Ludum Dare 32 is close to the end and it’s time to get ride of the procrastination and summ up some parts of the work we done.

First of all our game was about robots. And Natasha did some nice job developing their appearance:

Here’s the sketch to the first comic line:

that ended up as this:

She even wanted to add a cover, something like this:

But we, sadly, didn’t have enough time for it.

I’m very happy we made special room design for the boss

Btw, the way dead robot looks like was actually the fun bug at first.

The point is that we made robot animations in Spriter that has its own export format that doesn’t work well with Dragon Bones I could use in program. So I tried third part library to parse it properly, but it didn’t understand the bones and robot animation ended up as a mass of body parts with only one leg moving. After some time of hysterical laughing we decided to use this image as a base for robot’s death.

As a programmer I should say that the hardest part for me was work with frames (we had very precise table of active and recovery frames amount for each animation) and AI. Mostly because I’ve never work a lot with both technologies. So it was hard yet interesting experience.

Most of my work you could see at my Twitch channel. I even got my first tiny achievement for streaming for 24 hours total.

stream

Sadly I managed to cut only couple of highlights and Twitch deleted all the videos (I didn’t know about “Save forever” option). I really hoped to save the whole process but now I have only first video that was saved on the computer by accident.

That’s it for now.

You can play and rate our game here:

> puch -s

As a bonus for the long post here’s our cool ending wallpaper:

(Sorry for possible language mistakes, English is not my native language)

Here is a second video of my game! just before the voting ends!
Thanks sooo much Omiya Games or Tech Valley Game Space or whatever (I am so confused of multiple personalities 😀 )
Go check their game(s) out (and ignore my comments on some of them so sorry)

Also, here is the first video from a beginning youtuber so go subscribe to him! He is AMAZING!!!

P.S.sorry for my second post today 😀

How many of the 100 anagrams can you solve?

What went right:

+ Reference simple rules in a popular game: Jennifer loves Scrabble, so she might like Text Twist, which apparently a lot of people on Yahoo games like. Honestly, I didn’t want to make a fighting game, so the theme “unconventional weapon” was bumming me out. I decided I could playtest an anagram game, because my girlfriend kills me at Scrabble and Banagrams. It worked: Saturday night, she played the prototype for over an hour!

+ Playtest 2 text files in the first 3 hours: Jennifer and Anders played a text file prototype of rhyming, which they didn’t like, and anagram typing tutorial, which they liked more, so I made that. I just showed them the text file and had them type into another text file. I really would prefer a rhyming game, but others wanted anagrams, which gives you flexibility of multiple solutions.

+ Research multiple-solution anagrams: A website had a lot of anagram words, so I could include 100 of those words. How many different anagrams of “ywas” can you type?

What went wrong:

– Little playtesting of harder words, so word 85 stumped more friends than word 86.

– Procrastinated playtesting graphics, so the images are minimal and clashing. I was planning for robots and missiles, but people tell me this looks like a dungeon crawler with a sword. Now that I listened to player’s interpretation, I could play that up more.

– Procrastinated playtesting sounds, so the sounds are incongruent. For this, I’m thinking next time I’d try musical notes in MuseScore rather than 8-bit sounds in BFXR.

Play Anagram Attack

For my second Ludum Dare, with limited time, I did a pretty decent job. Slick was originally supposed to be a game about protecting your family’s land from corrupt underground oil drillers. The unconventional weapon of choice is complicated to explain, but simple to understand. However, I had barely enough time to finish implementing said weapon with schedule issues. What I have to show for judging is a demonstration of some cool effects and code architecture.

What Went Right:

All the carefully planned design architecture and technology worked perfectly. The different systems function elegantly and independently. Each gear of the engine has its own workload.

The effects are what I am most proud of in this entry.

What Went Slightly Less Right:

It took some time to implement and maintain the design architecture.  Had I instead gone for a more crude approach, I could have coded more gameplay and had even more to show for my limited time.

Please help me achieve my goal of 100 people playing and rating my game! Play Slick here!

Tags: ld32

I think these goals are desirable and good for the community of LD:

1. We need people to rate more games;
2. We need people to give more help/suggestion/comment to less appealing games too.
3. We would like people to give more insightful opinions/suggestion than “Great, nice_work, great_graphics, etc”
4. [Optional] Discourage behaviors that like giving false rating or just give random rating without playing.

I think the best method to achieve that is to provide more **INCENTIVE** to people;

Current rating system already provide much incentive for people to keep rating other games, but the drawback here is the incentive will fade quickly after receiving more than 40+ rates, you will have much less chance to be in the first page, and that’s when self-promotion blogs become more effective. (Of course, Post-mortem is valuable, we should keep the incentive for people to keep writing that)

It’s hard to design good incentive to drive people to do things, but luckily, we’re all game developers, and that’s what we do daily.

I believe many of you could come up with good ideas for that (with low development cost).

Let me just give my own idea first:

===============================================

(1) The “Top-Page Featuring” hidden-ticket;
Add 6~8 special feature slot at the top page;
and every 15min, for each slot, the featuring ticket will be regenerated and hidden in a random game entry, the guy who first comments that game after that will dig that ticket out, and gain the 15min “special-featuring” chance.

[Optional] add some fun for digging, give hints like “VeryFar/Far/Near/VeryNear”;

This plan might give incentive for people to play random games and give love to those games less appealing.

(2) Add some gamble elements

We all have a sorting-score for sorting in the pages. Use that to boost the incentives.

Even if you didn’t dig out the ticket in (1), you would get some random credit for rating a game;

People could place some credit into the slot machine and might earn a boost of the score, or even a ticket.

(3) Improve the comment quality

(1)&(2) aim to add incentive to drive people to keep playing & rating; but we also need to give incentive for people to improve the comment quality.

An upvote system for comment could do, and the upvote will boost sorting-score.

[Optional] every one could only give X+D+5 upvotes, X is the upvote he received, D is day in judging. This is to prevent vote rigging.

I just wanted to say thanks to everyone for their kind words and advice. This is a really great community and I really enjoyed the games that I got the chance to play.

Ok you cheeky scrubs, 17h left so you better start playing my game now m8.

I rated 139 games (will rate more) and have 55 votes. Last day exclusive offer – you comment on my game and i will play, rate and comment on yours. I’m not proud about that but we all are running out of time and my C/R ratio is not so great : (

It’s a gif, m8

Click to play Gravity Gram

I’ve rated lot’s of games this LD. Maybe too much, but I had so much fun playing all those unfinished titles

The game I’ve made (Ageless Machine: Cup of Tea) was mostly misunderstood, as I’ve made the gameplay too long (20-30 minutes). If you haven’t played that game, it’s some sort of a pessimistic puzzle adventure about determinism. Many people stopped playing after 3 minutes and then accused me of not following the theme.

I followed the theme. Just finish the game.

The confusion is probably the worst thing on this game. Since I’m not a graphic designer, I made very  primitive graphics, that made the game even more confusing.

People complained it’s hard to distinguish what’s on the screen, etc.. They may be right. I do shitty graphics.

Lot’s of people got stuck on some particular puzzle. That forced me to make this walkthrough, which solves all the ‘riddles’:

Eventually, I even wrote this article to explain thoroughly the story. I hope that if someone is interested in the game, I made sufficent materials to make him happy

The game overall became way too ambitious (I found that after about 20 hrs of working), but there was no going back. Feel free to make your own opinion on the game and let me know

I don’t know how it happened, but apparently there are more Unconventional Stick Swinging Simulator Let’s Plays. Let’s start with the one where the player didn’t seem to enjoy the game:

And one where they did:

In more serious news, we’ve finally cut out 90 LD game playthroughs from the Twitch.tv livestream and exported them to Youtube. If you have submitted your game through our Google Forms (and thus, listed under this spreadsheet), we have in fact played through every submission (with an exception of 3 due to technical problems), so if the game is not in the playlist below, it will be in the near-future. Check it out:

And hey, you can check out the other submissions made at the real-world meeting location, Tech Valley Game Space listed below!

• My Voice is My Weapon
• Star Power
• Adaptation
• Jammie Dodger
• Star Driller Ultra

Oh, yeah. There was one more, Not-Safe-For-Work (NSFW) Or-For-The-Young (OFTY) playthrough of the Unconventional Stick Swinging Simulator:

I have 13 votes so it would be awesome if people would have a go of it to get some more votes. My game’s super short so it’ll take you about 5 min. Here’s what it looks like:

PLAY IT HERE

I’d really appreciate you playing it (I’ll play yours too if you comment)

Thanks in advance

I keep reading about the “winning formula” being a well put together platformer, and I was wondering about the validity of such a thing.

Is it just because that’s the easiest thing to make well in a short time?

Is it because game devs have some kind of bias towards platformers?

Is it because everyone in the world loves platformers?

Is it because we are all subject to the Oedipal complex and am still heavily in love with Mario or whatever we grew up with? (Just like how I still love all Jackson and Madonna’s music, there’s scientific proof behind how people’s favourite stuff are whatever they grew up with) (so one day LD will be dominated by FPSs? That’s a sad thought)

What do you think?

Hey guys, ShakeMeLuzifer here. I´m the graphics guy from Dr. U and the bottomless PIT.
I wanted say a big THANK YOU for your awesome comments!

You guys really gave me a constant smile on my face during the last few weeks! So if anyone wants to join us for a few beers (in Berlin) when the jam is over, just let me know 😀
Cheers my friends!

Hey everyone,

With Ludum Dare’s rating period ending in the next 12 hours, I’m looking for some games to play and rate. If anyone has anything they want me to check out feel free to post a link to your game in the comments. I’ll be sure to try my best to give some good feedback as well.

If anyone else is looking for games to play, feel free to give my game Off to the Races a shot. I’d love to hear what you think of it. It’s mainly designed as a hectic local multiplayer experience, but it has a single player component as well.

Play Off to the Races

Good luck!

There’s less than 11 hours until judging ends so like everyone else, I’m shamelessly plugging my entry (Beacons) for one last time (Just 5 more votes until I’ve reached the 100 mark!!)

Click the pic to play!!

Also, as always, I still have my Google Form if anyone would like me to play/rate their entries (unless I’ve already played them before). I’ll try and go through every game as quickly as possible depending on the number of outstanding responses I get.

Alright, I got this little gif of my game to share with you.

Try the game and give it your votes

Grow My Thing

This was my third Ludum Dare entry and I am very happy with what I was able to complete in such a short time. You can see the result in a couple screenshots below or you can check out my game here.

At it’s core, Out of Bullets is a shoot ’em up, but you are limited to firing the ‘trash’ out of the back of your ship, which requires careful avoidance of enemies and bullets in order to line up shots.

What went right:

• Art: I spent more time on graphics for this game than I ever did on my other games and I think it shows in the final game. I probably spent too much time on certain parts of it, such as the stars/planets generation, but I had a lot of fun doing it. I used Google images to reference a few sci-fi ships, but then drew a variation on paper until I got something that looked easy enough to create and started creating everything in Gimp.
• Animation: I had a lot of fun last time creating animation, but I really took the time to make the animation I had this time work well with the game. Ship engines, explosions, and the menu doors. The past experience using Gimp really helped out here and I only had to tweak a couple animations once they were in the game to make them look more natural.
• Sound: This was actually a last minute thought put into the game, but thanks to using jfxr before, I was able to quickly turn out the few needed sounds to add to the game.
• Gameplay / Difficulty: I actually threw together the difficulty pretty quick and never modified it.  It always just felt good while I was playing it.  It starts out fairly easy and ramps up the difficulty pretty quickly. The multiplier shown next to the score was a last minute addition to show the difficulty in some form, which I feel helps show the users that there is something getting more difficult and gives them a more intermediate goal than just a high score to achieve.

What went wrong:

• Items: The original idea I had was to create a few unique ‘weapons’ that each did different things when shot, which would then make you think about what you were shooting and plan attacks more.  I didn’t plan them out as much as I wanted to and due to lack of time, just made them slightly different in how many bullets a couple could take before being destroyed. This made the reloading hatches in the top right of the ui not as useful as I had originally designed them to be.

Things that could be improved/added:

• Music: I still haven’t found a good method for creating music as a non-music person.  I played with a few interesting tools before the competition, but none of them had an easy way to export the created music.
• Leaderboards:  If I had more time, I would have added a global leaderboard to track scores.  I’ve seen this used to great effect in other games, but have not attempted it myself. I might try doing this in a post Ludum Dare version.
• Story/Goal: I had some thoughts for how to add snippets of a story or an end goal to the game, but I don’t think either would have helped the end result much at the time.  It would be interesting to see how much different the game feels with these added in and might play around with it for a future version.
• Social Media/ More Posts: I still haven’t convinced myself to start using social media during these events or to post status updates, but I know that it would result in more people seeing the game early on and could get me more feedback.  This is one of the areas I will likely be focusing the most on in future events.

As always, this was a lot of fun creating a game and challenging myself to get something completed and somewhat polished. I look forward to continuing this game and doing more Ludum Dare events in the future to keep improving.

Feel free to check out my game: Out of Bullets and give me any feedback you have.

Less than 12 hours left in the rating for LD32! Good luck, everybody, and thanks for another awesome Ludum Dare.

If you haven’t played and rated 2015’s premier C64-style propaganda-em-up Red Threat, why not give it a try now?

Check it out here.

Tags: game, ld32, unity

Hey guys! Try out our game, The Power of the Flower!

You are a hippie and need to convert the soldiers using your magical flower rifle! Shoot flowers on them!

We´ve written a small tale about the game too, if you like stories, read it!

Play here: The Power of the Flower

Tech Valley Game Space plays my game Flappy Shrimp Ninja Blob VS Blue Water Saussage !

As a not-game developer, it’s a really big satifaction, to see someone playing and enjoing his game. I really need to stream me more playing other games like this.

My Ludum Dare entry TETRATOR has it’s very own let’s play video made by Tech Valley Game Space !! It was really nice seeing people that were total strangers to me enjoy my game ! Best feeling in the world ! The footage of the actual game starts at 2:45 .

I know it’s super late to beg for rate and stuff and to be honest I don’t really need it since I have already forty or so. But I do love feedback (and that can just be that you had fun) and people seem to think that TETRATOR is pretty fun so don’t hesitate on playing it and tell me what you think :D. Oh and find me on Twitter too !

Tags: TETRATOR