Here are a few videos I put together showing progress of my game Vox…

http://www.facebook.com/VoxGame

This is a direct continuation of the voxel engine/game that I made for Ludum Dare #23.

Hope you like… feel free to ask me any questions or comments yo might have?

Alwaysgeeky

Tags: alwaysgeeky, cubes, gamedev, indie, minecraft, progress, SuccessStory, tips, vlog, Vox, voxel engine, voxels, youtube

Hi,

I am a developper from the 90sml team. We’re going to participate to the next Jam … That’s pretty exciting.

If there are here some Python language Fans. I’m working on an open source game framework. It’s based on pygame & box2d.

Hope you’ll like it : https://github.com/dawicorti/bloodyhell (work in progress)

-> Feel free to use it, fork it, ignore it ^^ …

Tags: framework

OK so first off, i use gamemaker because i’m S*** with scripting languages, but i thought because gamemaker can support mutliplayer via GML (witch i gotten the hang of now) and can and will be releasing the link to my game for beta multiplayer witch will probably use a modem connection status for simplicity. but right now i cant find a place to post my game for the download page so ill update my status for now to give you the closer i have gotten to getting a publisher. for now however we can only wait for the best!        😀 happy ludum everyone 😀

.:UPDATE:.

-notes

– i CAN be using a IP/TCP address  if the modem fails to work, otherwise, i will make connection settings custom via 4 settings: IPX, TCP/IP modem or serial (MAYBE not sure though)

-also i will be making connection (SEE ABOVE) to the main server in a custom options menu that will appear when one selects mutiplayer, where they can choose between 4 options (not sure about serial though…) and then connect to 4 different main servers, depending on the chosen connection, each server compatible up to 16 players.

~ Mohammad Mohammad :3

ok ive gotten a bit TOO eager about multiplayer games, and i made a post containing GML code that will show what my game will look like:

//this connection is made for ipx connections
{
mplay_init_ipx();
}

//this is another for TCP/IP and its a bit more complicated…
{
mplay_ipaddress();
//to show the ip address is completely OPTIONAL and is NOT recommended,unless its in a separate room.
mplay_init_tcpip(address_here);
}

//heres one for modem connection,as you only need to enter your phone number
//note that the initilization string is left empty,witch is possible
{
mplay_init_modem(0,95155658066)
}

//finnaly, heres one for serial, witch is much more complicated and im only using this for demonstration.
{
mplay_init_serial(2,100,0,3,1)
}

//heres a short command to see wheather is returns successful
mplay_connect_status()

//and if the command above fails, the server will end to prevent bugs, or “crash”
if (false)
{
mplay_connect_status();
}
else
{
mplay_end();
};

//note that this code is VERY buggy and im leaving this open source.if you wish to debug it and repost it, im
//glad to do so. also note that certien pieces of code will not appear normally when i put it up, but will show
//normally in the compiler from where i typed it up.

im still working on some multiplayer games, and heres some more code for you to see (if you dident already see my previous code…):

//this piece of code is more or less about creating sessions. note that complilation errors will occur if you
//just copy and paste it onto here. this is because only one program or “{ & }” can be put at a time.
//and as such, i will try to limit my programs as minimal as possible, still keeping a good deal
//of debuged funtions as possible.

//to start a session, or what would be a server, you would do this:
{
mplay_session_create(name,player_amount,playername);
mplay_session_name(a_number);
}
//to find the amount of sessions avaible, and join, you would do the following:
{
mplay_session_find();
mplay_session_join(the_number,playername);
}
//note that the number may be 0. (the first session, IF avaible)
//to check the status of the session,along with witch connection your using, you wold do the following:
{
mplay_session_status();
mplay_connect_status();
}
//to easily end the session,along with a message, all you must do is this:
{
mplay_session_end();
show_message(either connection lost or the game session has ended.);
}
//to display it as a bug,do the following
{
mplay_session_end();
show_error(the game has ended and/or crashed.,abort);
}

//i hope you guys liked my previous scripts,for we shall be coding in GML. if you experince errors in the compiler
//like, “PROGRAM ENDS BEFORE END OF CODE” it means you have one too many programs. other than that lets get
//started shall we? this script is about players and handling with them. because its soo short we will
//throw in some more commands on messages.

//to see how many players are on a session,along with a certian name, you would do the following:
{
mplay_player_find();
mplay_player_name(a_number);
}

//note that in order to do this you MUST use mplay_player_find(),else it will not work.

//to find the ID of that certian player,use the following code
{
mplay_player_find();
mplay_player_id(a_number);
}

//now onto messages.messages are pre-programmed strings the will be sent to a player instance.
//but enough of that! lets get programming! lets start on a personal message sent to a player.
//it would look like this: (use 0 to send it to all players)
{
mplay_message_send(player,id,message);
}
//to make sure its sent to it,you would use the following code:
{
mplay_message_send_guaranteed(player,id,message);
}
//this next code will have you “recive” messages from other players: (use 0 for any message)
{
mplay_message_receive(player);
}
//now we can tinker with this abit.the next following code can be used to do diffrent things with the message:
{
mplay_message_receive(player);
mplay_message_id(); Returns the identifier of the last received message.
mplay_message_value(); Returns the value of the last received message.
mplay_message_player(); Returns the player who sent the last received message.
mplay_message_name(); Returns the name of the player who sent the last received message.
mplay_message_count(player); Returns the number of messages left in the queue from the player (use 0 to count all message).
mplay_message_clear(player); Removes all messages left in the queue from the player (use 0 to remove all message).
}
//there you have it! if your eager to see more code ill be happy to show you just simply post a comment
//down below and ill see how it goes!

Hey guys,

So one day, I thought, “What could make this game better? What could make it more fun?” The simple answer, of course, was multiplayer. What’s more fun than playing a game with your friends? However, multiplayer in Unity is harder than you think. After several failed attempts, I watched a few simple tutorials, and finally came up with a working… thing. Not really even an alpha… Anyways here it is at it’s ugliest:

Since then, I’ve added tons of stuff, fixed over one HUNDRED glitches, and added a lot of simple features! (Such as Chat, Ragdolls, etc)

I’ll cover the latest update in a new video hopefully posted sometime this week. But for now, Update 1 is here. I hope to continue this update series like Overgrowth Alpha update series, so check back on DontBeNoobish and RobProductions channels for the fastest way to hear about them.

Happy Gaming, Ludum Dare <3

Tags: Assault, Isolated, multiplayer, SuccessStory, unity, unity3d, update, video

I think the rating system in Ludum Dare is not good (and in many other websites as well). I don’t know a better solution, but I think it is worthy thinking about this problem.

Let’s say there are 1000 submissions and 1000 reviewers.  If each submission receives a lot of reviews, then the average of the reviews will give a good estimation of the quality of the submissions.

However, if each reviewer only reviews a few submissions, each submission will only get a few reviews, which means that the average will yield a very poor and “noisy” estimation that doesn’t represent the opinion of the community as a whole.

This means that simply asking people to rate and averaging the rates is not a good idea in this case.

I suggest that we invite our mathematician friends to come up with a smarter and more elegant solution for this. Wouldn’t that be awesome?

I played around with crossfilter a few months back, which is a neat library for filtering data across different metrics. I figured, the Ludum Dare statistics would be fun to visualize that way. So, not gonna go to deep into what this is and how it works, but here;

* Crossfilter, http://square.github.com/crossfilter/
* Ludum Dare 22, http://comicbookguy.kvisle.net/dump/ldcf/
* Ludum Dare 23, http://comicbookguy.kvisle.net/dump/ld23cf/

It’s just something I made for fun, and you can do whatever you want with it for what I care

Raw data:

* Ludum Dare 22, json encoded: http://comicbookguy.kvisle.net/dump/ldcf/minut.txt
* Ludum Dare 23, json encoded: http://comicbookguy.kvisle.net/dump/ld23cf/minut.txt

Have fun. And, I can’t guarantee that this is bugfree, but it looks OK at a first glance.

I would like to hear comments from the community what things they do to help inspire their games, whether it would be doodling, staring at their favorite model, messing around with a laser pointer near a cat.  No comment here is too crazy or simple!

I made a small game using unity3d engine

Game mode  first person horror type for more info and download link

Please tell if you have any improvements of if you find bug:).

Tags: Inside game unity unity 3d

Every now and then I see someone tackle the discussion about voting and results, after thinking for a while here are my thoughts.

One of the main problem (right next to small number of votes == possible better scores) is that some voters like to give good ratings, while some doesn’t. You can imagine someone being a jerk and giving bad ratings to good games, and the opposite, someone who is way too nice and gives good rating even to bad games. I noticed this on my last entry (LD#22), where I quit halfway through and still some people gave medium ratings to my game.

To remedy this, maybe we could give ratings based on other rating by the voter. If someone gives a lot of games 2-3 stars, but gives a game 5 stars, it must mean that that game is somewhat better than the rest. On the other hand, if someone goes around giving 5 stars to a bunch of games, it’s possible that those games are not really worth 5 stars.

Two possible workaround would be: calculating the rating based on the position of the game in relation to other games the voter voted (if he votes for 3 games, giving 2, 3 and 4 stars, their real rating would be 1, 3 and 5 stars, or something like that) or letting the voter order his voted games from best to worst. I’m not sure if this would work out, and I know you guys will be able to find a lot of flaws in it

Another possible solution to the voting problem, and this would mean an overhaul of the voting system, would be to separate voting in phases. Every phase would last for a week, and during that week the voter would have to vote on 10 games for his votes to be considered. The first phase would have all games, randomly given to the voters. The next phase would have just a fraction of the games (something like the 500 best voted games), the third phase even less games (for example, 100) and the last phase would have the top 10 games to be voted. I believe this would make voting something a lot more exciting than just picking random games and hoping they don’t suck, and would also make people vote more, especially on the last phase where almost everyone would come to vote, since the games are somewhat guaranteed to be good.

I recently noticed, we have a ton of posts ranting about the rating system.

Either I missed out on the other compos, or people suddenly started disliking it?

Why now? I’ve been here for almost 6 compos now, and I very rarely heard someone complain about the rating system. Ludum Dare isn’t about winning after all! So, basically if we go for actual LD-esque rating there would be only one solution:

We disable the ratings altogether, and people just give their opinions in the comments.

If it would work like this, we have the basics of LD summed up in the rating. I quote Mike (PoV) here now:

“Our (Ludum Dare’s) role is to start something, to plant the seed of that next great indie game..”
- Mike Kasprzak, Ludum Dare 18 Keynote

And comments are perfect feedback for that:

• You can point out what’s good and what’s bad.
• You can make suggestions on what to change or add.
• You can point out any bug that’s in the game.

Thus, I conclude: Rather than changing the rating system, you could just disable it. People get their feedback in the comments, and there is no prize for winning anyway.

Now, let the flaming, which points in my general direction, begin.

• What’s going on here?
• Again about voting
• Rating system

Hoo boy. Another Ludum Dare coming up, and I am going to exacerbate
an existing problem by also talking about the rating system. But first,
I have a confession.

I like the rating system. Screw accuracy, it encourages people to
play your game. We’re all hungry to see who made the best games this
time around, so we play each other’s games, rate them, and give
feedback. The rating system creates more feedback, because it
encourages play. And I also like seeing the top games: the top games
are pretty solid games these days, even if (especially if) they’re
short. And on top of that, I love having the opportunity to get
quantitative feedback on my game!

So I came to talk about improving system accuracy, because I dug up a
pretty simple statistical analysis of the voting system that shows the
likelihood distribution of the top three overall ranked games from LD
#23, and the picture is not pretty. (From: Let’s make a voting system)

Well, it is kind of pretty, but the implications aren’t. It kind of
implies that the ranking (not the ratings! the ranking!) is a bit of a
farce. I provide the mathematical model, a discussion of community
goals, and a possible fix in my article.

Article: Let’s make a voting system

It’s been a while! Back in the judging period of LD23, I promised I would make a post-compo version of Recluse – one with sound and bug fixes – but I was too busy with college back then. Well, I finally manged to work on the game, and here it is!

You can download the new version in the entry page – in the same links as usual. (I’ve included the original compo versions inside the RAR files, so that shouldn’t be a problem)

To make up for the long time without any update, I also decided to include a whole new game mode for those who are bad enough dudes to find all secret collectibles in the game. This should be enough reason for people who have already played Recluse to download it again, and in case you still haven’t, this is also a great opportunity to try it out for the first time.

Changes in the new game:

• Sound.
• A new game mode, activated when you collect all secrets and finish the game.
• Adjustments on the difficulty and controls.
• Some new animations where it was needed.
• 4 hidden collectibles instead or 3.
• Bug fixes.

Unfortunately, the screen flashing (which is not intentional) was the only bug that couldn’t be solved. On the other hand, I managed to change the color of those flashes from white to purple, which made them less intense.

Well, I hope you enjoy it!

Tags: post-compo, recluse

go on…im waiting…

i wanna see witch is the best *gif animated file out there…I NEED ARTWORK PPL!

First off i’m not affiliated with this company but i love they humor and they are looking for people.

So if you want make TRUE games tell them us

Hey there, LD! I took a break from game development for a while, but now I’m back and ready to rock.

I’m in for this month’s LD.

I’m going to be working on getting my personal game framework ready for the jam. Hopefully I can do it in time!

I’m probably going to try making a JRPG, since I’ve been fascinated by them lately. I’ve been playing Breath of Death VII and am going to start a game in Cthulhu Saves the World soon; you can get both of those in a pack on Steam for $2.99 USD, by the way. 😀

So, that being said, I’m looking forward to this.

Did you miss me?

– Henry

This is my team’s first full-size Ludum Dare competition. This is also the busiest weekend we’ve had in months. Funny how that coincides; life hates us.

Artist – Stuck on a fishing trip Friday/Saturday, home late Monday.
Musician – Unable to make team meeting due to family issues and lack of ride.
Lead Designer – Friend’s birthday party to attend, college assignments, and campus job to attend to.
Programmer – Stuck at home waiting on assets. ;__;

First tip: Make plans in advance, don’t be surprised when those plans collapse a week before the LD.

The theme was announced, “Evolution.” I squirmed in my chair a bit out of dislike for the theme. Rush home, get on Skype, no one’s on. *facepalm* When I got everybody in one chat, we got to planning. Odd as it is, the first idea that was shared ended up being our final choice. Plenty of ideas were vented in our chat, but the problem was that I can almost guarantee that all of them were thought of by someone else, as evolution doesn’t make for as much originality as you would think.

Examples: (I’ll link to games that were made using ideas that had been thrown out in our chat)
“I’ve an idea where we take some kind of basic game, and have the art and music evolve as the player progresses. The only caveat is that a similar game has been done before, by the name of Upgrade Complete”
“We could make a funny game showing how some evolved animals would fail miserably laughably bad”
“An AI could evolve”
“Maybe, a man of some sort creates a cyborg. Half human half robot or half animal half robot, which ever one. And as the game goes on it evolves and turns on the player.”
“Maybe the player could evolve in some way, not the character they’re playing, but the player themselves”
“like lets say the music evolves ranging from who knows when to today different guitars or sounds from your guitar, up to modern music. Make like a music game based on that or something, idk.”

All of that has been done. I just know it.
Second tip: Go for the most original idea.

We went back to the idea of a breeze becoming a depression and later a category 5 hurricane. This was unique and also had a grassroots feel to it. Our team being based in Louisiana, no one was more qualified to make a hurricane game. Also it was the only game that made its own pun.

“going from a wind to a hurricane, and we could call it The Winding of Isaac (for those not in the know, Isaac is the hurricane that’s supposed to hit us in the next few days)”

The original plan was to make the game follow from an original breeze caused by something or other in the Atlantic all the way to a Category 5 Hurricane hitting the Gulf of Mexico area and use the “music evolving” idea to let the music help show how powerful you’re becoming. Yeah, that didn’t happen.
Third tip: If you can’t do everything, take what you can and make it nice.

From the start, we knew the idea of going from a light breeze just wasn’t going to happen with our artist out of town, not to mention the difficulty of planning. So we skipped forward to the final stage of the game where you’re a hurricane going from Category 1 to Category 5. Once it was planned, work began. The hurricane ended up in game pretty quick, and it rotated (backwards, *facepalm*), and I added a random background, just so I could see the movement of the hurricane relative to the map.

The hurricane was intended to (and does, if you’re super good at our super bad game) grow with the amount of water you gained, and that would be represented by the background scaling up or down rather than the hurricane growing on the screen, considering how much real estate it needed to look proper. We used the scaling of the hurricane itself as an attempt to reference how high/low you are in the sky.

Fourth tip: Developer graphics.

If for whatever reason, like in our case, your artist is unavailable and is the holdup in the development process, don’t sit there and do nothing. Make some garbage art that no one will see but you. You’re not doing it for the final game, you’re doing it so that you can move forward. Instead of jumping over the hurdle, you just gotta plow through it and stand it back up later. This is the fatal flaw of our game. I relied too heavily on the hope that our artist would be able to do a decent amount of work in a decent amount of time.

This led to two crucial features to the play of the game being broken/missing. The first, fronts, would have added challenge and variety to the game, through the use of strong winds blowing your hurricane left/right, making it go faster/slower, making it spin faster/slower, and changing hurricane height all based on what front hit where and what direction it was facing.
The second, and most important to the “gameness” of our game, was the endgame. With no end game showing the destruction your hurricane wrought, you just fly right on through the top of the map, never to be seen again. With no end game, there was no scoring system beyond the water count and speed that you’ve managed to achieve. The whole thing just ended up being a lot of concept and not a lot of play.

A word from our artist: “I would like to say working on the artwork for a couple hours before the deadline was very pressuring but I enjoyed being part of the team and will be making a port for this game.” Expect his GameMaker/HTML5 port to be a post-competition build.

PS: This post contains just under 500 characters less than all the code used for the game. Props to Corona SDK for making game development that easy.

Hey all, Just saying hey and looking forward to my first Ludum Dare on the 24th 😀