A little mockup of the game now being developed 
This entry was posted on Saturday, April 21st, 2012 at 10:51 am and is filed under LD #23. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Now this is gameplay
We got movement, some functionality such as grabbing objects for cover, and eating stuff to recover health.
Edit 1: And also some litte physics to float on water
This entry was posted on Saturday, April 21st, 2012 at 2:43 pm and is filed under LD #23. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
The game is ready!
Having some trouble to submit…
This is my first Ludum Dare. As a full-time developer I have always liked games, but never programmed them. Ludum Dare is the perfect opportunity. As developer, programming is my daily job, but Ludum Dare requires not only programming, but also graphics, music and game design.
In order to accomplish a game in just 48 hours I selected the following tools:
– Game maker: Fast to prototype and really easy to learn.
– Paint.net: A free and easy tool to create pixel art.
– SFXR: the best for music effects
How I work
1. Get ideas on post-it
2. Make concept art
3. Polish concept
4. Make it move! Having your art in motion gives you early motivation 
What went wrong
1. Not deciding fast enough how the game will go.
At first I had decided to make it a never ending game, survival style, but later changed to several levels. That change required more graphics, more programming and more time.
2. Almost none musical ability
My ability is almost null, so… no music for the game.
3. Not working on game navigation soon enough.
I never thought in the game flow, and how much time it really required to create menus, navigation and high scores. Create a font required more time than I had thought and it is a tedious chore. I had to go with a simple style but fast enough.
What went right
1. Making the concept art early enough.
The concept matured really fast and having the concept really early on gave me time to toy with the ideas I had.
2. Correct tools
Having experience in Game Maker really reduced the development time. Many devs don’t like GM for considering it not a powerful enough tool, but for me is a prototyping tool. It can create very fast prototypes that can later be migrated to a more powerful language, but allowing very fast development.
3. Previous experience creating shooters
Shooter is a genre I like very much. I am a full-time dev and as such my free time is reduced. A shooter allows me to have fun even if I have very little time. They are easy to play and very fun. I had made some other shooters and that definitely helped.
Conclusion
Creating Games is great! Ludum Dare is a great opportunity to get that game you wanted to make but never dedicated enough time. Selecting the correct tools is fundamental since it will allow you to work more in the fun, avoid learning on the go is fundamental for a fast pace development such as Ludum Dare.
You can play my game in here
Enjoy!
Edit 1: As an advice I would recommend making browser games to make it more available for people to play. I will work on that for the next LD.
There are a lot of LD games to rate, these are my favorites:
A little platformer with a nice difficulty. Awesome gameplay and graphics.
A Zelda like RPG with quests. Everything is so tiny, but awesome.
A very cool shooter with a gandalf-like wizard. You shall not pass!
The story of a fly trying to get outside. Very cool concept and Fun!
Feel free to play my game too:
A Bathtub Story
A shooter game in a bathtub.
I am the creator of Monster Interceptor. A game on which you control a pulsar gun, with the objective of reaching and stopping an alien invasion.
Development process
This time I wanted to reach a larger audience and tried to develop using Lōve instead of game maker. But as the time passed I decided to get back to game maker and reach my objective: Finish the game. Next are the steps I did:
1. Get the theme – You only get one
2. Brainstorming for ideas
3. Sketch basic functionality of selected idea
4. Install lōve and run some tests.
5. Implement the pulsar ray. (took a long time… 4-5 hours)
6. Rant about my slow progress using lua.
7. Switch to game maker!
8. Implement again the pulsar ray (Just 30 minutes in game maker)
9. Tweak the pulsar ray for smoothness.
10. Add space exploration room
11. Add menus
12. Add pulsar ray eye candy (paint the trajectory of the “bullet”)
13. Time to add sound effects! (And failed… skip sound effects!)
14. Time to add music! success!
15. Submit
What went right
– I had previously joined LD48 and knew about the time constrains and knew the submit process so there were no surprises there.
– This time I tried to do a very simple idea and incrementally polish until the time was up.
– Experience as a software developer allowed me to make better decisions. (Inheritance, design patterns, etc…)
What went wrong
– Starting with lōve and lua with no experience on them. Definitely a really bad decision.
– Weird bug on sound effects.
The result
Here is my game, I hope you enjoy playing it as much much as I did developing!
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-28/?action=preview&uid=11246
Hello,
This will be my third ludum dare and I am exited! Participating is always tiring at the end, but the results are always awesome. For my last two participations I did my games with game maker, which is a really cool engine, but the problem for me was the accessibility on windows desktop. I have learned now a feature to export to mac and html5, but the html5 didn’t worked as good as I hoped.
This time I am making an accessibility first approach, complete code designed to run in browsers. My tools:
I have just tried Phaser and it looks really good.
Have fun and make great games.
Switcher
/ˈswiCHər/
noun
1. Mutated individual with super human abilities. Extremely dangerous. Enemy of the State.
Switcher is an endless running game with a twist. You are the enemy, it is not because you are the bad protagonist, it is because the protagonist is different. The world fears different. Your choices are to run/fight or die.
The bad
The 48 hours compo is extremely exhausting, at least for me. I can not sacrifice sleep hours since at the end of the compo I still have to go to my 8-5 day job. Instead of using the 48 hours I ended up using maybe just about 20.
I tried also a new engine Phaser to deliver a web game. It went smooth most of the time, except by the one time I hit a bug and waste 2 hours. If I had practiced more, those two lost hours could be used in polishing the game.
The last show stopper was when I was about to deploy the final version. Compressed my zip and upload to itch.io just to have it fail with an error of zip containing more than 500 files! I had only about 20 files and didn’t understood what happened. In the end it was a dummy error. I was using git as version control and I was zipping all the git files as well. About another wasted hour.
The good
Phaser was definitely a good choice. It allowed me to deploy fast and deliver to most of web viewers the game. Accessibility is king. For voting since I have a Mac, I can not vote on Windows games and also have some trouble with Java games. I however had no trouble running flash/hmtl/unity web games.
Designing on pixel art was also good, I have been doing pixel art for almost 2 years now and I am happy I have reached the point to finally release acceptable pixel art, at least pixel art that players can enjoy.
Version control was definitely a great asset. Other games I have delivered for LD were on game maker, which greatly difficult the versioning. This time I was working on pure code and versioning is a bliss.
Improvement Areas
Tools
Language/Engine: JavaScript/Phaser
Version control: Git
Text Editor: Sublime 2
Pixeling: Pixen
Debugging web browser: Firefox
You can check my Ludum Dare compo page for Switcher, vote my entry, read comments and even download the source code to see what is inside.
What?!!!
A new version of Switcher?
It has music?!!!
After some days of work a new version of Switcher is ready 😀
You can play it here
I hope you enjoy the improvements!
I created a very small game for this Mini LD 53. It is called Inmortals.
I also wrote a small article about the development here:
http://mokusoftware.wordpress.com/2014/07/21/mini-ld-53-inmortals/
The game can be played here:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-53/?action=preview&uid=11246
Programming is almost finished, just require more art, animations and music.
Push your cat opponents and become the King!
More improvements and a background!
Want to be the King of the Cats?
Fight for the throne!
Play here: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=11246
Control your ducks and save the world!
http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-32/?action=preview&uid=11246
I wrote a detailed post mortem about my game Duck Attack at:
http://ernesto.io/duck-attack-post-mortem/
TL;DR
The making of a game about controlling a flock of ducks and saving the world. Made with phaser in javascript.
The time waste sucks, but you learned about it, didn’t?
Thank you for making a post mortem!