HOLY PLATFORMERS BATMAN.

The next Ludum Dare should have not only a random theme but a random genre too.

Who else likes this?

Well, regardless of how the voting goes, I consider my effort a failure. I’ll explain why after breaking down the issues…

What went right

What went wrong

In this shot you can also see the debug plane – a quad with a mist texture on it that slices through the landscape (most obvious above the doorway) showing where the player can move. I used this to help sculpt the terrain and place objects on it, and intended to delete it before submission. It’s a minor niggle, but it annoys me!

Self-analysis

The main reason I consider Lonely Island a failure is that I made ALL THE SAME MISTAKES as in LD21. Read the post-mortem for that one here.

You’d think because I’m a programmer by trade, I’d be able to knock up working game mechanics in a few hours. And I can, if I try. But that’s exactly what I do at work day-in, day-out. During Ludum Dare, I’d far rather play around with the art – it’s more fun, I learn new tricks and I get a pretty result a lot faster than with programming. And I guess that’s fine, if that’s what I wanted to do.

But what I really want out of Ludum Dare is to prove to myself that I can design and build my own games – not just implement highly-polished cogs that go into the big machine. And I’m failing at that because I’m doing the fun stuff instead of the important stuff.

So as far as I’m concerned, the theme of the next LD is “Self-Discipline”!

Play (Unity) | Ratings Page

Hey Indies,

One thing that my LD 22 entry (and most games I make) lack is sound.  I have little to no experience making sound, so I wanted to get some feedback from the community about how indies either prepare or gather sound effects for their games.  Right now, my “option of choice” is to go to Freesound.org and play with sounds for ~1 hour until I find the ideal one I want to use (for 1 sound clip), and it takes forever, and sometimes the sound I want isn’t there!

I did notice the LD team was awesome and posted a bunch of tools here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/tools/ for us to use, which is cool, but I had a few questions for the community.  Answer as few or as many as you’d like!

Do you use LD’s recommended tools?  Are they any good?
Do you outsource your sound generation (can’t for LD-comp) to someone else?  Do you pay them?
Do you use any other tools to generate sound?  Free vs. Low-Cost?
Do you make your own music?
Finally, do you use any reliable royalty-free sites to pull music and sound from? (is that legal for LD?)

Thanks for sharing!
Josh

Tags: sound

Main idea: An astronaut finds himself all alone in boundless Space. He must reach his spaceship before it flies away.

Used: Inkscape, freesound.org, sfxr, Monkey, Paint.NET, Audacity

We were very excited to take part in our first LD and create our first ever game.

We tried to prepare for it as hard as we could. That’s what we ate.

And that’s where we have been creating «Stand Alone».

What went wrong:

Idea. From the very beginning we haven’t worked enough on our game concept. Therefore, changes in the game have been made during the development.

Art. It takes as a lot of time to create art. More than we’d expected. We had to refuse some game objects due to lack of time to draw it.

Some art in progress.

Sound insertion. There were some bugs with sound in Monkey. It was very annoying.

Performance. Flash-version works not very well in browser. Have to deal with it later.

Time. We did not have enough time to add everything that we’ve planned.

Tiredness. Despite the huge amount of fluid, good nutrition and healthy sleep it was very difficult to concentrate on any task.

Despite this we managed to submit our game in time and got a lot of fun!

And we’re going to finish and improve «Stand Alone» according our plans.

Ludum Dare 22 Entry – Stand Alone

Tags: deskphoto, foodphoto

I’ve quickly hacked in a Fireworks show at the end of my game as my nod to the New Year’s Eve celebrations.

[GAME LINK]

Tags: nye, xna

It took me several days of non-stop playing and rating, but it is finally done:

220 games (25%) have been judged in a critical but honest manner. The milestone i was aiming for.
While doing so i experienced fun and frustration, astonishment and annoyance, excitement and ennui, ingenuity and inability, sympathy and sadness, love and loneliness, quality and quantity and many more things… the games vary a lot in all of those aspects. But only a few managed to get me thinking: “Wow, i’d actually pay to have a more complete/polished version of that!”

I’ll use this occasion to highlight some of those titles that appeared exceptional to me. Keep in mind that this list is not meant to be a complete list of the top games. I only played a quarter of all games anyway. Its just a list of games that i think deserve some attention.

Final Trip Soccer by Benjamin

I won’t talk about this one… just play it! No, don’t ask, just DO IT! I reserved an overall rating of 5 Stars for extremely exceptional games and in the end this one was the only one of those 220 games that recieved such a vote from me.

The Last Geek by Robotic

It’s basically Super Meat Boy with better graphics and a gameplay twist. Easily the most complete game in this competition. The controls need some tweaks (movement ist too fast in my opinion), but apart from that there isn’t really much to complain about. Also the Kittendare challenge was completed in such a blunt and yet hilarious way that it deserves an award.

Ennui by Zutty

The basic idea of this game is incredibly creative and the gameplay is deeper than you would expect at first. The game itself is a bit short, but it has a lot of potential.

Terra Dua by lectvs

An adventure-platformer, which is a surprisingly rare concept. Surely not among the most adrenaline pumping games, but intriguing and driven by the desire to see what happens next.

Loneliness by Vit

A game that doesn’t involve fighting or the threat of dying, which is a nice change. It comes with an amazing mood, a lovely main character and the by far most annoying message beep sound in the world. The amount of gameplay is quite limited at the moment, but i’d love to see what other friends she might gather in this desolate world in future adventures.

Are We Alone? by Fiona

The search for extraterrestrial life… always worth a game. The logistics and dangers of deep space exploration without it involving battles, invasions and other overly fancy sci-fi stories is quite a rare theme. Add more gameplay possibilities (like building outposts, permanent mines, etc.), many more things to discover and a way to recover from failures without restarting the game and you’ll have a game with a very unique feeling of exploration and discovery.

Thanks to those mentioned for these exceptional games, and equally to those unmentioned for their contributions in this event.

Hi there,

A while ago the October-Challenge was held. It went over the entire month, with the simple rule “make 1$ with a game.”

I planned to enter this game, but unfortunately the port wasn’t ready in time. So now, with a slight (and very miniscule) delay I present my iPhone-game!

Unstoppaball DX is a marble-style puzzler, in which you roll a ball (by tilting the iPhone, no less) through 30 varied levels.

Check out the trailer if you’d like to know more.

Also features a new soundtrack and ball-customization, with 36 balls available.

It’s now up on iTunes. Some say it might be the Best Game Ever. (it’s not) (it’s still fun, though )

-Matthew

Tags: appstore, iphone, itunes, SuccessStory, unity, unity3d

Hey peeps and thanks for all the lovely comments you made on DiggyDig so far! 😀

First I want to explain a couple of things here as reply of some of the comments:

I apologize that it is so crash prone, again. My engine is not very stable and i experiment a lot with it. I try to improve that while i work on it, but it is quite difficult to get it to work properly on different machines with all the different hardware configurations. In that respect, ludumdare is the only wide scale test i have available right now, so i am using your feedback to improve this piece of software so it will eventually end up working alright. LD 21 was already a great help there! Thanks for all your input on it.

Thanks for the praise on the game mechanics. It is certainly not unique, but rather borrowed from minecraft/terraria and taken to a slightly different direction. Getting the mechanics work properly actually took most of the time, so i only had a couple of hours left to create the content, which you can observe in the timelapse.

The limited amount of time, i think i had around 6 hours left, is of course the cause for the lack of game depth, versatility, actual content, and everything else basically.

The physics are very hackish. I never coded collision with rastered terrain before, so i am happy that it works as well as it does.

Post Mortem

What went right:

• I got the mechanics and gameplay to the degree i wanted to. I was not expecting to make a stellar entry either, instead i just wanted to fiddle around with this idea.
• Although loading times are terrible, i was able to get a quite big world created from a number of bitmaps. This was actually an important proof of concept, as i plan to use this technique to improve on the concept.
• The music was quickly hacked into like an hour before the deadline. It is not too shabby, so i’m fine with it.
• The overall appearance is not over the top, but okay. It could certainly use more polish but you can see what it is supposed to be.
• I had awesome food.

What went wrong:

• I couldn’t fall asleep on thursday, therefore overslept on friday, and was screwing up my sleeping rhythm just before LD.
• The theme. I was raging all night after the anouncement, and the day after about this ludicrous theme. I was thinking about making a game actually fitting the theme, before i realized it is just too generic to actually make a game of it. Same as Escape was, but this is getting offtopic. Anyways, only got started with the actual project some time saturday afternoon, so i wasted a lot of time actually not working.
• I spent too much time on the tech side of the game. It was not so bad this time because i was trying to get something done i planned to do anyways at some point, but i really  should get more gameplay done next time.

Aftermath

I will use the next month to play with this prototype.

I will :

• add dynamic lighting and normal maps to create a denser atmosphere.
• create a 2d Ragdoll animation thingy for teh awesome moves like i already started with as you can see in this basic proof of concept:

• add different kinds of terrain materials, and an actuall surface
• add physics (actual 2d physics) for bridges, elevators, traps, and more
• if the january is still not over by then, I will start experimenting with smooth particle hydrodynamics, or an approximation thereof in an attempt to add realistic 2d liquid simulations. I am not sure how well this will perform, but man, that would be wicked to have 😀

I am not sure in what direction i will take this to be honest. This has an aweful lot in common with terraria, which i don’t like. Don’t get me wrong, i love terraria, but i don’t want to basically remake it. So i will just keep working on this and see what i can make of it. While i have a few hints, i am not fully certain about it.

Thanks for reading, and all your precious feedback!

with love

wzl

Hi Guys,

Well after another ludum dare compo I’ve noticed alot of people, including myself have always needed to spend a great amount of time writing the tedious backend for our tile based games, The problem with these back end levels is that they are always the same old code and its just boring to have to write over and over again.

Well not anymore, I’ve been working on a application that allows you to make your tile based game and once your happy with the way it looks you can export the map as a IDE ready source file (currently XNA 4.0/  c++ and JAVA output is planned)

How is this program any different then Tiled for instance? Well with tiled and other programs of this nature it doesn’t allow you to export to ready to use code, you will always need to parse in a XML file for instance.

When you export the file it creates all the needed source code for you.. It may be a little hard to understand so I’ve made a video demonstration below.
Its also worth noting that this is extreamly early in the dev stage and alot of improvements can and will be made. You should also know that the viewport is rendered using a camera so you can look around and zoom in and out (not shown).

Got a opinion on the application, think its crap?.. Great let me know as its early days and your opinions are useful to development.
Enjoy

I got an email today saying that I should go rate Ludum Dare games. Which was pretty sad, because I can’t – even though I want to. (I didn’t participate this time.)

But why not allow people like me to vote – people who have done past Ludum Dares, but were unable to do the current one? LD would get more votes/game without sacrificing voting quality. Plus, I get a nice diversion for a few hours. It’s a win-win!

Switching rooms in game maker was a hazy mystery to me during the end of LD22. It caused me some headaches at the end of the compo, so I’ve taken some time to understand it and write a sample bit of code for general consumption. Here it is (requires game maker of course). Enjoy, and use freely for whatever

What went good?

I’ll start with what i felt went good. I have done probably up to 20 game jams / compos by now, including LD’s and i feel that i’ve started to get to a point where i know what will fly and what won’t in terms of time and production. I know what i can manage when it comes to graphics and animations and i stick to that as much as possible. It won’t look super good, but  then again i’m not primarily an artist, so that’s ok. I know how to manage sleep, food and having a good work routine. I felt like all that worked this time around aswell.

The way i go about comming up with an idea basically boils down to me thinking about the theme for a while. What the theme means, what it could mean or how i can make it more interesting for me. This usually takes about 10-20 minutes, but after that i steam ahead, ironing out any detail that i havent thought about as i go. This is good for the most part i think, over analyzing things usually, for me, makes the game to complex or to strange in the end. I think that if you can’t come up with something decent after twenty minutes, then atleast do something else for a while, try to clear your head. Sitting down and grinding it in your head or on paper for an hour just does’nt work for me if it’s a 48h game. But maybe it should, more on that  later.

The game didn’t turn out great, but i think thats more because i only had roughly 24h to spend in the end, given the full 48h i think it would have been decent. I enjoy working with my own framework and given some more development, it could become something really good.

I had more sound effects in this game then in my previous entries, but it’s still something that i’m doing at the last moment, and thats not good. I need to start thinking about it from the beginning and not as something i have to put in there just becuase. It really helps the game feel better, and i should pracctise making good sound and music.

I’m also glad that i tested the game on friends before i submitted it, something that i have been really bad at in the past. Getting that feedback on balance and bugs and glitches really made the game better and helped me to see the game through another persons eyes. It so easy to go blind to things that, to you the developer, seems obvious and intuitive, but to others confusing and strange. This is a lesson i will apply to all my projects.

What didn’t go so well?

I struggle to get that something special into my games and i belive part of the problem is that i don’t think about the design enough. It becomes a programming challange rather then a game design challange for me. That is, i think more about how i want to code it rather then how it should feel playing it. I need to stop and think of the overall picture, the aestethics and the dynamics of the game. I also need to go back to my old games, and other peoples old games and see what works well and what doesnt, and then steal that. Save it in my game design cheat sheet. I usually play my own games alot, i even enjoy playing them from time to time. But i need to analyze and think more about the design decisions that i’ve made and then cut the bad and keep the good.

The sound was bad, and not all sound effects i made were even in the game. I did them at the last minute, as always, and paid the price for it. I also need to get good at musagi or a similar program for music.

The game balance was bad, but still alot better then what it was just a few hours before the submit. Again, i belive this is a time issue more then anything else. Had i worked the full 48h i hope and belive that it would have been better. But who knows.

Graphics and animations still takes alot of time, but i know that and plan for it. I still sucks tough, so i should practice making graphics alot more then i do now.

There is more to be said about my entry, but i need to get back to work. So i’ll wrap this up with a recap:

The fact that i only had 24h made the game bad, so next time i need to make sure that i can and will spend the full 48h. I also need to think more on my design and what have worked in my previous games. If i do that and just keep producing stuff, eventually i will make that real gem of a game.

Edit: Oh, the game is HERE

YES PLEASE!

Thank you for the awesome response to my last post. There were just over 200 of you wanting to be in the video. I would LOVE to have recorded you all… but Christmas meant I had even less time than usual to work on it. Next time I’ll try and do better… and try and figure out a nice fair way of picking who I do.

But until then… grab some popcorn… then toss it away and open a beer instead – and enjoy:



Thank you again to everyone featured, and thank you to everyone who shows a bit of interest in it. I’ve said it before, but I will happily say it again and scream it from the rooftops: Independent games development is incredible. The community is incredible. And YOU are incredible. Much love. x

Long belated Trainlapse.

Also, since I might have made my game obnoxiously difficult as opposed to “roguelike difficult”.

I had a lot of wonderful feedback for this year’s LD. I never would have gotten so many people to playtest and give honest opinions. I spaced out a timestep issue, which is almost unconscionable – and there was a serious spell bug that I only discovered after the compo. So, since then I’ve been nailing down loose boards, slowing down combat, improving text, making things Just Work.

So, with much more sense-making:
Erased 1.3 (Post-LD version – don’t rate me based on this!) 

The original entry is over here – again, rate me for what’s in the post below, not the link above.

www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=preview&uid=5762

Changes in the post-LD version include but are not even remotely limited to:

• Fixed timestep for all modes (known issue: cosmetic spell animations still act a little weird)
• Slowed down battles in general, more distinct spell naming and effects
• Added “1/Q 2/W 3/E 4/R” captions in battle mode so you have a hint of how to fight
• Moved player dialogue over the player’s head and colored it, added more tutorial/help text
• Drastically overhauled intermission text
• Walking into an object now interacts with it, making space/enter often redundant
• Player and enemy health increased
• Player and enemy spell upgrades separated – major bugfix!
• Player battle sprite is now animated
• Most intermission backgrounds swapped with a higher-res version
• Music added and sounds gutted to make room for less-irritating sounds
• Battle is a seperate screen now instead of being painted over the map view.
• Made Nyan Cat’s role in this story much more clear

Please let me know what you think. I hope this release demonstrates my sincerity in listening to constructive comments, and I really will take them to heart and make the next game better. Also, if you have a post-LD version, I’d very much like to play it!

peace,

Falkreon

I’ve updated my LD22 entry with bug fixes, better instructions, music & sound, and a timer. You can play the new version here. Of course, the original is still available for voting here.

I was very happy to hear that people enjoyed the game. I don’t know if I’ll ever add more content and levels to make it into a long game, but I was able to polish it a bit more. The two big bugs I fixed were 1) subjects who stop colliding with walls and just leave the castle and 2) the player not being able to turn exactly when he wants to. The only other bug I know of is that subjects don’t always leave and enter their rooms well, but that doesn’t affect gameplay, so I left it for now.

Hello everyone!

I’m not really sure how PM works but I will try to do like everyone else. IB4, I’m not native english speaker so sorry for my mistakes and if there is something really impossible to understand, tell me.

First of all it was my first participation and if I’m not busy like hell next time, I’m in again.

I’m really happy to have been able to finish my game, 5 levels and a boss to conclude the adventure (but the story is a lame). For the game design, it’s simple, you aren’t really controlling the main caracter, he is scared so you just help him to run away by making him jump, roll or dive.

What went right:

• My tools: I’m really familiar with most of them, I’m using Visual Studio since years to develop, I’m using Paint.NET to draw because it is so really easy to use for basic drawing (even if I suck at it) and I discovered BFXR to make really easily sound effects.

• Friends: Indeed, during all the event I was connected on IRC (french chan), on mumble and streaming on twitchtv for them, so, when I wasn’t focusing on math for collision (for exemple) and deafen myself, I could talk without focus 100% on my job, like in an open space but still being active on it. (My dual screen approved this, all the work on the main and all the communication on the second).
• Priority orders: After finding the idea and making clear what I wanted to see in my game, I started by creating the engine, the level made with pictures, then the beginning of the graphics, then the physic, the foes, the level design, the opening, the ending, the menu and to conclude the sounds. In this order, I was able to create a game that suits me even if I wasn’t finishing it. (I even made a save file and I’m proud of it ^^”)
• Sacrifices for time: I was able to make some sacrifice like remove an environment, less sleep, always to gain some time. (I kick the first one saying I saved time on graphics :P)

What went wrong:

• Graphics: It’s one of my worst gaps in game dev, so I need to work on it, I swear, I will be able to make better pixel art next time.
• Sleep: I had a sleepless night few days before, I had really short nights during the contest so I felt it but could overcome it by focusing on other things.
• Social life: Really weird when you have a familly meal on sunday and you need to explain them why your leaving the table between each dishes.
• Maths: I really like math but when seconds count, that’s really not fun debugging collisions and physic, it took most of my time on saturday, I’m not totaly satisfied by my physic but it runs and that was the important point.
• Idea: Despite of the fact that I went to bed just after the dicover of the theme, I found an idea but not something really amazing, plateform games are games really hard to inovate so I hope I will be able to spend a bit more time on finding a really original game next time.

To conclude, the game is almost how I imaginated it, I’m really not satisfied by the graphics (I thing you must know it now) but that was a really good experience. Maybe next time I will make more gambles (like new tools or try crazy things).

I will probably work on it a bit more when I will be able to fix my HDD that crashed last week, with all my data and my tools and my OS on it

You can have a look at it here.

Thanks for rating and reading

My game seems to cry for some kind of tutorial or game example, so I decided to make one. Hope it’ll make things clearer for those who are interested in the game but can’t figure out what the **** the game is all about.

Happy 2012, and thanks to everyone who’s taken the time to rate my (and everyone else’s) entry.

Don’t have the time/patience to actually play the game, but still want to justify a 5/5 Theme rating? Check out the walkthrough:

Also, if you can figure out why I apologize to Stephen King, Tweet at me and I’ll give you a prize.

If I can.

Now, back to trying to win this pot of gold…

Tags: alone, Dark Acre, pipedream, shameless promotion, Stephen King

I’m finding a lot of good games that haven’t received many ratings yet, and that’s just sad. So please, check out these awesome games and let’s try to get every entry at least 20 votes.

Dread Maze (demonpants) – A cute little maze game that has your fighter running around and killing things while making hilarious noises.

Dark Isolation (epaik) – A roguelike where you find yourself trapped in a strange cave. Has a crafting system, hunger system, and bears, soo many bears.

Are We Alone?  (Fiona) – Travel from solar system to solar system in search of life trying to answer the age old question, are we really alone in the universe.

Alone with… things! (Hazard) – A boy with the ability to animate objects. Great mechanic and art style.

Tomes of Solitude (Maato) – A wizard with powerful spells in search of ancient tomes. Very fun to play and the most unique take on the theme I’ve seen yet.

Solitaire of Solitude (Lusmu) – A new card game for one. Once you figure out the rules it is very addicting, and the cards are well drawn and quite humorous.

Deserted (stefano_ninja) – a telekenetic wizard on a journey. I’m a sucker of telekenetic games, and this one is pretty good.

LDKittenRL (zackhovatter) – another roguelike. This time you are in search of your lost kitten. Along the way you must fend off insurance salesmen and wild mechanics. If you like roguelikes this is definitely worth your time.

Lost in the Woods (ratboy2713) – a shameless self plug. Now with an ending, a secret ending, and more than four buttons!