Be a shit monster against another shit monster in this 2 player game

Make shit together is way better!!!

Yay!! Grab the shit in the neigbohood!!

Excremonsters!!!
Excremonsters!!!
Excremonsters!!!

I’d like to share what I did in my game to procedurally generate puzzles. The cool thing is that this technique is quite general, so it may work for your games as well. If you’d like to, you can play “You! Are the monster” before reading on.

In my case I generate a “whodunit” type puzzle. There are four people and they say things about where they were, what they wore, and who they saw. Sometimes it’s vague, like “I saw someone tall at the bar”. The bad guy is a monster, of course, and they can lie but no one else does.

We can’t just generate those statements entirely at random, because some puzzles may end up unsolvable. So here’s what I do instead.

I start with only a few statements – one per person. I pick those at random. Then, I try to solve the puzzle (more on this later). If there is more than one person who could be the monster, then I add more statements. If instead no one can possibly be the monster, I start over. This eventually leads to finding a solvable puzzle.

Then I trim it down, removing statements that are not necessary to the puzzle being solvable. This results in a puzzle that is hopefully fun to solve.

One thing I only realized after the compo deadline is that this technique sometimes generates trivial puzzles, where the monster says things that contradict themselves. I fixed this is the post-compo version.

Now, you may ask, how do I solve the puzzle? I use brute force. Each randomly-generated statement is not only a bit of text, but also a bit of code that can check if what it says is true. I cycle through every possible choice for who is the monster, and then look for a combination of choices (people,location,color) such that every non-monster person tells the truth. If I find one then it means that that particular monster can be a solution. There can be either zero, one, or more solutions. I stop as soon as I find two since I know that’s not a puzzle I’ll want to keep. So a good puzzle has exactly one solution: if I remove the monster, then there exists a scenario that means everyone else tells the truth. If I pick anyone else as the monster then the remaining statements (including the actual monster’s) don’t go together – there is no scenario where they can all be true at the same time.

Surprisingly enough, this generation is fast enough that I can run it at the client as you load the page, and I didn’t even feel the need to put up an animated spinner or other “please wait” indicator. For more complicated problems, though, this may become necessary.

So there you go! With this simple technique you too can generate procedural puzzles to add to your game. Let me know what you think in the comments!

Now you can play our game in your browser.

Play and rate 

in the unity , I want to delete a element in the Array by index, so I called the function  array.remove(index); but it remove the first match the element. I realize that I should call the function like this, array.RemoveAt(index)

game is here:http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=55854

For those who are having trouble getting the GIFs to run (for example, past me), follow this advice: when adding, click edit and select full size, otherwise WordPress will remove all the frames.
If the GIFs end up too big and become compressed, go to the HTML view of the post (top right corner, switch from Visual to Text), look for these lines where the picture is embedded:

width=”432″ height=”243″

And set them to be approporiately sized (no wider than 500 px is a good guideline). Also, do not forget to keep the width/height ratio the same or the GIF may still end up looking as if an elephant sat on it (or pushed it sideways).

So, here’s some from our game!

Very sinister!

Gameplay

Link to the fixed Post-Mortem post here.

Play the game by clicking here!

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=55854

A super fun game~~

Do you like it？

Come and challenge！！ lol

The timelapse for my compo entry: Dungeon Hunter

I’m away from my computer this week and only got my phone so I can’t record new gifs of my game Earthpocalypse. So have the same one I posted in 3 other posts. I’ll be playing the games of all those who have commented when I get home at the end of the week.

play game here

It is my first Ludum Dare (not my first game jam though). I made my game Birdy Bridge. I could never imagine I finished a game with such completeness in 48 hours. Graphical and musical effects are out of my expectation. It is a game with new ideas for the gameplay and fairy-tale-style art.

This game is inspired by Chinese folktale The Weaver Girl and the Cowherd, but the ending is totally different because you are the monster. Acturally it doesn’t matter if you have no idea about the story itself.

Now here is what I’ve done in 48 hours (originally written in Chinese). I hope my English is good enough to express.

Theme

I am mostly a front-end developer, so I was prepared with HTML5/JavaScript with CreateJS. CreateJS is a good framework for prototyping games, though not perfect. I have used it before. It could decrease my coding time and solve some browser compatibility issues for me.

I voted for all candidate themes and gave -1 for you are the monster. I do not like this theme at all. I do not want players to act as monsters, and I’ve never drawn monsters before

But I had to make it. I was considering a game “finally find that I am the monster”, something like “princess finally find the prince and eat him”. Later, the folktale came into my mind (because Qixi Festival in China just passed two day before). Then I designed a game “prevent lovers from reunion”.

Originally in the final level, players should act as the boss. However, I gave up this idea for I thought it bad for overall gameplay, so it was somewhat away from the theme. Sorry.

Graphics

40 minutes passed when I finished thinking about the theme. I thought I should hurry up. I had to do the following myself: graphics, programming, level design, texts, music, and final fixes.

I started from graphics. Here I made an important decision: using vector graphics. Vector graphics would meet the folktale, and could save me lots of time! I did not wasted much time in graphics, and improved overall quality and completeness.

In the next 1 hour, I drew a girl in pink and a bird that not moving. Both of them are replaced by better sprite sheets later. Then I spent another hour to structure basic code. Before lunch (LD started at 9 a.m. for me), I could see a girl stand on a bird.

Programming and Level Design

Coding went well for me. I met a bug about path detection and fixed it soon. Some gameplay details were decided while coding. Stars were drawn. Before dinner, 3 levels and a simple game cover were done.

Then it took me a whole night to design levels, play, and fix bugs. Code were always changing. After the first day, I could see

• Seven playable levels, including boss fight (though it differed from the final version).
• Whole story with prologue and epilogue.
• Birds, the girl, stars, but no background images.
• Game cover with title, level selection, text descriptions, and my logo (game progress could be saved).

I had to do on next day

• Draw background images, a.k.a. the sky with moon and stars.
• Create music.
• Final fixes.

I did some graphical fixes and slept late. In the morning of second day, I had the background image embeded into the game.

Music

Music is important to my game. I preserved a whole afternoon to create music. I planned to make two sound tracks, but finally I made 3 sound tracks in 6 hours. Crazy?

The first sound track are used in title page. It is the most important one and took most of the time. It was a combination of imagination, sorrow, and bravery. The second were created for difficult levels, and the third were used in boss fight.

Later I decided to add sound effects. It differs when jumping onto birds with different heights.

Final Fixes

The final fixes include

• Replace the girl with a better sprite sheet.
• Checked the texts.
• Added some small features like back to title.
• Fixed known bugs.
• Changed title image.
• Submitted, and fixed bugs in iframe.

I finished these late in the night.

After then…

Next day, I discovered some bugs and fixed them.

Some players suggest that the game is difficult, so I released an “easy mode” several days later.

Overall, it is a great experience in Ludum Dare. I feel greate to make this game. Hope you enjoy!

Hi everyone!

I have modified the web version so it now fits the screen space and can be correctly played directly on the game page here.

That has been my very first game jam, and I appreciate so much all your comments.

Thank you all again, and have a nice play!!

a middle ages UI with stylize is difficult for me …

so,maybe i need to explore some new way with other method….

Scheme 2

Scheme 1

the old UI(final show panel) was use from our team’s last game < Double Cross>  : (cyber-punk survival game)

[evening]

bugs still alives,woym and Mr.Hitman  have been working hard to fix them…

Tags: conditions, screenshots, UI, witch

Hi there,
I’m doing a remake of my LD33, with Unity and Playmaker this time ! Prototype is soon ready, I need to have a working inventory and keys / doors system with unique numbers.

Here is the graph for Guards :

I need to make new 3D assets (they are on paper atm) and I try to improve the gameplay.

Stay tuned !
You can play my entry there (UE4 version) : WHERE AM I ?

Time to destroy a village and wipe out the population.
They sent an army? Wipe out that to.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KteGX3ge0TI

Tags: destruction, LD33, monster

Hello guys, after a long week receiving feedback for our game, we finally posted it on Game Jolt

Here is the link of the Road To Hell In Game Jolt: Road To Hell On Game Jolt

Also here is Brazil we have an event called Power Up, in this event a lot of professionals from the local industry come to make lectures and  so we can show then our games from Ludum Dare, so being able to receive their feedback is awesome, not only this, but this event is great for making networking, so thank you Ludum Dare for all of this!

Also here is the link for my game in Ludum Dare, if you want come by and leave a comment: Road To Hell On Ludum Dare

Tags: gamejolt

Have you tried to destroy the world today? PLAY OUR GAME and try it.

After ld33 we all have some social businesses need to deal with, but now we come back and manage to improve and polish the game by following many constructive feedbacks’ guide.Boats come from both sides at the monment!

Lets show some new features by a gif:

NEW FEATURES:

1. Fixed the ui render bugs when the screen is not 1280 X 720;
2. Now the boats come from both sides;
3. New enmey types, now 19 types;
4. Now you can attack the flying enmeys by your tentacles;
5. Reorder the skills tree, now you can learn the active skill earlier;
6. Now the game is much harder, tweak the exp formula and the spawn speed of the enemys.

If you want to try and rate it please click here:

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=54824

So, I was trying to play some entries but can’t download them because dropbox is giving error 500, it seems that the whole service is down. Anyone else having the same trouble?

Play and rate

tl;dr

What went right
Graphics – I love the brain!
Cut scenes – I think they’re funny!
Gameplay – Controls and such work and feel pretty much how I wanted them

What went wrong
Levels – Too many levels for 48 hours!
Music – Not my forte.
Bugs – I had too much content that I was generating too fast.

Lessons learned
Don’t nest too many actions in C#
I can build a fully featured and relatively large game in 48 hours
I suck at music

Well, my first Ludum Dare is done, and it was awesome! I’ve done game jams in the past but LD is a whole other ball of wax. This time out I decided to be ambitious, insanely, stupidly ambitious!

The theme came as a surprise to me. I had planned for lots of them but “You are the monster” slipped through the cracks. Fortunately, a few months ago I had come up with the idea of a “space invaders in reverse” game. The only problem was, my concept was for a full scale game with cutscenes, hand crafted levels, and full 3d! Way too ambitious for me to do all by myself in 48 hours!

Well, never let it be said I lacked for ambition! It turned out to not be that tough. I started with the 3D modeling. I used Qubicle, (the 3d designer that cross road used), I wanted to use a limited Atari style palette so I used 8 total colors. I’ve been using Qubicle for a while and like it. My approach was to draw a “sprite” first in 2D. Then extrude into 3D and then carve out details. I’m super happy with how my models came out, especially Emperor Brain. He is my favorite character I have ever designed!

I also needed 3d text. I used Cheetah3D which is kind of a leaner, cheaper, Maya. I like it better than Blender because Blender has a UI designed for people from some planet that has more arms and fingers than Humans do! Anyway, creating 3D text in Cheetah was really easy.

Finally, I could move onto code. I’m genuinely happy with all the code I wrote on Saturday. I built all my classes as state machines. My idea was that if I took the extra time to structure everything correctly at the start then I would be able to greatly simplify the “crisis code” I knew I would be writing on Sunday. That was the best decision I made during the jam!

So, in addition to all this I also needed to script and voice cut scenes. I know I’m insane! The scripting was really easy. I’ll be the first to admit it could be tightened up. But for something that was more or less a stream of consciousness, not too bad. The script itself took me about an hour. Recording dialog took another hour. I used Audacity because it is the only recording software I have a clue about! For the actual recording I used the Blue Yeti microphone. I’m pretty sure I used the wrong settings on the mic and I forgot to use the spit guard (my wife knows about recording audio, not me, so I was SOL). If I had set myself up like I normally would for recording it would have sounded a lot better!

One thing I wanted to do was edit the audio files to make the whole thing tighter, but I didn’t have nearly enough time for that! I also didn’t have time to rerecord for anything other than serious issues and flubbed lines.

Another thing I needed more time on was level design. For some reason I decided I needed 9 levels. There was no way for me to make 9 hand crafted exquisite levels. This was a huge mistake. I wish I had focused on making 4 perfect levels rather than 9 decent ones. Live and learn!

One really interesting thing I learned about Mono is that if you have too many nested actions it will freak out, use 100% of the CPU and hang. I’m not sure why this happens. But it didn’t make for a fun Sunday surprise! I ended up needing to remove the ability to skip individual lines of dialog. This little surprise took a couple of hours to fix. It was the only major technical hiccough.

Generally though, I’m super happy with how everything came out I definitely plan on being back for LD34!

No really, play and rate

P.S. I screen caped all the cut scenes in case anyone is interested in the entire ludicrous story!

Alien Rush is mine 6th LD entry and mine 5th Compo entry. You can play it here.

What I’m happy about:

• Gameplay – Most people commenting my game (my friends or other LD participants) says that my game is good, addictive and based around good idea. Personally I also like it
• Game genre – All my former games are platformers or top-down shooters. I didn’t want to make another same game, so I decided to make something different, and the final result is mash-up between platformer, real-time strategy and tower defense.
• Graphics – In my former games graphics were awful. I think Alien Rush graphics are acceptable, which is already big improvement (and some people even likes graphics!). During warmup, I had a bit of practice with pixel art. Also, I learned how to make animations. I think they adds life to my game.
• Level design – Most players and I think that levels are nice and fun to play.

What I have mixed feelings about:

• Theme – Amount of ways LD participants could use it was pretty small, in the other hand,  there were a lot worse themes during votes, or former LDs.
• My engine – I really like Unity3D and its workflow. But there was one bug in engine that caused me a lot of pain. It caused that some Rigidbodies2D automatically translated into (0,0,0). Everytime it happened I had to restart Editor.
• Sound – Sound in my game is just SFXR-generated sound effects. I cannot make any music (I’m willing to learn it someday). Besides that, I feel that sound – similar to animations – makes my game alive
• Splash screen tutorial and learning curve – it translates rules of the game, but now I think that in-game tutorial would be better, ever if I had to sleep one hour less Also, learning curve is too steep IMO. I should add easy level 1, which also would serve as tutorial.

What I don’t like:

• Balance – I hate balancing units and I can’t do it, no matter how hard I would try. As a result, cannons are practically useless, and game feels overall unbalanced.
• Way I made this game – Shortly after I got idea of game, I sat down and started making it, without any thinking how I will do it. As a result, code is a mess and it leads to last issuse
• Glitches and annoying things – I fixed all major bugs, but some things are a result of implementation design (e. g. houses blocking units). I couldn’t fix it without remaking almost whole game.

What I hate:

• I hate that I didn’t make any screens during development or timelapse

Anyway, I’m very happy with result. You can play my game here.

Other things about my game:

• Major inspirations were Lemmings (gameplay, way of commanding units), StarCraft (plot, units) and Plants vs Zombies (HUD, overall design).
• I’m still thinking about making post-compo version, but I don’t know if I will have sufficient time (school begins soon). In post-compo version, I would rewrite game, eliminating all glitches and annoying things. I’d also like to rebalance game and add in-game tutorial, more levels, more complex A.I. and music).
• I were going to add menu which would serve as invasion plan, but I ran out of time.
• If you want to ask me anything about my game or post-compo version, feel free to do it under this post.

Tags: 2D, compo, LD33, postmortem