Hello Ludum Dare World!
Greetings, I’m IronLungs and this will be my first Ludum Dare. I’ll be aiming for the Jam since its my first LD.
Language: Java
API: LWJGL[2.8.4] – Slick2D[2.7.4] – MarteEngine[0.0.3 dev]
Image Editors: Photoshop/Paint/GraphicsGale/Flash8
Music and Sound Effects: BenMclean
Idea Generators: Caffeine
Cross-posted from the Rheo development blog.
Hey, I’m Ben McLean, a computer science major at UMKC, music enthusiast and participant in Ludum Dare 24 Jam.
So here is the story so far. Yesterday in my game design class, the teacher says Ludum Dare is this weekend. I don’t have the game design specific programming skills to compete on my own this time but I got on IRC and starting asking around if anybody wanted a music guy on their team. This got me hooked up with Rob Chubb, our lead programmer, artist, level designer, project director and general doing-most-of-the-work guy who is making Rheo: a platformer game based on the concept of water. Or, as a lame excuse to fit within the craptarded Ludum Dare theme, the “evolution” of water: i.e. the water cycle. (Although for the record, we never thought of water before the competition started)
Enter our double hydrogened hero, Bernoulli, a cutesy sentient anthropomorphized puddle of water who is on a mission to …. star in his own platformer game. The cool thing about him is that he transforms into the different states of water based on temperature. If he gets too cold then he’ll freeze into an ice cube, which will be another mode of play and if he gets too hot then he will boil into being a cloud of steam which can fly!!
It’s my job to come up with some awesome tunes that sound like happy water and don’t sound too much like they were blatantly copied off of Mario or Zelda. Subscribe to our development blog if you’re thirsty for news about our game! 😀
Speaking of thirst, an early idea I had which got scrapped is, I think, too hilarious to not at least mention: my idea was that Bernoulli would have to avoid cute thirsty puppies who would be running around barking and trying to drink him! LOL
I did something last night and I can’t figure out what the heck is wrong with my game. I wrote a destructible blocks class and it worked last night, when i got developing this morning the entire game was broken, Link errors, Resource Manager Errors.. ‘The works’ I was hoping to enter the jam but if I cannot figure out what is wrong, I’ll probably cry.
Cross-posted from the Rheo development blog.
Does using a time machine count as cheating at Ludum Dare Jam?
I mean, after all, there is no limit on the number of people who can participate. Using a time machine would just be having yourself fill several roles on the team instead of just one. If Harry Potter can do it …
Cross-posted from the Rheo development blog.
Ben McLean here, composer for Rheo. Apparently, Rob, our programmer, isn’t gonna get his demo together in time for the Ludum Dare 24 Jam deadline. He has stated that he will try to put something of some kind out in the future. As a consolation prize, here is the soundtrack I composed for the game, which BTW unlike the game’s code, was delivered on time last night.
By way of introduction, the game is supposed to be a cutesy platformer featuring a living puddle of water named Bernoulli who changes state from solid ice to liquid water to flying gaseous steam cloud and back based on temperature. I composed three different themes that would play when he is in the three different states. I was going for a happy retro sound, while not strictly adhering to any specific era, so be prepared for some ambiguously retro style musics.
In happier news, Rob’s sister had a baby!
I am hoping by taking a game design course in college to be prepared to compete as a programmer in my own right in future Ludum Dare challenges, assuming they aren’t based on such stupid themes as “evolution.”
I’ll be doing the Jam with a friend to teach him the development process of creating a video game in 72 hours :D! We’ll be targeting the web with flashplayer 11.5 We are excited for the themes as they all seem relativity decent! Good Fun and Happy Holidays to you all and (hopefully this isn’t the last of LD or the world -> 12/21/12 😉 lol)
Yeah! Finished lol the goal of me participating was to teach a friend how top make a game in 72 hours and we did just that!
I’ll be using my own version of FlashPunk located here called DevPunk
https://github.com/kgbkgb/DevPunk
Also I’ll be using http://www.abundant-music.com/ for music and sfxr/bfxr for sound effects
And GraphicsGale/PyxelEdit/Tiled for levels and graphics
I’ll probably stream it too.
Well, i’ve gotten placeholder graphics but got allot of the code done.
It’s getting there. Tons more stuff todo.
heres a link to test it if you want
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/95665415/LD48TenSeconds.swf
Enjoy
Ten Seconds!
Movement Controls:
Up, W, KEYPAD_8
Down, S, KEYPAD_5
Left, A, KEYPAD_4
Right,D, KEYPAD_6
YOU MUST HAVE FLASH PLAYER 11.7+
You have ten seconds to destroy the buses with the deer, don’t let the buses touch the squirrels though! AND DON’T RUN OUT OF TIME!!!
Squirrels death count as a -.5 second penatly and -100 points.
Killing buses grants .5 seconds and a +100 points
IF THE LINK DOESN’T WORK OR TAKES TOO LONG TO LOAD THERE IS A SWF IN THE BIN FOLDER OF THE SOURCE.ZIP THAT WILL RUN AS LONG AS YOU HAVE FLASH PLAYER 11.7+
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=3625
I’m joining the compo this time not the jam, with ue4, sfxr, musicgen.py, and photoshop.
Time to feed the cats and then get started!
Oh im a wee bit late. oops
After a long night of idea crafting and some basic scripting. I got my idea down and a few assets made and i even got some sleep in! Time to really get down to business.
Wow, in just 2 hours time I’ve got a character, uvw’d, skinned, rigged, a walk animation and a couple objects turned out. Now just a few more anims, like push pull and jump! Then on to game-play coding ! Wewt
AffixIt character walk
Awesome, more animation done. Just jump start, land and falling left, Gonna grab some lunch. <3
After a 2 hour Dr.Who + an hour Simpsons break, im back to work! Took allot longer than I thought to get the box moving mechanics working, although it’s far better than I expected! oh yeah i forgot to update earlier about some more animations. 😀
AffixIt : It’s all connected man. (Red is Gre²n, Good is Bad, Blu is Best)
Super excited getting real close to having a full game. I got sounds, music, textures, particle effects, levels, and the game play. Need to implement a main menu still but that can come last. I gotta finish the player textures, flesh out the levels more and give them each a theme. Finish up some story things, ect, ect, ect.
This ss is hours old and i cannot stop to take a new one just yet, (would give away too much for now) That’s Gre²n, player, Blu, and Red all smiling on the inside.
I’m super sad right now i think i’m going to have to waste this last hour on figuring the packaging error out instead of polishing 
Darn it! Off to re-compiling !
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=3625
– Post Mortem-
1. Theme
At first when I heard the theme, I was less than excited. But after some thought and debate with myself, I started to really like the theme and I knew right away that i did not want to create a space game, or a game that relied on characters with switchable worlds, or had multiple worlds that you could interact with at the same time. I wanted to create a game where you had to take some lovable rects and help them back to their own world or be selfish and go yourself and by doing so maybe teach you something about yourself.
2. What went right
I created an entire game in 48 hours. Complete with graphics, music, sound fx, levels, game-play, and even morality choice.
3. What went wrong
Pretty much everything. Dial-up internet, that speaks for itself, i almost missed the submission time-frame because of dial-up. I failed in the designing stage, the game I made did not resemble in any way to what i had designed on paper. At first I started with a 2d plat-former, by the end of a few hour long rampage of making the 2d game mechanics and art I realized it’d be better as a 3D plat-former. I had created mechanics and the art assets for a game I was never going to keep or finish, so I delete it all ! Big mistake, in retrospect i could and should have kept the art and tried to reuse them but i didn’t. I failed at creating a HTML5 port, mostly due to me never trying to build a UE4’s HTML5 project before and the UE4 HTML5 tool-chain being super finicky and really un-intuitive. Next LD I will have a proper build process for HTML5 ports before hand as well as offering support for Linux and OS/X platforms.
4. Conclusion
Having proper design choices before development is key. Also having and knowing your tools for ports is highly important. Better than dial-up net, i should have taken my laptop to the local free wifi and uploaded it there. But regardless im getting better than dialup soon. In the end I don’t think I could have squeezed out much more efficiency in my work. Focusing that efficiency on the other hand was a huge problem. My development style was so erratic, i went from making music and mechanics to sound fx to art back to music back to mechanics to level design, and so on and so forth, but in the end I am happy with what I made and to me that makes me a winner of LD48.
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-The Red, Gre²n, and Blu Explanation-
The game is about racism, segregation, and self-image. Where you and these lovable rects come from & Where you and they are going in this all connected world. Red, Gre²n, and Blu all come from different worlds but you the player are a mix of Red, Gre²n, and Blu, but somewhere along the way you lost your color, that thing that makes you, you; your self image. You are told that by helping these lovable rects to get back to their own world, that would some how help you get your color back. During the game you are either desperately trying to use the others as stepping stones to see their worlds, or helping them get back to their own world. All to reclaim your lost color. No matter what you do or how you do it in the game, at some point you need the help from the lovable rects.
Yep, you read that right AffixIt is about race, segregation, and self-image. not sure if it is really clear within the game but if you read this and have played AffixIt, now you know what I was aiming for and if you haven’t played it go check it out before you read the rest of this.
The game heavily relies on the fact the player is given a choice, either travel yourself, or put one of the lovable rects through the colored world portals. No matter your choice in the game all the portals lead to the same place at the end, where you can reflect on what you did, maybe in every level you helped only one color to their colored portal, maybe you tried to help one color per level, maybe you said screw these rects, im gonna invade their worlds. Maybe you noticed it didn’t matter their color and that any one of them could travel to any other colors world. Maybe you didn’t do any of those. No matter what you did or how you did it, all of our worlds are interconnected, it doesn’t matter where you come from. We all need help at some point from others to accomplish things. You cant do everything on your own. In the end we all end up in the same place. Maybe my game helped you realize something about yourself, maybe you thought it was pretentious, and to some extent it probably is.
Tags: compo, LD30, ld48, post-mortem, unreal engine
I’m gonna participate in the compo.
Unreal Engine 4
C++/Blueprints
SFXR
Audacity
