Had a party on Saturday, only did around 2 hours (on the train towards London). Next day, couldn’t work on train back because I had to stand for two hours, then do shopping. My computer also decided to have issues that required restarting twice. So after 46 hours (with sleep) all I could do this time was this.
Hopefully I can get a bit more done tomorrow and submit it as a jam entry.
So this is something I didn’t expect to happen, around two weeks ago was Ludum Dare, where we all had only 48 hours (or 72 for jams) to develop a game, however because I had plans to go to a party that was some distance from home, I had much less time. Despite that I still managed to finish something, although honestly was disappointed I didn’t have much to show, so I could go and vote on other entries.
What surprises me is that I’ve had some nice and positive comments from many people so far, obviously I wasn’t expecting overwhelmingly positive comments of people thinking a game about planting trees, letting them grow and chopping them down with no time and a limited amount of space was the best they’ve ever played, however I was surprised to see many people saying how nice and calming it is, how it’s very peaceful and relaxing it was to play. Among that, most people said they were impressed that I managed to produce this in around six hours.
Originally, I was going to team up with an artist that I work with in my full time job as a programmer. When the themes were announced, we were hoping the winning theme was going to be non-violent combat, and had an idea for combating enemies with dancing. I cannot recall why we didn’t go ahead with that one, but we did also have ideas that involved growing trees, so when growing became one of the themes we ended up agreeing to it.
After recalling the development stages, I’m not entirely sure if I did only work on the game for less than six hours. After the theme was announced at 1:30 am on Saturday, I went to sleep. I didn’t start working until around 10am when I got on the train to London, where I did at most 1 1/2 hours (see above). Because of the party, I didn’t do any work until Sunday afternoon when I got back home (around 4pm), and even then I had stopped to discuss any chance of salvaging what time we had left to work on the project with an artist. Once it got late enough I decided to call it quits and try for Monday.
.@CarelessLabs this. Also had an artist interested in working but he backed out due to work related stress.
pic.twitter.com/oEszogkrdS
— Gamepopper (@gamepopper) December 13, 2015
Unfortunately I don't think I'll have time to finish my #LDJAM entry tonight. :( Here's what I have so far. pic.twitter.com/W25Q35NZma
— Gamepopper (@gamepopper) December 13, 2015
After getting back from work on the Monday, I quickly finished the last of the art work, added in some audio from freesound.org and uploaded it, so judging by the timestamps and when I took breaks, it’d be more accurate to say I took around 6-8 hours of the game.
Finally submitted my entry for #LDJAM, go and tear it up! https://t.co/8m7GoXUjsv pic.twitter.com/dRvvBqOQJe
— Gamepopper (@gamepopper) December 15, 2015
Regardless of how long I actually took, what’s clear was that I honestly should have planned my time better, either by cancelling my invite to London or not take part in the games jam entirely. By having more time, I could’ve made a more complete and fulfilling game entry, and probably kept both myself and my artist motivated to working together. Instead I went on an assumption that because I managed to create games in shorter times in the past, that it would be fine this time around.
Thank you to all those who have voted, I have been enjoying all the entries that I have seen so far. I’ll be interested in what the final scores will be.
Tags: Growing, ld34, post-mortem, postmortem
So I haven’t really prepared, but I think I’m gonna throw my hat into the ring and make something.
Engine/Framework will be HaxeFlixel, since I’ve managed to get it up to date, and I’d love to try out one of the newer features.
Graphics: Photoshop
Audio: BFXR + LMMS (if I bother to make music)
This is my finished compo entry, best way I’d describe it is what would happen if you cross Ikaruga with Super Hexagon, you’d get a difficult, fast paced bullet hell where you must switch colours to absorb matching bullets or dodge anything else.
To match with the theme, the boss shapeshifts and the player can shapeshift into one of two kind of ships a fast-yet-large or small-yet-slow.
I originally had both a HTML5 and Windows version, however there seems to be a problem with HaxeFlixel’s HTML builds being extremely slow even on high performing machines, even though this never happens on either Windows or Flash builds.
Vote for the game here or go play the game directly here.
Tags: compo, finished, HaXeFlixel, Ikaruga, itch.io, LD35, super hexagon
Do people still do these?
Here’s mine anyway, I like seeing these because progress is fascinating.
Go play & vote on Spinstar HERE!
Tags: chronolapse, LD35, Spinstar, timelapse
First of all, thank you very much! It’s really great to see so many positive and constructive comments on Spinstar. It was a fun yet challenging 48 hours and it’s great to be able to make another compo entry after only managing to reach jam last time.
I’ve managed to play and vote on over 80 entries so far, and while there is still a week left of voting, I thought I’d show my five favourites thus far, as there have been many developers who have pulled off interesting and creative ideas based on the theme, and this LD had a really good theme.
Very well polished game that combines vertical space shooting with racing, while tracks can eventually get repetitive there is a really good challenge with multitasking between going along the track and shooting down enemy choppers and the like.
One extremely good looking boss battle, I love my bullet hells and this one was both easy to jump into but hard to beat, but actually succeeding is very worthwhile!
As soon as I saw this gameplay gif, I was immediately reminded of an entry back in LD31 called Screen Mover. I definitely like to say this game definitely expands on the concept of your game window having an effect on the gameplay, and seeing a real window move around on the screen is captivating to me.
Some really nice low-poly graphics at work, this game does an interesting job at controlling flight that takes some getting used to, but feels great once you get the hang of it.
It’s a shame that it doesn’t look finished (and I cannot rate it on any category) but out of all the entries I’ve seen which imitates the “Hole in the Wall” game show formula, this is probably the best executed one by design. Not to mention the camera work is brilliant, showing the perfect angle for each wall and position of the player.
Now go do Ludum Dare proud and PLAY AND VOTE!
Tags: boss fight, bullet hell, low poly, ludum dare 31, ludum dare 35, puzzle, racing, shooter
So far I’ve managed to receive 84 votes, and some really great comments. There are still a few hours left, so why not give a bullet hell a try?
PLAY AND VOTE HERE
The results are online and I’m confident in saying I have improved once again!
As you can see, not only have I achieved the 100% Coolness ranking for the second time, but in all but one of the categories I have managed to reach the top 500! Compare this to Ludum Dare 34 where I only had one category in the top 500 (but then again, I didn’t do much effort and only allowed voting on four categories), and Ludum Dare 33 where despite having a better ranking in audio and fun, four out of the eight categories failed to reach the top 500.
So in a way, I’ve improved overall. I’m still aiming to get a category in the top 100 though, I was so close last year.
You can play my LD35 entry here on itch.io!
So on twitter, I telling people how I didn’t really have much time to take part in Ludum Dare. Turns out I did, but less than 24 hours, and for whatever reason I decided to experiment with the Nape Physics Engine.
What I can say is that it’s a suprisingly easy engine to use, thanks to HaxeFlixel’s wrapper functions and Sprite class. I figured for the theme “One Room” what would be the worst room to be in, and figured the toilet. Hence, in Danger: Mondays, you are trapped in the porta-loo, balancing on a steel beam above while the wind blows and some kids throw rocks at you.
I'll be using HaxeFlixel, and that's all I can say so far. I'll be hanging out with friends on Saturday so I might not get work done until Sunday.
You can play the game on itch.io right now! Here is the LDJAM page.
I managed to have a little over 24 hours to work on this entry, because of scheduling, but I'm happy to have finished another game. It was quite fun getting all the sprites to orbit around a single planet, maybe if I had more time I could have gotten planet hopping to work, but that's another idea to expand upon later.
Since voting is upon us, I thought I'd share with you the progression of how my entry came to be...
The theme this time around was Small World, so I (like a lot of devs) made a game either around a small game world or a tiny planet. I went with the latter and drew up a run ‘n gun shooter on a little planet.
Sadly I had plans with my friends on Saturday so I didn’t start work on the game until around 8PM GMT, so development felt more rushed than a full games jam but I managed to make what I set out to design: littleBLASTplanet
Similar to my past Ludum Dare projects, I used HaxeFlixel. It’s straightforward to use, multiplatform (Flash, HTML, Windows and Android maybe…) and it’s still being maintained so there have been several improvements. I’ve provided the game’s source code on Github so feel free to have a look to see how the game works.
The first problem I had to solve to make this game work is how to make a sprite orbit a planet. HaxeFlixel has a FlxVector object for vector math, so using that with a sprite’s acceleration meant having the sprite fall towards the centre of a circular planet was pretty easy, but how do you get the sprite to stop on the planet’s surface?
HaxeFlixel has no circular collision, only rectangtle collision. When I wrote my own C++ framework for a game on Steam called Gemstone Keeper, a framework which took inspirations from HaxeFlixel, I included Circular collision by giving each object a Radius property and writing my own circle overlap and separation functions. This would have been too much work for the time I had, so I wrote a hack method for a derived sprite class that always checked and updated the distance between a sprite’s centre and the planet’s centre, and if the distance was less than both the planet’s radius and sprite’s radius combined, then the game pushes the sprite up to the edge of the planet. This circle collision method is only applied between a sprite and the planet, and since rectangles don’t rotate then all sprites had to be perfect squares.
Bullets were one of the only sprites that weren’t built to orbit the planet, instead simply moving in an angle that combines the firing direction with the player’s current angle. I’ve had some feedback that said that the bullets should also be affected by gravity. I decided against it because it would make enemies on the planet easier to hit, while enemies in the sky would be harder to aim, not to mention the game loses a strategy element because of where bullets travel.
I went with three base enemy types: Rockets, Spikes and Robots.
Robots functions no differently from the player, except that it moves in a fix direction and smaller ones bounce by constantly jumping. Spikes has the same orbiting system, but it’s planet radius is much smaller to allow it to go into the planet. I use FlxTween and the FlxTimer to allow the spikes to move in sequence. Rockets simply spawn outside the screen at an angle and move towards the centre of the planet. If a rocket touches the planet then it would be destroyed, resulting in an instant game over.
I also added an escape object, which changes the planets side and makes the level a little bit more harder. This was for variety, so you wouldn’t have to stay on the same planet. If I had a bit more time I would have included more animations on the planet itself.
Speaking of the planet, that was one of the first objects I applied polished graphics to. To give it a more detailed pattern, I used the built in Cellular Automata function, and applied the pixels to the circle. Since it uses a random seed, the pattern is different on each playthrough.
The planet’s destruction is a particle effect that uses the planet sprite’s texture, a technique I used a lot in Gemstone Keeper. However one gripe was that I had to make a derived FlxEmitter class that could allow me to set how many frames I wanted based on the particle’s frame size.
Along with proper sprites, smoke was added to the spikes so that the game can provide a one second warning before spikes hit. I also added a distance check to avoid some unfair spike deaths. Finally I added a second camera mode incase the first one wasn’t interesting enough. The follow camera simply rotates with the player so they can stay in one spot while all the other objects rotated around. It did mean having to create a new Camera for UI elements, since objects can only be parallax scrolled by position.
The last elements I added were the title screen and audio. Sound effects were produced with BFXR and music with Abundent-Music’s Procedural Music Generator. Audio is one of my weakest skills so these procedural tools made that quick and simple, although I probably wouldn’t enter myself into the audio category for them.
I figured I add a smaller version of the planet in the title screen and have the player sprite on a bigger world to give a vague sense of a setting, with emphasis that the player is fighting on tiny planets and not just a giant on a regular sized planet.
And that’s basically how I made littleBLASTplanet. If I had more time I probably would have created more enemies and made proper transitions between planets. Aside from that I’m pretty happy with the results, particularly hacking the physics to getting jumping and moving around a 2D planet to be possible.
Voting for the game begins tonight, so if you took part in Ludum Dare, please check it out!
Thank you for all the feedback so far! If you haven't given feedback yet, feel free to check out littleBLASTplanet and give your feedback today!
Let's see how many I can rate and give feedback for!
Happy to see littleBLASTplanet get into the Top 100 in at least one of the categories. Let's hope next time I can get into the Top 50 or Top 25 of a category (I got close on Ludum Dare 37 with a #27 in humour).
I posted on my twitter that I probably won't do Ludum Dare this time because of how exhausted I was from work. But it looks like I've changed my mind somehow.
Good news is that so far, there has only been one bug to fix. Be sure to check out Running the Marathon!
It took less than 24 hours but I managed to receive over 20 ratings! Thank you all!
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/39/running-the-marathon
Is there a reason Running the Marathon has fewer ratings in the humour category than others?
Do some people think this game is too serious?
Does anyone have the patience to run a marathon using only two buttons?
Appreciate all the comments for this, I'm happy to have taken part!