Here is the timelapse video for Chaotic Spread: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szSGSoBTBcE

Tags: timelapse

First things first, I finally got the timelapse to upload!

Discoverer – 48H Timelapse

Now onto the post mortem.

What Worked

1. The Idea
   The idea was simple enough.What I’ve found from working on other projects, is that I tend to get carried away with the idea, and never actually work on the game itself. So for the LD I forced myself to set out the idea, and then not to alter the idea too much (Slight variations were okay though!)
2. Enemies as Turrets
   Having the enemies as turrets turned out to be better in the end (In my opinion anyway :P). Rather than have crummy AI that wouldn’t have been able to follow the player properly, the turret concept got better the more I went with it, and started to explore ways in using the concept more (Teleporting turrets anyone? :)).
3. Simple Graphics
   I know that I’m not a good graphics artist, and that to pull off anything fancy, I have to take time. Having said that, I think that I’ve done a good job of it’s looks, even if it was a bit “quick and dirty”.

What Didn’t Work (As Expected)

1. Map Generation
   The map generation was quite appalling in the end. I had envisioned that the generator would build structures and challenges that got more complex as the player went though the game. But in the end I ran out of time, and it never really progressed. When I do a “remake” of this project after the comp, map generation is definitely on the list of things to fix.

What Never Made It In

Challenges... never quite made it in...

1. Weapons / Treasure Chests
   I had also planned that the player would get more powerful weapons as they progressed through the game, but in the end, it was left out as the mechanic wasn’t in place, which meant that having it in there would have broken the style of gameplay that I was going for.Again, this is one of the things that I hope to fix when I look at it again.
2. Challenges
   Something else that I had hoped to have working in the final version of the game, but it never did make it in. If they were in, they would have been like the boss levels, except that they wouldn’t have been required to progress through the game.
3. The Final Boss
   The final boss, also, never made it. It The idea was that after you had gotten the 4 keys from each of the arms, you would then fight a final boss before finishing the game. Ah well, maybe in 2.0 😛

And that’s that done. Now to downgrade the required framework from 4.0 to 3.5 (Or even 3.0!) 😛

Update: Have uploaded another copy of the game that targets C#2.0 instead of C#4.0 (Source code included, slight alterations to some files, optional paramaters aren’t supported by C#2.0 :P), the download link for it can be found on the submission page.

Tags: post-mortem, timelapse

EDIT: Windows port added \o/

[ MY JAM ENTRY | SOURCES / LINUX | WINDOWS]

Now is Beer & Pizza time ! Whoohou good job everyone

Also, please read my entry presentation to know more
(I’ll post here if I can figure out how to make the game work on Mac and Windows)

Tags: entry, First entry, python

LD48 Entry: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-19/?action=rate&uid=2297

Play the flash game here: http://www.mcfunkypants.com/2010/snowboggan/

Snowboggan! is a 3d flash game.  I’ve always wanted to write a toboggan simulator, where you can speed down a snowy hill on a sled, dodging trees and smashing into snowmen.  This weekend’s game jams finally gave me the chance.  Check it out!  I would love to read your comments and warmly encourage you to let me know what you think.

Use the arrow keys to go left and right, and try to take out as many snowmen as you can!

In this game, you are immortal.  It was created for fun, and no matter what happens you can always climb back to the op of the hill and start again.  There is a hint of danger, however: if you smash into a tree or hit the “thin ice” signs, you might get flipped over!  If you do get flipped over, simply hit the “Click to restart” button on the top left.

The objective of the game is to discover gravity, prove that snowmen are not at allimmortal, and avoid the thin ice while gravity is constantly drawing you to the bottom of the hill.  These words are bolded because those were the secret “theme” words for the game jams I participated in.

This game was programmed using FlashDevelop for a pure as3 project, compiled using Flex, and the engines are away3d for graphics, jiglib for physics and Flint for particle effects.  All sounds were created by me using a microphone.  The guitar and snow sounds were done with my hands and mouth, and the sliding snow sound was the microphone rubbing up against my winter jacket.  It was an absolute blast to program and I learned a lot.  Thanks for playing.  Enjoy!

Here are screenshots of the game in action:

Tags: 3D, as3, final, flash, post-mortem, postmortem, screenshot

I finished something for the jam! I wasn’t able to get much of what I intended in there, but I managed to get an animated character in and the basic gameplay is definitely what I had in mind.

So here’s my quick LD maze of towers trailer.  If you think it looks interesting, don’t hesitate to give it a try:  http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-19/?action=rate&uid=2359

(Warning: It is quite difficult. I didn’t have enough time to play test, or include enough power ups. However, play with it for a bit, and tell me what you think after looking past the insane difficulty 😛 )

Finished up our jam entry, playable here through java web start:

http://wgta.ws/webstart/launch.jnlp

Enjoy!

This is our first jam entry. In the search of ancient treasure you will travel deep to the bottom of the ocean. Use your voice to operate a submarine. U can say rrr or simply blow into the mic:

http://bandymas.byethost13.com/jttbots/

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-19/?action=preview&uid=3214

written with AS3.

Still missing bosses, but at least I have additional enemies and weapons.

How I managed it, I have no idea.. but in the past ten hours or so, I managed to build a game from scratch, with just SDL, a C compiler and my trusty GIMP by my side… that’s the art package of course 😛

I also literally hammered some buttons of SFXR in the dying hour and got some rather disturbing sounds from it, so they went in as well.

WARNING! You're about to fail!

Doesn’t look particularly spectacular, but there is a game in there somewhere!

The theme link is so tangible it’s unreal though.. as most of the scoring is a bit hidden for you to discover.. I was going to have the infections just appear and have them the “discoveries” but that made it much more stupidly difficult than it is!

So go cultivate some germs, and earn massive points 😉
Link to Germies comments and download page

Source is included.. it’s a one file jobby of close to 900 lines of “C” .. it’s nasty.. enjoy!

Congrats to all the participants, Compo and Jam alike
Here’s to the next one! where I might be better prepared ( hah! )

Hi everyone!

My friend (Blitzgren) and I participated together on a jam game.  It’s his 2nd LD, my first.  Overall, we’re pretty happy with the results, despite not finishing everything we wanted.  We did learn a lot though about how we would improve for next time so we can release a more complete game.

I’m working on getting the web files hosted, but in the meantime, you can download the game to play on your machine.  Please try it out and let us know what you liked/disliked so we can improve!  Hope everyone had a good LD, see you in 4 months!

[Edit:] Here’s the web link! http://cgamesplay.com/bin/josh/!

~JMichalc

Yesterday I was totally giving up because I couldn’t figure out the any kind of reasonable gameplay, and the whole game idea seemed like a bad choice and time was running out for the compo, which was the original goal. Failure seemed unavoidable. Then today when I got out of school there was still about 10 hours of time left for the Jam and I decided that I will just make the simplest gameplay idea I can think of… After 8 hours of solid coding, 10 minutes before the deadline I finally submitted the finished version.

I am happy that I reached my goal of Gettin’ Something Done even though it wasn’t 48 but 72 hours. The game turned out OK as well. Now I may rest.

We may not have any music. We may not have any sound effects. We may not have a very complete “game” in the sense of the word. But we only had 72 hours. And I think we probably worked only during 30-40% of the time. So we’re pretty proud of this one.

Not bad for a weekend. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m building an arcade machine with my friends.

Check it out: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-19/?action=preview&uid=1936

Link to final build: http://www.certainlogicstudios.com/projects/nano-something/final

Now with more Green

Tags: certainlogic, nanosomething

If you enjoy puzzle games, give “Cannot Ludum Dare 19” a play.  There are nine different gems that each handicap the player in different ways.  First learn what the gems prevent you from doing, and then puzzle through how you can carry that gem to the next door.  I especially like the orange gems near the middle of the board, and the aqua gems that follow.

Feel free to comment below on which gems you can say that you like, and which you “cannot”.

What a great holiday gift all of these games will make over the next week.  Thanks again, to everyone who’s participated.  If anyone’s interested in my other games, you can find info at http:sugarpillstudios.com.

Has some big graphical bugs in it, but at least it is playable.

I am so impressed by the people that managed to make actual games during this compo, it gives me something to look forward to for next time.

Soundman Stepper windows version

INSERT “A WINNER IS YOU” IMAGE HERE

In all seriousness, crafting a game is hard.  It’s harder when you’re constrained by time and theme.

To all my fellow successful Dare-ers, I salute you.  For those that didn’t make it, you’ve got the intervening months to lick your wounds and prepare for the next one!

Now, to the best part of it: hours and hours of freshly-baked gaming goodness!

Tags: celebration, congratulations, elation, exhaustion

Looks like I missed the jam deadline… Here’s the latest version of my game: download.

Controls:

– Left click to move

– Right click to pan the screen

– Space bar to center the screen on your character

This was my first Ludum Dare and it was super fun!! Next time I’ll finish in time 😉

(click the picture)

Roughly 285 people came up with a game idea and made it happen in just one weekend!  That’s a pretty awesome thing!

Abarrane - A game about self-discovery

It’s now 26hrs post LD #19 compo end. The dust has settled, my brain has had a chance to wind down. It’s time for a post-mortem.

>Play Abarrane

>Watch the Time Lapse of Development

The Theme & My Idea

Ludum Dare 19’s theme was “Discovery”. I wasn’t a fan of it considering a year ago the theme was “Exploration”. But the bonus is it did give everyone a lot of creative leg room. On my ride back home after derby practice on Friday night I started brainstorming ideas. I settled on focusing on “self-discovery”, doing something a bit surreal, and having levels based around Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. The idea would be that the player would battle through each of their stages of needs only to reach self enlightenment.

The game would play as a side-scroller / RPG hybrid. This gameplay concept is something I’ve wanted to prototype for Granville for months now.

I knew immediately that my idea was ambitious. I’ve never made a platformer with levels before nor have I ever coded an RPG battle system.

Screenshot from Saturday Morning

Time Structure
My Ludum Dare time structures are very consistent. Prototype on Friday. Build the whole game on Saturday. Polish and tweak on Sunday. This structure couldn’t be applied this time around. I had a roller-derby written test and practice on Friday which caused me to miss the first 5hrs of the compo. I got home at 11pm and was only able to to spend a couple of hours fleshing out my idea and starting to write an RPG battle system from scratch.

I knew that it was likely that I’d still be building core-content into Sunday but committed to the submission deadline and pushed to see how far I could get.

Saturday was incredibly productive and I had the core battle system running before dinner. That evening I connected the battle and platformer bits, built the first couple of levels and got the critical pieces of the game done and working well.

Sunday morning was all about finishing all 5 stages of platforming. Sunday afternoon I spent polishing and playing with the difficulty (through the various enemy and hero stats). The difficulty curve for an LD game is tricky. I only like to keep the player’s attention for 10 minutes max. With over 200 games to rate, I want every player to have a reasonable chance to finish my game before their attention wanes.

Technology

One of the first tests of the platforming working

Sticking with the now familiar Flixel libraries meant little time futzing around with tech. I used some of my pre-baked  platforming functions and a set of dialog classes I’d been working on. I was reasonably happy with my starting codebase and it’s starting to show that I’m slowly building up my own set of classes and functions which make new projects start a lot smoother.

The hardest tech piece this weekend was figuring how to copy the Flixel buffer for the blur effect when you enter battle! I thought for sure I was going to have to drop this feature. I wasn’t willing to invest more than an hour figuring out so I was glad when I did.

Art:
Clearly art was not my priority this time around. However I am pleased with how I worked with the limitation on time and talent. I kept the palette greyscale with the only colour being flashes to convey information during battle. The art was minimalistic but stylized. I played with the screen shake and blurs to add to the surreal atmosphere.

Pressure:

End of Saturday Progress

My scope was ambitious. Had things not have worked out as smoothly it’s clear I wouldn’t have had a submittable game by the deadline. But I would have been ok with that since the prototyping exercise would have been valuable nonetheless.

I felt more pressure than I did during LD #17 and spent a few more hours in development. But the pressure was manageable and I was able to produce a deeper game by pushing the scope a bit.

Overall:

I got to do a lot of new things this weekend:

• Build a platformer with levels made in Ogmo
• Build an RPG battle system
• Use text written by my better half

Abarrane came together a lot better than I was expecting. I was able to explore some really dark themes and have a lot of fun doing it.

P.S.

The Significant Other Factor
Melinda won fiancee of the year this weekend with all her support. She kept me fed. She kept the house clean. She provided feedback and emotional support. She even provided ALL of the enemy name, enemy special attack and random battle dialog text! On Saturday morning I mused “Hey if you want to help, start coming up with some enemies that you’d encounter as well as their special attack”. A couple of hours later I was handed an Excel doc formatted perfectly for a .CSV export full of excellent content.

Abarrane has 49 lines of random battle colour commentary and 67 enemies all with unique attacks. All of this was thanks to Melinda.

Lastly word about my game in till post comp, at which time I’ll start updating it with versions I’m working on, I finally got the timelapse up, I made the mistake of lapsing each day in a different file, so I lost quality when windows movie maker put them together

Click Here! 😀

I’ve always wanted to make a game using the “groundhog’s day” concept, similar to Majora’s Mask, Level Up!, and Pikmin to some extent. I have a love-hate relationship with time-pressure games, but it’s so rewarding to finally understand what’s going on in the game’s world and figure out how to manipulate it.

I had a lot of fun making this one. It doesn’t necessarily have the greatest gameplay, but it’s really the story and level design that counts in this type of game. Since the theme was discovery, I decided to make it purely about information seeking- each time you try, you should learn something new that’ll help you the next time. I tried something different this time and planned out the entire game beforehand, complete with a map and a rough description of the natural progression of the game. I felt that this really helped, since I had time to come up with a ton of ideas, and then once I started coding I just followed what I had already laid out.

This was my 3rd 48hr design competition, and I still fell into the trap of planning more than I could ever finish in that time. I had hoped to get this done after the first 24 hrs so I could have more time to study for my finals, but after the first day it was apparent that it wasn’t going to happen. I actually didn’t even have a working build until an hour before submission.

I can’t stress enough how important it is to have someone else play your game after the first day, or whenever it’s playable. For me, it was a sort of sanity check- it really helped to have a fresh set of ideas tell me what was broken, and what just didn’t make sense.

Play it here!

Also, check out my Timelapse!

With each Ludum Dare, I am progressively more blown away by what people can do in a couple days.  There are so many cool game concepts.  I’m really fried for the first couple days after the compo, so I don’t get on and rate games right away, but just from the little perusing I’ve done, there are a lot of amazing entries.  I’ll be back to rate and comment once I can see straight.

For people who like this kind of thing, I tried to keep it light-hearted.  It’s got a stellar cast, a decent script, and a happy ending.

Enjoy!

Tags: Dark Acre, Jack Nilssen, LD19, ld48, timelapse

I decided to put a timelapse together this time! And even better, you can play your favourite music alongside it, by which I mean I didn’t edit it. I’ll figure out how next time, I suppose. So here’s the Spacebrick Timelapse

It turns out I played a lot of Blight of the Immortals, especially early on.

On to the game – Spacebrick (which you can play and vote for HERE)

I really enjoyed making this game and got feedback at quite a few points – meaning I heard “It’s hard to control” or “I don’t know what to do” quite a bit. Eventually I ditched any sort of realistic physics. It’s curious to note that I actually went for realistic physics at any point when making a game about a rocket powered brick in space.

I’m actually not too happy with the music. I managed to take a few hours out to write and record some piano music, but in the rush I didn’t really make something that fitted the game. The first part seemed to fit the “space” part well enough, but later I was just playing whatever I came up with and it didn’t work so well.

The graphics did turn out pretty nicely, especially the recoloured planets. You may be less impressed with any skill you thought may have been in the enemy graphics if you saw in the timelapse that I quickly made a fighter, smoothed it, clicked “auto-unwrap” and scribbled something on the texture, whereas my last game was a purple mess, this looks quite nice

Oh and it turns out the upgrade curve is 100% broken.

I may not have coded a win condition, but I can safely say this is winning the game.

Anyway, I had a great time this Ludum Dare, especially chatting with other devs in the IRC channel. See you all next time!

Tags: ante-mortem (my game isn't dead D:), timelapse

I really enjoyed making Autoflotilla for Ludum Dare 19. It’s quite different from anything I’ve ever made before, but the project appeals to me very strongly. I’ve decided to release a post-competition version. What I would like to do is give it a bit more polish and develop the game’s atmosphere. I want to avoid making it more complicated or making it feel cluttered, however, so I’ll try to use a light touch when making additions.

A friend of mine will be contributing some ambient sound to the game.

Other additions will include:

• a curved, rather than flat seascape
• some light regional variations- for instance islands in one area might be shaped differently
• a few visual extras, such as flying creatures
• a few unique landmarks
• looping edges (Asteroids-style toroidal)

Can’t wait for Ludum Dare 20 now! I’ve played around 10 games so far but I want to play them all thoroughly enough to rate them, some awesome ones around. I’ve reduced the size of my entry by compressing a wav file to an ogg (From 150Mb to 20Mb). Just make it easier to download and play. Here’s a link to my entry and my blog too.

I’ve decided to make  a timelapse video too to see what it was like during development! Pretty cool.

Also i made a little qwerky video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gl-66LyOjlc

Thanks very much!

Kyle.

Tags: bear, timelapse

Well, Ludum dare 19 is over and the game is over. The final name is Discover the name (never changed it to discover the way).

I started the game with not too much time for the compo and I released a unpolished and unbalanced version but I already read some good comments for the game. For the jam, with a friend, we improved it a bit, because we felt the game worth the time, so people could play a better game.

In the end, there are three versions of the game, the competition version, the jam version and the latest stable development version. If we think the game has to be continued, the last one is the version that will be modified.

I have also added a timelapse video for the game (had to remove the gameplay video from the game page because I lack of links in the form).

Remember, you could also go to our blog to see more games and stuff.

Now, a mini postmortem:

What went wrong:

• Game idea came on sunday, miss one day of development, cant force imagination
• Competition version is not balanced it right
• Level editor is hidden and not explained
• Few levels

What went right:

• Made a level editor provided an easy way to make a lot of levels, but… (last point on previous list)
• Movement feels right, a bit to sensitive, but based on a right idea
• Webstart platform, really really like to have an online available to all version from the beginning, to test, get feedback, etc.

Well, I cant think more pros and cons.

Enjoy the game.

Tags: compo, final, postmortem, progress, timelapse, update

I’ve spent a lot of time doing game development, but I almost never release stuff. Always base code, game logic, and abandon. So going in I had a bit of a fear of not finishing LD.

Looking at it now, I can safely say LD has been the single most educational thing I’ve done in my entire life as far as game development goes.

Its so easy to fall into the trap of scope creep, or to say “Oh, I can’t work on this yet! I don’t have graphics from the artist!”. But when time is tight and you ARE the artist, it’s easier to start looking at solutions instead of problems; and it’s that line of thinking that keeps you moving.

I’m really looking forward to the next LD. In the mean time, maybe I’ll actually finish some of my other projects for a change of pace.

Obligatory timelapse:

I’m currently adding more areas, after which I’ll start implementing monsters and traps specific to those areas. I also implemented some monster ‘types’ or ‘elements’, as indicated by the fire skeleton up there!

Hey guys I made a timelapse!

Here is my timelapse

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6LQBMw-wZE

It’s been an educational LD for me.

Here are a few of the things that I learned:

• I can’t stand developing more bland action games
• I am okay with developing something that is not difficult to play, even if it doesn’t have any sort of combat
• I spend loads of time on making sprites for enemies. Comparing the time I’ve spent spriting characters for Evening to the time I spent spriting characters for Little Ninja really highlights that for me
• It is more important to have a game than a thing with sound. That’s a tough one for me, but it is something that I have to learn.
• I should come here with some codebase prepared. It wouldn’t be much, but it would let me get to making the actual game much faster.
• It can still be LD if I’m in the jam, it’s just a more laid-back LD. I got it in my head not long before LD that the jam just somehow wasn’t LD (Whatever that actually meant), and denied myself a laid-back, social experience. Next time, the jam’s the plan, and the compo’s an optimistic outcome.
• It’s okay to only have one playable character, and it’s a huge time-saver. Even though I seem fixated on having spear/distaff in my games, it’s not needed for everything.
• I understand now that I have a fascination with female leads in my games. That’s not something for me to “conquer”, but something for me to simply break from now and then.

I also gained a few other things over the weekend.

Yesterday I received a DSi-XL as an “early Christmas present”. “Christmas present” meaning “thing that my mum bought for me with the money I was receiving from my relatives for Christmas”. We aren’t really big on holidays in my family, so the practical idea of just getting the thing when she already had the money and was shopping anyway, then just give it to me when we got it because having it and waiting for it is the sort of holiday tradition my parent aren’t huge on.

The DSi-XL, for those who don’t know (And I’m sure there are those) is a DSi (DS with front and back cameras that can download software from the “DSi Shop”) with very big screens. It also comes with Flipnote Studio. And on top of that, a big pen-style stylus (In addition to the normal DSi stylus)

I will probably be using Flipnote Studio to make mockups of things from here on, and I will probably start posting those mockups once I get good at making them.

I also gained a tiny bit of understanding in what Jonathan Blow calls “exploration design”. When designing Evening, I originally intended for it to be a screen-by-screen platforming challenge, but changed my mind while playing with features during early testing. Not that folks here would have seen that, as I’m sure you can guess.

Finally, I have a game idea that’s unlike things that I have done before. I really do. I’m excited about it. Something that’s actually semi-original for a change.

The post-mortem for Evening comes after the break.

Evening – Post-Mortem (Jam Version)

Summary:

Evening was originally supposed to be a low-stress run-and-jump game featuring a series of screen-long challenges leading to an ending that used the theme in a “poetic” way. What it ended up being was an incomplete but fertile prototype.

What Went Well:

• I was very deliberate in doing something that felt different than the platformers that I have made in the past, and did indeed make something that felt different to play.
• The animations for the girl were pretty good, though I still feel I could have done better.
• The art style I chose to use for the girl turned out pretty good
• I actually had something to submit for the jam!

What Went Badly

• I didn’t work nearly as hard as I could have in the last 24h that I had. I slacked off for most of that time and wound up with something that wasn’t nearly as good as it could have been
• The girl and the terrain have a visual mismatch that I felt didn’t look right. In trying to make the terrain look organic, I made it look really weird and rough.
• The graphics were incomplete, and would have added to the game immensely.
• I didn’t add in ledge-grabbing, so the “game” wound up with spots where the player would not quite make it up a jump, but could have grabbed the edge and pulled themselves up if I’d put that in. That mainly bothers me because I really wanted to put it in originally, and feel bad that I didn’t.
• The game lacked any sense of “discovery” at all. This is mainly because it was incomplete, but even the original idea was kind of lame.
• The girl’s jump animation took too long to run. I should have sped it up and maybe dropped a frame from it. It got a bit frustrating sometimes.

Overall Impressions

Evening was fun to work on, and a nice departure from Little Ninja. This game taught me that yes, I’ve been making platformers that feel fundamentally the same for a long time. Even Probe and Little Ninja feel a lot like platformers that I used to write in Python/Pygame.

Evening has some promise with a bit of tweaking, but as-is it just isn’t a real game. Still, it was game-like and I managed to get it to that point for the jam.

The controls worked fairly well, but could still use some tweaking, and some of the animations take longer than they should (Notably the pre-jump animation). Notably, I do want to separate high-jumping from crouching. As one comment playfully pointed out, you could well have the girl crawl on her hands and knees the whole time so she could jump higher. That’s weird and I don’t want that kind of behavior to give such an advantage.

Because it was an LD entry that was started with 36h left in the jam, it wasn’t very ambitious. The post-jam version will be much more interesting.

Where to Go From Here

Evening has some promise as a game provided that some things are tweaked. I fully intend to work on it and try to turn it into A Real Game.

I will add some features to it and make the level design much more complex. At the moment I’m thinking of putting in items that give new abilities along the way, and making the level design less about “go right until you win” and more about following a complex path. That means adding a vertical component to the level design, which isn’t a huge problem for me.

I will be switching from a continuous view (IE: Camera scrolls freely over the whole game world) to an area-by-area view (IE: Camera scrolls freely within set areas, and then scrolls between them when the player enters a new area)

I will probably redo my sprites for the girl, because I want her to be about 2 tiles tall. One bit of weirdness I ran into was that I couldn’t put in an overhang that was 2 tiles high, because the player would have to crouch to get into it (Her hitbox is 75 pixels tall when she is standing up) and that wouldn’t look right.

I will definitely redo the terrain. It looks really weird and I don’t like it. I will choose something that is visually simpler and actually matches the look of the game.

I have a lot of hope for Evening, and I think I can turn it into a fun game. I’ll periodically post demos as I go. (Probably not as aggressively as I was doing for Little Ninja, though…)

Peace

— Mr. Dude

Is there a way to know what people are rating my games, and is it against the rules to change the background music of my game?

Figured I’d toss my rocking little time lapse up.

Click here for the youtube vid http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kY55gj7rGhQ (can we embed here)?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kY55gj7rGhQ

If I didn’t play around so much with the editing I might have had more time for a jam entry, oh well had a blast with it.

Post-Compo build and Post-mortem to follow!

I beg every developer here to think global !

Please, WASD keys are not funny on a non qwerty keyboard ! There’s a number of games I cannot rate because I cannot play to them because of the WASD choice.

I quite don’t understand why you won’t use arrow keys instead ?

Thank you all for your understanding !

I’ve just uploaded Scarab Amazing to Kongregate:

http://www.kongregate.com/games/bernardfrancois/scarab-amazing

Within less than half an hour, it was played 97 times.

Is this the first Ludum Dare made with Unity that appears on Kongregate, or do I have to change the title of my post?

Yep, its real!

Iv posted a timelapse, a post mortem, a final submission and i am now finishing the games levels and style as i was aiming to.

Here is a picture of the first part of the game, the actual explanation of what is happening.

Intro animation sequence (scary lighting!)

And the first pass look of the first level (id say ill do one more pass after this for polish) :

Game first level

So, watch this space. I am adding the other 6 levels i cropped and the boss level.

Tags: postLD

I’ve just released a post-compo version of Q-Bers which includes the following:

-Puzzles after level 16 are not quite as difficult

-Cubes are a bit larger

-I’ve fiddled with one of the puzzle pictures and made it a bit easier, although not quite as pretty, to solve if you get it in full rotation mode.

Try it here, or checkout my original competition version here.

The time-lapse movie for Scarab Amazing is available now on YouTube:

Lots of folks in the LD community have non-qwerty keyboards, and it can be difficult for them to play some games due to some keys being far apart in one layout that were decided on a layout where they are next to each other.

I myself do what I can to use keys that are placed similarly on most keyboards.

The question I have is: Which keys are more “safe” to use in control schemes? Meaning, which keys tend to be in around the same place in most layouts?

I’d appreciate a general sense of this, as I really don’t know. I live in the US, where non-qwerty keyboards are very rare, so I really don’t have a sense of this.

Peace

— Mr. Dude

I’ve just put up a new version of my copy-and-kill top down shoot-em-up Scanno Domini. It’s a game where you encounter randomly generated enemy robots, scan them to unlock their parts, then kill them and take all their guns, shields and engines for yourself. Play it here. If you’re a judge, rate it here.

The feedback has been amazing so far – this is the first game I’ve ever finished, so it’s been a genuine surprise to hear of people enjoying it. Whether you’re judging or not, I’d love to know what you thought of it if you tried it out – leave me a comment here or at my blog (doesn’t require registration).

This version fixes a few significant bugs I didn’t have time to test during the compo – the competition version will stay as it is, of course, I’m just putting this up for anyone who wants to have fun with it. The key changes are:

• Choice of resolutions – anything up to 1920×1200. The game will remember your choice and not ask you again.
• Fixed a crash relating to being able to fire while dead. Duhhh.
• Fixed a bug preventing enemies from sensing when you shoot or touch them – they now turn to try and find you.
• Fixed a lot of erratic behaviour with the scanner – it’ll now scan all the new tech the bot has in one go.
• Fixed a problem with bot behaviour that made The Ominous Event extremely hard to recover from – they’ll wander off on their own once you’re down now.
• Fixed a bug causing some bots to spawn ‘blind’, with no vision cone. It was kind of cute, but causing problems down the line.

There is a timelapse.  Me making my game.  On the youtubes.  Go Look.    Here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5G1jvTWfZ4

After regaining some energy after that cool but exhausting weekend I finally realized that quite a lot of people don’t read the text of the tutorial and therefore don’t get all options how to play the level. We all have to vote for about 250 games so there is no time for a tutorial….and to be honest I would skip it as well! 😀 Nevertheless that prevents people from knowing that you can change planet- and orbit-size as well which is actually the most important part…

To make it a bit clearer I just made my very first screencast… ;D so have a look

How to survive Level 2

http://kennymalac.wordpress.com/category/game-dev/

I’m going to be finishing my unfinished game as a personal project. If you want to follow my progress, please finish the link above.

Thanks to information provided by bernardfrancois (thank you!), I have released my Unity game competiton entry on Kongregate.

It is kinda like Marble Madness played mostly on ledges in the darkness.

You can try it here:
http://www.kongregate.com/games/Dogstar669/in-the-darkness-i-shall-fall

*** I have fixed the problem with the jerkiness in the web edition. Please don’t review for this compo on the version submitted to Kongregate as I have published some fixes and tweeks to levels on there. The windows version is the one to review.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yrLjvmn8lEw

This is a time lapse of me and my friend participating in the jam. We got 4 perspectives, a video of each person as well as their screens. Enjoy!

Happy voting and commenting everyone.
Have a great holiday season and I hope to see a bunch of you at GDC in February.

Tags: bear

First of all, I want to quickly note that I’ve made another minor revision to the post comp version of Mothership, details can be had at my website blacktriangles.com.

As to the title of the post, I wanted to quickly jot down a second post mortem for my project, this one perhaps giving better insight into what’s really important about what happened during LD19 and why I believe my submission was a failure.

The consensus in feedback has overwhelmingly contained the sentiment that “your project had a lot of potential, it’s too bad you ran out of time.” At first I was inclined to agree with them: the failure I met was with an inability to scope my project to meet the timeline, an inability to execute on the plan, and too many features without enough polish.

I realized the truth, however, after reading a blog post I made a week before ludum dare ever started. I was talking about a platformer I was working on:

If it isn’t fun to jump and run around in a platformer you’ve already failed – regardless of the bells and whistles you tack on.

I reread that today and realized that I had failed with Mothership long before I ran out of time. Even if I were given a week, or a month, or a year, in the mindset I had while developing the game I would not have been able to compete with any other LD submission. Not only did I fail to nurture the fun in my game – I completely failed to identify it to begin with.

I am friends with a very talented designer who worked at Bungie back in the Myth days and while describing to him an idea I had for a game he asked me a simple question that stopped me cold.

“What verbs describe your game?” The question made no sense to me, he elaborated, “What do players do, list out the verbs.” They… move? They fight? They explore… I went on for several minutes before he stopped me again: “Pick one, make it fun. That’s the best way to make a game.”

The reason I thought of making Mothership in the first place was because the original verb for the game in my head was “exploration”. The fun wasn’t in collecting the materials, or even repairing the mothership, it certainly wasn’t supposed to be a crappy FPS. It was supposed to be about landing on an alien planet and seeing something new each time you played the game.

If stepping off the mothership onto the planet didn’t make you feel excited, if you weren’t anxious to see what was around the corner, or felt a sense of discovery – I have failed. I admit, that’s a tall order for two days! No wonder I didn’t pull it off!

Luckily, failure in games is really just an excuse to start a new iterative phase. Each milestone is a starting point as well as a finish line. I have already outlined a few items that I believe will help bring out the fun in my original idea. Wish me luck, and thanks for your feedback, without your insight I would never have gotten this far, nor understood how far I still have to go.

Hi everybody,

I thought I’d share some of my experiences from LD19 creating “Caves of Darkness”, what went wrong, what went right and so on…

What went right:

1. Design – for the first time ever, I thought of a game idea, and implemented all the necessary game mechanics! Here is an early sketch from the morning of the competition:

Those of you who played the game (And if you didn’t – please do it now! ) will note that the game and the sketch are pretty close, something I consider a success.

2. Graphics – I think the graphic style of the game went very well, I worked quite a bit on the lighting effects as they are a major part of the gameplay mechanics, and I think the result is decent!

3. Sound – although the music is not exactly as I wanted it to be (I wanted it to be a bit darker, and mellower) – I think it is not bad after all, and suits the game well.

4. Levels – another first for me – my code base actually supports adding new levels easily, loading them and the game elements from file. This is a HUGE step forward for me, as I really think this makes this thing a GAME and not just a sketch.

What went wrong:

1. Controls – a common problem I have on all of my LD entries – controls are a bit twitchy. Fine tuning the parameters is hard, and because it is based on a simple “physics” engine, it makes it even harder. I think this should be the main thing to rewrite towards next LD competition (or in general, for that matter).

2. Game Elements – this is probably because of lack of time, but I really wanted to have more gameplay elements – moving platforms, collapsing floors and more – maybe for the next LD I will be able to make those happen, now that the code-base is growing.

Overall, I’m pretty happy with the result, and I had lots of fun participating.

So thanks, and if you haven’t played my game already – go, now! and vote!

Thanks,
Daniel

Tags: postmortem

Well, had some time to think over what I did right and wrong for my first participation in LD, or any game making sprint for that matter.

The good :

• I ended up with something playable. Sure, it lacks a lot of stuff, but considering I had to pretty much give up on more than half of the 48 hours thanks to “life”, it’s still a good thing.
• I managed to learn pyGame. I had sort of glanced over the docs before, but getting down to programming with it really is the best way to truly learn how to use it.
• I didn’t spend a single second fixing ‘code’ problems. That’s thanks to Python, but anyway the only bugs I had were logical ones, and not some weird case of the code behaving in strange ways. That was refreshing.
• I had loads of fun, which I see as an important point, that means I’d do it again.

The bad :

• I tackled problems in the wrong order. I spent a huge amount of time trying to fix my lighting system, and still didn’t get it right on time for the submission deadline. As I was making a platformer, I should have concentrated on getting a platformer first, and then add the light stuff.
• In relation to the previous point, I spent way too much time on a single problem. And by not changing and working on something else, I kept trying to push in the wrong direction. Case in point : on monday, I fixed my lighting problems in about 20 minutes, because my mind was clear and I could see the solution I’d missed (hint : I was trying to determine what areas were lit, I ended up computing the shaded parts instead…).
• I didn’t allocate time for packaging. I figured that Python and pyGame being cross-platform, it would work out, but I should have spent some time to properly package for MacOSX users and Windows users. I’m going to fix that as soon as I have some time, though.

So there you go, all in all I’m proud of myself, and I’ll be sure to continue working on the game. I think it has some potential, even if it’s very crude and barebones at the moment. I’ll post updates on my blog, so go there if you’re interested.

Thanks to those who provided feedback, it’s really helpful! And stay tuned for proper exe and app executables in the next few days (busy packing as I’m going to Canada on friday, but I’ll find some time…).

Following on from my first post mortem… I’ve uploaded pictures of the notes that I took throughout the comp.

Tags: deskphoto, journal, post-mortem

I was pretty happy with how things went over the weekend, however I did do a number of bugfixes in the days since then (a game-breaking lightbeam glitch, added ‘up’ as jump, changed the position of a couple of blocks to remove some shortcuts, and changed the circumstances under which a particular help message would appear), and I had just thrown them up in the same place. I felt VERY BAD about that today, so I went and managed to find a copy of the sunday night version and put that up as a download as well, with the web one marked as a ‘bugfix’ version.

So, if you want the true, authentic, 48 hour experience, then go to that one

Here is my timelapse video. Unfortunately run out of time to figure out how to edit it and append the gameplay video.
Maybe I will work it out for next time.
Video here

Tags: timelapse

Can anyone recommend 3 or 4 downloadable compo games that I shouldn’t miss?

I’ve only tried Flash and Unity games so far but would love to try the best of the best of the native executables.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 22nd, 2010 at 1:09 pm 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’ve just fixed a rather peculiar bug that I didn’t catch as my main dev machine is 64bit Linux, and my Windows build laptop was running 64bit Windows too… seems that my timers are a bit iffy as under both 32bit Linux and Windows, the game runs at double the speed! Well, technically, it’s the 64bit versions which are running at half speed, but as I wasn’t aware, I tuned the game for this speed.

Seems that being lazy and depending on SDL_gfx’s FPSManager wasn’t wise.. I’m assuming it relies on the size of an int since SDL_Timers are unsigned ints – which is obviously different across 64bit and 32bit architectures. Though it’s my own fault for not testing in the first place!
Granted, it was done in seven hours, and I guess these can be considered “ports” to 32bit platforms as the only change was a modifier to the infection countdown to double it’s response time.

The original one has now been marked for 64bit platforms, and a 32bit version uploaded on the Germies entry page, here.

Speaking of those seven hours, here’s the postmortem after the jump.

Most of the weekend was spent trying to get my original project up and running – a platform-puzzle game whereby you had to run and jump around platforms, absorb objects to gain “powers” and use these powers to collect bits of your ship; which had crashed on this planet and scattered bits of itself all over the place.
I was borrowing an engine for the weekend with the premise of adding a prototyping layer on top of it. Thereby breaking one of the rather fundamental “unwritten rules” of LD – the code you’re going to write in the weekend is generally going to be thrown away, as it should be specific purpose rather than general purpose. You’re coding a game in 48-72 hours, so you don’t generally have the time to cover all bases with your code!

Day One:
To be honest, the first day went reasonably well for the most part, as I did get a lot of the wrapping done. It wasn’t till I started abstracting things out to Lua that it all went decidedly pear shaped as the system didn’t quite support what I was up to.
As it’s not my own personal engine, hacking it in wasn’t really an option; so I tried to do it properly.
Fail.
I haven’t really done much Lua – engine binding in particular – for a while now, and it showed as I had forgotten what the engine was actually doing, and got a bit lost. It didn’t help that I had also forgotten to grab the book that effectively has a rundown of several binding mechanisms in it and is an invaluable reference for what I was up to ( that book being Game Programming Gems 6, by the way.)
However, when I eventually headed off to sleep on Day One, I did have something implemented which I thought was working.

Day Two:
After thinking Day One had gone reasonably well, I started expanding into the Lua side of things. This was where I was going to do all the game logic as per usual. So I started getting the framework setup Lua side with the binds I had done yesterday; noting down any extra stuff I would need later on.
Then I realised what a pig’s ear I had made of the changes I had done to the engine… the way I was binding things was total nonsense.
What I was trying to add, was the ability to bind the C++ objects as meta tables. This would effectively allow the engine’s bound class to act as the “virtual” interface, and I could extend it Lua side if need be. Except… I hadn’t done that, and had bound it out as a generic table, and forgotten to bind the user data pointer to it so that Lua understood what it was.
I then spent literally the rest of the day faffing about in the binding mechanisms trying to get it to work right, with a notepad tracking the stack state at each point. In the evening I decided to stop, have a bath, relax a bit, and get some sleep; thinking that coming at it with a fresh mind in the morning would be best.

Day Three:
Unfortunately, this wasn’t to be, as I spent till lunch time banging my head off the wall as Lua politely told me that I was referencing any one of a table, a string, a bad self on a table, or a user data pointer.

So, the worst had happened.. I had forgotten much of my Lua knowledge, buggered up the engine, and didn’t really have anything that worked. Although I had managed to get enough bound to open up a window from Lua, that wasn’t really going to cut it!

After a long walk and some lunch, I decided to plump for Plan B – do it from scratch.
This was particularly insane considering at this point there was only about ten hours left of the Jam, and all I had was some concept doodles I had done a couple hours after the theme was announced.
I scrabbled around for a quick design, and based it on an old puzzle game I’ve had the idea to do for a while.

A few hours later, I had a basic game loop, with stuff being drawn, tiling, selecting, etc.. but no real logic.
Few more hours and the game itself was essentially done, and just needed some testing and sound effects.
In the last hour, I added the sound effects, quickly ported it to Windows, and fought with my FTP server a bit in uploading it – but I did infact submit it before the deadline ( and before the hour’s grace period started! )

Conclusions:
It makes me wonder how it would’ve ended up if I had done Germies from the start, rather than being perhaps a bit too ambitious with my plans. If I had remembered my books, I may have got my initial problems sorted quickly and produced a completely different game, but then would I have fallen into a trap elsewhere?

It’s interesting, as mostly I come into LD with some base code or engine stuff, and most of my time really is spent hacking around that to get it to do what I need it to do, rather than just writing logic code. This weekend was no exception, just that the engine was bigger and more complex, and used for more than just for silly little things that I do.
Yet, I managed to do something from scratch, with no base code whatsoever outside of stock SDL libraries, in just seven hours, which is probably more stable and playable than my previous efforts have been.

So there’s a topic of discussion, do engines actually help in Ludum Dare? or do you spend more time hacking around and squeezing your game constructs into patterns the engine will understand, rather than writing your actual game logic?

Perhaps the sweet spot is actually maintaining a prototyping engine/layer that’s in reasonable constant use, so that when a main Ludum Dare or other prototyping opportunity comes around, you’re used to what it’s doing and how it works, rather than having to waste considerable time remembering how it works; or worse yet, forcing it to do what you need.

I suppose, even if my submitted game has very tangible links to the “Discovery” theme, from a personal programmer perspective, this weekend’s certainly been an eye opening discovery in itself.

Hi all,

As a first part of my postmortem I just wanted to tell you about a language we used with two of my friends (ben & deepnight) during the competition : haXe.

The language itself is easy to learn and has many powerful features that make it a strong one. (link to doc)

It features a very complete API and multiplaftorm target. with the same language, using the same API, you can generate swf files, javascript code, C++ code, PHP code, C# and java coming soon.

Extending the language is pretty easy, so you can use your favorites game API (sdl for instance). And you can target specific platforms like android or iphone. Which means that with a single codebase you can quite make a game works on several platform…

So all the javascript I created has been generated with haxe. And the flash games of my friends too. We’ve been using the language for a few years now at motion-twin and it has enabled us to code fast, easy and switch platform whenever we wanted.

Of course, you can use the language on windows, linux or MacOSX (intel), the generated content will be the same.

So to finish this first post-mortem, I can tell you that having a strong typed language helped  me create my javascript project without worrying  too much. No js nightmare debugging at all !

Last but not least, it’free  and open source That was my fifty cent to rapid development 😉 (not a commercial, just my tribute to one of my favorites language, that’s all )

For those who are interested:

Jack’s Ludum Dare 19 Post-Mortem

Yeah, you gotta click that.

Tags: post-mortem

Here is my timelapse:

I was going to add a titlescreen and a gameplayvideo at the end but crappy software stopped me(i should probably go and buy/download premiere as that is the only video software that I’ve used that didn’t suck). I also used youtube audioswap to add some music so that it doesn’t feel like your computer hangs at  hanged when nothing happens.

So I guess my post mortem is don’t look or try to sort your funny pictures collection during ludum dare

Tags: final post mortem, timelapse

Every person has his own personality according to which it do likes and dislikes the things

so what is your favorite game that you want to play

poker

chess

football

etc

Hello again.

Well, that was fun, wasn’t it? My friend Kieran and I, under the name Surprised Man, entered the Game Jam and produced The Wager, a game all about exploring a randomly generated map of islands and returning to dock with information about what you find on them to sell onto prospective colonists. We’re really pleased with what we put together for the 72 hours and plan on getting a lot more content into the game that we just didn’t have time to include in this release. I mean, who wouldn’t be pleased with a game with an island name generator that gives such names as:

I hope you like our game, we worked very hard on it, enjoyed the whole process and look forward to adding more loot, unique encounters and other such things in the near future!

Tags: ld #19

The competition has passed and voting is underway, and I can think clearly again. This 19th Ludum Dare was my first competition of its kind, and I must say I enjoyed it very much.

Timelapse on Youtube (didn’t get it to embed, somehow)

My thoughts are after the break.

When starting the competition and throughout the first day, I had a pretty good feeling about what I was doing and the ideas I had. It seemed doable in the time given, and the engine came along well. I started out with some placeholder graphics, programmed movement, camera and map pretty much the way they made it into the final game and I felt pretty good about it. I had working upgrades and resource collection to pay for those upgrades. Again, not much different from the final product. I took frequent breaks, ate somewhat well and had fun checking out the competition and reading what people were writing in IRC.

However, during the second day, I was suffering from tiredness and felt more and more panic while I discovered that the last 10% are indeed more like the last 90%. After starting out with programming in pickups and a message dialog that I could use for progressing the story, I did a lot of work on the assets of the game and made the gameplay feel more comfortable.

The reason for this was mostly my dwindling concentration. Creating graphics, putting in sounds and making the game as a whole look better was much more relaxing than actually working on story progression or combat. Thus, I really came short on providing actual content and some story. Instead of the multiple endings I was planning, I could barely manage to fit in a single one. enemies shooting at you, and you shooting back, along with the implied upgrades, also didn’t make it. The game works fine peacefully as it is, but the red aliens, supposed to be somewhat of a warrior race now look kind of stupid just moving close to the player and stopping.

So what have I learned?

Obviously, releasing a somewhat decent game within 48 hours is doable, but you have to make some cuts. For me, that probably means next time I’ll try to get as much gameplay and actual content done during the first half of the competition. After that, I guess it would be polishing and if necessary balancing a few things, and at long last adding sound and better graphics — if the time permits it.

I was definitely lucky that my engine supported most of the things I was trying to do. I hardly had to write anything very complicated. And I actually found a few minor bugs in my base code that I could fix on the way.

I’ll also have to find out how to release the game in a stand-alone way, since some people seem to be having problems with the applet.

Either way, I’ll probably keep working on the game after christmas since I do like the idea and can think of a few ways to improve upon it.

Tags: postmortem, timelapse

For those of you wondering what I have in store for Dodge and Collect! or what my original intentions were for this game, take a seat because I’ll explain now.

Originally, you where going to have a level select menu that looked like a planet map, with your station station/HQ hovering above an Earth like planet. You would then click on a planet and you would travel there and start the mission, which was to dodge asteroids, space junk and even alien ships to collect the artifact, when you did so it would be sent back to your HQ, and was used to upgrade its systems, so you would be able to fly further (Basically unlock more levels) each level would vary in difficultly, and some levels would not have artifacts, but fake ones that did nothing. Planets you where unable to reach would not appear (Or be gray ) in till your station’s sensors could reach that far. Without all of the HUD or display options, it could have looked something like this.

As for the story? Your piloted a prototype ship called C.O.W 142 its is an intelligent space ship that connects with the station, relaying information and sending objects back to the station, which it self is sentient. The hope was while you, the best pilot in the space force, was testing out the ship, they would be able to find a planet suitable for colonization, but having to do it on a bunch they asked you to scavenge the galaxy for parts to improve your station and the likes.

Something I thought of after the contest began and would like to add is a side scrolling part, where you would go down to the planet and possibly rid of aliens or something, allowing it to be colonized. Once it was colonized your station would be moved to space above that planet, allowing a change in the planet map to take place, and more planets unlocked.

Well, I will continue and hopefully work up to something like this, need to smooth out some of the glitches in the game currently, then I will start the planet map, wish me luck!

I’ve been playing the games like there’s no tommorow since the compo ended and I found some really interesting stuff. Some are better, some are worse, some are prettier and yada yada, but I like to see myself dragged in some of the entries up to the finish! I am a bit dissapointed that so many games still lack sound / music. It’s better with sound thaks to DrPetter’s sfxr, but music is a scarce. Maybe a tool for that one would be useful aswell? Well, I probably won’t have much spare time after christmas, so I’m going back to playing before my brains bleeds out.

Also, [by looking at the games] I suppose that a proper sh*tgame is sometimes better than an unfinished materpiece.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 22nd, 2010 at 6:19 pm 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’ve been continuing to add new features and secrets to my game after the Jam version. For those of you who are fans, I encourage you to check out the latest version here.

http://sarah.draknek.org/Games/CompactDiscovery/MostRecent/

I will be using this link to host the newest versions of Compact Discovery until the end of the competition judging. After that I’ll be merging the original LD submission with the newer copy.

I went to go check up on comments for my game, to find that my entry disappeared. Wonderful! Anyone have any ideas on how to fix this?

So, Im attempting to do a review of every single game that I possibly can, and Ive dont 39 so far.

You can read them in the mean time, and I will keep this post up to date (as much as I can) and in the end I will list which games are in which post.

1 to 10

11 to 20

21 to 30

31 to 40

My first ludum dare, my first post mortem. What an amazing experience this was! I had an absolute blast and can’t wait to do this again, though it might be a while before I’ll be able to find the free time. Also wanted to say that I love all your feedback. Thanks for trying my game and leaving comments.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-19/?action=preview&uid=2925

What went right:

I made a game! – About 10 work hours in, I realized that if it wasn’t for the competition, this was precisely the moment when I’d normally stop on a hobby project and leave it unfinished forever. I am so glad for the external pressure. Thanks, Grandmaster Ludum Dare!

20×20 and the 1 screen game – I am a programmer, no arguing it. This means I’m not an artist. Limiting my assets to teeny pixels really helped keep those limitations from being the focal point of the game. Not to mention I saved sooooo much time by not having to deal with mechanics like paging, scrolling and camera.

Design Up Front – I’d decided that I was going to spend two hours designing on paper before I wrote any code. This was tremendous. I managed to go through several crappy designs

No Level Design – I’m a huge fan of Lost Garden. If you’ve never read it, it’s one of the best design blogs I know of. Anyway, I’ve really been convinced to push for ‘evergreen design’, that is, design that can be played forever, not driven by ‘once through’ content. Besides, I’m not a very good level designer. It was really hard to shut off all the possibilities of level based games from my design thinking, but in the end it was worth it.

Polish Last – I tried really hard to keep myself on task and spend my effort on mechanical completeness more than anything else. Probably 75% of my polish came in the last hour of the competition. I’m pretty sure that if I’d tried to polish each mechanic and feature I’d have never finished at all.

Making lists – Each night I would make lists of all the features I needed to implement next. This really helped me keep priorities focused and not to go down the rabbit hole on anything.

Lucky Tuning – I am so lucky my game is playable. The tuning was all guesswork and I didn’t even get to play it more than 2 minutes before submitting. It’s actually not bad!

Skip Audio – Yes it’s nice, but a playable game seems nicer.

What went wrong:

Time – I had planned to only work about 20 hours in this competition. I have a family and also my sister and brother-in-law were in from out of town, so I was expecting fairly limited constraints. That being said, I had even less time than that. By the end of the first day, my game wasn’t even mechanically complete and I was feeling pretty low. The last day I slept in accidentally and only managed to get 3 hours in between everything that was going on

Last Minute Purpose– Even with my design up front, I still had no idea what the purpose of the game was until the last hour. Discover the green planets is what I came up with. Funny that I didn’t think of a goal related to discovering until the end. I tend to get a bit ‘mechanics focused’ as a designer. This was very risky.

Shops are so complicated – I went through three iterations on the architecture for my in-game store before finally getting it right. It was terrifying and took up at least a third of the total competition. The end result was the ability to arbitrarily upgrade statistics on the player object, but it took way too much time to get there.

Chopping Block – Some things didn’t happen. Pink planets are completely pointless, which is so frustrating because they are huge and at the fringe of the galaxy and you just want them to be awesome.  Lots of stuff just didn’t make it.

Lack of feedback – Every time I watch someone play my game I cringe a little. They understand the game, but there’s just not enough feedback to keep them from making silly mistakes or getting stuck unnecessarily. The vast majority of the feedback that’s there went in during the last 20 minutes of the competition.

Need more Engine – This was my first time ever working with HTML5 and canvas. I spent about 3 days building up some really basic example code for drawing things, handling input and preloading images. Wow I really wish I had spent more time building up a library for this. Particularly for UI elements like text controls, popup windows, etc. I sunk so much time making quick hacky versions of what was essentially library code that could have been spent on the game instead. Next time I’ll be more prepared.

What’s Next:

There’s so much more I could do to make this game awesome. Here are some of my plans:

Better UI – More than anything else, the game just needs better feedback. Tell you when you’re running out of fuel or armor more clearly, show tooltips on all the things in the world, give you enemy stats before you get in a fight, tell you the resources a planet has to offer, better rollover highlighting. Infinite time can go here.

The Money Game – Credits should only drop from enemy ships and never from planets, changing the money game dramatically and giving you more reasons to hunt down enemies and fight.

Resource Distribution – Create variations of the green planets that drop different resources instead of all planets dropping all resources. I want you to have to hunt for the resource you want to get the upgrade you’re targeting

Tuning – The resource tuning is probably a bit high, especially around the edges of the galaxy

Audio – Learn how to do audio in HTML5 and add audio to the game.

This is a message from the ministry of love and sexual affairs.

I just received my LD Gift Exchange gift today. It’s a Glasgowbury 2010 music festival programme on a lanyard.

The programme has five parts, for all the different stages at the festival. “Small But Massive Main Stage” in dark red, “G Sessions Stage” in bright red, “Spurs of Rock Stage” in pink, “Eagle’s Rock Stage” in orange, and “G Spot Stage” in yellow. The backsides are all black, with the venue logo and the slogan “Small But Massive” in white. Some of the listed bands include names like “Panama Kings”, “Team Fresh”, “Little Hooks”, and “Henrietta Game”.

The lanyard is 90cm long, black and has the venue logo as well as the words “red square” in white.

The accompanying letter written by gift-giver Grieve has nice lines to write on, and a pink margin line on the left. It also has holes for easy storage in a binder.

Tags: ldgift

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 23rd, 2010 at 8:34 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.

more goodies

woo thankyou, mystery santa!

Tags: ldgift

My timelapse video for Q-Bers is up. In it you’ll see my kids working on computers too (actually they are playing games).

Tags: ld #19, timelapse

I’ve managed to plow through and rate 40 games most of them today. I’ve got a headache of gaming joy now =)

…Time to stop for a bit I think. Atleast until after I have some edibles ;P

Previously, i posted #1 over here

Iv posted a timelapse, a post mortem, a final submission and i am now finishing the games levels and style as i was aiming to.

Pass 2 level image

Pass 2 level

More information soon 😉

So I finally managed to edit up the timelapse video. I wanted to make an audio comment and actually had two tries on that. But as my voice sounds face-punchingly dull and boring, I decided against it, ending up just adding some royalty free music I found by searching the net.

So click here to see my timelapse.

Maybe.

I wanted to easily access a list of games that were available to be played on Linux. So I wrote this userscript at the behest of LegacyCrono in #ludumdare.

You need Firefox and Greasemonkey for this.

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/93455

When you visit this page, it will be … better.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-19/?action=misc_links

And you can trust this script doesn’t just vote up my game because I failed to submit one… again :\

or, A Million Ways to Ruin a Good Idea

nice pants, shorty

Last Things First – The Conclusion

This game (“Lost Races’ Abandoned Artifact Recovery“) failed. It is not fun (actually rather boring). It fits the theme, but not in the way I wanted. It does not transmit the information intended. It is not very funny, either.

In short, the game does not live up to any of the goals set. Let’s go over why.

The Concept

This is the only part of the game I am proud of, even if it is not reflected in the finished product in almost any way. You take the role of an exploring astronaut, scavenging old, abandoned machines and technologies left behind eons ago by advanced races (now extinct). This mechanic alone may have been interesting, but there is another twist: whilst you are busy discovering and cataloging these machines, another technologically-advanced race is monitoring YOUR progress.

I was struck by this model of double-discovery as a good take on the theme, and something that would probably be rather original. The game wouldn’t explicitly tell you that you are being watched, rather it would become clear as you played. (Also, if your actions arouse too much attention, you are destroyed.)

I decided to go with a mechanic that requires the player to upset a random distribution of “glowing stones”. As the player organizes stones around focal points (the artifacts), they are unwittingly making their presence known. I show this by using a minimap in the lower right-hand corner, which actually represents what the aliens see on the planet.

Daniel recommended using negative entropy as a measure of organization (defined here), which worked very well. I built a quick proof-of-concept in MATLAB. It’s like a poor-man’s pattern recognition algorithm, and Flash was able to do it reasonably quickly.

For the same number of points, entropy is reduced as they are clumped up

Another thing that spurred me forward: I don’t know of any other game in which the minimap plays a key part of the mechanic.

The Riddle

This is my fourth Ludum Dare competition. This compo marks one year since I made my first game, for LD16. If so, why, oh why, do my tilemaps look like this:

I know retro is in, but Windows 3.11???

Why? WHY WHY

The Failure

Ultimately, despite the good concept driving it, the game failed to communicate what was necessary.

The scary voices I added were ambiguous to the players. Along with the “alien” writing (Wingdings), they were meant to correspond to the interest level of the aliens, ie. how organized the playing field is. Similarly, the minimap was not recognized for what it was, and I was asked “why doesn’t the player appear on the map?”.

The graphics were very, very ugly (except maybe for the astronaut’s helmet, which I liked).

Evidently, the algorithm failed as well. Depending on the random starting layout, entropy would drop at different rates as clumpiness was achieved. Also, I couldn’t account for different player styles, so maybe clumping differently had an impact on the measurement. In any case, people could play through the game without losing and without knowing about the Overwatch aliens. To these players, it was a boring, repetitive game with no point and no reward.

Random distribution - no alien threat

After player "organizes" the stones near artifacts - high risk

To players who lost, I doubt they understood that if they redistributed stones after discovering an artifact, they could avoid the aliens’ attention.

Ironically, I thought of a great way to improve it, after the competition was over. Instead of piling stones on top of artifacts, the player should uncover them from beneath mounds of stones. This is more intuitive, and might be coupled with a physics element to provide a less “grindy” feel. Unfortunately, I don’t have time to test it out.

Dear Eli: For Next Time

• Try to make a SIMPLE game that does ONE THING and does it WELL.
• Don’t bother with forced artsy concepts that hold up an entire game. Maybe these concepts need to be built, but maybe they don’t need to be in game-format. Maybe it’s the wrong medium. Maybe.
• GOOD GRAPHICS
• If completing the game does not provide satisfaction, there needs to be something more than a title screen that says YOU WON!!! on it.

Hope I do better next time. Thank you for reading and I apologize for making another non-fun game.

By the way: if you have read this far, then YOU WON!!!

Tags: Failure, not a fun game, post-mortem, self-flagellation

In case you missed it, Phil organized a low-key gift exchange between members of the Ludum Dare community. About 20 of us signed up, Phil put all our names in to a “virtual hat”, and forwarded a contact to each of us.

To keep it interesting, everyone was assigned someone in a different country — that way, we could send locally relevant gifts to each other. So yes, somewhere out there, a very Canadian bundle should be arriving soon.

Me, I was awakened today to the sound of the door ringing. As it turns out, the mail man arrived super-early with a package for me — a HUGE laptop sized box, covered in Deutsche Post markings!

What mysteries lie inside DAS BOXEN?

Lets explore the contents of this uber gift.

First off, it’s not a Laptop (Duh ‘eh?). Instead, just a big box full of little things. There are so many things in the box, I’ve decided to break them up.

It's things, but German things! That makes them better!

A selection of goods ranging from a small business magazine for entrepreneurs, a local rag, a movies magazine, and a web and online businesses mag.

But definitely, a totally super-perfect LD appropriate gift, a beginning computer programming book in German!

Learn Pascal and Visual Basic now! Wunderbar!

Next, a selection of local tea and biscuits.

Beethoven seems a surprisingly common theme

And last, a fully illustrated comic book guide to Cologne.

And perfect for me, the virtual tourist, it's actually in English.

Next up, a selection of fliers and pamphlets… in German!

Hey neat, they do McDonalds Monopoly in Germany too! Also, KFC Germany has a chilli cheese fry... No fair!

In addition to some fliers about attending the Ballet, there's this postcard with a dog on it

That sums up our “all ages” portion of the gift — or to use a common xmas colloquialism, the “nice” portion.

* * *

Now for the “naughty“.

German Playboy, FHM, GQ, Maxim, and a Men's Health just to balance things out

Yes a whole variety of magazines were included in the package. Something for everyone.

Hey see, Netbooks! I make games for those! It really is for the articles honey! Honest!

And of course, what better way is there to show your national pride than with the local brew.

Coasters, a mini Bonn mug, a shot of Ficken, a contoured glass, and a large star filled with Beethoven Liquer

Check out this bottle…

That's a cool bottle

The card says it contains “Beethoven Liker”. Classy.

Beethoven is everywhere, even on the glass

The mini mug for the city of Bonn.

Hey I wonder if the Ficken will fit in the mug?

Success!

So a big thank you to my German “Santa Clause”. I had a lot of fun digging through and discovering all the neat things included in the gift.

Tags: ldgift

Following on from what I made in the compo, I’m going to try and build upon it’s underlying ideas and concepts. Currently, I’m experimenting with moving the core of the game over into a Unity project… slowly getting there 😀

Yep, slowly getting there :D

Currently on my check-list of things that (I think) would be awesome for the game:

• Multiple “floors”
• More use of lighting
• More interesting turrets
• Better level transitions
• Level editor (A must :P)
• Treasure 😀

Once I’ve got the basis of it working in Unity, I’ll post a test build of it and some more info about what I’m trying to get out of it 😀

Happy x-mas everyone!

Yep finally posted. I used some unliscensed music, but it was already too lowres to include on the wrapup, so I strike out on two counts. Sorry, shoot me.

Also some notes on my game, for next time I decide to participate. Also this comprises what I saw other people doing that I would like to rip:

• Flash, Flash, Flash. I need to learn it and use it, or else not many people will play it (my game). Even though I could theoretically release my entry for iPhone today, the tradeoff for lack of feedback just isn’t worth it
• Trigger Mechanics. My game is effectively a cross between mario and guitar hero for the first three levels, but the player doesn’t have quite enough agency about when the notes trigger. I could fix this by changing the sound triggers from platforms that the player stands on to switches that the player needs to throw. I was really overloading the verb “positioning”.
• Play up the cool part. I didn’t get to the cool part of the game until about 3 hours before the deadline. As such I didnt get to tune it, and it makes it not very cool. My opinion of the cool part is the player ability to reposition the area around the goombas so that you can make a goomba sequencer. It needs more messing with though, because right now the goombas really trigger too much.

Any who, here is the utoob.

Tags: postmortem, timelapse

Whew! Lots of good stuff here. Somehow I doubt I’m making it to my goal of 200, but I can aim for 150! I’m done for today because my brother needs the bandwidth for TF2.

Also, I find it highly amusing that the 32nd game I played was develop32’s.

As always, the most up to date info can be found on my webpage http://www.blacktriangles.com

I haven’t had a whole lot of time, but trying to continue incremental progress on “Mothership”, I’ve been working on creating more interesting spaces. I’ve removed combat and minerals for the time being. Neither of these are playable (unless you really want them) since I’ve stripped them of game play elements. Right now I’m focused on the areas.

First I built a new “digger-bot” algorithm that works in 3 dimensions. By tweaking some of the variables it creates these trippy space islands which are kind of neat. They aren’t fun to run around in just yet, but I think it shows some promise.

I’ve also been playing around with a more traditional “rogue-like approach” which is to build interconnected rooms.

It’s funny that these take a lot more effort to build, and I’m not convinced they’re a whole lot better in terms of either gameplay or visuals. I think the digger-bot was and is a better choice but I am not going to abandon the room-bot until I make a playable space.

I know it’s not a lot, I apologize. I should have more time coming up soon to make bigger progress.

Updated my game a bit. I added a pause function – press P – also made some tweaks to the scoring, so you don’t get a score boost when falling from the top and you get less points when sliding.
All scores were deleted as it would be a bit unfair. So get playing and get on the table while it’s empty!

ALSO NEW MUSIC. Yes, you don’t get your ears raped by my attempts – well half. The drum loop is made by me, and the epicness you can hear on multipliers x5 and x10 is made by ganon95. Big thanks to him! I hope I can get a drum loop which fits the song a bit better soon :p

So what’s still to do is the “Respawn and fall in front of a platform” problem. Lets see what I can do there.
Also someone suggested, your multiplier keeps increasing if you are on x10. Any comments on that? Good/Bad?

GO PLAY THE GAME!

Ok, finally I released the timelapse video for 2011 – Last Ride of the Discovery. I used windows video maker after trying lightworks which I could not make to load my videos!? So no cool overlays Maybe next time!

Here is the timelapse and don’t forget to have a look at the game itselfs.

Merry XMas everyone!!

PS: 248 Games is really lots of work! 😀 I’m voting like crazy and only got about 40 games (yet)! Ok still some time left!

I want to share some tought about my entry for LD19 : Land Of Fodnal

What went wrong

Scrolling constraints

I tried to implement a scrolling system where you have to select a unit to center the scroll zone. No other way to scroll map, so you have to build units to visit, and also you have to keep your units alive if you want to go back. Incidentally, if you loose one of your unit, your link to your main base is cut and you have to choose between explore back or go forth with what you have.

In theory it was ok, but in pratice the main system really look like a bug or some very bad control choice. Most of the player were trying to find key shorcuts or mouse control to scroll around, and I was not able to write a hint to describe a control you actually dont have… Ingame help is my biggest flaw, so maybe other gamedesigner could  have done much better with this.

Ingame Help

All is said, I knew I will mess up this part and I did.I hope  that many LD experiences will help me to correct my way of creating games.

Stress

The last 8 hours was a nightmare. The final 15 minutes ( didnt know about the 1 extra hour for submit ) I found a crash on the gameover sequence ! I added tons of aborigines on the map, to trigger gameover faster and have some tests. As soon as I fixed it, I uploaded my entry… with the test settings…

Really sad to see how 48h of work can be wasted for 5 minutes of overstressed debugging…

Interface

Creating game from scratch is fun. But spending hours for creating a button Class and aligning text really made me feel like I’m loosing my time. Maybe I will declare some interface libs in the next LD to stay more focus on the game creation part.

Writing post, read other people posts.

I intended to post step by step part of the game and I was totally unable to do it. Stress was eating me so much that I could not give enough attention to the LD blog, or even test the game of my friends that were working just next of my desk… Now I will catch up by testing the more game that I can ^_^

What went right

Minesweeper

Working on a minesweeper games is really entertaining .  I’m actually not a very good player at the classic game, but last year I played to the fantastic Onslaught of the Electrics Zombies and I had very good time with it. I was amazed on how the minesweeper gameplay could ignite some kind of exploration will. I also had good experience with Mamono Sweeper and Mine Tower. That’s why I tought that Minesweeper mechanic could be a good idea for the LD Discovery.

Sounds

Having to create sounds  was really exciting. In my everyday work I make webgame without sound because most of the users turn it off or even complain about it. Adding some sounds ( even just a bit ) in my LD game really feel like I’m creating a complete videogame. I was thinking it will cost me a lot of time, but it was easy and fast thanks to Sfxr. I also had a look to musagi but I was not able to make a good music ( need more pratice )

When I decided to enter this LD, my rationale was thus: My weekend is free, I’ve always enjoyed the products of LD, and I’ve only ever created a “finished” game once. My end goal wasn’t to create a polished, high-quality game, but to just finish something. Something, hopefully, that could be considered a game.

I think I succeeded, and perhaps, on the way, actually made something fun too.

If you haven’t yet, play and rate here.

What I did right:

Prepared for the possible themes: I came up with some concepts in my head for each theme, and that cut down a lot on the prep time when I found out that Discovery won.

Chose a simple, easy to implement gameplay mechanic: Tile-based world, no animations, player character is the only character that moves. That helped a lot with the engine programming, and left me plenty of time to do content. This could also be thought of as a thing I did wrong, because it meant the fun relied solely on my storytelling, which I don’t consider a strong point.

Tone down the scope of the game: My original design ideas had the player discovering who they are by the actions they take and decisions they make, with a total of 32 possible final “selves”. However, I soon realized when I got to the content part that I simply did not have the time to make such a game. I decided that it’s better to succeed with a smaller scope than fail with a large scope, and thus I mostly scrapped the existing plot ideas and went with a combination of two clichés: amnesia and aliens.

Frequent breaks and relaxation: A luxury afforded to me by my simple engine design, I kept my mind fresh by playing other games, reading the blog feed and reading a book. Having new looks on old problems is unspeakably beneficial.

What I did wrong:

Community: As evidenced by the fact that I’m only now thinking to do a post-mortem, I wasn’t as active with the community as I should have been. I didn’t supply any beta builds, I only did one in-progress post and it was very bereft of information. At least I did a timelapse and a live stream!

Lack of beta testing: Publishing a beta build would have helped a lot with getting some bugs squashed a lot quicker. I managed to kill most of them anyway, simply because I finished early. Two that are left over: The knife respawns (could be considered a feature!) and if you try really hard you can make the numpad enter more than four digits. (You have to click in-between two numbers).

Relying on writing: I’m an analytical writer, not a creative writer. The fact that the fun of my game relied on my writing skills for the interest/fun was… Well, as FireSlash put it, “…without direction I find it hard to stay interested.”

Lack of beta testing: I’m repeating this for emphasis. I found out that my game was actually pretty difficult too late to make a significant change. I’m actually pretty surprised most of the commenters have managed to beat it without any significant hint – only one of the 15 or so friends of mine who played it was able to solve the puzzle themselves. Perhaps that is why FireSlash lost interest – there was only one hint and it was rather vague.

Didn’t find out about AutoTracker-C until after the compo: I mean, hot damn.

In Conclusion..

I had a lot of fun with this, and I’ll certainly be doing it again in four months.  The most shocking thing to me so far was the amount of positive feedback I’ve had on the story in the game – I’m going to chalk it up to beginner’s luck and next time, I’ll focus more on gameplay.

A note on commenting and rating

I noticed that the thing I wanted the most as the rating period has been going on was feedback. Then I thought, other people are probably feeling the same way! So I made it my goal to play and give constructive, useful feedback by way of comments to as many games as I can. And I want you to do the same. Have fun and good luck!

I failed to finish anything at all worthwhile for Ludum Dare this time, but I did finish a game. I wanted to avoid making a game about the act of exploration because there’s already a million billion games about that, so instead I tried to focus on the fear of being discovered – the act of hiding, of obfuscating the truth from an investigating agent. The game I planned to make was like a cross between Pong and Battleships where both players tried to keep track of the ball’s location while hiding it from their opponent, but the short deadline, procrastination, and my poor technical abilities meant that I only ended up with a barely modified remake of Pong. It seems kinda ridiculous compared to some of the stuff you guys have been posting, but I’m pretty happy to have finished something more ambitious than a Wario Ware game.

Presenting: Turn-Based Pong. May or may not be more ambitious than a Wario Ware game.

Tags: Failure

I just found out how to add blog posts…bit late I know but I may as well.

So I’ve updated the collision detection mechanic in Wysp, it’s a little less bouncy now. I’m also in the process of designing more maps and thinking of new ways for players to use the phase mechanic and maybe moving platforms too!

I highly doubt these features will be implemented before judging ends though but I’d like to see this game through to completion.

I like to make platformers now and then. One thing I’ve noticed, though, is that they require a great deal of artwork. Developing Evening, I spent a solid three or four hours on just the artwork for the terrain and three or four more for sprites of the girl.

That’s time not spent on gameplay, time not spent on levels, time not spent on making it fun to play.

That’s just not good when you’re working in a 48h/72h time limit.

I’m thinking that from here I’ll probably be making less animation-intensive things. Not necessarily art-light games, but games with a lower art-to-content ratio.

Shumps come to mind, as do (very simple) strategy games. As well as puzzle games. But not platformers and certainly not fighting games.

Just some thoughts I had.

Peace

— Mr. Dude

A week late, but after a break here it is, a post-mortem and a more coherent version of my game.

Click here for the new and moderately improved version of HOMMage

My main goal for this competition was to develop social game within the 48 hours, or at least something that had the hooks for a social game.

When discovery came up as the theme I figured I’d rip off Heroes of Might and Magic, that way I wouldn’t have to focus too much time over the weekend on design, and could make this game, mostly a technological challenge…. Should be easy enough to get all these features done then eh?

Woohoo, all the design is done for me! Cake walk, right?

What I ended up with at the end of the competition was a nice start of stitched-together half-finished features. If you squint really hard, you can see the start of a HOMM style game, and I couldn’t been happier with the result. I wanted a nice little tech/scope challenge and to develop something that could transition into being a social game, this LD scratched both of those itches.

Hey, I still think it's pretty.

Positives

Goals, Planning And Scope

I had a clear vision of what I wanted for this LD, a HOMM style social game (ugh).

So I may have overshot a bit in my scope, but it broke down into simple milestones. Be able to navigate a hero around a hex map, unit management, combat other heroes, end condition for the game.

Having the design already done made the informal milestones a lot easier to place over the 48 hours. The last few game jams I’ve participated in I’ve tried to play around with exploratory gameplay and found it was even harder to wrap the jams up in time. In a lot of timelapses, and post-mortems I’m seeing a lot of the great games generally end up being the developer’s second attempt that weekend (It’s a Fricking Cave, Quarters). How do you know when to cut and run, when the funs not there, and wont be?

Timelapse

First time I’ve done a timelapse, and man was it fun. Nothing more motivating to actually get something finished for the competition then investing in recording the whole thing. Awesome fun to watch it and show it off to friends afterwards. It also goes a long way to keep you honest, you end up spending a lot less time slacking when you’ve got a camera focused on you.

The catlapse really tied it all together

Regardless of how useful or entertaining it was for anyone else, I loved it!

Choice in Tools

This is the first jam I’ve done that I’ve had experience with all of the libraries and tools I’d be using going into it. I find it so hard to apply Box2D, Flynt, or any of those fun libraries in my day to day that I figured a game jam is a great time to give this stuff a test run. And I mean it usually works okay for evaluating an engine.

On paper 48 hours is a lot of time, Ill get up to speed on whatever lib in 3 hours and It’ll be smooth sailing, this has never been my experience.

Tweenmax was a god send, simple tweens really easily took the place of more time consuming little effects (combat screen).

Community

Oddly enough I was pretty excited about my food photos, even if they were pretty mundane.

Loved reading LD posts during a competition, so many new types of technology to try out. It’s a Frickin Cave(totally have a crush on this game) makes me really want to take a look at MMF.

In previous LD’s I’ve picked up and used Musagi and SFXR, so I’m pumped to see what technologies I end up taking away from this LD 😛

The only downside to the whole community bit was that I was so swamped with my scope that I didn’t have a chance to take a look at the IRC channel or to jump onto Mumble, hoping to do that next time around.

Negatives

Unintuitive Gameplay / Ease of Play

Biggest problem with HOMMage. If you haven’t played Heroes of Might and Magic, you’re completely lost. If you have played HOMM you’re only mostly lost 😛

This really stuck out like a sore thumb, a lot of the comments I’ve gotten on the game have done a lot to echo it.  I wasn’t unaware, I realized how rough around the edges the game was, and provided a narrated play through. Ick.

Reflecting, I’m not sure if there was much I could do within the 48 hours to really lead the player along any easier, other than a detailed tutorial… I feel like this genre of game is so focused on user interface interactions that the amount of consideration it’d take to make this a pick up and play game for a casual user could not be accomplished in 48 hours.

At the very least I get to come away from this thinking a lot harder at the concept stage about how the user will interact with my systems.

Planning and Scope

I don’t know how I held any illusions that I would get this done:

“This game will be built with AS3 using PHP to make database calls.

• Finding the time to design and develop the DB structure and getting it working properly with AS3.
• Is my little tower enough of a web server to handle multiple games?
• Working with hexes and simple pathfinding.
• Simple AI in place of human players.

Initially the whole game will be single player with AI, I’m hoping thats not as far as it gets but well see how I can manage my time.”

!!!

Honestly? Anyway, even paring this down to the smallest scope that constituted as a game, it still would have been painful to polish it, let alone find time to put sound into it. Huge flop here in terms of making a game for the competition,  the sting is mildly dulled since I at least met most of my initial goals and motivations.

Art

I wanted to use my tablet for everything. Wasting time on the HUD by sketching it out on the tablet was a huge time suck. I figured even if the result was so-so, it’d give the game a little character. But no, no I was way off.

Even though the rest of the art wasn’t terribly gorgeous, I had a blast doing it, huge time suck though.

Castle Greyskull was totally worth it.

Interface Design

All things interface really kicked my butt here. “How should clicks act if the currently selected hex is ____ and the user clicks ____” trying to figure out a lot of the interactions and then implementing them consumed a ton of time that could have been spent polishing gameplay, or spent trying to make the game more intuitive.

Fun

After reflecting a bit, this stab at a HOMM style game just isn’t fun. Even the post competition version, is still just a neat tech piece and not really something people would want to play.

This really got me thinking about “fun”, and where it comes from in the HOMM series, and even in other strategy games.

Thinking about HOMM and other strategy games, you could say fun comes from the progression, building up a units, becoming a force within the system of game mechanics. Theres a lot of minutia there in making that an enjoyable experience, carefully balanced units, carefully balanced progression of AI opponents, and a lot of pretty window dressing.

Any fun strategy games I’ve seen as a result of game jams do well to avoid the majority of the genres trappings. Something simple like, setting up a simple top down map, and simple units with flocking behavior. Only allowing the user to point to where the flock should go. Or letting a user choose his units before the game starts, and once engaged the units will automatically interact with their environment.

With some time to reflect on it, I feel if you really take a hard look at the strategy genre, you can boil the core “fun” of a strategy game down to “conflict between units”. With the focus I spent in pretty much every other aspect, it seems like I may have totally missed the mark on this one.

Bottom Line

Even ripping a game off HOMM’s design, there are so many bits of interface minutia to consider that there was no way to deliver an intuitive quick to play game within the 48 hours, but the trip getting there was a blast.

Post Competition Build

Loved the comments I was getting, gave me enough motivation to bring the concept a little further along. Pretty strapped for time over the holidays but I came up with this build.

Added features:

• Fog of war.
• Working combat, more information.
• Working unit purchasing.
• Tons of small bug fixes.

I figured this would be about where I should have ended up for the competition. It does well enough to showcase most of the main elements of HOMMage.

Time consuming things I wish I could have added:

• Racial abilities.
• Abilities for the special characters of each race.
• Hero abilities.
• Enemy AI.
• Castle garrison combat.
• Title screen + tutorial.
• Items on the world map.
• Multiple heroes and castles.

You guys can play it here.

And just tacking this on here since it’ll be my last LD19 post. Big thanks to the organizers, you guys do an awesome job every LD of putting this together, the rating system for games is just awesome now. And a big shout out to the community, I’ve learned tons and garnered tons of neat things from posts here and there 😛

Ya sneaky ludumrats, mate Bear made us a torrent HAR HAR ya wimpy coderers.

Nah be ya good lads and man the har har harpoons!

THAR SHE BLOWS!

All yer gams be thar me lads!

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 30th, 2010 at 11:06 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.

Hey everyone, hope Xmas and New Years is going well. I’ve got a great idea for a future challenge if you want something to during the January blues. OK here goes, how about we do a weekend challenge where the theme is ‘Finish Each Others Games’. The basic idea is that you take an existing game, it can be incomplete or complete, retrieve the source code and add your own elements/levels/art to it. The aim is to improve the game in any way you see fit. The end result should be a mass completion of unfinished games and vast improvement on already finished ones.

RULES

• You need to declare the source code you’re working from before starting so we can see the difference in the initial and finished games
• You can use your own source code from a past game if you want
• Team entries are allowed
• Many different participant/teams can work off one source code if they want
• Once finished at the end of the week we will vote for the best game.

Hi all,

I am like everybody there trying to do my best to rate all the games I can. However, due to personal constraints I fiund it really hard.

The fact that I use a linux netbook at home allows me to rate the following kinds of games : linux based, flash based, wine compatible.

The problem is that there’s no way to know if a game fits these categories before going to the game’s page. I have to click on a page, scroll down ( thanks to my netbook super high resolution 😉 ) and discover if I can actually play the game.

I know, I know I could wait to go back to my office and launch all your wonderful submissions on my 90″ 3D extraLED screen on my wonderful Windows 7 mega pro 256 bits edition ;). But I am on holidays !! So I must wait next week to take time to do so.

Now, now, the idea I had is to be able to browse the game by label or tag. So I could know if the game works on linux, flash, mac osX, win7, unity, etc…

So I could focus on trying the games faster than light ! Well I would have to scroll down of course, but this would be really much better :).

Okay, that was the idea. Please feel free to destroy it as much as you like or consider it is my 50 cents to the next ludum dare rating system…

2.0 ? Noooo, much better

I think my thoughts are sufficiently settled for me to write a blog post about how things went.

How things went: Things went well! I’m just about past the amazement that I actually managed to complete a game in 48 hours, and not only that, some people seemed to find it fun. It’s the first time I’ve went into an LD while in any fit state to do so. (LD#18 was 5 hours of focused work on a so-so concept, followed by me falling ill for nearly a week with something that had been creeping up on me for days.) I’m just lucky that my mistakes were partially countered by my good fortune.

What I did right: Lacked ambition. Or, less concisely and more accurately: came up with an idea for a game that was well within my capacity to make in the time allotted. Though there’s some slightly clever backend stuff to handle the addition, selection, deselection and use of different keys (using these revolutionary new things I’d heard were good called ‘classes’ – object-orientated programming is great), essentially the game was about a square that can accelerate up, down, left and/or right in its attempts to reach the next green square (and discover new keys), and can eventually do some wacky stuff like teleport or destroy spike zones too (the instant death spikes made a huge showing). I used the Flixel library, which provided basic tilemaps that could load layouts from .png files (which I ruthlessly hacked into so they did what I wanted them to) and sufficiently good collision and physics. I reduced my graphics burden by making the game 320×240 and representing everything as either ‘keys’ (boxes with letters or arrows on) or mono-coloured arrows and spikes (though they look pretty awful).

Where I got lucky: Somewhere on the second day, I stumbled on the revelation that gave the game a title, a plot, some symbolism and an ending, all in one fell swoop. Hopefully, at least some players (some of those that didn’t get stuck well before completing the game…) realised that the entire game is about the ‘X’ key you press at the start collecting up the direction keys and letter keys that form the title screen, creating some sort of stable transcendental loop. Finding the word ‘transcend’ to tie the game up with really was a stroke of luck, since I’d already implemented the [T]eleport and [R]everse keys and was scrambling in the dark for a way of making the game seem less like a random series of things with no significance. (Admittedly the key naming wasn’t quite as good from that point on in order to fit the discovered word, but never mind.) In this way, appropriate to the theme, the game was very much about discovery for me (and I hope that it is for players too, particularly those who reach the end and discover the start-end symmetry of the whole thing).

What I did wrong: The game ended up as a two-layered challenge, where each level (beyond the first) required players to a) come up with a strategy for tackling the level’s obstacles, selecting a subset of their discovered keys to use, then b) execute their strategy using careful precision and timing. This isn’t necessarily a bad structure for a game’s challenge to have, only I didn’t sufficiently think about how to make part a) not insurmountable to many players. Since I designed the levels, it didn’t occur to me how many leaps of logic were required for some levels, particularly level 6.

To explain why level 6 failed: players have just unlocked reverse, then are faced with a strange boost-arrow racetrack that requires a) the correct intuition that [LEFT] is required to prevent [X] being accelerated too fast down the first straight, [UP] is required to counter the down boost-arrows at the far end of the level, and [REVERSE] is required to get enough up-velocity in the down boost-arrow area in the first place (unless you are exceedingly patient and precise), and is also required to move right at the start of the level (by moving left then reversing); then b) the accurate input of keys, often multiple at once or in quick succession, to make the crazy plan work. Needless to say, this was stupidly hard given players hadn’t even used [REVERSE] before, nor had they needed to exploit the fact that directional keys had precisely equal power to the corresponding opposite boost-arrows, resulting in zero momentum and thus constant velocity. The level itself could have worked, had there been adequate teaching of the required concepts in earlier levels, but there wasn’t. So instead it probably frustrates most players who reach it, and many will give up there and never reach the nifty symbolic ending. A shame, and a huge error on my part.

So, the main lesson is I need to pay careful attention to the difficulty of game levels or scenarios, checking thoroughly for difficulty spikes.

Of course, that wasn’t the only place I went wrong. The graphics were left as their original placeholders, and so the spikes and arrows look pretty ugly. The last-minute hint system was not helpful because there wasn’t enough space for the text, meaning the hints I wrote had to be so brief as to be useless. (Also, the hints should have never automatically appeared after 2 minutes; some players found this patronising or annoying. Instead, only a reminder that a hint was available should have appeared.) As if to make up for level 6, level 9 was stupidly easy and required no strategy. Then the final level (10) could be glitched (by using [T]eleport) to allow the player to reach the end in an unintended way and find the placeholder ending screen (and potentially players could not realise they got the wrong ending). The restart level key was only mentioned on the starting screen, long before players might ever need it (at which point they may have forgotten, and there’s no way to check what it was) – it should have made its presence clear in other ways. And other flaws I’ve forgotten (feel free to remind me…)

What I’m thinking now: Numerous people have praised the idea, if not the execution. As such, I’m thinking of making a fuller version of the game (with new and/or reconsidered code, art and levels, though still with a simple aesthetic), to release as my debut into flash game production on the major Flash portals. I want to be good at this game dev thing, so I figure trying to release a polished version of an idea I know works would be a good learning experience. Heh.

What I’d like from you, my devilishly attractive and incredibly smart hypothetical reader: Ideas! Deeper criticism! Accusations that I suggest my games are profound when they are not! Anything textual and contextual.

Thanks for reading this and/or playing the game, by the way. You really are a most excellent person.

I’ve added a post-competition build of my game to the links on the entry page. It’s mostly bug fixes but also a few simple improvements and a draw engine overhaul.

New Features:

• simple detection of being stranded without fuel with a popup message
• permanently show a flag over explored planets to make it easier to tell where you’ve been.
• Fuel is consumed over time as you travel, so if you are interrupted by an enemy ship, you only pay for the fuel you’ve used.
• improvements to the shop prevent you from being able to waste money on refills for things you’re already full on (like fuel)

Engine:

• Entirely new draw manager, allows for limited view regions and camera movement (disabled in this build)
• Better UI management for windows and text

Bugs Fixed:

• fixed purchasing to negative money in the shop
• fixed bug where you could travel off screen in the right circumstances
• fixed bugs related to shopping or exploring at the same time as being attacked

All in all, pretty light, but I hope to keep improving it in chunks as I have time.

Check it out

After staying 2 weeks at home I finally came back to my office. And what was awaiting me? An XMas-Gift by Philhassey himselfs.

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So, what was in the Box? A bottle of maple syrup, 5 packages ‘microwave pork rinds’ and a photo of himself and the cool goat that pulled his coach in the ld#17(?) keynote.

I’m quite curious about the microwave pork rind…. 😀

Thx a lot!!!

PS: Hope there will be an secret santa next year again! It was fun! Thx for organizing!

EDIT: I finnaly ate some Pork Rinds and I have to say it is really good! Wouldn’t have expected that way! ;D

The lack of comments on Rosetta seems to suggest it falls on the wrong side of unintelligible or just not very entertaining. Going to try and make a new version in the next couple of days that addresses some issues and adds a few things.

Tags: Rosetta

Yep. You can get them here :

My submission entry

Nothing else has changed there, just added binaries for the  two platforms.

Also, if you downloaded the linux version yesterday i had uploaded a version with a debug library linked in accidentally. This affected performance greatly, please update to the latest!