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.
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:
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 
Tags: music, soundtrack
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.
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.
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 😛
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 :
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:
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.
Post mortem in the extended.
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.
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.
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
