I’ve got a couple of game development-related new year’s resolutions for myself, and I thought I’d share them.

First of all, I’m going to finish things that I start. I will allow myself to shelve things, but I will finish them. I leave too many neat things unfinished. Enough of that.

Second, I will make things other than scrolling shmups and platformers. I make too many of them, and I need to broaden my experience beyond that stuff. I will still make some of them, but it won’t be all that I do.

Third, I will complete at least one mid-sized project. I want to accomplish at least something this year, and a good, mid-sized game seems like it would be the thing to do.

Finally, I will improve my artwork. This doesn’t just mean making my art look better, but being able to draw things that I currently have a hard time drawing. (Such as characters in isometric perspectives)

I’m hoping that I can hold to these, as I think they’re things that I really need to do.

Peace

— Mr. Dude

I’m a big fan of the analytics so I thought I’d share a few. I also wanted to share this clever comment from a guy named Mario… and a princess named peach…

(comedy gold that)

Up until LD19 I never really used my site. As such, I had no views. What that means is that every view since the start of LD19 has come through this website from my LD entry. If you head over to http://www.thefunkvan.com/ now this is what you will see:

And if you dig into google analytics this is what you will see:

Great stuff

Happy new year everybody =)

My resolution for 2011 is to enter for my first LD.

my game this contest:
http://www.kongregate.com/games/Dogstar669/in-the-darkness-i-shall-fall

This was the first time I used a toolkit like Unity to make my game rather than writing it all in code. I chose to do this because I knew I would be limited on time; I had two long Christmas parties scheduled for that weekend. In essence, I only probably had about 12-15 hours to make my game.

Well, thanks to Unity I think the game came out pretty well considering how limited my available time was. It is a pretty fun game (though super simple) and there are five levels and some cool sounds and music too.

My determination after using Unity in this contest, after having written code in all my many past entries, is that clearly those that use Unity and the like have an unfair advantage in the game competition. In fact it is not even close. I spent almost no time writing code and completely leveraged the physics and other aspects of Unity that came for free in the toolkit. Instead I could spend all my time in 3DS Max creating levels. I love the fact that I have finally done enough video courses in 3DS Max to actually use it effectively for the game competition! Besides the music and sounds effects, all my time was spent creating levels and testing levels (probably 50/50 time spent on each).

I think as a result, for this contest to actually mean anything, we need to consider separating the game toolkit entries from the code entries. I can say from actual experience now that there is no comparison between the two, and comparing what one person does in code is just not in any way fair to compare to what another does in a toolkit such as Game Maker or Unity. Let’s maybe consider this for next time. Why bother to rate at all if the competition is fixed, right?

My levels were static, so I created them as one gigantic model in 3DS Max, rather than assemble them from prefabs in Unity. I think this saved time as well. But it limited what I really could do on levels (no moving platforms and such). But I accepted that I wouldn’t have time for any extras anyway. I just wanted a basic game, simple but fun, with a win case and a lose case, and i think I accomplished my goal. I love how Unity handles levels. It makes it so easy to build additional levels once you have one finished.

To give you an idea of how easy it was to create new levels for my game in Unity. This is all I had to do. Save level1 as level2. Delete the level1 terrain model. drag in the level2 terrain model. Scale the terrain to the appropriate size. Place the player at the starting position for the level. Place the win marker where I wanted it in the level. Save the level again. Play and test. That’s it. Took about one minute to setup and begin testing a new level.

I wanted to spend no more than one hour on sounds and music. So I quickly assembled a kind of new agey tune with my Axiom Pro 61 keyboard, Cubase 5 and Omnisphere. The sound effects for falling and winning were actually tunes I created with the keyboard and Omnisphere as well. I really like the falling sound for some reason. I was pretty happy with the sounds and spent no longer than an hour on them. And Unity made it less than trivial to bring them into the game.

At first, I wasn’t planning on having a start screen, but then before going to bed on the first night, I thought I would give it a try. My goal was to spend less than 20 minutes on it. I quickly sketched something out on paper with pencil (my favorite way to draw) and scanned it into photoshop. I love to draw, but I’m not very good at it, but I do much better with pencil than the mouse or tablet. The only way I can really do decent computer art is to create something with pencil and then use illustrator pen tool to redo it to make it look decent. Didn’t have time for that here. Wasn’t really happy with my little sketch, but didn’t have any more time to allocate to it. So what I did was I tested a few different filters and found one that made it look like it was night and I thought that it at least conveyed the idea of the game and gave it a bit of style. The text really needed to be redone, but I just didn’t have time for it.

With Unity, it was easy to add buttons, but I had no idea how to make buttons that would fit the art, so I didn’t bother. Had to move on. Think I spent probably about an hour on the start screen including art and the coding of it.

So I then spent the rest of the time creating the levels. One level I created I didn’t use because I tried to create rolling hills, but for some reason I couldn’t get the lighting to show that the hills and valleys even existed. It made it impossible to get through the level because the player couldn’t tell you were trying to go up a hill. I tried a black and white checkerboard texture on the level floor (ala marble madness) and that showed the depth, but the lighting was off, so the player could see the entire level at once. I didn’t have time to mess with it any more so I just decided to try to keep the levels more or less flat (although there is a slight depth here or there, nothing too outrageous). If I did a new version that is one thing I would definitely add because I think I could create much more fun levels with more bumpy terrain and curves and stuff.

Anyway, I’m happy with it. It’s on kongregate. I’m already getting some inquiries on companies interested in it. And I’ve already made my $1+ from advertising!

Hope you enjoy and I hope the powers that be consider separating out the code entries from the toolkit entires, because I can now tell you having done them both, that the amount of work needed to make a game with these toolkits is just a small fraction of what is required to make a game with all code.

So here’s how I wrote Bacon Beacon.

What I did:

I started LD19 with ambition, ‘flu and no preparation or basecode. I wanted to do a sprawling content-driven platformer, both to practice storytelling and to see how big a scope I could hit within the 48 hour limit.

My initial goal was to build a fairly linear “Metroidvania” type game where you’d explore and then get to an exit. I figured I’d come up with a narrative using the theme within that game structure once I’d started.

Then my internet connection was cut off forever.

What went right:

Ongoing scoping

About a third of the way into development, I realised I might not finish the game in time. I started logging work done in timelog.txt to help me estimate further work. Having a good idea how long it’d take me to tile a new zone or draw a new full screen image for some area helped me keep the scope realistic, letting me produce a relatively complete game – even if I missed the mark slightly. But more on that later!

I got better at tile mapping/level design as I went

I’ve never done any tile mapping or serious level design work. I rapidly picked up experience over the weekend and I’m quite proud of some of the later areas I crafted compared to the first few. I also got much quicker at it. If I hadn’t, I’m not sure I’d have had time to put the ending together.

Delivering story through text

Just as this was my first attempt at level design, it was my first attempt at storytelling through gameplay. I was originally considering an intro cutscene to set up the story but decided to jump straight in and leave clues instead, communicating the relevant information by text. Text-only content was extremely quick to implement, and since I’ve had comments praising this aspect I conclude the text-heavy approach helped to establish the mood very efficiently.

Low-fidelity graphics

Beacon’s native resolution is 400×225. The main character is 24×24 and its tiles are 16×16. The high-res structures and objects are very simple and stylised, with straight lines, a very limited palette and banded gradients (if any). This low-effort approach to art let me create a great deal of bespoke art for scenes in the game in just a few hours, even with my crappy art skills.

Beacon doesn’t have any lighting, shaders, full-screen effects, particle systems or other niceties. Skipping this stuff helped me focus on my priorities of content and tight, simple gameplay.

What went wrong:

No preparation

I started without any basecode, so my first task was writing windowing code, input, basic texture loading, rendering and so on. It took me about 6 hours to reach the point where I had a character moving around in a tilemap and could render text. If I’d invested the time to prepare (within the limits of the rules) before the competition, I’d easily have had 4-6 more hours to work on the game while I was still well rested.

Internet failure

Two hours into working on the game, my Internet connection cut out.

It took over an hour on the phone to Virgin to find out that they’d disconnected the old house two days early for our requested house move, wouldn’t reconnect it, and couldn’t connect the new house across the street until Monday. (Jerks.) Without internet access, I couldn’t get tools/libraries I needed or check reference, and I wouldn’t be able to submit at the end.

I almost gave up at this point.

I resolved to keep working on the game and, on Sunday evening, packed my desktop into the car, drove 60 miles to *my* new house – which already had internet access – then finish the game and submit it from there. In the end, talking to Virgin cost me an hour; packing up my PC and driving down through the snow took two. When I needed a font/font renderer, I couldn’t search for one, so I wrote one; another 30 minutes or so.

No sleep

I worked through the night. By Sunday evening, I’d been up for over 30 hours. Staying on task was getting tough!

If I’d napped for an hour or two around halfway, I feel it’d have been worth it. Instead, I got through enough coffee that I still couldn’t sleep until five or six hours after the contest ended. That kept me awake, but I’m not sure it helped me stay focused

Slightly too ambitious

This ties into the ‘sleep’ thing. All that scoping stuff above was useful, but I didn’t factor in how I’d slow down as I got tired. In the end, I was a few hours short. I had to cut music and also some minor bits of art polish, but fortunately I’d got all the essential stuff done.

Non-power-of-2 textures

I really should have known better, but I used 24×24 images for a few sprites – like the astronaut! This worked perfectly fine on my machine, but apparently the way DevIL handles loading these images makes them blurry on some hardware.

What next?

I’m currently working on a revised version of Beacon, with gameplay and art polish, music and some minor visual effects, for freeware release some time next week. I’m also collaborating with an excellent friend on a much larger non-linear platformer building on the Beacon codebase.

I’m taking my first steps as a fulltime indie developer now and LD19 has given me a few projects to warm up with. More than that – it’s made me remember why making games is fun! I got more out of LD19 than I expected and I’ll definitely see you all in four months.

Technology

Beacon was programmed in C++ in Visual C++ 2010 Express using SDL, OpenGL, DevIL and FMod. All content was created in Photoshop CS5 trial, notepad, and sfxr.

I made a census!

So, since somebody on IRC had the wonderful idea, I made a census. It’s short, 10 questions, nothing too personal. It would provide some insight into the LD Community as well, so if you could take it that would be awesome. And here’s a link to it: LD Census

I am going to try to warm up for upcoming LD’s and Mini-LD’s by giving myself a challenge. I have a game that I will try to make in the time between tomorrow morning (Morning in EST, that is) and the time I leave for my first class in this semester. (Which is on Monday) If I really need to, I’ll also give myself the time between getting to campus and going to the class.

For those who would like to know a bit about the game I am making, information about it follows the break.

The title of the game is “Gun Gladiator”. It is an arena shooter which will feature 3 or 4 playable vehicles and several sets of waves of enemies, as well as a mode for random waves.

It will feature several types of enemy, as well as a few different bosses.

Each vehicle will have its own unique weapon, as well as varying attributes. The player will be able to upgrade their vehicles movement speed and armor, as well as the rate of fire and attack power of their weapon. In addition, each weapon will have a unique attribute which can be upgraded.

For the in-game interface, I will borrow the style of Diepix Arena and have the upgrade panel and hud in a frame next to the actual playing field.

Baddies will have varying behavior, as well. Some will move blindly and bounce off of walls, others will dart around randomly, some will follow the player. These varying behaviors will make it difficult for the player to dodge them. Not all of the baddies will be able to shoot back at the player, but some will.

Bosses will also vary in behavior, but none will follow the player. They will all be able to shoot at the player, and will have more powerful weapons than normal baddies.

I have some specifics sketched out in some design docs, but those are speculation at this point.

Wish me luck!

— Mr. Dude

Source code now up on my entry page (http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-19/?action=rate&uid=3023).  Post-Mortem coming soon.

It’s official. Ludum Dare 19 has finally ended. Here are your results:

Top 20 Competition Games

You can check out the top 20 competition games here (including ties):

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

Winners are decided by the Overall category. To see the complete list, hit the “Show All Entries” link at the bottom.

Categorical Top 5’s

Here at Ludum Dare, being the best game isn’t the only way to win. Games are rated in 7 additional categories, with a special “Coolness” category highlighting people that went above and beyond to be sure you got a vote.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-19/

*NOTE*: You can click on the titles of the categories for Top 20 style lists per category.

Ludum Dare 19 Jam Games!

Ludum Dare 19 was our 2nd run of the new combined Competition and Jam event, and the results do not disappoint. So in addition to the 242 entries created by individuals for competition, there are 43 more games created teams or individuals that decided to take an extra day to polish their game. Be sure to check those out here:

ALL JAM GAMES (43) <--

[ ALL COMPO GAMES (242) | ALL GAMES (285) ]

Wow!

So THAT was Ludum Dare 19

We are keeping score here, and again, the latest event managed to annihilate our prior best … IN DECEMBER of all months too (our historically lowest month). Back in August, we were impressed that we inched 10 ahead of our prior best, with 213. This time, we were just 15 entries shy of 300! And if you look at the theme voting, more than 600 people cast a vote for the final theme!

And THAT was Ludum Dare in 2010

Lets crunch some numbers…

Event Games: 203+213+285 = 701
Mini LD Games: 2+21+2+6+14+24+9+7 = 85
October Challenge: 24
Total Games for 2010: 701+85+24 = 810

Thanks to Sos for helping me with the math.

Seriously, every single one of you that participated, whether you finished a game or not, you’re awesome. Phil and I (Mike/PoV) took over running Ludum Dare in 2007, and every event since we’ve been constantly impressed at how much it’s grown, and continue to be amazed that it keeps growing so much. What will 2011 bring? Will we break 1000 games?

A big thanks to all of you for helping us make 2010 such a fantastic year.

More Ludum Dare 19 links

Lots of timelapse videos to dig through. I still haven’t had a chance to watch them all, but I’ll give them a browse soon. I’ll try to do that this week.

– Keynote!, starring Some Bear Thing — With Special Guest Mjau
– Ludum Dare 19 Timelapse Videos, list assembled by Fififox
– Entry counts in the final minutes, by me
– LD Census, by demize
– Wallpaper of all entries, by ExciteMike

Interesting Tags: montage, motivation, foodphoto, food, deskphoto, desk, timelapse, bear

Ludum Dare at the Game Developers Conference

Attending GDC? Stay tuned! Like last year, Phil and I want to get a whole bunch of us together somewhere, perhaps more than just once!

If you haven’t already, sign up for the mailing list, and we’ll keep you informed. Also, you can follow Ludum Dare on Twitter.

Ludum Dare 20 – Coming April 2011!!

Like always, stop by again in April for our next regularly scheduled event. We’ll try to have a date nailed down before GDC (Feb 28th), so we can brag about it at the conference. Again, don’t forget the mailing list, and Twitter.

January Mini LD #23, hosted by Jonny D

Fans of LD19’s Silly Themes, take note! Jonny D has a surprised planned just for you. Tune in this month for a very special Mini LD.

Suggestions

If you have any suggestions for us (website, observations, etc), we continue to collect them in the comments here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2009/08/30/suggestion-post/

Thanks everyone for coming out and making 2010 such an incredible year for Ludum Dare! We’ll see you again in April!

– Mike Kasprzak (PoV)

Hosted by yours truly, Jonny D…  MiniLD 23 will be a good time (see below).

MiniLD 23 will begin at 9pm EST (2am UTC) on Friday, January 21st (moved up from the 28th due to conflict with Global Game Jam).  It will end at the same time on Sunday, January 23rd.

MiniLD 23 begins [fergcorp_cdt_single date=”Fri, 21 Jan 2011 19:00:00 -700″]

Until then, you can vote on the main theme.  There will be a sub theme announced as well when the mini compo starts.  There will be either an immense amount of groaning or excitement, since your choices for the main theme are taken from LD 19’s Round 3 list.

That’s right! Vote here!! And like the monkey said at the fruit playoffs: Go bananas!

Tags: MiniLD #23

I have finally found a solution to the effect I was  trying to go for. The finished version of Lunarium should be coming soon. I just need to get another obstacle out of the way.

We didn’t get the full blown all-1s parade like last LD, but it did appear on my entry. What makes this particularly horrible, however, is that I didn’t get many legit votes, and would have scored 4.10 for audio rather than 3.82. ARGH.

What we did get, however, was a lot of all-N/As and even more all-N/As-apart-from-community. I got one and two from those respectively.

IT’S NOT COOL.

People who do that should get suckness points rather than coolness points, and whoever gets the most suckness points (above a certain threshold) should be banned from voting until they’ve removed all copies of Game Maker from their computer (and possibly Unity and whatever else is “the easiest way to make games for Windows”).

In fact, they might as well be tortured by being forced to program a game for an old console in assembler. Like what I did,  except done by someone who probably can’t even code in BASIC.

So, back to the topic.

If it doesn’t work, DON’T VOTE.

If you think the guy’s a complete idiot, PRETEND IT WAS MADE BY YOUR BEST FRIEND (I’ve yet to find an unexplained all-5s vote but these would be awesome (actually I think I just did on Coffee Forever)).

And now for the ultimate question: How do we stop these stupid, stupid votes?

I’m mildly baffled at the audio ratings my game recieved.

[ – – 5  3 2 – – 4 – 1 1 – 2 2 1 – 2 1- -]

First off, look at all those dashes. My game certainly had audible sound, and my game being made in game-maker, I see no reason for it not to work. I do however appreciate the amount of dashes I got versus the amount of ones, Protip: make sure those headphones are plugged in.
Although I may be biased, my audio certainly deserved more than a one.  This makes me mildly angry because those ones are mostly either
A) I’m on mac/linux and I’m jelly because I can’t play it but I’ll vote anyways, I’ll just give audio 1/5
B) I don’t hear audio, has nothing to do with the fact my volume is turned down. I’m in a bad mood so I’ll rate 1/5 instead of n/a
C) the game only has one song and one sfx, I am completely ignoring the fact that the game really doesn’t need any more than that and rating 1/5 because there aren’t 50 songs and/or they’re not chip-tunes and all pixel art games need chip tunes

I also got a lot of dashes for community, which is almost more gobsmacking. Remember people, there is a handy button for viewing the person’s journal

The humor category also bit me hard, as I didn’t make a funny game. Which make memad at the category, as I’m sure I’ve said before, giving a game props for being funny is great, but we shouldn’t be forced into making a funny game, and we shouldn’t turn a cold shoulder to more serious or neutral games in the process.

Anyways, </rant>, I think I’m just disappointed because I got 95% praise in the comments, and then I get on the computer today to see this. I’d really appreciate it if people commented for reasons other than to congratulate as well. Being told your game is great is good and all, but nowhere near as helpful as some good ‘ole constructive criticism. A few people commented that the game was “missing something to make me really enjoy it” and it frustrated me that they offered no solutions (as in, I had to sit around for a week and figure it out myself).

I’m really happy with the game I made, but this puts a bit of a damper on my desire to work on it more.

also whoever rated 2/5 for graphics. . . just . . .

I have been working on my game some more since the competition version.

New features include:

• Improved player control
• Improved physics & collision handling
• Enemies now have a bit longer line of sight, making them harder
• More logical levels, no more unexpected death drops
• Some new tiles and graphics
• Flickering and occluded lights
• A preloader

Play it here! –> The Secret Documents

I simply wanted to say a big big thank you to everybody there for their votes for Time Pigmy. This was my first LudumDare participation. And let me tell you : I loved it. Every single moment during this long weekend
I will be there for LD#20 in April, for sure.

There was lot’s of good titles to play here, my personnal favs going to Mother Robot and Aquatic.

And finally, a big thank you to my friends here in Bordeaux (FR) who participated to this LD#19 : Benjamin/Bumdum, Whitetigle, Hane and Valandre.

Benjamin & me work in a french indie game company we made 10 years ago, Motion Twin, and we still take lot’s of pleasure in creating new concepts everyday.

Have fun everybody, keep creating great stuff and keep innovation & originality to it’s highest.

Gun Gladiator eventually deteriorated into an unacceptably slow (At least on my netbook), overly ambitious story-heavy shooter. I think that would count as a failure, especially in terms of my deadline.

So, I’ve decided that I need to try again with a different time limit. This time around, it’s a bullet hell shmup. Hopefully.

The game’s title is one that I’ve been trying to apply to a game for a while now because I think it sounds really cool. (I may have used this title for an uncompleted game that I’ve posted about here, and there have been many others) The title is Starrior. (A portmanteau of “Star” and “Warrior”)

The game will borrow its style from the game Frantic (And its sequel), but will use a much less abstract style. It will support arrow keys and WASD, as well as controlling the ship with the mouse. It will have multiple weapons, special attacks, and other fanciness.

I want to have the full game with at least most of its content by the night of the 22nd.

Currently, I have the player ship moving around on the screen, including with mouse control.

I’m really hoping I can pull this off. Really.

Peace,

— Mr. Dude

Are there any file hoarders about? I’m looking for the download of the timelapse video I had available in this post (I foolishly removed it from my webspace some 6 months ago thinking I wouldn’t need it)

Now PoV is building this new database of timelapses, I’d love to be able to hand a nice high-rez version of it over

If you know what i’m talking about, and have the file – please either leave a comment (and a link), or contact me by email (david AT wizardslair DOT co DOT uk)

Thanks for reading, and I hope you can help,
David/Devlin @ The Wizard’s Lair.

Tags: help, ld16, timelapse

Hey guys,

I’ve decided to move MiniLD 23 to the 21st of the month.  Check the announcement post for details.  See ya there!

I’ve got some base code for my bullet hell shmup (Lazed out for the past few days, got very little other than school work done), but I’m ready to work on other things for a while.

I am looking forward to the Mini-LD.

I have my game in mind, and partly designed. Regardless of the theme, I will shoehorn and/or BS that theme into my game. It’s a Mini-LD after all, and what would a Mini-LD be without someone bending the rules to their liking.

I’m not starting on my game early, though, so there’s that.

A bit about my game after the break, for folks who enjoy reading these sorts of things.

My game will be a top-down shooter and a tribute to Alien Breed. It is also a furry game, but rather than being modified animals or animal-like aliens, the furry characters are a type of zerg-like form of life created by scientists. That form of life is called (For the sake of a cool word containing a couple of cool letters): Zero. (In fact, the game’s title is Zero Breed)

The player will take the role of a Zero-based commando (Okay a, Space Marine) who has been sent to one of a number of facilities that have been overrun by a rogue strain of Zero called “Maniac”. The finished game will have multiple level sets, and possibly a level editor which will use Kongregate’s user-created content system.

This game will hopefully extend beyond the Mini-LD, as I’ve got a lot in store for it.

Peace,

— Mr. Dude