Finally found time to fix interesting bug in my game – The Operator.

In some cases time froze before the day end. It was hard to reproduce, but I managed to find out the problem:
For each day I have random amount of calls and if generated amount was too small and player finished all the calls before the end of the day – time stopped.

So I just increased calls for each day, so it is safe to play now

The game can be played in browser here.

Original Jam Entry can be found here.

P.S.

Found out that I’m not the only one that came to the switchboard idea and found 4 more games:

The Switch – Worker by Ghen
One-Armed Operator by skele_blade
The Operator by ForeignGuyMike
Switchboard Operator by Jordan Campbell

Team VersatileVelociraptors participated in the game jam for a second time during Ludum Dare 36.

When we competed in Ludum Dare 32, we were just a group of 4 high school students: 3 juniors (11th grade) and 1 senior (12th grade). None of us had ever really made a computer game before. After 72 hours, we released a simple 2D game called Velocicopter. It was unpolished and named after the strange behavior that the velociraptor enemies have when they reach the player and then rotate, but it was still a fun and loveable game.

All of us are now in college and we had the crazy idea to participate again. One of our original team members had other obligations but we were able to pick up another team member who is a sophomore majoring in computer science. Our team for this Ludum Dare was made of 2 freshmen and 2 sophomores and our members attend the University of Houston, Rice University and the University of Texas at Dallas. For some of us, it was our first weekend of college.

Our biggest challenge was time. We couldn’t always spend the entire day working on the game and of course, we also had classes on Monday. Two of our members stayed awake working on the game for the about the first 30 hours of the jam and one of those members still had to pull an all-nighter on Sunday to finish the game. Unlike our first Ludum Dare game, we created all the assets that are used in the game and did not use any public domain graphics or audio.

In the end, we submitted Raptroid Prime, a small platformer in which you play as a robot that was built by velociraptors. The robot can interact with and change the level by flipping levers and “shifting dimensions.”

We hope you enjoy our game and as always, feedback is appreciated.

— LoadingPleaseWait (C. Michael Murphey), Member of VersatileVelociraptors

It’s just a little TBFTW tech demo…  RIGHT HERE -now for Windows too.  😉

Not much different, some tweaks and bug squash- I swear.  Let me know if there are any issues!

Also, the Rex is in the Spriter Awesome Boss Competition, you can check that out HERE if you want to see BTS of the animation in Spriter.

The Project:
I was the programmer for a 3 man team (programmer, artist, soundbro) that made the entry Dino X for Ludum Dare 36. I used C++ with SDL to write the code, and started from only a small math library (clamp, v3 functions, etc.).
Overall:
Overall I think our project was pretty successful. We managed to complete something that at least resembles a game. Unfortunately, some basic elements of the game never made it in, such as scoring, due to fatigue.
What went well:
  1. Physical Location.
I really wanted to get people together in one location that wasn’t anyone’s house so there weren’t any distractions. This worked very well and we were all productive the entire time we were there. I think a large part of our success, at the very least my success, was due to simply not working from home this time.
  2. Game Idea
This went by very quickly and we adjusted it a bit once we got started before locking it in. Going into this we wanted to do some kind of platformer, but we brainstormed once the theme was announced and came to a few possibilities, waited a bit, and then all agreed on the final game style that we went with. Once programming and art started, we decided to change it a little bit after a few experiments.
  3. Experience
This was an excellent experience. I learned a lot, as did my teammates. The time pressure is a really nice thing for getting stuff done and learning how to do things. I think that not spending a lot of time to try and figure something out and instead just doing it actually helps a lot for the first time you’re doing something. You can learn how to do it properly later, but the experience you get from at least doing it at all helps inform the learning later.
What went not so well:
  1. Preperation
I didn’t properly prepare ahead of time, so i was starting from approximately zero code, and I’m not quite fast enough to work from that far back.
  2. Bottlenecks
Our workflow wasn’t set up very efficiently, so a few times we stalled as people were waiting on me to add features so they could see if adjustments needed to be made, and we didn’t have stuff planned out with enough detail that people knew what to do while their current work was stalling.
  3. Timing
We had some issues getting to the location and back, mainly to do with stuff going on in people’s lives at the time. This cut into our start time a bit, but it ended up not affecting a lot because of the next point.
  4. Endurance
We started on late Friday/early Saturday, and by mid-Sunday we were mostly out of steam. Most of us had really done something like this before, save for my very much failed attempt at LD33. I think the main issue was that we were just mostly starting out from bad places in terms of how rested and focused we were.
  5. Requirements
This was probably the biggest issue. We didn’t have clear standards for how we were going to do assets/gameplay stuff from the start, which ended up causing some wasted work and loss of motivation when some stuff had to be thrown out.
  6. Completion
Due to fatigue at the end, some basic things that woudln’t have taken long to implement and would have gone a long way to making the game better weren’t put into the game.
  7. Gameplay
The game has issues in the gameplay department. The scrollspeed is somehow too fast and too slow at the same time, the game is too difficult but also easily breakable in terms of difficulty, there is no way to win the game and no score tracking, etc. It has the core gameplay and literally nothing else, so it was half successful, but not fully.
Takeaways
Having a dedicated physical location where everyone in the same room that isn’t anyone’s house was a huge boon, and I will be doing this if I participate in the future.
You have to have clear and well-defined standards from the start, especially for art assets. Things like perspective and size shouldn’t be something that anyone has asks about.
Make it so that people always have something to do. We couldn’t afford to have people stalling with no work because of the time constraints, but we did. The original plan was to have the game easily playable and tweakable by the other people when they weren’t working on something, and I had most of that implemented, but not the final parts to make it work.
Having the game be in a playable, mostly-shippable state since about midway through the competition should be a requirement. Putting easy stuff off until later to come back to is simply risking not having those things in the game. We tried for this and I failed to deliver, which affected the final game a lot.
Conclusion
The event was a success. Our main goal was to get something running and running decently, so gameplay itself was a secondary concern this time. The game was only a semi-success, since the gameplay didn’t quite come together and it feels like an incomplete game, which it very much is. The experience and feedback that we have gotten will help us a lot on our next LD, when we will now have the skills and speed to try and make a game with good gameplay that feels complete.

Tags: postmortem

Hello everyone!

We (@Galbix & @Jorjenz13) finally finished a game on time for Ludum Dare! (only after four failed attempts…)

In BRAVE to the Core! you have to guide the infamous explorer Braba across the depths of the Earth in search of long forgotten ancient treasures… and make a fortune out of the them!

You can play it HERE!

We’ll probably upload a post-jam version with some fixes and a couple of extra features in the next days, so stay tuned. Bonus artwork for those who click the more button:

Tags: $$$, cartoon, drilling, gamedev, LD36

hello, i am raphaelgoulart and this is the first game jam i joined. however, i didn’t do it alone (i was the musician and sfx maker lmao), and the one who submitted the game was the programmer (unphook – the game’s available here)

i just wanted to say that i am glad to have joined it. besides the programmer, none of us had been on a game jam before, and 4 of the 5 ppl involved in the game were at my house (me included, obviously). it was tiring, but we ended up having most of what we wanted (some gameplay features not included, but still), plus gathering some friends at my house was fun, and the experience was really rewarding.

so i just wanna thank the people at what we call ‘opode games’, the ludum dare organizators for the opportunity. if you play the game (pls do), leave feedback, and i hope you like it as much as we enjoyed working on it!

Now i can see that post Ludum Dare feedback is the best part of the jam. I am trying to play some video games each day and some of them are exceptional.

Thank you to all the people who played my game and keep the feedback up!

My game:

Oscilloschaos

I maybe did not finished my LD game, but still, i wan to play some interesting entries! So, for now, i have mood for:

1. Retro tech games (real world tech, like vhs, old pcs e.t.c)
2. Horror games!
3. Stargate (i saw one little screen of stargate looking game so… bring it)

If you created/played something like that, please paste link in comments. Aaaand… If you just want feedback for your game… You can paste link too because  i am generous 😀

Here was the moment during testing I decided I needed to improve my ground checking when hammering the jump button or remove the jump feature =)

I decided to remove it since I there was no need to jump anywhere on the level, but it gave me a great laugh in the middle of the night.

Take a look to the game from The Barberians Game Studio:

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-36/?action=preview&uid=112058

Tags: jam, LD36, screenshot, unity

Now the dust has settled and thinking about how best to improve the game in the future and potentially push it for real release.

Things I’ve identified:

• Some bugs that are really annoying
• Really need to improve the visual feedback throughout the game
• Build a story mode and a another idea I think is cool

The great thing about LD is that you get something that you can demo and grow to be good in a relatively short time period, this is because I don’t normally have the time to spend on something in a single go.

Hopefully over the coming weeks I’ll have more things to share and begin to post updates to the itch.io page.

Anyway if you want to play and offer any feedback you can View the Game Here

Free Afternoon is a game about ancient technology of the 80s: floppy discs, rotary dial phones, walkman cassettes…
You have a free afternnon and want to install your new video game but encounter problems.

During this Ludum Dare unlike my previous ones, the final game evolved a lot from the original concept. Usually I think of a game concept and then stick to it for the 48h, sometimes skipping or adding some additional functions if time allows or doesn’t allow.

What stayed from the original concept was a series of “mini-games” or “levels” including various technologies which were all connected by a common story line.
However originally I have really thought of mini-games whereas in the end it’s more of a experience levels. Can’t say whether it’s for the better or worse, it’s just a fact.

The reasons for this are purely technical. For exemple the level with the rotary phone, in the beginning I wanted to make it as an arcade game, with a finger character who would dial the phone. I started making it with Unity, thinking it would be easier to implement based on all the physics engine already present in Unity. But it was all tangled up, I spent a lot of time trying to make work all the diffrent colliders and triggers (the platform, the dial numbers, the receiver…) with the correct rotation of the rotary dial and of the finger character that would travel in the rotary… in the end it was just so complicated and didn’t work smoothely, and I still didn’t have any other levels ready, no sounds, no music that somewhere on sunday I decided to skip all the arcade stuff and just do a mouse only game without any finger character. I also decided to switch technology and passed to ActionScript and FlashDevelop which I master much better and in which I judged it would be much easier to implement the rest of the game (and it was…).

The original arcade level of the telephone, in the final version the scaffolding is gone:

It also become clear on sunday that I wouldn’t make it to the compo with a playable game so I decided to go for the jam. I didn’t work on monday (which doesn’t mean I was free) but I could count on a reasonable amount of time to finish the game.

After the modfication of the concept on sunday afternoon it all went quite smoothely without any problems, I even managed to put into the game the cassette walkman part (which took me just an hour and a half to draw and code.. and you can probably see that the graphics of this level are a bit worse than the rest of the game, I’ll probably change that part if I do a post-jam version).
The walkman part itself was supposed to be a bit different with more songs and hints scattered all over the soundtrack, where you would need to jump from song to song to find the final hint, change sides etc.. but well I coudn’t really do more in an hour.
Which just confirms the necessity to work with tools you master during a jam. If I hadn’t spent half of my time trying to make work the physics engine in Unity which I have never used before I would have probably made a more polished, complete game overall. The thing is I am really conscient that you shouldn’t jam with a techno you do not master and I have decided to do it either way! Maybe sometimes you just need to learn it the hard way 😉

While failing to arrive in the compo might be considered a bit of a pity as I have worked solo and done all the graphics and music assets by myself, switching to jam allowed me to come up with a finished game and also use telephone and walkman SFX from third parties which was a considerable gain of time.

All in all it was a good jam, I like my game, it’s not very standard and I think the concept is quite original. Whether it is fun or not to play is for you to judge.
But I know it could have been much better if I had stared working on the final idea right from the start.

What went wrong
– use a technology I do not master for a type of game I have never done before -> spend too much time on trying to figure things out technically and doing assets and animations that therefore didn’t make it to the final game
– dropping out other old technologies such as VCR and old television due to lack of time
– the need of simplification of the cassette walkman level

What went good:
– the decision to modify the concept and swich to a technology I master in order to be able to spend more time on assets than on coding which enabled me to finish a playable game
– create music early – I think the quality is better this way
– create graphics assets before coding: less time spend afterwards on adjustments

Thank’s for reading, you can play the game here.

We have fixed some issues and bugs with our newest update for “Invent The Wheel!”

Changes/Fixes include:
1) Overdrawing – You only have a limited area in which you can draw.
2) No more timer – You have an infinite amount of time to draw your wheel.
3) Updated controls – You now draw with RMB, which appeared to be easier during our testing.
4) White flag – You can now abort your run and retry.

We also fixed some minor display bugs that occasionally appeared pre-fix.

Enjoy your new (and hopefully improved!) wheeling experience! 😉

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-36/?action=preview&uid=32967

Tags: bugfix, features, Invent, jam, update, Wheel

I finally updated my game after I was ill on monday and didn’t got much time this week.

http://feedback.ld.intricati.com/?event=ludum-dare-36&uid=110833

I would appreicate feedback on the game/the tutorial/bugs.

I have to say that I’m not completly pleased about my first LudumDare, but there will be more in the future right?! 😉

Have a good day!

Dedioso aka Krautkopp

I’m almost recovered from Ludum Dare, which means it’s about time I write a post-mortem, but before that I’ll add here the progress reports we published over the weekend.

Day #1: A game about plants and sundials

Day #2: Everything is ready-ish

The game was made by Rubén, Celer and myself.

So let’s do a quick recap of the overall experience. We got to a local LD gathering to enjoy jamming along some friends of ours, which also means you goof around with everybody until the theme is announced, something I don’t usually do since I prefer to sleep and start the jam fresh.

We discussed a few concepts and decided to go for a gardening/harvesting game, which I liked, in most jams I tend to make games more focused around content creation (level design, narrative, etc) and this time I got to spend more time working on systems, which is nice for a change.

I believe we worked for about 3 hours before deciding it was time to sleep. At that point the project looked like this:

Day 1 was mostly about creating the system and testing it. On day 2 we focused on implementing all the art and eyecandy while trying to find some time to balance the game. Day 3 felt really short (nothing new) and we spent our time fixing bugs, adding the last details, implementing audio, adding a score system, a title screen, etc.

What went wrong

• My biggest issue with the game is that the rules are hard to pick up. I don’t think it’s too complex (in fact, I believe it could have ussed some add-ons) but the truth is that throwing all those mechanics at the player’s face as soon as the game starts isn’t the best thing to do. If this were to be a content-based game we would have made a first level to teach them the mechanics, but since this project was based around systems we would have needed to include a tutorial and we didn’t really have time for that. At least we got all the help/instructions in-game, so players don’t have to read the description to find out  how everything works (otherwise I think nobody would stand playing it).
• UI. Could have been better, we didn’t have time to iterate it. There was too much information we wanted to display and I’m pretty sure there was a better layout than the one we chose.
• I had to throw away part of my work (and re-do) it while implementing art.
• Seasonal change remains too “blocky”, but improving that would have taken many hours.

What went right

• Closed game, polished and with just a few bug reports.
• We didn’t have to cut off gameplay features.
• We got it working soon to focus on polish and art implementation.
• We were handling quite a lot of assets (4 types of tree, 5 different growth stages for each one and 4 different seasons) but fortunately communication was smooth and this didn’t became a big issue.
• We enjoyed working on it.
• Slept enough hours.
• Jammed with friends!
• Finished a couple of hours early (which means we could get back home on public transport :-P)

I’m happy with what we made. Sure, there’s a couple of things I’d like to change or add, but felt pretty decent to me, something that I don’t get to achieve on every jam. So far players are saying what we expected, they liked the mechanics but it takes a few games to get used to them.

-> Click here to play “Emily Morrison’s Garden” <-

Now that I’m done with the post-mortem I’m gonna start playing the games you made over the weekend. I’m starting with the ones from devs I know, but I’d like to play about 30 games over September. Let a link to your game on a comment so I can check it out!

So after skipping LD34 and LD35 I’ve finally participated again. I was afraid not to make something as fun as I made for LD33, but my wife inspired me to overcome this obstacle and make a freakin’ game =)
And here it is – Tomb Robbers.

My experience with both Unity and C# grown a lot since the last year, so I thought it would be a lot more easier to make something more complicated.

I couldn’t be more wrong =) Idk if Tomb Robbers is a better game than Zombie Rush or not, but here is a lot more content in here actually. Not graphical, but logical.

What went right:

1. Finite State Machine. I used State pattern for the first time in the way I liked it (read: without huge switch-case). Every state for every entity has its own logic and can be easily changed without any changes in other code. Raiders have pretty complicated FSM (walking, climbing, hit, dead, stunned etc.), but every trap have its own state set either, but a simpler one (ready, acting, reset).
It’s the most righteous decision I made in this LD since it was a pleasure to implement separate logic for every trap.
2. Gameplay mechanics. I’m sure I nailed it the second time ) Again, the game feels good, offers some satisfaction for the player and some tactical and strategical challenges which is good in term of replayability. Yeah, I know, not many people played it more than once, but personally, I played it about 20 times finding the most optimal strategy. And it was fun.
3. Visual accents. I’m not very happy with the visuals, but in was a total lack of time for it, and it still works well. Traps and raiders are highlighted enough to see them easily.

What went wrong:
1. No goal. Again. Maybe it’s because I’m a programmer and I always want to build some kind of system instead of player experience. This time I planned to make three levels with different themes (Egypt, Aztec, etc.) but I barely made one. And of course no win state, like in good old times ) Ancient times.
2. No narrative. It relates to the previous issue, but I want to separate it. I’m sure for the next LD I’m going to make something heavily narrative-based. Not sure if I will succeed, but it’s what I really want to learn.
3. No sounds. Epic fail. Hadn’t got time to add even a single sound. Game lost a lot of depth because of it.

I also hadn’t got time to polish the game overall. Wanted to add some funky FX, screen transitions etc, but again – run out of time completely.

I hope to do better next time.

And guys, thank you all for the feedback! It’s the most important part of LD =)

Click the image to play

I made a video for my Ludum dare 36 game Temple Plunder!
 

Hi there,

Man, Ludum Dare is great. We have now made our first complete game! All our other projects so far have never really been finished, they have only been sort of outlines of different game ideas. Now we have an actual product and it feels so good. Frankly we are quite proud of the music we made for the game. You can give it a listen here https://soundcloud.com/user-823491562/ancient-machine-ost.

Currently the game is only playable on windows, but a web-version might be coming soon! Cheers!

I’ve been updating my game.

Now there’s more sound, a mute option, tweaked enemies, and better game-play.

You can find it here.

Tags: 2D, jam, ldjam, Ludum Dare, post-mortem, progress, update, Windows