Three and a half hours in and I now have the art for a walking animation and am writing my first post. And I have made the foolish decision to try and draw it all by hand.

This is going to look terrible animated as my drawing is far to inconsistent. Things change size drastically from image to image. And I realise now that I didn’t finish his pack on the last frame in the first image.

As a not-very-good artist it also takes me far to long to draw things. However, since my idea is adapted from the idea I had for Isolation (a theme I suggested) it thankfully won’t involve any other entities. Though I would like to add more animations for this character. Sadly my idea is probably to large in scope for Ludum Dare. It will likely turn into something I’ll work on after Ludum Dare 16 is over.

Anyways, now on to cleaning up these drawings into somethign I can actually and making a game with them. I figure I’ll be using C++ with SDL.

So, I think I got a lot of the actual game logic I will have in the final competition entry done today.

You can try the current windows build here (see final submission). And hopefully everything’s working.

The character will look towards the mouse and will walk left and right with A and D respectively. If there’s a branching path you can take the upper one by holding W. With the placeholder graphics the different paths are not entirely clear.

I think any game play will likely have to wait until after Ludum Dare 16. The character walking animations I drew actually look a lot nicer than I was expecting. Shrinking them down from the high scan resolution and scaling the frames to be a consistent size likely helped. I’ll probably spend tomorrow making some environment art and setting up something other than solid colours to explore. And if I have time I’ll look into adding sounds.

It’s time for sleep now though. Hopefully I don’t sleep in to late.

That’s a lie. It’s not finished. But it is playable and it  has been submitted. And I will likely continue working on it outside of the competition. Since there’s a lot wrong with it. maybe I’ll write a post-mortem later about how bad it is. It was definitely to ambitious for one weekend.

Here’s the entry.

Two days after the end of Ludum Dare 16 I finally write my post-mortem. And you will find it after the break.

This was my first Ludum Dare, although not my first time trying to make a game in a short time frame. Twice before I’ve participated in the 24 hour games competitions the game development club at my university holds. I must say that having 48 hours, which allows more time to sleep, is much nicer. And certainly less detrimental to one’s health.

My entry, I Never Missed Anyone Until They Were All Gone, to give its full title, is here. I never really finished it, I guess it was overambitious. Though I think that mechanically it’s where I wanted it in that you can walk around and you would be able to explore if there was actually something to explore. Drawing all the art by hand took far to long.

I would like to continue working on this. Hopefully I don’t lose all motivation now the LD is over. I think my next step will be to try and create some sort of level editor where I can assemble the the world visually and have it calculate the positions of the areas and the lines of the paths for me. Having to write out everything that defines an area by hand and typing it into text files is a pain.

I’ve noticed that it’s difficult to tell where the paths that the character follows branch, since he does follow fixed paths. I think I will keep him on fixed paths but I want to make it clearer where the paths branch. I might do this by having him stop when the path he’s following branches until the player selects one, rather than having a default path for each branch. I will have to try some things out and see what works.

Other than that the large part of what needs to be done next is creating the rest of the world, which means more art I need to draw. I’ll also need to figure out a point for the exploration as well as maybe add some puzzles or some such thing into the game to flesh it out. I’m wondering if I can design puzzles based around observing the environment, rather than necessarily interacting. This might be difficult though.

To finish here’s some photos that I couldn’t be assed to post during the competition proper.

All of the work I did off of the computer, mostly art, and a lot of blank papers dumped rather unceremoniously on my bed near the end of the competition.

The results of a trip to the grocer. I grabbed snacks, only a quarter of which I went though during the competition, and a cooked chicken.

The chicken and leftover rice from my fridge served as most of my meals during the competition. Plus apples.

What I drank during the competition, juice and chocolate milk. Sorry. Chocolate Dairy Beverage. I’m still not sure why it was labelled as such.

Now I need to get started on playing the other Ludum Dare entries and continue working on my game before I lose interest.

Why is there never enough time…

What progress?

Seriously, who the hell voted on these themes? Islands? C’mon…

It’s the end of the first night for me now and I still don’t really have a solid idea. There’s maybe some vague concepts floating around in my head (like islands). And there’s an idea, but I have no idea where to go with it. Hopefully something will develop to the point where I can work with it when I wake up.

So far I’ve only written some very basic code that really does nothing significant and thought a lot with very few results.

I’m not given up yet though. I will continue the fight after sleep.

And that’s all I have. That and a bunch more islands I sketched.

After having given up early Saturday afternoon I decided to spend the rest of the weekend working on a non-LD project. But due to general lethargy that didn’t happen. Then after midnight Sunday morning, with less than 22 hours left in Ludum Dare I got my second wind and did a bunch of quick sketches of islands.

And then after sleeping I couldn’t seem to get anything done with them.

So it looks like LD 17 didn’t work out at all for me. Just couldn’t keep an idea solid enough to seem worthwhile I guess.

Cheers to all the people who finished something though.

I think I will try and get familiar with something other than C++ and SDL by the time LD18 rolls around. Flixel seems nice.

So, I’m in, despite the majority of the themes I like not making it to the final round. This will be my third LD; my last was 17 and I failed to produce a single thing. Hopefully this time goes better.

I figure I’ll be using Flash and Flixel. My other option looks like C++ with SDL.

Terrible GIMP made graphics are probably the order of the day, since drawing by hand takes too bloody long. If I get around to doing any sound I’ll be recording stuff with my microphone. Might do some music on a thumb piano I acquired recently (fuck yes).

I don’t know, but I’m going to make

It’s dangerous to go alone, take this: the girl game.

…and I’ve been up a little over 12 hours and am still going strong (I think). Moslty what I’ve gotten done in the past while is a bunch more areas to explore. Like this:

Still got a lot more areas to make, and a bunch of other stuff to implement before this becomes the game I would like it to be. I’ve got a whole pot of tea in me though, and I’ll see how long I can go before the need to sleep kills me. If I don’t make the competition, at least there’s still the jam. And if I don’t make that, then I guess it’s no different than normal for me.

I am getting a little tired of post-Easter sale chocolate, however, and am wishing I had bought some other snacks (I suppose I do have fruit I could be eating).

I’m really tired, so I’m admitting this is a jam game, if even, and calling it a night. If you can call it that; it’s after 2pm.

I can’t say I’m impressed with my stamina today. I’ve only been up a little over 21 hours (I haven’t really been sleeping well in general though).

Anyways, here’s another screenshot.

I don’t think I could get everything working before the end of the competition anyways, even if I was well rested.

Here‘s a very incomplete build if you’re curious. Arrows or A and D to move, space to do things. 5-9 when in the starting room do stuff (for debugging purposes).

Goodnight (afternoon?).

…but hit the jam.

Entry is here.

I have no idea why I ever thought it possible to get this done in the first 48 hours. I have got to stop trying to make games that use a whole ton of unique art assets for competitions. That’s always where most of my time ends up going.

Would like to add music, and a bit more variety to the events. It depends on how I feel about it tomorrow, post-jam.

I said I was going to make ‘it’s dangerous to go alone, take this: the girl game’. So I did. But I ended up focusing more on the girl game theme I think.

how to be a girl, my LD20 jam entry, has been updated. I suppose I could call it ‘how to be a better girl’ now, or something. I dunno.

The game’s jam page is here. Or you can go straight to the updated version here.

After recovering from LD20 I decided to spend this past week adding to how to be a girl in an attempt to make it feel more complete.  So what did I do?

I added endings. Plural. Not that I expect anyone to put up with the game long enough to see them all (there’s three). I think the main thing I took away from the feedback I got, was the game lacked a sense of closure (it really did). I’m not sure if the endings I’ve added quite do the trick. I could probably do better. One of the endings in the game works pretty well for me, the others possibly less so. Who knows, I may come back to the game in a while and fix them up. Maybe not; they’ll quite possibly stay as they are.

I also added a couple more interruptions for a tiny bit more variety. This is a very minor addition since the interruptions are all functionally the same.

Perhaps the biggest addition, at least in terms of the amount of time it took me, is music. I spent most of the past week recording and editing. I’m quite happy with how the soundtrack turned out, so you download it here, or from the game’s website, if you want (you probably won’t like it). The download includes a couple tracks which did not find a place in the game. I would maybe have used them for a couple of the endings, except their length would have caused a fairly large increase to the game’s (file)size.

If anyone’s wondering, the only program I used in creating the music was Audacity, with a few plug-ins. The music is all thumb piano (played by me) and noise. For the most part all of the noises are recorded sounds that I applied various effects to (the only non-recorded noise is the buzzing crescendo shared by the two tracks that are not in the game).

Give it a play, if you wish, and leave some feedback, if you so desire.

Well, I think I can come up with something to fit the theme. It’s got a few vague ideas floating for me. So I’m in.

Gonna be working with flash, flixel style. The Gimp for arts. If I get around to doing any sound I’ll probably end up recording things with a microphone.

So, about 4 hours ago (midnight here), with 22 hours left in the competition, I decided to scrap the idea I was working on and make a different game.

The original idea was a turn based strategy game, where, essentially, your units would gain bonuses for being isolated from their teammates. I knew that was over-ambitious to begin with though, and it was taking to long to get the basic control system working, so I gave up on it.

My new idea is much simpler, and I think I can get it done in the remaining time (even accounting for sleep). So far the game looks like this:

This is a hint about the gameplay:

I may have abandoned my first game, but I finished the second. The entry page is here.

I actually already posted this screenshot. Probably should have grabbed a new one.

Accounting for the time I spent sleeping, etc, I probably spent around 13 hours on this game. It uses the microphone as its only control method. I haven’t really play tested it. Most of my testing was done with debug controls, so I only have a vague  idea of how well the game actually works. There’s no scoring or anything in the game, and it doesn’t track the time you’ve survived or anything, so I guess it’s a little pointless as is.

Doing the microphone stuff turned out to be quite easy using Flash, so that was nice.

I am reasonably happy with how it turned out I suppose.

In making An Empty Room, my Ludum Dare 22 entry, I foolishly overlooked the fact that not all microphones are the same. This means that different microphones give different results when Flash calculates a microphone’s activity level, which is what I use to gauge microphone volume in An Empty Room.

Then it came to my attention that some people couldn’t play my game, because, regardless of how much noise they made, they were unable to make enough to start the game.

The game works great on my laptop, using my laptops internal microphone, since that’s what I tuned the game for. In fact I cranked Flash’s gain way down so that my laptop’s microphone gave reasonable levels, instead of always maxing the activity level to 100%.

Sort of a foolish oversight on my part. I even had a second, usb, microphone which I used to record sounds, that I could have tested with, but it never occurred to me to do so. Testing now, my usb microphone does seem to give slightly lower levels than my laptop’s internal.

Anyways, I went and made a post competition version of An Empty Room. This version has a configuration menu that lets you adjust Flash’s microphone gain, so that should solve the problem of people not being able to start the game. Otherwise the game is essentially the same.

Feel free to ignore this version for rating purposes. There’s less than two days left in the voting period anyways.

I toyed with a couple other methods of solving the volume problem, but this seemed like the easiest solution that was reasonable. The effect of gain on volume is not linear, which makes automatically adjusting the gain to match the desired levels a pain. And since Flash seems to round off the activity level to an integer percentage (capped at 100%) using lower baselines for quieter mics would result in less precision.

The other option would have been to calculate volume myself directly from the samples instead of simply using Flash’s microphone activity level. I have no idea how Flash calculates it anyways. Doing things myself would involve me figuring out how exactly to do so in the first place and would require me to rework who the effects are calculated in game, since I would be using a different measurement than Flash’s vague percentage. Which is far more extensive than I wanted to make this little update.

An Empty Room’s entry page is here, which has links to both the compo version and this new version.

Alright, I’m in. It’s been far too long since I’ve finished something for LD, so let’s do this.

I’ll be working in c++ with SFML. Using GIMP for graphicals. No idea what other sorts of tools I may use for other sorts of things (sounds? how do people find time to make sounds?).

Took a bit longer than I wanted getting things set up and ready to go, but I did it. Here’s a bit of SFML basecode I’ll be using. I more or less blindly tore it out of another thing (that I haven’t looked at in a month or two), but it should work well enough so I can avoid recoding some basics. Fairly minimal, a basic game class with a loop and one game state at a time, plus some entity and sprite animation code.

Time to go make a late supper while I think on the theme (by late supper, I mean like it’s almost 10:00pm late).