I’m going to try Ludum Dare for the first time, I’m currently standing exactly between excited and terrified.  I’ve got a fair bit of experience with SQL and VBA code, but never tried XNA/Flash etc before.  With that in mind I’m not going to try to learn everything and I’ll be using MMF2 (48hrs is not long people!), I’ll try to offset the whole “hey that’s not real game making” accusations by writing all my own custom movements, and limiting the use of the built-in stuff to as little as possible.

Be using good old Paint for graphics (I can’t do graphics), with bfxr for sound effects, and if I get time I’ll do music on GarageBand.

Good luck everyone

Hi everyone, just thought I’d check in.  This being my first LD  I am struggling with the time limit, you veterans who get something done every time are clearly some kind of game development robots sent from the future.  Still, you whether you are robots or not you have my respect.
Just about getting somewhere with my game I guess (despite a BSOD),  it’s based around a sort of DNA-changing gun that you use to genetically change your enemies into something more useful.  But I really need to come up with some way more interesting ways to use it than I currently have.  Been reading some of the other ideas on here, and there a lot of good ones, think there will be considerably more good games in the world by Monday.  Hope everyone is enjoying themselves.

Also, here is a photo of the development tools I have been using (coffee, malteasers, vimto & a pencil):

Well the theme is a good one, and I’ve got a few ideas I’m happy with, but I’m feeling guilty; all my ideas are quite simple and a bit clichéd.  I wanted to make XCOM where you are the aliens, plus your home base is an alien version of Skyrim, and there are driving bits like F-Zero, all wrapped around an insightful and touching storyline.  Either that or I wanted to make a game so innovative that there are no words in any language to describe it.  Anyway in the end I’ve decided to go for a platformer.
Good luck everyone!

Also I’m still offering free UK badges if anyone wants one, details in my first post here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2012/12/14/im-in-for-ld25-plus-free-stuff/

I have a title screen, a tutorial and a working game, just no levels yet.  3 hours is enough right?  Right?
Anyway, here is the title screen for PsyGoat:

INTRO
My game, PsyGoat, is a platformer about an evil Goat who can control weapons with his mind.  As the Goat, you must escape from a maximum security prison and use your evil superpowers to generally cause chaos.  Overall I’m really happy with it, I think shooting a giant laser out of your eyes and controlling machine guns with your mind is fairly fun, but there were definitely some problems that meant the challenge level and variety really suffered.  If you like to vapourise guards with a giant laser beam, play the game here: PsyGoat Game

WHAT WENT WRONG

Time / Priorities
So imagine you decide to make a platform game, you get the collisions and gravity working and you have to make a decision regarding your game design, do you:
a) Stick to pure platforming; just running, jumping and maybe bouncing.
b) Add a single combat or manipulation mechanic to complement the platforming.
c) Add 5 complicated superpowers that involve slowing time, creating objects, projectiles, controlling defences and changing gravity.

So the correct answer is “run as far away from option c) as possible.  Guess what I did.
This bizarre decision was supposed to lead down the route of having a multitude of awesome powers that would complement each other perfectly.  Then the levels would offer interesting ways to use these powers.  An ambitious goal, but it was mind-blowingly obvious that it wasn’t going to work in 48hrs.  So I got all the powers done, which I’m really happy about, but they were all either over-powered or totally useless.  There was no requirement to even use them at all.  This leads to the 2nd problem:

Level Design
In summary, I spent 46.5 hours getting the game working, getting the powers working, writing & recording some music, setting up pause menus, writing tutorials, creating title screens and generally making sure everything would function together as a game.  Great, I was very happy with this; it was my plan all along.  Now to duplicate my empty level 20 times and set about design a series of challenging and interesting levels… just get a coffee first… BLARG THERE IS 1 HOUR LEFT!  Yes people this actually happened.  It also happened in an identical way during LD24.  Level design is very important, you can’t do it in an hour.  The levels just weren’t engaging, and I have received some entirely justified criticism in this regard.  So next time I’ll go for slightly simpler mechanics and allow more time for level design.  Well I’ll try.

WHAT WENT RIGHT

Music!
This was a main goal of mine, I play and write a little bit of music in my spare time, so I felt this was an area I should try to perform well in.  I set about writing & recording a simple synth soundtrack on GarageBand, and I succeeded.  No auto-play or samples, just me play virtual synths with my actual fingers.  I’m really pleased about this, if you want to check out the soundtrack it is online here: Soundtrack

Super-Stuff
As much as most of the powers weren’t that inspiring, I felt that the main power of telekinetic guns was solid, and fairly fun to control.  Even more so with the laser; I like games that do bug stupid stuff you can’t do in real life, and I’d like to think that giant laser made a few people say “whoa!”

Sprites
I’m not an artist and really struggle in this regard, but I am professional developer of Excel reports & systems…  so I found using Excel to create auto-shapes as body parts really helped me!  It meant animating was easier and more consistent, and I was able to re-created some scribbled character drawings quickly.  I think I got the scale wrong, everything looks a little lost in amongst the platforms, but overall I think this went well considering my lack of artistic flair.

CONCLUSION
Ultimately I finished a platform game and created some music I’m happy with, so all my goals were achieved.  I call that a win!  I also learned more during the 48hrs of this LD than I have in the whole 3 months since the last one.  It is an amazing way to learn what you are good at, and how to prioritise the important stuff.  This time I also spent a lot more time reading the community blogs, so I had 40 interesting games bookmarked already when the voting started.  Overall, a great experience.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 20th, 2012 at 6:29 pm and is filed under LD #25. 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.

Whoa full devlopment stop people.  Our main character needs a beard.

Characters slowly coming together…

We had an amazing bug where a bird attached itself to your face and would never let go.  It’s now solved, but we were minutes away from leaving it in and calling it a feature.

Big ideas + game jam = facepalm.  No but seriously things are going OK, just realising the full extent of the work left to do.

Our idea was that an engineer created a set of robots to help restore paintings in an art gallery, except they have now gone wrong and they are stuck on Minmalism mode.  So you have to go into the affected paintings and remove the restoration bots from each one, thus returning the painting to their full impressionistic glory.  This is quite a lot to do, but we’re trying to get as close as possible to the finish.  Here is a Work in Progress title screen:

We’re in again for the Jam, the same 3.5 man team as the last Ludum Dare:

1. Adam D: Programming & Design
2. Adam S: Sound, Music, Writing & Design
3. James C: Art & Design
4. Darwin: Official Cat

The technical details:

• Platform: Web, HTML5
• Framework/IDE: Construct 2
• Graphics: Mainly GIMP, with Support from Paint.net
• Sounds: Sfxr, microKorg, Real Life Stuff + Microphone
• Music: Garageband, microKORG, Cakewalk

Some photos of our workspace:

And Finally…

Here is a photo of my wife abusing our official cat.  This was basically to motivate him, as so far he has just been eating and sleeping, which frankly has not been of much help.  “Official Cat” is a important role here at SecondDimension games, and this was the kick he needed to start taking his duties more seriously

Good morning from the UK.  Here is our official cat contemplating the theme:

We’re just planning our game out at the moment, it’s a tough theme but we’ve had a lot of ideas.  Hopefully we can pull it all together, Darwin the cat is ruling with an iron fist right now.

(PS Hopefully later these updates will be more game and less cat)

So this has taken a while, due to circumstances, but here is the walk cycle of our main character.
She is a little girl controlling a robot body, for reasons that may become clear.
(note: the reasons probably won’t become clear)

A lot closer to the deadline than we intended, but our game is finished and submitted.  It’s called ‘Poppy vs. the Night’ and is about a kid’s fighting monsters in her dreams, while the alarm clock goes off every 10 seconds.  You can play it here:  http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=14838

We have tried to write most of the details on the submission, and will do a post mortem soon.  Some screenshots below, thanks for looking.  Hope everyone  got their games finished, or least learnt something

A Post-Mortem for our game, Poppy vs the Night

Play it here:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=14838

———–
TEAM
———–

Adam D: Programming, Design, Art Support
Adam S: Music, Sound, Writing, Programming Support
James C: Lead Artist, Design

Being a team, we entered the Jam, but we treat it like the Compo wherever possibly – All gameplay, art and music was created in 72hrs over the weekend

——————————–
WHAT WENT RIGHT
——————————–

BETTER PLANNING
We all learnt a lot from the mistakes we made during the last Ludum Dare competition, so we spent more time planning things out up-front; we had asset lists and responsibilities all laid out from the start.  We also planned out a lot of the gameplay up front, and had a simple and focused goal from the first morning.

Despite a lot of crashes, Construct 2 is great for creating the bare bones of a game efficiently.  Plus we were more prepared for some of the quirks that C2 might throw at us this time, so it was probably the right choice to use it during this Jam.

Adam D: “In spite of everything critical that I’ve said about Construct 2 in this post-mortem and the last, it is still bloody quick at getting a game up and running”

ARTWORK & CHARACTER
We were all bit annoyed last LD that our main character was Mario and none of us had noticed, so this time everyone was pleased with the main character and the design overall.  James did a great job and is definitely growing in confidence with each competition.  James also felt that more of his own hand-drawn style is coming through in his digital work, which can only be a good thing.

A reduced colour palette was something was all wanted for this game, and again James did a good job of selecting the colours and giving the game a consistent visual atmosphere.

James C: “Overall I was very happy with what we produced for Ludum Dare 27. I feel our entry was more polished and looked a lot better than our first attempt.  Picking a colour scheme from the start helped to create a more uniform style”

DIVISION OF WORK
At times this was actually a real problem, but on day two, Adam S. took over doing much of the programming leaving Adam D to help James with the art.  Adam D was able to create the main game background, pick-ups, particles, splash screens, and other small graphics tasks. This allowed James to focus on the more time-consuming graphical elements such as the characters, the boss and the menu screen. Adam D thoroughly enjoyed helping with the artwork, leaving Adam S. to do what he was itching to do and get stuck into the development work.   Some portions of the first day also saw us working to our optimal capacity, with James on the art, Adam D developing the gameplay and Adam S writing music.

Adam D: “Helping with the Art was just really nice. Dealing with bugs at the end of a LD is stressful. Creating art at the end of a LD was good fun”

MUSIC & SOUND
Speaking of music, we were really pleased with how all the audio turned out.  Adam S managed to create 8 different 10 second tracks, as well as a longer piece of music for the menu screens.  The music fitted well with the atmosphere, and offered something slightly different depending on the current stage of the game.  We feel like it added to the overall polish of the game

Adam S: “I love that Ludum Dare gives me an excuse to write music, as I don’t really find the time very often.  For past LDs I have always written the middle part of the song first, then adapted it from there, so 10 second tracks actually suited my method very well.  It was great to get 9 small but coherent pieces of music together in just one weekend, and I’m proud of the overall standard”

———————————-
WHAT WENT WRONG
———————————-

STYLE SHEETS & CONCEPT ART
Although we had a colour palette in mind, it was always the plan for James to create concept art and a full screen mock-up before he started on the sprites.  Out of this would come a visual theme, defined palette and style sheet; helping to create a unique style for the game. Unfortunately this didn’t really happen due to time constraints, and as a result the visual identity of the game didn’t really come together until quite late in the weekend.  Next time we want to make time for this as it can only help to improve the feel of the game.  James would also like to work on some more varied walk cycles and better animations.

BEING TOO CONVENTIONAL
Another problem we all have with our past games, is that we feel they are a little conventional.  Outside of LD we all appreciate the unique, weird and wonderful side of the creative arts, but haven’t managed to translate that to our games together.  The mechanics of the games have also been fairly traditional, and we all discussed leaving guns out of our next game.

James C: “I want to continue to develop a more original style and improve my character design; I shouldn’t be afraid to make things a little weird”

PROBLEMS WITH SOFTWARE
Construct 2 crashed a lot for us and caused some infuriating slowdown problems.  Add to that the fact that we still have no source control, and it amounted to some major frustration at times.  It again became clear that using 2 programmers with C2 was just not viable without source control; we really need to look into that next time.  We thought we had it figured out this time; the idea was that Adam D would produce the basic engine, and then pass it over to Adam S. so that he could playtest, design level and tweak values. Unfortunately it took too long to get something up that was sophisticated enough for it to be worthwhile playtesting extensively, which meant that Adam S. did some fantastic audio on the first day but was not able to contribute as much towards design as we had hoped. This made Adam D a little uncomfortable, as although he has a lot of programming experience, he is not nearly as familiar with Construct 2 as Adam S.  C2 also caused a bit of a division between the styles of the 2 Adams (the age-old battle of Text vs GUI).

Adam D:  “I have also become increasing frustrated with point-and-click coding. What has been particularly notable for me is that I have really enjoyed coming back to JavaScript since LD and I don’t really like JavaScript that much… it’s a bit rubbish but it’s better than pointing and clicking”

GAMEPLAY ISSUES
We always try to stick to the theme during  a Ludum Dare, although this time we feel it has a detrimental effect on the game.  Much of the feedback we received was positive, but basically all the negative feedback was about the same thing; this game is too frantic.  We agree with this, it felt like just as you were getting into a stage it was over.  It was probably a bit hectic for players giving it a go for the first time.  This quick-fire gameplay also meant the game lacked depth, as there wasn’t enough time to develop the idea before the 10 seconds was up.  We’re considering working on a post-compo version to address some of these issues.

———————–
CONCLUSION
———————–

We are really happy with our game this time round, the idea was a bit simpler than last time, but that allowed us to focus on making it a more polished experience and removing the bugs.  We definitely feel like it’s an improvement over the last effort, especially the overall atmosphere.  A consistent art style and varied music added to the sense of being in poppy’s dream, and it felt like all the elements of the game belonged there as a whole, rather than being a collection of disparate pieces.  So in conclusion: Hooray!
Thanks to everyone who played and rated our game, we’re looking forward to seeing you all in December.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 16th, 2013 at 12:25 pm and is filed under LD #27. 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.

The other members of the team are busy this time round, so I’m doing this one alone.  This means I won’t have anyone around with any artistic skill, and I may not get as much time to mess about with music.  I will have to resort to the sort of shenanigans I used to engage in before I had team mates, such as creating graphics in Excel.  I will still ensure that my community and blog posts maintain the ideal ratio, as in 30% game to 70% cat

So here are my tools, good luck everyone…

• Make Game With: Construct2 / HTML5
• Make Graphics With: Paint.Net & MS Excel (Yes you heard)
• Make Music With: GarageBand iPad
• Make Sounds With: bfxr

So I danced out of bed this morning, another beautiful British day.  The bluebirds helped me get dressed, and the squirrels serenaded me while I ate my breakfast.  I skip over to my PC and check the Ludum Dare theme ready to start the jam, I went to sleep with ideas for all of the themes except one, and the chances of that theme being selected were low, so I… Noooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

So an initial reaction of pure dread, but having thought about it for a while I’ve got a few ideas.  I like the constraints of a theme, it usually makes me do at least one thing I wouldn’t normally do.  So here we go!

I’ve been bogged down in mechanics and making things move about correctly, but just about ready to starting making some graphics for my game.  As I mentioned, I am pretty terrible at most things art-related, but I can do Excel.  So here we go again, some initial character attempts with Microsoft’s wonderful auto-shapes:

Yes I am about where I was expecting to be 8 hours ago, got gameplay and music but no level design yet.  This happens every single time, I always think “get the game working and design levels at the end”, and then the end usually means about an hour at 1:45am.  Oh well, I can always resort to the Jam and finish up tomorrow.

Anyway, have a screenshot which has a lot of mistakes in it.  Mainly that there is no Unicycle:

Here is a Post Mortem of my game Castle Uno, a mini platform adventure in a dream-like castle. The idea is that each room contains a gadget or item that will make the room unique. I sort-of succeeded in this, so read on for more details, or play it HERE

What Went Right

Controls
Despite some issues with the physics, I was happy with the controls overall, especially with the 360 controller. The jumping was variable and responsive once you got used to it, and the wall climbing made me feel like a platforming ninja. I added a few signs in the game, challenging players to make it to some high places; this happened because I accidentally made scenery that you could climb on, and when I realised I wasted an hour of development time trying to see if I could get up there.

Graphics
Well I certainly didn’t expect to be writing this here, when the other members of the team can’t take part, the art is the bit I dread. I always start thinking “I can’t do art”.  So I went back to using Excel and making graphics with shapes, and it ended up working really well. I’ve had quite a few positive comments on the graphics, and I think that is the main thing I can take away from this LD; it’s a real confidence boost.

Mood & Music
I always enjoy writing music, and I was pleased with the simple melody I came up with for this game. It created the sort of dream-like atmosphere that I like. It made me go back and change the colour palette of the game slightly to fit the overall mood

What Went Wrong

Time & Biology
The game was definitely meant to be a compo entry, my team was busy so I did it all on my own, all the gameplay, art and music was done over the weekend. But unfortunately things didn’t go quite so well; I had a cold and a damaged muscle in my arm, so I felt horrible most of the weekend and that meant I was way behind by Sunday night. But instead of giving up, I pressed on into the Jam, and overall I’m glad I made that decision, as I ended up with a finished game.

Gadgets & Level Design
The idea was that each room would have 1 special item, as in “you only get one… something”. In reality this was a bit over-ambitious, and although I finished a few I’m that I’m happy with, this link to the theme got more and more tenuous as the levels went on. I had the same problem with the level design, as it was closely linked with the special gadget or item. I think I managed to make the game coherent, but it’s nowhere near my initial design.

Boxes & Physics
The physics of the game – running, jumping, climbing and pushing etc – were OK I think, fairly robust, but far from perfect. The boxes especially have caused a few people problems and it was possible to get stuck inside one. It is difficult to feel like a hero when you can’t outwit a box, so sorry about that! The wall jumping and sliding wasn’t perfect either, if I did it again I would use a gravity change for the wall slides, instead of creating and destroying invisible platforms

Conclusion
Overall I’m really happy with the game and the responses, and it has taught me some lessons for sure. It has taught me that I shouldn’t start a project assuming that I’m terrible at art, that maybe I can do it. The other things I’ve learned are about pushing boxes and climbing walls, and should help me do better next time. It was tough to get the game finished this time, but I already want to do it again

Castle Uno Submission Page

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 22nd, 2013 at 1:33 pm and is filed under LD #28. 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.

Happy Christmas Ludum Dare!