Keeping with the ludum dare tradition, time to do a little analysis on what went right and wrong during my development this time!  Before I get started with that though, for one I’d like to apologize, normally i do this at the same time as my “100 games rated” review and best of list but unfortunately so far my review list, though not quite at 100, to be perfectly honest i just dont have that many games that really stand out yet, not enough to make a real list, so expect that some time in the next week or so as i revew more!  Secondly, my timelapse is now up, accompanied by a nice track of classical music as always, so please enjoy this.

Get on with it!

Right! postmortem! The point of this post, for starts, here’s the link to the competition page itself

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=7131

What went right:

• The theme: frankly i was dreading another dreary, artys/emo theme like “abandoned” winning again, those kinds of themes are simply NO FUN for us programmers and it’s horifficly hard to get a decent gameplay idea that’s not just bolting the theme onto the story/background. (I generally rate 1 on theme when people do that myself, as just tacking it on isn’t really “meeting” the theme)
• My engine: my game engine worked BEAUTIFULLY, a few minor fixes were needed after release but having a fully cross-platform engine set up and ready did wonders, so even though my idea made me write a full entity system and isometric renderer from scratch having windowing/input/state management/texture and memory management already taken care of made the task a lot easier
• My tools: the newest version of my sprite editor (available under the “tools” link at the right) worked like a charm, it made animating the modular sprites a breeze even for a crappy artist like me, this time around a lot of people have even said they LIKED my art style!
• Time: for the first time, I was actually able to be HOME on both days of ludum dare! So this was the first competition i technically actually had 48 hours to work in

What went wrong?

• Timing: This ludum dare took place on the first weekend college is in, in the middle of one of the hottest weekends of the year in southern california so of course we had rolling blackouts all day saturday, my UPS tried it’s best to keep my desktop running but i ended up with a few hours of downtime midday, losing a good 4-5 hours of development, I ended up having to cut features due to this
• Mouse control:  The game was meant to be controlled entirely by mouse using pathfinding, unfortunately due to being down most of the day saturday i ended up having to cut pathfinding or I wouldn’t have had time to make actual levels and art to play.  This made getting around corners somewhat tricky though thankfully still do-able (wasd also works as analternate, it was debug code though and not the way the game was meant to be controlled so it’s a little jumpy)
• No way to restart: Another feature i had to cut due to time was resetting the player after he dies to restart (the levels already reset, only the player needed to reset) so i was forced to put just a simple game over screen when you die
• Lame ending: Another cut feature, I was going to make a better image to show when you get to the end and to thank you for playing but again, due to playing catchup for saturday a lot of art had to be cut, so all you get now is a blurb of text for the temporary ending
• not all evolutions have artwork:  my game actually tracks a LOT of statistics when you’re evoloving, over 2000 combinations are actually possible but only a tiny portion make visible changes due to my inexperience in isometric art that’s not geometric in nature and lack of time. There is no distinct skin/leg/ear/or fang graphics for the other features that evolve, only general body type, head type, and back type are actually shown
• needed a statistics readout window:  I really needed a window to show your current statistics, the “overall” statistics modified by your current evolution status are  attack/defense/speed/flight/poison/and vision, a lot of people had trouble in the caves because they did not kill enemies outside first that would buff their defense before starting to fight the much tougher bats and spiders inside

And to close out, here’s a short gameplay video of how it all turned out!

Tags: C++, compo, ld24, linux, post-mortem, postmortem, SDL, timelapse

Just like the last few times, now that I’ve passed 100 games rated time to pick some favorites that I think could use a bit more <3 !  This time is a little different though, I’m not going to pick “overall” favorites, as to be honest this LD every game so far that i’ve loved in one way has managed to frustrate me in another, so I’m going to categorize some favorites based on what I think is their strong suit!

As always, in no particular order (games that would fall in multiple are only listed in the one i think they’re strongest in)

Best Use of Theme:

• Poggle Island – Rose
• Digital Generation – Dietrich Epp
• Empire of the Petri Dish – quadtree
• Emergent Dungeon – attagcatc

Most Fun:

• Kinetic Dream – mdkess
• Goo – Cipher
• The Erebus and the Terror – sfernald
• Title Goes Here… – eShredder
• This Is Totally About Evolution – GreaseMonkey

Best Graphics:

• Badass – Sos
• Flitter-Flatter – aeveis
• EVILUTION – GothFraex

Best Music:

• DeviLock – Misfit
• Lolicopocalypse – quasist

Some of these still only have a handful of plays, go try them out and give them some feedback!

And as always, I could always use more feedback on my entry as well if you havent played it already !

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=7131

Tags: 100 club, best of, ld24

I’m in barring any sort of emergency or being called in.

Just like past few LD’s, my toolset

• Engine:Aether (my own cross-platform engine that’s been in development for quite some time)
• Art:Sprite editor (soon to be renamed Aether Graphics Editor but the new improved version has a few bugs to work out still)
• Sound: sfxr/atrk/lmms/audacity
• IDE: Code::Blocks
• Livestream: custom scripts (attached lower in this post)
• Target platforms: Linux/Windows/Android (I unfortunately still don’t have a mac to test compile on)

This LD my engine now has all SORTS of new features and enhancements, and I have just launched a kickstarter campaign to try to get some funding to take it even further now that it’s gotten to the point where it’s more than usable for 2d games, you can check that out here

Kickstarter Campaign

Short version of the most notable engine changes

• moved from GL2 and GLES11 to GL3.3 and GLES2
• VASTLY improved performance on android, mostly due to the GLES2 migration, though the pipeline itself has been cleaned up and the old batch rendering system completley re-written with a far more efficient one.
• huge improvements to the ttf rendering system, it’s faster and now also supports “tabstops” on the screen to make lining up text on non-monospaced fonts very easy
• internal message pump and state manager
• interactive debug console
• built in file and compression handling, path decoding, and configuration objects to manage saving game data and settings
• simple highscore manager object to retrieve and post highscores from a server

So far I’ve ported two of my android games on the market over to this new engine version

Jewel – my first game for android

Tiny Poker – Was the engine test for the new revision of aether, worked well so made it a full game

And again, here’s the latest modifications of the livestream script i’ve been kinda constantly tweaking.

#!/bin/bash

SIZE=”1600×1200″
BITRATE=”300k”
FRAMERATE=”5″
KEY=”live_xxxxx”

ffmpeg -f x11grab -s $SIZE -r $FRAMERATE -i :0.0 -f alsa -ac 2 -i default -vcodec libx264 -s 1280×720 -vb $BITRATE -ab 128k -ar 22050 -f flv “rtmp://live.justin.tv/app/$KEY”

Tags: C++, compo, ld25

I put this up yesterday but forgot to post about it 😛

Finished up a warmup game this last weekend, ended up being kinda a zelda-roguelike hybrid with randomly generated floors, took about 12 hours to make, can check it out here

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25-warmup/?action=preview&uid=7131

and see my post with the tools used and information on the game engine here, I could really use the support to get this thing developed further, it’s well along but has so much more to go!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2012/12/09/im-in-new-engine-releasekickstarter/

For anyone using the old version you might want to just save and upgrade, the new version here is 100% backwards compatable with the old project files.  By popular demand I’ve added a classic tool select alongside the autotool for people more comfortable working with that, plus the spritesheet export and palette ripper are somewhat improved.

http://www.midnightfragfest.com/sprite-editor/

First off I apologize for getting such a late start on rating, but I’ve had many issues come up and didn’t really have time to submit a full entry myself.  Normally I just rate myself and put up a “best of” every 100 games I rate, but this year I’ll be doing it a little different, plus kicking off an “event” I’ll be doing at the same time.

First, the link! http://www.twitch.tv/raptor851

Here at my twitch.tv page i’ll be livestreaming playing and reviewing as many ludumdare games as is humanly possible in the next four days (while still keeping the reviews fair and detailed).   My order will be semi-random, but for anyone who joins the stream and shares their link I’ll be happy to skip ahead to their game immediately and give some live feedback/directly answer why I liked or disliked certain things.  It would be nice as well if afterwards you stuck around in the stream to view other people’s game reviews, and perhaps provide some feedback of your own.

Later, though it’s going to be a small one this week due to the ludum dare reviews, I’m going to start my challenge this year.  Every week I will develop and release a fully cross-platform desktop game from scratch, using ideas from the previous week’s stream or just coming up with something on the fly, and using the development and testing of them, and perhaps support of the stream, to help drive forward my game engine project (unfortunately it’s kickstarter only raised 10% of the funding, so i’ll have to re-launch)

Hope to see some of you around!

assuming I dont need to work 30 hours this weekend like last LD, too lazy to repost but using same tools/engine as my last few LD entries.

Had to work this weekend but home now, even with the short time I’ve chosen to not believe in my self but to believe in the ME that believes in myself, this game WILL be finished on time.

probably going to stream my efforts at twitch.tv/raptor851 as well