Alright, so this was my first experiment with timelapsing (I used chronolapse). I used 120 seconds per picture, so it’s sorta choppy, and I missed a couple hours when I forgot to turn chrono back on, but it’s definitely a cool way of seeing how you work.

LD17 Timelapse \”Island Hopping\”

Done! My first 3D game ever. I’m tired but happy about it.

Entry is here, for GNU/Linux and Windows.

Arks of Mercy

Be the savior of an endangered nation, as the level of the waters rise ineluctably. Guide your people to the safest mountains, build boats, teleportation towers and mighty shelters before it is too late!

Be sure to read the readme. It might not be very complex, but there are no instructions ingame at all.

EDIT: the readme might not be totally clear, but you can change the whole keymapping (not only for the gamepad) in keymap.lua

Be sure to check the Gameplay video!

Also, no Windows binaries yet, sorry. Will work on it, but I don’t have a Windows computer right here.

EDIT: ported!

Since this is clearly going to be an all nighter, I might as well do the traditional postmortem right away.

What went wrong

• It’s not exactly “code” related, since the code is portable (both the C library, and the Lua “game”), but having issues with the Windows port is annoying. My library is probably very easy to compile on Windows, but crosscompiling is a nightmare. Will try to get access to a Windows machine soon. EDIT: done!
• Having — as usual — no idea whatsoever where to start, I built the game a bit randomly, throwing ideas and seeing what would happen. In the end, the code is so  messy that I couldn’t do what would have given the true meaning of the game: having a second player. Be it computer, or networked friend. The game is a kind of single-player training mode. The goal is to score a maximum of points. I’ve never been very fond of these “gradual” winning games. Being able to compete on the same terrain with someone else, and check who saved most, would have been great. Later work maybe?
• First time use of 3D. We’ve been warned, know the technology before using it in a limited time compo… Even if I had gone through the Redbook before, and had the library set-up done, a lot remained to learn or relearn. And a lot of time spend (not lost) on it.
• Stupidly spent a huge amount of time on the terrain generation. Tried and failed at midpoint displacement, fractal watchamacallit and other things. Tried three times to implement Perlin noise before succeeding. I guess being tired didn’t help. Or trying to tweak parameters that I knew would be irrelevant later anyway.
• Considering the game not being truly a “game”, I didn’t do any intro screen or background story, or levels, or campain. For a while I considered it a fancy toy.
• Spent far too much time playing the game. Hey no wait. That’s a good thing. It goes into:

What went (very) well

• Despite the few previous points, I actually enjoy playing the game. I spent a few times playing it through and saying to myself “oah that game is cool”. And that is pretty new. All my previous LD’s and mini LD’s left me with a certain feeling of frustration. And the impression of having made a non-fun game. This one keeps me glued to the screen, gamepad in hand, until the end. And this, for the following reasons:
• 3D coding turned out great. Sure there were a few facepalms, a few unfindable bugs, and a few mathematical challenges. But I am happily surprised to see how far a “first 3D game” can go. Plus, I was afraid of performance, since optimisation is excluded during 48h (octrees? meh… i just draw everything all the time!), and my EeePC is kinda slowish and doesn’t have a gamer’s graphic card. But with a bit of Level of Detail, and basic use of Display Lists, I end up having ~14 FPS, which makes it very playable. People with better machines will enjoy it even better.
• 3D looks turned out nice. With the obvious intent of having minimalistic models, no textures, flad shading, etc, it ends up being slightly retro. It’s been compared, obvious inspiration, to Darwinia (never played), which looks infinitely more fantastic. With the day/night cycle and the zoomable camera, there are some pretty nice landscapes ingame.
• Music. I needed a break from the code at some point and decided to make music, even for a non-game. I’m quite happy with the result, a dark atmospheric track that certainly sets the mood to this doomsday setting. Actually, it is probably for a big part in how compeling I find the game. It keeps you anxious and willing to save those little yellow guys, who keep dying. Oh nooo!
• My small brave library keeps working fine, and get additions every time. This compo was the inaguration of the new input system. It’s not perfect yet, but served its purpose well. I loved playing with the gamepad.

I realise I haven’t listed the tools I used, as it is tradition:

• EeePC 901, mouse, gamepad. A weebit smallish screen for some things (the art department), but otherwise quite ok for coding.
• Lua (mostly), C (a bit in the lib), in the geany text editor. F5 runs the game (or any command you need). Some autocompletion. Doesn’t get in my way. I am not as enthousiastic as usual about Lua, but it’s probably only because of the awful coding practices of the week end. Very ugly.
• LMMS (Linux Multimedia Studio) and the marvelous ZynAddSubFx, included in it. LMMS is not great, but good enough, and mostly makes a good front end to synths, samples players, trackers all in one. On the Eee, there’s not enough raw power to run jack and half a dozen sound apps at the same time
• Wings3D for the models. Curiously I knew very well how to use it, while I never really did that much 3D before. Very easy to use indeed.

Conclusion

I’m both very surprised and very glad of the final thing. Sure it could have been more (2 players vs/coop mode?), but I do enjoy playing it as it is, and that’s a very good sign.

Now I’d really like to hear what others think of it (agree, differ on the yes and noes). It’s one of the first games I’d actually consider finishing later. Cleaning code, adding modes, etc. Who knows.

Thank you reader if you managed so far,

and good voting!

Tags: final, postm, screenshot

Look at that, it has a name now.

Ok, so since I last made a post a lot has changed. The AI now makes ships and does stuff. the units and cities now look like units and cities. there is a bit of a user interface for current gold and unit creation. Paths are simplified to diagonals after they have been determined. Also, some minor tweaks all over.

Grab it here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-17/?action=preview&uid=1168

I mad a timlaps.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6r-Ha9IFKHU

I edited out a couple hours (frames) of sleeping and eating.  It’s kind of fast and strobey.

Well, for only having been able to work on this for 12 hours, I think I did a pretty darn good job. I used JPixel again (as I mentioned before), which basically has support for OpenGL, pixely particle effects, and a lot of other junk.

Okay, I admit it, I was banking on “Escape” when I came up with my game idea. Therefore I will admit that the only thing that this game really has to do with islands is that it randomly takes place on one. I really would have loved to be more original here and go with the actual theme, but I was very short on time (12 hours was even far more than I suspected) and having spent 3 of that drawing the characters I had to go with I had planned. I already had design docs written up and all that beforehand and this sort of game really uses JPixel well, so that’s that.

Anyway. In Zombie Grinder you are running from a horde of zombies! I thought it would be fun to do an escape-type fighting game where you’re not limited by hit points. So, in this you can’t die unless you touch the horde on the left side of the screen. As such, even though you can be attacked by up to 50 enemies at once (I limited it because any more might slow down older systems), as long as you can stay on the right side of the screen you’re pretty safe. Turns out this is more difficult than it sounds.

I coded all the characters using the same base class, and gave the AI the ability to compare “factions” for who they wanted to attack. This ended up giving the awesome side effect of being able to drop in allies (same faction as the player) with very little fuss. All I had to do was draw a new character (or just tint the player’s guy, of course). This adds a very cool element where you’re running madly from these zombies and you can have some dumb friends drop in and distract some of the zombies. I really would have loved to play on this mechanic more but obviously didn’t have the time.

Overall I’m pretty pleased with this. It’s a simple little time waster that does, more or less, what I went for. And the number of moves you can do, along with the complexity of the combat system, is pretty awesome. My big disappointment is that I didn’t finish doing weapons in time – trust me, they would have been awesome.

Anyway, give it a play and let me know what you think.  This could use a lot more work and quite a bit more polish (worst backgrounds ever!), but hey we can’t have everything. And don’t worry about losing – you can’t!

PS – Yes indeedy the gameplay and characters are inspired by River City Ransom.

My favorite screenshot

Lots of zombies and a few allies

My entry is up!

Play Pee Wee Pirates

Between this and Game-in-a-Day, I’ve done this kind of weekend “game jam” thing probably 10 times now (yikes). But this is the first time in a couple of years, so I was a bit rusty going in. I also decided at the last minute to go with an alpha-quality development framework that had some serious limitations.

Despite all that, though, it was fun to work on, and I’m pretty satisfied with it. Now I’m just looking forward to seeing what everyone else came up with. =)

Thanks to everyone who organized the event!

Oh well my weekend plans were devastated by personal issues 😛 but in the last 6 hours I was able to put together a game, a little bit different from my original idea, that really sucks.

have fun shooting some monsters and defending the island !

Tags: devastated, islands, late, Shoot

Haven’t played too many of the games yet, partly because of being stuck playing Hempuli’s Paradise Fort and having too much fun.

Anyway, the tower:

Note the damaged sections where it was HIT BY METEORS!!!

Then after a while longer the rains came, and I looked awawy for too long as the water level rose:

I fixed three critical bugs:

The new version has already been uploaded. Get it here.
As for the Mac and Linux ports, I’m having a bit of a problem with the Mac port, so it might take a bit longer than expected. But you can always try to compile the source for yourself.

I have uploaded the timelapse on Youtube: Watch it here.
Gameplay and walktrough video will follow as soon as I have the Mac port ready.

I’m still a little bit sleepy, but I wanted to fix those bugs as soon as possible. And because I hacked the game together in such short time I didn’t care about memory resources and stuff you need a relatively fast computer to run (works fine on my Macbook Pro in a virtual machine, but sometimes lags on my Single-core Atom 1.6 GHz Nettop).

Read on for the post-mortem.

Personally I didn’t like the theme that much. First of all, because I used islands in my LD #16 game, in several other prototypes and couldn’t really find an idea that would be different from them. I had several ideas in my head, such as “You are the island”, some kind of Project Nomads game in which you have a floating island, build towers on your island and battle other islands, a RPG-like game where you go from island to island solving different quests and finally the survivor idea.
I went with the latter because I thought I can pull that off in 48 hours. The plan was to make kind of parody game, I don’t know if you can already tell in the status the game is now in. I planned a nice little intro, where you definitely get the idea that the game doesn’t take itself too seriously, but it got cut due to lack of time.

I nearly spent the complete first day on graphics and I could have been more productive. The most productive time for me was the last nine hours before the deadline. The actual gameplay got finished the hour before the deadline, so there wasn’t a a lot of time left for playtesting.
Still, this is the most finished LD game I made yet, you actually have around 20 minutes of gameplay. Well, allright, that depends if you are exploring the world, building stuff or just focusing on the goal.

The Good

The Bad

What I’m planning to do for next time?

All in all, it was fun as always and I can’t wait to play all those games.

Tags: post-mortem, timelapse

I mentioned in my final I’m-Just-Gonna-Write-This-Then-Go-Pass-Out post that there was a bunch of stuff I wanted to write up but was too tired to at the moment. So:

Yesterday afternoon/evening was a real struggle. I’d done most of of the level design by then (a pretty herculean task in it’s own right), and early afternoon wrote two lists of the things I needed to do to make it a game, and the things I wanted to do to be happy with the result.

The first list read:

• Finish level design.
• Put in overarching game logic.
• Add intro and ‘outro’.
• Test that all orbs are reachable.

The second read:

• Add sound.
• Add music.
• Add ‘epilogue’ levels
• Add map
• Add sound + music toggle buttons.
• Add reset button
• Save game progress to cookies
• Test Test Test.

.. and I only had about 12 usable hours left. Obviously my work was cut out for me. So I put some music on, stopped blogging, stopped eating (not wise, I just forgot I needed food) and got my head down.

Somehow I managed to get everything on those lists done aside from progress saving (oh and possible one or two of the three ‘Test’s). Hard, but, I think/hope it was worth it.

Isles of Color

Just worked out that I spent approx 18 hours each day actually working, so, 36 total, ouch! Had a really brilliant time though, cheers everyone for making it the event that it is, particularly everyone on irc. Being able to chat to people going through the same stuff really buoyed me up when I needed it most.

There’s a timelapse video coming (it should be moderately entertaining as I spent so much time on level design), and I’m sure I’ll write up a proper postmortem at some point once my thoughts have settled a bit. Will have to get voting too, over 200 entries!? jeez!

Here‘s the timelapse video of me making Jump Pirate. I think there’s a frame (at about 1:37) of the final screen with “0 deaths” written on it, but that was a (subsequently fixed) bug, unfortunately.

Game Link – Timelapse Link

Lucky I decided to submit the game when I did, I fell asleep almost right away after and didnt wake up till a few hours after the deadline had passed 😀

Tags: timelapse, unity

More details on my entry here.

It seems some people are having bother running this on XP – I built it on Windows 7 and it seems the error comes from a handler that is in msvcrt.dll on vista/7 but not on XP.

I will try to get an XP build done as soon as I get home from work today. Anyone who is rating my game and can’t get it to run, I beg you to bare with me today and I’ll sort it out.

Thanks,

Grieve

After having spent most of the development time on my game, I realized that I’d been making the same game over and over again, and got very tired of it. My game was yet another crappy sidescrolling platformer, and I got very tired of it.

So… I threw in the towel, but didn’t tell anyone ’till now because I needed the time to relax. It hurt giving up yet again, but I just couldn’t stand to work on my idea anymore.

See ya next month for the Mini-LD, though. I’ll try to do something new and weird, because I can’t stand the idea of doing another platformer.

Here’s hoping…

–Mr.Dude

I fixed a bug that showed up when exiting the game (in both the “exit game” command and when you enter the cave (with all puzzles completed). It was a misuse of the exit() that apparently works fine on my Python, but when creating the binary it didn’t work anymore.

I kept the original sources so you can compare what I changed (just 2 lines really, an import sys and a sys.exit(0) instead of just exit()).

I’ll save my post mortem to after I make (off-competition of course) the last area of the game.

Thanks for the compliments on the game.

PSnake

Doing this now, because the longer I leave it, the less chance I’ll ever write it up.

I’ve uploaded OSX and Linux/source code versions.  These ones have the stupid bug where you could click on buoys before you’d found them fixed (thanks TFernando ), but I left the Windows version as it is, since that’s how I submitted it, and it’s not a huge bug.

Timelapse is here.  I’m afraid it’s missing the music making though, since I did that on a different computer and forgot to record a corresponding timelapse.  Post mortem after the jump:

I’m pretty happy with how it turned out, though having made the map first, I don’t think the rest of the game really lives up to its watery-coloury beauty.  This was my 4th Ludum Dare, and I think I’ve found my feet now; the 1st one I started off really excited and enthusiastic, but the final slog to get the game finished really took it out of me; the 2nd one was the exact opposite – I hated the theme but got really excited towards the end.  This one was much calmer – I never really felt under pressure, and the whole thing went pretty much to plan.  I wasn’t too happy with the theme though – Islands (like Caverns and Exploration) is too expansive, imo.  Creativity is stimulated most when it’s working within constraints, and as a theme, Islands isn’t much of a constraint.

Anyway, the game:

What went well:

• The map, the clouds.  Really pleased with how these turned out.  I couldn’t have produced a better effect had I been given a month to work on them.
• Also, the font.  Credit goes to a Mr. William Boyd.  I found the font at dafont.com.  A good font makes all the difference.  Oh, actually, I didn’t break the rule of only using your own assets, did I?  I wouldn’t really expect many people to make their own fonts for Ludum Dare.

What went wrong:

• I think the game may be a little too obtuse.  If you’ve played Weird Worlds etc. you’ll know what to expect (minus the space battles), but I don’t think the game really makes clear that you’re supposed to die frequently and start over.  Certainly, even if you win on your first play-through, you’ll miss clues and stories(?) due to the random number generator only picking a handful of the possible options.
• Is it fun?  I suspect it’s possibly a bit too random to really be much fun to play.  In Weird Worlds you get into battles and have various strategies to maximise your potential gains, but there aren’t really many strategies in The Lost Hebrides (though the ‘divine’ button is there for a reason…).  Also, it’s the kind of game whose replayability would probably benefit from a score, but that would kind of work against the story/setting.  To be honest though, I was more interested in creating an atmosphere this time than making a really well-designed game.
• The cut-scenes.  I’m not happy with the way these turned out.  I don’t think they can remotely hold their own against the main map (map = kind of elegant; cut-scenes = clumsy children’s picture book).  It’s the black lines as much as anything, plus I don’t think I really used the watercolours to their fullest potential.

What could be improved:

• The writing.  There are parts of this I really like “She will return a thousand years old…” (though I stole that line), and I do like the main (folklore-ish) story, but a lot of it’s a bit clunky and could do with some editing.

Where the inspiration came from:

• Like I’ve said, rockettothesky‘s Medea album was a huge influence while I was making the game, and my aim was to make a game that had a similar atmosphere.  Also, the islander who tells you “She will return a thousand years old…” is quoting from a couple of songs on the album.
• Scottish folklore.  I have a slight obsession with creating games that reflect where I’m from, and this is probably the closest I’ve come to creating a properly Scottish game.  It seems to me that most games don’t really reference their geographical roots, instead choosing to engage solely with the kind of internet digital monoculture that we’re all part of now.  This game was an attempt to emulate the kind of storytelling you hear in Scottish fairy tales, stories that reference fairies and enchantment, and places like Land-under-Waves which can only be reached by certain paths.
• Weird Worlds/Strange Adventures in Infinite Space, natch.  I love these games.  Short play times, high replayability, not quite a roguelike…

I’ll finish with a picture of everything I drew/inked/painted for the game (barring the clouds, which are hiding under the watercolour pad.  There’s a bit of a spoiler if you’ve not won the game yet:

Tags: postmortem, timelapse

the game is hosted here:
link

http://vimeo.com/11231157