So, a lot of people have been complaining about my entry, GROWL.

The main drawback of my game is that people can’t seem to understand the gameplay mechanics. To me, it just summarises as “inverted Hexagon”.

There’s been a very annoying bug in GROWL for the past few days : the green path to the next note was not displayed properly. I think this has confused many players, so I just fixed it.

I also added a fullscreen mode -which you can enable/disable by pressing the “F” key-, and lowered the difficulty as a (very) few amount of people survived longer than 15 seconds.

I hope this little yet efficient update will let you, players, enjoy GROWL more.

Tags: l

The post-compo version of Undetected is now updated with sound effects, a brand new soundtrack and several new levels. Still need to tweak some of the levels but overall things are coming together.

^click the image to play the gif as ludum dare hates me^

This a “short” little post for my LD33 entry – Drack’s Mansion or more accurately what I learned about the competition by making it. I did do a post-mortem about it but I felt the need to make this type of post as well, not only for myself but also for others that maybe thinking of entering the jam in the future. I am quite happy with how the game turned out and feedback has been very positive but the self-critic in me will simply not let the flaws with it slide without analyzing them. So without further a due, let’s begin.

The number one thing I learned about Ludum Dare is: Freaking plan like crazy.

It may sound simple enough but trust me, not following this rule is the main reason for the my game’s flaws. I simply did not brainstorm nearly enough which lead to a failed idea I scrapped down the road. Let me elaborate so you’re not kept in the dark. When I heard the theme I started brainstorming as you would do. I quite quickly came up with the idea of being a scary monster in a randomly generated cabin where new tourists came along every week and you had to kill them. You had to use cool abilities to accomplish this and all of them were powered by your fear bar. You used some of it every time you did something cool or killed someone. To recharge it you did typical horror type stuff like banging doors, making stuff levitate, shutting off lights etc. If you lost all your fear bar, the game was over. It was a simple stealth game idea that had an ok horror spin to it. It seemed fine in my mind at the time so I did no further brainstorming and jumped straight into making it. It was around the end of the compo’s first day that I realized I had not put nearly enough thought into how things worked. I had the game mechanics down in my head, as in what I wanted to do, but I did not have any clue about how exactly I wanted to do it. This simple mistake and rushing straight into making a game rather than knowing what I wanted to make cost me pretty much most of my first day and made the game much worse than it could have been (eg. no music, some unpolished areas). So to recap: Until you have every main mechanic for your game figured out 100%, DO NOT stop brainstorming. Main mechanics are the ones that make a game functional and playable. Secondary ones are the polish (eg. Mario’s running around in levels and jumping on bad guys are main mechanics. The different enemies and level obstacles are secondary). Speaking on mechanics…

Second lesson I learnt mostly through playing other entries is: The simplest entries are usually the most fun and well made.

Often these games have one or two mechanics at most. But they are taken as far as they can go without getting stale. What I mean is, the game is essentially just one or two mechanics, but the player is presented with variations on them that function similarly to one another but are different enough to be interesting. Most great Ludum Dare entries follow this principal and I wished I did as well. Games that do this (or similar things) that I have seen are: Bunny Inferno, Grave, Takodemon and Super Chop. Now in terms of how those mechanics are made, we move to the next point…

Think about the depth of your mechanics first, and not their presentation.

With well-made mechanics even the most mundane things (such as chopping a tree, getting bunnies across a pit etc.) can be made fun. So focus mostly on making good mechanics fist, and presenting them later. That does not mean: Don’t think of a clever idea or take on the theme as soon as possible. It simply means, think about cool gameplay concepts first before adding polish. You might have noticed I mentioned depth. Basically, the more of the aforementioned in the above paragraph variations your mechanic can have, the deeper it is. So don’t only think of how your mechanic stands on its own while making it but also how you can expand it later. And also, think outside of the box as much as possible. It makes for more memorable games that are better in people’s eyes even if they are not as polished.

That said, hopefully my little ramble was useful to y’all and to me for my next jam as well. If you feel the need to see my entry and get some more context about the personal stuff I tackled here, you can always give it a go over here. Happy deving!

Tags: LD33, ld33 postmortem, ld33compo, LD33GC

So I was able for once to stick to a game for more than just a weekend. The post jam version of Grow is now out! More than enough to celebrate!

The new version has a few things going for it. First, graphics are improved and sound and music is added. The game is very atmospheric now, even more than before. I am really pleased with how it came out.

The gameplay has been balanced a bit. Now your health decreases in bigger amounts the more you survive, meaning there is an added challenge. I hope that helps with the repetitiveness with the game a little. Now you see the time you have survived too!

There are a few minor bugs fixed, and the game is now stable.

So I hope you like the game. If you have already played and voted, thank you! You may want to check the postjam version to see if you like it more. If you haven’t played it yet, try it! It is a fast load and fast play. It is a bite sized game. You can find it here: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=21736

Thank you all again for making this Ludum Dare possible. I really really love this competition.

Andrea

Tags: grow, html5, postjam

I updated the post-compo version of my procedural puzzle game, “You! Are the monster” so it can now do bigger puzzles, with 5 suspects instead of 4!

You can play the compo version or the post-compo version with its new 5-people mode. It still also has the “preschool” version for your kid!

Hi. I wrote a postmortem about my game here on my blog. Check it out to see how much my game changed over the weekend!

Also, you can play and rate my game right here!

Tags: LD33, ld33 postmortem, postmortem

Went through and made some improvements based on comments, as well as some other things I thought of after the weekend was over. There’s a link at the bottom of the page where you can download it.

– All new art.
– Fire can no longer miss.
– New descriptions for attacks.
– Now able to pick up something you’re standing on.
– Added new action. Leaping will you let you move around fast, but also makes you prone for a short while.
– Corpses no longer block movement and can no longer shoved.
– General bug fixes.

Get it here.

A new edition of the LudumDare; and No Wand Studios, a small studio of four Spanish young people, participates for the second time to show our craziness.

This time we liked the theme more than the last one. The brainstorming was shorter and better ideas came out of it. In the studio, we are big fans of the tycoon genre and we also love kaijus (Who doesn’t?). So out of all the ideas we decided soon to join those two concepts.

As in all brainstorming we began with great and very funny ideas … but very costly in time. So we had to reduce it to a single gameplay mechanic. You would have to blend kaijus and send them against cities. When this was done, we saw that the battle may be somewhat boring. As we were (or we thought) on timetable we decided to add some of the features that we had though during the brainstorming. We also included some goodies for a feed stage and world news with a lot of references to geek & freak culture.

This complicated the game a little more. Now the kaijus had three stats and towns responded to the attack. All of this went along great until the last two hours until delivery. The last two hours were absolutely crazy, our programmers almost collapsed, but they withstood the pressure well.

Thus, we face Kaiju Tycoon, a simulator where you carry the kaijumancer and you send your creatures to destroy the world.

Summarizing, we talk about the pros and cons:

Pros:

• We have learned a lot of things. This has been our 2nd Ludum Dare. We have known our limits and each one has learnt more about the skills of the team.

• We have made an expandable game. The game has one mechanic and we believe that adding all mechanics from the brainstorming can become a great game.

• Art and mood are so great. Even though it’s wrong for us to say it, we think that the game have a great look and a great atmosphere. Also we recommend you to read all the news feed because it’s really funny.

• We have had a good time. We live together for 72 hours. We laughed and worked a lot. In fact we had time to film this video: https://instagram.com/p/6vmAsyneqR/

Cons:

• We scoped bad. Definitely we wanted to include too many things. Maybe that’s why the game only has one simple mechanic.

• We were overconfident. Development flowed and that’s why we were overconfident. This confidence took their toll on us the last 2 hours before submit.

• We don’t have musician in our team and we must use free audio. That point must be improved in future jams.

• We lack of experience. As we said already it’s our 2nd ludum dare. We have to be more organized. However we notice improvement regarding our 1st We think that we are on the right track.

If you’ve read up to here, simply thanks for your time and check it out: KAIJU TYCOON

Stay tuned!

Tags: Kaiju, Kaiju Tycoon, Kaijus

Hi again, here’s an update.  I’ve just added touch controls so that my entry is now playable in Android (either in the browser or as an app). It’s also on Google Play.

Glad to see so many positive comments on my game. Thanks all for the feedback!

>>> Play it here <<<

Justice Five is a boss-run kind of game. Each level consists of a boss fight which upon completion, leads to another. Justice Five is also a game about super heroes, and when we think of super heroes one of the first things that comes to our minds is: super powers. This also came to my mind when I thought of making a game with this settings but… how do we create and adapt super powers to gameplay?

In this post I will talk about the design process of the two first bosses.

The first boss

The first boss invokes the Superman cliché: strong, flies, has a cape… I could use super strenght as a power to this one. He could keep flying and hammering the player from time to time but, based on the ‘lore’ I wanted to create, the eye beams would suit him so much better. I tried to make his art to look imponent. He would keep flying, just standing there and shooting his beams at the ‘enemy’ (aka the player), that inferior being. Why use super strenght when he could just wipe that monster with little effort?

The next thing in mind was: how to make the beams work? If they were too fast, the player would have little time to respond and no time at all to predict where the next beam would be fired. If they were too slow, they wouldn’t seem “real”.

Here’s how I solved this: by indicanting to the player, through a target icon, where he would fire next. A few seconds later the beam would be fired in that direction. The targets for the beam are chosen randomly but within a certain area of the screen, that way the player always know where are the danger zones. Initially the boss was firing only one beam at once. This was making the fight very easy, because just one beam covers little screen space. This made me decide to make the boss also fire 3 beams at the same time, with the quantity of beams (1 or 3) being chosen randomly (40% chance for each). Now, with a decent amount of screen space covered, I had to create  a ‘break’ for the player. Since you can only attack this boss in a certain angle, sometimes players could find difficult dodging the beams and reaching him. And to fix this I created a special attack. During this attack, the boss stops firing beams and becomes completely vulnerable until he unleashes it.

With these settings players who enjoy a challenge can try to hit him while dodging his beams, and players who wants to play safe can have their time and only attack him during the special animation.

The second boss

Upon finishing the first level I opened Photoshop and started designing the second boss sprite. I wanted him to have lightning powers but until then I hadn’t created any mechanics for him. After adding his sprite to the game I made him shoot lightning, but… the first boss also shot things at the player. To create variety I had to add more to it and… why not a shield? Characters that uses energy as the source of their power often use it to attack AND defense. I then created a shield for him. Immediatly that connection between lightning and triggering something just clicked in my head, so I created two devices that should be activated with the boss own attacks, disrupting his shield and letting him vulnerable so the player can hit him.

You may note that fighting this boss is like fighting the first one using the ‘safe way’: you have to dodge his attacks and wait for a opening. But in this case you create the opening.

This was one of the trickiest boss to balance. There was the speed of his projectiles and the time bewteen the barrier being destroyed and rebuild again. To test the projectile speed I was using the two lightning devices as reference: when standing next to the device, motionless, am I able to escape a projectile if I start running/jumping at the time they are shot?

As for the barrier time, I did it by brute force. Started with X seconds and tried to hit him (always using the longest way). Many times I would end up stuck inside the barrier, dying right after it. Evey time that happened I would add 1 to X and check again. I think in the end I found an optimal time.

Feedback

So far I’ve received some amazing feedback over here. The game is far from perfect, but recognizing its flaws make me learn so much. I wanna thanks all of you who used your time to check and rate my game. If you haven’t played it yet, you can check my entry on the link below:

>> PLAY JUSTICE FIVE HERE <<

Come check out my game!!!

I will play yours.

Thanks!

Well, good day to all! We’re a new team for this 33th LD. How should I start with…ok, a bit of intro first.

Firstly, this team is formed originally for participating in this event. All members of this team come from the same country (well, duh), same university and same club named Games Development Club (GDC). And when we were informed to take part into this event, we just joined in with solely a little of game making experience that can be referred as “next to none”. However, thanks to the other club members’ advices, we managed to come up with a playable prototype entitled “Monster Guider”.

Here’s the overview of the game. Monster Guider Link

Now here’s a bit of self-introduction. I’m Ang, a proud member of Team Kast and at the same time the current team leader (you see, we exchange leaders sometimes for better ideas).My current main role is being a Core Programmer in learning(and also doing a little marketing).

Next up is Gordon, the Ultimate Audio Designer. Why he’s “ultimate”, you say? Well, the songs he composed was astoundingly awesome to hear so it’s natural for me to say that. He’s a pro-to-be as he has the music root deeper than the rest in the team.

As for the Graphics Processor, the fame goes to our Koh. Although Koh is an average pixel artist, but he’s got the best artwork among all of us in the team! He’s still in learning process, but he’s got the highest art potential among us.

Ok, that concludes our greetings to the Earth. So…why’s the name Hegback in the post, you say? Well, that’s just a random name I thought out with no reason. Haha!

New version!

Finally finished cleaning up the mess I made when first making the end turn logic. Now it’s much more accurate and readable and adding or changing actions isn’t a huge pain any more, as a result I could make most of the actions more varied and unique.

Also added 2 new enemies to the game and made dying more interesting(it just sent you back to title but now it tells you what the humans find after killing you).

Next I think I’ll make it so that you level up(gain maybe 10 health and pick action to improve or something) by eating more enemies without resting than you have so far.

After that I’ll probably try to do AI, I have no idea but I think making it evaluate each of the 120 options it has each turn should be a reasonable way to do it, if it is I could see if I can make it compare some of them to your options though I think that could slow it down a lot if I’m not careful.

I just setup Some Knights Left on Gamejolt. Thinking about implementing their Highscore API but not sure yet.

You can play here. Happy smashing!

We had only a day to make a game, so we went through very few ideas before finally deciding on the one that was the easiest for us to make and funniest for you to play.

What went right:

• All of the game was divided into unrelated levels and had scripts that would automate the loading process. That way we could make levels up until the deadline without risking for the game to become unplayable.
• We already had Unity prepared to work with SVN – that allowed us to work separately on art and code without depending on one another, experiment and send changes back and forth – we knew that any mistake could be reverted and the code would not be lost. That really sped up the development.
• We communicated. A lot.

What went wrong:

• While planning, we didn’t really leave time for anything interface-wise, that’s why we lost a couple of hours trying to hastily implement a menu that could not work with the reset of the game. It came out buggy and eventually we dropped it completely.
• We are not any good at music and sounds, so we ended up with something primitive.
• Some puzzles were too unclear for the players – the jam ended at 4 AM local time and our gamer friends are mostly asleep at that time hence the limited feedback.

Conclusion:

We still have so many ideas for new puzzles (we only implemented about a fourth of everything we thought of), that it would be bad to abandon this game. Right now, we are going to revamp the menu, animations and update some graphics. When that part is solid – we will keep adding more puzzles until we run out of ideas.

If you really like this game, you should follow us on Twitter (@Patomkin, @MrLevich) so that you will not miss the new build in the near future!

You can play the game here: Dude, Stop

Recently I have found out that you could get stuck on some of the levels, this has now fixed and has made the game work again.

If you haven’t had a chance to play it yet, then now’s your opportunity!

Please, play it here!

Well, first thing first how do you do a post-mortem on your own?

Hmmmm…

Second thing is – how do you do a post mortem to a short game as mine?

I think I still have lessons to share though so … call it the irrumabo you want!

How To Begin

Well, try anything! Just make something! How I usually begin, and how I began this LD is like that:

Plan vs Result – Close enough

Write any idea! Even silly ones! It might turn upside down!

For example – I wrote “Anti-cheering”. This is of course a maybe wierd maybe dumbest idea ever – A game about getting down on the player (the computer). Next I wrote 3D Pacman. Sounds good at first and than you realize all pacman monster do is following the player hoping to touch it. Not that intereseting. Key rule: Never make the player do something you (the programmer) can do yourself. If you can make the character pathfollow pacman, unless you add some punch this isn’t a game, this just sucks. Among other ideas were “Clumsy Situations” which apperantely was taken so I’m happy I didn’t use this. The wierdest thing was “getting hit or acting cute or nerdy gets you points”. OK what? XD

Okay maybe not EVERY idea is good, but bad ideas can turn into things later – for example the anti-cheering became a mocking laughter in the beginning of each level, to help the mood. Try to use the ideas even if you won’t make the game around them! You spent time thinking about them, so use that effort!

Know Your Tools

My claim this LD was that I can accomplish making a game with a tool I don’t know. I took two-three days to study it and that’s it. Finito. Ut ‘eam.

Making it worse I chose Blender Game Engine – a very unconventional, undocumented annoying engine which has all the tools just hidden in its core offering no help getting them. Unpolished, lacking simple and trivial operations like making a copy of an object to another scene without loosing it’s logic. Indeed very annoying stuff, and I’m not talking about the bugs, crashes and BSODs yet.

My point is – get to know your tools a little more than three days since this means you practiced less than the time of one LD to prepare to LD. If the keynote this year wasn’t clear – KNOW YOU TOOLS!

Sleep Before-hand

Beacuse tiredness is never good at LD. It’s better sleeping than writing buggy code or having struggle to concentrate.

Do DARE, but Don’t Get TOO Ambitious

There’s always a cost. In my case – I was making a simple AI using the tools blender gave me but even with the help of an engine – getting to do an AI that have over the game two different weapons with different mechanics, having him following coins,  aiming at you and retreating when you’re too close is kinda a long thing to do when it’s basically my first time making an animated 3D character, and don’t forget you have to texture all those. This gave me though LOTS of mechanics to play with but don’t forget – there’s always a cost (as I stated in the beginning of this paragraph). In my case it was the length – lots of gameplay but merely 6 levels. It made the game basically a prototype of something that could have more levels, and it might make you lose some points.

The Good: Learn, Enjoy & Make a Game You’re Proud of

Oh I surely learned a lot. I DARED this Ludum Dare, even though it had its cost I’m pretty proud of the amount of gameplay I achieved in 48 hours, knowing this is my first time making a game with this tool.

I think the game is pretty fun once you get the goal and controls – it’s a puzzle platformer based on color-mechanics correlation. Obviously you’re told nothing in the beginning about this but Shhhh keep it a secret! The players need to figure stuff for themselves and I think that this is one aspect I might actually done right. Making a vague beginning might draw some people in! Not too vague though cause then you’re just making ’em all go away!

Playing My Entry 

We all know that’s why we actually make this thing – shmeless advertising. But I hopefully shared with you my lessons and also explained myself – why the game came out so short.

A mini-game, A prototype, call it whatever you want. I had an idea in mind and even though I procrastinated I actually managed to transfer it into something playable!

So.. it was all worth it =]

>Play “Being a Video Game Monster”<

It is an intrigging short strory in a 2D sidescroller and i hope you play all the way to the end : p

( we didin´t updated yet so it have some bugs when you die X) and the end is not a crash it is just the lack of a menu)

It is our first entry in a LD!

We tried to create a good strory with a nice connection to the theme with a powerfull mood. The game itself is short, because of the high amount of work in it and we didn´t had time to do more :S  but we had a blast doing it!

hope you enjoy !

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=56160

Concepts/final ideias

Hi all,

I’m one of the developers behind G.A.M.E, created for this month’s Jam. We were a team of 3, spread out across the world and with an urge to sleep make a cool game. After seeing the theme announced, we bounced concepts back and forth until one stuck – this concept was one that resonated with us as developers and gamers – that you would play as the head of a large games company, a-la EA, and work to instruct the creation of the game without much of a care for those that played it.

We took inspiration from Papers, Please, creating a similar (we hope!) area of play, where you go about your job with messages coming to interact with you rather than you going to interact with anything. We came up with a quick messaging system for some quirky humour and interaction from your employees, and later expanded the system to include the main gameplay – the proposition system.

This was a system which required you to make split second decisions, and one which we decided was necessary to be as hectic as possible, to make it both a more challenging experience and to stop these propositions clogging up the screen too much. We created an extensive system of many results and reactions, and let the timer decide if it ran out. We linked these to a number of variables, such as your current income, profits, expenses, employees, fans, etc. We then decided that each game would take 7 days to create, and some results would increase or decrease that time, such as fixing bugs or moving office.

It was at this point we realised some further player interaction would be necessary, so we created Floppy, our version of ‘Clippy’, who ended up with a few chains of dialog explaining the systems of the game and getting angry at you when you attempted to quit. We had bigger plans for Floppy, including a rough sketch of an actual story that he would be involved in, yet as is always the case with Ludum Dare, that was not to be in 72 hours. After about 68 hours we had created a game with a mixture of cookie clicker and papers, please gameplay mechanics, with graphics which we were pleased with and some (unfortunately) minimal annoying background sounds to make you feel like you were truly in an office. The hectic nature lent itself well to our interpretation of the theme, leading you to not actually care too much. A quick leaderboard system to drive players and we created something that was enjoyable to play for us, however we must admit it lacked replayability.

tl;dr We are happy with our final product, however it misses our planned story and probably gets annoying after a while.

And of course, if you’d like to check it out, go here: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=57508 it would of course be much appreciated!

-FlamingKiwi

Rate mine and I’ll rate yours!  I’m off to work, but I’m playing afterwards!

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=51802