This is my first time participating in on of these competitions, and I’m greatly enjoying it so far.  I figured I’d write a blog post to summarize the first day here.

My game has you fight waves of randomly-generated enemy “bots”.  When I say randomly-generated, I mean whole-hog random.  Colors, behaviors, weapons, stats – it can all change.  After the first set of enemies, I start using a genetic algorithm to combine these enemies, hopefully ramping up the difficulty and making some neat combinations.

Genetic algorithms are really cool and they suck at the same time.  On the positive side, it’ll be easy to balance the game when the algorithm works right – if it keeps picking certain features over and over, I’ll nerf ’em.  On the downside, it’s hard to tell if things aren’t working quite right.  I played a few generations and noticed that the game kept dropping weapons for some reason.  It would select out almost all weapons by the fourth generation.  I was pretty sure this was not, in fact, the optimal solution to the problem.  Turned out to be some misplaced curly braces (sheesh).

So what’s still to do?  Sound and music, notably. A pause menu. I also think it would be pretty cool to have a system for exporting enemy genomes having friends fight them, or even having two bots fight each other.

Here’s a screenshot!

Because finished is what I was with a few hours to spare, and finished is what I am right now!

I’m pleasantly surprised with how well this went.  My idea was scoped very ambitiously, but I managed to get through nearly everything I envisioned (even saving and loading of genomes).  I learned a lot about genetic algorithms, too, a technique I’ve tried to implement in the past, unsuccessfully.  So that alone seems like a good use of a weekend.

I also learned that I actually stink at making sounds.  Also, music takes more than an hour to do to satisfaction.  Perhaps next time I’ll make a purposefully silent game.

My art is decent (but it looks a lot better in motion).

You should, of course, play it: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=15030

I haven’t yet decided whether I will continue working on my game, Primeval Laboratories, at some point in the future (October Challenge?). The feedback seems to be quite positive so far, but I’m not sure where to go with a low-scope XNA game, other than XBox Live Indie, a market I have been singularly unimpressed with.

Anyway, I though I would brainstorm what I might do to complete the game. Any feedback from those who have played would be great!

• Music and sound effects. These should be a critical part of the game, and I learned too late that they take time and skill to produce that I did not have. Free resources from the internet should suffice.
• A character sprite. Should be human but as generic as possible (a la Portal’s Chelle).
• A degree of player evolution so the player isn’t so static. Maybe issuing the player a new type of gun each round. The guns would receive small boosts each round (fire rate upgrades, spread, etc). This should involve some kind of choice on the part of the player.
• More variety in enemies. As much as possible. Prominent things I had to leave out for the compo game were armor plates (bits of the enemies that block shots from certain angles, have their own health), and visual distinctions between the enemies (visual guns and such).
• Add passive stat genes to the Products display panel in addition to weapons. Add an interface for saving enemies through the Products panel.
• Currently the player can only load two bots and fight against their offspring. May also include a feature where the player can load two pairs of bots and have them fight each other and evolve.
• Balance difficulty (restrict how good enemies can be on the first wave a little better)

This weekend may be busy for me, but I’m going to make an attempt to enter anyway!  I’ll be using C++ with SDL and a partial engine of my own creation built on top of SDL, uploaded here.  Good luck to all, and at the very least I look forward to playing lots of great games.

Oh, and I may be trying to integrate some procedural music generation if it’s appropriate.  My code for that is up here.

In addition to being a unit of time, a second can also be a unit of distance.  One second is 1/60th of a minute, and one minute is 1/60th of a degree of latitude or longitude on the globe.  What would the world look like if only 10 square seconds of its surface remained?  The area would only be about 300 feet on each side.  Sounds like a great setting for a survival/horror “Don’t Starve” game…\

Have fun all.

Walk, walk away from the scary zombies.

Three hours left, no sounds or music!

At least most of the other stuff is done.  The zombies will kill you, anyway, as will falling off into space, and there are a few mechanics in place to allow you to delay your inevitable zombie death.

When your spawn timing algorithm breaks at a certain depth…

As the first full day draws to a close, my game is looking significantly more fleshed-out.

What began as a simple, arcadey diving game that had you harpooning fish has now acquired a pretty well-featured conversation system, with state data and branching based on conditionals or player responses.  It was a lot of fun to implement.  Plus, still a full day tomorrow to creep some more!

Tags: feature creep

Here’s my short post-mortem for The Legend of the Thunder Fish.  Cross-posted from brianmacintosh.com.

I worked with Justin Britch on this one. We met just after the theme was announced to brainstorm. I really liked this theme – it evokes mystery and exploration, provides an easy setting (underground or underwater) to start with, and could simultaneously be tied into gameplay elements. While we thought it would have been a lot of fun to make “Ben Eath, the Surf Ace”, we ultimately decided that we really wanted to go after the mystery, the thrill of exploration, fear of the unknown, and such themes. We also knew that we wanted to attempt to introduce some sort of narrative into the world.

The beginnings of the conversation system.

The design was ambitiously scoped for a jam, and I’m happy I was able to turn out so many features.

More conversation.

The Good: Dedicating time during the development process for polish worked well for the game. When polish gets left as a task for the end of the jam, there’s often no time to actually do it. I didn’t leave a feature until it was in a state it could stay in.

I also didn’t run into too many momentum-killer problems.  I’ve worked on several smaller projects using HTML5 and ThreeJS over the past few months, so I knew some of its quirks and was able to work continuously without getting stuck on strange bugs, even though the codebase for Thunder Fish pushed way past the size of my previous HTML games.  Familiarity is key for jams, and it definitely pays off in the ability to continue grinding out features.

Learned: Yet again, I completely failed to allocate time for audio. Fortunately, I was already in the Jam category for this one, so I pulled some free music fromNGXmusical in the last hour. Sound effects could have improved the feel even further, though.

Interested?  Play and rate here!  http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=15030

I’m in for my fourth LD.  I’ll be working with one or two other people, and using this extremely minimalistic JS/HTML5 game template built on ThreeJS:

http://www.brianmacintosh.com/projects/ld30/jsGameTemplate.zip

Cross-posted from brianmacintosh.com

Just starting the first real day of coding. I started off this jam thinking of making some kind of simulation game – something where you, in a relatively low-pressure environment, could build up a system or a network and watch it do its work, like SimCity.

Justin and I had a short brainstorming session when the theme – <b>Connected Worlds</b> – was announced. They say to never go with your first idea – however, after considering two-screen tower-defense games, games where dinosaurs are attacking the modern world, games with constellations (I really liked that one and I hope some other people do it), and meeting Kevin Bacon, we eventually went with just that. This will be a game where you build up an interstellar shipping empire, moving goods between planets.

I also wanted to try to make use of multiple windows or views, and that goes well with theme. We’re pretty sure we know what we are going to do with them. Early screenshot:

Hah!  All you people and your fancy arts.

Many moons ago, I was on here plugging our game Camera Obscura, which was on Steam Greenlight at the time.  Well, we made it through, and we’re releasing the game on Steam on February 19th!  This is the first game I’ve worked on to be published on a major platform, so I’m pretty excited.  You should visit our Steam page, check out our new trailer, and see how far we’ve come.

If you missed my first post, Camera Obscura is a sidescrolling puzzle-platformer with a unique mechanic that allows you to take a picture of the geometry around you, then move it with you for a few seconds.  You can use it to bridge wide gaps, create staircases up cliffs, and solve other, more intricate, puzzles.  It takes place in a mysterious tower in a forgotten land, and features amn

This site has been a huge part of my personal journey to this point.  I also wanted to thank you so much for your support on Greenlight!  I don’t doubt that the members of this site helped the game get approved.

Camera Obscura on Steam

Thank you again!
– Brian

Tags: 2d platformer, camera obscura, greenlight, puzzle platformer, release, steam

I think my hot-air balloon got a cramp…

I love couch multiplayer games, but I’ve never made one for Ludum Dare before since it seems like most people don’t have another person on-hand when they’re playing.  This time, though, I had such a good idea I couldn’t pass it up – and I’ve been having a blast playing it with people, so I’m glad I didn’t!

Here are a few postmortem thoughts:

• The Emscripten port of Box2D to Javascript is good. This weekend was my first time ever using it (though I’ve used C++ Box2D), and I didn’t have any problems except for figuring out how to implement a contact listener.  I’m definitely going to use Box2D more for jams – it’s not hard to implement, and it gives you so many options you’d never consider for a jam gam otherwise (like particles with physics).
• Re-using code really paid off in this one.  I was able to make three different game modes and a neat main menu, predominantly because they all pivot around the same Balloon code, with a few small toggles to tweak the behavior in each.
• When I have sound effects, I usually use sfxr. This time around I recorded sounds using Audacity. It was quite fast and almost as easy as sfxr. All I needed was a balloon, my wastepaper basket, and my voice (at 190% speed).  I still need to find a good tool and workflow for making fast music for jams, though.

I hope you can find a friend to play the game with, it’s totally worth it!  If not, there is an AI available.

Porcupine Dogfight

We will miss you.  Well, I will anyway.

Here are some games that I happened to come across this jam that I think are worth a play!

sOS

A clever and amusing “hacking” simulator.  Reasonably short, and features a number of fun custom puzzles.

Stone Age Clicker

This is a terribly addicting rate-management sim with glorious pixel art.  If you’re anything like me you won’t stop playing it until you win, and maybe not even then (I played for 3 hours).

Contraband Crate

This is a clever and very satisfying quick-play highscore game where you have to pack wildly-shaped artifacts into boxes as quickly and efficiently as possible.  The gameplay is smooth and the art’s not bad, either.

The Last Blacksmith

A play-til-you-die game that looks good and is just a solid experience all around.  Moment-to-moment gameplay is just satisfying.

Of course, I also think you should play our game, I am the Destroyer, if you’re a fan of those humorous old-school point-and-click adventures.  But I’m biased.

Tags: LD36, recommendations

Ready to do some vandalism.