Heya, just posted my game on GameJolt! 😀
here’s the link:
http://gamejolt.com/open-source/games/arcade/afterdark/3418/

It’s the post-compo edition.

On another note, good luck to everyone with the results!

going to announce date, as well as themes and rules all at once, to make a nice change

• theme: Greatest Fear.
• rule: Collaborate with someone who has never worked on a game before.

you don’t *have* to work with someone else, it’s optional, but encouraged. and collaboration can be of any level, as long as someone (or thing, I won’t discriminate against pets, zoo animals or alien encounters of the game kind) contributes something, be it level design, a doodle on paper you scan and use as a sprite, photos of them for character frames, or writes the dialogue, or voice acts… whatever.

and due to the nature of this rule, these contributions can be made at any time, before, during, or after the weekend of the mini (and I’m super lenient with time anyway, so feel free to take your own 48 hour-ish chunk out of September as you please for putting it all together, the weekend date is mostly so if you want to work alongside others its then).

• the start date: 3am GMT/UTC 25th September.
• end date (not strict): 3am GMT/UTC 27th September.

[ Submit Here | View All Submissions ]

but like I say, its loose so do whatever suits you.

also judging entries; I know some people like to have minis with a round of judging, I wont be having that, and it’s not up for discussion.

also also, it’s my hope that people will explore what their real greatest fear is through the games they make during this mini, but you are welcome to interpret the theme how you like, or disregard it all-together.

any questions about the rules or anything just comment on this post, but as a general rule anything you want to do, I’m cool with

I’m very excited for the Mini-LD. As I said in the announcement thread, I will be working with my stuffed fox, Charles Feynman.

He is partly there for moral support and partly for me to bounce ideas off of. (I have some good ideas when I just sit and chat with him. Having someone/something that just sits and listens to you is great for brainstorming.)

I will be facing a fear of mine this LD: I will be making a side-scroller using pixel graphics. I’m terrified of making pixel graphics as I’m rather bad at it. That’s my task here.

It will likely be pretty simple, but it’ll get the job done.

I’m starting out by doing a warmup game using (As I’m doing in the Mini-LD) GIMP for graphics, sfxr for sound, Flex+FlashPunk for code, and I’ll find something for music.

For those who are curious, my warmup game is a side-scrolling hack ‘n slash about a fighter (One of two playable characters) trying to retrieve a Valuable Treasure from a dungeon, fighting goblins and orcs to get to it.

With that, I’m going to get to work!

Hey Everybody!

A friend of mine is organizing an “art game” exhibit in Toronto called “START”. Here are some details:

START

Sept. 13 – 17
8am – 10pm daily
www.thestartshow.com
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=157656320916123

The goal of the event is to promote “art games” created in Toronto and beyond. The plan is to let visitors play a variety of unique games, and let them decide for themselves what is art. This is the first START, and we’re hoping it evolves into a yearly event. START will be held at the Ontario College of Art & Design which is affiliated with The Art Gallery of Ontario.
http://www.ocad.ca
http://www.ago.net

Everything takes place in one very large room, traditionally used to display paintings. In that room we’ll have 5 PC’s projecting games onto the walls for people to play – one projector is HUGE. The room will be impressive. Visitors can drop by anytime (open daily until 10:00pm) including Thursday (the Gala). We’re expecting hundreds of students daily (school will have just resumed), with 2 “gala” nights that will attract an older audience.

Due to budget and time constraints, we will be showing PC indie games only.

I gave him a list of artsy games off the top of my head (with some help from IRC), but LD is so big now, I realize I could be missing some real gems.

So if you know of any Ludum Dare games that meet the criteria of “art game”, ones you created or adore, please nominate them in the comments (one game per post, and give a nod to nominations you agree with). If you can find a link to the competition page, or a blog post here, that would be extremely helpful. Thanks!

Ludum Dare 18 judging has finally ended, and here are your results.

Top 20 Competition Games

You can check out the top 20 competition games here (including ties):

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-18/?action=top

Winners are decided by the Overall category. To see the complete list, hit the “Show All Entries” link at the bottom.

Categorical Top 5’s

Here at Ludum Dare, being the best game isn’t the only way to win. Games are rated in 7 additional categories, with a special “Coolness” category highlighting people that went above and beyond to be sure you got a vote.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-18/

*NOTE*: You can click on the titles of the categories for Top 20 style lists per category.

Ludum Dare 18 Jam Games, Compo Games, oh my!

Ludum Dare 18 was our first trial run of the new combined Competition and Jam event. So in addition to the 172 entries created by individuals for competition, there are 41 more games created teams or individuals that decided to take an extra day to polish their game. Be sure to check those out here:

ALL JAM GAMES (41) <--

[ ALL COMPO GAMES (172) | ALL GAMES (213) ]

Overall, the response to the Competition and Jam has been extremely positive. But now that the Ludum Dare 18 has come to a close, we’d like to hear your thoughts.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2010/08/25/did-you-like-the-jam/

* * *

And THAT was Ludum Dare 18

What an incredible event! Thanks everyone for making Ludum Dare 18 such a big deal.

When the smoke cleared, we had a total 213 games across both the Competition and Jam! This is our current “high score”, 10 entries ahead of Ludum Dare 17 in April (203).

During the final theme voting round, we collected nearly 500 votes in a single day! If we’re to take that as the number of participants, that means Ludum Dare 18 had an over 40% completed game rate! Wow!

Theme voting results can be found here.

Press Coverage (Viral Timelapse Videos)

As for other happenings, Ludum Dare made an impressive showing in the gaming press, especially the timelapse video from one Notch. Kotaku, Engadget, Digg; You name it, they covered it. 200,000 Youtube views later…

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2010/08/25/ludum-dare-18-press-coverage/

In addition, IndieGames.com and Bytejacker are back with a quick look at many games from the competition. Go see if you were one of them.

Ludum Dare 18 Meetups

Even though the Ludum Dare competition is a solo event, that doesn’t mean you have to work alone. Here’s a look at some of the gatherings that took place Ludum Dare 18 weekend.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2010/08/17/ludum-dare-jam-live-at-cb2-bistro/
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2010/08/21/ludumzilla-at-cb2-indies/
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2010/08/22/new-england-meetup-video/

If I missed any posts, let me know and I’ll update this list.

Other Ludum Dare 18 related links

– Number of competition entries in the final minutes
– Watch the Keynote, hosted by Mike Kasprzak (PoV)
– View the Theme Voting Results
– The “ALL GAMES” wallpaper by ExciteMike

Interesting Tags: montage, motivation, foodphoto, deskphoto, timelapse

* * *

Ludum Dare 19 coming December 2010

Our Winter event, Ludum Dare 19 will be in December. Date to be finalized as it gets closer.

If you haven’t already, you can sign up for the mailing list, and we’ll keep you informed. Also, you can follow Ludum Dare on Twitter.

Mini-LD #21 “Greatest Fear” this month!

Can’t get enough Ludum Dare? Later this month, tune in for another MiniLD hosted by SophieH (GirlFlash). Details about the upcoming mini can be found here.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2010/09/04/announcing-mini-ludum-dare-21/

Unfamiliar with the Mini-LD? Mini-LD’s are smaller competitions hosted by Ludum Dare veterans. They’re held monthly in the off months between our major competitions. Tune in to the website every month for details on the latest Mini-LD competition. Curious who’s up next? You can check out the host list on the wiki.

Ludum Dare Games at Toronto Exhibit

I was asked by a friend for a list of “art games” from Ludum Dare events (current and past). I gave him a few off the top of my head, but LD is so big now, I could use everyone’s help making a list of Ludum Dare “art games”. For details and to give me your suggestions, see this post.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2010/09/06/ld-art-games-at-exhibit/

Feel free to nominate games you made. 😉

Suggestions

If you have any suggestions for us (website, observations, etc), we continue to collect them in the comments here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2009/08/30/suggestion-post/

Thanks everyone for coming out and making Ludum Dare 18 such an incredible success. We’ll see you again in December!

– Mike Kasprzak (PoV)

While 50th overall is definitely a step up from last LD, 16th for audio (for the first game I’ve ever used sound effects in) and equal 6th for innovation (4.04 average!) are amazing results and it’s definitely a victory by my standards. Thanks to everyone who voted!

This has been a great LD for more than the scores, of course. While I have to say there were a number of games that felt too similar, there were also a good number that stood out, and the standard of presentation as a whole was fantastic. The feedback and support from the community throughout has been incredibly encouraging and uplifting, and while the previous LD was a good learning experience this has blown it away.

Work on an improved AS3/Flixel version of Sonic Boom is well underway and hopefully others are developing their games further too – I look forward to seeing them.

Cool, came in 5th in a compo that I almost abandoned halfway through due to isometric sorting woes

But looking at the scores in general has reminded me just how much the Humor category needs to be nuked from orbit!

Being hit with a load of 1’s and 2’s in this category (which isn’t relevant to a lot of games) isn’t much fun. It’s obviously not just my games that suffer from this – even Notch’s epic Metagun was given a couple of 1’s in this category, and that was a solid 4-5 game. How about just removing the humor category, if a game would have scored high here, that should add to the ‘fun’ score, shouldn’t it? (Maybe even score Fun out of 10, instead of 5?)

Also, there’s been a bit of what I can only describe as ‘troll scoring’ going on – with solid 4+ games being given 1s and 2s across the board by at least one voter (in a lame attempt to vote down the competition?)

I’d almost suggest filtering out the highest and lowest couple of ratings for each game when calculating the final results?

Discuss…

I’ve seen some pretty unfair ratings in my 3 LD career, but this is just ridiculous. At least they had the decency to n/a everything and not 1 everything. If you can’t play the game, don’t rate it, even if you just n/a everything, the Coolness meter is to show who made the biggest contribution via vote, this isn’t contributing to anything. Anyways, [/rant].

I wrote a little script to scrape all the ratings for all games and put them in a comma separated value file.  You can open this in any spreadsheet app (Excel, OpenOffice Calc, etc.).  It’s here, if anyone’s interested:

http://www.spampudding.com/ratings.csv

Tags: ratings, stats

[rant]
If you look at my ratings, every
category has a 1, a 2, 3, 4, and 5 (excluding community, audio). I don’t know if my game is just controversial or what, but it seems silly if the one person who gave me a 5 for graphics (which suck) gave me a 1 in audio (as if it had none, even though it did at the end, and in this case a – would have been just fine). I don’t know the logic behind these ratings, but it’s very silly.
[/rant]

The single best indicator of what your overall score will be, is how fun your game is. Innovation, theme, and graphics all are noticeably correlated with the overall score (though a few outliers managed to get a good overall score without meeting the theme). Audio has a slight correlation. Games with good humor tend to have a high overall score, but games with little humor don’t necessarily have a low overall rating.

 
Next I have a few observations on the ranges of values in various categories.

Innovation: Very few games scored below 2 in innovation. It’s clear that innovation is being done.

Theme: Most of the entries made a good attempt at the theme, but a few seemed to ignore it.

Audio: Not many entries scored well in audio, and some put little or no audio in their game. Does this mean participants don’t have very good audio skills, or just that audio was somewhat neglected in the competition?

Humor: Very few games rated above a 3 in humor. Only handful of games both tried to be funny and succeeded.

After getting slammed with a couple of troll rating votes (people who rated an entry with 1s across the board, while all other votes had decent ratings), I was curious about how much this was happening overall in the voting.

I ran some numbers, and put a report here: http://spampudding.com/troll.txt

The format is username and how many troll rating lines they received (1 or 2), followed by their average ratings in each category, followed by what their average ratings would have been without the troll votes.

These five entries were hit the hardest, each losing a quarter of a point or more in at least one category due to troll votes: http://spampudding.com/trolltop.txt

Assuming all votes were logged, I’m wondering if maybe the admins could go through the database and see if it was the same couple people making these votes.

Now, there obviously isn’t a prize and the whole rating thing is pretty meaningless, but this sorta bothers me. None of the comments fit that kind of rating, and if you have some complaint to merit such a rating, I think voicing them in the comments would be the nice thing to do… (I’m more than willing to take negative feedback, but a universally negative rating tells me nothing useful).

Here is a little program I’ve been playing around with (inspired by the theme Evolution, which didn’t make it again):

• Random Art Evolver (Flash)

This program generates random images based on a code (which is shown at the bottom) and mutates them. When you click on one of the images, you’ll see it in full size at the right and all images will start to evolve from that point on. If none of those get any better, you can restart the same code by clicking on the large image.

Once you have found an image you want to use for something, you could capture the screen and save it somewhere as a bitmap, but the idea is to simply save the code and use a function to generate the image at any time.

The library is for haXe, it generates a BitmapData from a given String. It shouldn’t be too hard to port it to as3 as well.

Enjoy!

Tags: artwork, evolution, evolving, flash, graphics, haXe, random, tool

Yep, I’m a-goin’ for it. However, I’m breaking the rules in two important ways:
1) I’m blithely ignoring the theme and doing double zombie rainbows instead (see my comments in the announce thread for why fear really needs more time to do it justice).
2) instead of 48 hours of calendar time, I’m doing 48 hours of compute time.

I am timelapsing this, and there is a clock visible in the display to accurately assess how long it takes. I’ll be pausing the clock when I’m not at my station (due to shopping, being stuck at my day job, etc).

As usual, I’ll be working in Allegro 4.4, and possibly AllegroGL, with GIMP, Milkshape, MilkyTracker and SFXR rounding out the tool suite.

I have some vague bullet hell ideas, and some kawaii/moe chibi zombie girls bouncing about in my head – should be fun!

Tags: cheater, fail, mini-LD #21

Considering i am a man of NO FEAR, i will be making a fishing game

It will contain a morningstar of some description, because morningstars are cool. And a boat!

I’ll think of a proper design when the weekend starts.

I wonder whether the amount of fishing games will be more than the amount of fear-based games? 😀

I, like quite a few people, thought that the Mini-LD was this weekend. (It’s not, though)

However, I already had an idea for a game I wanted to make, and I’m still making that game, still making it this weekend.

What I aim to do is start some time today and finish some time Monday evening. (I will use a similar time frame for my Mini-LD game) I will use AS3, and an SVG rendering library I found.

I was going to use pixel sprites, but I… I just don’t like them. I like making vector images, and they’re much more flexible.

My warmup game uses a play off of a tangent from the Mini-LD theme: I’m taking something that is usually scary and making it cute. (Not cutesy fluffy bunny cute, but still cute)

The game is about a demon girl trying to save a jar of cookies from Evil Robots. (Goodness knows what the robots want with the cookies, they might just be trying to start trouble)

The protagonist (Whose name is Luna) has a powered armor suit which is what allows her to fight robots. The game may feature multiple armors, but I’m not sure whether it will.

I’m hoping that this game turns out well. It’d be really nice to finally have a finished project, too. (Up to me entirely, I know, but still worth saying)

I’ve thrown out everything I had the other night and decided to restart this afternoon.  Here’s the design so far:

Presumably, we’ll have four colours of gem, I haven’t decided yet.  I have decided that there shall be bullet hell bosses, though.

Yes, I’m aware it’s been done before, I don’t care, I <3 shmups :).

Also, if any of you are at SuperHappyDevHouse in Mountain View, California, stop in and say hello! I’m in the Saturn conference room upstairs.

I’m really embarrassed about this. Maybe more than I should be.

I got side-tracked throughout most of Friday evening and the entirety of Saturday. I’ve lost massive amounts of time. I’ve failed. (I’m sorry if this is coming across as really whiny, I’m trying really hard to keep myself under control and I might be doing such a great job)

I may continue with my game, but I’m not sure right now. I’m really, really pissed at myself and am going to wait until I’ve calmed down more to do anything or make any decisions.

Any game I make at this point will come long after Monday, no doubt.

Sorry, guys…

— Mr. Dude

I made a notification about the collaboration in facebook to get someone to develop the game with. I got a reply from a old classmate of mine and we spent a little while chatting about the basic idea and the roles in the development. This is what we’ve got so far:

The basic theme ideas we came up were deep water and leeches. I built up a experimental prototype of the gameplay.

You’re a diver in a sewer dodging leeches but watch for your stamina meter, if it runs out you’ll drown. You can try to detach the leeches from your body by pressing spacebar, otherwise the leeches will drink your health. The graphics are still placeholders but the basic gameplay is functional. Unfortunately im quite busy with packing my bags and leaving the country soon so i don’t know if ill be able to spend more time on the game much but Nina wanted to take the role of game artist. Oh by the way do you have to work the 48 hours straight or can you work on it as chucks in september?`

– Mika