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

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

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

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

Obligatory screenshot:

Lots of little Germies!

Might actually get a game submitted after all!

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

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

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

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

Ludum Dare #19 – LegacyCrono Timelapse

That was fun. And stressing.

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

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

the bare minimum brainstorm

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

finding a key view position

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Timelapse

So the Dare is over!

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

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

Still, some notes:

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

I’ll stop patting myself on the back now:

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

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

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

Just a single zip file with batcave.app inside.

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

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

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

Tags: timelapse

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

Wow.

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

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

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

Please, play and comment here.

Here’s a screenie:

I have a new wallpaper!

All 285 Jam and Compo Games!

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

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

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

Update! Better version of the timelapse:

Tags: gameplay, timelapse, video

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

So, I’ve added Lunarium to the Jam.

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

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

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

Tags: bear

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

– Needs More Lasers productions

Tags: discovery, jam, needs more lasers

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

PRIOR
You know nothing

GAME LINK

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

PRIOR: Screenshot: Maintainance Room

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

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

WHAT WORKED

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

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

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

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

WHAT NEEDED WORK

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

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

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

Check out PRIOR’s Ludum Dare game page

-Nick Yonge

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

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

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

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

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

Tags: discovery, Rosetta

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

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

Needs More Lasers productions is:

Jesse – programming

Shane – graphics

Kevin – music

Hope you guys enjoy it!

Tags: temple guy