So I’ve decided to take part in my very first Ludum Dare. Yeah, I’m probably gonna fail so hard at this but then again what better way to level up your game dev skills than to take part in a 48/72 hour game development contest 😛

Gonna try for the compo but chances are, I’ll end up submitting for the jam even though I have work on Monday. Anyway…

Likely Tools:

Language: C#
Engines/Frameworks: XNA/Possibly Monogame
IDE: Visual Studio 2010
Art: Positech’s Explosion Generator(in case I need something of the kaboom kind), bvanschooten’s Random Sprite Generator, Paint.Net (I can’t even draw to save my life so content generators for the win XD)
Sound and Music: bfxr, autotracker with schism tracker, otomata/circuli, audacity (for general cleanup)
Misc: A notepad+pen (for jotting down ideas as well as going through problems step by step in case things go wrong)

 

 

I usually don’t know how to write these kind of things but I figure I try and write as much as I can about how my game turned out and what it was like taking part in and actually completing my first Ludum Dare.

Long story short, Only One Shot is a game where you must shoot all the enemy squares to complete the level. However, the game adds a twist where you must do this with one bullet otherwise you fail the level (Hence the game title). But how do you kill more than one enemy with just one bullet (especially when the enemies are spread quite far apart)? This is where the reflector blocks that are placed around each level come in. When a bullet hits a reflector, the reflector will spawn a bullet from each side apart from the side that it was hit on. In levels containing more than one reflector, the game almost feels like a Rube Goldberg machine where one bullet starts up a long chain reaction just to kill some enemies in one go.

What went right:

• The Graphics: Having minimalism as a theme meant that I didn’t have to worry about the art (since I can’t draw to save my life XD) and sort of essentially get away with simple (if somewhat crude) shapes.
• The Gameplay: Trying to interpret minimalism in terms of gameplay mechanics was a bit difficult. Whilst I could have made a simple one button game, I wanted to convey minimalism in the sense that the simplest of things (either one or nothing) are only needed to start a huge reaction hence the one bullet rule of my game. From this core concept, I managed to create a game with simple, yet deep mechanics.
• Having a Plan (and mostly sticking to it): Once I had decided on the core idea of my game as well as figured out the type of game I wanted to make, I decided to flesh my idea out a bit further by brainstorming and jotting down notes on a pad before I get started on doing some actual coding. Although some features I had planned in my notes did not make it into the final version of the game that was submitted, doing this really helped in two ways: Firstly, having a plan to stick to meant that I was able to get most of the essential concepts of my game done in time without the distraction of bloating up my game with unnecessary features and secondly, having a plan meant that I would have a concrete idea of what to code without the risk of suffering mental blocks (if I had decided to just jump in and start coding without one).

What went wrong:

• Time Management: This was probably by far the biggest fault I had with the game. Originally, I had planned to get the game completed and submitted in time for the compo but overall, I wasn’t really making full use of my time as I was either too distracted to work or taking too long on one task (The collision code for my game between the player/enemy and the walls took one long tedious Sunday afternoon to do and most of it was wasted on trying to work out which parts of the collision boxes have overlapped before I eventually realised that I could just use the direction vector of the player/enemy and use that instead whenever the two collision boxes interect and reposition accordingly). Having to work on a Monday didn’t exactly help either which meant that I was only able to work on the game during the evening but fortunately, my game was nearly done and luckily I managed to submit it in time for the game instead (despite the fact
• The reflectors: Although the basic function of the reflectors worked out pretty well (spawn additional bullets when hit), there were a few glaring bugs in the overall functionality which meant that they didn’t work out exactly as I had envisioned. The most obvious bug was when a reflector would spawn bullets when it wasn’t recently hit. During early playtesting, an endless stream of bullets would sometimes spawn from a reflector for no reason causing the game to unfortunately slow down and crash. Although the bug still persists, I managed to work my way around it by adding an extra flag in the logic that checks for a game over condition.

Initial Feedback:

To my own actual surprise, the initial feedback for my game so far was really nice with most saying that they loved the overall concept of the game (with some saying that they would love to play more levels) whilst criticising the fact that the player moved too slow and that there was no way to tell which way the player was facing (a fault of my own in trying to keep the art as simple as possible).

Post-Compo Version? :

Due to the positive feedback that I have received, I am considering making a post-compo(post-jam?) version of my game (depending if I have time) fixing all the bugs I wasn’t able to fix during the 2/3 days of development as well as tweak the game based on feedback (i.e. a faster player and a way to work out where it’s facing) plus add some extra functionality whilst keeping the core mechanics and art the same (although I may consider adding some extra polish to the art as well). To keep things fair however, I would only consider starting work on this version once the judging period so that way I can take all the feedback and work out what needs to be changed.

Overall Experience and What I’ll Do in the Future:

For me, taking part in my first Ludum Dare and actually completing it was a rather scary yet fun experience and despite the fact that some things didn’t go exactly as planned, I feel that my gamedev skills have improved (a bit I think) further. For the next Dare however, I will be working much harder to ensure that I am able to submit something for the compo rather than the jam by working hard to improve on my graphics skills (which I find terribly lacking) so that I don’t have to make something rather crude and simple (unless it’s actually better to go that way). I might use another engine for the next Dare (I’ve used Unity before) or perhaps learn a new one (I’m looking at you LOVE). After all, there’s only roughly 3 more months I have left to start improving my skills until August 😉

And now for a selection of some of the nice comments that I have received for my game…

“Really cool concept. Would have loved to play more levels :D”

“Cool bullet splitting mechanic! Work on this, you have a neat puzzle game idea on your hands :)”

“Great game, I loved the concept.”

“Simple, challenging, awesome. Simple, yet smart design.”

Tags: post-mortem, postmortem, xna

With less than 7 days to go until judging ends and well, because pretty much everyone else is doing it, here’s my top 5 out of over 100 games rated so far:

F*** this job

(Follow the) Line

You must Escape

Super 1 bit Space Arena

The Sentient Cube (Game has unfortunately been taken down as of 14/05/13 but it’s still in my Top 5)

The Special Hidden Gem Award (Courtesy of the Rating Rescue Rangers): A Trigger Darkly

And finally, insert shameless plug of my game here.

4

This entry was posted on Monday, May 13th, 2013 at 5:22 pm and is filed under LD #26. 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.

So the results for LD26 are out and I must say, despite some of the obvious faults my game had, I was pleasantly surprised with what I got so without any further ado, here are the results for my entry, Only One Shot:

Ratings

Coolness 100% #67 Theme(Jam) 3.92 #83 Innovation(Jam) 3.58 #239 Audio(Jam) 3.00 #245 Fun(Jam) 2.98 #281 Overall(Jam) 3.11 #350 Humor(Jam) 1.85 #365 Mood(Jam) 2.66 #464 Graphics(Jam) 2.47

Anyway, according to bvanschooten’s percentile maths, I’m actually in the top 14th percentile for Theme and top 17th percentile for Innovation out of all rated Jam games.

Strongest Category – Theme: Minimalism was probably an easy theme to interpret so no problems here.

True Strongest Category – Innovation: Now this one I can definitely be proud of as a lot of the positive comments on my game were to do with the core mechanic of my game.

Weakest Category – Humour: Wait, what? My game hardly has any humour 0_O

True Weakest Category – Graphics: I’ve probably said this before so many times during the rating period but I’m more of a coder than an artist and I can’t even draw to save my own life but regarding the theme, I just sorta lucked out.

Category which took me by Surprise – Audio: Apparently bfxr and a few randomly placed squares in Otomata somehow managed to get me a 3 in Audio.

Category I nearly managed to break through – Fun: Was only 0.02 away from 3 stars and possibly making top 100 for fun.

Overall, I would say not too shabby for my first Ludum Dare. I’ll try and possibly make some time over the weekend as I’m pretty busy at work during the weekdays but I might start on working on an improved, fleshed out, post-compo version of my game.

Finally, a big thank you to everyone who rated my game and gave nice comments about it and to everyone who submitted an entry of course.

See you in August for Ludum Dare 27 😀

Tags: results

Hey everyone,

So this past week I’ve been taking part in The Charity Game Jam and since I had no time to make something new (because of work and other stuff), I decided to do a slightly tweaked “Turbo” (read: Post-Jam) version of my old Ludum Dare 26 Game Only One Shot with some changes based on the feedback I got back in April such as slightly faster player movement as well as four additional levels.

“Turbo” version of my game

Original version of my game

Download Turbo Version (Standalone EXE for Windows)

Play Turbo Version Online (HTML5)

Entry Page for Original Version

Post-Mortem for Original Version

Tags: Charity, Charity Button Challenge, Charity Game Jam, charitygamejam, post-jam, xna

Better late than never, after barely surviving my first Ludum Dare back in April (with a jam entry) and missing the one in August (because I was too busy that day), here’s my obligatory declaration of participation post for my 2nd LD.

Again, I’m gonna attempt to submit a compo entry.

Likely Tools:

Language: C#
Engines/Frameworks: Going for Unity’s 2D tools this time
IDE: Monodevelop
Art: bvanschooten’s Random Sprite Generator, Paint.Net (Again, can’t draw to save my life :3), maybe Inkscape
Sound and Music: bfxr, autotracker with schism tracker, otomata/circuli, audacity (for general cleanup). I’ve been playing around with Bosca Ceoil for the past few days so I might use that as well
Misc: Notepad+pen (for jotting down ideas as well as going through problems step by step in case things go wrong)

 

 

Since there’s less than a day left until ratings are finished and I haven’t gotten around to doing it yet, I figure I might do a little post-mortem of my LD28 Entry One Jump (not to be confused with a couple of other entries with the same name). This was my 2nd Ludum Dare game but the first submitted for the 48 hour compo.

My primary aim during the weekend was to avoid some of the mistakes I did in my last entry (such as time management) and submit something playable in time for the 48 hour compo. Prior to the competition, I decided I wanted to use Unity (specifically the new 2D tools) for a couple of reasons:

• Familiarity (I’ve used Unity before but not for a Ludum Dare entry) instead of trying to learn a new language/engine in 1/2 weeks
• More widespread deployment: Compared to my last entry (which used XNA), using Unity meant that I could easily deploy my entry to the web as well as create standalone versions in one go.

I also decided that I wanted to create a platformer (mostly because I haven’t made one before and also because I didn’t want to create a top-down game where you move something in 4 directions and shoot stuff). The day before the actual theme was announced, I did jot down a couple of ideas based on some of the themes that made it to the final round of voting (although I didn’t actually have an initial idea for the one that eventually chosen). After the theme was announced however, it took me some time to think of a core mechanic that would fit it (To be honest, I didn’t really like the theme although ironically, due to the primary mechanics, my last Ludum Dare game would have been an absolute perfect fit for it). Eventually, I decided to interpret “You Only Get One”  as being able to do something that you can normally do many times only once. In the case of a platformer, the primary mechanic is jumping hence the main objective of my game: To simply reach the exit but being only able to jump once per level (which led to some rather strange and interesting level design)

What went right:

• Planning and Time Management: Compared to my last entry, I actually made much better use of my time thanks to the Unity workflow and managed to submit my entry in time for the competition.
• Levels: A common complaint with my last entry was that there were too few levels (about 4/5). Thanks to Unity, I was able to rapidly prototype levels in the editor without having to recompile and restart the game and created around 8 levels for my entry.
• Mechanics: Initially, I thought that being only able to jump once was too gimmicky (trying to design levels based on that mechanic was pretty hard as well as I wanted to make the player use their only jump at the right moment). In the end however, I was pretty satisfied with the end result.

What went wrong:

• Graphics: I’m not a very good artist so I decided to use simple shapes again for my entry. Unfortunately, I didn’t have enough time to change those shapes into something more plausible (but still somewhat crude).
• Lack of background audio: I initially created a small audio loop for my entry but I wasn’t able to get it to loop properly in Unity.
• General Platformer Physics: Although the game generally worked, some of the primary platforming mechanics were a bit buggy (having to create some momentum in order to jump, unintended wall sticking etc.). Some platforming elements such as the moving platforms didn’t work as much as I had hoped.

Initial Feedback:

Feedback for my game so far has been fairly ok (and better than I had originally anticipated) with level design being praised the most and some platformer physics/controls being the main criticism.

Overall Experience and What I’ll do in the Future:

Compared to my last entry, I didn’t enjoy this one as much as I’d hoped (mainly because of the theme) even though I managed to submit something in time for the compo. I did have a fun time however and if there was anything new that I’ve learnt during that time, it’s that I shouldn’t be afraid of submitting to the jam instead (rather than treat it as a place where I didn’t submit my compo entry in time): if my entry needs one more day of polish then I should take advantage of that extra day. During the period of time before the next dare, I will try to make at least some improvement with my graphics skills (or failing that, just collab with an artist friend for the jam instead).

Tags: LD28, post-mortem, postmortem, unity

So it’s almost been a week since the results for LD28 were out and even I though I did worse than last time, I thought I might do a quick breakdown of my results for my game One Jump and see where I went wrong:

Ratings

Coolness 100% #101 Theme 3.66 #641 Humor 1.93 #703 Audio 1.89 #746 Innovation 2.50 #768 Fun 2.44 #898 Overall 2.46 #899 Mood 1.98 #963 Graphics 1.74

Strongest Category – Theme: The one that almost made it to top 100. Didn’t really enjoy the theme for this Ludum Dare but I’m glad people thought my game fitted it somewhat well.

Weakest Category – Graphics: I’m very bad at drawing things but I’m going to try and make an improvement for the next Dare.

Even though I’ve done two entries so far, here’s a little chart comparing how I did last time:

Overall, despite this entry being the first to be submitted for the compo (The last one was for the jam), there’s probably a lot of stuff I really need to improve on such as graphics. I will still keep aiming to submit my entries in the time for the compo but will consider submitting for the jam if it needs that extra polish.

Finally, thank you to everyone who rated my game and gave nice comments about it as well as useful constructive criticism.

See you in April for Ludum Dare 29!!

Tags: results

Only one hour(ish) to go but here’s my obligatory declaration of participation post for what’s going to be my 3rd LD.

Going to try and submit for the compo again but this time, if I feel that my entry needs some extra polish then I’ll submit for the jam instead.

Likely Tools (sorta copied and pasted from my last post because I’m lazy):

Language: C#
Engines/Frameworks: Unity (2D Mode to be specific)
IDE: Monodevelop Visual Studio (because Monodevelop likes to break. A lot)
Art (aiming to make something that’s not simple shapes despite lack of skill in the drawing department): bvanschooten’s Random Sprite Generator, Paint.Net, maybe Inkscape
Sound and Music: bfxr, autotracker with schism tracker, otomata/circuli, audacity (for general cleanup).
Misc: Notepad+pen (for jotting down ideas as well as going through problems step by step in case things go wrong)

So I just made a small form for people to fill in if they want me to play/rate their entries (partly to make things slightly easier for me :V)

Anyway, click here if you want me to check out your entry and such.

In the meantime, here’s my entry.

Just submitted my entry for MiniLD 58 (Intergalactic Pong) last night.

Same rules as regular pong except everything is now set in space and the ball is now an asteroid and there are planets that can pull the ball in and also the ball can wrap around the screen because space.

Click the pic to play!!

Tags: #miniLD58, 2D, 2d unity, mini ld, pong, unity, unity2d

Here’s my compo entry for Ludum Dare 32 (Beacons)

Click the pic to play!!

Also, if you would like me to play your entries then I’ve got a Google Form that you can fill in right here (I’ll try to play and rate them as soon as possible).

Tags: compo, ld32, unity, unity3d

I just wrote a post-mortem for my LD32 game Beacons (probably the earliest I’ve done a post-mortem and also the first time since I actually wrote one) which you can view on my blog.

Also, for those who haven’t played it yet, click here to have a go. I’m also still looking for more games to play/rate so click here to submit your game and I’ll get round to playing/rating them as soon as possible.

Tags: post-mortem, unity, unity3d

Seeing as I’ve rated over 100 games this Ludum Dare, I might as well share my personal top 5 entries in no particular order (apparently based on the ratings I’ve given so no backtracking now) because that’s what everyone is doing these days:

Chromagun

Sun Wukong

Weapon Shortage

Drone-a-pult

Tundra

Also since there’s only five days to go until voting ends, my Google Form (if you would like me to play/rate your entry) is still up plus my own entry (Beacons) could do with some more ratings 😉

Click the pic to play!!

There’s less than 11 hours until judging ends so like everyone else, I’m shamelessly plugging my entry (Beacons) for one last time (Just 5 more votes until I’ve reached the 100 mark!!)

Click the pic to play!!

Also, as always, I still have my Google Form if anyone would like me to play/rate their entries (unless I’ve already played them before). I’ll try and go through every game as quickly as possible depending on the number of outstanding responses I get.

Well I finally did it. I finally managed to get over 100 votes for my entry (Beacons). Huge shoutouts to everyone who played and rated this. Couldn’t have done without you guys 😀

Also, since there’s still some time, you can check out the game by clicking right here (It’s a bit of a long shot but anyone wanna help me reach the 150 mark ;D?)

Took me an entire day to write this but I just published a post on my blog analysing the results I got for my entry (Beacons). You can click here to view the post (although fairly be warned, there will be a lot of charts).

See you in August guys!! 😀

Barely survived this one but here’s my jam entry for Ludum Dare 33 and before you ask, yes, that is the name of the game.

Click The Pic To Play!!

Also as usual, if you would like me to play your entries then I’ve got a Google Form that you can fill in right here (I’ll try to play and rate them as soon as possible).

Tags: jam, LD33, Unreal Engine 4, Windows

Just wrote a post-mortem for my LD33 game First Person Giant Monster Game which you can view on my blog.

Also, for those who haven’t played/rated it yet, click here to have a go. I’m also still looking for more games to play/rate so click here to submit your game and I’ll get round to playing/rating them as soon as possible.

Tags: LD33, post-mortem, postmortem, Unreal Engine 4

Here’s my jam entry for Ludum Dare 34 (It’s a multiplayer game requiring at least 2 players so grab a friend/sibling/relative/significant other/etc. to play this. Also controllers are definitely recommended).

Click the pic to play!!

As always, I also have a Google Form that you can fill in if you would like me to play/rate your entries (I’ll try and do each one as soon as possible).

Tags: 2D, Controller support, game, ld34, local multiplayer, Ludum Dare, multiplayer, multiplayer game, two button controls, unity3d