Hello everyone. I managed to finish my second Ludum Dare Compo entry this weekend and I’m proud of this achievement. I feel like I’ve created a much better game than my first entry.

PLAY MISTER MISBEHAVE NOW!

Description of the Game

In Mister Misbehave, you control a character who, well, likes to misbehave often. He’s banished from the city, and he continues to misbehave when he arrives to the countryside. However, the villagers are not happy with his misbehavings so they try to catch him to put an end to his bad actions.

The basic gameplay involves a tile-based, randomly generated forest map with a couple of houses (villages) on it. Our villain tries to misbehave in as many tiles as possible before the villagers catch him and give him a taste of his own medicine. There are also some “healer” type of characters in the game, dressed in white, who wanders around and tries to repair the damage our villain has brought to the universe. These characters reduce your total score, but can easily be dispatched by our villain. So, basically, villagers chase you, you misbehave a lot and also try to chase healers.

The Good Stuff

• Sleeping is important. I cannot emphasize on this nearly enough. Nearly 15 hours of my 48 hours were spent while sleeping and I’m not complaining. Sleeping is important to put your mind together and it gives you the boost you need to go on when things get tougher.
• Solid game title and concept. I believe I came up with a great name for my entry. The villain character is also a little bit different from all the villains we’re used to see, so I believe it’s a nice twist to the theme which made the game entertaining.
• Console text. I added a console to my game which describes all the misbehavings you’ve done. There are 5 different flavor text for each of the tile types you can misbehave in. I wanted to add even more tile types and flavor text to the game, and I might do so if I get to try my luck at a post-compo version. Right now, it’s one of the best features of the game imo.
• Feature complete. I managed to put in almost all the features I’ve planned initially for this game. The content does get repetitive after a couple of plays but still, it’s enough for a player to try the game a few more times after his initial try.

The Bad Stuff

• Pixel art. I suck at creating art. I tried doing some pixel art, and while it wasn’t a bad effort, it lacks style which might’ve lured a couple more people into playing the game. I want to learn more about doing pixel art if I want the look of my games to be more attractive.
• Difficulty adjustment. Once again, some people have found my game to be a little on the difficult side. While it’s definitely easier than my first entry in LD23, next time I’ll remember to put in a difficulty slider in my game to satisfy everyone’s needs.
• THERE ARE NO GOATS. ’nuff said.

So, what now?

I’m a little bit busy in the next couple of weeks, but I’ll try to make a post-compo version of my game in the future. The features I have in mind are adding levels to the game, adding more tile types and more flavor text, along with some other character types that approach you in a different way. Better graphics if possible are also on my to-do list. I guess we’ll see what happens next. Until then, I just have one thing left to say:

PLAY MISTER MISBEHAVE NOW!

Tags: ld25, postmortem, unity

Here be my timelapse video, with gameplay video at the end.

Play it here.

It was my very first time taking part in a Ludum Dare, but I already did make some games and one game jam with friends of mine, so I wasn’t new either to technical aspects of gamemaking nor to the 48 hours time limit. In the end, I find my game quite satisfying, except for its difficulty wich is a little bit excessive.

 Play Goat 666

So here comes the post mortem :

-As I said, no big surprise during the making of the game. I didn’t get unexplained errors while coding, and didn’t spend too much time on deciding how the graphics would be done (except on the cover art).

-Good time management. Even if I became less and less efficient as I got tired, I endend up having some hours left to polish everything, which I wasn’t sure of at the beginning. It may only be chance since I didn’t really plan anything :B A good thing is that I decided quite precisely what I wanted to do right from the beginning, so I didn’t spare time thinking of what I should do after that : I knew where I was going and how.

-The experience was really enjoyable, even if I felt totally destroyed after that 😀

-Friends. Lov’em.

-Unconvincing game mechanics. I don’t feel like my game actually is really fun in its gameplay, even if the music and the graphics make it more nervous.

-Unbalanced game : although I managed, in the end, to tweak a little the probabilities and enlarge the hitboxes of the people you have to click in the game, the difficulty is still quite high. I usually make this mistake of forgetting that people who will play my games for the first time won’t be used to it as I am since I’m permanently testing it, and thus that I should make it easier even if I can beat it quite easilly. One day I will remember it.

-I don’t code fast enough..

-Couldn’t really get any sleep D: I tried though, but too much tea, coffee and not being at home (thus only having a sofa to sleep) broke  the mood. So I ended up being really really tired and slow at working.

-I used musics from other artists, which forbade me to submit my game in the compo, so I moved it to the jam. I didn’t read the rules with enough attention and though it would be OK if I used free-of-use tracks. This is no big deal, but it’s kinda annoying since I made everything else by myself within the 48 hours, so… Well, I’ll be more careful next time.

-I wasted time writing posts because I wasn’t always sure of my english. Nothing grave, but still, it’s kinda stupid to spend 5-10 minutes on a five lines post 3:

-Spare more time on looking for game concepts, and learn how to do it more efficiently. It’d be nice to have a really fun game for once.

-Learn how to make music, for heck’s sake D:

-Maybe start working with 3D in order to get moar skills, even if it’s quite hasardous for now.

-Keep washing the dishes when I get too tired/upset to do anything right. In the two game jams I made, there was that moment when I just finished something and I though “Okay I really need a break right now, but I don’t feel like sleeping, and I’ll get even more upset if I just stay there doing nothing”. And seriously, washing dishes is the best thing to do at that moment 😀 It’s totally mechanical, so you don’t have to concentrate while doing it, and it’s more relaxing than doing nothing. Well, maybe it’s just me…

-Do games ! More games !

Recent post about my game with a video

The theme

As many others, I was sure. 100% sure “End of the world” would make it as the theme.
LD started at 3AM local time here, and I was honestly tired, shocked and disappointed when I read that its “You are the villain”.

The idea

I started from scratch thinking about a game I could make. All I knew was that I wanted to make use of box2dlights which I had discovered a few days before and which I adapted to some extend by playing around with the shaders. I came up with an idea after an hour or so. I thought about being evil and remembered my last neighbour who was a huge douche-bag. I remembered how I got really mad after a few months of fights with him and what thoughts where roaming my head during that time – they weren’t nice and definitely not rated as E-for everyone but more E as in evil. So I thought my game could be something like this:
You are a nice guy actually, getting into a fight with your new neighbour. As you become more angry, you start to do acts of evil to him.

The game-play

The actual game-play would be that you sneak around his house and garden and manipulate things to play evil tricks on him (plug his toilet, trample his plants, poison his bird, …). While you do that he would be roaming the area and have a cone of light indicating his field of view. You would have to avoid being caught by him. For each evil act you would unlock new things to do,eventually even new rooms in his house, in which you could free the villain in you. While the neighbour roams around, he would start yelling and play funny animations while he rages. All this was planned to happen from a top-down (birds-eye) view. The game would end by you killing him. In the final act.
So much for the plan.

The creation – day 1

I decided to use a tiled map for the layout as I have some kind of work-flow that should help me speeding up things. What I had not done is integrating physics with it. I used tiled-map editor and drew the physical borders over the map and had to make my game (java, libgdx) create physical bodies at the right position perfectly aligned with the tiles drawn. This took a while as I made some really mind blocking mistakes at that time. But well … I had barely slept, had a Christmas party the night before (did leave at 4AM, so not much sleep) and this was the result. So after two or three hours I had the work-flow reestablished and started to implement all the other stuff.

I used placeholder gfx for everything until ~15hours after theme announcement. I started adding some rotating cone-lights which was easily done, and wrote some code to make a playable character and some “are you in the light”-detection stuff. I started creating some ugly graphics and put everything together.

After adding the neighbour with some simple path-following, I realised what a massive amount of content I would have to create within the next 24 hours to make my concept enjoyable and got really frustrated. But I had to sleep by that time anyway. So I thought I might have an idea the next morning.

The creation – day 2

The next morning I warned myself, not to do the same mistake as last LD. Last time I had my game mechanics not settled until an hour before the deadline, which made me finish a lot of other things in a hurry (thus resulting in bad quality, like a wall-of-text-tutorial). I wanted it to be done earlier this time so I could actually polish things and have nice graphics and music. I decided that I had to change directions a bit to get that done. I threw away the neighbour concept. That was a hard step because I really liked this take on the theme. I felt like it would be nice to have the villain being just an ordinary guy like you and me, turning into a “monster” (very breaking bad style).

Instead I focused on what I already had, and that was the sneaking around and not being detected and line-of-sight part. I changed the setting from “house and neighbour” to “Villain in jail on a run”.  I had not created many graphics yet, so content wise, it wasn’t that bad. I had used tiled only to place all my meta-data in the “neighbours house” so it was relatively easy to generate a completely new map with more than one enemy. I added some security-cameras that would rotate between to specified angles with a specified cone-angle. By being able to place and define all these things (including the paths for the AI jail-guards) I was able to get some concept done quickly. Here’s a screen of what the map looked like in tiled-map editor with all the meta-data at a later point in time (click to enlarge):

I added mouse-over items that would explain game mechanics and some basic storyline about you waking up in jail after an intense dream of a goat that betrayed you. (You should play the game to see what this leads to). I added the ability to kill guards while not being detected and some kind of jump/dash that would make you move forward quickly to escape the view of cameras and guards. I think at that point I felt like the main game mechanics had been done. I created three difficulties that unlock once you have completed the preceding map. I had some nice to have features on my trello-board but thought I might postpone them and work on assets and music first.

The audio

I spent around 2 hours to compose a main theme for the game. If you like you can listen to it in my dropbox folder: PLAY. I used Reaper for the first time together with some free virtual orchestral instruments and my Korg SP-250. This worked very well although I didn’t know the software well. I added some percussion sounds that are played when you get caught but other than that I couldn’t find a way to produce nice foot-stepping and attack sounds. As this is a stealth-game I found it not so bad to have the main character not producing noise. I still am not really missing the sounds much. But I might add some in a post-compo version.

Well that’s basically it. I produced all animations with pro motion which I had bought and learned a few weeks ago, and I start feeling comfortable with it. Oh and as with my last LD I used Artemis Entity System Framework instead of a classical component-based approach and this is still my preferred way to do things in games. I haven’t come along the game that I wouldn’t want to implement with this pattern. If you haven’t heard of Entity Systems as a design pattern – give it a try and wrap your head around it 😉

So instead of a time-lapse here is a short animation showing screenshots of different stages in the development (click to enlarge, but ignore the compression artefacts please ;):

One last paragraph about controls

A lot of people in the comments on my LD page, say that they have problems with the control scheme that I defined. When you press W, you walk in the direction of your mouse-cursors position. If you press space, you jump into your mouse cursors direction.  I did a mistake that I didn’t realize until release in that pressing A and D doesn’t make you strafe orthogonal to your orientation, but in a circle around the mouse cursor (this part actually is really weird). I suggested in my games description not to use A+D at all. In fact I haven’t used them at all, which is why I didn’t recognize the wrong movements.

Yesterday I started porting the whole thing to android. It’s running smooth on Tegra2 devices, but even without android specific performance tuning I had it running at 30FPS on my desire hd. Given this input scheme it actually fits very well to touch input. Maybe I was influenced by that when I made it the way it is now.

What I would like to ask you, in case you play the game and plan to leave a comment: Could you please suggest a way of control that would suit you better? I can hardly think of one, so I need some input. Thanks in advance and please rate my game, i’ll definitly rate yours.

Oh, and it has a goat. 

And English is not my first language

Makarun: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=15341

TL;DR

What went well:

• Using the right tools that I was familiar with
• Concentrating on the mechanics before spending much time on assets
• Using Trello to stay focused
• Isolating myself for two days to concentrate
• Using Artemis Entity System Framework
• Not drinking as much energy drinks as I did last time – I switched to tea.

What went wrong:

• I was very tired the first day because I had partied to long on a Christmas party on Thursday.
• I defined my scope wrong initially but was able to adjust on the second day without much trouble
• I really should have added at least a second control scheme, but I wasn’t aware of it during development
• I made myself too much pressure because I was really overwhelmed by my placement in the last LD
• No breaks. I should have stopped every now and then, if even only for a short break.
• Adding static lights for the map in tiled was a bad idea because I had no preview implemented and had to restart the game on each change.

I started and even had an idea and everything, but my weekend was so busy that I had no time to work on it, even for the jam.  *Groan* it looks like “Super Evil Soviet Goat Commies vs. The Moon” will have to wait.

Hi people.

It’s more easy for me to make a complete game than write a post en English, but I must do a post mortem.

So, It’s first time a really try to finish a game. Last time I had only one day and just had the time to finish the engine.

Good things append :

– Time

• Friday night the gameplay was ok.

• Saturday the engine was ok

• Sunday was relax and graphics/polish.

So time was perfect and had time to sleep

– Graphics

I’m actually happy with my basic graphics. I never do this type of work, I usually use my minions designers

Some people here (ok, deepnight) motivate me to practice a make me believe a developer can actually draw correct things

– Code :

Well I imagine making game all the week for work help me a little

I just had a problem trying to use a buffer system without use it never before and renounce when I see that doesn’t change nothing for this little game performance

Keep it simple and dirty code is the unique way to finish in time.

Bad things append too:

– Theme

Well, finally a make a so original Dungeon Keeper like, like everybody

I keep with only 2 ideas, this one and another with classical games end boss where we control the boss. But there were too many different gameplay to code.
– Time.

My wife come back from week end to early

Without that my elfe had a blow and the mage some spell

I wanted to do some bigger/fun monsters too…

I doesn’t had time for using particules, light system etc, so I was a little disappointed to not use this for a realy nice polish

– Music

Last biggest point is the sound music. Bfxr help me a little for sound, but I didn’t know how to do a correct music. So there is not…

I had a really good time doing thing I will try to participate again.

I just regret there is not gatherings here en Santiago de Chile (and south America) when I see so many in my country, en France.

Thanks everyone for playing and for your feedback!

You can test the game here : Gobelin’s Dungeon

Manest

Thanks everyone, the feedback is great so far!

Postmortem – Crime Scene

Right?

- Unexpected use of theme: I think, this was one of the great features of the game. A lot of games were created putting the player’s character as the villain, or even the Player himself as the villain. And I usually work with games that could bring some “Good” entertainment, based on virtues, heroes and fun gameplay. So in this game you control a detective that needs to find “Who is the Villain?”, and he says to the assassin: “You are the villain!”.

- Experience with Unity 3D. I’ve being using Unity since 2009, in version 1.6, when everything on the interface was terrible. And since the beginning I felt a lot closer to Unity’s creators concept/philosophy of bringing game dev for everyone and on every platform. That’s one of the reasons that I use their tool for almost 4 years. So, when I’m Jamming, the experience helps me a lot. I know I could do better 2D in other engines, but the fact that i know how to work with unity kept me going. (and today I’m a professor in Unity 3D programming course in a Game Design University)

- No art experience at all: My experience with Photoshop and Maya/Max is close to none. Not the use of the tool, but the knowledge of art, composition and colors. I don’t draw or 3d model, so I needed to create a game based on cubes. I think the art concept, at the end, was pretty cool. The use of colors and some post-processing effects of Unity Pro really came along. And everything is made with the transformation of Cubes or Cylinders. No UV Unwrapping, no texture painting, no animation or rigging, nothing more.

Wrong?

- Lack of time (or say, organisation): In this weekend I had a lot of family appointments, like my mom was getting married and everyone of the family was around. So it took me a lot of time, and I could only code between 2pm – 6pm on Saturday, and 5pm – 12pm on Sunday. So I had 11 hours to make the game. In the end, I could not polish enough. The game has no tweens at all, like fade in, fade out, transitions, hud movements. I think the thing that did worst without a proper tween is the End Game. Some said to me that they didn’t know if they had won or lost. =p

- No art experience, so I did not have the proper experience on creating a rigged character, that could walk, shoot, and stuff.

And in the end…

The jam was really fun! This is my first time at Ludum Dare, but i’ve being to a lot of solo and group jams.
I’m very excited to Global Game Jam in january. I’m hosting the Brasília-GGJ in Brazil.

Thanks to all, and thanks for the feedback.

[1] – Wanna play it and rate it? http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=19073
[2] – Wanna se what else I did as a developer? Knights of Pen & Paper for instance. http://www.beholdstudios.com.br

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 18th, 2012 at 1:13 pm and is filed under LD #25. 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.

Wooh! Coming off of the last Jam where our team had to pull out early, this one went really well.

Feel free to play and rate our game:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=19139

Good:

• Scale: Last LD, we decided on way to large a scale for the game (causing us to not really have a game by Sunday night and having to pull out). This time we went with an extremely simple idea that we could get actually playable in a single day, then improve on.
• Lots of good ideas: The theme allowed so many good ideas, we could easily come up with quite a few unique ones quickly, something we felt was difficult with “Evolution” and “Tiny World.”
• Style: Mostly do to our artist, our game had a lot more style than any of our previous games and we were able to put together a “complete” package.

• Time Management: Partly due to our simple idea, but it was a lot easier to manage our time and not be as stressed during the whole process.
• Good Team: Although this is the first team our artist Jammed with us, we all meshed really well and didn’t really have any conflicts (Other than some discussions on the design of the game).

Bad:

• Change From 3D to 2D: Our game was originally in 3D; however, do to some technical issues, to save time our artist decided to change over to 2D. He was able to crank out a lot of art quickly so it turned out to be a good thing, since we might not have finished otherwise.

• Unity’s Prefabs: For all the things that are great about the Unity game engine… working with prefabs on a team with source control can be a nightmare… Prefabs not saving connections correctly would constantly be breaking the game during merges.
• Last Minute Changes: Although we got a lot done before hand, the last 3 hours became a mad dash of cutting / making compromises as we pushed to finish the game on time.
• Coming off of Finals: The three programmers just finished a week of finals, so we started off tired and warn out. However, even while getting sick we pushed out the game, just wish we were a bit more rested beforehand.
• Ruined Pizza: The first night… the pizza that was delivered was smashed into the side box… I mean really… Thankfully the company sent us another for free, so it turned into a good thing.

Hey all,

Firstly hope all went well with your compo and jam games and I hope you all enjoyed the development.

First note is that Team RobKat is a newly formed game development team, im joined by a new to the industry artist and designer, Katrina Reynolds. Much props to her as she quickly picked up all the niggles game development throws at you 😀

This weekend we developed a game called Grand Theft Crimbo using Unity, originally we were going to call it The Epic Robbery That Ruined Xmas AKA Grand Theft Crimbo but we decided to keep it simple.

The game is about an elf wronged by Santa, the story is kept open for players to imagine. Just know this, this elf is angry, super evil angry. His trusty sidekick, evil goat, drives his sleigh as you terrorise a small village near you evil lair. The plan is to steal presents and not get caught so Santa looks like he didn’t bother with presents this year.

What Went Right

As mentioned before we our a new team and it went really well, we worked cohesively and it was great fun.

We managed to develop most of the mechanics we wanted, stealing presents, driving a sleigh, basic collision, avoiding police.

Most of the graphics required for the game were made in time, its a shame we didnt have time to make the lair, individual house and village decorations but as a game prototype were happy.

Prior to the LD25 jam we decided to do a creative exercise where each voting round we would come up with 5 ideas for each theme, thats 240 game ideas. It really helped us to get into the creative mind set and we also now have 10 other really good game ideas to experiment with.

What Went Wrong

TileMapping – Boy did I not know how complex a tile mapping system can be. I started by creating a script to plugin prefabs for tiles, but soon realised even a small tilemap has a large number of individual tiles, meaning I would have to make every tile as a prefab and I can guarantee the performance would have sucked. What I really wanted was a system like RPGMaker but there wasnt a chance in homers noggin I was going to complete a system like that in time. Of couse there was always the option of using rpgmaker to make the game and that certainly would have saved time but we really wanted to have the game playable on a web page. Ive seen the work some people have been doing with a html5 port of rpgmaker but the api seemed complex and not something I had time to learn.

Unity was not without its difficulty though, ive been using unity for just over a year and im fairly confident but there were 2 things during this jam that really stumped me, thankfully the unity community is awesome and a quick google search sorted the problems. One of the problems was activating disabled game objects with children.

It wasn’t just unity specific problems that stumped me though, in fact occasionally I made my own problems, there was this really annoying situation where the police car wasnt changing animation cel, it didn’t even show any graphic. I went over and over my code which I had ripped from my other code for the character. The problem was in the fact that the code did something specific for the character but I needed it to work another way for the police car. Turns out the code I was trying to get working was in a custom function and not in an Update(), Doh

Unfortunately the game was released with bugs and there’s quite a few, Its been suggested in the comments for a post-compo version with all the problems fixed and while were at it we should add some more features, were definitely up for this and hopefully in the next few weeks we should have something to release

Improvements

The tilemapping situation presents an intricate problem which I will need to sit down and plan a strategy to attack it, there are two ways, tackle the problem myself or find a third party software. Actually theres a third way and as im writing this I think I might go with this one. A measure of the two. I have been using Pyxel Edit for a while now and I think its amazing, but it too like our game has many bugs and could benefit from some much needed features. If possible I will see if I can offer my programming skills to enable the development to move forward. A key feature(already in Pyxel edit) is export as xml/text. Using this I could develop a content processor making the whole tilemapping process smooth and trouble free.

As previously said were going to fix the bugs and release a post-compo version.

Were super excited about going back through the game and adding polish like xmas decor for the houses and village.

Its been great fun, hope you enjoy the game:P

Team RobKat (Katrina Reynolds, Rob Yates)

A small village was my first entry, and also the first time I released a game ! It’s about a villain doing bad stuff in a small village, where people don’t know what to do against you !

What went right ? After finding my basic idea, I had  time to make my small village nearly as I wanted. It was fun making all textures myself for the first time and it was looking good. I like the faces of my little people, goat included. The gameplay (FPS) was quite simple to do because a lot of my test with unity were like this. I didn’t know at first how to add humor in the game then I had the idea of let them yell stuff and it was really fun. I learned a lot all along the creation !

What went wrong ? In the first place, i didn’t even sleep well. I learnt about the theme at 3 a.m., woke up at 10, and wanted to make a 3rd person game, in a village like this. But I didn’t manage to make a 3rd person camera working so after 2 hours of retries I quit to making what I know most. The music in the game was my first time with lmms, so i’m really sorry for your ears ! Some of you liked it, but I don’t myself !

What went REALLY wrong ? It’s the code ! First, there was an update in Unity a few weeks before LD, and I didn’t had enough time to fully understand about the new animation system, nor about classes and methods which becames unusable and invalid. So after the first day, when I was happy about my village, I had something like 25.000 errors in the debug console, and no idea on how to fix them all. Of course, I didn’t had the time to learn everything about A.I. all over so I decided to make a stop to the development of this game before I ended up with nothing to play !

What do to next time ? I think I will be a little less stressed next time, and (I hope) more self confident about my programming skills (which are very low right now). I’ll also spend less time working on the map, and I’ll make a lot of art in a row, not doing so many alt+tab between unity, notepad, flash, photoshop, and the Ludumdare website ! One thing at a time, a better organisation !

Anyway, thanks a lot for this LD, i’m going back to rate your games (I already liked a lot of yours, it’s amazing the amount of idea!) don’t forget to test my little game and to rate it ! A Small Village

Keep in touch,

Edocentrique

Tags: a small village, Edocentrique, LD #25, post-mortem

Splatter was an attempted to kinda of fuse Frogger and Plants vs Zombies Defense. You play as the cars, the villains of Frogger.

You can try out the result here http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=7406

This was my first game jam and it was a ton of fun. I picked the worst possible weekend to do it as I was graduating from college on Saturday  and I was not going to give up drinking with my friends and family and celebrating this weekend. As a result I was only able to work on this for about 9 hours. So I am quite happy with what happened with such little time.

What went right:

• The Idea, I believe, was good. I immediately wanted to do a classic game where you play as the villain  I toyed around with many different games as I had plenty of time to think about it before I could actually work on it. I eventually settled on this idea which I think has potential if fleshed out.
• The Distribution, I had alot of concern about whether I could compile for windows as I was programming in Ubuntu and using a library with separate natives. But it seems to work at least on Linux and Windows. One person has said it crashed after awhile of play but that may just be because I didn’t put in a kill screen it just closes. Thanks so much to JarSplice, you saved my ass.
• Finished, with my lack of time I was afraid that I wouldn’t have a finished product but I managed it, although it is not as fleshed out as I would have hoped.
• Persistence, (kinda goes with finished but whatever) There was a point where I thought it was over. I could not get slick to let me write text to the screen and I couldn’t find an alternative approach that didn’t use slick. I needed to display the score and points and costs and I didn’t see any options. Then I said to myself “NO! I’m going to finish this! I’m gonna make something. It doesn’t have to be the best. It just has to work and be mildly fun at least. After I encouraged myself I got the idea to draw the gold coins to represent cost and not worry about a score.

What went wrong:

• SLICK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Slick, the library, hated me. I could not get it to do anything right for me and the tutorials I found were all for depreciated methods and they wouldn’t work either. It cost me an hour or so looking at all the different tutorials and playing with it trying to get it to work.
• TIME, I graduated and partied most of the weekend and probably only spent a total of 9 hours on the project. That was not enough time, but I only graduate from college once and I wanted to spend it with all my friends and family. But It was also important to me to do this Jam, to prove to myself I can finish and make something in limited time.
• MAVEN, There really needs to be a good archetype for maven that uses lwjgl. The tutorial for using maven on their website was lacking and it did not automatically compile to a jar that would actually run. I lost lots of time learning how to do this manually.

Future:

• I really really really enjoyed doing a game jam and I think I am going to do as many of these as I can from now on. It will also help keep my programming skills up as I look for a programming job.
• I want to flesh out the game with graphics, sound and ACTUAL TEXT ON THE SCREEN DAMMIT. I joined the One Game A Month challenge so I think I will flesh this out and release a newer version for January’s game.
• I would like to learn how to make an Maven Archetype and design one for making LWJGL projects to help anyone that has had the same problems I have. Plus it would be yet another thing that would be good to learn.

In closing, Its been a really fun ride and I can not wait to do it again and really be able to put in all the time I could to make something exceptional next time.

I finished a html5 port of my ludum dare entry. I wanted both the Html5 version and the windows version to be finished at the deadline but I ran into some problems with sound and drawing with the html5 version. But now it’s finished and those who don’t have windows should also be able to play the entry.

Play the game here!

I’ve tested the game in internet explorer, firefox and chrome. It works in at least those three browsers, but looks best in firefox or chrome.

Hey everyone.

I started writing some reviews on some of your entries!

At first i will review every game by users that rated my entry. After i catch up i will start rating and reviewing other entries  i’d like to share.

So if you want your game reviewed and added to the list you can head over here and gimme your juice 😀

The complete list of reviewed games is here

Ludum Dare Mini Reviews

To link a specific review just add # + username to the url (http://ldmr.wzl.vg/#pinion)

Keep in mind that writing those takes some time, and it might take a while until i catch up.

Hope you enjoy it 😀

love and kittens,
wzl \o

I entered as a Jam entry, instead of a compo entry in order to get more time but I only actually ended up with around 6 extra hours on the third day because I had to sleep and work for most of the extra time.

The entry page is here: (Click)

There is a windows executable or a .love file, so if anyone on mac or linux knows how to compile love2d games, that would be really cool.

What went right

I created a pretty cool isometric rendering engine, which seems to be pretty capable.

I put a lot of effort into tuning the terrain generation, and it ended up looking quite good in my opinion. I haven’t done much world generation before so I had to experiment a lot to determine what variations would look natural and interesting.

The art style is 100% geometric, with everything being some composition of primitive shapes and it looks pretty cool. I would’ve liked to add a bit of detail to the “people”, but even as cylinders they feel lifelike enough when they are moving.

The splatter and shadow effects turned out quite well because of how they interacted with the tilemap.

I learned a lot about world generation, isometric rendering, and object oriented lua programming, so I would be more comfortable working with similar concepts in the future. It turns out lua allows you to define your own concept of a class and there are multiple ways to implement inheritance. I also now have a name for a “pigeonhole sort” which is a concept that I have sort of considered before but not properly executed.

What went wrong

I spend most of the first day trying to figure out how to get objects to draw in the right order (back to front) until I realized that I had to make each object no larger than a single tile size or else you could get a circular loop of objects that are above, behind, in front of, and below each other.

Performance issues: I put a lot of effort into making the game as efficient as I could, so objects that are far away are forgotten and things like the front faces of a tile are only drawn if the tile is taller than the tiles in front of it, and shadows are only drawn when the object is not on the ground. However, it still runs relatively slowly on my own machine and I assume even worse on the machines of some of the people that will test it. I added a few options at the end of the jam time to change the screen size and thus how many objects are drawn so that hopefully it can still be experienced even on lower end computers, but it is hard to get a sense for performance on another machine.

There isn’t really much to do. You spend more time exploring than being a villain. I was planning on adding cities, farms, castles, and heroes for you to fight, but it all seemed so complicated and I ran into time constraints.

Next time

I think I will try to work with a more complete rendering framework prior to entering, as I had to write a lot of drawing functions during the compo time. (cylinder, prism, sheared circle).

I will also try to have a better idea of necessary gameplay interactions and try to get them in place before anything else, so that the game is 90% playable within the first day, instead of being 90% pretty after two days but still missing a bunch of gameplay elements.

I know that my game idea was a bit too ambitious and so I set myself up for failure, but even so I think that having a challenge forces me to experiment and learn things that I wouldn’t otherwise have tried.

This LD was a little bit of a failure for me! I had no idea what to do with the theme. After some thinking I went with a dating simulator, which was a bad choice. A good dating sim need two things: Good writing and cute artwork. As I’m not a native english speaker (and my english in general isn’t that brilliant) writing is really hard for me. I also can’t draw. Period.

I’m usually very motivated while coding, but most code was done in a couple of hours. This was actually good, because I could focus on content now, which I didn’t enjoy that much and after the end of the first day I realized that I couldn’t finish it in time with decent content. After some frustration and a couple of hours of non-LD related work I went back to at least finish it with the help of a greek twist.

What went right:

• I never wrote much for a game and it was an interesting experience.
• HTML5 canvas & JavaScript is very usable for game jams.
• It turned out to be quite meta.

What went wrong:

• I did not like my own game, which is kind of frustrating.
• Horrible gameplay. It’s basically a bad interactive joke.
• I had trouble creating music for it (Now it’s very basic, I trashed a lot of other attempts).
• I need to get more practice in pixel art (or general in creating graphic assets).

So, next time I’ll do a project that involves more coding, which should keep me motivated throughout the weekend. If you’re still interested and like bad humor give Dr. Spackolo a try.

I’ve written something -a little postmortem if you like- in my blog about my game: http://feiss.be/blog/post/1355840627

My game Legacy of Hamelin was a bit of a rush job, and crucially the levels were the last thing I made. Always a bad sign!

That meant that I didn’t have time to actually see if the puzzle mechanics worked or were interesting. Turns out they don’t really work, so what could I do about that?

A few ideas for the rat sections:

• Don’t let the rats go into the sewers until they’re all over a sewer. However, that A) seems weird in the fiction (stupid reason) and B) might make it hard in a not particularly fun way.
• Don’t stop the rats falling in the water in the first stage. But why would the piper care enough to restart? Not sure if I want there to be moves that kill you: that’s frequently annoying in puzzle games. Might be okay if I also had undo I guess?
• Make the rats poop, player won’t step on any tile with poop on it. Might end up with too much poop? Alternative: only make the rats poop after they leave the sewers.
• Add tiles which only the player can go through/only the rats can go through. What would these tiles be? Already have that the player won’t walk over sewers, but can’t really use that to limit the player’s movement because then it’ll be too easy to get the rats in them.

And for the children-stealing:

• If a child moves next to an adult, the adult grabs them until the piper moves next to the child and re-brainwashes them.
• If you move next to an adult while controlling the children, they’d attack you.
• Possibility of drowning the kids? A bit dark, not sure if people would pick up that you have a choice of drowning them or kidnapping them?

Additionally, people don’t immediately get what the aim is in the second and third sections. Could fix this with some dialogue from the mayor probably.

Not sure I intend to take the game any further, but it’s good to consider these issues anyway.

Inquisitor’s Note: Under interrogation, the insurgent “dustystylus” was deemed to have screamed the following:

Original plans

When the topic was announced, I thought about some recent uprisings in the world where communications were monitored and thought about a game where you don’t know where the enemy is and have to decode their signals to find them.

Aesthetically, I’m a fan of all things Russian, so I wanted to have a vaguely eastern look and feel the game. The name Victor Grozny is a play on Ivan Grozny, who we know in the west better as Ivan the Terrible.

What went right:-
– Unity. This was my first time using Unity 3D and it turned out to be a great choice.
– Unity… let’s you get away with some atrocious coding and scripting hacks… which is exactly what you need when you’re under pressure to just get stuff working.
– Music. This is one of the bits of the 48hr game making process that I like the most. It’s nice to take a break from the code to play around with musical ideas, I find it refreshes the brain a little bit for when you head back into the code again.
– FX. Heehee, I was going to record my own voice for the radio chatter, but had an idea to translate English to Welsh and get Google Translate to ‘talk’ it, and then record that back into Reaper, and then process it with various FX (pitch adjust and transistor distortion). They’re actually quoting from the Magna Carta about the rights of citizens not to be oppressed. ;o)

What went wrong:-

– Fun. Well, a lack of it really. Before posting my entry I asked a friend to take a look at it. “well, it’s not very fun” was the reply and he was right. I almost didn’t post my entry.
– Controls. It was a terrible idea to have the game use click & drag for the 4 knobs. You spend all the time looking at the knobs rather than the map display. It would’ve made more sense to have the mouse control XY and then use either keys or mouse-click-hold for the other controls. Make it feel more ‘interactive’.
– Unity. Well, let me elaborate. I had a panic on the Saturday morning… this was the first time I’d used Unity and was struggling a bit, so I closed Unity and opened up Eclipse with an idea to do a pixel-art game instead. After a couple of hours I went back to Unity again and decided to press ahead with it. Definitely made the right choice but I lost a few hours to that indecision on my part.
– Clash of art styles. The GFX for the Inquisitor, Insurgents and Buildings are pixel art… this is because it was going to be a LWJGL pixel art game (I thought it would save time). Didn’t have time to work on better replacements.

Conclusion

I still like the basic premise of the game and am thinking about developing a much more strategic version. I will definitely use Unity in future. However, I’m going to prepare some foundation LWJGL code so that I have the option to something pixel-art based if the mood so takes me.

Ooh, uploaded a Linux version as well, as you guys don’t have access to the webplayer
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=15902

So, the past weekend has been a blast. Ludum Dare 25 has been the first game jam I’ve ever taken part in and to be honest I surprised myself a little bit.

Working on Black Knight Blockade has been a blast and the most fun I’ve had coding since I’ve done another mini-game back at university. If you haven’t done so, I’d suggest you give it a try – or I’ll send the Black Knight after you!

I didn’t really expect me to finish the game in time. Especially people liking the really simple gameplay concept (poke people but lose anyway!) were quite unexpected. I usually tend to overthink stuff a bit, dependencies and data structures for example. In the past, this lead to things getting stale, due to too much back and forth without anything to actually play with (i.e. framework stuff, entity handling, etc.). This project started out similar, but early Saturday evening I decided to go a different way: screw good practices and software architecture, I want a complete game within 48 hours. And this played out nicely.

Considering his rage so far, this is going to be his last stand…

To avoid boring you with long paragraphs or anything similar, I’ll just stick to a few bullet points like most people here:

What went well

• Finding an idea: I had this idea literally within seconds. I’m not sure why, maybe because I’m a huge fan of Monty Python and Mel Brooks movies, who knows…
• Getting the framework done: Window creation, main loop, event handling, etc. has been rather trivial thanks to SFML.
• Graphics looking better than expected: I’m a big fan of the old Zelda games, and us such I thought trying to catch their style might be helpful. I think this one succeeded, without making the game look like a clone.
• Sound creation being a blast: I’m no great artist. Call me code monkey, but not painter, artisan or musician. I’ve never heard of sfxr before, but it’s been an awesome tool to get everything I needed.
• Creating entertaining gameplay: The basic idea was simple, but at first I couldn’t think of any real goal or fail condition. In the end a simple “get as far as possible” approach felt like the right choice.
• Adding some fun: I really have to be honest here. I didn’t expect anyone to find the whole thing ridiculous or funny. The basic idea, yes, inspired by a movie, but other than that? The last minute effects and sounds really made a difference!

What went not so well

• Wasting time on program architecture: I should know it better, and should have kept in mind that this isn’t going to be a project you want to make money off and expand over years. You don’t have to make everything perfect or only use best-practices. It can help, but Saturday afternoon I rewrote some parts of the code several times, cause I weren’t happy with my interfaces/dependencies.
• Some parts of the code became quite ugly (see previous point).
• Not believing in “programmer art”: Hey, I didn’t expect reading that people that find my pixels adorable or just love them. Seriously!
• Lack of variation: I lacked the time to add some more variation, e.g. different peasants or enemies (well, they have different health and speed, but they all look the same!) or weapons. I thought about having King Arthur as a boss-like char you must not touch (or he’d cause you some flesh-wounds). Also – as some comments noted – the bridge is just another tile in the background: I should have add some mechanic for the water tiles, even if it’s just a tiny slowdown.

So, what now?

• Due to the positive feedback I’ve received since making the project public, I’m definitely going to upgrade and extend it further. There’ll be different ground tiles (not just different appearance), maybe even random maps, more enemies, more weapons, etc. If you’ve got something you’d like to see in the game, tell me and I’ll try to add it.
• I’ll try to get the game ported to Android devices. It’s already cross platform and should run on almost any decent PC running Windows, MacOS or some kind of Unix. I think this is the kind of game that could really shine on mobile platforms. Maybe even on the upcoming OUYA console as well! Only downside to this is the fact that SFML doesn’t support Android yet, but there are people working on this and I’ll definitely try to help them. After all I’ve got something to port now, too.
• I’ll definitely participate in future LD Jams and Compos. I just can’t wait for the January MiniLD (hope spare time will be plenty)!

Tags: black knight blockade, postmortem

My game was The Banker: An Atrocity in Three Parts

It was made in slightly less than two days from scratch with C++, and entered in the Jam.
Libraries used: SFML and Boost Property Tree
Tools used: VIM (IDE), GIMP, Tiled Map Editor.

What went right:

• I finished! This was the first game I’ve actually managed to do in time.
• The idea. While I didn’t get to work on it for a day, I had the idea the moment the theme was announced and it didn’t really change at all after that. This is the first LD that I can say that for – although it’s the only one where I would have benefitted more the other way around.
• I got most of the dialogue I wanted in
• By compromising on features, managed to make all three parts of the game
• It was almost funny?
• SFML wasn’t as God-awfully obstrucvtive as I usually find it

What went wrong:

• Programming took around twice as long as I expected
• As a result, all graphics had to be made in ~1 hour
• As a result, the graphics were terrible
• Movement was too slow, but this only became apparent once I made the map larger than 10×10 tiles in the last ten minutes of the competition
• Some of the dialogue was done in the last couple of minutes before I uploaded, so it’s a little badly written in places, and feels inconsistent
• While it would never have been a “gameplay” type of game, it lacks even an attempt at gameplay features

What didn’t go at all:

• Didn’t have time to do any music. Not even sFXR
• Had to cut a few interactions, and jokes suffered as a result
• Didn’t have time to add the minigame I had planned
• Didn’t get in any social commentary or obscure economics jokes

Overall, though, I’m just glad I finished – it was a very close thing.
I spent so long on loading the maps that the benefits I reaped in terms of entity loading were rendered useless given the lack of art assets, which was a shame. Just having better art or any music would improve the game so massively that I think I ought to just brush it up a little next weekend.