–Day 2 morning update:

Over half way through. Pretty much nothing other than the core engine is done, which includes collision stuff, movement & physics, animation stuff, and moving seamlessly between maps.

I know I can finish the engine stuff in time it’s just all the assets, I’ll be able to do an enemy or two and a few rooms, if I go into jam time then I may be able to enlist the help of a friend.

–Day 2 end:

In the morning I started working on getting other entities into the game. After that I started working on giving those entities AI, at first they started going of, some disappearing off-screen forever and some loading new maps because I initially just gave them the same code as the player. Fixed the problems and then actually used them to helped me fix a few collision bugs. I wondered how many of them I could have on a map so I tried a hundred, fine, 200, 400, 600, 1000, 2000, 4000 all worked fine. (testing this stuff is known as messing around/wasting time)

But their movement was stupid, so I spent a while too long improving the AI, stopped them going near map edges/terrain and smoothing the movement to make them not completely change direction (i.e not go right if they were previously going left etc.). I then added a couple of behaviour types as well as the random motion, I made one type scared of the player and made them flee when close, I then added another type that made them swarm towards the player if they got close enough and the effect was great, I thought they would immediately home onto the player and lock into position but due to the movement smoothing code they circle the player with a very small loop and can be shaken off. I then added a few other fish types (for 5 fish in total) and added a method to just say load x number of this entity and y of this entity instead of writing (or copy pasting) 100 lines of code and sprawled them randomly around the map.

After that I realized I had wasted my time writing a fish simulator 😛 and couldn’t finish in time. Though I thought I might be able to complete it in jam time IF I could get my friend to help.

–Day three

Jam time had begin and I was relying on my friends amazing art skills, but due to other circumstances my friend could only make one map… So while the game features were almost complete there would be no content, so I gave up.

–Hindsight

In hindsight I know why I failed, I made a stupid decision to have fully hand drawn maps which led to me spending too long on the core engine. I then spent too long on making the AI… of the fish… which were merely supposed to be used to make it more aesthetically pleasing/immersive.

The problem with the engine is that all the maps were full images and thus the collision stuff was slightly more complex. Absolutely no idea what compelled me to use hand drawn maps I’m not exactly an amazing artist so making a good map would take up way too much time, though somehow I thought it would be easier to draw a map all in one.

Next LD I shall stick to good old fashioned tilesets for the map, that will reduce programming time costs and asset creation time costs, and remove almost all the problems I had with this LD. I knew that this was going to be my doom about half way through but it was too late to remove all my progress and begin a new.

After 48 hours, Scarab Amazing has been designed, developed, bug-fixed and released on multiple platforms!

It was the first time I participated in Ludum Dare, and it was amazing.

Although it’s 3 AM again (just like it started), I’m too curious about the other entries, so I’ll check out some of them before going to bed. Tomorrow I’ll spend some more time on this.

Next post… the time-lapse movie!

Observatory has been submitted!

Windows (tested) and Mac (fingers crossed!) builds available.

I would like to make a web version available, but I’m not yet sure how to host the Unity web player…

There’s no turning back now, my entry has been submitted! As expected, I spent the last few hours frantically fixing bugs that were suddenly noticed when I built the damn game and ran it outside of Unity… silly game!

I would’ve loved to submit a web player version as well, but I never got around to writing a script to ensure that you picked fullscreen… but hey, both PC and OSX support… that’s something… and now, I’ve been waiting 48 hours to try out all these awesome games! Seeya when my fingers turn numb! (But then, how would I chat? Meh!)

Anyhoo, if you wanna check out my game, I’d better shove in a link for the lazy! 😉

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-19/?uid=3042

Thanks for an awesome compo, I’ll definitely be back! ^_^

Hi, I’m having trouble compiling an application using SFML. When I run the app with “Debug” selected as the active configuration, it runs fine. However, when I select “Release” as the active configuration the screen flashes white for an instant, then it dies. Help?

I have finished writing up the entry for my game and getting the binaries and sources on my public site. If you’re interested, have a look at Q-Bers. It is a puzzle game in which you must manipulate the grid of cubes to reveal a specific picture given a single clue about what is in the picture.

Play it here or grab the source.

Corpse Runner, a (very) simple maze game is finished enough for the competition entry. Made today after scrapping my initial project, it’s just a maze game with a single twist. Your goal is to find the exit to your maze within the time limit. However your time limit very very short (just 15 seconds). Plus the maze is very dark and you can only see your immediate surroundings.

The twist is that at any point you “sacrifice” yourself for the next maze-goer. The next person will be able to “use” your corpse to extend his time limit and each corpse leaves behind a small amount of light.

I started this game this afternoon after scrapping my previous idea which had a neat mechanic that just wasn’t feasible within the time limit. The maze was going to be a bit more full-featured, with keys that needed to be found and multiple doors to unlock before escaping. However the game is so simple that adding any more tedious mechanics just made it even less fun.

I like the mechanic of dropping corpses and using them in future player runs even if the execution here is pretty limited. I might take some time and investigate it a little further in the future with a different game.

Anyway Ludum Dare as usual was stressful, frustrating, and yet simultaneously a blast as usual. Best of luck to everyone else and I look forward to seeing what gems other people have made.

A very good question...

To bed, that’s where!

I didn’t get everything finished that I would have liked to. There’s room for a lot more upgrades, combat (though it works nice peacefully), multiple endings (only one for now) and nicer art, like backgrounds.

Still, I’m both excited and content with the final product. The last few hours meant quite a bit of panic for me, since I did not have the concentration to space to include really everything I would have liked. I’m looking forward to playing the oodles of great games that have been released and am hoping for somewhat decent votes myself. Though participating in itself was awesome in it’s own right!

Post-mortem and Timelapse will follow during the next days.

I need sleep.

Badly.

So, here’s a screenshot or two:

Next, I didn’t blog as much becuase last time I was slightly distracted by blogging instead of just developing. So, up next will most likely be my meal montage for your enjoyment. Followed by a comprehensive list of how to fail at ludum dare, or my jam entry. Add another failure to the ever growing list. The problem? No way of scoring. Hopefully I can get that fixed.

So, what’s the problem? No way of scoring.

Well, I have to say that was fun as hell, coding a game and chilling on IRC? Hell yea! Well anyways my game is Dodge and Collect! Which was originally suppose to be a top down space shooter with a planet map, you would go around collect artifacts and discovering cool things I had to cut most of it out because I ran out of time.. It barely fits the theme now .-. Well what can I say? I’ll be working on it more in the future, but tomorrow I’m sleeping in and going Christmas shopping then I better start on my homework… Don’t want to leave that for long. Well here is what I learned.

Things to do again:

Ask questions, something I did a lot.

Another Dare, I will certainly be back when the next dare roles around 😀

Hard Core work in the last 3 hours.

Most Importantly, have fun! 😀

Things not to do again:

Not to waste so much time on IRC, only talk when you need help or have give assistance.

Not start with a new language, which wont be a problem next time around, will hopefully be broken into FlashPunk.

Take time doing real life things, I spent way to long away from the keyboard, will have to try and Minimize that next time!

But yea! Check out my game here click on it, then press P to play 😀

As so many LD19ers have already expressed, this has been a busy weekend to squeeze a game jam into; amidst a family holiday party, a day long wedding, and long standing plans to see the new Tron movie.  None the less, I was determined to participate.  I was also initially turned off by the theme, but am now happy with the direction that a  little google-enhanced brainstorming led me.

“Cannot Ludum Dare 19” is inspired by Lyn Yutang’s quote, “Sometimes it is more important to discover what one cannot do, than what one can do.”  It’s a puzzle game that involves collecting gems to open doors and navigate a maze.  The catch is that different door-opening gems rob the player of specific abilities.  With all of this competition’s delays and drop-outs (including this game’s), this theme-interpretation seems particularily relevent.

All nine gem-types have been implemented and tested, but the test-maze leaves much to be desired in terms of level design.  I’m about a third of the way through redesigning this maze, and look forward to submitting the completed game tomorrow.  I’d like to have submitted for the contest, but am happy to just participate.  Hopefully I’ll be able to dedicate more time to the next compo. 

Cheers to all of the participants!!!  It’s been fun watching everyone’s updates, and I look forward to playing through so many of the submissions.

My game is done! I’d tell you all about it, but I already did that over at http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-19/?action=preview&uid=1548

Ok I’m done and I’m completely shattered after staying up all last night and working like crazy right up until the submission time.

My game is called Island Commander and it can be downloaded from here. The game is kind-of inspired by Carrier Command but with a completely different combat system. I wanted to have a story driven game so I put a bunch of cutscenes in there but they are short because I didn’t have much time to work on them (I did most of them in the last hour).

Currently it requires Windows Vista or 7, but I’ll probably do a Linux port and make it work for XP as well.

The game itself is fully playable and there are cutscenes and in-game help. I didn’t really test it too much so I have no idea if it is too hard or easy (I suspect it might be too hard). There is no music or sound effects and I would have liked to have done more graphics (especially the picture for the bad guy) and a few other things as well, but overall I think there is a solid game there.

I had heaps of fun working on this entry (although it doesn’t really feel like it right now because I’m really tired and have a bit of a headache). It was great talking to everyone on IRC (although I didn’t say much on the first day, because the chat was moving so fast I could hardly keep up).

Next time, which I hope isn’t for a long time (say… 4 months? :)) I hope to be better prepared  as I didn’t really have many tools or a functional library (I say this every time), and I spent a few hours at the start getting fonts into the game. Also my progress was slow on the first two days and I didn’t really start getting into it until last night and today. Perhaps if I spend more time planning, and less time watching IRC go by I would be more motivated?

Tags: final

As expected this participation didnt reach the end with an complete game, but at least I moved forward in some research 😀 was able to create some nice pieces that I believe I will use soon or later :

– store the user location and movement direction in a server
– make the server based on tomcat
– remove the inactive users from the list of current users
– make unity to send the current position and movement direction of an character
– receive on unity the result of http calls using POST

now my next steps will be :
– beased on the list of objects from the server, keep track of the necessary objects to create and show.

good luck all !
cheers

Tags: incomplete, lessons learned, not this time

This was my first LD and my only post for the competition. It was too difficult for me to focus on the game and writing post in english… -_-

It was a very intense experience. Saturday was a lot of fun, Sunday was Hell, the last 15 minutes was above Hell. I could have killed anyone who would have stand between me and my keyboard…

I kept a log of my activity on Land Of Fodnal during the 48h :

3:00 –>  Discovery ( Containment is second :-/ ) –>THINK
4:00 –> go for minesweeper game with island progresive discovery –>THINK
5:00 –> ??? Inside the body cells discovery <vs> fantasy
7:00  –> go to bed
10:00 –> wake-up >>Brainstorming
11:00 –> have the CASTLE MANAGEMENT idea -> start to code + base GFX
14:00 –> lunch break
14:15 –> folks structure tracking
14:45 –> Danger zone + tower ( number in zone are killing my display :-/ )
16:30 –> structure selection + scroll
18:00 –> structure interface GFX + ergonomics
18:36 –> loosing huge ammount of times on interface ( have no field / buttons / whatever libs )
19:35 –> still crawling with buttons… -_-zZ
20:23 –> At least I can build things !! It seems fun to discover map buy building things to scroll.
21:00 –> lunch break
21:30 –> try too animate folks
22:00 –> Refactoring
23:20 –> GameOver sequence
00:00 –> Decide to cycle worldmap… Always late for this kind of decisions…
00:20 –> working on sight system
00:40 –> Debugging cycled coord
01:00 –> Trying Musagi
02:44 –> Sound session end –>  debug
04:00(?) –> Go to Bed
11:00 –> Wake Up
11:30 –> Work on Aborigines path
12:00 –> FX ans parts
13:00 –> new bads
13:10 –> try to make nice border for beach but fail -> goto difficulty generation
14:30 –> working on sight system visibility ( = headash )
15:15 –> Starting the science bonus system
19:15 –> Editing world map
19:30 –> adding some hints
20:15 –> correctings few bugs
20:40 –> starting minimap o_O
21:20 –> Intro artwork + intro coding
22:00 –> Title artwork
23:00 –> First serious test on the game…
23:15 –> implements new sciences
00:00 –> adding small elements
01:00 –> balancing ( ouch, a bit late for this )
01:20 –> adding difficulty level
02:30 –> adding hiscore local saving
02:45 –> Arrrrgh my first infinite loop NOW !!!
03:10 –> Version submited !

Now I will test the other games !

I went full retro this time, I love that style of gfx.

4 different ambient “songs” made with renoise to set the mood.

An end with a twist, which I hope will make ppl remember it.

Should take about 5-15 minutes to finish.

Play it @ http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-19/?action=preview&uid=1087

Made with Ruby & http://ippa.se/chingu

Tags: LD19, ld48, retro

So, my game is now submitted. You can play it here (flash): PLAY!

Here’s the entry page: ENTRY

Time to rest.

Well I’m not submitting it because it’s nowhere near finished. I will submit a Jam version but probably won’t have much time to work on it.

It’s pretty broken but it’s got potential. Right now it’s kind of like a SFXR for terrains .. all of these were generated completely at random with no user input beyond a planet name that is used as a random seed.

Here’s some pretty planets:

Here Be Monsters!

Civilization I sailing meets R-Type I side-shooting.  Sound fun?

Play it in your browser.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-19/?action=preview&uid=3040

And after 48h, it’s somewhat done… Well, it’s playable, and has multiplayer and scoring, so I guess I can’t complain too much!

You can see the entry here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-19/?uid=2968

So, I finished my entry, ROBOTS AMONG US. I think I spent some 12hrs or so on it. Unfortunately I didn’t have time to play it, and the game mechanics are kind of experimental, so we’ll see how that goes. I fear that it’s kind of dull, and impossible, and confusing. Let me know!

Robots Among Us - Progress GIF anim

The goal of the game is to navigate the crowds and avoid the evil robotic infiltrators. You can use the goggles to spot them (RMB). Move towards the CLUE which reveals the CLOAKING GENERATOR used by the robots. You need to blow that up with the C4. If you have time, you can pick up a one-time-use GUN, or pick up a DAMSEL.

Holding LMB will make you run, but doing so slowly increases your detection radius because you look suspicious. The goggles drain your health a little if you leave them on. On top of this, wearing them makes you stand out, and taking them on and off a lot looks suspicious too.

I wanted to do some painted arcade style borders and a title screen, but did not have the time (spent the last minutes on sounds). The sloppy source code is included in the zip. It was written in BlitzMax. I can compile a Mac version too if there’s any interest.

The game can be found here:
Robots Among Us

This is the workspace from my company where Deepnight, Valandre, WhiteTigle and I participated to DL19 !

my place

So I ended up trying for something too large to complete in a sleep deprived final 10 hours.  About an hour and a half before the end, I decided to go by the old mantra “Time running low .’. branch the project and add spiders”.  A frantic hour followed, accompanied by a great boss music medley from nicovideo, and I got something submitted, albeit without any win condition/loose condition/much point.  But dayum, it freaks me out some it does.

Submission page here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-19/?action=preview&uid=1190

It at least shows what I was going for with the shadow system, and how it performs under pressure.

Also, for fun and to make the timelapse more interesting, I had a big image in GraphicsGale I was adding to a bit to show some of my thoughts and add a little commentary.  That’s after the jump if anyone is interested (and can see this post through the deluge of submission posts 😉 ).  I think this kind of thing would have been a bit more use if I had a drawing tablet with me, instead of just mousing.

Jeeesus. Five minutes to go, and my game is zipped up and submitted. Grab it here. Feels strange and amazing to be ‘done’ with something – I’ve tinkered around with games for months without getting to a point I’m happy with. And while there are a few items not grayed out on my Scanno to do list, I did much more than I ever thought I could in two days. And I actually have fun playing the result.

Rather embarrassed about Gunpoint now. It could probably be done in a week.

The finished game is pretty much what I planned: a top-down shooter with randomised enemies, whose randomised bits you can steal for yourself. I didn’t end up scaling much dynamically, except the gun sizes. I couldn’t find a way to make it look right in the time, so it was quicker – even for me – to draw a few engine and weapon types. The differences are more immediately interesting, too – “Ooh, blue plasma?”

Number one thing that went right was definitely time management. I had two days, so I picked something I thought I might just about be able to do in one. It was done in one and a half, so I had that crucial half day to take a working concept, find the fun, and make the game about that.

I don’t know if I actually made it fun, but it’s so much closer than it would have been if I’d picked a more ambitious idea and only just got the basics hammered out. This is my first finished game, and given the time limit I thought I’d end up with something a lot more half-baked.

It is buggy, and its tutorial is just gibberish, but in an ideal circumstance it’s conceivable that it could convey to you what you need to know. Oh, except that you have to press R to restart.

Thing that went least well was trouble shooting. I’m rarely good at this, but on the scanning ray in particular I just went out of my mind. It’s still buggy – won’t always scan everything there is to scan on your first scan – and I may have messed up other things in the last minute fixes.

I said I was going to leave graphics till last, but in the end I decided it was worth a stab at them if I gave myself a hard time limit. I basically managed to turn the visuals from offensively ugly to merely very crude. I’m OK with crude. There’s just a particular look to very bad graphics that’s not endearing or ignorable or in any way OK, and I had to try to avoid that.

I also took time to put in sounds for almost everything important, and I’m really glad I did. I knew they’d be important to the feel, but I didn’t quite appreciate how important the feel would be to the overall thing. It’s not an art game, it’s not very brave or inventive, so it really needs to have some decent ‘pew pew!’s in.

I have exactly no time tomorrow to polish this up and also submit it to the jam, the less strict contest that gives an extra day. Which is a shame, because it needs a few bandages to hold it together properly, and a few basic human rights like a choice of resolutions. I will do those things, just not right away. For now, I am done. Thanks for reading.

Ahh it’s over. Just waiting for dropbox to speed up… It’s taking ages to upload such a small game.

It’s been exhausting but it’s at a stage where it’s playable at least. I just called it ‘The Genetic Playground”. Just a simple splicing game. More of a toy but i had bigger ideas for this game. Maybe for the Jam i’ll add some more features and keep adding to it if i have time in the future.

I’ve been keeping Ludum Dare progress updated on this blog: http://kyliroth.wordpress.com/

so that’s why i’ve been quiet on here but i’ve enjoyed reading many people’s posts during the past 2 days when i’ve had time to peek at them.

I’ll enjoy playing the games too but there’s so many of them! I really enjoyed this Ludum Dare competition! I’ll take part again and i’ll learn from this definitly!

#edit: Here’s  the link to my entry. And a cheeky screen shot…

The entrance to the genetic lab...

Cheers,

Kyle.

At last, I managed to complete the game & fix all the remaining bugs…
Play it here : entry

The engine took me one day to code from scratch (no flixel, nor punk). If i had more time, I would add a music track & allow level editing Maybe later !

I really enjoyed this weekend ! We were 5 people participating here, at Motion Twin (Bordeaux, France) : Whitetigle, Bumdum, Vallandre, Hane and me !

I will be there for LD20, for sure

Comments are welcome !

Well, I’ve finished my first LD Compo. It was pretty grueling, fun, and ultimately I did get something finished. If I’d had the idea earlier, it might even have been something fun. My original, now abandoned project, will be picked up again tomorrow and will be something I’ll work on over the next few weeks. Hopefully it will turn into something fun.

In the meantime, I hope that if you try “Great Discoveries in Human History” you’ll find something amusing in it. I’ve been blown away by everyone’s entries and I can’t wait to try them all! Here’s my last screenshot…

GDHH is a memory/matching game with a tongue-in-cheek view of history

You click on a tile to reveal it. Click on a second tile to see if they match. If so, you score a point and the tiles are removed. The extra trick here is that you have to match the discovery or invention with its benefit to humanity (or the problem it solves). These are from a decidedly modern American’s perspective. It’s built in some fairly vanilla Javascript with help from a server-side PHP script. Oh and jQuery/jQuery-UI. This may be the ugliest code I’ve spit out, but it’s done! Also I had no time after coming up with all the discoveries to work on art, so y0u get black and white. FYI, there’s 71 pairs of discoveries and benefits in all.

Good luck to everyone!

I submitted my entry well before the deadline ended, something I never thought I would manage. I’m usually the one desperately trying to code the last gameplay elements 10 minutes before the submission deadline.

Overall, I’m pretty happy with how my first LD went. I set out to actually finish the game instead of getting bogged down with coding complex game mechanics or doing lots of art for the game as I always do. I think I actually succeeded with that goal even though the game has some rough parts, such as a complete lack of music, sound effects and graphics.

Even though the game is a bit short, all the gameplay elements are there, there’s a menu and I even had time to add some animations. Considering the game was made in ~20 hours, it isn’t that bad at all.

Here’s the timelapse I recorded if anyone’s interested. I’m sorry there’s no music, the laptop I’ve been using isn’t really capable of editing video.

For the next LD I’ll hopefully come more prepared.

This was a rather disappointing first attempt. I was unable to coax the copy compiled under XCode to run outside of the Debug mode of the IDE. I also tried to set up Code::Blocks to compile the project, but it just plain failed altogether, and now I’m out of time, so I guess that’s that. It would be awesomely amazing if someone managed to get a copy compiled on Windows for me, but I don’t have very high hopes of that happening… live and learn. =)

This was quite a learning experience though. I had no prior experience using SFML. Using it for the competition was probably a mistake, but I’d been wanting to try it out for a while, so at least it forced me to finally get around to it. Next time I’ll get some prior experience, rather than diving in head first. Then there was the time. I know its been said many times, but… I really underestimated the amount of time it would take to both learn to use SFML, and make a game with it.

Finally, I’m rather proud of my art. Its still kind of crappy, but its less crappy than the usual stick figures and grass that I draw, so go me! I discovered character drawing style (from another) that I am actually capable of emulating (ie: it suits my limited artistic ability). Now its time to get a bunch of sleep and move on to other projects. And maybe watch that total lunar eclipse tomorrow night.

Update! I finally figured out why the stand-alone Mac app was not working. Next I’ll see if I can get Code::Blocks set up to compile a Windows version. If I can then I’ll see about working on a version for the Jam with a bunch of bug fixes.

Couldn’t be botered adding in music, too braindead.

Done finally done!

In hindsight, I guess my feature list was pretty ridiculous. Seriously… a social game?… bah…

On the bright side in the last hour before submissions I was able to pare things down a bit, and get all of the semi-working features tied together.

Learned tons this LD, the timelapse was a great motivator / distraction.

Post-mortem and timelapse with some sweet cat-stop motion going on in the background, coming soon!

Oh and one last food photo

Took a quick break to knead the dough for this Monkeybread

Tags: final, food, foodphoto

That wass stressful o.o

I finished the game with 6 minutes left. By the time i had it compiled, Zip’d, uploaded, screenshot’d there was only 1min 40sec left!! That was close ._.”

Check out Mini Ghost Hunter!

Tags: 7Soul

Made in Flashpunk.

Ludum Dare Page
Timelapse : Trip (n.)

Finished my game for Ludum Dare 19: Discovery.  Would’ve posted my development stuff during LD but didn’t really have time so I’ll do it now.

I was originally going to do a parkour-ish platformer that depends on ability unlocks, but while I was making an “energy bottle thing” it ended up looking like a bottle of meds.  So the original storyline of “random square jumps around really fast” got changed to “random square jumps around really slow and happens to be senile/old/drug-abusing.”

To propel the storyline, I decided to use hallucinations, giving it a more upfront, connected feel.  There are three characters that make up the hallucinations: a psychologist that tries to “fix” him, a friend (his conscience) that helps take down his conscience mindset in order to rebuild it later, and an enemy (his subconscience) that tries to reinforce his mental stability, preventing him from helping himself out of it.  The images and their quotes match this description to a degree (although I won’t tell which is which; take a guess if you’d like).

Several times during development my cat would reach under my door with it’s paw and mess with the springy thing on my door and I let it out and that cat was distracting and awesome yeah.

Good first Ludum Dare overall, going to play these games now.

After a final rush to put together something I could submit, I can finally relax ! Pfiuuu….

It was my first LD48, and I must admit that I loved it ! Really ! I had never attended to such events, but now I’ll try to participate in most of them. It’s incredibly faster to make a game during LD than it is when you have the opportunity to do something else…

So, a big thank you to LD !

Next time, I’ll try not to lose too much time chatting on the IRC channel ! 😉

Man my weekend got all messed up… Not only did I not complete the project I got so busy today with other things that I missed the deadline for entering at all… Maybe I will submit something to the Jam. Sorry everyone for not having anything more to add.

LD19 is over. Time to sleep…
I submitted my game, although there isn’t really any gameplay to it.
Play Here
I will sort out the timelapse video tomorrow.

I picked a random electronic/dance song from the audioswap thing without previewing, and it hasn’t finished swapping, so if it doesn’t match at all, oh well…

I was freaking out, because I had a really big bug to squish right at the 3 hours left mark. It took me over an hour to fix it, then I rushed really quickly to finish the game world and license the source code.

But here at last, it is finished! Have a take at it! And here’s a timelapse video.

Finshed the compo! My head is pounding and all the lights are blurring together, but it was worth it. Ludum Dare was tough, but awesome! I produced a full product in under two days, something I wouldn’t have thought I was able to do beforehand! I’m quite satisfied with the work I managed to do, if you want to give it a look, here it is:

PRIOR

You know nothing.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-19/?action=preview&uid=2994

Anyway, that’s that. As for the theme, my initial idea was along the lines of “exploration and discovering new worlds!” but I felt like doing something a little more off-beat. So I ended up creating PRIOR, as it is now.

When the game starts “you know nothing”, and it’s up to you to figure out what the hell’s going on – hence the theme of discovery!

There is a set storyline to this game and a history to all the notes and events that occur in the game, but mostly you have to piece it together for yourself and build your own interpretation of what’s up.

As far as gameplay is concerned, it’s more or less a simple 2D platformer, where you move with WASD. Eventually you gain new abilities to help traverse the world, including a fairly unique “zero-gee” mechanic.

There are three different endings, each of which contribute in their own way to the overall story. You can’t figure out what’s happened without seeing all three endings, and even then it’s up to you to piece the puzzle together 😉

If any of you are interested, I’d love to hear your interpretations of the story! If you can take the time to write up a short synopsis of what you think PRIOR is all about, please email it to me at nick@nyonge.ca.

Thanks for reading this – now I’m going to view a couple submissions, then go pass out for a little while.

-Nick

I just need to say: Ludum Dare was quite incredible; and even my game characters themselves agree.

Although I didn’t finish what I wanted, i feel very accomplished. I started with absolutely  no base code; this whole game, images, sounds, concept, etc was made from scratch after the contest started. I did more than I expected but less than I hoped for. =p

Thanks to everyone who participated and organized this. Cheers

Oh, and if you want to see these cheery guys tear you apart in my game: download

(Warning!!!!! It is very tough! Didn’t have time to play test xD)

Unfortunately I couldn’t get my super wacky Ludum Dare game done in time. However I’ll try and get it done tomorrow for the Compo. I think maybe it was a bit too ambitious to be made in 2 days (I mean, it was basically a big, expansive Metroidvania. Not really the best design for a game being made in so little time.) Oh well. Anyway, here’s a screenshot in the meantime.

Hiya guys! Here is a time lapse video from working on Doom Cauldron during the past 48 hours. I used Chronolapse — thank you for recommending it.

You can go directly to the YouTube page instead: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3H9lBz3pYs

This certainly was a fun experience, and I’ll definitely be back again. Until then, I need a drink.

From Nothing is a minimalist game with a simple goal: The world begins in darkness but is revealed as the player navigates through it, and collects shiny things…

I can see myself revisiting this, developing the mechanic, polishing, and optimizing the code.

I began this game in an odd way, due to the time constraint no doubt. I started doodling with the character design as I brainstormed possible directions to go. Realizing I had spent way too much time fiddling with the little details of the player character (If I adjust the alpha by just 0.02…) I moved on to the controls, still without a clear direction in mind.

I wanted the controls to be simple to reflect the rest of the game, and be easy to pick up. Again, I spent way too much time fiddling with the little numbers in order to get the right feeling, but I think it was worth it.

This is where I feel I went wrong, designing the character and controls before having a clear idea of the gameplay, so I buckled up and focused on the word… discovery. I decided I wanted the world to start from nothing and be revealed slowly. To do this I designed a quasi-destructible terrain engine, covered my world with it, and optimized it as much as I could in the time I had.

Now I had the player, the controls, and the idea. Implemented. But I didn’t have a game. And I had just slept for 12 hours. Great. So with a few hours before the deadline, I tied up the loose ends with what felt right. And so we have From Nothing.

It was fun to participate on this compo, and I’m happy I could finish it on time

My first idea was to make a simple platformer, but with the theme being discovery I couldn’t resist to make a roguelike. And btw it was the first time I made a roguelike, so I didn’t know where I was getting into…

One of the hardest parts was to create the battle system, and to get all the math right, like exp and hit chance calculation… it was a pain to get it right.

Luckly I kept things simple. No items or equips, and all stats are based on player level and by buying stats, wich was also pretty simple to make.
I’ve chosen to work with Construct (a game maker by Scirra), even though I was using it for only 4 days, I was quite familiar with it, because its so simple to use. A part of the game creation process was to get to know the tool better, and this will help me on future projects.

Creating the map was kinda hard, because Construct was lagging every time I selected a bunch of object or when there were already too many tiles on the map.

Debugging was impossible near the end. The built-in debugger couldn’t handle over 5000 objects without the FPS dropping to 4. The game itself was at 35fps for most of the time, at least on my computer.

And yes, I made some mistakes
– Playing TF2 for more than an hour
– Wasting to much time to get the shadow system the way I wanted (I started using 8×8 shadow tiles, but I switched to 4×4, wich took some time, but at the end I switched back to 8×8 to improve performance)
– I think Construct has a built-in save system, but I made a custom one myself, maybe it could have been easier to have used the built-in one

But
– Making really simple cute little pixel art graphics saved quite some time
– Giving a shit to music also saved time (at a price I guess)
– Slept only 6 hours a night

And that equals game :]

Cya next compo

Tags: 7Soul, Mortem, postmortem

I’ve bumped up the version on the play page to force everyone to re-download the game. If you played one of the beta versions and tried to play the final version, you might have had the issue of it not downloading the updated jars. This should fix that.

Go play it now if you were trying to before!

First of all, here’s my timelapse:

Science Tycoon Timelapse

My game is a bit jiggered at the moment, but I think it was a valiant effort, with many cool by-products such as the Ludum Dare User Powered Scientist Name Generator! LDUPSNG! As well as I discovered that it’s probably not a great idea to aim as high as I did. Also, I found out that it’s not a good idea to stay up late the night before Ludum Dare watching Star Wars. Where was I? Anyhow, this was a great experience and you all rock. Peace!

LD19 was a blast! I got a decent gameplay prototype complete, and I’m really excited to take it further. I thought I’d share some my some concept sketches and what I learned from the process.

My initial concept for the game:

As you collect the items, the team of scientists your working for is assembling the pieces into some sorta device. It initially sounds like they are making something to save humanity or some noble goal. But once you have found all of the pieces, you find out what they’re really up to…”

I knew I wanted to make a platformer/metroidvania style game and I thought the mechanic of having to carry a fragile item around for a while could add interesting gameplay challenges. So I started on some basic concept sketches for my main character, enemies, and an opening level scene:

From there I dove right into Game maker, working on getting basic platformer functionality. I made sprites for all of the enemies and player right away, though not fully animated, instead of using placeholder graphics. This allowed me to get the right collision boxes and movement speeds set up right away, and when I went back to animate I knew approximately how detailed I needed to make the animations. I could get away with only 1 additional frame for the slug creature since it almost looked ok with only 1 frame.

placeholder tiles = bad

I should have taken the time to make a decent tileset early on, since I knew that time was short and that any art asset I made would most likely get used in the final game, however most of development was done using simple gray boxes. I had to scramble to make a decent looking tileset in the last hour, and I wasn’t able to create many levels, and the one I did make was just thrown together pretty randomly. I should have made a workable tileset initially, and used the playtesting during development to home in on a decent level design.

I spent a fair amount of the development time working on refining the animations, damage, and stun/bounce. I’m really glad I was able to get the separate animation state for picking up the vial completed, at least it hints at the “discovery” theme. I’m most happy with the way the visuals turned out, and when I get a little more experienced with programming I’ll be able to add some better gameplay. I achieved my goal of making a playable game for the competition, even if it is lacking a plot, or any real ending.

Give it a try and let me know what you think!

Aaaaaaand, here it is. Not as interesting as I would have hoped. But w/e.

LD48 DiSub

Looking forward to playing everyone’s game, already seen some really interesting projects.

A lot of people have done proc generators, I guess it makes sense. With such little time it’s a great way to extend your world. Gotta say though, as good as the proc is, I’m really loving the level design in some of these games. You should all check out http://bit.ly/gyyhsz. A classic indie game with a bit of a metroid undertone, all wrapped up in some top Notch (*cough*) level design. Not just saying that cuz I know him irl.

Plus go ahead and vote on mine: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-19/?action=rate&uid=3202

Make sure to leave plenty of comments, I plan to continue developing this game so absolutely EVERY type of feedback is welcome. Tell me what you had for dinner and I’ll find out what people who eat that like in video games.

Going to try to play everyone’s game within the time limit, but there is a good chance that I may miss a few. So please link me your game in the comments and there is a 100% chance I’ll play it, vote on it and give it some of my humble feedback. Promote yourself!

Had a heap of fun.. I’m really amazed by all of great games that have been a result of this LD.

screenshoot of AchooBoxes

timelapse video

( of the bug fixed jam version) : gameplay video

download link (osx version) http://www.player2.mobi/LD19_PLATFORM_FIXED.zip

I worked on my game and did lots of homework instead of Ludum Daring.
Dunno why.

Here’s the pastebin of the thirty pages that I have finished.

http://pastebin.com/z9z6rViX

Some notes:

$p[number] starts Page [number].
]p[number] is a link to Page [number].

Enjoy.

EDIT:

I just woke up, man was I tired!!

This was my first Ludum Dare and the first time I’ve started and completed (to my own meager satisfaction anyway) such an ambitious project. Originally I was going to write my own tech in C++ based around libcinder but luckily last weekend I ran a mock trial using Experimental Gameplay Project theme “Drawing” and realized that I would rather spend my time working on a game – not technology. To that end I decided to use Unity, and had spent the last week learning the ins and outs of this extremely impressive technology. Usually I’m not a fan of these out of the box engines, but I have to admit I am very pleased.

I started out strong, the first night I got the basic level generation working, as well as moving around the world. I had assumed that this would be the lions share of the work – how is it that no matter how much time we spend making games, we always underestimate the little things??

I wanted to add combat immediately, but felt that since the theme was “discovery” I should make sure to have all the mechanics involving that aspect of the game first. I quickly got the mini-map and mineral scanner working. The next key was victory conditions, I felt strongly the most important part of the game was making the player decide between self improvement and repairing the ship, so the next step was getting repairing the mothership and modules working.

This came together surprisingly fast, so much so that I took two hours off for a long lunch and re-watch some Rurouni Kenshin – I regret that now.

At this point it was Saturday night, and I felt I could start working on combat and making the game polished and feel like a real 3d rouge-like. I was quickly hit with a series of frustrations, all of which I now attribute to having gone about 30 hours without any sleep and my brain was addled. I passed out at 9 Sunday morning and woke up at 12.

Sunday was a mad scramble, I was constantly switching between MIDI sequencer trying to make sound effects (which never got in ), fixing and hacking a combat system (which I hate now, I really loathe it. I almost wish I didn’t put it in and just let it be pure exploration.) And putting polish elements like the ghost of a story I had imagined.

The title-screen, in case you didn’t realize, was supposed to be this dramatic slow motion re-enactment of the mothership crash landing haha. (Hint: I just put a spring on the ship and camera, randomly generated a map, and then dropped it slowly =p) I wanted to build particle effects, and fires, and have a red warning light … I swear it was all way cooler in my head!!

I wanted to track how many levels deep you went, make about a billion more modules, fix the combat system, make more enemies, make a texture or two =p, sound effects and more music, I also want to build a bunch of different floor and wall tiles to make the worlds feel more organic. Also, I have an idea for randomly generated height maps as planet side, and then you find randomly generated dungeons and then … and then …

.lol. ^^;

In any event, I AM proud, for a first time try I hope to have not made a complete fool of myself, even if I bit off more than I could chew, and even if I didn’t get to where I wanted to be – when do you ever? I look around at some of the other entries and feel a real sense of community, I’ve been making game for a long time in lots of environments, but I have to say that this has been one of the most rewarding experiences.

I know I’ve said this lots of times, in lots of places, but I hope the repetition doesn’t dull it’s intention. Thank you for the opportunity to contribute, and I am humbled and honored to have my game sit along side so many other projects of such creativity and quality.

Yep, I’m getting somewhere now. Dumped the use of real lighting in the wee hours yesterday and instead I opted for distance based hide/show. Less fancy but gives a far more satisfying effect (the white light is torch light by the way and follows the crosshair). The red block underneath the cow is a little spinning thing to attract your attention (especially since the cows are billboards – so this will alert you of the cow even if the cow is at an extreme angle/paper thin)

Also, note the above is placeholder (read: google image) art. I expect an art drop this afternoon from my ‘artist’ (we both jammed the idea but neither of us are artists).

15 hours could be tight, but if I can get shooting in within the next hour I think it could actually get done…

So there it was again, LudumDare. I shouldn’t have been working at the same time, as there were lots of distractions, and I should get together with other people again to have more motivation 😛

At first, the theme seemed to me like a revival of ‘Exploration’, LD 16. A peek to wikipedia showed me that ‘Discovery’ can be taken as that, but also as ‘to discover something new, not in the sense of exploring’. So I really tried to do that, not going into the direction of exploring (large areas) at all.

the idea came fast. it’s similar to a minigame that you can find in Pokemon Pearl/Diamond, where I spend hours running around. Then the rest was coding and a lot of drawing.

Coding is luckily not the problem. Ruby is very fast to write, Gosu nice to use, and the rest is up to me. No time -> hardcode. There actually is hardly any code, about 600 lines and that’s it. But the drawings ate up a lot of time. I also didn’t managed to do all the drawings. I wanted to have more, to animate everything slightly, and (of course) I also wanted to colour everything. Especially the win/lose-screens lack text, colour and animation. I probably could have done it with a bit more time

So that was it again! let’s have a nice time judging and playing around!

I’ve decided what exactly I’m trying to get across with my game. It’s a metaphor for what I experience when I learn a new skill.

Majority of the code is done, as is most of the character art. Still need background, the remaining character art, and a couple other bits. Will actually likely be done by the end of the jam.

Here’s a screenie of what I’ve got:

It's a metaphor for something else. Art!

I just realized that the online version is a test verstion…

There’s way to much aborigines ( I was testing the game over sequence ). I was not intending to kill the player at the first error.

I dont know If I can modify my entry or not. If I could I would be happy, but It break the 48h rule…

Here’s the correct version : fodnal 1.1

Please let me know if I can replace my entry with this one ( juste one line was deleted from the original version )

I’m taking the opportunity to learn some new production methods, and hoping to have my game ready tonight to enter into the jam!

The game is here. It’s like a retro arcade game with a twisted approach to the theme “discovery”. I spent about 32 hours working on it. I’m so happy that I finally submitted it in time.

good parts:

• game play is implemented as I expected.
• I draw the set of sprites all by myself(I never draw so much before).

missing parts:

• particle effects, score display with every hit.
• more mob types.  It seems that time is never enough in LD.

Also congrats to everybody who submitted their games! We’d be busy rating games for some days.

Well, thanks to that magic that is called adding in cheats for the purpose of debugging, I completely missed the fact that one area was impossible to get out of without it. Essentially, the area isn’t showing the clues and in order to get to the next you have to find a certain number of clues. I can fix this, right? :/

Play NOW

Mini bombing game.
Will add scoring later today.

Tested in Firefox & Chrome (absolutely no IE).

After have fought against mencoder’s options (the manual is far too dense, too many options), I finally uploaded it to YouTube. It’s still processing it for now, but should be available soon…

Here’s the video:

Bye ! See you all next time !

Tags: timelapse

There was a bug that prevented you from getting past one scene and as a result you couldn’t reach the rest of the game, it’s been fixed now.

First time I’ve seen a timelapse of my own work before… kinda interesting.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLZgdqBpL7U

So, this looks like the second Ludum Dare where I might not finish anything for.
Certainly not for want of trying this time though; however I never really made it off the starting line!

With about twelve hours left of the Jam, I have two choices:
1) Drop what I’m working on and start afresh – and ignore what I’ve spent all weekend banging my head on the table with.
2) Hope that I can fix it/work around it quickly to carry on with my original plan.

Somehow don’t see (2) working out that well, so giving myself a final five minutes to have one last root through this issue, and going for option (1) .. which means a MUCH simpler game.

Oh and failure is of course, not an option!
I’ll go down kicking and screaming with keyboard in hand, if I have to 😉

So, the real fun is just about to start. I was so busy the weekend, that I haven’t even tried any of the in-production games.

Anyways, I managed to finish in time, 2 (sweaty) minutes before the deadline (as usual). My entry has ‘the alternative theme approach’, well, see for yourselves. I’ll love seeing 200+ entries, let’s hit 300 next time! It’s bee hard as hell to hit a Coolness medal this LD, but as I said, the fun is just starting and I’m looking forward to playing as much as my PC can handle.

PS. I’m too dlrrpy too uplooaaAAAAaaaaa… the tiemlaaaAAaa……..zZZZZzzzzZZZZzzz…..

This entry was posted on Monday, December 20th, 2010 at 11:58 am and is filed under LD #19 - Discovery - 2010. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

I was excited as always to participate in LD. After 2 years java I switched to Unity3d. But that didn’t prevent me from making the same mistakes as every time. I had an idea and started directly coding. Hey, it’s only 48h. No time to think ;D

As soon as I heard ‘Discovery‘ as theme I had the spaceship in mind. Spaceship -> Planets -> Gravity -> Resources . So that should be the four main points for my game. I wasn’t so sure how to handle. At first I wanted to let the player control the ship all the time but somehow that was no real fun and I couldn’t find a good setup. After 8h work I realized the ‘Keep it simple‘-Rule (that I seem to ignore quite often) so I decided to restart the project! So that you have only different parameters to setup like direction and speed of the ship and fields of gravity of the planets. That worked quite well, although you have to try and error at the beginning after a time you get a feeling on how to change the setup to control the ship. The one major problem is that simulation is much too slow. You see the result of your change much too late! I realized the problem but had no time to make a 1:1-simulator that fit. Too bad.

Nevertheless if you see what I have done in the last two years this is by far my most game like LD-Submission. So what are the next steps?

– Create a Timelapse

– Show a quick time simulation. Somehow this would make the other slow simulation senseless ;D But who cares. So I will include the ‘Evolution’-Theme (beside the ‘Discovery’ and ‘Title includes a Year’) to mutate my game until it is even better.

– Online Highscore

– Level-Editor

– Make it clearer what the goal is! As I showed the game two different people and noone took the time to read the shitty tutorial ;D I think that is common (I wouldn’t do it neither ;D )

Actually I don’t have too much time to make something for the jam! Hmm,…I have 4h! Let’s see if I can do something.

BTW: Here is the link! Play it

Firstly, here are some links :

My submission

some other posts

Well,

First off – Timelapse. While i tried my hardest to get this to play nice it caused more trouble than it was worth and i was more intent on finishing. So, i only ended up with about one day maybe of timelapse. Ill post it anyway, lots of random rubbish there.

Secondly – What my goals were and what i didn’t achieve, and what i did.

A) Goals.

The original concept – “The Discovery of game development” ie  ; the character is me ( i tend to wear a tie all the time).

The character would go through the phases of game development, seeing each department in this large company and thinking how cool it is, making it to a small apartment with a laptop , and discovering game development for himself.

The second concept – “Discovering you are inside a game” ie ; The current

I changed to this about half way, not really enough time to go with all the mechanics i had planned. I was attempting to mix platformer and point and click adventure, where you explore with look/use and could move things, break things etc. A few minor hurdles got me with the last 5 hours to finish the gameplay side and stop working with all the planned options.

The story as of now :

You are suddenly spawned into an unknown world, a realistic surreal place that your pixel eyes cannot begin to understand. A small mishap perhaps but a broken console in a pool of coffee somehow extrapolated too worlds – colliding what is defined with what is real. Your journey starts here.

The missing elements :

The bugz. They were from the game world, escaped along with you into reality. You must collect them (they are hidden all over) and drop them off in the programming department.

The environment . Alot of the point and click world is missing its interaction. This is just a limitation of time and i plan to implement all the pointy clicky things soon.

The other 6 levels. There were 6 more levels, and a final rooftop (where you fought the boss). These should be easy to add with less pressure and with the working mechanics.

The boss battle. This was something i threw in randomly. When you discovered you were in a game, you met with the evil publisher guy who decided to change everything about you. Your hair your colors everything. In order to regain your originality and to be who you are, you must destroy him. As his health drops pieces of you are dropped to collect. So,  imagine platformery gameplay with projectiles (water cooler dispensed plastic cups) and mostly avoid and attack, no real combat per se.

What went right :

1) Planning something scalable. Going from 12 levels to 6, removing erroneous stuff was easy. I did most of the pruning along the way so i am glad i chose something scalable.

2) Writing alot of the tech specifically for this game. Instead of aiming for super flexible etc i just coded what was needed. I have trouble with this a lot before.

3) More time on code than on art. I finished all of the major mechanics i had planned barring projectiles (i did have a working prototype where he throws a handful of pixels from his pocket)

4) I had a crapton of fun.

What went wrong:

1) Leaving gameplay elements till last, interactivity is super simple to implement  but its lacking because of other things (like text messages etc)

2) Plenty

Thats all i guess. I can only hope to do something better next time but that isn’t to say that i am not happy with my submission

Thanks!

Tags: post-mortem

Finally got the timelapse of me creating my entry uploaded to Youtube. You can find it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLYye9zr32s

I created it using Chronolapse, set to take a screenshot every 6 seconds. The video was encoded at 30FPS. Given the length of the video, this means that I spent almost exactly 16 hours working on my entry; more than I had hoped for, but a lot less time than I actually ‘needed’. Oh well.

Just a quick reply to the comments on the submission so far: I’m glad you’re enjoying it! I could go and add to it for a Jam version, but I’d rather not. Don’t know why.

Also to commenter Devenger: not sure you mean about getting stuck near the right-most altar. Just go back through the tunnels?

Now for the post-mortmem:
I made one huge mistake right at the start of making the entry, with regards to how the terrain was stored. I stored each screen as a quadtree of blocks. Moving off-screen triggered swapping out the ‘current’ quadtree for the appropriate replacement, and sending the player to the other side of the screen.  What I should have done was store the entire world as one big quadtree, and just had the camera snap to fixed positions – or not. Really, if I could go back and chance one thing it would be this.
See, if I hadn’t done this I could have had my original winning conditions – collecting four ‘orbs’ instead of just seeing the four altars – in and working instantly. As it was, I had to scrap that because of my lack of time. Also, making one continuous world would have allowed me to grant the player special abilities after getting each orb – digging through walls, a jetpack, etc. – something that would have just raised too many problems with the current setup.

Art-wise, I can’t really complain – I was at the limits of my artistic ability as it was. I might have tweaked around with background colours and water tiles if I had the time, but I can’t see myself doing much better.

Sound… the sound effects are fine, I think. SFXr is a fantastic tool. The problem was background music – I have no idea how to create it, and it’s something I need to check up on for next time. I was going to use WolframTones, but that only produces MIDI files ( I can only play WAV ). Oh well.

At the start of the competition I considered how to use the theme best ( you can see this on the timelapse video). I didn’t have a decent game mechanic in mind, and trying to do it through story would have meant spending far too much time creating a GUI that could display the story (text). As it was, I decided to go with atmosphere – and I think I just about pulled it off.

If you haven’t yet done so, please try my submission “Quest for the 4 Altars”, and tell me what you think.
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-19/?action=rate&uid=1886

[ Go to entry | Watch timelapse ]

My game turned out to be a vaguely steampunk-ish exploration/management game in space.

I can’t believe I finished this! Aside from the lack of sound, the game is more polished than most of my Pyweek entries, and those get 7 days. I was very surprised that I managed to implement everything on my list without cutting features. I’m actually kind of impressed with myself.

Having said that, it’s not a great game. It’s not very fun and it’s not very innovative. If you like exploration in games as much as me, there are some cool moments, but you have to work to get them.

The gameplay complexity is added gradually throughout the game. I think I should have front-loaded it, because I expect that people will quit after 10 minutes without seeing the whole game. People who play for less than an hour probably won’t get the full experience, and I know that’s way too long to expect someone to invest in a LD game, especially when there are hundreds to play! Oh well….

This is now the third game I’ve made that’s basically a rip-off of one-quarter of Starcon 2. One more to go.

What did I learn? I need to learn how to generate sound and music for the next LD. In Pyweek you can use sounds that are freely available. I forgot this wasn’t allowed until the last minute, so I had to disable the music I put in. I may upload a Jam version that includes it. Also, python + pygame is great, but it’s time to learn another language for making games.

Thanks to everyone involved in putting this competition together, and good luck to all the contestants!

After a few hours of trying to get an idea I felt satisfied with I started coding a basic screen system hoping to get an idea while working. It worked and off I went. From then on things flowed nicely and I had very few places I got stuck. I didn’t have enough energy to work as long as I had planned on Saturday (~9hours effective work) but I made up for it on Sunday by putting in over 12 hours. I still had to cut a few things I had hoped to include, like a better level and scoring system, but over all I’m happy with my result. It was a great experience and I’m really glad I tried it and managed to finish!

The “effective work” times above were calculated from the number of screen shots generated by my little screen capture program I wrote the day before the compo for making a timelapse. I only had it running while actively working and I turned it off for even small breaks like when trying to figure out what to do next or working out some maths. Screen shots were taken every 12 seconds and with 6429 shots in the folder that amounts to about 21.43 hours of effective work during the 45 hours from when I started to when I submitted. 😉

Here’s the resulting timelapse: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6rGl6lPxSk

Timelapse as mentioned here is really short and pretty lame :  but i tried Its got some javascript, some c++ and some photoshop and sfxr.

Tags: timelapse

First thing : ZOMG I have wrote the worst code ever …

Two screenshots here :

You are the Red player and you start the game on a planet. Your enemy is Blue. You both can expand to neutral planets, accumulate more units with yours mother ships, fight for the possession of a planet, and kill each other =]

You also can make your own custom maps.

Since the last post I have deleted :

1. solar systems idea
2. zoom in / zoom out
3. camera movement

Todo

1. (ingame ?) Gameplay explanation / How to play
2. ships attributes depending on the planet
3. Some levels
4. tutorial (maybe)
5. check the Windows version

Tags: features, python, screenshot

I just finished my game for the competition and was about to submit it with 3 hours left on the clock when the power went out. In my entire city. For around 12 hours. I’m not even going to enter my game in the jam, that’s just not right(you can even check my game’s “last modified date”). Great so when does LD20 start… never-mind, decided to enter it in the jam.

There are now little cute boop effects when you click on blocks. Also, using blocks in combinations makes them become grey.  If you solve combinations fast enough, you can recover greyed out blocks. (Grey blocks can’t be moved)

Todo:

-Implement high-score board

-Make menu graphics better

-Ambient BGM?

Known bugs:

-None at the moment

Planet thing is done. Or not done, it’s actually so incomplete that it doesn’t even have a name. But you can download it and “discover” new planets. It’s kind of amusing and the results are sometimes pretty good (but often terrible).

I might try to turn this into a real game or sfxr-for-landscapes tool or something.  And send me the names of any cool landscapes you discover via twitter (@joeld42) or email.

It’s been fun!

Link to the program (please comment if you try it, even though it’s not elegible for voting).

Chapter I. Enthusiasm

First day. I’m full of enthusiasm.

Yeah. Discovery! Cool theme!

But, wait. I don’t want to create another Knytt Stories. Yes. I will make something really unusual! For example game about self-discovery when hero will goes through seven rounds of hell and he will found his love and then…oh, wait! I have only two days…

Chapter II. Stagnation

Wait, wait! Six hours! Damn six hours. And nothing. Stop. I must draw concept. Something unusual. Nobody must have it.

This is really unusual maze isn’t it!?

No. Of course.

Arghhhh!!! This is end of the first day! I will show you all really awesome!

Oh. Time to sleep. Really.

Chapter III. Despair

Mumble-mumble-mumble. Damn. I will create f****** puzzle. I will use flixel and main hero will be pixel. So i will call it plixel.

Okay. Now World safe. Maybe the next time…i will create something REALLY unusual.

Play my game. Rate it. Thanks.

I’ve finally caught up with the sleeps, so thought I’d post a summary filling in the missing time, when I was busy crunching the last 10 hours and unable to post. To summarise the progress, and to try and make up for the fact that I couldn’t do a video timelapse, here are playable snapshot web builds showing my progress throughout the 48 hours. I only managed a mere 26 hours to dedicate to LD, due to other commitments but I had a blast! My work pattern can be shown in the following gif I just put together. ^^

Click on a thumbnail below to play a Unity web build of the development snapshot at the time:

Hope you like. Drop me a comment on my entry page.

A while after making the first bugfix for my entry, Case Closed, I found another, loosely related bug that caused the game to skip the ending entirely. That’s fixed now, too.

Here it is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkvtMDfrlUc (available in 720p)

I didn’t get screenshots of the last ~3 hours of tweaking, adding artsy fartsy text to the backgrounds and packaging, sorry!

(Is there anything special I have to do to link it to my entry, or is this it?)

My video doesn’t appear here :/ here’s the link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QcJVGEE-qBo

Yep, it’s now playable complete with some great retro noises courtesy of DrPetter’s sfxr. Got a few powerups (and powerdowns) in, with only a few left to implement (and a few more textures to draw)

It has been an odd LD mainly because of the flip from “no chance of getting done” to “actually this is doable”. Marathon code session this afternoon certainly helped I suppose!

Only really been at this since about 4:30pm GMT ( it’s just past 7:10pm GMT now ) but I’m making some quite good head way already!

It’s a simple game now.. coloured “germs” get pushed onto a dish. You need to group them together to clear them, before they start to rot. You then need to manage those buggers to stop them infecting the rest of them!
Some germs are better than others, of course! ( and worth more points to clear! )

Ironically, it’s been a game idea I’ve had for a while, just never got round to doing.. though the link to the theme is a bit iffy ( discovering which germs are better to keep on the dish longer than others.. *cough* ) but it’s better than sobbing in the corner.. again..

And yes, they look like Splodge with no .. err.. feet, I suppose.. bit pressed for time art wise now 😉

Obligatory screenshot:

Lots of little Germies!

Might actually get a game submitted after all!

The Ludum Dare website doesn’t give you a great way to get notified of comments on your game. So I hacked together a bookmarklet to generate that RSS feed.

I’m having trouble keeping WordPress from mangling things, so go over here to get it.

I finally finished a time lapse video for my game The Last Moments. It looks like I was developing the game almost all the time but really I was doing a lot of other things on my second screen.

I’ve finished uploading my timelapse. Phew, that took some time!

Ludum Dare #19 – LegacyCrono Timelapse

That was fun. And stressing.

I didn’t get my entry finished to the state I had hoped but submitted it anyway within the final minutes, since I think the visual puzzle aspect is interesting enough to play with.
click to view: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-19/?action=rate&uid=3278

Right away I seriously underestimated the time constraints, I started working on my entry Saturday afternoon (about 18 hours in?). I had a rough idea of what I wanted to create but I hadn’t done any work identifying individual systems I’d have to script or how it would all work together.

the bare minimum brainstorm

I basically jumped right in and started sorting out how I was going to create the visual effect that I was after, sort of a reverse camera-mapping effect but with geometry instead of texture mapping.  I needed to take a plane which had been cut into fragments of various sizes and translate the fragments outward towards the camera at random lengths, but while scaling the fragments in size so that when the viewer looks from the camera’s position they see the plane as if it were solid.   I had made failed attempts at this effect in the past so I had some existing knowledge about what was involved, but the difficulty in this was making it work for a specific viewpoint. A few hours were spent of trial-and-error, all sorts of debugging lines being drawn between points in space so that I could compare results and figure out what I needed.  It turned out to be simpler than what I thought when approaching it, but it still was straining on my poor and forgotten math knowledge. There very well could be an even easier elegant way out there involving matrix transformations and stuff.

finding a key view position

I soon noticed that using a “raw” X Y mouselook for the player camera was too harsh, it seemed to reduce the impact and readability of the visual effect, so I began looking into lerping the camera. It helps a lot, and as a bonus makes input with a laptop track pad work great.

Soon after getting that working I descended blindly into an unexpected Quaternion hell where I also attempted to blend the player camera towards the “key” camera rotation when the Player was very near the correct position and rotation, as a way to assist in snapping to the perspective that solves a wall. I spent too much time on it and didn’t get it working right in the end, all I know is Quaternions have 4 dimensions and are inside The Matrix, instead I just opted to count a wall as solved when within X amount of the key position and rotation.  This leads to some problems where the Player never sees the wall fragments fully give the illusion of forming the wall, instead there are small gaps.  Thinking about it now however, I could probably just take control of the Player’s camera during the solved method and blend it to the correct view, creating a transition that feels smooth and provides feedback that the Player has just solved a puzzle, rather than immediately popping in the new room (as it does currently) which is jarring.

The next problem to tackle was creating a system to handle randomly placing the “key viewpoint” for each of the 4 walls, and handling the creation and removal of rooms.  By this point I had started working again Sunday morning and since I’d not planned out any order, my scripting began turning into spaghetti-mess with all sorts of back and forth checks, I was basically improvising everything as I went along.  There are some issues with the random placement at times, sometimes the fragments “spill over” behind the key viewpoint which means they won’t be in view for the player, so the player will see missing fragments (holes) in the wall when solving.

Next was the addition of enemies, the intent was to have enemies gradually spawning in from beyond the current room, slowly encroaching on the Player’s position in a way which would cause the Player’s tension to rise as they searched for a key to the next room.  Finding a key viewpoint would cause all enemies inside the current room to be destroyed, and the idea is that the speed and number of enemies would slowly increase the further along the Player progressed. Destroyed enemies would build up some sort of panic device which when activated, destroys all enemies in a radius around the Player, but potentially has some negative effects (maybe a temporary boost to the number of enemies spawning and a re-shuffle of the current wall solutions).

I didn’t get to that point, as the enemies were being added with about 2 or 3 hours remaining, and I spent the last moments generating some materials and colors to help give the entry a weird and potentially unique look.

Some of my disappointments with this entry are not putting in a placeholder title screen/state right from the start, along with a game over state, all future experiments will have that framework in place, as easy it may be to do, when you’re under pressure of a deadline it is very easy to disregard simple things that could assist in making your entry appear a bit more coherent. I also really wanted to get audio in, as it would have added a lot to the experience, looking back, I probably should have set aside the enemy stuff in favor of adding audio as the enemies are not very incorporated into the entry.

well, that’s about it, if you’re reading this I hope you found my entry somewhat interesting, I look forward to playing through the other entries and the future Ludum Dare compos to come!  I think I’ve learned a lot from doing this

Timelapse

So the Dare is over!

(It’s been over for a while, aye, but I was kinda dazed, and I started playing other people’s games for a while to restore myself.)

I think that this is where I mention the major problems that I had. But I really feel like I lucked out this time, because the creation went off without major hitches, and I even managed to adhere to a schedule (!!!)

Still, some notes:

• I’m still not exactly sure what kind of starter code we’re allowed to have. My starting code put me at about the same level as Flixel (but without map support), but that still disadvantages us to people who use things like game maker and get stuff like map support and room support built in. I don’t think I had all of that until halfway in!
• This was the best I’ve done with abstraction, I think (at least up until the last few hours where I was just cramming in fixes). It really paid off, too – the latter half of development was relatively breezy.
• I was insanely productive. This kind of game usually would take me around 2 weeks to make.

I’ll stop patting myself on the back now:

• My biggest problem by far was the lack of a good map editor. If you look at the timelapse, you might notice that it took me something ridiculous like an hour or so to develop a single map. Going back to make changes (of which I had to do several times) took a while too. Editing the raw data in Flash was atrocious because Flash just dies with that much text – I eventually switched to FlashDevelop, which is lightning fast. The good news out of all of this is that I have finally discovered how to solve this problem, and with it, another problem that I’ve wondered about for ages. Essentially, the tile editor must handle ALL of the output. My current setup was just outputing the raw map data, which I had to put into a class and hook up with exits to other rooms (which later led to nasty bugs). Editing maps and writing code should be completely separate activities. I really wish I could have made a more expansive world, and perhaps played around with the alternate world idea a little more. Ah well. I’ll be taking a few days to make my tile editor better (again)
• I never made a sprite for the main character and eventually just had a stupid smiling pixel. I need to learn how to do art better. I did some tilesetting a few months ago, but I never made characters. This needs to change.
• I didn’t have any animated things. I wanted to make the flowers move around, for instance, but I was preoccupied with other things, and worse, I wasn’t sure I knew how. Now, come to think about it, it’s not that hard, but it requires some more abstraction (yay!)
• The worst bugs in the game were related to collision detection and map transitions, two things that I should have (and could have) done before the Dare. Next time!

All in all, LD was a good experience. Makes me wish I could work at that efficiency all the time…

I created a pre-packaged version of batcave for macos here.

Just a single zip file with batcave.app inside.

On windows and linux, you’ll still need to download the love2d framework separately.  My windows/linux machine decided to stop booting, I suspect that it’s jealous of the other woman (macbook pro) and is trying to get revenge.

…using advanced graphite reconstruction technology I was able to re-create it, exactly as it happened.

Don’t have much to say in the way of a post-mortem. I hated the theme, but liked what I did with it. The coding went remarkably smoothly and I was pretty much done by the end of Saturday. Which was just as well, as I had to work on Sunday.

Tags: timelapse

It’s been a heck of an experience this LD. Starting planning on making 2 games, ending up abandoning one half-way through, then making a game for the jam.

Wow.

I’ve got my jam game “complete”. By “complete”, I mean that the player has all of the basic movements that I wanted, and most of the very basic features are there.

The game lacks… Well, polish. I may well have had time for it, but I didn’t have the stamina.

I’m proud, though. I actually have something to submit that resembles a game. That’s not nothing. That’s something.

Please, play and comment here.

Here’s a screenie:

I have a new wallpaper!

All 285 Jam and Compo Games!

Here’s a zip containing various size wallpapers and the Python script that generates them (requires PIL) : DOWNLOAD.

So I have painstakingly assembled a timelapse for my game. I didn’t have any video editing tools besides Chronolapse and Camtasia, so it was kind of annoying, but I’m happy with the result.

Click here to watch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aeFOvKJqIDQ

Update! Better version of the timelapse:

Tags: gameplay, timelapse, video

I wasn’t home much during the weekend due to concerts, and the time I was at home I didn’t manage to do anything for LD, other than thinking about what to make. I wasn’t happy with the theme at all, it’s way too broad (like most of the themes recently). In fact, half of my previous LD entries could fit the theme discovery in some way.

Both the Compo and the Jam have finally ended. Thank you everyone for joining us this December for our 19th event. By the time the clocks hit zero, we had 285 entries!! **

243 Compo, 42 Jam! Wow! New records across the board!

Since the holidays are coming up, we’ve decided to make judging last for 3 weeks instead of the usual two. Everyone has been randomly assigned 20 games, so please make an effort to play as many of those as you can. The list will grow over time, revealing more games to play.

Our next major event (Ludum Dare 20) will be in April 2011. Stay tuned to the mailing list for details.

Also! Game Developers Conference attendees, stay tuned! Like last year, we’re looking to arrange a meetup. Details will be here on the website, but I’ll be sure to ping the mailing list once things are more concrete.

Thanks again everyone for coming out, and we hope you have a safe and Happy Holidays.

* * *

PS: ** InaVegt, please check your game and post a comment. For some reason it’s flagged as disabled (an LD website bug?). Let me know where it should be (Compo/Jam) and I can fix it.

So, I’ve added Lunarium to the Jam.

http://www.swfcabin.com/open/1292881137

Please allow some time to load, swf cabin hates preloaders. The instructions are in the game. The goal is to get 42 points. You may also quit at anytime. So, I guess I can make a game in 72 hours, just not 48. Yet.

I really enjoyed this weekend guys. Here’s to LD number 20!!!

Tags: bear

We’re finishing up now. It’s a 2d sidescroller / puzzle game. Should be posted pretty soon. Not sure if I’ll have running mac/linux executables… not having much luck with py2exe today.

– Needs More Lasers productions

Tags: discovery, jam, needs more lasers

Also, check out the Post-Compo review of PRIOR to see where the game has gone since LD19 <3

PRIOR
You know nothing

GAME LINK

This was my first Ludum Dare, and to be honest, it really kicked my ass. I’ve done a 48-hour game challenge before but not solo and nothing on the scale that I worked towards in LD 19. That being said, it was an awesome experience and I am truly proud of the product that I ended up creating.

PRIOR: Screenshot: Maintainance Room

PRIOR is a 2D platformer built in Adobe Flash, in which you find out the answers to all the questions in your head – who am I, where am I, why am I here, what’s going on – etc. Throughout the game you must piece together the history of what happened by reading scraps of paper, and learning from certain events. There are three endings to it, and about 15-30 minutes of gameplay per ending.

Now, on review of PRIOR’s final build and the development thereof…

WHAT WORKED

KNOW YOUR SCOPE. I would like to clarify what I mean by that. Obviously it’s important to keep your project’s scope manageable, but note I did not say “keep a small scope”. I knew that my scope was very large and ambitious, especially for only 48 short hours. However, it was clearly defined, and I had an excellent workflow established early on, which helped me deliver.

KNOW YOUR SKILLS. I am not an artist, by any means. I have a basic understanding of how to create visual assets using Flash, and a ‘very’ basic understanding of Photoshop. Knowing these limitations, I decided on a stylized and abstract visual theme, rather than beautiful and proficient art. I could achieve this. Also, I knew my core skills were in level design and programming, which is what I focused on. Honestly, almost all the art was done after 4:30 PM on the final day.

I could go on about all the little things that helped make this game, but those were easily the two most important things I kept in mind. I didn’t worry about character art or animation – the player is just a little block and animation is limited to his eye and a slight stretching as he falls. I didn’t even really focus on the story – that came out of sheer dumb luck. I had vague ideas of what I wanted the story of this game to be, and from the beginning I knew “The player will know nothing off-hand, and will have to DISCOVER everything that’s going on.” But the story as it is just grew as I developed, and happened to grow into a self-contained, full story that not only spans between several different lives, years, and nations in the game world, but fits together perfectly.

(Yes, there IS a zero-sum, written-out & perfectly explainable story to this game. However, you must figure it out for yourself in-game!)

WHAT NEEDED WORK

KNOW WHAT YOU NEED. I made the mistake of trying to implement features that were both non-mandatory to the game as a whole, but I didn’t even know properly how to program. For example, my game had a CONTINUE option, which let you continue from the last room you were in. It would’ve been very useful, but wasn’t necessary for my project given the time constraint. I nearly went over-time trying to implement that feature, then eventually just removed it. (Really: my last submission was at 5:59.)

PLAN OUT YOUR STYLE/ATMOSPHERE. PRIOR was always supposed to be a creepy, mysterious game, and it is. However, if I had planned out what exactly I wanted to ultimately deliver, I wouldn’t have lost 45 precious minutes trying to find and implement sound effects. And it could’ve been much worse – I have a pretty big sound library available, and finding the sounds was no problem. I could’ve lost upwards of 2 hours if I had to search for those sounds online. In the end I decided to have just music, and the game seems much better for it. I wish I’d realized that sooner!

In the end, most of this seems like it could’ve been avoided with more planning, and pre-production time is not very abundant in a Ludum Dare. That said, I’ll keep these things in mind on my next project, and maybe you will too

Check out PRIOR’s Ludum Dare game page

-Nick Yonge

Tags: flash, ld48, Ludum Date 19, post-mortem, postmortem, PRIOR

My LD19 contribution: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-19/?action=preview&uid=1884

I think this is the best game I’ve made from my past Ludum Dare submissions, but it’s still lacking in gameplay and content.

For next time, I really need to finish off an engine beforehand, rather than make everything from scratch within the 48 hour period!

I’m done for the night. It’s not ‘finished’ as such, but it’s more or less presentable. I’ll expand on this later.

Tags: discovery, Rosetta

Our jam game is complete! Give it a try. It runs on Windows. The source is there to run it on other platforms. Sorry, I didn’t have time or energy left to make it work on mac/linux

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-19/?action=preview&uid=3068

Needs More Lasers productions is:

Jesse – programming

Shane – graphics

Kevin – music

Hope you guys enjoy it!

Tags: temple guy