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 😀