Ok, I have downloaded and verified the source code of every entry in the compo.

All sources available guys, thanks!

Also, people are posting their compo source code counts on this thread. I am going to try to do some reports based on the source code for statistics on things like language used, framework used, average lines of code, etc. Anything you can add here about your source would be helpful.

Things are starting to come along but only have a few hours left to work on the game (gotta work tomorrow :/)

If you’ve played the “final” build on FreeBSD, chances are you would have been severely violated by the garbage collector. Here’s a version that’s actually playable on FreeBSD (no, not all the lag has been cut out, but it’s smooth enough to… uh, something)

http://pubacc.wilcox-tech.com/~greaser/stuff/ld18/HeadTrauma-MemoryImageSource.jar

You can enjoy being a cupid in my game! thank you!^^

Wonder Cupid

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-18/?action=rate&uid=2022

Well look at that, we’re already at the last day! Textmode, our night shift, improved the collision a bit, which is great coming from a self-proclaimed maths idiot (no offense Textmode). So now we’re at the final touches I guess, we just added some gameplay elements, so we mostly need to add some finishing touches. (our primary artist is working on some animations at the moment of writing)

Looking back at the start, where I had no faith in this project at all, we have made huge progress, after a first day of.. well, nothing. And now? Now I’m feeling extremely confident (this can only backfire..).

I missed the deadline for the main compo, but I can still submit my game to the Ludum Dare Jam. The deadline is 24 hours after the end of the compo, so I have until 9PM tonight to finish this game.

After a good night’s rest, I woke up with bug fixes. Seriously, I was lying in bed, slowly waking up, and I thought, “Oh, yeah, I implemented cooldown for the entities after they attack, but I forgot to ensure that cooldown ends.” I fixed a crash bug which also prevents the creatures from trying to leave the world map. And I improved the exploration mode of the AI so that the entities should no longer wiggle or fidget. They pick a direction and go until they reach it. I found that the reason why the hero was getting stuck in place. It was due to the fact that I was checking if he had reached a very exact location, and with his speed, he sometimes overshoots it. When he tries to go back to it, he overshoots again, forever. I enlarged the collision detection box to compensate.

When I finished Iteration 4, I found out that accidentally implemented some stories from Iteration which deal with entities attacking each other. I’ve simplified combat so if entities are not in cooldown and are touching, they’re attacking. That implementation left Iteration 5 fairly moot. In fact, I decided to skip the remaining story in Iteration 5 which dealt with some nuanced AI that I’m not even going to look at, so I’m on to Iteration 6. You can see the backlog of skipped story cards under the Iteration card.

I’m pretty excited. It’s only 10AM, and I’m on the last two iterations. Iteration 7 is basically sound effects and packaging the game up, and frankly (and sadly), sound is optional at this point. B-)

About time, too!

clicky

Hope you like my music choice 😉

Some of you were having problems figuring how to play my game because of the complexity and the lack of tutorial, so here’s a two parted video of me playing it:

Part 1

Part 2

Anyone know how to do a youtube embedding? (i promise to be a nice boy and put it after the more tag!

I decided to record a gameplay video of my game Defend Your Glacier.

I was going to record clips and edit them together but for some reason my video editors can’t read the AVIs put out by my screen recorder. =< Also forgot to record from speakers and recorded from my microphone instead. ;-; But anywho, the video's here.

Should skip near the end, as it starts out slow. =P

Defend Your Glacier Entry Page

Trust your Enemy

…train them and then use them!

Lets get into some details…

First: another Screenshot:

download:
http://games.spunkmeyer.de/downloads/Trust_Your_Enemy.zip
source:
http://games.spunkmeyer.de/downloads/Trust_Your_Enemy_Sources.zip

I started saturday morning with no idea in my mind. After my breakfast I had my idea of a game with team-switching units.

You should be able to upgrade units to make them stronger and faster. But what if your units change the team? You need to keep a balance between strong units and defending your homebase.

That was my idea.

I am working with my own little 2D framework. And I wanted to write code in a way that I could use it afterwards. Mainly GUI-Code. That was not a good idea since it took nine hours 

In the end I have some GUI code which I can extract, polish and complete later. Thats the good side. The bad side is that it took really long to get even buttons to work and therefore I started with some core game mechanics on the second day. Far too late.

Next time: Just write down idea, write some cards to work on, and dont think about tomorrow

The cards are really helping. First you get an overview of what needs to be done. Second you get motivated if you can go to the next card.

I had a friend with me, who was coding for LD, too. Thats inspiring at one side and a bit distracting at the other side.  Another friend joined on saturday and coded some hours with us. I would do that again, but be more strict with schedule.

Dev-Log:

Also watch the Timelapse-Video!

saturday
4:00 Dreaming about theme… zzz…
6:22 Shower
6:44 Thinking… watching blog…
6:56 go for a walk, buy food
7:25 Brainstorm
7:33 Think I got an idea…
7:55 more detailed designwork
8:26 Breakfast
9:09 refining design
9:17 starting implementing/drawing
10:41 implementing core mechanics
11:00 need a more detailed plan…
11:34 starting card 1/16 (Core)
12:06 starting card 2/16 (bases)
12:20 buying stuff to eat….
13:44 continuing
14:52 Writing a generic GUI class
16:35 need to get GUI done…
16:47 GUI Mockup
18:00 gui class continue…
18:51 food ordering
19:08 gui…
19:49 foodum dare
20:04 gui…
23:15 Card 3/16 enemies…
sunday
0:28 sleeptime
7:07 cant sleep… must code…
8:09 Card no 4 (Energy sources)
8:36 buying breakfast
8:50 coding
9:30 breakfast!
9:54 coding again
10:34 card 5/16 yay, progress
11:25 card nr 6/16 bases
17:22 Card 7/16 Towers!
17:33 need a POWERNAP!! 😉
18:03 I need a showr!
18:26 continue
19:14 tower graphics
21:40 tower logic
22:13 Card 8/16: AI!
monday
2:22 finishing the unfinished (random cards)
4:00 submitted game, go..to..bed….

I made recordings with several programs during the competition. Here are the useless details:

Stats:
80000 keystrokes (I think the tool missed some…)
2.7 km mouse movement
11,500,000  pixels mouse movement
23000 leftclick
51000 wheel
350 rightclicks

programs used:
codeblocks  17.6 h
irc/icq  3.5 h
firefox  2.9 h
photopaint  2.1 h
test/debug  1.2 h
windows  1.1 h (moving files, searching files, open,…)
gimp  0.9 h

And a heatmap where I clicked (mostly in code window, taskbar, tabs, menus)

Thats my summary of the LD #18 competition.

I really enjoyed it and will participate in the future.

If you are interested in the polished game, follow my blog dev.spunkmeyer.de or visit games.spunkmeyer.de in the future

Here’s my timelapse, for my entry “Fratricide”:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNui4u02JK0

I’ll have a postmortem and some general thoughts sometime in the next day or two…

In the meantime, I might make a quick game for the jam too… just got an idea and I have some assets I could reuse.

Tags: timelapse

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTa6tyEp_mI

My entry is found here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-18/?action=rate&uid=1066

I just uploaded a Time lapse of the making of my entry, Illusion.

Enjoy. =]

Hi,

Since the competition is over (good luck jam people!) I thought I’d share some of the lessons I learned during the 48h in the making of HOME.

What went right:

1. I got a complete, working game. As someone who started many projects, but finished very few, this is the best thing about LD for me – I actually FORCE my self to finish this, and it rocks! It happened in LD17 as well, but this time was as good!

2. I think the style and general feel of the game is quite good, and as I intended. Everything runs fast and smooth, and has this vectorized look, which I like. Although I implemented this using sprites, it look quite crisp IMHO.

3. Music turned out to be atmospheric as I wanted it, maybe a bit boring, but it’s background anyway…

4. The code (available, of course) is surprisingly neat – it only started getting messy towards the end.

What went wrong:

1. Gameplay – I think the whole tractor beam mechanism is not fun enough, and not really necessary for finishing the game (although it helps) – this is both due to the physics code which should have been tweaked more, and possibly the general game idea.

2. The game is WAY too short, it’s not that easy (sometimes it is, depends on random values) but you can finish it in under 30 seconds if you’re lucky. not good.

3. No sounds effects! This is actually a technical issue, something weird with how clanlib handles sounds – I got the music to work after a LONG time, but sound effects were very problematic. ANYWAY – you can’t hear anything in space.

4. I wasted a lot of time of getting rigid body collisions (spheres, actually) which I didn’t use – it’s a shame really..

That’s it, I think.

You are welcome to play my game and of course, VOTE!

Can’t wait for the next LD!

Daniel

Click for the full page of notes

Phew, finished my game last night at very much the last moment.  Above is the page of scribbled notes accumulated over the 48 hours – a mixture of design ideas and remembering how geometry works.

Post mortem style words after the ‘more’ link.

The good:

My sprite drawing base code worked almost fine.  Although I did have to add a class or two to allow it to render sprites that should not be affected by lighting, such as the glowing bullets of the gunship.

Those lighting effects hid my poor art quite effectively.   Without it I could have easily spent the two days trying to get a ship that I didn’t hate the looks of.

I draw this..

..and it comes out like this

I think the basic design was pretty sound.

I’m really fond of the parallax background clouds, especially as it’s generated at runtime from a few layers of Perlin noise.

The bad:

No sound or music at all.  Just plain ran out of time for it.  Which leads on to..

Lack of feedback.  It’s fairly clear that something happens when your ship collides with something, but not that you’re punished for that by losing points.  More importantly it’s not at all apparent that a missile hitting the gunship is a very good thing.  The missile just explodes as it does hitting anything else, and if you happen to be watching your score you’ll see it jump up.  Except your score is always ticking up just from staying alive, so you need to be watching your score and taking notes.

The screen shake effect if the player collides with something.

Feedback that’s missing in the game:

A happy sound on damaging the gunship.  Display the points earned or lost as floating numbers over the location of the event. A warning sound on the approach of the gunship.  A sound on the launch of a missile.  The gunship visibly taking damage from missile impacts.  The gunship actually being destroyed if you hit it with enough missiles.

Lack of tweaking, especially to timings.  I was able to spend enough time so that I was happy with how the ship handled, but had almost no time for adjusting the timing of missile launches and when the gunship arrives.  The missiles could also have done with having their movement tweaked a little too.

I’ve not had any time to test it on machines other than my own, but I suspect that the framerate will suffer on many computers.  There’s still a lot of low hanging optimisation-flavoured fruit.

The other:

Didn’t make full use of my lighting base code.  I threw in obnoxious swirling lights for the title screen, but there’s virtually no dynamic lighting in the game.  I briefly added some on missile explosions but it was behaving oddly, and I didn’t feel I had the time to fix it up.  Ultimately I don’t think it’s actually a bad thing; graphics that compliment the game are more important than showing off fancy effects.  But does make me acutely aware that the engine is doing much more work than is needed. I could have pre-rendered the lit sprites before the game started and it would have run much smoother on much lower spec machines.

I spent the first day doing just graphics.  That should be a terrible idea, but it actually worked out not too bad.  That night I decided to quite significantly change the game’s design which would have meant I’d have wasted most of the programming work of the first day.  But I had done almost none except the graphic processing, which was easily applied to the new design.

This was my first Ludum Dare and I  made a game in a weekend.  Which is pretty exciting!

I’m going to call it good for this LD. At this point, I’ve got a long way to go before I’ve got a complete game. I don’t want to turn in what I’ve got, as it’s rather buggy, so there’s nothing from me.

It’s not for nothing, though. I discovered that 3D game dev is very troublesome on a netbook. OGRE3D is a monster to install, Irrlicht’s forced real-time clock caused big frame rate issues, and Panda3D just didn’t have the muscle I needed. I may get back to it once I’ve got a Real Computer, but it’s well beyond what this netbook can do.

I also discovered that Flash/AS3 is wonderful. Its learning curve is fairly shallow, and it’s still fairly powerful. I plan to use it in future LD’s and in my own projects.

I think I’ve finally learned my lesson when it comes to changing ideas half-way through a compo. I really created a problem for myself doing that. I’ll try harder to not do that from here on.

That said, good job to those who finished. I envy you right now.

The OSX and *NIX ports of The Lair of Fungal Wonder are up now (and amazingly required no edits to get them to compile on the other platforms – that must be the smoothest porting of a game I’ve made to date).

I’ve also uploaded my timelapse, so you can see me making the game.  The only slight hiccup is I made the music and SFX on my other computer, so during that part you’ll have to make do with watching the screensaver.  Also I didn’t think to point the webcam at my paper while I was doing the watercolours, so for that part all you see is me hunched over, occasionally looking up with a paint brush in my mouth.

I’ll do a post-mortem later.

Tags: timelapse

Woooo hoooo I finished my game. Overall it was a great learning experience and I even got to a point where I ALMOST gave up. I’m really happy that I stuck with it, got past “the wall” and polished it until it was done.

You can view my entry here and I would be grateful for your comments.

Streaming flash video, high score list, downloads and web version here:
http://www.orangeview.net/puzzabomb/

Use the arrow keys to move.

PuzzaBOMB in action!

PuzzaBOMB is a simple action-puzzle game. The objective is to lure the time-bombs toward castles which contain powerups. Collect the glowing powerups to go the to next level.

When a bomb is flashing red, it is about to explode!

Features: Five levels, including a “speed round” where the bombs get really spammy. Hand-painted textures. Music featuring me on electric bass and mandolin. Online high score database using php and mysql. Really damn high framerates. nVidia Physx rigid body physics simulation. And lots of explosions!

Programmed entirely in javascript.

There are three versions available:
– Windows (does not require shockwave: uses directX)
– Mac OSX (does not require shockwave: uses openGL)
– Online (in any browser: uses adobe shockwave)

You can get Adobe Shockwave here:
http://get.adobe.com/shockwave/

Have fun, and thanks for playing! This was a blast to make. Ludum Dare ROCKS.

I have really loved playing everybody’s games and reading your posts. This was a wonderful experience and I’m grateful for PoV’s hard work hosting it.

Kindest regards,

– Breakdance McFunkypants

P.S. Double ZOMBIE Rainbow! =)

Tags: complete, final, postmortem, PuzzaBOMB, screenshot

I’ve participated in a lot of game jams and spend many weekends not sleeping and rushing to get my prototype done. My Ludum Dare experience was completely different.

I started late Saturday and met up with a few friends who was working on their own entry. We had some coffee and started brainstorming. I had already realized that I didn’t have the whole weekend to work on my entry and I had also realized that I usually work together with people doing sound and graphics. This time I had to do it all in less time. This affected my brainstorming process and I came up with some very simple ideas. The one I stuck with was: Avoid homing enemies and make them crash into each other.

Concept draft

I’m a programmer, but I probably ended up spending more time doing sound and graphics. However, at the end of my Saturday I had a playable game. A simple game, but very playable compared to other entries. I showed a lot people the game and got some feedback. I’ve tried to sum it up:

• What do I do?
• It’s too hard in the beginning (very classic when you’re the only one who have played it)
• I don’t feel in control of what’s happening. It seems too random

I used the last day to perfect my intro screen with some better instructions and balance the beginning of the game so the player can learn the basics without panicking!  I spend a lot of time on the “straight targeting” robots (the red bullet like ones) to make it visible that they are targeting you. In the beginning they where big walking robots, but I made them into bullet like robots that pointed in the direction they were moving.

Cause the game mechanics felt kind of almost done and polished (for a 48 hour game) I started improving the visuals with shaking camera, particles, combos and pretty explosions.  I love particles and explosions!

The original concept in my head was about a horde of robots that was crazy in love with this cute little monster and wanted to hug it (which obviously meant hugging it to death), but I couldn’t really express that in the art and sound due to lack of skill so I ended up with the robots just trying to kill the cute monster. However, I kept the title  “Robots <3 Monster” 😀

Introscreen

Ingame screenshot

Ingame screenshot with combo

The final game can be found here:Robots <3 Monster entry

My game is almost finished, now that I’m working on a restful night of sleep. It’s got a heavy emphasis on the fact that it’s moddable, and as a result the actual game isn’t terribly long. I expect to get my entry up and available within the next couple hours.

Special thanks goes to LandsharkMeww for helping test the game and taking a look at its data files a bit and giving me a second opinion.