What went right

Playtesting.

I had the time to do two playtests. For the first one I recorded a nice animated GIF, and collected some useful about player experience, for example, my enemy sprite was seen as a child (but was not meant this way), so I replaced it with a neat soldier sprite.

Social media.

I started using Twitter, posted some warmup things. I had a good time there in development breaks, still not bothering too much. I also wrote some funny texts for my posts (“I hunger for playtesters!”).

Bosca Ceoil.

This easy to learn tool (with integrated tutorial!) made my first game music possible! I exercised with it for a couple months, so the music was good.

Unity.

I was familiar with the engine for quite a long, and for sure knew how to code for it.

Deadline.

I had to cut some corners but I was able to tweet and play others’ games while waiting for playtesters the second time. No one participated in that playtest, and I just submitted it 30 min before submission hour began and went to sleep 😛

What went wrong.

Playtesting (again).

In the first playtest some people said that they didn’t get what to do (even if it was shown in the animated GIF!). I didn’t listen to them, and realized it as a problem only post-compo… And the second playtest (some hours before deadline) was left unnoticed, zero comments.

Unity (again).

To be honest, making pixel-art games in the engine is pain! Considering to use Haxe(Flixel?) next time. I also failed to publish WebGL version of game because of the bug in Unity (confirmed by devs) which ruined the music completely.

No animations, few angles in sprites.

I had no experience in animation, and had no time to animate sprites. Also the main hero was exactly the same as I drawn him at the beginning (took about 10 minutes). And the enemy had only two sprites: alive and dead, with no angles.

Krita.

I didn’t update my tools not to break anything, but I regretted it with Krita. The version I used was a buggy one!

Few levels.

I began making levels 2-4 (total 4 in the game) at the second half of the second day. They only provide tutorials to mechanics, and not very much freedom to actually enjoy the game… I’ve returned from a business trip at last, so I think I’ll find the time to add 10+ more levels now.

Conclusion.

I had a great time participating in LD33, and playing what talented new-comers and old-timers done.

Take a risk! Survive!

Hello there! With this post we would finish the promotion of Kaiju Tycoon. We have had a great time but we must go back to work. We want to show you our tribute to the great Game Dev Tycoon:

We’ve learnt a lot. Thanks all for the feedback. See you soon!

Tags: Kaiju, Kaiju Tycoon

My game was Thursday the 12th, Lake Polygon. http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=41214

This is my second Ludum Dare, and my first Ludum Dare where I went Solo.  I tried to fit as much work in as I could between work and family during the weekend, overall though I think I did ok.

What went wrong.

This time around I had the theme ok, but 3/4ths the way through I realized I didn’t really have a win or lose scenario.  Basically I built a murder simulator with no way for the player to lose.   Though the first few kills were disturbingly satisfying, after a while it got boring as the game was missing “tension.”

To counter-act this I added the ability for the campers to pick up clubs and hit you back.  I also gave the player health.  This added tension back but now it went to far the other way.  You almost always ended up dying to the club wielding campers.

To counter-at that, I added a player power-up, a machete that you can throw.  I initially made it to where you could pick up you machete after you threw it. This swung the pendulum back again and made it way to easy to kill everyone quickly.  Finally, I modified the Machete one more time so it would randomly appear somewhere else on the map after the player used it.  This got me closer to where I wanted but currently the system still needs to be tweaked.

To recap, my biggest issue was I fell in love with my theme before thinking about what the game play should be like.

What went right.

Graphics.

Early on I decided to make everything out of layered basic shapes.  This let me generate most of the graphics in a couple of hours.  I really like how the graphics turned out, (with the exception of the player, I would like to go back and tweak those)

Some trickery withe some prebuilt shader effects let me add a gloomy viginette to the game, and to animate the water, fire etc.

Sound.

Though I didn’t create the sound effects, I think I got really lucky with some open source sounds/music I was able to find.  That more than anything completed the feel I was going for with the game.

Gameplay.

Overall I think it’s pretty fun!  It gets more frustrating as the kill count goes up, since you have to look harder for the remaining campers.  If I had had more time I would have added some sort of indicator to help you find the campers and maybe a couple more powerups to help you chase them down.  But overall I think the gameplay has a pretty decent base.

Anywho, I had a blast making it, and I hope you can all get a chance to try it out.

Thanks again fellow ludders.

I finally made it to improve my LD33. This patch is something I really feel to do as the game was a bit frustrating (due to bugs and not correct calibration of controls).

Now “You are the Star” has been patched and I am very pleased to present you this new version.

Things added:

-) Tutorial: this was needed otherwise the player is just been inserted into the game and he can spent some precious time just figuring out what to do. So now in the tutorial you will be presented with a little explanation of what you have to do and also some little video to show you how to do certain things.

-)Gameplay refactor: this also was necessary has we ended up to having a couple of bugs that just stuck the actors preventing  so the possibility of completing the level. Basically I had to rebuilt in a cleaner way the behavior of actors, but the advantage this time was that I already knew all the elements to consider. This is actually also a lesson of trying to have a better planning instead of just adding features to already existing structures.

Anyway I hope you could find some time to give a try and reward in this way my weekend efforts. Hope you enjoy!

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=57957

Lenakeiz

Hello everyone!

Just one week left before LD33 judging ends, I’m back from vacation and finally have a chance to play some games and look back at what I’ve made for my very first Ludum Dare (and the very first gamejam at all).

You can try my game here

The idea

I’ve never been good at original ideas or revolutionary gameplay mechanics. I really like simplicity in games but with good execution. So I decided to make something maybe ordinary, but make it as good as I can (taking into account my lack of gamedev experience).

Soo… You’re the monster. Okay, let it be a game about zombies. Why? Well, zombies are funny. Yes, I don’t think about them as about creepy scary monsters trying to eat your brains. They’re actually funny because of enormous amout of games/movies/etc made about them.

First hours

I was sitting with a pen and a pile of paper sheets trying to make something from a simple idea of “game about zombies” for about two hours. Or maybe more. The biggest problem was to not try to make something too complex. It’s only 48 hours and only me with no experience in commercial gamedev.

Finally the vision was formed. A game about running around with a horde of zombies, making more zombies, dying and playing as another zombie.

But I was so scared about “what if I just can’t do it?” so I was sitting with zero lines of code fore another couple of hours. I also didn’t knew how will I do art (I’m not good at it), would it be 3D (I know nothing about making 3D models) or 2D (I can draw something simple at least). But then suddenly the “programmer flow” started and I can remember only one thing – me sitting with a pile of code and art about 36 hours (or so) later. Exhausted but proud of myself. I did it – the game was finished =)

What went right

The art

It was very good decision to combine 3D with 2D. 3D for environment (simple and cubic without textures) and 2D for characters with super-simple art style. I’ve recently watched some Super Bros games letsplays and thought I could make something with the similar style.

Unity

I don’t have a lot of experience making games at all, but I was messing around with Unity for the past year, so it was enough for me to not suck with it completely.

AI

AI is super simple. And it fits the setting and game style completely. Zombies are stupid. Scared people are stupid. And military have guns – so no one will call them stupid even if they are =)

Horde mechanics

I didn’t expect this tiny little feature about playing as another zombie when your zombie dies will get so much impact on gameplay. It was really good idea and I’m glad I’ve come to it.

Dat cat

My girlfriend asked me to add a cat into the game. And I added it =) Some people found it pretty funny how the cats watching a zombie apocalypse without giving a f… =)

What went wrong

Unity + Pixelart = Pain

Everyone knows it =) Now I know it too. But my game not a completely pixel-artish, so I just decided I can sacrifice pixel-perfectness.

Goal

There is no goal except of getting score points for killing people. It’s kind of boring, I know. I wanted to make something like growing your horde -> breaking through military base. But I wasn’t sure if I can make it in time, so I decided to make it in post-compo version a couple months later.

Sound

The sound in game is awful, I know =) I messed with it, made some mistakes about tuning it properly in Unity. Sorry about that =)

In the end

I’m pretty happy with what I’ve got. I never thought I’m able to make a game in 48 hours, but I am. I’ve got a lot of positive feedback about my game, so it’s a perfect motivation for me to go on.

Thank you all!

You can try my game here

Hey all!

So we had a blast finally taking part in the Ludum Dare for the first time. I figured I should probably make a post-mortem, but since this is my first LD, that makes this my first one of these too. Sorry in advance. XD

What Went Right:

Keeping Resources in House:

Everything you see in the game, be it the pixelated alien that was initially developed for a 16-bit game or the villagers/tents clearly made in MS Paint, were made by us. The music (that is to say, the same chord progression over and over and over…) was made by us. The only thing we didn’t make was the engine itself.

Keeping the Game Simple:

You are an alien trying to get home after an electrical failure causes your spaceship to crash. To the villagers, you are a monster that attacked them with a giant fireball (your ship). You’re goal is to get your communicator, call for help, and try not to kill any villagers.

Whiteboard:

Thank. God. They. Exist. This tool, while it sounds trivial, was SOOOO useful during the whole process and helped us move along easily. We would have been lost without it.

Pow-Wows:

About every 3 hours, our group stopped working for 5 minutes to discuss what had been accomplished, what was needed, bugs that were discovered, and ideas to be pitched. It helped streamline the development process.

What Went Wrong:

Scratch:

While a really cool resource to use for some things (including game-jams), it did not help our team get this done as we thought it would. I (@Saphirako) made the mistake of not introducing my team to Unity soon enough. They weren’t comfortable with using something they did not know well. That being said, Scratch was discovered by one of our team members the night of the theme revelation and we scrambled to find ways to do things as we had no idea how to use it at first.

While it is rather simple to use and we got the hang of it, the nagging feeling of “what the heck is this thing I’m using?!” got to me multiple times during the Jam. It also did not have a way for us to simultaneously work on the same build. Each pow-wow inevitably included the process of attempting to sync up 3 different versions of the game. In at least 2 instances, there were implementations of game objects that were created with out-dated data. (ie. Old character movement scripts) And, though I can’t reference any pow-wow in particular, I know we definitely solved the same problem twice on at least one occasion.

Time:

For those of you that reached Level 2, you may have noted the Orange villagers had bows and arrows and yet, they did not fire at you. We made a decision to cut that feature so that we could release on time.

For those of you that noticed that the Alien had a walk cycle but none of the villagers had any type of animation. We made a decision to cut that feature so that we could release on time.

Noticing a pattern? The game had another level planned, 2 more enemy types, an HP bar, recharge for your attack, a fireball animation instead of a black ball. All of these things were cut when we realized we overextended ourselves. Even by the end of the jam, we realized after all the cutting, we weren’t merciless enough with the concepts that we came up with. But again, as it was our first time, we expected this to happen.

Venue:

I love my school. It excels at a lot of things. These things include fantastic internet speeds during the Summer. However, I made the mistake of not reserving a room until Wednesday evening. That was NOT enough time to get all the kinks out of the process. Let me clarify:

My plan – Reserve a room at the college with a whiteboard, internet access, and climate control. It wasn’t going to be too large, but it would be able to fit a team of 3 or 4 people plus some filming equipment.

What actually was the case – I reserved a room that required key access. I did not have the credentials to access said key access and had to call campus police each morning to get into the area I reserved. The room itself was a pretty comfortable for our team of 3 with some equipment, but it wouldn’t have done so with a team of 4. I also did not contact our network admin and, as such, the ethernet port for the room was switched off. We had to resort to Wi-Fi the whole time. Which would have been fine but it ended up pretty bad for streaming. Which brings me to my next point…

Streaming:

Multiple times the stream went dead and after 3 attempts, we had to give up the streaming video of the white-board. (The bandwidth just couldn’t handle it…) I would say a good hour of my development time was troubleshooting the stream.

 Conclusion:

Ultimately, we at Open Skies Games Studio are pretty pleased with our first-ever game jam product. It gave us a good idea for what to do next time around and brought us to meet a whole bunch of cool people. We had a blast and look forward to our next game jam, but first we look forward to seeing all you budding Indie Devs in MA at Boston Festival of Independent Games this Saturday, September 12. It’s gonna be a blast!

Special Thanks to:

Scratch, by MIT  –  Our Game Engine

Stonehill College  –  Our Venue

The team at OSGS which happened to be my family for this Jam. You guys rock!

Feel free to give our game a try. We’d love to play yours too! Just comment your game on this post with a link and we’ll play and vote! Want to ask us a question? Either post a comment and we’ll reply OR send us a tweet at @OpenSkiesGames.

Tags: ld33 postmortem, postmortem

Howdy everyone!

I had some spare time this fine morning, so I decided to get around to making that post jam version of The Banana Eater that I’ve been thinking about for a little while. Which you can find here: http://gamejolt.com/games/the-banana-eater/87926

Here’s a list of what I’ve accomplished.

Bug Fixes:

-Sent one desk back a layer to prevent weird graphical clipping issues.

-Stretched out a hallway to prevent accidental level completion.

Features:

-Added an animation to Gold Banana which will occur when you jump on top of him.

Those who have played this game probably don’t have much reason to come back, but for those of you who haven’t give it a shot yet this is a good version to play.

Have a nice day. 😀

Howdy! This was my third attempt at a Ludum Dare event, and my first submission. Thus, my first post-mortem.

Dominion is the fruit of my labour. It was built in Java using the Slick2D and JBox2D libraries.

Dominion (noun) – rule; control; domination.

Preparation

I went and bought a load of orange juice, soup, pasta, and a little celebratory chocolate. I already had the tea, so my body was ready.

I spent a short while writing a very basic generic-sidescroller codebase, which I wasn’t even sure I would use. I did, after pruning a large chunk of it away.

The compo started at 2AM local time (I’m British you see, pip-pip, etc.), I didn’t bother waiting up – I simply got up at 6AM and contemplated ideas over breakfast.

What Went Well

Ideas are nice: Unlike the last few attempts, I had an idea that I actually liked relatively quickly. It was born from an idea I’d had for another theme that I’d seen in the slaughter (and then the voting) – “Death Is Not the End”. You play as a spirit, and are able to possess people. When your body is killed, your spirit is released.
I tried thinking of alternative ideas for ‘You Are the Monster’ for a short while, and didn’t come up with anything better. My whole brain went ‘hey, what the hell’ – ghosts are regarded as monsters, in the supernatural sense of the word – and I began elaborating on the idea, ‘scribbling’ whatever cool stuff came to mind into a Word doc. In the end, I probably only got about 60% of what I originally envisioned, but I guess that’s how it goes!
To quote the first line in my ideas document – “Dominion is a game about controlling the bad guys and doing your dirty work via them.”
It didn’t turn out exactly like this, but the general concept stuck.

Hold your breath: I CREATED ART. Holy hell, stop the presses. I managed to create art that isn’t good, but isn’t necessarily eye-wateringly bad, as I expected it to be. I used a lot of noise in my art – I like how it adds a kind of discount texture. It also provided a theme to the artwork, so I stuck with it for consistency. Without the noise, everything is solid colours and would look rather bland. Most of it is made with basic geometries mangled and/or smashed together.
I went for a dark colour scheme – given that you play as a ghost, it seemed appropriate. The game takes place at night. A mountain range can be seen in the background. It’s a little nonsensical given that what little story there is puts you in a ‘town’… nothing looks even remotely town-y, but let’s roll with it.

Alone: I was left alone all weekend. No distractions, no nonsense – just me and my PC, ‘Susan’. Bliss.

Basically everything not mentioned below: For the most part, development went pretty smoothly.

What Went Wrong

Newton’s downfall: The physics. Oh man, the physics. I wasted a load of time trying to get the movement/jumping mechanics working well; the standard I managed to attain in the end is far from great – jumping/falling is way too slow, and makes the platforming aspect no fun at all. A lot of the reviews on my entry have mentioned this – believe me guys, I know! It’s like platforming under water.
As mentioned previously, I used JBox2D – this is a Java port of the Box2D physics library (C++). I had very little experience with it, and some Googling told me that it was not a good idea to use it for a platformer – I kept with it to ensure I’d finish on time. I like JBox2D, I’ll try and get a better configuration going – if that fails, I’ll explore other options or write my own system.

Level ‘design’: There are three levels in Dominion – the third and final one was rather rushed, I created it about an hour before submission. That sounds like a long time, but I still had numerous bugs to patch, audio to add, and a menu screen to create – the latter never even made it. Submission hour was 2AM local time, so here I was creating a level at around 1AM having slept about eight hours over the entire weekend. The level is harder than I intended it to be – you need to be very conservative of your ectoplasm. If you are, you can complete it with around a minute to spare – if not, you’ll barely make it or you’ll run out of time. If you are not careful and run out of ectoplasm, you will have to wait for it to regenerate which is no fun at all.
The second level is probably my favourite. It’s the one that looks most like some thought went into it.
Fun fact: the names of each level are based on cemeteries near my home town.

World: In the corners of tiles there are gaps in the gravel-y stuff. It’s not a big deal, but the game would have looked much nicer if I had gotten around to fixing that.

Oops: Morning II, I wasted an hour or so trying to squash a bug in NPC movement where the NPC would not register a clipped tile in front of it and would continue walking into a wall / object indefinitely. Due to a monumental balls-up, I was accidentally adding its move direction to its position twice during a loop, so it was checking the tile in front of the tile in front of it. *sigh*
See, this is why we can’t have nice things.

Bugs: Just after submission, I noticed a horrific game-breaking bug that I had managed to completely miss while play-testing in my sleep-deprived state, as well as a several other more minor (but still pretty nasty) ones. Embarrassingly enough, the game did not reset properly. Seriously. Once you died or changed level, the last level would continue happening – countdown, NPCs, and all. Duh. You would inevitably lose.
The next day, I patched that along with the other nasty ones and an oversight or two, and updated it. These were very minor changes, as permitted by the compo rules. They are included in a changelog in the download.

Missed the cut: As mentioned previously, there were a lot of things that didn’t make it into the game. Most notably:

• NPCs being able to fight off the possession: The unused ‘durability’ personality category was devised for this use – the more ‘durable’ the person, the more they can endure, the harder they are to possess. This would have been cool.
• Ability to shoot: I wanted the player able to shoot while possessing a criminal (notice that they have guns). There are no projectiles in the game, but your host is technically ‘shot’ if you are found out to be possessing someone. Perhaps it would have made the game too easy.
• Cosmetics: Some sexy particle effects would have been nice, as would some sort of transition from spirit to body and vice versa.

Conclusion

What Next?

On with my current personal project – “The Temple of Light” (hopefully I can douse the flames as it crashes and burns) – and back to university for the second year on my Computer Science degree. I’d love to participate in MiniLD 62 if I have time!

I had fun participating and genuinely look forward to LD34 – hopefully I won’t be too busy to join in.

–

This was not very techy / in-depth. I’ve seen some really interesting post-mortems from other developers detailing exactly how they went about working their magic, and this is not that – mainly because there’s nothing innovative or particularly complex in the game. However, if you’re curious about how I went about doing something, do feel free to take a look at the source code, leave a comment, or get in touch with me. Thanks for reading!

With little over a week left in the voting period, here’s a quick recap of my thoughts on this LD.

I, like many others, used reverse Pac-Man as the core idea, with the added change that while you’re technically the baddy, in this game you are role-reversed once more and Pac-Man is the hunter. It’s like role-reversal Inception, that guy Nolan’s got nothing on me.

Play it now!

You’re Pinky the ghost and you need to find keys in the Pac maze to open up the door to the ghost base while avoiding the mindless Pac-Abominations who can kill at but a touch. That’s really kind of it, concept wise. Navigate maze, find keys, avoid walking spheres, win.

Last time I used the 2D canvas implementation but since I’ve been busy with 3D and OpenGL 4 in my C++ library, this time I wanted to experiment with WebGL. So far, I have ignored the “Don’t learn new things during a Jam” mantra as I am a stubborn fool, but it has been in my favour, if not always in the game’s. So in PN, you move around a 3D extruded version of the pac maze.

First, I went for 1st person view, but I wanted a 3rd person camera, because 1st person would have just been _too easy_. Sigh. Since I wanted to keep it low profile and compatible, I couldn’t use the Pointer Lock APIs and keyboard controls are more like directional pads than sticks so I went with 3D of the late 1990s, in the glory days of the PSX. Fixed cameras. This was a major gamble as I had never done anything like this before. The decision was both good and bad.

✅ The good parts were that I put the cameras up high on the wall, so to speak, to give an oppressive feel of you being watched in the darkness.
? The bad was that switching between camera points becomes disorienting quickly when there are no landmarks or distinguishing features to help your mind orient.
? Additionally, I had to spend a _lot_ of time tweaking both the exact positions of the cameras to be far enough but not too far and in code rejecting cameras that can’t see you or are too far away. It’s very easy to end up with quickly oscillating camera viewpoints and the only reason that is not the case here is because I put in all the time to avoid it, which I should have been using for things like sound or other things.

✅ Coming from desktop GL 4, learning WebGL was surprisingly easy and fun. The feature set is so limited that if you are familiar with the core concepts of 3D programming, you’re up and running very quickly. That was fun.
? I didn’t have time for any audio, which would have helped immersion and atmosphere immensely. It was on my list but even with 72 hours I just did not get to it.

✅ I was able to quickly prototype the level by having it be a simple image. Using a PNG with the color channels having specific meanings I had the full Pac maze available for both level mesh generation, collision testing, camera placement and AI path placement. This was essential to dev speed.

<– Black = wall, blue = AI path, Green = camera

? I was so busy with cameras and getting it done, I never really acted on the fact that the Pac maze is too just not a good fit for this 3rd person camera view. Everything looks the same. I applied a colour gradient over the whole maze for basic guidance, but it was not nearly enough. I should have customised the playing field and/or added distinguishing features/marks.

In the end though, I had a start and end screen and a working game, I had a lot of fun and I learned new things. All good stuff.

And I’m continuing this vibe and will make one game a week for a while. I’ll post updates on my Twitter if you’re interested.

Hi everyone,

I could finally take some time and revisit my LD33 entry: Brainless Attack. It’s a reverse tower defense game. Thankfully, a lot of people have left their feedback, even though I couldn’t play as many games as I would like (thus, my coolness is not very high ). As some have pointed out, the game often felt like you can’t do much, besides spawning as many monsters as you can. I wanted to improve on this. It took me quite some time to find an acceptable solution.

You see, when I started the competition, I thought of making the towers quite slow. They would lose time turning and could be overwhelmed by sending hordes of monsters from different vectors on them:

It is a lot of fun to see hordes of little monsters, but it turned out to be quite chaotic, leading to some not seeing a strategy at all. The compo version utilizes a global launch cool-off (visualized via a green circle around your monster-cursor). In the end, I decided this was not a good idea to start with. I switched to having a cool-off for every individual launch-pad:

The cool-off is visualized by a “clock”-like bright area inside, which starts filling the launch-pad as soon as you’ve used one. This leads to a new possibility: overwhelming a tower by sending multiple monsters at it at the same time. Luckily, this allowed for some quite intricate levels, which can be solved by proper timing and the correct order of monster-launches:

I spent some time on exploring possibilities of additional elements on the map. Since the game is called Brainless Attack, I wanted to keep the monsters dumb. All they do is running brainlessly towards the castle. But the environment can be as clever as it needs to, creating a challenge for the player. The first additional element I tried and liked is sand:

OK, this might not look like sand too much, but you have to believe me here 😉 Sand slows down the monster, allowing for new situations and a bigger challenge. Hopefully, I will be able to explore many more possibilities, like moving platforms, catapults, water (don’t know what it would do, yet) and other tower types, like area-damage-tower or freezing-tower. I wish I had much more time for this!

Here are 3 games that I selected both because I liked them but also because they deserve more votes.

Fright Night : you play has a serial killer. You need to be discreet to approach your victims and fast to kill them before they run away. This game has a really original gameplay.

Damned : You play as a monster trying to get its prey. The search mode is purely amazing. The art of the game is unbelievable. You should really try it.

Starvin’ Sasquatch : This is an original take on the stealth genre. This is a very fun game with nice graphics.

And if you still have some time you could also check mine 😉

Since i had so much fun on my last LD‘s music, i decided to polish it. So here it is : a take on the gouls and ghost theme.

Hope you like don’t hate it ;p

Is this possible? Just wanted to crunch my own numbers

Well, two weeks past the submission, I guess it’s time to finally write my post-mortem! If you want to checkout the game here’s the link!

Preparations

So, this was my 2nd entry on LD! I’m still learning how to develop games, and LD is where I see how my skills developed and what are the next steps (aside from the challenge itself).

My last entry was really fun to make, but I was really frustrated in two aspects: graphics and audio. I have a programmer background and although I love drawing and playing music, I know I suck at them ^^; So in the last three months I trained both of them…at least tried to xp These last months had been really tiresome and since those are skills that I’m not very good at it was really hard to get progress. My drawing and pixelart training demanded a lot of time, but it was worth it, while my music training is still on progress~. Since I was so focused on them I barely developed programming skills though, and it reflected on the game.

So as LD33 came, I really didn’t feel confident, but well, that’s just life, and I wouldn’t miss it by any chance!

Planning the game

So came the theme announcement, and I was pretty lost. I wrote a bunch of ideas in my whiteboard, couldn’t decide on anything… all of them seemed so… trivial… So I went to take a shower, and there I had the idea of the game xp

The player would be a little elven girl named Anya, but now the humans see elves as monsters, so they began a slaughter. And so Anya had to make a choice to escape the city avoiding all humans or become the monster they feared and kill them.

The monster the humans feared.

The mood was clear, it had to be dark, the player should feel the city burning. It would be hard to kill humans, Anya is just a girl after all. Escape without killing would be even harder. Too many humans watching the road, so Anya would have to use the shadows and be as quiet as possible to get past the guards.

But of course, there wasn’t enough time to do everything I wanted ^^; Let’s see then what went right and what went wrong!

What went right

The art

The long time I spent training my pixelart skill was really worth it! I was finally able to make decent animation that I was satisfied with. Of course I wasn’t sure if people would like it, but I had a lot of great feedback on the style!

Finally she was fully animated!

On my training I learned a lot of important concepts that I applied when making the art. The most important one I think was coherence. Even though I can’t make better things than pixelart, since everything is in the same style it just feels right.

The music

Although I really like to play music, I never really composed anything. I did learn music theory but I was never able to apply it to anything really. And since I didn’t had time to make any serious composition before the LD I was pretty scared to make something. But I knew it was crucial to give the right feeling to the game.

At first I was going to use LMMS to make my music, but when I started composing I decided to use BoscaCeoil instead, and that was a great decision! It was way easier to make something fast in BoscaCeoil, and I was able to use their built-in midi and the Chinese scale, so composing was much more smooth. I wasn’t entirely with what I composed, but I received positive feedback on the mood, so I’m still happy for accomplishing it!

The mood

The mood had to be just right. It didn’t really matter if I ended up with poor mechanics. For this entry the most important thing for me was how players perceived my interpretation on the theme. It wouldn’t make sense for me making a great stealth game but without any meaning nor impact. I spent a lot of time choosing the elements, the colors and so on to give the players the right atmosphere of the game, and I think I managed to do it ^^

The city on fire, the blood graffiti. What a pleasant sight!

What went wrong

The art

Yeah… So I was able to make fine pixelart, but at the cost of my first 24 hours. Since I’m not really use to making art and I still didn’t master GIMP, it was really time consuming and tiresome. I almost gave up while I still didn’t finished it >_<. I also still don’t know very well how to place or animate sprites, so my program was really inefficient. I had some problems with the light shader too, something that I still didn’t learn properly.

The mechanics

As I said before, I didn’t have much progress in my programming skills. So when I made the game it was my first platformer. Had several bugs, I had to program the stage manually, placing every element, and I didn’t really know how to use Box2D T_T. I didn’t have time to implement all features that I wanted too, such as hiding in shadows, noise mechanics, more light mechanics, but you can only do much in 48 hours ^^;

The big mistake

And so, after much testing, making sure everything was in their correct place I submitted the entry with less than 15 minutes to deadline… And I didn’t playtest with anyone else beside me >_<. I had a lot of complaints about the controller that I didn’t realize since I tested it so much and got used to it. Of course the controls were suppose to be hard, but I didn’t want to frustrate people… Some more things such as font color, some simple stuff like skipping intro, and some bugs could have been solved if I had playtested in other computers and other people…

What’s next

And thus I finished a very challenging LD for me. I got a lot of things right, and I’m very glad for it! But also many things that I still need to learn! My next steps will be learn more about music composition, rewrite my engine, studying more thoroughly  OpenGL and shading, and practice more pixelart! As for my game, I really think I should continue developing it, but I still have much to learn… Maybe after my new engine is made I will try to publish it ^^~

Great job everybody!!

Below is duplicated from my own site: Twoplus Games. Not-yet-postmortem because I need to see the score before calling a postmortem 😛

TL;DR: Had an amazing Ludum Dare, one week to go for rating LD33 games, so go play my game (available as web, windows, osx, linux):

Play PokEscape now!

Interpretive Dance

Last Ludum Dare, I went in with pre-conceived notions of what I was going to make, and I felt it would have been better if I didn’t. This time, I went in with a blank canvas. Hell, I didn’t even look at the theme list to prepare myself.

The theme was You Are the Monster – a theme quite a few jammers bemoaned because it’s quite close to a theme a few LDs back – You Are the Villain. I wasn’t around back then (darn kids, right?), but I vaguely had the feeling it was done before. I didn’t care though, brainstorm commenced, there were a few decent ones, but when our chatter made me laugh out loud, I knew I had to do it;

You’re a monster. You’re a pocket monster (pokemon). You’re the lamest pokemon ever. You’re Magikarp. No, you’re so lame, you’re Magicrap. But you want to be the best you can be. Which is Gyrados. No, Gyradeuce. The crap puns flowed. I laughed, and off I went.

A stealth game where you have to eat your cover

That was the final destination of the core mechanic brainstorm, and that turned out to be super important. There were many interpretations of that core mechanic alone – Initially the game was not going to be on a grid, and physics-based, so you would dash around the place and slide and roll, etc. A turn-based version was also considered. But eventually a real-time, grid-based system was decided upon because it was actually the most predictable in terms of building and balancing.

Art priorities: 1. Fast, 2. Acceptable

The process was fairly straightforward, I made placeholder art because I didn’t want to spend too much time on art in the beginning, and just like the previous LD, I didn’t really get a chance to update them later. I think this is pretty much going to be the norm rather than the exception. Make okay placeholder art, but don’t waste time on them initially.

I’m privileged in this regard because I’m an artist/designer primarily. But don’t worry, what advantage I have on art I make up in shortcomings on my coding side.

Three dee two dee

The one interesting thing that I feel like is worth talking about technically and art wise is the 3D/2D effect that I have, where the sprites order correctly. Anyone who knows about z-sorting knows it’s a chore, and I didn’t feel like making the game constantly read y values and re-assigning them to different layers at runtime. So I tinkered and came up with this:

By tilting all the sprites at an angle, they overlapped correctly without having to programmatically set each sprite’s layer at runtime. The camera is a perspective camera with a limited field of vision, so it looks 2D, but is set in 3D.

I really liked how the effect came out – there’s a little 3Dness to it but still has the 2D charm that I love. And I didn’t need to make polygons 😛

In action

First of all, thanks very much for all you who played and rated and talked about it! 😀

Initial feedback on the game was super cool  It’s currently sitting on 110 ratings, which I think is the highest I’ve had (though I can’t confirm this, don’t know how to look up past rating counts).

There’s also been a bit of coverage by some really awesome people 😀

By Indiegames.com

By Jupi

By AmyNapkins

By LarryChupacabra

Thanks for reading! If you have a moment, try it out for yourself?

Play PokEscape

After two weeks of hard work, I’m proud to present the post compo version of my chiptune rhythm game, Melody Muncher Deluxe!

Link: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=7285

Please please please try it, especially if you were experiencing input lag issues with the 48hr version, as that should all be fixed now!

I’ve implemented a slew of extra features, including better timing code, animated backgrounds for every level, configuration options, high score saving and loading, a new scoring system, particle effects, more stages (and more music!), a brand new mechanic, and of course, EXPERT MODE!

I’ll let these pretty screenshots speak for themselves:

Underwater stage

Pretty backgrounds.  Also, a new enemy type — hold notes!

One of the hardest songs in the game on expert mode.  You have been warned.

Particle effects!

Full soundtrack – TWENTY THREE (23) SONGS!

By the way, all 23 songs are included in the new extended soundtrack.

Download the extended soundtrack here!

I’ll be writing up a full post-mortem on Melody Muncher sometime soon, so look out for that, too!

Hey! Did you like The Trial of Tyrone Rex? Did you dig those sweet melodies humming modestly in the background?  Well now you can listen them loudly right up in yours ears!  That’s right, the soundtrack for Tyrone Rex is now available on Soundcloud!  Download it! Show it off to your friends!  Bang your head violently to the smooth piano verses riddled about this game’s score!

Go check it out, yo.

Tags: ludum dare #33, music, OST, the trial of tyrone rex

I’m only 2 weeks late, that’s not that bad.

Our game for Ludum Dare 33, Dis-or-der, turned out pretty well.

What went well:

• Story
• Music
• Narration
• Tossing USB drives across the room
• Programming was done quickly

Most of the gameplay was finished on Friday night. The story came out interesting, but dark. Very dark. It’s amazing how fun it is to play catch with large USB drives at midnight.

What didn’t go well:

• Graphics could be better
• Occasional background noise in narration
• Not getting many ratings

I’m not happy with the graphics this time, even though they’re about equivalent to last year’s. Maybe I’m harder to impress now. We’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback, but in terms of shear amount of ratings, we had more last year. I blame the fact that this is late, and my ratings shall now zoom to the hundreds!

Enjoy this animation of Detective Pocket.

Play and rate here: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=50639

I finally had some time to do a quick update on the game.

• Better invisibility (shadow stays visible)
• Minor AI fixes
• Quicker player attacks
• Bosses properly colored to match their classes
• All enemy types introduced in the first 4 levels
• Random dungeon direction

Try the game here! The web version is updated, the downloads are the old ones.

My time has been split between working on Greetings, Human, and some other, less digital game projects, but I wanted to share some of the aesthetic progress I’ve made since the compo.

Sketches of possible alien heads/features.

Heads designed in Illustrator and rendered in Unity.

Updated UI implemented in Unity.

I’ve also been doing deeper research into cultural dissonance and what makes cultures different. There’s obviously a lot more than just saying hello and goodbye, including things like:

• Rites of passage
• High-context vs. low-context
• Class systems
• Values (personal, material and societal)

Tags: board to bits, gamedev, greetings human, LD33