Hello, all! We Tech Valley Game Space are at it again! We’ll be streaming on Thursday and Saturday nights, from 7:00 PM to midnight, EST. Check us out at Twitch.tv here:
http://www.twitch.tv/techvalleygamespace
Want to submit a game? Our submission form is available here:
In my first participation I have stressed, irritated, tired, frustrated … but I also have fun and I discovered the charm of this type of event.
It is not a challenge to others, it’s a race against yourself. In addition to creating ideas that may never imagined, it requires you to know your limits and exploit your strengths in the shortest time possible.
Our game “Dead Love” is a concept that we liked, incomplete, but it shows our intentions.
Personally, the jam is comparable to the Dark Souls saga, it is difficult and you have to give everything, but once you finish it … the self-satisfaction is unparalleled.
Congratulations to all participants, and remember:
“What leads and drags the world are not machines, but ideas’
So, I survived last weekend (my first jam) and ended up with a playable game (shameless plug) which seems to have been generally liked (although the feedback on most games seems to be very good and supportive. It’s definitely nice to have supportive feedback, but I slightly worry about people just being nice might make the feedback less useful. I’ll definitely try and turn on anonymous feedback next time, anyone have good/bad experiences with this?)
I managed to play and rate 42 games so far, hopefully I can get this up to at least 80 in the coming week.
I did learn some neat things though:
Definitely looking forward to LD34, but until then I’ll keep up with www.onegameamonth.com which I’m sure most people here already know about, and if not, check it out!
Just started my new prototype, voxel turn based game with angry farmers! #screenshotSaturday
Stay classy and make more games!
After playing some games (about 100 now?) I though I would share some games that I enjoyed playing.
“Platformer”, Story, Nice graphics
Game about talking foxes stealing stuff from peoples homes. Has some dramatic turn of events story wise 
“Turn based rpg”, cute graphics, Randomly generated allies
You are the slime who has to be the hero who saves the world. Well, you and your monster friends need to deal with the increasingly harder enemies. The game is interesting due to random element of buying new units to your team. Also most of the units are unique looking and well thought!
“Platformer”, Very funny story and dialogue
In internship adventure you jump into shoes of new guy posing as monster on the level. Your boss tells you what you have to do (like annoying the hero but not killing him) and if you do something stupid (or even correctly) then you get funny dialog from your boss. The intern also has some good one liners to boot.
“Action-Puzzle”, Unique gameplay, Funny physics sometimes 😉
You are ghost stuck into your tomb. You can project your tomb closer to people to enable you to scare them. The more people you scare the harder you can propel the tombstone.
“Action”, Growing up by eating, The ultimate bullying simulator!
In this rather simple game you have to eat other blocks to grow your block bigger. As you grow bigger your facial features turn more and more to represent bully. Watch out for the teacher though!
… you don’t leave a comment on games you rate.
Ok that may be a tiny bit too strong. But people are waiting for your comments! Don’t you love comments? You’re obsessively refreshing the page to check your vote count, and you see you have one more. Then you open your game’s page and it’s all sadness and disappointment and crying puppies, because there’s nothing new.
I think some people don’t leave comments because they didn’t like the game, and don’t want to leave something negative. But that’s the kind of feedback that can be most useful to the developer, and there are ways to phrase it so that you don’t crush their souls into a million pieces.
Here’s how I usually structure my comments:
<What I liked><Suggestions for improvement><End with something positive>
Example:
Fun to play, I really liked the sound effects. I would have liked it to be faster paced though. Nice job overall!
Even if you didn’t like the game, you can always find something positive to say, even if it’s just that one sprite or sound effect. And if you really really can’t, you can congratulate them on making a game in 48/72 hours, because that’s always an achievement worth celebrating.
So, this Ludum Dare I made a game called SnakeLike, which is supposed to be a cross between a RogueLike and Snake.
You can find it here:
http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=12883
The premise is that you meander around the levels, one move at a time, and can fight enemies and swallow their corpses. Each enemy you swallow gives you one extra segment, which takes on the properties of that enemy.
Each segment you get from an enemy is capable of attacking to either side, so as you accumulate new segments, it becomes advantageous to surround your enemies, and strike at them from multiple sides at once.
Stronger enemies give you segments with more attack and/or HP, and you can let their corpses run through your body to add on to the end, or else digest them before that to replace and upgrade an existing segment.
So, how did that work out for me? Well…
The timing of things
This ended up being a little tricky, as I actually had work during the weekend. So my time was a bit limited. And to start, I didn’t have any good ideas for the theme. So I pretty much spent the first evening coming up with whatever ideas I could, and trying to refine the mechanics in my head. I think it ended up being a good move, but I would still have loved to have that time back to code.
What went right
I think the concept ended up pretty solid for something so straightforward. I was really worried that it wouldn’t come together, but a lot of the feedback I’ve gotten has been positive.
I think that my approach to the theme this time wasn’t as… clever? as what I had attempted in the previous couple LDs I participated in, but I kind of feel like that worked in my favor. In my previous entries I kinda shot myself in the foot for concealing the theme a bit more than I should have, trying to go for a more dramatic reveal. With SnakeLike you can pretty much see all there is to it right there.
What went wrong
Boy, where do I begin…
I ran into so many technical problems and bugs while creating this. Many of them were my fault, but I spent way too long just reading and re-reading pieces of code, trying to see what the heck was going wrong.
But beyond simple bugs, I was meaning to rely on a Multimedia Fusion extension I’d never used before called the “Dungeon Object” in order to relieve some of the stress of generating dungeons. But it turns out that this extension isn’t compatible with Clickteam Fusion 2.5, the newest tool which I had set up my code base for. It was either do without the object, or work in an older program.
I went with the latter. Of course, my code base was no good any more, so I snapped up the one I had made for LD 30, and had to re-code the bits that were missing.
Even though I had never used the Dungeon Object before, it was really straightforward, and I got it working in my game fairly easily. The Pathfinding Object, however, gave me no end to grief. Despite having dealt with this one before, I ended up wasting a lot of time just trying to figure out what little things were making it crash.
And once I got all the extensions working as intended, I kept running into huge bugs with movement and collision, where enemies would sometimes stack on one another, or even move onto a space occupied by the snake. I hacked together a solution as best I could, but there are still remnants off bugs here and there (like these invisible barriers you might occasionally have to chomp through).
By the time I got the mechanics stable, there was almost no time left to make actual content. I scrambled to make really basic-looking enemy and tileset graphics, and in the last couple hours I was just sort of developing without thinking, running on some kind of stream-of-consciousness mode. I still don’t know what’s up with the end of the game, but I hope nobody gets so far as to see it.
So ultimately…
I think it was kind of a neat concept, and I think I managed to pull it together just in time, despite all the troubles I hit. There’s probably a lot more I could add to it (there’s no shortage of RogueLike ideas that could be implemented), but I’ll mostly likely leave this as it is.
So I’ve been hard at work polishing the game and adding some things I wanted to add that I didn’t have time to add before.
You might not know if you only played it once, but all the paperwork in the game is randomly generated. Right down to the specifics of the tax rules in the instructions. I wasn’t really happy with how some of the notes looked but I had to release. And now I’ve finally spent some time working on nice letterheads.
Here are what complaint notes from nobles and shopkeepers looked like in the jam version.
Here’s what they look like in the update.
I think it’s a big improvement. Also, the shops all have cool generated names now.
Other improvements:
But the coolest new thing is Print and Play Mode! You can print out the game and play on your own desk or table! Print right from the browser.
How to print and play
Other ways to play
If you’ve not seen my game, click here!
So, along with a lot of other things, I’ve learned a bunch from this experience. Though I tried ( very briefly ) to participate in LD32 I never did anything that made LD meaningful. So this is my post-LD report.
WHAT WENT WELL
I definitely had a positive experience this go around. Though in retrospect the game I made is very simple and could have done and meant so much more, for my first LD ever ( and the fact that I had to cramp it into the Compo ) I’m proud of it. I learned how to do animations, collisions, and basic graphics, which I’ve evolved into my own 8-bit style ( you can see my most recent character here ). I also tried my hand at music and story, and though they didn’t come out as good as I wanted, they were there and did make my game a little bit different than all the others.
WHAT WENT… NOT SO WELL
I don’t have any horror stories to report this time around. Everything went okay; the game came out and nothing was sacrificed due to time. It came out the way I made it and the way I wanted. The story was all over the place now that I look at it, and the music is a little off, but I guess it does the job. I could have put a little more effort into the graphics, and I went back and revised them for a post-LD version, but I don’t see it worth it. I’ve got bigger plans to work on ( hint hint ).
So overall I had a good LD! I’m certainly planning on returning in the future, and I hope to see you all there!
Again, if you’ve not played my game, click here.
For our first LD we created an inverse-stealth game called Guard-Master. You can play it here. The core idea was to create a typical stealth game where you control the guards rather than the intruder. Simple right? Well not quite.
What went right
We started the jam with an epic 3-hour brain-storming session. Peter had read about the 100-10-1 rule on Reddit and we were keen try it out. You start by coming up with 100 simple ideas and then culling them down to 10 of the best (and doable) ideas. Finally we selected one of the top 3 ideas that we felt was easiest to get done. We liked one of the other ideas so much that we’re actually prototyping that one now as well. You can checkout our list of ideas here. Be warned though, some of them are very outrageous! I’m really glad we took the time to work through this process. In past jams I have been in teams where we jumped on an idea way to quickly, just because it was easy to visualize and then regretted that decision later.
The other thing that worked well was creating the levels with the Tiled map editor. At first we were worried that we wouldn’t be able to find a level editing tool for the perspective we had chosen. As it turns out Tiled not only supported it but also exported in a format that Phaser could load and display easily.
Finally, something that I think we did well was the aesthetics. We chose a simple pixel-art style for the characters and tileset. Peter did a great job creating all of the environmental bits and pieces. Visually everything came together quickly. In fact we had a lot of props that didn’t make it into the final game because we didn’t have enough time to code-up their behaviour.
What didn’t go right
We’ve read over and over again that you should prototype the minimum viable product of your game first. Everything should be coloured boxes and all you should care about is the core gameplay. I’d be lying (a lot) if I said we did this. We didn’t really have anything playable until the end of day 2 and that would be being generous with the term playable. It was only once we started playing our game that we realized how not-fun it was.
In our original concept for the game, the intruder would try and sneak his way to the exit without being detected. We also wanted him to incapacitate unsuspecting guards along the way. I spent ages tinkering the A.I. to try and get this to work, but it was a bit too hard. More often than not the intruder would just wander into the guards field of view and be easily disposed of.
Eventually we scrapped this idea and went with a much simpler hide-and-seek approach. The intruder will now just pick the furthest hiding spot from all of the guards and if you don’t find him within a minute you lose. This approach was a bit more fun. We also changed the guards from auto-firing to manual shift-click fire. This made it a bit more of a challenge to hit him once he had been discovered. It is still a bit broken though. Since the intruder always picks the furthest hiding spot, he will predictably be in the same place once you reload the map. Bah, well at least the first playthrough might be fun-ish :p.
Final thoughts
Overall we had a lot of fun. It is also really encouraging to see the feedback we’ve gotten. Even though we made a broken game, people seemed to like the idea and could see its potential, which is all we could really hope for. The biggest lesson that we’ve learned would be to always prototype the minimum gameplay first!
Tags: postmortem
We are now streaming! Give us your Ludum Dare games to play and comment on.
Here http://www.twitch.tv/onlyslightly/
Or you can tweet me your @jetpackfandango
p.s. we are a bit drunk so I apolo0gize in advance for any lack of fine motor skills.
p.s.s. You guys are wonderful. I’m honored to play your creations.
I just wrote a novel blog post on my personal website discussing in detail our experience during this Ludum Dare. In short, we had a lot of fun, met some interesting challenges, and created something we felt was really cool.
If you have a few minutes to spare, please read my post, play our game, and give us some good, honest feedback. We’ll be sure to go through our comments and play your games, too!
Hey! Its time for the Dev Log / Post-mortem for our game “One of Us.” This was the first Ludum Dare ever for either of us, and it turned out to be an awesome experience.
Just thought I’d give you a small glimpse into how this fairly *ehem* “unique” game came into fruition.
The Creative Process:
So Friday night we found out the theme and started brainstorming up ideas. The main idea that stuck out to us is that we wanted the player to be the outcast in a world of monsters. A world where to the creatures living there, the humans were the monsters. We also had wanted to have the player be living among the monsters disguised, and accepted as one of them.
And then for whatever reason, we decided that the disguise should just be really bad and super obvious, and that the game would have a much lighter tone. (And then it turned into really obvious fake cat ears, and cats, cats, cats…not sure how that happened….)
Gameplay-wise, we wanted to create a fast paced time-challenge platformer that was a race against time, where you are still fighting the clock during the room transitions. However, somewhere in the early stages of development, this ended up changing to a more slow paced puzzle platformer. Art / Sound Effects (Benignbrett): Art: So for the art I wanted to go with a more hand painted and bright style, which I think turned out fairy well. I decided that for the levels, instead of piecing the tiles together a strict sheet of prebuilt tiles, I would just make every room individually. In each room I would end up using a lot of the drawings from the previous room pasted and melded together in order to save valuable time. This meant that each room didn’t just look like a bunch of squares from a tilesheet, but that they also didn’t take forever to draw. The thing that I was looking forward to drawing the least was definitely the bird boss, as I haven’t really drawn birds (well, cats either, for that matter), and there were a lot of animations and things I was going to need to get done. Like most of the characters and monsters in the game, I didn’t really have time to sit down and come up with various concepts for the bird, so I just drew the first thing that came to mind, and got to work on the animations. Because I was working in photoshop and haven’t done much animation, I didn’t know how I was going to view the animations as I worked on them. Thus I decided I would just draw out the whole animation before actually seeing it animated. This worked surprisingly well for all but one of the bird’s idle animations, which just looked really bad. (This drawing was born when Matt decided to take a break from programming, in order to properly make fun of my animation, hahaha)
Although it started as my least favorite asset to draw, the bird definitely turned our to be one of my favorite, and I’m super happy with how it turned out.
In the past I have found it hard to get anything looking good quickly, but this project really forced me to work faster and more efficiently. Although the art isn’t nearly as polished as I would have liked it to have been due to time constraints, I am really happy with how it turned out.
Sound:Level Design (Platforming)
One of the big challenges with designing this game is that even from the beginning it didn’t have much of a sense of identity. We had ideas for a lot of different mechanics we might implement, but had never really thought about how to tie them together. Originally we wanted a fast-paced “microgame” type of game loop, but it ended up being a lot slower paced. I would say that the two factors that really prevented a faster-paced style were the platforming mechanics, which were too complicated for fast play, and the small space we limited ourselves to on each screen. With so little room to play with, and such huge tiles, crossing a room directly would have been too short and samey.
In the end, the puzzle platformer approach was certainly a better choice, but it had it’s own problems. Early in development I had built the engine around rooms that were exactly the size of the screen – and then meant I only had 16×10 tiles to deal with for designing maps. That’s not very much room at all. Even when we could think of novel ideas for level designs (“what if they have to jump over a mushroom without touching it?”), there wasn’t even height to make forcing the player to double back feasible and not enough width to arrange more than a simple puzzle horizontally. In the end, every level is EXTREMELY compact and I didn’t have the opportunity to make small adjustments to level layouts to adjust difficulty without it all falling apart.
Basically, I learned not to paint myself into a corner with the engine right off the bat. I implemented all the transitions and parallax backgrounds before we had actually made any real levels, so then found that the levels that I wanted to design wouldn’t fit in the limited form factor of the engine.
The Bird Boss and Limiting Content
Anyone who has played the game all the way through should agree with me when I say we packed far more content, and far more DIVERSE content, then you would normally see in a Ludum Dare game. All in all, there are 4 different kinds of scenarios: the platforming levels; the free roam hub world with its NPCs; the side scrolling fast-reaction minigame; and the actual boss battle at the end. While the core of the engine is the same for all of these, each one is essentially a completely different game in how it functions.
Really, the morale of the story is that we didn’t know what type of game we wanted to make. We had lots of ideas for things to put in the game, but we definitely should’ve taken more time at the start to decide which of those things would actually end up being “fun,” as well as which ones would work together. What ended up happening is that we would finish one part of the game, and instead of expanding on it we would go ahead and add something else new that we thought might work well with it. This was a horrible choice. The game did end up decently fun to play, and nothing in it is clearly “broken” – but at the same time, I can’t help but feel that we could have done better by focusing on one piece of the game and embellishing it until it was extremely polished and interesting in a standalone setting.
Somehow the game launched pretty much bug-free, but it’s completely unmaintainable code – every time a new feature got added, I had to pretty much override the whole engine and hack the functionality into just that one scene. It’s a feature-creep nightmare.
Music:
As with sound, the music was all made in only 30 minutes. Some of the loops are grating enough that I can’t stand listening to them for more than a few seconds (the town…). While I would say this reflects how poorly we paced our work for the rest of the time period, no one has complained about it, so maybe sound isn’t the most important aspect as long as you have at least SOMETHING appropriate in place?
tl;dr:
Design your levels before your engine, and fit your engine to the levels.
Know the scope of what you want to end up with before you start, and aim small.
Find a balance between difficulty and creativity (hard to do without playtesting?).
To play with this game is to play with shit! 😀
A 2-player game!
Play and rate Excremonsters! >>here<<
Of the things I didn’t finish doing for my compo entry, Art was a big one. Since then, however, I’ve managed to paint a lot of images that are gonna go in the remastered version of Campaign Trail. Here are a bunch of them — Enjoy!
Hi! I you didn’t make it to Ludum Dare, or if you submitted your game, but still want more challenges, now a 72-hours GameJam on FGl is running.
Theme: Simplest possible game (I’ll try to fit withing 48 hours or less having such theme )
Besides honour and respect the winner will get $100, 2nd place $30 and 3rd place $10
Tags: contest
Find the Pepe – and your soul – within.
5 days have past, yet the Pepe remains undiscovered.
Will it be you to uncover this generations old secret? To uncover this demon from the past?
The reward for finding the Pepe is self satisfaction, and knowing you have achieved something that is greater than all of us.
Save the world, save yourself, with Jamie Oliver: What’s cooking? today!
To show that you CAN complete all the stages (even if it’s a bit unfair at times) here’s a complete play through. With some of the tougher parts that required several runs sped up to make it a pretty short video.
Check out the LD page here, and a post jam version (which makes it more fair) over here.
Hi, I hope you’re all having a great weekend. A chance to relax and play some cool ludum dare games.
Speaking of cool ludum dare games, would you please take a moment of your time to play my game time monster.
Thank you for your time!
If you like single dad creatures that eat fishermen only for the best reasons and if you say “yes” to puking on your babies – then you should really play Caring Creature. It would also be lovely if you’d let us know what you think of it. Thank you and have a great Saturday!
Always saddening (but hardly surprising) when not many read your post mortem or make comments, so I strive to do it for as many games as possible, and I thoroughly enjoy reading post-portems.
So I shameless plug for my game here, and the post-mortem here.
I am scum, I know.
Another thing is how better my games would be if I had the faintest idea as to how people draw and animate, for I can do neither of these things. So if anybody hates programming and likes wink wink nudge nudge
Also, this GIF because I like it:
Taha
