We finally fixed the Mac version of our game, SleepOver. To apologize, here is the only thing you could have enjoyed on Mac, our music loop!

floats level 4

Simply put, floats is a game about drag’n’drop in space. You drag a cube around on platforms filled with deadly obstacles and evil enemies. The style and mood is stolen from the famous rymdkapsel by Martin Jonasson and I’m not even ashamed of that. In fact, I want floats to be the game I thought rymdkapsel would be, after seeing it for the first time: A hit-and-run action puzzle platformer with cubes in space

Preparation

I already had the idea the friday before compo start. I was so enthusiastic about it, that I spent half of the day mocking up some graphics and sketching levels, although theme voting was still taking place. There were four to five themes that could have easily made it into the game. So I was pretty sure about my game idea. Even when An Unconventional Weapon won, which wasn’t one of my preferred themes, I kept the idea and thought to myself, that I was going to come up with some kind of weapon, that could fit the theme. In the end I failed on this.

initial mockup of floats

Floats is the result of me searching for a game that is based on drag’n’drop action. I wanted to do something like that for quite some time and just before the compo I found myself thinking about it again. Eventually I mixed up a couple of games in my mind, like rymdkapsel, Papers Please!, Metroidvanias and then suddenly floats popped up. Maybe it was magic. Or just me from the future doing Inception stuff with my mind.

Trying out something new

To get to know Unity a little bit, I prototyped something two weeks prior compo. It was a lot of fun working with Unity, since I never used an engine before. I wouldn’t say that I specifically choose to be a low-level guy, but I always enjoyed building toolkits and reusable stuff from scratch. I knew, though, that the architectures of my games were bad and that sooner or later I would have to use an ECS or something like that. After working with Unity on floats for two weeks now, I feel a lot better about the architecture then ever before.

As you might see from the mockup above, floats was sketched as a 2D game and I actually started to implement it in 2D mode. However, for the enemies I wanted to use pathfinding, which is really easy with Unity’s NavMesh. But I didn’t know, that NavMesh only works in the x-z-pane and thus isn’t available in 2D mode. After finding that out, I started fiddling around with 3D mode and it didn’t take long to realize, that 3D was not much more difficult than 2D. So I switched to 3D after more than five hours. That’s actually a big thing for me, since I never built a 3D game. And I was kinda new to Unity. So much for trying out something new.

Why I succeeded

I didn’t really plan what to do when. I just had a set of must-have features and some optional features (which didn’t make it into the game), that I started coding from scratch. As I’m pretty confident in my coding skills and my ability to estimate coding time, I just started hacking and adjusting priorities on the go. Most of my private projects are developed the evolutionary way. Additionally, I fucking love game programming. It’s just the best kind of programming, especially when heavily mixed with creating artwork. Although drawing and creating sounds and music in between coding sessions sometimes slows down development, it really helps me to better understand the game and to generate new ideas. It also brings a welcome variation of tasks.

So why did I succeed then? Because I had fun and I loved what I was doing. Motivation is the best fuel to achieve anything.

What I can improve

I have to admit, I copy-wasted a lot code from StackOverflow and Unity tutorials. Specifically the camera movement, which I didn’t understand at all until after submission, because I needed to fix issues around that. Judging from the comments I got so far, the camera movement still is a big issue. You can drag the camera around by holding the RMB, which doesn’t seem to be intuitive to players.

I didn’t really balance the gameplay. There are platforms containing movement puzzles and simple action platforms with enemies, but the difficulty just comes from an increasing amount and speed of enemies. I find that rather lame now. Maybe it’s ok for a small game like this but it wouldn’t work in a full game. Next time I would put more time into designing puzzles elements.

So yeah. Don’t copy-waste too much code, try to get someone playtesting your stuff and practice game design.

Next

Working on floats was and is a total balst! I’m not making any plans but I also don’t see an end coming to this. If I decide to continue working on it, I will start a devlog.

If you want to make me VERY happy, you can play and rate floats here. Thank you!

If you need a reason to visit YouTube, checkout the development timelapse.

I’m @mknpf on Twitter.

Thank you for reading!

Martin

Hi! Tomorrow i have little medical check and i probably return home tired and little depressed 😀 (my hearing is little bad, i have perceptual hearing loss) So, if anybody can, give me a tip for some cool relaxing / funny games in comments 😀 I will play and rate them all

Also, you can play my game too

So it’s been a couple of weeks and I think I’m finally ready to put up a post-mortem for the game. (the game can be found here http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-32/?action=preview&uid=41214 )

This was my first ever Ludum Dare and I was lucky enough to team up with David Tredeau at the Boise Game Developers Group Game Jam.

What went wrong?

There were a couple of things that could have gone better.  Work obligations cut the amount of development time from 72 to 48 hours.  That extra 24 could have been handy for adding some missing pieces into the game and tweaking the difficulty abit.

We have an issue with the jump not registering sometimes when you are on a moving or jump-through platform.  We weren’t able to fix this issue in out allotted time, and it is still partially an issue.  The game also has a pretty steep difficulty.  We were able to tweak it a bit before our time ran out to make it fun, but there are a few spots in the level that need smoothing.

A couple more levels or a much longer level would have also been good.  Once you get past the couple of hard parts the level becomes easy to beat.  The final issue was the looping sound, we didnt have time to properly loop the background music, and I forgot to kill off the sound when you restart.  So you would get the music finishing after retrying a level when you die.

What went right.

It’s fun.  It is actually funner than I was expecting.  The physics and lighting turned out better than we had hoped, and the graphics and sound were great.  (The only thing we didn’t create were the music and ghost sounds.)  David did an awesome job on the concept and the graphics.  The man is a machine.

The ghost sounds were a happy accident.  We were playing with positional audio and had it set to randomly pick a ghost and play the peekaboo sound every 5 to 10 seconds from the ghosts position. We messed up so it would pick a ghost as soon as the other ghost stopped playing its sound.  The end effect was a lot creepier than we expected so we left it in.

What’s left?

Response has been really good, so we are going to go for it and try to make it into a commercially viable game!  We are moving from the HTML5/javascript engine we used to Unity so we will have to rebuild a good portion of the base functionality, but in the end I think it will look and perform better as well.

I guess thats it for my post-mortem.  This will definitely not be my last Ludum Dare.

-Glen Colby /David Tredeau

I Just wanted to say thank you for 20 votes, and I hope I can get the full game out (yeesh, that’s gonna take a while).  In the comments, do you think game engines are worth it?  Are you against them?  Just a topic I want to know how others feel about.

Instead of a written post, I thought it would be a good idea if Alan and I recorded our thoughts on the jam, what went right, what went wrong, what we liked and what we’d improve for a podcast! The result is linked below. Enjoy!

Tags: ld32, ld32 postmortem, post-mortem, postmortem

Watch Tech Valley Game Space play my ludum dare entry, Frisbee Training. c:

This is a post-mortem analysis of my first completed game jam entry Weapon Against Oblivion (a submission frequency of approx. 10*10^-10 Hz).

What went right?

Know your tools: After noodling around with my sprite engine both in and out of game jams, and playing with tools and techniques, I am now able to implement basic features in the first day. The engine ain’t no Unity or GameMaker, but I am comfortable in it, and that means I can be productive.

Focused on my strengths: I am not an artist. I am not a musician, nor a writer. But I can code somewhat. Some my previous designs called for three or four animated sprites and a background tile set, which is just too much at my skill set. I was able to achieve this game with a total of five single sprites.

I actually “finished”: and it feels so good. It is a ‘full game’, with an intro screen, victory / defeat screen, and simple level progression. I didn’t get time to add a high scores screen which would have given the game more of a sense of purpose, but it has a complete game life-cycle regardless.

Community: I am not a naturally social animal, but during my down time I hung out on IRC, read LD blog posts, and watched some of the streamers. There were a lot of channels that seemed to only have one or two viewers but they were all working on awesome stuff.

Seeing the cool stuff kept me going, although before I had a concrete game idea it was disheartening to see everyone else with such great ideas.

What went wrong?

Maths: Here’s a tip for anyone out there: Don’t attempt to implement a complex and realistic-feeling model for planetary population growth unless you are super-comfortable with maths. At least, don’t do it if you also want your models to be entertaining. I spent almost half of my time making different functions and parameters, trying to get something elegant that was also fun to play. In the end, I ripped almost all of it out, and implemented some simple formulas, but even then…

Gameplay: It’s not.. very fun. I had wanted to make the game-play strategic, nurturing some planets and abandoning others. In the end, the best strategy is mostly to blow up every planet you come across.

If I chose to work on this project post-compo, there are several different directions I could take this game to make it into something real. For example:

• Design and lay out the levels instead of having them totally random
• Have some planets be intrinsically worth more, so you have to keep coming back to them
• Have your ‘best’ planets do things to help your cause, like invade other planets

What will I do in the future?

Enter again (: The weekend after LD I legitimately sad that there was no game jam scheduled. I had such a fun time this LD.

Well, I’m trying to create music for the game Stoned Scarecrow a few days. So far I managed to create two tracks, one for the stage and one for the boss, I hope you like but I intend to improve as soon as possible. For now I tested these two tracks and I thought it well fitted in the game for now.

Stage 1

Boss 1

Play the new version!

Rate the compo version!

Tags: Construct2, gillenew, ld32, pixel art, shooter, stoned scarecrow

I’ve entered compo twice before and never did a post mortem, so I thought now its time to write one! =D

What went right?

Tools:

At first I was thinking about using LibGDX, kinda used to it and made 2 Ludum Dare games with it. But last minute I decided to go with Unity instead. The reason being is that I wanted to use 3d models for my game which was easier for me to produce than 2d sprites. Strangely enough it worked out pretty well since I didn’t touch Unity in months.

Tactics:

I needed a different strategy for my development, like my last two games, it was kind of intense and focused too much on one part of the game like graphics and kept tweaking till I liked it. So I made a list of things I needed for my game. On this list like everyone else’s; gameplay, graphics, controls, sound, begin and an end and perhaps a story as extra. I think I started too ambitious with physics based gameplay. After the first day I didn’t came even close to what I’ve intended to make for LD. Unfortunate I had to make some sacrifices in some of the basic game key elements. It was a wise decision and I made the game simpler and it was easier for me to build. Instead of using massive flocks of particles as offense and defense, pretty much your unconventional weapon I made a single black hole you had to feed in order to survive.

Strength:

My strength is programming and modeling, everything else was on low priority and didn’t want to spend too much time how to deal with it. Although I wanted to add music to the game, my previous games had no sound at all, well… simple shooting sounds and that’s basically it. So I’ve spend some time on making music and it was really fun to work on and strangely enough it fits the game very well.

Time:

My previous enters were kind of hectic, no sleep, bad food, and lived like a zombie for a week afterwards. This time I wanted to have fun and be more productive in fewer hours and getting better results. I slept very well, took my time to think about the game of how it should look like etc. Doing some other stuff during the day to keep my mind from programming and did some relaxing modeling or watching Motor GP :P.

Music:

This is my first enter where I added music to the game and the result was pretty badass, and I got many positive feedback from other people as it added atmospheric vibe to the game.

What went wrong?

Well not a lot of things went wrong to be honest; perhaps the last minute choice to use Unity took away some fast productivity and the usage of particles in combination with physics. Spend a lot of time on the physics and world generation part. Most of the world you won’t even see as the game spends a lot in its center as the gameplay forces you to.

What will I do in the future?

Enter the next Ludum Dare ofc! Perhaps entering as a jam with friends, who knows 😉

You can play the game here!

~Dynad

The rabbits know too much! We’ve gotta make it to the safe house garden plot! WHY DID WE ROB THE PELLET BANK!?

Uprooted

Bloodshot

Tags: Bloodshot, Chupacabra, Larry Does Ludum, ld32, Let's Play Reviews, Uprooted

Introduction

As this was my first Ludum Dare, I thought it might be instructive for me to reflect a bit over the experience

The game I made is called The N.I.D. Project. You play a mind-reading surveillance weapon, in the form of a cloud of nanites, which can infect and jump between human hosts. The objective is to infiltrate an enemy facility, gather vital intelligence about the weapons being developed there, and escape.

What went right?

The concept:
I used a few hours on brainstorming the theme, deciding on the idea of an unconventional weapon which used some kind of mind control or possession. Combining these elements with the concept of infiltration, resulted in a pretty solid concept, because I could continuously draw new ideas from it during development. The hardest part was to filter the resulting list of possible features, so that I only considered features which could be completed within the 48 hour time limit.

The mechanics:
Gameplay-wise, I was going for a mood which would combine an element of exploration with an element of planning. I decided early on that the player should not be able to move by himself. Instead he would have to lie in wait, observing the personnel inside the base, and choosing the right time to “ambush” them, in order to make progress. This means that the game is more of a puzzle game than an action game, but I think the mechanics worked out pretty well. In order to accentuate the exploration aspect, I also implemented an “exploration fog of war” mechanic, so that you gradually reveal the base as your host enter the different areas. To enhance the mood, since you control a mind-reading weapon, I also put a lot of effort in simulating the “minds” of the personnel as well, so that you can see details about what your current host is thinking/doing (this was implemented by exposing a lot of the AI-states through the UI, by giving them meaningful names).

Time management:
While I did not have time to implement all the features on my “nice to have” list, I still think that time management was one of the things that went right. I kept a TODO list of features, and focused on gradually enhancing the core features, so that the game was playable at all times. The only exception was when I discovered that I had forgotten to make the menu-screens – luckily it only took around an hour to make them, or I’d been in trouble I focused on having the basic game features ready at the end of the first day, allowing me to concentrate on enhancements all of day 2.

The graphics:
While my graphics would probably be considered functional at best, in comparison to a lot of the other great games here, I still consider the graphics a huge success compared to my usual results :-). Following recommendations from this site, I tried out Aseprite, which is the first drawing program I have ever tried, in which I can be somewhat productive

Sufficient rest:
As the Compo started at 3 AM in my local time, I was able to go to bed early, and start working directly after a night’s sleep. I made sure to get 6 hours of sleep after the first day, and I made sure to go outside for a walk a few times during the Compo as well. This meant that I stayed effective for most of the compo (although I was a bit exhausted in the last few hours)

Practice with development tools:
I used Java with LibGDX to develop the game. I spent the weekend before the Compo on making a few small games and tests in LibGDX to acquaint myself with the framework, and this allowed me to be much more productive during the Compo.

What could have gone better?

Music and sound:
I had planned to do some kind of music for the game, but looking at my TODO-list I decided that implementing more game play features would probably be a more effective use of my time. For the next Ludum Dare, I should definitely practice a bit beforehand on learning some basic music skills and/or relevant programs.

GUI:
I am not satisfied with the GUI. The exploration/mind-reading details of the game required a lot of text, and the indirect control required a few UI controls. But I don’t feel that the UI meshes very well with the game map. Perhaps a more sharply divided GUI might have been better, rather than trying to “blend” the text areas with the game area.

Map-building:
I ended up spending a lot of time on creating the map, since I basically ended up with representing the map in a handful of text-files, and then parsing them into the game. For my next Ludum Dare, I should probably find an appropriate map-editor, and declare a parsing-library beforehand, in order to read the map made in the editor.

Smoother character movements?
This has been mentioned a few times in the comments of my game. I would probably not have had the time for the extra complexity, but I am considering adding this to a post-compo version, just to see if it “works better”

Thoughts about a post-compo version:

Looking at my TODO list of unimplemented features, as well as the very constructive comments on my game, I’ll definitely  make a post-compo version of the game (including experimenting with smoother movement). I am considering spending 16 hours on enhancing the game (corresponding to having submitted the game as a Jam entry), just to see how much of a difference an extra day can do

If you still haven’t seen our game, here are some fishes from it:

Play our game.

My artwork.

Finally, here we are with the Post Mortem for our game COPY GUN, developed during the Ludum Dare 32 Jam. We are going to revise what went right, what went wrong, what did we learn in the process and future plans for COPY GUN.

– What went right

When brainstorming ideas for the Ludum Dare this is one of the first we thought, quite early on during Saturday morning. From the beginning it was easy for us to settle for this idea and the set of mechanics and first levels were born fast.

Most importantly, for this Ludum Dare, Alicia and Sergi, fellow colleagues from Mandarina Games, joined me with complementary skills doing the art and code of the game. Undoubtedly, without them this game wouldn’t have been possible.

Finally, good planning was a key component, specially considering that as a team it was our first Ludum Dare. However, I have personally been part of 7 ludum dares, with diverse degrees of success, and from those experiences I learned how to plan the game execution in phases and to be able to make decisions fast. This helped us to complete a decent amount of the ideas that we had previously envisioned and to include 20 normal levels plus 5 bonus ones.

– What went wrong

For this Ludum Dare, we at Mandarina Games organized a real world gathering at Parc Audiovisual de Catalunya, in Terrassa, which meant putting a lot of effort not just organizing the event, but also attending local media, waiting for people to arrive to the location, solving issues with the internet connection, and other distracting stuff.

Additionally, as I said before, it was the first time we worked together as a team in a Ludum Dare, but particularly the first time in general for Sergi participating in such event. Despite this lack of experience, and also missing the last day due to job obligations, I would rate as very impressive what he achieved in just 2 days.

– Lessons learned

For this Ludum Dare I would say that we learned the following lessons:

· We should give a little more time to testing, as collisions, effects and some of the levels were not polished enough.

· Add more feedback details to make the game more responsive, user friendly and fun to play.

· Finally, strive to improve on all prior experiences, by repeating what we did good in this project and trying to avoid what we did not so good.

– Future plans

Next weekend, before the end of the rating phase, we will be adding a postcompo version fixing some of the issues we just mentioned in the previous paragraphs, making the game experience smoother, more balanced and fun to play.

For this game we would like to add 4 new worlds to the current one, such as a water, a volcanic or an ice world, and a final lab world. In each one of those new mechanics would be introduced and old ones reused, with new twists due to the nature of the environment. The idea would be to add final bosses as well, so overall when complete the game would be about a 100 levels, 20 of which would be available as a postcompo demo for everyone to try and play

– Conclusion

We are very happy with the results of this Ludum Dare, and we would love you to enjoy playing our game COPY GUN. We would be pleased to receive your feedback, as it helps us improve the game experience and ourselves as game developers.

You can follow us on facebook and twitter, or at our website mandarinagames.com.

P.S. If you want to play other fun games created at the real world gathering, then try the challenging Trappy Trap and the hilarious Grandma’s Kittie Rescue!

Hi there, this is Alex, I’m working on the post-compo version of my game, “I don’t feel like shooting right now!”. If you haven’t heard about it yet,  you may give it a try here.

At the moment I am trying to improve the UI feedback, but this appeared to be a hard task. I don’t exaclty know how to tell the player what each button does. So I created 4 versions of UI. They differ in what happens when the player hovers the mouse cursor over a button.

Which variant seems most intuitive to you?

Variant 1 – The default one. There is text under each button, describing how each button affects emotions. Nothing else.

Variant 2 – Is still a bit glitchy but you can get the idea.

Variant 3

Variant 4

Variant 4a – It is slightly different from the the v4.

we here at Tech Valley Game Space (TVGS) will be live streaming tonight at 7:00 PM EST! Let us know if you’re watching in the chat, and we will play your game first (which is important because we have a ton of entries to go through)!! We’ll also be streaming Thursday and Friday from 7:00 PM to 12:00 AM EST. We’ll also do our best to post the games we’ve played onto Youtube as well, as you can see below in our automatically-updated playlist:

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

All the games we plan on playing are listed below:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1RbvfWHMb-vWmYBagjjnfVAMKugG1vgQ41QFQ_Wa4YjE/edit?usp=sharing

I had very positive feedback for my game. And it motivated me to coming back and work a bit more on it. ^^

Some of my friends trained and even managed to finish the game without beeing hit once!

So i decided to add some content and to make  a version 2.0 of my game.
What changed?
-4 new power ups (tomatoes, Birdy the kid, Automatic weaponry and Explosive shots).
-1 new foe (the panda!)
-1 new end boss
-the game is longer (you must go through 24 areas to finish the game, 3 duels and 3 bosses)
-minor changes: (the carrot and the watch were buffed, the first boss is easier, etc)

I think the game became harder but it became even more silly, allowing you to have 5 power ups at the same time (out of 10). ^^

Anyway, here is a screenshot that shows the tomato power ups (it acts like a sort of shield, but it can deal damage if it touches an ennemy):

and here is a link to my game if you want to have a look:

the Radisheriff

I always enjoy getting feedback, so don’t hesitate =).

Several weeks have passed since I released “A Knight and A Line” (Game page here). Several weeks I felt that the game was too short than intended. So, this time I will update and add more content into the game. The screenshot below was initially intended to be in the game but because to of time constraint, I had to remove them. So, this time is my chance to add them into the game and also add more new content.

Facing the wolf

Boat to go to wasteland

Fire attack from long range

The update is expected to be finished this week. Also, there will probably more hundred pages added into the game.

Tags: progress, update

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-32/?action=preview&uid=52637

You can play the postCompo version on gamejolt

And why dont rate the compo version while you are here!