Here be a time lapse of me makin’ my game: Widget Workshop. Stamp widgets according to the specifications and make it to the next day as a Magna Systems Corp. widget-making wage earner. Check it out here.

I still haven’t put together a time lapse; I’ve been busy playing and rating. But I still want to write a post mortem to elaborate on my goals and express what I feel I accomplished.

Within an hour and a half of the beginning of the compo, I settled on the “caterpillar lifecycle” concept:

The goal was to create experientially different moments of play during the different phases of your caterpillar life. As the design sheet above depicts, an important early thought was creating a sense of freedom and openness when the player emerges as a butterfly. This was accomplished by providing wildly different controls after the player emerges from a cocoon.

(The player is immobile as a cocoon, but has the freedom to move the camera — something they couldn’t do as a Pillar. Being given a brief opportunity to scout the map is useful, and it serves as a cue for the player to make the control shift more intuitive.)

The loop was complete, and roughly balanced so that total population was dependent on player actions. Neat.

I hang out in the IRC chat for a few before some kind soul yells at me, “SLEEP!”

I wake up early and tweak a few things, then get to planning the next sprint.

This basic life-cycle was SO successful in providing experientially unique moments of play, that I implemented alternate forms in the next sprint:

I didn’t know exactly what these other forms would do yet. I just gave them names and drew them to help spur creative thought. During implementation, they changed a million times before I settled on these three:

Agrobug: eats other bugs, leaves a trail of food behind it when moving quickly (clicking). Emergently attracts other bugs, creating food (eggs, cocoons, etc) for itself. Playing the agrobug feels pragmatic. You’re constantly moving forward, but turning requires you to click (and drop food). Spamming his movement causes him to revert to a cocoon, so motion is deliberate and calculate.

Fastbug (Zipper): fast-moving egg-collector that can morph at will. Useful for when there is a bunch of food around, but also a large number of competing insects. Like the Butters, he is fast, but his controls aren’t very friendly unless you remain in constant motion. Controlling the Fastbug feels restless. Almost agitating.

Fatbug: An inedible, egg layer. He’s ridiculously slow and his controls are unwieldy, making him a pain to play, but that’s okay! This discourages players from using him prematurely, as his only real system utility is saving the player from loss conditions (no mates, about to be eaten, etc…).

It’s about this point that I really started to feel the theme. Morphing completely changes the “feel” of the game, despite the fact that the underlying ecosystem remains the same. Player actions affect the distribution of bug populations.

It’s getting complex.

Before taking a fairly long break, I time-block the last day of development with three major goals in mind:

1. create “levels” to introduce the complex game mechanics,
2. provide a sense of progression in the existing “endless” mode,
3. improve art and add sound.

Aaaaand…go!

I wrote up a list of goals that I wanted to accomplish (“Become a buttefly”, “Last 3 generations”, etc) and started writing level controllers like a madman. I made a simple helper message to provide context for the player: “You want to be butterfly.”

Then something beautiful happened.

In the minimalist environment of the game, with few other cues, this simple message was hauntingly engaging. I trusted it. It told me how I felt. Why should I question it?

A large part of my motivation so far had been attempting to control the player’s emotional response to mechanical changes. This form of exposition had unbelievable synergy, and I ran with this for hours. Helper messages got simpler, more bug-like in perception. Simultaneously simple and open ended, they spurred thought. Mood became everything, and story mode emerged.

But there’s still time for more!

Mutation Mode (Progression via Adaptations)

4 hours left. No time to think. I know what I want to accomplish. I don’t have time to question plans. I create a data object to hold names and descriptions of various mutations and begin writing what they do before lifting a finger to actually implement them. I’m sure this will be my downfall.

3 mutations to unlock the alternative morphs, 3 cool down reduction mutations, 5 speed boost mutations, and 10 “unique” mutations (2 for each bug). Here’s a sample of some of the ambitious mutations I chose to throw at myself:

– “Grabbing Claws — grab eggs [as the Butter] and carry them while holding the LMB!”
– “Explosion Pouch — when the fatbug dies, it blows anything nearby into tasty bits!”

Believe it or not, I managed to implement all of these (and visualize the mutation when hovering over an heir) with an hour to spare. My old friend crunch, he’s good to me.

Alas, I’m behind schedule. I anticipated having 4 hours to spare at the end to polish graphics and add audio, but there’s only an hour left. I open up illustrator and begin frantically replacing all of the art assets — all 7 sprites. 😛

Before visual update.

After visual update.

Done.

10 minutes to spare. Polish. Tweak helper messages. Panic. Merge control objects for level 1 and 2 to make it a single, longer level. Find bug. Panic. Fix.

TIME!

Finished product:

This Ludum Dare, I worked with scriptwriter Gwenhyver Davies (@Gwenhyver) to create a story based game. We used Unity to program the game, pen and paper to create the artwork, which we then scanned in and edited with Gimp. The sounds we recorded ourselves were created with Audacity.

We came up with lots of good ideas that I might make later on – this was a really good theme – but for the game jam, we went with Critter Creator, a story and point and click style game where you create a critter to help you in your lab. Each decision you make changes the critter’s personality – be careful!

It was a lot of fun and a lot of work. I hope you enjoy playing it here ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-35/?action=preview&uid=56155 or on my website www.edgeofcode.com/critter-creation/

Comments are appreciated!

We have finished our small game: Realm Shifters. At first we had a lot more ideas but we are happy how much we could actually get into the game.

“Mighty, the dragon, Berserk, the Viking and Coward, the Cow are walking in the Enchanted Forest of the Autumn Elves. Three body but one shared mind. They are collecting Magical Orbs to shift to the Abyssal Realm where they can gather the Soul Orbs to fully charge all of the Ancient Runestones to open the Really Dark Purple Vortex of Darkness. You know. Because reasons.”

In Realm Shifters you can:
– Collect orbs- Shapeshift to different forms
– Shift between realms
– Energize the Ancient Runestones
– Open the Vortex of Darkness

> Play Realm Shifters! <

Tags: Abyss, cow, Crystal, dragon, jam, LD35, Ludum Dare, Orb, Realm, Shape, Shift, Shifter, untiy3d

I learned a lot this LD, and was able to finish my game in 48hs. A game in which you change shapes to overcome obstacles as fast as you can.

The thing is, most of the feedback I got says it’s too hard. And that’s because it IS in fact really hard. And I will change it, but before that, I dare you to play it. Love infinite runners? Love hard, reflex-based games? Come on, play it!

LINK

Experience shapeshift.

http://gamejolt.com/games/the-king-shift/142159

I actually finished my second game in vanilla Java during this LD, and I’m really happy!
I really like how it turned out and that I managed it! It took some time so I had to settle for the jam, but I learned a lot of new tips and tricks!
Hope you will play it and see how it turned out 😀

Play it here!

Backstory;

You are “The Chameleon”, a famous criminal notorious for shapeshifting into other people by killing them. You have been prisoned because “The Boss”, which is your biggest enemy, wanted you gone. Now you want your revenge! Your goal is to shapeshift into every character (20 people) and to kill “The Boss” living in the nether! This is not so easy, because everybody hates you for your ability to shapeshift and steal identities.

Another intense Ludum Dare for me, but I think this is my best Ludum Dare game ever. I was able to put almost everything I wanted and learned new things.

Play it/Rate

After few comments,

I’ve been notified that the UI wasn’t clear enough,

and thus the game “seems” like bugged.

So I worked 10+ more hours to redesign the UI, and fixed a critical bug.

The game is about collect resources and spend them to collect more resources.

It’s a little bit complicate, and some feature need to play for a while to get it. (reach level 2 or 3)

Hope you like it.

PLAY HERE

http://giphy.com/gifs/gamemaker-indie-developer-ludem-dare-35-h400imZQWxXjy

This was my second Ludum Dare and marginally more ambitious than my first entry. I have to say that pushing myself to try new things and not be scared of taking on new challenges resulted in an entry I’m super proud of!

Things I tried for the first time:

-Animations

-Physics Objects

-Enemy AI

-Player and Enemy states

If you want to play my short game you can try it here

Hello guys!

Check out the added web version of the game (needs to load a bit after clicking)
or Download the Windows Version Here!

PLAY HERE

!

I didn’t realize that we had a-whole-nother hour to “submit” our games, so I threw together this title screen yesterday at zero hour for my game, Mike Rand in Fantasy Land.  I’m pretty happy with how it turned out.

I ended up not using it for the voting icon though because it got cropped funny and looked terrible, but I thought I would share it here, anyways.

Tags: ShamelessPlug

Wow! Unbelievable, but… I really finished my first Ludum Dare entry, even if I started late.. And.. it was fun indeed, with the voting now proving to be even more fun. Its absolutly fantastic to see the many different ideas and takes on the theme.. So.. I’m in, again, next time 😉

6th participation and 6th game. I managed to find an original idea on the “Shapeshift” theme and really happy with what I came with. First time I really took the time to compose the music, and the result is pretty satisfying!

Take a break and try a run! Give your best and try to pass the 1,000,000 mark!
(And leave a comment, so that I can play your game as well!)

Listen and Shift – Compo Entry

Now that I’ve had some time to rest, I hope to be able to write coherently about the dev process for TT:TTT!

I’m happy to say that the release is a complete experience. The gameplay is simple, and many of the elements are simpler than I would like (the shooting in particular), but the meat of the game is the tree/weed/tentacle monster and that came out as well as I had hoped.

The first piece I tackled was the tentacle mesh. It’s simple enough, each node is a conic-section. The base of each node is a circle of vertices, with a given radius, orthogonal to it’s length, and the top is a circle orthogonal to the next node’s length. Or more simply, it’s made up of increasingly smaller circles pointed at random angles connected together with straight sides. The final node gets a point, and it’s done.

Creating a tentacle in real time is a simple matter of traversing the node list and increasing the size and length of each over time. When the length exceeds a certain value, a new node is created with a random orientation and zero length and radius. Only the final node in any tree has it’s length increased, but their widths continue to increase always. Over time it becomes a big lump of a monster.

I finished them off by adding a sine wave input to the radius to create the pulsing effect, and colored them based on the node size.

I spent all of Sunday unsuccessfully trying to get the fallen pieces to be a connected rigidbody chain, but couldn’t get it to work out well. Sunday night I ditched that effort, and had each node break off separately. I should have let go of the chain physics earlier, because it left too little time to complete the gameplay.

The biggest missing piece is effects, and it’s hard to tell when the gun is firing and what if anything it’s hitting. I’m using a new renderer in my engine and my old particle effects system doesn’t work with it yet. I had been trying to think of ways to convey hits and firing better, but ran out of time and ended up making a mad sprint just getting the gameplay rules and minimal UI in place.

I hope those that play it enjoy the experience. I would consider this my most fun game jam game yet, and am seriously considering further work on it.

Link: Tentatively Titled: Tentacle Terroir Terror!

Thanks for checking it out!

My compo entry for LD35, “Pacifist Hill”

Check it out here

(yay, got a gif to work in my post)

Let’s take the translation of the Kuru Kuru Kururin’s rotating stick, make it morph in several shapes with special powers, put a Metroidvania-style map with locked doors and traps and then dress it with mythological statues and Eye of Crom-style painting!

Finally, after hours of hard work, we are proud to present Kuru Myst!

Here is the game page!

The Core can be found here. The following is a collection of my thoughts on the process of making this game in 48 hours, though as I write it, it feels like it is becoming more of a description of my game.

This was my very first Ludum Dare, and so, I was incredibly excited in the weeks leading up to it. Now that we have made it through, I would like to reflect on the 48 hours I spent pulling my hair out.

FINAL THEME VOTING

During the voting for the final theme, ideas were flying through my head, but the one that really stuck in my head was Companion. No matter how much I thought of for the other themes, my brainstorming continued to go back to that single theme. Once the voting closed, I stopped thinking about ideas. I decided to just cool down and wait for the results. When PoV revealed to us that the theme was going to be Shapeshift, I was slightly upset, but I wasn’t going to let that stop me. After all, the theme is only one voting category. So I decided to go through with making a game following the Companion theme.

BRAINSTORMING

Everyone knows that when you start to brainstorm, you get so many ideas, I mean, that’s the point after all. For this, though, it was a bit harder, because I couldn’t use every idea. If I tried, there’s no way I could have finished all of them. So it became a process of elimination. I really wanted this to be some sort of procedural dungeon crawler, with a 2.5D tileset. I shut myself down though, thinking that there was no way I could write a system I was happy with in a short enough time. So I decided to completely change the level format, making it a procedural platforming game, which makes it really hard to get across that it is supposed to be a dungeon crawler.

Moving on from that, I knew from my time thinking during the voting period that I wanted the player to have a robot companion, so I spent some time expanding on that. I wanted everything in the game to revolve around this companion. I knew that the only way the player should be able to improve their character is to improve their robot companion. I spent some time coming up with different attachments that your robot could have, and eventually decided that a reasonable goal would be to make three attachment types, each of which have three unique attachments you can build.

DEVELOPMENT BEGINS

First things first, I needed levels. So I started to write a system for creating procedural platforming levels. The first build allowed me to specify level width, level height, a platform size range, a platform distance range, and how many platforms I wanted. So now I had a sprawling empty level. After some time spent tweaking to make sure I could actually make it through various generated levels, I added in the ability to move past the first level. This was when I got my first “it’s not a bug, it’s a feature” moment. When I made it to the end of the level, it correctly spawned me back at the beginning with a new layout, but I immediately noticed that there were way too many platforms. As I moved along, it became obvious that I had forgotten to clear out the platforms from the previous level. From that, I decided a good addition to the platform generator would be the ability to specify how many paths I wanted in the level. After an hour or so of tweaking, it was done. I did some more level generation testing, until I found numbers that I was happy with for the levels being created. The final steps for platform generation was to add platform movement, which was as simple as specifying a random movement range and speed, and then bouncing the platform back and forth. With that, it was time to move on.

ATTACHMENTS

Attachments are, in my mind, the core aspect of gameplay. Everything I made this weekend tied into building these and attaching them to your robot, so you could get some sort of boost to your character. During the brainstorming, I came up with nine unique attachments, separated into three attachment classes: Attack, Defense, and Utility.

Attack Attachments

All three of the attack attachments (gun, sword, AOE) did the same thing in slightly different ways. The gun would do a moderate amount of damage to a single enemy within a moderate range. The sword did a lot of damage to a single enemy within a short range. The AOE did a small amount of damage to multiple enemies within a large range.

Defense Attachments:

The defense attachments (heal, shield, thorns) had a bit more variety to them. The heal would restore some amount of health every second. The shield blocks all shots coming from behind the player. The thorns would deal a small amount of damage to any enemy that damaged the player.

Utility Attachments:

The utility attachments (jump jet, booster, gatherer) were the most fun to write. Jump jet just enabled double jump. Booster allows you to sprint. Gatherer gives enemies a chance to drop double parts.

On top of all of the effects of attaching the attachments, I made it so you are able to level up or disassemble attachments. In the build that I finished for the comp, most of the leveling was really poorly done. I wanted disassembling the attachment to give the player a permanent stat boost, so that the player would have to decide between keeping the really nice active ability, or gaining permanent bonuses.

POWERUPS

I wanted there to be some sort of trade-off in the game, so that the player wasn’t just left stacking their stats and collecting more attachments. So I thought of a system where, once your robot companion had three attachments of the same class, you have the option to deconstruct your entire robot for a really overpowered temporary boost, at the cost of losing all of the attachments that were on your robot. I never got around to creating functionality for this, and so, once you equip a third attachment of the same class, it just does it automatically.

WHERE’S THE CHALLENGE?

So now I had a lot of mechanics for the player to mess around with, but there wasn’t much of a challenge to the game. This is because there weren’t any enemies. The only thing is your way was your skill with maneuvering platforms. So I really needed something for the player to fight against, so I dropped some red blocks while generating the level that would shoot at the enemy if they were in range. And that was that. Some sort of challenge.

DAWN OF THE FINAL DAY: 12 HOURS REMAIN

It’s safe to say that, by this point, my brain was mush. Luckily the game was also mostly to where I wanted it to be for LD. I spent my remaining time cleaning up code and making a main menu, writing a rather lengthy How-To, which made me realize my game just wasn’t intuitive enough if I needed to write something that long. I knew many players wouldn’t read it, but it was there. Honestly, my final hours felt a little wasted. I drew a few sprites, but that was it. I just couldn’t think straight by this point. I didn’t even manage to get a player sprite drawn. I tried, but I couldn’t make something that I would be happy with as the main focus point of the game. So once the submission hour hit, I put my game up, and that was it. I was happy with my progress. I was tired as hell. But I had finished a game in 48 hours.

LESSON LEARNED

Most of this is likely common sense, but seeing as it was my first ever Ludum Dare, and also my first ever seriously time-constrained project, I learned a few things from it.

1. SLEEP. Looking back on this weekend, I know that I probably wasted more time being mindlessly sleep-deprived than I would have getting 8 hours of sleep a night. Sure, 16 hours is a large chunk of your development time, but I was feeling like death as the comp came to a close, and I continued to feel like death through the next day. Seriously, I’ll be sleeping normally during the next game jam.
2. Energy drinks are a no-no. Sure, they were helpful this time around considering that I wasn’t sleeping, but that crash you get is awful. It hurts your development a lot. Just drink water. Or tea. Or something, just stay away from the energy drinks. Avoid the crash.
3. Try to get rid of all distractions. I was so very tempted to just open up movies or something on one of my monitors, and sometimes I did, but when I did, I started to slow down with my code, because I kept getting distracted by what was going on. Tying into this, don’t let your roommates throw big parties the first night of the comp. Drunk people wandering through your space definitely doesn’t help.
4. Decide on one fantastic core concept, and stick with that. Seriously, if you have a really awesome, unique core mechanic, people will notice. I tried to make too many features in my game, and because of that, many of them weren’t fleshed out all that well.

WHAT COMES NEXT?

I’ve received a decent enough amount of positive feedback for my game, and because of that, I have decided to continue developing it. So there will be a lot coming, maybe soon, maybe later, I’m not sure, but I know it is coming. Some planned features for the future:

• Making the switch to the 2.5D tileset system that I initially wanted
• Implementing standard RPG progression
• More attachments!
• Multiplayer
• Boss battles
• Some sort of actual tutorial. Or just introducing mechanics naturally
• Better artwork, of course
• And more!

Of course, the build here at LD will stay as it is, but over on the Itch.IO page, expect many updates! And please, if you feel there is anything the game needs, let me know, and I will jot it down, and you will likely see it in a future build. I can’t wait to see where this goes, and I hope you will join me for the ride.

Thank you for taking the time to read this post-mortem, and have a lovely day

— Syldarion, excited game developer

The ragdoll physics in my entry “Werepenguin’s Escape” worked out so well that I just had to make a montage of it in action:

Be sure to check out the full game! http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-35/?action=preview&uid=21630