So far I’ve tried 21 of the competition entries — I’m going to try to play everyone’s entry at least once.  Lots of good entries, even the “partially finished” ones.

For anyone that doesn’t have hosting for their project, just let me know, and I’ll try to get it onto my own server (have about 100GB of storage, and 600gb/month bandwidth). For really huge projects, though, I might not be able too (slow internet connection, here)

Tags: hosting

I’ve been working on my vectrex game, and I’ve encountered a lot of issues.

The two main bugs I’ve encountered are the input and the output………

The issues with the input is that it does not accept it at all, totally not sure why but I’m working on it. The issues with output is that the whole way of drawing is confusing. It sometimes works, sometimes doesn’t.

I’m going to Northern Ireland today, so I will be able to work on it without the distraction of the internet, I know of an internet cafe in the area I’m going to, so I will upload my game there if I’m done.

If you want to see my source code as it is at the moment click here

-bear

This was my first #LD48, and it was a complete disaster. Everything went reasonably well the first day, but on the second day I discovered multiple bugs with my graphics engine.

• Camera rotation culling glitch
• cRenderLine was completely broken
• TransformPoint did not work with rotation

So, I’m pretty stoked about what I’ve managed to get done this weekend, not just in the ‘oh wow, I got so much done’ sense (although that’s definitely a part of it), but also (and really, mostly) in terms of how people will play the game and their reactions.

For my game is a bit of an experiment.

I’ve been wanting to play with social gaming for a while, but to specifically look at how we might make social gaming more meaningful, and use it to create real shared experiences rather than virtual shared cows.

So this weekend, I decided to go social. To specifically use the Facebook API to create a co-operative gaming experience between each player and their circle of friends, that would result in a different experience depending on how the group played.

I’m not sure if I’ve been successful at this (and in some areas I’ve definitely misstepped, taking time from tweaking gameplay to adding these social aspects, or levels which are probably the wrong difficulty), and so I’m really hoping to get some feedback on the social aspects of the experience, and how they played out.

So yeah, if you’ve got a bit of time, please have a look at ‘Escape from Flatland’. You may want to get a few of your facebook friends to play it as well to get the full impact. Either way, I’d love to hear what you think.

Uploaded my final mac/windows builds to my server at 6:55 and 6:57, spent the last two hours trying to get the LD site to load, making blog/twitter type posts and building a Linux version. In the end I named it “You Don’t Fit”.

And… success, I think! The game is small and I have no idea what will happen in voting, but my goal with LD was just to prove to myself I could make a game with the 48-hour constraint (even my simple game projects tend to take months and spiral out of control) and I met my own little personal goals. There are some things I might have done different with a longer timeframe– I think the puzzles could have been deeper than they are (although it does have a facility for user levels!) and I had some ideas about sound and graphics that I didn’t have time to explore. But: I met the deadline, and the game feels “complete” to me, it has non-placeholder (if simple) sound and graphics and it’s possible to win. So, woo.

– My blog post about the game

– My entry on ludumdare.com

Thanks everyone for the support and the platform, and now it’s time to go try to play everyone else’s games 😀

So, I managed to get my game in on time. I’m so burnt out from the past two days! The game puts you in the role of someone caught in an unfortunate situation that I’m sure we’ve all experienced from time to time: A large double-irised disembodied floating eyeball creature has trapped the player in its circle of protection, and you need to escape before it bisects you with a laser. It actually loves you, it really does, almost as much as it hates anyone outside of its circle.

Under a Watchful Eye is by no means complete. I planned on building more escape routes, for instance. Right now there is only one way out of the circle that the eye has you running. I’ve already added a few more here… just check my site for updates. If I have any post-compo editions, I’ll post them here once the voting is over.

Here is the timelapse for my entry (“A tale about life, death and a looser”)!

As you will see, there lots of copy paste while painting the assets, just to speedup the process a bit The blond woman is actually the hero slightly modified, so is the boss..etc.

Entry:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=preview&uid=2982

Timelapse:

Have fun!

My entry features a girl called Ball, a ball.
If you didn’t know that, check out my entry “Poor Ball”.

Here is my timelapse:

Tags: timelapse

I don’t seem to have access to a submission form, what’s the process for submission?

I didn’t do much posting during development due to the site being mostly down and/or begging us not to use it. So, where do I start? “Escape” was not the theme I would’ve liked. When it was announced at 9pm my local time, I attempted to just get started because I had a bunch of boilerplate code to write. During my typing I thought of what I could possibly do with the theme. Prior to the competition I had made a promise to myself that I would make something arcadey and simple. The reason for this, I think was obvious: arcade games, once you have the basic mechanics down, you’re pretty much done.

After some deep thought over writing main(), creating a window and handling events, I arrived at a simple notion of “The escape of the Esc key”. You’d have to maneuver your Esc key (handling kind of like a top down vehicle) through a keyboard being typed on by an AI. Fortunately, you’d know what sentence the AI was typing, so you could anticipate the pattern. After some initial tests, this proved to be neither fun, challenging or interesting. Real sentences use far too little of the keyboard to make it a good obstacle test, and just random patterns screw up the notion of anticipation.

The blue background for some reason reminded me of Nyan Cat, and as a joke to myself I drew the some of the elements of the original video. Such as the background sprites and the Nyan Cat’s head. I made a little Escape key body for it, thinking maybe I could make this into the character sprite for the above mention game. The scale was completely off, but I didn’t care because it was meant to be temporary graphics and a joke to myself. I went to bed thinking “Well, I’ll sleep on it and probably will have a real idea in the morning.”. Well, not so much. I woke up the next morning and still had no idea whatsoever. After some contemplation I decided since the base code I was working from is actually a stripped down version of my side scroller game from years back, I’d make a side scroller. I set about making that a reality:

In this rather rushed concept you were a convict (in a prison orange jumpsuit, as illustrated by the fact you were solid orange)..who was…escaping. There’s was nothing really interesting about the design, and that was my problem. Had I seen it to its end, it would just be another kind of generic platformer. I had no hook to make it interesting. I had Elevator Action without the elevators. Also, no action. Add to that indecision, the fact I had to tackle a bunch of new, weird physics bugs that cropped up and I started to despair.

I thought back to the Nyan Cat I drew and oddly enough went back and attempted to flesh that design out better. Gone was the idea of evading an onscreen keyboard, replaced with a dirt simple typing speed test. It was a complete 180 degree turn around in the gameplay and genre I was originally trying for, but with 24 hours left and sleep between here and submission time, I had no choice. I had to make something, and something very very small. So I began hacking together code as fast as I could and, long story short, made a respectable little typing game despite its flaws.

Now typing games aren’t my cup of tea, and I’m pretty sure they’re not anyone else’s either. I went looking back through Ludum Dare archives and I could find only one other previous example of one. I expect that it won’t get much in the way of votes, but that’s not what I’m in it for. I was in it to prove to myself I could make a game in a weekend. In it, not for the glory, but for the satisfaction. And if anyone says anything positive, well that’s gravy really.

The whole ordeal can be seen in my timelapse

Check out my entry here: link

Still very much in dev, but here’s some screen dumps of my game ‘Escape the flood’

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=preview&uid=5896

Twitter: digital_glue

I made it in on time, without the upload issues, and actually had a decently sophisticated engine by the end of things! Yet another awesome LD experience.

Final Escape Timelapse

Some though, post-mortem:

Have more of my engine assembled beforehand – avoid wasting TONS of time on collision and movement stuff, and also avoid the spaghetti code I ended up writing.

Place a premium on powerful/accessible level creation – I meant to implement external storage, for maps/screens, but I didn’t quite get there.

Make sure to get the core mechanics assembled/playable from the earliest, as opposed to working mostly on tech until… say, mid-day Saturday.

My game’s all done and submitted now. Although I didn’t get to do everything I wanted to, I’m fairly happy with the result.

If you’re interested you can play it here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=preview&uid=4425

Health decided that last night was mostly a bust

With work today, I’ve only got a few hours this morning and tonight, to get it finished and slightly worrying I’ve yet to actually get anything game like in there.

So not really good going :-/

However I’m actually fairly happy with what I’ve developed, so if nothing else it will come back for the next Ludum or mini or maybe just worked on regardless and I still hope to submit something even if just one puzzle room.

Skel and Dollface are both in now, so just to get Dollface to tell you whats going on and then implement the first puzzle game, its designed and tbh probably far too easy. But without much time to tune it, i’m just hoping to have at least something game-like.

At the very least, its very pretty for a few days work and tbh shows that even indie titles using cheap off the shelf art, can look pretty good even for the art-talentless like me

This is my entry for Ludumdare21.

It is a Unity game so it works in BROWSER! TEST IT NOW. And give your feedback

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1497567/LD/LD21.html

NOTICE! I will make an updated version of this game during next weeks, with the ability to record scores and extended game elements.

Being 3.44am here, the upload of the timelapse finished (Click on the image above)

[Game link]

I see you on the next LD!

Tags: escapist, the, timelapse

Hello everyone,
This was supposed to be my first ludum dare,  but despite still missing 7 hours at end of competition, it’s 8:51 am and I have to work.

You’ve missing a boring game with awful graphics, its name was “Esc-Ape” and this should not be against rules competition.

Escape key was used for jump…I was really proud of text on video “Press ESC for PLAY” and “Press ESC for JUMP”

Yes, the smiling block at left corner is the ape!
Bye.

Hey guys, I finished my LD and successfully submitted last night 😀 Very happy with how this one turned out. It’s kind of a stealth submission as I had initially said “I’m In”. Followed by no other communication. I didn’t tweet or update blogs or anything this time, just got my head down and finished it!

The main thing I was trying to do was capture an atmosphere and keep the production quality as high as I could within the 48 hours. I think I managed to get just the atmosphere I was looking for so I’m really pleased with how it turned out! As it’s Unity you can play it online with a high score board on Kongregate here!

Congratulations to everyone else who made it into the compo, I look forward to playing all your games in the coming weeks!

(Link to LD Entry)

All that I can say now that I’m done is, it was awesome!  Despite a roadblock at the beginning (laptop charger decided to die on me), I’m happy with my game. This was my First Ludum Dare and I had a great time making my game.

My game’s called Fierce Undead, it’s more or less an open-world game where you have to survive in a zombie infested city until rescue arrives for your escape.

I also created a timelapse video of the development of my game.

I completed Rooms, a Java Swing game. You can download the jar and view more screen shots at this link.

Well, that was exciting,

Since this was my first try, you might think I wouldn’t be able to get much done in 48 hours. You would be be correct. I had (I thought) modest plans at hour zero, but same plans looked preposterously grand at hour 36. Nevertheless, I feel like I had a great chance to try a few techniques I’d been pondering for a while and actually “finish” a project and, for the low price of a weekend’s worth of sleep, I ended up with a nice little point-and-click adventurer (with a brilliantly original name to boot).

Castle Escape

I got a fun chase animation for our boss going, which was an interesting bit of practice/experimentation for watercolor-style animation.  I’ve been trying to fill in art assets where I can and we’re all buckling down and trying to finish those last bits that really make the thing playable.  Enemies drop weapons and health now, things can die, and there’s a high score screen.  Go team!  I’ve proven less useful in this code than I’d hoped since I sent myself to art-land, but I still poked around in there a bit to make the game end properly when the boss dies.  I’ve written up the todo list of things left before submitting.  It’s bigger than I’d like, but pretty doable.

Good luck everyone!

Managed to get a simple cutscene text intro in before work started, but for now onto the day job. Will try and get a puzzle in after work and submit the smallest game EVAR! for the jam.

Pic of Dollface giving you some bad news!

For those who care, here’s my LD #21 timelapse: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNmF2BMoW28

Also, for comparison, here’s the code I started messing with: http://pessoa.fct.unl.pt/d.serrano/amaze

And the game that it ended up being: http://david.substanciadigital.com/ld21

Hope you enjoyed this LD as much as I did =)
See you next time!

I got my entry submitted at about 2am BST, which makes a change from the 2-minutes-before that I usually end up doing. So here’s my entry, VOLCANOWNED!:

DOWNLOAD

I was pretty happy with how it turned out. It’s a very simple game but I think I did a decent job with the graphics. Next time I’ll leave that little bit extra time to record some proper sounds and music.

I’m going to put my timelapse together later and write a full post-mortem soon. And oh man I can’t wait to start playing all the other entries – I swear they just get better and better every time!

Tags: download, final, finished, happy, screenshot

OK, for anyone interested, I developed on Linux and the tools I used during LD21 were:

MyPaint

GIMP

Geany IDE

Google Chrome

Mappy

Bxfr

So here’s my game!

You must escape from Ludum Dare by completing microgames, each based on a Ludum Dare’s historical theme! Play Escape from Ludum Dare here!

Tags: final

I released my game, entitled Facilitated Escape, earlier today. It revolves around escaping a collapsing facility of some kind in your rocket, the challenge coming from dodging oncoming “blocks”. See its entry page and its page on my website. I’ve also put together a gameplay video, and a time-lapse should be coming soon.

What a fantastic weekend! I’m beginning to realize why people always stress the importance of forcing yourself to take breaks. This is an incredibly self-involving craft, and I got so caught up I probably only took about 6 hours worth of breaks throughout (excluding sleep, of course). So, I’m broken but incredibly satisfied, and I had a great time.

View my entry, “Cells”, here:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=preview&uid=3643

Post-mortem time:

My biggest gripe – adding sound and music has eluded me AGAIN! I also let it slip last time. I’m fairly new to a couple of Actionscript 3 concepts and embedding and playing sounds seems to be pretty simple, but I must be missing something very obvious because I always have problems. I did manage to get sound working in a previous project I worked on, but for whatever reason I couldn’t get it going this time. So, I opted to carry on with what I knew rather than spending hours messing around with sound.

The other problem is that I have more experience with 3D and digital art than programming, so even if when I don’t have trouble coming up with a gameplay idea I still tend to focus largely on graphics. I loved the theme this time, but had a hard time coming up with an idea, which meant by the end of the first day I still didn’t have an iota of gameplay/interaction code. The player could run and jump and all the technical aspects were in, but no game. I only came up with the hacking idea on day 2, so I didn’t leave myself enough time to create more challenging puzzles.

That being said, I was very happy with the hacking concept and I think the final game could be tons of fun as a puzzler if those puzzles were more taxing. With things like watching for enemy paths, following electrical connections and being able to hack more floors above, the game would be somewhere between an escape the room game and an arcade puzzler.

The graphics was the other aspect I was very happy with. I managed to get an animated character in too and even though his animations were a little rough, I can see that a little animation makes a huge difference. I wanted to do more with lighting – as you got higher the floor you were on would be brighter – but that, and many other tweaks, will come if and when I update the game. I also love the dark and slightly spooky atmostphere and I’d love to tie a creepy or mind-bending story into Cells.

Overall, I’m really happy with my entry. Good luck all!

Finally submitted my entry! Too tired to write anything else, so here’s a copy-paste of the entry desctiption! (And a screenshot!)

Here’s the link to the submission
Wow. I literally just wrote code, 3d-modelled, composed music pretty much non-stop for 48 hours. I had some problems building the Windows version in the end, so posting this a little late (thank god for the extension!).

The game is a little smaller than I originally planned, but I’m pretty proud of it and I hope that you enjoy it!

I used a framework called Polycode (which I am also the developer of and which you can find at polycode.org).

Aside from that I used Blender for 3d modelling and animation, Photoshop for all graphical needs, Reason 4 for music and SFXR for sounds.

The code is a real mess, so don’t take it too seriously. I had to jam a ton of quick fixes in the last few hours, so it’s really really ugly.

HOPE YOU LIKE IT!!

And is done. Play here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=preview&uid=5234

Wish I had more time, but nevertheless, enjoy!

Tags: gamemaker, ld48, Windows

This entry was posted on Monday, August 22nd, 2011 at 8:00 am and is filed under LD #21. 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.

Yeah finally done! Kinda… Still a lot I didnt get to add, like gruesome decore, music, harder puzzles… Maybe I’ll add to it someday but I’m sick of it at the moment

It’s submitted under the jam since I went over the Compo time limit. Here

Bed time!

Last night I submitted my first ever entry into LD. Loved every minute of the experience. At times I definitely felt like quitting. Glad I got my act together and submitted!

The game itself is a small adventure with a mini game on each screen. Just keep looking around for visual and audio clues and you’ll figure out how to get to the next stage.

Screenshot from the game:

My main focus was to create an interesting atmosphere to suck the player into the weird world. I think I succeeded fairly well in that aspect. The music & graphics work very well together in my opinion. Overall there’s a very distinctive vibe to the game.

I wish I’d had more time to create a few more puzzles and add some more clues into the game on how to resolve the puzzles. But I just ran out of time and probably made some bad design decisions along the way that prohibited me from created more puzzles.

This game was written from scratch in Java using the amazing libgdx framework. Pretty amazing cross-platform framework. Check it out here: http://libgdx.googlecode.com

I’ll definitely be taking this project beyond LD and make a nice little game out of it. It’ll also give me time to further tweak the assets & music and give it some good old polish.

Check the game out here: Still Dreaming

Congrats to the other 500 people that submitted an entry so far (wow!). Looking forward to the next couple weeks of playing everyone’s games!

Cheers,
Bach

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=preview&uid=4369

Phew, finally got it all uploaded and done! I’ll do a post-mortem later, right now I just want to sleep. Thanks LD!

PLAY NOW! (Unity3D web)

WASD to move, SPACEBAR to jump.
MOUSE to look, LEFT-CLICK to do stuff.

>>> You’re the type of guy who starts fires, just so you can save people from them and be a hero. First you’ll set your Fire Bomb, then you’ll rescue your Victims. Maybe your plan will go awry (it probably will) and you’ll just have to ESCAPE by yourself, leaving the rest behind in their screaming agony?

– 8 different endings
– dynamic fire propagating system
– dynamic level destruction! wow!
– totally unrealistic model of firefighting
– … and more!

Made with Unity3D, some super simple models in Maya, some sounds recorded on a Singstar USB mic + Audacity, and some simple textures in Photoshop.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=preview&uid=4369

Tags: FPS, unity, unity3d, web game

Now the progress I made yesterday.

• Difficulty settings
• Statistics screen
• Extended level
• More spike directions

Aaaand demo: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/18105137/scrash.exe

I have submitted my entry already, let’s see if I can make the game better in time. 😀

Once there was a weekend I made a game in …
… and that was yesterday.

Thank you, McFunkypants to remind me of “write the code, only then you’re ready for making graphics’n’stuff”

Yeah, that worked better, last time I worked on the code, panicked, worked on the graphics, came down and worked on the code again, only to have forgotten a few things.

So, I made a game about escaping ..an interstellar encounter with pirates, flowery aliens, asteroids and a f-ing sun

Goto Entry

You’re the 80’s style super cool, super human rough’n’though chief engineer (something I think about Philhassey and PoV right now :-P) who’s on board a freighter with some nearly out of the flightschool noobs, who don’t know anything and try to steer you right through the sun. You’ve got to keep the ship together, until your ship reaches the jump gate. You’ve got a crew of 8 nameless – but I’m sure nonetheless cool – mechanics that you can have working on various systems to keep your ship flying.

The idea was that you have these “lets hide in that asteroid field, that would hurt us, but the pirates will surely die sooner” – moments. And “oh god, we’ll never reach that gate, unless we explode our warpcore right behind us, but wouldn’t that hurt the hull to much?”

First of all, I’ve only got one level. Ok, the positions of the enemies and the asteroids change, but their numbers and the positions of you, your target and the sun stay the same. But I had that mentioned moments a few times, so I hope that works.

Second, there are bugs. I couldn’t test it on Windows 7 which seemes to be a problem, since a few friends (but not all of them) with hardcore gaming machines said it would lag und firefox 6. I on the other hand had no problems with my 5 year old core2duo under windows xp. don’t know.

Third, there are bugs. Yeah, again, I’m not sure but I don’t think the shields do that they’re supposed to do. But with the right configuration you’re able to survive the sun. And sometimes the systems bleed health without beeing attacked, don’t know why.

Ah, and something about the weekend: Since I’m in germany I staid up laaate (4 a.m. saturday morning) to get the theme and watch the madness on irc. I got to bed around 4:30, already having the idea in mind, but I didn’t want to miss the morning shower under which I have the best ideas, strangely, before starting something. Around 8 o’clock a child started screeming for hours in the flat right next to mine. I guess my neighbors have guests, since they don’t have child. Argh. Saturday was nearly over after that, I had a headache the whole  day, live streaming didn’t work and my moods were down. I sleeped over the afternoon and then drove to friends to play uno, that was relaxing a bit. I came home Sunday morning around 1 o’clock, and started working. And didn’t much stop until Monday morning 3 o’clock.

And that’s how Make a run for it got made

Thanks to PoV and Philhassey for fixing the server, after we made it crash – and in fact for this whole event!

(hopefully I didn’t miss another person who worked on the LD-Site? If so, please hit me hard and tell me his or her name)

Just submitted an entry to LD for the first time, and well, it’s not the most serious game ever made. Problem was that this Saturday we had decided to play some board games with friends (initially Diplomacy but we ended up with Android) and Sunday we were going to a family dinner. Soo, not much time left to code. Last minute I scrapped my plans of writing an awesome platform game in Scala and threw this ape game together in Java using Slick2D.

Tags: apes

After 10 hours, 53 minutes and 20 seconds of frantic coding due to a very late start, the Sky Fell.

Download the 1.8Mb zip file for Windows.

The servers also fell, and while I got my entry  in successfully last night, I left this final post for today. My entry this time around is the most playable and complete game I’ve developed for LudumDare. I’m very pleased with how it turned out – especially seeing I started very late and didn’t put much time into it. The game looks lovely in motion, and unfortunately the grey screenshots don’t do it justice. Saying that, here’s a grey screenshot :

I’m not entirely satisfied with the game. I had to manually program all of the particle effects, something that my previous games never needed because I had tool-set already developed for that. The graphics turned out OK due to an amazing fluke. I bought a new camera, and played with it all the way to work and back on Saturday. When I started my LudumDare entry, I had a huge stash of photos taken during the competition period – just sitting waiting to be used. With a bit of colour correction they turned out ok, but trying to modify anything made me miss my old Wacom Tablet. Hopefully next LD I’ll be back up and running as an artist.

The game takes some practice, but it is possible to win!  Good luck in your Escape  …

Tags: final

Well that was fun.

After spending a day and a half working on my original idea – a sidescrolling platformer where you play as a spaceship captain who must escape onto the last escape pod before the core overloads – I realised two things:

1. I suck at making platformers that aren’t buggy piles of rubbish
2. I had just enough time left to start over

So I did. I had 15 hours or so, and apart from a couple of hours here and there I spent them all working on what ended up being called “Escape the Space Nazis!”

The name came from a last-minute thought: “Hey, wouldn’t it look cool if the game was in the style of a WWII propaganda poster?”
Well I’m sure it would, but the stuff I ended up with wasn’t too bad either. Throw in some stuff about ‘Space Nazis’, and BAM – that’s the story done in about five minutes.

There are a few bugs that I had to work around, it’s not the most pleasant thing to look at (or listen to) and there’s only one level – but I hope you enjoy it!
(And in my defense – it was made in 15 hours at the very most!)

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=preview&uid=1886

I’ve uploaded the timelapse of the development of my game

You can see them here:

Day 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFjMG7mlYh4

Day 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFjogdlqEK0

Finally, my first game for Ludum Dare: No Escape

And the game entry is here.

I found out that Ludum Dare had started on Saturday, and told myself that I should join in. But, I didn’t act on it. The next day, I wake up with a game idea and the urge to participate. So, I open the Ludum Dare site and found out that they’re in a mess! I am not familiar with the rules of Ludum Dare but, decided to make the game anyway, thinking that I will check on it later when site is back up. After staying up all night, I can finally submit my game “No Escape”.

“No Escape” is a “stomp’em up” game. You play as an angry red eyed giant, stomping on the little guys that tries to escape from your wrath. But, you have to carefully avoid stepping on the little houses, or you’ll trip yourself to death in an epic way XD.

When I started the game, I thought of it as a Tap Dancing game. An idea that crosses my mine: a tap dancer tap-dancing his way to escape from a crazy horse chasing after him XD. But, I’m not so sure how to make a good beat or rhythm from the steps. With less than 24 hours to go, I decided to go for a safer way and make it an obstacle avoidance game. Which then, evolves into a mix of avoidance and stomping game.

That’s all from me. I’ll be glad to hear what you think. Thank you!

So, I did it. In 48 hours, I made a game about a bunny escaping from an animal testing laboratory. It’s called “It’s A Bunny Story, Actually…” and you can check its competition page here.

It doesn’t quite have everything that I was hoping to add, but it has ‘enough’, I think. If it gets a positive reception, then I’ll most likely go back to it, maybe even tidy it up and add enough content to warrant a commercial release (I’m thinking $2 for 20 levels, or something).

So play it, enjoy it, rate it, and I’ll see you next time.

Well, nevermind. It was against the rules so I restored the links for the version I sent within the 48 legit hours. Sorry about that, I’ll keep updating the game on my own but I won’t submit it to the compo 😛

yup, it breaks.

I made desktop wallpapers out of all 510 compo games submitted (as of when I ran the script a few minutes ago) for Ludum Dare #21!

Ludum Dare is getting popular! It's getting hard make out the games in these wallpapers! :)

Here’s a zip file containing the wallpapers in various sizes and the Python script that generates them (requires PIL).

DOWNLOAD

I’ll be back in around 11 hours to add the jam games!

Update: The list of all games has been split into multiple pages, so the script no longer works.

Tags: wallpaper

I decided to write a little postmortem about my first Ludum Dare while it still was fresh in the memory.
It how ever got bit longish so I posted it to my own forum and decided to link to it here (so I don’t whore up all the front-page).

So if you’re interested you can check it out in here.

There’s some screen-shots from the progress included =)

Tags: post-compo, post-mortem, postmortem

And Firefox suggested this to me

Seems like Notch is quite famous in LD. Well, he brought tons of people here (including me), so not a big surprise.

Anyways, I’m fixing up some things in my game and making a video on how to get faster. My record is 230km, and nobody went over 100 in the highscores yet. SHAAAAME ON YOUUUU.
EDIT: Video is done!

Right! So I’ve made a timelapse during this whole thing! It’s split into two parts:

Part 1: Singleplayer. Uploaded during the compo and posted on IRC.
Part 2: Multiplayer. Uploaded a moment ago.

The two songs used in them represent the two anime soundtracks that helped me keep motivated throughout the compo. (Haha)

Computers used:

Battleship Asus: Android tablet running Ubuntu 11.04. (AH THE DETERMINATION)

Battleship PC: A quad-core PC with 4GB of RAM, used towards the end of timelapse part 2.

Apps used: gedit, terminal, javac, zip, mtpaint, nano, wc -l, etc.

Timelapses:

Timelapse part 1

Timelapse part 2

This post will be edited in the next hours/days since I will upload my timelapse later and will add more statistics and stuff…

If you are interested in this kind of information about my game: Bookmark or leave the Tab open

Wanna know moar?

I started this LD early in the morning, half an hour after the beginning. The idea came to me in about an hour while surfing the web and wikipedia.

Idea: Make a dungeon game, where the players can see where others failed. The corpses should be permanent!

The gameplay around that idea was made according to the theme: A scientist robot (I can’t draw people) has to escape from his underground laboratory.

He is attacked by mutant self replicating bugs. But he has a laser to fight back!

Thats the idea so far.

This is my Devlog:

Saturday
4:24 Woke up, looking for theme
4:44 Think about theme
4:55 No webcam
4:56 Gamedesigntime
5:57 Got an idea, now working on details
7:13 Shower and Coffe break
7:41 Gathering food
8:29 Eating breakfast
8:38 starting proof of concept while eating
9:12 Proof of Concepts
9:40 Making milestone-plan
9:50 Milestone 1 of 16 : Mapgenerator
12:50 Milestone 2 of 16: Player and Camera
15:38 damn i’m late….
15:49 Milestone 3 of 16 Map Gui
16:37 Milestone 4 of 16 Enemies and movement
18:02 These enemies can run through walls…
18:27 need to fry these bugs
18:31 break
18:46 back to the bugs
20:07 enemy spawning…
20:44 code-bugs now…….
21:05 getting ms 4 done…
21:17 Milestone 5 of 16 enemy shooting at player
21:51 LD Site is down
22:13 Milestone 6 of 16 self replicating enemies
22:37 Win and loose conditions
23:12 tired, will sleep soon
Sunday
6:26 Goood Mornin!
7:19 Getting main screens working
7:36 Milestone 7 of 16 Website data storage
9:42 Breakfast
10:00 More webz
10:10 8/16: Working on the network thread in the game
12:33 arrrg. web not working
12:59 debugging web data
13:05 BBQ Break
15:33 Back to the Web-Access
17:41 MS 10/17 IntroScreen
19:25 lost screen
19:48 MS 12/17 : win screen
20:00 MS 13/17: ARTSY 8 Hours left
21:11 food time
21:18 time to crunch
23:23 Sound & Polish
1:10 panicmode : polish
Monday
1:47 core gameplay works
2:33 deadline is coming close
3:05 packing!

Some statistics from my SVN Repository:

Ludum Dare 21 Post Mortem

LD21 marks my third serious attempt at completing a game in 48 hours. On the previous two attempts, I stalled on Sunday
morning and didn’t finish.

The theme this time was “Escape”. It wasn’t one that I voted for, but I could work with it. You can see the results here.

My idea was that the player is a process marked for deletion in a Tron-like computer system. Player must navigate through various cores (levels) to reach the free network. He has to avoid firewalls, sentry programs and search bots.

I didn’t get my intro screens done in time, so the story itself isn’t really in the game, and you wouldn’t know unless you read this. Ah well.

All in all, I was extremely pleased with the weekend. I submitted a game, which was a huge goal. I didn’t do anything drastically wrong; although I could definitely do more things more right. Now it’s just a matter of continual improvement.

WHAT WENT RIGHT

1) Ruby Ruby Ruby! Man I love this language. It’s plenty fast for these kinds of game. I was constantly amazed at how quickly I could go from thinking of a feature, to seeing it in the game. Ruby isn’t always the best tool for the job, but it’s usually the first tool I reach for.

2) Gosu Gosu Gosu! The gosu library (www.libgosu.org) with ruby bindings takes a zen like minimalism approach. Load a graphic, blit it. Load a sound, play it. Not a whole lot of options. But you know what? It was exactly the right amount. It did its job when asked and stayed out of my way otherwise. It conformed to the way that I worked, rather than requiring me to conform.

3) More time devoted to artwork. Previous LD efforts were almost entirely coding, with no thought to art other than the barest stand-in images. Never sound or music. This time, while my art isn’t great, it’s all there, along with sound and music. Not great, but a huge step forward in terms of actually finishing.

4) Family support. It’s hard to overstate how awesome it is to have a family that was not only willing to let me disappear into the cave for the whole weekend, but would actually bring me food and water. Thanks ladies!

5) Git. I can’t imagine working without a repository now. Even in a single user environment. Next time I’ll be setup on github.

WHAT WENT WRONG

1) Collision detection. I borked this part up HARD. And I spent a lot of time looking in the wrong places. This is one of those basic game formula that I should have known, should have easily implemented, should have loaded from a gem, something. Spending several hours reinventing the wheel (or square, in this case) was frustrating and wasteful.

2) Ergonomics and comfort. Apple peripherals are stylish and pretty, but by the end, my wrists and shoulders were killing me. Using a Magic Trackpad for Photoshop work was a lesson in pain. TextMate took too many keystrokes to do oft-repeated actions. And I felt like I was constantly reaching for the trackpad, just to change window focus so I could go back to the keyboard. Probably just a matter of figuring out the right way to do it. I want to be able to never take my hands off the keyboard when coding. Even reaching for the arrow keys has to go. That might mean emacs. Sigh.

3) Cross platform issues can’t be put off to the last minute. I should have been doing Windows builds the whole time. I was also packaging everything by hand, which is error prone. My uploaded entry is missing the right audio libs, so I’ll need to fix that. So next time, some rake tasks for doing builds automatically, and frequent Windows tests.

NEXT TIME

Ruby and Gosu, definitely. That combination just works. Figure out packaging and cross platform stuff ahead of time. Find (or build) a gem with some basic game dev primitives. Improve my editor-fu. Not as much junk food.

TOOLS USED
OSX Lion
Ruby 1.9.2 / 1.8.7
Gosu
Ocra
TextMate
git
Photoshop CS3
GarageBand
Audacity

My screenshot capture program decided to scramble 90% of the images it took, so my timelapse is rather jumpy and fairly short. Just like my game.

I started mid-afternoon, and stopped only briefly for dinner. Even though I was badly stretched for time, you can see how much I wasted by playing other peoples entries and reading blog posts when the site wasn’t down.

Watch in your browser (firefox/opera). Or download the file.

Don’t forget that The Sky Is Falling and you should escape by downloading my game. It’s more fun than watching this timelapse, I promise.

Tags: timelapse

This Ludum Dare was a bit hard, I got a zero originality idea and that demotivated me over the process, so I tried to finish it quickly but almost without love.

The game name is Vampire Runner, like Canabalt, you control a guy who runs forever and runs faster and faster but instead jumping to avoid obstacles, in you have to activate your super skill to move through obstacles. The main objective remains the same.

Here are some images:

Running happy while there are no walls near

Using his move through wall skill near a wall

Lost all the skill energy while moving through a wall.

Despite I put almost no love to the game (well, I did for the graphics) the game is funny, so give it a try and I hope you like it.

P.S.: I will add the timelapse when I finish processing it.

Tags: finished, LD21

my entry: Forever Running

This morning I finished my LD entry. It’s the second time I participated, so I somehow knew what to expect. Here are my experiences:

What went well

• personal basecode: At first I wanted to use an existing framework, but then I realized that I would learn more if I write one myself. It has very limited functionality but I know every single line of code. This helped a lot to speed things up.
• preparation: Before the competition started I had ideas for the top 4 themes (self replication, dreams, escape, adaption). Even though I prefered self replication, I could start coding early. Beside that I tweaked my sleep schedule, so I was awake soon after the competition started (4am).
• visuals: I’m not a great artist, but I’m happy with what I produced. It’s so much better than what I used to do four months ago. (Yes, I’m a bit proud of it)
• goals: I aimed low. It’s not a very original game idea but I was pretty sure I could do it in the given time. I was right.
• release often: I released two indev versions of the game.
• code first: At the end of the first day, I finished all core game mechanics so I could spent the entire second day on content.

What I should do better

• sound: I was unable to produce music or sound good enough to include in the game. I certainly need a) more practice and/or b) better tools
• got up too early: The competition starts 4am here. I got up at 4am and started coding. Soon I realized that I was too tired to produce quality code. After sleeping 3 more hours, things got better instantly.
• focus: After I finished the game mechanics I somehow lost the focus. I thought about other game elements to add, watched some TV, tried to create some music. This way I lost some hours. I went to bed early to clear my mind and was full of energy for the second day.
• timelapse: I tried to create a timelapse with CamStudio, but somehow all files are corrupted I need to find another tool.

All in all I had a very productive weekend, learned a lot, spent time with an awesome community and had a lot of fun. Now I’m going to play all the games you made 😀

Thanks for this fantastic event!

Tags: postmortem

Disregard this post, it’s not just a compile issue, I have no idea what’s wrong.

Let me know if the game doesn’t run on your machine…

I compiled it on one Windows machine, but it’s not running on two other machines, if someone knows how compile a C++/SFML project to run on all Windows machines I’d be really grateful!

A MacOSX Compile would be nice too if anyone can do that?

Grab the source here :

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=preview&uid=1561

Hi.

Two days ago a guy at wonderfl.net mentioned LD challenge, and here I am, registered and submitted my 1st compo entry:

You have only 5 levels to beat, so it should not take you too much time to check out

This entry was inspired by awesome PSTW Action RPG, and the reason why I managed to complete it was that it’s way closer to things that got me into flash than stuff I actually do with flash now. I hope you will enjoy playing just as much as I had, making it.

This has been a hectic weekend. I’ve honestly never concentrated so much on an LD entry before.

Here are some of the good points about my entry:
The physics works perfectly – you can kick around the corpses of dead enemies, and the jumping is quite smooth. You can even bunny hop! This is all thanks to BEPU physics which is a darn good API. The character controller I’m using from it is experimental, but seems to work very well.
Gameplay has at least some depth. You have to escape from the lava as it rises, and that is confounded by the exit being locked (you have to find the blue key to escape).
The level is reasonably large. I was able to speed-run it in about 100 seconds. Some players have reported running out of time which makes me grin.
You can fall in the lava and die prematurely, which adds a tiny extra bit of depth i think.

Now the problems:

Only one type of enemy – I had hoped to implement a couple more. I wanted to have a sniper and give him a laser sight so you could see where he was aiming, and I wanted a lava monster who would wake up and throw lava bombs at you.
No pick-ups other than the keys. I had wanted health and weapons.
No unique weapons – the code supports this but I ran out of time, so I upgraded the default to be fully automatic.
The level wasn’t as finely crafted as I had hoped. I had intended to have a total of 4 keys, the red key just being a “tutorial” on the controls (that’s why its so obviously through the only unlocked door).
The big one… I messed up the graphics on the level geometry. The billboards were just fine, but the level geometry was rendered wrong. I tried to share vertices and thus texcoords between each block, but that proved futile. What I should have done was have one batch for each pair of parrallel surfaces – since my blocks are all axis aligned this would have made sense. Then, I would have been able to light them and have more carefully plotted texture coordinates.
I wish I had time to add more levels – the game code supports it, I just didn’t get the time to build them.

One thing is for certain though – from now on, I’m going to do 3D entries. So, when the next LD takes place, I’ll be using the same tech I’m using now.

I’ve just uploaded my final version of my game for this competition, well done to everyone.. It’s been great to see such a good spirit and it’s been good to be part of it for my first time here.

http://www.digital-glue.com/competitions/ld21/

Enjoy ^_^

Just 3 minutes before deadline!

For more information about the game, visit the entry.

I still could do the game better, anyway. Escape pod’s graphics are… Well, they could be better. Also the game is too short IMO. However, I’m fine with what I made. Well, it’s still my first LD. 😀

Well, I got somewhere! I had set out some personal goals this time to see how far I could get.

Here is the submission link.

a) Get the mechanics I wanted to make in
b) Get the levels buildable with my editor + Tiled so content is quicker
c) Finish at least 5 tutorial levels (which I did, all tutorials, merged one into the other leaving 4).
d) Don’t rush.

I got 4/4 for my personal goals, and I have something playable that I can expand on which is pretty much what I wanted.

What went wrong

1) Don’t rush. This was intentional, and I slept normally, didn’t spend all the time I could have so probably only about half the total time was spent.

This means its not a game, just a tutorial but since those were my goals, I am still happy with the outcome.

2) Trying to make a grappling hook that you can control

I lost a lot of time working on this rope thing that was pretty damn awesome (i love box2d) but it wasnt stable enough to use for now.

3) Only getting a concept/story idea late on saturday afternoon. Unhelpful. The rest of the time was spent working on all sorts of prototyped mechanics and stuff that i was hoping to use.

What went right

1) Mechanics and gameplay went first, then allowing me to edit them from the editor, then polish and art and such.

The editors kinda work like this :
Build the layout in tiled. Create triggers and object layers for whatever you need.

Once you have that, the level will load it for you, you can use the in game editor to edit the scene. Adding sprites, collisions, triggers and more.

Once you have that, you can edit the properties needed to connect the gameplay to the sprite objects. Like that glass1 will destroy the sprite tagged with glass1 in the editor.

What is next

Hopefully I will be able to make a few of them in time for the jam to show of the actual concept. Otherwise, I will just make some levels over the next few days and hopefully do a post release.

Tags: escape, LD21, post-mortem

Hey there, here is the Timelapse for my entry “cosmoZ”.

cosmoZ making of

Test the game here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=preview&uid=3553

When I showed McFunkyPants’ Keynote to my 16-year-old daughter, she said, “That is one wise baby.”

And over the course of the weekend, she kept asking me, “Are you doing what the wise baby said?”

And I would say, “Yes, of course.”

But I didn’t. I made a NOOB MISTAKE and got over-ambitious with my game design. I wanted to make a platformer with conversations at various places because I had a story to tell. But I decided that my platformer level would be larger than the screen, smooth-scrolling, and 256×256 tiles in size.

And I felt that I needed an editor in order to make my (one) level. I spent most of Saturday trying to beat it into submission, and when my wife told me Sunday that she needed to go out for most of the day to get the kids ready for school, I knew I wasn’t going to finish.

After an hour or two of working on the editor, I should have ditched it, reduced the map size to 64×64, and edited it by hand. If I’d done so, I’d have finished something; as it is I have a half-finished editor, a nice conversation system…and no game.

Ah, well. There’s always LD22.

Tags: postmorten

I gave up at about 2 am last night, after spending way too long trying to get Flixel to do what I wanted it to. Also I ran into a bug in the haXe compiler which made generated as3 code impossible to compile. If I had known about the extra time, I would probably have been able to make something. I might still do something for the jam using some existing code from an old LD or so.

Thanks to the 12 hours spare I could finished my game properly(almost). You can check my entry HERE. I’ve added sounds and background sounds(the clock..) and added some courses to the map. Now it looks fine, but now it’s for windows users only.. this was my second game in c++ so I have no idea how to port it to linux and to mac, the game is in allegro so it suppose to be possible. Can anyone explain how I port it to other platforms? I’ve added a source to the entry so maybe someone can do it for me please? thanks. and some photos:

Began the Jam rather late, but decided to give it a shot any way.

Work schedule:
1/2 hour brainstorm during family dinner
1 hour paper prototyping in train
8 1/2 hours of development
(Would have been 3, without the extension which saved me)

10 hours in total

Play the result here.

…if i’m ashamed to call what I made a game?

It does for me :). My only objective was to finish within the deadline and I managed that, even if there’s no art and the game on runs on one platform right now.

Looking forward to the next time I enter, I learnt a lot both about programming and game making in general, and about things particularly relating to speed development.

Angus

Now that I have gotten some sleep I just wanted to say thanks to everyone. This was my first LD48 and it was fun.

I learned a lot in the last two days.  The hardest part for me was not adding more features.  I had to take out some “Fun” elements of my game but I wanted something that worked above all.

One other note my submission has a WINDOWS Link but the link should work on Linux, Windows and Mac since its java.

Good:

Jmonkey was easy to use.

Hydrogen Drum Machine was cool.

Gimp rocked.

Blender 2.5X was awesome

Bad:

Loading Images in Jmonkey have a weird Flip By default. So I had to make my Letters Backwards.

Blender exporter to Ogre xml puts a capital “F” on False so the xml parser cries.

-Greg

Yay! XD

My entry, Fred the Astro-Miner is here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?uid=4920

You play as an astronaut who’s stuck in the middle of an asteroid, being chased by the giant alien that lives in the centre. You need to run away as fast as possible while trying to mine as much metal as you can!

I was quite busy this weekend, so I’m really happy with what I was able to get done in the time! The game is extremely short, as I intended for there to be more levels (there’s only one, and each level is split up into twelve small stages). There’s also a couple of bugs. I’ll probably keep working on the game though, especially if it gets some positive comments, introducing better graphics and more block types for more interesting, puzzle style gameplay.

Enjoy! =)

P.S. I’ll get a Windows executable up soon! At the moment it’s Linux only

Although… I have realised that I’m probably putting too much detail into this

Tags: design, level, map, sheep

In case anyone is using Tile Studio with Flixel, this might be useful. I added an option to always start with a transparent tile at the beginning of the exported tileset: !StartWithEmptyTile, since Flixel insists that the drawable tiles start from a certain index.

For some reason I haven’t been able to log into SourceForge for a while, but there is a new executable here: http://www.wieringsoftware.nl/ld/ts.exe (if you don’t already have Tile Studio, first unpack the zip from http://tilestudio.sf.net and then replace the executable with this one).

Tags: tilestudio, tools

Anyway, I had some trouble submitting my posts during the outages this weekend, as every single one of you contestants have also experienced. Here is a Saturday update with a production shot of my game, Under a Watchful Eye:

Today [Saturday] I’ve spent several hours testing the mechanics and putting together all the art. I took a digital camera into my back yard and snapped shots of the grass, moss, trees, stone, and one cloud. I cut this cloud out, made the sky color an alpha, and put it on a billboard. Spent far too long coding the movement of the clouds and the way they fade away/are recycled. Ah well, it looks nice at least.

I also created a number of meshes in blender for rock formations and boulders. They are all just extruded cubes that have been displaced using perlin noise, sub-surfed, and UV unwrapped.

Anyway, the enormous glaring eye now twitches and looks in random directions. If you step too far away from it, it will go into alert mode and warn you not to go any further. If you keep going, it will fire at you, killing you unless something is blocking its path.

I got a very late start and I’ve had a very relaxed attitude to boot, so I don’t have NEAR the quality many of you guys churned out! I think it’s cool though. My only goal is to make a game that’s fun to play, no matter how crude it is otherwise. I figure: this is my first ld; I’ve got nobody to impress.

I wanted to post up my tiny little WIP because I’m happy with it and I think it’s fun to play :). It’s 1 level. No sound. All programmer art. :).

My game is called Escape Velocity (which I thought was perfect until I saw how many others have that name 😛 ) and here’s the plot ripped from my readme:

You work for the cheapest interstellar delivery company in the galaxy. Your boss gives you so little fuel for each trip, you’re lucky not to slam into a planet or be lost careening into deep space! You know each delivery could be your last but you have to pay the rent :(.

You have to use the gravity of stars and planets to slingshot your way to the delivery zone!

Download it here.

Let’s give the “too long, didn’t read” version right at the beginning, it’s been a wonderful experience.

With the time difference, I had from Saturday 11am to Monday 11am to complete the game, modulo two kung-fu practice sessions and one band rehearsal, on top of your everyday needs (groceries, wife, food and everything). I could only start to work on the game after lunch and I had no idea at all. The theme “Escape” was too generic for my tastes, but that was maybe the point. There was no way to escape the theme…

At first I was thinking about a physics platformer, where you had to plan your escape: each level had two parts: the “getting-in” where you can look at the level, move things around and plan your run, and the “getting-out” where you get the hell out of the place after stealing whatever was worth at this point. I had played with Box2D and its Java port a couple of years ago, and the perspective of getting all that  to work again was not very enjoyable.

Time was running out already and I had no interesting idea. Well, in that case, the point is to start doing something. So I started the basic structure of a game, a simple framework to have at least something to play with. Then I just started to make a 2D top-view game, just because it came that way. “Escape” was easy to fit on a closed room setting, with classic stealth games as examples.

Well I was getting into the basic level loading of the game and I decided that I wanted to get a nice lighting system for my game, like the ones you have on rogue likes but better, just because I needed the challenge of doing something new with this competition.

And that was a huge mistake. The way I implemented this was buggy at best, and the code is a huge pile of handling special cases, getting around floating point errors and is probably performing very bad in a lot of cases…

But it worked relatively well. Sadly I ended up having a stable engine on Sunday late afternoon, leaving too little time for making a real game. “Never give up, never surrender” as they say. That’s the spirit of the competition. You make choices, some work, some don’t. But you keep on coding.

Making the light/switch system, enemies took me the last part of the day. Midnight, getting tired, and far from having a game. Polish, music and level design would have to wait. I could not sleep, having ideas to improve the poor gameplay of the game as my wife was happily dreaming by my side.

6am, already up, 5 hours to go. Code a few ideas, breakfast and coffee. Coffee. Coffee. It was 9:30. Quick, let’s make some music/sounds. Two sound effects done with the microphone of my laptop, and the music took five minutes to create, with 2 of them to choose the pad in Ableton. Just 8 bars, a very simple chord progression and a very basic drum loop. Add a bit of fading and done. Not enough time to do better.

10am and I had no levels!!! One hour later I had three tutorial levels and four main levels. None of them is very interesting, but it was time to pack. The game was “ready” just on time, but the server had trouble, extra twelve hours to submit? I managed to squeeze my submission a few minutes after the original deadline (well, I also needed to go to work eventually on this Monday). Resisting the temptation to use those extra hours to do better would be a bad idea…

Just checking that the game starts on all platforms and I called it done. 48h is short, but getting something done in that time frame is very challenging but so rewarding. I learned a lot on how to crunch, and how to cope with failure.

See you next time, Ludum Dare!

Test 123

Tags: Delete Me

Game made the 48 hour deadline, and is available to play and rate: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=rate&uid=2661

And timelapse is up. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rp7_G-4232A

It was a good weekend. Thanks to everyone on IRC for being very interesting and providing some pleasant distractions, and to my many friends who were supportive and understanding.

I made a somewhat longer post about the entry on my blog for some more information on the development on

http://redwatergames.blogspot.com/2011/08/collapse-ludum-dare-entry.html

also uploaded a video featuring the leveleditor

and a gameplay video

Enjoy reading/watching/playing and leave some comments

PLAY ~ VIEW PAGE

This was an intense couple of days, and felt more like a week had passed. It being my first ludum dare I didn’t know what to expect. I’ve made games before, and I’ve made games with deadlines before, but the ones I’ve finished were not much.

As the time of the theme’s announcement came closer I wasn’t worried too much, I had some vague ideas on some types of games to do. One game could fit several themes. Then the theme was announced: escape! I have to admit that this was one of the themes I overlooked in my mental preparation as I assumed people will want to avoid a pile of room escape games. I didn’t want to do a platformer because I assumed that there will be enough little jumping men and floating platforms from other competitors. So I sat down started pacing around the whole house and tried to think what I’d like to escape from: cities came to mind, then I thought that’s too much of a cliche since the whole world would want the same. Now that’s an Idea.

First let's get them spinning

 First thing’s first in an orbit-based game: get the orbit working. That worked easily enough. Geting them spinning around eachother was trickier though.

Then get them spinning around eachother

The coding went a lot more smoothly than I had anticipated, the only slight issue was in switching orbits where Urth (I’ve been told repeatedly that it looked like a hairy circle in its first incarnation) would randomly teleport around.

Probably my favorite level

By the end of day one I had 6 finished levels and escape mode. There were still no menus, no sounds, no interface of any recognizable sort, and at this point I hadn’t slept for well over 24 hours, not due to a lack of trying though. I’d sit in my bed, lights off and sleep wouldn’t happen. Instead what happened were the storyline overlays. Then sleep happened.

Day two started with implementing some suggestions from preliminary testing, adding the artwork, doing the menus, and generally improving the game play experience.

Music and sounds were a headache. I rarely add sounds to projects, so this was mostly new and uncharted territory. Some fumbling with lmms wasted several hours, so I just went and picked up my dusty old mandolin (no I can’t actually play it other than one song: Planxty Irwin) and banged and pinched on it (the sound effects) until I eventually managed a slow tune (the music). Some tweaking in audacity made it bearable to listen to.

Ready for my world tour, fetch my manager!

With that out of the way I still had some hours to spare. Since I became addicted to the Escape game mode, and would play it repeatedly for minutes on end instead of doing actual work I decided to make a high score table so others can show off their planetary avoidance skills. This only works in the applet though, the compiled versions will save your scores in a text file.

Escape this if you can

To conclude, some advice:

• start simple, but make it expandable
• prioritize
• do not update to a beta release of ubuntu the day before ludum dare
• 48 hours isn’t enough to learn new skills and use them, work with what you know
• do not forget to blink

A few thoughts on the pseudo-completion of my game, ‘I THINK IN A MINUTE OR SO I WILL EXPLODE.’

Climban gaems

It was a bit of a mess, all told. I spent almost all the time getting the switching mechanic to work properly. I always forget that swapping two states requires a break, or else it’ll just loop and loop back. Silly little mistakes.

I missed out on the chance to add sound, and decent menus. But the extended submission period did give me a chance to patch some bugs andfix the non-functional difficulty curve.

All in all, I’m happy to have gotten it done, and I hope everyone gives it a go. And I think I have an idea of where I’m going with it if I want to polish it up. Getting it done wasn’t as cathartic as I expected, but I guess it’s because it’s not really done yet.

There’s always more to do.

Please try it out here and let me know what you think.

And there’s another Ludum Dare!

Heh, the site issues were freaking me out a bit. I read that there’d be an extension, but I can get a bit paranoid about making sure I’ve done things correctly, so I kept on trying during the server troubles. Finally went through though.

I had to cut some things I wanted – biggest regrets are not being able to include a final sequence to better justify the health upgrades, and not having better art for the ending – but I’m happy with what I accomplished.

Thanks to the LD team for organizing this great event and working out those server problems, and thanks to all the other participants! =D

I had a blast making the game for LD48 but wow, was i tired last night.

Anyway here is the game as submitted: http://www.strangechair.se/LD21/

and here is the  Time-lapse.

Now to try out hundreds of new games!

I’m currently attempting to submit my entry for LD21 and thought I’d share some of the steps along the way with screenshots (from timelapse archive, <3 chronolapse).

No better way to start than a title screen:

I then got stuck straight into the concept I had for “escape” – solving puzzles to move up levels of a tower/dungeon to escape rising lava levels, with a snakes and ladders like “fall down 3 levels” mechanic if you got something wrong. First up, an indicator on the screen for your level and the level of the lava!

It wasn’t long before I scrapped that idea as I couldn’t think of how to implement a nice variety of puzzles that could increase in difficulty while being randomly generated (admittedly, I didn’t give the problem a lot of thought) and started work on my second idea, a side scrolling platformer where you outrun an advancing lava wave! I jumped into photoshop and threw together some concept art for the platforms you could run and jump along.

It became quickly apparent that there wouldn’t be much room for variety in level generation, and with tile designs like that it looked entirely possible to fall down a gap between tiles just by offsetting vertically. I could have worked on a more solid tile design, but instead I decided to forego graphics for the time being and get to work on random terrain generation, rendered as solid white for now, with a little red rectangle for the player! The “minimap” appeared and stuck with the game mostly unchanged all the way through.

Some time spent looking at a friend’s progress:

And back to my own work. Making quick progress now, I added a lava wall behind you and blue obstacle blocks floating in the air. At this stage I was intending to have the blue blocks as indestructable objects which were a lot less common than they are now and intended to have a seperate type of creature you would have to shoot and kill as you progressed across the world.

Next on the agenda was meteors raining from the sky! Rendered as simple circles themselves they were very uninteresting to have falling across the screen, so I added smoke particles trailing behind them. These were supposed to grow in size and lose opacity so they’d become invisible and be destroyed when they were completely unseen. It didn’t work as intended at first and there was amusement when they added to my lava wall and started covering the screen with “smoke”. It made the game much harder to play, and because they never despawned the game went slower and slower! Glad I got screenshots to remember it.

Smoke particles fixed and tested against different coloured backgrounds, the game was coming together nicely now – it needed an end condition though. I quickly made an image for failure and added it to the game. Also added a distance text at this point, so you could see how far you were getting!

Time for some more fancy graphics – cue the Lava Tsunami of Doom, for which the game will be applauded and named. Also added 2 background layers which scroll at different speeds.

The game was still lacking something while playing though, so I figured I should add some sounds. Audiotool.com for background “music” and bfxr.net for sound effects. Pow!

And then with everything else done, graphics for the rest of the game!

And that’s that!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=rate&uid=5019

Watch the Timelapse video of my LD #21 entry Stromcrow:

I did manage to submit my entry before the competition ended, but as the website was going so absurdly slow at the time, I didn’t write anything about it. Perhaps next time I will attempt post more updates during the competition.

My entry was made in Actionscript3 with the Flashpunk library.
Software used: vim, gimp, lmms, audacity, sfxr.
Timelapse video created with my timelapse script and Kdenlive.

Tags: timelapse

Hey everybody. I’ve written up a post-mortem on my game, with thoughts about what the game means, why I made the decisions I did as far as the two-player requirement and some other gameplay mechanics, and the backstory on how the game itself came to be. Check it out at my website.

And, a quick side-note: huge congratulations to everyone who completed and submitted a game this time around! You’re all awesome. I look forward playing as many of the games as I can this week.

The Grind was my first entry for Ludum Dare. This is an in-depth breakdown of the development went.

My goal was simply to finish something and I’m happy to say I achieved that goal. I ended up having to cut the vast majority of gameplay features, graphics, and sound (entirely), but the contest was a good exercise in scoping down a project to fit into the time available.

Time breakdown:

• Planning: 1 hour
• Map design/editor: 3 hours
• General coding: 6 hours
• Graphics: 3 hours (including scrapped art)
• Testing and bug fixing: 3 hours
• Real life + sleep: 32 hours

Lessons learned:

A narrow scope leaves time for polishing. I came into the contest with a vague notion of how time-constrained I’d be, but I didn’t truly appreciate the level of urgency until about 3/4 of the way through the contest. At the beginning, I tried to scope my project down to make it achievable, but honestly I brainstormed ideas I had no chance of implementing in time. This led to wasted time working on features that were later cut (e.g. smart phone text, nicer looking wall graphics).

Don’t underestimate time spent on algorithms. I had a rough idea of how to implement simple collision detection/resolution and line of sight detection, but I really underestimated how much time it would take to implement something acceptable. My first few attempts at collision resolution could lead to the player getting “stuck” and it was so frustrating that I had to keep iterating until I found something that “just worked.” On the plus side, I managed to come up with a simple line-of-sight algorithm late at night that works very well (set “debug = true” in the main script file to watch it in action).

Real life matters, but can be inconvenient. I hadn’t planned on spending roughly 11 of my waking hours doing “real life” things, but I think I had a better weekend and enjoyed the contest more because of it. After I submitted my entry, I was glad that I had done something else fun before it was time to go back to work on Monday.

Critique of The Grind:

The Grind is a very shallow game, but it is entertaining to watch the player get hounded by many bosses at once. I enjoyed watching 3 different guys in suits all say “Have some work!” right as I turned a corner.

Obviously, the game could use more polish. There are no menus to speak of and the smart phone isn’t really used very effectively (the original plan was to have various tasks show up on the phone–in the end, it’s just your score). The graphics ended up being a strange mix of 2D overhead (for the walls) and 3/4 (for the characters); this was simply a function of running out of time to make the wall graphics look good from a 3/4 angle. Lastly, the lack of sound and music is regrettable, but these were last on my list of priorities by necessity.

In the end, though, I had a blast and can’t wait to play through the other entries. Thanks to the Ludum Dare community for arranging this event!

Tags: postmortem

Just wanted to write a few notes about my submitted entry “Abandoned”, which participated in LD21 (escape).

You can try the game here:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=preview&uid=2393

First of all, it feels really good to have been able to submit the entry within the deadline. I have to say I’m really pleased with the result.
I had a great time coming up with all the weird artwork (which IMHO looks really good considering that I’m not a particularly good designer/illustrator). I really wanted the game to be creepy… which it is

About the controls I think the basic movement is really good, however the attack is a bit tricky (a tip is to collect a lot of green chrystals to speed up the rotation of the eyeball and just use it as a shield). That specific attack is based on an attack from a game for the C64 (I don’t know the name, and haven’t seen it since about 1989, so its probably just a twisted memory).

I really wanted the game to be more of a bullet hell game, but I designed the level in the last 3 hours and was really tired. Just one more hour would have improved the game a huge lot. Tweaking the position of the enemies and the rate which they spawn their particles.

Anyway, it was a great weekend, and now I have a lot of games to browse.
My thanks to the LD-crew (who struggled with the servers) and all developers who kept inspiring through status updates on the blog and in the irc. I’ll see you again!
/Tommy Salomonsson

(journal – entry)

Here’s the timelapse!

Tags: timelapse

Waking up at 1:30 PM in the day today with aching fingers, I felt happy.

The game is actually pretty fun to play, and not too badly balanced. There are three zones of different colors, and each zone get’s a bit harder. The enemies get a little too fast and jumpy after a while though.

I don’t regret using Flashpunk this time, it really makes everything so much easier than using just as3 like last time. I spent many hours on a stupid bug though, and realised Flashpunk tilemaps do not actually clear tiles when you call clearTile() on them if the clear tile (index 0) is transparent. That was annoying and made me loose a lot of time.

I think the leaderboard can add a lot to the game. Sadly Playtomic has disabled it’s leaderboards due to some problems, but it should be working soon again.

I didn’t really make any graphics at all, but focused on gameplay instead. I think that was a good idea, but the game could really use some better graphics. The music and sound effects could be better too, but they do the job.

A breakdown of the time spent in different applications (tracked with ProcrastiTracker):

• Flashdevelop 13h
• Chrome 6h
• Flashplayer 4h
• XChat 2h
• Photoshop 2h
• Cubase 1h

Entry page: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=rate&uid=2311

I didn’t make the deadline, but I’m still working on the game I started. Here’s a quick screenshot.
I’ll try to finish it before the Jam deadline, but I doubt it 😐

While youtube continues to refuse my ogg video timelapse all I can say it was done in time, 7 seconds prior to the 48hour deadline and about 15 seconds before I fell asleep for the next 14 hours…

Some bugs remain but its playable, and the name is the result of me beign too tired to remember the awesome one I had worked out earlier and the typo ‘p’ the result of caffeine at 2:50AM.

If you run windows, audio will omst likely not work, if you use linux x86_64 it may work but I recommend compiling….

Check it out here if you are brave enough: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=preview&uid=4203

Developped with the nonstop briti-nyan, nyan-cat and other nyan variants to ensure maximum code nyan-a-bility.

Here’s the link to my final LD entry: SurfN-2-Sur5

Vote link

Some helpful tips to get started:

• When starting out you’re falling from the sky, wait until you hit the water to turn.
• In order to have a successful landing you need to be facing in the direction you’re moving.
• Write down your longest time/distance and try to beat it (if you’re into that).

Controls:
Arrow keys Move
Space or Enter restarts

I made the game in PixieEngine, the tools are getting better and these games keep getting easier and easier to make.

I finished the background music earlier using Aviary this afternoon and I think it’s pretty rad. Aviary was tough to get the hang of and was rough with importing loops into the larger song arranger, but once I got the basics down it was just a matter of toughing it out.

Here’s the link to the audio:
https://rookery.s3.amazonaws.com:443/9491000/9491020_96a4.mp3

I was pretty proud of drawing the little pixel surfer guy. Originally I wanted him to have twice as many rotations as well as subtle animations, but you know combinatorics…

Timelapse

This is the timelapse of my attempt at Ludum dare. If you watch closely, you can see that i make 3 games. Two extra because of technical problems

<Salzkorn> how's your game goin
 <Salzkorn> finished in time?
 <asiekierka> almost
 <asiekierka> but crash bugs were fixable post-mortem
 <asiekierka> i fixed all but one until i said "fuck it"
 <Salzkorn> call it feature
 <asiekierka> the game stops sending data to you every 5 minutes (in multiplayer)
 <asiekierka> because you're a piece of shit so everyone tries to escape from YOU and not the infinite map they're supposed to escape from
 <asiekierka> THERE WE GO!

Dear judges, keep that in mind while playing my game. Thanks.

*Phew* Ludum Dare is so damn crazy. I think this Ludum Dare I didn’t make enough progress on the first day. The game turned out pretty nicely, although it’s probably not as original as I wanted it to be. One of the core mechanics I had planned for my game was having the wolves be able to chase the player around, so you could lure the out of the way instead of fighting them, while running the risk of getting trapped. It also could have used more original obstacles, with more gameplay depth than “go to A to get the key then go to B to open the door”. Kind of like the fighting. It also needed more levels. In fact, when I first submitted it, before knowing that there had been a 12-hour extension to the dead-line, the game only had a test room. Afterwards I realized that I still had time, so I was able to make a real level, test it properly, and even add sounds! It’s only a few, though. And there’s still no music. Another issue is that I didn’t make any decorative props, like I planned originally. This might sound superfluous, but scenery is actually very important in any game with big areas (mazes and exploration games), especially when you’re using walls that all look the same.

Escape from the Wolf Castle

Studies show than posts with chinchillas have a 20% bigger chance to attract attention from the common page-scroller

On the bright side, I think the game turned out fun. I made a checkpoint movement mechanic that I had never done before, I was able to make some nice animations for my rabbit, and I even made a turn-based combat system that players are able to learn on their first try, all under 48 hours! And I even crunched some home-made sound effects in there, too! It was the first time I made sound effects, and I have to say it was surprisingly easy. I have next to no experience with sound effects, but with a microphone and some free software, I was able to much together something. I realize now that it’s a HUGE difference in quality, from having no sound effects to having some basic crappy ones. It’s also very quick and easy to make.

I hope you all enjoy playing the game as much as I enjoyed playing it! Eventually I’ll want to develop this some more to make it more complete, but for now I’ll listen to my victory song (Frog’s Theme from Chrono Trigger. It’s a very encouraging song) and relax after my exhausting 60 hours of making a game. Thanks for reading!

So I finished my game last night! I really struggled with the theme at first – one of those that can be used for a game in so many ways it was hard to pin something original and interesting down. While I’m not convinced I truly achieved that in my concept, this has been by far my best execution on a Ludum Dare to date. I actually had a little time to polish! But no DISCO

Click to go to the game page

So, pretty happy. I also took a timelapse with Chronolapse that I stuck up on YouTube if anyone’s interested:

Timelapse

Tags: Flixel, timelapse

I just finished up my jam entry, Frickin’ Laser Beams, you can check it out here:

http://www.uncade.com/prototypes/frickin-laser-beams/

Overall I’m really happy with how this turned out. It’s a platformer where you have to run to the energy shields to avoid being killed by the ever present danger of laser beams. I might decide to keep working on this as a full game, not sure yet. I added music for the first time to my entry, totally worth it It also ended up looking a lot like minesweeper, which was unintended, but kinda cool now that I look at it.

Tried to make my first game ever with a selfmade engine and in 48h: Escape Velocity is what came out of it.

What went right:
– Base code: Already having drawing code and good collision detection in my engine saved me so much work. I don’t think I’d have anything
– Javascript: Man, I love this language.
– Real life: I managed to find time to BBQ with the family and go to the pub on LD weekend.. Food, Beer and Coding? Awesome.

What went wrong/Lessons learned:
– Physics: I really like physic based games.. but I really suck at coding them.
– Base code: I also tried to integrate the physics in the engine and that was a rather bad idea. I could have saved so much time if I’d just took the straightforward way.. next time: more work on the game, less work on the engine.
– Timelapse: next time I’ll make sure my script does not capture in 100% quality and I have enough disk space. Missing an hour or two in the video.
– Time for polish: There are a few tweaks I wanted to do but did not have the time to (especially how the gravity bullet behaves). Also more levels with greater diversity would have been nice.

Although my game is not that good, I really enjoyed making it and I think I’ll participate again next year (:
Now off to play all these awesome games!

Now that I’ve had an evening to gather my thoughts, I wanted to write a bit about the game I built for LD21. I submitted my entry into the Jam so that me and a friend could work together on it. That said, we limited ourselves to 48 hours and followed by the rules of the competition the best we could.

Overall the project went smoothly from start to finish and didn’t encounter any major issues, so I’ll go over some of the things I think went well for our project.

When we first got word of the competition’s theme, we just sat there quietly for about 10 minutes. I pitched the idea “You’re an escaped prisoner or something, piloting a ship down a corridor, where you have to break down these gates and dodge bullets while being chased by a big bad guy. Maybe with giant saw blades or something.” The game was more of a ‘chase’ game than an ‘escape’ game, but escape is a pretty broad term, and we figured we could hit the theme if we provided a little background to the characters prior to going into the gameplay portion of the game.

We used Unity for development. I must admit, while unity is awesome, the best part of it is the rapid prototyping. We took our idea and made a playable game within 3-4 hours of the start of the competition. We identified a lot about what would, and what wouldn’t work about our idea. You can see the prototype HERE.

We ditched the idea of gates, since we liked the idea of constantly accelerating gameplay. Gates required you to be able to shoot, something we got rid of, and also required to slow down, which we felt would probably break the flow of the game. The obstacles in the test version were entertaining enough, so we kept them around. We thought the game was way more interesting when the enemy was on screen rather than off, so we made it so that the enemy couldn’t fall too far behind.

The way I set up the game’s movement (as in the speed the stage scrolls) is kind of interesting. The speed the game was moving at was handled as two values; the target speed (the speed the player should move at) and real speed (the speed the player is really moving at). Getting hit dropped your real speed by a % (in the final version you slow by 10% for bullets, 15% for obstacles), and you recover speed by a set amount per second. That actually let us increase the difficulty by simply adjusting the speed the player moves at, since getting hit while moving faster would penalize you more. The enemy, his speed remains at 98% of your target speed, until he hits the bottom of the screen at which he matches it 100%.

Some really interesting things happened with this set up though that we didn’t originally intend. Getting hit just once didn’t really set you back very much because you recovered the speed you lose almost immediately. Consecutive hits would slow you down more, and more importantly, for much longer, which penalizes you much more. This meant that we didn’t have to make a game where your goal wasn’t to get hit… we could make the goal to try to avoid getting hit multiple times in a short period of time.

I was a little disappointed that actually slowing down was not noticeable. In the final version, even hitting multiple objects in a row, you won’t actually notice a change in speed, even though the scroll speed slowing down is what lets the enemy catch up to you. I think the shaking that occurs when you get hit hides the slowdown, but we needed the shaking to make it obvious that you got hit, since the explosion audio queue also sounds when an obstacle is destroyed by the enemy.

The enemy creeping up on the screen had gameplay implications that we hadn’t really foreseen, but once we saw it we kind of ran with it. I didn’t really notice much until a player mentioned on twitter that he enjoyed the way that the enemy’s position acted as a health bar of sorts. That made my day, and allowed us to make it a bigger part of the game. As you make mistakes, you’re given less room to work with, which makes further mistakes more likely. It reminds me of messing up in a game of Tetris, as the blocks pile up, you now have less time to plan your moves. It’s kind of invigorating, and while it wasn’t originally in intended feature, it was just one of those things that we were like “heey, that’s pretty interesting, lets see if we can make this a more important part of the game.”

It’s kind of amazing just how much a game, even one as small as a weekend competition game like this one can change over the course of development. We kind of had an idea where we wanted to be right from the start, as the prototype we built at the start looks fairly similar to the final product, but the actual gameplay was refined a considerable amount to make an interesting experience.

So yeah, I guess the take-away was that because we had our plan and working game so early, almost the entire 48 hour process was polishing and tweaking to make it more fun.  That’s a really good way to do it I think, it would have been much more stressful if we hadn’t had something running early on.

I want to thank Mike Paulson for helping me out with graphics, his art added a lot to the the game and it would have been a much uglier game if I had to do it all!

I hope you enjoy the game, let me know what you think!  Web/Windows/Mac version are available, as well as a timelapse and source code.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=preview&uid=5375

Here’s the full final version of the timelapse video, along with some gameplay video at the end.

My submission included the Windows version, I’m working on the Mac version now.

Forgot about that and am too lazy to edit.

What went right:
Music
Gameplay
Graphics
Submission Time
Food
IRC
Almost everything else.

What went wrong

The site server ^_.^ (I’m thankful to PoV and Phil for fixing it, though)
The variable ‘jump = 1’ x_.x

So, there, done.