I will stream LD games for the next few hours!
What games will I stream? It is entirely up to YOU, dear reader!
Suggestions and self-promotions are not only welcome in chat, I ask you to do just that!
Say your own game, a friend’s or just one you liked and I will play and rate it.
Join me here: twitch.tv/eemmbbeerr
Presenting my jam entry:
Raided
Fairly simple you eliminate Courageous Adventurer attempting this All new In town raid boss.
The enemy starts naive, with foolish one man show, and as they get slaughtered they wisen up, come in bigger groups, send stronger opponent and even party up.
While you can not become any stronger (boss dont level up) you can change up your skill arsenal to better deal with the wave at hand. (but really, screw strategy, just wreck havoc as a boss should)
Oh, after death you respawn to the last wave you reached, So just keep trying till you get it. (Well, you also have to kill the peaceful villagers you suprise)
Game features progressing 20 waves before going into random waves (still increasing in difficulty). Wave 40 is where its at!
So try it here!
Not perfect, but hope you like it!
It’s a “Syndicate-like” where you battle green monsters. Your job is to cleanse the world. The game comes with a “dehumanizer”, a message ticker teaching you to disregard the Monsters. You can hypnotize the small frightened monsters and use them as shields or additional forces. Let them walk into the line of fire, while you stay safe! Try it, rate it!
The part where you’re the monster is that your “Perception Correction Device” starts glitching, showing that the Monsters, the Greenies, bleed red and aren’t monsters at all. The small passive monsters that you can hypnotize and use as “Human shields” are actually… children.
Here’s where you’re *really* a monster; you always knew the small monsters where actually children, albeit monster children. Only when they were demonstrated to be human were you upset.
Animated gif
Super Monster Fighter is a brawling game: your mission is to crush other monsters and destroy the city. Show the world you’re the one true monster!
This game supports game controllers. Play with your friends (or AI) in local multiplayer mode with up to 4 people.
Play now HERE and vote for us THERE.
Have fun
After struggling with several bugs, constant black outs during development and a flu, I managed to make it to the compo!
I made this game using solely MagicaVoxel, a free voxel editor that is open source and super kickass!
My game (link to Ludum Dare profile) for this theme is a clone of basic cat and the mouse game. Everything was done by me. You can find out about the story by activating certain beacons when collapsing on them.
I’ll be adding a HTML 5 version soon enough. Everything was done in Unreal Engine 4. I wanted to make the game to look like a raycast game from the Doom era. Hope you like it!
Controls:
Movement: WASD+mouse
Attack: Left Click.
How to run:
First be sure to have UE4 pre-requisites installed. You can find them in:
<Folder Name>\TheEmpty\Engine\Extras\Redist\en-us
Then go ahead and run the game by running the .exe on the root folder.
Links:
Tags: final, MagicaVoxel, making of, Unreal Engine 4
Are you ready to use ur muscle tha u recently and illegally got to REVEEENGEE(expcpet legs cuz u know, skip the leg day!)??
Use punch, barbell area atack and trhow some weights on ppl that used to laugh at u!! (u can kick to, but its not very effective..)
Use the bounciness of ur muscle chest to bounce back projectiles!
Cutscene + tutorial + 2 levels + boss level (REALLY HARD – not impossible)
Skill + cooldown system :>
RAAAAAAAAAAATE here 😀
After giving a try to UE4 for this Ludum Dare, I’m seriously thinking about going back to Unity (used version 4 before, a little bit, for LD28). UE4 is slow on my computer (Intel Hd 5000), makes it heat up and the material editor takes ages to refresh and fails to give instant visual feedback to the changes.
I really liked the blueprint system still.
So in Unity I saw they have multiple visual programming plugins now. What plugin would you pick yourself, looks like Playmaker got thousands of users, what is your Ludum Darer experience with it eventually ! and compared to Unreal Engine ?
Waiting for answers !
Trying to export to html5 with UE4 atm !
I’ll be streaming LD entries starting from now!
Feel free to suggest your game or someone else’s : self-promotion is welcome!
I’ll play the suggested games and rate them.
See you on http://twitch.tv/uly_ !
We’ve added a downloadable link for OSX systems.
Enjoy and hope you will give us feedback about our game!
Game Link: Little Prankster
This was my first time doing music for LD and it was a blast. Will definitely be coming back. Full soundtrack is below.
The game is called “Fire Fight”. You beat up fire hydrants and boxes of puppies in order to collect “Fire Power” and assume your Demonic Form. There are two versions of every piece of music in the game: one version that plays during your Normal Form and one version that plays during your Demonic Form. Both versions are pretty over the top.
It took me all 3 days to do 8 minutes of music and SFX. I would have liked to have worked faster; I got asked to do more than one game and it would have been fun to do more than one. But I realized that this is pretty much as fast as I can work.
That being said, some people contacted me for music at the very last second; don’t wait until that late! Maybe I could have planned in advance how to do more than one game, if I had enough warning time.
Side note: I’d like to rate everybody’s game, but I guess I can’t vote since I wasn’t the one who posted our game… oh well. I’ll still be playing them.
“Fire Fight” is here: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=55627
They’re a little heavy because I didn’t prune down the runtime size. Figure it’s enough just to get ’em up
My first LD!
What went right:
Visuals
Absolutely nailed my Laser control + VFX on the first day.
Really, really, really happy with the results. I’m definitely going to make use of lasers in future projects if they turn out as well as this.
I’m no artist, but I’m very happy with how my low-poly buildings turned out too.
Unity
This was my first time using Unity as anything more than a 2D engine, so I’m very happy with how quickly I got decent-ish results using it as it was supposed to be used, as a 3D engine. My first time using ‘out of the box’ features like navmeshes, global illumination, camera post processing effects, etc all turned out very nicely, and making things in actual 3D is a lot less scary to me for future projects! Performance was also pretty good, even without any time for any form of optimisations (and I am spamming out particle effects and churning through destroy / instantiate gameobject loops like I just don’t care)
What went wrong:
Theme
Didn’t like it, and hoped it wouldn’t win. Ah well.
That’ll teach me to actually vote next time.
Preparation
As in: I did none. This is my first LD, and I just sort of assumed you had to do everything from scratch. Later reading of the rules it seems using existing codebases is fine, so I could have saved myself some headaches with a bit of prep work instead of on the fly debugging and trying to remember how commands work.
Unity
I backup code + assets regularly, but a nasty infinite loop I hadn’t noticed had me force killing Unity (you don’t force terminate infinite loops with an error, unity?), and I lost a big chunk of work I had been doing in the scene(you dont autosave, unity?) as well as corrupting some prefabs, so with a literally unplayable game as a result I decided to opt-out of the compo, and take an extra day to rebuild rather than ragequit completely.
Scope
In a way I was ready for this, as I built each ‘section’ of gameplay individually, so I was ready to run with whatever I had done in time and it still technically be a game (in that it has a clear fail state and can be restarted) but as a result of running out of time it ended up as not a particularly good game.
I’d intended to have enemy tanks spawn that you could kill, and instead of it being time-based, the little people you can eat would restore health that the tanks would take away.
There are still elements of this (people are called ‘food’ in my code, and I have an unused targetting cursor for ‘enemy’) and the garages that the people run to were intended to hide tank spawns, but… I think I got away with surgically removing this entire mechanic without it being too obvious its missing in the end result.
TL;DR
A+++ way to spend a weekend, would jam again
Tags: LD33, post-mortem, postmortem, screenshot, unity
I’ve just uploaded a timelapse of my compo game, Monster Academy. I forgot to press ‘record’ some times.. At the end you can see I was starting a new minigame, but I finally didn’t have time to finish it..
We’ve ported Little Prankster to run on Linux!
Download link is now up!
We really appreciate those who would love to give us feedback regarding our game! Thanks in advance guys!
Game Link: Little Prankster
This is my second Ludum Dare and I’ve never wrote a postmortem so forgive me if there is a format i’m overlooking. Between work and the rest of life I decided to dive in and take part in the jam. The theme “You Are The Monster” inspired me to work on an idea I’ve had floating around (and apparently many before me have had as well) to make a game where you play as the low-level fodder mob, The Slime. Far too long have slimes been abused and their peaceful forest homes encroached upon by adventurers on a journey to greater treasure.
What Worked Out:
Originally your slime grew and absorbed people and rats just by moving over them. When I changed this to having to mash the space bar in order to absorb an enemy I think this added a lot of needed interactively and gave me a better understanding of the monumental task a slime must go through to take on larger powerful prey. Finding the right rate for the growing and shrinking mechanic was easy enough to program. The far more difficult and time consuming task I was able to overcome was making the objects interact and look right with the slime. I really enjoyed how the arrows, humans, and skeletons slowly rotate in the slime and can move just enough to escape with difficulty. I think I did okay in the time I had with additional details such as the archers gathering arrows and the humans bleeding out when their flesh had dissolved.
What Didn’t Work:
Most of my poor time management went to programming small details I could of overlooked for the jam. It would of been far better for my project if I would of put more effort into the art and sound. I had imagined much more of a slope in the game play and difficulty. I ended up cutting out the rats and other creatures which you would hypothetically take on first. The rate of absorption when attacking the archers is far too slow and becomes tedious.
If I Continue:
I have a couple of more serious long running projects I try to not lose focus on (again) so i’m hesitant to start another side project. I’d like to add in more creatures, enemies, power ups, and general immersive flavor to the world. As well as redo the map, most of the artwork, and all of the sound. The controls and the rates of absorbing need adjustments. Additionally I’d want to fix the difficulty curve to go a little more in the way of Katamari, starting small and slowly growing large till you battle tougher enemies and devour a town.
What I’ve Learned From Jams:
I’m really bad at finishing projects. It really helped me having constraints and a deadline. What this jam has reminded me is the benefits and difficulties of working within a time constraint. In my personal projects I constantly find myself removing entire systems and rebuilding them . Nothing is ever good enough and i’ll stay stuck in a loop of “improvement”. The time constraint is also a difficulty as I didn’t have time to polish the aspects that would have increased engagement and I was forced to cut things I wanted to include, like animals. This makes me have sympathy for AAA developers who have to deal with budgets, time constraints, and knowing their failures will cost people their livelihoods.
Overall this Ludum Dare was a ton of fun and i’m finding awesome games. Good job everyone!
– Andrew, @SecularBaron, My Games
Tags: final post mortem, Slime
-> TWITCH.TV – HERE <-
Hello fellow game programmers !
Link in the stream comments your game and watch how I play it.
I’m going to be live every day from :
20:00 / 8 PM -> Bucharest, Romania Time / East Europe Time
13:00 / 1 AM -> New York, USA Time / East USA Time
10:00 / 10 AM -> Los Angeles, USA Time / West USA Time
(What time will be on your region when I stream)
Live gameplay / commentary of your Ludumdare games !
Hit that tasty follow button to see when I stream.
-> TWITCH.TV – HERE <-
My game is done. I called it The Net. It’s a stealth hacking game. It’s quite fun and challenging. Check it out.
I have something like 38 coolness or something but I can’t seem to get onto the rating page. I was wondering how you get onto it.
After we barely finished yesterday at 8pm, I forgot to compile OSX and Linux builds. We have them now! Fret not, for no bugs were fixed; you can still teleport out of the level, get catapulted by certain doors, and smooth criminal your way around the level. (Kudos if you figure out how to activate these glitches.)
When we originally compiled, we forgot to set the texture size, so it was a whopping 4k resolution and 500MB game size. Took us a minute to figure out why Dropbox was balking at the file. We compressed everything down to 1k last night before uploading, but didn’t take another screenshot of the game. The title screen on our game page is using the 4k textures. Below is an in-game shot with the 1k textures. Not too bad. It also helps that the game runs at 80FPS and not 20FPS. 😉
Generic scenery shot
My Ludum Dare experience didn’t go too horribly… in the duration I came up with 3 quite nice game ideas, 1 of which turned into my Ludum Dare game jam entry(the other 2 are potentially future projects).
When faced with the “You Are The Monster” theme, I started thinking of various classic video games, and trying to reverse the roles. At first I thought reversing Pacman would be a bit too ambitious, thinking the AI would be hard to program… but when I finally decided to hunker down and give it a try, it turned out it wasn’t so difficult(experimentation paid off!).
And that is how Pac Hunters came to be.
In Pac Hunters you take control of a single ghost(you switch to another one if you get eaten) and try to help corner the sadistic pacmen who are attempting to make off with your highly valuable ghost pellets! After catching all the pacmen in each level you will go to a new room with new challenges. It’s very important to keep the pacmen from ever reaching the powerups, if they do… it can be fatal. Don’t let them eat all your pellets either.
You can give the game a go right in your browser on the Ludum Dare page: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=4109
About halfway through the Jam I was reading the rules and discovered even the music has to be made in the time limit… which means no browsing the internet looking for a suitable track! Fortunately one of my composer friends was online and was happy to compose a track for my game! I don’t think the music could have been any better! Really impressed by my friend, Nicholas Short!
Thanks for reading and have fun!
-orange
Hey everyone!
First of all, thanks for all the comments so far. We really love reading them, and it’s great to see what you guys think of the game
So, if you wanna know who the people behind this game are, now you can check out the description, in the game’s page, and maybe even say hi!
Thanks again, and good luck to everyone!
Click here to go to the game’s page.
I’m gonna go back and try selling ice creams for now!
-Miguel
Some tripadvisor comments about us:
“I like the smell of hellburger in the morning. … it smells like victory.” Cit. Lieutenant Colonnel Kilgore.
“Mmfh mmmpfh ffmms!!!” Cit. Kenny.
“These sweet hellburgers make me almost forget about tacos…” Cit. J. Lopez.
“One ring to eat ’em all!” Cit. Sauron.
“Hey, this should be a my idea!” Cit Satan.
“Oh-oh-oh… Eating the third hellbruger right now, Chistmas delivery could be delayed, oh-oh-oh!” Cit. Santa Claus (missing since this last tweet)
If you want to try our special hellburger click here and don’t forget to rate!
Do you want to try the most difficult game ons Ludum Dare #33? And play the best story line with a insane sound design. Then Memory of a Psychopath is for you. Click the link below:
http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=40092
Dang it. I was really excited. So I added it to warm up weekend.
I just fixed some bugs for my game (score not resetting, bad colliders, etc). Check out My Cup of Fury!
I am sorry if playing it is a painful experience.
Just in case if you’re playing the HTML5 (WebGL) build on itch.io, your keyboard controls won’t work once the game is done loading. You need to “activate” the area where the game is embedded by clicking on the “Unity WebGL” logo first or anywhere around there, then click on the game’s screen itself. Now you’ll be able to move around with the keyboard.
Tags: 2d platformer, 2d unity, 48hcompo, badphysics, fire, flying monsters, LD #33, Saucer
I recorded a complete run of our jam game. If you like what you see consider stopping the video and experiencing it yourself by playing & rating the entry~!
Hi everybody,
We just added MUSIC to our entry : Don’t Sproutch Me!.
Don’t Sproutch Me! is about walking with giant feet through a city and avoiding to kill everybody. You are a poor creature victim of a scientific experiment that turned you into a gigantic monster. Be nice, don’t stomp on your friends and maybe you will find a cure that will get you back to normal.
Check it out !!!
Have sproutching fun 😉
Well, we finished the game! We actually stopped a few hours early due to being on UK time but we’re both really pleased with what we have achieved in the time. Our first Ludum Dare has been a really great experience so we hope we can come back for more next time. Here’s the link to the game for those who want to play it:
And some screenshots for those who just want an impression:
We’re going to let the dust settle for a few days, and after that we’ll probably do a post on our main blog where we summarize our Ludum Dare experience and talk about what we have learned.
Thanks to everyone who joined my Twitch chat room this weekend. My Ludum Dare 33 time lapse video for Monster Hotel is now posted for those who want to check it out.
Hello everybody!!!
This was our first Ludum Dare and we have to say that the experience was great!! A friend told me about this and the great community and I cannot agree more. Thanks everybody!
With this introduction done, we can show you our game!! It is our very first game and we learned a lot this 3 days. Everything was made from scratch (code, graphics…) and we are very happy with the result. Enjoy it!!!!
Another Ludum Dare is over… Time to play some games! I’m looking for games to play and rate so if anyone wants to have their game played, leave it in the comments to this post and I’ll make sure to play it! Also, as usual, I’ll leave a link to my own (incomplete) game to guilt trip you into playing it since I’ve played yours. Well I mean it is beneficial for the both of us so I’d assume you’d be willing to play it. Regardless, you’ve already gone beyond the point of no return. Bottom line is: Leave your game in the comments and I’ll play and rate it, maybe play my game too if you feel like it. Link:
http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=43866
Now that I’ve had a bit of time to recover, I thought it was best to write this post mortem while things are still relatively fresh in my head.
Play and rate my Ludum Dare compo entry (Climb Monster Climb!) here.
This was my second Ludum Dare compo. The first time around I jumped in head first and dedicated every waking minute to the game I was making. In fact, I ended up only getting 6 hours of sleep the whole weekend. That was rough. I was determined to not let that happen again, so I needed an idea with much less scale. I also wanted an idea that was a little off beat and wasn’t going to be the same as everyone else. I didn’t want to go in the direction of the monster causing chaos and destruction, so I thought, what if the monster wasn’t a bad guy? Let’s make the monster a friendly guy and make the villagers the villains. Thus was born the idea for my game. A game where the monster has to run away from the angry mob of villagers by jumping up through a tower, with things getting more difficult the higher you get.
One thing I’ve noticed about a lot of LD platformers is that the controls are usually pretty bad. So I spent a good amount of time tuning and adjusting the controls. I first started out trying to use Unity’s 2D physics engine, but that was turning out very poorly. I then decided to scrap that and do my own basic physics, just using Unity’s collision detection. That worked much better.
Once I had the controls working pretty well, I started working on randomly generating levels for him to jump on, but realized pretty quickly it was going to take a lot of work to write something that would scale the difficulty with the current height as well as never producing levels that are impossible to traverse. Instead, I decided to make templates of 4 levels each, assign them a difficulty and have the world generator choose one at random from the pool of choices for the current difficulty. That worked really well. Once I had levels he could jump through, I needed to add bonuses for him to collect and hazards for him to avoid. I wanted to give the game a humorous aspect, so I made the bonuses flowers, bunnies and teddy bears, all things that a typical monster would want nothing to do with. It gives him a child-like innocence. I also made him say silly things when he collected them. The hazards are typical spikes and fire. Nothing very original there.
By Saturday evening, I had a complete working game. Sunday was spent on polish. I decided I didn’t like the pixel art so I grabbed the Wacom pen and started drawing. The results aren’t perfect, but are better than they were and then I moved onto sound and music. One of the major criticisms I had on my last game was that the music didn’t match the mood of the game, which I completely agreed with. This time I decided to learn a bit more about music creation and dedicated a couple hours to it. The music in this game is much better, but not as good as I would like.
With a few hours left before deadline, I wanted to give the angry mob more character. Up until this point they were pretty much non-existent. The monster died if he hit the bottom of the screen, but that’s it. In my head, I felt the angry mob would work better if they were always off screen, but I thought it would be funny if they had speech bubbles that appeared periodically as you play, shouting absurdities as they pursued the monster. I think it turned out to be a nice touch. If you play, be sure to read what they have to say after they catch the monster.
Another last minute decision that I feel was a good one was assigning colors to the various difficulties. It was hard to tell what difficulty you were at, but by changing the colors of the platforms, it became easily possible to know where you were, but also to measure you progress visually compared to previous runs.
This post mortem has gone on way longer than I anticipated, so I’ll cut it off here. Overall, I’m very pleased with my game. It’s fun and challenging and relatively well polished. If you try it, please let me know what you think. I’m also pleased that I was able to get full nights sleep both Friday and Saturday night, which made the weekend much more pleasant. I had a blast in my second Ludum Dare and I can’t wait until the next one!
So, LD33 is over, and once again I made something: The Monster Within.
The theme was You are the Monster, and I wanted to really incorporate the theme into the gameplay mechanics for once (well yeah, Curved Curse did that, but the topic was very broad and there was no way but incorporate it into the gameplay itself).
Although you play a monster in The Monster Within, I took the theme a bit further. The theme reminded me of an exclamated “Look at yourself! You’ve become a Monster!”, something a movie wife might say to her increasingly out-of-control husband who just killed the neighbor that found out about the family’s dark secret.
The idea I came up with was the following: your main objective is to eliminate enemies from within a crowd of mostly civilians (in a generic top-down action game). However you turn into a Monster whenever you kill someone, which grants you a lot more power, but also impairs your senses; you can no longer differentiate between civilians and enemies. As a result, I figured, people would have to decide between two playstyles, going on a rampage and killing as many people as possible, regardless of their type, or trying to play strategically by memorizing the enemies in the crowd.
The Monster Within, normal and beast mode
Last weekend I found a nice workflow to draw the assets of Derpzilla. MyPaint is an excellent tool if you have a pen+tablet. It has an ‘infinite’ drawing space, so you can keep drawing various concepts until and look back what is best.
I’ve done this for Derpzilla as well and the result is one big canvas with all the try-outs and final assets. The result is fun to look back on. Take a look:
The timelapse is a nice addition to the canvas:
If you don’t know anything about HTML and CSS and are wondering how to integrate your generated web files to your Ludum Dare page, I’ve made a gist on Github to show what to remove and what to add in your index.html file:
You then just have to put it on a server with the .unity3d file, or get the public link of the html file if you’re using dropbox, and add it to your Ludum Dare page
Hello everyone! This is my humble list of favorite games. I’ve played around 60 games so far and while that’s not even a scratch in the surface of the 2500+ games this marvelous jam’s installment came up with, i’m posting here the ones i liked the most:
(Click the images to go to the respective game pages)
First of all, if you fancy sad stories, trolls, narration and trolls in ties , check out my entry: The Troll’s Toll,
Now, for my faves:
Camp Starvation
The concept is basic: you’ve got to be a monster and let people die if you want to survive at all. The complexity of it makes it quite scary and interesting
NotZilla
The Last Little Monster
Great mechanics here! With some polishing could turn out into a great product.
Child’s Play
Holy shit this game is more polished than stuff i’ve released commercially.
And it’s really fun. And cute. And might make your index finger go sore.
Loveless
A social experiment dressed up as a visual-novel-like game. The collective answers of the LD players will decide the ship’s fate. I really want everyone to play this one, the results could be amazing!
Dragon Tax Return Simulator
You pay mr Dragon, he fills up your tax return form.
This is why i love Game Jams.
Hello, folks! LD33 was my first Ludum Dare, and not only that, it was also the first game I’ve ever done by myself!
I must say, it’s really awesome when someone comment something about your game, it inspires you and give you motivation to keep doing it!
Definitely I can recommend Ludum Dare to anyone interested in Game Development or is afraid of doing their first game. Trust me, you won’t regret it.
So thank you for being so nice with me so far, and see you in December! I’ll definitely be joinning you guys again.
For those who haven’t seen my game yet: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=36594
It’s a really simple game, and doesn’t have any sound, but I’m happy I could make something in 48h!
Tags: 2D, compo, LD33, post-mortem, postmortem
For those of you using Google Chrome.
http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=56128
“Corruption 5” is a twisted little platform adventure game submitted for the competition inspired by The Fly movies. I’ve had to fix a few game breaking bugs since uploading it:
Since submitting I’ve also adding downloadable versions for Windows, Linux and OSX and, to help people with very old computers, I made it so pressing P toggles the post-processing shaders on and off.
The entry page is here if you want to have a play! It only takes about 5 minutes because, as usual, I ran out of time for level design. I did manage to get all the story in though, so that’s something!
Two hours go. This is going to be ridiculously close. #gamedev #LDJAM https://t.co/sjRVn8osdi
— Aye, Gore (@CharlotteGore) August 23, 2015
So yeah, another Ludum Dare has come, another one is gone. It was a fun weekend, and very instructive. This is why I love Ludum Dare: no matter how much the theme sucks, you can always have tons of fun!
Despite this being my 8th time in this compo (8 times? holy shit), I was still unable to complete the game in time for the compo. So here is another Jam entry. I am biting my tongue as I say this, cause I could have entered the compo if I didn’t do the same mistakes over and over. I am talking about mistakes that I did the first time around. Oh well, I still was able to finish the game (barely…), and now let’s see what happened.
The Theme
The weekend starts pretty badly with a theme that I could not have expected. There were so many good themes, and the one that got picked was one of those I hated the most. Also, wasn’t there a theme like this?
Oh well. No time to cry, need to brainstorm something. I wasn’t too blocked from the theme that I didn’t like, so thumbs up for me.
The Tools
Alright, so I have a small concept and I get my hands dirty. I thought about doing an interactive fiction game, but with a twist. So I load up Twine, and start writing to my heart’s content.
Uh, oh. Little problem here. I have never programmed in Twine, and didn’t do the warmup weekend. Will I be able to do what I want to do?
Psh, it is an interactive fiction. How much work it may ever require.
So I start writing, and I am deep into the first afternoon when I decide that the story is going out okay and need to implement the mechanics. And here things go grim. I realize that what I wanted to do required a rewrite of parts of the Twine engine. I could not do that in a week, let alone a week end. So I run head first into a dead end, and it hurts.
Here I made two big mistakes. The first one is choosing a platform without knowing its limits and powers. This way, I didn’t know that I could not do what I wanted to do until the end of the first day.
The second one, and perhaps the most important, is that I did not do my warmup weekend. I didn’t know how to use its macros, and wasted a ton of times trying to make it do what I wanted it to do.
So yeah, it is the end of the first day, 18+ hours into the compo and I have to start again from scratch. Stupid, stupid, stupid. This has happened too many times in the compos I have been in, I guess it is one of my sticking points.
Anyway, time runs, so we can’t stop and cry. Let’s keep moving.
Brainstorming
I realized another important problem about the game I was trying to create. I was doing it because I thought other would appreciate it, not because I wanted to see it made. This made working on it unneccessarily difficult because I was not doing something that I liked. So I knew I had to find a new idea.
I study the theme for half an hour, reflecting on the implications of it and how it could develop. This is when I found out about an idea I really liked. A monster that lives by eating its progenie. How that idea came into my mind is lost into the abyss of oblivion, but I knew right away that it was THE idea I wanted to work on for the rest of the weekend.
And so I did.
Picking the tools I know
I dusted off my old engien that I have been using for the last few ludum dares. It is a simple, quick’n’dirty engine that gets the job done without getting in the way. I was in doubt if I should use this engine or something else, like GameMaker or something like that. I ended up sticking with this, and it was a good idea. I know JavaScript very well and can program very fast with it. Also, having created the engine myself over time, I knew it inside out. Also, after struggling with spaghetti code for so many Ludum Dares, I start to understand the patterns behind programming, meaning that I can create code that won’t choke me when I turn my back.
This powerful combination let me flow the code without interruptions. I don’t remember being stuck for more than 5 minutes on a bug. The code base is quite robust, with global variables used only for constants and bigger, general purpose classes, and everything else passed by value. This takes a little longer to program, but the peace of mind I get is out of this world.
Making the simplest game possible
Another choice that made this weekend doable is the fact that the game I wanted to make was super simple (you can see it with your eyes). No multiple screens, very little moving sprites, super simple game mechanics.
This allowed me two things. First, I could explore a little, testing stuff out. There were so little things about this game that adding and removing feature was quite fast. Second, I could spend a little time into polishing the gameplay, testing it out and changing and tweaking things. This is something that I have never done in a LD game (jam or compo) because I always ended up submitting minutes before the deadline, or when I simply could not stay awake anymore.
This means that the game is actually playable (even if it quite obscure, I realize), and not a sewn together mess that I could barely look at.
Focusing on core gameplay first
Another stupid thing I avoided is focusing on details too much, too soon. I usually pass the weekend doing graphics and soinds, and end up panicking in the last few hours with programming and fighting last minute bugs.
This time around, I did all the programming first. I did the bare bones graphics just to understand what is going on, and then never touched them again until the gameplay was done. Not almost finished, done. This was HUGE. I cannot understate how important it is. When I realized how important is to do all the programming first, I thought I had found the Nirvana of programming. Coding is a complex matter, and requires memory, skill and precision. It is not something one can do under pressure, and this means that focusing on it first allowed me to get the best out of it.
Procrastination and Distractions
Reading the above, it may seem strange that I was unable to finish the game for the compo.
The fact is, I have been a little naughty. I only showed the good so far, but didn’t tell about my worst problem…
Procrastination.
Even though I loved the concept, even though I liked programming it, even though I really wanted to enter the compo, I still ended up getting distracted by other stuff. I watched crap on reddit for a couple of hours on Saturday, and watched videos on youtube for two hours on Sunday. While this may not seem like a lot, you have to consider that I had other things to do other than the Ludum Dare. All in all considered, I think that I wasted at least one third of the time I actually spent doing the game on distractions and stuff like that.
When you are in a compo where time is an important resource, procrastinating is a deadly sin. This is a big problem of mine, and I need to address it better cause it is very annoying and precuded me from entering a lot of compos in the past years.
Conclusions
But all in all, it was an amazing weekend. And best of all, I was able to finish the game! Horray! It is always good to send something in for the Ludum Dare, even if it sucks or it is severly lacking. It makes me feel like I have accomplished something.
This is all for now, I guess. If you want to check out my game, Grow, you can play it here. That said, thank you everyone that made this possibile and so much fun everytime!
Tags: grow, html5, postmortem
My entry 48 hour compo entry was Vale of Embers, a game where you play as a raid boss and must fend off various raiding guilds:
Sorry for such the late post: I literally finished my game then took vacation to New York. Pardon that.
I finished my first successful Ludum Dare! Surprisingly, it fell into the Compo because I had all the stuff necessary for it, as I did all the work from scratch, and in the right amount of time. You can view the project here
I learned so much from the LD experience, some programming related, some not. Here’s a simple list of what I think I learned this LD.
That’s just a tiny list of what I learned. I hope everyone else has had a successful LD, and I will start rating games within a few hours, once I get myself situation from my holiday.
Cheers!
-Eric
St. George’s Academy for Monster-Slaying Lasses
Because I had forgotten Ludum Dare was happening, I went cycling pretty much right at the start and came back to a message from killthealias saying “Friendly reminder, Ludum Dare starts in 10 minutes!”
The message was sent two hours ago.
Everything’s a bit more complicated than what went wrong and what went right, so instead of saying that, I’ll cover each section individually.
Characters
If I had a tablet, I would have drawn my characters with one. But I didn’t, and pixel art really doesn’t fit the visual novel category. So, I drew them on paper… and then I figured ‘if I don’t make any attempt to make them look like they’re not on paper, and continue that theme consistently, it’s not a flaw! It’s an art style!’
So, I did. And people seemed to like it. So I’d say this part was pretty good, though in a perfect world I’d have taken higher resolution pictures of the characters. But since that world is perfect… I’d have a tablet.
Backgrounds
I made my backgrounds mainly by taking photos and processing them to hell. Here’s an example of what I mean.
Before
After
And some of them, like the dorm, turned out great. I’m actually really happy with the library and hallway backgrounds.
Others… I didn’t have time to get a new, better, photo, and I don’t like them as much. The problem with these is that if I used someone else’s picture, it wouldn’t be a good enough derivative… so I had to use my own.
Ren’Py
I love Ren’Py. It’s an amazing, flexible framework for building visual novels in. It’s also the highest-level scripting language you will ever use in your life. It’s built on Python… which is already very high-level. So, yeah. I didn’t really have to program much of anything: it was all scripting.
Ren’Py Battle Framework
It turned out well, I guess. I didn’t have the time or knowledge to create a battle engine myself, but I’m going to make my own face-to-face battle engine soon, because it honestly wasn’t completely suited for the situation and I think I can make a lighter version. It didn’t seem very flexible, but I suppose it did the trick.
Music
There isn’t so much to say here! I made two songs, but… there were going to be more. Six songs, in the least. But music takes way longer than you’d expect (if you aren’t auto-generating it), and I didn’t have time for that in the end. The two that did make it into the game were apparently really catchy, though. So at least that’s good!
SFX
This is pretty much the audio equivalent of backgrounds: find a sound, record it, process it to hell. It worked.
I honestly think that this part went great. I spent most of my time writing. I went into this LD with the idea of a multi-path storyline… and I came out of it with a multi-path story line. There were a few elements (no spoilers here) that I foreshadowed and went over so. many. times. testing them, I thought “Nobody will be surprised.” And then everyone was surprised. It was great.
My one wish with the storyline is that I’d had a chance to draft it. All of the dialogue is a first draft: I’d write a section, then abandon it to the wolves. Write another section, abandon it. So it isn’t polished, and a lot of the writing is not-so-subtle. But I think it turned out pretty well! 😀
And that’s it for my post-mortem. 😛
You are the last one of them. A lonely knight, lonely standing against a never ending flood of hellish creatures. Your divine rifle, righteous fire to incinerate your foes, vile servants of the Devil himself; Yet there is to fulfill your destiny, your final quest. Now take your rifle. Bring vengeance to them and hope the rescue chopper will come and pick you up soon.
So, I’ve had a lot of nice comments regarding the puzzle mechanics in my entry, and I’m up for keeping on the work with more content and polishing, possibly some kind of future release if everything goes well.
But of course there are things to polish on! And I would like your suggestions.
The main critics I’ve gotten is that the input and collision is hard to grasp due to the perspective.
If anyone has suggestions of how that could be resolved I’m very thankful for your opinion.
My thought is that although totally top-down could be a more control-friendly option it makes the art style kind of tricky. Instead I thought it could be good to just visualize the collider more clearly by for example adding a distinct shadow or similar under players, aligned with the colliding area.
In case you might have some ideas, you can find my entry here, or just leave a comment below.
Created by by AgentParsec in the compo category. You play the beast of the Woods. Even knowing that I was the monster chasing poor humans in the woods, this game freaks me out. Great concept and execution. Favorite of the day.
Enter the woods : http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=12468
Our first entry to LudumDare ever and at least my main goal was just to deliver something complete. And we did! : )
http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=56176
My entry for the 48 hour compo Ludum Dare was Pedestrian Slaughterer, a game where you shall do your very best to slaughter as many pedestrians as you can because you’re a monster, however if you run out of bloodlust you lose! To your advantage you have a hovercraft to more easily slaughter more pedestrians quickly, however be aware if you hit something to hard you will fall off and lose!
Thanks for reading my post and have a lovely day because you are awesome!
Tags: final post mortem
2 days of my life compressed into 6min and 23se!
My game is here: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=21481
Now that Late for the Show is out and the Voting Period is in full swing, I’ve just finished the timelapse video for it.
I wasn’t expecting to finish something like this in 24 hours, I’m usually comfortable with 48 hours because at least I have two nights to plan things through, and it didn’t help that Lime stopped working correctly around 16 hours in and I had to quickly reinstall it through haxelib in order to get it working again.
If you haven’t already, go check out my game and vote on it. I’m currently playing as many games as I can and I’m enjoying quite a lot of them!
Tags: HaXeFlixel, Late for the Show, LD33, timelapse
Today I played these games:
– Akumajou Crapula
– Lunchtime Ninja
– Hell Wars XVIII: Soul Harvest
– Monster Attack!
– Gorgezilla
– Growing Up
– The Troll Toll
– The Mammoth: A Cave Painting
– Don’t Crawl
– Massacre Monday
I enjoyed playing them and I hope you’ll enjoy the video.
BTW, at FGl.com we a going to held mobile-only GameJam on the 28th of August. The theme voting is going on now.
Run, Edmund ! Ruuuunnn… Hum, this way : http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=40976
Thanks for playing…
I have just small info about my game… From some reason i used uncompressed audio… Wel i unchecked it now and game have cca 8 mb instead of 60 so… You can download game almost 10x faster XD
Dat closet though
A game about monsters snatching babies? Got it.
Those damned teddybears though patrolling the coridors.
Play it here: BooByeBaby
Ahoy, to people who may have played my game, or to those who would like to, I recently added a “finished version” with the last two floors that I was going to make, but ran out of time. The only other difference is that the dialogue box is a bit larger to assist legibility. If you are judging still, simply disregard the last two floors content, but obviously you can feel free to comment/enjoy it <3
Just a quick FYI: a lot of people complained that they wanted a bit more challenge, so one of the floors is significantly harder then the previous floors (though honestly still not that bad.)
Again, thanks for your time, looking forward to your comments, and I am considering turning this prototype into a full game in time (we shall see.)
Inspiration can come from the most unlikely places!
So there I was on Friday night, watching some YouTube videos on Unity while I was waiting in the IRC Channel for the theme to be announced. I had my list of game ideas up and had gone over them several time making sure I was happy with each of the ideas I had thought of for the different themes in the final round. ‘You Are The Monster’ only had one idea next to it, sadly I wasn’t really happy with it but it was one theme out of 20 and only had a 5% chance of winning… or so I thought :). 9 O’clock pm EDT rolls around and the theme is announced.
My heart sank… ‘You Are The Monster’ wins the final round. I looked at my idea again, still not happy with it. So I begin to brainstorm again for the next hour and I come up with something. To be honest I’m not really sure why I think of anything for this theme as it can be interpreted in many ways. I should of had a hundred ideas for this theme! But I didn’t… With the idea I did have I started in on making some art for it, and I come up with a few different designs.
I played around in Photoshop making some animations, brought the sprites into Unity and played around with the sizing of them. Then something weird happened… I lost all motivation to continue with this idea of mine… in fact I hated the idea… and I was back at square one… sigh… it was just about 2AM now… I gave up and went to bed.
Woke up before 9AM, still didn’t have a game idea yet. I make myself some breakfast, walk the dogs and basically just mill around the house. Around 10:30-ish I decided to see how everyone else is fairing on the LD website. I scrolled through the different posts and then I came upon a pic in one post. I stared at it for a few minutes and just like that I had my game idea! I again went back to Photoshop and mocked up some art, created my project in Unity and began the long journey of turning my idea into a game.
Now on to the Post-Mortem…
What Went Right
Let’s start off with some good news shall we :).
1. The Art – Not being an artist by any stretch of the imagination I was still really happy with the art I created. I am especially proud of the gold coins I made.
2. The Idea – Once I knew what I wanted to do I was able to easily flesh it out quickly.
3. Experience with Unity – This hindered me a little last LD, but this time around I was much more confidant.
4. Not a lot of bugs – This was a blessing It also helped me focus on getting the game complete instead of having to go back and fix things too much
5. Effective Time Management – A great skill to have for a Game Jam!
What Went Wrong
1. Collisions, Collisions, Collisions – Yep, I had problems with them again! Seem I was not aware a BoxCollider2D has a top and a bottom. This caused me about 20 minutes of frustration :).
2. The spawning of the enemies – While the spawning works, I do think I could have made it better than what was implemented
3. More player abilities – This of course comes from hindsight, but I’m thinking I should have added another ability than just shooting. like a breath bar that gives you the ability to breath fire that covers a small radius in front of you. Once the bar was depleted it would take like 30-45 seconds to recharge.
4. Knight’s Sounds – I’m not sure why but coding the sound so you could hear the knights death cries too longer than expected. I think it had something to do with a change that was made in the way Unity 5 handles prefabs. I could be wrong :/
If you’d like to Play and Rate my game, you can find it here. See you all in December for LD 34!
Here’s footage from the end of the Jam when I got the first mobile build done. I uploaded the APK online if someone want’s to try it on their phone. I think this game is the most finished jam game I have ever been part of. It was amazing weekend, made a game, made new friends. This is what I want to keep doing. Digital entertainment for life!
http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=30979
Love
Tags: android, intergalactic, LD33, Love, machine
Hey, It’s Nicholas, I’m a game developer. I’ve submitted a game to LudumDare, and while I don’t expect to win, I’d really apreciate it if some people could go give me some helpful advice. Thanks for reading!
) on other people’s games, your game will show up on the play and rate page and in turn people will play yours. The more games you play, the more people will play your game. Ludum Dare is just nice like that. Also, I’m pretty sure that if you don’t get 20 votes which won’t happen if you don’t play 20 games, then your game will not be entered into the contest but I’m 100% sure about that. But you get my point, give feedback to other games so you will get feedback. 😀This turned out to be engaging, in a way i haven’t felt for years. \(^_^)/
So, i’ve continued trying to fix and complete things.
Mouse aiming is implemented, hit detection is fixed, fixing the worst gameplay problems.
Work on a decent 3d model is progressing.
What went ok :
Bresenham (for lines of sight) and particles : once again, I owe Deepnight and his great libraries a big thank you.
The cake : I baked myself a great cake before the ludum dare : 2 days of pleasure and energy delivery !
Music : I made it during the final hour while I was tired and afraid to be late, and I didn’t really want to include it because I was not very proud. Obviously it is very simple and repetitive but it improves definitely the mood. A big thank you to Terry Kavanagh and his easy to use Bosca ceoil !
Characters : even though I had to create new characters from scratch, my experience on Unit maker helped me do it faster. And by using UM characters as examples I spared myself the animation job which would have been long (and hideous)
What failed or is missing :
As several people pointed out, there is no losing condition. I was afraid not to be able to make :
– a good level design
– a good “IA” for the adventurers who are supposed to fear you, shoot, patrol and investigate. And I was right about that one : sometimes the adventurers get stuck face against a wall, or don’t go back to patrol after an investigation.
In these conditions I was afraid that I might create an impossible level and I decided to let the adventurers be annoying but not lethals. The shield makes you immune to the impact and makes the game much easier but you are invicible anyway.
One more time I used the same key for interaction and passing text : very stupid because people miss some parts of my amazing writing.
A few graphical bugs (tombs cut in half, z display order not perfect… )
Barely survived this one but here’s my jam entry for Ludum Dare 33 and before you ask, yes, that is the name of the game.
Click The Pic To Play!!
Also as usual, if you would like me to play your entries then I’ve got a Google Form that you can fill in right here (I’ll try to play and rate them as soon as possible).
Tags: jam, LD33, Unreal Engine 4, Windows
I almost didn’t take part.
I had stayed up until 2am to see the Theme announcement and then I went to bed. No early morning notes or ideas, no, no thinking about format just sleep.
The truth is the Theme left me pretty cold, it still does. I am new to LD I only heard of it 3 months ago due to following @Ploogle on twitter and having casually started up Game Design as a Hobby I spent a weekend reading some blogs, playing some games and even offering a name to someone on twitter when they asked for ideas (if you played Flail Rider at LD32 and thought great game, terrible name that one was on me). I had never been involved in any Game Jams I kind of figured they were not for me. I have 2 kids, a job and a mountain of housework, my days of staying up till 3am playing video games is well behind let alone building them in 48hrs.
A little over 2 weeks ago I thought about LD and checked out the website and I saw the countdown timer and I thought about taking part,then I quickly dismissed it as a foolish notion that I would not be able to find the time for. I then started to help with the theme slaughter, almost a game within itself good, bad, slaughter like a tiny bit of power in my hands. I was a roman emperor deciding which themes would be fed to the lions, and boy did I throw a lot to the lions. I mean there were some really bad Themes in there. There were also some really cool sounding themes, I personally enjoy the open 1 word themes that could go in any direction. Then came the voting, where I was starting to convince myself I would take part. I had a system for how I voted, down voting the ones I thought dictated mechanics, upvoting the ones that offered creative possibilities, ignoring the ones that just didn’t inspire me. and then it was Friday, it was 2am. I had waited out the storm and the Theme and I even had an idea half formed if it was World in the Skies (a theme that did remarkably well in the voting).
Then I read the 4 words at the top of the page
YOU ARE THE MONSTER
“Well fuck!”
If there had been one theme I had been rooting against it was that one.
I just thought it was dull and uninteresting and would end up with a lot of very similar games (it was no Unconventional Weapon!) and it did the opposite of inspire me. It sent me to bed.
The next morning I woke up, still thinking I probably wouldn’t make a game, if I was going to spend a weekend almost ignoring my family to Jam did I want to do it making a game that didn’t inspire me? While my kids watched Cbeebies I turned on my Laptop and slowly changed my mind. I would keep it simple, not try to do too much and just have a go to see if I could. my focus not on the art but the functionality. I knew how to make card games so decided I would go in that direction, I could already see from the blog that my prediction of a lot of reverse dungeon games was coming true so purposely took it out the dungeon, There was also a lot of blood splattered pictures and dark interpretations of the Theme so I wanted to go in a different direction (anyone else having a Cuddling mechanic in their game?). So I hashed out what I could and I made a game and submitted it for the Compo.
Then people started playing it.
At time of writing 27 people have played my game which may not be a lot but its 27 more people than have played any game I have made upto this point and the feedback has been……fair for the most part.
A number of people have liked my idea but felt that the game was a little phoned in, needed more polish, needed audio, needed a better guide. They aren’t wrong and I started to feel like I short changed myself and the 27 people that played it a little by not trying. It turns out Audio isn’t as hard to muster up as I thought it was and just because I instinctively know how my game plays it doesn’t mean others will.
So I took all the feedback on board and made the time today to polish it up, now this doesn’t replace my Compo entry, that can stand on its own 2 feet and take the punches it deserves and if you want to give it a try and rate it on its own merits you can find it here.
But this is the polished version, and it is not meant to be rated on or improve that rating of the compo entry but its for the 27 people that played my game that I could of done better with. I borrowed a little open source Art, I made some sound effects and music like I should of done 2 days ago and I wrote a guide on how to play the game. So hopefully some of the guys who played my game will see this and try the polished version which I wouldn’t have made had it not been for their mostly positive feedback. Here’s the Dropbox link
For those who won’t play either but might want to see the comparison
Before
After
Tags: ld33 postmortem
Finally I nailed that annoying memory leak bug, plus a bug with the Cacodemon’s starting stats. Also replaced Phaser.js and EasyStar.js with their minified versions.
Now game plays a bazillion times faster. Go kidnap the Princess HERE (and leave a comment if you liked it).
This is my first game, first jam, first timelapse, we can all start from somewhere and I choose this way, lots of peoples couldn’t just do their first game inside 72h so please enjoy it
My initial plan for this game was to make an experience for what it would be like to be a “monster.” But when I thought about it I realised that what defines a monster is not the creature itself but our reaction to it. That led me in a somewhat relentless and melancholic direction.
My inspiration for the style of this game was the early home computer games of the 80s like Frak.
I painted the sprites in the Gimp directly onto the canvas. This was somewhat laborious. I’ll look for a better pixel editor if I decide to create any pixel animations in the future.
The only useful feature of the Gimp I used was in producing the flash effect for the lumberjack selfie.
Other than that it was all pixel by pixel painting. I’d like to have got a few more frames into the troll walk cycle to give the animations a little more bounce, but I started late and was already running short of time.
I think in depicting the troll’s death I was unconsciously influenced by the pictures of the death of Cecil the lion. I think that helped to capture the mood I was going for:
With the music I lucked out. I tried several of the tools in an attempt to create a sombre backing track. On my very first try with Otomata, as I was testing the ability to capture a wav, I got exactly the feeling I was after by pure chance. (I was unable to recreate it over several subsequent attempts.) So I edited the capture I had into a loop and went with that.
I didn’t make my own game this time around. Couldn’t think of any game designs based on the theme that I was excited for. I’m a mechanics-first sort of designer, and this iteration’s theme left me clueless. So I instead helped out with the programming and design on another project by some other local game devs. That project became Cvltists and Crusaders. (Also check out Bovidae Destroyer, produced by another local team.)
It was a new experience for me, being on a game jam team along with another programmer/designer, plus a very capable artist and a very capable musician. I was already worn out at the beginning of the weekend (not an encouraging sign at the start of a jam), and was exhausted by the end, but it was nonetheless a great team and a great experience; I’m glad I was a part of it!
Tags: #LudumDareKC
We found the whole process liberating (tiring, but liberating). Having to come up with a game in 72hrs seems hugely daunting…but in reality it was less daunting that the game ideas we have had in the past. Unfortunately, none of those have been completed…but you know what…our LudumDare33 was completed. We learned a lot as developers and we can’t wait for the next jam. Our goal now is to take Run Ogre, Run! to the next level of production.
Wish we would have grabbed some shots before we started replacing assets.
Tags: Crazy Minnow Studio, Run OGRE Run
I can’t wait for voting to be over. Everyone who voted for my game, thank you. Another great Ludum Dare has gone and almost past, and I’m looking forward for voting to be over. Congratulations everyone (*cough* Cookie Clicker Cheats *cough*) And great job on all your games.
okay so this is a post mortem of the game i made for ludum dare called bloody tentacles. if you arent familiar with it, here is a gif that illustrates the gameplay fairly well.
basically 5 stages of that. and spikes too. you control the body with wasd and the tentacles with the mouse. they aren’t big stages so i hope it doesnt overstay its welcome/become samey towards the end, although it might somewhat since the last level is a bit tough.
alright on to the postmorteming.
so what went well?
what went wrong?
this would have been sweet but it would have taken more time. i’m glad i simplified. i might still do this in the future but it is unlikely. maybe even in another game.
so anyway, if you havent played it, you should! it’s actually pretty fun i think, and i don’t always say that about my games.
he awaits you
Hey ya’ll, hope you all slept like babies after all that hard work.
First off, check out our LD Entry Mmmonster! Make sure to read the Readme file if you’re on Windows 7, and don’t forget to rate and leave a comment 😀
Also, we’re gonna stream on Twitch, so don’t be a stranger.
Dragon Tax Return Simulator 2015 is my first Ludum Dare entry. Once the theme was announced I brainstormed a list of about a dozen ideas, and then narrowed them down based on whether they were 1. doable, 2. interesting. Somehow this dragon tax game idea came out on top. While I was originally trying for a compo entry, when I realized I wasn’t finishing on day 2, I adjusted trajectory toward the jam.
Tools
Javascript – This is a mostly from scratch (libraries used below) HTML5 game. So if it looks bad or doesn’t work for you then I probably didn’t test in your browser/os.
Google Fonts – A great resource and allowed me to take full advantage of the “Fonts are allowed.” exception. I doubt I’d have even tried this idea if I didn’t know about Google Fonts.
Handlebars.js – I’d never used it before but it was great for making templates for all the various forms that got created.
jQuery – jQueryUI made it super simple to make all the paper draggable.
The Good
I feel like I really got a lot of value out of simple randomization.
The instructions use random values for most of the ‘rules’ so you can’t just learn the tax code.
The random name generator was really fun to make even though all it does is stick some random syllables together (about half the time it just picks a ‘normal’ firstname from a list). I decided this was not the time to try and figure out markov chains or anything fancy like that. I think this simple randomizer still came out fine.
I’m also happy with how well the random note generation worked out with its simple templates.
For example here’s the farmer complaint template (with the HTML stripped out):
Hey {{dragonEpithet}}!{{exasperatedComplaint}}
You burnt up {{value}} gold worth of my crops!
{{farmerAppeal}}
{{peasantNotice}}
{{partingShot}}{{randomName}}, {{location}}
P.S. {{grovelling}}
And the results:
It was fun to write all the sentences that filled these templates, but I still want to add more since the notes can still get repetitive.
The Bad
Originally, the ‘time limit’ in the game was only going to be 5 minutes. On the second day I actually tried a test run. One thing I noticed was that 5 minutes was nowhere near enough time. I used that discovery as an opportunity to cut extra forms, simplify the main form, and increase the time limit to 10 minutes. I probably could have saved myself a lot of time if I’d tried playing the game earlier.
Also, I probably shouldn’t have waited until the third day to add all the logic that makes it “a game”. I mean stuff like the dialogs, finish state, endgame report, etc. I was kind of pushing my luck as I rushed to get those all in before the deadline.
Ideas That Didn’t Make It
I wanted to add more graphics. Just things like little official seals/stamps for some of the paperwork. Burnt edges on the papers. A little pixel art dragon claw cursor.
And I wanted some of the complaints from shopkeepers to be on shop letterheads with randomized shop names but I was running out of time and ended up just reusing the design from the peasant notes.
Our game Clumsea is now available in version 1.2, released 1 day after the Jam deadline.
Features are :
As a giant sea animal, you have to make your way home to the ocean. But be careful, don’t destroy everything trying to reach your goal ! Maybe moving through small roads and building is not easy as it seems!
LD33 was my first time entering Ludum Dare. Here’s a timelapse of my entry, “Lure.Lair.Lunch.” for the compo.
Language: Python
Frameworks: Pyglet, Cocos2D(Python)
Software: Notepad++, GIMP
And here’s the link to the entry page for good measure.
Tags: 2D, cocos2D, compo, LD33, puzzle game, pyglet, python, timelapse, You are the Monster
Nearly two days later, I can call HanniBall a success.
After two finished LD’s, I gave up during LD31 and missed LD32.
But this time, I managed to finish a game. Woohoo \o/
It’s a little 2-Player Battle Game to find out, who the real Hannibal is.
Tweaking some influence conditions : post jam version / submission entry
Devil’s Thoughts
Trying to find time for development and for playing to your games !
Hey guys, I made the build Linux ready, but I still can get the HTML5 version to work properlly, I’ll see to get it ready this week, I promise!
Meanwhile, Linux users, enjoy the game here: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=56516
I am a new game programmer. Learning C++ and SDL. I plan to participate in the next ludum dare’s.
I was wandering if game jam teams are formed over the internet? If so, how would I find a team to join?
I considered compo, but I have absolutely no creativity or imagination. So, I need to work with others who can make the art and come up with ideas…
uhhh, go try my game if you’ve had a bad day and need to vent some rage lol:
http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=20860
This is my 2nd Ludum Dare and I learned a bunch. I’ll be doing a post-mortem soon, follow me at @BPOutlaws or check my devBlog or just keep on eye on here in a few days!
– Jeff
Tags: 2D, I am awesome, jam, LD33, Ludum Dare, screenshot
We submitted our game, a monsters-only dating website, to the Jam yesterday. We’ve already started thinking about post-jam updates and design changes!
One of our team members, Rosstin, is porting the game to iOS as an exact clone of Tinder (in fact, the original concept behind the game was for it to be a clone of Tinder). Here’s a gif:
It’s going to be pretty rad!
We’re also thinking of adding more unique responses from monsters who are not your true love (right now, most of those are randomly generated) and maybe making the disruptive scambots in the game randomized as well, so they’re less grating.
We have high hopes for the final version of this project!
Whoops, I was told my link was bad — and it was. I fixed the executable / source links. Check out my game-ish!
http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=save
I know some of you have degrees in Computer Science and have therefore taken advanced Mathematics. Hopefully one of you can help me solve this review problem.
Divide (3x^3+2x-10) by (x-4).
I want to figure it out before I start playing and rating other people’s games.
This was an interesting and different Ludum Dare for me. Earlier I had participated only with a team and with quite lot of planning and organizing. This time I just happened to check the theme 6 hours after the jam had already started and just decided to wing it and try to hack a game together with the limited time and resources I had.
I started by prototyping a bit of hitman-esque stealth stuff and was gonna originally make a little game where you have to identify your target in a crowd and somehow kill him. As I have almost no experience in anything to do with modeling or drawing, I tried to create a lot of different blocky cube characters with different colored shirts and small details but the game ended up looking like a mess. As I made all the NPC:s look relatively similar, the idea of the game changed from killing one target to killing them all.
By day 2 I had already implemented all the mechanics I had planned and could focus on other stuff. I had limited time to use on the game so I decided to focus all the attention on honing the atmosphere and the mood. Little changes to camera effects and sound effects slowly built up into a much much darker game that I had originally planned it to be. I started with relatively colorful scene and ended up with this grayscale horror game. I also came up with the name and the little back story for the game after seeing how different it had become. You were an actual monster feeding on humans during the night.
For a long time I thought the game wasn’t gonna be anything good but eventually was pleased with the result that I ended up with. It was kinda weird process where I never really knew what the game was gonna be like until it was finished. Still a good experience in developing a game this way, even if it’s not the best way.
You can play the game here: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=39351
We made a short film showing a gameplay. We intend to continue development.
Tags: 2d platform, Construct2, pixelart
Roll a shit monster against all stage objects and turn them into more shit, making your monster bigger! 😀
Here’s our Jam game, play it with a friend!!!!!111one
Play and rate it here >> Excremonsters!
GRAARRWWW!!!!!! GRARRWWRWRWRRR!!!! KILL!!! DESTROY!!!! – The monster
Hello Ludum Dare people!
The monster is a visual novel that tells a story of love between a monster and a girl. Maybe, don’t quote me on that.
I started programming the game before the compo because I was testing Luxe one of the libraries from snöwkit.
This is all I did before the compo. It took me like 4~5 hours while exploring the library. The background is from here.
I thought that doing a visual novel game would be an easy way to participate in the compo. But I can’t art so I had to find all the sprites and backgrounds. This and having code before the compo that I forgot to upload forced me to join the jam. And that’s good. At the end I had only a few hours a day to work on the game and I wouldn’t be able to finish anything as “polished” as the final product for the game.
I wrote the story while implementing new things. “Oh! it needs choices!!!” and implemented it. “Oh! let’s make it transition!” and implemented it. So, while I tried to keep a somewhat coherent story it… it isn’t.
I was really lazy (and had little time) to work on it so I chose the easier path… everything is a callback! I don’t even know how it doesn’t breaking in thousands of bugs, but, eh, it works so that’s fine.
Working with Luxe was really easy. The engine doesn’t force into a way of doing things and let you choose the best approach for yourself. To prove that to myself I did a little of everything, components, subclasses, a little of events, states,… It’s a really nifty engine but the documentation can be improved, then again, I don’t think there is a project with good documentation in Haxe so…
She is waiting for you.
When the compo started I already knew I was going to do a visual novel, but the theme didn’t clicked me until a few hours later. The code was all in one place and it wasn’t really organized. Because I knew what type of game I was doing I started to write the script without anything planned.
The second day, I organized a bit the code and keep adding features. Also, the snöwkit guys released mínt a minimal, renderer agnostic ui library for Haxe. And, of course, I had to use it! It’s was really easy and had the choice code done in less than a couple of hours.
In the same day, I wasted some time in a few non-important things like trying to get the game working on Android (I had the Android SDK and NDK outdated so I had to update them) but, after that, I just had to select android as a target and, BAM! the game was running on my phone!
I was short on time by the third day and kind of rushed the story (as if it weren’t rushed already…) but I like the end result. Now, it won’t be a bestseller, that’s for sure.
I had a lot of fun making and writing the game, a visual novel was something I always wanted to try to make and this LD was the perfect excuse to make one!
For the future, I may work on the engine (from scratch?) again and make a good visual novel. I’m not sure yet, but if you are interested on it, let me know it on the comments or contact me on my webpage!
Anyway, I’m pretty sure that this post-mortem has more text than the game so I will end it here! Don’t forget to play, comment and rate it!
Bye!
This was our first LD and I really think we did a good job. We didn’t get to finish the game, but it is playable and you can understand the core mechanics. Meet “Hide, Mr. Hyde”!
We toyed around with lots of ideas of being a monster, but we decided very quickly that we did not want to make a game where the monster is a mythical creature and just kills randomly. Well, go play it and give us your feedback, it will be mostly appreciated. Have fun!
A few notes: we only worked on the game on Sunday and Monday, it was kind of a Hardcore Mode, really.
Welp. Looks like we hit the bandwidth limit on dropbox. We feel the love. <3 So we have changed our file locations to MEGA as they are much more forgiving bandwidth wise.
In return, have a glamour shot of our antagonist, Robot George. (Robot Kyle’s bigger, badder, older brother with a criminal record.)
He’s had better days…
Finally you got the Princess!!!
But now that she is in your tower Legions of Knights come to rescue her, you must stop the Knights before they reach the Princess or she will be stolen from you.
Play here: Dragon Defense
We made a video talking about our thoughts on how our first ever LD went and did a speedrun in the background!
Any of you who beat it faster, I DON’T WANT TO HEAR IT I’M BAD AT VIDEO GAMES OKAY.
Hey fellow Ludum Darers! I’ve made a quick video of my entry “BUS CRUSH”! Give me a play and a vote here!
http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=45688
“Hero Stomp” postmortem is now up on LavaMonkeyGames.com
