The game I made was really a look into what I am doing at the moment.  It is a skeleton of a future game, otherwise known as an engine.  I have, by now, added a parkour system to the engine.  I am proud of how this little preview turned out, actually, as it forced me to find a way of easily displaying text on the map and gave me the first idea of how the gameplay is going to turn out.  I do not expect more than 9 votes, but I am happy, as always, of participating in the jam.

Just thought I would make a post mortem.  You can play this here:

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-32/?action=preview&uid=43281

Hendrix College – Post-Mortem Report

Genre, objective, and theme:

2D art experience puzzler?

-Attempt to salvage a couple’s teetering marriage by carefully putting together the clues and the right words needed to bring the two closer together without causing either to spiral into depression.

Theme: The pen is mightier than the sword…

Existentialism. Life.
Initial goals:

We sought to have a game with a story that develops based off of the user’s decisions/actions and to have at least 3 scenes.
Goals Met:

We managed to create a game that has 3 branches in story path.

Three scenes were created(bedroom, living room, kitchen)
Tools used:

•  2D Art: Piskel, Photoshop Touch
• Engine: Unity – C#
• Sound/Music: Logic Pro
• Misc: TexturePacker

Where did you spend unexpected amounts of time?

Character animations/graphics and Singleton objects. (objects that remained constant through scene loads)
What broke at the last minute?

• Build issues were abundant. We had to resize every scene to fit the 960×800 required for LD.
• The sprite filter was not working in the build. [fixed by removing bip mapping]
• Cloned characters.
• Dialogue/info textboxes weren’t displaying.

Improvements for final:

• Better looking and functioning GUIs
• Integration of the rest of the story/dialogue
• Functioning Depression Meter
• Credits screen
• Delineation of textbox ownership

Wok Quest! now available to download for PC, Mac and Linux

Play and rate Wok Quest! here

Tags: ogre pixel, wok quest

Play Sam On Tape here!

What Went Right

Music was easy-peasy. Just grabbed some drum sounds, dialed in some synths and went to town. Might have spent a little too long on it though. Here’s the song that came out of it.

I kept using Flashpunk to develop, and I’m warming up to it. I’m not a good programmer by any definition, but the more I use Flashpunk, the less flailing around I do while trying to get the behaviors I want.

Using ASEPrite more since last LD definitely helped. The goal now is to learn all of the important hotkeys before next time. Micro-optimization and all that.

What Went Wrong

I’m awful at budgeting my time. Like, terrible. I’ll spend too long on something, trying to get it exactly right and everything else suffers. Don’t know what to do about this. Maybe start using a timer system or something?

Related to the last point, I need to set priorities better. I spent a lot of time working on getting dialog to work, and getting the music mixed right, and I ended up shirking the gameplay and level design… oops. Maybe next time I’ll write out a list of things to do, in order of importance?

Okay, this one’s not fair, but there was a huge thunderstorm that kept me from working for a few hours. That must be where everything went wrong! So remember: all the issues you spot in my game, if it wasn’t for that thunderstorm, it’d be perfect…

—

This is my second completed LD, and even though it was stressful and hectic it’s still hella fun. Hope to be here for another!

Tags: post-mortem, postmortem

Play Zeldish

This was the first game jam that I’ve completed. I’ve wanted to submit a game before, but things never fell into place. This has been really fun. I just wanted to thank the people that have taken the chance to play my game, and the community here in general, for being awesome supportive people.

Also, I wanted to thank people who make open source art, without whom I would only make games about geometric shapes.

THE GOOD:

The game definitely pushes the nostalgia button for me. When I play it, I half expect the hidden shops and everything to be there; I’m just too busy being chased by skeletons.

One thing that I didn’t even think about, though, is that people might not have played The Legend of Zelda. I have so many fond memories of that game that I just assumed it was a universal human experience, like love or hunger. So it’s hard for me to tell if the game would be as fun if I didn’t know the map. Although, since you can just tile swap your way through things, it’s not like getting lost is a problem.

I’m happy with how the mob of skeletons to seems like an overwhelming, but not to be in impossible threat.

I feel like the mechanic works well with the world that it takes place in. When I play Metroid, and there are those crawly things on the floor, and I can’t shoot them because I can’t shoot while ducking it is a limitation that I really notice.(Really, I can’t even duck without turning into a ball, which seems like a bigger problem, but I digress.)  I feel like the skeletons are such a such a numerous threat that getting away seems like the sensible thing to do, even if I had a sword. That the tile swapping help me do what I want to do. Then again, I did make the game, so I can’t guarantee this is a universal experience.

THE BAD:

I would have liked for you to have to make it some sort of event that made it clear why you were collecting the orbs. Maybe making back to the starting screen for some video game catharsis. Even a better font would be nice.

The game has no sound or music. I should have made the game take place in a vacuum. Admittedly, this would have made it harder to beat the game.

I would like to get the controls down to one button; maybe holding down the button would swap the front and back tiles as you walked.

The red witch changes tiles that are near to her in a random way. I think I’ll make her a more refined threat.

IN CONCLUSION:

All in all, I am happy with the result. I feel like, though the game doesn’t do much, what it does do, it does fairly well.

Thanks again,
spike.house.games

The Goal

Let’s be honest.  Entering my first Ludum Dare with what would forever become my “first game ever,” I wasn’t setting out to wow the masses, break new ground, or knock anything out of the park.  I just wanted something that worked and was enjoyable.

The Process

I didn’t really have anything except Unity 5 and Adobe Cloud at my disposal, and knowing I had never created a game before, 48 hours wasn’t going to be much time.  On top of that, my daughter had kept me up the night before, so Friday night work was out of the question.  I knew I’d have to get sleep and start on Saturday morning.  I would try to make the Compo deadline, but if I couldn’t, sticking to Compo rules and finishing within my own 48 hour window for the Jam would be just fine.  A personal victory.

I love cheese and decided I’d do a simple defensive style game to protect my cheese.  And what eats cheese?  Rats.  So, I started by creating assets.  I took pictures in the yard and turned them into a simple 16 x 9 background.  Grabbed some cheese from the fridge and crumbled it into a plate, took some pics, and created the protective goal asset.  I Googled rat images for something to look at, pulled out the pen & tablet, and started drawing.  After I had the main parts of the rat enemy created, I pulled them into Unity 5 and began setting up animations.  That was the part of Unity that I had previously tinkered with, so I wanted to start with something familiar.  Fairly soon, the rat could run, sniff the air, and stand idle.  This was going to be easier than I imagined!

Nope.

I spent the entire day Saturday doing nothing but coding the rat.  I started by setting up collision detection with the ground, triggering the sniff on impact, and transitioning into a run that took it off screen left.  No destruction.  Just collide with the ground, run off the screen, and fall for eternity.  It was late, I was tired, and felt like I was way behind.

Sunday was where I learned the most.  I picked paper airplane as my “unconventional weapon,” folded one, took pictures of it, and turned it into an asset.  I knew deadline was approaching, so I had to take stock of all my ideas and boil them down to the most basic “must haves” and focus on those.  Everything else would come only if time allowed.  Which it didn’t.  I overestimated what I thought I had learned about Unity from the 95 hours of tutorial videos I had previously watched.  So, I spent most of the day cursing the gods and Googling “Unity how to…” every time I tried to implement anything.  In the end, I got a spawner working, had the rats selecting which of three levels to run on, could pitch an airplane reasonably well, had particle effects, and had object cleanup.  I knew I had missed the Compo deadline, but if I could finish up in the 4 hours after work on Monday, I’d achieve my personal 48 hour goal, simulating time I missed on Friday evening.

Monday was the final stretch.  I mentally allocated what I had to have done in 30 minute increments within hour milestones.  I started at 5pm tweaking things that I knew had to work better for me to be satisfied.  I improved the plane throwing, although I knew it was still wrong.  But I had to move on.  There had to be a score, and a HUD, and more testing to balance the 10 levels of 20 second waves.  I crammed and coded and Googled like a maniac.  With just over an hour remaining, I grabbed my phone and started recording sounds.  I exported those over, tried to attach them to my prefabs, and ended up on Google some more.  I was adding sounds and tweaking wave timings right up until the 9pm Jam deadline.  At that point, it was what it was.

Submission

When it was time to submit, I realized that I had never even tested the Web Player version of the game, as I’d been testing on Android for faster deployment.  I also realized I had never really tried to build and host a Unity game.  So, I spent the submission hour just trying to figure out what in the world I was supposed to do.  I finished up at the very end of the submission hour, barely.  Whew!  I really didn’t plan far enough ahead for this thing!

Afterthoughts

Overall, I’m pleased.  I got to add subtle effects, like rats running away with a bit of cheese off the ground–when I should have undoubtedly been coding something else–and running animations that speed up and slow down, and some funny sound effects.  It is not the game I envisioned and has it’s issues, of course.  There are tons of things I know need to be handled differently, or added, or tweaked.  And the code is an awful, cobbled mess.  That’s what happens when you can’t get something to work the “right” way, and have to let it “just work” for now.  But, it works.  And I enjoy playing it.  Goal achieved.

I hope you guys enjoy playing Cheesy Defender too!  Even if it is a little cheesy…  😉

We are three computer science students enrolled in a game development course. We are students of goadrich if you would like to check him out.

What was the genre, objective, and theme you chose for your game?

After the theme was announced, my team started coming up with the most bizarre weapons we could think of. It was clear from the beginning that our game was going to be some kind of cartoon shooter.

During our brainstorming, someone mentioned Starwhal, which inspired our weapon of choice. We started moving in the direction of physics-based puzzle game sort of like Crush the Castle or Angry Birds where the goal was to eliminate targets on the other side of the screen with limited ammunition.

What were your initial goals?

• We wanted to use only original sprites, but we also wanted these sprites to have some detail. We’re all fans of minimalist games, but we wanted to challenge ourselves.
• None of our previous games had incorporated music or sound effects, so we wanted to play around with these a bit.
• Launching narwhals was going to require a bit of code to talk to the narwhal’s physics2D component.
• We talked about having a puzzle element where some obstacles would only be visible when the narwhal used “echolocation”.
• One of our team members really wanted to incorporate wiener dogs…

Which of these goals were you able to meet?

We spent most of our time creating the assets and the mechanics of the game, so we found ourselves with little time to actually put the game together and create levels. Rookie mistake I suppose. Did I mention this was our first Ludum Dare? Extra features like echolocation were not implemented.

We succeeded in making the sprites, sound effects, and one song. We even got a wiener dog in there!

The narwhals launch a bit fast, but otherwise correctly. Implementing the aiming mechanic probably took the majority of the time. We wanted the launcher to point at the mouse pointer’s location. Lots of time was spent figuring out how to appropriately rotate the launcher, partly because we had primarily worked with 3D games up to this point and Unity has different components and method for 2D game objects.

What asset tools did you end up using?

I’ve already mentioned using Unity as our game engine.

We used a free 7 day trial of Pickle to make our sprites.

One of our teammates had a mac, so we used GarageBand to make the theme.

We also experimented with bfxr to create some sound effects. Having little experience with this tool, we produced some mediocre sound effects, but someone who actually knows what they are doing could do a lot more with this tool.

Where did you spend unexpected amounts of time?

Like I said, the aiming mechanics took a surprising amount of time. We first attempted to implement this mechanics using Unity’s 3D components, and of course, bizarre things happened. It’s not pretty when a 2D game incorrectly uses 3D mechanics. After substituting all of the 3D components and methods with their 2D equivalents, there was still some math to work out. Even after hacking out something that worked, I still don’t fully understand Quaternions.

What broke at the last minute?

We got pretty lucky here. We found out that our level selector didn’t work. Fortunately, we only had three levels, so we decided to scrap the level selector until we add more levels.

How do you plan to improve in the game over the next two weeks?

• Add more levels
• Add music to levels
• Create some interesting backgrounds for various screens including levels
• Adjust the launcher velocity
• Add obstacles to levels
• Echolocation?
• Make the villain look more evil

Walk right in, sit right down, we’re gonna play some real cool games.

Night two and I’ve already got quite a substantial list to work through.

Don’t worry — if you don’t want me to play your game until you’re around, I will keep it on the list until you are! We’re cool about that ’round here.

I also had some curious people watching the stream last night — feel free to pop in and just discuss game development if you wish. It’s totally awesome and completely acceptable to have micro-discussions and the more people other than myself giving feedback , the better. I go over a lot, but I can’t discuss everything! It’s simply not humanly possible. 😀

See you soon!

Don’t forget to play and rate EX-SWORD-STENTIAL CRISIS!

Tags: 32, all welcome, awesomesauce, Ex-Sword-Stential, feedback, Ludum Dare, play and rate, twitch, walk right in sit right down

Photon again, and I’ve hit the 20 game mark for judging! Things slowed down a bit in the judging regard over the work week but now I’m ready to post my next spotlight.

Wave 2

This bunch really had some nice standouts. There was some good humor, as well as some mood and intrigue. I was sort of split this time around, but in particular there was one that was just polished in a solid, all-around way:

Clashy Clouds by NCBRDev

Clashy clouds may not have a huge pizzazz factor, but its not supposed to. Its this simple, mildly cutesy game about making people unhappy.

😀 ???

No really, its not as bad as it sounds. You rain on these polluting cities to keep them from polluting, basically. The game mechanics are simple enough to catch onto and the overall vibe is just kind of relaxing. The powerups included add a nice touch. It was a game that didn’t smack you in the face with anything in particular; it was just a well-balanced, consistent game that was a pleasure to play.

Congratulations to NCBRDev on a great entry!

2 waves down, 8 to go. And again, getting feedback on my own game Turbo Moon Hero would be appreciated as well! Thanks all!

I decided to introduce my newest game, Brains Must Die! This game was supposed to be my LD32 entry, but unfortunately I ran out of time. I decided to continue to working on it later, and yesterday  I got it finished. You can play it and see what kind of game I was going to make for the previous LD:

Play on Game Jolt

After an hour of trying to solve the final level in Chris M’s Avenging My Gran, the Famed Botanist, the solution seemed to be there at last. But… oh-oh, little mistake. So frustrating, yet so catching that it encourages you to solve it to the very end.

A great recommendation for those who love brain teasers. Good job, Chris M!

I did it for you, gran! :'(

Thanks Jake McLeman for making a video of Shopping Riot

A.R.C.K is an unc0nventional w3@pon like no other. 

It‘s origin is a mystery and the knowledge it contains is sacred. 

Only the worthy can unlock the secret and solve the puzzle. 

Perseverance, h@ck1n, observation and understanding of the concepts is key to reveal a anci3nt myst3ry.

The A.R.C.K uses a method called Ontological Thinking. That is, a way 

to communicate a belief system similar to how the brain works. 

It is revolutionary and is a game changer! The game 

has an end – but it will keep you busy for a while. 

The Unc0nv3nti0n2l Weapon is knowledge and the it contains a real secret. 

Something ancient, but new.

Login to A.R.C.K

Tags: puzzle, secret

Do you ever wanted to guide a shrimp with TELEPATHAY and make it jump out of the WOTAR ?§? Well now you can !

Play here ! | Submission here !

try it out!

click this image ^^^ to play and rate Punch/Foot/Gun!

I finally managed to upload my timelapse from last weekend, my 2.5d platformer “Caffeine Rush” to Youtube.

Try the game here: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-32/?action=preview&uid=2393

I’ve just made a major bug fix, which caused the game to lag after a few restarts. Apparently it was a UI thing which is gone now.

If you haven’t already, give it a try! Especially if you’re into arcade stuff.

Here

Also many thanks to the LD community who have been very encouraging to me with my first entry. I always heard such nice things and also constructive criticism for my game.

MEGATON has now been updated with Linux 64-bit and Mac OS X ports.

-To run the Linux port, you need to install libsfml with your packet manager.

-To run the Mac OS port, right click (or hold down CTRL and left click) on the app and choose Open and confirm that you want to run a third-party application.

Get to tha game: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-32/?action=preview&uid=9784

Enjoy!

Tags: compo, ld32, linux, mac, ports, update

Hello Fellow Ludumeers!

So we are going to do something a lil fun today!

Going to make a Let’s Play video for your Ludum Dare games.

Only your games will be tested and reviewed by my 6 yr old son…a true gamer. Lol.

So, he will play test and rate and review.

I will leave the star ratings on my standards and his we will leave in your comments.

If you would like us to play your game, please send me a tweet with your game link.

I will post a link on my Twitter and in here for the Twitch feed later today. Let’s Play guys and gals!

Twitter: @OctopusMelange

Hey, LDers! I just published two videos of playthroughs of my game.

The “hard mode” were some challenges I set to myself, based on what I knew was possible and what rockhoppergames commented.