I started early this morning, and despite a few things looking a bit odd I’m on track to finish this game for the Compo. It’s a spaceship shoot-em-up game with a twist, I haven’t got to the point where I implement the twist yet but I think it’ll work really well. So far I’ve done 3 Waves, a dialogue system and all of the sound effects. Tomorrow I’m going to do Boss 1, the super special plot twist and the final boss, as well as music and the title screen. Unfortunately, there is no name yet.

Here’s how this ties into the alone theme:

Humans have discovered one other intelligent race in the universe, but a new recently elected (psycho) President (might change the title to something like dictator) doesn’t think very fondly of the aliens and wants to completely eradicate them, so humans can be alone in the universe again. This stems from the question, “Are we alone?”. The answer has become yes, but the President prefers it the other way (because he’s stark raving mad).

Here’s an incredibly detailed rough of Boss 1, if you’re interested. I’ll be livestreaming all though tomorrow, if anyone wants to watch… ;_;

0% mood score

The boss symbolises my internet. The player symbolises... a player.

I’ll have to admit, my first ludum dare was very far from easy. I took hardly any breaks and the rush at the end to fit in the (amazingly detailed) title and end cards and final boss was a bit overwhelming and I finished with one minute to spare. But I’m happy with what I made, and I’m surprised I actually made it this fast, because the last game I made took me 2 months and wasn’t as exciting as I had hoped.

So anyways, I came up with the idea after reading a book called “The Other Hand” in english. The book deals with immigration and discrimination, but since I can’t make a serious game I un-serious-ified it and put it into a character. That character being “El Presidente”. The spaceship idea just came to me, as did the plot twist. Not that the plot twist is serious either.

My decision to make the game have dialog came from the fact that I’ve never gave any of my games dialog before, it has always been tooltips or just UI elements. I don’t know if I did a good job with the dialog. I tried to inject some ironic humor but some people might take it seriously, which just makes it look like a cheesy, broken storyline.

What went right:

• I was familiar with all of the tools that I used. StencylWorks, Fireworks, PXtone; maybe it would have been better if I used another tool ending in “works”.
• The idea I had was clear, that way the game flowed better (than it would have been).
• Feedback and playtesting from friends over an IM service.
• SFXR is amazing. AMAZING. My game sounds great, from my perspective.
• That short music track made the game. It was really boring without it.
• Motivation! I wanted to do my first ludum dare right.

What went wrong:

Oh god, my internet.

Throughout the two days of the competition my router kept breaking for periods of time. This wasn’t directly affecting me, but it made my livestream (that nobody was watching :c ) cut off every hour or so and disconnected me from conversations from my playtesters friends. When it came time to upload my game, the router went down and wouldn’t come back up. I desperately set up 3G tethering, but that (somehow) broke too. The internet came back on 30 minutes after deadline, at which point I was relieved to find out that the submission time had been extended. Thanks, downtime.

My humor. I’m really not sure about my dialog.

Towards the end of day one and at the start of day two I started unintentionally doing other things, I don’t know why. At 12 hours remaining I snapped out of it, though. Thankfully.

Sleep. Just an hour longer… (I did make it for 9 am every day though)
I’ll be in bed the whole way through christmas at this rate.

The fun:

I would say “the whole thing”, but there’s no point in making a list if that’s all you have to say.

Designing the ships was a lot of fun, I really enjoyed myself making them. Same goes for the music; pxtone is a brilliant music editor.
The most fun was had though, programming the game with StencylWorks. It was really fast and I didn’t have to do any extra engine stuff that would have brought friction upon my idea.

The not fun:

Designing Levels, ugh. Next time I design a spaceship game (or if I continue designing this one), I’m going to make programming movements a lot more me-friendly.

—

So, to conclude, I really enjoyed participating in this ludum dare, and will definitely be doing it next time too!

Here’s a link to my game: Splaser Strife – by RHY3756547

(the lens flare on the logo is for sheer crappiness factor, i don’t actually think that looks good!)

It looks a lot better in motion, I swear.

The only readable parts are the graphics, and there's no text in them.

I don’t know how to download files off of livestream, so you can check out the slow, realtime process here:

http://www.livestream.com/rhy3756547/folder

My internet cut out a lot so there are big/small gaps between some of the videos but nothing too important should be missed. Except for the submission, which as I mentioned earlier in my post mortem, was hell. Unfortunately, since my upload speed is incredibly low the videos are in SD so there’s a lot of text missing. The StencylWorks design mode parts won’t be visible at all. Sorry.

Tags: timelapse

So I slept in this morning… so I’m a lot behind schedule. For whatever reason I’ve been doing the Music & Graphics first, so hopefully I have enough time to complete the gameplay. :>

Here’s the music that I’ve got so far, it’ll probably get longer later though: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/12239448/ludumdare.wav

The game itself is a game where you destroy stuff with your artillery boat on multiple small worlds. Also stuff tries to destroy you. I don’t know if there’s going to be any reason for the destruction, it’s just happens! Jeez!

Satan might have had a hand in my game, but don't hold me to it.

So this is my second time participating, my first entry being the mediocre Splaser Strife. Since it was my second ludum dare, I wanted to make something with more thought put into it than the last, and that was a lot more original as a game concept. I think I succeeded, but there are still loads of places to improve on!

What went right:

• Familiar with toolsets and frameworks used. Pxtone was the only unknown here, since I’ve only made a few things, but it came out alright!
• Graphics, the style I chose for this actually turned out pretty well and was mostly consistent.
• The physics. Though they are hard to control it really adds to the game’s comedic factor (and allows for some cool jumps!).
• Particle effects, they look really nice. (but laggy)

HOW THE WTF?!?

What went wrong:

• I slept in on both days. That was a bad move which cost the game a few levels and a controls revision (which was probably crucial)
• Performance – all the crazy particle effects kill older PCs.
• Ran out of time, Title screen, end screens, lack of gameplay polish and few planets reflect that.

Middle Ground:

• The music is super tonal, it sounds nice but it might be too extreme/get really repetitive since it’s only like 45 seconds. I’ll probably practice a lot more with music composition before next time.
• Unclear idea, all I actually knew was that I wanted a boat and a planet. The rest was spur of the moment decisions.
• Needs more enemies.

The submarine boss was designed at the last minute.

But again, I had a ton of fun participating in Ludum Dare this time, and I’m definitely going to to it again the next. It’s great to remind yourself that making games doesn’t have take as long as you give yourself.

Designing the planets was a lot of fun, especially the crystal planet. Although they’re simple, I tried to include specific jumps and terrain styles to give each planet its own distinct looks. If I make an extended release for flash sites, it’ll definitely have more planets.

So to conclude, I’m really happy with how my game turned out! And you guys should be too, I’ve seen some great things while voting. So here’s a link to the final thing:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=rate&uid=7339

If you beat it, or even if you don’t, please submit your score to the leaderboards. I would love to see how everyone’s doing.

Thanks!

I’ve decided to participate in Ludum Dare this weekend! I couldn’t make it last time because I had other plans, but this time is a definite.

The previous two time’s I’ve entered I made games with a program called Stencyl, but more recently HTML5 has struck me as a really powerful platform to make games on from scratch. I’m also really inclined to try making a multiplayer game using websockets, because it seems like so much fun and I haven’t done anything like it yet!

As before, I will be using Fireworks CS5 for graphics, PXtone for music and SFXR for sound effects.

I have loads of ideas for fun multiplayer games that will be great to make, but if the theme catches me out then a single player game won’t hurt. 😉 Looking forward to it!

I’ve got everything pretty much set for LD48 tomorrow! I set up a dropbox folder between both PCs and installed node.js on both so either can host the game server, though I’m probably going to do most of the development on my PC. 😛

The laptop will mainly be used for non-localhost multiplayer tests, or just a second screen! It’s also portable! (imagine that)

I put Fireworks, PXtone and Notepad on my taskbar for easy access so I don’t waste time searching for them. Can’t wait.

(my ideas sheet)

Got the movement system, multiplayer sync with interpolation and resource loading with loading screen working. By the end of today the backend (gameplay minus ‘levels’, placeholder gfx) will be finalized and I’ll have to compose a lot of music. 😉

I have like 6 hours to write 2 mins worth of music and add a crucial gameplay feature!!

If I don’t finish, tell my game I love it :'(

Sorta bland, but it’s all that I could manage.

Click here to play Rhythm Apocalypse

Rhythm Apocalypse is my third ludum dare entry, except it’s a bit different from my previous two. They were singleplayer games, both made with Stencyl. I wanted to make a fun multiplayer game using HTML5 canvas (no back ends, all custom), and when the theme came up, I had the idea of a rhythm game where you collaborate with friends to destroy the earth using the power of harmonies!

Originally I had planned 3 sections with three 4 bar segments which would be played in a random order, and the sections would advance when you did enough damage to the boss. As you can tell – I didn’t quite make it. The final game only has 2 sections with a fixed path that goes 1, 2, 1, and the planet doesn’t even blow up at the end.

There were quite a few things that culminated to cause this:

• I woke up late on the first day, so I lost 3 hours to start.
• Went out for dinner on the first day, though this was really pre-planned and I couldn’t really say no. -4 hours (it was a long dinner)
• On the second day I got really, really bored, so development slowed a ton.
• Most of the reason it got boring was because of the constant onslaught of blocking bugs, since I wasn’t too experienced with javascript + canvas and it was my first multiplayer game using websockets.
• Dropbox is the worst prototyping service ever if you have low internet speed.
• I haven’t made many songs in Pxtone (really, just my ludum dare music) or even made music at all, so I was having trouble finding inspiration or a common style.
• Didn’t actually draw any graphics. At all. And this is meant to be my strong point!

Despite this, I did pretty well on:

• Some effects. I really like the sparks, shiny curved note line, laser and starfield flatten when you start the game. I wasn’t able to create anything like those in Stencyl.
• Works really well for my first multiplayer game. Movement interpolation could be improved.
• The song in the waiting room is pretty cool.
• The game was of really good quality for a javascript app that wasn’t an engine, test or general purpose program.
• It’s fun! That’s probably all that matters, even if it’s really short fun.

Another thing is that at submission time a few horrible bugs popped up,  such as the collision for the beams emitted from the earth being totally broken, and various bugs breaking multiplayer entirely (players not disconnecting, not displaying, names missing). This left the game unplayable over submission night. But all of that is fixed now, so no worries!

So you should totally give it a wee cheeky try, and invite some friends to play with you! It’s sorta way too hard too, so you can see which one of you dies last. 😛

http://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/12239448/LD26%20-%20enginedemo/index.html

Simple isometric engine + rail physics ft. ghosts

I should really get to coding the actual game part, but the engine is so much of it. Track graphics are temporary and will be replaced with isometric tiles once I set up an automation system in blender. Going fine so far!

“i don’t think the skeleton had that many skulls before i blew it up”

shameless plug

This is my fourth Ludum Dare entry! The only way I can really describe how it went is SortaOKGoodNotBadTerribleFantasticNo.

It didn’t really come out as I had envisioned at the start, but then again it never does. Even though it came out as something totally different, I’m actually satisfied with it as it is!

Stuff that worked:

• The game! Even though it’s very tight on graphics assets and levels I think the outcome is fun to play and I enjoyed playtesting it 2 minutes before the deadline.
• Using pxtone again; I managed to make all the game music and melodic sounds within the last 30 minutes of the compo.
• Using javascript + canvas! It’s really fun coding engines from scratch instead of using prebuilt ones like stencyl or gamemaker, and it’s always a learning experience, assuming that each time the game is a different genre/requires different types of asset. 😉
• Skeletons. Skeletons always work.
• The particle effects! The ones coming off of the player were originally me testing the particle engine, they stuck and I made them look a ton better. The skeletons exploding into a lot more bones than they actually have is hilarious and will probably never get old ever.
• Player physics, I did a lot of tweaking on the first day, liked it and stuck with it.

Stuff that Definitely Didn’t Work:

• OGMO EDITOR. God jesus I hate everything about it. It closes all your open levels every time you want to add a layer/tileset/entity and forces tiled placements of entities. Not to mention it had some interesting bugs such as throwing an exception as soon as anything has a space in its name and you try to save.
• Don’t code games while watching TV. I code like 3x slower.
• Leaving the levels till last minute. I only had level 3 (was originally only going to be the test level) done until 1 hour before compo end, where I had to make fun levels and test them as a batch process for 30 mins before music. Because of this the game only has 4 levels. :'(
• Wake up earlier during Ludum Dare. Those extra hours could have been more levels/an actual background tileset/more enemies!
• Dropbox kept dropping asset requests randomly, so if you’re asking “Why is this game hosted on a site for a Javascript Gameboy Colour emulator” then that’s your reason! It also loads a lot faster too, as I have the site under CloudFlare CDN. Hopefully that and this bloody 10MB gif I just embedded don’t get my cloudflare account shut down for unleashing 300TBs worth of bandwidth on them. >:)

Stuff I enjoyed doing:

• Designing levels with a tool like Ogmo Editor and writing the parser was actually really fun, despite the tool being not what I needed. I’d like to find and use a better level designer for my next ludum dare game, if it happens to be tile based.
• The particle system was really fun to set up and play around with, but maybe I shouldn’t go so overboard with particles next time. 😉

Though despite all this, it has still been a blast, and I’d definitely do it again. Since I didn’t make it in last time, I’m extremely chuffed that I managed to create this game in the time I forced myself into, and from what I’ve played so far, you guys should be too!

javasctpript + htemml5 5 ever

Tags: 2D, final, post-mortem, postmortem

Since more than a few people had problems getting past the first or second level in my game, I decided to post a video of the full game played through with no deaths. I did keep one in though, because it was hilarious. 😉 Should be useful for people who don’t want to spend forever becoming mega pros to see the whole thing!

You can check out the post mortem here if you’re interested in how I accidentally made a sequel to my LD27 game, or if you haven’t tried playing the game yet you can have a go here!

literally no regrets

Collision engine is pretty much complete, now I just need to implement the actual gameplay, particles, graphics and multiplayer hooks. This level will probably make it into the game.

Having a lot of fun with this!

Day 1 is just about wrapped up! I’ve got collision, particles, movement physics (except for brake and turn) and basic multiplayer down. Tomorrow I still need to implement shooting, special weapons, scoring and UI/game state stuff so that games can actually end with a scoreboard.

So here’s a multiplayer demo! Controls are:

• Click – reposition self
• E – rotate Counter Clockwise in air
• R – rotate Clockwise in air
• Space – jump

Since I have to like, sleep, I’m only hosting this for about 15 minutes. Invite all your friends! Find ALL the bugs! Get the legendary “undefined” flip!

(it’s over :'()

gelatindesign #rekt everyone

http://www.twitch.tv/wertle/b/597848675?t=190m51s

While I was busy playing my Mach60KAS’s game with a few other people, someone submitted my game to Wertle’s stream and it got (miraculously) randomly selected out of like 50 games! They only played one match, but I’m glad they had fun! It was also good to see a game that I wasn’t present in, since I’m pretty positive I ruin the fun for everyone by getting 15k points every time :I

Earlier in the week I played with taunia_sabanski’s stream (no VOD unfortunately) and Noaksey’s stream, which is recorded here and much longer (and makes more sense cos there aren’t like 8 players)!

http://www.twitch.tv/noaksey/b/597505909?t=40m30s

The players will look up and shout “Save us!”… and I’ll look down and whisper “No.”

The server crashed at the end though (the bug was fixed for taunia and wertle’s streams), so we weren’t able to play long enough to see Noaksey become a SNOVERCHILL GOD. yokcos700 did come back later and eventually rekt me in a few games though I did actually submit my game here, so no miraculous random selection!

Thoughout the week I’ve been playing with some people who got really good at the game through playing for a while (some people stayed on for like an hour at a time!), and found a ton of cool spots to pull off insane tricks. Someone else even pulled off a 5x trick, which is worth like 3.5k points! (and now i know where to do it, hahaha)

It’s fun getting streams to play the game – the most fun thing about making a multiplayer game is by far playing it with a bunch of other people. The feedback has been incredible, and I hope you guys have had as much fun as I have!

Here’s the link if you’re interested, but make sure you have people to play it with! http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=7339

I’m in! I loved coding a multiplayer title last time, so I’m going to try and push it for something more sophisticated this time. But it might not even be multiplayer! Depending on the theme!

• Language – Javascript, no libs except from my own collider.js and svgColParse.js created last LD. To make up for this, the challenge is implementing quad tree partitioning so that I can spam colliding particle effects at little cost. 😉
• Graphics – Fireworks CS6, and the wonderful help of the canvas api.
• SFX – SFXR, PXtone for melodic sound effects.
• Music – PXtone! The challenge is making it longer than 30 seconds. 😉

Also – for funsies, Snoverchill (LD31, aka the last one) is back online for the final hour before Ludum Dare! Come chill – there’s even a chat that displays messages for a whole 5 seconds before deleting them FOREVER!

Join us here!

Unfortunately I forgot to take this weekend off, so I was only half able to work on my game. Hopefully It’ll be finished in time.

Basically, it’s a ridiculous over the top MOBA style game where you’re in a gardening competition (The International Gardening Festival) and big money is at stake, so your genetically modified plants have to pull out all the stops. I’ve planned out 20 individual abilities and 5 “ultimates”, which each player drafts from. Each ability should have accompanying graphical effects, though at this rate that may prove quite difficult to pull off effectively!

Since everything I have so far doesn’t really sell the idea, I have included a piece of “concept art” of the future gameplay.

The best thing I have ever drawn hands down.

Here’s a mockup with a placeholder flower, since the real game does not have any yet for whatever reason.

I KNEW YOU HAD IT IN YOU.

Note that your ultimate changes your flower head, so not everyone is Flow- eh, this thing. This particular setup is for the pure damage ult, there will also be variants for invulnerability and the speedy growth ults. It’s all in the master plan.

Here’s everything that’s done on the coding side. Literally only have a simple scene setup with no gameplay at all, though net multiplayer sync is working perfectly. I have a long way to go, so it probably won’t be complete for compo.

The calm before the storm 8O|