I managed to get some basic gameplay working so far, and that’s good

I still need to do lots of stuff though.. some decent gfx, audio, some more gameplay stuff, loads of particles.. 😉

But considering this is my first LD entry I’m already satisfied I got this far.

This is my first Ludum Dare and I have to admit that it’s been fun but hard at the same time.
I wanted to ship something and here’s the result:

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=48604

Here are some random facts about what went wrong and what went right:

• I wanted to try a different framework. I usually work with Unity, but I felt I owed to give the latest framework from Mike a go and see if I could make something with it. So I set myself on making a game with MonoGame + Nez. The good is that I’m familiar with C# so code was flowing quite easily. On the other hand, I had to deal with the Pipeline Tool of MonoGame that I didn’t know as well as I should have before venturing further.
• MonoGame is good, but it’s not so easy to make a portable game. I worked on Mac and ported it to Windows at the end, and I faced some issues with the stable version of MG using some DLLs that were not included in the final build of the game. That took a few hours to figure out.
• Nez is a wonderful framework and it made it quick and easy to work with 2D from a programmer’s point of view. Did I mention that I can code, but that I can’t draw?
• I wish I had a web target. It would have been a lot quicker to get things up and running for everyone with something that doesn’t require to pack up the game and distribute it before people can actually play.
• I settled for simple sprites with no animations. All animations are just stretches and particles handled by code. It really helped in cutting down the time I spent creating the assets
• Making the sound effects has been a lot of fun. If you’re wondering where I took them.. well.. I didn’t. It’s just me and my wife screaming like a pork and mumbling like a farmer 😀
• I made some beginners mistakes and I completely forgot about some of the basics about communicating back to the user when he’s doing something right and when he’s not. I should have put more attention in the details, but they completely slipped under my fingers
• I wanted the final game to have different levels subdivided in waves that become harder as you progress. I wanted to have bonuses like crates that spawn for a brief time and that you have to click as quickly as possible to pick up. I wanted to have some background music. I just didn’t make it all in time.

While I’m trying to get a little build up and running for friends to start testing, I’ve uploaded the scores of my LD35 entry there:

Intro
Menu
Level

I managed to get my little entry for LD35 up and running.

You can play it right there: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-35/?action=preview&uid=48604

I’d really love to get some comments!

Here’s what the game is about:

You are a stray cat with super-powers!!
A horde of rats is chasing you and you must make your way through different levels and reach the end.
You can shapeshift between three different shapes:

– the fat ROUND cat, whose super power is being extremely goot at eating snacks!
– the SQUARE cat, able to shoot fishes at doors to bash them open
– the TRIANGLE cat, the fastest and fiercest of them all. He can freeze the rats tailing you!

Tags: LD35

Santa frowns to town postmortem

It's time to write a little postmortem about my LD43 entry.

This time I decided to skip using an existing engine and focus on using my own hand-made one codenamed Binocle. As usual this isn't a very good decision as it isn't a mature engine, but it's definitely a pleasure to work with. I've written it in from scratch in plain old C, using some common libraries like SDL and it gets the job done, but at the time I started coding the game it was still missing a lot of features.

I also wanted to settle for something with a Christmas vibe together with the compo theme, so I ended up with this "help Santa or the elves will be sacrificed" kind of play.

What went good

• coding with my own engine in plain C has been a pleasure. I didn't have to fight an existing engine that does a lot of stuff that I will never use
• I managed to get some decent graphics even though I'm no artist
• I liked that I managed to put at least one Christmas-themed song
• I managed to submit the game to the compo! yeah!

What went wrong

• using your own engine that hasn't been battle-tested before is going to be a problem as you will spend a lot of time implementing missing features and fixing engine's bugs
• I didn't have enough time for more music. I put together a quick main theme loop with Figure on the iPhone and that was it. I wish I had more time to compose a few longer background songs
• game mechanics are way too simple. I had to rush near the end and cut off a lot of ideas and ended up with this Santa moving back and forth and interacting with a few objects and that's it. I should have put at least some enemies to dodge and give a meaning to the jump ability
• compiling for cross-platform targets takes a lot of time. I had to fight with emscripten to build a runnable web version and resolve some obscure bugs that were happening on Windows but not on macOS (my main development platform)

Conclusion

In the end I think I will use my engine again in the future. But this time I want to get ready a new sprite animation system, some spatial has collision code and sprite batching to ease the CPU when spawning particles and the like. And of course some scrolling code.. I still need to finish the camera implementation. Next time I hope I will have enough time to focus on the gameplay rather than the engine though :)

Please try it out and leave a comment

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/santa-frowns-to-town

I just wanted to say that I will probably keep working on Sprookies and see what I can make with this game. Here's some footage from the original compo version

https://youtu.be/0XoIx2H9jlo

I would really love to have everyone try it out and leave some feedback. I will make sure to get back to you and play your game too.

I already posted an updated version with better controls. It didn't really came to my mind that I could have taken a way easier and better approach for turning around the world without actually doing that :)

I will also try to wrap-up a post-mortem in the following days.

Here's the link to the game: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/sprookies

I am going to share a little bit about the development journey of my compo entry. As usual I didn't have much time during the weekend so I went with the Lua framework I build on top of my C engine as it would give me all the speed I need to come up with something 2D without having to fight with other engines.

It took me a long time to finally come up with an idea, though. I had tens of different ideas but none of them really felt like it would embrace the theme and make it a meaningful mechanic. So, after hours of brainstorming, I decided to give it a try at something I never did before: a card/city builder mix.

I started big and scaled down the design in such a way to have to manage a minimal amount of variables and interactions between the different gameplay elements.

The result is that you get 4 cards per turn. Each turn lasts exactly 10 seconds. You have some energy that you spend to play the cards. Playing cards let you build different kind fo buildings. At the end of the turn, your town is hit by a disaster that you cannot avoid. But your energy replenishes and you get some new cards. Rinse and repeat and try to make your town survive as long as possible.

I also narrowed down the amount of buildings you can have to just 8 to make it a little bit harder.

I would have wanted to let you place the buildings on a map, have some people move around, have animations and nice looking graphics but I didn't have the time for it. I managed to squeeze in some basic graphics, some music and sound effects and then had to call it finished, even if it needed a lot of polish, still.

I hope you will enjoy it nonetheless. Here is the link to the game:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/51/unlucky-town

Hello everyone

I would like to introduce you to my compo entry: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/53/pet-delivery

I started with pretty much no good ideas and in the end I resorted to something nice like pets and a well known gameplay like the one from Angry Birds. I hope you will enjoy it, please leave a comment or two!

Here is some gameplay footage: https://youtu.be/K5CUcHVguiI

Ok, I finally managed to submit my entry fore the compo. I wanted to give a try at UE5 this time and I went full-on with it. I knew it would take me quite some time to get things right, but that's part of the fun.

Here is the link to the entry: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/54/warehouse-keeper

And a small video of the game itself. I wanted to put in way more features to make it better than the usual sokoban-like game, but there is way too little time and I won't be able to spend much more time in front of the screen today. So here it is, I hope you will enjoy it.

I want to spend a few words to talk about my compo entry. It's been quite a ride as I was not home and I could only bring my laptop with me. I was in Riva del Garda, the weather at least was quite cloudy so I was not too worried I would miss out on some sunny days :smile:

Nonetheless, not having all your gear handy can make things more difficult. On top of that, I wanted to give Godot a try so it was a new game engine, my iPhone with Koala and Figure to capture samples of myself and make some sound effects and music and possibly stick to super simple 2D art.

Oh and did I mention that there was a birthday during the weekend? That means even less time to try to beat the clock and complete my entry on time.

I stuck to some basic rules:

• super simple art, possibly some 2D vector art to avoid having to spend too much time drawing (I am so slow at that!)
• all the music should be done with Figure as I am quite quick with that tool
• all the sound effects will be me doing something with my mouth :stuckouttongue:
• try to get all the core mechanics down in the first few hours and try to avoid the usual pitfalls when you are using a new game engine
• use my good old leaderboard server
• create a GitHub pipeline as soon as possible to push out the builds of the game automatically, thus cutting down the time spent packaging everything up.

The result is what I called Badabees, a tribe of bees trying to save their hive from invading wasps.

I kind of wanted to make a sort of collectible cards game initially, but that sounded like way too much work, given the time constraint. I also explored an idea borrowing from the gambling world, something with slot machines and the like, but it didn't really stuck with me. And then I remembered about an old game called Patapong where you let your tribe of stick figures say a set of syllabes to perform different actions. I thought I could definitely do something along these lines.

Two days later, this is the outcome:

Unfortunately I couldn't make an interactive tutorial, which is something that would definitely help. I opted for a much simpler wall of text at the beginning of the game. I would have rather added tooltips as you progress in the game and I believe there should be some humming from the bees to help you remember the combinations of syllabes, but that would have required way too much time and I was already late and also had to pack up to drive for more than two hours to travel back home, so that was not really an option anymore.

I still hope you will enjoy this small little game as I had a lot of fun bringing it to life. As usual, please leave a comment as I love constructive criticism.

You can play the game here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/badabees

I have just published Coco-llectors for the Compo.

I have been on the usual situation where I am not sure whether I should go with my own C engine, try out some GDScript or just stick with Unity. In the end, I chose to go 3D (that rules out my own engine as it's mainly suited for 2D games and it would require way too much effort to get all the missing parts to have something usable for a jam) and between Godot and Unity, I chose to go with what I know best to try and cut the development time.

I thought I'd go with something with simple controls and not too many mechanics (again, let's keep the scope small!).

The result is what you see in this picture:

You are one of the inhabitants of a remote island in the Indian Ocean. And it's well known that the residents of that island go crazy for "coco de mer", a weird fruit that they love to collect. Your task is to grab the fruits and pile them up and beat your opponent in a 3 minutes match. I hope you will have fun playing it!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/58/coco-llectors