Hello there. First time entrant over here.

I’m in and I’m going to use:

Unity for development

Gimp and Paint for graphics (programmer art ^_^)

sfxr, wolfram tunes for sound and music

Thinking about entering the Jam competition, but I might even try compo if things go well in the first 48 hours. To all other entrants, good luck, have fun.

After getting up four hours after the theme was announced, now I have an idea and I’ll try to craft something decent out of it.

You are a federation employee whose job is to track and destroy little planets that our federation does not like. In a regular day like others, you travel to the core of a mazy planet you’re going to destroy with your digger and plant your planet devouring bomb. In an unfortunate turn of events, your digger is not able to start up, so you have to work your way up to the planet surface to send a signal to your mothership before the planet gets devoured completely.

You begin in a maze. The maze shrinks from inside every second. You need to work your way outside to find the end of the level. You can’t see the whole level and obviously going in a dead end might have serious consequences. Luckily you still have some tools with you that can be useful in dire situations.

While this tiny world gets tinier every second, can you make your way out of it?

I really hope to be able to finish the game in time. See you on the next update!

Here was my first post this morning, explaining what I was aiming for.

Right now, I’ve done very little but I remain optimistic. Movement is done, field of vision is done and shrinking is partially done, although it lacks random elements to make it more fun. I’ve not yet created a maze level but working on it right now. Next up are tools the player can use, more levels and the other stuff.

You can see the game for yourself here. All the graphics are placeholder art, ofc. But I don’t expect a lot from my graphics skills

Here is my previous progress. A little more is added up such as a full level, a menu (sort of) and some pop-ups. There are four exits in this level, each of them on the corners of the screen. Next up is utilities for the player, after that it’s graphics, sound and I’m finalizing with more levels, game balance and bug fixes.

Right now I’ve had some dinner and I’m going to take a walk outside to get some fresh air.

Here is my previous post. Continuing from there…

This was a disappointing evening coding session. Nothing went well. I managed to do so little, which are in-game powerups. Simple powerups such as teleporting, running faster and shooting blocks out of your way. They’re unlimited for now, making the first level too easy, but I’ll get back to that topic later when I’m finished with graphics and sound.

Yes, next up is graphics and sound. I’m too inexperienced on these topics but we’ll see what I can come up with.

GAME LINK

Here is my entry. This was my first ever game jam and it’s been a great experience. I’m really looking forward to play other participants’ games and also looking to get constructive comments about my game aswell.

It’s a maze game where the puzzles shrink from inside to the outside. A few things I’m not pleased about the game is the lack of music and the lack of any indication of tiles that are about to fall down soon. I’ll try to work on these issues next, but if I can’t progress further I’ll just call it a day.

Hello there. My name is Arhan Bakan. I’m a senior CS student at Hacettepe University, Turkey. This is the postmortem of my first entry in Ludum Dare competition. I had a lot of fun in the competition, so it definitely won’t be the last one for me.

The Good Stuff

• Before I started working on my entry, I was confident that it was impossible for me to finish a game in 48 hours. “Just gonna try the Jam if I fail the Competition.”, I kept saying to myself. In the end, however, I finished the game with one hour left on the clock. Sure, there are some places where I can say “I wish…”, but I feel like it’s a fun game overall and I managed to learn a lot from the process.
• Base game concept (a shrinking maze) came to my mind within the first few hours, and it turned out to be a simple and effective idea. Also, I set my goals for 48 hours pretty accurately.
• Sleeping. Lots of sleeping. 13 hours out of 48 were basically spent sleeping. I don’t understand how people manage to stay up all day and night to work on a game, but I just can’t do it. It’s way better to sleep well and think with a clear mind. Eating habits based on fruits and vegetables also work like a miracle when all you do is sit on your butt and code all day long.
• Learning from other people’s mistakes. I read some tips on how to survive a game jam before the weekend. And it all helped a lot. Reading good advice is always helpful.

The Bad Stuff

• Should’ve known the engine better. I worked on Unity3D. It’s the only game engine I’m familiar with, however, I’m not familiar with it enough. I spent nearly 3 hours on the character controller and after the dust settled, it was only a few lines of code. This competition made me a lot more experienced with the engine, but I still have a lot to work on.
• Lack of music. I couldn’t find a fitting content generator for music, and I was not prepared to compose music on my own. Next time, I hope this won’t be an issue as I’ll come back having finished my homework. 😉
• Lack of interesting gameplay. For most of the users (and friends) who played it , the game has a good concept, decent graphics but not enough gameplay to keep the user interested enough to finish it. It’s also a bit tough for most of them, and this takes away from the fun, too. Most of this problem was due to time constraints, so I’ll try to do better next time.

Thanks for reading through my postmortem. I’ll definitely be back for the next Ludum Dare if I have time for it. It was a great experience.

If you’re interested, be my guest, play and rate my game if you can.

PLAY —–>          WORLD GONE WRONG          <—– PLAY

Tags: postmortem

This is my entrance post. Pretty excited about competing for a second time in LD48.

The tools I’ll be using are Unity, Paint.net, Audacity and sfxr.

Good luck everybody!

I told my girlfriend that I’m going for LD48 again and the theme might be selected as “End of the World” this time. What I got in the evening was this:

There are some nice ideas written in this paper. Don’t try to steal them.

Also, here’s a picture of my workspace a day before the contest. It’s going to get a little messy afterwards.

Good luck on your little games, everyone! Have a lot of fun this weekend.

Tags: deskphoto

Hello everybody. It’s been a tiring day and I’m about to head off to bed. I managed to get a playable version out by the end of the day, though.

Right now, you’re a square that is trying to mind his own business at the same time he’s being chased off by other squares. Yeah, it’s dull. I’ve got a good story in my head but I need sleep before I can write something about it. Here’s the first screenshot.

PLAY MISTER MISBEHAVE

Graphics, sound effects, music, some extra features and polishing will be made tomorrow. Off to bed I go, then.

Ok, here’s my entry. I’d love to tell you about it, but I’m too tired to do so and I’ve an exam in the morning, so I’ll just give you the link so you can try it out.

I’ll certainly do a post-mortem in the upcoming days. This LD has been a success for me. While I couldn’t finish some of the things I planned to do, I managed to come up with a nice game. The only thing that worries me is that the difficulty might be a little on the easy side as the AI can easily be exploited.

Anyway, you play, you decide.

PLAY MISTER MISBEHAVE NOW!

Hello everyone. I managed to finish my second Ludum Dare Compo entry this weekend and I’m proud of this achievement. I feel like I’ve created a much better game than my first entry.

PLAY MISTER MISBEHAVE NOW!

Description of the Game

In Mister Misbehave, you control a character who, well, likes to misbehave often. He’s banished from the city, and he continues to misbehave when he arrives to the countryside. However, the villagers are not happy with his misbehavings so they try to catch him to put an end to his bad actions.

The basic gameplay involves a tile-based, randomly generated forest map with a couple of houses (villages) on it. Our villain tries to misbehave in as many tiles as possible before the villagers catch him and give him a taste of his own medicine. There are also some “healer” type of characters in the game, dressed in white, who wanders around and tries to repair the damage our villain has brought to the universe. These characters reduce your total score, but can easily be dispatched by our villain. So, basically, villagers chase you, you misbehave a lot and also try to chase healers.

The Good Stuff

• Sleeping is important. I cannot emphasize on this nearly enough. Nearly 15 hours of my 48 hours were spent while sleeping and I’m not complaining. Sleeping is important to put your mind together and it gives you the boost you need to go on when things get tougher.
• Solid game title and concept. I believe I came up with a great name for my entry. The villain character is also a little bit different from all the villains we’re used to see, so I believe it’s a nice twist to the theme which made the game entertaining.
• Console text. I added a console to my game which describes all the misbehavings you’ve done. There are 5 different flavor text for each of the tile types you can misbehave in. I wanted to add even more tile types and flavor text to the game, and I might do so if I get to try my luck at a post-compo version. Right now, it’s one of the best features of the game imo.
• Feature complete. I managed to put in almost all the features I’ve planned initially for this game. The content does get repetitive after a couple of plays but still, it’s enough for a player to try the game a few more times after his initial try.

The Bad Stuff

• Pixel art. I suck at creating art. I tried doing some pixel art, and while it wasn’t a bad effort, it lacks style which might’ve lured a couple more people into playing the game. I want to learn more about doing pixel art if I want the look of my games to be more attractive.
• Difficulty adjustment. Once again, some people have found my game to be a little on the difficult side. While it’s definitely easier than my first entry in LD23, next time I’ll remember to put in a difficulty slider in my game to satisfy everyone’s needs.
• THERE ARE NO GOATS. ’nuff said.

So, what now?

I’m a little bit busy in the next couple of weeks, but I’ll try to make a post-compo version of my game in the future. The features I have in mind are adding levels to the game, adding more tile types and more flavor text, along with some other character types that approach you in a different way. Better graphics if possible are also on my to-do list. I guess we’ll see what happens next. Until then, I just have one thing left to say:

PLAY MISTER MISBEHAVE NOW!

Tags: ld25, postmortem, unity

Hello there everyone.

So, it’s been almost a week since Ludum Dare 25 finished. In the meantime, I’ve managed to rate 50 games, and I’ve noticed most of them via the rating system, so it was a complete mixed bag o’ games. Here are 7 Compo entries that you might find interesting & maybe haven’t played before.

Elevator Evil by 8bitDamage

In Elevator Evil, you play as an evil elevator which is trying to blow the brains out of some people by dropping them off the wrong floor. It gets kinda confusing in the late game, but this doesn’t change the fact that you’re going to have some serious fun while playing.

Monologuer by Devenger

Monologuer is a hilarious game where you, the mastermind villain, try to explain your evil plot to your victim while his friends are coming to rescue him. Of course, you should try to talk to your victim as much as you can while you stop the rescuers from reaching your prisoner by placing spike traps and activating them on the right time. While playing this game, you should also read what our villain is saying as most of the text written is really funny.

Red Legion by DeathBySnail

Red Legion is a short, story-driven game that you should check out, partially because of the bad jokes, but mostly because of the good storyline.

The Quite Annoying League by pierrec

The Quite Annoying League is a quite intriguing adventure game with a good sense of humor. You’re trying to annoy your victims, but you should balance your actions carefully as you might make them call the police, or right to the opposite, you might actually make them like you, which you might find quite annoying.

Stop Him Now! by TijmenTio

Stop Him Now! is a first time entry with solid gameplay as you’re playing as an army of evil birds trying to stop the good guy by bumping him on the head or firing a rocket at him – which is easier-. Reverse platformer with some nice ideas.

Eaten by wzl

Eaten is a game with hilarious sound effects where you’re a cannibal who’s killing and eating people on the streets. There are a few uncompleted features but the game is still fun to play in its current state. “Yum yum yuuum!”

Evil Keeper by XmmmX

Evil Keeper is a game where you build your own dungeon, try to attract heroes with treasure and kill them with vicious traps and fireballs before they can escape. There are a few unimplemented features that might be available on a post-compo version later, so I’m keeping this on my watch-list.

So, these are a few good games you might want to play. This LD was a great experience and I’ll continue to play and rate games during the judging period. If you liked a couple of these games, or if you’re the developer of one of these games, please consider to drop in on my game page and leave a comment on my game too. You might find it interesting.

Mister Misbehave by arhpositive (me)

Mister Misbehave is a reflex game where you’re trying to misbehave in as many places as possible while trying not to get caught by the villagers who are quite angry at you for stealing their goats and doing many other bad stuff. You should try it.

Hi everyone. This’ll be my third Ludum Dare after the 23rd and the 25th.

Tools will be Unity3D, Paint.net, bfxr/sfxr and autotracker.py.

Good luck and have fun!

Arhan

Forgot to post an “I’m in.” post yesterday so here it is. We’re ten hours into the competition and I’ve been awake for the past four.

My basic idea will be an abstract reflex game based on multiple spheres around the scene and maintaining connections between these spheres properly. I’m thinking of dressing the game into a “human relationships” theme which will enable me to introduce interesting rules on connections. So, my connected worlds are going to be people.

Nothing done yet, just the idea, but I’m fairly confident that I can come up with something original and fun. I’ll be using Unity3D and C# as always.

See you later on my next update,

Arhan.

PLAY CONVERSATION!

Hello everyone! I’m Arhan, a young game developer from Turkey and this is my third Ludum Dare entry so far. So far, it’s been a pleasure creating games along a lot of creative people who loves video games as much as I do, and for my third success in Ludum Dare, I feel like I managed to come up with a unique idea, albeit coupled with ugly, boring graphics.

After consecutive flops in Ludum Dare 27 and Ludum Dare 29, I knew that I had to produce something in this summer edition of my favourite game jam competition. I was awake at 9.00am in EET, which is five hours after the theme was announced. Connected Worlds, you say?

GOALS

I had a couple of goals that I wanted to accomplish for this edition of the jam. These were:

• Game should only use mouse movement and LMB. I wanted the game to have simple controls for a possible future mobile port. I succeeded in my goal, and the game will be playable with only one finger when I eventually port it to Android.
• I should not use the first idea that pops up in my mind regarding theme. Connected Worlds! Space! Planets! Aliens! Controlling characters in different worlds! That was just the first 60 seconds of me thinking right after I saw the theme and I immediately put all these elements into my “forbidden” list. Don’t get me wrong, space is cool, aliens are awesome, I enjoyed every entry with multiple different characters stuck in multiple dimensions. It’s just that I knew these ideas were going to be overused for this theme, and I didn’t want my game to feel like “that other game you played, but with worse graphics”. Although it’s worth noting that my game could easily be themed into a space game.

WHAT WENT RIGHT

• The Idea: Basically, in this game, you’re trying to keep a group of people together by conducting successful conversations in pairs between them. I won’t get into details, but the idea and the gameplay concept is, in my personal, biased opinion, a solid one. I feel like I have succeeded in making all game mechanics feel natural and related to the story. A good conversation keeps people together, while a bad conversation makes them repel each other. Characters which are too close to each other collide and push each other away in order to protect their “personal space” in a way.
• Prototype: I was quick to put the first prototype out and to decide that the core idea is fun enough to pursue for the rest of the weekend. This was something I was unable to do in the first two succeeded attempts of Ludum Dare for me.
• Time Management: I briefly followed Pomodoro principles to use my time more efficiently during the weekend and I feel like they helped me a bit.

WHAT WENT WRONG

• Time Distribution: While I believe I managed to use my time efficiently, I insisted too much on implementing a few more gameplay elements (some of which went to garbage afterwards), resulting in a lack of attention in all the other details of the game, which will follow this entry.
• Graphics: Couldn’t find the time to draw decent faces for the characters, a decent conversation line, animations for all kinds of events related to getting and losing points, and so on. Heck, those lousy eyes, nose and mouth were added to the game literally in the last hour.
• Gameplay Polish: My game lacks polish in every aspect of it, but gameplay is the most critical of them. Currently, the game is hard as hell and controls are rarely well understood among players. Moreover, the game is boring in my opinion, because I wasn’t able to tweak the gameplay to make the player feel like he’s/she’s accomplishing something. This could’ve been easily avoided with more attention to detail and less attention to additional elements that ended up not making it in the game.

CONCLUSION

I’m happy to put out yet another successful entry for Ludum Dare. I feel that I’ll get rather low scores thanks to lousy graphics and rather boring gameplay which is also hard as hell. However, I’m really happy with the core concept and I’m thinking about taking this game further and making a better version of it at some point.

It’s been an awesome game jam, big thanks to all the gaming community here and the organization. See you later in December for Ludum Dare 31. Keep playing!

PLAY CONVERSATION!

I’m in for my seventh attempt and hopefully 4th success. Let’s hope everything goes well.

Tools:

Unity3D, paint.net, sfxr/bfxr, Visual Studio 2013 and various other small stuff.

Have a good time and make good games, everyone!

I’m excited for this weekend! I am not having the best week of my life, though, so my participation will heavily depend on my mood and my ability to come up with a decent idea for the theme.

I’ll use Unity 3D, bfxr/sfxr and paint.net. I might try Tilemancer as well.

In my “I’m in.” post, I said I was going to use Unity3D as always for this LD.

I diverged a little bit from my plan.

Ejderhalar is an abstract, zero luck, perfect information area control board game for 2 players. Each player controls 5 dragons which can stand up in one square or crawl all over three squares of the game board. It is critical to use your dragons’ bodies to push enemy pieces off critical regions of the board, only to capture these regions yourself and win the game.

I’m calling it a night. It’s been an amazing experience. This weekend marks my first ever board game design and I don’t think it’s really bad either. It’s at least fun for a couple (or five) games.

I’ll do a post-mortem later on. In the meantime, if you’re curious about Ejderhalar, click the link above and download the rules. You might like it if you’re up for a thinky game.

Hello everyone,

This time, I’ve opted for something rather unconventional for Ludum Dare. I tried to design a board game over the weekend.

Ejderhalar

Link To Game Page

It was Saturday morning. The competition had already begun. I woke up. I took a look at the theme. Shapeshift. Great, either I had to find an artist or I had to make a game about squares turning into triangles. I decided to take a shower and try to come up with an idea.

It was not until I fired up Unity3D after the shower when I first thought about making a board game. I’m a big fan of board games and I have a decent collection of them, too. At first, I thought I could design a game on the table first before I implement it with Unity3D for everyone to play on their computers. Therefore, I closed my computer, took lots of game pieces out of my existing game library and got to work.

Ejderhalar was made over Saturday afternoon and evening combined. I just sat next to my gaming table trying to figure out how I can shift the shapes of game pieces and make an interesting game in the meantime. “Istanbul” is a really good board game that includes a mechanic where you stack tokens on top of each other, only to leave them behind when you’re walking through a grid-like structure. This mechanic inspired me to put my own twist in it and I came up with the creature-like game pieces in Ejderhalar. When it was night, it was clear that I was not going to open my computer just to try to code a mediocre point and click interface for the board game in Unity3D. I stood up and played the game against myself a dozen times instead.

Sunday was spent with playtesting. I called a couple of friends who were available and I arranged meetings with them to play the game. The name of the game came up from one of my friends, who thought that the movement of the pieces resembled a dance of dragons. “Ejderhalar” means “Dragons” in Turkish.

I played 6 games with 2 different people before coming back home. The rules were set in stone in my head by that time. I just needed to write a proper rulebook. I spent all evening and night to create decent illustrations for the examples in the rulebook. There were two hours remaining on the Ludum Dare clock when I submitted the rulebook into the system.

Ejderhalar is a 2-player abstract area control board game about an ancient dance of the dragons. Your goal is to have a token on 3 out of 4 control points on the board before your opponent does. The game has an original movement mechanic that allows players to carry out long term plans.

I know it’s hard to come up with the energy to test a game jam board game, but I’d really appreciate it if you can play it at least once with a real opponent. Even if you are not able to play it, please write a comment on how you feel about the game. I promise a “play, rate and comment” in return for every comment below my game entry.

Thanks for reading my post and for taking a look at Ejderhalar.

Arhan Bakan
https://arhpositive.itch.io/
https://arhanbakan.wordpress.com/