I’m feeling a bit nerveous about my first LD. Anyway, this time I’m about to finish my game and post it!

Tools to use:

• Unity3d, for fast prototyping;
• vim, because it’s awsome;
• GIMP as the best bitmap editor I found;
• bfxr, because it’s pretty simple;
• Bosca Ceoil, if I’ll manage to write a melody.

So, let’s do this! Good luck, everyone!

The second day begins with bug in Unity, then bugs in game, then bug in GIMP… What a buggy morning!

But then begins the real challenge. And, after 3 or 4 hours of drawing, scaling, drawing again, redrawing etc, meet Mr. P. Layer. Or just Pete.

I hope I can do better, but now is not the time for it.

Greetings, stranger!

My first LD entry was not so good (really, I don’t like it at all), but I’ve got a lot of feedback from people, saying something like “Hey, that’s cool! Just keep doin’ the thing” (thank you, guys! There’s nothing more motivating in the world, than your feedback). So I’ve decided to use every little chance to get better in making games. That’s why I’m in for MiniLD70!

The last LD theme wasn’t inspiring for me at all. I just spent the first day frustrated and trying to get something great from “Ancient Technology”. Now I feel different: MiniLD theme looks interesting. I’ve got an idea to make just a clone of a tabletop game for two persons (yes, multiplayer again), that is absolutely not random-driven (like Go or Chess). But it will not look like a tabletop game. Let’s see how cool can I do!

Wish you enthusiasm and inspiration!

Tags: dump of mind, imin, MiniLD70, postmortem

Hi, everyone! Right from the heart of Siberia we (@komnotmr, @dolorosso and I) are in for the 40th Ludum Dare! I bet it will be 500% more fun then the last time I participated because we're heading to local real life Ludum Dare-related event!

Possibly our tools will be:

• vim for code, because it's awesome;
• phaser as a simple cross-platform engine;
• sunvox for music and sounds (or maybe beepbox);
• gimp for graphics.

Good luck! Let's make some games! :video_game:

...and about 27 hours of coding with about 5 hours of sleep between I need some rest. :bed: Teamwork is truly exhausting for ones who prefer to work alone, y'know. :tired_face: But anyway, we made a huge progress, alone I would never made it that far.

People who gave our game a try say that it's fun, but a bit hard. So we are planning to fix bugs, polish some stuff and create menus and tips for players tomorrow. Hope you're gonna enjoy this one! :sunglasses:

Here is a little WIP screenshot:

Celebrating the last fun-breaking bug fix with wumpa fruit shower. :smiley: It's about time to create a main menu and some kind of tutorial.

Yay! The first submission for a Siberian team. It was hard but it's finished and polished as I never polished any software I made before (there are a few of it). Enjoy and don't forget to share your score!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/snaketris

We're having fun playing Snaketris and seeking bugs and things to improve in post-jam version. Do you want to help? Or do you have a friend and some time to spend playing snake around tetris or vice versa? If you are not sure, here's the gameplay video made of the best moments from the last eight rounds:

https://youtu.be/gxcUn8PzdKE

Play yourself, don't hesitate to comment!

Here's our one!

In colors and font of Snaketris. As you can see, people found it more snake than tetris. =D Check it out too!

Well, enough time have passed since a submission, so I think it's post-mortem time (it's gonna be a long post)!

First of all I want to thank GameDevNSK team for local event they organized for developers to take part of LD and even to stay and code all the night. You made Ludum Dare a 500% more fun!

It was the second my LD (the first was 36th and I didn't manage to finish my game) and the first one with a team. Our team consisted of three linuxoid students with almost no game development background (@komnotmr and I once made a clone of Nidhogg with Phaser.js for our web-dev university course, but it was a one single bug of a game, so doesn't count). However, I was sure we will make it right to the end and here is what we got.

Day 1

When a theme was announced, two of us were on our way to a place (the event took place in a wonderful building of Technopark, see a picture below), so we started to brainstorm in the car. Throwing away all the rubbish, we ended up with four acceptable ideas. Most of them needed tricky sprites to be drawn so, as no-one of us were an artist, we decided to pick the idea that challenges our programming skills and don't require much graphics. Here is where Snaketris begins.

We presented our idea to other 7 teams (6 of them have published their games, check here) and started to code. We agreed to use Phaser as two of us were somewhat familiar with it and also not to care too much about architecture, modularity and stuff like that. So, architecture was pure and simple: a tile field, input handling in 'update', two classes (for snake and for tetrimino) and one 'tick' function in a loop that handles all the mechanics.

When @dolorosso came we were already locked and loaded. First of all we occupied a comfortable couch, created a GitHub repo and set up Phaser. Then we split up: @komnotmr was busy with snake (and created the best falling animation ever. So inspiring!), @dolorosso was learning JS and making tetris work properly, I was busy with rendering and connecting two games in one. By 1:00 a.m. we had an image.

When this sprites was drawn we came up with an idea to make it look kinda Chineese-styled with golden dragon and a bamboo, but, as I mentioned before, there were no artists to help us. As for a code, things were runnding pretty smoothly, yet independently. There were lots of things to link, features to add and, of course, bugs to fix. Most of people around have already went to sleep, Aleksey was playing Super Mario 64 on his Orange PI when we were coding and merging like Pepsi-powered robots. By 5 a. m. we finally fallen asleep in our bean bags.

Day 2

The day begun with breakfast and a quick game of go. Feeling fresh and charged then we continued our development. Long story short, we made our game playable right in time to introduce it to the other participants. The only problem we encountered was a difficult merge gone wrong, turning a game into a black screen (lesson #1: never put everything in one function), but we addressed that problem. By the time of presentation, we had a game with gameplay, fancy squares and even some sounds to present.

After a presentation we had some time to play each other's games and to get some feedback. Some people said that the game was too difficult, but everyone who tried to play it team said it was fun! After a while the event was over and we went home satisfied and inspired.

Day 3: polishing

We really didn't want to spend one more day on this game, but dammit, we didn't want to publish unfinished job either! So, the next day began with a massive bug genocide (well, it appeared to be more like an assasination rather then genocide because there were only four of them and they were hidden very well). By two p. m. I met @komnotmr and we decided to put a little more effort into our game to make it look finished. He made all the pictures for tutorial screen and also added particle effects while I was busy with logo, game over screen and HTML-layers above our game's canvas. The game was published at 3 a. m. the next morning.

Conclusion

Ludum Dare 40 was so much fun to participate! I definitly want more and will be here for LD42 (yeah, seems like I'm skipping the next one). Here are some things I learned from our work:

• As someone already said in his post-mortem, making games is hard. Teamwork is even more harder because you need to explain your point, make compromises and just read someone else's code. But together you can do far more work and achive something you can hardly achive solo.
• It's better to share a room with your teammates rather than work remotely on voice chat.
• Multiplayer games are rated less often because less people can play it.
• Graphics and sound are soul and spirit of jam games. The better they are, the more people plays your game. Ironically, this two aspects are the weaknesses of our game. =)

Thank you for reaching this point. =) Leave your feedback, play Snaketris, make your own games. Hope to see you on oncoming jams. Here's wumpa-shower for you!

Hey, Ludum Dare! We updated our cooperative mix of old-school arcades.

We got rid of the most of dirty LD code and started again from scratch (here's a devlog). Grab your friend and give a new version a try on our itch.io page.

I'm absolutely glad to read that the next LD is starting at Saturday 21st because it made me able to join it! Not 100% sure because my final exam (possibly in my whole life 0_o) starts at the same time, but when I finally pass it I'm going to create a game! =) Also, I hope my friend @komnotmr will join me.

As for tools, we decided to pick the same set because we want to master it:

• vim for code (V-I-M for the win! =D );
• phaser 2 despite of the third one;
• bfxr for sound if presented;
• gimp for graphics.

If it happens to me to run solo, I may decide to switch to GameBoy Advance game development instead of all this stuff. =) Just curious, how many people would play a game presented as a ROM? If you would, please, leave a comment.

Have fun everyone! Let's make some games! :video_game:

Here comes ours! Well, it's not that neat, we're still working on it. The idea is to combine a platformer with text-based control. I hope we will make it on time.

And, hornestly, I'm not sure it's worth. =/ Anyway, today we didn't make much of progress for several reasons, including unrelated personal responsibilities, refactoring, game engine related problems and a few more things. Also, it's still pretty unclear if the game will be fun. Luckily, we have whole the third day to find out. =)

By the way, I see some cool compo games around here. =)

Now I know what they mean saying that making platformers are far more difficult than it seems. However, with only 16 hours left I'm finally pretty satisfied with gameplay and ready to... design a level. Which is also very tricky process, I guess. =(

Here's a screenshot for you, folks.

Looks like my game will have only one level, that is, however, not so easy to master. Do you think this is acceptable, or should there be more?

It was 3 a.m. when I pushed the "publish" button and fell asleep. Now I'm back again and happy to present you my game: Remote Bot!

Control your robot over a command line in this hardcore mix of platformer and text-based game! Play it, rate it, leave a comment and don't forget to have fun!

Well, not really...

It runs soooo sloooow on my smartphone, but still is playable with a Bluetooth keyboard.

Or you can just try it yourself in your browser using this link.

Have fun!

I know it's kinda late for debugging, but I found out that some people are suffering from a rare kind of a mysterious heisenbug that can make the game more difficult and unplesant. That's why I'm opening a hunting season. Play Remote Bot, rate it and, if it happen to you to meet this bug, tell me your browser's and the operation system's names. The description of a bug can be found in the game's description (check out an UPDATE section).

Good luck and let's get rid of this boy!

Ludum Dare 41 have almost passed, I think now is the perfect time for a post-mortem.

Prologue

To the last minute (and even 4 hours after) my participation wasn't certain because there was an exam to pass that started a half an hour after the theme was announced. Nonetheless, I was too excited about the upcoming LD and couldn't resist picking the theme before going to the university. The theme was completely unexpected (the first thought was like "Really, Ludum Dare, REALLY???"). Then I came to the university and discussed the theme with my groupmates who came up with a handful of ideas, from completely stupid or impossible to complete in 72 hours to pretty acceptable ones. As I passed the exam, I took @komnotmr and after a lazy brainstorm session, we finally came up with an idea for the game: a platformer, controlled from a command line. It was a somewhat difficult choice because there are not many people who find typing-based games fun and I had no idea if such a combination will be playable. But I decided to take the risk and began coding (unfortunately, @komnotmr couldn't join me this time).

What went right

• Graphics. ASCII art is quite a shortcut, but it can help you make the right mood. I've seen this in action in @bwalter's first day's posts and fell in love with this aesthetic. I instantly generated an idea of a robot controlled via command line and from that point giving up was no longer an option.
• Polish. One of the personal goals I wanted to reach this time was making a finished game with an intro, a tutorial (or self-explaining UI), win condition and some other stuff. And thanks to graphics' simplicity, I think I got it fully covered.
• Level design. That's where the things got really interesting. It was the first time I was doing level design for a game, but, surprisingly, I didn't feel unconfident and somehow I managed to do it quite well.

What went wrong

• Tools. Yes, Phaser, I'm looking at you. I wasted several hours trying to figure out why the officially supported physics engine doesn't work with tilemaps. The solution was... it wasn't! I was forced to change the physics engine. And it's not the first time Phaser behaves unpredictable, in fact I have already encountered strange thing like this working on Snaketris' gamepad support.
• Collisions. Now I know why they say that platformers are not that easy to create. Almost every collision-related decision I made was a workaround, not the real solution. I don't think it's such a bad thing, especially for a jam game, but deep inside me a perfectionist programmer cries.
• Timing. Sometimes life decides to split an event into two parts and seizes the day in the middle of it. That is my case.

You should always learn, young padawan

...and Ludum Dare is a great opportunity to do it! This is what I got from the LD41:

• First of all, the theme doesn't really suck. Even the worst one can be transformed to an exciting game, you just need to dig it deep enough to find the actual gem of an idea.
• If you want to do something, do it yourself. Sadly, this time my enthusiasm wasn't as contagious as is was during the previous Ludum Dare, so I couldn't team up with my friends. Lonely ride is a completely different experience with its pleasant aspects (no useless arguments, no bloody merges in the git) and the unpleasant ones (sometimes you are wrong and you realize it when it's too late).
• Be ready to cut the most of your game's content. Can't say I didn't know it before the current jam, but want to point it one more time. The first concept for Remote Bot contained a lot of animated (!) sprites I made for the objects I didn't have time to implement (e.g. a spring from the image below). Maybe if I didn't spend my time on that useless animations, I would sleep better (haha).

Boink!

It's all about journey, not the destination

For me Ludum Dare is a full spectre of emotions, from despair ("No way I can do it in the time this short.") to overwhelming excitement ("Holy crap, I did it!"). And the pleasant bonus in the end of it are a game to be proud of and a pile of awesome games to play and rate.

The next time I want to take part in the compo and use something different to Phaser, more low-level stuff like PIXI with Matter or even some sort of C. For now, I just want to relax and play some more games. =)

Thanks for reaching this line!

P.S.: for everyone who left their feedback for my game: thank you very much, guys and gals! You are the greatest power of Ludum Dare! And special thanks to @jupiter-hadley and @philstrahl: watching someone playing my game is not only a pleasure, but a rare kind of feedback, the most valuable one, I guess.