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

You can see them here:

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

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

Finally, my first game for Ludum Dare: No Escape

And the game entry is here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

yup, it breaks.

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

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

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

DOWNLOAD

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

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

Tags: wallpaper

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

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

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

Tags: post-compo, post-mortem, postmortem

And Firefox suggested this to me

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

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

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

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

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

Computers used:

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

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

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

Timelapses:

Timelapse part 1

Timelapse part 2

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

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

Wanna know moar?

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

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

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

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

Thats the idea so far.

This is my Devlog:

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

Some statistics from my SVN Repository:

Ludum Dare 21 Post Mortem

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

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

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

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

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

WHAT WENT RIGHT

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

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

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

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

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

WHAT WENT WRONG

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

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

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

NEXT TIME

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tags: timelapse

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

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

Here are some images:

Running happy while there are no walls near

Using his move through wall skill near a wall

Lost all the skill energy while moving through a wall.

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

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

Tags: finished, LD21

my entry: Forever Running

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

What went well

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

What I should do better

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

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

Thanks for this fantastic event!

Tags: postmortem

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

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

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

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

Grab the source here :

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

Hi.

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

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

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

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

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

Now the problems:

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

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

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

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

Enjoy ^_^

Just 3 minutes before deadline!

For more information about the game, visit the entry.

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

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

Here is the submission link.

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

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

What went wrong

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

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

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

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

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

What went right

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

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

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

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

What is next

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

Tags: escape, LD21, post-mortem