Post Mortem on my game Star Tribe.

About three weeks fore the LD weekend, a mental reminder went off in my head.  Check Ludum Dare dates.  I quickly asked my boss for those vacation days.  It had been a while since my first LD some few years ago (10 Seconds Theme), and I wanted to try it again.  I had tried about a year ago without taking time off, but this didn’t work out so well. With work, I just didn’t have the drive or energy to do a 48 hour game no matter what the size or scope.  But this time I was prepared.

So the weeks before the compo I imagined the type of game I wanted to build.  I had been looking at the old Star Control games and figured a space shoot em up like that would be a fairly simple reach, and could be adjusted in theme when it was announced.  So I had a plan in place.  One that I ended up not sticking too, and much to my detriment.

After the theme was announced, I hit the ground running and started with some sprite concepts.   I could absolutely do a space shooter like Star Control battles.   Just needed to make the ships transform.  And for some reason native American themes had been roaming around in my head.  My original plan was starting to mutate already, setting me off track.

Eventually I ended up with four designs for a single ship in the next few hours after the theme commencement.

And those are what I stuck with.  I could have easily stuck with a single ship, with a rock/paper/scissors format of battle.  But I didn’t.  I then began to imagine a small squad of assistant ships to help each side.  Then it shifted to having an invader fleet against a desperate native population woefully unequipped to deal with a large unending wave of invaders.  So the enemy became carriers with huge compliments of light fighters and the player would command scattered small squadrons called war bands.

By Saturday I was into the code.  But I hadn’t finished all the art I wanted to do on Friday.  I figured I would relax and contemplate what my next moves would be.  I spent fourteen hours in total on Saturday constructing a simulated off screen battle system…which eventually got erased by Sunday.  Instead I opted to have all fighters be presently spawned and have the AI be calculated for hundreds of various fighters on each side.  Which, on my system was working fine.  By the end of Saturday night, I had the enemy and friendly forces able to engage each other at the very least, but so many elements were missing.

Here is where my problem started to come in.  I wanted to complete the game for the 48 hour compo.  But on Sunday I was running out of time.  I would have to shift over to the 72 hour jam.  No worries.  Crossing the finish line with a viable game seemed to be the goal here.  BUT.  For every new feature or set of features I had to test if they work.  In the face of time constraints, having a game that takes a long time to play for testing will kill you.  A play session could last for 30 minutes or so (well, it’s endless technically – but to do a full round through the features takes a while).  I had yet to finish some minor graphics, make my audio queue for sounds, and did not have key mechanics in (death for instance).

Sunday came and went with another 14 hours or so of work.  It was looking good, but I missed the 48 hour deadline for sure.  I was almost depressed.  But I wasn’t out.  I could still complete for the jam, which also allowed me to add in some cool music from Kevin McLeod of Incompetech.   Come 9pm, I missed having audio in the game.  Barely got lose conditions in the game, and didn’t have any win conditions.  However, it wasn’t a bad run overall.  Just a bit too large of scope.   It became a great concept for a larger game.  One that will likely never happen.  But I will add to game as time goes on, just not enough grand features to take it too much out of the way of being a space tower defense game of a sort.

I will likely stop using BlitzMax after this point.  The engine is fine.  It is still, after all these years still quite capable of being fast. But only when you optimize your raw code for your own engine.  Which, who has much time for organizing and assessing the bulk of code for optimization during a time limited development jam? Not too many people.  So I suppose it may crawl on some people’s systems due to the way it is written, not because of the tool.  However, Blizmax at this point has limitations that is drawing me away from it anyway (Deployment targets being one of them, and inability to easily create/manipulate rendering surfaces without going through some serious long winded GL hoops).

I should have just stuck to my original plan.  I’d likely have made the 48hour compo time limit easily with two 14 hour work sessions and made a pretty decent game in the process.

Early on in development of Theseus, I made a simple decision: the character’s shape at the end of each level would be maintained at the start of the next level. I wanted to give the journey continuity and make it feel less like just a collection of levels.

So I set up the system that would save your shape between levels and started designing puzzles. Initially I wanted some levels to solvable with the character in a variety of shapes. However, levels that might start with many different shapes were hard to make solvable and even harder to make quickly. I had to give each puzzle a unique solution. The character’s shape would be maintained between levels, but I’d make sure I knew exactly what that shape would be.

The continuity between levels made it necessary to design levels in order, and any changes I made to a level had the potential to affect the levels around it. This was manageable in a small game — in a larger project, this could have been very cumbersome. One advantage to controlling the shape at the start of each level was that I could ensure a nice variety of shapes throughout the game.

As the jam neared its end, I was pleased with the 22 levels and how they explored the 3 main mechanics. Then, with 1 hour left, a playtester found an alternate solution to a puzzle… And I realized I hadn’t removed the system that maintained the character’s shape between levels.

I had designed the levels to control the character’s shape, but any alternate solutions I hadn’t found could put the player into a level in a shape that made that level impossible! This is particularly bad in a puzzle game, as players expect to get stumped and are less likely to realize they’re totally stuck.

An unintended impossible situation.

I rushed to remove the shape-saving system and make each level start with a predetermined shape. As a result, it’s possible your shape might change from the end of one level to the beginning of the next. In those cases, congratulations and apologies — you found a solution that I didn’t see during development, and the illusion of continuity between levels might have been broken.

After the jam, I found 4 unintended solutions. I’ve uploaded a Post-Jam version with level tweaks that prevent them. It’s possible that more exist, though, and I’d love to hear from anyone who finds one.

Thanks to everyone who has played Theseus and left comments/criticisms. You can play Theseus here.

Well, releasing the first major update for my game L.I.G.H.T. Development is going to halt or stutter for a few days or even weeks, as I must concentrate HARD on school at this point. The game is not abandoned. I’ve been working pretty fast on this update for a while. Its not too content based but there is a lot of framework and fundamentals set up for the upcoming Guardian mode. Also, I”ve been working on textures for the UI, but haven’t used them yet. Part of my UI project included a level select with these textures as buttons for you to select the level. Its a little small in game though.Have some teasers:

First Level

New Forest Level:

I’ve also added a full pluthera of new textures and tiles! See the full changelog here

View the game’s Ludum Dare page where you can find the post compo download here

As always, thanks for looking, Flygamer101 OUT!

I just uploaded a video of our crazy fun weekend game jam result!

Fun quotes from our comments page:

“This is bizarre and wonderful…” – mahalis

“…I liked the feel and didn’t expect the rpg style battle. Trippy” – Ironhead

” I had fun, thanks for making this game.” –NvrSkipGameDay

” I laugh every time I see that fish’s face, lol.” – fenwick

” I just got an orgy of flashing white rectangles on all textures, couldn’t play the game.” – gurkenlabs

… sorry gurken!

DOWNLOAD/PLAY/RATE: —> HERE

Tags: #LD35 #gamedev #indiedev

3 days of hard work

Play it Here!

Windows Version(itch.io) = Here

With a game-breaking bug fixed and a ready web build, it’s a good time to try our entry HERE!

It’s that time when it’s best to play our game… with better experience

PLAY IT HERE (and be the best!): http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-35/?action=preview&uid=64207

Another Ludum Dare in the books! Another great experience, another game released.  My game is called Shape Shifter Match Maker:

Click picture to play and rate my game!

This was my second LD and to be honest, I was not thrilled with the final list of themes, so my enthusiasm dropped a bit the day before. Once the theme (Shapeshift) was announced, I drew a complete blank on what game I should make. I spent more than a couple of hours hashing ideas and came up with nothing. At this point I figured I had to do something, so I decided to create some code to take a shape and change it. This was out of desperation, since I didn’t want to waste valuable time just sitting around and hoping an idea would come to me. Once the basic shape shift code was created, I was determined to take that code and wrap a game around it. The result was this game. I don’t normally recommend working like this, but since time is valuable I needed something.

I utilized Unity’s cube and sphere assets, but I needed a third model and decided to use a triangle. My Blender skills absolutely suck, but I managed to take a basic cube and make a pyramid out of it.

So now I have code to change shapes and colors, and a basic game around it.  Time to get going.

I recently bought a Tweening library called DOTween and decided to use that in my game. I didn’t have a chance to use the library before LD35, so this was an added unknown in the development of my game. Tweening libraries are fantastic… you can easily move, rotate, and animate objects with some cool effects. I used DOTween to:

• Rotate, shape shift, and color shift all the 3D objects in the game.
• Warp in the additional level objects.
• Animate the colored backgrounds.

Also new to me was the use of audio tools bfxr and Otomata. Both (free) tools are incredible for creating sound effect and music. Otomata was a gem of a find. I was very pleased with the outcome of the music.

I am not sure how I feel about my game. It’s not what I expected to develop, but then again, I didn’t expect to develop anything at one point. As I play it, I do tend to enjoy it.

About a day after I submitted the game I had an idea to use the left and right mouse buttons to change the shape and colors. Hmm… I wish I thought of that while I was in development mode. I think that would be better than clicking on buttons.

An hour after my idea for improved controls, I had a brainstorm for a much better game. I am not going to explain it here, since I am seriously considering developing this new idea.

• I finished and uploaded a working game within 48 hours.
• Great opportunity to learn and use new tools DOTween, bfxr, and Otomata.
• I decided to use C# Events instead of linking to scripts via Unity’s “Find” and “GetComponent” (where appropriate) like I did in my previous LD entry. I prefer a loose coupling, but this can get out of hand very quickly if you are not careful. I also prefer C# Events over Unity Events, but that may change after I revisit Unity’s manual for another read-through.

• I had a tough time thinking of an idea… I guess I was very short sighted in using this theme.
• Better game play is needed. The game does not get harder after the 3rd set of controls warp in.
• Using multiple new tools during a 48 hour game jam is a little stressful. Glad I did it though, since it greatly improved the game.

Of course, I am looking forward to LD36. In the meantime, I need to decide if I should continue to work on my current project, or shelve that for a bit while I look into developing the new version of Shape Shifter Match Maker. I guess the comments in the review section of my LD entry will help me decide that.

Hello everyone!

I hope playing and rating games is going well! I just wanted to take a few minutes to talk about my game and the new things I tried out that happened to work out for me. Anyways, here we go!

This go ’round I got the idea for my game pretty early on. I wanted to make a game where I could focus more on design, and good look and feel. A metroidvania felt perfect for that goal. I listened to a lot of GDC design talks leading up to ludum dare so I could be prepared with a proper toolbelt for level design. From the talks I listened to, 3 things stood out to me as important:

1. Iterative Design
2. Visual and Audio Juice
3. Taking inspiration

First off I will talk about Number 3 very quickly. In my game I obviously “take inspiration” from Castlevania. The level design and the look and feel lean towards that, but also games like Limbo and Risk of Rain. There are a lot of original ideas here, it is amazing how lots of new ideas are experimented with here, but personally, I see no shame in emulating the design practices a game that you love. At any rate, nothing really controversial here, moving on.

Next I will talk about Visual and Audio juice. I watched the GDC talk “Game Feel: Why your Death Animation Sucks” and it showed some really cool effects I wanted to use. (note: chromatic aberration) So that was clearly something that inspired the way I made my death animation, and when you get hurt. Along those same lines it’s a similar effect when you transform. It was important to me that the player feel the effect of the transformation without having to elongate the animation, and also to draw attention away from my poorly done animation, so that’s why you get the scream and the chromatic aberration. Now the cool screen effects were only one part of it, the particle effects were another thing that added to the weight the sprites had, it was very easy to set this up with Unity and it’s animation system, hooking a public method into a keyframe is vastly powerful for visual effects

.

Lastly iterative design, the last tool on my toolbelt. Coming in to Ludum Dare I had this pipe dream that I’d be done with the mechanics by Saturday so I could spend all Sunday polishing and tweaking the level design. This didn’t happen for a variety of reasons, which meant that I didn’t have a chance to really use this tool much. The level design did change a bit from my initial vision after playtesting it myself, but it definitely could have used a few more passes.

Even with the worlds tiniest toolbelt, I was still not able to avoid complications. Unity provided plenty of those for me, and the CharacterController2D by Prime31 that I adore didn’t initially act as expected. So after some tweaks I got it working for my player, but I really spent too much time with little sleep trying to tweak things like the jump that detracted away from implementing more important things, like enemies, and the boss. I kept running into little issues like this. Knockback proved difficult to implement at 3am, as did enemy wolf dashing, but still I got it to a functional state. With all these tiny features taking hours to implement, it left me with a little less than an hour to design and program the boss. Fortunately I was able to copy code from the other enemies and just change it to fit with my idea for the boss. Even with all these problems, I was happy I ended up with a complete game, however tiny it is.

Not to say I ended up with a perfect game either. There were lots of bugs and tweaks I couldn’t squash or fix. There was always a problem with the sprite flashing of enemies when you hit them, knockback was still inconsistent, human combat was awkward, the boss fight wasn’t clear, and the wolf enemies dash made them seem to come out of nowhere. I also had some design problems that I just couldn’t get to; for example getting a platforming section directly after getting the wolf form was no good as the wolf form was meant for speed and damage, not platforming. But even with the hundreds of glaring problems, I ended up with something I  put a lot of work into, and I feel like I can be proud of it.

So with that, I will leave you guys with this:

No matter how many problems you or others see in the game you made, be proud of it. You did the game developers equivalent of a 100 meter sprint, and you crossed the finish line in time. Take the problems you see and the feedback you get here to make a better game next time. I hope to see you back here in August. 

You can play/rate my game here: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-35/?action=preview&uid=26320 

P.S. I uploaded a post-compo version of my game with controller support, improved enemies, and a sort of checkpoint system.

I spent the preceding days before LD35 looking over the remaining themes and trying to decide which one was the most generic, least inspiring, and therefore had the greatest chance of being voted on. I pegged “Mutation” as the theme, but “Shapeshifter” won out. Originally I thought of a puzzle game where you’d move vertices on a polygon to fit into holes. For some reason this evolved into buildings, and I though “What if I made something like “Be A Great Artist in Just 10 Seconds” but with 3d objects. Buildings came into this somehow. And the game was going to be about designing weird buildings for an unnamed oil-rich country. Somehow that changed to Seattle. The rest started falling into place.

What Went Right:

• Deciding gameplay didn’t matter.
  • 48 hours is not a lot of time, and I wasn’t thrilled about the theme. Plus, not having an objective freed up the game to be about something else. At the core, I wanted the game to be about self-expression, and letting people add things to a world, and then interact with it.
• Using Public Domain Classical Music
  • An idea I had for previous games, but never got around to using. Making music is a weak point for me, I’ve tried doing it for games in the past with little success. I found a piece by Chopin, with a Public Domain license on the recording, and I used that. It added so much to the game’s atmosphere. I was lucky that I didn’t have to look very long to find a few short songs that looped really well.
• Adding Selfie Mode
  • I wanted the game to be about being creative, and Selfie Mode was sorta a joke that I ended up spending some time on. I like the idea of having a souvenir from your game after finishing it. Selfie cameras in games aren’t new, but I’d
• Finishing the core game early
  • This allowed me to basically tack things onto the game and add “polish” or other things I’d usually neglect in a game jam. Rule of thumb for 48 hour jams, think of something you can code in an hour or less.
• Doing the Jam over The Compo
  • I used  lot of helper libraries, code, and assets. Even though I made most of them within the span of the game, I didn’t make the music, which excluded me from the Compo. Loosening the rules lowered the stakes, so I was able to goof off a bit more.

What Went Wrong:

• Not Surfacing Controls Better
  • Unfortunately, few users read instructions, readmes, descriptions, or in-game instructions. I really wanted players to switch to walk mode so they could take selfies, and I’m not sure I emphasized that enough. I nearly stuck in a huge graphic that told you this in the game, but didn’t want to handle showing/hiding it. People reported that they didn’t know they they could walk around in-game. Ah Well.

Was the game successful?

One person commented that they laughed, and people seemed to like it. A few people shared selfies that they took in game. So, I consider it a success.

Play and rate it here -> http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-35/?action=preview&uid=3400

Here is my Game Beat the Boss.

Ludum Dare 35

My first Unreal Engine game is finally complete!

I took a risk and tried some voice-acting. I’ve always wanted a story-focused game, and I think this was a good fit. You unlock the story as you find related shapes in the scene.

Shapes like this book! The story is inspired by people in my life. I hope you enjoy playing it as much as I enjoyed making it!

Until next time! 😉
http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-35/?action=preview&uid=62604

Coming up this weekend : enemy team shapeshifting, AI easy mode and powerups !

more updates on twitter @Lav_Wa

I have to say I learned a lot about Unity doing this game but most important I feel is jury rigging a UI system that works. I don’t think is the proper way to do it but I works. I didn’t get to put as much time I was would have liked into it but I am happy with what I had. I am working on a post compo version that will include the things I wanted to add but didn’t have time like levers, push-able blocks and more levels. Also fixed the Enemy AI and player movement. I really don’t know why I had the player moving so fast.

twitch.tv/nicktend0

I love just talking about people’s games and love playing LD games. Come and submit stuff!

So, for this Ludum Dare I decided to go down the risky road and try out Defold for the first time (keep in mind I used only Unity for several years now).
I managed to make a small game which can be played here

I also decided to document all the things I liked or not in a blog post. So if you are interested in finding out more about Defold you can check the post here: The flippin’ amazing blog post.

Here is I Have Brig Plans. It’s my 10th entry! What do I get?

I mostly make logic puzzles, and this is one of them. You have to design cells for prisoners. Each prisoner has a number on it telling you how many tiles they need for their cell. Each person’s cell needs to be a connected group. In addition, there are three types of prisoners, all having special rules inspired by two Nikoli puzzle types, Shikaku and Nurikabe:

• Humans require rectangular cells
• Cockroaches require cells with no 2×2 blocks
• Energy beasts’ cells must not touch each other.

As such the game plays out a little bit like Shikaku or Nurikabe, but also has its own unique flavour coming from the interactions between the rules. Later in the game, a shapeshifter is introduced whose type you have to figure out yourself.

My wife and baby daughter were overseas visiting relatives at the time, so I had the house to myself. That means less distractions, at least in principle. By the end of the weekend it was a pretty lonely experience, though. (I Skyped with them a couple of times which helped.) I had too much coffee on both days, which led to a more stressful weekend than necessary.

Since the rules were relaxed a year or two ago, every time I start a game, I grab my previous entry and empty out the stuff that’s not reusable. It’s worked well for me. The code I reuse is mostly file loading and audio stuff. (And a few miscellaneous things, like a function for finding “islands” in a grid of data; it’s served me well for 4 games in a row, with minor tweaks here and there to handle different data formats.) This time I added a simple “packager” consisting of a bit of python to dump all the resources in a single file, and a bit of client-end javascript to pull all the resources out. It saves having to request each sound/image file individually.

What went well

Puzzles: A big advantage of making a logic puzzle game (compared to, say, an action game) is that you can get an idea of whether it’s fun without coding it up. Just make some puzzles on paper, then forget the solutions (cinch) and try to solve them. I spent the first 5 hours making the puzzles before even starting to code! I think they are fun and satisfying if slightly on the easy side. (Though the final level of the final act is a decent difficulty.)

Music and SFX: Maybe it should have been obvious, but I only realised some time between the last two LDs, that even if a game has music and speech, it really ought to have sound effects too. It adds a lot to the game to have sounds that play in response to inputs; I think it makes the player feel more strongly that they are affecting something.

I decided to tune the sound effects to notes. To avoid too dissonant a sound, I placed some restrictions on the chords in the music. Maybe the music isn’t very challenging, but I think it sounds relaxing and goes with the rest of the game.

What went OK

The look: Well, I’m not much of an artist but I’ve started to learn how to draw… the player’s attention away from that. I drew the icons in Krita and used an edge detection filter to get a carved look. The rest of it was about fiddling with colours and border widths and things in the javascript.

What went badly

Story: Originally I wrote a funny story, but then I read it and realised it wasn’t funny at all. Also a funny story wouldn’t really go with the rest of the presentation. So I took out all the crummy attempts at jokes, and went for quirky instead of funny. It adds a bit of flavour to the puzzles, maybe. But I don’t think the story ended up very exciting or memorable.

Spending too much time on details: I spent a lot of time on tiny details like having a sound switch, and fiddling with the controls to make them as convenient as possible. Normally I advocate putting a high priority on polishing, on focusing on those minor details. But this time I might have overdone it, using up time that could have been better spent giving my game a bit more character, or making more levels.

Do you like assassinating?
Do you like hitman games?
Do you like sniping games (killing from afar) ?
Do you like hide-and-seek?
DO YOU WANT TO EXPERIENCE SHOOTING DOGS (but not IRL) ?
THEN THIS GAME IS FOR YOU!

Go play it here: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-35/?action=preview&uid=64207

Play In Browser

I created a new thumbnail for my game and here is a gif of some of the gameplay. The game is getting a positive response so far asides from the graphics being a bit plain.