So I think now that my schedule has calmed down a bit I’ll be writing my post mortem for Edo Arena. If you haven’t seen it yet watch my development time lapse!

How it went

The process went surprisingly smoother than I expected for my first compo attempt. After spending much time messing around with potential ideas with two button controls, I settled on a fighting style game, with two button ideas like One Finger Death Punch. I wanted to make sure the models looked well enough so I went for a extra minimalist art style. After a few hours I had gameplay and pretty sword trails.

From then on I continued by adding enemies. This took me a great deal of time to get the animations and feel to go well with the gameplay. The player soon flew around the screen the way I wanted. I added the upgrades shop for the rest of the second day, then added more enemies and power ups, made sounds, and polished the rest of the time.

What went well

I am very happy with the crisp look of the stage– it may be strangely UV mapped but it looks very nice in Unity. The animations were well received and I obviously took good care of the particle systems. The enemy spawning and “AI” wasn’t anything special but it did the job. The weapon variety was good too and the upgrade shop was worth the extra work. I will hopefully be able to add to this game and make a Post-Compo version.

What went wrong

The overpricing in the upgrades created many problems, I’ll be them fixing for Post-Compo. The music isn’t too great, but I’m not upset about that considering it’s the second song I’ve made using LMMS. The animations were good but they could be much more accurate and varied for each weapon. The enemies were sometimes coming at the player from directly above, which is not ideal. Finally, things that I did not have time to add in included: additional weapons and buildings, final boss, and a credits menu.

That wraps up my Post Mortem, it’s been an awesome Ludum Dare 34 and I love playing your games! I expect to make a Post-Compo version to be released around the end of judging. Remember to play Edo Arena and follow me on Twitter.  Thanks for reading!

Hi, everyone!

Chris from Crashmore Studios, speaking. Both me and Jacob would like to thank all of you who commented/voted for us.
It’s been our second Ludum and we’re just grateful of the response we’ve received and happy that so many of you tried it out.

If you have for some reason not tried it out, hey, why don’t you check it out, right here ?  It would be really cool of you :).

What’s next? Well, we’re talking about some ideas and will probably look into them once the dust has settled a bit. We’re planning on putting up a little post-mortem eventually, though we’ll have to see how soon considering the holiday season. Regardless however, will try and post ut as soon as we can.

Anyways, to sum up; thank you guys and stay tuned!

My fellow Ludumers.

Thanks a lot to those who already rated my entry and left a comment. For the others, I don’t blame you, yet. Just innocently pretend you forgot and go there fix this outrageous mistake: Right here… Thanks

Delivery in process

Now, quick word about this edition.

Introduction

This Ludum Dare was my best experience yet. Maybe not based on the game’s quality (you tell me), but based on the workflow. This is the second time I use Unity3d/Blender and the progress between past Augustus and now are obvious. Back then I wasted half my time looking for documentation. I was way more ready this time.

Tools I used

• Engine: Unity3D 5.2
• Art: Blender 3D – Illustrator
• Sound: SFXR – Mic – Audacity – Garage Band
• Project Manager: Trello
• Timelapse: Chronolapse
• Streaming (yeah I was live on Twitch, not really efficient): OBS
• Video Editing: Sony Movie Studio Platinum

The Good

• The Theme: as restrictive as last year (Remember “Entire game on a screen”?)
• I put my wife and the kid in the car and they went visit my parents => calm and focused weekend.
• I found time to party with long missing friends (no alcohol, seen my sleep deprivation)
• Trello: great tool to keep track of what to do, add, fix, improve in the game.

• a workflow I would like to have each day (Except for the sleep deprivation)
• Unity3D: love this program.

The Bad

No so much, really.

1. I forgot this //INSERT STRONG LANGUAGE HERE// data folder when I uploaded the game. I know nothing…
2. The originality of the game isn’t its strongest suit. I must think outside the box next time.
3. My clouds look like stones (poll realized on a representative sample of 3 people after the submission)
4. The tutorial could have been better.
5. The “throwing gift” animation would have been better with an extra single line of code I now add in the POST-COMPO version

Fan of Timelapse ? Be my guest.

Thanks a lot to PoV for all of this.

Thanks for reading. See you next time…

We thought it was about time we did a post about our entry, after catching up on some well earned sleep!

Play SUPER SCIENCE CORP

Play as a janitor at a high tech scientific research complex, tasked with saving the world from mutant insects.

Use the power of an experimental DNA disruptor hand cannon to take on these beings – you must make it to the generator room and press the TWO BUTTONS to shut down the energy reactor that is feeding these mutants!

Play SUPER SCIENCE CORP

Watch out for the acidic goo some of these creatures spit out, they’ll cause damage and lessen the chance of making it out alive!

Luckily you have your janitor’s broom, with this you can brush these damage areas out of the way, giving you more room to maneuver.

Play SUPER SCIENCE CORP

We had a blast making this for LD, though we made the mistake of staying up for 42 hours straight which made us all completely knackered by the time the competition was over. Now we’ve had some rest, we’re going to be playing & rating as many awesome games as possible! 😀

If you’d like us to play, rate & shout about your game, please let us know.

We hope you enjoy playing our entry and can’t wait to hear what you all think!

Hey there!

My name is Mathieu Clavel, and today I’m the speaker of my group Lullaby.
So it’s been a few days since the end of the Ludum Dare 34, and it’s Post-mortem time!
For this Jam session, we were a team of three : 2 Game Designers (Louis and I) – one programing and one making the art stuff – and 1 Music Composer. First of all we would like to thank you all for the games you’ve made. Each LD is a great adventure, and there are so many awesome entries! Each time we’re proud to be part of it, alone or in group like this time.

But let’s talk about Flowering Souls development. First of all, what is Flowering Souls ? Well, it’s our game, and you can try it right here :

[I really wanna try this game and leave a constructive comment!]

It was the first time Louis and I were working together, and we discovered there was a good synergy between us : the final game was designed on paper in less than one day. We decided to use both of the themes this time, and after a few ideas going to trash, we had our final concept.

Then, we launched the “production” part. The graphic part went surprisingly good. The last time I made graphics for a game was far from now, but at the end of the first day, all the characters assets were designed and ready for animation.
On his side, Louis was completing our List of Features, and we were experimenting and messing around with these mechanics in the same time that he implemented them.
At the end of our first day, we were confident : everything would be on schedule.
The second day was more about experimentation, modifications and polishing the “engine”. Louis also prepared a Level Design tool that would help me to design wave of ennemies, while I was creating animations and FXs.
The last part of the Jam was far more stressfull. We were looking at the timer, and were only starting to make Level Design and still improving ennemies behavior. It became more and more painful since we discovered the first couple of bugs (that we would take 45mn to solve), opening the gates of the “what the hell is happening ?!”. The tutorial was a big part of the time we spent on fixing bug, because we really wanted to get something clean and understandable.

Finally, we managed to deliver the game on time, and now we’re really proud of it!
We learned great stuff, produced something in 72 hours, lived a unique experience, and now it’s time to play

Happy hollidays to all of you, and see ya for the next Ludum Dare!

That’s right! I just ported Abyssal Zone to Windows.

Play it here: Abyssal Zone

We’ve added a Linux build to our LD entry – hopefully this will allow more people to try our game.

Play SUPER SCIENCE CORP

Unfortunately we’re all on Windows over here, so the Linux build remains untested – fingers crossed it all works okay!

We have released the Linux and OSX version of “A Growing Threat”. Please go check it out if you feel like a cool story and fun game-play :D.

I want to make a mobile version of my game (free version of course) : http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=50164

With some game mode, but i’m not great for making musics so i search someone for making musics for my game ! If you’re interested, contact me on twitter at @PaulJsSerie (Oh and i speak french.)

Oh and you can test, rate and comment my game too, obviously !

Hey everyone, I finally sat down to write a quick Post-Mortem for my LD34 entry Peon than you can read of my blog.

Good luck to everyone during judging!

Keep in mind that I’ve only tried nearly 200, that’s 7% of the total! So these are my top 10 favorites SO FAR. The criteria is simple: the games I’m about to list are those that kept me returning and even saving them for later. Here they are:

Concrete Jungle

The Almighty Spectrum

Nine till void

2 Growing Buttons

Super Duper Stacker Supreme

Left-leaning

RhythmRider

Slate

Litterlings

From the deep

Am I missing something? Say below,

…oh and by the way…

TRY MY GAME OR I’LL EAT YOUR SOUL MUAHAHAHAHAH

Hello everyone,
I’m going to start playing your games in 5 minutes and stream it so come by and drop your links in the chat.
I won’t be talking (I don’t have a proper place) but I’ll be in the chat and I think it’s still valuable to see how I do in your games.
Stream Here

Note: Do not post it in comments.

If you would like to try our game:
Lost Contact

Seriously. I just made a terrible game.

Saturday morning. 2 am. Walking home from my friends house warming. The themes come up.

‘Hah.’ I thought, ‘Growing… what if I did a game where you grow wings?’

‘Two button controls? I can totally make a platform game with two buttons.’

Can I f***.

Mouse aiming. Left button leap forward. Right button fire your uzi. What a piece of sh… Genius.

Maybe I should just stop making platform games.

You can play and rate this travesty here:

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=40246 

Tags: travesty

And then procedural seed 20 crushed our hopes…

Jumped a little forward, you see the first mistake we made was dreaming big. Let’s make a thoughtful , infinite, beautiful game and we … kinda did We planned to generate our worlds from different seed every game, then that pesky seed 20 had a broken collider on one part of the terrain, so we decided not to risk and just pick one world , test it and stick with it. I learned a lot during this LD , and feel invigorated for next projects.

Our team: just 2 programmers – we were pleasantly suprised by positive feedback on aesthetics, since that is not exactly our area of expertise.You can check our game:

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=66283

And be proud if you can solve the final riddle!

I am happy to say that the postjam version of my Jam visual novel, The Seed of Love, is now out on itch.io!

Main addition is music, more images, unlockable endings and additional features.

Hope you will give it a try.

The Seed of Love on Itch.io

You can find the game page here if you want to rate it!

Tags: postjam, Ren'Py, Visual Novel

Here is the game in question if you care to give it a shot.

Introduction: While I have done overviews of my two previous Ludum Dare entries, I decided to do a proper full retrospective, especially considering that I think it is probably my weakest entry to date. It’s important to review poor performances so that you can fully recognize what went wrong.

Goals: As with any LD, a set of goals was established to be completed.

• Attempt to rig scripts to particular frames of animation.
• Attempt to finish a significant portion of content.
• Attempt to maintain the level of polish my previous entries had.
• Attempt to make the Theme more integral to the game.

Preparation: As opposed to previous events, there was very little preparation. Tools were not set up or used within the last few months which led to some confusion, specifically with Unity as it had been updated and changed significantly.

In addition, very little time was spent pre-conceptualizing based on the last round of potential themes. Due to this the eventual release of the theme led to considerable issues.

Concepts: With the release of the dual themes of Growth and Two Button Game, I actually came to my first concept in short order; however due to the nature of a dual theme I ended up changing my mind repeatedly and ended up working on several themes throughout the 48 hours.

Digital Pet: My initial concept was a combination of the two themes; a revamped digital pet similar to the Tamagotchi. This seemed conceivable however the eventual decision was that the number of sprites necessary were a workload beyond what I felt comfortable in completing in 48 hours when combined with the necessary coding to be done. In addition, I was intending on this entry doing well in the votes and I felt that a longform game like a digital pet would not be received well.  Work completed included the base UI, as well as some basic logic needed.

Dungeon Crawl with Growing Sword: Similar to the concept I ended up with, but a third person, overhead dungeon crawler with basic combat and a growing sword with every kill. Decided to move on to the next concept as I got frustrated with certain issues and wasn’t thinking properly. Worked on basic camera and movement code, in addition to a basic player model and weapon model and some required animations.

Kaiju Game: Essentially using the same camera and movement code from previous concept, this would be a game where you start as a small monster and grow with every person eaten, eventually able to destroy buildings and whatnot. Decided that production of the enemy AI would be far too extensive for the short time remaining. Work completed included several building models and the creation of a small test city.

2D Platformer: In the style of old castlevania games, I decided to ignore the growth theme and go with “Two button” but decided it was a bit of a cop out, since there are still movement buttons. No real work completed, though.

Tower Climb Platformer: The decided upon concept, this combined the growing sword with the concept of making a platformer. To go with it’s simple tower geometry I went with an orthographic camera to make it feel strangely flat and to make the controls feel more appropriate.

Time Chart:

    9pm -1am Fri-Sat: Worked on the digital pet concept, deciding that though I wasted the first 4 hours I could make it up in the morning.

1am-5am Sat: Attempted to sleep, failed, was too busy conceptualizing the project at hand. Came up with all sorts of concepts that never made it into the final project.

5am-8am Sat: Actual sleep

8am-3pm Sat: Built the base player model, the sword, the movement and attack animations and the movement and camera code. It was at this time I dealt with frustration regarding the Attack code, and the goal to integrate code into animations failed horribly.

3pm-7pm Sat:  Slept

7pm-12am Sat-Sun: Was frustrated and still tired, decided to calm down and look over some things but didn’t actually really work on anything.. At this time considered calling it quits.

12am-7am Sun: Slept

7am-12pm Sun: Swapped to the Kaiju concept, built a couple building models as well as the base terrain for the city as well as several  terrain textures and a few support models. Decided this wouldn’t work.

12pm-1pm Sun: Fiddled with a few things in 2d, to set up for the platformer. Came up with idea of the tower platformer

1pm-7pm Sun: Built the base tower model, 2 platform models and a “floor” model. Created a jump animation for the player model I had made earlier. Rebuilt the attack animation code to be separate from the animation itself.  Created an enemy slime model, then the enemy AI.

7pm-8pm Sun: Took out my guitar and fiddled around to make a theme for the tower, then used my mouth to make the other sound effects. Last second UI for reloading the level on defeat, quitting the game and starting the game.

8pm-9pm Sun: Generated the game file and published onto itch.io

Review of Goals:

    Scripts to Animation (Failed): Due to the way the unity engine inherits animations, they are read only and won’t keep any scripts attached to keyframes, despite that only affecting them inside the unity engine. Can only attach it to animations created in Unity.

Considerable Content Generation (Failure): As I spent a lot of time and effort on other concepts,  I ended up behind schedule considerably and barely finished making one level.I would hardly call one level with one enemy type considerable content.

Dedication to Polish (Failed): Unfortunately several buttons used generic Unity button graphics as well as not having a proper intro screen. In addition the player and weapon models was incomplete as well. Lastly the enemies don’t actually have an attack.

Theme Integration: While I think technically it was more actually part of the gameplay then my previous entries, I still think I could have done more if I had more time left over, however the low enemy variety and lack of enemy attack combined with the lack of any real mechanics regarding the sword growth besides killing things meant that it was sort of irrelevant.

Conclusion:

While I think the game I managed to pull through and make a product in short order, I am disappointed in my capacity to hold to a working concept. My original concept would have fit both themes and while it would have meant a fair deal of sprite work, if I had stuck through I think I could have completed it. I think my inexperience with 2D work in Unity is part of why I decided to switch concepts.

Goals for the next Ludum Dare:

• Stick to a concept if it works: The main reason I would consider this entry a failure is the fact I swapped concepts repeatedly until nearly the end, and barely produced any content at all.

• Make the Theme the heart:  The double theme made focusing on the theme kind of challenging; but making it such a small part of the game feels kind of lame.

• Make the game with Reviewers in mind: Simple fact is, there are a lot of things that reviewers immediately recoil from. Complicated control schemes, long startup periods and lacking an browser version are all good ways to immediately prevent people from reviewing your game. Keep it simple stupid seems to be practically required.

• Create a decent amount of content: This has been a major issue with all of my entries is that they can all be completed in a few minutes… even a first person stealth game. Considering procedural generation as a potential to allow for a lot of content.

Thanks for taking the time to read, I mostly made this for myself, but if it helped any of you think through your issues I am glad it helped maybe.

And for ultimate sellout, here is a link to the game again >.>

For those of you who haven’t played my game yet, you can do that here

In my game you are the president of a state at war and you have to make choices about how far you will go in order to win.

I went ahead and stored the data of choices, and put them into graphs.

Here you can see how people replied to the first moral choice (whether it is OK to torture an enemy spy for information)

You can see all choices in the post compo version.

Forklift Man is now also available for Mac! You can download it here: http://tocogames.itch.io/forklift-man

In case you don’t know Forklift Man yet, he is the guy who can grow his limbs at will, in his quest for greatestness he has to use his powers to overcome various obstacles and puzzles.

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=44878%C3%A2%C2%80%C2%8B

i am proud to say that Deep Growth got a patch fixing common bugs

♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦PLAY NOW♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦

Change log

(P = patched,R = resetting will fix it)
plant skips movement and the screen jumps up (P v1.2)
possible to skip growth power up and soft lock the game (p 1.2)
the plant’s color at the ending was off(p 1.2)
possible to get stuck on the plant (p 1.2)(R)
R did not reset the player’s x and y to plant’s (p 1.2)(R)

Recently, we got many people asking for a port to Mac and Linux. Although the majority of people use windows, it is nice to have a universal platform that everyone can use and know that no-one will have to wait for the download. That’s why if you haven’t added a web port to your game yet, I would highly recommend doing so.

Plank is a 3d puzzle game about growing and shrinking, if you haven’t played it already, click Here.

blue left, red right, 4 shields – avoid everything else!

LD34 was my second Ludum Dare and 3rd game jam overall. This one turned out pretty decent and complete, though could use some tweaking. Here’s a timelapse of the development over the 48 hours it took. I entered the jam because I couldn’t make the start time of the compo, but decided to stick to 48 hours anyway.

The major take away I will apply to next time: Sleep is for the weak..? No, in all seriousness it’s that I’ll probably rope in a few friends to do some quick-fire play-tests if I have time to spare.

And of course, here’s the link to the game page if you want such a thing.

Tags: arcade, ld34, monochrome, panda3d, python

A few of you tried to download the OS X version of my game but it did not function properly for people who did not have libraries installed. I have updated the download link to a version of the game that has the necessary libraries included. I need people to test it out and make sure it works on other OS X computers that do not have SDL2 installed. Thanks! If it works for you, please let me know in the comments!

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=62665

Hello again,
I go on playing your games in 5 minutes on stream.
You can come and send new entries but I will play them after 12 games I already have.
I won’t be talking (I don’t have a proper place) but I’ll be in the chat and I think it’s still valuable to see how I do in your games.
Stream Here

Note: Do not post your game in comments.

If you would like to try our game:
Lost Contact

Hey guys,

Just a shameless plug here, as I’ve been super busy since the jam and haven’t had time to do a sexy post-mortem yet. It’s coming! Really hoping to get some more feedback as this is my best LD entry by far, and I want to get as many eyes on it as possible!

Go go go: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=33962

I rate back btw, so just leave a comment and I’ll get to your game tomorrow (planning to hit the 100 mark and need more games!)

Yup, got another timelapse up! This time, instead of using Chronolapse or FFMPEG to generate the video, I ended up using Blender instead. Let us know if it’s an improvement compared to the other videos in the playlist below.

Here’s our development process for hack.source.net, where I end up going circles debugging a ton of networking problems. Then a blur at the end where I drastically improve the graphics in the game. Ah, classic game jam panics.

Tags: blender, chronolapse, hack.source.net, timelapse

What Went Wrong

I honestly don’t know where to begin. I will start by saying after LD33 I spent about 95% of my time trying to better my game development skills. Learning how to do different things, like rotating towards an object or creating a mouse zoom. I even watched several videos on Khan’s Academy on Calculus and Trigonometry because I never learned those back in High School. I really thought I was prepared for this LD and then the themes were announced and I was like ‘yeah I got this’. Well I didn’t have this… heck I didn’t have anything.

All that preparing went right out the windows. I started making some art like I normally do and starting drawing blanks on how to actually implement the ideas I had. So I changed my idea around and came up with a new one then I went to bed. Woke up Saturday morning and started in on my new idea. a couple of hours later I was like “This is totally not fun at all”. So I scraped it and stated in on another idea I had thought of which also turned out to not be fun. At this point I was getting frustrated and depressed. Its such a motivator killer to discover your game is no fun. It was at that point that I gave up…. I was out of the Compo and boy was I depressed. I’ve never failed to make a game in all the times I’ve entered the LD.

Being a failure is no fun. I sulked and moped around the house the rest of the night then I went to bed. Woke up Sunday morning and had a thought about a game I could make. I came down stairs and did a little prototyping. I liked the results so I continued to flesh it out. I was inspired! Now I only had 8 hour as I had a prior engagement that would take about 4 hours. I was able to reuse some of the art I had created on Saturday so that made me happy it didn’t go to waste. I was half done when I again realized the game was not as good as some of my other games, as it was only mildly fun. Alright I’ll be honest… its no fun at all so when something is not fun you need to make it funny! lol!

What Went Right

1. I made a game!

I need to start strong as I don’t really have anything else… So yeah, I made a game for LD 34 and I’m not a failure!

If you’d like to try and judge for yourself you can play it here

I ask 2 things though.

1. If you do try it out please leave feedback.
2. The track only goes to 20, if for some odd reason you get beyond that can you leave feedback on how you did it. In all of my testing I never got past 11 or 12.

Hi , It was my first Ludum Dare entry , and there it is “Alien Pathogen” Top-Down Sci-Fi Horror Shooter game. Take place at MARS Alien Pathogen Control Facility – Extraterrestrial decontamination Unit  (2315 year). Alien pathogen escaped from lab and Horror started.

A Small zombie Like Alien  Creatures which are living and acting as flocks .If they see you or smell you they will attack you and kill you. If they touch the water they will grow and on the and they will explode and create few small once.  Save your self  using different weapons .

 Download

It was my second ludum dare (the first alone) and some things went better and others not so much.
Let’s see:

Went right:

• Better practice on pixel art (not good yet)
• Learned that it’s better to have a color palette (I have used this site -> https://coolors.co/).
• Improved mood (this is something I really appreciate while judging other games)
• Learned something about Construct2 path finding behaviour (despite the fact that in the end I didn’t use it)
• Streaming. This time I had streaming in real time. So if you want to see how I developed this game you can see in last videos at http://twitch.tv/martim00. You can also follow me if you want! =) I am developing an adventure game engine based on phaser.js!

Went wrong:

• time (when you work in a group you can focus on details that make difference, especially sound, music and animation. Those things were left to last hours, this time)
• jogability and usability (I think those could be improved, like some commenters have pointed. Notably the player deacelleration and procrastinator time alert)

I created a post-mortem for our game Robot Frost Eagle and Worm Big Rescue Adventure , you can read it here;

http://bit.ly/1NAU0UP

Screenshots

Don’t forget to watch the Timelapse video;

A few weeks ago I got a book to learn Unity. Most of the chapters were for 3D and I was really excited about it. Eventually, the 3D math got me discouraged, because I was having a hard time doing what I wanted to do with my objects. I decided to transition to 2D and found some great youtube tutorials.

One of my friends mentioned that Ludum Dare was coming up so we formulated a plan with another friend to have our own Ludum Dare meetup and all use Unity. We decided to all stay at my buddy’s studio apartment for the entire weekend of the compo.

We got to the apartment Friday evening and set up our laptops and monitors. The first night when the theme was announced I decided on my two-button control scheme of clicking and boosting with a ball moving around. I decided to try to make an area where a ball could bounce around and used a pong tutorial to help out with the physics and some of the interactions. I got a little discouraged that night because there were so many unknowns and so many things I needed to do.

We ordered pizza and worked a little more. At the end of the night I decided to write out every small thing that I wanted to accomplish the next day. Saturday, the whole concept started to come together because I was listening to this new Remix Collection by Topmodelz, which inspired the open-world and the music. I made most of the level on Saturday and decided that I needed to share my experience of listening to Euro Trance and testing my game with everyone so I started making a song in the style of that mix. I slept on the kitchen floor at 3 AM.

On Sunday I spent a few hours finishing up the song and then realized that I still had a lot to do. I made all of the pixel art that is in the final version, added particle effects, added sound effects, finished up the game logic, and then cut a lot of features at the last minute!

After I submitted my game we got some food, played a bunch of compo entries, slept on the floor again and then went to work the next morning and got nothing done. This was one of my best weekends in recent memory and It’s so cool to see what we all made. I plan to continue working on my game so that I can release it or a different game with a similar concept. See you guys next time!

TLDR: 10/10 would do again

GAME PAGE

Post-compo version of Slime Smasher has been updated with new challenges.
New slime and boss slime. Particle effects. Keyboard bug fix. Better game over screen.

My game Subject Is Compliant / Subject Is Defiant  is up! It is a science fiction text adventure with a difference: most commands have been disabled and replaced with COMPLY and DEFY. If that got your attention, feel free to check it out!

I’m very happy that people are playing and enjoying The Artifact and I am aware this is a tricky game and lot of people got stuck so I have made a quick walkthrough to help those in need:

You can play The Artifact here

It was my second Ludum Dare in a row, so I already knew that its going to be though. The theme got announced at 3am and I had instantly an idea, so that went well. I used Unity 5.3 which I used in 33 too, I knew my weapons and started forming my idea. The first pictures were made and the core gameplay was ready.

But then I decided to move from a sheep to a lawn mower and I think that it was the right decision.

What went well:

• The Idea
  • I choose the idea pretty fast, which gave me enough time to work on other things
• The art-style
  • I think this game looks miles better then the other I made
• The core gameplay
  • The game has 3 levels, an end and a victory, more than I have ever done in my last LD. And this was my first time without Random Levels which was a good move, because making the levels myself means I can balance them without rewriting a lot of Level Generator code.

What went wrong:

• The time management
  • I wanted to do a compo game, but the game wasn’t ready and without any sounds, which makes it boring. I planned to do Power Ups which weren’t ready too
• The passiveness
  • The games plays too passive, there aren’t any ways to kill the other lawn mower without killing yourself, I thought of adding weapons but the time ran away…

Go play it here!

Hints for other LD participants:

• Prepare your worksation!
  • Dont just check if you have unity installed, check if you can build your game!
• Test yourself
  • Give yourself the objective to make something, like an working UI, or a Character Controler
• Build up a base code
  • I had some scripts for Camera Movement, Camera Ratio and a working Mesh Generator!

Feel free to use my scripts or even include them in the next LD, if you use them feel free to credit me, but that’s not necessary!

Camera Size | Camera Border

Those Objects need to be in two separate Cameras, Camera Size in the parent Camera and Camera Border in the child Camera

Snowman Builder Extreme’s idea came about quite quickly and was shared by other participants: roll a snowball down a hill to make it grow while stuff happens. The twist in SME is that you pick up typical snowman stuff: carrots, pebbles and hats and they accumulate and roll down with you, similar to the Katamari games.

Create an Extreme Snowman right now!

The growing theme was thus growing the snowball itself but also extending the ball with a bunch of carrots and hats.

The two-control part was easy, the snowball moves forward by itself and you can only apply force to the left or right, which also helped in making you feel less in control of this thing thundering down the track.

Overall I’m very happy with how it turned out. My artistic skills are minimal so I used external assets from places like opengameart and freesound and a theme by Kevin MacLeod from incompetech, which I’ve always wanted to do, but I took the time to add a simple menu and other game-y elements, statistics and achievement titles.

Tip: Always take time to add menus and hud overlays where appropriate, I didn’t last time and it made the game worse for it.

The movie above is me showing you can get the highest title “Expert” in the game. Reaching the absolute end of the track is not easy. Try it yourself!

The Good

• Making use of assets allowed me to focus purely on the game and engine code (and I needed the time)
• I made a track generator that works with simple rotation and length instructions to create the track and wall mesh blocks and collision + direction information
• Creating the game showed me where some of the holes were in my custom WebGL engine and it got better just by being used for something new
• At the end of day 2 I was a bit demotivated, it still looked rather barren and most of the game wasn’t there yet, so on day 3 I started with pure gameplay and once I saw the carrots and hats rolling along with the ball my spirits lifted quite a bit. I could get this working and it was fun too!
• Adding the titles. When the game reacts to what you’re trying to do, it feels very satisfying. Always put in effort-reward points and/or cycles. BTW: there are 16 titles total, get ’em all!

The Bad

• My engine does not yet have built in collision detection and we all know how much fun that can be, especially in 3D. As a result, it is possible to fly through walls at certain angles and speeds but it happens rarely enough that it would just have to do. LD is not a time to spend 2 days fixing it, but the track gen + collision info gen took me a full day
• Like most LD entries, there’s a lot of low hanging fruit. Small improvements that would add good value. But Monday I had a 20-hour day and that was just enough to get to where I got now
• Good+Bad: It looks like a game from 1996 because of the simple 3D objects but I decided to own it and promote it as if it was a low-budget game from the early PSX days.

I had a good time, learned new stuff and improved my framework. It was great and I hope you enjoyed it as well. Now play the game and please rate!

-Arthur

Hi guys! I though posting a walkthrough video for the game was a great idea! Here’s our! I’ll be glad if you guys post some speed run video of it 😛

Test the game > http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=20316

Hi! @LiaSae here. For background’s sake, I’m a AAA game coder currently taking a break to fix her brain. LD34 was the perfect chance to make something, feel good about it and fall in love with game-making again.

My game’s called Thunder On, and was made in 48h (~16h of work) even though it’s a Jam entry.  I initially wanted to call it Thunder Down, but… Well, you google that and tell me what you find. Possibly not at work.

Gameplay view. It’s THAT kind of game.

The idea had been bouncing through my head for a good while now: “being” a lightning bolt, going down, losing energy as you go and having to create new branches, to see the final result once you touch ground. The LD themes gave me the constraints I needed to make a workable implementation.

WARNING: Coder lingo ahead. Artists beware, though I’ll try to have some snippets for you as well.

What went wrong

1. “WTF is going on?”
   This was the general reaction from the bulk of the players (thanks all for your feedback, it’s very valuable!). I purposefully left the initial instructions vague, because I was going for whimsy / eerie. But combined with the lack of altitude indication of any sort, this means that what is obvious to me – “well of course the camera’s looking down and you’re going down, it’s like that in the Scene view!” – is cryptic to players.
2. Check the compo rules beforehand next time
   I was aiming for a compo entry, but had forgotten even sounds had to be made from scratch. As I checked when getting ready to upload my entry, I facepalmed hard and ticked the Jam box instead. On the bright side, that means it sounds decent instead of terrible.
3. Unity 5.3
   I don’t know what on earth was going on with viewport rendering, but a quarter of it routinely turned black for no apparent reason. Getting my alpha blended shader for the cloud layer to work was a matter of one hour of copy-pasting and tweaking the built-in shader to get a version that didn’t break. I can’t say I’m not used to randomly breaking tools, but generally that has been because I’m on a dev branch! I should have stayed on 5.2 for the jam and upgraded afterwards.
4. Responsiveness
   I went with a coroutine-based easing animation for the movement, but that also meant blocking inputs until the easing is done. Unfortunately the end of it is virtually infinite, so I added a cutoff. But it was not tweaked well enough, and the game feels frustrating as a result, because you expect to be able to provide new input earlier that you’re allowed to.
5. Too easy
   No time means little tweaking, randomness means impredictability, and as a result it’s way too easy to reach the ground. It would not be hard to add a system that analyses possible paths to decide how far up you should go for the best difficulty, but it would take time!

What went right

1. Hell yeah, I made a thing
   It’s finished. It works. It feels and sounds and looks better (*suppress banding rant*) than anything I’ve ever made by myself. It’s complete, people like it overall, they get the point, and that makes it an excellent proof of concept for that idea. I’m happy and proud, and this does wonders for Broken Brain.
2. No crunch!
   I live in Sweden, and that meant waiting until 3AM for the themes to be announced. Then to bed, let my brain work it, takes notes, sleep. The next day we had to go borrow the car, buy moving boxes for my partner’s family, drive to IKEA, survive IKEA, come back (this is all very Swedish). Then I had to go buy yarn Because Reasons, head off to an exhibit, go back home, head off again to dump some stuff, then drop off the car. THEN I was able to start on the game, at 5PM past. Between breaks and meals, I put in about 8h that day. The next day I had to go have lunch with a friend leaving the country, run an errand halfway across town, come back, which once again meant starting work at 5PM. Again I put in about 8h total, completing the last tweak to the feel of it all at 2:58AM and doing the submission afterwards. All of this to say: the week-end was packed, which forced me to put in normal work hours instead of Jam Crunch Hours, and I still made it. If life gets in the way, just slash scope massively.
3. Procedural techniques
   The bolt is a binary tree (made simple by the two button controls). From there, I generate a mesh that represents the final bolt. The clouds are based on Simplex Value noise from an excellent tutorial at CatLikeCoding. This all adds up to something that feels more complicated and rich than it really is, and was fun to code.
4. Infrastructure
   I typically use Assembla for projects like this. The repos have a size limit IIRC, but otherwise they’re free and you can create tons of them. So I created a SVN repo and off I went. Then I made sure to commit quite often, keep things running at all times, and added debug draw as early as I could. It helped immensely, because I didn’t have to guess whether things worked: I could just test, at all times.

   

   The scene view with the debug tree.

5. Coroutines
   I had never used coroutines. On related news, I positively hated gameplay and procedural animation programming for its heavy reliance on a crapton of flags. I don’t know how well coroutines-based systems will scale to bigger projects, but for this it was an absolute delight to chain per-frame callbacks instead of keeping track of all that state. It taught me a new way to think and that makes me immensely happy.

Conclusion

I’m happy with it, as I’ve mentioned. It’s far from perfect, but it was never going to be, and I had to finish, package and ship it off. It looks good because I went with something simple and cheap with glow. I learned stuff. I’m getting excellent feedback, and pondering whether to bring this further eventually. I’m taking the time to play and rate some games this time around too, and discovering a lot of fun things. So long live the Ludum Dare, and congratulations to everyone who made a thing, or tried to make a thing. It’s worth it.

Making lightning bolts is fun!

So people have a couple of problems with my game, which I can understand, but I also think people are just assuming that it’s broken, which is kind of getting me down.

The main problem people have is that it’s just too fast, which is basically correct. In the game you grow to a very large size, and once you reach those sizes jumping becomes very slow and heavy because of your scale and the fact that gravity is constant. So it was a design choice to make the gravity seem very high at the beginning. And that just instantly puts people off. Admittedly I never got round to putting the very large scale puzzles into the game, so I could have got away with having less extreme gravity at the beginning. Live and learn.

The other problem people have is saying that you can’t get past the second ‘goblet’. This is really a bummer because the jump is meant to be solved a specific way, and because people can’t work it out, they’re saying the game is broken.

TL;DR The game is too fast and appears broken when it isn’t which is putting people off playing, and I would really like some feedback, good or bad from someone who’s persevered past the second obstacle.

Thanks!

PLAY

Hello lovely people ^^!!

I’ll leave this here in case it catches your attention and you feel like playing. Thanks a lot if you do play it!

Here is the link: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=64553

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

Well, before I get started, are Post-Mortems supposed to be when you’re done with a game, or just looking back at the weekend?

Anywhoozle, I made this thing in 48 hours, and, after about 30 minutes of deep, deep consideration, named it Hero Feed Co. and here it is: …in a thiserly direction… I think… yeah, here it is!

So, in this hectic-ish and horrifying place, you pop out of a little cage labeled “Snack”. Then the janitors start pouring in. Now that I have the story out of the way, the weekend went as such: Theme came out at nine ‘cuz I’m an Eastern-Coast… dweller, and then I started bouncing a few ideas off of some friends and doing some art for the game. Then, about an hour later, decided to turn in for the night. Next day was the usual semi-relaxed rush to build the basis of the game, and I had the game itself done by bedtime that night. On Sunday, the awe-inspiring day of rushing, I had the majority of a game done, and was able to focus on polish. I spent the morning and beginning of the afternoon doing cool and fancy stuff, like knockback, flashing-hurt-colors, and two new enemies. Of course, like a good little jammer, I left the music and sound until the end. I actually think I wasted quite a bit of time on the sound, as I scrapped what I had after an hour and reverted to BFXR. Music also wasted about 30 minutes, and I ended up with none at all. Deadline came and went, and it was quite a success in my opinion. And, feedback from the community has enlightened me on quite a few interesting details.

What I think went right:

Art- I had a ton of fun doing it, and have gotten a few comments on how much they liked the art style I used… which I don’t really know what I did differently from normal, so maybe they just like my art.

Concept- the statement of “Keep It Simple Stupid” is completely genius, and a must-have piece of advice to follow. Every time with Ludum Dare, I’ve gotten the comment “Nice idea, bad execution”, and now I’ve learned that time for polish is essential to limiting the number of these comments.

Sound… ish- I guess I could put a “what went okay”, but I’m actually kind of impressed with the sound this time. Watching that Magfest 48-hour game jam tip session-panel-thing taught me the tip of “When on BFXR, just hit the Randomize button a few times”. It worked a charm, with some really cool and somewhat-smoother-than-normal sound effects. Sound was a little incomplete though.

What I think went wrong:

Music- Not applicable, again. Nice job man.

Controls- Again with the “Nice idea, bad execution” thing. I went with a similar control scheme to Mobs inc. from LD 33, and by similar I mean VERY similar, and the execution was very easy to do, but ended up with a slight “icy-floor vibe”, as one comment put it.

Difficulty- Combined with the “icy-floor vibe”, and some cramped level design, quite a few people found the game too hard. I went with what was a comfortable difficulty, and ended up making it far too hard for anyone else to do very well. Which unfortunately also means that not everyone got to see some of the later content, like the all-powerful Death Pugs. They come in wave 4 for those of you who may want to see one. Good luck.

I really learned quite a bit from this LD, had a ton of fun, and can’t wait to see more of what you guys have made this LD, and try again in April.
If you want to try my game, it’s here: in this link.

Good luck seeing a Death-Pug.

Breathe is now on itch.io!

Breathe Entry – Play

Tags: 2d unity, Growing, ld34, two button controls

So my first Ludum Dare ever is completed! Hooray!

If you haven’t yet, you are welcome to try my entry, Strong Like Orc, a pseudo-hack’n’slash endless runner starring one (or two!) orcs who are training to defend their tribe against the humans by dodging and smashing their way through a dungeon full of crates. Sample gameplay below!

This was my first entry into this storied competition, though I tried and gave up once a few years ago. In fact, I didn’t even realize that LD was this weekend until 24 hours in! Deciding I had nothing better to do that weekend, I jumped right in to do some brainstorming. I’m very pleased with the results, simple as the game turned out to be. Everyone else seems to be doing it, so I’ll give a bit more detailed description of how everything turned out.

WHAT WENT WELL

Simplicity – After getting an idea and starting, I kept scrapping gameplay features – multiple characters/weapons, enemies to dodge, powerups – in the name of simplicity, and focused on creating a base experience with a (moderately) high level of polish. There’s less to do than I had envisioned, but with the amount of time I had, I think it turned out better for it.

Gameplay – The two buttons used were for jump and dash. Recharging the player’s air jump after a complete spear dash allowed for much fluid gameplay, and suddenly created the additional challenge of how long the player could stay in the air in one continuous dash/jump chain. I felt that the game was quite fun to play, and I received numerous comments to the same effect.

WHAT DIDN’T

Down to the wire – I started after 24 hours had already elapsed, and I had work most of Monday, so I ended up with very little time to work on the game. I only had an hour or so to do all of the audio, so that was a rush to make sounds in sfxr, and find free to use music online, though I am fortunate to have found music which suits the atmosphere of the game. Next time, I’d like to do my own music proper. Technically I went 5 minutes over time trying to get the music to play and fixing audio bugs (please don’t disqualify me).

Level generation – I ended up with a fairly simple algorithm for dungeon generation (place some rectangles randomly, put some boxes on top of those randomly), but there is no difficulty progression, and it is not impossible (however unlikely) to generate a completely impassible hallway. One of my highest priority post-jam improvements to work on is better level generation.

Player communication – I figured the best thing to do was tell the player how to jump and how to attack, and let them figure out the advanced combos. What happened was several people didn’t realize they could double jump until 5 or 10 minutes in, and one person even thought that infinite dash-jumping was a bug. I had added these as occasional gameplay tips when you die, but what instructions I figured were implied didn’t come across the whole time.

FUTURE GOALS

Multiple characters – Try out different weapons for different play styles, for instance knives which you can hold to dash forever, or a big mace which slows the player when they swing.

Level progression and enemies – In addition to the infinite random runner, I’d like to add a dungeon progression where the player clears out successive areas with different enemies/themes, and eventually take on the human army, culminating in wizard boss battles.

Level generation – Add some checks so that the generated hallway is always fair, or at least not impossible, and some progression so the game gets faster/more packed as the game goes on.

ANNOUNCEMENT

I got bored last night, and added an option for a second player, so you can compete with a friend in real time. If you’ve played before, perhaps try again with a second player for you to trounce with your existing skill.

There’s an issue though where if one player dashes, the other increases to the same speed. I’ve left it in because it would be quite hard to find a fitting solution, and because it gives players options to kill each other by dashing when the other is near a wall.

TL;DR – I completed my first Ludum Dare game, check it out here!

Let me what you think!

So, this is my second time competing in LD and this is also my second game. I feel like this game is significantly better than the first one I made, but I also had more time and less stress during the event this time. Overall, it seems people have enjoyed themselves when playing it, which is fantastic! I hope it means I did something right. Learning from my last game, I had the goals of making this game play longer than my previous game (you can rush through my previous game in under 1 min) and to have decent sound effects, especially since I’m a bit of an audio guy.

Anyway, what went right this time is that I was ready for this event from the get go. I got off of work at 6:30p and the theme was announced at 7:00p my time. I immediately went to a coffee shop with an idea already brewing in my head and started to jot down ideas and even levels.

I decided to try both themes this time, but one definitely had a bigger drive in the game than the other. Two-button controls was my main focus and the gameplay definitely shows this. In the game the character (named Zorc) cannot do anything. You have to manually select which mechanics he can do and assign them to the either the Z or the C key. The gameplay is tedious at times because of this, but what I tried to do to help alleviate this annoyance was add beautiful bell tones that play whenever Zorc moves or when you select mechanics from the menu. Add a drone-esque tone with a rhythmic recurring note and I built an audio atmosphere that I’m proud of. All the sound effects were stock sounds from Reason 7, with a little bit of synth editing and mastering the sound in Audacity.

Focusing on the audio was what helped pull this together. I originally planned about an hour or two for audio, but I spent about four hours (maybe five) working on it and implementing into the game. This is because part of what didn’t go right was the graphics. You can easily tell that I do not know what I’m doing with graphics. I still want to learn how to, and for the next jam that’ll be a goal I’ll strive for.

Another thing that didn’t go right was time management. There are several known bugs in the code and I spent way too much time trying to fix them. It wasn’t a good idea because the game as a whole suffered for it. I had to scrap levels, mechanics, and even art because I tried to fix bugs that would need more time and thought to fix than a 48/72 hour event can provide. Because of this, I was forced to submit my game to the Jam. I submitted my game to the jam last time, which is fine, but last time I had a better reason to. This time I was being stupid. I also tried new things that I have never done with code before (which is the reason for the bugs) and that only made things worse.

I also did not account for international keyboards. I’ve had several players from Europe mention that the ‘Z’ and ‘Y’ button are different from American keyboards, which drastically changes how the game is played (Z and C keys plus the mouse). This meant that the mouse was more of a hindrance for these players since they had to use two hands to Zorc instead of one. I will have to be less ignorant for my next game.

With that, I have my goals for LD35:

1. Focus more on art. It will probably be pixel art.

2. Don’t be too ambitious. Strive for an idea that fits the theme but is also something you have done before or will be easy to do.

3. Manage your time better.

4. Be wary of the controls for other people and who the controls will affect the game for them.

For the future, I would actually like to pursue an idea like this. I wouldn’t just have two button controls for an actual game, but I do like the idea of having a game with a very interactive audio atmosphere that the player can directly control and influence. That sounds neat to me. I originally thought I’d have to use Unity to make such a thing, and I’m still very new to programming. But I made THIS game in Game Maker. So I may just be able to pull off my idea in a program I’m already accustomed to, which is unbelievably exciting and reassuring.

Thanks for taking the time to read this if you made it this far. And if you haven’t had a chance to play my game, then here’s the link: BAM!

I thought I’d do a little making-of for the art creation phase if you are interested.

For this adventure game I wanted to try a different process to create the backgrounds. I’m not extremely comfortable with pixel art, but I’m used to painting in a traditional way, so I decided to paint the backgrounds in high resolution. I’m using a custom painting tool that was originally designed for live-painting performances, it did the job well and fast.

Then came the problem of resizing, as you may know, resizing down an image can be difficult if you want to keep a pixel-art feeling. You may use “nearest filtering” resizing, but it usually totally destroy the image. Or you may use “bilinear filtering”, but it result in a blurry image. For some time I was experimenting with a new way of resizing-down an image, here are some tests :

Here is the HD of the second screen and the “pixel-art” filtered version :
 

It gave an interesting old-school vibe to the game, without loosing the sharpness, even after applying the CRT shader.

You can play the game here

If enough people are interested I can make a similar making-of about the programming aspect of the game and explain why programming in C is still relevant today.

Thank you for playing and for the encouraging comments on the game page !
See you around.

Hey guys just wanted to thank you for all the feedback that you gave.

I have made some changes to the game, let me know what you think.

HelloDarkness Post Compo

Handing out trophies to everyone reaching the end of Tubutten Beetle.

Screenshot or video required.

WARNING: This will spoil the ending for you 😉

Come play it yourself!

Hi there!

I’m livestreaming right now, playing your Ludum Dare games!

Feel free to drop by and post your game in chat, I will play it, rate it and might even leave a command about how to improve it

Twitch channel: http://www.twitch.tv/chubb1337

See you on twitch!

-Chubb1337

P.S. I also made a game, play it here: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=60288

The “Growing” theme made me an initial push to complete my long-lasting project. And now here’s what I can do on the screen of my Android device (an animated GIF is worth 1000 words):

Just swipe the screen and enjoy the snowfall. Now defeat conditions: you can do whatever you like to have fun.

As the project was started before LD34 beginning and finished 2 hours after, I didn’t submit it, but uploaded to Google play: Snow Relax on Google Play

The technology I used: Action Script 3/Starling/Air. The game keeps 1000 snowflakes at 60 fps.

Tags: android, Growing, release, starling

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=31114

So after another entry to Ludum Dare (my 5th entry), I’m really starting to see just how much better I am at making games, when I compare this entry to my first one there is a huge increase in quality, detail and even the number of game mechanics in it. I’ve also now completed my goal of including an AI system within a game which can make ‘player like’ decisions based on the current situation and for the most part can do exactly what the player can do.

PLAY IT HERE

The good:

• Tile based map – the map can have tiles updated in real time with no obvious decrease in performance
• AI – the AI can compete against the player in a relatively realistic manner
• There is a fair bit of replay-ability with the game as the map and spawn locations are randomly generated
• Resources – the resource system works well and the idea of balancing your resources works well
• Upgrades – although I haven’t made it very clear, you can upgrade buildings to make them produce more which means that you can balance the negative effect of having too many tiles, which is that they each cost 1 of a resource in upkeep
• Kingdom borders – these took a while to get working but I’m very happy I added them as it makes it a lot easier to see where each kingdom is

The bad:

• There is no music in the game
• The tile graphics need a bit more work to make them look nice, its only the tiles I made near the end of the 48 hours that actually look nice
• The resource display sometimes doesn’t update properly
• I didn’t have time to implement a tutorial
• The fog doesn’t loop very nice, it needs something similar to the kingdom border

So overall, I am very happy with this game, and am currently continuing the development of it to fix some of the issues as well as to add some new features. I am also working on a mobile version as I think this might work well to.

I have also added my game to Kongregate so you can play the latest version there as well along with the itch.io version.

Thank you very much for playing my game and I’m really enjoying playing other entries as well.

First, here’s the game for anyone that wants to play it! All feedback is greatly appreciated!  Link

Post Mortem

This is my third Ludum Dare, but the first time that i’ve dared to make a post mortem! 😀

For some time now I’ve been trying to improve my programmer art, I always felt that my games were lacking in that aspect. But the road of the artist was no easy one for me, most of the things i found were very hard to manage and the result was not appealing enough. Mostly due to my lack of persistence and laziness. Luckily, in my search for a good Art pipeline i found Inkscape, with it’s auto correct tool and power strokes the results looked pretty good!  With that and my usual Paint.net + Unity + Anvil Studio + SFXR , my setup was complete and I was ready for the Ludum Dare! Or was I?!

When the theme came out, my mind was blown. At the beginning i was so confused that i even thought that “TIED: Two button control and Growing” was one only theme.  After rereading it multiple times and finally understanding what it was about I started to think about which one would fit me better. To tell the truth I just wanted to do something simple, but with a twist. The first idea that came to my mind was about a knight that kept on getting bigger and bigger as it killed his enemies, but the growing part and the level getting small sounded complicated, so i discarded the idea. I kept on thinking about other ideas for a while and then… BAM! It hit me like a train! A knight that keeps on jumping up and down! It sounded fun! And it was a 2 button control, so I started the development right away!

The first part that I implemented was the bouncing mechanic, it wasn’t too hard, and even tough it had some glitches with the side walls, it was working pretty good. The next part was to start to make some art, surprisingly enough, the knight looked like a knight and the weapons looked like weapons. By the end of the first night I had the bouncing mechanic, and one enemy that was just standing around. Things were looking great!

Things were looking good by the first half of the first day. Some of the enemy AI was implemented, weapons were functional, I even had the system to pick weapons up. And then, when it came the time to implement the camera, It all started to go wrong!

In the beginning I wanted to make the camera follow the player. This way i just had to design one enormous level and the player could just navigate around it. But the camera following the player felt horrible! I couldn’t figure out a way of doing one big level without becoming dizzy from the camera after 5 seconds of playing. Other solutions were a bit more time consuming, but it looked like I had no alternative. So I buckled myself up and I started to implement a roguelikeish type of levels.

The first problem I encountered was that I had no experience on using any Tilemap editors like Tiled… And i surely didn’t have time to learn and create a pipeline to export it to Unity. So I searched a bit more and I found that in Unity you can move the sprites around snapping them to the grid if you press Ctrl while doing so! That was great! I was able to design levels already inside Unity and a lot faster than learning to use Tiled!

In the end the map ended up being quite big, 13 levels, and the level design consumed a lot more time than I had planned! Only half a day was remaining and I still had to create  music/story/final boss, and polish the game as much as possible.

With more coffee than blood running through my veins I faced the last few hours of this ludum dare! The music ended up coming good and the boss was simple but effective! I also had to cut the story short and only put a small introduction. But in the end the game was finished!! I was happy with the result and there was only one thing missing! Uploading it!

With Unity it’s fairly simple to upload, But some things like the particles on picking up coins were broken in the process. I didn’t have time to fix it and they didn’t look superhorrible on WebGL, so I let them be.

After the succesful upload I went to sleep with a smile on my zombie face! Another finished Ludum Dare!

Thanks for reading! Hope you all enjoyed your Ludum Dare as much as I did!

This my second time participating in the Ludum Dare jam, and this time I thought I’d put together a quick post-mortem about what I learned, how I improved over last time, and where I can still do better. You can play and rate Charge! here.

I was actually quite pleased with the choice of theme. There were some of the others that I felt I had more original or innovative ideas for, or ideas that were closer to my heart, but I did have a solid idea for “Two Button Controls” that I felt I could implement competently, so I wasted no time in getting stuck in. This time I was prepared in advance with a basic title screen and SFX and music architecture.

I initially was going to go for a low-poly 3D art style (but still with gameplay on a 2D plane). After adding a couple of layers of background terrain I decided that I didn’t want that sterile look, and I didn’t want to tackle character modelling in Blender, so I switched to a pixel art style. Initially I went with a more standard colour palette for this, but soon switched it up again with a palette selected by a web-design tool.

Next I added the “monk” enemy as a brown box placeholder sprite, and the player as a red box, and implemented the basic gameplay. Aside from some struggles with the animation system (as usual for me), this was really quite simple. I described the gameplay as 2D above, but that was a lie, it’s actually 1D – everything is based on the x position of various objects.

With the basics down I turned to the music and SFX, because a major criticism of my last game was that it was too quiet and had no music. I’d messed around with Bosca Ceoil a few times in the weeks prior to the jam. I don’t know much about composing music, but enough to pick a common chord progression, make a few variations of it, and base everything else off of the chords. I wanted a sort of metal feel, and I think I spent longer trying to pick a distorted guitar instrument that I liked than I did on composing the tune. I added a “bagpipe” instrument as the melody, because I read that the Vikings may have had such a thing. Finally I made a variation of the same tune with half the guitar chords and drumbeats removed and a more melodic instrument than the bagpipe, to use for the title screen. I picked some sounds from bfxr for all the things I would need.

After that it was all animations animations animations. I animated the second enemy type as I was creating it, rather than using placeholders, because by that point I had a good workflow down.

What went wrong

• The biggest disaster was when I went to prepare a release in the last hour of the jam, only to discover that my UI was not being scaled correctly when run full-screen. I scrambled to find a fix for this but couldn’t. I’ve actually seen the same problem in other games from the jam, so I think it is a Unity bug I upgraded the day before the jam, which was an obvious mistake.
• I thought the colour palette would make the game stand out and look more interesting, and I think it does to an extent, but I also think I stuck to it a little too religiously. I should have chosen one limited palette for the background elements, and another for the gameplay elements. As it is the gameplay elements blend in a bit too much, and there’s a few spots where details disappear completely.
• Some of the sounds are quite good, like the impact sound when an arrow hits your shield – very satisfying. Others are a bit grating, like the treasure collection sound. I wish I had had time to tone that down a bit. I would like to figure out a better way of doing sound effects in general actually.
• The art – I wish I had gone for a lower resolution. It was my first time attempting this kind of art, so I wasn’t sure where to start. I don’t think it’s as impressive as my last game.

What went right

• The animations. After some initial struggle with Mecanim it finally started to click for me. Most of the animations are only two frames, but they feel punchy and bouncy and convey what they’re supposed to. The run and idle animations are even in time with the music. That was accidental, but I love it
• The music. Nobody has commented on it either way, but nobody is complaining about my game being too quiet either. And they’re not complaining about it being annoying. To me that suggests that I made music that’s not amazing and awe-inspiring, but it compliments the gameplay and doesn’t get on people’s nerves. That’s a success in my book.
• The basic gameplay was really easy to implement, which left me lots of time for tweaking and polish. I didn’t have to bother with physics or colliders. I felt that my last game was clunky and awkward to control, but this one is responsive, and is more fun as a result.
• The frivolous elements. I think the gameplay stands on its own, but being so simple it could easily become boring. I think things like the praise and admonishments on death, and the random battlecries form a reward system on top of just getting further each time, and were much easier to implement than new gameplay elements.

Overall I’m pretty happy with my game. I got much closer to achieving what I set out to than I did last time, and I had a lot of fun. I will probably even improve on it a bit and release it – I think it would be good on mobile.

Please check out Charge! and rate it, I hope you enjoy.

Did you know?  In the game zx you can change the two buttons to be any two letters you want!  Just scroll to the left one screen with ‘z’ after you download the jar file…

Before

After

Button Simulator in action

Play the game here

The Concept

I had the idea for Button Simulator, my LD34 entry, while watching a crappy science fiction movie. The characters sat at their space ship consoles, flicking switches and pressing buttons. There was something strangely entertaining about the experience – the link between human and machine – a sense of power, and a satisfaction in being able to control the world around you with just a flick of your fingers. I suppose its also the same little itch that DCS A-10 and its hard-core simulator siblings scratch, or this mission control desk (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6zseFi070E). But how to translate a switch flicking simulation into something that was fun to play and could be completed in a weekend?

I suppose I completed the process back to front – instead of using the theme to generate a game idea, I used the theme to flavour the game idea I already had! In the final days leading up to the theme announcement I took the 20 final themes and wrote a short paragraph – a “hook” – for as many themes as I could that set out how my game idea would fit into each theme. My hook for the “growing” theme was:

    "Last year's crop wasn't that great,
 and unfortunately we had to let Freddy go...
 ...from altitude.
 Don't let the crop die"
 

This turned out to be pretty close to the final intro text. Even if my approach was back to front it meant that although I wasn’t ecstatic about the themes that were announced, at least I had something ready to go.

Making the game

My last Ludum Dare entry was probably the worst thing I have ever publicly released. I wasn’t happy with it at all, and I think it was because I didn’t have a solid concept in mind before I started, and as such was a bit all over the place. This time I decided to do a lot more planning and so I spent the morning of the first day jotting down some thoughts and scribbling out the UI. My idea was that there was a relatively old fashioned computer terminal that controlled the growth of a crop. You had to flick switches and turn dials to manage light, food and water, and keep the crop growing.

I had decided ahead of time to make the game using React.js and Redux. I’ve played around with web interfaces using these technologies, but I was curious to apply the Redux/Flux methodology to a game. (If you aren’t aware of React/Flux then its worth reading up on, if nothing else as another way to approach application design) As it turned out React was very well suited to the type of game I made and I felt it helped me develop very rapidly and relatively bug free. Hot reloading (i.e. when you save the source the changes get immediately injected into the browser) is a massive productivity increase, particularly when playing around with styles and layout.

I could probably have made more use of ES6 and javascript features, in particular a lot of my game logic could have been simplified using a few calls to Array.reduce(), and I should probably have used selectors for some of my UI code, however overall I’m happy with the way the code base turned out. Would I use React again for another LD entry? Depending on the type of game, yes I probably would.

I used Inkscape for the graphics and Audacity to make the sounds. The sounds effects were all bundled in a single file and I used Howler.js to treat them as a sound sprite. I think the buttons have a really nice tactile feel to them, and at least some of you agree.

How it was received

Most comments have been positive, although time will tell what people have actually rated the game!

I did wonder a bit about the difficulty level. As I made it and am aware of the logic, I can win quite easily. However for other players (although its not meant to be an easy game) a lot of the comments have been that its a bit confusing and challenging. I did put in some help tucked away in one corner which explains a lot of the mechanics (and one of the game screenshots shows the help screen), but many players didn’t seem to find the option.

I’m a bit torn about this feedback – the “plot” of the game is that you have no idea what you are doing, so providing any sort of help is kind of breaking that premise. At the same time the game is meant to be fun. I think in future I’ll make the help button a bit more prominent.

What now?

I’m thinking of making the game into a sort of multiplayer party game that I can play with my mates. This could probably be done in React using RethinkDB and websockets, however in this case I think I’ll do it in Unity as I want to try out Forge Networking. I do want to bring a lot of the React/Flux mentality to the C# version though, where appropriate, particularly the idea of a single global state – although I think I’ll discard some of the immutability Flux favours for its state.

Play the game here

After receiving some advice, I made a standalone .exe (compressed into a .zip file), for people’s convenience. If you held off on playing my game due to the fact it used an installer, please consider giving it another try. Thanks!

Tags: hope, jam, ld34, Ludum Dare

I hope this new incredible promotional picture will convince you guys to
PLAY and RATE my game here => http://tinyurl.com/2gbld34-apk
P.S : sorry for the side-bar it will be fixed soon when ill be able to finally build APK on my own
for non-android users the game is playable in WebGL here : http://tinyurl.com/LD34-2gB

Click here to play now

I didn’t intend on entering Ludum Dare 34 because I thought I was going to be busy all weekend with college work. I didn’t have as much time as I wanted too but I’m still pretty happy with the game. In terms of programming challenges there was nothing too hard that I did this time round. I wanted to play around with shaders but I didn’t really get the time. Thanks to everyone who played.

After a lot feedback, I did what none asked for and ported my game to android .

(pick skewing what tangentially related means, and then skewing it a little bit more  )

(i also want to stand out more monochrome-san)

Was everybody asking that I made the jumping mechanics more nuanced  … well, I did that too.

click for bad-ass iddle and running animation

Did anyone ask for new character animations… not that I can recall, but they are here anyways .

Will you play and rate it ?(click here)

Hi folks. I did a little platform game for this 34th LudumDare session with a cute aesthetic and a quiet mood. For this project I used Unity (code C#), Gimp, SFXR for the sounds and SoundTrap for the music. I am very proud because I think that I did something (more or less) interesting with funny physics – even if this game is really hard. Now I am working on a post jam version with enemies and more features. If you dare, try it. I wish you the best and see you later friends ++

The Seed

I have responded to all the comments that my game has with a post-mortem with some fixes and additions. I fixed the loud sound when you kill a tree and added some obstacles to make the game a wee bit more challenging. Oh the Christmas Trees have more detail.

Check out my LD 34 Game: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=39898

Made this during the compo. Thought I was going to do a text adventure with 2 buttons for a bit there. Changed my mind. But not before creating this: link to download

For my third LD, i think it went really well. my 2nd LD game sucked, so i’m really proud of this one.

First things first, what did you guys think of my LD game?

1. “Its really hard”. I’m well aware of the difficulty of my game. i wanted it te be challenging, yet not impossible. the random generation CAN rarely screw you over, but there shouldn’t be any situations in which it was 100% the game’s fualt for your death.

2. “The controls are frustrating”. To be honest, i never thought this at all. During development, i thought having shift as attack was pretty convenient. apparently i’m the only one who thinks that.

3. “The music is great, but repetitive”. I tried making it similar to an arcade game. they usually have repetitive loops, but they are catchy and sound good.

4. “It’s impossible to play this game without a huge, stupid grin”. This was one of my favorite comments. i’m definitely going for humor on this one, and this comment made my day.

Thanks for all the feedback! i’ve fixed some of the errors in my brand new Post LD version of my game! but what all does the post LD version have to offer?

PRESS ENTER TO ATTACK INSTEAD OF LSHIFT

A HIGHSCORE SYSTEM!

MOUNTAINS!

“RIP” CAN NOW BE SEEN INFRONT OF TOWERS!

BELT RANKINGS!

BETTER RANDOM GENERATION!

MORE!

(There were pictures, but imgur kept breaking. sorry about that.)

Check out my game here and enjoy! thanks for a wonderful LD34!

Hey guys!

Look at this youtubers playing our game:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPLMJ567hNc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkHGGh0jVJE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mQJ7U-0Sx4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UgPbHOQSon8

We were really impressed when we saw these people have dedicated time in their lives to tell us what they think about 2Door.
So I think that’s what Ludum Dare discusses: mutual collaboration, learning and, most importantly, experience in game development.

Thank you, really, to all those who have also made a comment with reviews, positive and negative, and who believe in our potential.

You have not played our game? Oh really!?
No problem, we’re still open to comments and suggestions.

Play here!

So, we did some user testing (read: watched some let’s plays) and discovered that some players were having trouble with the PUSHING aspect of OSHIYA! PUSH! In our entry, you push people into crowded subway trains by HOLDING the space bar. But first, you have to TAP the space bar to get the passengers to group together. Alternate the two for MAXIMUM POINTS and get a DOOR BONUS when the door closes!

We’ve added a small extra message to try and help new Oshiya learn how to push. As you can see, the Oshiya above has successfully gathered passengers together by the door: they’re much closer to each other than the ones at the next door over. Now it’s time to PUSH! Holding spacebar will more efficiently get the passengers into the train, and once you’re at the door, it will close. Then hold enter to move over to the next door and do it again!

Try it out by playing OSHIYA! PUSH! now and tweet your highscore to us @inbetweengames!

Since I was working this week, I had not much time to compile for other OS or edit a playthrough of my game. It’s weekend now, so I updated my entry a bit.

I added compiles for the Unity Webplayer, Linux and OSX (untested), so everyone can play the game. It always had a WebGL version but I like native versions more (especially because you can rebind the buttons in the launcher).
I also added a playthrough, which was a bit of work because my game is rock hard (intentionally), so I had to edit out all my fails. I added a level selection at the beginning of the Video, in case you are stuck and want to see a specific level.

If you rather want to play than watch, please do so here: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=39869

I also wanted to add a timelapse of the creation process but smart me went outside for a cigarette, paused the video recording and never started it again.

In this post, I’ll be going over what went wrong and right in my LD 34 entry, Deceit. Play it here. ( Hey look, a extra link! )

“Deceit is the story of a where a madman loses his memory, and the voices in his head take him over. The voices tell him to do stuff he doesn’t agree with, but he complies out of fear. You play as the madman, where you must follow the voices is this horror shooter game.”

What went right :

• One of the greatest things that went right, its people loved the Voice Acting in this game. I am a Dubstep producer, and I have 2.5 years or so of experience with audio. As every Ludum Dare, I try my hardest to do something, audio wise, that sets the game apart from the rest. I feel like the Voice Acting throughout was a VERY nice touch.

There was a lot put into the Vo-coding ,and it was very complex! I couldn’t even fit 1/5th of it all in a whole screen!

• Another thing that went right, was the art and atmosphere was amazing! I am NOT a artist in the slightest! I am probably the worst artist here, but somehow I managed to make some pretty neat stuff.

I guess It was a lot easier to draw when u have everything so dark you can’t see anything.

• Another thing that went right, was the gun mechanics turned out great! The guns accuracy varies, and the machines gun just felt so smooth. I love the guns.
• I didn’t have any major glitches that broke the game, but I did have to take away a couple features I wanted due to just not getting then to work and running low on time.
• I felt the overall feel of the game was complete. This is probably the most complete entry I’ve turned in for a LD.

WHAT WENT WRONG

• THE BIGGEST THING THAT I DID WRONG! Was I made it where you have to click on crates to open them! For some reason, people are getting SERIOUSLY ticked about this. I did this because if I programmed it to open on collision, it would likely repeat the process in the millisecond it takes to remove the crates collisions. I didn’t want 5 pistols spawning, and you are able to kill all the monsters in 1 hit.

I did this to keep the game from breaking, but people seriously hate having to click stuff… Its weird…

• The next biggest thing that went wrong, was I messed up on the movements. When you collide with a wall tile, It stops your x movement completely. Apparently, people do not know how to time a jump, and they cant make it over a tile… Idk, I think I got used to that, an didn’t even notice anything was weird, but some people cant put 2 and 2 together and figure out how to time a jump, it is really easy.
• Another TERRIBLE thing that went wrong… even though I spent 15+ dollars on snack food… I ran out of them on the first night.

I had like 1 beef jerky stick that I had to proportion out to last 30 more hours XD.

• Let’s see… Another thing that didn’t quite go my way, Is I never had a opportunity to create some sweet dubstep due to the reason, it just wouldn’t fit the theme of the game. I did have some REALLY SICK audio effects! But no Dubstep.

I had to replace where I normally put my dubstep, with dark ambience.

• Possibly the most painful thing that I did wrong… Was I went for a more metaphorical interpretation of the theme, but people just didn’t see it well. I did this last LD, and it turned out great, but it didn’t cope well with me this LD.

Summary

Overall, I had a blast this LD! I learned so much about the structures of a song. Because of having to create ambience and background effect, I now realized how important the stuff in the background are to the overall song. I also learned, NO MORE METAPHORICAL INTERPRETATIONS! Next Ludum Dare, I am going to stick 100% to the theme, and focus more on the gameplay than the storyline. I’m super excited for the next Ludum Dare, and I can’t wait to apply what I learned in the next dare! This is probably the most fun I had participating in Ludum Dare, so I’m excited to keep it going! Goodluck with your games!

Check out my entry here!!!

Check out my sound cloud page!

AND LISTEN TO MY LUDUM DARE SONG!

If you haven’t already, take a look at my entry Stickman Sam in the High Fly Sky.  I’ve recently updated it with a Web port that is available on Newgrounds.

Man I haven’t made a post mortem for a ludum dare game for a while but I was quite happy with how this turned out so I decided to write one for my current compo game.

What went right!

• The Game Feel

I wrote a long post about this already so you might want to check it out if you want more details on that. Long story short the game feels good because I focused on to make it feel good.

• Generated Levels

A big problem I had in many of my previous dares is the fact I needed to craft the levels myself and that lead to either they became boring/repitive or the game became too short. This time however I used a simple chunk level generator that took me around 1-2 hours to make. It both saved time and added replay value to the game.

•  Gameplay first not visuals

A big problem in my earlier LD games is that focused on the visuals of the game even if that’s not my strong suit. This time however the main time was spent on programming and instead using quick ways to make visuals look decent and otherwise just focus on the game. Even with me taking my time coming up with the idea I pretty much had the main mechanic ready and working well day 1.

• Quality over Quantity

A lot of my earlier games was focused on throwing thing after thing at the player trying to impress it but creating all that content was tireing and many of those things ended up half harted. This game the main mechanics became just “Climb high”. I was planning to add spikes and many different obstacles like spikes but I realized that hitting the walls hard killing you worked well (and was easier to make) I decided on that. It made it so there was only you and the walls and focusing on only that alone created nice dynamics from a simple base. The only other mechanic that’s aside from walls is ice blocks that you can’t grapple on.

Day 1

What went wrong!

• The style is not cohesive

Ooh boy. I was never sure what tone I wanted to go with this game and the final product shows how indecisive I was there. I was both thinking to go with a more serious climing from a prison cave like in Batman the dark knight returns. But at the same time I wanted to go a more wacky game with a more fun vibe. In the end it ended up more towards the wacky angle with a colorful smiley character with anchor hooks and silly scream. But at the same time I place it in a abstract gray cave with a dark bruiting music (That I lowered down so it’s barely noticeable because I felt it was so out of place in the end). If I decided from the start when I started working on the graphics it would look better and maybe even save time.

• Took a while to get to the final game idea

I envy the dare people that say “I got the idea immediately and get started and worked hard these 2-3 days” . I always lose at least a half or a whole day on being unsure or doubting myself before or after. This time I spent a long time on another idea where you first just could moving diagonally north west or north east on a grid trying to find stuff that that made that you could move in different ways. a kinda “growing movement system”. The idea was something I thought sounded neat at first but after starting working on it I realised that it was not much to it.

I also tried out many different engines like the Defold beta and then Mono game to see if that worked and that ate up a lot of my time. In the end I went with Unity and I could play much more to my and that engines strengths there.

It took me around 6-8 hours from waking up the first day to working on the final concept. I did salvage some parts of that idea like that the crystalized visual style and the diagonal hookshots was inspired by that game but it still wish I didn’t spend as much time as I did with something that unrelated to the final product.

• Port after not before

I spent like two hours just getting it to work on a mobile. It was kinda stupid as I should have spend that time after the combo so I could port it and focus instead on the main game. Not as big as the other two but eh. (I still need to upload the apk later.)

Day 2

Other thoughts

I made it vertical due to the having mobile design ideas in mind (and vertical felt more fun with the controls) as I felt two button world work great with it and I might be able to upload it into the future. It made it kinda ugly in the Desktop versions though but web works nice.

I made it without a tutorial, while the buttons and what they do is easy to understand the controls might take a while to get used to as you die fast if you make a split second mistake. I was kinda going with a flappy bird style of gameplay of trowing directly to the main gameplay and I’m not sure if it worked in the games advantage or not.

The name sucks.. I combined the words Caving and Grappling but it’s not that obvious and doesn’t roll that well on the tongue.

Conclusions 

In the end I’m really happy with the results. I find it my most fun Ludum Dare game yet and judging from the comments that seems to be a shared opinion. Many people stated how addicting the game is (and that is without any progression systems of any sort) and some think it’s the best ones they seen in this LD. I’ve been thinking on working on it further to make it into a mobile game so hopefully that will work well.

If you are curious to play the game here’s the link to it.

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=18652

First of all, here it is!

Credit to Killswitch423 for the great video

This LD has probably been my best learning experience so far. I made it my personal mission to utilize everything I learned from this video about “juiciness” in games. My previous entries have been more focused on engagement and depth of content than on feel and tactility. With Bubblegum Uppercut, I wanted to make something that was more about making something that just feels good.

First up was the character

This thing is my most basic, no frills character yet in terms of the pixel art itself, but the one I put the most thought into how it would move and animate. Rather than detail in the art, I was going for creating a feeling of elasticity and energy. Also the gin helped. I did a bunch of stuff with squashing and stretching that I’ve never done with a character sprite in a game before and I think it paid off, but give it a try yourself and let me know what you think :]

Next was the set piece. I may have taken the “give everything eyes” tip from the juice video a little more literally than intended, but what would this game be without the 20/20 rose and the panic-stricken falling rose petals? I had originally planned 3 different levels each with its own theme (rose vine, volcano, skyscraper) but time constraints forced me to cut out the other 2. That’s definitely the next thing I’ll work on if I continue on Bubblegum Uppercut. What do you think? Would you play more if you could escape an erupting volcano or climb a skyscraper?

Probably the best thing I learned from this Ludum Dare is how great an experience it can be to work with another person in an event like this. The super talented Gregg Wright of PageWright Media created the epic music for the game. I can’t even begin to tell you how useful it is to have someone to talk about ideas with. It give you a chance to not only get feedback on the fly for thoughts and concepts, but it give new perspectives on ideas. Maybe you have the greatest idea in the world. That’s cool. Share it with someone, and they may have a different angle on it that could make it even better.

And finally, I learn this a little bit more every time I participate, but DON’T OVERWORK YOURSELF! My day job and general life situation currently are a lot more stressful than they have been for past events, so I decided to give myself that extra day by entering the Jam instead of the Compo, and I’m glad I did. Not only did it give me the time to take care of myself (eat, sleep, breathe, etc.), but it allowed me to enjoy the process a lot more. If you want to challenge yourself, and do the compo all alone in 48 hours, by all means, do so! It’s a great experience. But don’t think you have anything to prove by doing so. Be honest with yourself, and really put the thought into deciding if it’s the best choice for you at the moment.

Well, there it is. I hope you enjoy Bubblegum Uppercut!, and I hope some of you found this write-up interesting :] Keep exploring and playing those LD games. There are some really unique entries this time around.

Thanks for playing!

Dustout Games
Find Dustout on Twitter

Last weekend, we took a stab at creating an online multiplayer shooter. If you haven’t seen it already, it’s a fun 2-player experiment where each player can hack the controls of the other player, disabling up to two buttons. Since the original release had a lot of technical problems, we’ve created a post-jam release that improves on the following:

1. Explosions and sparks will not sync their positional data to the server more than once.
2. Increasing how often the player and bullet syncs their data.
3. Made the opposing player’s animations to be much more reactive.
4. Changed the health meter graphics.
5. Vastly increased the range of the radar.
6. Player avatar now appears as arrows in the radar.
7. Added a laser to indicate the path the bullet will follow.
8. Prevented disabling more than one directional key
9. Shields (called “Reflect”) can now be disabled. The programmer actually forgot to enable this button, and was meant to always be hackable.
10. Made the player avatars and their colliders much larger.

Hopefully these simple changes will improve the playability of the game.

Tags: hack.source.net

I have just made a walk through guide for my Ludum Dare entry, Growdom just to help anyone who is having difficulties.

YOU CAN ALSO PLAY GROWDOM HERE

Congratulations on another great Ludum Dare, everybody. I’ve been having an absolute blast playing through the mountain of games.

I’ve never actually written a post-mortem for a Ludum Dare entry before, but figured that for my fourth go-around I probably should. As such, here is the post-mortem for my entry, Xtreme Crop Duster Simulator ’82.

As mentioned above, this is my fourth Ludum Dare entry (having previously participated in LD30-32, taking LD33 off due to a family commitment.) However, this was my first time making it in for the compo deadline. I used my usual tools – Unity/C#, etc – with the exception that I used Photoshop instead of GIMP this time around (as I finally shelled out for a subscription) and gave Chiptone a spin for sound effects, which worked very nicely.

What went well

• I actually finished a game for the compo deadline, after 3 Ludum Dares failing over to the jam when I wasn’t ready by 9pm on Sunday.
• Despite wringing my hands the whole weekend about what I thought was a dubious idea, looking back on it it’s a pretty good take on the theme.
• I had a lot of success with the retro feel, bringing a lot more polish and sophistication to the emulation of an old system than I had achieved in the past.
• Wrote my level loader in a way that should be reusable
• Didn’t go insane, or become miserable from stress and sleep deprivation
• Made something pretty fun
• Learned to use SidTracker64, which is an awesome app I’ll certainly be coming back to.

What went poorly

• The GitHub client crashed. A lot.
• I didn’t reach all of my targets – I wanted 8 levels and at least 2 songs in the game, only achieved 5 levels and one (very short) song.
• Some of the sprite work isn’t as nice as I’d like, especially a few of the airplane rotations.
• Didn’t realize I was writing the game with controller support the whole time, so it’s not reflected in the in-game text.
• After the compo, I had way more trouble porting to other platforms than I should have – the Mac port went fine, but WebGL never worked right and the Linux port took a lot more futzing with than it should have. It especially didn’t help that each test of a Linux build involved rebooting my machine – hours become an eternity when you’re groping blindly for a fix, rebooting constantly to test small, unsuccessful changes.

If you’re interested in a more detailed play-by-play of the weekend, it follows below the break. Otherwise, why not give the game a try and let me know what you think?

Friday

With the themes revealed, the first thing to do was some brainstorming – I typically use XMind for that, as it’s a good way to get ideas down in a quick and dirty fashion with some structure to it. The mind-map ended up looking like this:

With none of those ideas greatly appealing to me, by 11pm I had started in on the crop duster idea. I wasn’t thrilled about anything I had, but that was the best one on the list, so off I went. First thing was a single airplane sprite, and a controller to let it fly around – at this point, it just moved at a constant speed in the direction it was facing.

How things looked at the end of Friday night

I knew from the first that I was going to use a retro graphics style, as I had done in my previous LD entries Smugglers! and Red Threat, so started with a 4-colour CGA palette. One thing that left me dissatisfied about those two games is that they didn’t compensate for the non-square pixels of older systems, so I wanted to find a way to do that in Unity. I hacked together a dirty two-camera setup which came close, and left it for the night. After that, feeling limited by the 4-colour palette, I made the choice to go to a Commodore 64-style 16 colour palette, drew the 8 sprites for the different airplane angles, and called it a night. My last commit clocked in at 2:41 AM.

When I went to bed, I wasn’t thrilled about the idea for the game – I was fully prepared to wake up in the morning with a better idea, and scrap everything. That didn’t happen, as it turned out.

Saturday

Saturday morning, I woke up around 10am feeling somewhat sleep-deprived, and got right down to work. The day was a real flurry of activity, so I’ll just summarize it in point-form:

• Made improvements to the two-camera approach, allowing for pixel-perfect rendering of any in-game resolution and pixel aspect ratio. At this time I also put on the shader effects for CRT emulation, and the C64-style border around things.
• Implemented the actual flight dynamics, with flying up slowing the plane down and flying down speeding it up.
• Added behaviour for crop-dusting, takeoff, landing, and crashing – at that point, all of the basic game mechanics were in place.
• Added the UI, such as it is.
• (Re)implemented a level loader to load the stages from text files. I basically end up writing this same code from scratch every Ludum Dare, but I think this one is clean enough that I could package it up for easy reuse in the future.
• Added a whole bunch of terrain sprites.
• Added the other airplanes, with their “AI behaviour” of flying at a constant speed in a straight line.
• Implemented the first three levels.
• Added the sound effects (but no music at this point.)
• On-going balance tweaks
• Spent some time puttering around with music, but nothing came worth keeping.

End of Saturday night – looks a lot like the finished product.

Even at this point, I was having doubts about my idea, but feeling very good about the scope of what I’d taken on and my ability to complete it for the compo. In my past three tries at Ludum Dare, I’d aimed at the compo each time but taken on too much, so my games were only finished in time for the jam. This time, I put the project to bed for the night with a clear vision of what was required to finish, and a positive feeling that I would be able to finish in time for the 9pm deadline.

My final commit went in at 3:29AM, as I went to sleep with visions of the finished game in my head.

Sunday

If Friday was a sprint, Saturday was a marathon, and Sunday was a mad dash. My band typically rehearses on Sundays for a few hours, and Ludum Dare weekend is no exception, so for most of the day I had that looming over my head – being away from the project for two hours in the final stretch of the compo was not something I looked forward to. On top of that, sleep deprivation started to catch up to me – while I aimed to be awake at 9 and get right down to work, I actually slept in to almost 11.

Thankfully, none of this was actually a problem, and while I didn’t feel good about my prospects when I left the house for the practice, taking the time off really let me focus on what was actually left and I came back with less than three hours to finish, but with confidence that I’d be able to do so.

The list of things I did on Sunday is a bit smaller, because I only had 10 hours to work less the two hours I was away. Before the rehearsal:

• More balance tweaking: made some of the levels a bit easier, and made the landing a bit more forgiving.
• Prepared the title, level clear, game over, and win screens, with all the control code to move between them. At this point, things were really a game!
• Made some crappy music, just to get the logic to have it playing in place.
• Realized that I had controller support the whole time, thanks to how I’d implemented the controls in Unity.

And after the rehearsal:

• Actually wrote music I was happy with. I came across an iPad app called SidTracker64, which was easy enough to learn to use and fit the aesthetic perfectly, as it emulates the sound chip in a Commodore 64. I had aimed for at least two songs (one main theme, and another game-over theme) but ended up only having one.
• Added two more levels – level 5 was actually made in the final 10 minutes of the compo.
• Packaged it up and submitted it!

If you want to see what the game looked like at the end of Sunday, you’re in luck – it’s right here on the Ludum Dare website!

Tags: compo, ld34, post-mortem, postmortem, unity

One week later after all of this started and I have to thank you all. Thanks for playing the game, for saying good and bad things about it, I’ve never felt so happy for a game that I’ve made. Thank you, Mike Kasprzak, and everyone envolved in Ludum Dare for the opportunity of making a game and have people playing it.

Really looking foward to extend this game, make it to something great. So if anyone have any sugestions, critics, or just wanna say hi, comment here (LD Page) or here(Google’s form).
If you haven’t played it yet, play here!

Hey everyone Just wanna say that i’ve finally updated my game Torque, sorta.

I was only able to get out two new levels in this update, since all feedback has been talking about how there should be more levels. Doing this post-compo update taught me one thing: That I could never turn this into a full game like I was putting into consideration.

Yes I think this turned into a very great game for me, but the puzzle levels are just so hard to create. I might be able to do another post-compo update with some more sounds, polishing, etc. And maybe get back to figuring out an efficient way to design levels. But no promises. I’m also thinking of porting it to andriod, which i’m finding shouldn’t be all that tough.

Anyways, if you haven’t already tried my game try it Here.

And thanks to everyone for the great feedback.

I almost have 100 votes for my entry: Arc. I absolutely love all the feedback I’m getting! I want to see if I can make it for iOS and Android devices. If you haven’t already checked it out, check it out!

Also, people have said that they really like the music, do you?

Kudzu: I Can Grow Forever… makes my eighth successful Ludum Dare entry, and my fifth entry in a row. A shout-out to the devs of Love2D for making this achievement possible.

The tied vote caught me off guard (has that ever happened before in the history of Ludum Dare?), but I was up for a challenge. It didn’t take me long to decide I wanted to make a game where you controlled a perpetually growing vine with two-button left-and-right steering controls, and with that concept in mind, Kudzu! seemed like a natural choice for a title (though obviously not the final one). So I spent my whole first day hammering out the look and the feel of the vine-growing effect – not to mention figuring out a way to keep the ever-growing plant from overwhelming the draw and update loops.

Once that was done, I realized I was facing a dilemma I’d never encountered before: I had a gimmick and a pretty graphical effect to go with it, but I didn’t have a game.

Days 2 and 3 were spent taking my vine and figuring out how to make an actual game out of it. The first prototype limited the game world to a single 640×480 playing field; the final version adds scrolling (which was tricky to get to work right with the method I’d used to keep the vine from eating too many resources), and a little feature I’m particularly proud of where the vine will automatically turn around when it approaches the edge of the world. I have to confess I was inspired by Race the Sun to add chasing after sunlight to extend playtime as a mechanic, though I’ll admit the sunspots don’t make make a lot of real-world sense (let’s pretend the field the game takes place in is covered by randomly-moving clouds with the occasional perfectly circular break in them). Before I decided on the sunspots, I had it in mind that you would be chasing down and eating randomly-spawning bugs (which is why, even in the final version, the flower on the end of the vine looks like a chomping Pac-Man mouth) – ironic given how the bugs ended up spawning to chase down and eat you. I’ll admit they’re slightly, ahem, bugged: the idea was they would swoop across the screen and try to pass at you, but I made their turning radius too tight – they’re fully capable of taking multiple passes before they pass beyond the edge of the world and vanish. Maybe in a post-compo version I should put in something at the edge of the arena for them to run into so that this accidental mechanic actually makes sense?

The main game code comes out to only 550 lines; there are some utility snippets in other files more or less copied from my past projects, as well as copious use of the hump and Tactile libraries (the latter of which made it trivial to support a bevy of control options – six different two-button configurations between keyboard and gamepad!), but I take an odd bit of pride that I didn’t recycle the entity framework I wrote for S-LAYER and reused in CRUNCH!!! (which probably should be thrown out and rewritten from scratch anyway), nor did I write any new classes for this project – it’s all functions, loops, and arrays. Of course, I could get away with that because Kudzu officially has the fewest number of unique object types to keep track of in any game I’ve written…

Sound effects were made using my own voice and copious use of Audacity filters. I didn’t feel I had time to fiddle with Bfxr and get the sound effects juuuuust right, but I think the SFX turned out surprisingly good regardless. The music was composed in 15 minutes using FL Studio. I accidentally used the same instrument for both the back beat and the main melody, but I think the tune ended up nicely capturing the whimsical feel I was going for regardless.

On a final note, the background was made using Love2D’s built in random noise functionality – though not on-the-fly. I actually had it set up to generate the background at the start of play, but this resulted in an uncomfortable loading pause, so I temporarily added a line that saved the image to PNG and then used the saved image (with a little color tweaking after the fact) as the game’s background.

I hope you all enjoy playing Kudzu: I Can Grow Forever… as much as I enjoyed making it!

As this was my first Ludum Dare, this is my first Post-Mortem, So I hope I cover everything that people generally cover in this! ^_^ I was debating if I should even do one of these but I figure why not, right? So here goes.

Oh and here’s a timelapse if you’re interested!

What went wrong:

• Computer Crashes
• Software Crashes
• Choosing a genre that I don’t enjoy playing

What went right:

• Completed the game
• Fully functional
• Submitted before the deadline

Details of the Weekend:
So usually I miss ludum dare by a few weeks or sometimes just a few days, but this time I learned the date two weeks ahead of time, and posted notes and reminders to myself all over the place so I wouldn’t forget. At first I was excited, and warming up with my tools, and learning new tools just in case I decided to use them. Then as it got closer the wait got excruciating, I didn’t want to practice anymore I just wanted to get the theme and make something awesome. 😀 Well anyways the waiting was painful, but once the theme was announced I felt great!

I was pleasantly surprised how smoothly the weekend went. I started with a pretty strict time schedule, and I prepared meals ahead of time, because I figured it would be a mad dash and non-stop working once it started. But I was incredibly wrong. Perhaps that was because I had a pretty low bar to reach, my goal wasn’t to make a masterpiece, but to make something fully functional within the time frame. It would ideally have audio and graphics and solid gameplay. I didn’t really care if it was a great game, just that it was complete, and I must say I feel like I accomplished that pretty well.

I only allowed myself an hour and a half for planning and brain storming, because I wanted to have tons of time to work on the first night. The goal being to have some prototype ready before I went to sleep on night 1. That went well, and by the middle of Saturday I had pretty much finished most of the gameplay aspects and mainly had level design, graphics and audio remaining. I felt like I was doing well. Then I lost a lot of my motivation, I spent quite a few hours on Saturday evening watching streamers and I even watched a movie with my roommates.

When I got back to work, I did the basic audio loop for the game, and decided to leave the graphics as simple colors for multiple reasons, I didn’t know what else to make it, and the minimalism seemed to fit for the style of game I was making.  Once that was done I slacked off again, returning to Twitch to check in on the progress some streamers were making.

I’m pretty sure I know why I slacked off so much, and at one point I even considered not finishing at all. It’s simple really, I chose to make a platformer, knowing that I don’t like playing platformers. I like them as games, but I’m terrible at them so once the functionality was implemented, and I was working on the level design I quickly got frustrated having to play test them constantly.

I didn’t get the level design finished until an hour or so before the deadline, and I ended up going with endless generation from premade modules rather than the initial idea of having completable levels. I decided this because I was having trouble coming up with ideas for the levels, and I didn’t think I had time for true procedural generation. Instead I just made 10 segments that the game randomly chooses from as the player progresses. It’s not the best, but each segment it completable and they’re long enough that you’re not likely to survive to see all 10. ^_^

Anyways I feel like I succeeded in my initial goal but I feel like I didn’t have enough faith in myself. I feel like I took the easy way out when I could have challenged myself to make something more complicated. Regardless though I’m glad I participated and I now have an idea for how to approach the next one.

Tags: compo timelapse, final timelapse, ld34, post-mortem, postmortem