So, now that things have calmed down (a little bit) I thought I’d take a moment to look back on how things went for me during this LD, how the game turned out, and what I learned.

Overview

First of all, I thought this was a really fun Ludum Dare. While some people were a little upset by the large amount of attention Notch got, I thought the fact that it raised the profile of LD was fun, and I think it got people aiming a little higher (in some cases) than they would have otherwise. Also, I really liked the theme. Even though it seems so open-ended and easy, the theme is what got me into this contest. I didn’t think I was going to do it, then going to sleep Friday night I had the idea for the game, woke up on Saturday and just made a decision to start working on it. I didn’t commit as many hours as last time, which actually ended up being good I think.

The Game: Red Rover

The game itself turned out a lot better than my first. Whereas the first game had really big (over-complicated?) ideas and conceits this one was very simple. A rover driving around a lonely planet, exploring and hoping to escape its fate. Right away I knew that I needed:

1. An overhead rover sprite that could rotate 360 degrees.
2. Tracks in the sand to show where the rover had been.
3. A world that wrapped (kind of simulating a small planet).
4. An obvious but boring mission (collecting rocks) with the secret mission of escaping boredom, the surface, the planet, etc.
5. Contrasting sensor read outs with internal thoughts and feelings.

I won’t go into too much detail to avoid spoiling the game, but I do want to point out that it’s not just about collecting rocks.

Schedule

I spent most of Saturday working on getting the “feel” of the game right, including the graphics, tracks, terrain, etc. I’m pretty proud of the graphical look, even if it straddles a line between too retro (very lo-res graphics) and not retro enough (the graphics are up-sampled, and rotation/wheel tracks are done at higher-resolution). I took a break to go to an art show in the evening, and then to play cards with some friends.

Sunday I woke up and started on the plot stuff. While I definitely ran out of time on some of these things, I was able to hit all my major objectives, commit about 3 hours to writing music (I ended up not having time to write music last time) and do enough testing that things were stable and worked. It did get a bit stressful toward the deadline, and I wish I had taken a bit more time to write in-game instructions/narration. But I did get the game released on time, in a working state.

Observations

After I started play testing other people’s games I realized that maybe an introspective, open-ended exploration game with an obvious linear goal and a bunch of secret interesting goals may not be the best design for Ludum Dare. It doesn’t have a lot of the gameplay stuff people might expect (levels, bullets, power-ups, challenge, death and retry, level design, etc) and it also might seem like a really boring, simple game when in fact there is some added depth there. I tried to add to the game description page and README to clue people in to the fact that the game intentionally seemed simple, but might have more to it, but I’m not sure how well that has worked.

Another thing I learned is that I need to somehow get a copy of Windows running somewhere, even just in a VM. I failed to package my game for Windows which meant tons of people couldn’t play it. Someone named ‘jplur’ kindly created a package, although it turns out that some people had problems, and ‘Jiggawatt’ (a.k.a. ‘ointment’) ended up creating a working one using py2exe. Without these helpful souls I probably would have far fewer players/reviewers, so I’m definitely grateful to them. In that vein, if someone has a python game that they want packaged for Mac/Linux I’d be happy to try to help!

That said, I have gotten a lot of nice feedback, especially on the music and look-and-feel, both of which I felt like I lavished time on. While I will probably aim a little bit higher next time I do like the fact that I created a game that feels pretty polished and playable, even if it has retro conceits and is kind of atypical. I doubt I am a serious contender in the overall category, but I hope to do well in the audio one.

Final Thoughts

To those who felt like they ended up with a lot of bugs or a game that wasn’t very playable, I would encourage them to boil the game down to its simplest systems (e.g. the “feel” of jumping, catapault physics, etc) and spend a lot of time early on making sure it feels good. Last time I was fixing weird bugs and trying to smooth out feel right at the end, and I never really got there. This time I put more effort into those things up front and it showed. Even if your game only has one level, if that level is fun to play and feels right, people will enjoy it.

Thanks to everyone who participated in Ludum Dare, chatted with me on IRC, reviewed games, and especially those who offered packaging advice and helped package the game. I hope to release a 0.2 version with more involved plot/story/secrets, maybe some sounds, and better instructions.

Take care, and dare to Ludum Dare!

I am not sure postmortem is the proper term for this entry, being I can’t be sure the life of the project has come to an end.  Perhaps it has.  Regardless of the lifetime of the project, this post is about what happened, what went right and what went wrong, as I worked on my Ludum Dare 21 entry: Escape.  Sorry, I made the “what happened” a little longer than I expected, skip to the bottom for a true post mortem.

Ludum Dare 21: Start – 1 month:

This weekend started at least a month before with preparation and cleaning my slate for the entire weekend.  I made it clear to family and friends that I would be busy during the weekend.  Under no exceptions, (perhaps a big pay bonus), was I going to go into work; regardless of the circumstances or consequences.  Luckily work didn’t want me to come in, so I didn’t need to worry about consequences.  I had my framework picked; homegrown DirectX 9 engine written in C++, my language of choice.  I was set.  The week leading up to Ludumdare I made a blank project from my template – in doing so I felt I’d automate this process; which took me the full week nights after work.  However, I can now type “CreateProject ProjectName” and out comes an already compiled template project that is at blank screen and ready for development.

Ludum Dare 21: Start – 5 hours:

No lie, there were several ideas floating around my head and was hoping for Castles to be the theme.  I went shopping for some food and supplies for the weekend so I didn’t need to waste time doing so later.  The IRC channel; #ludumdare was insane, I started a G+ hangout that filled with so many people, and I didn’t know them all, but we all shared a passion for Game Development.  Finally, it was time.

Ludum Dare 21: 48hrs Remaining

Theme: Escape.  Thoughts crossing my mind, #ludumdare going insane, I left the G+ hangout and went to my white board, and to cook a meal while I thought up ideas.  I was pretty surprised that I had three right off the bat, each with their own challenges.  One was a turnbased puzzler that would have been easy on the programming side, harder on the content side.  Another I threw away based on scope, it was much too big for a weekend.  The final was a physics based glider falling through a maze like puzzle to the ‘exit’.  Despite being harder with math and level design, I choose the physics based glider on the basis that content would be kept to a minimum.

Ludum Dare 21: 44hrs Remaining

I had created a 2D camera, and sprite class – two things I overlooked on my framework, which admittedly is typically used for 3D projects.  I managed to get the basics going before heading to bed to sleep on my idea before committing completely.

Ludum Dare 21: 36hrs Remaining

Woke up, ate a good meal and planned to work on the physics of the glider until I got it right, so that I could avoid wasting time on level design by setting the physics in stone before a level is started.  The physics gave me some problems, it took awhile to figure out that the equation for lift did not apply it in the correct direction.  That and other strange things.  I spent far longer on the physics that I wanted, and I never got quite what I wanted out of it – but it was somewhat controllable.

Ludum Dare 21: 24hrs Remaining

I spent about 2 hours trying to get a randomized tunnel to generate, and quickly gave up on the basis I didn’t like the outcome of any of the work.  So at this point the choice changed to making a quick and dirty level editor, which actually came out very well.  By the time I went to bed I had wrapped up a level editor that I could play, edit, play, edit in quick succession.  Hung out on G+ hangouts as much as possible, had some good discussions while still getting stuff done.

Ludum Dare 21: 13hrs Remaining

Motivation has dropped quite a bit even though I was on the final stretch.  Time pressure was starting to begin as I realized I didn’t have a level or anything – but I did have my main gameplay mechanic; physics.  To accurately test the level I was about to develop, I needed to add the collision for the game – which was much more difficult than it seemed.  Despite using code I had from another project for line-to-line collision, it did not work.  In the end, debugging proved that I was putting in the wrong lines…  Many hours wasted.

Ludum Dare 21: 6hrs Remaining

A final burst of energy to finish the level, add a score counter, title page and share it on #ludumdare – got some feedback, made a quick and dirty tutorial page – that added a lot to the look and feel of the game.  Removed the level editor and temp map files for the final build.  Tried making some music for the game, but failed miserably.

Ludum Dare 21: 0hrs Remaining

Submitted the project as a jam on the basis I did not share my code.  However, I followed every other rule strictly.

Ludum Dare 21: Postmortem; What went wrong

• This was the buggiest project I’ve worked on in years, I had to cross hurdle after hurdle; physics, line collision, level design.
• I did not put enough effort into created the game music, or sound effects – and this would have paid off huge in the end.
• My own expectations were let down on basis of; physical feeling and level design.
• Although I took a good share of breaks, getting out of the apartment would have been useful.

Ludum Dare 21: Postmortem; What went right

• The visual quality stunned me, it actually came out looking decent.
• I made good use of breaks for food, shower, sleep, and thinking.
• I finished, it was close to complete, and I had a lot of fun.

Check out the project, rate it, leave comments and most of all – hopefully it is enjoyable, even for a few moments.

While rating your games I came across several written using Unity3D, which is understandable as it looks like a modern 3d Flash on steroids. However, there still is no Linux player available, so go and vote for them to write one!

Most of you probably don’t use Linux, and might be thinking “why should I care”. But you should. It’s about freedom of choice as much as about anything else. One might think that people should be free to choose the operating system they like, without being punished by third parties. Ok, I know it’s not that simple, porting to a new OS requires an effort and some companies will have to make a cost/benefit calculation, while many others can afford to be selfless most of the time.

I  will always try to make my games multi-platform, even though I think Windows is crap and that Apple is an awful company (with good products :)). Not because I think I can sell more copies, but because of you. You should be allowed to use the OS you chose, not the one I do.

Tags: linux, unity, unity3d

I’ve been playing some of the entries, mostly those of which I liked the screenshots and there have definitely been some really amazing games already. This is why I thought I could share my top11 (why top11? Because I couldn’t decide which one to leave out!) with you. I’d love to see your top5/10/11/whatever, I’m sure there are still a lot of great games I missed.
So here we go!

1. To Hell And Back (Link) by Kayamon:
   This game amazed me right from the start. The graphics might be a bit blurry, but they’re full of retro charme and the character design is really awesome (makes me think of Final Fantasy 3/6). And for 48h it was really well done, the puzzles were not hard, but also not too obvious and once you finally understood what you must do to leave hell it was pure fun. And I’m not really an adventure fan btw.
2. the dream forest (Link) by mes:
   This one’s very artistic and has a great atmosphere. You walk around quite slowly and the only thing you can do is pick up umbrellas that bring you to new locations. This very short game is all about the feeling it creates. The graphics and animations are very thoughtfully put together and it’s a great experience.
3. Flee Buster (Link) by ChevyRay:
   The idea of this game is that you play three games one after another. Everytime the time runs out the game switches to the next game, which starts right where you left off before. It’s really hard to adjust to the new gameplay mechanics every time but that’s exactly why it’s so much fun. ^^
4. Not the Sharpest Sword in the Box (Link) by Draknek:
   This game is plain and simple pure fun. You have to avoid swords with your ragdoll character by pulling his arm or leg or whatever part of the body you like around. The graphics and sound are very stylistic and make for a very polished, little game.
5. Tea Powered Escape! (Link) by Gachuk:
   Your task is too flee from a cave while the water is rising. You can destroy the blocks around you to dig your way up to the surface. There’s also tea which lets you jump higher (I think, I only used it once ^^’). This game has just the right amount of challenge to make it a thrilling experience. I don’t know about the long-time motivation, but the first playthrough was really great.
   
6. Still Dreaming (Link) by bach:
   Although this game contains only two puzzles, they’re so well done and presented that you feel you’ve been playing something absolutely worth your time. It has this undeniable ‘Sword & Sworcery’ charm. I really would like to see a longer version of this.
   
7. Virtual School 2 (Link) by GozerGomez:
   Oh god, how this kid gets on my nerves! ^^
   The cool thing about this game is how surprisingly well it fits the theme of the compo. It has three endings, but unfortunately I only found ending 1, which was really great. It’s a short, but very fun game for people who like to explore their surroundings.
8. Amke’s Revenge II (Link) by Mark Overmars:
   This retro platformer seems to do everything right: It has nice retro graphics, good controls, a lot to explore, a good challenge and possibly the best designed boss fight in this contest. And that you can buy a hat for your little pixel character is the icing on the cake. ^^
9. Boat Escapade (Link) by wademcgillis:
   Again you have to flee from the rising water (this time on a boat), but the nice twist of this one is that you sometimes have to dive right in to get to a new place. The water is really merciless and one mistake could already be your last. Really well done!
10. You Don’t Fit (Link) by mcc:
    This game is very minimalist. You move around a rectangle and have to try to manipulate other blocks so that you can move further to the right. The graphics are not worth to mention, but the sounds fit very well and it’s really fun to puzzle your way through it.
11. Vampire Runner (Link) by arielsan:
    I love the concept of this little game! It’s so simple but also so much fun. It’s maybe one of these games that could’ve been done in a few hours, but the concept itself is so good that it definitely deserves a place in this list.

So, this is it. What do you think of these entries and what are your favorites so far?

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Tags: Top10

So, I decided to do a video postmortem this time around. It’s available on YouTube: Slip Away Postmortem

Hi! My name is Lucas , me and my brother Pedro participated in this ludum dare, it’s the third one we try ^^
We couldn’t count on programmers this time so we did all graphs and programming ourselves, so it was quite a simpler and much more buggy game than we expected, but that’s the spirit of ludum dare : challenging yourself and showing your work. ( I hope i’m right about this )
Anyway, just wanted to create a post about our work, since we didn’t do that during the weekend .

I’ll be posting a link to our Jam Entry, it’s called “Perdiganawe” , all the description in there.

In here I just wanted to congratulate everyone , i’ve been seeing some great games around here and it makes me really happy =]

also wanted to say what’s different in this post-mortem version we’re uploading :

* Our game now has fog of war!
* In the first version, if you failed a level and clicked the option below the “you failed” message, you would go to the next level! D: that does not happen anymore
* Level two is harder, it was too easy before…

Well,that’s all for now, you’ll be hearing more from us along this month.
Hope everyone enjoys our game,as much as we enjoyed making it and playing yours \o

There ya go :

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=preview&uid=4166

bye everyone ^^

The Thiers Brothers

…That didn’t come out right.

Anyways, everyone who plays my game on my pc likes it, everyone who doesn’t, doesn’t. Conclusion: there’s a bug causing framerate-dependence. I think I’ve fixed it and my game is WAY more responsive and hence fun, even on this pc :).

So, if you hated Escape Velocity, or if you just feel like a generally good bloke or lady, check out my new-and-bugfixed-(I-hope-)Escape Velocity!!

Watch it if you still haven’t played it yet.

If that got you interested. You can play it here.

Hi LD48ers,

I’ve had a couple of people ask me about how I put together my 2D game in unity and seeing as the techniques might be relevant in other games I thought I’d take some time to explain some of the things i did in my game, in the hopes that it helps someone out.

like my LD20 game Drum Hammer Dig I chose not to use any external sprite libraries (such as ex2D or SpriteManager), everything game related was written from scratch and there’s of course a link to the source in my compo entry should you want to check it out. ( As you’d expect its all over the place but it got the job done ;))

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=rate&uid=4202

To start with, i’ll talk about how I handled landscape collision.

One thing I knew early on was that the level shapes themselves were probably going to change a lot as I put the game together. Collision wise I also knew that this game would be 2D, but I didn’t have the time ( or skill ) to write a custom 2d collision system.

Editor shot of the 9 areas

With that in mind I went with the “work with what you have” approach. In this case, Unity fortunatly has a great built in 3D Physics system that i wanted to utilise.

I wanted was to harness that system, in a way that allowed me to quickly create and layout collision without relying on an external 3d package, I also didn’t want to mess around placing lots of box colliders down for each level and then having to move or change them when the level changed.

I chose to write a simple mesh creator in the editor, and then used the generated geometry as a mesh collider. This gave me the best of both worlds. Fast turn around, and all the physics collisions I needed.

Its dirt simple but really effective;

1) First I have an array of points in space ( arranged in a clockwise order )

Points in space

2 ) A set of Vertices is created from these points, extending forward and backwards on the z axis.

Vertex positions based on previous points

3) triangles are created from the vertices

Triangles are created from the vertices

Translated into unity, I have a GameObject for each area in the game which has a “MeshHitcheck” component that contains array of positions (laid out in a clockwise direction)

Using the steps above a collider mesh is generated at runtime from those points.

Background painting on a single sprite

Clockwise layout of points with Gizmo draw in editor to show edges

Hitcheck mesh generated at startup

2D Collision Done!

Same area shot from in game

Editor Extra’s

Hand editing position values in an array isn’t exactly fast so to make editing and layout of the positions array as quick as possible, I created quick little editor helper script that basically draws position handles for each point, and a button to add new points into the array. Its not a perfect solution and there a number of ways to improve it, but it saved me plenty of precious time.

Quick editing of points inside the editor

I should also note that the seed character in game is simply a rigid-body sphere with a limit on the z axis, all other objects are sphere or box trigger colliders that don’t move.

That’s all for today, I hope this was of some use.
If you have any questions or want explanations on some of the other things in game, let me know.

Thanks for reading.

Steven Burgess

So, all in all, I think this dare went WAY better than my last (which was my first). I think what mainly accounted for my better outcome was finally swallowing my pride and deciding to write a 2D game. It’s amazing how much removing that 3rd dimension simplifies things. I wanted to make something cool, so I really didn’t want to spend too much time just trying to think of ideas. I couldn’t think of any amazing revolutionary new game play style, so I just went with the good old classic top-down shooter. Of course, to keep it with the theme, I set the goal of the game to escape the game. I probably won’t do too well on theme points but I’m still proud of my creation. After all, who of us really does this in hopes of winning? I just do it as a motivational leap to start a new project.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=preview&uid=4069

What Went Right

So, for the most part, the beginning went very smoothly. I stayed up until 4:30 AM the first day and got a lot of the core coding done. I started with the basics – a basic OOP design in C++ (my language of choice), movement, and collisions. Then, I started to get my hands dirty with a weapon system. Unfortunately, I ended up changing the weapon system since adding new weapons eventually turned out to be a huge hassle (this was actually after I finished the compo version game). Next came the rovers. Rovers went along a lot smoother than I expected them to. No problems really there. All hell broke loose when I started programming doors though.

What Went Wrong

Basically, I thought doors were going to be like 30 minutes tops, but they ended up being like 2 hours. First, I had to write basic animation functionality in the object class – no problem. Switching states became a huge hassle and I finally  broke down and analyzed the update loop step by step – then I finally got it. I was forcing a specific frame in the door code on certain states, but this created problems, so I ended up just letting them flow naturally and not try to prevent the occurrence of a bad frame (which I later found was not possible to occur). Another huge issue that I didn’t expect was scrolling. Yes, scrolling. Of all things that could go wrong, scrolling did. I ended up having to edit a lot of drawing code that should have been there from the beginning.

All in all, I think my favorite thing to add was the shaking when an explosion goes off. It’s freakin’ awesome 😛

Thanks for a great Ludum Dare guys! I had a great time.

So LD21 was my first ever Dare and some things went okay and some didn’t. I definitely learnt a lot from it, and I’m keen to keep making games and work on my entry. I thought I’d do a brief little writeup.

Blatant self-promotion link: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=rate&uid=5119

The game

The Daring Do! title screen

I’m pretty pleased with the game I produced: “Daring Do!”. It’s a sidescrolling running platformer where you play an intrepid archeologist. Each level is short and follows the same formula: grab the glowing golden idol and get the heck out of the temple before the whole thing caves in or you get crushed by the giant boulder coming after you. Avoid pits and arrows along the way. I wanted to keep levels short so it kept you wanting to play; that just one more level feeling. I’d like to add an ‘infinite mode’ in a future update, though. I’m also planning to add many, many more of the normal-style levels, as well as a lot more trap types: crumbly blocks, falling debris that you have to dodge, spike traps,and perhaps even some bad guys and collectables. I would’ve liked to get more of these in during the compo, but just ran out of time. Also, more work is needed on sound and sprites.

Daring Do! gameplay - pick up the glowy idol and prepare to run!

The Bad

The main thing that went wrong was that I didn’t spend enough time on day one thinking up a concrete idea. I got a rough topic in my head of a Breakout bat escaping from a game of Breakout, and rushed off and started making it. I built a simple little Breakout clone really quickly, and then spent a fair amount of the rest of the day trying to script together some kind of in-game cut scene explaining your escape. At this point, I realised I’d spent far too long on an ‘intro’ without having any idea at all about what the core gameplay would be after your escape. I became somewhat disillusioned with the idea and stopped working.

My first game idea, a breakout clone where you actually break out.

I woke up late on the Sunday with the intention of giving up, but I felt that I’d be very disappointed in myself if I did so. I chatted with a friend about what to do (thanks @triard!), and a new idea was born, that which turned into Daring Do! This one I felt I could run with: a simple gameplay mechanic that can be easily extended by the addition of more traps, levels, etc.

Daring Do! gameplay - outrun the boulder, avoid the arrows, jump the pits!

The Good

I’ve only recently gotten into Flash development, but I absolutely love working with FlashDevelop. I use a Mac as my main machine, so I had to run FD in a Windows virtual machine which was pretty slow – this infuriated me on numerous occasions as I sat there wanting to code but having to wait for my computer to catch up with me. For future LDs, I’ll have to run Windows natively somewhere, as the VM was almost unworkable. I wish there was a Mac version of FlashDevelop.

Flixel is also brilliant, although I was kind of learning as I went along so got a bit hung up on things that should’ve been easy but I didn’t know how to do yet. I’d like to spend some time with FlashPunk, too, to see how they compare. Writing my game in Flash made it super easy to test, to send to friends for comments, and to upload for other LD48ers to play.

As for my other tools, I used DAME for map editing, which worked pretty well, bfxr (fantastic tool!) for sound effects (although I somehow forgot to give my main character footsteps!) and had a brief attempt at creating some terrible music with FamiTracker.

Next time

I’d certainly be up for taking part on Ludum Dare again – the feeling of satisfaction having built something in such a short space of time is brilliant, and I love the community feel of the event. I’m so glad I didn’t give up after day 1! Next time, I’d spend longer ensuring I had a great gameplay idea before starting. Gameplay, gameplay, gameplay, that’s what it’s all about. In fact, I’d probably recommend trying to spend some time during the final round of voting thinking up some ideas for each of the top-voted themes from previous rounds, just in case they come up. Having a solid idea from the start would allow me a full two days to make my game – next time, I’d plan for day 1 on the engine and gameplay, and day 2 on content and tweaks. As I had to cram all of that into one day this time round, the content was a little light.

At the moment, I’m really enjoying looking through everybody else’s entries. There are some truly, truly brilliant games in there – not are they fun to play, but it’s nice to be able to find out how things were implemented. It’s a great way to learn.

I’d really appreciate it if you’d take the time to check out my game and rate it and / or leave a comment.

Tags: as3, bfxr, DAME, FamiTracker, flashdevelop, Flixel

Is it allowed to update during voting ?

I have a little perfomance update to do, as well as a missing key!

So this was my first Ludum Dare, but not my first jam. However, this was my first jam as a code monkey, previously I’ve been doing only sound design. But since I’ve actually got a degree in computer sciences and programming, I thought to give it a try and see if I can push myself to make a game during one weekend. And yes, I more or less managed to do that, of course I had a friend doing almost all the graphics, but if you watch the timelapse you’ll see I did some gfx related tasks too.

Timelapse:

What went right:
Brainstorming ideas before the topic was announced – we had a suitable idea for almost every theme in the final votes. Escape suited us quite well but actually we were hoping for wormholes. I also had my own basecode written and ready with collision detection and controls in place. Graphics worked ok and my decision to take Gleed2D as a level editor was a good one, since it gave us a way to prototype the hud and levels prior to having actual game code ready. However I ended up tweaking the XML files generated by Gleed2D by hand after all. Porting to Mac OSX went smooth as ever and even the release bundle worked without any issues, unlike the Windows version. One thing that is good to mention here, is that we understood to cut features from the game when we saw that we don’t have time to implement them.

What went wrong:
Stuck on stupid bugs, mostly due to lack of sleep. I didn’t sleep nearly enough. Also our initial idea was way too big to implement in such a small timeframe so we had to drop lots of features. In the end, we had only the bare minimum of the story we had planned and basic set of the game mechanics. We didn’t use enough time for testing, and that showed up in the final phase, where I was playtesting and tweaking the difficulty constantly on OSX while trying to fix audio issues on Windows. And that brings me to the fact, that choosing Phonon as audio engine, even though it’s built into Qt, was a wrong decision due to severe problems on Windows. It might have worked if I’d have time to test it thoroughly beforehand. Two things I should make mental note about: have at least 1/3rd of the time dedicated to playtesting & debugging and stay away from doing sound design for other projects if your own code isn’t working! 😀

Anyway, thanks for a great Ludum Dare, it was fun! Don’t forget to rate our game 😉 http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=rate&uid=5118

Mindbane was my entry for the 48 hour competition. If you haven’t, check it out and rate it here: PLAY MINDBANE!

The development of this game was a mess, to say the least. To begin with, I had to work on the saturday, so actually I lost ten of the 48 hours doing absolutely nothing. Well, nothing is quite inaccurate, because I was trying to have ideas for the entry. But my brain at 4AM is barely working correctly, so I couldn’t think of anything.

When I arrived at home at 9AM and booted my laptop to start coding, I still had no idea what I’d be making. I started FlashDevelop, extracted the FlashPunk directory to the project and started working on the level loader that would import the Ogmo Editor files…

Suddenly, tiles.

Loading objects was still missing though.  At 3PM on Saturday I called it a day and went to sleep, unsatisfied with the current state of the game. Then I woke up for dinner at 7PM, wrote down some notes while eating a BigMac and went back to sleep, because I was still tired as hell.

I woke up at 1AM and made a decision – I wouldn’t waste another four hours making a level loader that would ultimately be composed of the worst programming anti-patterns mankind can think of. So I started GameMaker, programmed the main character motion and made a simple level. Then happened to me that it could be fun to use a button to disable gravity. And it was. I also added a button to stop vertical movement when falling. I accidentally found that by using that button it was possible to do airjumps. “Perfect!” I though. That’s pretty much how I decided to use the hovering and midair stopping mechanics. At that point I was already using “disassociation/escape from reality” as the basic premise of the game. The disruption of the natural laws of physics seemed like the perfect gameplay mechanic to fit that premise.

Not much happened after I got that working. It was still 9AM, so I decided to relax a bit. I made the ghoul and player sprites, tried some melodies on FL Studio and proceeded to add more levels on the game. 10PM, game was finished, with ten minutes left. Phew.

Things done right

1. GameMaker: Now, I’m sure many people would frown upon this choice, but I’m not the kind of guy that cares for technical silliness. For me, a good game is a good game, and that’s all there is to it. As I said on my Fate of Mankind post mortem: I like to make games, not exception handlers.
2. Fun first, art last: I suck at drawing. That doesn’t mean I don’t try. This time I made the wise decision of finishing all the gameplay stuff before making the game pretty. On Innocence (Ludum Dare 20) I started by drawing sprites first. That was stupid.
3. Experience: When I participate on LD19, that game was the first I made in years. Then on LD20, I used AS3 and FlashPunk – something that I never had used before. This time I played safe, and I guess that was for the best.
4. Cool game mechanics: I really like the hovering, midair stopping and airjumping… XD

Things done wrong

1. Fun first, art last: I suck at drawing. Yeah. The tileset looks terrible, and I wish I had a better sprite for the main character. I know it’s important to have good graphics, they ARE a key point when people decides to play your game or not.
2. Difficulty: I completely forgot to ask people to try it before submitting. Oh well. People frequently complain that it’s too difficult, and that’s probably true. But it’s not like I wanted it to be that difficult… For me, it doesn’t look that hard (well, I created the game after all). Next time, less spikes and more beta testing.
3. Obscure Plot: Is it clear that (spoilers ahead!) the main character is being haunted by his inner demons inside his mind while he’s in coma after attempting suicide? And the spirits you collect along the way are the good memories the character have from his past? If you played the game and didn’t knew that, I failed at storytelling. If you knew it, then disregard this one. 😛
4. My job: Seriously. Working from 11PM to 9AM on the first day was a huge waste. Just by thinking all the cool things I could have done with extra 10 hours…!
5. Not using FlashPunk: I really, really wanted to make this game using AS3 and FlashPunk, but I didn’t had a framework ready. Flash games are much more accessible and can be distributed on Newgrounds and Kongregate. Windows games, not really…

Tags: postmortem

Escape Velocity is now on Linux-64! Many, many open-sourced thanks go to JohanAR!

I used SDL and FMOD, if anyone else out there is feeling port-venturous. Maybe somebody with OS/X? 😀

I dare you to disagree:

Now I have had a swamp of build issues with this and such and such not running on yadida. This seems to be due to the variable way in which various windows builds interpret floating point values – they either want them as ‘0.3’ or 0,3′

I CANNOT BUILD A WIN32 RELEASE SPECIFICALLY FOR YOU.

The builds WORK on windows 7 X64 (on two seperate machines albeit no sound), and the linux build WORKS on Ubuntu x64 with common sdl and opengl packages installed. Period. I understand Linux x64 is not popular and in that instance I am going to get a WINE version rolled out.

For those that have invested in FPC please do compile – the library code is very rushed and this is to be forseen as I’ve had a hell time getting thigs working. I am currently trawling through code on a windows 7 netbook trying to find what is affecting th windows users while also installing a 32 bit linux machine to run a test compile and dependency list.

I am sorry for those unable to rate so far, however this issue will be resolved soon and many resolutions in library craft have been pulled from this LD as was the case for the last LD also.

Thank you dually for your patience.

I got bored, so I put together a nice Python 2 script to output all the entries in a easily parseable JSON file. Here’s the dump: http://pastebin.com/r2XW8RQi

Source coming along, as soon it is ready for release…

Thank’s to PixieEngine’s one-click export feature I was able to publish SurfN-2-Sur5 to the Chrome Web store in minutes, just needed to upload the zip file and add screenshots. It’s as easy as filling in the LD competition entry page.

Chrome Web Store – SurfN-2-Sur5

Currently the version in the store is exactly the same as the LD competition version, but in time it will improve.

I am the creator of PixieEngine, so I may be biased in favor of it, but I thought that it’s worth sharing. And while we’re on the topic, I also love that when I’m building my game in PixieEngine it’s already on the web, so there’s no extra packaging or upload step required, just click “Publish” and everyone has access to the latest version.

Did I mention that it is free? And that it runs on OSX, Windows and Linux? And that you can always export/download your game at any time? But wait! There’s more…! Actually, that’s most of it.

So please, check out PixieEngine for all your game development needs and give feedback with any questions or concerns. You can even start by messing around with the SurfN-2-Sur5 source, though the code quality isn’t super high since it was made for the competition.

YRGBO is a “weird” puzzle-adventure game. Since it couldn’t be long, it had to be tough! And it is. I gave the past Ludum Dare a shot but I quit after the first 24 hours as the game I was working on didn’t turn out as I expected. This time I could finish, and I’m happy for that. I also think the game’s good, not that it will appeal to most people, but that was never really my intention.

THE GOOD
– I finished! (For the jam, although I wanted to submit it for the main competition).
– I ended making a good game (not exactly how I wanted it, but I’m still proud of it).
– I got into the zone (Never really got tired, I lost track of time).
– I got “the hang” of it (I knew what was worth adding and leaving out).
– I handled sleep deprivation nicely (I’m a heavy sleeper, so skipping sleep was never an option, but I could get away with very little of it).
– I got a nice idea early.
– I didn’t quit! (the idea crossed my mind a couple of times) instead, I cut off features and adjusted the project to the time I had left.
– I felt good, period. I forgot all my problems while working on this. I was tired but very happy and excited.

THE BAD
– I couldn’t finish on 24 hours, had to use the jam deadline and work for some extra 24 hours.
– I didn’t have the time to test my game, it had bugs that made it almost impossible to be finished. Had to fix them up.
– I should’ve planned more before starting coding, could’ve saved some time.
– No time to exercise and I ate lots of crap, well, not lots, but I ate them, which is bad!
– This isn’t exactly bad, but I tried to make a kind of game I had never done before. In these kind of compos you should probably stick to what you master, it’s no time to experiment.

THE UGLY
– I felt weird when the compo was over, my time awareness was messed up, I have trouble getting up early now.
– I felt really tired the day after. It’s weird that my legs were so sore.
– At some point I started to feel really stressed out, you know, that pain in the chest. Pressure + lack of sleep. I’m ok now.

CONCLUSION
This was a great experience! I hope I can repeat it the next time. This was my second “short” game development competition, I had been involved in compos that gave you weeks or even months to make your game, but this is a whole different thing! I’ll finish in 48 hours next time! ’till then 😉

Tags: post-mortem, postmortem