Part of the preparation for the next Ludum Dare (because, hey, it’ll be here rather sooner than later) is looking into the past at how the previous entries worked and how they didn’t. First, let’s recap how our time was roughly spent during the three days of the jam, while working on Minotaur:

Saturday:

We met at 9 o’clock, six hours after the theme was announced. I don’t think there is any way to improve this, since a good night’s sleep is crucial for doing anything. After an hour or so of smalltalk, setting up the project/workstations and deciding which engine we were using (Phaser), we were ready for brainstorming.

We had a few ideas what kind of game we wanted to do. Some ideas were really just other themes or settings, but in the end we had two ideas in competition. The one that didn’t make the cut was “You are the (Flying Spaghetti) Monster, converting people with your noodly appendages and meatballs, while Zeus throws lightning at you”. Hey, we can’t all be genious writers. As far as time goes, the brainstorming was done reasonably quick, without rushing things.

After we settled on the Minotaur theme, we split into three groups doing stuff. I can’t comment much on how my coworkers faired, since I was doing the graphics. I’m really a programmer, but Ludum Dare is perfect for dabbling here and there and I know how to use gimp somewhat effectively. The others were working on extending the game skeleton with the actual game logic, some basic AI and implementing procedural level generation. Unfortunately, we had to scrap that last one.

Graphics-wise I should probably look up how to improve the workflow. A lot of the time was spent creating mirrored and rotated versions of tiles. Since I was doing a bit of shadows and working exclusively with bitmaps, I had to fix the highlighting after mirroring/rotating the tiles. Maybe I can improve that aspect. I also would love to work more with higher levels of abstractions than pure bitmaps. I kinda did so with using copious amounts of layers (Achievement unlocked – “Layer Madness: Create a meaningful gimp file with more than 200 layers”), but there has to be a better way to work, possibly using vector graphics, texture editors/generators and specific programms for working with spritesheets/tilesets. Other than that, I think doing graphics simply takes a lot practice. Doubly so, creating them efficiently.

The big I-wish-we-could-have-done-this thing was animation. With my crappy workflow, animation would have required drawing each frame manually. The horror! It’s certainly possible and how a lot of people do it, but a programmer doing animation during LD? You gotta “cheat”. Again, with vector graphics you can draw key frames and let the computer interpolate the frames in between, but that is hardly possible with bitmaps. Something to research for next time.

My coworkers made better progress, but hit a bump in the road with pathfinding. Sure, everyone and their mother knows of A*, but it’s not like a language construct you can write down with a few keystrokes. First, you need a data structure, that actually supports the algorithm. Second, you have to implement and use it. Third, your actors need to decide where they want to go before they can calculate a path. In the end, the game didn’t end up using A* pathfinding, but a simple state-based movement, that worked well in the purely orthogonal maze, by cleverly choosing angles to deflect when hitting a wall.

We have plans to vastly improve working with simple state machines and pathfinding for the next LD, should we decide to use Phaser again. Now we know.

Sunday:

The second day is the day for the actual game logic. Having the mobs and the player move around is nice, but not exactly a game. Again I can’t say where the chokepoints for the programming side were, but I gathered, that a more systematic approach using OOP patterns (even if javascript is often called a functional programming language) right from the start would have saved a lot of time. Evil, global vars! Fight the monolithic functions! Say no to god objects! And for the love of Elune, don’t repeat yourself!

On the graphics side, I was busy doing some decoration objects, that later were reused as different sprites for the same game object to provide some variety. The only decorative thing in the level were some fountains, and those were the worst sprites I made. Oh well.

A big time waster was doing a big spritesheet for the mob groups. We decided that mobs could band together to form a group. Since collective behaviour and movement was basically impossible with the crude AI and movement we had, two or more mobs would simply fuse to one object with the sprite of a group. This time I had no shadows to worry about, so could copy+paste and rotate to my heart’s content, but it still took some time to create the spritesheet. If we have our better AI for the next game, I’ll be able to save on that side, since grouping can be done a more abstract level and the mobs simply stand close together (if we even need grouping).

At the end of the day, we had our game almost complete. However, from my previous entries I knew that instructions and tutorials are absolutely crucial for LD. People just don’t have time to figure out the game. So I decided to do a tutorial. For that I created a very small level and added a page-through collections of short texts, like “Strange creatures have invaded your labyrinth […] and if they band together, they get stronger.” They don’t outright tell you what to do in meta terms like mobs and highscore, but should still provide a quick introduction to the game. I really hope this solves the problem. Ludum Dare is not the time to create elaborate tutorials, that are longer than the main game.

At that point I also discovered a really annoying engine limitation: Reseting the game is not as easy as it should. The solution was to reload the page to reset the game. Ugh!

Monday:

We all had to work on Monday, so not much development was done on the game. In the evening, I extended the main level for some additional gameplay (still short though) and fixed a bug. After that, an unfortunately very short round of playtesting to check the winning/losing conditions and browser support, then it was already submission time (actually sleepy time). Even though the jam has a day more, the third day is not the day to do any heavy work, since most people have to work on mondays.

Conclusion:

Better preparation for common patterns in game development goes a loooong way. It’s not just that you can do stuff faster, but also more is possible because a reasonably well constructed program enables more features with a few lines of code than a horrible mess of spaghetti madness. Also, for graphics proper workflow and tooling is crucial. I don’t know much about audio, but maybe it’s the same. We chose external music and sound effects, because programmers make for horrible musicians (for us anyway).

Tags: ld33 postmortem, postmortem

Flappy Monster is a nod to helicopter-in-a-cave style flight games, and turns them sideways. More popularly known as “Flappy Bird” games, the thrust/gravity/navigation mechanic has been around for a while. In my twist, I gave the monster ineffectual wings. Flapping makes him angry (because he can’t fly) so he runs, runs faster, through buildings and forts of humans civilization who desperately lay down sharp pikes to stop him.

WHAT WENT WRONG

Idea waffling

I start each game jam by walking the dog and talking to myself like a weirdo. I run through the possible interpretations of the theme, what I think others might do, and how I might distinguish myself. When I get back, I have a drink (this time it was Remy cognac), sit on the porch, smoke a cigar and brainstorm. Normally by the end of the evening I have several ideas fleshed out and I’ve at least picked one, with the core mechanics designed. But this time, I was flustered, and was waffling between two ideas until 4AM.

The first idea was an homage to The Thing where you were accused of being the monster (but not actually). It was somewhat a logic game, where you knew little facts about the other people that clued you into who was the monster. Anyone left alone with the monster could become infected, and then you had two monsters. You assigned characters to do tasks which revealed more clues about who’s the monster. Characters would have trust levels with each other, making this task harder, and ultimately putting suspicion upon you, perhaps leading you to becoming infected yourself. I loved the idea, but I spent hours researching logic puzzle design and failed to nail down precise core mechanics.

The other idea was a chasing game. People thought you were a monster and chased you, and you responded nonviolently. If they grabbed you, they held you in place until you shrugged them off. If you stayed held long enough (perhaps because several people grabbed you), your health would begin to drop. The twist was when your health reached a lower threshold, you’d explode with rage, killing everyone on the map. So ultimately you are the monster (albeit provoked), and your goal is to survive long enough. I eventually settled on this idea, but I was still analyzing mechanics in the morning, trying to figure out how to make the chase exciting. Ultimately when it got to noon, I acknowledged that this design had too many issues and no time to work on them.

I came up with the Flappy Monster idea as an alternative, as something I thought I could build with the time remaining.

Poor prep

I generally code Haxe using the Sublime 3 text editor. It’s not an IDE. It has support for templates but I don’t use them. It has support for completion, code style, and shortcuts using the Clemos Haxe Bundle but I had trouble getting it working properly and stopped using it a while ago.

Under the hood, Flaxen uses Ash-Haxe as an entity-component system. The benefits of this system are only realized if you actually use systems and components to address states and behaviors in your game. These things require some boilerplate code. Not a lot, but when I’m coding under the gun, the extra minute it takes to set up this boilerplate and locate the file in the appropriate location seems like forever.

So instead I start hacking. The code base gets ugly, cluttered, and hard to extend very quickly, and by the end of the 48 hours I’m fighting kode krud in my desperate attempt to cram in one more feature. Next time I’ll put together some templates and macros to make this process quicker, and keep me leveraging the ECS.

Also, I had little practice with Spriter. While I love the ability to do custom animations in it, it’s a buggy and very quirky app. Between Spriter and TexturePacker, I was trying to discover an efficient art pipeline that wouldn’t drive me nuts. In the end, I barely escaped a Lovecraftian descent into insanity. Seriously Spriter, I have to enter my custom rect every time? You can’t save that shit in the scml file? Jerk.

Ran out of time

This “what went wrong” is always on my post-mortem list. And every time it’s my fault. Because I know I have 48 hours and only 48 hours to make a game, yet I “blow the time budget” at various points. I have to be more ruthless in my time management. Unknowns are a killer and a time sink, so prepare as much as possible, and if the design is not coming together quickly – ditch it!

As one gets to the end of the deadline, things stop dropping off your to-do list in favor of more critical priorities. In my case music and more special effects never happened. And the game would have benefited immensely from another hour of playtesting and tweaking. But that’s alway the case!

Users complained that the pikes were hard to see, the difficulty was brutal, the RNG was unfair, and the monster took too long to slow down. All true, my friends, all true.

WHAT WENT RIGHT

Knowing when to scrap a bad plan

I’m glad I switched ideas.

The chase game was still stuck in design, and I’ve been bitten before jumping into development without thoroughly understood gameplay. The idea I came up with was a twist on Flappy Bird, placing it on its side. Instead of flapping for height, you flapped for running speed. Instead of the “height” of a hurdle to get over, buildings of different sizes required a minimum speed to run through (or you get knocked back and your game ends). And to simulate a “roof” to duck under, I added pikes in the ground that you could only tiptoe through; if you ran too fast, you’d trip and get impaled.

It’s a decent twist. It doesn’t quite provide the same depth of experience as a flying game. For example, when flying you may have to fall half way down the screen, but in Flappy Monster (where the running speed correlates to flying height) there are no pikes that require a max of “half” speed. All pikes require you to go pretty slowly, so as a result pikes right before buildings can be quite punishing.

Completed!

Out of 9 Ludum Dares, I’ve completed 6. That’s a terrible stat that shows I have persistent issues with time management. In some cases I’ve hit the deadline very close to a playable game, which I consider a minimum requirement for submitting. (Some people don’t.) Despite my fumbles, I (eventually) leveraged my ability to recognize when plans needed to change, I identified and shifted priorities, and most importantly, I placed utmost priority and focus on the goal completion. Without that, no game!

Working on a Post-Compo version

When the compo ended, the game had only JUST become truly playable, and I was entering a groove where adding features and juice was eminently satisfying. So why stop there? I branched my code and kept working on a post-compo version, albeit at a more-relaxed pace. I added scrolling grass, shaded the monster, cleaned up and animated the pikes, added a demolition rumble effect, smoothed monster movement, tweaked the RNG to be less cruel, and gave the monster an increasing deceleration for faster and more dramatic slow downs. It’s more playable. And I’m still adding things to it. It gives interested players a change to look at something closer to “what I was going for,” and rewards them with a better experience as appreciation for looking. And I get to put in those missing elements that make me happy.

Tags: Ash, Flaxen, haXe, haxepunk, LDCompo, post-mortem

I have implemented diagonal movement for player and enemies. That improves the game balance by making it much more difficult, as now it is dangerous to be sorrounded by enemies. By being sorrounded by a group of eight ninjas you could receive up to 48 damage per turn.

Fear the power of… DIAGONALS

Also the touch controls have been updated for diagonal movement.

The touch control zones

If I’m able to iron some bugs I’ll upload the post-jam version in a couple of hours. In the meanwhile you can play the original jam entry HERE and leave some constructive input

I missed the deadline because I was busy tweaking things and wasn’t ready to submit what I had and wasn’t sure what I needed to summit my entry. I tried submitting a few hours after the deadline but it was too late.

This was my first attempt at Ludum Dare and I’ve learned a lot in the process which was my main reason for taking part. So, I’m happy with that at least.

I’m disappointed I missed out on judging the other games and getting the most out of the event but it’s my own fault.

I would still like some feedback, this is what I made in just over 74 hours. I’d like to develop it further into a full game, if people like it. I think it’s pretty decent. Tell me what you think…

You can download the PC/Win version here!

Cute name….Hard game

A NEW High Score has been set by ImTheZiggy with a time of 20.668 (Rank S C)

Do you or someone you know have what it takes to get that “Perfect S S” Rank?

Play Nimble and don’t forget to comment your best score!

We all know what it is to be attacked by a shark, thanks Hollywood. But have you ever imagined what it is to be the shark in a situation like this?

We guess it is something like this…

That’s right, in our game you can bring your wild instincts, your inner monster out. Eat humans, blow boats and have fun!

If that’s not enough craft your deadly skills and challenge the top five great white killers on the leaderboard.

Munch and rate

It’s all fun and games until your lizard ankles snap upon impact with the ground. -> Play [Up & Away] by Bytegrove

Tags: bytegrove, Game Showcase, Larry Chupacabra, Larry Does Ludum 33, Up & Away

This is a long post about my experience making Hell Court. Reading time: 7-10 minutes.

About the game

Hell court is a platformer, where you are a master of a dungeon in hell. Humans that have sins come down here to be judged. You first listen to all the sins they have made. You then deal physical and mental pain to them, based on the sins they have committed.

Here’s how I made it.

Before the Ludum Dare

Two days before the start I was kind of bored and visited CompoHub.net. There I noticed that Ludum Dare is starting soon. I immediately started voting and let my family know that I will be coding a lot in the following days. This would be my second game jam and I was curious what I’ll come up with.

To maximize productivity, I told everyone not to distract me during the jam. I also installed Cold Turkey to block distracting sites. I paused every aspect of my life not related to making games, such as reading books.

I was ready.

The start

The Ludum Dare started at 3 am. I could not sleep well, so I got up at 5. I read the theme and started coming up with ideas. Soon enough I came up with the idea of my game. You will punish humans for their sins in your hell dungeon of some sort.

So I took two sheets of paper and started drawing. Images, mechanics, anything.

Then I drew a rough plan of a level from the game and made a todo list.

After all that, I was ready for the computer. So I created a Github repository and Unity project inside it.

First day

I decided that I will create the platformer part of the game first. This had to be good enough, so it would not stand in the player’s way. I created sprites for the devil and some blocks in Aseprite. Then I moved to Unity.

I should now mention that my artistic skills are horrible. I knew that, but I also needed to create graphics for the game. My previous game looked bad. I knew it was because I’ve been using random colors (and lack of drawing skills of course :P). So this time, I wanted a simple color palette with few colors I wouldn’t have problem using. I used ColorBlender and Coolors to create a simple color palette. I also restricted myself to 16×16 pixel images to keep things simple. In the end, I think it all paid off.

So back to Unity. After a while, I had the movement done. I then added stairs into the game.

Next, I started working on the sins system. I wanted every human to choose random sins from the sin database I would create. The exact number would be defined by level settings. Every sin would have associated mental and physical pain.

Done. Now humans. For movement, they shared some of the components of the player. I also added random movement so they don’t just stand still.

Now I needed a way to deal the pain. I added a pot and a skeleton. Then UI and dialog system. Then I made humans and skeletons say random stuff.

I wasn’t worrying about the quality of the code at all. It ended up being a mess, but I was astonished about speed at which I kept adding things. Lesson learned.

Anyway, first day was ending and I was happy with the progress.

Second day

I started by taking a paper again and drawing mechanics I wanted in the game. I also drew objects and the sequence of the listening table. Finally, I made a new todo list.

That day I wanted to add animations and sound. So I started drawing idle, walking and carrying animations. Then I moved them into the Unity. Making animation states in Unity is super easy, so I had all animations in within an hour or two. Next, sound. I downloaded Bosca Ceoil for the music before ahead of the start. I decided not to create any music, though, because I had no idea how.

For the sounds I used sfxr. I added them in, putting code to play sounds all over the codebase (and adding comments like “shouldn’t be here, but it’s LD so whatever”). I couldn’t get 3D sound in Unity working for my 2D game. So I wrote custom system to handle volume and panning (and random pitch) of the played sounds.

With animations and sounds the game felt great to play. It made me proud. The best sound system in the game is that for the dialogues.

More levels, menu, highscore system, random objects to fill the levels with… I made good progress. I went to sleep happy.

Third day

I decided to add statistics tracking to the game, just for fun. I used Mixpanel and Mixpanel-Unity-CSharp I found on Github. It working great. I tracked useful statistics, but also some funny ones. Like the number of times a human has been picked.

I needed more ways to deal pain. So I added flying ghosts, reusing logic from skeletons. Then lava. I also added a healing table.

After that, I spent a lot of time creating levels. I found out that Unity is not that great for building 2D levels, especially tiles ones.

After all that, I added flamer.

The game was done.

It was about six hours before the jam ending, so I began the preparations for a release. First time I was releasing a game in Unity.

At first, I created and entry just with a Windows build, but I also wanted a web build. After a few tries, I wasn’t satisfied with the WebGL build, so I made a Web one. I put the game on itch.io, wrote a post and a tweet. Later I also added Mac and Linux builds. I couldn’t test them, but Unity makes it so easy, so why not.

What went well

• No distractions. I blocked them all, on the internet as well in the reality.
• Graphics. By using a constrained color palette and image size, even I was able to put out decent graphics.
• Code. I didn’t worry about the code. I didn’t refactor much. I didn’t create complex systems. That allowed me to advanced faster. The code is a mess, though.
• Planning. I drew a few things, made a simple todo list and that was it. Then straight to computer. No long descriptions or anything.

What to do better next time

• Some basement for code. This I will accumulate over time, just right now I started from scratch. I would certainly need a code for game object pool, for example.
• Recording development. Right now I only my memory to recall what was roughly happening. Next time, I will probably record a timelapse and write notes.
• Keep the game short. According to my statistics, nobody made it past the fourth level yet! That means that nobody even tried a flamer yet. Next time, present features faster.

The future

I will work on the game. Some aspects need to be tweaked or removed, like the platformer side of the game. I also need to rewrite most code.

Also, I’ve never sold a game before. I will try it with this one. The full reworked version will hopefully be my first paid game. I will create a blog and post updates there. I’m thinking I’ll use Tumblr for that.

Final

Thanks for reading this long post! If you haven’t played Hell Court yet, check out my entry here.

What do you think about the game? Should I continue working on it? Please leave a comment here or at the entry page. Have a nice day!

This post has been checked by the wonderful HemingwayApp.

Tags: LD33, post-mortem

Hello!

So, I don’t really feel the need to put a second-by-second schedule of what it is I did, and I lost a lot of time in the end due to visiting family, but here is a post-mortem dissection and reflection as to the use of my time during the development of Vindictae (working title, not good with names).

Now, I’ve always had a problem with themes. The last LD I did was the ‘Entire Game on One Screen’ one, and I hated that theme, despite (after a lengthy period of time) getting a good idea and making something quite fun. It also always took me a couple hours just to think of something.

So it’s ironic that, although I saw this theme and disliked it, I proceeded to get the idea rather quickly. It was amusing that I was originally doing the typical ‘list words relating to monster, what relates to them, etc.’ and the ‘look around your environment for inspiration’ malarkey, couldn’t think of anything, then my idea just came to me, completely out of the blue. So I’ve no idea how concept people do it.

My idea, in the end, was to make a survival game where you were a ghost wisp thing being besieged by an onslaught of soldiers with varying weapons, with the only way of defense would be to take over the body of soldiers and use their weapons, parading them around as a bullet sponge until either you get bored or they are more lead than flesh, then move on to the next.

Day 1:

The movement was implemented, and I lazily used the GM Studio particle system. This was easy enough. Flying around was fun!

Unfortunately, the issue that arose was that I fell into the deadly trap of realising I had never done sophisticated top down AI before. After many, many hours, I had about four uses of the mp_potential_step_object function being used along with the basic bullet and firing system, because I’m too dumb to figure out how to do it otherwise, but it was very broken. No time to fix it, though for I had a family member to visit in hospital. For context, I am not heartless, and also I’m Seventeen, so I still live with my family, etc.
But I did have the basic dumb chasing AI in!

Day 2 : Return of Day

The next day I woke up bright and early, and spent all my time till lunch finishing AI and implementing the basic possession system and bullet system. Because of my rigorous (and mostly tedious) preparation the day before, this was almost totally bug free, (except for the movement while possessed, which had such buggy firing I was confused as hell, before realising it was actually my space bar that had broken from spamming it so much or something, not my code, haha) so there’s that! Hours before the evening, I had this to show for it, before having to visit another family member for the evening:

Day 3 : Something Something Final Daystinaytion

Waking up insanely early (for me) I realized, even with ~18 hours to go, I wasn’t going to finish this ‘army’ thing quite so nicely, so I basically go into the idea of just having a survival map with the idea of just racking up as many souls as possible before your inevitable demise. So, I made a quite nice soldier who fired a rifle thing, rather than a pistol thing, put them in a test map, and showed it off!

Spooky slaughters! Pretty fun, too, and at this point I am really happy with everything save the graphics, which I have stated before as vomit-inducing, whereupon I also made a destructive enemy, who can give other enemies access to you when you hide in walls, demonstrated:

So, with some time to spare, as I have already disregarded audio as a luxury for the talented, I made some levels, and finished my game’s polish at half 2 in the morning, to submit.

…then promptly realising the next day that I’d forgotten to add the actual ‘play’ button to the menu! Good stuff!

So then, now for the obligatory reflection!

What went right?

• The concept: I loved the idea of switching from body to body, mercilessly slaughtering sellsword after sellsword.
• Implementation of said concept: While it didn’t turn out quite like that, it’s still, in my opinion, a really neat system.
• The soldiers: Three uniquely identifiable soldiers, all with fun weapons to screw around with, except for pistol guy. He’s lame (intentionally – lame to use, but easy to kill)
• Weapons: I thoroughly enjoyed firing the rifle, and using the (slightly op) grenade launcher thing, how you can use it to blow up walls, etc.

Okay then, what about what happened that was the opposite of going well?

As for the bad things, there were numerous:

• The graphics: always to be expected, I can’t draw. Like, at all. So don’t even start with animation. I used to have a guy I met who was great enough to draw sprites for me, but I lost contact with him after he disused Skype, and clearly moved on to bigger things, so (shameless plea) if you’re an artist (or somebody  who isn’t me who can draw) and you don’t like programming and money, give me a call! Subtle hints aside, it has been a limiting factor to the charm and satisfaction of every feature in my games since my artist friend buggered
• Audio: With no time to make music even if I knew how, I had barely three-four minutes to find two three of music and implement them into the levels and menus, the boss, and the survival aspect. Again, no idea how people make music, and I haven’t the time nor the talent to learn, unfortunately. Once I tried to ask the only musical contact I had, an acquaintance of mine, if she could possibly make a track of music for me for money, but I had the social skills of a stoned catfish and had a unique… situation regrding them, so that went pretty much as expected! And this was but a year ago! Yay for childhood, or something.
• AI: They’re dumb. I’m too dumb to make them not dumb.

So yes! That’s the life story of my game’s creation. And scrolling up I see my reminder to not write too much, so look at me! Now I’m a liar. That’s another lie, because I’ve lied many times prior. So in conclusion, I’ll stop talking now, after these last statements:

I’ve seen some amazing entries out there, good job guys! (And one not so great one…  seriously, it’s shameful, and it isn’t mine)

And so thanks for reading this monstrosity, and if you want to burn even more time, maybe check out my game right HEREEEEEEEEEEE. Subtle, I know.

Most likely all from me via post for a while, as I’ll be consumed with college work soon enough, but I’m going to be able to rate games for at least another week, so ta-ra, fellow developers!
Taha

After playing over 150 LD33 entries this week, I figure it’s time to start looking at where to take Greetings, Human as a more polished game. So, here are a couple concept pieces for the menu & codex if I were to port the game to iOS/mobile devices. The biggest challenge is fitting entries into the codex screen. Right now I’m down to 16 races, which is about half of what was in the base game. With that said, there’s going to be a lot more stuff to juggle, so maybe having fewer races to hunt through is a good thing. We’ll see.

Anyway, here are the first two “screens” as a preview.

And, as always, you can play the original Ludum Dare edition here: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=57679

Tags: board to bits, concept, greetings human, post-LD

The Idea.

The idea of the game was for me simple. I thought” why not a tower defense game”,
but instead seeing from the ground over a map why not going vertically to an devil.
And use the 7 deadly sins to defeat your enemys.
And on second day of the jam i came up of an extra idea to use devil Power.if the game gets hard for people.
And also i got the idea to make people choose there own goal to win game.

And this is the result of it.

So what went good.

-Well create the game form your head to the screen.
-I get a lot of feedback that was one of my personal goals.
-Players like the game. So the basic idea works.

What could be better.

-Balancing. Yhea this is harderst part of making a game. Balancing is finding the middel of easy and hard.

so the game get some Reducing in spawns and type of enemys that spawn after the manny round.Because most people found that the enemy completely overwhelm them.
-Feedback from screen. Nobody knows where the enemys came from(meaning left or eight or both.)
some people say after find it out the game is easy to understand to them.
-bugs that I still cannot find. there is a bug with the buttons on the menu screen.sombocy tells me yesterday but after testing the game for the 20 time notting has been found.
And the game works really really good. An other bug that i fixed but was the amount of souls you where paying. the sin reed cost 7 souls instead of 5 but that is fixed now. And will be see in the new update.

What i am going to do.
(Hot)
fixing bugs if founded.
balancing the game.
make better player feedback.
more sounds.

(OPTIONAL)

-make more levels.
-set more goals.
-Put it on my developers protfolio.As well on game-jolt.
If you have some more suggestion let me know it.

If you still haven’t played the game yet. feel free to it.
http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=56933

Have a good weekend everybody.

Back in LD 25, with the theme “You are the villain,” my friend El_Cabaro and I made Obamapology, a game about accidentally ruining the lives of various game characters by abiding by the game’s implicit rules.

Naturally, when the theme “You are the monster” rolled around, it was time to make the sequel. Obamapology: Term 2

This time the game takes on a paper twist, originally meant to be a pastiche of Paper Mario but ended up looking more like Yoshi’s Story. Our skills have definitely improved since 2012, and you can tell by playing the two. The first one features game ending cliff falls, “federal crime” level collision detection, and a cheesy ending. Overall we were both satisfied with the game as it was but I think that the sequel is certainly a step up.

The good

• We came up with the idea immediately after hearing the theme, so there was little planning involved
• The art was honestly pretty easy to make and looks good.
• The arts and crafts were interesting to work with and shopping for them at Walmart was fun.
• I got to use the Epson scanner I bought at Goodwill for 4 bucks!

The bad

• Time logistics really got in the way of making the game, I had to bribe some dude at work to cover my shift and still had to cut 4 hours out of the first day for marching band.
• We really cut the time close on this one, wrapping up with a very very rushed ending. We’re going to release a “Director’s cut” after the Ludum is over that has the true ending.

Here are some screenshots.

Play the game here!

Gamepad support has been added to Kaiju Down Under, so check it out if you want to get your giant kiwi fix.

LINKIWI!

With all that wonderful feedback in mind and while stil in development of the post compo version, I want to write a little post mortem of our Ludum Dare entry Pumpi.

First, if you don’t want to read the full text and want to watch yourself what we’ve done, here is the link: Pumpi

And here is a little picture to make you want to play it:

Finding an idea

That was the fastest ideafinding we’ve ever had in an LD. We made a short list with seven points while we played Diablo 3 and killed a bag of chips. Three of the points were: Halloween, stealing sweets and Jump’n’Run.
So it was decided that we wanted to make a Jump’N’Run game, where a monster steals sweets from children at Halloween.

First Works

At that point we began to do some creative work which should help us later. My wife drew the first concepts of the monster and the children and I made the soundtrack and after that we both fell asleep because it was 6 o’clock in the morning.

Next Day

So it begins! Our first task was, bringing the pumpkin to life! So I looked at the drawing my wife had done and made a copy of it in Photoshop, colored it and showed it to my wife. She had said yes and so I started to animate the pumpkin. 8 animations were on my list: stand, walk, jump, scare, pick up, hide, shield and die. While animating the pumpkin we were talking about how we wanted the game to be! There were so many ideas and so many things to do, that we decided to make something possible and concentrated on scaring the children and make funny animations and sounds. After completing the pumpkin animations, please take a look at the spritesheet:

we started pixelating the witch-girl. We scanned the drawing of my wife, drew the outlines and filled them with colors and shadows and light spots. The first day was done! And so were we!

The Second Day

I opened my eyes and was so tired… It was hard to hold my eyes open. But what a luck I’ve got a little motivating machine next to me that was saying: Wake up! We’ve got a game to make!
So I jumped out of bed and began to draw the animations of the witch-girl. When I was finished with that task, the coding begins. I hacked all together what I thought we could use. Some animating techniques and some camera movement that took me a lot of time, because I wanted to use some mariolike camera movement, but then decided to use a more simple one.
The day went on and after the animations and the first scare were build in bed was calling!

The Third Day

At this day we started with the background. We drew the first concepts and choosed the colors. But the first draft was… not so good… hm… So we added more colors and made some additions like the door and the window and it looked a lot better and we stayed with this.
After the background was implemented we started our funniest part of the development. The audio recordings. Screamings, Booohhhs and a bunch of other sounds and loughts were made during this time.
But we needed some more content. We needed a vampire-boy! Scanned, drawed, animated and voice added in a rush. (With shocking my wife at night, because of not warning her befor screaming).
Here is the spritesheet for the kids:

All had to be build together, a tutorial had to be included, the position of the kids had to be decided and a finish and restart had to be made. And then we had no more time for a start screen and no brain capacity for a better name… But hey, we have made a game in 72 hours and we are damn proud of it!

After the Jam

The first feedback came in and our proudness growed and we decided to make a bigger game out of it. With more kids, more scaring moves, more sounds and a start screen! But until it is done, we hope you enjoy playing the Jam Version of: Pumpi

So we wish you a big bunch of fun and hope you enjoy our little game,
ruerob.

The Gold Eaters

The Idea

Basically i create a rogue-like where you play a monster. All start for the simple joke/question : why monsters keep gold coins if they do nothing : because they eat them.

So the game became a race to grab gold coins before humans, and other monster.

Objectives

• Make a 2D game
• Create Sprites
• Create randomly generated level
• Create IA controlled monsters
• Add a real progression with even a tutorial

What went good

• I have finished the game, and that’s good.
• I add visual effect : bloom, blur ad chromatic distortion
• I worked mainly on dummy asset and add graphics slowly. It allow me create a better code, and to avoid my usual issue taking too much time on graphics
  The IA system worked but the settings is not perfect to create most of the interaction : human and monsters have condition, objectives, and could really surprise the player. Its a basic FSM, badly implemented but it worked.
• I create the main theme alone with Ableton Live

What went wrong

• No game over.
• A downscale of definition between unity and the webplayer
• No effects or indication when you hit somedbody else (make fight unreadable)
• I’m still bad with UI, and it lack of some button.
• The speed of the NPC is bdaly implemented, as all the travelling system is chaotic.
• It lack of a longer objective.
• The animation of the knight is on 2 frame, and it’s ugly
• I removed a chest system who should have been the main source of gold coins
• the hitbox size is too variable
• the exit door can’t be enter, you only touch them

Improvements

• Add a path finding system
• Remove diagonale movement and let the player move along a grid
• Memorize the room and create connection between them
• Create more source of gold
• Improve the fighting system
• Add other monsters and others heroes.

Conclusion

Third LD not my most innovative idea but i tried to avoid my old issues, and i was pretty proud of myself, it took 20h to reach that based on technics from the 2DRogue-Like tutorial of Unity, but i made so huge modification that it became quite a mess in the code.

I still like this idea of reverse rogue-like, with the what do monsters when heroes are not there, and what are they doing with all that loot.

Maybe a good idea for a bigger game…

Hi!

“Sunset Monster” can be now played on the web directly, but I strongly recommend you to play it using any of the links on the game page, cause of the poor quality of the webGL in the iframe.

Sorry for the inconvenience, and have a nice play.

If you haven’t played “Sunset Monster” yet, try it out here.

I hope you to enjoy the game!! 😉

I uploaded debug version of the game by mistake on the site. In that version you had 10,000 dust to start with, instead 200 that I intended. I you look at the 0.1.0 version on gamejolt for windows, you will see that, but when I added scripts for main menu button that i forgot, i exported debug version.

Once again, big apology to everyone who played game untill now, because you didn’t expirience it fully!

Hey guys!  I’m online playing for a while, feel free to check out my game too!

Only takes 5 minutes to play, and I play everyone who leaves a comment on mine!

Only request is please be honest, I’m not saying be mean, but I won’t revenge rank games if you tell me I suck.

So as it turns out, last night during the Super Stream, you all had a ton of games to submit to me! I now have a list JUST AS BIG as yesterday’s of games to play, and I’m ready to check them out. Let’s all have a great time and check out these games.

Type !ld in Twitch chat at any time for a link to the current game I am playing.

Watch from any of these:
Watch/Chat On Twitch
Watch on YouTube
Watch on Hitbox

Enjoy the show!
-Highsight

Be a bird!  Steal the food!  Trample the humans!

Check out Terror Bird Feeding Frenzy!