Hey guys!

I just wanted to let people know that, depending on the theme chosen, I may use a substantial portion of the code written for my LD19 entry as basecode. Specifically, I’m thinking of the map handling, player movement and collision detection code. Obviously, all the art assets will be done from scratch, as will the game text and the map designs and such.

I had originally intended to go in a very different direction with LD20, but if It Is Dangerous To Go Alone, Take This wins, there’s no way I’m not doing another zelda parody.

It’s done! It’s not [i]done[/i] done, but it’s done.

I hope to continue improving this in the coming weeks (though I guess I’ll be to busy judging, for  a while!).

Anyway, congratulations to everyone who finished, and to those who are doing the Jam, go baby go!

My game, Princess Mystery Dungeon, is now available in savory Windows and sweet OS X flavors! A big thanks to Spooner for packing up the Windows build for me.

If you haven’t tried it yet, give it a go!

(One warning: There is a very occasional crash during the initial dungeon creation that I haven’t fixed yet. If the game crashes on launch, try running it again, it should work most times).

(There are may be other crashes, too. Probably there are! If you run into any, let me know, and I’ll try and get them fixed.)

Just dropping by to say hi. I don’t *really* have time to enter the LD this time around, not with a serious entry, but I have an interesting idea for a small entry (possibly jam rather than competition) that has a text-based interface (console, or web if I have time) that I think I could code up in maybe five to seven hours.

Hope everyone is having fun, looking forward to seeing the entries people are working on!

I haven’t been able to participate in a while, and I’m only sort of going to be able to participate this time, as I’ll be traveling for work on Monday morning. I expect to get about 10 hours of time for working on my game.

That said, these conditions are similar to the ones I created my LD16 entry, The Legend of Purple Dot: Episode 1: Purple Dot the Explorer, which ended up being one of my more well-received entries. I think it was because the extra time constraints forced me to keep it really simple.

Maybe this time I’ll make TLoPD Episode 2.

So, here’s a screen shot of my work on my project, tentatively titled Phygasma’a.

Obviously, it doesn’t look like much so far. But, there’s some stuff going on that isn’t drawn to the screen yet.

(Extreme bonus points if anyone can figure out what my game’s name means. It ties into the theme, but it’s pretty oblique)

I actually was forced to finish my Jam entry late last night, but I held off posting about it until now because I only now have been able to post a Windows build of it for people to play. You can check it out at my entry page.

Aglaeca’s map screen

Aglæca is a game inspired by Grendel, the oldest monsters in English-language literature, and also by the 1971 novel of the same name (by John Gardner), which is excellent and you should read it. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

…

You’ve read it now? Good. In any case, I didn’t hew too closely to the novel in my game (or to the original story from a thousand-odd years ago, either).

Because I was only able to spend about 15 hours developing it, the gameplay is much more limited that the idea behind it. Here are some things the game should have had, but didn’t:

• Multiple monsters to choose from (though Grendel would always be the one I designed around).
• People travelling around the map who you might run into outside of settlements.
• People founding additional settlements.
• The different tribes going to war with each other.
• The settlements being able to do something with the lumber and iron they collect (they were supposed to build settlement improvements, and weaponry, respectively).
• An actual combat minigame, either action or strategy, rather than the computer just crunching numbers and telling you how you did.
• More awesome quotes from Grendel, as well as quotes from Beowulf.
• Stats other that health/strength, such as cunning and speed.
• One or more stats (possibly hidden) that keep track of how awful you are – when you are hungry, for instance, do you steal food from the village, or do you just kill and eat a villager? Mind, you’re always bad. This is more about how you are bad.
• Multiple endings, possibly influenced by the aforementioned hidden stats.
• Music.
• Different tilesets for the different seasons.
• LOTS of balance tweaks. Lots and lots.

So, given that it’s missing all that stuff, is it still a good game? Well, you tell me! Personally, while it’s not everything I had hoped for, I’m pretty happy with what I have so far, as a building block for something bigger.

For this to be a real post-mortem, I need to include what-went-wrong and what-went-right sections,  I suppose.

What Went Wrong

I can already say that my biggest mistake was wasting several precious hours on a procedural island coastline generation algorithm that went nowhere. The problem isn’t just that I didn’t make it work; the bigger problem is that even if I had made it work, it wouldn’t have really added much. If I hadn’t wasted that time, I could have gotten one or more things on the list above in there, instead.

Most of the rest of the problems fundamentally came down to the fact that I was too busy to spend the full time block working on it. Oh, well.

What Went Right

In the end, I really liked the theme. It’s not one I had voted for (in fact, as I recall I down-voted it), but once I thought of basing the game on Grendel rather than, say, Bowser, everything sorta clicked.

I’m also just really glad that I was able to submit anything at all. I haven’t worked on any game code for months at this point, and it felt really good to get back into the swing of it.

Anyway, congratulations to everyone else who submitted an entry, and I look forward to playing some of them myself!

Tags: LD33, post-mortem

It looks like I'm using Ruby + Gosu again! Probably Pixen for graphics (or just drawing primitives), plus sfxr for audio. No idea how music will work.

All that said, I'm in for the Jam, not the Compo, so I may also dig around in opengameart.org if I need extra resources.

There's a small chance that I'll make a last-minute swerve to using Unity instead... but I don't think so.

So I was able to get my game Strangeness posted, including both Mac and Windows builds.

Strangeness is a little puzzle game about a world that's too small (along the same general lines as Chip's Challenge). It's my 9th Ludlum Dare submission, but only my second using hand-designed levels instead of procedural generation (or third, depending on how you count).

There was a bit of a learning curve figuring out how to use Tiled, and then another one figuring out how to get data out of a TMX file reliably, so I did't get as many levels done as I'd hoped for. I also think the game would have benefitted a great deal if I had been able to implement one or two additional enemy types or interactable objects. Nevertheless, I'm reasonably pleased with how things turned out.

Shout-out to to my fiancée for helping me with some of the art.

EDIT: Updated the download link for Windows, it previously contained a spelling error.

I've posted the first Post-jam release of Strangeness to my entry page (you can still find the Jam version linked as well, of course). This version fixes two bugs with pushable objects getting pushed places they don't belong, and makes the enemies all move at once rather than one-at-a-time, making it much less tedious to move around when there are a lot of enemies on the screen at once.

Next update will bring additional levels, including a new puzzle element!

I've posted a critical fix to the Mac version of my game, Strangeness, both the Jam and post-Jam versions. If it already worked for you, you don't need to worry about it, but for users who didn't have SDL2 installed on their Macs already, the game now bundles the library so it should work for you.

Of course, Windows version and source are also available from the submission page.

Hey everyone! If your game is playable on Mac, please leave a comment with a link, and I will play and rate it!

That includes Web-playable games, but I'm especially interested in games with Mac downloads. Still, web games are good too.

If you like, feel free to rate my game, Strangeness, as well (it's playable on Mac, as well as Windows and Linux).

My LD38 entry, Strangeness, has a major content update!

The new version, available for Windows, Mac and Linux (from source), includes:

• Twelve new puzzles!
• Customizable controls (including probably gamepad support maybe)!
• Two more music tracks!
• A new enemy and a new puzzle element!
• More responsive player movement!
• A small but important tweak to an existing puzzle!

The majority of new puzzles are substantially easier than the puzzles that were in the Jam submission. This is intentional, as a lot of people felt the original puzzles were too hard. For those of you that liked the difficulty level of the original puzzles, four or five of the new ones should be right up your alley! If you're one of the two commenters who thought the original puzzles were too easy, well... sorry. I plan on making some more difficult ones, but that'll be in a future update.

My todo list for the next update includes some UI tweaks, SFX and graphics tweaks, a few more levels, a level select menu, and saving your settings and progress. After that... it's a secret!

I saw all the word clouds people were uploading, and it seemed pretty cool. Let's give it a shot!

These are based on the comments about my entry, Strangeness

I'm looking for games to play! Feel like your game hasn't been rated enough? Looking to hit that magic "20" value? Just want to see what I think? Let me know and I'll take a look! A strong preference will be given to games that have either Mac or Web builds available, to play a Windows-only game I need to borrow someone else's PC.

Also, if anyone has the link to that tool that automatically finds all games that have been rated fewer than 20 times, can they please post it in a comment? You'll have my eternal gratitude (in the form of a heart on your comment).

I just wanted to say thanks to everyone for who participated in Ludum Dare this time around; to all the people who played and commented on my game; all the people who made awesome games for me to play and comment on; @pov, @zwrawr, @noojuno and @local-minimum for all their hard work; and to the whole community.

I'm particularly happy about the the community feedback this time around. In previous LDs I've participated in, I've gotten a decent enough number of ratings, but I usually got far fewer comments, and those comments I did get tended to just be things like "Cool, good job" or "Fun, but I wish it had music." This time around, not only did I get a much greater number of comments in proportion to my ratings, a lot more of them contained really good information - what people liked, what they didn't like, what levels were too hard, etc. I've seen some of this in past LDs, but nothing approaching what I got this time around.

I'm really happy with how my game, Strangeness, turned out; I don't usually do level design, favoring procedural generation whenever I can get away with it, but this time I decided to have a go at hand-desgining my levels. People really seemed to like the level design, which was incredibly gratifying (even if there was some disagreement about the difficulty level). I'm definitely going to continue working on it - I've already built 12 new levels since the jam ended, and plan to do even more once judging is complete.

Another thing that I found really gratifying (and a touch surreal) is that I'm apparently ranked 8th in the whole community in terms of Feedback Karma for LD38. I've made a concerted effort to leave constructive feedback on every game I rated, especially ones that didn't have many other comments; I'm happy to know that people seem to appreciate it.

Anyway, thanks again to everyone who participated, good luck in the final rankings, and then, get hyped for LD39!

You'd think after doing this nine times I'd do a better job :neutral_face: Nonetheless, I had a lot of fun, and came away with a lot of ideas for how improve my game post-Jam.

I'll just take solace in the fact that last I checked I took 6th place for Feedback Karma. Woo!

I'm in, for the first time in a while. Don't even know whether I'll be using Ruby+Gosu like previous entries or C#+Unity which is probably smarter except I've never used it before. Won't be starting until I'm done with work.

Here's hoping!

I've got a handful of different ideas on how this could go, just need to figure out which is most likely to lead to fun gameplay while being something I can actually implement.

I've submitted my game, ...and to Nothingness Return, with an hour-and-a-half to spare! Looking forward to comments, and extra-looking-forward to trying out everyone else's games!

... now just need to make sure all the download links work as expected.