problem was that the tank on the menu screen doesn’t look like the in-game model, we figured it after finishing it and didn’t have time to change. But that’s only a detail
• After making the game, we quickly realized our main error, the timer. When we finished the game, we didn’t have a clear objective, we had a choice between “Staying alive” and “Killing the most aliens”, but because our characters were pretty dumb, we thought that staying alive was enough hard regarder their skills. But after seeing people play the game, we saw that avoiding the aliens was the best strategy to have a good score.
• The randomness of the physic wasn’t a problem for us, but some people were able to get out of the battlefield and fall forever. We didn’t had something to prevent this, but, hopefully, this problem seems to be rare.
• Finally, we used made some references to other games and movies in our the random voices that appears during the game, we wanted to do it to make people laugh, but some seems to not like it, and we understand why.

What went right:

• The game makes people laugh! That was one of our main objective, we were constantly having fun during the developpement and we’re happy that it has the same effect on you!
• The game was on the front page of Newground for one day! This is the first time that one of our game has that much popularity on a web based game platform and we were extremly proud.

What’s next?

Well nothing for now. Despite some player saying that the game can be extend to a full length one, we think that the randomness of the physic can make it pretty frustrating if the game last too long. However we had some idea of abilities that you can gain (and lose by tossing them), so maybe if the game is really a huge success, we can change our minds.

 

Anyway, thanks to our players, thanks to the other participant, you guys rock!!

Hi fellow LudumDarers,

Do you have some suggestions for recording webgl games et animated GIFs, I tried different softwares, but they doesn’t seems to work very well… Or at least, I don’t understand how to use them very well..

Any ideas?

So how to add a video like this for your game?

Install Fraps or your favorite game screen recording tool.

Install VirtualDub

Open and edit your video in VirtualDub

Add filters: Menu/Video/Filters/Add… and add the select 2:1 reduction (high quality) twice to create a video with quarter of the size

Change framerate: Menu/Video/Frame rate/Change frame rate to 25 fps

File/Export/Animated gif, select target, and choose ‘Infinite loop’.

You’re all set! Don’t forget to rate my game SLICK LICKER!