Ahoy, to people who may have played my game, or to those who would like to, I recently added a “finished version” with the last two floors that I was going to make, but ran out of time. The only other difference is that the dialogue box is a bit larger to assist legibility. If you are judging still, simply disregard the last two floors content, but obviously you can feel free to comment/enjoy it <3

Just a quick FYI: a lot of people complained that they wanted a bit more challenge, so one of the floors is significantly harder then the previous floors (though honestly still not that bad.)

Again, thanks for your time, looking forward to your comments, and I am considering turning this prototype into a full game in time (we shall see.)

Inspiration can come from the most unlikely places!

So there I was on Friday night, watching some YouTube videos on Unity while I was waiting in the IRC Channel for the theme to be announced. I had my list of game ideas up and had gone over them several time making sure I was happy with each of the ideas I had thought of for the different themes in the final round. ‘You Are The Monster’ only had one idea next to it, sadly I wasn’t really happy with it but it was one theme out of 20 and only had a 5% chance of winning… or so I thought :). 9 O’clock pm EDT rolls around and the theme is announced.

My heart sank… ‘You Are The Monster’ wins the final round. I looked at my idea again, still not happy with it. So I begin to brainstorm again for the next hour and I come up with something. To be honest I’m not really sure why I think of anything for this theme as it can be interpreted in many ways. I should of had a hundred ideas for this theme! But I didn’t… With the idea I did have I started in on making some art for it, and I come up with a few different designs.

I played around in Photoshop making some animations, brought the sprites into Unity and played around with the sizing of them. Then something weird happened… I lost all motivation to continue with this idea of mine… in fact I hated the idea… and I was back at square one… sigh… it was just about 2AM now… I gave up and went to bed.

Woke up before 9AM, still didn’t have a game idea yet. I make myself some breakfast, walk the dogs and basically just mill around the house. Around 10:30-ish I decided to see how everyone else is fairing on the LD website. I scrolled through the different posts and then I came upon a pic in one post. I stared at it for a few minutes and just like that I had my game idea! I again went back to Photoshop and mocked up some art, created my project in Unity and began the long journey of turning my idea into a game.

Now on to the Post-Mortem…

What Went Right
Let’s start off with some good news shall we :).

1. The Art – Not being an artist by any stretch of the imagination I was still really happy with the art I created. I am especially proud of the gold coins I made.
2. The Idea – Once I knew what I wanted to do I was able to easily flesh it out quickly.
3. Experience with Unity – This hindered me a little last LD, but this time around I was much more confidant.
4. Not a lot of bugs – This was a blessing It also helped me focus on getting the game complete instead of having to go back and fix things too much
5. Effective Time Management – A great skill to have for a Game Jam!

What Went Wrong

1. Collisions, Collisions, Collisions – Yep, I had problems with them again! Seem I was not aware a BoxCollider2D has a top and a bottom. This caused me about 20 minutes of frustration :).
2. The spawning of the enemies – While the spawning works, I do think I could have made it better than what was implemented
3. More player abilities – This of course comes from hindsight, but I’m thinking I should have added another ability than just shooting. like a breath bar that gives you the ability to breath fire that covers a small radius in front of you. Once the bar was depleted it would take like 30-45 seconds to recharge.
4. Knight’s Sounds – I’m not sure why but coding the sound so you could hear the knights death cries too longer than expected. I think it had something to do with a change that was made in the way Unity 5 handles prefabs. I could be wrong :/

If you’d like to Play and Rate my game, you can find it here. See you all in December for LD 34!

Here’s footage from the end of the Jam when I got the first mobile build done. I uploaded the APK online if someone want’s to try it on their phone. I think this game is the most finished jam game I have ever been part of. It was amazing weekend, made a game, made new friends. This is what I want to keep doing. Digital entertainment for life!

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=30979

Love

Tags: android, intergalactic, LD33, Love, machine

Hey, It’s Nicholas, I’m a game developer. I’ve submitted a game to LudumDare, and while I don’t expect to win, I’d really apreciate it if some people could go give me some helpful advice. Thanks for reading!

This turned out to be engaging, in a way i haven’t felt for years. \(^_^)/

So, i’ve continued trying to fix and complete things.

Mouse aiming is implemented, hit detection is fixed, fixing the worst gameplay problems.

Work on a decent 3d model is progressing.

What went ok :

Bresenham (for lines of sight) and particles : once again, I owe Deepnight and his great libraries a big thank you.

The cake : I baked myself a great cake before the ludum dare : 2 days of pleasure and energy delivery !

Music : I made it during the final hour while I was tired and afraid to be late, and I didn’t really want to include it because I was not very proud. Obviously it is very simple and repetitive but it improves definitely the mood. A big thank you to Terry Kavanagh and his easy to use Bosca ceoil !

Characters : even though I had to create new characters from scratch, my experience on Unit maker helped me do it faster. And by using UM characters as examples I spared myself the animation job which would have been long (and hideous)

What failed or is missing :
As several people pointed out, there is no losing condition. I was afraid not to be able to make :
– a good level design
– a good “IA” for the adventurers who are supposed to fear you, shoot, patrol and investigate. And I was right about that one : sometimes the adventurers get stuck face against a wall, or don’t go back to patrol after an investigation.
In these conditions I was afraid that I might create an impossible level and I decided to let the adventurers be annoying but not lethals. The shield makes you immune to the impact and makes the game much easier but you are invicible anyway.

One more time I used the same key for interaction and passing text : very stupid because people miss some parts of my amazing writing.

A few graphical bugs (tombs cut in half, z display order not perfect… )

Barely survived this one but here’s my jam entry for Ludum Dare 33 and before you ask, yes, that is the name of the game.

Click The Pic To Play!!

Also as usual, if you would like me to play your entries then I’ve got a Google Form that you can fill in right here (I’ll try to play and rate them as soon as possible).

Tags: jam, LD33, Unreal Engine 4, Windows

I almost didn’t take part.

I had stayed up until 2am to see the Theme announcement and then I went to bed. No early morning notes or ideas, no, no thinking about format just sleep.

The truth is the Theme left me pretty cold, it still does. I am new to LD I only heard of it 3 months ago due to following @Ploogle on twitter and having casually started up Game Design as a Hobby I spent a weekend reading some blogs, playing some games and even offering a name to someone on twitter when they asked for ideas (if you played Flail Rider at LD32 and thought great game, terrible name that one was on me). I had never been involved in any Game Jams I kind of figured they were not for me. I have 2 kids, a job and a mountain of housework, my days of staying up till 3am playing video games is well behind let alone building them in 48hrs.

A little over 2 weeks ago I thought about LD and checked out the website and I saw the countdown timer and I thought about taking part,then I quickly dismissed it as a foolish notion that I would not be able to find the time for. I then started to help with the theme slaughter, almost a game within itself good, bad, slaughter like a tiny bit of power in my hands. I was a roman emperor deciding which themes would be fed to the lions, and boy did I throw a lot to the lions. I mean there were some really bad Themes in there. There were also some really cool sounding themes, I personally enjoy the open 1 word themes that could go in any direction. Then came the voting, where I was starting to convince myself I would take part. I had a system for how I voted, down voting the ones I thought dictated mechanics, upvoting the ones that offered creative possibilities, ignoring the ones that just didn’t inspire me. and then it was Friday, it was 2am. I had waited out the storm and the Theme and I even had an idea half formed if it was World in the Skies (a theme that did remarkably well in the voting).

Then I read the 4 words at the top of the page

YOU ARE THE MONSTER

“Well fuck!”

If there had been one theme I had been rooting against it was that one.

I just thought it was dull and uninteresting and would end up with a lot of very similar games (it was no Unconventional Weapon!) and it did the opposite of inspire me. It sent me to bed.

The next morning I woke up, still thinking I probably wouldn’t make a game, if I was going to spend a weekend almost ignoring my family to Jam did I want to do it making a game that didn’t inspire me? While my kids watched Cbeebies I turned on my Laptop and slowly changed my mind. I would keep it simple, not try to do too much and just have a go to see if I could. my focus not on the art but the functionality. I knew how to make card games so decided I would go in that direction, I could already see from the blog that my prediction of a lot of reverse dungeon games was coming true so purposely took it out the dungeon, There was also a lot of blood splattered pictures and dark interpretations of the Theme so I wanted to go in a different direction (anyone else having a Cuddling mechanic in their game?). So I hashed out what I could and I made a game and submitted it for the Compo.

Then people started playing it.

At time of writing 27 people have played my game which may not be a lot but its 27 more people than have played any game I have made upto this point and the feedback has been……fair for the most part.

A number of people have liked my idea but felt that the game was a little phoned in, needed more polish, needed audio, needed a better guide. They aren’t wrong and I started to feel like I short changed myself and the 27 people that played it a little by not trying. It turns out Audio isn’t as hard to muster up as I thought it was and just because I instinctively know how my game plays it doesn’t mean others will.

So I took all the feedback on board and made the time today to polish it up, now this doesn’t replace my Compo entry, that can stand on its own 2 feet and take the punches it deserves and if you want to give it a try and rate it on its own merits you can find it here.

Monster Of All Trades

But this is the polished version, and it is not meant to be rated on or improve that rating of the compo entry but its for the 27 people that played my game that I could of done better with. I borrowed a little open source Art, I made some sound effects and music like I should of done 2 days ago and I wrote a guide on how to play the game. So hopefully some of the guys who played my game will see this and try the polished version which I wouldn’t have made had it not been for their mostly positive feedback. Here’s the Dropbox link

Monster Of All Trades V2.0

For those who won’t play either but might want to see the comparison

Before

After

Tags: ld33 postmortem

Finally I nailed that annoying memory leak bug, plus a bug with the Cacodemon’s starting stats. Also replaced Phaser.js and EasyStar.js with their minified versions.
Now game plays a bazillion times faster. Go kidnap the Princess HERE (and leave a comment if you liked it).

This is my first game, first jam, first timelapse, we can all start from somewhere and I choose this way, lots of peoples couldn’t just do their first game inside 72h so please enjoy it

My initial plan for this game was to make an experience for what it would be like to be a “monster.” But when I thought about it I realised that what defines a monster is not the creature itself but our reaction to it. That led me in a somewhat relentless and melancholic direction.

A troll’s life

My inspiration for the style of this game was the early home computer games of the 80s like Frak.

I painted the sprites in the Gimp directly onto the canvas. This was somewhat laborious. I’ll look for a better pixel editor if I decide to create any pixel animations in the future.

The only useful feature of the Gimp I used was in producing the flash effect for the lumberjack selfie.

Other than that it was all pixel by pixel painting. I’d like to have got a few more frames into the troll walk cycle to give the animations a little more bounce, but I started late and was already running short of time.

I think in depicting the troll’s death I was unconsciously influenced by the pictures of the death of Cecil the lion. I think that helped to capture the mood I was going for:

With the music I lucked out. I tried several of the tools in an attempt to create a sombre backing track. On my very first try with Otomata, as I was testing the ability to capture a wav, I got exactly the feeling I was after by pure chance. (I was unable to recreate it over several subsequent attempts.) So I edited the capture I had into a loop and went with that.

JAM entry gif!

VS

Early prototype Vine!

—

BTW, you can play Monster Streaking! here!

Cheers, people!

Tags: beavl, gif, monster streaking, pixel art, Vine

I didn’t make my own game this time around. Couldn’t think of any game designs based on the theme that I was excited for. I’m a mechanics-first sort of designer, and this iteration’s theme left me clueless. So I instead helped out with the programming and design on another project by some other local game devs. That project became Cvltists and Crusaders. (Also check out Bovidae Destroyer, produced by another local team.)

It was a new experience for me, being on a game jam team along with another programmer/designer, plus a very capable artist and a very capable musician. I was already worn out at the beginning of the weekend (not an encouraging sign at the start of a jam), and was exhausted by the end, but it was nonetheless a great team and a great experience; I’m glad I was a part of it!

Tags: #LudumDareKC

We found the whole process liberating (tiring, but liberating). Having to come up with a game in 72hrs seems hugely daunting…but in reality it was less daunting that the game ideas we have had in the past. Unfortunately, none of those have been completed…but you know what…our LudumDare33 was completed. We learned a lot as developers and we can’t wait for the next jam. Our goal now is to take Run Ogre, Run! to the next level of production.

Wish we would have grabbed some shots before we started replacing assets.

Tags: Crazy Minnow Studio, Run OGRE Run

I can’t wait for voting to be over. Everyone who voted for my game, thank you. Another great Ludum Dare has gone and almost past, and I’m looking forward for voting to be over. Congratulations everyone (*cough* Cookie Clicker Cheats *cough*) And great job on all your games.

okay so this is a post mortem of the game i made for ludum dare called bloody tentacles. if you arent familiar with it, here is a gif that illustrates the gameplay fairly well.

basically 5 stages of that. and spikes too. you control the body with wasd and the tentacles with the mouse. they aren’t big stages so i hope it doesnt overstay its welcome/become samey towards the end, although it might somewhat since the last level is a bit tough.

alright on to the postmorteming.

so what went well?

• writing my own engine: i dont think i could have made this game with an off the shelf engine. not without hacks or having to work around the engine in many parts of the code at least.
• using bosca ceoil: i have have never written music before this jam but i was able to make nice sounding stuff with bosca ceoil in very little time. highly recommend.
• my art: i dont consider myself an artist but this stuff came out very well. i have been trying to get back into pixel art lately
• my method of choosing a name: i just looked through my source code and found the coolest sounding names and picked from those. it was down  between “gibify” and “bloodyTentacles”. both are good names but i think this was a better one.

what went wrong?

• my art planning: i have like a billion art assets in my art folder that are unused. the coolest of whcih is a set of sprites that let the eye follow your mouse. but also a whole sprite font! and another track of music! jeez. should have held off until the end.
• my sleep schedule: i stayed up until like 5 am every night even though i got no good work done between 1 and 5. had i not done this, i probably would have finished in time for the main compo. this is the biggest thing i think.
• my first day plan was too ambitious: it was the same basic idea but i wanted you to control the tentacles more individually.essentially, you’d hold shift (or something) and go into a slow motion/pause mode (think like in transistor when you’re planning moves, or in the witcher 3 when you are using runes), where you could move the tentacles to individual places and pick targets that were in range. you’d then release pause mode and theyd do that.

  this would have been sweet but it would have taken more time. i’m glad i simplified. i might still do this in the future but it is unlikely. maybe even in another game.

• blood splatter on the walls: towards the end i added a feature where i would draw the effect buffer onto the wall every frame at a low opacity, so that you would see the blood spatters (smoke also showed up there but you couldnt really tell). this looked cool, and gave the game a great sense of persistence, but since i was doing it in screen space it looked really stupid when e.g. the blood would fall off the end of the screen and be cut off suddenly, or you’d move and you’d see the world outline on screen because of the parallax background (even without the parallax background, the first effect was bad enough looking make it too annoying to be worth doing).

so anyway, if you havent played it, you should! it’s actually pretty fun i think, and i don’t always say that about my games.

he awaits you

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=40468

Hey ya’ll, hope you all slept like babies after all that hard work.

First off, check out our LD Entry Mmmonster! Make sure to read the Readme file if you’re on Windows 7, and don’t forget to rate and leave a comment 😀

Also, we’re gonna stream on Twitch, so don’t be a stranger.

Dragon Tax Return Simulator 2015 is my first Ludum Dare entry. Once the theme was announced I brainstormed a list of about a dozen ideas, and then narrowed them down based on whether they were 1. doable, 2. interesting. Somehow this dragon tax game idea came out on top. While I was originally trying for a compo entry, when I realized I wasn’t finishing on day 2, I adjusted trajectory toward the jam.

Tools
Javascript – This is a mostly from scratch (libraries used below) HTML5 game. So if it looks bad or doesn’t work for you then I probably didn’t test in your browser/os.

Google Fonts – A great resource and allowed me to take full advantage of the “Fonts are allowed.” exception. I doubt I’d have even tried this idea if I didn’t know about Google Fonts.

Handlebars.js – I’d never used it before but it was great for making templates for all the various forms that got created.

jQuery – jQueryUI made it super simple to make all the paper draggable.

The Good
I feel like I really got a lot of value out of simple randomization.

The instructions use random values for most of the ‘rules’ so you can’t just learn the tax code.

The random name generator was really fun to make even though all it does is stick some random syllables together (about half the time it just picks a ‘normal’ firstname from a list). I decided this was not the time to try and figure out markov chains or anything fancy like that. I think this simple randomizer still came out fine.

I’m also happy with how well the random note generation worked out with its simple templates.

For example here’s the farmer complaint template (with the HTML stripped out):

Hey {{dragonEpithet}}!

{{exasperatedComplaint}}
You burnt up {{value}} gold worth of my crops!
{{farmerAppeal}}
{{peasantNotice}}
{{partingShot}}

{{randomName}}, {{location}}

P.S. {{grovelling}}

And the results:

It was fun to write all the sentences that filled these templates, but I still want to add more since the notes can still get repetitive.

The Bad
Originally, the ‘time limit’ in the game was only going to be 5 minutes. On the second day I actually tried a test run. One thing I noticed was that 5 minutes was nowhere near enough time. I used that discovery as an opportunity to cut extra forms, simplify the main form, and increase the time limit to 10 minutes. I probably could have saved myself a lot of time if I’d tried playing the game earlier.

Also, I probably shouldn’t have waited until the third day to add all the logic that makes it “a game”. I mean stuff like the dialogs, finish state, endgame report, etc. I was kind of pushing my luck as I rushed to get those all in before the deadline.

Ideas That Didn’t Make It
I wanted to add more graphics. Just things like little official seals/stamps for some of the paperwork. Burnt edges on the papers. A little pixel art dragon claw cursor.

And I wanted some of the complaints from shopkeepers to be on shop letterheads with randomized shop names but I was running out of time and ended up just reusing the design from the peasant notes.

Our game Clumsea is now available in version 1.2, released 1 day after the Jam deadline.

Features are :

• New Character
• More DESTRUCTION
• Improved framerate on all computers
• Mac and Linux builds

As a giant sea animal, you have to make your way home to the ocean. But be careful, don’t destroy everything trying to reach your goal ! Maybe moving through small roads and building is not easy as it seems!

You can try and rate our game here !