We are looking for a new major for our army. Maybe you… Our scouts have noticed a big army, which is heading towards us. Everyone will not survive, you will have to make some choices.
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/the-last-outpost
6 more rating and we're in!
If you haven’t played and rated this game, come and get some fun!
I want more ratings and comments to let me know my game better! If you help me, I will also help you by rating and commenting on your game :) Let’s play some games, shall we?
PS: Windows version is recommended to play the game. You need headphone or earphone to play the game. (To hear the sound from different positions.)
Here’s my LD43 jam entry: Ordeals of Limbo. Escape to the exit with your hearing and memory!
So, try my game :v:
you can find it here
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/its-yout-life-dude
it's a web game, so it's easy to test
and... please send me your opinion, even the bad one. I will treasure them
15 days left of playing+rating games! If you haven't tried my game, feel free to do so, i would appriciate it! Thank you!
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/43-days-on-the-sacrifice-ranch
It's a peon scout simulator. You know from those in RTS games, early game. Just now you are not the commander, but the expandable one.
You can play it without downloading in WebGL!
I need more votes!
Play it Here!
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/lands-sacrifice
This is more of a development diary so please excuse the wall of text.
For a long time now, I wanted to make a narrated game, ideally in the style of Bastion or Little Big Planet where the narrator is in on the fact that we are in a video game. I have also been taking piano lessons for well over a year now and I wanted to make a more orchestral soundtrack using some of the knowledge I gained during that time.
As always I tried to keep distractions to a minimum so after my family agreed to go on a weekend trip, I was down for Ludum Dare and had the house to myself. Unfortunately I had came down with a cold two days prior, so I needed to take care of getting enough rest, especially since doing voice work with a stuffed nose was not going to happen.
I always try to pick one of the finalist themes a day before the jam and think about what kind of game I would like to make, just to get into the problem-solving mood. I chose Each Playthrough Builds on the Last and thought about making a game where the hero is constantly killed by a Bond villain's contraptions that explode in the process and change the environment for the next attempt which then lets the hero overcome the challenge.
I woke up to the theme Sacrifices must be made and had to scrap the Bond villain idea. I'd have loved to act out the bad guy, but maybe another time.
Taking a shower usually helps me getting my creativity into gear and I came up with this idea of having a giant space fleet fighting against a powerful alien creature where you have to constantly sacrifice ships in order to protect your main vessels. The past weeks I had been listening a lot to Warhammer 40k audio books (Horus Heresy), and both the narrative force of the readers as well as the wording and the idea of sacrificing units in war without remorse was a bit of an inspiration here.
Since I planned on making an orchestral OST I fired up some epic music playlists on Youtube, which gave me a huge push in motivation right from the start.
In GameMaker, I loaded my boilerplate project with my usual settings (a few empty rooms, some basic input code). Since I wanted to have a hierarchy of ships, I decided on having one main flagship with a number of command ships, each of which would be swarmed by some fighter ships. The game would be turn-based strategy but I did not have a clear picture about what the actual challenge was supposed to be, hoping that it would fall into place eventually. So I played around with some fighter formations.
Next up was the enemy attacks. I wanted to have a spread shot, a laser that could destroy all ships in its way, a swarm of rockets randomly hitting the sides of the fleet and a large missile attacking in a straight line from the top. I eventually got rid of the missile as it was too similar to the laser. The original idea had an energy bar for each ship but that was also scrapped pretty soon.
I wondered how the laser should pick its next target. I thought about going for the strongest/weakest command ship but eventually decided on picking the closest.
I added the spread shot.
I added the spread shot a second time after Gamemaker deleted some of my code. It's a really weird behavior where you can compile and run your game but it actually does not save your sources. So at one point I clicked "no" when I closed a window and it asked me whether I wanted to save. In hindsight, I was very lucky that I did not lose more. After that I started doing regular check-ins.
Added some limits on motion range to force the player to think ahead when placing their ships
Lunch Break
Added the rocket swarm. I originally wanted the rockets to swoosh across the screen randomly but I started out with a simplified version where they just fly in from the sides. It turned out later that it was really hard to implement my original idea while making sure that the rocket behaviour was predictable enough so that the player would be able to plan their move properly, so in the end I kept it pretty much as it was at this point.
I needed a break. Brain overload combined with the common cold is a bad combo.
Decided to limit the overall distance from the flagship to prevent drifting too far over consecutive rounds. Doing a proper "stay within two circles" routine was much tougher than it seemed initially.
Defined a central function for level design and control. This allowed me to set up all parameters for each level in one single place (number of command ships, number of rounds per level, enemy attack patterns etc.)
End of day 1
I hadn't slept as much as I'd wanted to, but at least my cold didn't get worse. My voice was still ok and I felt confident that I would be able to get my voice overs done. Still in bed, I took a notepad and wrote down level configurations. It turned out to be a great idea to do this offline on a piece of paper as it helps to stay focused on how things should look instead of getting too hung-up on the technical details.
Since the new levels demanded multiple flagships and multiple bosses, I had to revisit and refactor all of my code to accommodate for that fact. This would pose some additional challenges for the rocket swarms, as I wanted each boss to be able to fire rockets at each flagship.
Added some indicators for which ships would be hit by the next attack round. I decided to do a quick fix for the visual part by using image tinting, however this would lead to one of the visual problems in the final game. More on that later.
The indicators proved to become my biggest headache, since I wanted to be absolutely sure that whatever ship was indicated as being hit would actually be hit during the attack phase. The first implementation of checking intersection of the targeting rays and the ships was not precise enough, but worked for the time being.
I implemented the levels I had thought out in the morning. The game was now playable from start to finish in a rough alpha
Next I tried to get my hit indicators for the spread shot more precise. I decided to simulate each shot along each targeting ray and checking for collision with each ship. The original implementation was super-inefficient, especially when there were multiple bosses involved but I pushed that back to the optimization phase. However it left a bad feeling in my gut because I did not have a clear solution in mind.
I played around with bezier curves for the rockets, which promised to look very cool but I had to scrap this idea in the end since I couldn't get the target indicators updated in real-time in a meaningful manner. It's always painful to let go of a really cool idea, but sometimes you have to cut your losses before they drag you down with them.
After skipping the Bezier curves it turned out to be for the best to forego the target indicators on the rockets completely and just give a general indication about where they would roughly hit. There is an important lesson here: If there is a concept that is complicated to implement, try to find a different concept that solves the same problem and is easier to implement. The player won't care how hard it was to implement as long as it works out in the end.
With the game mechanics complete I had to make a plan for assets. If I really wanted to go for recorded vocals, I would have to cut some corners for graphics, but since I'd wanted to do this for so long, I decided to go for it. So I went off the computer to write some narrative.
I really should have set up my recording equipment before the jam, there was a lot I'd forgotten since last I used Reaper, but in the end everything came together nicely. I think I botched some lines which I should have re-recorded a few more times, but I didn't want to push my luck on the remaining time so I rolled with what I had. Much later I realized that I actually misspoke in one of the lines, which turned sector 74-11 into sector 7-11 but I didn't have time to fix it and hoped that nobody would notice. Adding the recorded voices to the game was easy enough and gave me a lot of satisfaction.
Dinner break before the final push. Only 10 hours to go.
Music time! I realized quickly that I really couldn't apply a lot of my piano lessons when composing for orchestra and again, writing music was a struggle for me. I ended up with a somewhat simplistic composition using timpani, cymbals, cellos, trumpets and a bit of choir. Not exactly the quality I had in mind, especially since the lead lines were pretty boring and I didn't really make a lot of progress since previous LDs, but at least I got it done without wasting too much time.
As time was slowly ticking down I made the decision to only do a quick overhaul of my graphics to get the bare necessities improved. I'd stumbled upon the AAP-64 palette that I wanted to try out but quickly realized that the colors were much too vibrant for my shading skills so I abandoned that idea and went with custom shades. In hindsight, I should have spent more time fine-tuning the visuals which in the end for me turned out to be the weak point of the game and definitely a step back from my previous entries.
Now I started to panic. There was still this horrible runtime issue with the shot prediction and huge pile of things that were not finished. No title and ending screens, no background image, no sound effects, levels not balanced and a plethora of other minor points that were not much effort by themselves but which seemed like a mountain of work.
So I decided to tackle the big mountain of open points one by one, deciding to make most of the remaining time.
So I fiddled around with the slowdown issue and found a configuration that somewhat worked, but made the game look kind of crappy since the markers jumped around a lot. At least there was something I could ship even if it wasn't that great.
The game desperately needed some visual effects, but I didn't have enough time actually draw any, so I fell back to the good old trick of drawing explosions as white circles that flash up for a very short time. Instead of creating a convoluted solution with a lot of timers that would render the code unreadable, I had the idea of letting the explosions manage themselves. So the explosion object draws itself, counts down its lifetime and deletes itself when its time runs out. I was even able to cascade explosions by having an explosion object spawn other explosion objects. All I had to do was to create an instance of my object in a single line of code and never worry about it again. This concept is definitely a keeper for future games. Maybe with nicer graphics.
It was past midnight now and I wanted to focus on the important missing aspects. But since the recorded narration mentioned an asteroid field, I definitely had to have one for consistency. Turned out the background motion was very distracting to the game, so I decided to just play it once in the beginning of each level and let the player concentrate on the play field after that.
Time for some sound effects. This went fairly quickly since I only needed a handful, and Chiptone produces nice results really fast.
With 1.5 hours left on the clock there were a few more issues to resolve. I needed a visual indicator that if one flagship dies it's game over, even if the others survive. So I created a cascading explosion that would engulf all other ships. When revisiting a certain section of my code, I saw the instancegetnearest() function I had used there and had an epiphany. Could this be faster than manually checking for collisions in my hit prediction routine? I tried it out and it worked like a charm. Not only was it really fast now, it looked and felt way better than before. What a relief!
I spent the last hour doing some minor tweaks to the level definitions, adding a better title screen and gave the graphics some minor touch-ups.
Time to upload the game and finish this thing.
Although not my prettiest game, it was one of my most ambitious that actually got done on time (looking at you, Snackleworth!). I'd love to revisit audio narration in the future, if it fits the genre, but should spend more time on polish here. Ultimately I am very happy that I can scratch a challenge off my list, maybe next time I can relax a little and not try to be overly ambitious.
Thanks for reading so far. If you want to give The Omicron Fleet a go, please be my guest:
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/the-omicron-fleet
Hello! We finally managed to put together a small trailer for our game Praise the Snek :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A85XQHY80R4
If you haven't praised the Mighty Snek yet, here's your chance to do it now :D
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/praise-the-snek/
We hope you'll like it! ~
Hey, all! Tech Valley Game Space is livestreaming from 3:00 to 6:00 PM EST on twitch.tv/techvalleygamespace! This will be our last stream for this year, too (you'll see us again on January 13th, 2019). To have your game in consideration for playing and judging, you can sign up on the form below:
goo.gl/forms/zQAhArQG3Lfp2imS2
As the form already states, we do enforce a Code of Conduct in our live-streams. As such, we do reserve the right to cancel streaming and rating a game for any reason. Otherwise, come join us!
What r u waiting for :d
I’ll be playing for like 30mins, prefer web gl games :D but i can download some.. (And I will also play tomorrow)
Our game:
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/fighting-souls
I'm playing an rating some games today if anyone wants to do the same for me it would be greatly appreciated <3
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/compo-ld43-broken-people
I created a short time lapse about my development! For me, these kind of videos are satisfying me. Hope you guys like it https://youtu.be/jwzyNrlRHl4
Sound design is perhaps the most underappreciated aspect of video games. Is that an overstatement? Possibly, but let's talk a little bit about it. Sound effects are rarely ever the focal point of a game. When they are bad, it is painful and people do notice. But when they are good, players usually don't even think about it because the in-game actions and sounds are working together to be convincing. I know I am not a great sound designer yet, but I am doing my best to learn and grow, so hopefully there is something in this blog post that is useful for everyone.
Our game, Roustabout, uses about 31 sound effects in total. Finding, creating, and mixing these sound effects took a lot of time and care. Most of the sound effects in this game started as raw sounds from online libraries, but sometimes it made more sense to create them from scratch using virtual instruments or synthesizers. I want to go over some of our virtual/synthesized sound effects today (made with FLStudio).
These sound effects are: - Clicking menu buttons - Rotating the game's puzzle pieces - A generic "this thing is now ruined" sound for when game pieces get infected by rats - Musical chords for animations in the post-game score screen
Menu ButtonsButtons tend to feel best when they give you a bit of a "let's go!" feeling, so this time, I gave the menu button sound effect a pretty high starting note, then quickly jumped up from there and gave it some delay (an echoing effect). The pitch might be a little too shirll, but it still sounds pretty cool to me:
(The play button is at the top left of the linked page!)
Rotating CargoGetting a good puzzle-piece-rotation sound to fit the game was a lot of trial and error. I ended up using a noise channel (think Atari sound effects from the 80's) and scaled the sound 2 full octives during the short audio clip. This sweeping motion felt like a decent fit. Clockwise got a sweep-up sound and counter clockwise got a sweep-down sound:
Sound Effect: Rotate Piece Clockwise
Sound Effect: Rotate Piece Counterclockwise
Infected CargoIn, Roustabout, when a rat touches its target, the cargo is ruined and you must toss it overboard. The goal of my sound here was to clearly let the player know that the item is now "bad". Slowly sliding a note down achieved this effect pretty easily:
After each level, the player can get a rating of 1-3 stars based on how much cargo made it on the ship. They also can get a special stamp if they kept the bonus cargo aboard too. Our score screen creator made a cool animation of the player's star count and bonus stamp tallying up on screen. There was some obvious room for cool sound effects here, so I put together some chords that built up to a perfect score. The player only hears the biggest chord when they achive the perfect level score (and they get a drum too!):
Sound Effect: Perfect Score Tally
Once the sound effects are created, there is still more work to do. Getting each sound effect to play at the right volume in-game is another important battle that takes time and effort. This becomes especially challenging when the music is playing alongside the sounds in the final game. To tweak and tune this delicate balance, I use FMOD Studio! It is a very dense audio integration that takes some time to learn, but I won't make a single game without it. It is that good.
Thanks for reading! I hope you found this interesting. If you want to hear the full game's sound effects and also hear them alongside the main theme song (written/composed by me!), go play Roustabout!
Sorry about that, it was Windows-only for a time! Now I think it's way more open for judging by a lot more people.
Don't worry about the "work in post" thing. The recent acts were entirely a port to Mac OSs - no changes were made to any of the game's code. There's no way I'd be a sneaky snitch and mess with the 48hour validity of my entry, I hate that idea.
I hope y'all Mac users play and rate this game, because it still needs rescuing and I think the game is pretty good. This wasn't on purpose, but it's my most difficult game yet. I think it's not too badly put-together for my first compo, and worth playing. It's kinda like a short roguelike with heaps of techniques you can choose from, and a last-ditch effort to save your crew's life in a race against time with genuinely action-packed segments.
I'll be making sure to judge games solely from the Rescue Filter for the next few days. Nullus ludus peritus.
With another Ludum Dare in the rear view mirror, I wanted to look back at working on our entry, Fruit Flinger.
Like most of our Ludum Dare entries, the graphics were not prioritized, and it shows. We wanted a game that was fun to play, solid with minimal bugs, and entertaining to listen to. The music came together smoothly (thanks to @floata-1), and the voice overs were fun to record (another in a long line of characters I've voiced in our games, from cows and squirrels, to a shady salesman, to a cranky foreman, among others).
I wish I'd taken more time to make the minions look better and animate with more detail, but the base mechanic they served - marching towards the player and dying upon impact with flying fruit - was still clear, so it worked out in the end.
The theme was one that took no time at all for us to come up with an idea for, even if that idea went through a few mutations along the way. From an initial idea of tossing people into a volcano to the Last (Fruit) Stand design we finished with, the base concept of using a catapult to hurl things was at the center of it all. The idea of throwing things across the map was just too appealing to pass up.
The controls were fairly easy to nail down, but we eventually went from only controlling the power of the launch to mid-air aftertouch control after finding it too hard to consistently hit our targets. We included a reset button (pressing the B key on the keyboard breaks the current fruit at any time, loading up a new one) to prevent downtime on a missed shot, but probably should have spelled that out better, given the number of people who didn't notice it.
Deleted
The game has been updated.
Updated win and defeat conditions.
It changed the sound and graphics of the game a little bit.
Difficulty and game speed changed a little.
Hey ya'll! This is the last blog post about my entry. I wanted as many people to play it as possible! (obviously :v: )
I do want some unique feedback if possible. Right now we're at Ad Nauseam about camera controls.. I get it, they're terrible. Lol.
Again thanks everyone for checking it out, I'm going to continue playing games from the jam. :v:
I urge you to play it with a controller if you have one
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/expendibots
