Hello!

I add new explanations for Cthulhu Ftagn, and also a direct link for those who want Cthulhu animated gif.

I will definitely put a post compo online version next week. If you have any suggestions you want to see in the future game, do not hesitate to say : I am new to the computer, but I am in the board game creation for long ago, even though I do not have yet been published, I used to take into account the opinion of the testers

It seems like people liked my game.

The question is : “Should I continue working at it?”

If you didn’t see my game here is the link:

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=56119

I’ll wait for comments.

If the answer is “yes” then you can follow the development at my twitter: @indieAlchemist.

Thank you.

Some post-mortem thoughts. I think the theme “You are the Monster” has been the most fruitful and interesting from all the Ludum Dares I have been participating. So far I have seen really interesting implementations of the theme in graphics, story and gameplay. And lot of warnings before the games 😀

About our game. I feel kind of sad that some people are not getting the joke of the story and how it’s part of the theme. Our main character is human who want’s to bone every species in the universe. All the ladies look more or less like monsters, but the real monster of the game is the main character who is willing to do or say anything just to get laid. I feel little like spoiling the game when I write this down, but meh…

Anyway. Here’s a beating heart for you all. It has been a great Ludumdare, Keep on making awesome games!

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

Just kidding, but we made a silly fun physics game where you throw humans around into eachothers’ baskets (attached to your back), the strategy is to fling humans off of the wall and into your opponents back. The person with 3 humans in their basket loses. Come play?

Hi!

I’ve been working on the webgl version, and now Sunset Monster doesn’t have scrolling bars, so it’s fully playable inside the iframe directly on the web.

Using firefox it seems to be playable without any problem, but on chrome and safari, when you press the arrow keys, the web scrolls up and down, so if it’s your case, just press the fullscreen button.

Sorry for the inconvenience, and have a nice play!! 😉

You can play SunsetMonster here

Most people have commented about how difficult it is to play my game.

For those who have no idea what is it about, I’ve just added a gameplay video of my Ludum Dare 33 compo entry, My Cup of Fury.

Tags: angry, badphysics, balancing, burn, compo, Cup, fire, flamethrower, flying, Fury, gameplay, hovering, LD #33, ldjam, monster, physics, red, Saucer, unity, Victim, video, youtube

Starting almost a day late, I suddenly had a fun idea for a game that would fit the theme just right: Playing a giant Kraken in the ocean, destroying passing boats!

Play the game

I instantly knew how I wanted it to look, but just like my last entry, it really took me out of my comfort zone – which is risky for such a short amount of time, but also makes it much more interesting for me personally.

The good parts:

• I’ve made some pixel-art before, but never did I create such large sprites. I also wanted to recreate a somewhat Game Boy Advance looking style. In the end, I’m really satisfied with the looks.
• I was already familiar with the tools I used, so development itself was pretty straightforward, without any unexpected technical difficulties.
• I started with the graphics first, so even until the very last hours, I was unsure if I could even get a playable version of this done. I did!

The bad parts:

• I started with the graphics first. While I knew how I wanted the game to look, I only had a vague idea of how it would actually play. Originally, I had some multi-sprite tentacles in mind, that you would fling at the boats with your cursor, but I was really unsure if I could get that implemented within time. Long story short: I couldn’t. With literally 4 hours left before the deadline, I had to get the most basic gameplay in as possible.
• No sound effects.

Conclusion:

When trying multiple new things at the same time, it can be hard to determine how much time each segment will take, and sometimes compromises need to be made. And even if I’m not exactly satisfied with the gameplay, it was still a fun little project that taught me a lot. Also, being part of the community by chatting, or just watching other people developing is always super enjoyable.

So I hope you had a good time, and take a minute to check out my game – And make sure to comment, so I can play your game as well

Hi friends. You can test my project here. This is my contribution for Ludum Dare 33. I did a little casual game with a monster (but cute) frog which is trying to catch all flies around it. In order to move, click on the screen and frog follows the last point which has been selected. But be careful because you must avoid all bombs and catch some bonus so as to decrease time flow. I did three game modes – Arcade, Timer and Zen. For the first time I created my own track with SoundTrap. Bye ++

For the first time in our 4 entries to Ludum Dare, we managed to jam at the same location – at least for one day. Funnily enough, that took some time off our development time as we first had to fight an only partially working monitor – the first monster to overcome. Now to …

… the good

• Idea and gameplay. I think managing hydra heads with different types lead to an interesting gameplay and we are quite happy about that.
• Using libgdx and ashley. It helps to use things you are already familiar with and use library code you already created for other games. As ashley is concerned, we are still experimenting with it and component based programming is quite new to us (although already experimenting with it in LD32). The general design and organisation of code can be especially challenging.
• Graphics. The overall graphics and aesthetics are a plus for us. We both are no designers so everything that does not let you want to rip your eyes out is a win. (and takes a long time to create)

… the ok

• Game progression. As the jam went on and time flew by, there was no way we could implement enemies to spawn heads by damage as originally intended. So we settled  for the easy way (the programming hooks were already there) and spawn heads on mistakes which added a nice snowballing effect. But we should have also made something score bound as the comments suggested because a good player will actually have to make mistakes on purpose to get a more challenging experience.

… and the bad

• Clearly sound & (the non-existent) music. It just was not enough time to search for good sounds or hope for the best in bfxr. To be honest, for us sound is the hardest thing to do.
• Fixing weird hotkey behavior in browsers. Especially the search-as-you-type feature in Firefox was a pita to deal with. As a quick and dirty post jam fix, we catch all key presses on the page which to be honest is quite irritating (no tab, F5 … we could filter them but i think it will do for now)

Concepts

What is this thing?

Evolution of hydra

Conclusion

As always, it was a great fun to take part in a #LDJAM. There is always a lot to learn. Don’t forget to try and rate our game.

See you next time!

My game Saucer turned out to be my best Ludum Dare game thus far, and for a couple of reasons:

• I stuck to my goal of keeping things simple
• I stuck to my goal of not trying too many new things

Trying completely new things in past LD’s had me learn a ton, but produced some not-so-good games along the way, and it feels really nice to finally present a polished game for this LD. It was also shocking that I finished 2 hours before the end of the compo, which has never happened!  For all that joined me at my live stream, thank you all so much and the game would not be what it is without you!

 Check out SAUCER and PLAY IT here!

I also have a full TIMELAPSE of the development process HERE!

First time is always dificil:

DIA 2:

the game: ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=52094

Tags: Predator Hood

I made video where I described line-by-line the source code for my game The Wrath of Gandhi.  Check it out!

I was inspired by projects like Handmade Hero and Jai where people demonstrate their coding decisions and style in specific detail so others can learn and compare their own.

If anyone else made a video like this let me know in the comments and I’ll go watch it!

First Came The Thinking, Then Came The Jamming, Then Came The Playing, Now Comes The Learning

So I have Jammed and made a game and am playing through the ones I can with the little spare time I have and probably won’t play all 2700! So I am prioritizing playing Compo entries and the people who have left comments on mine. Which means there are lots of games I am just missing and some will be great and some I will want to read the source of and learn how they made such an awesome game. So I am asking for a little help, Unity is my drug of choice so which of the games using Unity can I learn most from?

Platformer, puzzler, tower defense, 3D,2D its unimportant, I just want to learn so Jam or Compo please point me in the direction of the games I should be playing, and reading the code for and absorbing into my small but growing understanding of making games.

If you built one yourself or played one that showed a great level of polish drop its name (or even better a link) in my comments and I will take a look.

Hey, all. As promised, we’re working on exporting all the videos we’ve recorded in our Twitch.tv lifestream to Youtube. Here’s the always-up-to-date playlist below. Check it out, and see if your game is in there!

Tags: Let's Play, Tech Valley Game Space, TVGS, youtube

Hey all! If you (like me) cranked out a lovely piece of interactive fiction for Ludum Dare, consider submitting to sub-Q! It’s a literary magazine for interactive fiction, and we pay authors and developers for original work and reprints.

We are seeking works of speculative fiction (fantasy, sci-fi, horror, magic realism). We’re open to hypertext pieces (made in Twine, Choicescript, Inkle, etc.) and parser-based work (made in Inform, TADS, etc.).

If you’ve got a piece from this Dare, an earlier work, or something that you’re just finishing up now, we’d love to see it! Give us your best and brightest.

For more info on our rates and guidelines, you can find our submission page here: https://sub-q.com/about/submissions/

Thanks!

First off, The Bug Fixed/Post Compo Version

Gamejolt or Itch.io

Now, the Post-Mortem

Originally, about a week before the start of Ludum Dare was when I decided 100% on making a game this time around. I aim to every single Ludum Dare, but can only ever push myself into finishing the game through a tremendous amount of effort. Originally I was detoured from this jam thinking that I was going to have to work alone in the solo competition, but a bit before the start of the jam is when ??? (The same artist I worked with on my Ludum Dare 33 gane)decided to join forces once again to complete a game.

Fast forward to the start of the competition, and things already start off a bit unfortunate since I was not around for the theme announcement or for about an hour afterwards. When I returned though is when things really began. Our original game concept was simply an anti-platformer of sorts where things that would traditionally be helpful would harm you and things that would normally harm you would help you.
It changed so drastically do to a miscommunication error (the game needed some kind of unique mechanic to it), and ???’s going to sleep right after I returned. By the time he woke up enough work had been done that it wasn’t worth changing to a different idea.

For all of day 1, the game seemed pretty hopeless with the only real attacking mechanic being a very long lock on air attack. Not a lot of art or deep thought came out of that day, but a lot of the base engine was there by the time I woke up on day 2.

On day 2 I started to get a lot more of the enemies and structure in, and added in the mele combat system. This, as well as a drastic speedup is what really made the game go from terrible to awesome in my opinion. Kaz also started to grow quite fond of the game. By the end of Day 2 majority of art was done, all mechanics, and all enemies.

Day 3 was just the polish and finalize day. I worked out the waves (which I’m terribly sorry I messed up so bad), the menu (which I’m terribly sorry I messed up so bad), and the sounds (which I’m terribly sorry I didn’t have time for music).

And just like that, through all of the stress, I had completed another Ludum Dare(with help from ??? of course).  I can’t lie and say that  it went perfectly smooth or that I was 100% happy with the final product, but I do think that to date it is one of my funnest games, and definitely worth checking out!

Shameless Plug To Play And Vote On The LD Version

Additional Screenshots

So Ludum Dare #33 lies behind us now, and I take the chance to write a quick follow-up of how this all turned out for me.

There is also a timelapse video of Virus‘ development:

The Preparation

I didn’t prepare much this time. No basic games to get back into the whole process, not many commits to my engine.
What was important though was that I made a list of ideas for the 20 final themes, which helped me a lot in getting creative and was quite a bit of fun, too.

The First Night

I forgot to commit final but crucial changes to my engine, which I consider would be cheating since then I would be the only one with access to that code. I noticed my mistake very late, and after documenting and committing everything there were only about two hours of sleep left.

When I woke up and started Eclipse as well as my timelapse software, I noticed the latter didn’t really work. Everything looked JPEG-ish, even though I had set it to PNG. I spent the last seven minutes before the theme announcement quickly building my own timelapse script, just to realize the original software did work correctly… Anyway.

I was not happy with “You Are The Monster”. Not at all. I mean, I knew that the chance for it was high, but still. I ended up making my biggest mistake, not sticking to the idea I had prepared beforehand. I wanted to do something atmospheric, something calm, like flying a bird. There was my idea – you play an eagle, which looks friendly at first glance, but for something like a mouse an eagle is quite the monster.

I built awesome flying mechanics (really, they deserve to be called “awesome”), made the textures, and put it all together into a lovely little eagle. It would even sit down when you flew it to the ground!
Unfortunately, after spending around six hours on that, I had no idea what to do with it.

After sleeping a little, 14 hours in, I gave up. Back to my original idea: playing as a virus that infects all of humanity.

Starting Over

Progress came fast, since I had mostly the whole thing in mind from the start. In just a few hours, the basics were already done, although it was still far from a game.
In the evening that day, I took a break from coding and started with:

The Music

I am bad at making music, there’s no doubt about it. Partly because of my missing experience, I guess – this was the second time I ever made something for real.
It isn’t what you’d expect when you think of the word “music”, it’s rather some disturbed synthesizer sounds with a heavy focus on drums. Those are the only two things I am not that bad at. It turned out OK.

Want to listen to it? Play my game!

Making It A Game

After tuning the music to my satisfaction, I added the progress minimap, tweaked the gameplay and added the main opponent: vaccine production.

I also changed the background to a non-static one, with a pseudo perspective on the houses. Very proud of that!

Voice Acting

I appear to be surprisingly good at voice acting. It was my first time to ever narrate anything, and I only did one single recording, but it turned out very well!
One hour of effects work to make it sound like some highly-disturbed walkie-talkie transmission, and suddenly my game got a lot better.

Testing & Fine Tuning

Obviously, when you have played such a simple game for a few hours, you get really good at it. That is a problem, because as the developer, you have had to play it over and over again, which means you don’t know how hard or easy it is for someone starting from the beginning. That is where I got other people involved, basically just playing the game and reporting back how it worked for them.
Then followed lots of fine tuning, since the game turned out a lot harder than I had thought.

After one of them managed to win, I called it a success and submitted my game.

My Overall Experience

This Ludum Dare was absolutely great. I had a bad start, but after that, everything went very smoothly and I am happy with the outcome.

The way I did it this time appears to be how I should always handle game jams in the future. Giving everything you have drains a lot of energy, and you lose more than you gain. If you do this in a more relaxed way, you are not exhausted and get to do more.

• If you haven’t yet, you can view my entry here: Virus
• The development is available on YouTube, sped up to just over 5 minutes: Timelapse
• And please vote

Thanks for reading,
JangoBrick

Tags: animated gif, compo, java, LD33, post-mortem, postmortem, timelapse, virus

I’m currently working on enabling different sets of tiles based on dungeon depth. Until something failed, of course
You can play and rate my entry HERE

Shit happens

Tags: ldjam, roguelike, SSTP

I’m going to be around for a few hours tonight, rate mine and I’ll rate yours!

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

Graham Dolle(Artist, Coder, Co-designer)

I would like to take some time to talk about the game we made for this Ludum Dare. I worked with my girlfriend on this LD as I did with the last. We started out wanting to make a game about alien planets and exploration in the form a twine-style game, but after thinking about the work division and the amount of work it would take we decided to make a puzzle game in Unity instead.

The game all began with one game design doc…but it’s more of just a doodle

so from the beginning we head a decent idea of how the game would work. As we went through I slowly added more mechanics and more structure. The First night we really didnt do anything but plan because i had to work. The second night though…I stayed up the whole night writing the map loading code and all the mechanics. The next day we hung out at a barnes and noble in Baltimore and made some levels and tightened up some code. Then that monday we finished up the levels and did some vfx and format stuff(menus etc.). This game came out really well and it was super easy and fun to make so we’ll be working on it more. Many of the bugs and short comings of the jam version have been worked out this past week. Anyways, not a long post-mortem, but feel free to ask me any questions on twitter or here @cbear_wallis <3 and try out the game

Bailey Carroll(Co-designer, Musician)

Our first idea for the jam was a text-based game about a space explorer whose race is dying and needs to get to a planet that has the main ingredient for a cure. I did a whole bunch of pre-writing for this game, and we brainstormed a ton before realizing the game we hoped to make was just too big and would take more than a few days to make. That being said, we quickly changed our whole look on the jam. Knowing from the start that we didn’t want to follow the theme, we decided to make a different take on the game we made for the last Ludum Dare entitled Garden State.

Since I don’t code at all, my job was mostly planning out the game and coming up with quirky ideas for levels. Roadblocks or water-sources that would fit into each season were a must considering our only ideas were water drops and stones when we started our original planning. Both Graham and I were able to meet up only on one occasion during the making of the game, which proved to be both vital and awful; vital because of the work we were able to do together and awful because we should have spent another day together just planning it. Not having another day to just work on the game was our biggest roadblock in my opinion. The game was my first introduction to level design and I was faced with a lot of problems along the way that would have been easily resolved if Graham and I were together. All in all, however, my only regret is not putting in more flower puns. Flower puns make everything much better.

<3 try out the game <3