Cubees Entry: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-16/?action=rate&uid=1481

Ludum Dare 16: Cubees – Timelapse Video

Ludum Dare 16: Cubees – Gameplay Video

http://www.platymuus.com/goods/junk/asploreheim_bugfix.zip

Contains a new Asploreheim.exe. Replace and enjoy the lack of fancy, laggy road rendering. I also tweaked the hill placement slightly so it ought not to be so center-biased.

View my Timelapse.

What went well:

• Finished a game!
• Learned Lua and LÖVE inside and out.
• Made some decent (by my standards) looking pixel graphics.

What could have gone better:

• Had to scrap most of my planned stuff in order to finish on time. Originally Missing was going to be a survival game with a lot of roguelike elements.
• Spent way too much time making a procedural maze generator, which didn’t end up being important to the final product.
• Didn’t have enough time to add gameplay, ended up adapting the planned food/water element of exploration into a collection game.

Tags: post-mortem, timelapse

So this was my first Ludum Dare. I did the Global Game Jam back in February, so I had some idea of what to expect, although the GGJ was teams rather than solo. One thing I do regret is not interacting more with the community–IRC, Twitter, etc. I could have used more feedback than I got, instead of relying almost entirely on my husband’s comments.

Friday night I spent brainstorming ideas and thinking over mechanics. Saturday morning I started coding. By late afternoon / early evening, I had the major mechanics implemented, but it wasn’t fun. At that point the turrets were just yellow diamonds (and they were warp portals which your cyan circle teleported between), and the hint circle always disappeared before you could fire again.

Screenshot of older version of SEEK*TOR

The best thing that happened for the game occurred when I sent my Saturday prototype to a friend for feedback. He told me two very important things:

1. He had the most fun figuring out where the hint circles intersected
2. He wanted to know why you had to aim and fire to reveal the map instead of just placing light bulbs around the “platforms” (yellow diamonds)

So I made the hints persist but fade over time. That means you can see the hint circle intersections, but the screen doesn’t become overly-cluttered with old hint circles. It also means the aiming mechanic is important, since if you take too long, the previous hint will have faded away. I also changed the theming of the game so that the portals became turrets and you selected a turret to fire from, rather than teleporting between them.

Sunday was mostly a day of polish. The big feature changes were implementing multiple levels, scoring, and flare limits. I also added the start, game over, and between-level screens, made the graphics, (such as they are–hooray for GlowFilter!) composed a background track, and created the sound effects.

In the end, I was successful in terms of having a pretty-much finished game at the end. On the other hand, seeing some of the other entries, I kind of wish I’d done something a little more ambitious…

Things that worked out:

1. Using abstract glow-y vector graphics instead of trying to draw. (I spent about 20 minutes attempting to draw a single turret before deciding my time was better spent elsewhere.)
2. The game selects from 4 (hand-crafted) turret layouts and randomizes the enemy and player locations. That turned out to be enough randomization that I didn’t need to make a turret layout generator. In fact, I only just realized that I left the game in debug mode where it always chooses the same turret layout.

Things that didn’t work out:

1. When I started, I implemented everything in one file just to see if the core mechanic would work. I made such a mess of my code that I spent hours late Saturday night moving code around so I could add levels. Spending hours working on code without actually adding new functionality–even regressing at times–was very hard on my morale.
2. I spent too long trying to make my git history tidy. I’d keep forgetting to add a file to the commit or not commit for a while and wind up with a gigantic commit that involved 3 features and all the source files. Then I’d try to figure out how to break up or revise the commits. (And how to use vim, since that’s the default git editor…) Given that I never had to revert to a previous version, it was kind of silly of me.

Tools and Libraries Used:

1. FlashDevelop
2. TweenLite
3. git
4. ACID Music Studio
5. Free VSTi soft synths: Crystal, LazySnake, and ErsDrums
6. Audacity
7. sfxr

Tags: Explore, flash, ld48_16, postmortem

Fixed PATHWAYS so that it would properly show two of the “events”, uploaded the source, and I also moved around some text to avoid overlapping.

There are a lot more entries than I expected, I will try to fairly judge as many as I can.

I reset Asploreheim’s universe and made changes to the hill allocation setup… it *ought* to work now. I’m pretty sure I’m operating within the rules as they state that I can fix bugs if they’re game-breaking (which this is)

Apparently the login crash and hill-claim freeze happen when the game can’t handle all the data the server is sending back… happens scarily quickly. I’m not going to mess with the game any more. So there, if it breaks, I’m sorry :/

In retrospect, an MMO was a bad idea…

Heartiac Arrest

I fixed everything and made the entry more readable / aesthetic. Also uploaded the Source.

Pro:

– Even though I wasn’t planning to take part, I still did and don’t regret it

– Managed to create a new game!

– LD is always kinda fun, and coding with Gosu is allowing to code in Ruby very fast

– Created a shooting game with a lot of enemy fire. And the flower effects went surprisingly well

– very happy that the radar worked correctly!

Contra:

– when I was creating sound effects, they didn’t sound right and I took them out again. That was lost time. should have made bgm instead

– shouldn’t have made the enemies’ movement “random” :D. So some of them are having flowers, others don’t

– i know, the shootings are kinda crazy, but they aren’t crazy enough! ^^ should have been MUCH more

– i didn’t wanted to use wingdings as enemies, but, you know, no time and such. i also wanted to have them animated, but that would have taken even more time

– there’s a big performance problem if you get to the end. Reminder for myself: don’t make the collision calculations in the laser shots if you create around 360 every second, lasting for at least 10 seconds each

– i also wanted to add a possibility to move left and right, but having the calculations in euclidic dimensions crashed my brain at hour 42 😀

So, this LD was a nice experience again! To all alpha-testers and fellow programmers: have fun!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iy-dLGBFMcw

Finally got my timelapse uploaded.  I used chronolapse.

Now I’m going to start chipping away at playing all these great entries

Tags: exploration, ld16, timelapse

Game-crashing bugs for 5 Colors fixed, readme expanded, hints added.

You can get the new build here:

http://necessarygames.com/5_colors_pandora.zip

For the record, I changed one line of code, and inserted two small objects… amazing how small yet game-destroying some bugs are.

TimeLapse Vid

Hey Crew! I did it, I got through a Ludum Dare! I’ve been wanting to get into one of these for at least a year and a half, I didn’t have the chance, mostly because they happen right in exam season, but I done graduated!

The theme of “Exploration”, which isn’t much of stretch for Video games. It got my imagination rolling though. One thing that my mind grabbed on was Lewis and Clarke, probably because I listened to a pod-cast on the death of Meriwether Lewis on the way home on Friday. I wanted to make a game with some historical roots, other thoughts are a ‘space exploration’ or something more abstract. But my mind kept returning to the idea of the famous western explorers and their adventures.

I set the game on an island because thats an easy way to create hard boundaries. I wanted you to be able to find new and interesting flora and fauna, name them, and sell them to distant aristocracy for exorbitant prices. But I could only manage the unfettered expansion of your settlements into the island itself, turning its tranquil simplicity into a criss-crossed bustling seaport.

I named it after the first lyrical part of my favourite Decemberists Song “The Island”. The idea of an untamed island untouched by human hand, explorer expeditions venturing into its untamed wilds, finding riches to bring back to the empire. That idealistic Romantic idea struck me and I ran with it.

-I like it!          – I am proud of what I made, and it’s fun in a relaxing way.

-World Generator     – I wrote this in the first half, I’m really happy with how the forests came out, they feel really organic, the scalability is excellent as well.

-Wagons and roads    – The most interesting part! I’m really happy that the roads run and can check their distance from a dock or town, I also like that the wagons follow their paths correctly. If I had another hour, I would’ve made the wagons adjust their path if a faster one becomes available.

-Flixel rocks socks  – I feel more confident in my flash game crafting then before!

-I am excited for more game making! – Got me out of a funk I’ve been in a while.

What went wrong

-Inconsistent Art  – I tried out a couple different things. So the character is an bizarrely coloured and abstract, the sea is WTF, and the rest is stylistically ripped from the first 2 Civilizations.

-Shallow game-play – There isn’t any challenge, and there isn’t much to do.

-No sound!         – This is really lame, I just ran out of time.

– Ran out of time  – I didn’t really plan on what I wanted to do, I winged it from start to finish, I came up with the ideas and came up with too many, got stuck doing things that I should’ve not attempted. Oh well!

The Game:
http://www.ericmcquiggan.com/Gameuploads/ludumdare/LudumDare48.swf

Controls

W/A/S/D – Movement
E – Build Improvement
R – Build Road
T – Build Dock

Man. I have made a game! Thats pretty unbelievable. Wow.

Why the heck did I join Ludum Dare? And why now?

Hm. I guess Notch simply, or just accidently pushed me over to it. Also everyone else that randomly yells “JOIN LUDUM DARE”. Theres quite a lof of those people.

And there I was, having a registered account, voting for themes, hoping it wouldn’t be Twilight Fandom, with barely any game making experience more complex than if statements.

But it turns out I had an idea for exploration. A simple one even I could realize with a bit of experimenting around. How that idea came, I don’t know anymore. I think it was a fluent process after opening Game Maker and simply starting by making a platformer engine, kind of. Saturday was kind of depressing in the beginning. I think Iwas trying to figure out how I could use FMOD to use the simple stuff I wanted it to do. That took about 6 hours of my time. I have found simple solutions to my problems by not using examples of how it could work but instead of just doing my own shitty code. But it worked like I wanted it to! And that makes me… a tad happy.

If I would make another game like this, I probably would rely more on the 3D stuff FMOD has. It gives you more of a feeling where you are going to. Would I have tried to figure it out while being in Ludum Dare, I guess it would have sucked all my blood, eh, time away.

The way the game looks was something that evolved naturally too. At first I had some kind of placeholder graphics for the very beginning. But the rest never changed.

Hm, I seem to have overwritten most of it. Ah, here is how the game start initially looked like. After I got to the endings on sunday, changing the cheesy look of this was kind of a good idea.

I think most of the time was spent on sound. I didn’t notice, but making 36 sound effects and master them so they kind of have the same volume or destroy speakers, that takes a lot of time.

Look at the mess of project files I created.

For people that are interested, I used Ableton Live Suite 8. Lots of it’s internal Synthesizers and Effects. Also FM8, Absynth 4, Reaktor 5 and Massive. All VSTi from Native Instruments. Yeah, I own that shit. God damn, I’ve spent too much money on this.

I’m very happy with the sound results. I think some loops are really cool.

What else… after I got my code working, everything was just straightforward work. I actually worked most of the Ludum Dare. Although it’s such a small game. I blame my shitty coding. I could have made scripts so I don’t have to repeat steps over and over. But I was fast enough to finish what I have initially kind of planned, so it’s not that bad. Okay, to the pros and the cons!

PRO!

• I MADE A GAME.
• Good sound!
• Interesting experimental experience!
• Happily finding out 2 days are exactly the time needed
• Replay value!
• I MADE A GAME.

CON?

• The controls are confusing. Some people get it instantly, some don’t even know there are in total 8 different routes.
• The sound is sometimes confusing. Sometimes you don’t really get the difference. Using “3D” sounds or panning would have deminished this.
• The game is quite short. Some people might give it a shot once and then never open it again.
• The visuals could have been more involved.

Do I have something else to say?

APRIL.

I think it would be fun to have a race to see who can play, win and rate all 121 games from this contest before the time runs out for voting. There will be no prize for the winner and the challenge starts now. So far I have played 2 and beat none. But I’ll get there soon. Exception: if the game is not win-able you do not have to win it.

Okay, ANOTHER BUG 😮 was fixed. you can now (finally) beat the game. I’ve played it through ;3

Also, i was planning on keeping this a secret but i cant hold exciting things in for long >_<

A secret path!? Could it be?!

Oh, and by the way, if anyone liked that font i made and used in my game, you can download that here.

I have the following question: unfortunately I used Wingdings as enemy graphics, and those are not allowed in the rules. I didn’t know about that, but that also means that I disqualified myself.

Question: is it still ok to change the graphics now? I don’t want to be a spoilsport, so I have these to offer, intentionally making them worse to indicate that

Old graphics

new graphics

So do you think this is ok? Elsewise I will take back my entry by also deleting the links

pythong

I’ve put together my timelapse video! It’s on youtube here:

Frimkron’s LD16 Timelapse Video

I didn’t leave it recording while I was asleep and I stuck footage from the 2 days together – that’s why there’s a jump in the middle. As you can see I spent the entire first day working on the maze generation *eyeroll*

Tags: timelapse, youtube

pythong says …

haha, I have the most evil book in the world, but which is worshipped by mages? i always thought it would be the manual for windows ^^
nice game!

Mages can be evil too Just because it has a skull+crossbones cover, doesn’t mean it isn’t a manual for Windows 😉

SonnyBone says …

I thought the skeleton was a villager at first, so I just kept bumping into him. HE MURDERED ME.

Nice use of the theme.

You are indeed surprisingly weak at the beginning of the game. I was hoping to have a whole level-up system but I decided it would have taken too long.

Hamumu says …

I really liked it, except that you have to go past all these guys who are lethal. After reading the walkthrough, I thought I’d give it another shot and when I got to the mountain I got one-shotted by a guy standing in the middle of the passage. I couldn’t have avoided him! I want to see more of the game, but it’s just too vicious.

I really like the graphics.

Would appreciate auto-repeat on the keys!

Thanks! It took me quite a while to get the graphics the way I wanted but at the time it was very much early days You should play left handed, your sword is longer :fnarr: it doesn’t affect gameplay though.

It’s possible to get to the top of the mountain without being hit – dodge moar 😉
Auto-repeat was planned but I guess I never got round to it.
A couple of cheats if you want to see more …
Pressing F7 will remove all the fog.
Pressing F8 will give you 40 HP, The Sword, the Lantern, the Book, and enough Skill to kill just about anything before the Dragons.
There comes a great price for such cheatery though…

Frimkron says …

I was killed by a Trogdor 😛 I must come back and finish this one. Really enjoyable!

You’re very near the end! I’d read the walkthrough, it has hints on how to deal with those pesky dragons

My LD entry, Boboil goes Exploring, will no longer ‘melt your laptop’, as I’ve fixed the memory leak.

Also, as some people said they were on laptops, I’ve added support for arrow keys too. So play it NOWZ!

Tags: bugfix

Well, I choose to took the challenge as a double-experiment: it was my first LD as well as my first Java game (or something like that, called Mars Rover). I wanted to learn more Java while making a quick game. I can say the experiment wasn’t a total failure, just a half-failure, ’cause I’ve learned more about the Java language. The other half (the main one, should I say), in contrast, was a horrible failure. I started the game Sunday 1:00 PM (GMT -2) and “finished” it by 7:00 PM. I was locked in my bedroom trying to avoid external noise but it was terribly hot (and just now, writing it, I remembered I have an air conditioner ¬¬). So I released the game with the minimum features needed to play it. I didn’t know the best way to work with good performance 2D graphics in Java, so I ended doing it like a normal desktop app with some 2D drawing in the background. The original idea was to have some nice icons for drag-drop instructions and nice sprites and tiles for the rover and scenery, as well as sfx and bgm. I think I had enough time to implement it after my submission, but I was really tired (I know, you guys worked almost the 48h we had and aren’t complaining… shame on me).

For the next LD:
– Learn how to make real games in Java (BEFORE the contest) OR
– Use Python with Pygame OR
– Use Ruby and learn Gosu OR
– Use JavaScript with some pre-made games lib
(I’m much more comfortable with those 3 languages)
– Think about the themes BEFORE voting ends
– Turn on the air conditioner

OK, here’s my story of the LD48 compo this year.

First, it was my 2nd LD48 so I quite knew what I could expect. The main restriction for me always is that I have a family that keeps me quite busy at the weekends. But this weekend my wife was invited twice to go out, so my actual time was:
Friday 3am-5am
Saturday: 12am-1pm, 8pm-12pm
Sunday: 8pm-12pm
Sum: 11 hours.

But that’s fine for me. I’m bad at polishing things. I’m quick at prototyping.

What went right:

• The idea. Really, I sat there for 2 hours thinking of a game I could do in ~10 hours and I was close to give up. then came the idea with “explore the fridge”.
• Music, Sound. I’m bad at anything about sounds. I have no idea how to make music and how to make sfx. So for the sfx I just did some “chip chip” and “squeek” sounds using my voice. That gave me the idea, that I do have 5 hours left in my MS SongSmith free trial version. I wrote a few lines in the IDE, launched it and just “sang” as it came to my mind. It was bad. But it was so bad, that it started to be good, again. I kept the first trial w/o any improvements. Had I tried to improve it, I think it would have failed horribly

What went wrong

• MS Paint. Really, usually I use CorelDraw for graphics, but I just wanted to do a quick prototype to see if the idea just works at all. I wanted to redraw the gfx with Corel later, but got no time. The gfx suck totally, but at least the game is fully playable.
• Sleep. I was so excited on Friday, that I woke up too early. I was dead tired on Saturday and close to be sick on Sunday.
• Communication. Really. I was so busy and had just too little time to chat and look what others did, that I have the feeling I missed a good piece of the compo. Might have been because I had so little time, too.
• Sleep. I’m still tired.
• Highscores. Next time I should try to find time to implement a simple online high score table. That might add long time fun to the game, since no one cares how much you can score if you can’t compete with others. Maybe.
• Sleep. I slept too little and feel like I can’t remember what I wanted to do the very second ago

Tools I used

• GLBasic. I’m the author of that language. I hope not to get a pimp hat for that 😉
• MS Paint. Next time I’d better use CorelDraw, because the results are worth it.
• AC3D. For the fridge door I used AC3D, which is a very nice modeller for low poly objects.
• Audacity. For the wav sfx recording I used Audacity with the “save selection as wav” option. Was very quick.
• Microsoft Songsmith. Really, they all post YouTube videos about “Enter Sandman” with MS Songsmith, and they suck. But if you use it in the way they designed it for, the results are quite funny. Don’t expect anything serious. It’s a toy that will produce a joke. I should have saved the file as WAV and convert to MP3, later. That way the Linux version had had music.
• Nettalk. It’s a slim, free IRC program. I can’t program w/o IRC, I’m afraid of being alone 😉

Final thoughts
The game was thought as a joke. I didn’t like the theme a lot, because all my “exploration” ideas were too big to realize in that little time. The feedback so far is overwhelming. Thank you so much. I really thought it’d fail miserably, thus I chose “cheese” in the game’s name. I’m happy that it doesn’t stink in the end.