Super Excited First LD for me!

Jamming with my Girl

We’re using: html5/javascript

Art: graphics gale

Engine: impactjs

Sound: LMMS and Audacity

IDE: Sublime Text 2 and/or Komodo Editor

Coffee: Ethiopian yirgacheffe

http://ld24.devbriggs.com/

It’s pretty hard to win and takes some skill with memorizing the level. Let me know what you think!

I challenge all of you to take the first steps now for October.

Be preemptive !

Right now you did it! You have your game up for LD24 and are under judgement by the community.

Right now you are getting great feedback on your effort and your prize.

While the code is fresh in your head and you already have the gears working start taking the October challenge early.

Maybe not the whole game ready for market, but how about tackle some of the small bugs and features you really wanted to get in and know need to be there in that game.

Create a new Post Compo Branch tonight. Right now. Fix 1 thing add 1 feature. do it before October and get a list ready for then. I have played so many games if I had the money and you were charging me I would be broke.

A lot of you turned in gold.. or at least you turned in lead with a chance. Take that chance. Start now.

-TigerJ

This entry was posted on Friday, August 31st, 2012 at 8:42 pm and is filed under LD #24. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

I recently (as of last week) made my first sale of a game which I build with impactJS, ported to android with cocoonJS and then uploaded to the market. The entire process took me less than a week, I did however have some minor problems with the cocoonJS port.

If you want any help during October wtih ImpactJS or CocoonJS and android (I don’t have an Ios device yet…) Then I am here for you and your questions.

Usually I am lurking the #impactjs IRC on freenode on the weekends and week nights (eastern US time)

Just send your questions to my twitter if I am not in IRC http://twitter.com/stalkjimmy 

If it is impactJS related post in the impact help forum so your thread can be used as reference to future people.

Thanks a ton for reading this and GOOD LUCK!!

http://thehill.com/images/stories/blogs/flooraction/jan2013/hr287.pdf

6 SEC. 2. RATING LABEL REQUIREMENT FOR VIDEO GAMES.
7 (a) CONDUCT PROHIBITED.—It shall be unlawful for
8 any person to ship or otherwise distribute in interstate
9 commerce, or to sell or rent, a video game that does not
10 contain a rating label, in a clear and conspicuous location

on the outside packaging of the video game, containing
2 an age-based content rating determined by the Entertain-
3 ment Software Ratings Board.

Well so far so good.

http://devbriggs.com/chickensnatch/

Well here is my Day 1 progress. time to power nap! My car engine blew and I have to go car hunting tomorrow morning

http://devbriggs.com/chickensnatch/

The feed back so far has been great!

http://devbriggs.com/chickensnatch/

This is how far I currently am with the prototype. ENJOY!!!

http://www.weebls-stuff.com/toons/aaaaaaaaaaaaahaha/

PLAY  |  RATE  |  SOURCE

Chicken Snatch is my second LD entry. I made run run amoeba  last year, skipped a couple LDs and now a year later my LD rash was itching!

What was different this year? I was ready! I knew to dream big and focus little. I knew to  stock up on things like coffee, deodorant and granola bars. I knew that having no friction in a platform game kinda sucked.

What else was different? It seemed like the whole universe was trying to stop me or tell me to start a country music jam instead. My car’s engine blew immediately after 1300$ of repairs and my hardrive went on my main dev box!!

Lets get to the good stuff..

So I log into IRC and what happens as soon as I log in?

BAM theme in your face! 10 seconds?! why does space never win???

So I high tail it with my artist and Q.A. girlfriend to the coffee shop with the same notepad from last year.

We drink coffee/tea, we talk, we drink, we talk… it comes down to a traffic light administration simulator OR a fox and chicken platformer. hint: this post is not called traffic (game)jam – the inside coupe ~ I just made that up!

Our system is pretty good. I do all the sprite/tile/design/code and she does the fine art, concept art, story boards and QA testing as I update builds. We use trello  https://trello.com/b/mLVA6FOS/chicken-snatch to keep organized slightly and she reports bugs and updates stuff on there.

We stay up until 4am and have a rough prototype we release to our friends online

Sunday I wake up super early, finish the tilesets and add a dog.

We break, run some errands that are totally FAIL (more on that later) and then come back and finish the game up. I crank music and design the level and she finishes the congratulation artwork.

So lets postmortem a little

What went well?

• I used a framework and code base I’m real experienced in so there were not many bugs
• The game controls felt good and the game play concept was really fun from the beginning
• The Art created for the title and end level screens was beautiful
• My friend in Florida hooked me up with music I requested on time
• The game actually worked in IE9+
• I was able to make the game freshly installing Linux mint wiping my entire system
• people helped me. On twitter, on steam on irc and everything in between. suggestions, code problems, you name it. Community is good, ludum dare community is amazing. seriously go buy some coffee and pretend I did it thanking you.
• using trello to work on things https://trello.com/b/mLVA6FOS/chicken-snatch

What did not go well..

• So remember I dropped windows? well I needed visual studio to change the mime support on my hosts web.config for ogg support for html5 audio… I ended up switching my host to Linux which left the public site down for a few hours and I had no public QA from the friends
• I didn’t implement the ending level screen until really late Sunday night and it introduced a bug… the player kept re-spawning and exploding AFTER you beat the game. BOOM dead fox BOOM dead fox BOOM dead fox BOOM dead fox BOOM dead fox BOOM dead fox. I had to work in a few hours and here is this omgAWEFUL bug staring me in the face..
• I use impactjs and JavaScript which is cool because I’ve used impact for 2 years and I work full-time as a developer writing internal business apps (mostly in html5/js). HOWEVER I also used impact++ which really improves impactjs, but it also requires a learning curve. This was probably not the best decision but Collin Hover saved my game by tweeting back and forth with every issue I had. I really owe him some success because I would have lost a lot of functionality if he couldn’t help me and I had to drop impact++ from the game.
• I added some lighting effects as seen above in the dog image.. they just did not work. I wanted the game to have a night feel but the lighting just made it look weird and took away the retro coin-op feel I was going for.
• Sunday I left for 3 hours to go look at a truck I was going to buy at a dealership AND IT DIDN’T START… SERIOUSLY?!!? I called ahead and said I was coming a day in advance and the damn thing doesn’t start when I get there… WOW I could be working on my game instead of wasting my time in Chardon, OH with a truck I can’t even test drive… (I’m still mad about this).
• Firefox hates audio. I don’t know why but I just am done messing with Firefox and it’s problem with my .ogg sounds.
• Everyone is making awesome gifs on their blog posts and I can’t seem to find a way to do this without some dumb website stamp. (I don’t own photoshop CS)
• If you do beat the game then it will ask you to press space to replay. this actually reloads the page because I was having a major issue removing the existing entities from the game. the chicken counter would double (based on how many chicken entities are in existent). and the player wouldn’t reload properly.
• I ran out of time as usual so I didn’t……
• tweak the jumping from a press once to a press and hold. This prevents players from using skilled jumps and releasing to have more control.
• have time to make a fox cutout appear in when you enter the fox hole. This would have added more to the play and experience.
• fix a bug that if you die jumping, you will respawn with the same velocity you die with. It’s kinda fun but will piss you off in a speed run.
• get Firefox working.. but I didn’t have time to mess with the audio. stick with chrome or safari for optimal experience please.
• make the fox drop the chicken on death instead of respawning with it in it’s mouth.
• get the game on kongregate
• get the game on newgrounds
• get the game everywhere I could get the game

Stuff used

• Linux mint (dev OS) apache2, php http://cinnamon.linuxmint.com/ OS
• ImpactJS http://impactjs.com/ – game framework
• Impact++ http://collinhover.github.io/impactplusplus/ – extends game framework and removes a LOT of boilerplate writing
• Gimp http://www.gimp.org/ – this is what I paint tiles with
• Wine/Graphics Gale http://www.winehq.org/  |  http://www.humanbalance.net/gale/us/ – Old habits die hard. I love gale for spriting.
• Sublime Text 2 http://www.sublimetext.com/2 the editor that will change your life
• SFXR http://www.drpetter.se/project_sfxr.html I love this thing
• Audacity http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ Because html5 is a standard… (joke ha ha)
• Mikey uses his own software for the awesome beats. you can contact him here: https://twitter.com/MikeyGTweeting
• Trillian uses her own art programs for the main screen it was gimp or CS4 probably. ask questions on the game page and I will get answers.

A Very Special Thanks to:

• My first fan Matt Tippens @matt_tippins
• @i8bugs one of my best friends far away
• @collinhover I can’t thank you enough for what you do for the impact community and my games
• @Orlai for never holding back
• 507th Aristoi aka mochnant Good ideas are hard to find
• @bryan_on_rails thanks for letting me spam you all weekend
• John Zeller, Sorry I blue screened you, switch to linux

So anyway this was a blast and I did like 10 times better than last year!

PLAY  |  RATE  |  SOURCE

Tags: game, html5, jam, LD27, postmortem, screenshot

Ya’ll might wanna go check this baby out!

Humble Bundle

(from humble bundle website below)

Humble Game Making Bundle

Let the games begin! Sure, playing games is fun, but what if you could easily make your own games? You could have action, romance, weird plot twists and plot holes, and even half-centaur/half-apricot monsters if you so desire. The options are aplenty! All you need is the software to get to work, and that’s what we’ve got here (plus some games too!).

Pay what you want for a Game Dev Starter Pack; Stencyl: Indie Edition One-Year License; Humble Store coupons for 90% off RPG Maker 2000, 2003, and XP; a Humble Bundle Starter DLC Pack; an Indie Game Maker Contest ’14 Finalist Pack featuring Remnants of Isolation and Last Word; andLabyrinthine Dreams. Pay more than the average price to also receive RPG Maker VX Ace Deluxe Edition, Game Character Hub, a Humble Bundle Sci-Fi DLC Pack, Humble Bundle New DLC Pack, Aveyond: Lord of Twilight, and Crimzon Clover WORLD IGNITION. Pay $12 or more for all of the above plus App Game Kit 2, Spriter Pro, Sprite Lamp, Humble Bundle Fantasy DLC Pack, and Goats On A Bridge.

Pay what you want. Ordinarily, this collection of software costs up to a whopping $1,985! Here at Humble Bundle, though, you pay what you want!

Win moola (optional). Make a super sweet, totally gnarly game with your new software? Enter it into the Indie Game Maker Contest 2015. The prize pool for the contest keeps growing, so you could take home some big money if you win.

System Requirements. There’s a lot of software here (and even some games!). Some of it is DRM-free but some of it isn’t. Please check out the full system requirements here prior to purchasing.

Support Charity. Choose where the money goes — between the developers, the Indie Game Maker Contest 2015, and two charitable causes (Extra Life/Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals and Child’s Play) via the PayPal Giving Fund and The IndieCade Foundation via Tides Foundation. If you like the bundle or like what we do, you can leave us a Humble tip too!

TL;DR; game jam/indie dev open mic night I play the games and give feedback everyone hangs out in chat.

Hey everyone! TigerJ here after not participating in any LDs since LD27 I was recently called out by a buddy of mine who talked me into Movie Game Jam over on itch. Since then I have started a twitch channel, and I am hosting a show where game devs and game jam participants can hang out together while I play their games (finished or not) and give feedback.

If you have a game you would like played or want just to hang out feel free to come by this evening (5 pm eastern time – 2 am) I will be streaming for a large window to accommodate many international devs.

Thanks so much! Keep making games! (I will be in the next LD with an entry)

https://www.twitch.tv/tiger_j

Look who's back in the LD
It's me, With a game for you to see

You might rate it well
you might rate it poor
at the end of the jam
I will enjoy my score

Stay up late
writing lots of scripts
I hope that I ate
committing all these bits

Got a pot full of coffee
Got a tower and a 'top
In a room real lofty
Hope I never have to stop

Tunes are blaring
My art skills are not
ScreenShotSaturday is caring
Tell me my sprites are hot

Crunch time coming
Crossing off the features
Bugs fixes and fixing
delete half my creatures

Scrap together sound
Better than some quiet
Ratings will abound
Hope hundreds Try it

I think my last was LD27? I can't remember. Really happy to be back!

The title says it all! fill our the form, I will play your game on my twitch channel. you can follow me ;) Come hang in chat during the stream for priority!

FILL THIS FORM OUT NOW

I was able to finally get the web build up. please run it in full screen!

https://tigerj.itch.io/magic-and-machines-ld41

Play win/mac/lin and rate it here

Looking for something fast and fun? Look no further! Magic and Machines is a fast paced action game
(think classic diablo/diablo2) but instead of having a skill tree or set spell book you only get to use cards that are dropped once per card! The order is determined by which they are looted!
(you can flip through your skills with F... for flip)

I am streaming 4-6 games tonight while I have a free hour of time. Add your game here and be present in chat!

https://goo.gl/forms/ac7kCG2uPDN5tCTE3

Watch & Follow here for a full schedule and notifications on other game dev related streams:
https://www.twitch.tv/tiger_j

The hour will be between 7:30 pm - 8:30 pm Eastern North America

If you would rather have your game on the Saturday Morning 3 hour show you may do so here:
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/magic-and-machines/add-your-game-to-my-stream-for-saturday

The amount of feedback and quality suggestions if overwhelming. Thanks everyone who has give Magic and Machines a play/rating. I really appreciate it! If you have not played it yet feel free to give it a play! It's short, less than 5 minutes. https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/magic-and-machines

https://www.twitch.tv/tiger_j

Come join me as I play your LD games!

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/255425715

play it here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/magic-and-machines