And when I say “we” it’s not like I have a symbiote parasite with its own personality attached to me and trying to take over my regular self driving me nuts.  I’ll be participating in the Jam with two friends. It’s our first time here so there will be a lot of things here that are completely new to us but we are sure we will have a hellin’ good time.

Our framework:

• Java (for the sake of “multiplatform-ness”)
• Libgdx (we have never used it before, but it looks like it may minimize the coding time while maximizing the target platforms.  You can’t go wrong with that)
• Notepad++ (my personal favorite “IDE”).  I don’t know about the personal choices of the rest of the team but it’s probably between Eclipse and Netbeans.
• Coffee (no, it’s not a library, I mean, actual coffee, the one you drink)
• Energy Drinks (no explanation needed)
• Food (probably not of the healthy kind)

 

I’m not sure if my mates wi’ll be participating again but I think I’ll be taking on this challenge at least a second time (it depends on lot of things, but that’s what I plan).  I’m really excited about this competition and I strongly encourage newcomers and veterans alike to give their best on this challenge -and above everything else- enjoy it!

 

Our brainstorming went like this:

• LOL
• OMFG!
• Challenge Accepted

Then, we started improving over the concept of having the old dude from Zelda giving you random and useless items whenever you start the game again. However, no matter how useless the item may look there’s always a way to finish the level with it (by either using the item in a unique fashion or by taking another path where that item becomes handy and allows you to reach the end of the level).

Once we agreed on that, we started thinking on what the game genre would be. We narrowed the choice to “Shadowgate-like” and “Platform game”. What we chose will be a surprise.

Then we decided what the character and enemies will be (that’s a surprise too) and we started thinking a little bit into the game “story” (or at least what the player’s mission will be).

Then we improved the original concept a little bit, having the old man giving you a different item from the array of  useless trash he hides under his bed useful tools he willingly shares with the player, so, if there are 4 tools and 4 levels there will be a total of 4*4*4*4 = 256 different ways to play the game from start to finish based on what the dude gave you for each level. Not bad for 4 levels.

Now we are coding, making the base classes and improving an old map editor I made in my early days of youth to fit our purposes. We may release it to the LD community if it ends up being a multi-purpose and useful tool.

(To be continued… someday)

So, we started working as soon as we matured the idea enough. Our progress so far:
This is our Map Editor (if it becomes something more polished to the end of the Jam, we are totally uploading it for other compos) and our current test setup for the game. We finally switched from Java to C++ (using Allegro) since we failed to find a Java framework with the features we wanted.

#gallery-1 { margin: auto; } #gallery-1 .gallery-item { float: left; margin-top: 10px; text-align: center; width: 33%; } #gallery-1 img { border: 2px solid #cfcfcf; } #gallery-1 .gallery-caption { margin-left: 0; } /* see gallery_shortcode() in wp-includes/media.php */

We have uploaded some pics of our development lair to flickr. Be sure to check them out.

Well, I woke up today a little confused after 12hrs of continous sleep. Man, I was so tired.

Anyway, I decided to tackle the ‘bugs’ and problems our original release of the game had, so I quickly fixed them and uploaded the package to my server with my usual method.

Problem? Since I worked over the original source code and the original folder I missed changing the filename of the packaged game so I kinda overwrote the original file in the server.

Once I realized that, I rushed to upload the original file again and changed the name of the updated version to upload it again (it’s confusing, I know).  So, if anyone downloaded our submission during that time lapse you probably got the wrong version. Sorry for that.

So, things are good now, the original file in the server is indeed the original file and the updated version can be found here. There’s a file inside explaining what was fixed. The most important change is extending the reach of the hook so the LV3 is solvable if you happen to get it for that particular level (See my previous post).

Sorry again for the mess, hope you enjoy our game.

Ok, I’ve only been part of the jam before (LD20) and had a hellin’ good time. However, it seems that I’ll have to go solo this time around if I want to participate as my friends have a life things to do. Problem is… I have quite a few things to do this weekend (and I’ll be back at the office on monday) so I’ll probably have no more than a single day for making the game. Despite that fact, I will try to participate anyways.

As for my tools I have not decided the programming language yet but I’ll be using GIMP for the graphics, SFRX for the effects and probably LMMS, Famitracker or PixelBlipz for the music (haven’t really used them beyond playing 5 minutes with each software, so I’ll have to chose eventually the one that works better for me). Of course, assuming that FX and music make it into the game. Given my time-frame that’s unlikely.

I really want to participate and I’ll make an effort to be part of this iteration of LD… just cannot promise anything.

So…..I knew in advance I’ll have VERY little time this weekend….. and I was also aware how many different things actually go into making a (playable) game…. so I REALLY had to think very well what I would do for the compo.

As I also knew I won’t have the complete weekend to work on it  (and since the theme was to be announced by Friday 10:00PM local time) my plan was like this:

• Friday night (after theme’s announcement): Think on the game concept. Shall I fail to come up with one,  I would abandon the competition.
• Saturday Morning: [Boring things to do]
• Saturday Afternoon (until 7PM): Work on the game (assuming I didn’t abandon the competition)
• Sunday Morning (until 14:00PM): Work on the game. Submit. (assuming I didn’t abandon the competition)
• Sunday Afternoon: [More boring things to do]

The critical point was Friday night…. Fail to have an idea and it’s all over…

Luckily… I think I have my idea now…and it’s not even midnight! (although the clock will probably hit 00:00 when I finish writing this).

Of course sidescrollers, shooters or anything too conventional in terms of gameplay were out of question. I wont’ have the time to do any of those from scratch (as I didn’t declare the use of any boilerplate code beforehand) so this is what I came up with……

You are the Escape Key (ESC)…. you are in a maze of rooms and doors (the keyboard perhaps?) and you need to escape from the evil Function Keys (F1….F12).

You will run into doors, and those doors will open revealing a key that is inside the room (any other key from the keyboard). If it’s a “harmless” and “friendly” key you should press ENTER to enter the room (duh!) and you will keep running until the next door… If it’s a function key you should press ESC to close the door and keep running until finding another door.

So, the game will be pretty much watching yourself approach to doors (first person view) and press ENTER or ESC according to whoever opened you the door and repeat until reaching the exit. You will have a “reaction time limit” that will be shorter as you get closer to the exit. The running speed will also increase as you progress through the game. A timer will tell how fast you managed to escape (if you succeed, that is) so you can play again trying to beat your best time (or a friend’s time if you dare to challenge a friend).

So it’s basically a reflex-testing game built upon the concept of ESCAPE and (hopefully) constraint to my current limitations.

I HOPE I can actually dedicate the aforementioned time to the game and complete it  in such time frame. Although the idea is simple I can still run into a few walls (so to speak) with it.

I’ll try to keep here a journal of any progress made into the game but don’t expect lot of updates since I’m a damn perfectionist b*stard who checks whatever I write dozens of time in order to make sure it makes sense … so making these blog entries consumes a hellin’ lot from my time. Also, I suck at writing, lol.

I’ll start working on the game tomorrow (Saturday) after I finish with everything I have to do in the morning…. so until that time comes I won’t worry about the game….. In the meantime…… STAGE ONE CLEARED!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tags: compo, escape, idea, journal, LD21

Yesterday I went to bed in peace because I have already settled with a game idea and I’m now ready yo start working on it.

If you didn’t read it (and you are too lazy to do it now) it was basically to help the ESC key to escape from the F1..F12 keys by opening doors, avoiding those where a F* key resides and opening the ones where a regular “friendly” key  is.

However, now I realize that the keyboard theme was basically because when I first thought of the idea, you would have to press on your keyboard whatever key was on the room you just opened but after I simplified the idea to use only ESC and ENTER to interact with the rooms, I’m no longer attached to the whole keyboard concept.

So, I would like to know what you people feel would be more fun? passing through doors where keyboard keys help you escape (unless it’s an evil Function key that catches you) or  having the characters be anything else but keys? (like silhouettes or whatever I can think of) and throwing away the whole keyboard theme.

 

Tags: compo escape idea journal LD21 feedback

A door as envisioned by a post-modern programmer/artist

Ok, here is what happened since my last post.

[OPTIONAL SAD STORY]

I was supposed to start working on the project yesterday after lunch but didn’t find the inspiration and was tired as hell so before writing a single line of code I took a short nap that somehow became a ~3hrs long sleep. I woke up around 6 PM and after coming back to my senses (around 6:30PM) I sat in front of the computer so I could start working on the game. I settled with Monkey as the programming language and made some progress with the code… but as the night fell I started running into some problems. I was not satisfied with the overall implementation of a few things and although I tried a few alternative ways I was not getting the results I wanted. My goal was to finish the game that night so I could spend the few hours I would have available on Sunday to make music/sound and better graphics.  Around 3 AM I discovered (by checking facebook) that DST  was to be resumed that night… so it was 1 hour later than what my clock was telling me. Having my time cut by my “little” nap and the damn DST, and frustrated because I was unable to achieve the results I wanted for the game, I decided to give up on the project.

I woke up this Sunday a bit before lunch, a bit depressed for having abandoned the project.

My sister entered my room and asked me about the competition and I told her I gave up on it last night. I remained on bed a few more minutes and then started thinking on my plans for the day.

I discovered I had nothing better to do, so after a few minutes, I decided to give it another shot at the project. I rescued the files from the recycle bin and started working on it again. Don’t ask me why I did that… I didn’t have a single reason to resume the project… in fact, it was quite unrealistic to even think it was possible to finish the game in the remaining time having already lost like 50% of the estimated time I had. But I was not in a hurry for finishing now… I was .. just curious to see how far I could go with it…

[/OPTIONAL SAD STORY]

I actually got trolled by the clock. I checked the LD page and made my schedule according the remaining time it displayed. I should have grown suspicious that it was still telling me that the compo would end around 10:00 PM despite the DST, but I wasn’t thinking on the DST in that moment.

I managed to finish the game code around 8 PM, so I had like 2 hours to make some music. After trying a few programs from the LD tools page and realizing I didn’t have time to learn any of those I settled with composing the music with my DS (and the DS-10 Synthesizer) and record it on the PC with a stereo cable. It worked fine. I made the special FX with SFXR on my computer.

I wrote the sound manager module and then rebuilt the project. It worked fine except for one thing… background music was not looping. I tried a few things but given the time constraint I ended up giving up on it, leaving only the special fxs.

With like 40 minutes remaining until the end of the submission deadline I uploaded everything to my website and tried it on the browser.  It worked fine except for a minor thing… I was loading resources in the moment you need them, so the first time you face an open door, or any of the game screens, the game freezes for a second or so in order to load the image/sound. BAD.

I coded a quick and dirty image manager class that I could use to keep a cache of previously loaded images. Then replaced all loading calls for cache calls and added a few calls at the beginning of the code to cache the most heavy images (so they were already loaded from the start) and then uploaded the game again. Now it was working fine. As I didn’t write a cache for sounds you may miss a few sounds if they are too slow to load, but that shouldn’t affect the experience.

With only 18 minutes remaining until the end of the competition I finished uploading the game and submitting it into the compo. I was done.

I felt so relaxed that I kicked back and checked the IRC…. only to find that it was still 1 hour and 18 minutes until the end. Damn YOU DST!! LOL.

—————–

TL;DR? Managed to make the game. Don’t ask for the graphics as I had like half the time I was supposed to have (which was already around 1 day total). Had some problems but fixed them (although some compromises were done). Total time was around 8 hours including “art”, “sound”, and “music” (which was not included for technical reasons). Also, I’m bipolar.

 

HERE IS THE GAME!

P.S: You need to correctly avoid/enter 50 doors to win the game. Good luck with THAT!

Tags: compo, escape, journal, LD21, post-mortem

If you haven’t played our game yet I strongly encourage you to do so. We are hungry for feedback!

Well, ok, is time to do this; post-mortem time!!

Enter the team

  

I call this portrait "Smiling Shadow"

 

I’ve personally been around since LD20. I participated for the first time with two friends from University (when jam entries were not rated) and we had a hell of a good time. Then LD21 happened, and I was alone, so I entered the compo. I must say that sometimes, working alone can be truly depressing, but may scale into an epic adventure. I skipped LD22, and -if I must be honest- I wasn’t quite sure if I would make something for LD23, after all, I’m a kick-ass programmer but with little art skills.

 

 

He is less blurry in person. Less colors as well.

My friend and jam mate (ilovepixel) is a completely different case. He knew of ludumdare, but never participated before. He is a hell of an artist and all-around creative guy.  Since this was LD’s 10th anniversary, I asked my friend if he was interested on participating. He liked the idea, so -before I could fully realize the implications of it- the game was on and there was no backing down.

For this entry he was going to be in charge of the art, and I was supposed to take care of programming and music (given we had time to add such a thing to the game). His weapon of choice was Photoshop while mine were Notepad++ and Monkey.

 

 

 

The game is on …

Friday

We met online Friday night, about 20 minutes before the theme was announced. I was on IRC waiting for the life-deciding moment. After some technical difficulties, the irc bot finally announced the theme; the usual chain of events followed. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance; we went through all of them in about 15 minutes.

We wanted to make something different (some forecasts were done in IRC about most entries being side-scroll platformers with small elements and creatures and with some linear combination of “tiny” and “world” as their name) so we first thought of a tower defense game.

To fit the theme we pictured small-scale organisms like protozoa, amoebas and that kind of living creatures. As I wanted to bring some emphasis into the “tiny” aspect, I envisioned the world to be limited by tight constraints, like a petri dish… or… a drop of water. We later found that you can actually fit a hefty number of bacteria into a drop of water so we went along with that.

At that point we already decided it would be a “player-vs-enemy” battle and we came up with the idea of the drop falling into ground and having the microorganisms to fight each other for survival. Since bacteria was going to be carried to the battlefield in drops of water, we decided to use that as a core restriction; the player won’t have the freedom to create units by accumulating points or resources, but rather he would receive a number of units after each drop reached the ground.

There was a problem with our choice of genre (tower defense) though; player units were required to be stationary while the enemy was supposed to move freely across the field. We then started thinking on ways of making our units to move, but it wasn’t easy to picture some unicellular organism moving on that scenario other than by drifting on the liquid surface with no input from the user.

Then I recalled Conway’s game of life, and although it’s not a game per se, there you have cells which “move” by death and spawn of new ones. The idea of fully implementing conway’s rules followed quickly, so we settled with making a playable version of Conway’s automata with the additional challenge of  incoming waves of enemy cells.

The formation you dream your country came up with, but deep into your heart you know it was an asian dude.

 

With the basic game concept and mechanics decided, we called it a day and logged off so we could start working on the game the next day.

Saturday

My mate came over to my house Saturday around 3:40 PM. We had things to do early that day so we started with more than half a day of disadvantage. My friend shown me some ideas he sketched on his pocket notepad related to the main game view and the intro, so we discussed them and settled with the general feeling of the game.

I had a few basic classes and components made as part of the warm-up weekend, so I didn’t have to code ABSOLUTELY everything from scratch (I had animations, tilesets and the framework for dynamic resource loading implemented) but I was still missing a few things (fonts, scene management, cameras, etc) so I ended up doing a lot of them during the compo/jam which drastically reduced my time.

I wasted some time experimenting a bit with zooming in and out of the field, but since I didn’t have a solid mechanism for camera control I discarded the idea and went ahead with a fixed zoom level (we will probably implement zoom on the post-jam version).

If you are curious, this was our inspiration for the general look and feel of the player’s units:

Real unicellular organisms as seen by an electronic microscope

 

We stopped working around 5 AM and we went to sleep. We planned to rest for 4 hours but we ended up taking a 6 hours full nap. BAD.

Sunday

We further discussed the game rules, basically if it was worth introducing new rules that took into account the fact that two different parties were in play but everything we tried completely broke the game. After realizing how truly wise Conway was, we decided to make no modifications to the standard rules. Well, to be completely honest, I managed to sneak a little modification: while the conditions of “overpopulation” and “loneliness” doesn’t take into account whether the cells are friend or foe, for breeding you NEED the 3 cells to be of your team (although we don’t explain that in game :/ ).

My mate made some tutorial screens explaining the rules and finished the sprites, which I later added the game. I worked into implementing individual sprites for each cell so they could display different animations (like “death” or “sprout”) instead of all the living cells displaying the same sprite and dead cells having no animation. This is where I came up with the current implementation which is most likely the cause of the performance drop the game experiences after a certain number of rounds. I knew  it was going to cause problems but according to my calculations, there was no time to implement a dynamic sprite pool (and in fact, I didn’t have time to later rewrite this part) so every time a cell spawns, a new sprite is created in memory. Where is the memory freed? only god knows.

My friend left my house around 6:30 PM because he had things to do. At this point the game had no turn-based action and no way to remove cells once you placed them on the field. We also had no enemies although all the methods for adding and processing enemy cells were already implemented and tested (by manually placing  enemy cells and watching them “live”).

I kept working on the game: Added the full set of animations my friend made, added a way to recognize cells placed by the player so you could remove them if you wanted, and had the basic turn-swapping mechanics in place. I also implemented a text box which could contain multiple lines of text which I used to signal the beginning of your turn.  It was 00:00 AM, Monday, so I left the development and did my routinary sunday-night routine which involves preparing myself for the next day (which means returning to my day-time job). Went to bed between 3 and 4 AM.

Monday

Arrived home around 7:30 PM after an intense day at work. Jam deadline was due 10:00 PM so I only had 2 hours and a half  to finish the game. I immediately resumed my work on the project. I kinda panicked since my mate wasn’t online and I needed a credits and game over screen as well as redoing the tutorial to have simplified instructions and reflect a change in the background color of the field. I also needed a story.

I decided I didn’t have time to sit and wait so I crammed the credits into the intro screen, used the handy textbox class I implemented the night before for recreating  the tutorial screens together with a new set of screens I made . Then added a skip button I quickly created with one of the fonts we were using.

For the story, I wrote a short description of the game premise and stuffed it into another text box which I made scroll. I also added another skip button for that screen as well.

Finally I wrote the game-over condition test and abused yet again of my textbox to notify the tragic event to the player and display the survival stats.

My friend finally logged in, like 10 minutes before the deadline. Too late for redoing anything of what I needed, sadly. I polished a few details and started getting ready to submit. I launched the submission form and started filling what I could. I also ran filezilla and connected to my ftp.

It was 5 minutes before deadline and the game didn’t have enemies. I came up with some crappy AI which basically starts spawning cells after two  rounds, trying to fit a few standard formations which give the enemy either a stable low population of cells, or some compact weapon (The glider, which you can try here). It didn’t test if the formation fits though, or if it causes to suddenly annihilate his entire army, so whenever the enemy runs out of cells, a new wave arrives.

I was finally done with the enemies and it was like 10:01 PM. I was off by 1 F*CKING minute!!.

I refreshed the ludumdare’s homepage and realized that the submission hour just started. I was then like “Damn right!! the submission hour! We are SOOO not screwed now!”.  It was actually good that I forgot completely about the submission hour, because otherwise I may have worked without haste.

I then realized that our game didn’t have a name so I asked my friend to think on something. He came up with drop of life which I immediatly liked. I told him if he could integrate the title into the intro screen, I also uploaded the game to my server to show him the current status of the game. He luckily loved the result and the way I implemented the missing things and brought everything together (the last time he saw the game before leaving my house not all the animations and assets were in the game, mostly placeholders and the first animations he did).

He sent me the modified intro screen which I added into the game, rebuilt the project and uploaded everything to my server again. Filled the LD form and submitted….

IT WAS OVER

It was DAMN over. I was tired as hell… with a f*cking headache that words alone can’t describe…. but I was satisfied… and happy.

And so was my friend. I must say it was a real pleasure to work with him. He worked lighting-fast and delivered high quality assets for the game in jaw-dropping time. We both are proud of what we achieved; we came up with a nice game concept and we managed to develop the game entirely (well, not 100% complete but it’s playable and it looks damn good)  in probably no more than 30 hrs. It doesn’t have music, it has a few bugs, and some screens are pretty generic but man, we love every damn bit of it.

So we would like to ask you from the bottom of our hearts: Play the game. We truly hope you enjoy it as much as we enjoyed developing it.

You just can't hate it, can you?

 

EDIT: Added the MOAR tag so this post won’t appear as the behemoth it is unless you click on (more…)

ERRATUM: I *think* I added a temporary form of credits on the intro screen on Sunday night but I’m not actually sure of it. Just wanted to add that clarification for the sake of accuracy.

Tags: drop of life, jam, journal, ld23, post-mortem

Ok, I’ve rated 50 games so far (and left comments on each one of them because they all deserve it) so it’s time for me to share the awesomeness of the entries I’ve reviewed. I must say all of them were amazing games so it’s hard for me to pick only 10. I would actually like to pick 50 but oh well, I don’t want this to be easy for me either, picking 10 is a sort of a personal challenge.

There are a few games whose level of polish blown me away. I’ve placed them at the top 5 places of this list.  Besides that particular arrangement there’s no order in the list whatsoever.

Top 5

• Inside my Radio Bit-trip-Who? Play this game and you’ll forget about those games.
• Predicament Simple, short, but amazingly well done.
• Asylum Awesome game, and the ending is so-  I mean.. it’s just so-  oh.. really,  play it.
• Ant Surf Hero: The Surfening Lot of people seem to like this game. Let me tell you something: they do it with reason.
• Tiny Civilization Old-school fun with old-school feel. Love it.

Moar amazing games

• Tiny Garden of Hope L-O-V-E-L-Y. You MUST play this game. You MUST PLAY IT NOW.
• Disregard All Humans Eating humans have never been more fun than this, truly.
• TinY World  An interesting take on the theme. Creativity at its best. May be too hardcore for traditional audiences though.
• Tiny Castles Sound fxs can get a little bit annoying but the game overall feels pretty awesome. Loved the game.
• Cube World I suck at this game but I like it a lot.

Special Mention

I actually couldn’t pick only 10. This game just HAD to be on the list, so I’m cheating here and awarding this entry the honorific title of  “Special Mention“:

• Prince of Leaves Only thing I have to say: “Let’s go on an adventure, Let’s go on an adventuure… do-do-do-do doo”

 

I’ll probably make another top 10 after 100 games (which is something I plan to reach at the end of next week)

We would love to receive more feedback on our entry as well, since we want to make a full-fledged game out of it so If you haven’t played our game yet and you have a few minutes to spare after playing all the awesome games posted above, check out our game!!

PLAY OUR ENTRY HERE

Thanks.

Tags: favorites, ld23, Top10

After I rated 50 games, I choose 10 entries which I thought deserved more recognition and praise. Now I reached my goal of 101 entries, so I’m picking 10 more games from the total I’ve played so far (of course, without repeating games from my previous list, so if I’m not repeating games here it doesn’t mean I don’t like those entries anymore, lol). To celebrate I reached my goal, I’m also putting pictures this time around!. You have no idea how hard is to select only 10 more entries out of 100 (and believe me, scrolling such a long list to spot the entries you enjoyed the most is not any easier, so if I missed one I’m sorry ) but here is my attempt:

Let’s do this!!
Zephyr

This game is beautiful. Simple, fun, polished, play it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tinysasters

AWESOME game. Amazing graphics, cool background music and with innovative game mechanics. Loved it.

 

 

 

 

Game With a Fantastic Title

A beautiful musical experience accompanied by gorgeous art. Warning: Involuntary smiles may be a side effect of playing this game.

 

 

 

 

Little City

A gameboy-era-reminiscent game. A tiny adventure on a tiny city with a mind-blowing ending. Tears will come to your eyes when playing this game.

 

 

 

 

Apocalypse Inc.

Die Aliens! Die! Die!!! Mwahahahahaha!!!

 

 

 

The Tourist

Interesting adventure although the beginning is a bit slow. Be patient with this entry and play it until the counter reaches zero!

 

 

 

 

 

Cosmicro

A challenging game. You can clearly see how difficult is to defend a planet when you play this game.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Obsolescense

Interesting and well executed game mechanics. The mission is to survive as much as you can by finding new planets where your population can migrate before the end of that world comes.

 

 

 

 

Phobius

Intriguing take on the theme. It doesn’t matter if you don’t feel anxious in small spaces in real life, this game will make you feel exactly that once your character feels trapped. Don’t believe me? play this game.

 

 

 

There is a Picture

Insteresting and insightful game where -in fact- there is this picture…

 

 

 

 

 

Special mention

The Green Planet

Yeah, I cheated again. I was unable to pick only 10. This game deserves to be on the list as well.

We all know that for the most of it, gravity is a b*tch. Well, in this game you have to use your planet’s gravity to redirect asteroids so they impact with Jupiter, collecting the resulting debris so your planet can grow. In other words, this is probably the only scenario where gravity will ever help you reach your goal instead of sabotaging your plans.

 

Well, if you haven’t played our game before, you still have 1 hour, 30 minutes to PLAY IT! We love to receive comments, suggestions and any form of feedback you may spew! (from both Conway’s Game of Life veterans and people who never heard of CGOL before).

EDIT: Now I’ve mastered the obscure art of proper paragraphs.

Tags: favorites, ld23, Top10

It’s always pretty exciting to work on a game for  ludumdare. I’ve participated alone and in team and it’s always such a great experience!

I’ve seen a few discussions popping up here and there about the judging/review process. There are several instances where it’s not THAT easy to know how to rate a game!

While I’m not a veteran, during the time I’ve been here I’ve seen people agree on “best practices” that I’ll try to outline below or at least start a healthy open discussion about them! (if I’m wrong in any of them please let me know!)

 

Take into account  whether the game was submitted to the compo or the Jam!

This will let you rate the game better. I know bad graphics are bad graphics, but compo games can’t be judged with the same “harshness” you would use for Jam games because they were done in less time (48 hours instead of 72), by a single person (not a team) and -in theory- during the competition! (which is not necessarily true for Jam games, where using pre-existent assets is allowed). Same with music, or the level of polish. In fact, every aspect should be judged taking into account whether is a jam or a compo game!

 

Make sure you read the description!

The “description” is the first and main instance for developers to communicate with future players, so a lot of them will try to post information here that will help you play and rate their game.

I know sometimes there’s nothing relevant in the description, but you’ll find that in quite a lot of games reading the description first will definitely make a difference! Perhaps the developers didn’t have time for a tutorial and you’ll find the instructions there. Perhaps all the audio was taken from somewhere else and they are honest about it in the description (more on this later), perhaps you need to install something before playing the game.  Perhaps the web version has annoying bugs and glitches the other versions don’t have. All of this is relevant and will probably help you judge their game better!

 

The game doesn’t run? Don’t rate it!

If the game you are trying to play is not working for you, don’t give it a low score!. The most sensible thing to do is leave a comment saying that it didn’t run on your system. If you can provide relevant information (Operating System,  Processor, graphics card, Browser, A message that popped up before crashing, etc) all the better!

 

Remember that N/A means Not Applicable!

If the game lacks audio, for instance, the best thing to do is to NOT rate the game in that category.  Same with humor, for instance. If it’s an emotional game about a serious topic there’s no reason to give it a 1-star rating in humor when it’s not trying to be funny.

 

The audio or graphics are not their own? (Open to discussion)

For jam games where assets made before the competition or freely available on the internet can be used this is a really hard topic!. A lot of developers will tell you in the description if there’s something in their game they didn’t make themselves, while others simply won’t, which makes this issue all the more complicatedl! Not really sure what the “recommended course of action” is, but when the audio for a game wasn’t made by the team I usually don’t give the game a score in that category.

If they used a mix between things they made during the jam and things they borrowed from public sources then I try to “judge” the assets they did for the game and how they “blend” with everything else.  It’s a really complicated case (and hopefully uncommon) so I’d truly love  to know what other people do when this happens!

 

Leave a comment!

Leaving a comment after you’ve rated a game is not only a way to let the developer know you played their entry but also a way of helping them improve their game!  Bug reports, suggestions and feedback in general (e.g: “Loved your game!”) are always welcome by developers and will most likely help them continue working on the game beyond ludumdare. Plus, a lot of people (including myself) will return you the favor!

 

 

I think that’s all the advice I can give for rating games. If you know of other “best practices” please let me know and I’ll add them here!
Having said that, go and rate some games!

 

Tags: advice, judging, Ludumdare

This is the first time we all participate as a team. Both @elmismopancho and myself have participated a number of times before, and @ignius has also been part of the LD experience a couple of times already. @mspawa on the other hand was new to this and it was really awesome to have her on our team.

The Plan

Before the jam even started we already had the idea of using voice commands as input for our entry. Quite a few number of options during "Theme selection" looked like easy candidates for voice-controlled action, so we were pretty confident that we would be able to go with that idea.

At first we thought a phone app was our best option, but after some research and quick tests, we found out that the HTML5 Speech recognition API was going to work just fine, at least on Chrome. Having a game that does not need to be downloaded is always good.

Only problem? None of us (devs) had used a HTML5 framework before, but I had heard of Phaser, so we quickly looked at the docs and examples and decided to take the leap.

So, in summary: We wanted our next game to be voice-controlled, and that meant using mostly tech we had never used before, which was exciting in its own right.

LD Starts

We met on Skype when the theme was announced Friday night, and we started discussing ideas. We went to bed with a rough idea of what we wanted to make and a plan of meeting Saturday somewhere, to jam together.

The next day we worked on the voice recognition and implemented the first stage using placeholders, while our artist, @ignius was sketching game elements, and worked on the title screen. @mspawa wrote the script, which constantly had to be adjusted as we decided on the details for each part of the game. We intended to make around 5 stages but it quickly became apparent that 2 or 3 was a more realistic goal.

Sunday was an interesting day. A lot of assets were done and added to the game, and @mspawa started looking for sound effects when no changes to the script were required. We settled for 2 stages, and by the end of the day we had both of them working.

As many of us had to work on Monday, it was mostly a day of fixing bugs, adding the intro screen and a quick message at the end, inserting the sound effects and uploading everything to our servers. This was when we discovered that the latest version of Chrome required HTTPS for microphone input, so @elmismopancho quickly got a SSL certificate for his server that night, just in time for submission hour. I did the same the day after, to have a mirror for the game, just in case.

What went well

• Despite using a bunch of stuff we were completely unfamiliar with, we managed to make a game that we are all proud of.
• Speech recognition worked better than we expected.
• It's always fun to be with the rest of the team in the same place, working on a game, and for most of this LD we were able to do that.

What went bad

• We had to cut a bunch of level ideas and scale down the game a lot.
• While a Chrome-only game was better than an Android-exclusive app, we would've loved to make something that everyone could play on their browser of choice.

What worked...somehow.

• I was really sick during that weekend and not feeling terribly well, but I managed to make my part anyway.
• We originally wanted to have commands that made sense but were mapped to the wrong actions, but we soon discovered that the Speech recognition had problems with short commands like "up" so we were in a tough spot. This, however, made us go with completely nonsensical commands, which added some extra charm and humor to the game.

Post-Jam version

We also made a Post-Jam version, with some minor improvements and language options, so now you can play our entry in Spanish, or (what we think is even more hilarious) in English but using Spanish commands!

Big thanks to everyone who has already played our entry, we LOVE you all, and we really hope you enjoyed our game!

Special thanks to those who took their time to leave feedback, be sure to check their games too!

@andidebob, @badly-drawn-rod, @c0nst4ntin, @deadlyalive, @dorkandy, @dotsquid, @dragojt, @evil-as-shit, @gamesplusjames, @geck0, @guckstift, @herniewise, @huitre, @irishbruse, @jason200101, @josehzz, @jsmcag, @lereveur, @machinetribe, @mamoniem, @mathiouza, @matt-fabius, @naminuz, @oddballdave, @pavel-kouril, @peachtreeoath, @pfeyffer, @phlip45, @pixel-game-wizard, @pjchardtthesecond, @prodigalson, @qzqxq, @rafael-souza, @ratly, @rixud, @robotsandmuffins, @rootpew, @simonhutchinson, @simplepotential, @steve-johnson, @sugarbyte, @sythgara, @teacapn, @thecodefactory, @tjakka5, @tmpxyz, @tyler-miller, @valphera, @vasco-rodrigues, @virtualacademy, @zyow.

If you haven't tried our entry already, you can try it now, and if you like the idea we encourage you to try the Post-Jam version, which has some extra polish.