Sorry about posting this again, but it probably got lost in the traffic and I didn’t get any answers…

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…

A quick postmortem of my LD20 experience…

Woke up read winning entry and then turned over to dream a game, got up a bit later with a fully formed game design buzzing in my head!

First play with Unitys Terrain tools had an island rising from the sea, but made the first mistake of using Unity textures to paint the island and skybox!

But a static view of an island with nice water and skybox does not make a game. Dropped in the FPS controller and he presto running around on the island.

(2 hours)

Oops the player can’t climb steep slopes, spend time trying to make the slopes shallower and test/repeat…

Some time later.. ! Change settings for max slope in controller!

(1 hour)

Towers: using default cubes and physics build a tower! Find a cool diamond material (oops!) and prefab it.

Position towers…

(3 hours)

Build weapon and plinth in blender…. drop into Unity.

(1.5 hours)

Picking up and Throwing the weapon to destroy the towers…

(4.5 hours)

Boomerang weapon return after throw.

(1.5 hours)

Day one over…

Day Two…

Played around with the graphic effects to give the impression of fatigue and near collapse for player.

Getting the towers to fight back fireballs were needed.

Spent a good deal of time tweaking the basic gameplay and had a lull, this seams to be a recurring problem in LD’s by day two I’m tired and tend to make less progress.

Got back too it and pulled together an intro scene and then released it as a Jam…

I should have avoided using Unity textures and prefabs (palm trees) to make a true LD entry!

Definitly should have done a warm up game/project to get the feel of starting from scratch again!

No Music/Sfx – Need to work on music/sfx creation from scratch!
No Player death/health
No Win State
No Levels
No Variety

Had great fun and I think ‘From the wreck of HMS Lightning’ is very atmospheric but lacking in depth!

If you click rate entries you get a limited list:

Then you have to click “show all entries” waaaay down in the lower left to see all the game.

What is this first list? And why doesn’t it just show all the games?

I have uploaded a bug fixes version of my game, in addition to the original one. Play it.

As I said in my entry, it was posted after the deadline so it’s not intended for evaluation purpose. But if you just want to play and have fun without fearing any bugs that will crash the game, try it :p

Right, I know I said there would be posts about how it was going and what I was doing as Ludum Dare was going on. And I do apologize, for the obvious lack of them.

So here they are all bundled into one big post.

The theme for Ludum Dare 20 was – “It’s Dangerous To Go Alone. Take This.”
In which fof the first hour or so, I couldnt find a single good story idea.
So I opted for Plan B – even though Plan B never exixted in the first place.
And Plan B was – make the game in XNA!

Brilliant plan – although my XNA skills werent the greatest, especially in the 2D department.
But now that I look upon how it did go, it went pretty darn good

So…with some start on what programme I was going to use, the coding began.
With photoshop open as well, I made small pictures to go in and within the first hour or two, had a small red and blue square moving around the screen.

My idea to tie this into the theme – the most important part of Ludum Dare – was that as it is dangerous to go alone. Why not take someone on the journey with you. – Hence the 2 squares. One controlled with the W,A,S,D keys, and the other the arrow directional ones.

The name of the game wasnt thought up until the Sunday, so almost the end of the competition.
The name I created was – B.Y.O.B
Now, this had two names depending on how you played, i.e. by yourself, or with a friend
If, by yourself, the game title is: Be Your Own Buddy
and if you are playing with a friend: Bring Your Own Buddy.
Still linking back to the not to go alone, take something with you aspect.

Altogether 3 levels were created, and due to terrible coding writing, the only way to link them was seperately, but putting them in password protected folders, with the password for each at the end of the previous level.
There was also a “Secrets” folder with an achievement in it, once you got the password at the end of level 3 – effectively completing the game.

If you want to play – entirely for free – click this link and download it.

http://www.mediafire.com/?ax2fze2fiue729l

Once you extract the files – READ the instructions text file FIRST!
That is the most important step, as if you dont have a certain something you wont be able to play – but tells you how to get it!

It isnt a very long game, and for my first ever Ludum Dare entry – I think it turned out amazingly.
Let me know what you all think 😀

And below is the gameplay video and playthrough I made!
Enjoy –

EncryptedShadow
Apperception Games

GNU/Linux users can now brave the kitten apocalypse by downloading the Linux port

I already wrote up a quick post mortem on my blog. This is a longer version with more info – if you’ve read the other version, skip down to “What went wrong” and read from there. Cheers!

The theme this time was pretty weird, so I was maybe considering skipping, but I got inspired and then I did it anyway. And I am SUPER PROUD of that because I got to do some cool sprite animation, script some cutscenes and make a game in a genre I haven’t tried before: the genre of PUNCHING.

PLAN

Every time I do a Ludum Dare, I have a vague idea of what sort of game I want to make or what skills I want to develop before the theme’s even announced. This time, inspired by playing Nicolau Chaud’s Beautiful Escape: Dungeoneer (review) last week, my plan was to make something contemporary and human. That led me straight to the idea of making a game where you punch people who don’t have rape alarms until they’re scared enough to want rape alarms. For their safety.

Consequently my entry “Vigilance” is a game about suspect charities, lonely women walking through empty parks at night, and pretending you’re a ninja.

Below the jump: my dev process, including roughly how long it took me to do the various things in the game, and a quick post-mortem.

DEV PROCESS

OK, here’s something I feel a little guilty about: I was even less organised this time than I was for the last one. I didn’t even do a timelog, didn’t really bother with scheduling and cutting scope until I had about two hours left, and the whole thing’s frankly pretty hazy. Here’s what I remember, though:

I started off working on the graphics, as always, and then focused on character movement and response. Because the characters in “Vigilance” are normal humans and move about a lot – this is a gritty, realistic brawler of a fighting game – I ended up doing a ton of animation work. Including writing a decent animation system. Between this and rewriting my basecode because I never published it, getting a controllable character running around on a blank screen took me about 12 hours. But it was great! I learned a ton about animation, and making a controllable character with that fidelity and level of animation was enough of a victory that I could have stopped then and been happy.

But instead, I soldiered on! I set my character up so you could give a few NPCs with no AI a kicking. Here’s a playable version of what I had after day 1.

– Next I added the AI and game rules for the brawling part of the game, since I felt that part would need the most polish and balancing. (Also, I didn’t have a firm design in mind for the daytime scenes yet.) Getting the night scene into a decent state took about 3 hours, and I was polishing it and adding to it for the rest of the weekend.

– I now had about 14 hours left. The daytime scene came next. My original design called for conversations with each of the NPCs where you’d choose dialogue options, but for the sake of getting something in there fast, I built a minigame where you had a time limit and had to go interact with as many NPCs as possible. The whole conversation part of the interaction was abstracted out, so the NPC just gave you a final outcome at random. With a time limit added this turned out to be fun enough, so I dropped my further plans and focused on refining what I had!

– I spent a while here balancing the night-time combat, setting up the day-night-day-night game flow and putting in little bits of conversation text.

– I started work on the first major cutscene (“This asshole town!”) with about 8 hours to go and spent the next few hours adding context and jokes to the game.

– I added the ending screen to the game with about 4 hours to go. I think this is roughly when I managed my last start-to-finish playthrough. I don’t really recommend doing hours of development and then releasing without thorough testing, but I just didn’t have the time to make sure everything worked before I submitted. 😀 (I got lucky – everything did!)

– Started work on the sound effects (with bfxr) with 3 hours to go.

– Started work on the music (in Reason) with about an hour and a half to go.

– Tidied up a few loose ends with about 15 minutes left, like adding palette swaps for the NPCs so they weren’t all redheads with green shirts and putting in the mandatory “It’s dangerous to go alone!” conversation with an NPC… and submitted seconds before the end of the 48 hours. Result!

WHAT WENT WRONG

– I ran out of time. I could really have used about six more hours, just to draw better quality backgrounds, add a few more cutscenes/conversations, flesh out the ending, sort a decent title screen and polish the AI a touch.

The worst part is the night-time park background, which isn’t even identifiable as a park. Thankfully the location’s explained in conversation, but I’m still very much unhappy with it.

This was largely my own stupid fault for, again, not having basecode ready. Lesson learned – I’ll definitely be prepared next time.

– Focusing so much on fluidly-animated characters when I’d never done them before meant it took me hours of experimentation just learning how to animate them nicely! I went through a few iterations of the character and the run cycle early on before it started to come together. That kind of experimentation’s paradoxically the funnest part of Ludum Dare, but it’s a poor use of time vs. developing concepts that rely on skills you already definitely have.

WHAT WENT RIGHT

– The animation. This is the first time I’ve done this much character animation in a game! Beacon had about 9 frames of animation total – this has 32 frames per character, across two characters (generic boy, generic girl) and one variation (Night Marcy). I spent a few hours on the first day setting up a sweet little animation engine that let me string together frames from the sprite sheet and muck about with timings, and that really paid off in terms of making the character control nicely and the combat feel good. More than that: the animation was probably the most rewarding specific thing I’ve done in any LD, and I’m super glad it came out this well.

– The “feel”. Though the game’s obviously inspired by decades of beat ’em ups, I wanted a gritty, realistic, sadistic feel to the fighting. It was tricky coming up with a system that didn’t use flashy kicks or combos, but little things like being able to kick people when they’re down to make them run away really built up the atmosphere of random, cavalier vigilante violence.

– The music. I literally wrote three music tracks in under an hour. I am so incredibly happy they’re not terrible! By all rights, they should be.

– The script. The concept deserved some serious work on humour and characterisation, so I spent a good chunk of Sunday bouncing jokes off my awesome and eternally patient girlfriend to make sure they were funny to someone other than me. That seemed to pay off, and it’s a real pleasure to see people enjoying it. 😀

WHAT’S NEXT?

My current plan with “Vigilance” is to clean it up and do all the things I sadly couldn’t find time for during the competition, like decent background graphics instead of those placeholder scribbles, better sound and about a 50% bigger script. If you want to follow its further development, follow me on Twitter or check my blog. I’ll try to get the final version ready in time for the judging results three weeks from now in case this ranks highly. Fingers crossed

one of the new level mockups for T.H.I.S

No zombies, I promise… But maybe some skeleton kittens.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 3rd, 2011 at 1:28 pm 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.

As some will know, I’ve had a lot of trouble fixing what i thought to be memory management teething problems. I would like to say the following:

I AM PROBABLY ONE OF THE WORLDS MOST RETARTED PEOPLE FOR THIS:

The bug causing access denied and random crashes can be (or rather  not be found) on line 142 of Src/Video/LocalAssistant.pas where a missing close(f) was found later which by some miracle does not affect my 64 Bit natty box and any other 64 bit ubuntu variant for that matter bu affects Win32, Win64, Linux 32 bit and pretty much every OS under the sun. The new package is uploading as I speak with a win32 binary and libs along with a linux (ubuntu) x64 binary too. Oh, and I fixed 8 pixels in the ’tilkeset’

Sorry for the inconvenience, but its all fixed now and if you have 3-7mins of your life to waste, you can now give it a spin!

PS: Lazy people find the link here: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4853895/CrunchiesLD20Mk2-All.zip

Finally got round to doing a video of the game hope you like it and if you want to try it you can play it here

So, this was my first Ludum Dare ! And also, the first “real” game I made. You can play it here first before reading this.
First things first : the title sucks. I didn’t have any ideas on it so I just took what first went through my mind.

You might find interesting to read this post describing the whole process. You can also find my quite uninteresting timelapse video here; not of much interest, as i mostly spent my time munching code.

The idea

The first think that occured to me, was that the theme wasn’t great, and that nearly anything could be fit into it. As I had wanted to create some rogue-like game, that being one of my favorite genres and in my opinion having a lot of potential. Of course I wasn’t going to go for some groundbreaking game, but I liked the idea of doing something like that.

So I decided that I would “mock” a little bit the theme by having a old man give you a random set of items, those items being stupid… Then you would have to adapt in the dangerous caverns where all the monsters awaited you without much help (I was thinking toothbrushes and stuff). Alas, caught up by time, I ended up only putting in “serious” stuff.

I wanted something simple to play, but fully randomized like the original Rogue so that if players wanted to go on playing they wouldn’t have to stop because I didn’t have time to make levels (which sometimes happened to other participants, which was truly a pity !). That also meant I could really take my time on the game engine, starting from scratch.

The process

I started by implementing a basic loader, that took me about 5 minutes. Then I started work on the map. First big snag and also enormous error, was when I tried using a two dimensional array in AS3. I had never heard of nested arrays so I then assumed for some reason it wasn’t possible, instead of doing some research. I started coding using a very long array. Let’s say that I lost 6hours total, when I discovered I couldn’t do much with this, found out about nested arrays and learned using them, and cleaned all the mess left by the giant array.

So I worked on the generation algorithm. Didn’t know anything about that, so I sort of improvised to imitate Rogue. The algorithm goes through the map, and sometimes starts creating a room of variable size. After that, it creates corridors between rooms… That’s where it sort of became hectic. Thinks started behaving wildly sometimes, so I ended up doing some wall borders then floor all around the area, that way I could stop working on it. I had already spent a day on this. I finished it with random mob and item spawning.

Then came feature creep. I thought, “Line of sight, why not ?”. Ended up spending half of day two on it with no result. Twas fun, but then I started getting nervous about finishing.

I moved on to the inventory system and item interactions. That was pretty straightforward, using different arrays and algorithms. It was quite simple and I think, one of the things I managed the best. You don’t notice it in the game (well, I think) because it works seamlessly and frustration-less. This took me about three hours, max.

Finally, I implemented fighting and mob “AI”. Not really AI, because I didn’t have time to do pathfinding or stuff like that. It’s less than 50 lines of code. It justs checks if the player is standing next to him to attack him, and if not, moves in his direction. And even that’s basic.

Then came features : luckily I had worked by being careful that most things were dynamic, so I could easily implement items/mobs. I was hard pressed on time so I did only a small portion of what I had in mind… That’s where graphics kicked in, pixel-drawing armor/swords/potions. Not much work of course.

The end of LD#20

I think I did really okay, and I might even polish this to get a solid, entertaining game. It’s more of a engine now than anything else, but it could be more. I hope you found reading this interesting !

You can check out the game here, and my 31hrs timelapse of me coding away here.

I recorded a timelapse video for the weekend, with integrated webcam for the first time.

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

Game’s here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-20/?action=rate&uid=1984

Enjoy!

I wanted to base my gameplay on the theme, rather then come up be a game beforehand and shoehorn the theme into it. So I came up with different games for most of the themes from the final round of voting, and thankfully the winning theme was one I was happy with.

The idea is that the main character is sort of weak and can not kill enemies, and you have a partner who covers the main characters weaknesses. The “Take this” thing made it seem like “this” should not be a person, so I made the partner be a robot. Once I decided that, coming up with the different abilities for each character was easy, I just had to ask myself “How’s a robot different from a human?”, and based the abilities on that.

I think Stage 2 is the only level where it makes you actually feel the theme “It’s dangerous to go alone”, since it’s the only stage where you have to separate from your robot buddy for a short while. When Gem is alone, you have to avoid enemies rather than just shooting them from afar. I wish I made more levels like this, to further express the theme.

Some things I’m unhappy with, would be the lack of levels and music. I knew I wouldn’t get any music done before the compo even started, but I love game music and it’s set’s the mood for the game, so I’m sad I couldn’t make anything. This was my first Ludum Dare and it was pretty lax. I didn’t work super-hard or get stressed at all, but because of that I think I didn’t get enough done as I wanted to.

I’m pretty happy with the graphics, I made every sprite less than 16×16 because I thought it would be faster and easier, but if I continue to make this game, I won’t set such a limit on myself.

Overall I’m pretty happy with the result, just a few thing’s I could have done better. See the game here.

Tags: postmortem

SLiV, a guy on the dutch game maker community made a “Let’s Play” of Speculum, don’t watch it if you are still planning to play the game cause it contains spoilers. The game can be played here.

I have been thinking about creating a torrent file for all the compo games for rating purposes..

Is that even legal? Is anyone already doing this? If anyone has details please share.

Thanks

ER

Well, my first ever LD ended almost a couple of days ago (excluding the LD where I had to unexpectedly pull out because I forgot I was going to Vietnam the second day).

And how did it go?

Well, it could have been better. I decided in advance that sleep deprivation was going to be a big no-no: I either finish in daytime, or I don’t bother. Making games is fun, but it shouldn’t be too unhealthy.

There were also some dramatic unwelcome or unexpected interruptions, such as calculus homework, having to spent 5 hours helping a friend out with a film project, and having to research and apply fo tours to universities.

Overall, I could have done with more time.

The lack of time shows in the way that everything I made on the first day (engine, many graphics, hell, even music) was extremely polished, but everything I made on the second day (story, sounds, enemies, final polish) was *profanity*.

Lesson learned for next time!

One of the things I love about Ludum Dare is how inspiring the themes can be. This includes the themes that don’t get chosen. I plan to make a game with one of these themes soon.

Instead of copying and pasting my post from my own blog, I will write one just for LD!

The most important fact, as with any Ludum Dare, is that I was able to finish! I originally thought I wouldn’t have enough time to get it done, so I threw in the towel roughly 8 hours before. I had second thoughts a few hours later and quickly rushed back into coding. Thankfully I had just enough time to finish it!

Even though this was my first time making a platformer, I’m feel that it isn’t just another run of the mill platform game. I wanted the torch to be part of the player so those moments are more intense when you aren’t holding the torch. I think this worked quite well, but sound effects and a sound track really would have helped the atmosphere.

I usually use 8bit graphics, but I wanted to simplify them further so I wouldn’t be hung on graphics during the competition. I wanted to be spending more time with the actual level design. So I opted for 8×8 sprites scaled to 4x times their size. While it gave the game a cutesy feel, it made text feel awkward as it looks huge on screen. The furthest I’m going to go next time is 2x or I will scale the graphics in my image editor instead of doing it through code.

As I said before, this was my first time making a platformer and I was worried about it being too easy. From the feedback I’ve been given so far, I’ve found that it’s far from easy. There was also an issue near the end of the level where players thought they need to make a blind jump, when in reality they had missed the hidden passage. I’ll make it more obvious in the post-compo version. ;]

Speaking of post-compo, I’ve already added/fixed a bunch of things. Notably I’ve fixed the physics for both the torch and the player so things should be much smoother. I also added much needed particle effects to the torch. I should be releasing it sometime in the next few weeks!

Until then…don’t drop your torch.

>>Torch Play and Rate!<<

Tags: action, creatures, dark, light, platformer, postmortem, torch

Asteroid Explorer video on youtube:

Tags: 3D, McFunkypants, Molehill, video

They are Punishing

After my brainstorming session I had four things written in my notebook:

Avoid Monsters, look for other people, share an item and sheriffs badge

I then wrote the word share-iff.

At that point I was done writing. It was perfect. Though seeing as it was maiden voyage into LD I decided to overscope what I was able to do in 48 hours anyway.

Too many Deputies

The amount of characters for this game went into the double digits and for most of the people you come across and deputize they have a custom death sprite. I didn’t need that many options and most players don’t find them all let alone kill them all and admire their graves but I did it. I’m glad I did it, walking back to find a grave that you recognize was pretty cool, but It didn’t need to be 10 guys.

For the map I had decided about 2 days in that I would use the Deadly Alien Map Editor to make it but after a few hours of that not panning out and only half working I did the rest of it myself. The level itself was the most time consuming area which didn’t have to be and still ended up with a truckload of collision and placement issues.

The Final Push

I left a bit too much to the final hours of the competition: Win Condition, Tutorial, Lose condition, sound, music, other things.

Some of those things kinda made it in. The win condition is there, mileage may vary on the aesthetics of the splash screen, and a tutorial was implemented, complete with typo on one of the key presses in the game but I could have thought about them earlier.

This all sounds pretty negative but I had fun slept regularly and got to draw a lot of characters. I learned about my limitations and that’s what I wanted from LD anyway.