Hello, I am releasing an alpha version of my post-jam game. This is my second post since no one saw the first one. It has been ported to Android and has been developed from scratch. Please check it out by joining the testing group here or by download straight from here! Please leave some feedback on this post. Please tell me if you don’t like the music…
NOTE: JOINING TESTING GROUP CAN TAKE A FEW HOURS UNLESS YOU USE THE LINK ON THE PAGE.
Thanks!
Fellow jamers,
brace yourself. Time is come for a timelapse video !
Still not rated my game ? Please, be my guest : http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-32/?action=preview&uid=40976
See you… soon.
To celebrate rating 100 games, I drew a picture of what the main character suppose to be in my game “Ay Pinatas!” It’s a pinata too, but one of the good guys. Don’t feed it too much candy… it’ll go boom!
If you haven’t already, take some time on “Ay Pinatas!” and let me know what you think!
[ Click here to play the game ]
Meanwhile, I’m developing a post-compo version of “Ay Pinatas!” to add what I couldn’t during the compo. Check back at the game’s page or at my twitter feed for the latest happenings.
I forget that each new functionality introduces new bugs. Wraparound makes the hack corner possible. Then interesting things had happened.
Thanks to everyone who played my game, Temporal Gardener. A lot of useful feedback which I’ve used to make the post-jam version, now available here. LD32 game page and jam version here.
For everyone else, the goal is to produce ripe grapes. The unconventional weapon is a time gun. The idea is a tribute to Terry Pratchett (RIP) and Counterwise wine, which gives you a hangover before you drink the wine.
This is how I thought one might cultivate Counterwise Grapes. The grapes won’t grow from a vine normally. But, if a vine is travelling backwards in time (un-growing), rotten grapes from the ground will fly up onto it and ripen. The player has to set this up in each level to make fresh grapes.
Post version has bugs fixed up, improved responses/visuals, restart button and a much-needed tutorial added. Hopefully makes the game less confusing. Also added more puzzles, there are now 8 levels instead of 4. Please comment if you make it through to the end.
I fully agree that soothing music and sound would improve the game. Sadly, I’m on holiday and I don’t have the equipment with me to do sound. Listen to your favourite chill-out tunes in another window as you play.
After some days we continues work with our game. In few days it will be finished and we will submit.
P.S. sorry for bad english of programmer
As lead artist you can check out our game @
http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-32/?action=preview&uid=44294
Hi guys! Thanks for all your commets and votes so far. For those that havn’t tried it, my entry is here. I’ve written a porst portem a while ago but after the first week after the jam I needed some time for resting and voting.
After several votings (about 60) and comments it’s seems that a lot of you liked the game and and some of you encouraged me to keep working on it. Overall your comments were helpful even though some of your suggerstions and complains were already on my list of improvements.
So maybe you already assumed that I’m still working on this project, if not I’m still working on The Great Shooting. 😀
So, where am I now?
Since LD two weeks have gone and as I mentioned above I needed some time off, but during the last week the game changed totaly. As a programmer I have two faces (or styles). One when I’m under pressure and one when I’m not. The last one is easy explained. I usually have a well conceived class and function structure and a habit of focusing on having as few public and static variables as possible. On the other hand when I’m under pressure (like on a 48 hour compo) my style changes dramaticaly. I call it dirty programming. My habit is to have as many public variables as possible and no getter and setter fucntion at all. In additon to that, if you go through my code, you can’t find any comment at all. This way of proggramming is not bad for LD and I usaly have no serious bugs. Most of my bugs are related of not thinking ahead (most of the functionalty is made of the idea “I need this” and not what could I need and what’s the best way this mechanics work and communicate with each other). With The Great Schooting this way of programming resulted in the difficulties of moving and placing “scripts” and “movies”. (Who was the idiot how decided that you move something with the right mouse button down? Oh, ehm that was me. 😀 ) So after a short look over my LD code I decided the best way would be to start over again. Now, I know what features of the game have to communicte with each other and I have a code base that works quite well. So I don’t have to write them completely from scratch.
The first system I improved was the moving and placing “scripts” and “movies” functionality. I changed it so you move them with your left mous button down, instead your right. After implementing I was curious how the new feeling is and it is much better than the feeling of the old LD version.
The next project was imporving the UI and the paint mode. Here are two screenshots.
Old:
New:
In both you are in painting mode. In the old one (top) there is a blue-yellowish circle that indigates where you would paint if you press the left mous button. That’s almost not recognizable and sometimes at some camera angles and postionen it’s not at the place where it sould be.
The other picture shows the new version. The UI changed a “bit”. I wanted to ged rid of most of the UI texts. Therefore I used some (I hope self-explanatory) icons. But the biggest change is the “brush” indicator. Here you can see a blue square at the exact positon where you would paint.
The next improvemt I’m working on, is the build mode. I found a bug in the build possible/ not possible trigger but other thant that I don’t intend to change much.
So that’s my current status. More updates will follow. I will upload a post LD version, soon (when I finished the build mode).
If you are interested to play the LD version here is a link to my entry. Please vote and tell my your opinions about how I could improve my game. (Oh and yes I know some texts are hard to read, sometimes!)
And don’t forget to HAVE FUN! 😉
Battle of Tolzford
Ludum Dare 32 – An Unconventional Weapon
This was my fourth Ludum Dare so this time I had a better approach to the whole process. Last LD I suffered from focusing too much on the graphics and not enough on the content. This time I made sure to build a small playable experience before filling in the graphics.
The game idea I decided early on was going to be a play on the old final fantasy/shining force games. The player is thrown into an existing game and right away runs into an “enemy”. In the battle screen they can choose to Attack, Run or use the Unconventional Weapon.
I wanted to play on the way players know what is expected of them to do in games and how they do it without questioning.
The game is a really short experience but I’m quite happy with it and do plan on expanding on it. I have so many ideas for this world and situations that I didn’t have time to add in. Will continue posting on my twitter as I get around to working on it.
Survive the depths of this terrifying dungeon … with only your balls! It gives new meaning to the word hard. I mean the game is really difficult. And I’m getting ripped because of it 
Give it a try and let me know what you think.
For this LD, to do something different, I learned and used WCK (World Construction Kit). It turns the Flash IDE into a world editor with box 2D support. As a result, it was the least amount of code I’ve had to write to make a unique game experience for LD. It was also a challenge to balance physics based game play and create a set of levels with a different challenge in each one. Next time I wont put in a timer. I promise!
For those of you that have not played it, here is the gameplay summed up in 2 seconds:
For this update I have mostly focused on controls and underlying technicalities to improve the overall experience. Here are some of the stuff I have fixed:
I am working on making this game a full release. If you want to follow my progress, check out my Devlog on Tigsource.
We’ll be streaming games for the next couple hours and rating games on Twitch at http://www.twitch.tv/ryannielson. Feel free to drop by, or submit your games to us at http://goo.gl/forms/8fX9VdD6X2 and we’ll try our best to check them out.
Recently, I’ve been looking at HTML5. I’ve messed about in it, but I’ve never really made much, so I decided to give making a game a go. So far, I have a smiley face moving around on the screen. Yeah, not wonderful. I’m definitely going to be using HTML5 for game jams in the future. It’s quick to develop; runs well in a browser across most platforms and I can develop it in Visual Studio.
Videos:
If anyone has tips, I’d be glad to here them. Thank you for reading 
If you haven’t already you can now try Ultra Hat Dimension — the premier hat-based puzzle game — more easily than ever. I’ve updated the latest build to automatically work around two crash-on-startup issues the game had. I’ll explain the problems and the solutions in more detail below if you’re interested in learning from my mistakes.
Right after submitting UHD the reports of crashes when trying to run the game started flooding in. This was 4 am my time, so I was quite annoyed. I wound up staying up til 6.30 am trying to fix the issue. It turned out there were two problems:
ClearScript, which I used for Javascript scripting, has an interesting way of loading its dependencies, so it can load either 32-bit or 64-bit on demand. One of the dlls being blocked caused ClearScript’s loading to fail and crash with an unhelpful TypeLoadException error. I’d never noticed the blocking behaviour on Windows before, and I’d never heard of it causing crashes with my other games.
Eventually I figured out what was happening was that Windows Explorer’s built-in zip support propagates the file zone information (which indicates it came from another computer) and because I use 7Zip to extract files myself, I could not replicate that behaviour. Basically, any program that unpacks zips doesn’t have this problem, only the Windows built-in.
Since it only causes a crash with ClearScript’s dlls which are loaded at runtime, I rolled up a bin file format that packs multiple files in one. Now my framework checks for ClearScriptXX.bin (either 32 or 64) and if it finds them extracts the files from that before running the game. That creates the dll files, which won’t be blocked by Windows, and so won’t crash.
I also bundled vcredist_x86.exe with the game. The framework checks if this file exists and checks the registry* to see if the redistributable is installed. If it’s not it runs it with /passive /norestart arguments, which means no user input is required to complete the install and the user won’t be prompted to restart. After installing the redistributable, the game loads up as expected.
* The registry entries for the 2013 VC++ Redistributable to the best of my knowledge can be found here
Tags: 2D, C++, jam, javascript, ld32, Ludum Dare, postmortem, update, Windows
So, I fixed some of the bugs in my game and updated the builds. Here’s a list of things I edited:
That’s it. If you want to play my game click the image below:
Click me! Do it now! I need more comments to feed off of!
Here is my opinion and suggestions for opening up the Ludum Dare to outside voting:
I love the idea of opening up voting to people who didn’t make an entry. However, they should be clearly delineated from those who did contribute an entry. The votes of the entrants and non-entrants should be tallied and displayed separately. It will be very interesting to see if there is any overlap between the two final results.
The reason I think voting should be opened up is that it will give people who are not game authors but who are gamers a chance to see and rate our games. The more eyes on the games the better. I don’t know how many non-entrants play the games, but I doubt there are many. If they do, they probably wait until the results are in and sample the top games. Opening up voting to non-entrants would allow authors to get additional feedback on our games from the much larger pool of gamers. Non-entrants would feel more compelled to play the game if they knew they could rate them.
As far as the comment section goes, non-entrants should be allowed to comment, but once again there needs to be a clear delineation between entrants and non-entrants. My idea would be alter their avatars and their screen names in the comment sections so it can quickly be seen if they contributed or not. Whatever is chosen or technically feasible, it should be clear on first glance that the person making a comment did not contribute anything to that Ludum Dare. As an alternative, perhaps a mirror site could be made that was like Ludum Dare, but was just for outside voting.
I think allowing outside voting would encourage more active participation in Ludum Dare because there may be times when I wasn’t able to make a game but I could still participate. It would keep Ludum Dare in my mindshare and encourage me to participate next time. Outside voting would be a nice feature for previous entrants as well.
Check out Simple Squares it is on sale for $0.75. http://rd124p77.itch.io/simple-squares
Hi guys.
A short post to announce you that we reached today 400 players on Just a Dream… and I didn’t expect it.
I wanted then to thank you all for this support.
The two best days on this chart are :
This little marketing tools are quite useful.
You have played the game yet ? Please, be my guest : http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-32/?action=preview&uid=40976
Have a nice day.
Have you tried Sword In A Mirror yet? If not, you can play and rate the Compo Version. Based on the feedback and the things I didn’t get finished during the Compo, I created a Post Compo Version.
What is new?
Play Dungeon Balls