Phew! We are done! Congratulations everyone!

So… hello! This was my first Ludum Dare… and we just finished developing President VS Eevol. It was hard, but we did it!
For my first Ludum Dare I decided to join in and do the Jam with a group of friends. We worked tirelessly for three days and we just finished working some minutes ago. I came up with the main design and programmed, while my friend Whitesora and Daniele did programming and art respectively, other than helping with design. Another old friend of mine, Matteo, supplied some awesome music. We used Flashpunk for engine purposes.

We didn’t think we would make it. We had little experience, and this is actually our first complete game. We all thought we were going to end up making something simple and of little worth, but now that we’ve gone through with it, we are really, really happy with our results. We managed to meet all our goals, didn’t compromise much on the design and learned a lot more in the last three days than in the last year.

And that’s it. I hope you all enjoyed Ludum Dare 25, because we surely did! Be sure to check out our game, President VS Eevol.

President VS Eevol

Click here to play the game!

Hi, I’m Matteo Gagliardi, composer of the President vs Eevol sountrack.
I use a 55 pounds vintage Korg keyboard (from 1993) as my main working tool. Its only storage is a 3.5” fdd drive.
It’s mostly made of lead.
I upgraded my DAW for the first time since 2006 last week.
The total cost of my home studio doesn’t exceed 1000$ (excluding the PC).
I’m a Windows user. My DAW works only on Windows and I’m too lazy to change.
I mostly desktops. I have only one laptop, a ten years old Dell Latitude that I use to check the mail.
I value things that lasts. In this world full of short-lived things, music has to be eternal.

 

 

Hi, I’m Sun Shiranui, President vs Eevol team lead.
Even though Matteo likes going about his equipment and how it’s better than newer technologies, I use a 15″ MacBook Pro for all my computing needs.
It’s portable and sturdy. I also use a Intous 5 M to help me when making graphics and a Keystation 61es MIDI controller from M-Audio when i want to compose.
I don’t have any desktop computers anymore, and I like getting my hands on new technologies.
My setup is pricier than Matteo’s, because Apple likes money, but I still think my investment is worth what I get.
But when making creative work, even though equipment is important, in the end you can make good stuff even with poor resources. Hard work is all that matters!

 

 

We know each other since forever and we both love videogames.
With the other Team OR members, we made this game with our heart and our differencies helped to make the game better.
We hope you will enjoy it.
Happy new year from the President vs Eevol team

 

We all love goats too!

 

Hello everybody! This is the second of a series of four postmortems for our LD25 game “President vs Eevol“. Every article will cover a different aspect and point of view on the game’s development. The following post-mortem is on the game’s coding and is written by programmer whitesora.

President vs Eevol
Postmortem #2 of 4: Coding

Hello everyone, whitesora here. For this LD I was the programmer of Team Omniaring’s “President vs Eevol”, a stealth game and also our first Ludum Dare entry. As Shiranui did, I’ll try to give you a small “behind the scenes” of the coding process, our expectations, what went right and what wrong. This time, of course, from my point of view.

1. Participating or not

Believe it or not, I learned that Sun Shiranui, our team designer, wanted to take part in the Jam only two days before the start. In the beginning, I refused to help him, since I not only didn’t know anything about creating a videogame, but I hadn’t even heard anything about Flashpunk before.
In the end, he managed to persuade me, and so I found myself taking part in this project, with no idea of how to use Flashpunk and with the pressure of doing everything in only 72 hours.

The result of our hard work. I still can’t believe we did it.

2. A small head-start

No, I didn’t start coding things one day before.

Since I had never used Flashpunk before, it’s like the LD started half-a day earlier: the afternoon before the start, I downloaded everything needed to start coding using Flashpunk, and I also had to learn how to use it properly in something like 4 hours. Once my “tutorial session” ended, the LD began.
I was surprised to see “You are the Villain” as the theme, since I was pretty sure that “End of the World” was going to be chosen, and right after that we began the brainstorming to decide what our game was going to look like.

One of the things we thought to do was to implement our avatar as small portraits.

3. Our expectations

Even tough I study IT at university, I never really tried to make a videogame. Sure, I’ve messed around a bit with programs like RPG Maker, but nothing serious.
I always loved videogames, ever since when I started playing the old Doom 2 when I was 2 years old (literally), and I still play a lot now; Sometimes I start defining the base mechanic of a game I’d like to develop some day, but this was the first time I’ve really done something.

So, I expected to come up with something even worse than this, but the result was way better than anything we expected.

4. The results (Pros/Cons)

Almost everything went way better than expected: good music, good graphics, good animations, good gameplay… I even learned to code using Flashpunk AND to make a working videogame.
But, as I said, if almost everything went smoothly, then there are things that went bad, too.

First thing, we spent a lot of time to solve organization issues (especially us overwriting each-other’s files), so I hope that the next time we will be able to organize our work better and without any issues, but the thing that went bad the most was the boss battle.
In my mind, the battle was supposed to have 3 phases: running away from the player, following a “strange” pattern and moving randomly. The second phase was pretty easy to do (I programmed all the movement patterns of the game, after all), but the first and third ones were really buggy, and we only had time to fix only the first phase. Too bad.

Our boss. He may be buggy, but I like it.

5. Post Post Mortem

In the end I can say that I don’t regret anything of this Ludum Dare, it was fun and I had the chance to learn a lot of new things. Expect to see me again in some other project.
Whitesora here, ending my in-depth look into the development process. Don’t forget to try out and rate the result of all our hard work, President vs Eevol!

Hello everybody! This is the third of a series of four postmortems for our LD25 game “President vs Eevol“. Every article will cover a different aspect and point of view on the game’s development. The following post-mortem is on the game’s art design and is written by animator Daniele Piscitello.

President vs Eevol
Postmortem #3 of 4: Art

Good day! I’m Daniele Piscitello, and I worked as the only artist for Team OmniaRing’s first game “President vs Eevol”. As the other members of our team are doing I’ll talk a bit about some aspects of how the art and the animation of “President vs Eevol” have been done.

The game’s main idea was to have a sort of evil british gentleman infiltrating in the President’s mansion. The player’s objective is to find the hidden key and take it to the door in order to reach the next level sneaking silently and fooling the president’s armed bodyguards. When we came up with the game’s design I understood that, in order to properly follow the theme, we needed to give our protagonist an high level of characterization. In a few hours the basic look of “Eevol the evil” was ready. Most of the first of the three days was spent only on making that exaggerated sneaky tiptoe animation that immediately gave life and an evilish look to Eevol.

I decided that our protagonist should have had a very peculiar and evilish walking animation.

After that I designed his signature bomb. I opted for a classical looking bomb immersed in a teacup. That was very funny to do and I hope that it made the players smile for a moment.

I tried to follow a priority list for the graphic and the animation, so, after completing all the main character’s animations I noticed that half of our time had already passed and I still had to make all the other graphics. After I completed all the tiles that compose the game’s levels I understood that I didn’t have enough time to make a proper walking animation for the enemies. At the beginning the idea for the enemy’s design was to make them human. I have to admit that I never liked the idea because I thought it was too common to have human guards and that something different could have make the game atmosphere funnier, so I decided to make some floating robot bodyguards, which were easier to animate due to their lack of legs.

You need to make some compromises if you develop something in 72 hours, and
animating a floating robot was easier than animating a human.

I would have loved to make animations for the enemies in all the four directions, but the thing I regret the most is that the levels are too much empty for my taste. In my mind, the levels should have been full of furniture and little things, but I fortunately understood in time that such level of detail is almost impossible to achieve in only 3 days.I hope that with the help of all the experience I’ve earned through this Ludum Dare, by the time the next one comes I’ll be able to produce a lot more in a shorter amount of time, even though I realize that animation is always a looong process.

I’m an animation student, but I started my course just this October so they haven’t even started teaching to animate anything yet, and therefore everything that I made for this game was absolutely self-taught. This was also the first time I seriously animated something and I’m very happy of the result and of all the amazing feedbacks I received for my animations. Thank you all! It was very important for me. If you want to know more about me in the future be sure to check out my Twitter account!

You can reach Daniele Piscitello via Twitter at: https://twitter.com/danipiscitello

Next up is the last of our four postmortems for President vs Eevol: the music postmortem by composer Matteo Gagliardi.

Tags: animation, art, eevol, president, vs

Hello everybody! This is the fourth of a series of four postmortems for our LD25 game “President vs Eevol“. Every article will cover a different aspect and point of view on the game’s development. The following post-mortem is on the game’s music and is written by composer Matteo Gagliardi.

President vs Eevol

Postmortem #4 of 4: Music

Hello, I’m Matteo Gagliardi, the composer of the President vs Eevol soundtrack and one of the original founders of the OmniàRing Project.

 

1. The OmniàRing Project: An introduction

This post-mortem will be mainly focused on music, but Sun asked me to write something about OmniàRing itself so I will start with that.

In early 2006 I was a lot younger and I used to spend most of my free time playing and talking about videogames. I was involved as admin in a Nintendo fan community, we were quite small and I decided to create a webring of Nintendo communities to help us grow: Nintendoring was born.

Shortly thereafter all the communities of the webring merged and we realized that we were mostly more interested in our various artistic projects than talking about videogames: I was composing my first EP (called Tetraktys), Sun Shiranui was making his first videogame (a Zelda ALTTP clone as he recalled in his post-mortem) so at the end we changed our name to OmniàRing, from the latin word “Omnia” (Everything).

 

The OmniàRing Logo

 

2. Making music for flash games

I worked a lot of times with Sun Shiranui but we never made a complete game together.

When he gathered this incarnation of the OR Team for this Ludum Dare, initially I wasn’t supposed to join as a composer, since I was busy working on the final mix of my latest album. So what happened is that he wrote a song on his own, and when he sent it to me I started arranging it for fun. In the end, he asked me to join the team and the song became something completely different and new.

Since we were working on a flash game, I had two important goals in mind:

1) Make something easily loopable

2) Make something short and lightweight

 

One of my main concerns were loading times

 

3. President vs Eevol: The main theme

The main theme is thirteen seconds long. I used some drones and a sparse beat to give a subtle rhythm.

I wanted this to be hypnotic and mesmerizing.

Usually, working on a soundtrack for a videogame I prefer it to be interactive and bounded to the action on-screen, but since the team was working very hard on the core of the game they coudn’t give a lot of feedback on my work, so I had to keep it simple.

 

The use of drones makes the track easily loopable

4. President vs Eevol: The boss theme

The boss theme was more of a problem because Sun suggested using electric guitars. I worked on it during the second day while nothing of the boss battle was ready, so I had no idea of the precise scene I was supposed to make music for.

So, using only the general description Sun gave me, which consisted in a room where you have to kill the president using your bombs while he runs around, I started working on the piece.

I’m a keyboardist, so I don’t have any real guitars. I tried some synths, but in my mind the sudden change of style from drone ambience to something like Doom’s OST wasn’t good at all.

So during the third day I decided to try something else.

The track is mainly based on some huge percussions played on a Korg Wavedrum, but I used also the same drone of the main track to have a feeling of coherence. It was finished way before the team even started working on the boss battle, so I was really clueless, but listening to it now I think I made the right decisions.

 

The drone loop is synched with the wavedrum

 

5. Last thoughts about developing the game

So, did I accomplish my goals?

In a way, yes, I did.

The team had some difficulties dealing with the looping of the tracks. They tried mp3 and they later found out that for some reason mp3s don’t loop well, so to make the loops work they had to use uncompressed wav, compressing it only later using the flash IDE.

The main track of the game is only 580 kb and the boss track + all the SFX is 380kb.

I wanted them to be even lighter, but time constraints forced the team to work on more important things.

I think it’s really important, working on a web game, to have really short loading times and it’s even more important on a Ludum Dare, where you can try thousand different games in a short period of time and maybe you can even drop one just because the loading time is too long.

At the end it was a really interesting and compelling experience and I want to thank all the people who enjoyed (or will enjoy) the soundtrack of President vs Eevol.

Thanks again for joining me in this review of the composing process.

My home studio at the time of President vs Eevol development

Thank you kindly for joining us during our series of four postmortems for our game President vs Eevol. You can read the other postmortems here: design, code, art. See you in the next Ludum Dare!

Tags: eevol, music, president, president vs eevol, sound, vs

Hey everybody!

After about seven hours in, here’s some screenshots for our LD28 game! We thought we’d make a management game in which you have to start your own fast food empire with just one dollar (or euro, or bitcoin, or whatever) of funding. Take a look:

Some work being done by our artist (@danipiscitello):

Your first hot dog shack!

Our game, still without art…

Look at that first customer!

Stay tuned for more updates and more details on gameplay!

– SunShiranui, whitesora92, danipiscitello from the Tea Sipping Company

 

Here is another screenshot from the management game we’re making!

Those black squares over there are sad customers going back from the hot dog stand, since there are no hotdogs left :(

We’ve still got a long way to go. We hope to be able to put everything we want to in the game. See you soon!

Our game is finally complete!

It’s been a rough 72h… now that I’ve finally had enough sleep, I’m ready to announce that our game, “THE HOTDOG PARABLE”, is complete!

What is it all about, you ask? Well, a few days ago you made a bet with a friend of yours: can you build a fast-food empire with just a dollar and an old hot dog stand? Time to show him what you’re made of!

Play the Game

The Hotdog Parable is here!

Click on the screenshot to play the game!

Follow us on Twitter:

@SunShiranui (Designer, Programmer)

@danipiscitello (Artist)

@whitesora92 (Programmer)

@tulblut (Music)

I don’t have much time to participate in Ludum Dare this time around, so I’m going to do a solo submission. And it’s also going to be a very weird, little experiment… but fun to make! Here’s what I’ve came up with so far (click to see the animation):

An experiment with fluids and life

I wanted to see if I could make a realistic-yet-cheap fluid simulation, and after doing a bit of research I’ve managed to do it. So, the only thing left to add is, of course… LIFE!

See you tomorrow for more updates on my weird little simulator.

As you might know, I’m developing a little simulator with weird little creatures in it. Usually I’d do a project with the rest of my team, but I’ve got an exam tomorrow, so this time I’ll be doing just this small solo submission. Here’s what’s new!

I’ve added the ability to reproduce to my pond creatures. Look:

Love between micro-organism is very romantic

Then, I added something that is not as nice… after all, once we’ve got life and love, all that’s missing is… death.

John?! Ross?!? Noooo!

I hope you like what you see. More on the game later on!

Welcome to The Pond

The Pond is a place, hidden from view, where small creatures fight for life.

They live, they reproduce, they die.

You can watch them, or maybe help them.

But in The Pond, everything starts and ends the same way: with life and death.

[Play The Pond] [Twitter]

This is a small simulation game I worked on for this Ludum Dare. I had less time than usual because I had to prepare for an university exam on the 28th. I hope you enjoy it.

Hey! You guys are really going crazy with this compo I’ve seen some really amazing stuff, so good work and keep on!

I’m working on a farming game with a friend. We’re still on an early phase but I hope it starts snowballing from here. The final product will be some sort of economic sim + tower defense incremental game.

Here’s a sneak peak of the harvesting, still using programming art:

http://s1.webmshare.com/ZaaOy.webm

We’re continuing work on our farming + tower defense incremental game. I really like how the inventory and item system turned out, here’s a sneak peek! I’m using Minecraft assets as temp art, but I’ll get rid of them once I get to the art production phase.

Next up, NPCs and selling wheat!

https://my.mixtape.moe/dsxjlu.webm

Further progress on my farming + tower defense incremental game, this time on the farming and commerce side. Take a look!

https://my.mixtape.moe/lffirv.webm