For me, this is the culmination of thirteen years of interest in game development. I've made the front page before - even got Daily 4th Place once - but this time, it's with an actual game, and one I created entirely myself. No matter how I do in the Compo, I am so proud of myself.

If you want, please check it out: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/astervoid

Ever since I finished my L42 entry, I've been revising for a Microsoft certification exam and haven't had time to advertise my game or play other people's. Now that I'm free again, I gotta frantically start correcting that, so! If you like Asteroids, check out my game AsterVoid for a fresh new twist on it! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/astervoid

Of course, I need to play some games as well, so post links to yours in the comments and I'll get round to as many of them as I can!

With the rating period winding down, it's time to me to reflect on how I did. This was my second Ludum Dare, and there are definitely areas where I've improved since the first one. Getting on the frontpage of Newgrounds was one heck of an achievement, and always something I'll be proud of. Once again, a massive thank you to everyone who played AsterVoid, and left such good ratings and feedback. I really appreciate it.

Having said that, there are also areas where I feel I did worse this time. So...

What Went Well

• When Love Is A Battlefield came out, it was so glitchy that I had to rush out a patch to fix the more serious issues. However, since AsterVoid was simpler and smaller in scope, I was able to test it more thoroughly, and I feel like it's a lot more polished. I even had time to throw in content and Easter eggs beyond what I'd originally planned.
• Thanks to the earlier start time, I was able to stay up to see what the theme would be, brainstorm for a bit, then go to bed and wake up nice and prompt on Saturday. Thanks to that, I got at least a couple of hours' extra dev time compared to LD41.
• Now that I have some experience with PICO-8, I find developing on it a lot easier. Similar to my point about testing, I was able to spend far less time on things like menus than I did with LIAB, giving me more time to play with things like the reusable particle system and the eight-digit scoring system (which, in hindsight, was probably unnecessary).
• The sound effects don't suck!

What Went Badly

• While AsterVoid's smaller scope helped me get it done and polished with less hassle, I feel like it also detracted from the end product. For all its glitches and balance issues, Love Is A Battlefield was a true 8-bit bullet hell game with a deep, meaningful storyline, and a love interest who reacts to your performance. AsterVoid is just a gussied-up Asteroids clone. I don't think my Innovation rating is going to look too good this year.
• On top of that, I don't think I did enough to integrate the "void" mechanic into the actual gameplay. As several reviewers have noted (and as my own gameplay GIFs show) you can just stay in the middle of the screen racking up points, and the voids will never be an issue. I thought about ways to prevent this - spaceships that shoot at you, have the player be moving when they spawn, make voids block your bullets - but they all would have made the game even more difficult than it already is.
• Collision detection. The bane of my PICO-8 programming experience. This game could seriously have benefitted from per-pixel collision detection, but I just... didn't know how to do that. I had a look at other people's algorithms but couldn't make sense of them, and I couldn't use them anyway because Compo. So instead, AsterVoid has clunky square hitboxes that make the game even harder.
• I still have no idea how to use PICO-8's music editor.

What Comes Next?

I'm still committed to releasing an updated "DX" version of Love Is A Battlefield. I may also make a couple of post-jam updates to AsterVoid, just to address a few of the issues that people have raised, but I don't think there'll be any significant overhauls to it like there will be with LIAB.

For now, I gotta play some more games, as I've been busy for most of the rating period and haven't had the chance. Once again, thanks to everyone who's played my game so far! You're all helping me learn, and I promise my next game will be better (and not another top-down space shooter :P )

~F1

There's an Easter Egg that nobody's found yet. I'll be surprised, yet delighted, if anyone does...

Play it here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/astervoid

I did worse than last time, just as I feared I would, but overall the ratings aren't that bad. I did substantially better in Audio and marginally better in Theme. Probably should have opted out of Humour - last Ludum Dare it was the category I placed highest in, and this time my rating has dropped by an entire star!

Overall, I'm satisfied with how AsterVoid turned out, but I feel like I let myself down with such a derivative concept. For LD43, I'm going to try and produce another story-based game that's hopefully not just an enhanced remake of some other game.

Congratulations to everyone who took part!

This time last year, I was preparing for my first-ever Ludum Dare, and hoping to finally create my first fully-fledged game. Since then, I've had great success with all three of my entries, and I've now progressed to developing a full-scale game with a view to potentially releasing it on Steam.

Of course, I'll still be taking part in LD44 as usual. I may switch to the TIC-80 engine for this one, as it's what I'm using for my full-scale game. From my experiences here so far, I need both interesting gameplay and an engaging storyline, so whatever I make will try and combine those two things. Hopefully I keep up my good track record!

This will be my third Ludum Dare. Last time round I did slightly worse than my first run, which I attribute to the fact that my LD42 game was just Asteroids with a shoddily-programmed gimmick tacked onto it, whereas my LD41 game was more imaginative and had a fully-fledged storyline. So my goals for LD43 are to make another story-based game, and to finally try and learn how to use PICO-8's music editor so my game's audio doesn't just consist of terrible 8-bit sound effects xD

Good luck to all those taking part!

I have nothing I can show off yet, but I do know what my game will be. It's tentatively named "The Gods Are Angry", and it's a short, story-driven PICO-8 platformer. A dormant volcano has become active, signalling the gods' displeasure, and your mission is to venture to it and throw yourself into it to appease them and prevent an eruption.

I was hoping I'd get to make a more story-driven game for LD43, and this theme is absolutely perfect for that, so nice job with the theme selection, y'all! I should have something I can show off within the next few hours, so stay tuned.

If I look up one of the many tutorials or examples for programming a platform game in PICO-8, does that invalidate me from entering the Compo? Because my own attempt at collision detection isn't working very well--

--and I don't know why.

Jump power and gravity are global constants, so I can change them quickly if I need to. But the physics system is basically done now, so the next step is fleshing out the gameplay with damaging obstacles and some proper level design. Hopefully I can fit in four levels without things getting repetitive.

I don't think I've gotten as much done today as I could have done. Still, the core mechanics are in place: you can jump around platforms, die and respawn (though game over isn't quite working yet). The text-based cutscenes between levels are (mostly) working, and because the levels felt a bit boring, I've also added collectible scrolls that tell a side-story:

(A proper text box is on my to-do list, as is proper art for the player, instead of just a square. There's also supposed to be more gif at the start, dunno what happened there.)

Tomorrow will mainly consist of adding more content: I have three more levels to design, and I need to make sure they're not completely identical. I don't think I'll need a proper menu, just a "Press Start" screen, and then I can hopefully have a crack at composing a song or two. I promised I was gonna add music this time, and if I don't... the gods will be angry. And rate me 2.5/5 for Audio again.

The animation needs speeding up, and they don't actually hurt you yet, but these were the last obstacles I had to implement. You'll encounter pools of lava in the final level as well - including the one you'll hurl yourself into to win the game. And the protagonist is now an actual human instead of an orange square, so that's good too.

I've decided against music and instead added a sort of minimalist hum. I think it works better, creates a more ominous tone. The only bits missing now, apart from the geyser collisions, are the final 1 1/2 levels and the win/lose cutscenes. Nearly there!

The Gods Are Angry, a short, story-driven platformer, is now available to play on both the PICO-8 website and Newgrounds. Please do give it a play! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/the-gods-are-angry

Ever since I published The Gods Are Angry, I've been getting reports about glitches, mostly pertaining to the ending. Because, like the idiot I am, I rushed it out the door without testing that part. Oops. Lesson learned.

Obviously I gotta fix these bugs, but I need to keep the original version up too, in the interests of fairness. So here's what I'm gonna do. The version on the PICO-8 website will remain as it is now until the end of the rating period, while the version on Newgrounds will receive updates and bug fixes (the first of which has now been uploaded). So if you want to rate the Compo version fairly, go to PICO-8; if you want the full experience, go to Newgrounds.

Oh, and speaking of Newgrounds, I got frontpaged again. So that's cool.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/the-gods-are-angry

Your sacrifice.

My game needs more ratings and reviews, so please go check it out: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/the-gods-are-angry I've been busy recently and haven't been able to play as many games as I'd like, which hasn't helped, but I'm slowly getting round to them all.

I'm still playing catch-up in terms of rating other people's games, but I'd like to take some time to write up a breakdown of some of the techniques and design works that went into developing The Gods Are Angry. I've seen a few other people do this, and I thought it might be an interesting read for fellow PICO-8 devs, or people who like 8-bit-style games.

The Camera

The Gods Are Angry uses an "offset" value to determine how far into the current level you are. In a later post-jam update, I'll use this to render the smallest possible chunk of level, but current, the game draws the whole level at once, with "offset" used as the X co-ordinate of the left-hand side of the level. So if you're 300 pixels into the level, "offset" will equal -300.

If you change direction, the camera doesn't move immediately: there's an eight-pixel window within which the camera will stay still. This wasn't really necessary, since you only have to move left about twice in the whole game, but I hope to make a more complex PICO-8 platformer at some point next year, so having this feature already baked into the engine will come in handy for that.

The Graphics

For those not familiar with PICO-8, it has a strict set of graphical limitations: up to 256 8x8 sprites or tiles, a maximum map size of 128x64 tiles, and a fixed 16-colour palette. I've always found it to be perfect for Ludum Dare as its limitations force you to think small.

To fit with the game's sombre tone, I went for a quite dark, subdued look to the graphics. The way the terrain fades away into blackness was actually inspired by Shovel Knight's graphics, and not only did it fit the tone, it reduced the number of tiles I needed to place when making levels, saving me time.

The background is drawn in three parts: a repeating 8x8 gradient at the top, a repeating 32x8 mountain range silhouette, and a solid rectangle in between. The rectangle is static, but the repeating parts at the top and bottom are scrolled at different speeds relative to the offset, resulting in a simple parallax effect.

The lightning effect is one I'm particularly proud of, but it's actually quite simple. The game generates a random number between 240 and 360, then counts down for that number of frames. When it reaches 5, a thunderclap SFX is played, a lightning bolt is drawn at a random spot in the sky, and a series of palette-swaps brighten up the level. When the counter reaches 0, the bolt disappears, and I use PICO-8's pal() command to reset the palette back to normal.

Oh, and did you know the lightning also flashes if you linger on the title screen?

Collision Detection

Since The Gods Are Angry doesn't have any moving obstacles apart from the geysers, its collision detection system is pretty simple. That's one part of the engine I'll have to rewrite if I use it in any future games.

Vertical collision detection runs every frame. If you're moving upwards (i.e. jumping), it checks for obstacles above you, and if you hit one, your vertical momentum is reversed so you sort of ricochet back down again. If you're not moving upwards, it checks for obstacles below you, and if you hit one, your vertical momentum becomes zero.

Horizontal collision detection only occurs while you're moving left or right, and just stops you walking through walls or off the left-hand edge of the level. It also initiates the next cutscene if you walk off the right-hand edge. It's glitchy while you're in mid-air, which is another thing I need to sort out.

That's all!

Thank you for your time, and apologies for having played so few games so far. I only have two more days of work and then hopefully, even with Christmas going on, I'll have time for some more. Please feel free to check out The Gods Are Angry if you haven't already, though!

It's that time again! Time to dissect my LD43 entry, The Gods Are Angry, and look at the positives and negatives of its development. I'm more proud of it than I am of my LD42 entry - and it fared much better on Newgrounds - but there's still plenty I can improve on for LD44. So, without further ado...

What Went Well

• I wanted to make a more story-based game this time round, and the theme, "Sacrifices must be made", was absolutely perfect for that. The game's story and atmosphere have generally been praised, and I do think I did a pretty good job with them.
• Compared to my previous LD games and their plain black backgrounds, The Gods Are Angry has actual environments, and with a pretty good level of visual detail. I'm still really proud of the lightning effect, if you couldn't tell from the fact that I show it off at every opportunity!
• I didn't feel like there was much I could do with my previous Ludum Dare games, but this time round, I have a complete (if basic) platforming engine. I've had a couple of ideas for more complex, full-length platformers lying around for years, and now I feel like I have a decent starting point for them.

What Went Badly

• One of these days I'm gonna learn my gosh-darn lesson about testing things. I programmed the game's ending and restart procedure, then immediately shipped it without testing to see if they worked. Predictably, they didn't. It took me a total of fifteen minutes to write the patches that fixed those issues. Nice going, me.
• The game generally lacks polish. The gameplay is too simple, and lacks any interesting mechanics; the level design isn't challenging or varied enough; there are no visual effects when you die, your sprite just disappears. Part of this is due to PICO-8 limitations, and part of it is due to me spending way too much time programming the basic engine and running out of time on Day 2.
• My sound design is still terrible. I still don't know how to use PICO-8's music tracker, and the sound effects are still annoying to a lot of people. It's at the point where I'm seriously considering entering the Jam next time round instead of the Compo, just so I can get someone else to do the music and SFX for me.

What Comes Next

Earlier today I published the final post-jam update for The Gods Are Angry on Newgrounds. It fixed the game's horizontal collision detection, and tidied up the code to make it neater and more reusable. Love Is A Battlefield DX, the post-jam version of my LD41 game, will finally be posted on Newgrounds on either January 23rd (the site's annual Pixel Day), or Valentine's Day.

For 2019, I plan to start developing more indie games outside of Ludum Dare. As I stated earlier, I've got a couple of ideas for full-scale PICO-8 platformers, for which I can re-use parts of the game's engine. My ultimate ambition is to publish a full game to Steam and/or the Discord Store, either next year or in 2020. I will continue to take part in Ludum Dare in the meantime.

A big thank you to everyone who's played The Gods Are Angry and left feedback so far! I hope you all have a very merry Christmas and a happy new year!

Drop your games in the comments and I'll play and rate those too!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/the-gods-are-angry

This is my best Ludum Dare result so far, and my first-ever top 100 rating! Delighted with those Audio and Graphics ratings as well, especially Audio since I'd convinced myself the sound effects sucked again. (2.33/5 for Innovation though, oof)

I'll have to check the statistics, but it feels like there were fewer entries this year? For some of these categories, I scored lower than LD42 but got a higher overall ranking. Takes the shine off things a little, but overall I'm still really proud of my performance this time round.

Looking forward to even better things in LD44, and I hope you all have a wonderful 2019!

To celebrate, the updated version of my Ludum Dare 41 game is finally on Newgrounds! Love Is A Battlefield DX takes into account all the feedback I received from people here, and features:

• Multiple difficulty levels
• Improved graphics and sound effects
• A couple of added features
• Numerous bug fixes

Give it a try!

UPDATE: Love Is A Battlefield DX ended up achieving Daily 4th Place! Not bad!