I don’t think one of these posts is mandatory,  but they seem common and I don’t want to take risks on my first ludum dare. Can’t wait:

programming in: GM8 using GML

graphics done in: Graphics Gale, maybe some MS paint

Audio done with: FamiTracker, probably

Looking forward to the dare!

*sigh* I’ve done most of my programming and have a mildly enjoyable game up an running, but no music to accompany it. With no musical skills and no procedural music generators that really catch my ear, I’m going to have a rough time in the next few hours.

Getting pretty pumped for my second LD. Had a blast last time, looking forward to going again.
On a side note, why is our hashtag LD48 this month? Isn’t this technically Ludum Dare 29?

So I’ve settled on making a game about helping a team of trapped miners maintain emotional health while waiting for rescue teams to arrive. I was a little less than enthusiastic about my approach this morning, but I think this whole crazy thing is actually starting to take shape somewhat nicely.
The core mechanics are actually all there, I think, so now it’s just a matter of sprucing up my currently abysmal UI. The screenshot above doesn’t show it, but everything is based on really awful text dumps, which is kind of lame for the user and fairly unintuitive to use.

I have to say, this has been an exciting 24 hours. I settled fairly quickly last night on a game concept which I was extremely happy with, only to find that I was having immense trouble actually getting the very menu-navigation intensive gameplay to look/feel intuitive. I ended up cutting a lot of content for the purposes of streamlining the final product that people have to play. Anyhow, I’ve got something which I feel comfortable calling done on a mechanical level, now it’s just a matter of figuring out ways of making the whole thing look and feel a little better. Screen shake and particle effects, here I come.

Here’s a screenshot of progress, by the way:

It’s a game about keeping trapped miners from losing all hope of ever getting rescued. I’m pretty sure that the mechanics are a lot more luck-based than skill/strategy based, but the moment to moment gameplay has proved interesting and engaging for both me and my cousin, which I think is a good sign.

It feels so weird, but I’m pretty sure I’ve finished my entry well before the deadline. I guess it’s just a matter of continuing to test and tweak, now.

Here’s a screenshot of it right now, since that seems to be common around these parts.

It’s about comforting trapped miners so they don’t all loose hope and kill themselves. Fun times!

Undermined is done and ready to play!

It’s a sort of turn-based game about maintaining the emotional stability of caved-in miners. If that sounds like your kind of time (or you just want to try something a bit bizarre), feel free to check out the entry here (opens in new tab), or you can just click on my name at the top of the post. That should take you there, as well.

Because this is a thing people do, right?

The Story Behind Undermined:

I wasn’t ready for “Under The Surface” to win as a theme. I had some comparatively creative and well-fleshed out ideas for other themes in the list (Time Does Not Exist had me particularly interested), but I had never considered Under The Surface as a real potential winner. For about an hour or two after the theme announcement, I had no idea what I was doing. I wouldn’t settle for any kind of generic mining game (I ended up using mining as a setting, but not as a gameplay mechanic) and I didn’t want to go with what felt like the equally obvious “underwater submarine” type of game. I wracked my brain frantically for ideas, and even listened to Wu-Tan Clan’s “Under The Surface” in hopes that it might randomly trigger a bolt of creativity. I don’t quite think I owe it to the hardcore rap (which, by the way, was far more enjoyable to listen to than I had anticipated), but I somehow settled on the idea of comforting trapped miners by dealing with the emotions that they have buried under the surface.

When I started actually working on Undermined, I was hit with an *extremely* discouraging couple of hours. Setting up a functional UI was my biggest problem, as I had initially wanted to show information on every miner simultaneously using columns, but had to switch over to a tab based system because it was just way too much data to present at once without feeling overwhelming. I was also really uncertain on how exactly the player was going to have to handle social interactions with their crew, since not many games handle this sort of thing and I had no real sources from which to draw inspiration for my mechanics. On top of all this, I was working with generally disheartening subject matter that forced me to spend most of my time looking at frowning character sprites and words like “lonely” and “depressed” whenever I edited my code. I stuck it out, though. I brainstormed with a couple of close friends over facebook to figure out how the mechanics should work, and I eventually figured out that breaking up all of the miner’s information into tabs is a really effective way of making things easy to navigate.

So, when everything is said and done, what about Undermined works well?

When I was initially brainstorming with a friend on how to go about the mechanics of the game, I had the following really important exchange:
Friend: if one guy is throwing chairs across the room and one guy is in a ball sobbing, it’s hard to figure out who to comfort first and what to do.

Me: yeah, that’s kind of the challenge I’m trying to capture here.

I’m happy to say that I think Undermined does a spectacular job of creating that particulat tension. On any given turn, you’ll never be able to help everybody, and it actually feels really stressful to decide who needs the most help. Having to make this choice every turn gets particularly intense near the end of the game, where you have to start making the difficult decision of declaring certain characters as being beyond help.

Something else that I’m really happy with is the way that you have to actually remember which members of your party prefer which methods of comfort. I was initially a little hesitant to include a challenge in my game that was based on just pure memory, but it ended up working really well. I like that they player actually needs to pay attention to what their miners tell them and familiarize themselves with the preferences of the crew if they want to get anywhere. It’s such a simple little mechanic, but it adds an extremely personal level to the game and I feel that it gets the player actually invested a little bit more in their crew.

Of course, there are some flaws in there, as well.

Ultimately, there are only really two big things that I’m not entirely happy with in Undermined. The first big flaw is that the game feels to heavily dependent on luck. You can be doing everything right, making the most strategically viable decisions, and you can still get screwed by a bad roll of the dice. I know there are a lot of popular rogue-like type games which are actually well liked for their occasionally rough dice rolls (Binding of Isaac and FTL come to mind), but those games are more about making the most of a bad situation, whereas Undermined is set up in such a way that a bad situation often means that you kind of just have to waste a turn and do nothing, which totally sucks. I’m thinking about doing a post-compo version of the game, and if I do, the number one thing that I’ll do is add a “reroll” system that allows players a finite number of rerolls if they get a set of actions they can’t do much with (i.e. most of your miners hate hugs, but you randomly received nothing but hugging time for the current round).

The second big problem with Undermined is that it’s generally a little bit vague as to how all the numbers update. I think that most people manage to pick up on a lot of the core systems and how to comfort miners, but very few people seem to realize some of the subtleties in the system, which means that they make a lot of really poor decisions strategically. The game is still totally playable AND winnable without knowing the little tricks that I do as a developer, but it feels painful to me watching people play the game and clearly have an incorrect assumption of how the systems work precisely.

My only other “complaint” with Undermined is that I didn’t really have a lot of flexibility with which to draw special effects and add tiny visual details. Instead of giving each of the five miners their own object in Game Maker, I stored all of their relevant information in a single object and had that object draw static sprites of the miners along the top of the screen. I think things ended up looking okay, but I would’ve loved to be able to do things like give each miner subtle little animations using squash and stretch, but locking them up in an array made that a much more convoluted process than I initially intended.

how is Ludum Dare pronounced? I’ve heard tons of people pronounce this in slightly different ways and I want to get an idea of what the majority is. I’ve set up a straw poll here:
http://strawpoll.me/2306356
Please check in with your opinion so we can sort this mess out!

I’ve just realized that in order to make the tower defense-esque game that I have planned, I need to set up and properly balance an in-game economy. This seems like something that could require more than forty-eight hours to get right. Learn from my mistakes, community. Learn from my mistakes.

Does anybody know if there are restrictions on what the file size or dimensions a screenshot should have in order to be uploaded on a submission page? I have a few 1600×900 fullscreen shots but none of them seem to upload properly. Could it be a result of the infamous server load that happens here at the start and end of competitions?

Ever get tired of the same old spotify playlist that you use when programming? You should come on down to the Ludum Dare Plug.dj community! If you’re not familiar with plug.dj, it’s a bit like a digital club where everybody gets a turn at being the DJ. I think that this could be a great place for Ludum Dare participants to congregate, share the music that motivates them to keep working, talk about their ideas in the chat, and make for a more interesting compo/jam than ever.
As far as musical genres go, anything is welcome! Ludum Dare is all about experimentation, trying new things, expanding horizons, etc. Why shouldn’t we do the same with the music we listen to?

So? What do you think? Any interest in dropping by when the compo starts and making it a party?

Just a reminder to head over to plug.dj/ludumdare during the jam for a stream of great programming music, as well as a chance to share some of your own songs!
Come on down, and let’s make Ludum dare into even more of a party than usual!

and I’m just now reaching the point of being fully playable with win/loss conditions. (Wasted a few hours hunting for infinite loops, grumble grumble…)

anyways, here are some progress shots of the game so far:

You have to “screen” people for diseases. Get it? Get it?

I’ll just see myself out…

First things first, if you haven’t had a chance to check out LD scan, yet, you can do so here. I’d recommend you do so before reading this postmortem, as it’ll give you a better frame of reference when reading this postmortem.

How it all happened:
I’ll admit, “Entire Game on One Screen” was a bit of a surprise for me when the theme was announced. I hadn’t done any brainstorming for that theme, so I had to spend my early hours deciding on a concept. My very first idea was some sort of vague fighting game that took place on top of a computer monitor, or “on one screen.” I quickly decided that was a poor interpretation of the theme and wouldn’t make for a particularly unique game, so I explored other avenues. After a bit of looking into synonyms for the word “screen,” I settled on the game that I now have, which focuses on medical screenings.
The actual plans for game mechanics went through a couple of iterations. I initially planned on doing a WarioWare-esque minigame collection, with each minigame being based on a common procedure for medical screening. I never actually thought about how any of them would work, though, and just kind of compiled a list of screening methods on a scrap of paper. The first solid “mechanic” I actually came up with was the simple act of sliding a patient back and forth on a CT-scan by dragging them with the mouse. I immediately loved the idea of that and thought it would feel pretty satisfying, so I started fleshing out a whole game around that.

What Went Right:
Tutorializations: My cousin often jokes that my typical design strategy is to throw players directly into the lion’s den without much instruction and hope that they survive. This certainly holds true for a lot of my older work, but I think that LD-scan does a little bit better than most of my other games with regards to informing the player. Their goal is stated for them outright on the first page of their clipboard, and one of the first things they see before they look for malignant traits is a handy True/False chart that explains the game’s logical operators. Finally, the last page of the clipboard tells the player how to finish a screening and call their patient back for the final decision. The player is generally always informed on what they should do next, which is extremely important.
Difficulty: I’m pretty proud of the difficulty progression in LD scan. The player is always being introduced to new mechanics which both make the gameplay more challenging and more interesting than it was before. The player doesn’t simply need to look for more traits – they need to do so under a time limit, and eventually start negating their results based on patient’s age, height, gender, etc. I’m also happy with how forgiving I made the game. The game had to trigger a failstate after a single failed screening (otherwise the game wouldn’t depend “one one screen”), but it wasn’t until late in development that I decided failure shouldn’t actually send the player any further back than the day they were just on, to avoid frustration.
“Story”:I think LD Scan is actually my first attempt at actually creating a game with an even remotely relevant story. Even though the story is told fairly poorly and treats subjects like medical screening and misdiagnosis with far too little respect (serious business, folks), I’m fairly happy with it. There’s a concise story arc with a beginning, middle and an end, a couple of decent jokes, and some wildly over-the-top failure scenarios which I stand by as the game’s greatest feature.

What Went Wrong:
Time Management: I invested my time in all the wrong places for this Ludum Dare. I stayed up far too late and woke up far too early for my own good, which is not usual for me. My past few Ludum Dares have left my sleep schedule fairly intact, but something about this one compelled me to neglect rest, and I think my work may have suffered for it. Additionally, I lost around four hours of time at the end of the compo because my company Christmas party managed to overlap with Ludum Dare weekend for the second year in a row, and I wanted to attend. I scrambled to put everything together at the very last second, ran out to the party, and found that only two people had showed up and my “date” was running late, as well. Ludum Dare should have been my priority. Parties can wait. (The party did turn out to be really fun, though).
Bugs: I didn’t bother to time myself, but I’m confident that I lost at least three hours of my time just hunting for game crashing bugs in LD scan. A lot of the game’s is generated in loops that create content that adheres to a specific set of rules. There were a lot of these loops, and a lot of them dealt with fairly complex rules. As a result, a lot of them turned into infinite loops that were extremely challenging to fix. I even ended up making a clumsy infinite for loop somewhere along the way that incremented in the wrong direction and never terminated. That one was found by my brother, whose knowledge of programming is limited to a single computer science course from three years ago. He found it within thirty seconds of glancing over my shoulder. I had been looking for twenty minutes. Did I mention that I was lacking sleep?
Workstation: When everything was coming down to the wire, one of the last things I wanted to do was quickly add sound effects to the game. This turned out to be more of a hassle than I was anticipating, as my microphone had vanished and SFXR was no longer on my computer. It took me thirty minutes to find the mic, and just as long to re-download SFXR on my spotty wifi. It really is important to prepare everything you might need for LD well before the jam begins, or you’ll find yourself stressed out and scrambling for tools at the last minute like me. It’s not fun – just take the time to set up your computer in advance and you’ll have a better Ludum Dare experience.

I’ve been participating in Ludum Dare compos for awhile now, but I’m going to be on the road for the first time ever for April’s LD, meaning I can’t use Game Maker, because I’ll be on a mac laptop. I spent a week learning Python before realizing that it puts up a real fight when it comes to compiling and distributing code, so I’ve since decided to explore the Love2D framework for Lua instead. I know I’ve seen a lot of entries made using Love2D, and I was wondering if anybody who has experience with the language could offer help to a total newcomer like me.
I’m especially curious to know if there’s a specific IDE that people like to use, but I’m hungry for any and all tips, tricks, or advice that veterans of the language can offer.

-Thanks,
Nick

Star Power is a goofy turn-based dungeon crawler whose combat system is based heavily on the Ludum Dare rating system. I’ll admit that it’s a bit rough around the edges, but if the idea of rating monsters poorly to discourage them from using certain fighting techniques sounds cool to you, then maybe you should give it a try here (opens in new tab)!

Hey all!
If you’re participating in Ludum Dare this weekend, you’ll want some music to keep you going! Why not come on over to the plug.dj community I’ll be hosting and play some of your music there!

Think of it as a group radio station where everyone on the site gets a chance to play some music that they like. The community is open to all genres of music, so whether you listen to country, rock, EDM, alternative, jazz, or any other kind of music, you should come on by and share that with other participants!

Hope to see you there!

Just another little advertisement for a Ludum Dare plug.dj community I’m running right now.
Come by, play some of your music, listen to a bit of music from other LD participants, and share in the good times!
You can find the community right here if you’re interested!

So, according to google, the word “monster” actually has quite a few definitions that we don’t usually think of.
One that I found interesting is the British/Australian slang term “monster,” which is used as a verb meaning “to criticize or reprimand severely.”
So I’ll be trying to make something out of that – right now I’m thinking about playing as a speech bubble that acts as a spoken monster, if that makes sense.

As a side note, I’m just going to continue shamelessly advertising the Ludum Dare plug.dj community, where you can come by, play some of your music for other participants to listen to, and hear some of their music as well! We’re open to all genres of music and would love to see you there!