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! 😀