This was my first jam, and it was awesome!  I had a lot of fun.

What went right:

As far as complexity, I decided to aim really low on this one since it was my first time.  I had a playable game up and running within a few hours, which let me relax and spend my time adding things and tweaking gameplay.  I didn’t want to run myself into the ground and be burnt out this morning, so I took lots of breaks and got a fairly decent amount of sleep.  Next time I will probably go for something a little more ambitious, but I hit my main goal, which was to just finish something.

The gameplay ended up being pretty close to what I wanted.  So did the music and sound effects (if I may abuse those words).  The idea was to make a game that was way too easy, and then make it really hard not by increasing the difficulty of the game itself, but by annoying and distracting the player.  If you can block out all the visual/audio noise and adapt to the controls repeatedly reversing, you could play forever.  (Just for fun I made the time counter go up to 100 hours, but I can’t stand it for more than about a minute and a half.)

What went wrong:

The biggest issue I had was balancing the development with family needs.  My wife and I have two elementary school kids, so it was a lot to juggle.  I also lost some time due to some web hosting issues that I should have sorted out in advance (a DNS issue, and forgot to add the MIME type for Unity 3D files).  I figured that something like that would happen at some point, so I left myself a lot of buffer time.  I also had planned on swapping out the cubes with some kind of graphics, but I ended up needing more time for gameplay coding than I had though.  In fact, this game has absolutely no imported art assets of any kind.  It’s all built on Unity’s stock cubes and UI elements.

Conclusion:

Overall I’d call it a success.  The main goal was to finish something and have fun, and I did both of those.  Can’t wait for LD 32!

What went right:

First of all, I had a lot of fun.  Second, I think the concept of this game was pretty cool, and the gameplay really worked.  I’m also pretty happy with the music and sound effects.

What went wrong:

The art took longer than I expected [which is kind of weird writing in advance…because I’m expecting it to take longer than expected?!?].  I’ve never really done pixel art before, so I ended up getting in over my head.  But from my experience, getting in over my head tends to be very educational.  This game still needs a ton of polish.  Now that the jam is over, I may take some time to smooth over some of the rough parts…maybe even release a commercial version.

I had a lot of fun working on “Butterbats” (working title was “Flippity Flip”, but that’s just stupid), but I bit off WAY more than I could chew.  I was planning on doing this game in about two days, but I ended up spending the entire week on it.  Since the theme was “Reversed”, I…like a moron…thought, “why not reverse my workflow?”  First I’ll just do music, pixel art (which I have never really done before), and work on polish…then do the gameplay last.

It was kind of fun doing it that way.  It caused me to end up with a more polished game, but I spent most of yesterday wondering if I would even be able to finish the stupid thing.  This is not an approach I will ever use again.

It’s not beautiful by any stretch of the imagination, but for a very first attempt at doing any form of pixel art in a game, I’m pretty pleased with it.  I used Pickle for creating the sprites, and it worked great.  It’s pretty simple, but it did everything I needed it to do.

If anyone comes across any bugs (I’m sure there are some lurking), please let me know.  I’m considering doing an Ouya version, and I’d like to embarrass myself as little as possible in the process.

Can’t wait to play your games also…after a big ol’ bunch of sleep.

-Chad

If you like ultra-simple games with some dark humor, check out my game.  It’s about putting life and death decisions into the hands of a very buggy old executable on a starship’s computer.  Only takes about a minutes to play.

Very brief post-mortem:

This game was fun to make, but it’s obviously not very ambitious from a technical point of view. ***WARNING*** PATHETIC EXCUSE COMING IN 3…2…1…

I was sick the entire weekend, and wasn’t sure I’d be able to participate in LD at all. I was feeling iffy Friday evening, so I decided to go for it but with an ultra simple game. That way I could spend most of the weekend resting and still get something done. So in the words of one of the greatest scientists of my generation, “I didn’t have time to paint it, or build it to scale.”

The tone of the writing came out the way I wanted. I definitely entertained myself. Hopefully others will find it amusing also.

Other than three marginally different endings, it’s really only got enough material for a single playthrough. I may add more later.

Overall, I’d call my first full LD (have done two mini’s also) a success. Next time I hope to be feeling well enough to take on a project that’s more demanding.

I finally finished “Journey to the Center of the Sun”, for Mini LD 61.

http://ludumdare.com/compo/minild-61/?action=preview&uid=49058

I’m way too tired to write a proper post-mortem, but I’ll be writing a full blog post on this game later in the week and posting it here.

Here are a couple of brief points about how it went:

1. I’m pretty happy with how the art turned out.

2. I drastically underestimated how long this “little game” would take (mostly due to hand-painting everything).

3. The gameplay is really, really simple…basically you walk around and talk to people in the correct order to win. This was on purpose so that I could really push myself on the art without having to spend a ton of time coding it.

4. I’m really bummed that I didn’t have time to add music or audio (well, I could have, but again I wanted to focus on the art). I was really tempted to dig my theremin out of the closet.

5. I’m tired.

UPDATE: I have OSX and Windows builds available now. Still don’t know what is causing the web build to sometimes not work correctly. Sorry for the trouble, but please try one of the standalone builds if the WebGL version doesn’t work for you. Also, anyone who knows a solution to this issue, I’d appreciate if you leave a comment. Thanks. –Chad

It looks like there are some issues with playing my LDMini 61 game “Journey to the Center of the Sun”. The point and click stuff works fine, but sometimes the W/A/S/D and arrow keys are getting ignored.

Not sure exactly what’s going on–could be an issue with Unity’s WebGL build?–and won’t have time to dig into it until this evening (hopefully). In addition to seeing what I can do about fixing it, I’ll probably also add a Windows build and a Mac build for anyone who is having issues in the browser.

Strangely, it seems that if I point my browser directly to the game on my site (as opposed to playing through the Ludum Dare page) it works. That url is https://lavamonkeygames.com/gamefiles/centerofthesun (case sensitive). My build is set to a screen size of 900 x 600, but it’s still scrolling slightly when played from the Ludum Dare site. I’m wondering if I need to shrink it down just a bit. maybe the browser is interpreting the arrow keys as scroll commands and not directing them to the game?

Anyway, sorry for the inconvenience. I’m on it.

I’m in.

This is my second full Ludum Dare (have also done a few Mini LD’s). Last time I was sick the whole weekend, so I made about the least ambitious game in history. I’m really looking forward to seeing what I can do now that I don’t feel like complete garbage.

-Unity3d
-Visual Studio
-Bosca Ceoil / BFXR / Audacity
-ArtRage / Pickle / GIMP
-Coffee / Black Tea
-Donuts / More Donuts

Here is the link to the Unity3D base project I’ll be using, in case anyone else wants to use it.

It’s nothing too exciting, just a couple of utility functions that I found myself writing over and over, and a bare-bones scene loader. It’s also got my .hgignore file (you can just delete it if you don’t want to use Mercurial).

“Hero Stomp” is done, and it has…dare I say?…the greatest voice-over work of all time. That “In a World…” guy’s got nothin’ on me!

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=49058

It’s a Unity Web Player build (WebGL export was being all stupid), so won’t run in Chrome. If you have any issues with your browser, there are also Windows and OS/X builds.

“Hero Stomp” postmortem is now up on LavaMonkeyGames.com

https://lavamonkeygames.com/postmortem-hero-stomp/

I’m in, for my third Ludum Dare (also did three mini’s).

If anyone is interested, here is the link to the Unity base project that I will be using. https://bitbucket.org/chadivision/unitybaseproject

It’s very minimal, mostly just a utility class, some extension methods, and a bare-bones scene manager. I’ll probably be adding a couple more scripts to it this weekend.

Also, on an unrelated note, if you’ve got a couple of minutes to spare, please check out Roller Bomber, my November submission to www.onegameamonth.com. I’m always looking for ways to improve my game development, so I’d appreciate any feedback.

I also wrote a postmortem for it HERE.

Thanks, and good luck to everyone.

My game, “Flibitz”, is now live on the App Store, but on the submission page for the October Challenge I don’t see a box to enter a url for iOS. Should I just put the app store link in one of the other boxes?

I plan to support other platforms in the next month or so, but for right now iOS is the only one that’s published.

In the meantime, while I’m getting this sorted out, if anyone wants to check it out, here are the links:

App Store: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/flibitz/id1158554631?ls=1&mt=8

Landing Page: https://lavamonkeygames.com/Flibitz/

Thanks.

My game, “Flibitz”, is now live on the App Store, but on the submission page for the October Challenge I don’t see a box to enter a url for iOS. Should I just put the app store link in one of the other boxes?

I plan to support other platforms in the next month or so, but for right now iOS is the only one that’s published.

In the meantime, while I’m getting this sorted out, if anyone wants to check it out, here are the links:

App Store: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/flibitz/id1158554631?ls=1&mt=8

Landing Page: https://lavamonkeygames.com/Flibitz/

Thanks.

I apologize if I’m missing something simple again. I’ve done probably three or four LDJam’s and never run into this error.

Here is a screenshot of what I submitted. All of the .png files are within the specified size range. Is there an admin that can maybe look at a log file to see why this error happened? Thanks for your help.

I apologize if I’m missing something simple again. I’ve done probably three or four LDJam’s and never run into this error.

Here is a screenshot of what I submitted. All of the .png files are within the specified size range. Is there an admin that can maybe look at a log file to see why this error happened? Thanks for your help.

Thanks to PoV and others for helping me get the Ludum Dare submission error sorted out. Flibitz is now in the October Challenge (and we made our first sale yesterday).

For anyone who hasn’t seen it yet, here is the official trailer.

Thanks to PoV and others for helping me get the Ludum Dare submission error sorted out. Flibitz is now in the October Challenge (and we made our first sale yesterday).

For anyone who hasn’t seen it yet, here is the official trailer.

This time, I'm trying something different. Entering the jam as a team of three, and making a tabletop game instead of a video game.

The plan is to get creative not just with the game mechanics but also with the construction. My wife, Rachel, is a serious tabletop gamer and also really into making craft projects. We'll be using her experience to come up with some interesting ways of constructing a tabletop game.

My brother-in-law will be co-designing the game and also grilling some burgers, if we can talk him into it.

We're planning to release pdf's and videos to document the rules and the construction process. I'm guessing just about no one will build and play the thing (other than us). In any case, it should be fun.

This time around, we decided to do a print-n-play pdf tabletop game. It's called "You Can't Handle the Tentacles."

My wife Rachel and I also host a podcast, called "Live from Barsaive", about the Earthdawn tabletop RPG from FASA.

We decided to take a short break from Earthdawn to devote an entire episode to talking about Ludum Dare. This is the link to our podcast page if you're interested.

Rachel also made a video showing off the deluxe tabletop edition of our game, complete with a Cthulhu inspired dice roller. (When you put dice in the top, they randomly roll down six different tentacles to indicate which buildings are being attacked.)

We have not gotten a chance to make a gameplay video yet, but we will soon. "You Can't Handle the Tentacles" video