Well, I have seen the last few competitions pass. This time I think I will give it a go

Tags: first, Give it a go, ld, start

Right, after the disaster that was note pad I am using visual studio to edit my javascript, it is much more helpful for debugging.

Pleased to have have version 0.1 of my game now working. My canvas populates itself with little pixels that are creatures and they then move around. My question now is how can I host my html and javascript.  People, How do host your web games?

Any answers and I will be most thankful!

Pixel world with animals

Taking a break from coding, and spent the morning working on a tile-set for the world. It took at little while but I’ve got something i’m reasonably happy with.

My First Tileset

Time is disappearing way too fast (spent way too much time bug hunting yesterday), and I will probably now have to enter the game as a jam entry. Still it is useful experience and the other things that was costing time was getting my head around using object orientation. At least JavaScript has a similar syntax to C or I would have truly been in trouble. Next time the learning curve will be kinder.

See it here at:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=15698

With an hour to go, I have uploaded my competition entry. I’ll inform you all about what went well and what went bad tomorrow. As well as testing out some other games.
P.S. The worst thing was learning object orientation for the first time, I probably did more on the 3rd day than the first two!

Blood bear wants your soul…

Anyway goodnight, hope you enjoy my game!

Tags: finished, goodnight, jam, javascript, ld24, link, web game

Well instead of writing a summary about my own game I’ve spent a lot of today looking at what everybody else has done. It can be quite tendious to find good games that can be run from your browser. So below is some I’ve played, and some that I believe really do need to be shared a bit more:

The Best: you have probably found these already, but I am certain that they will all score highly

• Cubevo by NostraDamon : 3D world building game with tense puzzle elements
• Evoland by ncannasse : Amazing Zelda style game that as you play develops by adding all the features you expect from a modern game.

The Underexposed: these games are gems, but sadly have hardly any ratings or comments, please pay them a visit…

• Mars Evolution by morganquirk : play as an astronaut terraforming mars, the atmosphere and pixel art is amazing, but sadly currently only has 7 ratings
• Radioactive Space Bunnies by zimmy87: a very random platformer where you play as neon coloured bunnies.
• EvolutionWars by Spouwny: adapt the genome of your troops and workers to attack the enemy base who is doing the same.
• Fantasy Map Tactics by McFunkypants: move your 3 herralds around procuduarly generated map with a lord of the rings style pen drawn look to it and  bring the word of science to all the cities while avoiding evil armies.
• DNA by KEFIR: play as a fish that can evolve to walk and fly around the map.
• Targeted Evolution by johnfn: humourous platformer where you “fix” (destroy) terminals collect powerup cards with the help of the professor and combine them to grant new powers.
• Alien Rockpool by DustyStylus: lead a swarm of alien tadpoles to take down 3 predators (bosses)
• Shit! It’s evolving by fruitfly: best title yet, a self explatory retro 2.5D shooter

The Worst: just had to point out the single worst game I’ve tried

• simUniverse by Rex Peppers: Hold down a space bar and a counter will increase, the description says something interesting happens after 200  million years.

If you got through all that lot then prehaps you might like to try out my own game (shameless self promotion), “Bear Selection” its a relaxing sandbox game where you watch creature mutate, evolve and multiply. You have to manage them by prevent overpopulation and starvation caused from eating all the foliage so that the creatures can evolve to the final stage… a care bear! Its more of a sit back and watch kind of game, but its my first ever LD entry, my second ever game and my first object orentatied Java Script program. (Until now I have only coded in C for a University numerical methods course and some VB in college).

Tags: games play, list, underexposed, web games

This is in all regards a post-mortem just with a different name. A post mortem implies that the game is dead, but from the comments I’ve got the game has potential and any thing with potential is very much alive!

Bear Selection(Web)

The Good

+Stuck to the original concept, a sandbox world where creatures evolve and the player can only indirectly interact with them.

+Mutations can be clear to see, creatures start moving differently or go really fast

+Images are a million times better than I imagined MS paint could produce.

+Getting my brother to draw the creatures, allowed me to work on coding creatures larger than a pixel and some fresh direction in how to implement the images into the game.

+The world is dynamic, creatures can eat foliage and starve if none is left.

+The sparkline graph library made it easy to add a population graph: http://omnipotent.net/jquery.sparkline/#s-about

+The similar syntax between C and Java Script made learning a bit less painful.

+Web based, so that it is accessible to more people. Surprised to find it even runs on android browsers!

The Bad

-No collisions between creatures and creatures, or creatures and tiles leads to fish walking on land!

-No audio of any kind

-Pace is a bit slow and the limited interaction can make it boring.

-Didn’t have time to add terraforming or player activated events like meteorites or forest fires.

-First two days were mostly spent learning object orientation

-HTML-5 Canvas means not supported by IE

-No credits, no loading screen

-No entities like, eggs, blood splatter or fire. Despite the fact the graphics art was made.

Still all in all it was a mostly postive experience and a good game considering it was my first LD entry and my second ever game (first for the language, being web based, object orientated and non-ASCII graphics) so all in all it was a great success and learning experience for me.

You can play it and rate it here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=15698

Tags: First entry, first-timer, post-mortem, web game

Have been really pleased with some of the great feedback our second game is getting. I had a moment of doubt that the concept wasn’t enough of a game, but the humorous multiple ending seem to be enough of a reward for players to go through.

Play Royal Decree here

Your Court

“Encouraged by the accolade, you decide also to define 20 seconds.” The Good 

• Lucky to get 10 seconds as a theme, halfway through the voting our artist thought of a setting for the game. So the game fits very well with the theme.
• Music adds a lot to a game, after adding the Bach track  was the first play through I actually thought it was kind of good.
• The humour, wake up on Sunday to find my Dad had emailed me a large table of endings and reactions. By mixing the pair we’ve made over a 100 different conclusions, the randomly picking just adds to silliness.
• Slowly getting used to object orientation.
• Lua tables are brilliant for storing data in whatever structure you like, write a clever stage director script that would pass lines and directions to the actors. Using theatre terminology made the most sense for writing cut-scenes.
• This time managed to include all the things my last game (a simulation for LD24) didn’t: title screen, sound and cut scenes.

“In your shame you retire to your privy and compose poetry.” The Bad

• Finding our artist was unable to connect to our project server was a bit of a disaster, next time stuff like that needs to be sorted before the start of the contest
• Never got round to selecting outcome based on what the player did.
• Writing multiple line text was a pain as the renderer didn’t support it, given the time would have written a function to auto break lines by feeding the extra text to a different object, it would have taken a day I didn’t have.
• Would have liked to have written more game mechanics.

Tags: post-mortem

Finally made some good progress for our jam. Got both player and AI ships working with swivelling turrets, bullets which hit have a bit explosion effect as you can see in the picture, and health means you can kill and be killed. Our Artist Imaginary llamas has made four different types of ship for the player, pirates and the police. Also this time we have got a Music Composer (what I’ve heard so far sounds amazing!) and a story writer to the team, this motley crew is soon going to need a name.

Your Ship is on Fire!

While plenty of progress has been made there is still lots to do if we hope to complete the trading and markets aspect by the end of tomorrow. Nutta our economic simulation expert (yep Eve isn’t the only game who has one) has just handed me his simulation code that changes the price of items based on supply and demand. Following is some of the background story written by Wishsprite for your enjoyment.

When travelling between jobs I’d often think about 42. What could the question possibly be? Now that I’ve met the crew of The Folly, I’m pretty sure it’s ‘How many IQ points do these guys have between them?’

The knocking should have been a giveaway, who forces a ship to magnetise to their hull then knocks on the cargo bay door? No, you kick it down, get what you want and leave. No muss no fuss. If I hadn’t been in the loo they would never have caught me in the first place. Auto pilot aint worth shit.

‘Whose there?’ I yelled gruffly, hand on my holster.

‘Give us the Omni box, your money…. And a cup of tea!’ squeaked a voice, barely audible over the growling engines.

‘You idiot!’ interjected another more agitated voice. ‘Wait until he’s opened the door before stating your demands’

                ‘Who says I’m going to open the door at all’ I interrupted.

‘We’re pirates and we demand you open this door!’ Called the squeaker. A clang of boot meeting metal shook the door. Another kick and then a howl.

                ‘Ow! Open the bloody door’

I opened the door, but they were met with the barrel of my gun. Turns out I didn’t need it, my face did all the work.

                ‘HOLY SHIT DEAN BRICKSON! OH MAN, OH MAN, OH MAN!’ The squeaker barely reached my chest, a mop of brown curls covered his face. I just caught a glimpse of scared looking green eyes before he flung himself at my boots cowering.

                ‘Please don’t kill me! Oh god, please don’t kill me!’

‘Will you get up Squawk, you have a gun as well’ said a larger blonde guy who appeared through the hatch, gun trained on me.

                ‘What the fuck is Dean Brickson doing on a scavenger ship? You a Bin man now?’

‘I’m cleaning up my act’ I replied as I pulled the trigger. The bullet shot clean through his feet knocking Blondie to the floor. Squawk cried out slightly but didn’t move.

                ‘Now tell me everything you know about this Omnibox, why the hell do you think I have it?’  

‘We had it…we lost it’ mumbled Squawk quaking by my foot.

                ‘He left it in one of the escape pods, ship malfunctioned, ejected them all into space, gone fuck knows where’ cursed Blondie holding his shoe in pain.

                ‘How does a ship malfunction and eject all the escape pods?’  I asked. Blondie muttered something inaudible. I aimed by gun at his good foot and asked again.

                ‘What was that?’

‘I sat on a button okay’ Blondie muttered staring down at his wounded foot. ‘We saw your ship figured maybe you had picked up one of the pods, an Omnibox is worth big bucks to the right buyer’

                I smiled, big bucks is my middle name.

‘Guess we’d better find it then’

Squawk looked up hopeful.

                ‘Can we have tea now? And biscuits?’

Tags: artist, first progress, jam, LD #30, music, story time, Team

Hi all, I would like to here your experiences on the relative amount of reviews a game gets depending if its browser compatible or not.

I’ve always previously submitted web entries, however this time I’m using a module which adds physics that may not work with the web-player

Tags: help, question

The Swarm!

Due to travelling we started pretty late for this LD Jam, its no a problem as as you can see above it’s progressing nicely, movement and combat is fully fleshed out leaving tomorrow to add in trading. The game looks much nicer in motion I though about posting a gif, but here is the WIP windows .exe which is even better https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/31300151/SpacedOut/SpacedOutWin.zip WASD to move and turn, scroll wheel to zoom, mouse click to fire, Esc closes the game. Have fun!

Tags: Early Testing, jam, late start, LD30

It was a challenge to get the gif down to 2MB, the first recording I made was larger than the game! Anyway what are you doing staring at gifs, the game with music is here

So after a very long hiatius after doing Ludum Dare 24, 27 and 30 I'm back.

Could I still make games after such a long time? Having only done the Jam before could I manage it solo with no assistance with the art? The first day was a nerve wracker, attempting a new engine and language as well as a complete change of plan Saturday Lunchtime I did a about turn and made a chill little game about mining instead of a FTL like journey into deep space (too much UI!)

In the end was quite happy with my submission, if I had more time I'd have added in some enviromental hazards as well as some extra equipment to help you mine.

Play Mine of Mine online here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/mine-of-mine

First tip is with your art tools, and practice with different media. For the competition I bought aseprite which had some nifty features I read about for making pixel art faster. I found it much better than using GIMP or Paint.net, especially the support for animating sprites.

Aseprite has an ink mode to the brush tool where you can click and drag a subset of the pallet, when in that mode only colours in the range are overwritten on the canvas, and by right and left-clicking you can shift the pixels one step up or down in your selected gradient. If you paint miniature models it's just like layering up highlights and shading on your base colour (but with no fear of painting outside your base colour).

I found by rapidly clicking left and right while dragging I could build up a wood grain texture quite fast, as used for the mineshaft lift.

Play Mine of Mine online here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/mine-of-mine

Unlike my previous games this one I spent far more of the time on the art and animation. Using the right tools meant animating the sprites a breeze.

Using Godot engine's in-build physics classes and methods, as well as it's tilemaper save me from having to spent precious time coding up gravity and all the other stuff to do with collisions.

Play Mine of Mine online here https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/mine-of-mine

The most request feature from reviews was some TNT. After a bit of reading up on writing up programmatic signal connections, and now I can instance some TNT :grin: :boom:

Play the update here https://darkshadow4242.itch.io/mine-of-mine-post-compo

or rate the original here https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/mine-of-mine

Phew made it, felt like I was nowhere near yesterday,and stuck with being rusty and unfamiliar with godot. Didn't help I wasn't at the computer for many hours at all.

But compo entry submitted and please for the first time with not totally jank music composition Now to celebrate and have dinner

Play it here: https://darkshadow4242.itch.io/helirescue

play and rate it here

I have to say this time I scoped out the game nicely, minimal so no sweat and had time to enjoy going for walks, drawing the sprites and composing the music. I made a nice little game that doesn't overstay it's welcome.

See how the music was composed here

The music came from improvising a few chord sequence on the piano until something sounded right. A 4 chord loop of Am Em F G sounded good the minor to major sounded hopeful but also nicely looping around much like a helicopter. I then took this and added it to beepbox using a midi keyboard I'd recently got second hand from CEX, a major improvement on having to click to enter all the notes.

I went for a fast paced 6/8 time music, trying to be both hi-octane but also a little goofy, simple 4 instruments, after writing 4 bars, I duplicated and added a slight variation to make it less repetitive, that with a couple of breaks meant it was a pleasing 10 bars writing in not much time at all.

From not over-planing also meant I was able to adapt as went along adding in the winch mechanic.

Things I'd hoped to add was a flare animated sprite that would double up as victory fireworks, and better text overlay.