To my dismay,  I wasn’t able to enter a game for Ludum Dare.  However,  I decided to do something that would normally be way out of character for me.  I started up a YouTube channel!  I’m really excited about it.  Lately,  I’ve found that my LD entries have been a little lack-luster, and I have a feeling that it’s because I haven’t been looking around to see what else people are making these days.  So,  as a project for myself,  I’m doing a “Let’s Play” series of LD32 games.      Hopefully,  this will bring back the creativity that I used to have.  Check me out sometime! https://youtu.be/EgwLV4NT42k

Hey all. I wanted to give all of you my thanks, as Star Driller Ultra has reached 100 votes in one week. I find this amazing, especially since it took two weeks for The Sentient Cube (LD26) to reach 100 votes, and Laundry Day (LD31) never got that far. It moves me intensely to see a game I’ve made become popular so fast (even though I may hate it). This Ludum Dare was really busy for me, with setting up and organizing Tech Valley Game Space real-world meeting location, as well as making both a Compo and a Jam game. Honestly, I wasn’t expecting much from myself, but the results says otherwise. Wow!

So what now? First off, 42 points of coolness isn’t cool enough, so here’s a reminder that Tech Valley Game Space (TVGS) will be live streaming tonight at 7:00 PM EST! We’ll also be streaming during the weekdays and Saturdays from 7:00 PM to 12:00 AM EST (except every Wednesdays). We’ll also do our best to post the games we’ve played onto Youtube as well (this is proving to be more difficult, unfortunately, and may end up happening post-judging, to be honest).

Our Twitch.tv channel is at:
http://www.twitch.tv/techvalleygamespace

Want to submit your game? Fill out the form below!
http://goo.gl/forms/gDU933T27R

All the responses are listed below:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1RbvfWHMb-vWmYBagjjnfVAMKugG1vgQ41QFQ_Wa4YjE/edit?usp=sharing

Second, to celebrate the 100 votes, here are some games I highly recommend in no particular order:

Billy McMath Solves Problems

As I’ve said on Twitter, this is a God-tier Ludum Dare game. It’s hard to introduce the game properly without spoiling anything, so I’ll use a quick description a friend of mine used: this game uses comedic timing as a game mechanic. And it is glorious!

The Rock the Paper and the Scissors

A very, very unique take on rhythm games, The Rock the Paper and the Scissors uses a formula a bit similar to Parappa the Rapper where patterns needs to be read and repeated. Unlike ye old Simon-says game, though, you can start your trend of attacks at any time while the music is playing. This opens up to a lot of possibilities that I think this game utilizes well.

F.U.M.S (Fucked Up Missile System)

This is a game where not moving causes the missiles to explode. Sound stupid? I thought so too, but the moment I played it, the whole thing clicked. Since missiles homes into you, you have to maneuver around them with last-minute dodges while staying still at any other opportunity. It’s this beauty in simplicity that absolutely blows my mind about this game.

Sonny & Gloom

When I first heard of the premise of this game — a co-op game about using a player’s health to combat enemies — I groaned. The “use health as a resource for attack” premise never worked in the many game jam games I’ve played, so I expected the worst from this. Fortunately, that was not the case: the game cleverly uses regenerating health (and a rapid one at that) to balance out the quickly-depleting health. Additionally, attacks include both close-range and long-range, allowing for both players to do some hefty beating. The remarkable amount of balancing put into this game, coupled with a game mechanic I previously thought was broken, makes it one of my top picks.

Rude Bear Raid

Thought those Words with Friends, Farmville, and other asynchronous multiplayer games were the bane of gamings’ existence? I hope Rude Bear Raid changes your mind. Much like Team Fortress 2, Rude Bear Raid puts two teams against each other, with a twist: neither team can directly interact with each other, but they can place enemies (which sacrifices one’s life) to prevent the other player from reaching their flag. This means that you will always face user-placed enemies hellbent in keeping you from getting their flag. It’s such an innovative concept. I’d love to see more ideas likes these.

Crystalline

Crystalline is a fairly conventional puzzle game about a lone researcher who happens to have a gun that can make blocks pop in and out of existence. Still, it’s a solid puzzle game, one that had me scratching my head for quite a while. With easy platform controls and a surprisingly substantial narrative behind it, I can passionately recommend this game to any puzzle fans out there.

Wee Pon

Here’s a solid Metroidvania game! Wee Pon involves chucking around a destructive weapon that you can use to swap places. The swapping mechanic is the highlight here, as it allows for traversing locations you otherwise wouldn’t have expected, and managing to make death a lot less annoying. The whole game plays organically, and leans towards open exploration.

Super SALT Helmet

Need a casual multiplayer fighting game to play? Then look no further! Super SALT Helmet is here to take care of your needs! Just use the A-button to charge up your attack while using the left-stick to aim. There are a lot of baiting and mind-reading possibilities in this game, making it a blast to play with your friends, locally.

drone-a-pult

So here’s a game where I think the graphics are too clean. The audio is mundane and boring. The controls are needlessly complicated. The rules are very restricting. And the darn objective is too hard to beat! So why? Why do I find this game so entertaining!?

Now this leaves a single question: how is Unconventional Stick Swinging Simulator doing in comparison to Star Driller Ultra? Well…

Basically what I would have expected from a simulator game.

Want to know what other games were made at the Tech Valley Game Space? Here there are:

• Jammie Dodger
• My Voice is My Weapon
• Star Power
• Adaptation
• Unconventional Stick Swinging Simulator
• Star Driller Ultra

It’s fascinating to see which endings people are drawn to right away, and whether they go back and try to find other ones or not. Check out these Let’s Plays:

And, of course, the very nice coverage on Alpha Beta Gamer – click through to see a playthrough there of two different endings.

Still looking for plays and votes, if you haven’t yet! The game is here: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-32/?action=preview&uid=44075

– Ian

Tags: compo, ld32, unity, video

After catching up with school stuff, I finally finished the timelapse video.

Checkout 60 Second Opera Death!

Hi! Check my time-lapse video of making my game on Compo. Coding, assembling UI in Unity, modeling in Blender and many playtests.

Play the game – HERE

As always, Tom Fulp featured my game at Newgrounds main page. Also game is #1 there at LD32 collaboration:

And as always, here time lapse of development:

You are welcome, play and rate

Hatchet Harry

Hi. I’m Peter Javidpour. I worked with Travis Chen and Alex Wimmer on Operator 42. I was responsible for writing the voiceover script, implementing puzzles, and building out the phone navigation. Travis has asked that I make a post about the writing process.

I don’t normally like getting into the nitty-gritty of things I work on, but Travis assured me the Ludum Dare community likes to read this sort of thing. He also assured me a blog post would lead to more ratings on our jam entry, and I can really use the Ludum Dare Cash Prize, so here we go.

OPERATOR 42 | PLAY AND RATE

There are some light spoilers here, so stop now if you care about spoilers and you haven’t played the game yet. If you don’t care spoilers, but you have no intention of playing the game, I’m not sure why you’re reading this. But go ahead, I guess.

BRAINSTORM

The theme of the jam was Unconventional Weapon. At the start, we didn’t know we were going to make a game that would require any kind of writing. All we knew was that we didn’t want to do a lot of work and we wanted to make something unique. So to kick off our brainstorming session, we swore to follow three simple constraints:

After 2 hours of brainstorming quirky arcade ideas* that would make a game designer’s mouth just water we settled on an idea that needed:

Somehow we became fixated on the premise of needing an owner’s manual to operate a doomsday device. We replaced the manual with a phone and we had something we were excited about. We broke the only rules that we gave ourselves, but we were collectively too excited about the idea to fall back on better judgement.

*Here are some of the ideas we didn’t use. Please don’t steal them. I might come back to them one day.

THE WORLD

Once we knew that our game was about a doomsday device, the rest of the setting fell into the place easily. The player is an incompetent henchman who’s just going through the motions of a job that should, for all intents and purposes, be exciting. I think this is an example of irony, but honestly I’m not sure. Let me know in the comments if it is.

Of course, we never tell you you’re a henchman. You’re an “operator.” Your boss’s name isn’t Professor Evil, it’s Jeff, and Jeff has an implied hierarchy of bosses that lead up to the evil (but never explicitly stated as such) Dr. Killigan. And your organization isn’t The Legion of Bad People, it’s just Killigan Industries. Any indication that you’re operating a weapon of mass destruction is only implied by the orbital view of Earth and the giant red “LAUNCH” button. Also, Jeff explicitly requests that you destroy Paris. A bit heavy-handed, sure, but we had to get the point across somehow.

The stakes implied by your assignment aren’t “Will I have to destroy Paris?” but “Will I be able to appease my passive-aggressive boss?” It’s another example of irony, I think. Let me know in the comments if that’s true.

THE PHONE MENU

I don’t know why phone menus still exist. I’ve never had a “conversation” with one that felt smarter than talking to even the dumbest person I know (Greg).

In writing lines for the phone system, the main challenge was making them complex enough to contribute to the absurdity of the world (and the difficulty of the puzzles), but making them simple enough for the average listener to parse out the details they needed to solve puzzles. I also had to throw in some jokes.

Strangely enough, I actually wrote the script before we started working on the puzzles. Probably not the smartest way to design puzzles, and I’m not sure I would work that way again, but it was still fun. Plus, we had to front-load as much of the voice recording as we could early on, so we didn’t have much of a choice but to work “backwards” in that way.

Alex Wimmer, our musician/sound designer was responsible for creating all the content you hear in the game, including the awesome hold music loop, which I couldn’t get out of my head. He’s also the voice of the automated phone system (over 120 lines of VO)!

FRUSTRATION LOOP

We hoped the humor of the game would come from presenting the player with a solution to a problem, then keeping it out of reach with layers of frustration and mundanity. I feel that pretty much describes any exchange I’ve ever had with an automated phone operator.

This idea of complicating a solution led to my favorite moment of the game, the fire:

Ideally, a fully fleshed-out version of the game would be built on a chain of scenarios like this one. I would love to play a build of Operator 42 in which the station is sparking and burning, and you’ve had to open every single panel only to reveal more and more confounding machinery, with a dumb phone robot as your only guide through the tedium and frustration. But we only had 72 hours.

NAMING THINGS

There are a lot of weird labels on the control panel. I don’t know what “retroautomative” means, or if it’s even really a word. I don’t know what a “phase matrix” is supposed to be or how it would help you launch a weapon payload from a satellite. We just wanted buttons. So I just mashed a bunch of words together to make things sound technical and confusing. Did it work?

If we could do it again, I would have littered the control console with more fake buttons and levers and thrown all kinds of scary labels on them.

EMPLOYEE OF THE MONTH

I’m not sure if this was a comprehensive or cohesive write-up of what goes into writing a dialogue-heavy game over 72 hours, but I’m bored now and you probably are too, and both of us probably want to go do something else.

Thanks for reading and thanks for playing Operator 42 and thanks to all of you have been saying nice things about the game!

OPERATOR 42 | PLAY AND RATE

Yaay, my first Ludum Dare is over, and me and my team managed to push together a playable game. Yaaay for us!

Play Toilet Paper Saga!

Anyway, on to the post mortem:

The Initial Concept

I pretty much knew what kind of a game I would make despite not knowing the theme. I wanted to make a comicbook-like game with a branching storyline. The story would be the main focus, the graphics not so much. Think of MS-Paint comics. I also knew that I could get at least one artist and a story developer to join my team. I also knew that I could have a place to work in. I’d tested out Belle, a WYSIWYG visual novel engine the weekend before the jam, and it worked quite okay, despite the fact that ctrl+z didn’t exist. I also chose to use it because it was free, no coding and I could make the game for browser.

The Changed Concept

After I got together my team, we decided to brainstorm the game and plot together. It changed a lot from what I had in mind, but it didn’t really matter, because I wanted to take a more technical role in the process anyway. We ditched the comicbook style, and designed the gameplay around a map drawn on toilet paper, which the main character was drawing on. We wanted to make some speech bubble -like dialogue boxes to pop up when the player clicks a patient on the map, and animating the stick figure characters would be nice too.

We had many ideas about the “unconventional weapon”, and we thought it could be the patients that the player would use to escape the asylum, or the toilet paper where he scribbles all the locations. At some point we decided that we wouldn’t care if the theme was too vaguely presented in our game –  the process itself was more important.

The Bad

• Living in Europe – It wasn’t really helping, that the jam would begin (and end) in the middle of the night. I lost some hours from the beginning, and lost a lot of sleep from the end. But, it’s not something I could easily change. 😀
• Not REALLY Knowing the Tools – This was probably the worst problem I had. Belle showed its ugly beta face on the first day of the jam by crashing multiple times and not saving the project correctly. I had to spend the first day trying to make Belle work, and finally started to look for other options. On the second day I decided to buy Tyrano Builder as a last resort, even though I didn’t have any experience using it. Luckily it was easy to learn, and the workflow didn’t differ much from Belle or Ren’Py. Nevertheless, I lost a day because of my mistake, even though the other team was doing awesome.
• Not Focusing on the Core Mechanic First – I hesitated to work on the elsif-branching because I wasn’t sure I could handle the scripting language properly. Instead, I worked on getting the story into the project. Eventually, I had to work on the code, and it even wasn’t that difficult. I would’ve saved some hours of sleep if I had started coding earlier.
• Not Realizing the Limits of the Engine (and yourself) – This was probably due to the change in gameplay-mechanics from the start.We ran into a few visual problems early on in the game. First of all, I found that I couldn’t make the speech-bubble like text boxes as easily in Tyrano Builder as I could have in Belle, so we decided to go with text links and dialogue on the side. Tyrano Builder has a way to make parts of the image clickable, but I couldn’t figure out how to make it work, so things had to be changed. The other problem was with changing the images; we could only add images, not remove them, so we had to make patches to the parts of the image we wanted to change.
• The Lack of External (or Internal) Playtesting – We didn’t really have time to playtest the game, and I’m sure there are some bugs (there are some reports in the comments already).

The Good

• Knowing Your Team – Despite my problems as the coder, the team was awesome. Communication worked like a blast, and all the graphics, music, sound effects and game script were delivered in time. Everybody gave their ideas during the first brainstorming, and thanks to that we had an awesome story to tell. It helps to have a team whom you know, strengths and weaknesses and all.
• Preparing for the Worst – From the beginning, we designed the game with minimal assets in mind. The graphics had to be simple, in order to get everything done. The story was branched so that you could omit some parts, and every level was designed so that it could be the last (which was good, since we did finish only the first level).
• Food Supply – I baked a lot of pizza before the jam to last the whole weekend. That way I saved some money, even though I did go to McDonald’s a few times. Also the school where the jam was held had free tea and coffee, which was nice.
• The Workplace/Resources – Me and my team got space, laptops and Photoshop from Laajasalo Institute’s Game Design class for the whole jam, even though we graduated already. It was nice to meet the freshmen there. It was also good to go there and return home to keep the work and the free time separate.
• Separating the Tasks – Having everyone focus on only the stuff they were supposed to do, I think we saved a lot of time and got better quality. If I had had to draw the art as well, it would’ve taken much more time from the coding.

Surprises?

• The Team – I was surprised to find out that I could get as big a team as I did, and I’m grateful for that.  And it was awesome!
• The Technical Problems (With Engine) – I did anticipate some problems with the game engine, but I didn’t expect to have to change the whole engine to another one! It was a bummer.

Final Observations?

Well, the art style changed into a toilet paper map, and the game didn’t have any comicbook elements at all. But, since the team was so hyped up, and the mechanics didn’t seem that different from the original idea, I decided to go with it. I’m glad I did, because it fit the story better than a comic would have.

The story was separated into three levels, with some branching puzzles.

The main change technically was switching from Belle to Tyrano Builder in the middle of the jam. Towards the end even the WYSIWYG aspect lost its importance, as I saw that coding was somehow easier than dragging all the elements to their place visually. Sadly, I couldn’t port the game for browser for unknown technical problems with the engine, so I had to settle with the Windows version.

The only things that stayed pretty much the same were the branching storyline, and the visual novel kind-of engine.

What Next?

Since we already have the story for a second level of the game, I think it would be nice to continue from where we left off with this game. I also think I’d like to find another engine and a coder to make the game work better. Animations would be nice, as well as some extra sound effects. The game also needs to be playable in browser. I’ve already talked with some of my teammates, and they seemed keen on the work too.

If you haven’t, go play the game: Toilet Paper Saga

Not many people have noticed that our game about Chekhov’s gun has an ‘easter egg’-mode that adds bright LSD colours into bleak paranoid Chekhov’s life. Can you find it?

And while you’re at it, you can find all the unconventional weapons that Chekhov’s guests use to murder the ingenious writer. Top score right now is 16 averted assassinations attempts, can you score more? Play “Where Is Your Gun Now, Mr Chekhov?” now, and share your high scores in the comments.

Hello everyone,

One week after the game jam, time has come to do the WHAT WENT GOOD / WHAT WENT BAD post.

We were a team of five, working from Paris, France. Our game is The Grand Carpet Hotel, and you are gladly invited to play and rate it. (disclaimer: unconventionnal weapon > CARPETS !)

THE TEAM

THE GAME

Play The Grand Carpet Hotel 

WHAT WENT GOOD

• We finished the game, and I think every member of the team thought we couldn’t do it
• We were a team of five, and for four of us it was our first game and first Ludum dare. We never worked together before and I think we did a good job.
• A friend of us was supposed to make the music, but he had a problem with his computer and we never received his contribution. But one hour before the end of the jam we’ve done some music very quickly, and some people seems to like it.
• We all learned how to use new tools (phaser, graphics gale, tiled, git), and that’s some time we’ve gained for next jams.
• We have a complete game, with a start screen, tutorial, dialogues and 6 levels. That’s a lot more than what we thought we could do.
• My computer didn’t crash! It crashes 2 or 3 times a day when I’m at home, and for the jam it worked like a charm.

WHAT WENT WRONG

• We had two very little laptops, one old laptop, and one desktop computer. It’s very hard to work on a small laptop, both for coding or doing graphics, and we had to switch from computers to computers to work.
• We used Git for the first time, and it worked fine until a member of our team had a problem and lost some work at the middle of the jam. We didn’t know how it happened and because we didn’t want to see the same thing happenning again, we simply stopped using Git. At the very end of the jam, we were transfering files with usb disks from computers to computers. It took a lot of time and was very stressful. Next time, we’ll stick with Git.
• Our first prototype came very lately. So we didn’t test and play it enough, and we could have make better commands.
• We didn’t prepare ourselves. We learned a few tools, but we could have take that time a week or two before.

WHAT’S NEXT ?

We’re working on a post mortel version of The Grand Carpet Hotel, with a better gameplay and a many many levels. Stay tuned !

Play The Grand Carpet Hotel 

Tags: action, ld32, post-mortem, puzzle, whatwentbad, whatwentgood, wwgwwb

Either that, or a program that can “record” parts of one’s desktop and save it as a gif.

Play it here

Stuff that is different:

• Has Audio, a lot of it as a matter of fact
• Food is easier to pick up
• You can point and grab at the same time
• Throw trajectory is shown + more forgiving mouth collision
• And of course some mysterious other stuff

After I copied the files to my portable drive the free space was 66.6 GB. Nice.
That it was already called fatty is merely a bonus.

Happy with how this turned out especially considering the jam was a confusing mess of aimless developing. Maybe I’ll write a post mortem, maybe.

Some thoughts on my Ludum Dare experience. First Ludum Dare for me. It was a highly intense and rewarding weekend for me. Starting three O’clock in the night to check the theme, and then working 6 to 23 both saturday and sunday.. Dead in the head monday/tuesday the week after. But it was worth it!

The idea came quickly to me (three O’clock in the night actually). I wanted to do a ‘story-driven’ typing/shooter game, where the player needed to use words to solve an internal problem.

Play ‘A Way Out’ on LudumDare.com

I worked in JavaScript and Phaser. I am not extremely experienced with Phaser (I have used it in one previous game jam), so I was surprised of how few hurdles I encountered on the way. I spent quite a bit of the time polishing small things (text/sprite fading and timings was the worst one!) I also got nice visual effects using simple filters in Gimp, together with various degrees of transparency in the game. Finally, sunday evening, I put the sound together with FL studio and my trusty mini-keyboard.

One of the most rewarding parts of the Ludum Dare, which I didn’t anticipate to be so engaging, is the reviewing of other players games as well as receiving valuable feedback on the game. During the giving and receiving of ratings and comments, I came to realise how important the details are for the playing experience. Could I have handled the power-weapon differently? Was the finish to abrupt? How does the navigation feel? The details came back when I played other games. I have enjoyed most of the games I played (many fantastic games out there!!). But what is it in some games that makes me tick in particular? A slight difference in responsiveness of the movement, or balancing of the difficulty makes a world of difference.

With all that said. If you enjoy frantic typing games, and/or enjoy story driven ambience in games, you should give my game, ‘A Way Out’ a spin. And, I am in particular grateful if you rate it and leave a line. I am attempting to play and rate all commenters games (that run on my old computer) in return.

Play ‘A Way Out’ on LudumDare.com

Jakob, LinkPact Games

Nuke Whaling

This was bound to be an interesting one from the start, as my first (and, possibly, last) Unity game, after 9 entries in Flashpunk! You can imagine my dismay at discovering the whole Chrome fiasco on the day before the competition started, but by that point I had already committed (both mentally and in Git). Below I’ve listed some of the things I think went well with my game, and some that went not so well.

The Good:

• The music. I’m very pleased with the audio in general this time round, particularly the way the sound of the bomb syncs with the music.
• The aesthetics.
• Aeroplane physics. I may have spent a little too much time on this during the first day, but it was worth it. The plane is affected by lift, drag, and weight, dependent on velocity, engine power, and angle of attack (thanks to NASA).
  

The Bad:

• The concept. As usual, I began working before I had a real concept, and it took its toll on the direction of the game. Once you get used to the game, it’s very same-y and easy to stay alive (since there’s no real difficulty progression). There’s no real incentive to score points other than bragging rights.
• The code. Not being used to Unity, and being extremely rushed, I wrote a lot of code that should never see the light of day. I was just getting used to writing good code in Flash, but then that wouldn’t be trying something different

The Ugly:

• Unity’s HTML5 export. In an attempt to evade Chrome’s blocked NPAPI, I originally used the HTML5 export in Unity, and I can see why they call it a preview… After taking nearly 10 minutes to export, the build was 20 times the size of my largest Flash game, and several game features were broken. In the end I decided to stick with the webplayer.
• Killer whales. I never got the chance to animate them!

I’m a bit behind on rating, since I’ve been very busy this past week, but I’m looking forward to seeing more of everyone’s games!

Hello everyone,

This is my timelapse of Nano VS Bot.
I was running out of time since the end of the LD 32. So I didn’t have the time to post my timelapse of my entry for LD32. This is now uploaded and available on my youtube channel :

Following this timelapse, I will post a post-mortem in 3 or 4 days I think. I learned a lot again during this third LD participation, and this time, my game was really better than the first two. That’s why I have a lot of things to say. But I am currently moving to Japan next week, so my time is limited! I will try to post it by the end of the week.

Hope you like the video, and see you soon for my post-mortem!

Tech Valley Game Space (TVGS) is live-streaming now!

We’ll also be streaming during the weekdays and Saturdays from 7:00 PM to 12:00 AM EST (except every Wednesdays). We’ll also do our best to post the games we’ve played onto Youtube as well.

Our Twitch.tv channel is at:
http://www.twitch.tv/techvalleygamespace

Want to submit your game? Fill out the form below!
http://goo.gl/forms/gDU933T27R

All the responses are listed below:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1RbvfWHMb-vWmYBagjjnfVAMKugG1vgQ41QFQ_Wa4YjE/edit?usp=sharing

For those interested, the following games were made at TVGS:

• Jammie Dodger
• My Voice is My Weapon
• Star Power
• Adaptation
• Unconventional Stick Swinging Simulator
• Star Driller Ultra

Before I begin my story of awesome gamedev-iness, I would like to say:

I FINISHED ON TIME!

Because that is truly an important part of the story, and a fact of awesomeness in itself. I did a lot this LD. I made three levels, (which is really impressive considering my last entry: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=25337), and implemented three different weapons! It was kind of crazy getting it all done though….

The day: April 19, 2015. Yesterday I wasted over an hour trying to create and generate music that I didn’t even use. This morning I had to go to church, so I couldn’t work on my game for another hour. I still have to finish Level Two and START Level Three, (including making its weaponry). At around 20 minutes till the competition’s over, I make a build and decide to start testing. I edit, and tweak a few things, but so far everything’s going great and I’m happy. Then at  around 5: 53 pm, I realize I haven’t play-tested Level 3 in the build. The game is too hard for me to be able to get to Level 3 in the current time frame, so I just make a second build with only that scene in it. Anyway, I’m playing the game, and everything seems fine, it’s running at a good speed. But then, right off the bat, I die. No big deal, I think, I’ll just respawn! The problem is: I don’t. There is a null reference error, something that never showed up before!

“I must of respawned thousands of times in this level, in the editor. Maybe the build’s just missing assets from other scenes”, prays the little voice in my head. I try playing in the editor and the same error happens. I look at the code. I have no idea what’s wrong. Everything should be there! I look at the clock, it’s 5:57. I have 3 minutes to solve the error, and absolutely no idea where to start. I try commenting out the line that errors, and the game just breaks down on a later one. It’s now 5: 59. I’m freaking out! In a mad rush, I delete that whole section of code and run the game. I let my character die. I watch the screen, hoping and praying that this works, that I haven’t completely failed! And then, in an instant (because my computer’s very fast), the character respawns correctly. I look at the clock: 6:00 exactly, the jam is over and so am I.

My hear still th-thumping though. I’m sure it can’t work, how can it? I keep playtesting, each time finding nothing wrong with the respawn. I open my chrome tab and notice I need an update, so I let it restart.  I walk away from my computer, and look out the window: It’s over, I think. And then all of a sudden, I hear the start of the Rocky theme tune

playing in my ears. It takes me a few seconds to realize that when chrome reloaded, it refreshed all my tabs, one of which included this great song. I smile. This is a true movie moment, (you know if they made movies about game developers making games in strict time frames).

So anyway, that’s my awesome story. Now time for the post-mortem!

The Bad

    1. The Jump Bug

I don’t know if any of you that have played my game have come across this, but it doesn’t make its existence any less fake. The Jump Bug, first you’re own the ground, or just jumping regularly, and then all of a sudden your flying. The sky’s not even your limit. I have no idea why this happens, and may or may not have fixed it post-compo, but since I don’t know and no one has asked about this mysterious dilemma, I’m just going to leave the build be.

    2. The Fact That It Can Trap You

Ha ha, this is kind of funny. Ok, so you know that new chrome update that disables NPAPI plugins by default? I got mine way late, like after the compo, (remember it was in the story?) Right after my battle against the raging countdown was down, I updated my browser. THIS WAS THE NPAPI PLUGIN UPDATE! I GOT SO CONFUSED BECAUSE IT CAME SO LATE! I went to play my web build and it wouldn’t load. I was so confused, and no other Unity Web-player games would work either. So I made a standalone build, but having not planned to make a standalone, I didn’t implement any exit full-screen functionality. So yeah, you can get stuck… And die….

    3. The Controls

The camera is zoomed in waaaaaaaaaaay to much. So much so that sometimes you don’t even now where to go. I tried to minimize this with arrows, but what I really should of done was make the camera view bigger. I didn’t want to do this because I’d have to extend my map downward, and thus it stayed a mere idea floating around in my head, that got ignored, and wasn’t implement at all. So sad ☹

    4. I Wasted Time + Music Failed

This was aforementioned, but I wasted about over an hour trying to make some cool jams for this game. I usually use the music generator Abundant Music, but it just wasn’t giving anything I could go with. I tried making my own tunes, but, (as it turns out), I am no Mozart. Not even a Schubert. Actually, I kind of suck

    5. The Voice

Some people like “The Voice”, some people don’t, which makes me sad because it is my voice… I can see how it can get annoying though.

If I had to do it again, I would probably only have “The Voice” say one fail message per level instead of two. This way the people who like “The Voice” get some, and the people who don’t get less.

The Good

    1. I Learned More About Unity 5

To be honest, this was kind of my initiative for getting up to date with Unity’s new updates. They changed the animator a bit, (what with the new entry/exit states), and added some cool new button stuff, and made JavaScript look like C#.

I mean look at this! I don’t want to have to type more characters!

The changes weren’t that big, so I would still be able to get around okay without re-learning, it’s just nice to have a solid foundation. And this competition was my motivation to get one!

    2. I Learned The Great Art of The Pixel

My art kind of sucked last year. I was proud of it though because I am a horrible artist. However, I didn’t really score that well in the graphics category. This year I set out to change that! I learned the basics of pixel art by an unhelpful video, experimentation, practice and I fell in

(but not really)

with it! I think my graphics are officially better than last year’s:

(the old graphics are mad at this joyous statement)

 3. I Constructed the Most Complicated Animator I’ve Ever Done

Ok, I know this must be pretty basic for some of you, but I have never made anything this big before! For me, it’s a total win!

 4. I Created More than I’ve Ever Created Before

I already mentioned this like a thousand times, but yeah.  This Ludum Dare was pretty good for content creation, even though I almost died…

To Summarize:

Well, I think this LD was a success. My goal is to place below 1000 in every category. If I do that, than yay! If not, I’ll be a little dissapointed, but at least I attempted, and succeeded my 3rd Ludum Dare, and learned new things in the preparation, and midst of it, that super-charged my game-dev powers. This was the time I achieved the stars when before I had only ever reached the clouds.

P.S (Please note, in the case above the stars are relative to me. My stars aren’t your stars. To put it in scientific terms, we have different skies.)

This is postmortem of Space Enforcer and our first Ludum dare

Day one

Idea of the game came to us during short brainstorm. We thought, Why aliens always has to be evil in games? May be it’s people who are bad, trying to destroy each other?  And here comes the concept of the UFO, which enforces peace on Earth with his tractor beam. After brief discussion we decide that game should use unity Physics2D, because who doesn’t like to play with physics, right? There was three possible types of weapons for humans: rockets (player can correct their trajectory), tanks (turn over) and bombers (force them to land, but gently, so they won’t crash).  Last two was kinda tricky, so we stopped on rockets

At first rockets supposed to have their own thrust, but after we tried that out, we didn’t like it. Trajectory changes was unpredictable and unclear. So instead of rocket we made a simple ballistics projectile, which is more common in games (Worms/Angry Birds) and easier to play with.

When we were making UFO controls, we was trying to give player feeling that he controls big spacecraft, not just moving his mouse cursor on the screen. Instead of setting cursor position to UFO we decided to apply force on direction of the cursor. Force is proportional to distance between UFOs location and cursor. It gave desired feeling to controls and added some challenge.

At first our artist wasn’t available and we had to use some programmes art. Game looked like this:

But after his arrival game changed pretty fast. It started to look like normal indie-game (=

At the end of first day we had working prototype with flying rockets, working UFO and tractor beam.

Day two

After playing our game for some time we found a problem: player could just float at the middle of the map and easily redirect all rockets. Problem needs a solution, so we decided to add new mechanics: anti air rockets, which aims directly at UFOs position, tractor beam stamina and people who tries to escape from war zone.

After we did that, we had a choice: made more levels or spend remaining time to polish our game. We decided to polish game: add more sounds, particle effects, animations and improve balance and UI.

Sadly second day was the last for us, because third day was already monday at Russia and we had to go to work.

What wend good:

• Unity particles. Particles always seemed like hard and sophisticated thing, but as it turns out there are not! They are awesome actually, we used them everywhere we could.
• Planning. We didn’t spend too much time making concept, we wasn’t afraid of featurecut, we didn’t make anything twice
• Art and music. They turned out pretty well
• Ability to accidentally kill a man
• 

What went badly:

• Steep learning curve. We played our game too much and didn’t notice that our game become a little bit hardcore and also there wasn’t any tutorial. We thought about  difficulty level choice, but didn’t implement this feature, because we didn’t have enought time to do it properly

Here is some stuff I created for my game Aqua Marine after the Jam was over.

Trailer

Pearl Guide

The Bubble Launcher

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-32/?action=preview&uid=51002

Hello, I keep updating the Spate Bug. Now I created a display that show the collected hability. Check it out.

For those who have not played, enjoy now: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-32/?action=preview&uid=36629