Well, I tried my best to finish something in 48 hours for the Ludum Dare 20, but I don’t think that what I’ve done is good enough to submit. Saturday morning I had to work with other stuff and kind of lost the time today at noon. Couldn’t pull off an all nighter too, didn’t sleep very well during the week.

My idea was to make a gamebook in Flash with a nice story and some branching, put under control by the variables system I implemented. Loading scenes from a file, checking conditions and applying effects is working, but I wanted to make an inventory and a map too. I left the story and illustrations to be made after I finished the application, so… REALLY bad planing. Here are the screenshots of the unfinished app.

The screens of the unfinished app

One thing I remembered quickly after starting: drawing pretty stuff is hard and time consuming. Next time I will try to make a better plan and keep my weekend really free.

Would you look at that.

Well, I’m done. It was a long weekend, and I’m incredibly tired, but at least I can say I finished a game in 48 hours. Normally I go years without ever completing anything, so this feels good. And now I present to you, Diamond Hollow (submission coming very soon!):

on vimeo

CAT in the city – ludumdare 20 final version from Hamilton Lima on Vimeo.

and on youtube

have fun helping the yellow kitten.

Tags: CAT in the city, final, unity3d, video

I think this is my most complete LD48 game ever. That’s not saying much, though. There’s about one or two minutes of gameplay, but you can actually win or lose and run around and fight stuff and other game-like stuff.

Press ‘F’ to try the secret, not-really-working FPS mode.

I had some trouble with the mac build. It should work, but you need a 64 bit mac, and you probably need SDL installed, and it has to be run from the terminal because it expects you to be in the game directory to load it’s voxely sprites.

I’ll try and figure out how to bundle it up as a proper app. I’ll also make win32 and linux builds, but those might have to wait until tomorrow. Now, I’m going to take a break for a few hours, and have some dinner.

Go to my entry page for the download links.

I cut all the features that didn’t produce a game. I added a simple menu, high score, and timing system. The last 20 minutes have been me uploading like crazy.

I am very satisfied with this Ludum Dare, and hope to see you all next time.

GG all

Obligatory screen shot:

I just made and submited a game to the public for the first time.

Yay! I managed to squeeze it in the last minute..

I am wondering if I submitted successfully and what is the new counter “one hour” ..

I’m really pleased even though I see some people have made really polished games cause I only had 7h for this.:)

Best of luck in the competition!

Best regards,

ER

ALMOST done with my entry, i uploaded it anyway, even if its incomplete

Things i didnt had time to do:

• Sounds.
• Last scene, when you save the girl.
• Bonuses or something liked to get more lives.
• A menu :S

This Ludum dare rocked out! i am VERY pleased with the final result, i knew my project was ambitious since i started drawing it, but i almost finish it, and thats what matters, right? Hopefully next time i wont draw my characters in photoshop :S

Play it here:
LINKY
 

Well, I ended up commiting the cardinal errors in the Survival Guide, namely not having your development toolchain in order. I hadn’t seriously used Unity since version 2, so I ended up wasting a lot of time writing code that wasn’t needed in 3.x. Rolling a ball in a 2d plane is all I’ve got to show for 48 hours.

On the other hand, the concept I’ve got seems fun enough, so I’ll finish it on my own time, and chalk this up as experience for the next compo.

Or “Wise Man’s Wisdom Emporium and Item Dispensary”

Have a few playing play testing, but it seems to go ok… I got one “the text box broke” so I took out one of the super long strings that may have messed up word wrap.

In any case, I’ll submit in a minute and update with the link.

Edit: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-20/?action=preview&uid=3927

Alright, well this time around in ludum dare I finished everything I had planned and gotten a decent game. I know I’m not going to win, but such a fun experience! Anyway, here is the submission for it: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-20/?action=preview&uid=2287

A little snippet too: 😉

In the Prolock Galaxy there are two planets: One being Yarynx and the other Venox. Yarynx has declared war on Venox and your job is to capture their capital. Don’t forget to take your SMG!

WASD to move and SPACE to shoot.

Ah, so glad to have this LD wrapped. Came into it sleep deprived wasn’t sure if I’d be able to put a huge effort into it.  Had to friends participate in their first LD’s,  helped for a little bit of motivation, didn’t want to be one upped 😛

Thanks so much to the organizers, this is the best jam organization by far!

Timelapse, post-mortem and narrated gameplay coming up.

Finally done. The game only has 3 levels, I wanted to make more but there wasn’t enough time. It has been a fun past 48 hours. I’m hoping to make a game in c++ or Flash next ludum dare.

See it here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-20/?action=preview&uid=3733

Well, that was fun

And stressful. But mostly fun.

So here’s my game: A Steampunk Axebot Supply Run

Three robots are marching to fight the evil Prof. Malevolent in his castle, but they forogt their repair-packs. Your job is to keep them alive with repair-packs you send them via-rocket. In the end you will be judged on your effienciency.

Go see the entry here, or go play here.

Once I can think straight I’ll consider putting up a compressed timestream of two days of me sitting awkwardly in front of my pc, frowning and not working.

-Matthew

Holy crap, finished in time. Really focused and left a bunch of things imperfect at the end. HOORAY! I didn’t Ludum Fail my first time!

Anyway, my game is an old school arcade puzzler. You play as a guy who needs to “go” to the bathroom, and will take a kitten with him so he’s not alone… and it is dangerous.  The game is HTML5/JavaScript using the Akihabara engine, and the graphics are a bit of a ZX Spectrum flavor.

Play it now!

Guys I did it! I was good about continuously reprioritizing throughout the day (you can see this in my timelapse which I’ll post tomorrow), so I was actually done with about an hour to spare, just tweaking and putting together a pixely preview:

It's dangerous to go alone. Take sis!

Entry:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-20/?action=preview&uid=1984

Good times as usual! Now we need some beer over here.

Okay, the final game is complete, submitted, source code zipped and frozen, everything is done. Finished right on the buzzer.

The main difference between what I submitted and the final prototype I posted a few hours ago is this has a mute button (M on your keyboard or click the icon in the upper right), and a more full tutorial on stage 1.

You can play it here and see for yourself: Waterfall Rescue.

Now I’m gonna go get some sleep.

There it is, end of the competition and my submision is among the others! I’m filled with happines since this was my first “make a game” competition and I had doubts about completing a whole game in only 48 hours. It was nice to see how active was everyone and helpful in the same time. Impressions about this Ludum Dare are unspeakable!

Congratiulations to everyone that made it to the end, we’ve done it! 😀

Finally, Mittens is finished! I really need to sleep right now… so I’ll submit a time-lapse video tomorrow.

Instead of using Musagi I used Wolfram Tones random generator for music, since I ran out of time to make it myself.

I also used flixel Power Tools for the health bar.

I hope you all like it! I’m really proud of the game I made, this was a great experience

Not much of a journal, but hey:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-20/?action=preview&uid=1740

That’s it! No Trees. No Waterfalls. No Bamboo or Coins. Ran out of time…

Tips: You run faster with your umbrella closed… please take your umbrella with you.

But I like my robot.

There’s a whole bunch of stuff I wish I could have done (mostly being sound, music and better graphics), but isn’t that always the case?

A post-mortem will be on its way at some point in the foreseeable future, and I have yet to decide whether or not I want to jam it up and submit an enhanced version of my game with actual sound and music and better graphics. Signs kind of point to no, but we’ll see what happens. No screenshots, because there’s plenty of them over at the entry page, so.

It’s 3 AM. I am going to sleep for so long. FOR SO LONG.

Cave Jimmy II: Physics Breaker. Rendering engine.
Finally succeed at making LudumDareBot function properly. End Friday.
Physics engine. Level-switching engine. Umbrella.
Several hours later – add slime. End Saturday.
Do nothing all day. End Sunday.

And here we are! Food pics from Sunday, (maybe) timelapse, and the unfinished version which is totally useless coming in a bit.

I had a very frustrating beginning as this was the first time I made a platformer with flash. I almost quit a few times the first day, but I held in there. Then Sunday (today) I went out for a bit and realized I probably didn’t have enough time to finish the game. When I got home I decided to see how much I could get done before the deadline. Guess what? I finished it! It’s missing sounds/music and a proper ending though, but it is fulling playable. I am very proud. =]

TORCH: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-20/?action=preview&uid=3079

Will post timelapse later.

I hope the code doesn’t build for OS X users and the game crashes for them too.

😀

My windows build was done around 9:20, so I should have uploaded it then. But instead I shut down and switched to OS X, and it was nothing but problems galore after I got the game to build.

Downloads:

• Windows
• OS X
• I don’t have a Linux Distro

I wasn’t going to enter this one, but i found time and cooked a little something up. I hope you enjoy it!

The entry can be viewed HERE.

Phew, after a minor panic attack, I managed to submit my entry. It is not much (only five levels), but it demonstrates the principle. Looking forward to playing the other entries!

But first a short nap and then to work.

I GOT MY GAME SUBMITTED!  WOOHOO!!  I think it was technically 1 or 2 minutes late, but that’s because I was having upload troubles.  At any rate… I did it!  It’s not complete!  It’s not perfect!  It IS playable though!  I had to disable a couple half-finished things for the submission version, but there’s still enough there to see where I was going, I think.

Also, I’m entirely too exhausted.  And I have work in about 9 hours.  I’ve gotta go to bed, which sucks… I’d love to hang out with the festivities on IRC and here on the blagosphere.  Tomorrow, though, I’ll start looking at everyone’s stuff!  Good job, y’all!  It was an amazing experience for sure!

Tags: awesome, bats, dodongo, final, finally done, LD #20 - It's Dangerous to go Alone! Take This!, pygame, python, screenshot, win, winner

It feels good to finish!

I like to use the Ludum Dare compos as motivation to learn something new – or learn something better. This compo I decided I wanted to learn how to create models and animate them in Blender.  I also figured I’d ratchet things up a bit and go 3D.

This was my first try at using Blender to model stuff with animations and I have learned a lot and had much fun in the process.  I spent a bit of time with Blender before the compo began learning about how to do bone animations and getting the exported fbx files to come into Unity correctly.  That prep work paid off and my work flow from  Blender into Unity went very smoothly.  Check out my entry and leave a comment here.

Hello everybody!

I finally finished my 48-hours game – Duple!

I actually had to go out for a whole day yesterday so I only had a little less than one day to actually work on the game.

As soon as I heard the theme, I started running ideas in my head. I guess after all it was not so bad that I had a day to clear my head so when I sat down to work I knew pretty much what I wanted to achieve.

The main idea is that for each level (except the first introduction level) there are several “targets” that should all be occupied at once for the level to be complete. To do this you have to split your characters in two (since it’s dangerous to go alone, you see…), and you do this by stepping into special transporters. The clone works a little different from your own character and may be rotated or flipped (when you go left he goes right) – and it’s different each level so you have to think carefully about where you are going at each step.

I spent the last couple of hours building and tweaking my levels. I actually wanted to go a little further but ran out of time – so there are only 6 levels for now and they are rather easy to solve.

In the future I hope to add a few more levels and the possibility to create your own levels.

I wrote the game with javascript, so it can work everywhere with no installation and no compilation – and of course it’s easy to see the code and change it if you are interested. I tested it on Chrome and Firefox and it worked fine, hope you guys have no trouble running it.

I hope you all enjoy this silly little game – I had fun creating it

You can check it out at http://duple.yanirk.com.

Yanir Kleiman (hexygen)

Well that concluded my first LD48 competition with the game Ant General.

So how did it go?

The positive:

• I picked a good scope on the project, i got pulled away to real life a few times and still managed to finish a playable game. I guess i can thank my years in the demoscene for this
• The game looks pretty good and plays pretty well
• Game mechanics based on the theme
• Learned how to use HTML5/Canvas
• Figured out how to make InkScape work as my level editor

The negative:

• Had a little inspiration lapse and didn’t figure out more game mechanics on time, once i figured out some fun stuff i didn’t have time to implement it or make levels for most of the ideas.
• Only 2 levels.. it’s mostly a tutorial game right now. Could’ve been really great with a few levels.
• No sound (But for webgames it can be a good thing)

Gonna write a bigger post-mortem later and upload a timelapse video tomorrow after sleeping and catching up on real-life.

Entry page

I can’t believe I really finished. This was my first LD and I thought I get probably stuck somewhere or underestimate the time I need, but no! I finished just in time. Ok…. some more content would be fine, but apart from this I’m really pleased with the outcome.

Looking forward to play all the other games. Good luck everyone. “hurry up” to those who haven’t submittedd yet, “keep on” to all those jammers. Good night to everyone in a timezone near mine (It’s 4:25 here).

my entry

It’s done! It’s not [i]done[/i] done, but it’s done.

I hope to continue improving this in the coming weeks (though I guess I’ll be to busy judging, for  a while!).

Anyway, congratulations to everyone who finished, and to those who are doing the Jam, go baby go!

It was a long haul, but I’m glad to say that I actually finished my first Ludum Dare about 45 minutes ago.

I made Armageddon Moochery, a game where you act all heroic to mooch stuff off of other people. I thought it was a nifty idea, and I’m happy with how the finished product turned out. Bad code though. It isn’t the worst code I’ve ever written, but it comes close.

That being said, I’ve learned a few things for next time:

• I needed to have a better, more solid idea for the model for the game. All the entities are reaching all over the code because I didn’t have a strong concept of how to organize conversations. If I did it again, I’d probably have swappable controller classes for switching between walking and conversation states. As it is, the controlling code for the conversation is half in the player and half in the townsperson who is being talked to, and the controlling code for the walking state is all over the place. Not really sure if it would be overkill to do this, but I might give it a shot next time.
• I started with graphics that I thought were really simple, at 32×32. I soon realized that if I wanted to finish the project, I would have to simplify the graphics further – I’m not much of an artist anyway, but I was spending a lot of my time trying to draw tons of walking frames. When I simplified the basic character model, it got way easier to create a much more diverse cast.
• I’d like to do music next time. If I follow my plan and don’t waste my time with simple graphics, I’ll probably be able to squeeze some music composition into the next try.

But holy crap. I haven’t finished a self-directed project in years.

I’m totally sold on Ludum Dare. I’m balls tired, but it was totally worth it.

Entry page

The gameplay is unfinished, there’s no audio, and the code is terrible, but I think I did a decent job with the presentation (as far as programmer art goes) and I think it’s a good base for a completed game, so I’m happy enough with it to submit as opposed to my total failure in LD19. LD18 is definitely still my best, but this might do better for graphics and humour.

I do have some good ideas for turning this into a proper game so I’d like to develop it further (maybe for the Jam, maybe later) but I always say that and nothing ever really happens, haha. :/

So glad I decided to Ludum Dare this time.  The sprint to the finish was crazy, the kind of stress that makes you feel super-great when it pays off.  I finished my game with 10 minutes left, and submitted 5 minutes into the extra hour — my internet had died, and I needed to walk a ways with my laptop for some WiFi!  The perfect conclusion to this hectic event.

My game polished up better than I thought it would, though there’s a rather big spike in the difficulty curve after level 8.  Also I might have turned the music into a muddled mess among all of my hasty tweaks.   But I think the game concept is really fun, and my execution was about as good as it could have been for my first Ludum Dare.

I gotta say thank you to everyone who puts this event together.  Such a good idea.

Welcome, please check out the game. It is my first LD and first game out and I’m glad I managed to finish in time.

I’m happy to have joined this event.

I am really excited.

Good luck to everyone during the game rating phase.

Best regards,

ER

Not too happy with the completeness, I will create a jam version too.

Tags: final, screenshot

Well… my game only has one level, zero sound effects, and isn’t challenging in the slightest. It does look really pretty though, and I’m still pleased with the result.

I thought I had a pretty good idea for a gameplay mechanic, but I ended up spending all my time on graphics and what I would loosely refer to as polish. I still think its pretty cool, and I look forward to adding to it in future.

Well done to everyone who entered in time, and thanks to those who came to CB2 in Cambridge for all the helpful suggestions.

It’s 4:00 AM here and I have managed to finish my game for this entry. I’m not as tired as I though I’d be, but it must be the caffeine running in my veins. Time to open a well deserved beer

I hoped I would manage to put more stuff into the game. I had a number of weapons and choosable items planned, more monsters, more music… more of many things. At least there are 22 levels 😉 I just hope that at least one person plays my game until he/she gets the invisibility ability

If You want to try here’s the link: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-20/?action=preview&uid=33 ^_^

I’ve also managed to put my framework to a good test. I found a lot of bugs (forgot most of them though:P) like the light management is foobar and I do have some serious memory problems. I’m wondering… is it Java’s or my fault?

It’s time to rest…

We won’t finish our project in time for the Jam, but I thought it’d be nice to at least share the details.  So here’s the rundown…

The game is called “L.I.N.K. : Laser-powered Interplanetary Nazi-tracking Killing-machine”.  It’s a space shooter with plenty of Hyrule satire and a Katamari twist.  The L.I.N.K. ship is a super magnet.  Any weapons you bump into on the field stick to the ship like glue and you can fire them using the mouse button.  Weapons include the iconic sword, cannons, lasers, and asteroids.

I was barely able to touch the code today in between grocery shopping, cleaning the house, getting laundry ready for next week, and shipping some mail.  But, we’ll keep poking sticks at it and see if we can’t finish it in the near future.  I think it was a little too ambitious for our first Dare, especially since this is the very first time I’ve ever coded (or even looked at) AS3/Flash and I have absolutely no code-base to work off of in this language.  With that in mind, I think it’s an impressive amount of work, and I had a lot of fun doing it.

Download it Here.

The game turned out perfectly, and I had a lot of fun making it. You play as a person stuck on a ledge on a world that is just one flat vertical surface. You must rise up to your city above using a ledge-creating device. I got the random generator to create an infinite world but my computer’s memory overloaded quickly. Rather than resolve the problem within the last few hours, I limited the size of the worldto about fifty chunks, with fake wall streaming off into the distance. Maybe I’ll fix this in an actual release! I really enjoy the Ludum Dare, and hope that I will be able to compete in the future as well.

Edit: I originally submitted a .7z file and did not know that still had 15 minutes to correct my submission to .zip! Thanks to PaperCutDoom for the save!

Wow… I thought I’d be able to finish this faster. Of course, it doesn’t help that I’m falling asleep at the keyboard… had I known that LD was running this weekend before Friday night, I would have made an effort to not get ridiculously exhausted this past week.

All in all, even if I don’t get anything submitted, I’d say this LD went pretty well… this is the first one I’ve ever participated in, this is the first game I’ve ever written using PyGame (aside from a tiny bit of joystick work in my main project a couple of years ago) and I just taught myself how to work with PyGame on Friday night, and this is the first 2D game I’ve worked on since high school. Not to mention that I wrote my own parallax-capable system for the game using PyGame’s sprite support – the first time I’ve ever even messed with code that does something like that.half hour,

Still, even though there’s no way I’ll be able to submit anything in in the next 10 minutes I’ll still try and submit this for the jam… it’s already a pretty cool game, just missing some important pieces, so it feels pretty incomplete at the moment. I’d probably be able to finish it all in like 6 hours if I slept first… but if I had slept earlier today, I would have slept through the deadline, easily.

I didn’t finish in time, sadly.

This is what I accomplished, which doesn’t look like much, but it now features NPCs, with a few different customizable move behaviours (going straight forward, pacing back and forth, random direction). Regular map entities are y-sorted to allow you to walk in front of and behind guys, depending on where you are positioned, relative to them. It also features buildings, which you can walk in front of, behind and “underneath” (through the door when it’s open — which occurs when you step into it).

Eventually, there’d be a bunch of buildings, some interiors, and stuff to collect and do.

Sadly, I ran out of time, so that’s all for now. And I can’t do the jam, since I work tomorrow. However, I will try and be dilligent and continue my game progress anyways. A lot of projects that don’t finish in compo deadlines usually don’t get finished, but so far I don’t feel disgruntled or anything. It’s just slow going.

Part of that was the decision to use FlashPunk, which I had never used before. And it has a lot of little weird gotchas, especially when it comes to the collision and rendering systems, which could use a lot of work, in my opinon. Thankfully, with a bit of cleverness, I was able to work around most of the hiccups I had, but it did mean I spent a lot of time reworking small things.

I’ll try and make an effort to finish my game down the road. Obviously, I can’t promise anything, but I’ll try anyways.

Had a great, if exhausting time this weekend. I’m really happy with how the game came out – it is a complete, if fairly short, platform adventure.

Looking forward to checking out everyone else’s games!

There we go! Everything is Sand is officially submitted! Kinda proud about how much I actually managed to do in less then 24 hours, even though I’m willing to bet my game is one of the shortest.

Try it out if you feel like it, http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-20/?action=preview&uid=3831 , now I’m going to bed!

Managed to finish, and then spent an hour trying to get everything onto the internet. Ugh. But I finally got everything done, and here is the result. Saddly no music, but whatever. Here it is:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-20/?action=preview&uid=3743

—
Mikhail Rudoy

Bunker 69

And with only five minutes left, it’s over

Sadly, it’s hard to call it a finished game. However, I’m exhausted after coding the whole night, so I don’t think Jam would help much. Sorry if the game is horribly raw, or should it happen to be boring — I did what I could for the first time. I’ll try to be as active as I can in rating your games after I get some sleep.

Congratulations to everyone who finished on clock

Tags: finished

Close call.  Ran into tons of bugs all over, but I think I fixed them all.

Link here. I’ll post a timelapse as well as a post mortem tomorrow.  Tired and have to do all of my weekend schoolwork.

/relief

So I decided to timelapse about 30 seconds before the competition started, so I wasn’t really prepared to do anything cool. However, the video turned out okay for being pretty basic. The beginning is kind of boring because I was working in photoshop on another monitor, which is the most interesting parts. Still interesting to see how the game progressed. I also have timelapse caps of my webcam the entire time, still debating whether I should show that one, lol.

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

You can view the game here:

Another competition over.
Completely ran out of time again. My idea requires a lot more art to come close to my vision. I was planning to throw together some simple music and add sound effects but then the deadline sprang up and attacked from behind line an angry velociraptor.

The current level and goal is a bit last minute. Actually the level is my testing level, I ran out of time to do a proper one. Even the stone tile was meant to be a place holder.

Here are some screenshots:
#gallery-1 { margin: auto; } #gallery-1 .gallery-item { float: left; margin-top: 10px; text-align: center; width: 50%; } #gallery-1 img { border: 2px solid #cfcfcf; } #gallery-1 .gallery-caption { margin-left: 0; } /* see gallery_shortcode() in wp-includes/media.php */

I do like where the game is headed, and I may continue writing it, but may not as the code is a big mess and could do with a lot of optimisation. As it is, it seems to struggle with more than fifty creatures.

Anyway – time to sleep. I will edit and upload my timelapse video tomorrow.

A  few hours ago I didn’t have much of a game at all. I’ve been learning to sleep 2 hours per day for the last ten days and I’ve had lots to do. I had decided that I wasn’t going to enter in this LD. Then I decided, to hell with that, let’s see how much of a game I can crack out in the last three or so hours of the deadline. So here it is, I’m quite happy with the result tbh. Even though there are a few things that are missing for this to be a complete tiny game, I’m still happy with what I could produce this fast. It was really fun to make too, I will probably work more on it within the coming days to get everything working correctly.

Anyway, this was a great first LD entry for me, I hope you enjoy it! I look forward to testing out everyone elses games!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-20/?action=rate&uid=3933

It appears that I didn’t get enough time on my game.  That’s okay though.  Lots of other things demanded my time (like screaming kids), but I managed to make a really fun game.  Really, me and my wife were having more fun with this than with all of my previous entries.  It’s not ready for the compo and I might not bother with the jam because work starts again tomorrow.  That means there will be a post-compo version for sure!  Stay tuned to my website or the LD planet.

I had a great time, as usual!

Here are some screens to part with.  Behold, “Don’t Blow It”.

Finished!

Play p.i.g here!

Upside down!

I’ve been thinking in portals the last few weeks, so I made a puzzle platformer with portals.
The portals are like tunnels: you shoot one end, and another appears at the other side.

Once again, my project grew as I worked on it. I told myself I’d make a very short demo of the portal mechanic, since I graduate in a week and have final projects to attend to. But I was having too much fun with it, and I had to implement all of my ideas!

I decided to up the resolution from my usual 320×240 (and then zoomed x2) to 640×480. I adjusted my art style to something a bit cleaner, and I’m happy with the result.

I’ve always struggled with level design, particularly puzzle design, so I took this as a challenge to improve my skills. Hopefully the results are enjoyable!

I sort of got some kind of playable thing together by the deadline – more or less.

It was nowhere near what I wanted it to be; no audio, no real gameplay other than a quick boss fight, no titles, no ending… But I guess the graphics could be a lot worse.

I’m going to work on my game more tomorrow and probably enter it as a jam entry, too. I’ve also got to edit my timelapse together. But now, sleep.

Tags: bed, done, entry, final, jam, screenshot, sleep, unfinished

I am actually amazed I somewhat finished a game.  I only put about 10hr of work into this entry.  I literally added all the enemies that you see in the game in the final hr of the competition.  Hope you enjoy my game/timelapse

My Final Entry Link: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-20/?action=preview&uid=55

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOQ0KmyGMpo

The world’s last ninja creeps in the shadows of zombies, monkeys, and robots in this post-zom-key-bot-calyptic world.  Watch the creatures’ movements to navigate the world while collecting batteries, bananas, and brains to redirect them.  Can you survive the zom-key-bot-caplypse?  Can you say zom-key-bot-calypse? Cheers fellow LD20ers! Download, Play, and Rate Here!

I got my game submitted about 10 minutes before the submission deadline – that was the longest 80 minutes of my life – phew!!!

Things that went wrong:

• Initial concept failed, because the art requirements were too difficult for my poor skills…
• Only managed to come up with another concept 13 hours in…
• Performance issues about 6 hours before deadline, requiring implementation of more efficient hit detection!
• Struggled with Java Webstart in-spite of having done a warm-up game as a test before the competition started.

Almost failed to finish due to having to do this...

Things that went well:

• My most complex and complete game in an LD so far (ignoring graphics / sound) – in spite of the 13 hour penalty due to my theme problems!
• My base code library performed pretty well (the hit detection issues aside) – also made many improvements in the course of the competition.

All told I feel like a winner! For about a week of work spent on Ludum Dare warm-up and competition I have:

• 2 good prototype games that can easily be fleshed out into nice games.
• Massive improvements to my base code library that will help my all my other projects.
• I had a lot of fun!

Thanks for a great competition and well done to everybody that finished a game – to those that didn’t: keep trying and better luck next time!

Tags: post-mortem, postmortem

Submitted just in time, and it’s playable and complete, even if it’s not as big a game as I had hoped.

A proper post-mortem and osx version coming in the next few days when I’ve caught up on sleep.

Congratulations to everyone who managed to finish!

Celebratory dinner! (Thanks Laura!)

I didn’t get to implement everything I planned on, but I think I’ve got a nice demo to build on. I had so much fun.  Now, ZzZZZzzz.

I managed to submit my entry just before the deadline. I got kinda stressed out, especially after I wisely decided to go for another idea halfway in. So I did my postmortem the visual style  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snNehSZ-KxI.

Timelapse!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=au79wqo7Bu4

Made with chronolapse

I uploaded it minutes after the timeline, and didn’t knew if it was in or out.

Now I’m sure that its out

Its feels very very bad to have rushed the last hours and fail, but well…  things that happens.

Here is the entry if anyone wants to test it anyway: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-20/?action=rate&uid=2503

Good luck to everybody!

Finished the Dare, just in time 😀 I’m really quite proud of myself for this one, not only did I really push my technical skillset (first time integrating a full-on level editor in a game!) but I also kinda pissed away the first 12~ hours 😛 Anyway, in the end it turned out pretty well, check it out if you want, hope you enjoy it!

Eunaborb

Tags: as3, final, flash, LD #20 - It's Dangerous to go Alone! Take This!, music

Just barely made it into the compo with a playable version!

The gameplay is nothing much – just jump from platform to platform in search of the portal platform that takes you to the next level.  I didn’t have time to implement enemies, more complex level layouts, or any kind of storyline to bind the game to the theme.

Regardless, I’m really happy with what I got done over the weekend – a lovely multipurpose 3D mesh generator,  a very powerful game editing framework, and the bones of a nice game.  I even came up with a passable plot that matches the theme, even if I didn’t have time to implement it.

If you want to download the game or browse the source (it’s Scala) you can find it in my github repository under a GPL license.

Now to catch a few hours of sleep.  Thanks to everyone for a nice Ludum Dare!

I managed to finish my game, Elidia, in time for the compo!  The game is rough, but finished.  This is the first time I have managed to actually complete a full game–in Ludum Dare or out!

So what are you waiting for?  Go play and rate!

Everybody loves particles!

First attempt at making a timelapse, quickly glued it together before going to bed this morning. Enjoy

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

I made it! My first Ludum Dare! I uploaded it last night after which my big soft bed was the only thing i could think about. I’ve always struggled with perfectionism, so releasing something that’s rather half finished is kind of a step in itself for me.

I spent lots of time on a boss that never got finished and some graphics that never got used so I might try to finish everything up in time for the jam, if time permits it today.

Anyway, lots of fun, this! Hopefully I’ll be able to keep finishing what I start and join the next dare.

Entry is HERE!

Here is the download link for Cleansing: http://www.megaupload.com/?d=KZMEJY0E

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-20/?action=preview&uid=4178

Old news, but a few hours ago I submitted my entry to the competition.

I’m impressed with myself. I single-handedly made a fully playable game about some kid who single-handedly takes down a robot empire with a little pea shooter. And then I named it SINGLEHANDEDLY.

After looking at the other entries I doubt if it will win anything in any category, and that’s not saying anything bad about my game. It’s an honor to be competing with the kind of talent I’ve seen here. What means the most to me right now is that I made a game from start to finish, a bit rough, but I made it and it’s fully playable and packed with decent features. And on top of all that, it’s a FUN game. No doubt, it’s a little uninspired, a generic “Metroidvania,” but you know what? It’s been too long since I’ve played a game this spiritedly simple.

I hope you all have fun playing this game and I look forward to the feedback I hope to get.

Oh, and I might whip something up for the jam. I dunno.

Well, my game was a complete failure, but I did learn from my mistakes. For one, I should make sure I have at least a little game plan. Second using physics was a huge no-no. It made things far too complicated and screwed up my player controller. Thirdly, I need to make sure I have the time to finish my game – I only got to work for about 18 hours total. I also spent wayyyyy too long in the beginning trying to figure out really dumb things that I had to end up simplifying to move on anyway.

I’ll be looking forward to the next dare! Good luck to everyone.

Woo! After busting serious ass, I’ve “finished” and turned in my game! If you want to give it a play, you’ll need python and pygame installed. Here’s a link to the source:

http://brianschulman.me/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/Spark.zip

I’m proud to have finished, even if I missed the compo deadline. There were some issues there, but now I’ll know to prepare better beforehand. Speaking of, I’ve totally got a post-mortem to write up. Long story short, though, I learned a good bit about work in Python and game development in general. This is a huge first for me, and I’m psyched to move on to the next stage! LD 21!!

I’ll get a video of the game up soon, to save people the effort of grabbing Python and pygame. In the meantime, I’m dead tired, totally full on an awesome burrito, and satisfied. Night all!

So, this was the first year I participated in Ludum Dare. I had an idea for a dungeon relay race, where adventurers were passing gear back and forth to beat the clock. Coming from Angband, I was thinking about this in a turn-based, grid kind of way with procedurally-generated levels, etc. I thought I might try to do some graphics though, to make the game more accessible to people. I was kind of nervous about being able to finish in the time, especially since my idea for the game kept expanding outward.

48 hours later, I managed to (barely) finish the game (Quengon: Dungeon Relay), or at least, the parts of it I could get done in 48 hours. Toward the end I started feeling a lot of pressure and disappointment: I had planned to create a bunch of different types of monsters, but ended up only having orange goblins because I didn’t have time to draw more. I had a lot of different items that I wanted to make but failed to, and there were a lot of basic things I should have finished that I didn’t (the most egregious was not rotating weapons depending on what direction the elf attacks from). Leaving the sound effects and music to the last minute meant that the sound effects aren’t great and there is no music. And I failed to create a lot of in-game content to help players understand what’s going on.

That said, I did manage to finish the game (even with a 9 hour break to play a show), and the game seems to work pretty well (I haven’t seen any crashes yet). Given that I came in with very little preparation (a few PCG algorithms taken from Angband and Pygame) and that I don’t have any experience doing programming with SDL/Pygame I was glad that I managed to get something built. Also, I was really worried about the art, but actually I think my pixel art ended up being OK. I’m already thinking about “the next one” and while I don’t think my game will win any awards I think it’s something people will be able to play (assuming I can figure out how to package it for Windows/Mac tomorrow).

In retrospect I would have been better off with out using PCG to generate dungeon levels, since most players don’t see that many anyway. I could have used that time to place items and layouts in a more interesting and narrative way. Tons of little things I have heard over the years (don’t use square tiles, don’t make your tile the base unit, etc) were born out in my experience. I made sure to get 7-8 hours of sleep a night, although again I wish I had carved a few hours out of that.

My biggest regret is not leaving an hour for playtesting at the end. I ended up making the 7 items and 3 power ups in the game a bit too rare, which means that the decision of which items to pass on (or not), which is supposed to be a central piece of the game, kind of gets side-lined. I may try to do a post-LD release where I create a splash, an instructions page, a death screen, fix the sounds and fix the rarities.

Thanks to everyone who helped put this on and participated, especially those hanging out on IRC!

You can run Unity webplayer builds directly off DropBox! I did not know this – just discovered it by looking at someone else’s entry (hat tip to Doktor Ace). Useful thing to know about for Unity devs.

I just managed to get Lonely Fortress more-or-less playable by the deadline. No music, and a lot less gameplay than I planned (not even a win screen – it was that tight). But what a great exercise! I love having to do everything yourself.

I think the adrenaline is finally wearing off so I can go to bed. ‘Night.

Tags: dropbox, unity, unity3d

Download HERE!

For some reason the zip file of my windows build kept getting corrupted. After removing the mirror update feature thing from the files on GameJolt, I was able to upload and the problem went away. Since the zip file was normal, I decided to render my time lapse…

After waiting an hour, I quit after 50% of my time lapse was rendered because it was taking sooo blooody long in Windows Live Movie Maker and switched to OS X.

I found out from twistedjoe that I forgot to have two .framework files copy into the package, so I had to rebuild the game to put them in.

The windows build still uses the same code (no cheating!) and the mac build just required some tweaking for timing and file loading. For some reason 3*CLOCKS_PER_SEC on Windows lasts a lot shorter than on OS X, so dividing all times by three for the OS X build makes the extended times disappear.

I was told by PoV that I could upload ports after the compo was done, so I’m guessing that I’m allowed to have the ported code included in the source zip too. Right?

So if you’re running Windows (32 or 64) or OS X (intel only), play my game please?
Organs and Marriage

This LD48 took me to my limit, everybody to the limit, I said come on Fhqwhgads!

…ahem…

So yeah my ‘game’ is ‘done’ and ready to be ‘played’. You can check out the official LD entry page HERE and check out my personal site with game info, controls, and downloads HERE.

It’s a 2D beat ’em up with a twisted theme interpretation. The majority of your entertainment is gonna come from the audio and basic mechanics, as there is not challenge at all… since you CAN’T DIE. Or win. You just go through the rooms and then the game resets after the last room because I didn’t have time to make a ‘win’ screen or whatever. I prefer to play in full-screen… which you can do with F4, or you can manually change the game window size.

GAH I’m tired. Going to sleep now.
I can’t wait to dig into these games!

Tags: complete, LD20, screenshot, submitted

I managed to finish my game. This was a bit of a twist for me, instead of spending way too much time on the code, I spent way to much time on the art content.

In order to do a 3D game, you pretty much have to have animations, unless you’re making a space game, or a racing game. So that meant that I needed to do animated models for my game. I haven’t done much of anything for modeling, animation, or texturing. This meant that the process of creating the art assets took a huge portion of my time. I think they turned out pretty nice though.

You can see the video of them here : http://vimeo.com/23143112

And the finished game can be seen here : http://vimeo.com/23141263

Final update:  the dang download died at 94%, hit bandwidth cap.  argh! sorry all.  I do have the zip still though.

I created a zip of all the games.  1.5 gigs.  Where do i put that? lol. no idea.

Update: trying to upload to a big file site.  Says they will hold up to 2gb.  says it will take a while, i’ll post the link here when its done.

I tried to zip all of them together, I think I got nearly all but with 305 it’s hard to say for sure without it taking forever to make the zip, and some of the web ones… i’m not sure how it handled those, but the various source/bin archives should all be here.

Note:  For future reference, it would make lives a LOT easier if you name your zip/etc something like your user id + game name, there were many “ld 20″ and related and if you have a great downloader, that works, but for me it may have overwritten several of them.

Update: ~20-30 of them had server errors, etc. and so they didn’t get pulled down.  If you added a file, i’d double check it’s upload location because that’s a pretty high number so it could be you got d/l capped or similar.

Also a question: how far can you get in zelda if you don’t “take this”?  Without cheats?

This entry was posted on Monday, May 2nd, 2011 at 5:41 am and is filed under LD #20 - It's Dangerous to go Alone! Take This!. 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.

It’s been a long Ludum Dare. No longer than usual, but still. I submitted my game, Questling, with 4 minutes to go. I then realized there was an additional submittal hour, so I polished and added music. Since then, I’ve kept updating my post release .exe, and I’ve finished my timelapse. I really wish I got more levels into the final version, but I’m very proud of what I have. So, try it out.

Submission – Timelapse

So I really did manage to submit my game last night. Who would have thought.

Tonight I’ll be doing the porting work, because up to now there is only a OSX build up there. I’ll port to Linux and Windows.

Also further post mortem, timelapse video and the like will follow, so stay tuned. There is still so much work to do to really finalize the submission with all the porting and editing to do. Also there is rating, don’t forge the rating.

But for now I gotta work my daily job as superman. Looking forward to going back to my secret identity of Clark Kent at night and create shibby games.

We are shooting for a Diablo meets an 8 way shooter with an accessable mouse interface. The lookis starting to come together, but we don’t have that nice hallways + rooms feel yet.

You can shoot to kill now (finally)

So I recorded a timelapse of this LD48 – Chronolapse did a great job of capturing screenshots, although doing a batch resize+crop and high-quality encode from jpegs was a little trickier… The end result was pretty good, though:

And of course, the final game is here

I saw all these cool timelapse videos everyone was making so this time I wanted to do one too! I made a perl timelapse script and off I went!

Only… I forgot to start it the first few hours and I lost some screens in the beginning to some technical difficulties. It’s not always a good idea to throw up a script the day before heh, heh.

Anyways, here’s the result:

A quick upload of my timelapse. On this ocassion i slept a lot and i set chronolapse to 30sec shots, so in general the whole thing turned out to be quite short..

It works as a timelapse, so here it goes:

25 hours of work, frame taken every minute, played at 30 frames per second (timelapse music: “Gloves Of Power” by dB Soundworks http://dbsoundworks.com/ ):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlKWTmex1Zw

I used scrot and mencoder to put the timelapse together.

PLAY THE GAME online (flash): http://www.jarnik.com/pub/ld20/

Tags: timelapse

RL-friends pointed out that my soundtrack is kinda neat. If the embed doesn’t work, click here, Or just go play here to experience the entire thing. Or see the Ludum-Dare-Entry. Either way, go play

-Matthew

Tags: music, soundtrack

I put together wallpapers from the screenshots of all the Ludum Dare #20 games!

352 games!!!

This .zip has wallpapers in various sizes and the Python script that generates them (requires PIL).

DOWNLOAD (all the games!)

DOWNLOAD (compo games only)

Tags: wallpaper

Okay, in retrospect I’m not that unpleased with my entry.

Anyway about my first LD. When the theme was announced, it was 4 am in the morning here (in Budapest, Hungary, Europe). I was still up working on something else. I have to admit I didn’t even know what was this sentence about, I had to google it. My first thought was OMG. My second was a Katamari Damacy/Nibbles-crossover, in which you are with someone going somewhere and people keep approaching you and obtruding various shit on you. So your inventory gets longer and longer. Another idea: Nyan Cat getting balloons and sandbags at random times so you have to balance her. Another idea: Robot Link Attack, you get the sword in the intro and then keep running and “dashing” with your sword. Another idea: something about Adam who gets Eve so as not to be alone. Another idea: vertical shooter about boy and girl in love, who fight aliens with a link of “laser hearts” between them. Another idea: something about a lot of prey animals who avoid being caught by predators by going in a crowd (it’s a real-life phenomenon and I like biology).

Then I fell asleep at 5:30 in the morning, got up at 10, tidied up my place, went to the railway station for my gf, and then a wedding until 4 in the morning. I was hoping to get a lot of ideas from real-life experience and asking friends. It didn’t work at all. At least I could chill out and not care about LD. We went home and slept until 2 in the afternoon.

Okay, 34 hours already gone and I have still nothing. I’m thinking about the Nibbles thing and I don’t remember why was it fun at all. So I try a Flash version and realize that it’s *not* fun at all. Okay, Nibbles dumped, let’s get this vertical shooter going. I know I don’t have the brains, the time, the talent to make decent graphics by myself. My gf is a graphic artist but it’s a lonely compo so I cannot “use” her. She’s watching Porco Rosso thankfully in Japanese so I can concentratre on the game. Anyway I bump into the Silk Icon Set made by famfamfam.com. That’s when it gets clear that the two main characters will be penguins: Linux Tux is the cutest icon in the set.

So, two tux penguins and a heart bumping left and right between them. Feels a bit like Pong. In about two hours I have a “working” version. It’s not fun at all, speed not right, enemies not right, intro not right, no music and sound fx. I start looking for a good piece of music. The Crow: City of Angels and then Restoration going muted in the background. It seems like all the great music in the whole wide world is protected by copyright. I even google “GNU music” but I only find some shit by Richard Stallman. Yes, he might by a black belt open source ninja, but not a musician. Finally I find Talco, an Italian ska band who make free music. Then it turns out it’s not that free, no derivates are allowed. Fuck!

Better forget the music and tweek everything else in the game. Sound fx by Dr Petter’s sfxr. It’s an awfully great tool, I have no idea how else could I get sound effects. I run through the Silk icons and copy every piece that could be an alien. I mean in some surreal cartoony suitable-for-small-kids world. Like a wrench, a basketball, an iPod, a key, a bell, a clock, etc. The only graphical work I do is magnifying and “blueing” the cloud icon to use it as a background animation. I even forget parallax (more layers of clouds running with different speeds) which would make the game so much better. Finally I get the speeds of the game and the scoring “system” right.

It’s 2 in the morning and I’m totally fed up with everything. At this point I hate not only my game but Ludum Dare as well. And I still need some background music. And yes, I find a lot of free music on Last.fm. After about 5 minutes of searching, I get Fot i hose by Casiokids. Nice indie music from Norway.

I can’t believe I’m ready! Let’s upload the game, submit the entry and forget about the whole thing for ever. 2:30 going to bed. Can’t sleep for about 2 hours, I got the “boogie” in my legs. Then I fall asleep.

That was it. My third gaming compo and my first LD. Thanks for the opportunity!

Tags: postmortem

Firstly: I’ve uploaded all of my notes that I wrote during the competition to here, and added a link to them on my submission page.

What Worked

No Framework

From what I have gathered from it, not having a massive framework to use helped me get what I wanted done more quickly, as I wasn’t spending time trying to get the code to work with the framework. Also, not using a framework meant that I’d often just write something that was basic and worked (GUI Especially) or use existing code without writing a class for it, instead of going overboard.

Modular Code

This time around, I think I’ve gone for a more modular approach to the code. Which made me reuse the core much more than what I did in the last submission (The player and enemies use the same movement logic, except that the input for the player is controlled by actual keys). This made it somewhat easy to fix any issues that arose, as all I would have to do is change one file instead of multiple files.

What Didn’t Work

No Framework

The only downside to not using a framework was that if I needed anything, I’d have to spend time implementing it. I think the solution here is to find a point at which the framework doesn’t impede code development, while at the same time providing useful tools that can be reused through each project.

Too Big of Idea

While the core idea for this game was quite simple, I (once again) decided to go slightly overboard with the ideas that went on top of it, which resulted in majority of the features not getting implemented, or quickly tacked onto the game to make it playable.

Basically: Next time, keep it even more simpler 😛

What Could Be Improved

Cross Platform Development

Once again, I chose to use C#, which effectively limits playing to people who have a Windows machine. A better alternative would be to use Java or Flash so that people from multiple platforms can play the game. This is something that I will look into before the next LD.

But once again, I had fun working on this game! Bring on LD #21!

What’s the current policy on bug fixes?

People have found a couple of bugs on my entry so far (one pertaining ambient light levels, the other the behavior of the ESC key)… I’m I allowed to correct these bugs (since the first one kind of ruins the second level, and the other is just silly)?

I also have another bug concerning full screen (if the resolution is not that of the desktop, it just shows a black screen), would like to fix that so that people don’t have to edit a text file…

I remember we had some compos that allowed for bug fixes after the end, but I’m not sure what’s the current status…

[ ENTRY | PLAY THE GAME [Web – Flash] | Sources]

Your spaceship crashed on an unknown planet called Earth and where inhabitants seems to live in The Middle Ages. There is kings, knights, princess and treasure hunters but they all appears to be cowards.
So your grandpa decided for you that you will explore dangerous dungeons on this planet in order to get loots and treasures and sell it in your brand new shop. Yes, you have a shop where people comes, buy a treasure and claim to every one that he has explored the dungeon, killed the monster and got the treasure 😉
With enough money you will be able to repair your ship and get the hell out of this damn planet !

Left & Right Arrow : Move
Up Arrow & Space : Jump (when jump available)
Down Arrow & X : Interact
C & Z : shoot (when gun available)

There is some bugs :

• If your character don’t appear on the screen after changing area, I’m sorry but you’re screwed… this is a shitty tips but try to avoid returning to already visited area (when you don’t have to).
• You can’t re-enter your own shop… (anyway you don’t have to do that to finish the game)

A bug fixed version will come soon. I’ll made a new post about it.

Tags: entry

I’m happy now Was expecting it to be a bit more difficult than it was, however I did need to optimise rendering to get it up to speed due to working in a VM – didn’t want to take the risk and release something suboptimal! Didn’t think I would get it done till later in the week, however I now know that I have a working setup on my Mac for doing Windows ports for the rest of the LDs to come!

Tomorrow: Playing all the awesome games people have made!

The time-lapse caps from my PandaBot entry.

This comes from the Mac App “ScreenNinja” at http://getscreenninja.com/

Can’t work on the compo today , but we should be able to finish after work hours

Lots of nice games released yesterday !

I’m going to give up. There’s no way I’ll be able to finish a game at this point.

I’m sad. If I had slept better Saturday night, I’d have been able to work on Sunday. Could’ve been, but wasn’t.

It wasn’t my best LD. I’m looking forward to the mini next month. Maybe I’ll be able to redeem myself. Until then, I’m just going to try to work on something to keep myself busy. Going to try to find a job for the summer, too. Probably at a grocery store. Hopefully that’ll work out well.

Happy coding,

— Mr. Dude

I just noticed, that the menu still reappears when changing/reloading the map, but game isn’t paused, I thought I fixed this, but appearantly I didn’t. If anyone is interested in a fixed version, here it is:

Post LD bugifed version

If you find any more bugs, feal free to leave a comment and I’ll try to fix it and update the Post LD version.

NOTE: the fixed version is NOT the entry, the official entry has the bug in it (unfortunately).

So I had about 3 hours to make a game from scratch, because of my crazy schedule.  After doing the keynote video with my old mac I thought I’d try an old mini D/A style game, because for one thing those games were tiny sized and should be doable pretty fast.  However, this still took a while and I was disappointed with the lack of cross-platform testing I got in (doesn’t work right on linux firefox, but works on windows firefox… wtf?  Anyhow, thanks for that Oracle.  Way to make java cross-platform compatible).  I was really happy with how the applet actually came together architecturally and how closely it matches what I wanted it to be.  Unfortunately there is one bug I found with the tornado, but I can fix that post-ld and I hope to make a suite of smallish survival games like this to help people play with the supposed “right thing to do” in various simplified survival scenarios.

[ ENTRY | PLAY THE COMPO VERSION [Web – Flash] | PLAY THE JAM VERSION | Sources]

You built a hotel in on a patch of ground that missiles like to hit. You must now attach shields to protect it. Last as long as you can manage. You have to wait for the shields to be delivered to you though.

Z – Load, then attach a shield from the left

X – Load, then attach a shield from the top

C – Load, then attach a shield from the right

There is a Jam version as well that has better music, and sound effects. It also has a global high score table, so you can get ranked. The gameplay did not change at all though.

Thanks to Bender for the post format. I hope you don’t mind me borrowing it.

Watch the timelapse.

Post mortem in the extended.

What went wrong:

I used a pretty new to me game framework. I had only used flixel for one compo prior, and that was a super simple 2 hour trainwreck. As such, I didn’t have the best handle on the ins and outs of the way that it worked. Some of my stuff in this compo relied on me overriding the collision detection, and it was not entirely obvious how to make that work exactly right. I blew about 3 hours trying to get the collision detection right, with a bunch of missteps along the way.

I didn’t play test enough. I made the classic mistake of thinking that it was easy to play, because it was easy for me. When I showed it to my friend, it became immediately clear that there was nowhere near enough onscreen prompting. I really should have included a basic tutorial before the missiles started coming on screen.

The mechanics are a bit TOO innovative. The one play test showed that there are some things in the game that are completely non obvious. I probably could have switched the mechanics to use Tetris style interaction without too much difficulty, but I ran out of time.

There is no difficulty ramp. I am pretty sure that you can keep going until you get bored. I am not one hundred percent sure what the upper limit on the game is, because I always got bored before the missiles actually killed me. It wasn’t going to be super hard to add a difficulty ramp, but I was a bit gun shy, due to the fact that I didn’t have anyone to play test it with. Next time I will make sure to put one in.

I didn’t leave enough time for SFX / Music. Yup. The jam version is significantly better with them. I think that I also need to work on more music, more often, because I was totally at a loss when I got to this point, and had to drop to using wolfram tones.

I suck at art. Another thing that I just need to practice before the next one. Man this game is UGGLY. Maybe just more unplayable game scenes to practice this. I really wanted to do rotoscoping for this jam, but the mechanic that I came up with just didn’t match that, so I had to scrap it.

What went right:

I slept a reasonable amount and didn’t work to the deadlines. The last ludum dare I did, I worked two 13 hour days in a row, and I was so burned by monday that I was barely able to go to work. I am really glad that I didn’t do that. I am also glad that I ended 8 hours early. I think that I would have hit the realm of diminishing returns pretty darn quick if I hadn’t.

I made a bunch of simple food in advance. Yup. Having three solid meals on the first day was crucial. I wish I had cooked the second days food as well, but it didn’t dawn on me until it was too late.

I decided on a simple mechanic. I think I am just getting better at realizing what makes for a simple mechanic. Practice Practice Practice. This is clearly the most indescribable part of game design for me. This time I just took an existing concept, and flipped part of it: missile defense, except you block rather than shoot. Thanks to the tigsource “Never ending hybrid design” thread for giving me this idea.

Stopped working on mechanic stuff well in advance of the deadline. Hot dang. There was so much that I wanted to add, but I just polished what I had instead. I think this worked out pretty ok.

Flash. I did it this time, just like I wanted to after the last one.

Ideas for future Dev:

More Block types. One of the initial thoughts that I had for this game was to have guns that you could attach to your hotel so that you could shoot down the missiles. Also that way, you would have secondary things that you needed to protect.

Different way of placing blocks. I think just doing tetris exactly would work pretty well. Or I could make it so that you charged up the droppers with incrementally better blocks rather than getting random ones. Or a mouse based control (would be easy to implement, just move the block away from the hotel rather than towards it when looking for a place to attach).

Power ups. Hitting a power up when placing a block would give you some modified form of blocks, or behavior.

Better Scoring System. Yeah, the scoring sucks. Making it so you get combos for not placing blocks very quickly, or hitting a missile that is about to hit your hotel. I think this might need to be built in with the different blocks, maybe even having special block to protect that build your multiplier.

All in all, a very successful LD for me, I can’t wait to do it again.

Tags: entry, postmortem, timelapse