So I was doing some Batching, Creating some sort of 2D Engine, and the scary part is it kinda works!

Here are two screenshots from my warmup test-game that runs wonderfully at 14 FPS:

It’s not really game-ish as I haven’t implemented any logic like collision detection or randomness.
All the player can do is move their car (the left one) up or down between the two lanes, and see it pass through the other cars.

Somehow I think I won’t be surprised if I find myself doing a text-based game instead.
The sound implementation will definitely be used anyway

P.S. I really hope I won’t need a car sprite in the LD48 because I can’t see myself creating another one…

Tags: batch

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=21623

So here ends an awesome first LD, and I’m both satisfied and unsatisfied with the results. I’ll just share some thoughts I had during the competition in no significant order:

• It appears that I saw the process as a technological challenge rather than a game development challenge. In that aspect I might have succeeded, but I really think the game should have been more fun.
• I felt the theme really hindered me. Saying “It’s ASCII and Batch, isn’t that enough minimalism already” seemed to me like “the easy approach”. It got to the point that several times I was answering “Should I add this and that?” With “No, they’re really cool and won’t look minimalistic at all”. In retrospect that might have been a big mistake.
• The walls closing in on you was a game mechanic from a very (very) early version, and it was really creepy at the time. I couldn’t let go of it, and it probably hindered me even more than the theme.
• I think the ASCII animations were kinda cute, especially the punching and kicking ones.
• Making them was also one of the highlights.
• Coding this was a wonderful adventure. It was a process of rewriting every piece of code a few times so performance is reasonable. FYI if you try to implement an efficient algorithm in Batch you’re doing it wrong. If you’re trying to implement ANY algorithm in batch, you’re doing it wrong. The code just looks horrible.
• I’m really satisfied with my take on sound
• Time management wasn’t a big issue, Even though I haven’t slept too much, my parents came for a visit, I went out for a few hours and still wasn’t stressed.
• Batch was fun, but if I do this again some time, I should definitely pick something else.

That’s it, I hope everybody learned as much as I did and had double the fun

See you in the next competition!

Tags: batch

It appears that like Batch, you can’t just C your way through LD48 without a  solid framework (at least I can’t), so I’ve started coding something to wrap SDL2 (with the generous help of rxi‘s tips and code) and it’s now in a working state.

Everything is available here: https://github.com/ashdnazg/ld27
It’s still work in progress, and I’ll probably use the same repository for the game itself, but I suppose that’s the wonderful magic of source control.

I’m now considering whether to try coding a particle manager, or try a warmup before that.

If any of you wise people have tips or suggestions, please leave a comment

Vote for the right theme!

It seems that nudity can get you tased

(I’ve improved the field, added players, and police)

In the picture you can see all the security guys that bumped into the grass/each other, a player from the red team is also amongst the casualties, and last but not least, our faithful streaker getting tased by the police force…

I think that in the remaining time I’ll add goals (achievements)  to the game, such as:

1. Making two security guys bump.
2. Injuring a football player.
3. Causing a police officer to be tased.
4. Other stuff.

Enough talking, I have less than three hours!!!!

https://docs.google.com/uc?export=download&id=0B68iBzCzE1OXQzIzVEZKZFAxcW8

(here’s a beta link, if anyone happens to try that, don’t forget to press space, and please leave a comment :))

Finished minutes before the 48 hours ended.

A very interesting LD!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=21623

Don’t worry, we’ll have a post mortem, but first:

1. shower
2. sleep

At first I wanted to write a post mortem here, but it’ll never be taken seriously if it’s in the same post as this 😀

What have I done…

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=21623

Instead of an in-game picture, I put here the end screen. If you haven’t played my game yet and wish to see how it looks, have a peek  here.

When coming to write this Post-Mortem I looked in my previous posts from LD26 to see if I have learned anything at all and also compared this jam’s goals to what actually happened.

I think the main idea for this game came to me the day before the the jam started.
I don’t really remember if I thought about the specifics, but it surely helped after I verified the theme is indeed 10 seconds.

The Good:

1. C – I think it was a good choice as I’m quite comfortable with this language and I felt I was coding swiftly. I encountered only a single mind boggling hair pulling memory bug, and one or two annoying “Who wrote this” bugs. Another important part was my framework. The fact I don’t mention SDL2 here, is because I hid it entirely, probably saving a lot of time.
2. Time planning – Yes, I’ve finished the end screen and achievements system (pictured above) 4 minutes before submitting time, but  I had time for these and the intro screen because I’ve finished the core game 3-4 hours before. In my timezone, LD started in 4am. Unlike the previous LD, I slept until 8, had a look at the theme and went straight to eat breakfast, during which my ideas and plans took shape.
3. Fun – The main goal I had was to make a game that is fun. In the previous jam that was low priority, and it showed. I think my entry improved exponentially over its predecessor. There’s still a lot to be desired, but the gameplay seems to work!
4. Audio – I’ve never imagined I could do such things using my laptop’s built-in microphone and audacity. I even had to hit myself a few time until I was satisfied with the recording that was eventually transformed into the effect that plays when people bump into each other. An anecdote: Before coming up with the idea for this game, I planned to record myself playing live music during the jam.
5. Funny – I laughed out loud so much while making this game. I tested the game very often, with every feature I have added (which is a good advice, by the way!), and it still made me laugh every time, even near then end when I was coding like mad.

The Bad:

1. Funny – Back to the statistics, humour has absolutely no correlation with the overall ratings, and even though I wished to focus more on the gameplay and less on the lulz, it didn’t happen that much. As stated in The Good, it’s an improvement from last time, but there’s still more way ahead.
2. Graphics – I had all the tools I needed, Gimp is wonderful, and my framework supported loading spritesheets. I didn’t use them. Right in the beginning I created the first 5 or 6 sprites as separate files, and didn’t migrate to sheets later. With every type of person I have added, I had to do way too much redrawing, exporting and coding. Even if it didn’t waste that much time, the repetitive work was extremely annoying.
3. C – Well, using C with a simple game means you don’t have to waste your time on optimizations. That means you can recursively merge sort this list. Heck, you can even bubble sort it! However, I have done neither of those. I looked in the internets for a merge sort algorithm with loops, found one, implemented it adapted to my intrusive lists, and all hell broke loose. Memory pointers went flying, and I was relentlessly debugging. After two hours or so (maybe even more) of searching, I’ve found the bug in an unrelated place! Another fail that relates to the previous point about graphics is all the ugly asset loading code. It should probably be implemented in lua or something, but even if not, some functions could really simplify this horror.

The Ugly:

1. Graphics –  😀
2. After the first day I understood my game has no end or goals. That’s why I came up with this headlines/achievements system, because the thing I enjoyed most during testing was to cause amusing things to happen (such as a police officer tasing their colleague) .
3. If you haven’t noticed, the field floats in space. I wanted to have an audience. I even wanted them to be throwing bottles and stuff at you. Unfortunately, Other things had higher priority. There are no goals either (football goals), the goalkeepers have the same uniform as their team. Did I mention there’s no referee?

All in all I’m satisfied with the result, and I hope you like it as well!

After rating a decent amount of games, I have to admit that some of them are quite good. Unfortunately this post is not about these.

A more exclusive club is this of the funny games. When I use the word “funny” I don’t mean “amusing”, or “giggle worthy”, I mean those select few that make you wish you had a spare set of underwear nearby.

To this date, I’ve found two extraordinary entries that I’d like to share with the reader together with five others which deserve an honourable mention.

Note that all these entries were judged by my unusual sense of humour. If your game isn’t here it’s probably due to a combination of the following reasons (from least to most probable):

1. I don’t find it funny.
2. I haven’t played it.
3. No one finds it funny.

Entries Extraordinare

Romantic Comedy/Tragedy – Forever Alone

Well written and well executed, this game creates a solemn atmosphere surrounding a ludicrous plot.
The result is magnificent.

Similar to many games in the humorous genre, the gameplay has a small impact on the player’s enjoyment. Well, except the falling pianos I suppose.

 
Lavatory Humour – MY ASS

What can I say, while many had smoke coming out of their ears trying to conjure a witty narrative, a hairy ass just swept by and found itself drowning in a pool of diarrhea.

It’s not elegant nor smart, but it’s what the audience wants. It also shows the importance of silly sound effects.

Honourable Mentions

The main reason games found themselves here isn’t because they’re less funny, but because their creators held other priorities above humour.
The Storyteller – Extreme Trauma Surgeon

While the game itself isn’t much more than amusing, the intro is priceless.

The Musician – Keep Flying

Who needs to compose music when you can sing nonsense. (There’s also some cat dung and photon potatoes)

The Sadistic – Royal Defenestrator

Throwing cats, guards and whatnot out of windows cheers me up.
A good example of implementing simple game mechanics and giving the player the freedom to do whatever makes them laugh.

The I Couldn’t Think of a Title – Detective Awesomepants

This game is too good to be disregarded as humorous.

The Meta – 10 10 Second Game Design Lessons

It might not be universally funny, but here in this jam it definitely is.

That’s all, I hope you enjoy them as much as I did!

Well, I’m crashing vrld‘s party with other things I was curious about

In particular the difference between Compo entries and Jam entries.

Unsurprisingly,  jam entries get higher ratings in graphics:

Similarly their audio is also rated higher:

My theory is that these two give the Jam a boost when it comes to mood:

But are jam games better? The overall doesn’t show a major difference:

And neither does fun:

Same for innovation:

They certainly are funnier (disregarding a certain outlier…) which I wasn’t really expecting:

But the coolest thing is that there’s one category where the compo gains the upper hand (not by alot, but you can’t deny it’s there):

All in all, nothing too crazy here, but I wonder why the compo entries get higher theme ratings.

Even if I couldn’t participate in LD this time, it doesn’t mean I’m breaking my (short) tradition of statistics.
Here be spreadsheets of rankings, scores and percentiles*

Links:

– Compo(CSV) – 1010 Rated Games
– Jam(CSV)– 556 Rated Games

Graphs might follow if I’ll have interesting ideas (suggestions in the comments are welcome).

* When you divide your position by 1284 you include 274 games that haven’t received any ratings at all, giving you a brighter look at reality. Moreover near the mean score there are quite a lot of ties, the position you have on your page is the top of the tie range (should be middle for calculating percentiles) which can brighten your day even further.

Congratulations to the winners! (everyone who learned something new from participating).

well, here is my semi-working base code:

https://github.com/ashdnazg/ld29

let us all hope for the best…

So I have added soldiers (all the black dots), which move around, seem busy, and make my submarine functional…

The player will move around as the captain (the soldier with red in the middle)

Tomorrow I will have to:

• add command giving
• add sound effects
• add bad things (so it’s actually a game)
• add water
• add music

Seems almost possible! 😀

bloobloblboblbo

Most things are kinda OK 😀

Using love2d with libraries by rxi or something like that.

Good luck everybody!

Recent Archaeological findings show that Orcas were used to transfer late Romans to the Underworld.

I need more boats!!!!!

Fun and mayhem!