Hello fellow to-be game developers,

since everyone seems to be in, I will probably have no choice but to foll0w.

I don’t have high expectations, (that’s why I’ll participate in the jam not the compo) and just hope that my first LD won’t be a disaster. I really like to create games and to play games, but somehow I don’t like finishing games… well, we will see about that.

Used Equipment:

• Programming: Java (Netbeans IDE)
• Libraries: LWJGL and some code I wrote on top of that (maybe also Slick2D if I’m able to learn it within three days)
• Audio: sfxr/bfxr/audacity
• Graphic: Gimp/Paint
• Workstation Equipment: Two screen, two keyboards, one mouse, one headset and three gamepads.

What I will see for a whole weekend.

Probably will get some help from some friends in game design/graphics/sounds/playtesting/nonsense ideas (aka inspiration).

I hope I get it running as an applet, because nobody likes downloading files manually.

This will be all for today #nopotato #longlivebacon. Have fun everyone.

So, now I have been awake for 22 hours (but sadly only worked about 15 hours). Still I gotta get some sleep now.

My game will be about Music and Sounds and Epileptic Colors (not yet implemented), and a guy who wants to escape minimalism (or boredom)

Some random screen from the timelapse.

YES, it will be a platformer. YES, I’m far behind schedule (well, if I would participate in the compo instead of the jam). YES, tommorow I will also have other things to do. And YES, many things went wrong. Thank you for asking.

(If somebody would know, how to speed up music with OpenAL/Slick2D without having to restart it, that would be awesome)

good night

Tags: help, progress, sleeptime

Today I finally finished my first Ludum Dare, and it went worse than expected… Still, I managed to create a game. Especially since I have been ill for a day…

I called it “Escape the Minimalism” and you can play it here. I’m not sure if you should, but you can.

My Concept Draft for the Game, which was completely different from the finished product.

My inital idea was, to create a platformer where every step you make every move you do you create a sound, and when you chain actions the world would get more colorful and your character more agile, and then the sounds somehow would make a nice music, if one would design the levels correctly.

But then reality struck, and well I had to simplify things, and now you just have to collect stuff so that the music won’t stop.

I wanted to upload a timelapse, but I’m having problems merging the audio with the video, and nobody wants to look at a silent timelapse, or?

I would write a postmortem now, but I’m far too tired. Everybody have fun voting games for the next 3 weeks.

Finally, I get to write a Post-Mortem about my Game “Escape the Minimalism” that I made during LD26, my first LD. Here is my first short summary of my LD.

I’m not totally happy with how it turned out, but it still turned out better than I thought it would.

A screenshot of the “finished” game

So I think I will give this whole Post-Mortem thing a twist and do it a little bit different:

What went worse than expected:

• The THEME: From all the possibilities, why would it have to be Minimalism, and it struck me extra hard, because I think I’m not totally irresponsible for this. Well, at least we can all learn from our mistakes.
• The Motivation has been quite low at some times, partly because of the theme, partly because I got up at 4:00 AM to start working and kept working for a whole of 22 hours. Taking breaks and drinking a lot is essential to keep healthy, stay motivated and avoid dehydration.
• Being sick for one day is not awfully productive. I had food poisoning and spent the second day in bed and on the toilet. So be careful and watch what you eat, but eat something, because you need the nutrients for your brain.
• I didn’t even got the core mechanics ready after the first day, and I only started making levels after the second half of the last day, so I didn’t have enough time for smart level design. But I shouldn’t have skipped on letting others playtest it, because this really helps finding the balance in level difficulties and to get valuable feedback.
• Working in a team was not working out as I wanted, because of the theme I didn’t have a plan for a long time and still didn’t have a concrete one when I started working. Some of my friends didn’t have much time, and I was ill the second day. The last day I was already giving up on making a polished game, and just decided to push it through and get at least something playable out of this.

What went better than expected:

• The Feedback for my game has been surprisingly positive, I personally didn’t think at first, that people other than myself could actually enjoy it.
• The weather was perfect, it was cold and it has been raining a lot, so I didn’t have to come up with excuses why I wouldn’t leave my room.
• I was able to create my first game with Slick2D and I learned Tiled also along the way. This weekend had been more of an extensive learning session than a game jam, because I didn’t really know my tools beforehand.

What went like expected:

• As hoped I didn’t die from this extreme challenge or dehydration, but I nearly thought I would at some point over the weekend.
• I wasn’t able to create a complete polished game within 72 hours, but at least I made something playable and finish-able. But that’s okay, maybe next time I’ll use tools I’m already familiar with.

So my first LD made a lot of fun, and it motivated me to get at least something done. I will for sure create a more “finished” verison, fixing all the bugs and creating some better levels. And I think I will participate in the next one for sure.

Now when you go play my game, I would be happy if you left some constructive criticism, because I can’t believe that my game got so much positive feedback. 😀

Tags: postmortem

Since my first Ludum Dare went rather well (25th in Fun), I guess I will also participate in the next LD (Jam).

Tools I’ll be using:

• Frameworks:
  • LWJGL, Slick2D or (if I manage to learn it within the next two weeks) LibGDX
  • and NiftyGUI
• IDE: Netbeans
• Graphics: Gimp, Paint (maybe Wings3D for modeling)
• Sound: bfxr, sfxr, audacity
• All my friends for (alpha & beta) testing (this time for real)

My major goal for this LD will be to make it playable in the browser, because it seems that many people don’t like downloads ( I get why people don’t like installers, but standalone executables aren’t that bad), hence why I try to learn LibGDX.

Maybe as an exercise I will also try to make a real RTS out of my MiniLD44 (7dRTS) entry, which is currently only turn-based.

Having said all this: Happy Jamming everybody.

So, I fed all the results from the voting into an excel sheet, and did some number crunching. If you like numbers as much as I do, than come and look at all my research results.

The results of my research are:

Have a look at this beautiful excel sheet

• Round 1 has been the best, atleast almost all top 20 themes are from round 1.
• The most votes on any theme are on “You must leave it behind” with 2575 votes, meaning we can expect a slight rise in the number of participants from last LD (2346). The theme with the least votes has been “Desperation” with only 2338 votes (irony?).
• The most downvotes got “Prohibition” with 1488. I guess this will never become a Ludum Dare theme.
• Two of the top themes are nearly identical “Parallel Worlds” and “Multi-layered world” (or at least they sound identical to me) still “Parallel Worlds” performed better because less people disliked it.
• As far as i can judge, and except “Evil vs Evil” which is very similar to “You are the villain” from LD 25, there are only fresh “never seen before in a LD” themes.

Fun facts:

• Did you notice there are actually 21 themes in the final round instead of the announced 20? (Seems like PoV wants to keep “Darkness” in the final round) (Edit: my bad, there are really 20 themes in the final round, but “Contrast” got replaced by “Darkness”, although having higher votes) I’m too stupid copying numbers from one screen to another? PoV is of course right, it was my mistake. (Data files have been updated)
• “Infestation” has exactly 666 upvotes. Coincidence?
• There are as many people hating “Destruction” as there are people hating “Immortal” (1167).
• “Balance” is the theme with the most Neutral votes (696). Seems like people couldn’t decide for one side. 😀

(Anybody who is interested: here is my original xlsx file, here is a super-portable CSV file of this or as a PDF for viewing pleasures.)

(Any errors or typos are pure intentional and for entertainment purposes only.)

Thank you for your time, I hope you had as much fun reading this, as I had making this.

Suddenly there are (2563 + 497 + 1463 =)  4523 total votes for the top theme, just 1948 more than the most rated theme from the previous four rounds…. WHAT!? O_o

Do I sense manipulation? Or is it simply the smell of an insane amount of competition? Who knows… only the final amount of submitted games will tell, and I hardly tread to imagine what onslaught it will be.

So, now on to WORK… I mean… BACK TO SLEEP. I think I have to digest this first. I kinda expected it to be the theme but I somehow hoped it wouldn’t.

So the question is: what can you really DO in 10 seconds?

Can anybody draw a pixel-goat?

The moose that was supposed to be a goat

This year I was really ambitious to complete the October Challenge. That was in September. Then in early October I had nearly no time for game development. So starting only midway in October I figured that I could just postpone the October Challenge to November, since it’s more like a personal challenge than a competition. So I started my very own November Challenge.

But as life is, there are many other things to do. And I get easily distracted from what I want to do (or also called procrastination). At some points I wasn’t even sure if I should bother anymore. This means I only have an unfinished game (about in the alpha-stage I would say) now at the end of November.

Still, I showed what I have to some friends and they reassured me, that it isn’t that bad and that I should just keep working and finish something. This made me decide not to give up that easily. Since I (sadly) can’t do the LD 28 in December (only got one day time, maybe I’ll do a joke entry, but I’m not sure if it is worth the try) I will instead work on my October 2013-Challenge in December.

I also recently watched this video about Motivation which made me rethink my way of working and (surprise, surprise) motivated me. Jazza is mainly working as an artist/animator, but it pretty much applies the same to game development.

The 2013 Challenge is on!

Tags: motivation

Here is a short post-mortem of my third Ludum Dare Entry (Jam): Below Earth.

In it you play an adventurer (bomb throwing maniac) that is exploring an underground cave only to find a rather hostile environment.

This time I also tried out some new tools like IntelliJ (IDE) and Aseprite (Pixelart) and I have to say I like them.

The somewhat good things:

• Brainstormed the idea long enough and then sticked with it.
• Prototyped graphics really quickly.
• The game is actually fun to play.
• I successfully drew my own pixelart with aseprite.
• I didn’t neglect my personal duties during the weekend.

Don’t mess with the local wild life.

The rather bad things:

• I originally intended to procedurally generate levels, but then I realized, that I have absolutely no experience with procedural level generation. I ended up with uninteresting and lazy “random” levels. So I later created a level parser to read text-files and made some quick levels, but I also left some of the generated levels in it.
• It’s too hard. I slowly start to see a pattern with my Ludum Dare games. I always balance it in a way, so that I still have a challenge, but that might not be an acceptable difficulty for others. Having difficult levels itself isn’t the problem, but having a too steep difficulty curve is a problem. I should learn to slowly(!) ramp up the difficulty of the game. Giving the game to playtesters often and early can really help with this.
• Hiding content in later levels. Because of it’s difficulty, some players never got to see every enemy that the game has to offer. This might be something not true for game-design in general, but it holds true for Ludum Dare, where most people probably don’t have the time to try and master your game. This means all the main game features should be available within the “easy” levels, and only combine them and challenge the player after those levels.
• This is another entry without music. Music is important for a game, but before I hastily make some annoying 10 second loop I rather leave the game without music. This might be a personal goal for my next LD to focus on music and create some for my game. I just have to find a program I can make some with and learn to use it….
• I created pixelart. It’s not good, but it’s better than anything I’ve created yet. Still it took far longer than it should have.
• No Web version. I really tried to get that GWT build to work, but there are so many things that go wrong when they somehow possibly can…

Time spent (aka everybody loves statistics)

During the whole weekend (Saturday to Monday because it’s a Jam Entry) I recorded my development time with toggl.com, which is really useful for such things. I ended up spending more time on graphics than I thought I would. Programming seems to be so big, because I was always testing my game inbetween bigger changes and played it over and over again. I also spent a whole hour setting up the project because I was using Libgdx without eclipse. 😉

That’s how I spent my weekend.

Conclusion

Every Ludum Dare helps me in some way to become a better developer and even a better person. 😀

I found some new nice tools with which I will continue to work.

I also should try to make my future games not too difficult for the average player.

I already started and will continue to develop a post-compo version of this game, because this is one of my first games where I feel like polishing it is worthwile.

If you want to play or rate or try out the post-compo version, you can do this here.

Tags: ld29, postmortem

We will participate in the jam and we are already completely stressed, so here is an inspirational quote for everyone to calm down, and remind you of that loving time we all call Ludum Dare:

Taking showers? What is that?
Eating? I’ll live from what I find between my keyboard keys. (most certainly Ramen noodles)
Sleep? Ain’t nobody got time for that! I got to create a game!
-an average Ludum Dare participant

GET HYPED: LUDUM DARE WILL START OMG IT IS ALREADY HAPPENING

Crosspost from our blog: http://accidentlyawesome.wordpress.com/2014/08/22/get-ready-for-ludum-dare-edition-30/

Tags: hype, intensifies

The open beta of Hello, Alien! is now available through itch.io! You might remember this game from LD30, if you have been one of the ~50 people who rated the game back then. We didn’t finish improving it within October, that’s why it will be in open beta for the rest of November. This still counts as a successful october challenge, or does it?

You can pay what you want, which also includes paying nothing (if you really want that?), so you have no excuse for not trying it out! Well, except if you are being abducted by aliens or attacked by bears. But we are thankful if you take the time to check it out nonetheless. We know bear attacks are really serious, so we’ll understand if you got no time.

Tags: aliens, bears

We just released version 0.7 of our “Extended October Challenge” game “Hello, Alien!”. It brings new levels, bugfixes and probably other new bugs features.

We would really like to have your feedback to further improve it, and since we figured sending us an e-mail is too much of a hassle, we created a little feedback form, where you can anonymously give us some feedback about our game. So when you try it out, consider giving us a minute of your time and tell us what you thought. (That would really put a smile on our face.)

So many jams

With all those jams coming up, it’s really tough to not get distracted. Next year, October Challenge will NOT be extended into November. The next few weekends will be really busy.

Nov 21st: Indies VS PewDiePie A jam with a real prize: PewDiePie is gonna let’s play the top 10 entries, which will mean fame and honour for those games. So it’s definitely worth checking out, although the lack of a proper theme (“Fun to play, fun to watch” – Duh, sure my game is gonna be fun.) makes it really hard to come up with a game idea. I somehow really miss the restriction of a theme that forces you to think outside the box.

Nov 29st: MiniLD55 I will probably use this MiniLD as an excuse to create a proper code base for LD 31, rather than making a game. Maybe just a small test game, with that feature… and that feature would be nice… oh, and wouldn’t it be cool if… god dammit brain, stop!

Dec 5th: Ludum Dare 31: The event everybody has been waiting for. Not much to say about this actually, I guess you are all familiar with LD.

Artist wanted

Oh, and I don’t know where to ask this, but here it is.

If you are an artist, but don’t know how to code and can’t make any music (optional), live near some european time-zone and know english (sure you do, you are reading this) or german, then we search exactly for YOU!

If you are interested in teaming up for the next jams, write us at accidentlyawesomestudios [at] gmail [dot] com

Nothing special, yet. Needs more particles!

After ranting about the theme for hours, I finally committed to one idea and after about 8 hours of work I’ve got the basic gameplay.

I’ll be making a Two-Player Local-Versus (imaginary-sports?) game. This is very risky for Ludum Dare, but that’s  why tomorrow will be the “Implement an AI that is not as dumb as  bread”-day.

HURRAY!

Hyper Soccer is now playable in the Browser, go try it now. It’s a frantic little local-multiplayer game with gamepad support, you can even play with as many players as you have gamepads. So grab some gamepads and some friends and get playing. (Although gamepads may not work in the Web-Version, and you probably need to download the Desktop-Version.)

It has a lot of match customization options: you can choose the unit types available, the AI Difficulty and the amount of units per team. Although, not all values may be reasonable…

Promise me to never do that.

Two teams with various unit’s consisting of four unit types, each with their own special ability, try to get the ball to their side of the field, to win a round of hyper soccer!

I do however recommend a “only-grappling-hook” match.

 Libgdx doesn’t like Iframes

I had to jump through a few hoops, to get the HTML5-Build of my LibGDX game to run flawlessly on itch.io, because it gets embedded in an iframe. If you are having similar problems you may want to read the stuff below.

Beating the iframe

First problem is, although mouse clicks are distributed to the iframe, key events are not. To remedy this you will have to add a call to window.focus() in your handleMouseDown javascript function in your index.html file.

Disabling Arrowkeys

Next problem is, if you use the arrowkeys as controls, they will scroll the page and/or the iframe when pressed, that’s really annoying when trying to play a game. To prevent the iframe from scrolling, you can simply make the size of the iframe a bit bigger than your game is. But to prevent the site itself from scrolling, you will want to prevent the default arrowkeys behaviour. This did work fine in Firefox, however not in Chrome, so a different solution had to be found. After applying BOTH methods to my index.html (just to be sure), Arrowkeys no longer scroll the page, and the game can be enjoyed in peace. (If you are not sure about how to do something, you can always check the source-code of the game’s page.)

Deploying to itch.io itself is actually pretty straight forward, you just zip all the files in your html/build/dist/ folder and upload it to itch.io – finished!

I hope this saves someone from going through the  horrible things I had to go through.

Tags: hyper soccer, now with more web, web

This MiniLD was a lot of fun. I managed to finish a small fun game that is not the worst thing I’ve ever made.

I challenged myself to reverse my game development process, meaning

1. I started by creating music,
2. made a design document,
3. pumped some sound effects out of bfxr,
4. created all the art for the game,
5. wrote a TO-DO list
6. and finally started programming the game.

Good things that happened:

– No silence: By making the music first, my game finally wasn’t silent because I usually drag this out to the end and then I totally forget/scrap it.

– Small but finished: The game is actually finished, because I decided to not take the first thing that came to my mind and think about all the cool things I could do, but instead kept the scope small and concentrated on one single core mechanic.

– emehT: This is probably the first time I made something that fit the theme, instead of ignoring it or just tangentially relating to it.

Bad things that happened:

– Bad Art: The art is really bad, as always when I do the art myself.

– Bad Music: The same goes for the music, but at least it’s better than silence… right?

– Rather shallow: The game is only fun for a short time, the novelty wears off quickly and then it’s rather bland.

Tags: MiniLD57, pre-mortem, pre-postmortem, reverse

It’s the same every LD: At first I make a rough plan for the weekend and start working, forgetting that there is something outside of LD. That never works out and I end up with a half-assed game by the end of the weekend. I’d really like to participate, but it’s an illusion to have 72 hours (or even 48h) of free time, uninterrupted by real-life obligations.

That’s why I’m gonna enter:

LUDUM BOARD DARE

So, this time, I’m gonna try something (hopefully) less time-consuming, and try to create a traditional (board/card) game!

Tools at my disposal:

• pen and paper
• multiple decks of cards
• dice
• ludo board and pieces
• chess board and pieces
• more dice
• coins
• any other household article most people probably have at home

My goal is to finish a printable pdf with the rules and board (if necessary). I’m just not sure if I’m going to make something “single-player” (like Solitair) or for multiple people. Probably not many people will bother to play it anyway. But that’s not what I’m here for, I’m here to make a game.

PS: I’m in

Tags: board games, card games, traditional games, why cant i have 72 uninterrupted hours