Hi, I’m Udo. After hanging around for a few years, this will be my first actual LD. I’ve enlisted the help of my buddy Eric, so we’ll be doing the Jam.
Country: Germany
Language: JavaScript (probably)
Libraries: don’t know yet
IDE: some pansy-ass OS X text editor for me, Eric will probably go vi all the way I imagine
Very excited about this! Hopefully, we’ll manage to get a live feed going as well.
Well, here goes nothing!
Alright then! Yesterday, we did some basic infrastructure for our game, but today we MUST produce something that actually runs! Technically we’ll still have tomorrow, but it’s a normal work day…
Here’s what we’re doing: it’s an RTS where the factions are geometric shapes. We have three races: the Cubes, the Lancets, and the Circles. They’ll compete for resources. We don’t have a lot to show for, but hopefully that’s gonna change today.
Eric is doing the backend in Node.JS, I’m doing the front-end in JS.
As yesterday, we’re streaming the whole thing, switching between Eric’s screen and mine – and we have two embedded “coder cam” streams as well. It’s all on www.twitch.tv/udnozor.
Part of the challenge is finding new games to entertain the cat to divert her away from my keyboard!
Geometry Wars is coming along, still a long way to go though. It’s a multiplayer game, it was probably a huge sign of hubris that we decided to do this! Still, there is progress 
Right now you can set up a multiplayer game and launch it, but the game itself is only a shell. We still got time though!
Streaming live, with code screen and two coder cams: www.twitch.tv/udnozor
We’re calling it a day for now. Geometry Wars now has very basic movement and mechanics, but still no real gameplay. Thankfully we’re doing the Jam, but we’ll definitely need to make good use of the time we have left!
Tomorrow we need to be at work, but we’ll be streaming again at www.twitch.tv/udnozor when we’re up and coding again
7 hours and the clock is ticking! Still so much to do, let’s go!!! Yeah!
We’re back from work and are streaming the final development chapter on Twitch again: http://www.twitch.tv/udnozor
Our game was Geometry Wars, a real-time strategy game where you play with geometric shapes!
Languages: JavaScript / HTML5 / PHP
Frameworks: Node.js, Kinetic.js, Howler.js
Soundtrack: GarageBand
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=6821
IT WAS A LOT OF FUN! This was our first Ludum Dare and I’m looking forward to the next one. Making this game was awesome! The music works (sort of), the sound effects are nice, and all in all I think this concept had a lot of potential. That moment when we could play or first death matches was simply magical! Wooo!!!
Streaming to Twitch was also an interesting experience, now everything is documented! (http://www.twitch.tv/udnozor)
The current version is (un)playable on the web: openfu.com/ld26/current/client/ – it doesn’t really work, but it’s there.
The game is not playable as it is. The server crashes literally every 10 seconds.
There are a lot of bugs left in the game that we didn’t have time to fix. As it is, it hovers just below the edge of playability. Multiplayer combat actually works pretty well, so it’s possible to have actual matches between two or more players. The single-player content (this is what the Evil Potato base is for) simply does not work. It broke during the last minutes before the deadline.
Team development comes at a cost, and this project was no exception. Working in a pair requires a certain level of coordination that we did not apply consistently.
Eric was doing the Node.js server backend, whereas I coded the frontend. Of course we coordinated often, but over time it became clear that having two separate data models (one on the server and another one on the client) was a decision that cost us a lot of development time and broke the game on a deep technical level. We talked about our data models only after it was too late by about 2 hours. In hindsight we should have scrapped those two hours, because the cost was even higher during the rest of the development effort. It was a very bad decision to build something on a cognitively dissonant data model. Poor Eric had to maintain a translation layer to talk to the client and adding features became very painful over time.
We definitely got more done together, and the experience itself was an absolute blast, but I have the feeling that each of us would have been able to deliver something more complete if we had worked alone. For our next project, I think we need to focus a lot more on actual technical specification.
I’m exhausted now, but I am also determined to invest one or more days during this week in order to put a bugfix release together, even if nobody should care 😉
I’m looking forward to the next weekend. Last time was fun but we didn’t actually deliver anything playable. Let this be a lesson, keep the concept simple! This time I’ll go it solo.
Tools I’ll probably use:
– web browser as platform
– JavaScript as programming language
– plain text editor for IDE
– Pixelmator for graphics (if any)
I’m really excited about this one, it will be my second LD. Whatever the theme may be, it’s gonna be great!
OK, it’s now 11 AM here in Germany and I’m finally awake after being in a coma for ages. 10 seconds! Well, there are no bad themes, only bad brains! I’m gonna need to get mine working with some coffee now while I brainstorm what to do.
I’ll be using:
– JavaScript / Webbrowser as a platform
– text editor for coding
– probably Three.js and Handlebars as libraries
– Garageband for the music
– Audacity for sounds
– Pixelmator as a graphics editor
Go-Go-Go!!!
And this is my den. I planned on cleaning it up before this, but didn’t 😉
3 hours in, not a lot to show for, but I’ll be making it up with vision 😉
In this game, you play a couple of robots. It’s round-based and each round lasts 10 seconds… we’ll see!
“Robots Save the Day” is coming along, albeit slowly.
I decided to forego WebGL and do it in plain 2D. Three.js is nice, but far too low-level. I expected it to be more like Kinetic.js, but in reality Three.js is more like raw WebGL with some modest convenience features.
Anyway, here’s the concept: you control one or more robots. They have 10 seconds to clear a level. The player determines the actions of the robots in advance and then watches them execute the mission. There will probably be some generic backstory.
I’ll be out for a few hours now, our Dark Heresy group is waiting!
It’s day 2 for “Robots Save the Day”! Judging by my speed, I’ll probably end up submitting to the Jam. But we’ll see.
On today’s agenda:
– actual graphics for the spaceship
– more robots
– more game logic
– levels
Probably tomorrow:
– sounds & music
– polishing
“Robots Save the Day” is coming along, but I’ll do the Jam now and use the extra day. The game logic isn’t quite finished yet, but the robots are definitely on the move!
Day 2 of the Jam is drawing to a close. There’s a first, somewhat-playable demo of “Robots Save the Day” where you can play the first level: Escape from Cubot’s Broom Closet! However, this is the only level so far, so it’ll start right at the beginning again if you survive or not.
He’s the second player character in Robots Save the Day:
First of all, and most importantly, this has been a lot of fun to make! It’s not perfect, and there are probably horrible bugs everywhere, but it’s a complete little story to play through for our robot heroes!
This time, I didn’t fail. The game runs well (at least on my system) and there is real content. Last time, the goals were too ambitious and a lot of things went wrong during development. This time, and with the experience of LD26 to look back on, things went more smoothly even though I didn’t spend the entire 72 hours actually making the game.
Overall I like “Robots Save the Day” a lot. The graphics and the UI, although not spectacular, feel right. And I really love our two protagonists!
I had only time for one music track, and it’s not exactly great. Also, the sound effects are uneven at best, but at lest they do convey the humorous atmosphere like I hoped they would. Usability of the “programming” screen isn’t that great, and it will take players some time to figure it out. I wonder if anyone will bother to do that, but I sure hope so. If I had more time and energy, I’d probably invest it into more content and levels as well. As it is, the puzzles are so easy they hardly deserve the name. This is mainly to allow fellow LDers to play the game through to the end in a few minutes. It’s a trade-off though. Lastly, the level and robot graphics could profit from more refinement.
I started the project in Three.js. Robots Save the Day was initially planned as a 3D WebGL application. But I didn’t look at Three.js before Ludum Dare, so of course that started to go very wrong very fast. After about half a day I scrapped the 3D ambitions and went basic 2D. VERY basic. This allowed me to actually finish the game, which I otherwise couldn’t have. But it’s a big regret. The game would have been so much better with real graphics and animations. For next LD, I vow to finally make a 3D game.
Also, next time I’m planning on using more of the development time. Running off to our pen&paper RPG round, and of course having a normal work day on day 3, all of that could have been spent making the game bigger and better.
This game was ridiculously fun to make, I really had a blast. I love what I made, warts and all. Looking at the other entries though, I also know it’s unrealistic for me to expect to make much of a dent. It’s absolutely humbling how many awesome games you guys produced. I can’t wait to play them (tomorrow, very tired now).
If you’d like to try out Robots Save the Day, here’s the link.
That’s it, folks. Robots signing off.
It almost looks as if the people rating my thing haven’t actually tried out the game, I think they just paraphrase the description with some random words thrown in. Is that normal? Am I too paranoid? o.O
5 LD27 games:
Kannas: 10 Seconds
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=18332
Infernet89: The Value of Time
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=14271
teamenschede: Placeholder
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=27808
myachin: Descent Alpha
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=10579
Tange: Exocolony
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=1012
I like my two protagonists way too much, so I made this real quick:
I had a real blast making Robots Save the Day! One of the hardest things after LD is probably coming back down again thankfully there is the review period. I have to say I’m absolutely humbled by the quality and creativity of the games out there. Everybody did a phenomenal job and this sets the bar very high – which is a good thing.
I’d like to talk a bit about the tools / the environment I used for my game.
The game is completely browser-based, native HTML and JavaScript. Originally I had planned on making a 3D game for this LD, but alas I had to give that up halfway through because otherwise I couldn’t have finished on time (again, this happened at LD 26). Anyway, I want to sing some praise for HTML games now:
Even without a game framework HTML/JS is a combination that lets you get things done very quickly. My one headache though was I didn’t know how big the browser support for both CSS transitions and CSS element rotation is, as the game relies very heavily on it. So far, no complaints, the robot gods be thanked. Here’s the stack I ended up using:
– JQuery for DOM manipulation
– Handlebars.js for JS-enabled templates
– CSS effects for pretty much everything
– oh, and: PHP as a backend resource compiler
The graphics were made entirely in Cinema 4D, no post processing. Aligning the level layout with the grid had been somewhat of a challenge, but in the end I ended up liking how objects were often just a leeeeettle bit misaligned. That made the levels look more organic. For a bigger game, I’d have used tile-based levels, but for this one it was enough to render most of the scene in one go and use sprites for the rest.
I made the soundtrack with Garageband, it’s basically just some mellow synth throbbing, but it kinda works for the atmosphere I wanted. Again, this was absolutely the right tool for the job to get things done quickly.
As for the sound effects and the robot speech, that’s just me with a microphone and some Audacity effects/editing. The most complex one was Captain Hannigan’s “Abandon-Ship” message that plays over and over on the abandoned bridge. But even that was created just with my mouth 😉
So all in all I’m actually glad how everything turned out, even though I didn’t follow through with the original plan for WebGL. It’s actually kind of shameful how easy this project was to do with just HTML and I’d like to encourage more people to try it. I know the game dev frameworks out there enable great things, but it seems equally as often they’re stumbling blocks for the dev to fight against.
Which brings me to my final point on web games. I have to confess a certain bias towards trying and rating browser-playable entries way more often. A downloadable game on the other hand has to look very good in order to motivate me to download it. And even then, there’s about a 30% chance the executable just won’t run on my system. I feel very bad for these projects, because – more often than not – interesting games run into trouble at this point.
So that’s kinda my lesson from LD27: HTML for the win!
Plug: Try out Robots Save the Day and let me know what you think!
There’s a Show HN to pool the games made by fellow HNers. I’d be very interested in seeing what the community has been up to at Ludum Dare 27
I have played and rated about a hundred games by now (by the way, is that a lot? I have no idea). Overall, the quality and creativity are impressive. Almost every single game has at least one aspect that totally rocks!
However, I don’t know what to do with entries that don’t use their own music or their own graphics. These may sound or look good, but do they really deserve a good rating for something that was not in any way made for Ludum Dare? I don’t think so. In a way I feel like these people are gaming the system with content they didn’t make themselves. Am I being too harsh here?
However, I’ll probably not score it as highly at graphics and music as if they had all been done by the dev.