Now, I’m going to enter my first LD.

Tools I will use are:

-Unity

-Photoshop

-MilkyTracker

-Audacity

Good Luck everyone.

ruerob

My first Ludum Dare entry ever is ready and online. Here is a pigture *SCNR* of trufflehunt:

It was a very funny and exciting time. As I’ve started I thought that it is impossible for me to finish a game in this time, but now I know better.

Good Luck to everyone,

ruerob.

So, now I think it’s my turn, to write a post mortem for trufflehunt.

First, I want to tell you, that this was my first ludum dare and that it was a big surprise to me, that I take part. It was just 5 hours before the final voting round was over, when I bumped into this thread on Gamejolt.com and read about the compo:

http://gamejolt.com/community/forums/topics/ludum-dare-29/3239/

There was little time to think about the pro’s and con’s of taking part and so, after talking with my better half, I decided to do it.

I have taken the right decision. Because it was really fun and a very important experience to me.

So lets talk about what went well:

– The Idea

The idea evolved very fast, just after one hour of brainstorming, the gameidea was ready.

– Prototyping

After a little nap, because LD starts 3 a.m. in the morning in germany, I started my work on Trufflehunt and all went very well. First I drawed the field and made the piles, then I added the mechanics and the prototype was done.

– Graphics
Now it was time to improve the graphics. I added the piglet and it was bedtime again. After a not so long sleep, I added the last pictures and animations from the piglet and the level start and was going to the next step.

– Sound recording and creation
The sounds and music are all created with milkytracker and edited with audacity, except from the *nufnufnuf* of the piglet which was my own voice recorded in audacity and pitched higher.

And now, what went not so well:

– Sound in Unity

Then it was time to include the sounds and music into Unity. But because it was my first time with Unity and sound, I have had some little problems, which could also be a result of not so much sleep. But all get fixed in time. But it was close.

– Score descriptions
The only thing I have forgotten is, that I have not explained how to get much points in the game. There is no feedback when you dig for truffles, that you become more points when you dig longer without releasing the mousebutton. That is because first I had a little strange idea of getting points at the beginning of a level which decrease by 100 for each eaten truffle. After I had changed the points system to what it is now, I just have forgotten to include a little animation for how much points the player gets for each truffle.

After all, I must say, ludum dare has made a lot of fun and I want to be part of it the next time, too.

I have learned that it is posible to make a game in that short time and that it is a very free kind of programming without that thoughts, that bother one when sitting weeks on a project.

Thank you for reading,

ruerob.

P.S.: Here is the link to:  Trufflehunt

Hello,

now that LD29 comes to its end, I wanted to write my favourites post. I’ve tested much games so far, but not enough I think. Many gameplay, graphic or sound jewels are lying beneath the surface of untested games. But from the list of games I’ve tested, these are my favourites:

Ripple Runner for all it is. Great music, graphics and Gameplay.

Le Ver for the mood that let me shiver.

Platform Hero for the music and gameplay, which i liked very much.

Thought Police for the story, the drawings and the amount of good written text.

Scary Ugly Face for the story, the well made graphics, it makes me smile and Sir Face.

Giant Pumpkin for the graphics, the sound, the gameplay and the pumpkin.

Room Cleaning because I never had so much fun cleaning a room like in that game.

The Sun and Moon because I couldn’t have stopped the game before solving the last level.

Mine Cannon for its gameplay and the jewels.

Me & my metal detector because of its sounds that make me lough everytime I hear them.

This list is not sorted in any order and I’ am happy to take part at LD29.

Bye and hope we see us again next time at LD30,

ruerob.

Hello Ludumdare friends,

what a bunch of good games are created in this LD!!! Because I’ve rated over 50 games so far I wanted to post a little best of tested 50. So here is my unsorted list:

One Ship Two Ship from 01010111

Heart Star from AdventureIslands

Schrodinghost from Carduus

Hello Worlds from Dustyroom

Trappy Tomb from jimmypaulin

1989 to 2014 from McFunkypants

The World Within from Oxeren

Flicker from PapaCheech

Continue from ratking

Crystalbots:       T-94 from rynti

So that was my unsorted top ten so far. I thank everyone of the devs for their games and hope you enjoyed deving as much as I enjoyed playing.

If there will be any big changes on that list, I will let you know.

ruerob (Nigel – Hero of the Universe).

This LD was a lot of fun. It was my first LD I made together with my wife and our first project we did as a team. It was very hard at the beginning to find something we could make out of the theme but after a day of intense thinking we decided to make a point and click adventure. We both like point and click adventures.

After that first decision we had another to do. How we part the work…

That wasn’t much of a decission because in that point we know each other very well. Because I love her drawings and writings, she draw the characters and the writes the story. My task was it to write the code and animate the drawings.

Sadly there were two things left. Music and sound… This point I wanted to do after beeing ready with the game. But because I was working until the deadline to get everything ready, music and sound was canceled.

After releasing the Treasure Quest we were super proud of us. But when submission hour had begun and the first feedback came in, we have had a big problem. Errors…

Because I just tested the game in firefox and firefox didn’t tell me that there was a problem with a function declaration chrome, safari and everything else denied service. Fixing that error didn’t took so long, but it was a shocking moment for us.

Now, after a little cooling down and reading our feedback we are lucky to have done the step of working together. We are proud of the story, the graphics, the characters and the mechanics but, we’ve also pointed out 3 main cruelties we’ve done to you. The textspeed, the font and the lack of sound and music. I hope you can forgive us. :] We are working on a post jam version. The textboxes and the font are ready and we just have to do some music.

We will let you know if it’s ready, till then we hope you enjoy the jam version and have a lot of fun playing it.

ruerob.

Treasure Quest

Today I’ve added the first post jam version of Treasure Quest to the games site.

New features are:

1. A new skipable textbox behavior.
2. A new font, because of better readability.
3. Some new texts, when using the magnifying glass.

I hope you enjoy the new version. More features are planned, but that have to wait until after christmas holidays.

Comments are welcome.

ruerob

I’ve got 2 ideas about the voting and rating process I want to share and discuss with you!

The first idea: Wouldn’t it be helpfull to get random games presented at the top of the startpage?
This would help to find games that aren’t on the “play and rate games” site, because they’ve got about 50 votes or have not enough votes! This little section, maybe one line with 4 games or something, would be generated everytime you load the site.

My second idea is, that it would be nice to see who votes on my game without commenting, so that I can vote and comment back.

Thank you for reading this and good luck for the results,
ruerob!

With all that wonderful feedback in mind and while stil in development of the post compo version, I want to write a little post mortem of our Ludum Dare entry Pumpi.

First, if you don’t want to read the full text and want to watch yourself what we’ve done, here is the link: Pumpi

And here is a little picture to make you want to play it:

Finding an idea

That was the fastest ideafinding we’ve ever had in an LD. We made a short list with seven points while we played Diablo 3 and killed a bag of chips. Three of the points were: Halloween, stealing sweets and Jump’n’Run.
So it was decided that we wanted to make a Jump’N’Run game, where a monster steals sweets from children at Halloween.

First Works

At that point we began to do some creative work which should help us later. My wife drew the first concepts of the monster and the children and I made the soundtrack and after that we both fell asleep because it was 6 o’clock in the morning.

Next Day

So it begins! Our first task was, bringing the pumpkin to life! So I looked at the drawing my wife had done and made a copy of it in Photoshop, colored it and showed it to my wife. She had said yes and so I started to animate the pumpkin. 8 animations were on my list: stand, walk, jump, scare, pick up, hide, shield and die. While animating the pumpkin we were talking about how we wanted the game to be! There were so many ideas and so many things to do, that we decided to make something possible and concentrated on scaring the children and make funny animations and sounds. After completing the pumpkin animations, please take a look at the spritesheet:

we started pixelating the witch-girl. We scanned the drawing of my wife, drew the outlines and filled them with colors and shadows and light spots. The first day was done! And so were we!

The Second Day

I opened my eyes and was so tired… It was hard to hold my eyes open. But what a luck I’ve got a little motivating machine next to me that was saying: Wake up! We’ve got a game to make!
So I jumped out of bed and began to draw the animations of the witch-girl. When I was finished with that task, the coding begins. I hacked all together what I thought we could use. Some animating techniques and some camera movement that took me a lot of time, because I wanted to use some mariolike camera movement, but then decided to use a more simple one.
The day went on and after the animations and the first scare were build in bed was calling!

The Third Day

At this day we started with the background. We drew the first concepts and choosed the colors. But the first draft was… not so good… hm… So we added more colors and made some additions like the door and the window and it looked a lot better and we stayed with this.
After the background was implemented we started our funniest part of the development. The audio recordings. Screamings, Booohhhs and a bunch of other sounds and loughts were made during this time.
But we needed some more content. We needed a vampire-boy! Scanned, drawed, animated and voice added in a rush. (With shocking my wife at night, because of not warning her befor screaming).
Here is the spritesheet for the kids:

All had to be build together, a tutorial had to be included, the position of the kids had to be decided and a finish and restart had to be made. And then we had no more time for a start screen and no brain capacity for a better name… But hey, we have made a game in 72 hours and we are damn proud of it!

After the Jam

The first feedback came in and our proudness growed and we decided to make a bigger game out of it. With more kids, more scaring moves, more sounds and a start screen! But until it is done, we hope you enjoy playing the Jam Version of: Pumpi

So we wish you a big bunch of fun and hope you enjoy our little game,
ruerob.

Here is my christmas post jam version of Knuspernikus,

You can play it on Android, Linux, Mac and Windos!

Merry Christmas everyone!

Here is the link to my entry: Entry

and here is the link to the post jam version:All versions (Post Jam)