Here is a timelapse for my entry

Tags: LD21

I always wonder who reads these posts, there are so many and they keep coming in so I guess we might as well focus on the games..

However, I do feel that granted the premission I have a few things to write about Ludum Dare  21, My first LD was 20.
Unlike my first LD, this time I only completed nearly 20% of the features.
This Theme was actually one I wanted long before the LD21 and I ended up coming here unprepared to make an exquisite submission.

I spent the entire first day on perfecting the first feature that hardly affects gameplay(random maze) and only using one sample so the player doesn’t benefit from the variety of having a fresh new maze each time we play.

The game I wanted to create, a rougelike inspired shmup,  (Think Metroidvania meats Powder)where you play as a space traveller caught in a massive (not so) abandoned  space station looking for some spare parts to fix his rig and save some bucks.

Requires improvement:

The game was suppose to introduce the story to the player in game amongst other things, like powerups, enemies, bosses and traps, this feature will only be in a future version.

The good:

I learned something I should have known by now.
How to blit fast in AS3 which I never tried before.(I actually used shapes)
This was very refreshing and got me highly excited near the last hours.

What I learned:

I really should focus on making gameplay elements first.
Making and playing with the actual player experience is far more important than the technical aspects, cause if the game ends up not finished, I would like to think that people enjoyed my submission.
Otherwise it would be a technical demo competition and not a game making event correct.

Anyhow I’m sure tomorrow I’ll play all the great games and enjoy and start getting some code ready for the next LD.

Thanks for reading.

Hi,

It’s a day after my first LD.

Unfortunately I didn’t have too much time for coding and game doesn’t looks as good as I want, but the first pancake is always spoiled 😉

I was writing in technologies which I never used before. I’ve chosen flash to be able to create web version of game. To make it simpler I used FlashPunk and Box2D (with box2fp as a wrapper).

I don’t have graphic talents but I was trying to create something better than classic programmer art in GIMP (with Bamboo tablet) and of course Paint

It’s also my first game in which I generated sounds by myself, but when you use Bfxr it can’t be difficult.

In general it’s possible to finish this game. Just remember a few things: sometimes you need to move back, it’s impossible to destroy TVs and grenades doesn’t hurt you.

Yes, I know, my English is terrible so maybe more visual rest of the text could be better.

Photo taken before start:

You can see here my desk, Lech Poznan match, yerba mate, two energy drinks, some other not important stuff and of course pierogi!

History of creating:

Theme announcement – 4AM here:

Start coding after night:

…

real life
…

First prototype:

Graphical corrections:

…

sleeping, bowling and party time %)

…

And final version without any significant progress since last day:

Thanks and congrats to all that participated in this LD.

Maskl

Tags: postmortem

So… the day after. I spent some time playing my oh not so great yet almost promising game and found out I made it tooo hard It really needs few fixes and tweaks, especially island generation, I’ve fixed most of the stuff even before submitting, but I forgot about the grass which plays vital role in successfully escaping from the island. So I’m considering doing some kinda “enhanced” edition with some more stuff.

Looking back, the biggest problems were:

not getting motivated enough, didn’t like theme and couldn’t think out anything really good… It was better second day because it seemed that I might have a chance to finish it in some sort of playable version.

having too much ambitions instead of sticking with something much simpler, but which would be more playable.

and doing everything from scratch just with openGL via OpenTK – I lost few hours doing stupid things like something resembling GUI (btw coded so ugly my head hurts even now), on the other hand, I took the whole competion more as experiment (my first Ludum Dare, although I participated in global game jam).

And too bad I just hadn’t time to make some sounds :/ I started to implement them about hour before the submission hour and realized I never worked with openAL and that there’s no way I could even play some simple wav without looking through some tutorial. Too bad, since I’ve bough a microphone to record some screams and other sounds just for the Ludum Dare

So, I didn’t write about anything in my journal. To be honest I didn’t have time! I was too busy making that damn game! HAHA. But maybe I can write something now. Mainly about what I have learnt in this contest.

Time: Well, I kind of didn’t learn anything here. I like everyone wildly overestimated what i can get done in 48 hours. I spent ~26 hours. But I am always over-estinating time. At work especially where I’m making games daily, I still think – “a week, sure, no problem”… Then I get bitten by time for disrespecting it. I usually double estimates to stop this… :o)

Instructions/GUI/Intro: Never spend enough time on these and they’re really important. Far too interested in the idea of the game, the mechanic and how it plays. Never on how to teach a player to understand it. The GUI needed an overhaul or actually doing in some cases (falling back to the default Unity stuff).

Planning: I need to plan and timetable stuff out next time. I think I spent 45 minutes modelling a gun, but it’s not visible and should have stuck with something simpler. If I planned everything, allotted time to each part with contingency then maybe the GUI would have been better.

Too big: Next time I’m going to aim for a 12 or 6 hour game. 24+ hours of coding over the weekend on top of all the game coding I do in the week means I didn’t have a proper weekend. I may have gone out for dinner so my wife didn’t kill me for ignoring her that long, but today, on Monday, I’m zonked.

I think that’s it for my thoughts for now. Hope you enjoyed my game…

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=rate&uid=4757

Jasper

Tags: LD48 LD21 Alpha Centuri Unity Game Entry

time laps now online

day 1
day 2

first youtube vids ever 😛 enjoy!

Basically what the title says

The menu for our game

Almost finished!

We’ve got the mechanics working and now we just need to utilize said mechanics in some sweet levels.

What we have so far:

• Running
• Wallrunning
• Walljumping
• Sawblades
• Sliding
• Ramps
• Crushers
• Flying enemys
• Glass which breaks
• Particles
• Checkpoints
• Health
• Slowmo/bullettime
• AI
• Background tiles
• HUD effects

Standing in the gunfire of some drones, surrounded by sawblades.

You control with the arrow keys, Z and X. You jump higher the faster you run, if jump while running towards a wall you will run up it, and if you press up while wallrunning you will jump off the wall.

If you press Z you will turn on slowmo/quicktime which drains the yellow meter in the lower-left. It will make you run faster, make bullets show trails, and makes it easier to avoid stuff.

link to game: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=rate&uid=4909

Tags: game progress

It’s finally crunch time for the LD Jam and here I am chatting it up for the rest of my team because

A) my job is pretty easy by comparison
and
B) variations on a theme make my job really easy by comparison

that said, have some more sound clips!

http://snd.sc/pBHV54

My game for this compo was Black Hole, a game where the objective is to escape both the horde of Drones who cornered you, and the black hole which they cornered you against.

Fortunately for you, a long-dead alien race left a platform here, which feeds off of the emissions of the black hole and broadcasts energy to all nearby ships. You have moved in close to this platform and the black hole itself, and thus avoided the gigantic Drone Mothership which was chasing you. However, the smaller Drone forces can and did pursue you, so now you must hold out against them to recharge your Jump Engines, allowing you to jump to beyond lightspeed and escape to your home.

The coding process was quite frantic. I had to write the entire game engine, and at one point ended up re-writing and re-integrating the entire collision engine, as I had failed to discover that my method of detecting overlapping rectangles was not accurate if they were rotated. Fortunately, I’m quite skilled with circle based collision, and it only took about 20 minutes to switch and integrate.

Another thing to note: I was high on Oxycodone and other painkillers the entire time, having gotten my wisdom teeth removed on Thursday. This caused many dumb mistakes, the majority being simple math related. I persevered through it though, and ended up coming out with what I think is a fun game!

Plans for the future: to continue to develop this game. I want to add more enemies, powerups, and new game modes.

Timelapse Part One is here.

Timelapse Part Two is here.

I’ll be writing a Post Mortem at some point… Thanks for the fun times all! Cheers!

Edit: 1814 lines of code, for those of you who care. 😀

Tags: Black Hole, BlackHole, CSharp, finished, LD21, xna

The compo is over, my game is finished and the rating starts. For anyone trying out my game (if you haven’t yet: HERE), I will explain some strategies to survive, just in case you have trouble with it. Additionally, as I tried to get some advice from my wife for setting up the level generator yesterday evening she wasn’t really enthusiastic, to say the least. So for anyone more interested in the tech behind I will explain, why the level generator currently doesn’t work that good for providing difficulty.

The game mechanic basically works with to values that decrease as long as you are digging tunnels (and even when passing existing ones). The first value is food/hunger. You can find three different kind of food which will give you 5 to 15 points back. Food, if there is any, is only revealed if you enter a cage. By that, it is often necessary to leave the direct path and search adjacent rooms if you are low on food. This strategy also has a second benefit related to the second value, hope.

Hope is generated by spotting new cages around you. So progressing the level is the key to prevent death by starvation.  The hope mechanics leads to another point. Often it is better to move to the center of the level because chances for revealing cages is better in free field than at the level borders. This seems contradictory to the aim of getting to the upmost row or the rightmost column which are the only places to escape the level later on. Remeber that you can see 2 spaces horizontally and vertically and one space diagonally (not if you are digging). So if you already are two rows below the top border and there is no cage above, you won’t find any if you dig that direction.

The cacti walls are revealed by digging, so sometimes a tunnel can give further information for planning your path. This only applies if you have enough food/hope left.

To summarize the strategies:

• try to reach upmost row or rightmost column of the cages but pass the center of the level
• don’t dig to places where there can be no cage (2 spaces between player and border)
• don’t hesitate to search rooms for food
• progress to keep your hope filled

Headed to the center and didn't took the direct path to replenish food and hope. Else I would have died short before exit (Difficulty: Hard).

With that you should be able to beat all difficulties after some tryouts. At this point the random generator sets in. The design I used is rather insecure in providing the difficulty level. Instead of spreading a fixed amount of cages for each difficulty, I implemented to check a percentage to set a cage for every field of the grid (e.g. 33:67 that there is a cage on a field in normal mode). Instead of filling one third of the level with cages, this leads to very unsteady number of cages. By that, an “insane” level could have more cages than an “easy” one. Same applies to walls. By that the difficulty selector is a rather vague adjuster. But nevertheless you will notice the difference if you give it some tries (one playthrough is quick; around 15 seconds). So go and play. Good luck.

TL;DR:

Just a game design related teaser for the post mortem coming soon.

Tags: game design, procedural generation, pygame, python, screenshot

Didn’t finish. I’m just too tired right now, and it’s nowhere near done. Thats what you get for slacking off I guess…

Things that went well:
* Forming idea’s

Things that didn’t go well:
* Always putting my idea’s in and wasting time instead of working on the core game
* Internet on computer
* Notch livestream

Overall a great experience. I feel ready for december. I’ll try not to get distracted as easily.

share: http://uploading.com/files/c6859f6b/WhaleEscape.zip/
movement = arrowkeys
rest = R
if Stamina = 0, you need 20 rests. (should have lowered, didn’t… méh)

Turn based gameplay, but with buttonbashing, feels reamtime-ish

TimeLapse day 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZ8XI1YOXMY

TimeLapse day 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjmUgS86rW8

Tags: fail, LD21, TimeToSleep

I showed my game to a friend on facebook and decided to make some changes and enter it into the Jam.  Enjoy, even though the FPS still sucks when there are lots of blocks

I was relieved to get everything in Escape the Fate working in due time. However, some problems arose after entering.

One tester quickly reported the game crashes for him on startup. I spent a while Googling about py2exe’s quirks and isolated the cause to the font. Had to include that in the download (it’s a free font, don’t worry) and force users to install it before playing.

Later on, people complained the game was confusing with its two different types of falling. Instead of throwing the player straight into the action, I added an intro level which limits the interaction to a minimal amount of tiles. It’s amazing how the mechanics of falling suddenly became self-explanatory. This was on the extended time, so with the slight addition, the game still qualified for the compo.

Just a moment ago, I was giving tips to a player who seemed a bit lost. I wondered why, he hadn’t even gotten to the tricky part yet. Apparently, the game was too big for his laptop screen, and parts of it were cut off so that the level was unplayable. Yesterday I realized this might happen, but I kind of forgot about it when I was busy fixing collisions. That goes under bugfixes, so it won’t get me disqualified from the compo either, especially when I posted it as an alternative download. I should know since I’ve answered several questions about an update’s validity on #ludumdare.

Speaking about IRC, my username is different between the site and the channel. I’m also known as Jiggawatt; I simply failed to predict I’d be using the IRC channel much, so I registered here with something else than my standard issue IRC nick.

For those who actually got the game working and even understood what’s going on, the feedback’s been positive. So go try it.

Yeah, we finally have a completed game for our first LD jam!

This has been a lot of fun – Now I am courious what you guys did with the theme!

Happy testing! 😀

Well, that was manic. I had family stuff to do this weekend, but I didn’t wanna miss LD, so I’ve cobbled together what turned out to be pretty much the tutorial level of what I originally had in mind…

So here’s what I learned:

Don’t try to Ludum Dare on a weekend when you have other commitments

Tags: animation, blender, fireflies, postmortem, unity

This was my first time i entered Ludum Dare.

I only had 12 in total to work on my project.  But somehow i got something working.  I decided to create a game where you have to escape the cops on the freeway.  I tried to make it not to complicated,  so i could finish it in the limited time i had.  I started by creating some of the base code and the graphics for the game.

The base code was nothing more than an applet with double buffering,  a thread with frame limiter to progress the logic,  a key-listner for user input and a loader class to easily load resources into the game. I lost almost a hour figuring out why my applet didn’t draw a thing.  It was a stupid mistake.  I called thread.run  (which doesn’t start a new thread)  instead of thread.start  (which does start a new thread).

The graphics took me most of the day.  I spend around 3 hours drawing the cars and the road,  and another half hour for the lights sprites.  Regionally i wanted to add different road tiles,  so the road wouldn’t be boringly repeating itself,  but there was not enough time.  After this the Saturday was finished for me. I didn’t even had a single car driving yet.

Sunday i started on the main code,  unsure if i had enough time left.  First i got the player car driving,  which was actually quite easy.  After that i worked on the other cars.  After an hour or 2 i got a “working” game.  But it was still quite boring,  because you could drive through everything.  So Time for collision detecting.

After the collision detection and writing code for the sprites.  I had to create the title and game over screen.  Which got finished just in time.  After this i had to go away for a while so i shut down my computer.

After starting my computer back up…  disaster strikes.  All my images where gone…  I think eclipse throw them away,  but i’m not sure about that.  I tried a recovery tool,  but no luck there. Luckily i had posted an screenshot on twitter from where i could recover a lot of the graphics.  It took me a pressures hour to restore the damage.

I still had to code the police cars but the clock was running out.  So i hadn’t much time to tweak the behavior.  Especially the detection if it can go left or right is a bit broken,  so it can happen that police cars overlap each other a bit,  or drive full speed into an other car.

I haven’t had any time to include sounds,  so the game is a bit silent.  On the other hand it saved me some time programming a mute button.

Lessons learned:

• Try to make more time free,  12 hours is really tight.
• BACKUP!!! It could save me an hour.
• Basic code,  so i can start on the game code directly.
• Graphics are hard and cost a lot of time

You can find the game (including the source) here.

I knew that if I wanted to sell the ‘story’ of my game NO ESCAPE, I was going to need a strong atmosphere. I’m guessing not many game devs consider After Effects an essential tool for their process, but because I do motion graphics work for a living, I knew that AE could give me solid results quickly. So, here’s a quick breakdown of the my layering/compositing process:

Layer 1: Background 1

Initially my background only had one layer, but the result looked fairly flat, so I decided to break the background elements into two layers, which allowed me to get a better parallax scrolling effect.

Layer 2: Background 2

The ‘main’ background. The buildings were modeled and rendered in Cinema 4D. I used the Environment tool to add a layer of fog, which is why elements that are farther away are more faded.

Layer 3: Foreground

Also created in Cinema 4D. I rendered everything out using an orthographic projection, which is why the foreground looks flat even through it was modeled in 3D.

Layer 4: Rain

The rain was added in After Effects with a very useful third party plug-in called Particular. I created one single rain drop and set up a particle system to do the rest. If there’s anything I’ve learned from rainymood.com, it’s that rain makes everything better!

Layer 5: Smoke

The smoke was rendered in Cinema 4D using its PyroCluster shader, which creates pretty convincing little smoke puffs fairly easily.

Layer 6: Water Overflow

This is a small detail, but one of my favorite things in the whole game. After I was more or less done with coding, I knew I wanted to add a few more details including this little water overflow coming off of the billboard. I set up another particular system in After Effects, this time using the built in CC Particle World and this was the result.

Layer 7: Lightning!

The last thing I added was a few lightning strikes, which I thought came out pretty cool. Created in After Effects using the built in Advanced Lightning effect. I timed the strikes so that they would come a few seconds before the thunder claps in the audio track, and positioned them to where the player would likely be at that point.

So there you go – a HUGE downside to doing things this way is that having this video background increased the size of the .swf dramatically. If I was a more competent programmer I would have tried to create these effects dynamically, but alas. Hope this was somewhat interesting, feel free to ask any questions about Cinema 4D or After Effects if you’re interested.

Here’s a link to my entry:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=preview&uid=5821

Beetle escape

This morning I looked on the ludum dare website and I saw, that i had only a few hours left to make a game. I wanted to enter this competition, so I decided to work hard and here it is!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=preview&uid=5946

Enjoy!

Tags: Beetle escape

Well… The title is based on the inspiration for the story (Well… Apparently. I haven’t watched it).

It really doesn’t need much explaining.

And I don’t have a timelapse or story or anything, I just worked on it, learned some new things, found that I do REALLY bad under pressure, but anyway, here it is: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=rate&uid=4220

Well here is my timelapse for this LD.  This time I got a good chunk of uninterrupted work in on Saturday (about 18 hours) .  All total I estimate that I spent around 27 hours on LD this weekend. Woot!

Tags: timelapse

I have finished my jam entry, and titled it 😀

I’m quite happy with this, my first ludum dare game, my first decent game, and my second game in total. I have achieved what I set out to do, which is not something that usually happens.

Click image to play!

This event was great fun, I’m glad I decided to give it a go. And now, it’s time for me to play some of the other entries

Time lapse up on You Tube with music!

Susan

This is my first time entering LD _properly_. I didn’t have much time due to real life getting in the way [/symapthyvote] but that’s what the Jam is for, I know.

I’m fairly happy with how much I’ve managed to do in such little time, but I’m not proud of the end result as a concept as a ‘game’ however.

I’m still not a professional Game Dev yet, but I’m definitely going to get there one way or another, and this competition was a great experience…and sleep depervation.

I’m fed up with staring at code at the moment, and I have no artistic abilities, so that’s why I’m stopping here. Personally, I think I’ve done enough even for a simple entry.

Oh, and I advise you don’t look at the code, I can’t promise the stability of your mental state.

I wasn’t gonna take part to begin with, but I’m glad I did. Like I mentioned, it was a nice experience, and it also actually got me off my butt to make a game.

Good luck to the other LDers!

P.S You can view my entry Here.

For my entry the level was stored in RAM as an array of characters, and each character held 8 blocks, which means that each block only took 1-bit (on or off). So theoretically a level 1000 x 1000 would take 125 kilobytes, a 10,000 x 10,000 level would take 12.5 megabytes in RAM.

Ofcourse, saved as a text file that’s easy to edit in notepad, the same file would take over 8 times as much space.

I’ve got two comments so far, both mentioning the complete lack of a difficulty curve (it just gets difficult too quickly).

I’ll agree with them. I’ve only beaten it once. Unfortunately, I ran out of time before completing any levels other than the first one, which wasn’t anything but a tutorial. As such, I copy/pasted a bunch of obstacles and placed them at semi-regular intervals throughout the level and called it a day. Too bad. The game supports loading multiple levels and I was planning on having a nice difficulty ramp across them. The first level was originally supposed to be the tutorial and like one more trap.

One commenter (Notch) said it feels like trial and error, which is actually partially what I was going for. I remember the game n+ where you just try each level over and over until you’ve mastered all the traps and the like, and I kind of wanted that feel. Part of what I was missing, I think, is the everything-on-the-screen you get from sideways 2D. The perspective the camera has and the amount of playing field you can see makes it very difficult to see far enough ahead of you to make any sort of difference. Basically the only option is to die and restart several times so that you know where everything is beforehand. And get a bit lucky.

Last minute I added in a bullet-time ability that really helps a lot, but having made it a limited timer (1 second of bullet time, takes 2 seconds to charge) means you don’t really get it enough. In retrospect, I think it would have been cool to subtract money from your character as you use it, thereby giving you as much as you want bit still adding in the pressure of not using it too much.

The biggest problem though I think is just the curve. Level 1 should be a piece of cake, and there should be around 10 very short levels. That way when you restart you’re not forced to redo the whole thing. That or checkpoints, maybe.

I still think the game is a great idea and I’d love to see it on iPhone some time in the future. Just needs a bit of tweaking.

Hehe. The luxury of 24 extra hours. What to do with them but gloat that you actually managed to finish everything and to have time to spare.

At any rate, we (Joszs, Ever121 and myself) have just finished our Jam entry. The game, called Left – for what better name than a non descript name? – is an action/agility flyer based around a small craft in a large facility. Loads of explosions and gunfire, as one might imagine.

Go have a look!

I have some minor things to fix, but I’d be just as happy to leave it in its current state.

We’re all pretty surprised at how fluent everything went. The amount of technical hickups was remarkable (one might say miraculously) low, we all shared a similar vision and we were all deeply impressed by eachothers work.

Loved the experience.

Tags: postmortem

Finished uploading my timelapse. 8 hours in 8 minutes (:

How the heck are the pygame users among us planning to port your game to all platforms?

I’ve been trying with py2exe and py2app and having absolutely no luck; I’ve been seeing crashes everywhere. Any tips?

Tags: oh god the pain, port, porting, pygame

As I failed to post a single blog entry whilst I was actually making my game I thought I’d instead lump it all into some horrendous mega-post after the event.  Only the brave should read on.

So my game, Escaping the Rat Race…, is all about how working for the man sucks and how we all would like to quit and make a shed load of cash doing something infinitely cooler, like developing our own indie games (if we haven’t done already!).  That’s the escape, the escape of being your own boss.  I have to say I made this game from the perspective of someone who’s never done it, I’m sure it’s not all wonderful and rosy, but the feeling of getting up in the morning and knowing you’re going to work on something you personally care about and have a massive stake in is frankly intoxicating.

In with that context in mind that you should play the game.  Some of the design and content decisions I made were extremely specific, including making some elements of the game frustrating and annoying because I thought it best represented my message.  Please don’t hate me for them, and, in hindsight, maybe you should turn down the sound in the rat race section…  There are a couple of annoying bugs with some of the variables and the rats tail is still hilariously disembodied but I probably wouldn’t change a great deal about the game apart from a little spit and polish here and there, including spending more time on the frankly very crude graphics.

This is the first game I have made in a long time, probably something ridiculous like over 10 years.  I used to make little games on Klik and Play in my mid-teens and then I didn’t even think about making any for ages.  It’s only recently I’ve decided I do really like games and want to have a hand in making them.  Alas I’m not a programmer, or an artist, or anything particularly useful for making games (I’m a mechanical engineer in another life) so it’s always been that nagging hobby I’ve never indulged again until now.  Therefore I ‘cheated’ and used Scirra Construct Classic which was only mildly frustrated in places.  Ludum Dare has been such an awe inspiring and encouraging event for me and I cannot fathom the quality of some entries.

I realise I’m probably rambling by now so I’ll finish off – it didn’t turn out to be that epic a post after all.  Please let me know what you think of my little entry, I’d be intrigued.

48 hours of development compressed into 2.5 minutes! (edited out the boring sleep segments too)

Mountain Break
 

Tags: timelapse

Well, I have to say that compared to my last Ludum Dare, this experience was COMPLETELY different. The first difference that comes to mind is how I didn’t waste all of my time trying to create a physics/movement engine. That thing sucked up, probably, about 80% of my time and I certainly wouldn’t call it “complete” even now. Also, it was more laid back since I only got around 14 hours to work on the game, as opposed to the 24 – 30 that I had last time.

What Went Well:

• I, once again, was focused the entire time. I was so focussed, in fact, that I forgot to finish off a delicious beverage (although don’t worry – I drank it now).
• My game concept was simple enough to leave me a whole day to work on assets & the front end.
• Audio. It existed this time. I think it sounds pretty nice for, like, 30 seconds on a loop.
• I had lots of screenshots & some demos to share before the compo ended (although I don’t think I packaged the demos correctly, and the LD site was down)

What Didn’t Go So Well:

• Uploading. I wasn’t good at it. I gotta remember to include sndfile.framework & to add other frameworks to the “Copy Frameworks” step in Xcode. I actually lost $5 here because I bet my brother that I uploaded something correctly and it didn’t work.
• I didn’t test all the “pipelines” involved in my game; 1 hour before the contest ended, I realized that I didn’t know how to get audio into my game. I figured it out though.
• All my ideas at the start were basically the same; I was only considering ideas where you (singular) were trying to escape from something, which isn’t really thinking outside of the box. I was actually really displeased with all of my ideas, and wasn’t having much fun developing them until I thought of the evacuation idea.

Overall, I am once again pleased with the product that I produced, and think that it is a pretty big step above my last entry, and am looking forwards to December. I might keep working on my entry (after the ratings though; programmers = good playtesters) since I can think of a few ways to spice it up.

(If you are some sort of STRANGE ALIEN and have yet to play my game, it’s over here)

Tags: postmortem

Here you are. Just over a minute of goodness. I spent about 14 hours working on it.

The music is from Conker’s Bad Fur Day.

Just doing the guns’ animations, while listening to ‘Wild West Hero’ by ELO, classic.

Tags: ELO, gun, hero, west, wild

My game is Bob’s Escape. It took ~30 hours to create everything. I hope you like it. Support me by going to the COMPETITION PAGE and voting! =3

Finally, after several hours of troubleshooting some audio issues on Windows I finally managed to squeeze a build that works. So yeah, we were done at around 44 hour mark, but I ended up using 14 hours for fixing issues that rised during porting and making the release packages.

Go check it out!

Now it’s back to the daily grind for me, hopefully I find time to do a linux port, write a post mortem and compile my time-lapse. Thanks to Hasis for joining the ride, it was a nice experience and showed me that yes, I can squeeze a cross-platform game engine and a game out of me in less than a week. 😀

– eimink

Hi all !

Uchuu Sentaï Pastagaga’s first game is submitted. Named Pastagus Fantasy, we hope you will enjoy it !

Please give it a try

See you soon for a post mortem, at least one update of the game, and for another jam !

May the Sentaï Force always be with you!!

So enough time has passed since finishing that I can look back objectively over Stratus, found here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=preview&uid=5541

The game I initially envisaged is *roughly* what got made, but I had all sorts of ambitious ideas about minigames and complex interactions with the objects on board.. frankly the initial design was laughably ambitious, but hey I’ve never tried to make a game this quick :). But I kept the scope as far as the airship design is concerned, and poured a lot of effort into the design and execution of the ship. For me, the key thing for this game was the experience and atmosphere, and anything else came second- so I pressed ahead with the art and particle effects, and ditched some of the ambitious interaction mechanics.

what went right:

– the atmosphere I was trying to create, I think for the most part came together.. I really wanted you to feel the wind in your hair, high above the ground in a flying machine.

– the shooting sequence, while brief, I find enjoyable. I can play it a few times and be happy, so maybe I could have made it longer.. I really love making low-fi particle effects so the explosions were fun to make

what went wrong:

– probably having slightly too wide a scope for the concept left me really stuck for time to code the actual game and mechanics. I had to cut a bunch of ideas to finish the game which is always a shame

– sound, about the only sound effect I’m reasonably happy with is the wind, which was done by modulating the frequency of some pink noise. I really really wanted to devote some proper time to creating nice sound effects because they add so much to the atmosphere of the game, but unfortunately apart from the wind it’s all sfxr (I still love sfxr.. but all games sound the same when they use it. and you can have really blocky graphics but if the sound gets a little extra love, it can really add to the experience)

-testing: I didn’t get anyone to test my game, because I left it so late to get the mechanics in place. So, if there are some major bugs lurking then that’s why!

overall, I hugely enjoyed the weekend, even the massive stress on sunday This was my first compo, and I would definitely come back again. It’s a great community here!

cheers,

-RichMakeGame

Whew! Participating in the Jam was a lot of fun but really tiring. We managed to finish our game Claustrophobia with just a few hours to spare.  Check it out here!:  http://sandbox.yoyogames.com/games/184445-claustrophobia

Tags: finished, jam, shard123

Well.. It did went as I was hoping. However I’ve submitted it.

On the bright side my idea for the game engine worked quite well. However I did spend a lot of time on the mechanics (or rather lost it, for example for stuff to move properly around took me like 6 hours) and actually almost finished it. And of course barely any graphics and no sound at all. Levels are also only two. Maybe I’ll try to finish the game just to see if it will turn something interesting.

After the submission found a major controls problem, do not use trackpads for development !

Here is a link to my entry:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?uid=5130

This was my 2nd Ludum Dare (you can play my LD #20 game here) I was a bit un-prepared this time, since I only found out that I would have the weekend free about 45 minutes before Ludum Dare started. Talk about timing!

Once again I chose to use the Flixel engine. It’s a powerful and simple little engine, and developing in Flash means just about everyone will be capable of playing my game with no trouble. For my IDE, I used Flash Develop running in Windows 7, running in a Parallels VM on my Mac. I don’t recall exactly why, but that’s what I did last time so I stuck with it. Once again, sounds were recorded on my iPhone and edited in Audacity (cfxr doesn’t work on OS X Lion. I might need to fork it and fix that…) Also, I recorded a time-lapse of the whole thing using ScreenNinja, a Mac app I developed for exactly this purpose. One minor hiccup: I didn’t have Photoshop installed on the machine I was using, so I grabbed Pixelmator from the App Store. It’s a nice little photoshop replacement app suitable for most tasks, but unfortunately making pixel sprites isn’t one of those things, and I think that may have cost me some time.

The main frustration I had with my previous Ludum Dare game was that it was very short, so this time I knew I wanted to have some sort of endless map (plus, I think it fits with the theme) – so that’s where I started. Progressive level generation is tricky to get right, and looping though a single map just isn’t the same thing. What I ended up doing was designing a number of levels (at first 3, in the final entry I believe there are 11), each only slightly larger than a single screen, and as you approach the edge of one level, the game randomly picks another level and inserts it on the screen. Because the ‘levels’ are tile maps, and each is loaded from a .png file, I was able to design levels in Pixelmator and easily see how each level would look next to all the others, and make sure the edges lined up right.

Once I got that working I quickly threw together some basic player and enemy logic (it’s fun seeing the henchmen jump off cliffs, lemmings style), then it was just a matter of throwing things together and seeing what was fun. In action movies, the gun is a versatile tool. Along with killing the bad guy, guns can also be used to open doors, disable equipment, activate buttons or traps at a distance, or anything else an escaping hero might need to do. So I thought a game based around a sort of chase sequence might be fun. One of the things I programmed and didn’t end up using was for the wall mounted turrets to fire missiles that would destroy the ground under you. It looked really cool, but unfortunately the player could get stuck in the craters, so I had to take it out (although it’s still in the source code if you’d like to see how I did it)

Bugs. Hopefully there are no major bugs in my game, but there’s always a few weird ones. Occasionally the henchmen just won’t jump off the edge of a cliff, and I can’t figure out why. I’m pretty sure 30 lines of AI code isn’t enough to gain sentience, right? Also, sometimes the door spawner will spawn a henchman 32 pixels lower than it’s suposed to (and he ends up stuck in the ground below) But, since neither of these were game breaking bugs, I said screw it and worked on new features instead.

And finally, I tried to add a little humor and competition to the game in the final few hours with the game over screen. Much like in Super Shotgun Deathrace, the final text is assembled from many different pieces so it’s different each time. After showing a near final prototype to a few friends online as well as the IRC, it was suggested that I should have some stats besides distance displayed at the end of the game. So, I added the damage values and a henchmen killed counter. Took all of about 10 minutes to do, and I think it significantly improves the game, so thanks everyone who suggested that.

Oh. One more thing. Play (also, please vote and comment on) my game here, then you can click here and watch the timelapse

This has been a good experience, which I will sure repeat again in the future.

At the end, I have only spend about 12 hours into developing the game, as I was sick and was sleeping almost all the time.

I hope you like the concept behind the game and I look forward to the next Ludum Dare!

Hey All!  I wanted to do a quick postmortem on the game we submitted to the Jam, Reveal.

What went right

A solid  artistic vision.  Most of the artistic vision for this game came from @pixelbutterfly,  who also did the art.  At the core of the game, it’s about uncertainty in a world where the media tells you who to be and how to look.  But as you scratch deeper below that, and peel away the superficial layers, the world only gets uglier.  Finally, as my own little nihilistic touch, you realize that the escape you sought from your uncertainty wasn’t exactly as you had planned it.

A simple mechanic.   We wanted a game about systematic destruction.  What could be funner than that?  Unity3d has a great support for physics at its core, so it lent itself quite naturally to such a game.  Almost everything in the game (except the wallpaper) is powered by pretty standard rigidbody physics, so it was very easy to implement and get running quickly.

What Went Wrong

Startup time issues.  We had some initial creative differences and as a result, ended up not getting started until Saturday night.  As a result, we ended up cutting out several of the more meaningful layers for some of the less intensive ones.  Oddly enough, this didn’t really get in the way of development too much…after cutting the more time-consuming room layers, we finished the game way ahead of time (even submitting before the contest deadline).  That gave us more time for audio and testing.  Sure, it’s not perfect, but for 24 hours of dev it’s pretty good

Learning.  I’ve done a lot of game jams in the past, and every time I go into them with the mentality that I want to learn something new and significant.  This is either something specific like, “I want to learn how to write 2D physics and do pixel-perfect collision from scratch,” or something more general like, “I want to think about Level Design in a new way.”  Unfortunately, I can’t say that I learned that much from this game development, and the same goes for @pixelbutterfly.  Because of the vision and scope for the project, she didn’t have any game assets to create from scratch, and her dev computer was out of commission for the weekend.

Summary

Ludum Dare is great!  I’ve followed the Ludum Dare scene for the past year or so, but this is my first time participating, and I’m astounded by the level of creativity and enthusiasm that has come to the table from all over the world.  At Uni, our game development club would host game jams a few times a semester, but they were generally ill-attended affairs with 2 or 3 teams coming out with something to show, and solo development being a rare bird.  As I look through the 500+ game catalog of LD #21 and wonder how I’m going to be able to rate them all in the next 21 days, I know that this is something I want to be a part of for years to come

I had to sacrifice any community effort to get this in…  It’s 3AM and I’ve just finished!

A ZX Spectrum RPG

Here is the link: the link

My entry: http://code.kevinworkman.com/EscapeFromMonsterCity/index.html
Timelapse: http://code.kevinworkman.com/EscapeFromMonsterCity/timelapse.html

I only worked for about 12 hours, so instead of making a video, I took screenshots as the program changed. You can check them out if you feel like it!

This was my first Ludum Dare, and I’m pretty pleased with how everything turned out, especially considering that I had never used Processing prior to the contest- learning it was half the fun!

I stuck with the bare minimum considering the time constraints, but I’m surprised to see how many other entries were pretty similar. I guess that’s the nature of working around a theme, but I think next time I’ll work at coming up with something a little more different.

There is one bug left in the final version that causes the program to freeze occasionally- this is due to logic I attempted to write to prevent monsters from spawning inside buildings, which doesn’t work anyway. Lesson learned, next time I’ll stick with something that definitely works instead of trying to implement algorithms I know might break things.

Also, I didn’t have time to implement a goal, or score, or an ending, which I think hurts replayability. I did manage to throw in a title and game over screen, which goes a long way to making the game feel more legitimate.

However, I think I came pretty close to my original goal of capturing a creepy mood, so I’m happy with the outcome. I wanted to create a spooky feeling as the player rounds a building and almost runs into a monster, and I think I came pretty close to that. Yay!

I’m also satisfied that I met the theme, which is extra awesome because I wasn’t really thrilled when it was revealed (I was hoping for evolution or adaptation). The main focus of the game is to escape the city, with the added terrifying mini-games of escaping monsters that wake up. Yay again!

All in all, I had a bunch of fun, and I love the Ludum Dare community. Awesome job to everybody who managed to put together something in 48 (or 72) hours! You guys are all rock stars.

Thought since others are doing these after-submission look-backs I would too!

What went wrong:
>The physics from the start were a shambles, collision detecting is a very awful thing to deal with when you don’t have some solid code for it, and mine wasnt! All through the game I continuously made changes to the physics.
>I didn’t brainstorm… Being my first game to complete, I had the idea for a game where you smash into atoms, then just dove into doing the physics, graphics etc, and didn’t brainstorm any features, so I ended up making them as I went along.
>Coded in GameMaker, not the best idea if you want a retail quality game, or a game thats cross-platform… So I started learning Flash(FlashPunk) straight after my entry…

The main point i’m disappointed is not following the storyline, I basically said at the beginning “Go smash into atoms” then didn’t elaborate too much.

You can play it here:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=preview&uid=5696
Some screenies:

Wow it’s done kind of BEF

Not sure if it’s a fun game but mechanically it ‘works’.

Quick Postmortem:

The concept was viewing the Evacuation of Dunkirk as an Escape, the problem how to implement that in 48/72 hours as a game!

Initially I just though it was the wrong way to go but the idea stuck and after thinking I could make the whole game in a Narrow almost 2D path then maybe it could  work ( I probably should not have stayed up until 3am to catch the start of the compo).

Also I thought that if I restricted the actions on the Units (yep it was turning into an RTS) then maybe it could work!

What went right:

Modelled the units, used a simple style for the troops but differentiated their helmets ( Well I liked it ;o).

The combat system, I thought how to get the units to fight, and realised that a simple D20 style combat would help prevent predictable/repeating outcomes but outcomes with trends.  I think I had it up and running in a few hours, initially the German army just stormed the French lines and that was my way of testing it out!

The idea of a slider driven scrolling map area works well.

Keeping the control simple was a great help, only allowing units to move left or right/ fast or slow, stop and dig in.

What went wrong:

The UI was complex well you have 3 cameras one for the Main View, another for the Map and a third overlaying the controls.  This combination was arrived at after a great deal of hair pulling and dead ends were tried to resolve UI issues and get it all to work.

I didn’t get the Spitfires and Stuka’s in the game, yes the plan was to have the full blitzkrieg style of battling to occur, after all the game was 2.1D.

The Ship, well if you want to take soldiers from England to France you need a ship, how to load it and get the troops on probably one of the most complex and convoluted aspects of the game.  The ship has ended up being a 2 door system with a locking when docked mechanism (it’s frustrating to lose troops to the deep when in the dock)!

LOL the best bit was when I was struggling to get the Units to stay on the ship while crossing the channel, I did have to use physics didn’t I, anyway after much tweaking I managed to get it to work only for the Tommies to shoot across the channel and then fly out into France, over a hill and into the German army Angry Birds Style! ;o)

The game is not really balanced, it just about plays but it needs quite some time spent on it adjusting the combat parameters and unit speeds, tweaking and fixing a few bugs!

No Textures, Music, Explosions, Stukas, Spitfires, Little Boats, Re-Supply Trucks, Ambulances, Prisoners of War, Injured, Blood Splats, Artillery, Historical List of Casualties/POW’s/Medals!  ( I need to learn how to work faster!)

Conclusion:

I am very pleased with this game, not sure how fun it is, I’ve had fun making it and I’m very pleased with what I have managed to get working!

Hope you enjoy it, any and all suggestions welcome!

TIP#1: Get troops to Dig-In downward triangle makes them tougher.

TIP#2: The last troop in a row of three can push the two ahead of it.

Tags: postmortem, screenshot, unity

Howdy I finally finishing building the windows release of Zeta Prime you can try it out here
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=preview&uid=2879

Enjoy!

Well, I finished my first jam game (Escape Velocity). I’m pretty damn happy with it too! My goal was not to make things “simple stupid,” but stupid simple. It worked like a charm :). It’s funny because the gameplay is by-far the most fun of anything I’ve made – all from trying not to work too hard. Weird, huh?

Anywho, there’s only two levels and no score but I’m already addicted to my little game. Then again, I’m very, very biased ;). I would’ve liked to take more time on the music, and at least have an indicator for your ship’s delivery destination.

I wanted to have a small map popup before each level so you wouldn’t die right away but c’est la vie. I also realize, just now, that extra lives would be a good idea :/. Funny how that slipped my mind *shrugs*.

Also, I haven’t actually beat it yet but I’m pretty sure it’s doable (I haven’t had much time). I do know that the first level is doable, even with less fuel than I give you.

Why are you reading this? PLAY MY GAME!

Hi everyone!

First of all, I’d like to say that I’m really happy with finishing my game. Unfortunately, due to the site’s issues, I couldn’t log my progress. I guess this isn’t just a postmortem but rather also an “I’m in” post.

So far, this is the third game I made for LD. I made a game for some miniLD or another (I don’t remember which), and another for LD20. However, I wouldn’t count either game as a “full” game (for some definition of full corresponding to the 48 hour time limit). The miniLD entry was a game where you shot enemies that came at you (sort of like asteroids but with people) but had no video feed; instead you had the audio of creepy footsteps, gunfire, and screams. While it didn’t turn out bad, it wasn’t quite complete because it had no graphics. As for the LD20 entry, I made an (almost) exact clone of part of the original Legend of Zelda game. So finished or not, it wasn’t really my game. That’s why I’m extra-proud of finishing this time.

Before I analyze what happened, go play my game
Here is the entry page:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=preview&uid=3743
and if you won’t vote anyway, here is the game:
http://mr.galacticgaming.net/Real%20Live%20Avatars%20Inc/Game.html

What went wrong:

1. Sound – I wasn’t planning to make sounds and I didn’t, so no loss here.
2. Community – I didn’t even say that I was in
3. Physics Bugs – There are two bugs with the physics in my game. Because the rest of the physics went well, I’ll address these bugs in the What went right section.
4. Presentation of the story – First off, I’m about to talk about the plot of the game, so if you haven’t played it and will, skip this part for now because there are SPOILERS here. The story turned out to be almost exactly the same as I envisioned it when I came up with the idea.Real Live Avatars Inc is a company who pray on weak civilizations. They abduct people and take control of their bodies via implants. The controlled people are then sold to members of more developed civilizations as avatars for a game. I had hoped to create a cutscene for the start of the game. It would feature people talking about what they would do if the rumors of the company coming to your home planet to abduct people turned out to be true. All the things I explained could thus be introduced. Then the screen would shake and the game would begin with you running away from the company. A side effect of this is that in the process of running, you could see all the other people from the conversation caught and abducted.When you won the game, a person would walk in from the right (throughout the game you run to the right and away from the right-advancing enemy) and proclaim that your implants are working perfectly; just look how well you did in all the tests. If delivered well, this could have resulted in a realization of the futility of the situation; Even as you were “escaping,” you were actually only being tested. The player, who was supposed to sympathize with the abducted peoples, would be horrified to find that they were actually controlling one of these people in the exact way that Real Live Avatars Inc would.Whenever you lost, you would be presented with that same person saying something about testing implants which would make sense in the context of escape, but would take on a whole new light in the context given by the “winning” cutscene.Of course, I didn’t get to ANY cutscenes. Instead, I have Bob, an employee of the company:
   
   While Bob got across all the facts I provided above, I doubt he got any of the emotion across.
5. Level generation – The procedural generation of the obstacles in a level made winning or losing a level sometimes a simple matter of luck. Also, I wanted to include caves into the floor (I wanted the ability to have more than 1 floor at a certain x coordinate and potentially have ceilings). As it stands, the framework only supports a single floor height and no ceilings per x. Inherent in the idea of ceilings is the idea of low ceilings; the player was supposed to be able to roll or crawl, depending on their speed, under such obstacles by pressing down.

What went right:

1. Graphics – I think the graphics were a great success. At this point, those of you who have played the game are probably raising an eyebrow and wondering whether this was supposed to be item 6 in the above list and only ended up here accidentally. For those who haven’t, here’s a screenshot:
   
   Frankly, the graphics suck. Despite being a person, the player has no head and no appendages, and only a rectangle for a body. Similarly, Real Live Avatars Inc, who by virtue of traveling the galaxy we know must be very technologically developed, are represented by a simple beam into the sky. The reason the graphics are so bad is two-fold. First of all, I’m not an artist; my best is only ever programmer art. And second, I took Baby McFunkypants’s advice. I didn’t waste time fleshing out the graphics, but rather tried getting something playable ASAP. Had I spent time on impressive machines on the part of the company, or appendages on the part of the player, I might not have finished.
2. Physics – I made it from scratch without any tutorials, libraries, or previous experience with in game physics. Each case in the algorithm for deciding the player’s motion is based on real physics, but by virtue of it being composed of various cases, the result is “weird” (the first person to play the game said that they liked the weird physics, so I don’t mind the label). Since I made the thing from scratch, there are several idiosyncrasies which probably contribute to the weirdness. For example, while jumping, none of the keys do anything.Another example is how jumping works. When you press up, a vector in the direction of the normal to the surface where you are standing is added to the current velocity vector. Thus jumping on an upward slope pushes you back towards getting caught. In order to find the normal, I needed to find the slope of the tangent to the surface where you are standing. I approximated by using the secant between the point on the ground one to the right of you and the point on the ground one to the left  of you. Unfortunately, this results in the first bug: If you stand right before the ground drops off, then when you jump, the point one in the direction of the drop is much lower, resulting in the jump propelling you almost horizontally. I have no clue what caused the second bug: sometimes, you get stuck on the edge of a drop. You would expect to fly off, but instead, you suddenly stop.
3. Code – Quite accidentally, my code ended up very organized. Usually, it sort of builds up in a couple of classes. This time it didn’t. I could probably tell you exactly where in the code any specific functionality came from, and what any piece of cod does. I could probably draw a diagram of the way the game was structured without looking at the code.
4. Hosting – I placed my last LD entry on my dad’s website. It kept crashing and people couldn’t get to the game. This time, I got lucky. the31 graciously offered to lend me a sub-domain of his website to hold my game. I took him up on that offer, and my game can now be reliably be accessed. Thank you the31!

Tags: flash

I found out today that the last level was impossible in the game I submitted last night. This was due to some last minute changes that I thought were too small to merit testing.

Oh well! It is at least good to know that players made it that far in!

I fixed that level; CLICK HERE FOR THE UPDATED VERSION.
Or CLICK HERE FOR THE SUBMISSION PAGE – the update is linked on there as well.

The leaderboards are growing, and I am both sad and happy to say I’ve been dethroned on all levels – except of course that last level on which hamburger holds the first and only score.

Tags: bugfix, impossible, post-compo, update, vault

I put it off long enough! Here’s my timelapse video of me creating Glissaria:

Timelapse

I have to say, reliving an entire weekend of your life in 6 minutes is kind of fun.

You can rate and play Glissaria here:

Glissaria

Hi,

This is my first time in Ludum Dare, I don’t know if you already saw it but anyway I would like to get comments from you if it’s possible :).

This is my entry for the competition: http://is.gd/qrkSjE .

Maybe it’s a bit annoying that you have to download the game instead of playing online but I worked in XNA, next time I’ll try to do it easier and use Flash.

Here is a screenshot of the game, as you can see it’s very simple, a platform runner. You are the rounded piece of candy and the goal is to escape from the walrus. I hope you enjoy it.

Caramelo screenshot

The comments section on my submission page (for Goat Milk) is broken! HALP!

That’s right, I finally uploaded the game, with 2 minutes to spare! And after trying about 5 time times, I managed to complete it (I guess a one-level game’s gotta be hard, huh?) with a score of 2605, try beat it 😉

-Will be adding a scoreboard within the next few days

Tags: jam, score, sheep, upload

It was supposed to be Flash, goddamit. But the Greek… he owns a Mac with Gamemaker. And he cannot code a single line.

The Greek listened to Enrique Iglesias Escape Album the whole weekend. He should go see a shrink or something.

Right now, the Greek is sleeping. He told me to promote his game. Right. He deserves to have nightmares. He made his game for OS/X! But we love the Greek and maybe we will port his game to Flash, make some original artwork and polish the gameplay.

Enrique Iglesias on a game? Only the Greek can come up with something like this. He wrote some description before passing out:

In 2001 people in the United States were terrified. Something terrible had happened. Something that frightened even the bravest ones. Enrique Iglesias released a new album in English: Escape.

There was more. Enrique decided to make surprise appearences around the States. In shopping malls. It was said that listening to his new songs would blow your mind. Literally.

In the game you are a shopping mall security guard. You should protect visitors from him. You should find Enrique Iglesias among the visitors and click on him. Then, people could escape from Enrique.

But fail and people would listen to him.

More info: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=rate&uid=5634

Download (OS/X): http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2051675/EnriqueEscape.zip

EXTRAS

Who is Enrique Iglesias?: http://bit.ly/WhoIsEnrique

Listen to Escape album: http://tny.gs/EnriqueEscape

Tags: LD #21

phew, this was tough!! I’m way too tired to write a post mortem right now, I wanted to enter the main compo, I couldn’t make it, but I submitted it to the Jam.

3 days of non-stop work. I need a rest. I put a lot of heart into this game, I hope somebody can play it and appreciate it

cheers!

EDIT: Timelapse video is up :3

YRGBO Timelapse

With all the server problems, I wound up using twitter (for pretty much the first time) instead of posting journal entries here. I did take timelapse screenshots. I just need to figure out how to turn them into a movie.

Anyway, let’s see:

What went right:

• Flixel  turned out to be a great choice. The debug layer (available by pressing the backquote key) was slick, and every time I went looking for how to do something, it turned out flixel had a simple way to do it built in.
• DAME completely rocks. It’s a lot more than just a tile editor. I was able to set up initial states for each sprite (dead vs live aliens, powered vs unpowered machines) and even set up relationships (this lock powers these portals, and this portal leads to that one).
• Pomodoro technique (when I remembered to use it) helped me be a lot more self-aware. The break time would come up, and I’d realize I’d drifted into a low priority activity like polishing graphics instead of sticking with the core work to be done.
• Having a walkthrough. Maybe that’s the wrong word, but once I mapped out the basic solution to the game, it was easy to see what items and features needed to be in each room so that by the time the player makes it around to the other side of the ship, he knows everything he needs to know to solve the puzzle (ie, how do you actually reach the door that you can see from the first room?). I actually mapped this down to narration that was supposed to appear in each room, for a “learn as you go” experience. Even without the text on screen, I think there’s a pretty clear logical progression to the encounters.
• Font-based graphics. Except for the ghost and the background tiles, pretty much all the graphics came from standard fonts. (Webdings for the spiders and aliens, Consolas for the player and most of the other things) Even the hero’s ship outside is made from various symbols.
• The “grab/drag” mechanic. I really like how this turned out. I’ve been playing a lot of Arimaa lately, and I had a hunch the push/pull mechanic would work well in a video game. Once that was working, lots of other neat effects just sort of happened: things like slinging spiders around, carrying items through portals, and letting the ghost drag objects through walls.

What went wrong:

• Learning curve: most of the time I lost had to do with not knowing enough about flixel. Most of what I wanted was easy to find, but one or two small gaps lead to massive disasters. In particular, my dragging and portal code both tried to move sprites around by setting their x and y values. This appears to work, but causes all sorts of trouble with collision detection. All I needed to do was also set last.x and last.y but that small oversight had me pulling my hair out for hours, because I thought the problem was with my game objects. I think the fix here basically just boils down to experience.
• Polishing Early. I spent WAY too much time on the graphics for this game. It was originally going to be straight ANSI art (Kingdom of Kroz style) but I got carried away, and pretty soon I had gradients and two layers of shadows and way more detail than I needed. I should have limited myself to solid colored rectangles until I had the basic gameplay working.
• Not having a walkthrough up front. In Arimaa, you capture pieces by dragging them into traps, and I was going to use that idea, too. I also planned to use expand on the push/pull concept with machines that moved whole rows or columns of boxes. So I drew graphics and wrote at least some code for all that, when it turned out I didn’t really need those things (mostly because I hit on the idea of using the spiders as a weapon instead of as an enemy). There’s also a fully working implementation of on/off switches that I wound up not using. So lots of waste in this area. The walkthrough really clarified things for me, but I didn’t do it until the second day. Next time, it’ll be first thing on my list.
• Too many contraptions. I really thought I was aiming small, but… portals, dragging, machines with various states, keys and locks, combat and health, and an NPC that passes through some walls but not others… That’s quite a large scope for such a short game. I’m actually pretty proud of all the neat gizmos in the game, but in terms of a 48-hour contest, the cost was too high.  Toward the end, it was too late to design a new puzzle, so I was locked in to finishing the implementation for all the machines instead of adding the narration, which would have wrapped everything up into a nice coherent story. Here again, the walkthrough would have helped, and perhaps even an iterative walkthrough: start with nothing but the hero and an exit, make sure it works, then design and implement one obstacle at a time. At least that way the game would always be playable start-to-finish and I’d have more flexibility in choosing what to add next. Basically, I should have adopted a more agile development process.

Hi,

There is nothing like LD to clear up misconceptions and bring you up to speed:)
Since the a few LDs ago, seeing some brilliant games made in Flixel I’ve always wondered what are the advantages of using a Library like that?
(Please be patient, I was quite a noob at game making for the web, let alone a 48h competition)
After all, it seems that all the tools that are available in AS3 API, are sufficient to create great games quickly.
After this LD I finally understand, even though I do not use that library because I enjoy learning to make stuff myself, I now know why it is so great and helps a ton.

Here are some reason you would want to use Flixel instead of writing more code yourself:

1. You can talk to people about something in Flixel, there is a community.
   Having conversations is beneficial to learning for beginners and advance users.
2. You get every tool neatly organized and handily available during the competition when you really need.
   Doing well in the competition may require preparations and knowing Flixel well covers that.
   If you write the code, you still may need to organize it properly.
   You may have a ton of code but is it handily available?
3. The tools are tested for bugs and they do what is expected.
   If you write it yourself, you still need to test for bugs and even if you do, one person testing in 48 hours or a few weeks does not match with ? thousands that are constantly testing it during the whole year.
   Having bug tested code saves you unwanted surprises.
4. You get really high performance, this is something I did not know. These tools are tweaked for high peformance.
   I made a huge maze for the competition and I know Flixel handles tile based maps, however I did not know it does it really fast and takes advantage of the best ways this can be accomplished in AS3.
   I actually learned and used Bliting in AS3 for the first time this LD which was really exciting to me.
   Flixel would have done that for me and I wouldn’t even need to know it is doing it. The same principle is true about other tools. Flixel offers an answer to the need for speed. This is very important for games where low frame rate ruins the experience.
5. Bottom line: If you understand how Flixel works, you can focus much more on the game instead of writing the “low lvl” functionality.
   Sure writing an engine is a wonderful learning experience but when you compete to make games, you can use this precious time to work on other aspects of the game itself.

So basically I’m not planning to use it but by I highly recommend it for most AS3 based game projects.:)
Now I finally know why. If you have any comments on the advantages of using Flixel please share.

Here is a gameplay video (*spoilers*):

If you want to try it out yourself, there is a fancy new windows build courtesy of Wallacoloo that you can try out:

LINK

Please give it a try, and don’t forget to leave a comment if you have a moment!

I kind of like how this game concept turned out, so perhaps I will try developing it post competition into something more substantial.  For now though, it is time to sleep!

This was my first Ludum Dare competition (but not my first 48 hour competition) and I’m very happy with how my game turned out. When the theme was announced, I was disappointed — I didn’t think I could come up with anything good, but eventually settled on a sliding block puzzle with patrolling enemies.

By the end of Friday, I had all the sprite-work done, a player that could move around the screen and some basic level collision stuff. Saturday was much more productive, and by mid-afternoon I had most of the game mechanics finished.  Saturday evening was divided between making music/sound effects, making title and instruction screens and trying to come up with more levels.

On Sunday I made the animation smoother (originally characters moved an entire square with each step; a quick hack changed this to a fluid motion over several frames), added some slightly better music and introduced pressure switches.

I also redesigned all of the levels except for Level 3, making them more compact and placing more emphasis on the puzzles. In hindsight, leaving Level 3 alone was a bad idea, and it seems like the game for most people ended up looking like this:

…which is a shame, because Levels 4 and 5 are my favourites.

Lessons:

• I need more practice with LMMS/Musagi/Sfxr.  The music and sound effects definitely need work.
• Programmer art can sometimes be charming. 😀
• Running all the way across the screen to reach a puzzle is not fun, and neither is a puzzle so dependent on perfect timing that it frustrates people.

Beak Free Birdie

Entry: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=rate&uid=5470
Timelapse: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQfTh-Z26wU

This is my first entry to Ludum Dare, and one of my first Unity games, as I’ve only recently started using it. Development went fairly well and I was on time for most of my goals, I only had about 8 hours sleep during the 48 period though, but not all of it was spent at the PC.

What went right:

– The competition began at 11AM local time(JST), meaning I basically woke up normally and was right into dev
– My game idea was really simple to pull off, in fact, the core gameplay was done in about 30 mins, the rest was spent polishing everything
– The artwork turned out better than I expected

What went wrong: 

– It took me over 5 hours to come up with a game idea based on the theme
– My library had some bugs in that I spent some valuable time fixing
– My library lacked some features like the ability to swap out textures for UI elements, this meant I couldn’t implement a mute button in time without using major hacks
– I didn’t have any plan about how to make music, so I didn’t
– I didn’t have  any generic code to handle 2D animations, so I had to settle for very basic texture swapping which took a while to write and didn’t allow me to implement anything complex
– Apparently the sound effects caused people to want to vomit, even though I thought I set the volume quite low :'(
– I had no code ready to make creation of collision meshes easier

Summary: 

It was a great first attempt, next time I’ll be far more prepared and way more code ready to save me time during development. The IRC is cool, it’s full of helpful people and the structure of the competition is very nice. Next time there’ll probably be even more entries, so that should be fun!

I finished my game over a day ago. I expected the event to be over then too. But it certainly is not! There are still 200 people hanging out in irc! I very much like the social aspect of this event, so I’m trying to participate in that a bit more. I’ve uploaded a timelapse of me developing my game, “Who let the robots out?”

I also helped some kind fellow port his game to Windows, which is something I’ve never done before. It’s always been the other way around for me, porting Windows applications to Linux. Can you believe that Mingw doesn’t implement all of the standard library? Some functions, in particular drand48, are completely missing! Perhaps this was just an oversight?

Getting back into the swing of things has been pretty difficult. I had a hard time sleeping during the competition, and briefly broke my polyphasic sleep schedule since I was too excited to nap. And it doesn’t help that tennis just started today and I had to do an hour long run. I also look back onto the project I was working on up to the competition, and think “there’s no way I can go back to the normal, slow-paced programming I normally do. But if I write sloppy code on such a big project, I’m screwed”!

“Bunnies, Back Into Your Cage!” was my second Big Ludum Dare game, so I didn’t expect anything surprising here. Of course I was wrong.

WHAT WENT WRONG?

1) Idea and tools

I began my 43 hours of game development (I woke up ca. 5 hours after the theme was announced) without any idea. I already knew I wanted to use Unity3D though (because I use it at work and made my last LD game with it), so I tried to make my concept fitting a 3D engine. After some time I had the idea of  a guy running faster and faster as long as he doesn’t hit anything concrete. If you run fast enough (e.g. after running in circles quite some time), you could break certain walls and destroy enemies. Objects would have different values to which speed they react.

So I started Unity3D and did a small prototype. One of the first problems here were the physics though. Smashing through walls only looks good with falling and tumbling pieces of trash, but physics aren’t much controllable. As soon as the player runs into something, he becomes slower. When there are many bricks (sized 2*1*1 meter or so) lying around, the player becomes slower constantly. Which is tedious and not much fun.

The lesson here: Don’t add physics unless they are part of the core gameplay.

2) Motivation

In the end, the prototype just didn’t make any fun even after some hours of work, so I started to distract myself with things on the web and IRC. Motivation was completely vanished – the fact that the theme “Escape” wasn’t really to my liking didn’t help much either. But as soon as I realized that I was more procrastinating than working on the game, I stopped. Grudgingly, I closed Unity3D.

Even though this was bad at least it led me to using Flash, with which I made my final entry: “Bunnies, Back Into Your Cage!” – a game about capturing bunnies that escaped.

3) Again, theme

My second idea didn’t fit the theme any time. I had the idea of a really minimalistic Minecraft which I would call “Pixelcraft”. From there, I began to write code, with more motivation, and at some point, the prototype was playable, and even a little bit fun.

Of course, it was missing the “Escape”.

4) Controls

The player controls were wonky from the beginning, and still are wonky. “Tedious” is the adjective I hear most as feedback to my game.
This is because everything moves/works block-wise. A block was originally meant to be pixel-sized, so this is why I chose to do the movement this way. Now, to add a little bit detail, the blocks are 8*8 pixels (they really are 32*32 pixels, but you can’t see that, hehe), and the controls feel strange. It feels like you often can’t direct the protagonist where you want him to be. Of course, I have no problems with the control scheme, but I am the creator, so this is expected.

The lesson here: Take the time to let your game test by others. They will crush your ego by pointing out all the bugs, but it will be worth in the end. I think. (Of course, the *real* problem is that in the Ludum Dare IRC channel were 330 people who all needed game testers. Try another channel or your girlfriend then. ;))

5) Being not Notch

With ~600 entries, not being the creator of Minecraft can draw some of the attention off your entry. You have to compensate it with marketing. And like most people, I hate doing marketing.

Lesson learned: Be notch. Top notch!

6) inudge

I like inudge, but the music sounds just like the one from my last entry. Also, there still is no way to export to WAV or MP3, so I had to record the tune with Audacity. But whatever recording method I tried, it either didn’t record or it all sounded strange and noisy. Even other recording tools made it sound like some horrible sound experiment.

The lesson learned: Sometimes, just rebooting your computer can help. It’s some kind of magic.

WHAT WENT RIGHT?

1) Flash. And FlashPunk.

I just began to love this combination, because you get results so fast. I started my second try at 18 o’clock, so I only had 34 hours left – sleeping included. Yet I came around to make full game, with levels. Cool!

2) FlashDevelop as a level editor.

This is a screenshot of my “level edtor”.

As you can see, you can edit not only rows, but also columns with FlashDevelop. This made it much easier to edit my ASCII array level definitions. Also, I am happy that I decided not to dwell into level definition files, but just hardcode the whole thing. I got levels pretty late, about 8 hours before submission, and yet it didn’t feel like “too late”.

3) Pixel art.

I often hear “nice art” or “I love the graphics” for my entry. This baffles me – everything is just 8*8 pixels. It was a piece of cake to do the graphics. I don’t even have animations, or different frames for walking left/right. OK, color selection may be a factor, but that isn’t hard to get right, either. Just choose colors with nearly the same saturation. Bang, instant good-looking art!

The lesson here: Minimalism is for teh win!

…

That’s it for now. Thanks for reading, and don’t forget to play my game!

Tags: flash, LD21, post-mortem, postmortem, screenshot

In case anyone is wondering, here’s how I reason when I hand out Theme-ratings.

The main question is how important is “escape” to your game? It’s very easy to start any game with a text box saying “you have to escape this XXX!”, but in how many of these games could you replace that sign with “you have to find the treasure” or the “…evil XXX hiding in his dungeon”?

Many, you say? Indeed. If you could simply exchange one or two dialogs and the game would still play exactly the same, that’s going to give you a lower Theme score. Not necessarily a 1, but low. Notch’s game is an example of this. Overall it’s a fun game and incredibly impressive for being made in 48 hours. But IMHO it’s more a game about killing monsters and gathering trinkets than an escape themed game. I’m not going to give him all 5s just because he’s Notch 😀

On the other hand, if something is so intimately tied to escaping that it would be an entirely different game without it, you get higher scores. If you look at ChevyRay’s Flee Buster the escape (though technically, it could equally well be “chase” but I’ll let it slip this time) is very central to how you play.

And I might have to add, if you write a story driven game and it’s about escaping, it’s of course possible to get a high score – if the story actually is about escaping. But I’m not sure there are too many of that kind here, most games I’ve played yet focuses on gameplay and mechanics. Nothing wrong with that though, there are a lot of good games where the story is unimportant!

Finally, what do I consider perfect (theme) score? I had a look at my ratings and the only game that has a 5-star theme so far is Gjarble’s Beyond the Fourth Wall. In other aspects, it might not rate as high as Notch and ChevyRay, but it’s a solid mini-game 100% dedicated to an escape. Flee Buster could still be a cool platformer, but take away escape from BtFW and you pretty much have nothing left.

So there you have it. Luckily there are many aspects to give points for, and personally I’m basically focusing on humor and theme (guessing I’ll have pretty low scores for overall and fun, because as a game it really sucks). If you’re going for a high theme rating, or perhaps got lower than you initially expected, hopefully this provided something to think about.

Now I have to go back playing all your entries. Having great fun doing so! If you know any game that took good advantage of the escape theme, please post a link in the comments!

UPDATE EDIT:

I also rate [theme] based on how originally it is used. Bonus points for not using the most simple and common “escape from prison-like facility” and “escape from XXX chasing and trying to kill you”

Tags: chevyray, escape, gjarble, notch, ratings

I used the extended submission time (I started very late) and made jam my game much better!

• Resampled my song so there’s one simple download
• Fixed a HUGE white-whale of a bug that was a show-stopper and took me over an hour to track down – and now I don’t remember what it was :/. LOL.
• Added another level and made some fuel tweaks to make the game more accessible and fun
• Cleaned up distribution zip (all media is in media folder )
• Made a slighty less cynical and more rewarding win screen

This game is FUN! At least, in my forgiving eyes it is ;). I submitted it less than 2 minutes before the final-finalest deadline and I just finished beating that version. I’m brimming with pride!

I’ve really enjoyed this whole experience and I want to thank the awesome people who put in extra work behind the scenes to make LD happen!

There’s a time-lapse (with plenty of time-lapses 😉 ) on the way but if you haven’t yet,

GO PLAY [Jedi’s] ESCAPE VELOCITY!

(EDIT: You may want to play the game first. It’s a platformer game about throwing blocks on enemies. Timelapse: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNpejFN19pQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5rtT8qZgyo )

Right! 31 hours of coding out (yes, I was fixing bugs after LD), and I could write up an explanation of how the game worked.

Main.java: It was supposed to run either the Game class or the Server class. That’s about it.

Common Files:

Block.java: Defines the block behaviour. Instead of playing with (co)sines, I decided to hardcode the directions, getting:

Yeah, it wasn’t as good as you think.

Enemy.java: Enemy behaviour. Falling code was a copy-paste from the player code in Game, and the rest is straightforward.

Map.java: Map code. Also, the most complicated part of the game.

First of all, “if(r>11) enemies.add(new Enemy(this,(i*16)+4,(rand.nextBoolean()&&(currpos<6)?(((currpos-1)*16)+8):((height-1)<<2)+8)));” Try to find out what this code does. DO IT

Second of all, it stored the player movement checking code. That wasn’t half bad for a simplified collision detection attempt, but it could be done easier (and faster (and better)).

Third of all, map painting code.

This shows how hacked it was (I was adding wraparound near the end, mostly).

Fourth of all, I had a very easyway of checking whether a player was on. If they weren’t,

	px[i]=-1299293;
 py[i]=-9238223;

Straightforward, isn’t it?

Fifth and final,

block throwing functionality.

MyRandom.java: A version of java.util.Random with a visible seed. Was experimenting.

CLIENT CODE:

Canvas.java: Basic canvas rendering code. Not half bad.

Game.java: My… what? It handled player movement, key handling, ticking map and network code, almost everything D:

First up,

WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH IM SCARED

That leaves the key handling mostly alone, other than a trick that made moving faster when jumping, but… meh.

JUMPING AND FALLING WHAAAAAT

Net.java: Fairly sane (but buggy) networking code.

SERVER:

Server.java: Uhh… fairly sane server connection acception code. Except this snippet:

Client.java: Again, fairly sane networking code. Only pretty buggy.

How did I manage to LD without a PC?:

Battleship ASUS (EEE Pad Transformer) running a quickly hacked up Ubuntu. Which I had to fix 6 hours into the LD before I could finally start:

Obligatory anime girl album cover on iPod connected to surround speakers included.

What did I learn?:

• Race conditions will destroy your sanity. ONCE AND FOR ALL
• Sometimes, generic code is better than making a solution yourself. Not always the case.
• I should try to plan out work more than “Singleplayer: Day 1, Multiplayer: Day 2” next time.
• NEVER WORK ON GNOME AGAIN
• BUGTEST EVERY SECOND

Thanks for reading. If you tl;dr, :<

Here’s the timelapse of me making my LD entry:

I made it with chronolapse, taking screenshots every 20 seconds for the 2 hours of development.

If you haven’t played my game, you can check it out here. I made it with Multimedia Fusion 2.

Absolutely incredible. All of us are amazed at the sheer numbers we did this past weekend. When the smoke cleared, we were left with 599 entries! To compare, Ludum Dare 20, an event taking place just 4 months ago did 358 entries (288 Compo). Yowzers!

Of course, this weekend wasn’t without its share of problems. You can visit this link to read my postmortem of how things went Saturday and Sunday.

Even still! After getting the site usable, Phil had to come back several times to HEAVILY optimize the site code. We still can’t even turn the sidebar back on yet due to the extra load! Yikes!

But no matter. We are on top of this. Lets talk judging.

For the next 3 weeks, entry voting (judging) is on. Everyone that entered is strongly encouraged to play and rate games. The Rate Entries page will give you a custom random selection of games for you to play. The more games you play, the better the averages, and better the results. Still confused? Check out this guide by matthias zarzecki.

And remember! Only people that submitted a game can vote!

Still no matter the results, be proud of yourself! Whether you finished or not, you did something amazing this weekend! You did in 2-3 days what large companies take months, even years to do (well not exactly, but you get the point). Job well done!

That’s all for now. Thanks everyone for coming out and making this our biggest event yet!

I guess I could write up how I coded the thing as well. (The thing being my game, also time is shown from 00:00 being the beginning of Ludum Dare. Add 4 hours to get the time in my timezone)

Beginnings:

A day or two before the Ludum Dare I realized i’m going to my grandmas, which meant no PC. I was, therefore, stuck with an Asus EEE Pad Transformer – a tablet running a Tegra 2 clocked at 1.2GHz/core. It also had two cores.

Thankfully, someone fixed the build of Ubuntu available for it to support the touchpad, making work on it a few times easier. Granted, the driver was quite experimental, but I used it anyway.

After fixing the WiFi issue, I was ready to go.

06:00: Let’s go!

I downloaded the JDK, then XChat and Pidgin. Configured everything so I could easily and effortlessly work. I also set up scrot to take screenshots every minute. On this part, no problems appeared.

06:50: Coding!

First, I wrote the basic canvas code. Next I added scaling for it (I decided lo-res pixelart is easy enough to draw for me.). It scaled from 160×128  (the resolution of the game) to 640×512  (sorry, VGA screen owners, you’re out of luck).

Next, I drew the tiles. I decided they’re going to be 16×16, creating a tile resolution of… 10×8. Yes. That made everything easier.

Then, I created the code to load tiles.png and render it from an array. Good.

07:30

After a while, I added code to make it scrollable. After a few bugfixes, it worked. By 08:40 into the LD (I had breaks, mind you) I drew and rendered the player properly. Finally, I coded a simple mapgen (whose general concept stayed up into the final).

08:45

Until 09:30, i was preparing mencoder/ffmpeg for timelapse rendering. Then I took a break. Up to 10:20 i was busy IRCing and IMing, as well as replying to people on /compo. Then, another break.

11:00

At this moment, I started adding physics for the player. At 11:45 I was improving the mapgen code.  Then, mostly community activity from 11:50 to 12:30. Finally, another break.

12:50

I tried setting up the microphone so I could live stream. That failed (stupid buggy drivers). At 13:00 I was designing the enemy “bug” graphic. By 13:40 they kind of worked. Major IM/IRC activity until 14:20, then a break.

From there, I forgot to timelapse, but IIRC i was improving enemy/player physics code.

16:20

Code/IRC intertwinned until 17:00.  Then I released the first beta (of mostly working singleplayer). I showed it off to people, finding bugs, chatting, procrastinating and fixing a bug until 17:45.

SLEEP

(remember, it was 21:45 in my timezone!)

27:07

I’m up and running again! Time spent chatting with GreaseMonkey and coding until 27:25, after which I went fully into coding mode. At 27:45 i released another beta on IRC, because why not? I spent time discussing it with people until 27:53. Then, EARLY MORNING LUCKY STAR WAKEUP SCHEME

28:15

Until 28:35 I was bugfixing. Then, I designed the “story” title board until 28:50, at which point it was in the game. Then I started work on wraparound and called off singleplayer as complete. Mostly chatting until 29:30, after which I rendered the first part of my timelapse (on an ARM tablet, in “high” quality!) and uploaded it to YouTube.

30:30

Hardcore mutliplayer Googling/coding with minor IRC. (I had some knowledge on how to code multiplayer right from a sandbox game, 64pixels, that I made in 2010-2011.) At 31:00 I took another break.

33:00

By then I had multiplayer about 50% done. But enemies were a LAGFEST. Too many packets, even for loopback :< Tried fixing until 33:20, then IRC. Fixing/IRCing until 34:15, then break.

34:30

Screw enemies, I was trying to get block throwing work right. Of course, I couldn’t, because ENEMIES ATE ALL THE BANDWIDTH (and CPU). Then, IRC from 35:00–35:10 and I was forced to go outside for 3 hours.

38:10

THE PERFECT IDEA – I made the client do enemy movement prediction! Sure, I had to throw out random movement but IT WORKED! Multiplayer was closer to being completed than ever. Hardcore fixing until 39:10.

40:00

Hardcore fixing/online testing until 42:00 ON MY OWN, FAST COMPUTER. Yay!

42:30

I realize I made a fatal bug after release. Can’t sleep.

48:30

I wake up, realize I can’t fix the bug anymore. Major depression until 49:50, including crying and loss of sanity.

50:10

PoV saves the day, telling me crash bugs are fixable. Attempting to fix a few (with lots of breaks) until…

57:30

I fixed all but one, released a “fixed version”, then stopped it.

Today I posted EfDB post-mortem.

I made the fix everyone that played requested, now the navigation arrows will always appear, instead of only when your mouse cursor is hovering them.

This is a simple problem, even simpler to fix, but annoied a lot of people.

It also is a problem that, without proper testing, will surely go unnoticed, as when I was deving it, I thought every path seemed very obvious, and everyone would be able to find their way easily.

I also learned that sometimes you don’t need to do the art to make a game, but without a script, it’s way harder…

Here’s a time lapse of my LD21 entry! Enjoy.

I hope to write a post-mortem in the next couple days as well, time permitting.

Hey guys, finally got round to editing together my Timelapse footage! For your viewing pleasure!

enjoy!

Hello there. May I present to you my jam entry: Faceless. I hope you will like it, or at least the idea of the game :p

You can test it and rate it there: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=rate&uid=5454

It’s the first time I participate, and I had a lot of fun improvising a game within 3 days.
As I didn’t release a single game nor demo for some years, I feel relieved that it can still happen to me haha.
It’s a nice and refreshing boost before going back to my main project ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4O71nPsJmo ).
I’m definitely becoming a regular, too bad I couldn’t set up a timelapse this time tho.

Good luck with your games,
DragonSix back to rating!

I entered this LD21 with my own additional theme : “No level Generator”.

I’m designing game for a long time now and I have always eluded the leveldesign problem by programming levelgenerator for any game. Breakout generators, sokoban generator, shmup generator, etc.
I was pretty proud of it. Knowing that my game have sort of infinite ammount of levels feels powerful and trying to make them fun althought they were not craft-handed was challenging.

Back when I was 14, My iconic game was Frontier Elite 2. I had no clue what a random seed was, but having a universe on my 3.5 floppy disk sounds magic !

When I started to read the LumdumDare blog, I was surprised by the time spent on leveldesign. Filling a .txt file with “O” and “X” was the kind of thing I totally wiped of my mind. It feels like and old age thing.

That’s a very twisted point of view, but I cant help thinking like this

Enough with the psychoanalysis, what about the game ?

In Rainbow Jail I tried to design the level instead of procedurally poping block and baddies by reversing puzzle solution.

and… Hell, it’s hard work !

For manually designing these kind of puzzle, you have to think hard ! First you have to make some easy level. Not only player must achieve them by doing almost anything, but they must feel like they made some wise move to do it. After that, more challenging levels. For achieving this, you have to test.

A lot.

And I’m awful a this too.

Spending all my time playing my own 48h game seems like a nonsense.

The hope : A Solver !!

So of course, I want to create a a LevelSolver that will check for me the ammount of solution for the current level so I can, just by blindly add or remove block, navigate between 0 & infinite number of solutions until I reach the “only 1 path” holy grail.
Well that would still be leveldesign, but it seriously take the generator twist. And moreover dealing with the fact that player can push some blocks ( sokoban factor ) is not making it easy.

Back to reality

I had to face the harsh reality. For every single level, I will have to check

•   is my level possible to finish ?
•   is my level fun ?
•   is my level erhh.. beautifull ?
•   is my 12 move ultra-smart solution is not overlaped by a 2 move solution I didn’t notice ?

I did my best and I think the result sucks

The problems :

• My urge for quantity over quality made me add those grey dots (random color block  ) so I can easily create enough room for my game. Most of these levels are untested and boring.
• Not enough testing : maybe 10% of the room are truly tested. It turned out that making a good level take me 30-45minutes. I should have spend 6-8h on 12 good level instead of this zelda-ish interconnected room map.

The good sides :

• Creating an ambiance for your game is easier with a manually drawn map, I could for example create some kind of jail look level.
• Thinking and testing each of your level really shorten the distance between you and the player.
• Testing specific features of the game is easier : Just draw the situation and test it !

I wish I could design fantastic puzzle like chocolate castle, or better,  mix procedural generation and leveldesign to produce gem like spelunky…

Well you can’t become a good leveldesigner in 48h, but a sure thing is the LD competition help me to progress in this way !

Oh hi there, you’re looking fabulous today. That Ludum Dare has really done you good…

I’m dogbomb. I do silly things. One of the silly things I do is play/review/mock/love indie-games on a weekly basis. This week I’d like to tickle a few of your Ludum Dare entries and see what happens.

I did this last time; it was my 50th review so I decided to cram 50 games in.  You can see how that turned out here:

50 Indie Games in 10 Minutes

I truly wish I could play/record all of your games, but I can’t due to time constraints, so please leave a note if:

• You want your game to be played
• You want to recommend someone else’s game for me to play
• You really DO NOT want me to play yours. I’ll take you off the list.

I’m quite kind, but I can understand that you won’t want this British chap with a weird accent pointing out bugs in your 48 hour game or swearing at it because he doesn’t understand it through his drunken haze.

This is pretty much first-come-first-served, though I already have a small list I’ve put together myself. I will get upset if people WANT to be reviewed and I have to say no… so I’ll close this when I need to, to stop me bursting into tears.

TL;DR : This dude wants to play your game and put 10-15 seconds of it on youtube while shouting over it.

EDIT: I HAVE A 50+ LIST NOW. YOU’RE TOO LATE FOR A GUARANTEED SLOT IN THE VIDEO. WORTH GIVING IT A GO THOUGH… I MIGHT ADD YOU IF SOMEONE ELSE’S GAME DOESN’T WORK OUT. ANNOYING ME ON TWITTER IS MORE LIKELY TO GET MY ATTENTION IF YOU’RE DESPERATE! 

p.s. I love you all. Thank you for the great response. x x x