Someone ask me if I use procgen to create my trees in SEED:

yes

try it here!

Support the Ludum Dare #34 game on Steam Greenlight!

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=578076230

There’s a lot of cool dudes who have played our game already

If you wanna be one of those dudes, you can join by playing our rap battle game

here

Just uploaded a solution video to my game. If you’d like to raise your blood pressure a little by trying to solve it before you watch, you can do so HERE

Hello everyone!

We completely forgot (or were just too tired after LD) to post anything about our submission! So here we are, fixing our small mistake…

Meet SportsRaces!!

Small game that we were making through the whole 3 days and finished right 1 minute before deadline. It’s not perfectly balanced, maybe too short on the content, but it has slick UI animations (maybe we should focus more on the gameplay next time) and has some potential and some replayability! So feel free to check it out right here.

Some screenshots:

Tags: ld34

What went good:

1. It’s finished! It’s short but kind of complete.
2. It came pretty much like I wanted gameplay wise.
3. Graphics are consistent. Thanks MagicaVoxel.
4. It’s concept I can build on.
5. There is a challenge.

What went bad.

1. One major feature is not there(anti personal program that tracks player). One smaller feature (time based level destroy/buildup) is there but broken/disabled.
2. Graphics are not quite as I envisioned them. I need to learn more about Unreal lighting.
3. Didn’t have time to make more levels.

Previously I was working with Flash but working in Unreal Engine is a blast. Blueprints make it the ultimate prototyping tool. I encourage everybody to at least try it.

Overall I’m very happy with result. I got some strong base to make small fun game. And getting into LD is super fun – not pushing yourself to be perfect but just to finish something. Finishing something even so small makes me feel warm programmer feelings :] Also watching what other people squeeze into theme in such short time is very inspirational. LD FOR EVERYONE AND FOREVER! Ekhm.

Don’t know what I’m talking about? Go play and rate. Any feedback(especially on those camera rotation is welcome).

Also I’d like to send big thanks to fasterthanlime for making itch app and whole itch.io It’s superb platform for gamedev and likes.

This is my first Ludum Dare and I have to admit that it’s been fun but hard at the same time.
I wanted to ship something and here’s the result:

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=48604

Here are some random facts about what went wrong and what went right:

• I wanted to try a different framework. I usually work with Unity, but I felt I owed to give the latest framework from Mike a go and see if I could make something with it. So I set myself on making a game with MonoGame + Nez. The good is that I’m familiar with C# so code was flowing quite easily. On the other hand, I had to deal with the Pipeline Tool of MonoGame that I didn’t know as well as I should have before venturing further.
• MonoGame is good, but it’s not so easy to make a portable game. I worked on Mac and ported it to Windows at the end, and I faced some issues with the stable version of MG using some DLLs that were not included in the final build of the game. That took a few hours to figure out.
• Nez is a wonderful framework and it made it quick and easy to work with 2D from a programmer’s point of view. Did I mention that I can code, but that I can’t draw?
• I wish I had a web target. It would have been a lot quicker to get things up and running for everyone with something that doesn’t require to pack up the game and distribute it before people can actually play.
• I settled for simple sprites with no animations. All animations are just stretches and particles handled by code. It really helped in cutting down the time I spent creating the assets
• Making the sound effects has been a lot of fun. If you’re wondering where I took them.. well.. I didn’t. It’s just me and my wife screaming like a pork and mumbling like a farmer 😀
• I made some beginners mistakes and I completely forgot about some of the basics about communicating back to the user when he’s doing something right and when he’s not. I should have put more attention in the details, but they completely slipped under my fingers
• I wanted the final game to have different levels subdivided in waves that become harder as you progress. I wanted to have bonuses like crates that spawn for a brief time and that you have to click as quickly as possible to pick up. I wanted to have some background music. I just didn’t make it all in time.

Help Kevin, the snowman, to reach the star on the top of the tree! Available for Windows, HTML5 and Linux!

I improved the physics handling quite a bit which makes it much easier to stack boxes, carrying a stack sorta works too:

View post on imgur.com

I also improved some camera things and fixed a issue with the challenge where you have to run fast. At some point I made the growing legs slower when moving which made that challenge very hard.

This is now the so called New version but that older version is still also there for you to download: http://tocogames.itch.io/forklift-man

I had a little time a couple of days ago to make some post-compo changes, mostly smoothing the difficulty curve, and adding some more visual feedback when you are about to lose. Thanks for all the great feedback, those of you have left comments.

GameJolt trophies are still forthcoming and I will likely be putting it up on Kongregate also.

Eldritch Trance: A Lovecraftian Ryhthm Game

Welcome to Garden Grow!

Hello! Justin here, bringing a post-mortem nobody asked for. But it’s probably good practice to do so anyway. Garden Grow is one of the games I’m proudest of that was made in a game jam. Admittedly, not my best, but it was a step forward from the LAST Ludum Dare. Fun, accessible, complete! Let’s see if I can keep this breakdown short and sweet.

The Highs
– The music. Never had I imagined that I would be able to compose something that people would actually comment on as being a strong point! Most times, I composed simple melodies using ‘shortcuts’ of sorts; playing only with black keys was one of them. This time, though, I took a few hours out of my time to study different chiptunes by different artists and try to emulate certain aspects of it that I never thought of trying before. The end result was a melody that paved the way to what the mood of my game was going to be. A shoutout to Jason Reed (@jcreed on Twitter) for his songs that inspired me.

– Time. On Ludum Dare 33, I had to scrap 48 hours worth of work and ideas, and made a game from scratch in the remaining 24 hour jam period. While the end result was rather pleasant, it hurt my pride to know that I botched up, that I failed to hit that deadline. I made it a vow to make up for it on this one, and I managed to get it done with plenty of sleep to spare for work on Monday!

– Polish. Since I managed to finish early, I took the time to add what I would call ‘LOVE’ into the game. The little details that give a tiny bit more fun factor, but may take more effort than it’s worth. Things like particle effects, obscure conditions and secrets, anticipating player behaviour, etc. Pizzazz, magic, chrome. Granted, more could’ve be done, but this is one of the more ‘livelier’ games I have made. Baby steps. I think I’ll stick to this trend a little more!

The Lows
– Art. There were some comments on how the artstyles didn’t really jive together, and I was painfully aware of that. But time wasn’t on my side this time, and making a detailed 32×32 sprite with full animations was out of the question. I defaulted to my old style of making 16×16 sprites and increasing their size, instead. The end result is the slight dissonance of the other objects in the game and the characters.

– Engine limitations. I’m no programmer, so I rely a lot on visual coding. By extension, that means I’m at the mercy of the engine’s whims. Simple mechanics that sound easy to implement on paper become huge hassles when you have to jump through the hoops set by the engine so you can make them a reality. A few features had to be cut because of some time lost from figuring out the engine, but I may add them in on a later date.

– Balancing. In my haste to finish the game, I did lose sight of a few core principles in design that I shouldn’t have. The powerups were added on a ‘difficulty-of-implementation’ basis. If it was easy to put in, I’ll chuck it in without second thought to pad out some gameplay. Even though they were nice and welcome additions, they didn’t contribute much to the overall experience curve of the game. There are some things I wish I could’ve done better, like actually having the difficulty ramp up slowly somehow, since the game’s difficulty stays stagnant for quite some time.

Conclusion
This Ludum Dare, I decided to bump my coolness up and play as many games that I got my grubby hands on. And boy, was that a fun experience. I learned a lot from playing different games, comparing them with mine and seeing where I could improve. And, as always, I found many games that humbled me as a developer. Such polish, such finesse, such wonderful design that I can only hope to emulate in the future… I still have much to learn, and perhaps one day, I’ll sit amongst the greats with a game I can be truly proud of.

But for now, I’d like to thank all the people who’ve played my game so far. Those that have given me reassuring words, and those that have criticized me for me to learn and better myself. The response has been overwhelming (more than I would dream to get, anyway), and perhaps I may continue with this project and see it to the end. Add more features, spruce up the sound and graphics, maybe even port it over to mobile.

Thank you for taking the time to read this, if you did. It’s time to go back to rating all these awesome games, and also return back to working life. Here’s a little sneak peek of Garden Grow’s death scene, just to break the monotony of this huge wall of text.

Also, play Garden Grow here! If I have the time, I’ll definitely try to play yours, too!

Hey. You can now listen on soundcloud to the music made by Arthur for SLUG STORM last week-end. Enjoy !

Play and rate SLUG STORM

My LD 34 Game Review Form is open again. So if you don’t have many votes take a minute to fill it out.

Google Form Link: http://goo.gl/forms/RsW5ZyicXa

Don’t forget to check my LD 34 game out: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=39898

Hey fellow gamedevs,

We are a team of five german students. We name ourselfs “Banana4Life” and have developed the game “Legendary Legionnaire Massacre 2 – The Empire Strikes Back” for the fourth ludum dare we took part in. It was really fun to develop a successor to our last ludum dare game.

You can rate and play our game here: Legendary Legionnaire Massacre 2 – The Empire Strikes Back

But now lets get to the post-mortem. This time we used Unity for the first time. Nobody from our team had use experience in neither Unity nor C#. Still I think we did pretty good and had apart from some problems regarding Unity in combination with git. The scenes saved in Unity tend to conflict very often even in character based meta data format. Just in the last half hour I (Jonas) had to reset the scene file an was under much stress to get the menus finished. Using C# was okay. We all have some to a lot of experience in Java and other programming languages and C# is not really exotic. Thus, the language worked pretty good for us, even though we do not like it a lot.

In the end we came to the conclusion that even though we do not love Unity in combination with C#, because both have their little problems, we will probably choose it the next time too. Just Unity can save such a hugh chunk of time that the rest is worth it in comparison with LibGDX on Java. Pathfinding, collisions, physics and UI are a pain if you quickly need them and have no knowledge of other libraries, so Unity is a big step up in that regard.

For the art I used the same tools as last time (GraphicsGale for pixel art and Photoshop for bigger work) and was really satisfied with them. They work great together, but I had to facepalm when I discovered that you could export .png files with alphachannel in GraphicsGale, because it would have saved me a lot of time. Now lets get to the good and bad before we conclude the article.

What went right?

• We now have some kind of franchise 😀
• The game was playable and apparently fun to play.
• We all met up at one place and were really productive.
• We developed a cool idea and could reuse some of our art and sound from last time.
• The graphics were developed steadily parallel to the code and thus weren’t a product of the last minute.
• We implemented the hardest parts first (for example pathfinding) and after that connected all lose ends to a cool game.
• We had a lot of features that we wanted to implement, but cut the right features at the right time.
• We slept a reasonable amount of time (and weren’t completely destroyed after the weekend) (I went to work the next day and was completely destroyed).

As you see the most important parts went right and I think we did a pretty good job developing the game this time. But we had some small problems anyway.

What went wrong?

• We didn’t have the final idea from the beginning on and had a hard time with the theme/s. Especially the two button controls theme was as bad as the entire game on one screen theme. People please don’t vote these restrictive and uncreative themes.
• There were a few graphical features I wanted to implement, like random props(snow, forests, …), that I did not have time for.
• Not all of us could work on the game for the whole three days, because they had other stuff.
• The rendering of the river could have been solved better.

Most of the “What went wrong?” stuff could be solved with more time and thus I think we did a great job.

What we want to do better?

• Maybe even cooler idea

I hoped you liked our short writeup. Greetings,

Team Banana4Life

P.S.: Play and rate our game please.

I thought it would be nice to show you my game in action, so I created some animated gifs!

In Robot Boxing you are a robot punching random things in front of a hopefully appealing parallax background.

I initially planned to have a boxer punch things in a somewhat coherent world. However, I couldn’t draw a boxer, so I drew a robot and I couldn’t draw a nice coherent world, so I drew totally random things and two nice backgrounds. I hope you don’t mind 😉

How To Play

You must use the appropriate glove to hit the next thing or you will lose a life. Hit tall things (traffic signs and balloon) with the blue glove and small things (balls and cake) with the red glove.

To punch with the blue glove use the A key or the left arrow key or tap on the left side of the screen. To punch with the red glove use the S key or the right arrow key or tap on the right side of the screen. Use the ESCAPE key or tap on the upper 10% of the screen to go back to the menu (if you are in the menu this will show you the controls).

Play

• Web version (requires WebGL)
• Desktop version (requires Java)

• Please rate and comment on my game on its Ludum Dare page here.

Hi! I’m proud of myself! Do you know why? That was my first LD and i did it! I polished my game, added many features like difficulty level and animations. What’s more, it is my first game ever! (After pong made far, far ago). And that what is most important, I placed it on Steam Greenlight :3

Why is everyone calling it that? Stop killing yourselves during these events!

You will need your health 10 years from now to still make games within incredibly small time frames.

I personally had more sleep and regular eating during that weekend than I usually do, because I know how badly my performance drops otherwise.

Added web version of our game. Mobile port is in progress. Do not miss – follow us on twitter!

Play Dude On Fire

Thank you for feedback! Very helpful and pleasant.

This was my first time trying my hand in platformer. The whole ordeal was bit strange with the two button setup I had in mind. At first the whole thing seemed obvious: Use simple state system to determine what the buttons do. So if player holds right and then presses left the character should be set to “jumping right”.

I had massive plans for layers upon layers of “states” to create combinations of attacks and special moves and destroy what ever enemies I could hassle together. While working on level pieces that I could quickly use and possibly later use for a level generator, all the testing for player movement was so much fun that I decided to focus on that. I was so confident in my movement system that I didn’t expect the thing that was obvious. Almost no one else could get used to the controls. My bias as the author towards the control scheme eluded me until well after the jam.

The facial expression thing was fun to work on. When my lovely artist handed over the last pieces of the game graphics I was enamoured how the whole thing started to flesh out. Before then I was only working with green cube. I had no clue what the thematic setting of the game was going to be. And when I finally pieced together the code for swapping player face for few seconds randomly in random intervals the whole game gave different feeling. It had actual charisma. Especially when sometimes the facial expression managed to change just the right time, your brain just decided to connect the events on the screen to the player expressions.

So today I sat down and thought “f**k it, lets fix this s**t”. So today I’ve worked to create complete tutorial level with helpful in-game guides to aid in difficult spots. I also reworked most of the movement system to allow player lot more control. Now the control scheme should be more intuitive. When you want to jump you will always press two buttons. This change will let player prepare for the action. This has the draw back of forcing player to be quicker with TWO buttons to execute fast movements but I think it was necessary change.

What went right?

• Created something I enjoy playing.
• Graphics style. Nailed it!
• Finished something. *sweeps old projects somewhere where no-one can find them.*
• Stuck to the theme.
• Facial expression system for main character.

What went wrong?

• Author bias on difficulty
• Author bias on control scheme.
• Should have made map editor/generator.
• Time management. I could have done so much more!

What I learned?

• To make a platformer.
• How you don’t have to create complex system for a character in-order to make it feel alive.
• Learning through play is important. No one wants to read when there is game to be played.
• When creating map, make sure you design the geometry with the art in mind. Art is not the afterthought.

Please try the new version by clicking the image above. The new version has more death/score lines.

We love Ludum Dare and we love you developers and your games. We’re all cozied up on a giant fluffy bed, ready to play your games this instant. Come and join the party! 😀

http://www.twitch.tv/onlyslightly