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

cosmoZ making of

Test the game here:

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

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

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

And I would say, “Yes, of course.”

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

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

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

Ah, well. There’s always LD22.

Tags: postmorten

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

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

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

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

10 hours in total

Play the result here.

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

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

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

Angus

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

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

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

Good:

Jmonkey was easy to use.

Hydrogen Drum Machine was cool.

Gimp rocked.

Blender 2.5X was awesome

Bad:

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

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

-Greg

Yay! XD

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

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

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

Enjoy! =)

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

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

Tags: design, level, map, sheep

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

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

Tags: tilestudio, tools

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Download it here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

See you next time, Ludum Dare!

Upset: The Post-mortem

Thristhart: This post-mortem brought to you in the style of a chat log, in the spirit of my game.

Thristhart: I was completely unprepared for an “Escape” theme. I thought for sure self-replication or one of the evolution synonyms was going to win.

Thristhart: My carefully crafted idea had to be thrown out! (as usual)

Thristhart: The Conversation Mini-LD earlier produced a game based around IRC.

Thristhart: I loved the concept, but found the execution kind of lacking on where it could have gone with it.

Thristhart: So I took the concept of an IRC game and tried to make it better!

Thristhart: I think I succeeded, somewhat.

Thristhart: Even if I didn’t, I learned a lot and had a bunch of fun.

Thristhart: As a final note, The Lord Master would be upset if you didn’t try my game.

Thristhart: You wouldn’t want to upset him, would you?

Test 123

Tags: Delete Me

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

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

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

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

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

also uploaded a video featuring the leveleditor

and a gameplay video

Enjoy reading/watching/playing and leave some comments

PLAY ~ VIEW PAGE

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

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

First let's get them spinning

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

Then get them spinning around eachother

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

Probably my favorite level

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

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

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

Ready for my world tour, fetch my manager!

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

Escape this if you can

To conclude, some advice:

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

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

Climban gaems

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

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

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

There’s always more to do.

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

And there’s another Ludum Dare!

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

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

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