For our first LD we decided to keep it simple and make a parallex scrolling race game in which you (for a good reason, mind you!) have to get 10 silver medals (10 seconds, heh).
The game might have 10s intervals too, in the form of checkpoints or something but that remains to be seen.
Still a lot to do so back to work it is! Good luck and have fun you all!
Well, our first Ludum Dare Jam is behind us now, and even though it didn’t quite work out we still managed to gobble together something (almost) playable, or hopefully atleast enjoyable.
I was really disappointed that I couldn’t make the physics work and so I upgraded the game to use Box2D (my second venture into Box2D programming, first was yesterday!) and guess what; it makes things almost too easy! Here is the link to a (windows) build that is much closer to the vision we had in mind when we set out to make this game. Hopefully we can take the things we learned and apply them in Ludum Dares to come!
What went right:
What went left… I mean wrong:
Tags: Mortem, Post, postmortem
This was our second LD and we think it went quite well atleast compared to last time. Oh the panic.
After the theme was announced we bounced some ideas around and went to sleep. After waking up we promptly decided to make a game about growing a plant in one week.
Without further dudes here is Wild Growth:
(http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-28/?action=preview&uid=25343)
Oh and spot the Bieber! 
Tags: bieber-challenge, easter-egg, fun, funny, hard, isildur fanclub finland, moosefly is a real thing, pot, sometimes i eat too much candy
Our game, StromnetZ, is a pipe-esque game with bombs, vaults and other fine things. The idea for a pipe game dawned on us almost instantly and we worked on the game for the whole 72 hours (minus the time spent sleeping and eating).
Without boring you anymore: the good, the bad and the ugly… Actually no ugly.
The good:
+ We focused on the essential stuff first -> we managed to do everything we wanted
+ We managed to include some extra features, like the leaderboard!
+ Semi balanced scoring system
+ Nice difficulty curve
+ Already had some stuff ready from LD28 so we didn’t waste time learning new technologies (highscores was new and required some effort though) or creating the basics of the game.
+ Explosion animation is brilliant
The bad:
– No dinosaur skeletons in the background images
– The cross pipe and the over-under pipe are hard to differentiate
– Still no musician (music is royalty free from incompetech.com)
– UI is like that of a real power plant: bland and dull
– Not enough juice! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fy0aCDmgnxg
Click HERE or HERE or even HERE to play StromnetZ.
Tags: eat your vegetables, help i am stuck in a tag, post-mortem, postmortem
Anssi from MooseflyGames here! You can find our LD29 entry, StromnetZ here. With that out of the way: the results are finally in (well, they have been for hours now)! Of course I had to take the data and see how we did compared to our previous entries. As can be seen from graphs 1 and 2 (check the full post for graphs and more!), our results are once again pretty solid. Even though our game was somewhat lacking in humor and mood I’m really glad we managed to raise the “Overall” and “Fun” ratings from our frustratingly difficult LD28 entry. Didn’t make it into top 100 in any categories, but we still have our humor ranking of 45 in LD27 to look back on on our deathbeds. Yay. Don’t feel like cluttering the whole front page, so be sure to read the full entry by clicking somewhere, beneath this paragraph maybe?
Graph 1. Ratings (click for a bigger version)
Graph 2. Percentiles (click for a bigger version)
Adding a leaderboard into our game also gave us an interesting tool for tracking the amount of games finished and the scores people managed to get. As of this morning our score-database had 610 total entries. Although a large chunk of them were from our friends and other people who didn’t participate in the voting process, here are some statistics on the scores attained: 188 entries (around 31% of total entries) had a score of zero, 341 entries (around 56%) were below 10k points and 535 entries (around 88%) were below 100k points. The highest score of 400752 points was attained by Shinetti, good job. Too bad we didn’t see any unfamiliar names on the leaderboards, but I guess people don’t want to waste too much time rating a single game. And the bar was indeed set pretty high by some hardcore players. One thing that amazes me though is the number of plays with a total score of zero. I would really love to know if that’s due to a bug or if people really had a problem getting anywhere in our game.
Managed to play and rate almost 160 games too! It always amazes me what people manage to make in such a short time, so I thought I’d list some of my favourite games so others can experience them too! Here are just some of the most interesting games I had the chance to enjoy in no particular order:
Go! Go! Purgatory! – Pretty, and somewhat witty (heh) visual novel.
They Launched a Probe! – A game about programming computers. IN SPACE!
Ripple Runner – A really nice and complete rhythm game.
Beneath The Surface Of A Scratch Ticket – A game about scratching tickets. Wonderful!
Water Miner – Really impressive tech in this “digging” game. Funny sound effects too.
Dowser (Lucy) – Cute girls (and uncles) doing cute stuff. Yay.
A Mole’s Life – It’s as if I really am a mole. Really got me going.
Wunderheilung – Amazing art and a bizarre mood. Doctor game 1/2.
LAIR M.D. – Same as above really, doctor game 2/2.
Beneath Colossal – Control a colossal, wreck stuff, look fabulous.
Tenkosei ROBO – It’s like watching anime. But it’s a game. A typing game. How confusing! How wonderful!
Inside Look Activity Book – I bet I would’ve grown up to be an upstanding citizen if I had had such an activity book as a child.
The Show Must Go On – Organize a play. All by yourself. Who needs actors anyway.
Safety Blanket – Nope. NOPE. Don’t play at night.
I look forward to competing with you all again in LD30! Moosefly over and out.
Tags: graphs, statistics
Commander, it has come to our attention that the Empire of Waaagh, The Council and even the Simian Alliance are gathering troops near our planet!
We must act now!
We must strike first!
We must do this for the God Emperor!
ONWARDS TO VICTORY!
(Commander, if you are reading this, please click on the UEF logo.)
Also, for some reason I really like the visuals of your screenshot.