Hi,

I am greatly looking forward to Ludum Dare 22 and I am practicing for rapid game creation but I have one thing on my mind I would like to ask; I would like to use PlayMaker in the competition. Unity developers will no that it is a visual scripting tool. It is in the source code of the game when a game is made with it and if I give out the source code of the game will I not be giving out a copy of PlayMaker free, which is obviously ilegal? what do I do in this situation?

Hello!

This is my first LD so I want to get things cleared up.

Can I use fonts in my game or do I have to make my own? If so How?

Anyways this is what I will be using For this LD

Unity for the game engine

Visual c# express for code

Paint.Net and Inkscape for 2D sprites and textures

Blender for animation and modelling

Bfxr for sound effects

Music, havent decided probably no music as I have no musical talent

Oh and I currently have a game on RocketHub(international kickstarter), You should check it out: http://rkthb.co/4587

Hello all,

This is my first journal entry for this competition. I have decided to do a moon game(because I liked the theme) But it is still alone based!

I have been working on the character controllers and a simple moon terrain. What do you think?

The moon texture and the skybox were also created in the last couple of hours!

Happy game making!

Well due to some restrictions I to not do a moon exploration game but still keep my sci-fi idea going

So if you have heard of the new planet keppler NASA have found, this Apollo Keppler gone wrong!

Tell me what you think!

So this is what I have been up to. I have made great progress, I have done far more in this time than I thought I would.

I have a cool suprise idea if I have the time to do tomorrow but for now I have all the character controllers in place and the GUI is pretty much done.

Anyways see ya later!

I’m really enjoying this, everything is on time, everything seems to work!

My game now has multiple modes! First you explore the planet in first person( as seen earlier ) then after repairing your ship you take off and start this old school mode were you have to fly through space and not hit any meteor’s:

I’m really proud of it as I was told it would be very difficult, I mean It has been difficult but I have gotten over all the hurdles thrown at me! Anyways I’ll be back later with more news!

Dinner Soon!

Well hello again, I am doing well on the game front. Im having time to add little bits of polish and doing some all important bug squashing.

I am having great trouble with sound though and I was wondering if anyone could help me.

I am using Wolfram tones to make the music but I need to convert the midi files into wav or mp3. Is there a way I can do that with having to spend money on some software. I have already tried recording the midi playing but there is an astonishing drop in sound quality.

So what do I do with midi files?

Any ways this is currently what it looks like:

I am quite proud of it as I have less than years experience making games!
Anyways I will be back later!

Well I say that and I’ve spent 27 hours on my game and I feel like I need to do more. So Im not going to upload just yet and Im going to test the game profusely on me and other family members to try and iron out all of the bugs.

But thats that, oh and I officially stopped my timelapse!

Anyways I’ll be back

Right well everyone else is doing post mortems I suppose I should too!

Seriously though it’s nice being able to look over what happened, so here we go,

The Good:

• I started with a simple idea that took 10 minutes to plan out which didn’t get me bogged down at the start so I had far more time to actually work on the game. Infact the large majority of the game was design and planned during the course of the 2 days.
• I was very familiar with all the tools I used and so there wasn’t an awful lot that slowed me down.
• I am very happy with the graphics of my game as I was worried before the competition what to do about textures but I ended up being creative and made my own in Paint.NET
• I took frequent breaks from my computer which made me feel less tired of staring at a computer screen and I felt made me more productive.

The Bad:

• I feel I got the balance wrong and the game was too difficult.
• As stated in my journal entries I had a lot of trouble with sound design and music as this is not my strong area(practice needed)
• I am not a hundered percent happy with the gameplay in the first part of the game, I feel it was too slow and unexciting which may put people off playing through to the later stages of the game

Overall though I am extremely happy with what I did in my first LD and I will undoubtedly be back for more next time! My game can be found and rated here. And my timelapse of 27 hours can be watched right here.

 

Tags: postmortem

Hi,

My name is David Colson, I am the CEO of a very small indie game company Peripheral Games. Today I am announcing a new project called the “Community Game”. In this project people can come to our website and submit game idea’s of any kind. After that is done we will have a vote on the best idea. This process will continue throughout pre-production and development with unprecedented community involvement. Anyone who wants to be involved in the project just need to visit our website and jump in! When the game is finished it will be released on the iOS app store and Google play for 0.79 cents. Every single drop of the profits go back to the community in the form of Kickstarter donations and other generous donations to the indie games cause (also Ludum Dare). The only requirement I have is the game is a 2D mobile game. I hope that as many people can be involved as possible. You can submit game idea’s here: http://peripheralgames.net/index.php/the-community-game/

Hello,

I never actually wrote an “Im In” post, but this isnt my first LD and I didn’t think it would matter to much considering the volley of posts we have had over the past couple of weeks.

Anyways I woke up and had an idea about slipping time to different evolutionary times to help you pass a platformer. But I spent 5 hours on that idea an then ditched it because it was too ambitious.

Onto idea number two.  A physics based building game were you explore the evolution of construction! Different levels give you different building tools based on how well you used the previous generation of materials and tools. Sounds complicated but it isnt really. Screenshot and then I’m off!

 

Hello,

My second post this competition and this one marks the end of day one! An event full and fun day it has been. My idea hasn’t changed much over the course of the day. Basically you have to build structures out of various materials to advance your evolutionary construction skill and unlock better more modern materials.

Newly added, wind! This adds a huge level of skill to the game as you cannot simply build a tall tower, it has to be structurally sound as well so it will stand up. Its not a masterpiece but I am proud that it is a (correct me if I’m wrong) somewhat original idea. Another screenshot:

So I’m finished, Im not quitting as I am busy uploading the game and submitting it. It’s ok, I really could of done better if Im honest. I had a friends party last night at it went on quite long and so I woke up with that after party feeling, much later than I intended.

For anyone who isn’t in the loop its basically a construction game were you have to build structures to evolve construction and get better materials.I really wanted an original idea but I hope it doesn’t stray off the theme to much. The graphics havent changed much from last time so I am not including one in this post.

Im am happy I competed and I am proud of myself for submitting a game and I hope you all enjoy it when the voting stage comes along!

Well the competition is over and so that means only one thing, Youtube will be smothered in LD48 time lapse’s.

For my one I decided to join the idea of a post-mortem with a timelapse and so my video has my void in it speaking about my experiences this Ludum Dare! I hope you enjoy it and if you do give me a little heart!

So I never posted an “I’m in” post, mostly because I didn’t want to be just another person with an I’m in post, so I’m wrapping my “I’m in” post with an evaluation of morning one as I take a breakfast break.

Incase you wanted to know, I am a Unity user, with Modo for 3D and Gimp for 2D, and Sublime Text for code because MonoDevelop won’t open.

I initially saw the theme and thought “okay that’s cool I can work with that”. I did not have confidence in my first idea so I ditched it and started another idea involving a bicycle race in which your front wheel has been stolen and you have to win the race balancing on only one wheel, complete with super hard QWOP-like controls. This turned out to be rather difficult to do in practice so I ditched it after 2 hours of work and went back to my original idea.

The problem was the original idea seemed to unexciting. I wanted to wrap it in context that was amusing and light hearted. And then I had it! A game were you have to destroy all games consoles because PC Master Race! Before console gamers eat me, I’d like to point out my epic new PS4 I am spending my time with. It is however an amusing satirical context to set the game in.

So far some basic framework has been set up and I made fire, because what else to spend an hour working on when you’re using Unity?

 

Just to clarify the theme fits in because your weapon has only one round, yes, you must destroy all consoles with only one round. Anyway if this post doesn’t get lost in all the rest give me a heart so I know someone read it!

Now food!

If anyone want to provide suggestions to my issue I would be rather happy, but either way Im going to rant about my problems.

So the game used to be a carnival shooting type thing were you shoot things with one bullet and win prizes, but then to make it more fun I made it so you shot pictures of games consoles and professed “glorious PC master race”, while you destroyed as many games consoles as you could. However.

I now have wooden, carnival themed graphics with a technological target of computing devices. It doesn’t match. Look at this screenshot:

Computer games and wood? It just doesn’t match. So I want to update the background graphics to match games consoles, but Im at a loss as to how to reflect gaming in background graphics.

What should I do?

 

I am about to go to bed, its nearly midnight and I have had a fun day one. I have started 3 games today, one of which I spent 13 hours on before ditching.

The current game I am REALLY liking. I’m not amazing at art, nor are the graphics finished but I like the way this game is looking:

As you can see the space ship is still a placeholder, but space itself looks great with misty gas clouds and asteroids everywhere. The stars fly past you as well in the game. And of course my lovely wingtip trails of epicness.

You can just see in front of the space ship is another space ship in the distance. That is a fully AI controlled space ship, marking my first ever successful swim in the AI side of programming.

I really am quite proud of it! If you think it looks nice please give me a heart to tell me, and goodnight!

 

 

So its been an eventful two days, my game has  been posted here. Be sure to go play it, I will most definitely be playing your game at some point.

In the next few days I will post a more details post mortem but for now i will say the biggest problem this time around was my perfectionism.

I made two games this weekend because I hated the first. Now I finally finish the second game and I still don’t feel happy. I must tell myself that what I did is good. My complaint is that because I had little time the game is not fleshed out and is very small. I tell myself that this is ok, because the game is actually fun, heck I spent nearly an hour playtesting by accident because it’s addicting, or at least I think so.

You know just writing this is making me feel better, if you read it, drop me a heart so I can be made to feel even happier.

Here are some screenshots, oh and by the way Ludum Dare community, Thank you, I had a great weekend!

 

 

So I announced a couple hours ago that I’m was done, but no. I’m back. I was playtesting my game after submission and I realized it’s probably to difficult. I mean its hard for me, the developer, and in past Ludum Dares I have been highly prone to making games that are far to difficult.

I returned to my game, and I’ve spent the last two hours meticulously tweaking the settings to get the difficulty just right. I playtested on a friend who could beat the game, I also added a dynamic difficulty system so it gets easier the more you fail.

So yes, I might not have the most content of any Ludum Dare game, but I feel proud that the gameplay of my tiny game is as good as I can get it in the time limit!

Play it here, and give me a heart if you think gameplay trumps content.

So here is my timelapse from this weekend, nice and short so people don’t get to bored. Its about 32 hours compressed into 2 odd minutes.

As you watch it I will make some quick reflections over the weekend. I want to do a more in depth post-mortem, but only after the voting so I know what other people think of the game.

So lets start the usual format:

What went right:

• I know my tools inside out, so there was little in the way of technical difficulties
• I successfully managed my scope and made a game that was completable in the time
• The graphics looks nice, and the time spent on 3D art was well worth it
• I spent a lot of time playtesting and tweaking controls and difficulty, which made a fun to play game.
• I actually managed to pull of AI in the time limit, although a bit buggy
• I feel I got the difficulty balance a lot closer to perfect than I have in previous LD’s

What went wrong:

• I started working on a game too quickly with an under developed idea, meaning I ditched the first game 13 hours in
• I left sound effects and music to the end, which meant they are pretty crappy
• The music is awful because I used WolframTones since I can’t make music.
• The final game is questionably too small, and can be finished in mere minutes

So there we have it, overall I am happy with my entry, my main gripe is that its too small, but thats because I had half the time because I didn’t properly develop my first idea and wasted 13 hours. The gameplay and controls are fun, which is what matters.

Oh and throw me a heart if you so feel like it!