Orni

LD26

Demo Version!

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Play the demo here!

As many others I interpreted the theme in a visual way – however – I went to the total extreme and chose to use only 1-bit of the graphical spectrum. (that’s minimalism for you)

as you can see the game is far from done, you can play with WASD + Mouse and try to shoot those little buggers of the platform without getting knocked off it yourself. the physics hick up occasion, but it’s quite stable now – only far from feature complete. so here’s what I’m planning:

todo:

  • 3 different weapons (handgun, rifle, canon), currently only the rifle is implemented
  • 6 different enemy types, most of them shoot back (the one that’s implemented now is supposed to evolve into a stronger form if you don’t kill it in time)
  • ingame objects, like crates and bombs that can be used to your advantage
  • more “juciness”, for example camera shakes and more particles
  • actual music (the one you can hear now it only a placeholder)
  • much more fun!

so, enjoy the game and make sure to check out the upcoming builds as well as the final submission

don’t forget to be awesome !

 

Super 1-Bit Space Arena

screenshot

 

Play it now!

I’m finally finished.

The game turned out almost exactly as I planned, with some hours of time to spare. I’m quite pleased with it.

Enjoy!

😀

Post Mortem: ‘Super 1-Bit Space Arena’

gross

Play ‘Super 1-Bit Space Arena’

 

So, here’s my post mortem I wanted to write for quite some time now.
LD#26 was my third time participating and it was the first time everything worked more or less as I planned to.

I started by thinking something up that would fit the theme and chose to interpret it in a visual way, in terms of color depth, so it ended up being a 1-bit game – the most minimalistic color depth. Since this isn’t limiting genre wise I had to decide that next. Although I’d really liked to make a RPG but that’s something I simply can’t do within 48 hours (yet). The only other genres I have experience making games of are platformers and generic action games – so I decided to choose one of those. For some reason unknown to me (it might be because I was re-watching Star Trek Enterprise and Firefly at the time) I wanted to put my game into space, which fits action more than platformer – and what’s more fun than an arena shooter? yes, nothing, so this was settled then 😀

What went right!

  • I love Flashpunk!
    By now my workflow is tuned almost to perfection – I can make art, code and implement content at a fast pace for/with it. I already decided to use something else next time – but for this time it simply felt like the obvious right choice – and it was.
  • 1-Bit graphics rock!
    It’s both very hard and very easy to work with very minimal graphical possibilities – like in this case, only two colors – since the art can be produced very fast and efficiently, yet it’s hard to get those few pixels right. However, by now I’m not too shabby as a pixel artist so this was a lot of fun for me and suited my skillset
  • time management is key!
    I made a lot of breaks and was able to get everything done nonetheless. the biggest reason being that my workflow didn’t let me down and I didn’t stumbled over significant hurdles along the way
  • I’ve implemented everything I planned!
    yes – this is a first for me. The game you can play is exactly what I imagined when I started making it (except for 2 gameplay thingies I’ll explain later). Having a to-do list and getting everything done in time is such a great feeling

What didn’t!

  • Although I’m quite pleased with the audio of my game – it’s far from great. I’d really like to get a less repetitive, more funky music track but simply wasn’t able to achieve that. mainly because I suck at music. I’ve known for a long time that the first person I’d hire for a dev team of my own would be a music guy.
  • Sound effect variations are incredibly awesome – yet I didn’t implement them. As many comments pointed out the weapon fire sounds are very repetitive and although this  leads to a nice retro feel – it also doesn’t sound that great after a while. One of the things I learned this LD is to always produce slightly mutated sound effect variations and play them randomly.
  • I’m not happy with the AI – but I implementing some nice A* pathfinding seemed unnecessary at first – yet as my game progressed it became clear it would improve it a lot. So I started hacking it together but couldn’t get it to work without screwing up my time schedule – so I dropped it
  • I should have introduced the different monsters step by step instead more or less all of them at once (although there’s some nifty background algorithm going on determining the quantity and quality of monsters to spawn), but didn’t think of it until it was to late to implement
  • my original idea was to get exp points for “killing” monsters to level up the currently used weapon (in terms of knockback and frequency) but I somehow changed that plan – that’s the reason why you already start with those 3 weapons. I should have stuck to that plan – since I feel it would have improved my game (never ever cut a feature if you’re not completely sure it would make the game worse or would cost too much resources)

 

So – what now?

I don’t know.
Maybe I’ll eventually make a post-compo version but chances are I won’t. However, I had a lot of fun and am proud of my game and it’s a delight to see what you guys have come up with and play your games. being part of LD is a wonderful experience, every time :)

Some other gems I’ve found

<I already made a little roundup before>

Here are some other great little games I’ve stumbled upon.
The Ludum Dare Voting ends soon! Make sure to check these games out!

 

Random Legend Adventure by Captain_Genial

 

100% Safe Download by 3.14

 

Four Scepters by Benjamin

 

F*** This Job by Casino Jack

 

Life! by cwilloughby

 

and again, make sure to check out my game as well 😀

Super 1-Bit Space Arena by Orni

keep calm

If you’re anything like me you really want to know how the voting turned out. I know it’s all rather irrelevant – but be honest, would you take part without the voting/rating/top-games stuff?
I know I wouldn’t 😀

Competing with others is a great source of motivation and therefore surely an important aspect of Ludum Dare

So – bear with me as you count down the last hours and make sure to check out all the roundup posts available, like both of mine for example:

Roundup part 1

Roundup part 2

Comments

20. May 2013 · 18:51 UTC
♪ dee dee deee deeeeeeee

de de de de deeeeee ♪

LD27

We’re in !!

So I just woke up (it’s 4:30 am in Germany) and immediately started coming up with game concepts with my girlfriend.

We’re going to take part in this LD together!
This is a first for both of us, since I didn’t participate in the jam category up until now and she didn’t participated in LD at all.

We were able to decide on a fun (and hopefully unique) concept in a very short time and I’m going to spend the next one or two hours coding together the basic engine stuff, sleep a bit, and continue working on it tomorrow :)

(by the way – we’re going to use flashpunk, take a look at the tools I used last LD – I’m going to use them again)

Dungeoncrawler incoming!

Unbenannt

I’ve actually started making my entry and got the player movement and world generation done.

As you can see I’m using the awesome LoFi Fantasy graphics by Oryx (thanks again for permission to use them!) – please also note that I’m taking part in the Jam category for the first time, so using already pre-made graphics is a revelation for me 😀

I won’t reveal what the “10 second theme twist” is – at least for now, but I’m pretty sure my game is going to be unique.

Later today my girlfriend will join me and we’ll continue working together on this (which I’m really looking forward to)

stay tuned – and keep up the amazing work

Dungeon Deadline!

It’s done!

 

Our game ‘Dungeon Deadline’ is finally finished:

 

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Play it now!

‘Dungeon Deadline’ Post-Mortem

 

Play it!

 

First things first: I’m happy about how the game turned out – it’s the first time for me that I finished a Ludum Dare game as I initially designed it, without cutting any features.

I worked with my girlfriend on ‘Dungeon Deadline’ and she helped me a lot coming up with the idea and refining the gameplay elements, while she designed all levels beautifully as well.
As you probably can immediately tell, I’m using Oryx famous ‘LoFi Fantasy’ set – the same set that many other games use (for example ‘Realm of the Mad God’ & ‘Legends of Yore’) so this part was settled. For the audio I asked Landon Podbielski for help and he composed a wonderful tune for it.

I’m very grateful to those two guys, since all that you see and hear in my game was made by them.
(besides the impromptu sound effects and some minor graphics that I did)
So my job was coding and actually developing that whole thing – and it took some very long hours to do so. however – since I’m by now basically fluent in the Flashpunk engine I was coding at an amazing speed and was surprised of myself for a few times – loved it.

Despite being a overall very positive experience I also had some minor downsides:
The code looks like hell … I’m always starting out neat and organized and end up hacking stuff together in a way that should give any compiler a heart attack. It’s still memory-leak proof and more or less reasonably performance optimized though.
Some of the features are a bit buggy, or at least under-developed – one of them being the warrior attack. It’s a bit unbalanced and simply not very well done – but I kept putting it off and ended up having to keep it like it is now. Please try out the other two classes to play the game in a balanced way.

After reading the comments that I got by now I’m happy to report that people generally like my game – some seem to like it quite a lot :)

Several people suggested that the time limitation hinders the potential of the game – since they want to explore the dungeons in a more traditional RPG way. While I certainly understand that feeling – this is simply an other type of game and the theme of this Ludum Dare is ’10 seconds’ after all. However – I might develop this further and ditch the time limitation to include up/down stairs and a shopping – which should make this a much more classical dungeon crawler. We’ll see.

I also have to thank the whole Ludum Dare community – all of you are awesome!
It’s amazing that so many games got made and I’m going to take my time playing as many as I can over the next days.

Have Fun!

LD33

I’m in ! + First build

I’m finally participating in another Ludum Dare … it’s been a long time.

Same Tools as every time: FlashDevelop + Flashpunk

I immediately got a nice idea for a game and while I’m not going to reveal it just now, here’s a screenshot of the very first running build of my game … all the running around and collision stuff is working nicely.

Great stuff I found so far

Check out some of my favorites so far – I wasn’t able to play & rate many games up until now, but I’m planning to do so next week.

 

The Red Planet by Zccc

Fantastic aesthetic! Reminded me of Doom and the story telling was nicely implemented


Grave by uheartbeast

This one has both – great gameplay and great looks!
Possibly the best 2D animation I’ve seen so far


Seperated by rxi

Amazing mood that’s supported by equally amazing pixel art


The Bear Hunter by Devark

A great short experience that tells a gloomy story


Sewer Monster City by bitslap

Great classic game idea fully polished. Enjoy.


and maybe check out my game too:

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