What went right

-Even though we all live in different countries with different time zones and no one knew each other(we met each other a week and a half before the Ludum Dare), it went really smooth. Awesome guys.

-All the game mechanics were easy and fun to do.

-The gameplay is fun(my opinion).

-The discussion after the theme release was fun, everyone gave their input/ideas.

-The art and the music are really good.

What went wrong

-The choice to use GameMaker Studio to do this. I should have used my own engine or the 2D framework i’ve made for unity. The Html5 port for of GameMaker break the game.

-I spent a lot of time on the stair system trying to make it feels right and work with the AI(even though the AI is not working perfectly), but i redone the stair system 2 or 3 times.(So much time for an easy thing =/ ).

-The AI. I needed more time to polish the AI. In the last few hours did some things that broke the AI(careless mistakes).

-Even though i like the controls, some people said that the controls are weird. I had no idea how to map the controls on the keyboard, i think the game is better played with a joystick.

-Monday around 3pm there was a hail storm that happens once or twice a year(blame it on Murphy) in the city i live in(Goiânia – Brazil). I live in the outskirts(outside actually, almost an rural area) of the town so i lost power for almost 3h.

-No time to make the online highscore that i wanted. Shame =/.

What i wanted to do

-An hideout(between levels) to craft and upgrade your gadgets.

-More game modes.

-Super heros with super powers(shoot lasers and etc).

Conclusion

This Jam was really fun, it was really fun to work with the team, no stress at all(aside the time that i went out of power). I spent most of     my time play-testing the game and making small adjustments to make it feel nice. The game came out pretty good for our first Jam.

Game page:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=10554

As many other people, I had some hard time thinking up my game idea this LD. In the end I decided to make a metroidvania platformer. I wanted it to get players to learn and master the controls and be able to do parkouresque awesome moves in the end. Here is how it went, and how I feel about this.

What was the plan?
To create a metroidvania style platformer taking place inside an evil scientists hi-tech lab that allows users to learn and master the controls and be able to execute cool moves inside.

What went right?
I have managed to tailor the game as intended and I was able to master it nearly perfectly.

What went wrong?
It appears that the players find the game really hard. It seems havign mastered the game, I had to require some external testing, that I had simply no time for during the LD. However, I keep telling myself they’re just lazy 😛

What was left out?
I had to cut down on few features. One of these is movable enemy robots, that I didn’t even start to work on. The other would be final boss. The environment of the game is pretty tight, so I am eventually glad that I did not stuff it with more obstacles. I also had grenade launchers ready and working, that I left out. I just thought it unnecessarily make the game harder. Also, enemies have HP and cool this hit-effect all ready, but I wanted the game to be as speedrunnable as possible so they are all one-hit-kills.

So, can you speedrun?
Sure! I decided to record a video of me speedrunning it to perhaps help players who might have trouble on the way! Here it is:

Play & rate & play again!

Post mortem of    coming soon ( the game is here if you want to give it a try), but just one mystery fail for now:  the goat trap.

In our game, you place various traps in your evil-haunted-mansion-in-the-woods to scare, slaughter or attract those various pestering highschool cliches:

On the web version (the only one for now), when you activate the “goat trap”, this is what happens:

(exploding goat, why not… )

While this is what we draw/animated/coded:

(obvious reference is obvious, plus T-rex make everything better anyway)
Yep, dinosaurs have disappeared from Earth and our game, and we lost half a hour not finding why this animation didn’t work ?_?

Anyway, don’t hesitate letting us know what you think of the game, we’re planning the post-compo version so feedback is very much wanted

(come on, you know you want to slaughter them ;D)

Mixed feelings folks, mixed feelings.

I mean, I totally made a game in 3D, I learnt the basics of OpenGL, and I did it. I also learnt all the side stuff to that, exporting models and UV maps in Blender, texturing models with GIMP, and importing and rendering that shizzle with Java and LWJGL

But there REALLY isn’t much to this game.

I mean, people are getting used to my LD games having little to no actual gameplay. Solitas Exodae was the pioneer in the “pretty thing with no gameplay” genre I am defining. Solitas Exodae was followed next LD with Robot in the Garden, which didn’t yield quite the same success (more about that here), but definitely confirmed my distinctive “Hey this is cute, but erm… what am I supposed to be doing? Oh… Nothing… Kay…”-inducing games.

Now understand, I’m actually more of a fan of gameplay-rich games, give me Angband over Final Fantasy anyday, but for some reason, during LDs I spend so much time tweaking the visuals that gameplay gets boiled down to pressing arrow keys to explore the world.

So here goes…
What went well:
> I totally made a game in 3D, what up with that bro?
> The character is procedurally animated, that was fun
> I learnt Java (I knew some Java from school, but I learnt so much more here)
> I grew confident in my modelling skills
> Also, this was made at the LD gathering at my university here in Montpellier, France
—–> This event went really well
—–> There were 14 of us, and we had loads of fun
> I finally completed Hexagon and set a personal record of 81 seconds

What went wrong:
> It’s not very pretty, especially for a game with no actual gameplay
> It’s a game with no actual gameplay
> I didn’t have time to make music for the game and I LIKE making music
> I STILL don’t know how to make an applet, so choosing a Web-able language seems so futile now

Here, play it!

Well, I’ve thrown my entry into this December’s Ludum Dare, and I’ve come out happy and better for it!
Without further ado, let’s get to reflecting upon my entry in to this year’s jam.

The Good

• The Gameplay Worked, and it was polished!
• The tileset looked pretty.
• I was able to write a grid-based movement system after scrapping a smooth-moving system that was proving to be incredibly troublesome when it came to sticking to walls. That recovery was what set me back on track.
• 7 Levels + Start and End. Lots of variety.
• A musician friend of mine told me that the music I used was kick arse.
• I discovered that #’s are Line Breaks in Game Maker.

The Bad

• My choice of sprites for the main character was poor.
• As was the choice of sprites for the guards.
• There should’ve been more enemy variety, or different types of Guard AI, even simple things like Left to Right/Up to Down.
• A narrative written at 3 in the morning to accommodate the theme was probably not a good idea.
• I didn’t make much use of the crawl or lean mechanics in the later levels.
• In spite of the polish, there were some minor movement bugs I didn’t quite anticipate that other players picked out.

The Strange

• The ‘goat of disapproval’ makes no sense unless you’re paying attention to the narrative. (Spoiler, the main character is a Were-Goat/Satyr/Something)
• There was a bug that I fixed which disabled you from saving if where you came in was in the same place as the save point, on the X or Y axis. I had to change some things at the last minute to prevent this from occurring.
• There’s a -very- subtle bug with the cameras. You’d notice it in Room 4 (after the crawl room) – the Camera sight follows the camera perfectly, allowing it to see you around a corner sometimes. Whoops!

That aside, I had a lot of fun! I’ll see you next time!

-Luca!

Tags: BREAK!, post-mortem

While I write a postmortem for my abominable entry, you can watch my timelapse. Usually I keep chronolapse running for the whole Compo – this time I had to keep switching it on and off because of other things I had to do on my computer. It’s around 20 hours of coding. I also added some comments.

And if you want to see and rate my Jam entry, here’s the link.

Tags: hunt, timelapse

Hi guys!

It was a great time for me (and I hope for you too)!
Quite a bit, I want to talk about my LD25 game. The first day I did not do anything. I sat and tried to think of a visual style (at this moment I have not thought in any genre will game). I have not been able to come up and went to sleep. Came the second day and I woke up in the afternoon. Yes, I had very little time. But I ran out of time and I finished the project. Game (not really a game) was very short. But I had time to do it. Art, music, and animation.

And I was working in the bathroom. The house was very cold.

I hope you enjoy my game!
Everybody all the best!

PLAY CLOSE MY SIDE

Tags: blood, close, dark, dead, indie, post-mortem, side

Here is the time lapse for my game TerraForma. This time I cut out all the boring parts when I was sleeping.  Play/rate my game here.

And now for the video:

Tags: timelapse

Now that it’s all over, and comments are still rolling in, it’s time to figure out what went right, what went wrong, and just what I’d change. All of these things are things I will change for this coming year, and my New Years’ resolution, One Game a Month. They’re basically the things I will focus on, one or two at a time with each game. As my LD24 resolution was ‘Next time, I need to focus on making a fun game, and one that works from a technical standpoint.’, this resolution will be longer, and aimed at making me a better game developer overall, rather than just a better game jammer. This’ll be a bit of a long post.

What went right:

• The idea(s): I managed to come up with a simple idea for each theme in the final round of voting. I didn’t stop there. When it was announced, I forced myself to come up with another two ideas I liked. The first was an Evil Genius-like game, which basically everyone came up with. The second was so unmemorable, I’ve already forgotten it. Out of the three, I decided the early one and the first one were the two I liked best. Out of those two, I went with my keyword: “Antibition”. Rather than go with the ambitious dungeon-building game that involved lots of mechanics and was considerably more impressive, I decided to go with the simpler idea, but polish it a lot more. The choice was a good one, after seeing how many people came up with dungeon-building games, and how few people came up with railroad-type games (one, that I’ve seen)
• The tools: Starting out, I decided that I would have to choose between C++/SFML, the hard option, and Python/Pygame, the familiar option. ‘Hard’ in the sense that I was unfamiliar enough with the library that I wasn’t confident I could make a full game, even if I could make a tech demo. If I hadn’t felt confident I could at least make a tech demo showing off the mechanics (but not including any user friendly interface, animations, etc), I would have chosen the familiar option and researched SFML more before next time. C++/SFML was immensely more powerful than Python/Pygame, less problematic, and a lot more easily packaged.
• The progression: My initial milestone was making a working representation of a railway system, with junctions, with no train. The second milestone was getting junctions (or actually, any tile) to have a mode, which toggles the direction of travel when coming from the right direction. The third milestone was representing a train that exists on rails and moves in a pixel-based fashion (this failed, and was replaced by..). The fourth milestone was getting a node-based graph back-end to the railway, created when the level is initialised, and on which the train exists. The fifth milestone was getting the train to respect junction modes, and to have a variable speed. The sixth milestone was being able to toggle junctions (by mouse callback, which then calls an internal function that the AI also calls when changing junctions). The seventh milestone was allowing the AI to turn you around, and adding cooldowns for all these abilities. The eighth milestone was getting the cooldowns represented onscreen as the HUD, as well as the current speed. The ninth milestone was getting a working menu system to choose between two levels. The tenth milestone was getting an instructions menu. Those I had established beforehand. Once those finished, it was all polish, reworking graphics, failing to add audio, etc.
• The updates: In case you were reading my site, you might have noticed what were basically hourly updates on what I’ve been doing, following all those previous milestones. These were a bit of a nuisance for a particular roguelike news aggregator picking up a dozen updates in a day, but were useful both for me and for people to see my progress in somewhat real-time. Next time, I might attempt a livestream, or, if not possible, a timelapse. At the same time, I’ll attempt to be more active in IRC next time.
• The endpoint: Finally, I called it quits when I should have. Finishing the core gameplay and milestones less than a day in, I didn’t decide I should give in to feature-creep and keep adding mechanics I wasn’t sure about before. That, most likely, would have had me at less than five hours left with no polish and half the mechanics broken and unbalanced.

What went wrong:

• The graphics: I’ve mentioned I’m not fond of the graphics in it. The animations are horribly choppy, and the train is a classic example of programmer art. I’ve never been properly artistic, or at least artistically creative, and I feel this shows in the way I tackle graphics in most projects. I’m capable of producing half-decent art for things like backgrounds, terrain, mechanisms, etc, but I’m really bad at detailing them properly, animating them fluidly. This is something I know I can improve, and I will improve, however my resolution for this is another. I will attempt to collaborate with artists more, for game jams especially. Not having to deal with the graphics would basically free up half of my core development time to spend on gameplay, and almost all of my polish time to spend on bugs, balancing and interface work. Speaking of..
• The interface: This is basically a remnant of my progression as a programmer. I started out with Visual Basic when I was very young, which is fine, but it was way over my head at that point. Followed that up with Pascal, but stayed well away from any of the graphics bits in it, and worked solely with text/file input/output. Veered into C/C++ at one point, steering straight into user interfaces and OpenGL, and gave it up when it turned out they were difficult. Moved through various languages, always managed to stay with text-based interfaces, attempting tutorials on graphics-work every so often and giving up once the projects got big enough to be useful. Settled on Python for a long while, and after a long time, decided to turn my roguelike work into simple graphics. Gave it up once again. This year, I finally decided to stop being a baby and tackle graphics properly. In the month or so I worked with OpenGL, I managed to get to a point where I’m no longer scared or confused regarding graphics, 2D or 3D. In fact, I’ve even got 2D perfectly under control now. However, my interface work is still horrible. By which I mean, menus, widgets of any description, buttons, windowing systems, etc. Sure, there’s GUI libraries out there, but I need to go an use them. My resolution is to make a game with a proper windowing system, and an interface that works, feels nice to use and has no bugs.
• The audio: Something I wasn’t happy with was the lack of audio in the game. This was because of two major reasons. My electric guitar and preamp decided that they should be noisy as all hell when plugged into my computer, to the point where I could not manage any sort of clean recording, and my dorm is also noisy as all hell, to the point where any attempts to record my acoustic guitar were foiled by people shouting, dancing, singing off-key and yelling at one another on the hallway just outside my door. There wasn’t any sort of clean recording in the whole two hours spent attempting to record. To that end, my resolution, which is unrelated to game development in itself, is to attempt to pick up a piezoelectric bridge for my acoustic to allow me to record on my acoustic properly.
• The intuition: To start off, I know I’m not the most eloquent person. I definitely know I’m bad at explaining things as well. I also know that most things that seem intuitive to me are plain ass-backwards to most people. I’ve had this pointed out to me what feels like half my life so far, and accept it, while attempting to improve it. I already knew before-hand that I need to consider everything in my game as unintuitive as possible to most people and attempt to explain it as well as possible. I managed to fail to consider junctions as a potentially unintuitive element, and have also managed to fail to explain the AI’s abilities properly, or make intuitive enough that it requires no explanation. Out of the ten or so real live people I’ve had test my game (while of course offering no assistance or comment besides the ones given in game, translating for some) only two thought the junctions were intuitive, three spent over five minutes attempting to make a train turn in a junction in a way it isn’t possible for it to, eight didn’t understand how the cooldown meters for the player worked, and nine were annoyed when the second ability for the player showed up. Five of those nine considered it a bug, despite reading about it in the instructions. Out of the other four, three said it makes the game plain impossible, and refused to believe me when I demonstrated how to win, claiming I had changed it somehow since I was the developer. So, my resolution is to make mechanics as intuitive as possible, not only easily explained, but to require no explanation whatsoever.

That’s basically it. A long post, but I hope it provides some insight into the process of finishing a game jam, for me.

… someone is planning to stick with the goat theme. Android is already on that train:

http://developer.android.com/reference/android/os/UserManager.html#isUserAGoat()

This was my first ever game jam. It occurred a very short way into teaching myself to program again. My current skillset is very limited, though my conceptual understanding of programming is a bit above what I can currently do — for example, I can’t successfully program graphics, at the moment, but I have done so before and have some idea of how OpenGL, at least, works.

In spite of that, however, I figured I could get something done, and now seemed better than later. I learned a lot about Python in the process, particularly with exception handling, and in general had a blast.

Pre-Compo

Since I went into the project knowing that I was starting from such scratch as dreams are made on, I had what turned out to be realistic expectations for what I could accomplish in such a short time frame. Here’s how I envisioned my prospects going in:

• I wasn’t worried about concept and gameplay design. I am accustomed to designing simple, focused games on short notice.
• I knew I could come up with some kind of interactive game mechanic and program it in a decently short period of time.
• I was not sure I could add graphics or sound, so I was prepared for the possibility of needing a text interface for the game. I therefore planned to focus on mechanics first and only add graphics/sound if I had time.

In the weeks leading up to LD25, I was busier than a starving mouse in a pantry full of food in cloth sacks. After digging my car out from under 1 meter (not a typo) of snow on the Monday beforehand, I spent three days bone-tired and recovering. I therefore had little chance to really prepare. I couldn’t get PyGame to install and barely got Pyglet installed with enough time to dink around with the tutorial stuff.

So I had absolutely no base code to start from. None.

Conceptualizing

When the theme was announced, I quickly assumed that most of the LD entries would run the gamut of stock game types with villain-themed wrappers. Although I take no issue with that, I wanted my game to be as unique as possible. Especially because of my limitations. In looking for a way to achieve uniqueness, I found inspiration in dystopian science fiction, a German board game a friend of mine told me about a while back, and some things I learned in my social psychology class in college.

I don’t really want to go into too much detail about the story here yet, since people are still playing and rating, but I will talk about the format of my game. There is more story than gameplay, but there really IS gameplay. There are segments in which you run simulations to determine the optimum configuration of robots for a work site with a farm and a factory, and which robots to discard in favor of some new robots. This ties into the story and the villainy, though the villainy isn’t apparent until the end.

Execution

Having set myself up to write a frelling simulation game with a lot of story (oh, how I facepalmed at myself), I had a feeling I wasn’t going to end up with graphics.

I focused first on working out how the simulation would work on paper and then launched straight into programming it, starting with object classes for the robots and where they were to work. I occasionally wrote functions to display the bits of the story when I needed a break from formulas and stuff, but I did the majority of the story work after the simulation was working. I wasn’t consciously thinking about having a playable prototype ASAP, but in hindsight… that’s essentially what I aimed for.

Once I had a couple of story segments and the simulation done, I considered my music and graphics prospects. I knew graphics were out. I thought there was a chance that background music was in, though, so I did some singing and then tried adding my music to the game with Pyglet. I got the music playing, but not looping; then looping, but all activity in the console stopped while it played. So I threw that out, too, and went back to working on the story and checking for bugs. (But you can hear the first BGM song I recorded here! Single take. It was to play during the normal, everyday parts of the story.)

I think the most important thing I learned from all the coding I did was how to properly handle exceptions in Python. I already knew how to make custom exceptions in Python, but I wasn’t practiced enough in their use to make good use of it. I am much better at it now! The way I handled input meant figuring it out lest the game crash.

Even so, my initial executable releases still included a bug at a critical juncture in the robot simulation because I missed exception handling at a critical juncture. I found and fixed the problem (I think) and have released updated files for everything except Windows, which I was unable to get to recompiling today due to not being anywhere near my Windows machine. I also figured out how to use Pyinstaller to compile the program into a single file for niceness.

Oh yeah, just figuring out how to compile the programs was a new experience, too. xD

Improving the Game

I definitely want to keep working on this game. There are a number of things I could do to improve the game, starting with more storyline branches and figuring out how to add sound. It would be nice to have graphics, too — basic visuals for the robot sim and maybe some visual novel style backgrounds and character graphics for the story bits. The story could be lengthened to allow for more robot simulations and better expression of the ideas in the story.

Tentative Plans for the Next LD, Based on Lessons Learned

• I will have base code beforehand. Yes, I will. Starting well beforehand. Must learn moar!
• Make sure I know how to incorporate at least sound, if not graphics as well. I’m not really a drawer, but by gosh I can sing, and if I am gonna keep doing things where mood is important, I want that extra mood buff.
• Cook good food beforehand instead of expecting myself to want to do it during breaks. When I take breaks, I end up playing games or otherwise goofing off.
• Spend more time in the IRC channel because the community rocks.

Overall

I’m very satisfied with how it went.

Wanna check it out? 😀

Tags: post-mortem, postmortem, python

Once again, I finished a game! Okay, it’s lacking a lot of features… the story should be longer, the maps are ugly, a trap doesn’t work, there is no kinda of sound, people are again complaining about the combat… But, now I have something solid to expand!

Looking back, I noticed that I had spent a lot of time. Since I really (I mean, REALLY) like to code, and usually think that any problem can be solved “if I just change this one line…”, I kept trying to make a “Multiple Autotiled Tilemap”, only to be able to draw this map:

I easily lost three hour doing so… I could use three tilemaps, but it wouldn’t work with how I was managing the maps… Or I could have done it manually… Well, next time I’ll try not to be stuck on those problems… Another stupid thing that made me lose some time was this (incomplete) tileset:

It’s the first graphic I drew. But I didn’t like the fact that it was too repetitive, so I discarded that one and made a simpler one. If I had time, I would then enhance every tileset (and map). Well, I didn’t have…

But, hey, I enjoyed the compo and didn’t only lost time. I really liked the sprites, and I was able to draw and animate them relatively fast. Pay extra attention to the boss. I drew that in aproximatelly one hour! And only needed few more time to animate. There’s that castle, though… I still think it’s missing a tower and some windows. I tried to detail it a lot… and kept trying to make it seem like a castle… That one was hard (and I’m not completely happy with the result…)!

But the main aspect of the game is the story! After seeing the theme I tried to think on the most unique way to use it… a way that noone else would use (so far, I think I played 3 other games with similar ideas… xD). The name of the game, “Save the princess(?)”, try to point that things aren’t as they seem…Though the game is about saving a princess and you can indeed save her, you get a rank according to how you played and what your final decision was. I tried to make you play as a hero but later find out that you actually weren’t one (depending on how you played). I wanted to show that the “Evil King” isn’t quite evil, and killing his followers and himself would turn you into the villain

I also though that this time I made a playable game… I tried to fix the problems from my last entry: there’s a kind of check point (though you respawn on the first map, you don’t have to redo anything), I recover the life before and after the boss battle, there’s a big (well, half the player’s size) graphic that shows what hit enemies… but people still found the combat problematic. I don’t know… perhaps the lack of knockback and sounds didn’t help… or… I simply don’t know!

Anyway, I’m happy with how the game is overall. If I hadn’t spent so much time on stupid stuff (mainly, trying to fix things that didn’t need to exist), I would have an better polished game. Well, I’m making a post-compo version! I hope that one is playable. xD

If you haven’t played my game, you can do so here!

Thanks for reading! =D

Tags: postmortem

So as anyone who has already played my Wario-Ware like game “60 Second Bad Boy” knows (and a big super thanks and hand claps to all who have so far….)

Here it is the cheeky scamp of a game:     http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=19384

What have i learned so far…. It’s bloody hard to beat all the levels!!!!   So sorry for any RSI- like mouse clicking strain (someone has already had that happen to them… oops, sorry!) Its a bit harder than i thought while i was building it. but the intention was to make it old school hard so kind of a big win for me there at least!?!… I guess it was way easier for me to beat it as i knew the levels (obviously, silly me 😛 ) and was play testing it very,very often, which is dead easy when each round only lasts 5 seconds.

So anyway….. THE GAUNTLET HAS NOW BEEN LAID DOWN LADIES ‘N’ GENTS!!!!!!!  limber up and become the first ULTIMATE BAD BOY(or girl!) to beat my evil game.

oh wow, i guess this has all become a bit meta and im now the over arching villian inviting people to play my evil game about a villian…… nice, i’ll take that and use that to explain the game next time to make it sound more pretentious and arty!

or maybe not.

well post a comment on my page if you manage to beat this naughty arsehole of a game and i will praise you highly and allow you passage into the exclusive “ultimate bad boy club!” (which is just a name really, no free shit or parties im afraid..)

Here’s a link to a lovely timelaspe of the last 5hr crunch (condensed to 4mins ish) of me doing the childish pixel art and stupid fast music for the last levels. enjoy hombre’s.

60SEC BADBOY – last 5hrs tlapse from Matt Clarke – PORTFOLIO on Vimeo.

So yeah, I’ve rated roundabout 40 games, and the game I’m about to link I enjoyed the most up till now.

Not that I have the best tastes, mind you.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=14576

Play the game here! http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=11391

I had another fun and busy weekend pixeling and making a game. This time was much more interesting than usual though, I made a sideways tower defense, and I have never made a game like that before. Frankly, at first I wasn’t even going to make the game about this idea, fearing I would not have time to make it, but then I thought, whatever, at least it will be an interesting learning experience.

I’ve had this idea of a psychopathic princess killing heroes for a while now, but I’ve been just waiting for good time to start making it. Then it turned out that the Ludum theme was You Are The Villain, what an excellent chance to finally make the game!

What went right:

– Finished the game on time
This was real close call, I spend perhaps a bit too much time with the graphics again, and lots of time was spend just making the traps and enemies behavare correctly. I only finished the core mechanics near the end and all 8 levels were designed in hurry with just two hours left before the deadline. I also should have started making the graphics to the 16×16 tilesize like they are in the finished game from the very beginning, when I first started making the game, the characters were much bigger, but I soon realized it takes too much time to make and animate their sprites, so I instead started to remove pixels and made them as tiny as I could. Here is some before and after comparisons, I think the smaller ones look much better anyway. I can’t draw big characters. At all.

Before and after

– Made a good tower defense!
Like I said, I have never done a game like this before, in fact, this is my very first game that is not a platformer. I am very proud of myself. At first I wasn’t going to go with this type of game, but I decided to take a risk and it paid off. Considering how fast I had to learn everything and put the thing together, I think it turned out pretty well and I am glad the feedback has been prettypositive too so far.

What went wrong:

– Number of levels

I had only two hours left to make some playable levels, so it’s no wonder some of the levels are bit poorly balanced. I also didn’t have the time to add any kind of help or tutorial texts to the beginning of the game. Currently you just have to read the game description. I was aiming to finish 10 levels, but it would have taken too much testing, so I had to go with 8, but that’s pretty ok number too. Also All the levels turned out to be the same tiny hall, with lots of unused empty space underneath it. The reason for this was that I simply did not have the time to start designing more complex levels like in alpha design picture:

– Enemy balance.

There are 3 types of enemies in the game: Regulars, who are basic walking and attacking knights, Agiles, who can run ridiculously fast and can walk past road blocking traps, and Brutes, who are slow but very powerful giants. Plenty of people have said that the agiles are bit tough to deal with as they take no damage from spike carpets and reguire either arrows or carefully placed bombs to be taken cared of. I haven’t really heard anything said about the Brutes, but I personally think they should have showed up a bit more and perhaps be a bit more stronger, they are pit of a pushovers currently, there is a weird bug that makes them slide down hills when they punch things.

– Trap balance

I didn’t have enough time to properly test the traps, so I am not entirely sure if the prices are balanced enough. Also the final Chain Ball trap turned out to be bit useless, it costs a lot, moves slowly and breaks way too fast. I really should have boosted it’s spinning speed and HP. Also the game gets a bit easy if you just buy lots of crossbows in the later levels, the wall trap doesn’t get much use either, it should probably get a boost in HP to be truly useful.  There was also supposed to be 6th trap but I didn’t have the time to make it. Well, I didn’t really even have any ideas what it could have been. Perhaps slime that slows the enemies down when they walk through it?

Traps of Mad Princess

Disregard of what went wrong, I think the game turned out pretty well anyway, at least this is a good foundation to start building something bigger and better, maybe an improved post-compo version with better levels and more balanced gameplay and fixed bugs? Mobile version? We’ll see, I’m especially interested to see if I can turn this mobile. That depends on how stable the new beta of Stencyl 3.0 is.

Goods is a game about trading stolen goods. You are a shady street salesman who has to sell as many stolen goods as possibly to bypassing strangers, while avoiding being spotted by undercover cops. The game is highly inspired by the Eighties television series Miami Vice, but instead of being an undercover cop chasing villains, you are the villain. Yeah.

My initial idea for Ludum Dare 25 was to do a game about AIDS. The problem with AIDS is that it’s not that funny, not that provocative and not that dangerous anymore. My second idea was a drug dealing game, pretty much like the final game, only with drugs. When putting in the graphics, it became obvious that this was going to be a humorous game rather than a serious game, and having a drug dealer as a main character soon became too much of a contrast. I’d love to make a drug trafficking game, but I don’t like to make it into a joke. Furthermore, I’m totally unfamiliar with the jargon and the methods of drug dealing.

I really wanted to make the 48-hour entry, but Alas, a God damn wedding ate all of my Saturday. And it wasn’t even my own wedding. I could easily have made the 48-hour deadline, but instead I spend most of Saturday small talking with old people who will probably die of old age before we meet again. But the cake was good.

I started working on the game Sunday morning at 5am. For reasons unknown, movie director Jim Jarmush’s face kept popping up in my head all morning. “It’s a sign” I thought. So I put him in the game. I guess this is the first time ever that Jim Jarmush makes a cameo appearance in a video game.

The rest of sunday/monday was basically just crunching/coffee/crunching/sleeping.

What went right

– I decided pretty quickly on which idea to work on, and then spent a lot of time perfecting that one idea in my head before starting. I don’t necessarily recommend this approach, but it works for me.

– I only used software that I know really well, and I only did stuff that I knew how to do.

What went wrong

– I should have some game soundtracks lined up. Making music after two days of crunching just ain’t that inspiring.

– A God damn wedding ate all of Saturday! Yeah.

So yeah. Here’s what went right and wrong about the project. The biggest event overall was when I ultimately ditched XNA for unity due to compatibility problems. Specifically, we wanted to compile to web, as we felt the most people would prefer to not have to download a thing. We probably could have gotten away with XNA, but I don’t think our game would have turned out as well in general. There were a bunch of features that we probably could have implemented had we started with Unity, but oh well. We completed our game, and that’s good enough for me, at least for the first time. next time, we’ll be in it to win it!

Right:
We managed to get a working game, and it was actually quite a bit of fun.All of our 2d art ended up working really well as reference when we moved to 3d.
The sound came out great. The music was really strong, as was most of the sound effects.

Wrong:We shouldn’t have changed engines halfway through, that was a big mistake.
We should have spent more time before the competition learning how the engine(either one) works.
Flash somehow had a weird bug which wouldn’t flag certain booleans, causing some strange crashes.

Features we wanted to implement:The ability to tractor civilian ships to your base for money
The ability to upgrade your ship with extra turrets
The ability to destroy military bases for reputation, and civilian bases for money
Reputation was supposed to get you more minions, which would repair your base
The military was going to be able to destroy your base.
There was supposed to be a really nice starfield effect, which never happened, sadly.

Another great weekend full of designing, coding, pixeling and composing is over. LD 25 for me was a good edition because I finished my game in time and it seems to be my best yet.

Play and rate the game

Dream Chamber is a very basic tboi/zelda-like dungeon crawler with procedural maps featuring ranged combat. Collect sleeping pills to get your fire rate up and hearts to get your life up. It progressively gets harder the deeper you get.

What went right?

Well, the second day was really really productive. I did write most of the code on the second day and the gameplay got better and better. But the first day was kind of a mess because I really couldn’t decide what to do with the theme. At first I wanted to make a puzzle game which involved solving levels by swapping your place with the villain(as in ‘you have to become the villain’). But I somehow did not like that so I decided to go for this room style procedural generated maps.

What went wrong?

The description of the game on the LD Site says: “You are a dream thief. Fight incubi and nightmares on your way deep down into the dream chamber…“. I wanted to bring this out more in the game but there was no time really. So I decided against it and kept the reference to the LD25 theme sort of loose. That’s not very satisfying but I had to make this cut in order to get this game to a playable/stable version in one day. In the future I hope to make LD games that have more to do with the actual theme.

What will happen?

Right now I’m still pumped from the weekend and I really would like to continue the work on this and make a deluxe version. But I don’t want this to be a stupid Binding of Isaac Clone –  we will see what happens if my endorphin rush decays and real life settles back in. I enjoy the concept of these particular types of zelda-likes so maybe maybe my ‘commercial’ game is going to be like this. Who knows.

RED LEGION was the fifth time i’ve entered this competition, and the fourth time i’ve come away with a completed game. However, many things were different this time around:

1. This was the first time i’ve done a game jam with RSI. This has been plaguing me since the end of summer, and consists of chronic pain after long sessions of sitting down typing at a computer. You can imagine why this is such a problem for competitions like these.
2. This was the first time i’ve left my comfort zone and tried a new engine. Whilst C++ is my primary language, and i’ve made many games using HGE (Haaf’s Game Engine), I decided to work in Lua, using the newly created MOAI engine. This allowed me to prototype faster in a more high level language, as well as have the option to port to other platforms (I have a complete version of this entry on my Android device :D).
3. This was the first game i’ve made which followed a storyline, and didn’t all take place in one large space. My other entries to LD are purely an arcade affair.
4. This was also the first jam i’ve done using a standing desk.

Point (1) was a big mental block to get over. How was I supposed to do anything awesome in 48 hours if it would likely damage my hands in the process? Besides, I was banking on “end of the world” being the theme and had trouble thinking of something cool.

So the first four-five hours of day 1 was spent in the nearby park, feeding squirrels. It was there that I had the idea for a double-agent attempting to extract information from a companion, and decided to at least give it a go. So I put on some wrist braces, and started to type.

It’s so easy to prototype in Lua. Within hours I had a basic walk animaton (the one that is in the final game), as well as the ability to seperate the game logic into rooms. Each room had it’s own list of events that were processed one by one in a seperate thread (NOTE: i’d barely done any multithreading before, yet I used it extensively in this!). This allowed all of the logic to be compartmentalized into lots of small components.

Very soon I had dialogue working, and the ability to give commands to actors, such as “walk there, then turn around and say something, then put your combat face on and attack X…”.

These fundamental systems made up the majority of the game. All I needed next was an idea for a combat system. The one I settled on is quite simple, but gives a sense of urgency to the player. With that done, I could simply use the event system to randomly spawn enemies at set points in the game, and I had a full framework to work from.

However, the dawdling at the start and some arrangements for Sunday evening meant I was beginning to run out of time. I had about five rooms done, and no sound. I had spent too much time trying to get the rooms looking nice (they didn’t turn out so well, but they are quite detailed for someone with my lack of artistic expertise) that I hadn’t enough time to implement all the features I had planned. I was gunning for ~20 rooms, and ended up with only 10. I had only two instances of working doors, and one button (which was meant to be a tutorial, but turned out to be the only button in the game). So scope was a big issue for me in the project.

For how short a time it was made, the music and its underlying systems turned out well. The bassy beat gives a sense of emergency, whilst pulling in a bit of a solo and some drums when combat kicks in made it feel even more actiony. However, I kind of rushed the last part of the lead track, and it makes me twitch when I listen to it (it just sounds horrible to me). I also didn’t want to experiment using compressed sound files in case they didn’t work, so I ended up with two wavs, effectively doubling the zip size!

I also failed to include sound effects, which I believe could have made it feel a lot better to run and punch.

My initial plan to work in windows and port to OS/X and Chrome NaCl ALMOST worked. There are reports that the OS/X version has trouble with dialogue, and the Chrome version didn’t run at all. However, as I said earlier it appears to work a treat on Android (apart from the combat system, as it’s impossible to “press X” when you don’t have a keyboard!).

So in closing, good project, just need to scope better next time. And I know there will DEFINITELY be a next time, as i’ve now proved that it takes more than typing ridiculously fast to come out with a good game.

super 10 times well done to Madball !!!!!!!! ( http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=8370 )

YOU ARE THE FIRST “ULTIMATE BAD BOY!” 60 SECOND BAD BOY WINNER!

Here is my sorry backside and a big brown boot you can use to kick it in glorious victory over beating my silly game!

Congrats also go to GFM !!!!!!!! ( http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=7375 )

Another fine winner! 

Here is one of those annoying little blue balloons that everyone hates from the game as your prize! 😛