For anyone else who sucks w/ music like me, I found this….since my compo entry basicly plays like robotron on crack i’m SOOO using this.

http://wurstcaptures.untergrund.net/music/

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=preview&uid=7131

First Ludum Dare for me, i’ve been meaning to join in but always ended up busy during the weekend it came up…though even this weekend was no exception. (was out of town most of saturday)  Interesting experience though, I don’t think I’ve ever rushed quite this much to write anything….normally at work we’d have at least 72 hours to finish a major project

Overall I was pretty happy with the results, I’ll be honest in saying that the theme was total bunk, it’s too vague of an idea and 99% of the games in the list (mine included) are stretching it about as far as possible to make really anything work on the theme. Would be nice in the future if themes were limited to physical objects or gameplay mechanics.  /minor complaint

What Went Right?

– Time : I picked an idea that I had more than enough time to work on with my additional constraints, it was a little close at the end due to all the things I did wrong… but I didn’t really have to rush to get done (though i did have to cut back on how much artwork i did)

–Choice of api’s: I’m glad I picked SDL to use, as I’m very familiar with it, and sticking with plain old c++/SDL let me take quite a few “shortcuts” I wouldn’t have known in other languages. (bad if this were a real project, but good for saving time)

What Went Wrong?

– sound & art : I’m not COMPLETELY unskilled with sound or art, but it does take me forever. In retrospect I should have just shot for super low res and claimed it “retro” styled instead of using the higher res that I did, which, in not having time, led to a very messy, poorly drawn look

– porting: I didn’t realize that ports were allowed to happen after the deadline, so I wasted a good 4 hours of my 20 actual hours I had to work on my entry trying to get the windows port to compile properly (turned out I needed to upgrade mingw’s toolchain, mine was too out of date for the SDL build i was using)

– tools: I should have choosen tools ahead of time, i didnt even think of sound or music till I was nearly done, and at that point i spent a good hour or two of my precious dev time installing lmms, sfxr, and learning how to use them.

Also, here’s a nice set of videos of gameplay and my dev timelapse.

Some of these have a pretty low number of ratings and i’d hate to see them completely ignored.  I’ve basicly been randomly picking games with a low number of reviews that I can actually play and rating them, so far these are the best games of LD22 (in my opinion, of course, but I suggest others try them out as well)

I won’t bother posting already well known ones, just ones here that are still relatively unplayed.

48 Hour Compo Games

“Cave Wanderer”  by Greasemonkey

“Soloing” by Goldendice

“Sinkhole” by Shaun Inman

“The lonely island” by Bezza

Jam Games

“Ancient Rover” by tnelsond

Tags: review

Hey guys, just thought i’d toss this out here for anyone interested.  Finished a first “stable” release of my new sprite editor, It’s QT4 and written to be cross-platform but at the moment only downloads for linux are up, as I’ve yet to figure out how to use the mingw cross compiler with QT.  Tailored for my engine’s format but the toolset can also easily export to png spritesheets.

Short version of the features (full list on download page)

• Onion skinning to help with animating
• customizable palletes w/ full save/load/rip from image support
• more color picking tools than you’ll ever know what to do with
• fully integrated with system clipboard so you can freely select, copy,cut, paste, etc..with other image editors
• large undo/redo bufers, specific to each frame
• live animation preview
• fast control scheme (mouse + command keys, or hotkeys control every action, all hotkeys are listed in the edit menu)
• customizable UI, all toolbars can be reshaped, floated,  pushed behind tabs, hidden….etc

Still got a lot of bugs to work out, and missing features, but it’s at least stable and capable of image editing at this point. You can download it and try it here http://www.midnightfragfest.com/sprite-editor/

Edit: Windows download is now available, but somewhat untested, I would appreciate any feedback on how it runs.

Tags: art, pixel, sprite, tools

First, a rundown on what got me thinking of this idea….

I have no real complaints about how I scored in LD22, it was overall around where I expected, but one thing kinda stuck with me.   My actual scores were VERY inconsistant with all the feedback I received.  For instance I was pretty universally praised by all that commented (a fairly good number of people) on my community effort in doing a build for multiple platforms, a timelapse video, and even commenting my source, In the end I got a 3.2 score in that category which does not seem to reflect that (especially compared to the fact that many games that had no such things, and single platform were averaging a score of 3.5)  Quite a few people both in the comments and on IRC said the game was really fun!… I actually got no negative feedback at all on that….I scored a 2.66.  As you can see here I found it bizarre that the actual ratings were pretty much completely opposite of comments I had received.

My main point to this being, It would have been nice to know why those rating at a 1 out of 5 hated it so much, nobody seemed to want to leave any negative feedback (And I’m not just speaking for myself, a lot of other people had expressed the same confusion as to why their scores were opposite of what they would have expected from their comments), so perhaps it would be nice for 23 when we rate something it could have an anonymous comments box attached to each rating category where you have to quickly fill in the main “problem” or main “draw” as to why you’re rating a 1 or a 5?  In doing this it could actually help improve future games instead of pretty much just leaving everyone confused as to how the scoring worked after the compo is over.

Another thing I would like to see is more detailed instructions on each rating category, and a N/A rating for games that don’t use it at all (for stuff like humor…many people were rating games down overall due to humor scoring a 1 on games that were not supposed to be funny)

Also, add a “Does not run” button that removes a entry from your list of ones to rate but doesnt set a rating on it, I fear too many people were scoring games low that they simply couldn’t run and it was throwing off the statistics

I’m in, this will be the 2nd LD i’ll actually be able to take part in at all, and the first one where I’ll actually be able to be here coding for more than half the compo! (last one was more of a LD16 for me…)

• Programming Language(s): C++ / Angelscript
• Development Platform: Gentoo Linux Kernel 3.2.11 AMD64 build
• Target Platform(s): Linux x86, Linux x86_64, Win32, also OSX if i can figure out how to cross compile to it in time.
• Engine/Basecode: Aether Engine (still finalizing, documentation and download will be up within a few days, just trying to get physics fully implemented…..I procrastinated too much 😛 ) Which is built on SDL, SDL_image, SDL_mixer, OpenGL, tinyxml, zlib, angelscript, and Box2D
• Code Tools: Code::blocks, gedit, gnu make, gcc, gdb
• Sound/Music:SFXR, LMMS
• Graphics: GIMP for high res graphics/backdrops, My aptly named “Sprite Editor” for pixel art
• Food: More than likely stuffed shells w/ arabiatta sauce and a side of asparagus
• Drink: Water, rockstar recovery, newcastle, or I’ll mix a martini…all depends on the situation

There wasn’t a whole lot of information about it around but I managed to piece together a quick script to do live streaming from a linux desktop.  It’s simple and for speed reasons I’m not broadcasting sound myself. (I get unrealiable levels of upload lag so if i add sound it’s kinda distorted…I really wish their streams allowed speex codec :/)

SIZE=”1600×1200″
BITRATE=”128k”
FRAMERATE=”20″
KEY=”your key here”

ffmpeg -f x11grab -s $SIZE -r $FRAMERATE -i :0.0 -vb $BITRATE -vcodec libx264 -threads 0 -f flv “rtmp://live.justin.tv/app/$KEY”

if you do want sound, you can change it to this for alsa

or for OSS

Tags: tips

This entry was posted on Friday, April 13th, 2012 at 12:42 pm and is filed under LD #23. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Too many porting bugs to work out in my engine before LD starts so I’m revising my “I’m in”..Instead of using an engine I’ll just do straight SDL/C++ again for simplicity’s sake.

Also, sorry to any Mac users who may have wanted to use my sprite editor (i did get a few questions on it)….I don’t have a MAC but i did try….but OSX keeps crashing on me in virtualbox and I dunno why :/

All done…whew..got the music in just in time too.

Some gameplay footage

And rating page!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=7131

I’ll start with the part that’ll interest more people….now that I’ve rated 150 entries, here are my top 7! (in no particular order)

Bottlecolonies By tcstyle : A clever little strategy/puzzle  game, the art direction is great, the sound both fitting and awesome, and the gameplay itself is solid and complete…a joy to play

Nanofactory By JustinMullin: A solid puzzle game about a nanobot assembling widgets, a little hard and cryptic at first but the puzzles are both simple and clever

ANT SURF HERO: THE SURFENING By Jigxor:  A refreshing change from the massive number of dull uninspired platformers,  aside from a few physics issues it’s really fun,  and riding on top of the ant is amusing to say the least.

Housefly By dacap: You play as a fly on a mission: to get back outside!  It’s a short but very immersive adventure game with solid controls, great visuals and sound…its hard to describe but the flight control feels “right” for a fly. Very fun.

Recluse By chambers: You play as a snail with a neckbeard in a “metroidvania” type game….but with a twist.  Easy 5/5 for innovation personally, I don’t want to ruin it by the starting room is misleading and it quickly introduces one of the most unique gameplay mechanics i’ve ever seen. (even if it is mostly a gimmick…it fits the theme very well)

Hero of Rain By 31eee384: Extremely incomplete but what there is of it is very enjoyable, the story is both fitting and interesting, the gameplay is for the most part pretty good (though touchy at parts). All around a good feel to this game.

Fusion Time! By NeiloGD: A simple but solid arcade-type game where you fuse atoms in a sun.  Theres not much too it but the explosions and strategy of timing the fusing makes it surprisingly fun to play.

Please try these out if you havent! Most still have a pretty low number of ratings and could use some more love! Also, <shameless plug> I really wouldn’t mind a few more tests on my entry as well, it’ll be linked below with the timelapse and postmortem</shameless plug>

Post-Mortem:

First off, here’s the link, try it out yourself and let me know what you think!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=7131

I have to say…I had more fun with this theme than I would have thought, it was a lot easier to make a game that fit the theme but was still….you know…a GAME..than it was for “alone” (LD22)

What went right:

•  My game Idea! I came up with it MUCH faster this time and IMHO it’s a much more fun game than my 22 entry
•  My cross-compilers were already set up, saving me a lot of time testing the windows build
• Using my sprite editor (listed in the tools section to the right) I was able to do what little spriting I needed very quickly with decent results, it was MUCH easier than trying to do it in GIMP (great editor….not so good for animating)
• I planned fairly well what I would have time to do,  I was complete (though had to cut a few units) and able to submit before the rush.
• Deciding early to render with opengl instead of plain SDL was a good call,  I ended up abusing it quite a bit to scale/recolor graphics & text (SDL can do it but it’s so slow it would be near unplayable..).  Having recently written a LOT of OpenGL code also it was pretty fresh in my mind and I was able to painlessly get it up and rendering.

What went…welll…not quite as right:

• Once again, LD fell on a weekend I had to be gone quite a bit, I wasn’t home on saturday till nearly 6pm, so I lost a good 18 hours of copetition time there (seriously, i had NOTHING planned that couldn’t be moved for like.. a month prior and a month after…only that one day)
• I had to take care of some stuff outside friday and was EXHAUSTED after the theme was announced, ended up losing even more time by going to bed early. (though i did finish a opengl renderer + sound system before then)
• I had a OpenGL/SDL/Angelscript based game engine I’ve been working on for quite some time that I was going to use so I could concentrate more on game code….unfortunately I had some last minute issues and there was no way I’d get a windows build of the engine working in time, so I had to change plans and just write a renderer/sound/input engine from scratch during the competition.

And of course, here is the timelapse video! (with soothing music added)

Tags: ld23, linux, opengl, post-mortem, postmortem, SDL

2. All game code and content must be created within the 48 hours. **

I’ve seen a few cases of added features and new art being added to games, PLEASE break those changes off into a post-compo version…it ain’t cool adding stuff while ratings are still going on.  Not going to call anyone out but you know who you are who’s doing this!

and…

If you can’t run this entry, please leave a comment saying so and explaining why. Do not score unrunnable entries.

I saw a twitter feed talking about rating games “1 star across the board” for not being web based…..seriously..not cool.

As always…these are MY opinions, you may or may not agree, but I feel these games could use some attention as I feel that they “stand out” from the crowd.  As per usual…no particular order.

Asylum By Orni: A good take on the theme, fluid controls, art style isn’t my favorite but it works ok.  A little slow paced at first and somewhat short but it left the correct “feeling” behind when done.

It’s a tiny world By Endurion: A clever and fun “single screen” roguelike.  Though I think it stretches the theme a bit this title definitely deserves a mention simply because…it’s really fun! (and that’s what games are supposed to be at their core, when you strip all the excess from them)

Memento XII By deepnight: A little point & click adventure game, great style and atmosphere, though a little frustrating at times figuring out what you can or cannot click on.  Not a fan of the audio but well worth mentioning.

Bottlecolonies By tcstyle : A clever little strategy/puzzle  game, the art direction is great, the sound both fitting and awesome, and the gameplay itself is solid and complete…a joy to play

Nanofactory By JustinMullin: A solid puzzle game about a nanobot assembling widgets, a little hard and cryptic at first but the puzzles are both simple and clever

ANT SURF HERO: THE SURFENING By Jigxor:  A refreshing change from the massive number of dull uninspired platformers,  aside from a few physics issues it’s really fun,  and riding on top of the ant is amusing to say the least.

Housefly By dacap: You play as a fly on a mission: to get back outside!  It’s a short but very immersive adventure game with solid controls, great visuals and sound…its hard to describe but the flight control feels “right” for a fly. Very fun.

Recluse By chambers: You play as a snail with a neckbeard in a “metroidvania” type game….but with a twist.  Easy 5/5 for innovation personally, I don’t want to ruin it by the starting room is misleading and it quickly introduces one of the most unique gameplay mechanics i’ve ever seen. (even if it is mostly a gimmick…it fits the theme very well)

Hero of Rain By 31eee384: Extremely incomplete but what there is of it is very enjoyable, the story is both fitting and interesting, the gameplay is for the most part pretty good (though touchy at parts). All around a good feel to this game.

Fusion Time! By NeiloGD: A simple but solid arcade-type game where you fuse atoms in a sun.  Theres not much too it but the explosions and strategy of timing the fusing makes it surprisingly fun to play.

Honorable Mentions: Things under here are games that did very well in some areas but poorly in others, so they don’t really hit my “best of” list but they’re worth mentioning for other reasons.

Tiny Island Adventure By AdventureIslands: This game has EXCEPTIONAL artwork and is a fresh take on the theme.  Don’t get me wrong, I love this game, but unfortunately it has some pretty bad control issues and the levels were a bit uninteresting.  Kept it from being in my “top” overall  picks but still worth a look, and IMHO could very well take the gold for “graphics”

Gale Axile By free_napalm: This game has some very clever gameplay mechanics, and is EXTREMELY innovative. It was definitely a refreshing break from the zillion and first back-to-back “planet defender” game played.  While I like it and the mechanics are unique it unfortunately has a big problem for me…the outcome is so random and the gameplay is so tedious that it’s just not very fun as is…though with a little work post-compo it could be a VERY good game.

Green Invasion By Kableado: The art in this game is FANTASTIC to say the least, it really is great. Unfortunately…that’s all there is to it, as a game it’s incomplete, there’s absolutely no gameplay implemented, no real sound, no goal.

Predicament By orangepascal: Again, another game with very good artwork, if a little TOO pixelated making it sometimes hard to see.  It’s a somewhat innovative mini-advanture game.  Unfortunately though the controls can be a little frustrating and the lack of any sort of ambient sound took away from it somewhat.

Mayor vs Aliens By Sheep: Very innovative, very funny, easily one of the best takes on the theme I’ve seen. The gameplay is ok but not great, the controls are a little stiff, and it’s wayyy too easy, you can pretty much defend indefinitely since they always go straight up the middle after taking the dirt.

Mini-Worlds and Monocles By Zed: VERY good sound in this game, one of the best.  Aside from that not much to talk about…it’s not “bad” but it’s really just another in a long line of generic “pick up the coin, move to next level” platformers.  Not very innovative and the jump controls are pretty frustratingly bad.  Still worth mentioning for it’s audio and humor though.

The Good Ship Higgs Boson By Jezzamon: Easily one of the most fun entries in the entire compo. EXTREMELY fun gravity based platformer.  Honestly though, aside from the name, it doesnt really fit the theme at all, the graphics were nothing special, and the sound lacking.  It is VERY fun though and I suggest playing it, and I suggest to the author clean it up a bit and publish a full version of this game….I think it would do quite well!

Oh, and I suppose I should put this here too, as always, I would appreciate more reviews and feedback on my entry as well!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=7131

Everyone should plot where they’re at on the LD world map….doesn’t need to be exact, since it’s google-maps based just put city + state and it’ll put a “approximate” tag for you….or however “close” of an approximation to your area you want.  Would be kinda cool to see where most people are clustered around…interesting to see how right now it looks like a lot of people are in a few city areas and the rest of us pretty spread out. (right now 4 of us total in so-cal…and only two of us in the LA area)

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/world-map/

I’ve said my thoughts on the current ranking system elsewhere so no real need to re-state here, but theres something to me that’s quite a bit worse that could be addressed, and this is more of a community thing really but perhaps there’s some way for LD24 some “encouragement” could be put in place to do it.

Much like LD22 I take the same issue with my comments/feedback…..my comments and feedback are 100% positive (well..99%..someone did bring up that more feedback in the HUD would have been nice 😀 ), nobody could really say a bad thing at all.. out of just over 100 ratings 40 of said people posted that they “loved” the audio and thought it was “really really fun!”….and that was about the extent of my feedback. (And not just my game of course, I’m just using it as a easy example as it effects me the most personally, many many others I’ve browsed through are the same, nothing but positive feedback and glowing praise towards the game….then a really low score)

I scored a 3.07 in fun and 2.75 in audio

Now…whatever, those scores arent “bad” by any means, but they don’t reflect the feedback in the least!  if 40 people of 100 “loved” those….then I’m looking at probably 20-30 ratings who did not like the gameplay/audio who did not leave feedback.

That sucks…mostly because it’s the feedback from those who didn’t like the game that I care about, I want to hear why they didn’t like it!  As much as I appreciate the “I love it!” posts as feedback goes negative feedback is far more helpful. I don’t know if people are just too “polite” to post things they didn’t like or if they are somehow afraid of being “retaliated” against and being given a bad score on their game or what, but, at least to me, I enjoy feedback good and bad…It lets me know which things I tried people liked and which things i tried people didn’t like so I can either explore further into an idea or avoid it in the future.  (Especially in something like this where I made a game type I’ve never done before AND tried a few twists from the “norm” in it’s genre)

So, in saying that, I’d like to re-iterate my suggestion I brought up prior to LD23 based on my experiences from LD22….we need some sort of way to allow people to attach an anonymous comment to their vote (well, the site would still know who posted it, just dont show the name) but still leave a way to leave comments in the thread like we can do now (showing our names).  Perhaps this would allow more people who don’t want to say anything bad to open up a bit and give honest feedback?

Feedback has to consist of both what worked and what did not work to be effective….just my $0.02

Tags: feedback

While my game didn’t do terribly well in LD 23, it got overall average scores, I did get quite a bit of plays and a lot of good feedback on it.  I decided why not, take it and expand it out further.  Well this has taken FAR longer than expected and I ended up developing a full cross-platform 2d game engine/library that supports Android NDK/Linux/Windows/Mac in the process, but as of last night the extended edition of my LD23 game “Tiny Defenders” Is available on google play

First off, a link to the free version:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.raptor85.tinydefendersfree

And a link to the compo page!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=7131

But that’s not  the primary purpose of this post!   I wish i had though of it sooner and done more in between but i’ve started doing video logs of my development so following this sentence i’ll have a few videos, starting with a video of the competition version, showing how the game evolved as i tried new things and added on to what I already had.  I actually think it’s kinda interesting to see how something starts from a tiny little ludum dare game and evolves into a full game.

Click the link to view the rest of this post! i’m hiding it under a “more” tag otherwise it’ll eat up the entire front page….it’s huge!

First off here was the competition version, very simple, simple 2 step sprite sheets, only one sprite used for all enemies and defenders, mouseover text in the upper left used for everything, levels are simply a single bitmap that the game is drawn over, all the levels essentially the same but with different graphics and slightly different path, and all but the base “army ant” unit were pretty much useless…basicly lots of shortcuts used to get it up and working in 24 hours

Unfortunately skipping a few builds as i didn’t think to take more video until this, drawing off most of the comments I had received i basicly stripped the game to it’s basics, changed the field size to better fit mobile screens, and wrote a simple UI layer so you can better see what you’re actually doing. (also made movement and attacking more smooth/requires ants to actually walk to an enemy before they can attack).  The biggest changes though are the statistics you get when you select an ant at the right and the upgrade menu showing current stats and stats after upgrade, mostly due to feedback that it was hard to tell if an upgrade was worth it or not as there was no numerical feedback.  Ants were also all capped to level 3 as level 5 ants were simply too powerful…and of course a button was added so you can give up on a level at any time and return to menu.

At the next update I had started adding new units but it cluttered the interface far too much to be usable on a phone, to reduce the number of buttons in any menu without requiring sub-menu’s and such I came up with a “weapon switching” mechanic where every unit has multiple “modes” you can set them in effectively allowing one unit to take up the roles of two, each having a certain advantage.  This actually added more strategy to the game where you are forced at times to decide whether damage or range is more important.

After this and from feedback it felt that the old 3 types of enemies and art were stale to the point where it would be too boring with so much new funtionality, so I took some time for a art revamp and added new systems for boss enemies, flying creatures that some attacks can’t hit, and redid the level format significantly, now making it tile based instead of single image, making it singnificantly easier to alter or make new levels

In my next update I decided to address some more of the primary complaints of the compo version, for one that it was hard to tell exactly the “square”  you had to select to upgrade an ant since they moved around while fighting and that it was “just” different enough from a normal TD game that you really needed some instructions or a tutorial to learn how to play.  To address this I added waving flags to the squares you place an ant on, so you know where to click, and have ants return to their flag while not attacking.  I also added in a set of tutorial levels that have onscreen text instructing you how to play and a locking mechanic where levels only unlock after completing the previous one. (the tutorials have a skip button however).  Another mechanic I added at this time was terrain effects. Each tile could now have different effects like disallowing ants to move through them, slowing down or speeding up, healing, or blocking placement and projectiles.

At this point the levels were actually getting pretty complicated and hard to edit by hand so i needed to move to using a editor, since they had essentially evolved off the origional format moving to something like tiled would have required a huge rewrite, though thankfully my origional level format was actually pretty well designed and easy to work with, they were just getting too large with too many sections with all the new layers of data the tiles had.  I opted instead of using an existing editor to simply make a in-game editor for my own use, which ended up being a HUGE time saver in the end as i could swap between edit and game modes freely to test changes live instantly.

And last but not least,  I did quite a bit of polish, and created extra levels/tilesets/worlds for the android release.  It’s not quite in the release yet but there is actually a working achievement’s system as well that i havent enabled yet as i wanted to polish it a bit more. Thankfully my engine design was versetile enough that integrating admob support was completely painless as well, i can just put the banner anywhere and the game will auto-resize to fit around it on any screen, so i made a really short promo video showing off a few stages in the first world and one stage from the second.

A little bit of a long post but hopefully interesting to some of you to see visually the evolution from a simple toy made for LD to what it is now, and how things changed and evolved from user feedback.

Tags: android, journal, ld23, post-compo, progress

Language: C++

Engine/API: Aether Engine (My personal developed API/Engine http://www.midnightfragfest.com/aether/)

IDE: Code::Blocks

Graphics: Sprite Editor (My own personal tool http://www.midnightfragfest.com/sprite-editor/ )

Audio: SFXR, Autotracker, LMMS, and Schismtracker

Livestream: Simple bash script for livestreaming to twitch.tv

#!/bin/bash

SIZE=”1600×1200″
BITRATE=”128k”
FRAMERATE=”2″
KEY=”put_your_key_here”

ffmpeg -f x11grab -s $SIZE -r $FRAMERATE -i :0.0 -f alsa -ac 2 -i pulse -vb $BITRATE -vcodec libx264 -threads 0 -acodec libmp3lame -ab 128k -ar 22050 -f flv “rtmp://live.justin.tv/app/$KEY”

 

Timelapse: Simple timelapse script and timelapse processing script

#!/bin/bash

sleep 30
x=$1

while [ 1 ]
do

valf=$(printf “%.8d” “$x”)
scrot ./`echo $valf`.jpg
sleep 30
x=$(( $x + 1 ))
done

 

#!/bin/sh

OutputVideo=timelapse-yt.flv

Quality=5
FPS=2
FPSI=2
AudioBitrate=44100

ffmpeg -r $FPSI -i %08d.jpg -s vga -r $FPS -f flv -qscale $Quality -ar $AudioBitrate $OutputVideo

 

And no i don’t mean Sony…talking about Southern California Edison…my power company.  TWO power outages so far this LD, first power outages of the season actually, but then it doesn’t surprise me that much, SCE is notoriously bad on peak days and this LD is timed pretty poorly for us, this is the first college weekend of the semester so today there’s thousands upon thousands of students all staying home to get their first week paperwork/homework complete, indoors with AC’s cranked.   Hopefully we don’t get too many more rolling blackouts in this area, this last one was bad, was down for about 30 minutes and my battery backups died :/

This is definitely making things harder than they should be….

So many problems this LD, being the first week of the college semester had tons of homework and rolling blackouts in the area (thanks to the fact that a LOT of people are home doing homework, on a super hot day with the AC’s on, worst power outages of the year so far).  Actually lost power twice yesterday!  Thank god for battery backups and incremental saves though, I pushed through and though i lost a lot of time and didn’t quite do all I planned I managed to release a complete game again, just recorded a bit of it to show off the evolving aspect.  The creatures body parts are independant and when you kill anything you “absorb” it’s DNA/traits and it reforms you into some…generally pretty silly looking things. (blob with bat wings and a wolf head, wolf with bird head, etc…basicly any combination of the monsters found in the game)  It actually works pretty well and the dynamicly combining sprites don’t look half bad, especially for artwork I did 😀

check it out here, it’s short as i cut straight to the evolving parts, but then the game is pretty short too, there’s only about 7 map areas but they’re all linked and you can freely explore them. (the maps are all done in tiled so you can edit them and link in more maps too if you really want)

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=7131

Tags: 2D, C++, compo, ld24, opengl, screenshot, update

In the interest of less typing, first, read my post from last ludum dare on this topic, as it covers 90% of what I want to say right now.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2012/04/27/how-to-ensure-more-people-can-sucessfully-run-rate-your-game/

Basicly though, the short of it is, if your game REQUIRES a setup procedure, or requires me to go out and install some other libraries or runtimes on my system itself before I can play, I will (most other people will too) click the “back” button and move on to the next game in the list of 1400.  This goes for you too love2d people! (ESPECIALLY love2d people!) Even if i did manage to figure out how to get the mess of severely outdated libraries love uses on my system without destroying my entire OS I would still have to deal with the fact that love versions don’t work with games made in other versions, so no matter which one I install it would only work for half the games!  Pack the interpreter for love, it’s a TINY set of executables and libraries, i showed a few people how to do this last LD and it seemed to be a huge success, a lot of people were able to play the game that otherwise wouldn’t have.

To add on to this as well:

* No I will NOT install a different web browser, if your game has issues in firefox I talk about the issues in firefox and rate it based on that, sure chrome may be a better experience in your game but I don’t use chrome.  If it has MAJOR issues under firefox i just leave a note saying it doesn’t run on firefox and move on. I’ve seen a lot of instances of people pointing out bugs/lag issues that break the game and the response basicly being “oh…just test it on chrome”

* No, I will not upgrade my system core (libc, libstdc++,etc…) just because you compiled with the latest git version of gcc and don’t want to take 10 seconds to copy those shared object files into the tarball.  “just upgrade gcc/libc!” as a fix to get your game working, leaving me with a month worth of tracking down every package that breaks and bug testing all my code against a new gcc version is not going to cut it.

* No, I will not install sun java 7.  Seriously, unless you have some sort of HUGE PRESSING REASON to be compiling for sun java 7, set your compile target for java 6, now magially those 90% of users complaining in your games page about “crashes on start” or “wouldn’t run” can run the game just fine!  Also stop using the non-standard java extensions for different sound types included in sun and microsoft’s jre’s only, it breaks your game under the default vm’s on android, linux, and basicly any system using anything but those two vm’s

A few extra tips to add on to the ones in the linked post:

* Linux Games:  on top of what i already posted last LD (READ THAT POST!!!)  another common mistake i’m noticing is distributing the linux games in zip files.  Remember, zip does not preserve permissions! This means that your executable files will not be executable after download, and you simply have to hope that the user knows how to re-flag the file executable. (you’d be surprised! linux is far more mainstream now, the majority of users do NOT know why that file “just wont run”…even in something here like LD) . The preferred distribution format is .tar.gz , i don’t know offhand the gui programs for linux that can create them but even from a shell it’s as simple as

tar -pczf filename.tar.gz /folder/path

* Naming your links:  Please stop simply calling everything “web” it makes filtering for platforms next to impossible, and LD’s search function next to useless.  At least make them say, “web(html5)” or “web(unity)” so that when i’m  browsing html5 games on my android or such every other “web” link isn’t silverlight or unity telling me “lol…i trolld you, i don’t have a web plugin that works on your device!”.  There’s also quite a few games that named their links “windows” “mac” “linux” and all three of them point to a windows executable, sometimes with a blurb that it “hopefully” works under WINE.

* Don’t put things like “sorry linux users”  “sorry mac users” “maybe next time i’ll do html5” or things like that in your description text, it makes your game come up when filtering for those platforms and makes the ludum dare search feature entirely useless.

* Make sure your zip/tarball has a well named folder your entire game is contained under in it, do not have all your files simply sitting on the top level.  there’s 1400 games to test, most games do this properly but a few still do not, if you dont contain your stuff in a folder it will happily unzip all your files all over other peopel’s test directories, generally containing other games we’re testing or want to keep around to try farther/review, and now instead of just having a folder to remove i get to hunt and peck files, sometimes hundreds of them, from the main directory trying not to delete the ones i meant to keep…

Tags: ld24, ld48, protip

Well, i’ve basicly given up on ludumdare’s search feature, it’s utterly useless since it finds every single game that so much as mentions linux in any way (it finds games that say “sorry won’t work on linux” and “let me know in comments if it works on linux”) and half the people that “do” have linux version requires a 6 hour install procedure to get all the interpreters installed.  If anyone has a linux native game that needs testing, go ahead and leave it in the comments here and if i havent already I’ll check it out!  Now that’s NATIVE games though, i don’t want a bunch of java7 and love2d games linked here, I can’t run those! So binary only.