I’ve never done anything like this in my life, but I can’t wait to try!

I’ll be using pygame, GIMP for graphics, and BFXR for sound.

Good luck to everyone, and a hi-five to anyone else in Japan taking part!

What on earth is this?

It sure doesn’t look like a game, but it is! Most of the real action is happening on the command line, though.

The idea came to me pretty early into the competition, but it’ll be easier to explain once I have some graphics going. I’m working hard to get the groundwork finished.

The real challenges with this game will be making the graphics and balancing the action. Since I’m an inexperienced coder, something that’s easy to get running and then can be tweaked indefinitely is a far better choice for me than pulling my hair out over a physics engine.

After working at this for about 14 hours, I’m feeling relaxed and happy. Even though there’s a lot of work left, there’s a clear end in sight and aside from balancing the game, most of the changes from here on out will be cosmetic.

So, here’s a look at my take on villainy: Build-a-Bandit. Basically, you customize your bandit based on wacky stereotypical villain caricatures: how squinty the eyes are, how twirlable the mustache, etc, and then send them into a shoot-out against the sheriff (Who I just noticed doesn’t have a face at this point? Sorry.)

The three adjustables were going to be body type, mustache and eyes, but body type might take too much time to sprite so I’m going with hat size instead. Each of these attributes will affect an aspect of your bandit’s shoot-out, but how and to what extent are yours to puzzle out.

Here are some before-and-after screens showing how the different sliders affect your bandit’s appearance:

Tomorrow, I’m hoping to:
-slap a real background on the duel screen, and a nice menu with health bars too
-give the slider screen a makeover, with a face showing the changes to your bandit in real time before you enter a duel
-add sound
-do further balancing, add multiple sheriffs with different stats

Aside from a few basic usability things (a title screen, toggling fullscreen/windowed mode), and a few essential cosmetic touches (the sheriff STILL needs a face), I can say that Build-a-Bandit is finished on a basic level! Whew. Of course, the last 17 hours will go towards more polish and adding more fun stuff, a goat, levels, perhaps even another feature or two.

Remember my first screen shot with the blank slider screen? Today it received a major, essential face lift:

I spent most of the morning drawing the face and facial features, and was able to implement them without much trouble. The sliders still need labels, but from the top, they control Hat Size, Mustache Type, and Eye Squinty-ness.

The duel part looks much better too! The menu isn’t great and there’s some graphical glitching and debug numbers, but I’m proud of my tiny General Store!

Now, I’ll work on implementing the rest of my desired features one by one until the competition is over. This has been a really fun experience, and I’m already looking forward to the next Ludum Dare!

This was my first Ludum Dare, and I had an absolute blast. I’m already looking forward to the next one!

My entry was Build-a-Bandit, a Wild-West duel simulator game where you create a bandit with very stereotypical villain features and then send him to duel the sheriff and take money from the banks in the towns you visit. By adjusting attributes like how twirlable your mustache, and how tall your hat is, you also affect how your bandit fights.

Every slider corresponds to a relationship between two stats that I left ambiguous to encourage playing around. Going to one extreme or the other will rob you of the benefits of the other stat, making choosing your bandit dependent on the player’s preferred style. Do you balance your bandit in the middle, or make him a huge tank? The three scales (hat, mustache and eyes) are Firing Speed/Defense, Accuracy/Power, and Dodge Rate/Critical Rate respectively. Tweaking the hat size has the most noticeable effects, but all three play a huge role in behind-the-scenes numbers.

I surprised myself with how Build-a-Bandit turned out. I’m very happy with the final product. There are a ton of flaws, featureless gaps and things I wish I could have done, but I get the feeling most people can rattle off lists of should-haves after a timed event like this. I’d never made a game to a state this complete before, even accounting for the missing stuff, and while I was making Build-a-Bandit, I got to enter that coveted Flow State, where you’re so absorbed in the work that everything comes together with no distractions. Little problems that needed solving, I was able to solve without a lot of conscious thought, even though I might have trouble explaining why I came to the solutions I did. For me, that feeling was the biggest reward of Ludum Dare 25.

Other things that went right:

• The Graphics: I’d never sprited anything in my life before this, but the wonderful ASEPRITE made it a breeze. A game with the concept of “create a fighting bandit using outlandish physical villain stereotypes instead of stats like Attack and Defense” needs to be able to sell that idea with the graphics, and I seem to have succeeded. A lot of comments rolling in are about how excited people were to make big mustaches and squinty eyes. My biggest regret for the entire project is not being able to implement comically tall hat sizes in the graphics as well. One commenter remarked that it was “tragic” that a towering hat didn’t translate to epic tallness in the duel, and I agree wholeheartedly. If I could fix one thing, it would be that.
• Bug-free: I can’t know for sure, but from my testing and the lack of mention of bugs or crashes from commenters, I think Build-a-Bandit is clean. I made sure to test multiple restarts, game over conditions, graphical quirks, etc., and if Build-a-Bandit were a ship, I think it’d be seaworthy. Did this come at the expense of some features? You bet. But after being frustrated with only being able to rate about one entry in four that I try to rate due to bugs, crashes and missing packages, I do take pride in the fact that there have been no reported problems to date with BaB.

What I’d love to include in a post-compo version:

• Hat tallness: As mentioned above, having one out of three physical traits not reflected in the duel graphics is a huge deficiency. The sad part is that this wouldn’t have taken much time to fix, and I probably would have if not for last-minute setbacks. I was originally going to do bandit body-size instead, but early in my spriting I realized that drawing different bodies and making the sprites line up would take far too much time. I switched to hat size to make things simpler, but never got around to going back and fixing the duel graphics.
• Better visual feedback: It’s hard to get too into the character-building puzzle aspect if it’s not obvious what every aspect does. Given more time, I’d have loved to make miss, critical and dodge notifications on screen, and a dialogue box that showed what happened the last five shots or so. It would have been easier for players to grasp how the physical features are related, and would have given them a greater sense of control over the duel. I would have also liked to also make a screen where you could view the next sheriff’s stats, so try and anticipate what kind of bandit to make best suited for killing him.
• Better balance: When the crux of the game’s fun is building just the right character to take on a carefully constructed enemy, you have to create just the right level of difficulty and a variety of challenges to give meaning to building many different types of bandits. What I managed to cobble together on the first day is far from terrible, and fine tuning this type of balance takes more time and playtesting than what’s possible in 48 hours, but this is the meat of the game, and if I decide to come back and polish the game, balancing the game to keep the player interested is a priority.
• Naming your bandit: It’s a small thing, but I’d love to add a little box for naming your bandit. This was a feature I gladly cut for time, but it would add a little extra personalization to the bandits. As it is, the standard name for the bandit is “Crudely Knifeslash,” a play on “Snidely Whiplash.”
• Minor graphical touches: The duel backgrounds would be nicer with more buildings, and if they were randomized or different for each town. I noticed that I didn’t add the sun. The death sprites are laughably bad and the work of two minutes as I rushed to put together something, anything. Maybe a woody texture for the backgrounds of the menus where the dark browns are, and an old paper texture for the lighter menus boxes. Different sheriff features and colors would be nice too.

What went wrong:
Only one big thing went wrong, but it almost caused me to miss the deadline, and I was late for work. I tried Py2exe and Pyinstaller to package Build-a-Bandit, and they both failed to work, hanging up or producing unplayable .exes or not including essential packages. From what I’ve read, other people have experienced same problem trying to package applications built with Pygame. I wasted 90 minutes on that garbage. Then I found a recommendation for cx-freeze, downloaded and ran it, and it was like the heavens opened and choirs of angels sang hallelujahs. No errors, no weird dialogue boxes or incomplete dist folders or anything, just an exe and all my assets that worked immediately.

All in all, I had a great time and I’m pleased that I managed to finish a game on my first try at Ludum Dare. Looking forward to the next one with you all!

Well, there’s under 11 hours to go, now. The deadline really crept up on me. I’d been meaning to do some write-ups on my favourite entries, but with such a small amount of time left, it’s not going to be anything fancy.
In no particular order, I really think you should check out:

The Visitor, by avaki : Play as an alien sneaking onto a spaceship to kill all the humans by cutting the power supply. The catch? Humans are radioactive to your species, turning the wandering crew NPCs into toxic hazards. The level of polish and unique twist of this game impressed me. It only has 8 ratings right now, though, so go check it out!

Young Villain, by Rubsrub : All the pieces come together in this game, where you play as a future villain who hasn’t quite grown up yet.

Sealed Evil, by Neonlare : You are an ancient evil, sealed away…in a can. Squish innocent victims in a variety of locations to earn souls, used to buy some really fun powerups and more levels to stomp around in. Don’t let the slow start and a bug or two get you down. This game is the most fun I had during the competition, and the game I spent the most time on.

Sorry it’s so brief, but I really thought these three games deserved a mention, even with just a little time left. Try them out!

I’ve been crashing and burning hard on my goal to create 25 games this year (made plenty of prototypes on schedule but always seem to run out of steam when it’s time to make the game look like more than a bunch of colored rectangles), so I hoped that Mini LD#40’s smaller time limit might help me with Game #4. I’m calling it Hell Terror Cave of Darkness.

You play as a guy who fell in a dark cave and have to escape by moving and jumping, but the cave is filled with ghosts and monsters. You die if you come into too much contact with either one. The only way to kill/repel ghosts is to turn on your flashlight–which will be controlled via webcam input! (Monsters will avoid you in the dark but are agitated by light and will attack.) Controls are WASD and a light source, or a light source and arrow keys depending on your handedness. A lamp, an iPhone, a bike light, anything will do. (Alternately, if you’re playing in a bright room, you could shade the camera with your hand to control the darkness.) Is it unwieldy? Probably, but it gives me an excuse to learn about coding with webcams! I’ve learned something every time I tackle a weird, ambitious prototype.

I wrote some code using Pygame and VideoCapture that detects light concentrated into the center of the camera using a brightness formula, and built a game world that lights up and darkens accordingly. My problem is that the webcam operations and character movement don’t mesh well–the game grinds to an unplayable standstill whenever the webcam is running, regardless of whether or not the video is actually displayed on screen, regardless of the rate at which brightness is calculated from the webcam, and regardless of the amount of player input.

I’ve tried adjusting the number of pixels analyzed, the frequency of the analysis, etc., but this problem is really stumping me. I can’t figure out if my crappy notebook PC is part of the problem, and I’m not sure how to tell the webcam to run in a more conservative manner.

I’ve made a good run at this Mini LD, but time is running out fast and I might have to abandon ship if I can’t sort this problem out soon.

After humming and hawing about the theme for an hour, I said I’d work on a fallback project if I didn’t think of something on a trip to the grocery store. Not one minute out my door, the idea for a game called “Many 2 One” popped into my head. I’m going to go ahead and rename it “Priorities.”

No, it won’t be random squares, that’s just placeholder programmer art.

The idea was to purge a lot of things from screens representing different facets of life, to lower stress, and letting players pick what their priorities are in life. The basic gameplay was pretty fun, until I added pop-up labels to the squares. Suddenly, the reading and thinking slowed the fun to a standstill.

So after my trip to the gym, I’m going to switch things up a bit. The labels will be less important because I’ll indicate fleeting, unimportant responsibilities and time-sucking facets of life by using black squares. I’ll cut the number of coloured squares by a lot, so if and only if players have triaged enough crap out of their lives, then they can start picking and choosing what valuable things they want to focus on.

What on earth is going on here?

I switched my coloured squares to simple shapes like hearts and people, but when the game scales them up, they start distorting and growing weird appendages! Anyone know what’s going on?

I was looking forward to applying some new code with these images, but the images themselves aren’t really doing well in the game, even without the weird distortions. Maybe I’ll switch back to squares and put symbols in the middle instead?

Since the theme is minimalism, I tried to avoid wordy help explanations. But this…might be crappy?

Gameplay shot:

I’m finished except for balancing the rate of new objects appearing and how the score is calculated, but I can’t do it alone. If anyone could give Priorities a try and let me know their final score (positive and negative), it would be a HUGE help!

Download here

This postmortem is a little late because I’ve had company over, but I’d like to take a look back on my entry, Priorities.

Priorities turned out a lot more thoughtful and meaningful than what I usually make. One player described it as “exceedingly artsy,” which I though you had to be deliberately trying to do to achieve, but here we are. Let’s see what went right and wrong:

The Good:
-The metaphor seems to resonate with people. When the theme was announced, I didn’t want to make something that just looked simple. Minimalism is a movement for communicating ideas, so I wanted to make a game that communicated SOMETHING. I’ve done a lot of reading about stress, success and perseverance lately, so after about two hours of thought, I decided to try to combine minimalism in the artistic sense (simplistic elements) with minimalism in more of a zen-living sense. I know I’m not the only person out there who would love to cut a whole bunch of crap out of their life!

-Discovering while developing. I learned some new things, but I was especially pleased with some of the deductions I was able to make while prototyping and playtesting. Originally, the squares would have been five different colours, and looking at the labels would tell you which things you want to get rid of. After a run at this, I found that the action ground to a halt. The reading sucked the energy out of the game, so I replaced some of the colors with black squares that were obviously time-sucking stuff like Farmville and Internet trolls, so players could tell at a glance what absolutely HAD to go, and then could examine the other things more closely later. Bigger squares originally also took more clicks to destroy, but I scrapped that to speed up the gameplay and give players fingers a break.

-The music. This was my first time composing music, and I’m pleased with the results. I used Milkytracker and some free piano samples, and tried to mimic Philip Glass, a minimalist composer. To the person in the IRC channel who encouraged me to keep going when I was discouraged: THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU.

-Low-stress development. Last time, when I made Build-a-Bandit for LD25, it was my first original game ever. I was up until wee hours in the morning trying to cram in interface bits, figure out the intricacies of my spriting program, and wrestling with packaging the whole thing up in an exe file. This time, with about ten other small projects under my belt, (including my warm-up game, Gotta Groove!), I was able to get things up and running much more quickly.

The Bad:

-The scoring system. With so many players getting negative scores (often six or seven digits!), I wish I had changed the scoring system to something like a stress percentage. Then the goal would be to reduce your stress to 10% or less, instead of playing for three minutes only to discover you have negative 800000 points.

-Fun. I swore that this time, if nothing else, I would try to make something fun, after a somewhat dismal Fun ranking for Build-a-Bandit. At least it has some other redeeming qualities, but I don’t think Priorities is very fun, when everything is said and done. I definitely made it more fun throughout the course of development, but ultimately, I don’t expect people to have a blast playing it. Maybe that’s OK?

-The balance. I spent the last six hours of my development time begging for playtesters on IRC and didn’t really get the sample size that I wanted. I was acing the game every time, but a lot of testers first said they wound up with solid walls of black, and then found it easier on subsequent tries. Come deadline time, I cut all the spawn rates by about 10% and prayed it would work out.

Priorities is set up in such a way that it is either laughably easy, or hopelessly difficult. The way that the total number of squares influences how fast squares grow and spawn made it possible to completely screw yourself by taking care of too many big things while neglecting small things, or by taking lots of time deciding what to get rid of instead of ruthlessly triaging. Since it is all metaphorical for the stress we cart around via our to-do-lists and bad habits, and succeeding depends on doing something true to real life, I don’t know if I would change the mechanics given the chance, but I do wish that the balance wouldn’t tip so extremely to either side.

There are a few other changes I would make. I want to put a border around the squares so they don’t all fuse into a big blob as they get larger, and though you could argue that this too is metaphorical, it would be nice if squares didn’t spawn under other squares.

Overall, I’m happy with how Priorities turned out, and I hope you give it a try!
I’m also very proud of my warmup entry, Gotta Groove!, so if you want to smash your keyboard a bit, check that out too.

There is so much talent in this LD it’s not even funny, and it’s sad that I won’t be able to play even a fraction of the amazing-looking games out there. Here are my lesser-known favourites after rating 100 games:

The absolute unquestionable champion:

SPACE TEST 48 – lazybraingames

At present, only 14 people have rated this game, and that is a crime. This game is so jaw-droppingly good at everything, from the audio and the humor to the phenomenal gameplay. It’s looks like an alien shooter, but plays like something else altogether, an amazing blend of puzzles, dodging and multitasking. Play this game.
Seriously, play this game.
Did you hear me? Just stop right now and go play this one. You don’t even need to read the rest of the list. It’s amazing. I promise.

Runner up:

*Humorous Title!* – Graf_Grun

Pass through holes in the tunnel without hitting walls…and after you’re done, level different aspects of the game up or down to change the experience! Add colour! Make the geometry more difficult to perceive! Make the shapes simple or jack up the gameplay to make the corridor rotate!

Other awesome games:

SLEEP! we have a long way to go – NicoJaujou

This one actually made me sleepy. It has a wonderful atmosphere.

Add Removal – StuStutheBloo

This is a creative and tricky puzzle game, where you subtract colours from images to find secret codes.

Tokyo Minimaley Land – junt74

A minigame collection of games themed around different Disneyland attractions, with tiny sprites of famous characters to match. This one had really tight theming and creative games, including a breakout where you control the ball instead of paddle.

———————
I hope you give all of those a try. I haven’t seen them highlighted yet and I believe they deserve the attention.
If you’re interested, you can also check out my game, Priorities. De-clutter your life by clicking objects to free them from your mind! I wrote a postmortem here.

Whoa the thing starts in like seven minutes, so here’s me saying I’m in!

Or rather, we’re in. Usually I enter the Compo, but LD27 just happens to fall on a weekend where my sister has spent copious amounts of money and time to come halfway around the world and visit. So I decided I wouldn’t spend 48 hours parked in front of my laptop while she’s here.
So, she’ll help me make something simple, and we’ll enter the Jam and get a little extra time.

I’ll be using Python and Pygame to write the code, she’ll be creating assets out of whatever we decide to cobble together.

Shark-themed Jam?
Hell yes, I am in.

Maybe this guy will be in my game?
I haven’t decided yet. Sharks! There are so many possibilities!

Last LD I managed to pull out a game after three hours of coding in a hotel room with my sister animating sprites, which she’d never done before, in between hectic travel connections. After an experience like that, I started to think that the only thing only a catastrophic life event would stop me from making SOMETHING, anything.

This time, due to unexpected but pleasant life events, I’m…off to a really bad start. I may have to throw in the towel this time.

I have really hacky gravity, really hacky collision detection, and no real graphics or sound to go with my cool idea yet.

I’ll be busy tomorrow, but we’ll see what I can manage. I’ll sleep on some back-up ideas and see if I can come up with something simpler.

I can’t believe I pulled off something at the last minute!
I had the very best intentions of making something cool. My design was going to be based around the idea of “You Only Get One Jump.” It would have been a puzzle platformer where you can only jump once in the entire game, and need to use other tricks to get where you’re going, like riding elevators or melting through floors.

But then, suddenly, I got recruited for a New Years television special and had a camera crew following me around! The first day of the jam I had to prepare, and then for the last couple days I’ve been filmed and had to go a bunch of places. Yesterday I was on camera for 13 hours, so sitting down to make a game was not posssible.

This morning I had to go do more filming early in the morning, but as I was biking home I realized I’d arrive home at 10am and would have a whole hour to spare! YES!
So I threw something together in the final hour. Is it good? No, but it’s something! Hooray for making something! It’s called Christmas Cookies and you can play it here!

This was my fourth LD and usually I’d write a bit more about what I made and the design process behind it. But this time around, I’m…disappointed? Embarrassed? I made my entry, “Christmas Cookies” in the final 62 minutes of the Jam and while I’m impressed with my ability to make something–anything!–in such a short amount of time, the game is obviously thrown together. It doesn’t have sound, a title screen or a game over screen. There was almost no testing and no balancing to speak of. I wish I could have made the game I wanted to make.

The game I wanted to make, as soon as the theme was announced, was The Legend of Gas-stache and His Fragile Propulsion Device. What a title! What a concept! What level design! A puzzle-platformer where the player could only jump once…in the entire game. I sketched out the concept while at work: a famous jumping hero named Mr. Mustache is cursed and turns semi-corporeal. He can no longer jump by his own power, except by using a propulsion device his kidnapped brother left behind. He must use other techniques, including his newfound ability to turn into liquid or gas and melt through floors, to navigate through a castle and rescue his brother. I sketched the first ten levels at work and made sure that every level included spots that would try to trick the player into using his only jump, or convenient shortcuts. As soon as I got home, I rushed to start coding gravity and collision detection.

And then something I couldn’t have imagined happened: a national TV station contacted me about appearing in their New Years TV special, and they’ve already received a permit to film at my workplace, could I come in early on Monday?

To say that this turned my life upside down was an understatement. That week I was filmed for 40 hours, and 15 of those were during Ludum Dare 28. There simply wasn’t time to sit down and work on a game. As soon as I heard the schedule, I shelved The Legend of Gas-stache, and any plans for any other game, immediately. But Tuesday morning rolled around, and as I was biking home from an early-morning shoot, I realized that I’d arrive home with an hour to spare before the Jam ended! I plotted out the simplest idea I could think of during the ride, walked in the door and plunked down to code as fast as I could. Christmas Cookies was born.

I hated the idea of using the theme to create a game where you only get one life or hit point or whatever, but I had to run with the simplest concept possible. Your spouse is baking Christmas Cookies for a party, and you’re allowed to have one. You try to work, but the smell and thoughts of delicious cookies keep getting in the way of your work…literally, in this case.

As soon as the game was submitted, I jotted down a list of stuff I wanted to improve upon in a post-compo version: title and game over screens, more cookies in different shapes and sizes, better graphics, sound, and maybe a little background tune, like a chiptune Jingle Bells, ANYTHING. But the filming schedule swamped me and I spent the time after recovering and fielding phone calls about more details. Then it was Christmas, and New Years, and the rest is history. I hardly even had time or energy to rate games this time around. I became that person who barely rates anything–a person I never wanted to be.

Though it won’t be seasonal anymore, I do want to touch up Christmas Cookies, if only because I hate submitting something in that state. Assuming more TV shenanigans don’t happen, though, I’ll be back to regular form for LD 29!

I can’t believe I missed the MiniLD 50 announcement earlier! Demakes is such an exciting theme to work with. I would have loved to have jumped on the bandwagon weeks ago.

Luckily, it looks like submissions will be open for another day or so, so I decided to polish my collision detection and platformer skills and demake Gravity Rush, one of the PlayStation Vita’s most unique games.

I’ve decided the best way to go about this demake is to strip out everything except the gem collecting aspect. Collect enough gems and you’ll have the power to escape the map by flying (or rather, “falling”) upwards through a narrow vertical shaft. I got all of the gravity mechanics and collision detection in place this evening. The player can float in place, fall in any of four directions, and walk and jump normally on walls and ceilings, so long as the power bar isn’t depleted.

The art is placeholder-y right now, but here’s a gif of it in action, with the player’s sprite pointing the direction gravity is currently directed:

I work tomorrow, so I won’t have too much time before the deadline, but I have some of the world designed on paper, and if I can implement that, then I’ll try and make a nicer player sprite.

I’ll be using Python and Pygame, GIMP, Aseprite, MilkyTracker, Audacity and BFXR as usual.

This’ll be my fifth time in the LD, though only the third where I’ve been able to devote the whole weekend to it. The last two times were rush jobs–one done in a hotel room in transit, and the other in the final hour of the jam after being filmed all weekend.

I’ve improved a lot in the last year or so, though my polish skills suck so you wouldn’t know it. I did finish a demake of Gravity Rush for MiniLD 50 recently that I’m mildly proud of, and you can play that here!

I’m not super jazzed about too many of the final themes, but we’ll see what we end up with! I’ve always been able to make do.

What do you get when you cross this: with this?????

“AHHHHH!!!! GET AWAY FROM ME!!!”