1. Added girl petters.

Tags: Bad Puppy, csanyk, ld25, post-compo

Last weekend i created a game called “Villainous Dungeons” for the 48h compo. You can play/rate the game here.

What went right:

• Tools. I used FlashPunk to make the game. This turned out to be much more useful than i first thought it would be. I have been jamming a lot with FlashPunk over the last few months and I have become very familiar with it. This made coding stuff much faster than i first thought it would be.
• Idea. This is the first LD (that i have finished) where I had an idea for a game, where the gameplay really fit the theme. It wasn’t very hard to code either (this was why i failed the last LD). It was also an idea that i could pull off in the time that i had.
• Sound. Even though the sounds are just SFXR sounds, I think that i used sound the sound really well. A sound is played when you select a guard. Different sound play depending on weather the hero or one of the guards were hit.
• Time. I did spend the time i had quite efficiently. I didn’t spend too much time on animation or drawing. I had a train trip on Sunday where I also got a bit done.

What went wrong:

• Time. I had a few Christmasy things to attend over the weekend, so i barely had time to make games.
• Playtesting. The game wasn’t really playable until the very end of the compo. This meant that i couldn’t tweak the gameplay as I was making the game.
• Controls. The thing most people seem to dislike about the game is that the controls are kinda tricky. I am not really happy with them either. Even I have a hard time playing some of the levels.
• Level design. The levels were designed in the middle of the night on the last day of the compo. I was so tired that i started to feel sick this is why there are only 4 levels in the game.
• Graphics. The graphics is are really ugly pieces of programmer art. This is especially terrible because  I know i can do better than that.

What i learned:

• Sound. As i mentioned before I think that i used sound really well in the game. I have never really used sound as part of the game design before, but i think it worked really well.
• moveBy(). This is such a useful function and I never knew it existed until last weekend. The function moves the entity by whatever you set it to and does all of the wall-collisions for you. Before this i used a really clumsy set of for loops to do my moving/wall-collision.
• Get it playable. Next time I do a game  jam I will focus on getting it playable fast, rather than spending a long time programming the  individual parts of the game.

Overall I am pretty happy with the game. With the amount of time I had, I am pretty amazed that i could even finish the game in time.

Bye!

I did it! Last week I was finally able to finish a game for Ludum Dare. I’m really happy, it was my major goal this time. I have participated previously but couldn’t finish for different reasons. The first time, my project was too ambitious. Next time, I had other urgent things to do. This time, I decided to go for something very very simple. I decided to write something between Space Invaders and Galaxian, where you actually played the aliens. This was part of the “you are the enemy” theme. I really loved the theme, by the way.

What went right:

• I finished! That’s the best thing!
• I made something simple.
• I started using very simple graphics and decided to improve them later only if there was time.
• I could come up with a design pretty quickly, this allowed me to spend more time on coding and creating graphics.
• I created a simple plan and was able to follow it on time.

What went wrong

• Game mechanics and controls. The controls didn’t fit quite right with the game. The game mechanics could have been improved.
• No sound I didn’t have time for it.
• Final game had some bugs, because I tweaked the controls at the last minute.
• I had bugs with other browsers that I didn’t detect until the last minute.
• Sunday was significantly less productive than Saturday and Friday night. I was really tired and took a lot of breaks. Probably because I had a lot of work the previous week. I will try to take a rest before the compo next time.
• I’m not an expert with the tools I used (Dart + HTML5). That slowed me down with the code. And the engine I wrote is still very immature.

What I learned

• Playing and rating games is equally or even more fun than writing the game. I love to see such explosion of creativity!
• The community rocks! Thanks for everything.

But first, have some evil holiday wishes !

Development notes

-The villain’s rules was our first game together (and Zimra’s first game ever), and as a couple we thought it might be tricky. But it turned out to be a brilliant experiment, we had fun… and learned what we should NOT say to each other when we’re working XD

–Our concept: If you’ve seen Scream, Cabin in the woods* or enough horror movies to figure out how they work, you know there are strict rules to follow if you want to survive a horror movie. The most famous one being: “don’t wander alone, stay with the group !”
But why is this one so effective when you have quasi  invincible villains who could kill a dozen puny humans without breaking a sweat ?
Well… because VILLAINS HAVE RULES TOO ! (And one of them is… “You can kill them only if they’re alone”).
(* if you haven’t yet, you should, it’s a brilliant movie !)

–The tools of the trade: Unity and Photoshop.

==> Play the game <==

What went right

• spending time on developing one of our first idea… and giving it up.
  The “victims” (3 for a start, each of them with different strength/weaknesses: a strong man, a brainiac, and a lucky one) entered a room with 3 doors. As the villain, you place traps in the 3 adjacent rooms. You have 5 cards at your disposal featuring various traps, each coming with different characteristic (some would require strength to survive, other brain, with the addition of poison trap, neutral card, etc…), and visibility (the trap can be visible to the victims, invisible, or seen as the opposite kind of trap).
  Depending on what they can see by opening all 3 doors, the victim would send one of them check the room/defeat the trap (and lose some HP in the process).
  Then you get 3 new cards to replace those you played, etc… The point being to get rid of all victims before they stumble upon the exit.
  It took us more than a couple hours to refine it, think of all the parameters, fake a game on paper, and realized it was dull as is. We still think it had potential, but we didn’t see how to make it an exciting video game, so we moved on.
• concept:
  analyzing what wasn’t fun about the first idea helped shaping the next one, and we quickly knew this one was the one.
  
  
• managing ideas and time:
  we had tons of ideas for “The villain’s rules” but we made a shorter list of what had to be and could be done within 72h to get a first complete draft, and we managed to stick to it, which saved us a lot of time
• graphics:
  we decided to KISS (keep it silly and simple), which was perfect for the mood we wanted and allowed us to do small animations, so a win-win.
  
• IA:
  all the “victims” have their own personality which is pretty cool. For instance, the jock is the most popular and fastest of the team, so everyone follows his lead, unless he gets drunk, then he’s left alone (and slower). And don’t get me started on the dog !

What went wrong

• no in game tutorial
  definitly our main and stupidest mistake… lesson well learned, always leave some time for beta testing purpose !
• snap box on the smaller side, which can be extremely frustrating when you have to drop and drag the same item several times for it to “stick”
• virgin not virginal enough
  which is understandbly confusing for players (should have made her wear a white dress, it seemed so obvious afterwards)
• the goat/disappearing T-rex mini bug
  we still haven’t found what is wrong (which is annoying because we had a nice idea, but at least it doesn’t affect the game)

Post compo

Correct what went wrong, add a few items, polish everything. Also try expanding the gameplay a bit (we have different option, but we have no idea yet which one will be the funniest to play).  And if we gather enough interest, make other levels (we have tons of kooky, spooky ideas !).

BTW, if anyone is willing to beta-test the edited version let us know, it’d be nice to have someone who’s not a friend or a relative giving us his/her opinion ^^

 That’s about it, we hope you enjoyed our entry ^^

Tags: post-mortem, postmortem

What went wrong:

• Computer Crash – Had to install a foreign OS before-hand, had to install a new dev toolchain.
• No warm-up – due to my crash I had to scramble to get a dev environment working.
• Over-Scoped for Preparedness Level – Since I wasn’t prepared, the scope was a bit too large. I think I could have done those extra awesome things
• Sound Levels – My speakers are junk so I didn’t realize the sound was so loud.
• Wasn’t fun - Really,  I don’t think my game was fun.

What went right:

• Quick Coding – I coded briskly, though not as brisk as I know I can.
• No interruptions – I didn’t get interrupted or procrastinate at all.
• Quick Idea – I had an idea quickly.
• Consistency – The graphics and game play were at least consistent.

Things I wanted to add really badly:

• Street Names, Addresses & Random Apartment Names – I thought this would be important to adding depth of gameplay, much like it was in Tiny Civilization.
• An informant – There’s a ‘convict’ sprite still embedded in the SWF.
• More enemies – I wanted to make it so you couldn’t go inside buildings when enemies were nearby.
• Cars – I wanted to add cars as obstacles. I even had for a glimpse of a second the idea that bobbies would come out of cars, but I was already 24 hours in at that point.
• Other Obstacles – I imagined a few simple obstacles such as potholes. Never got there though.
• Tweaked bobby AI – Bobbys were dumb and didn’t properly follow the playing character. I wanted them to move about the map in a pac-man like fashion.
• Tweaked balance – I wanted to have more time to tweak the balance of power, how fast bobbies went, how often they appeared, and what kinds of deals you got.

Shorty & The Big Deal 2600

 Click here to play Shorty & The Big Deal 2600

What’s Next? – Retrocard Alpha

Retrocard is one of those things that’s really hard to explain.  It’s a game where every area is designed and programmed by the users themselves, in-game.

It’s far from finished, but there’s a working prototype online.  Click here to see it in action.

There is enough scripting available to keep a programmer busy.  If you know a bit of LUA you will be right at home editing scripts.   You can play musical melodies,  pop-up dialogs, and soon add networking and chat capabilities too.

A user-programmed location in the Retrocard world.

Players themselves create and expand the Retrocard universe by making custom paintings, buttons, and scripts.

There are plenty of missing features still of coarse,  as should be expected in an Alpha release. If you have thoughts and suggestions, I would love to hear them.

Click here to try Retrocard Alpha Release

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 23rd, 2012 at 12:31 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.

Hi,

I just published a Christmas android game powered by http://citrusengine.com/

Santa Rush is a classical “Monster truck” game.

I hope santa will make my dream come true and that a lot of people will play for christmas eve.

 https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=air.com.studio3wg.SantaRush

Santa Rush For android free Monster truck game

Because apparently my game died? I don’t know. Anyways, here’s a synopsis of my game, and how I made it. If you haven’t already, you can go get a Windows (sorry Mac users!) download here. While not needed, it might help to play the game before reading.

A screenshot of the current version of the game.

My timezone is pretty nicely situated for LudumDare, and my ‘routine’ of sorts is based around that. The theme is announced at 8PM, giving me time to design a game before I go to bed. Then, the next day, I begin making the game, having gone over many of the details of how the game will work the night before. It’s a really nice system for myself, and it’s worked for me very well in contests previous.

However, this year, I didn’t do that, because I completely forgot LudumDare was happening. The next day, around 1PM, somebody on Steam showed me a screenshot of a game he was working on. I happened to notice that he put the image in a folder named ‘LD25.’ I quickly navigated to the LudumDare website, and lo and behold: There’s a contest going on! So I scrambled together a quick design document that basically said “make that one game with the dungeon and the heroes but with more puzzle” and got to work.

My first challenge was to make a text parser. You see, GameMaker’s room editor, while pretty nifty, didn’t suit my needs in making coordinate-based paths. So, I set to work on making code to read text.

At the time, I didn’t really know about XML at all, and since (to my knowledge) GameMaker doesn’t have any built-in XML reading, I’m not sure if it would’ve helped. Instead, I based my file structure off of Valve’s “keyvalue” format, in which different objects store different facets of data in curly brackets. Here’s what my file structure ended up looking like.

It ended up a bit different in the final version, but you can pretty much infer how it works. I also discovered that, while writing my text parser, GameMaker doesn’t like tabs. Not one bit. When I tried to filter out tabs from the file to get the raw data, it didn’t work, since GameMaker’s code editor interprets a tab as a series of spaces. Consequently, I had to limit myself from using tabs while writing my level files. Lots of fun (NOT), for someone who’s used to writing code!

After getting the text parser up and running, I worked on the basic, boring stuff: Placing and removing towers, making heroes follow paths, etc. Defining which regions the hero would get hurt in ended up being harder than I expected, and I ended up having to do all the base work that you might have to in regular coding. Good practice, I suppose. Consequently, however, the game will give errors if a tower tries to make a hurtful area off the screen. Oops!

A screenshot that shows the first time I got multiple heroes in the same level. It was really exciting at the time! Also shown is a checkerboard background that seems simple, but I couldn’t have made the game without.

Eventually I got everything to a working stage, to where you could play a single level. It was at this point that I had the idea of a “campaign” system. Instead of having a predefined series of levels that the game would play in order, it instead would read a single file that had a list of all the levels that the game would then play in order. This not only meant that I could reorder levels without recompiling, but it also meant that custom level integration would be a helluva lot easier.

Then I made lots of levels. The level making process was actually fairly streamlined. I would use GameMaker’s room editor to map out how the different paths would go and intertwine, and then I would make a text file using the coordinates from that level. I considered making a rudimentary level editor for my own purposes, but I decided that the time spent making a level editor would probably be longer than just typing everything in by hand.

After that, it was polish time. I always try and keep the graphics in my games very simple. I ended up using the hero placeholder sprite as the final thing, just because it easily conveyed direction, and I can’t draw people (turns out that was a bad idea). I used SFXR to create some simple sound effects, and then used Sonar Home Studio to create a nice jazzy song for the main menu. I thought both turned out nicely, and others especially liked the music loop (one even asked why I didn’t keep the loop going during the game).

But enough about making the game, let’s talk about how it turned out.

The Good

• Education! I always try and learn something new with each LudumDare. In years previous, I learned about surfaces, primitives, and vector math. This year, I learned about text parsing, and some nice methods involving paths.
• Music! I write and play music a lot, so I always try and showboat every LudumDare. I ended up chickening out a bit this year though, as I used a drum loop. As a drumset player, I felt pretty bad about it. Otherwise, the music turned out fairly nicely.
• Custom levels! I absolutely love games like TrackMania and Portal 2, not only because they’re lots of fun, but because of the community level creation aspect. Level editors have always been one of my favorite features of games, and I wanted to create that in one of my own games. Even though the level editor is Notepad, I’m still pretty happy with it.
• References! Sticking in the “name” and “occupation” qualities for heroes was purely so I could add in jokes. I’ve compiled a list of every reference made in the game, if you’re curious.

The Bad

• Design! My hastily designed design left me without much design to design my design around. Consequently, I only packaged 8 levels because that’s how many I felt were really unique enough to warrant being part of the final game.
• Theme! Lots of people mentioned that they didn’t feel like a villain, since the hero was a spaceship-cursor thing. Even something as simple as a badly-drawn hero could’ve alleviated the issue.
• Tutorials! I wanted to make the first level an interactive tutorial, but I ended up scrapping that because I’m lazy.
• Late start! I need some sort of calendar for these sorts of things.

I should probably wrap this up now.  Even if the game wasn’t the best it could be, I had a lot of fun making it, and I hope everyone else has fun playing it.

Oh, and before I forget, here’s a page with every level solution, plus other stuff!

tl;dr: i made a game

Hello there everyone.

So, it’s been almost a week since Ludum Dare 25 finished. In the meantime, I’ve managed to rate 50 games, and I’ve noticed most of them via the rating system, so it was a complete mixed bag o’ games. Here are 7 Compo entries that you might find interesting & maybe haven’t played before.

Elevator Evil by 8bitDamage

In Elevator Evil, you play as an evil elevator which is trying to blow the brains out of some people by dropping them off the wrong floor. It gets kinda confusing in the late game, but this doesn’t change the fact that you’re going to have some serious fun while playing.

Monologuer by Devenger

Monologuer is a hilarious game where you, the mastermind villain, try to explain your evil plot to your victim while his friends are coming to rescue him. Of course, you should try to talk to your victim as much as you can while you stop the rescuers from reaching your prisoner by placing spike traps and activating them on the right time. While playing this game, you should also read what our villain is saying as most of the text written is really funny.

Red Legion by DeathBySnail

Red Legion is a short, story-driven game that you should check out, partially because of the bad jokes, but mostly because of the good storyline.

The Quite Annoying League by pierrec

The Quite Annoying League is a quite intriguing adventure game with a good sense of humor. You’re trying to annoy your victims, but you should balance your actions carefully as you might make them call the police, or right to the opposite, you might actually make them like you, which you might find quite annoying.

Stop Him Now! by TijmenTio

Stop Him Now! is a first time entry with solid gameplay as you’re playing as an army of evil birds trying to stop the good guy by bumping him on the head or firing a rocket at him – which is easier-. Reverse platformer with some nice ideas.

Eaten by wzl

Eaten is a game with hilarious sound effects where you’re a cannibal who’s killing and eating people on the streets. There are a few uncompleted features but the game is still fun to play in its current state. “Yum yum yuuum!”

Evil Keeper by XmmmX

Evil Keeper is a game where you build your own dungeon, try to attract heroes with treasure and kill them with vicious traps and fireballs before they can escape. There are a few unimplemented features that might be available on a post-compo version later, so I’m keeping this on my watch-list.

So, these are a few good games you might want to play. This LD was a great experience and I’ll continue to play and rate games during the judging period. If you liked a couple of these games, or if you’re the developer of one of these games, please consider to drop in on my game page and leave a comment on my game too. You might find it interesting.

Mister Misbehave by arhpositive (me)

Mister Misbehave is a reflex game where you’re trying to misbehave in as many places as possible while trying not to get caught by the villagers who are quite angry at you for stealing their goats and doing many other bad stuff. You should try it.

And don’t forget to play and rate my game!

PLAY CLOSE MY SIDE

Thanks!

Tags: blood, close, dark, happy, ld25, Merry Christmas, New Year, side, taste

I’ve been working a little more on Here be Dragn, and I’m thinking that I havent really done that much since last Monday.. The major roadblocks for me right now are random gc’s and adding features which break stuff. For example, I overhauled the audio system to use a JDK v1.5 class, Clip instead of a JDK 1.0 class, AudioClip. And even though people seem to think its the ueber solution, it misses clips randomly (though looping and sequencing samples would be quite handy for what I have in mind for the music).

I changed the render method to use texturepaints to draw images with subprecision accuracy and that really slowed everything down. Weirdly, the animation as it uses different subpixels brings in features of the original drawing that wont fit in a compressed size image. But only when its moving. I tried moving it randomly 0.6f, but that made me feel ill. Looked pretty though before I canned the concept. I decided that the reason why super-deformed is so big in CG art is because faces need more detail than the rest of the character.. So my dwarfs are now pretty squished (but I think the effect is pretty cool). I also gave them beards and differentiated the existing archers and warriors with different colour cloaks.. And beards!

In the past hour I tweaked a bit of gameplay and made archers shoot more, dwarves appear faster as the game goes on and munching them giving back less health. I made some changes to some sound effects as well, as I prefer them to sound heavily digitised.. I also did this to the soundtrack (19mb>884kb) and it sounds a lot rougher, but a bit more chiptunes.

I got some great feedback from my sister the other day (she’s really into dragons). She was content to just fly about and eat people (until I was bored) and really comfortable breaking the back buffer when the program was in full screen mode, but oddly, she wanted more people variety just so she could “eat em all”. This was kind of motivating for the beards so I can later add more colour variety. I learned from watching her that having the mouse outside of the game window breaks control, a problem I’ve experienced a few times, especially with web games.

I think I’m starting to appreciate how LD enabled me to go further than how I would generally try to make a game. I am extremely detail oriented and like my program to be “just so”.. Because of this I’m playtesting and I’m thinking; This control system feels horrible?! How can I fix that? Why is this pixel not antialiased? LD forces you to code priorities, and if you’re doing it right, essentials first.. When you have 6 hours left on the clock then its fine to drop things you’d like to be working on and move on. I have a few unfinished projects which all have similar breaking points.. I was working on a feature, couldnt do it, and then didnt come back to that project.. Which is a shame really, but with the latest one it has been really nice to have a (mostly) finished project from the start which could then always be upgraded at a later point. Having a playable project also makes it a lot more fun to come back to, so this is just the start, really.

Anyway, there are over 1000 excellent games to be playing and rating, but heres a Post LD version in case anyone is curious:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/lisuyi2qx4nkj7l/dragnsv5.jar

Play Bad Puppy

1. randomized petter skin color.
2. fixed some subtle graphics bugs that would sometimes draw a person’s clothes backwards.

Tags: Bad Puppy, csanyk, ld25, post-compo

The Montpellier real-world gathering was a great success, and hopefully we’ll be able to organise a similar gathering next time around

Here you can see Gaael and FlowerPower engaged in “witty” banter while Pierrec (in Black), Niavlys (blond), Doelia and company are hard at work. On the right you can see our buffet (the participants got a LOT of food) and Christmas tree, and perched up on top of the mainframe in the corner of the room is the web-cam we used to stream the event.

Gaeel, Agamgad and I did a radio interview for the event. We were also all interviewed on site by Fight4Game, who’ll be putting cutting together an interview and putting it on their site. I was called in on Saturday morning to present the event (as the “final boss”) in French after 15 minutes of sleep, so I can’t vouch for anything I said 😮

In the background you can see the projector where we put up the countdown, the LD twitter feed and the live-stream, depending on the overall mood.

I’ve gathered together list of the games produced by the participants. Unfortunately I’m not on it myself: I spent a lot of time getting things ready and as a result had to spend the weekend catching up on course-work rather than making games

Hopefully next-time we’ll have the process a bit more stream-lined – I can’t wait: after seeing all these amazing entries come together I’m aching to make a game 😀

“The quite annoying league” by Pierrec

Pierre had a rather bad experience on the train coming over from Marseille – you’d never guess 😛 This is my personal “coup de coeur”, and if it wins a medal I’m claiming 100% of the credit: after all if Pierre hadn’t taken the train to come join us he’d never have been so… inspired. Made with AGS (Windows).

• post-mortem (french)
• time-lapse

“Trainsaw” by Znoraka

The French rail-service seems to have been an inspiration for more than one participant 😉 Made with Java.

“Godwin” by nitramgc

Swing Swing Submarine’s epically-bearded programmer apparently doesn’t like Batma- euh I mean “Bhatmann”- very much. Swing Swing are awesome: you should buy their game. Immediately. Made with Unity (Windows / Web).

“Fuuuuuu” by Agamgad

A game about anger-management through the destruction of inanimate objects. My friend’s first ever game – a stepping-stone to greatness 😉 Made with Game Maker (Windows).

“For the love of the king” by FlowerPower

Sometimes the ends justify the means, even if the means involve the mass slaughter of poor people so the rich don’t starve. Reminds me of the economic crisis. Made using HTML 5.

“Villain – the game” by Arihy

Another first game made in 48 hours. The Ludum Dare is a good way to start in my opinion Made using Unity (Windows / Web).

“Somso” by Niavlys

Niavlys was very indecisive, so ended up making multiple prototypes before settling on one. It’s rather abstract, but the movement feels good and you can tell he had fun with the procedural sound-effects! Made with HTML 5.

“Crobal and friends” by Gaeel

A game about a happy monster who just wants to play. Gaeel (who is Welsh and isn’t called Gaeel) decided to teach himself LWJGL, OpenGL and procedural animation in 48 hours: what a show-off! Made using Java (LWJGL OpenGL).

• post-mortem (english)

“Minelia” by Doelia

A cross between mine-sweeper and tower-defence. For those who don’t speak French “Niveau” = “Level”, “Cibles restantes” = “Remaining targets” and “Recommencer” = “Restart”. Made using HTML 5.

Tags: France, gathering, irl, montpellier, real, um2, university

Happy Holidays!

Have an awesome holiday season everyone! Octopi just threw this together while the kids are driving her absolutely bananas so its not the best she can do but we are happy with it

Though, Grim’s list is one you don’t want to be on! Have a play (If you want! We won’t be offended if you don’t!) to get you into the holiday spirit 😀

Play Grim’s Christmas List!

Tags: arcade badgers, Grim's Christmas List, ld25, octopi, stuckie

First off this was the first Ludum Dare that my team and I have competed in. We decided to enter the 72 hour jam as a team so that we could create a more complete game than if we had entered the 48 hour compo. Initially we had a large team planned but a few people dropped out last minute which left us with 3: Myself and my friend Paul from University as the programmers, and our housemate Leela, who has never created any animations before or been involved in creating video games at all, as our artist and animator. So how did it go?

What Went Right

A lot went right to be honest. Like a few others we were expecting ‘End Of The World’ to win the theme vote. As such we’d started having a cheeky think about what we’d do if that came up the day before. ‘You Are The Villain’ took us by surprise a bit. We were a bit stumped for a bit but Paul came up with the main idea and we had decided on the sort of game and rough features we wanted after a few hours. I feel that the game fitted in with the theme quite well. We didn’t want to create the obvious you are a thief/bandit/zombie/vampire type of thing because we knew that many people would be going for that. As such Mother Nature as the villain was a little more left of field but we felt it was justified. After all she is trying to take down the entire human race in the game. Interestingly some of the criticisms we have had from the game is that people can’t see how Mother Nature is the villain and therefore how it fits in with the theme – If exterminating an entire species doesn’t make you a villain I don’t know what does 

We got a lot of the features we wanted into the game. When we were first discussing the game we were talking about upgrades, different types of enemies, different landscapes and all sorts of different features. We were realistic about what we could achieve in 72 hours though and we managed to whittle this down to the core features, leaving other ideas as things we would add on if we had time (which we didn’t J) The game’s features are therefore fairly Spartan but they are the core mechanics and any other features would be built off of them. So we feel they enable the game to be played out as we had envisaged it.

Gameplay is one of the areas where we could have done a bit better. However I believe it is still enjoyable, if a bit short. We wanted to lock down our features on the Sunday So that we could focus on refining the gameplay and building levels on the Monday. Unfortunately it didn’t quite work out that way. We had a discussion on Monday morning about whether to hard code in our levels or to build a simple level editor to streamline the development. Paul was in favour of hard coding as he believed it would take too long to get a working level editor up and running AND then to create the levels. I believed I could knock up a level editor in a couple of hours and that it would save us time in the long run. I also thought that hardcoding would mean creating less interesting levels and more problems if we wanted to move things around after testing how it played. As it turned out it took me almost twice as long as I’d thought to create the level editor. Nevertheless by around 4pm we had a working level editor which could place our tiles and objects, set tile passability and so forth. It took Paul a short amount of time to create the level he had designed with it after that so I believe this is something that worked out well. I also believe that if we decide to enhance the game post-compo then this decision will pay off.

A few criticisms have been aimed at the need to invest early on or be swarmed by enemies in later levels. But this was a design choice. You can spam comets for the first couple of waves and get by but after that it becomes very hard to make it to the end. If you look at RTS’ such as AOE you will see a similar design pattern. You can build a barracks, spam the militiamen and send them over to the enemy. Whilst you might do damage initially you won’t do enough to finish the enemy off and they will be investing in their units. When they have better units they will destroy your militiamen then come and destroy you! Our game requires you to think a little and make an investment in the early waves to help you out in the later waves. Waiting and buying a volcano early on helps you out enormously!

I was particularly impressed with the artwork. As I’ve mentioned Leela had never made any sort of animations before or created graphics on the pc. On top of this she could only take part for about 2 days due to coursework commitments. So I was very impressed with what she produced for us in such a short space of time. The graphics fit in with what we had envisaged. They are bright with a good amount of contrast. The artwork she produced for the menus was my personal favourite.

The sound is something that only made it in at the last moment. I had created a simple sound manager on the first day but we didn’t have any sounds to really test it with until the last day. As it wasn’t central to gameplay it was left until the end as a less important feature. Nevertheless we all knew how important getting good sound into the game would be for setting the right mood and atmosphere. Once we had sourced some sound effects from online suddenly our comet impacts and lightning and so forth came to life. Our other housemate David, who couldn’t take part until the Monday night created the main theme and in-game music for us in a couple of hours and that really made the difference as well. Overall I am satisfied with how the sound turned out given the limited time we were able to spend on it.

What Went Wrong

Our biggest problem with the theme was that we didn’t realise that there was a bonus goat theme! All through the jam we were wondering why everyone was making games with goats in it but we’d just completely missed this extra aspect of the theme!

As I’ve said we would have liked to have added more features into the game. In particular a couple more weapons would have been good to have in. A hurricane/tornado was one we wanted to do but thought it would be a bit tricky on the art in the time we had so it was dropped. An upgrade system was something we really wanted to get in as well. This would have meant being able to upgrade the radius of attack for different weapons or their damage and so on as a trade for resources. We were hopeful that by limiting the number of weapons we had we could still keep the upgrade feature but it had to be dropped due to time constraints.

Whilst I like the gameplay it is also the area we are most disappointed with. Not so much in terms of how the weapons work and so on but more in terms of the levels themselves and this is all due to time constraints. The biggest issue is there is only one level with 5 waves. These waves are all too predictable. What I mean by that is that when the level starts all the humans spawn at a fixed time interval and all together. When we originally envisaged the game I wanted the waves to come down in groups. So rather than a continuous stream of people running to the spaceship you’d have little groups running together. I also wanted these groups to be separated a bit rather than all coming down at a fixed interval. Again this was all a case of running out of time. Another aspect that never really materialised was the points system. Although you earn points for kills this doesn’t actually mean anything to the game. We wanted to add in a highscore screen or something so that the points had a purpose but never had the time.

My biggest issue with the artwork was a lack of content. Again this is all about the limited time our artist had. We are missing animations in places which had to be replaced with static images instead. For example our volcanoes are static when idle when we really wanted them to be gently puffing out some smoke and ash. Our comets don’t animate when they fly just when they land. I don’t feel this has a huge effect on the gameplay but it would still have been good to have those animations in the game.

A lack of sound and music was the key problem although I think we managed to scrape in an acceptable amount at the end. Sound is a key component in games (amazingly I’ve played some ludum games without sound at all) which was demonstrated for us when we started putting the effects in the game. The game really came alive with the sound of comets exploding and volcanoes erupting and so on. There were other issues as well though. Some of the sound effects aren’t as loud as others, some go on too long or not long enough. When the music repeats in the menu it is not seamless as it should be. I would also have liked for you to only hear the sound effects emanating from the part of the game world you’re looking at, with all others either faded out

Conclusion

Most importantly though was the game ultimately fun to play? I believe that it is. One of our biggest criticisms was that the game does not last long enough which I will agree with. But that was a result of lack of time rather than design. I think that had we managed to create a few more levels the game would have entertained a bit more. Nevertheless I believe that it is still a fun game as it is. Whilst I have a few regrets over some of the features lacking in the game I am on the whole very pleased with how our game turned out. None of us had ever actually completed a full (largely bug-free) game before. The entry for our last game was riddled with bugs and almost unplayable. It left us very frustrated at the end with the time we had invested into it. But that was 2 years ago when we were starting out as programmers. This time I believe we have created a full game which is fun to play and looks and sounds good.  It has also left me excited and looking forward to the next ludum dare. Can’t wait!

Play it here or check out my blog here

Twitter: @TJ_Clifton

Tags: C++, ld25, Mother F****r Nature, xna

Well, to begin with, it’s worth of notice that “Rest in Pixels” was our first game EVER. Not a single Team member had ever made a game before. So, the “what went wrong” part is a little heavier than the “what went right”.

Rest in Pixels by Overlord Game Studio

What went Wrong:

Time Management:  If this was our firs game, obviously this was our first jam. Being so, we had LOTS of problems with Time Management, that including sleep time, eat time, smoke time, coffee time…

K.I.S.S. : We didn’t have any clue about how to keep things simple, at the begining. So, we started by developing a GREAT idea of a HUGE game (25 lvls with ass-kicking almost realistic art) and about 2 hours later, our faces were smashed against the huge clock of game jam reality. We had to make it simple and the art was reduced to squares and basic colors (but we kept the 25 lvls concept). Many many hours later, with only 40 minutes to upload the game, I had to cut off 80% of the levels we had planned because we ran out of time and the levels were not ready yet.

Final Game: The final game is nothing close to what we expected it to be. The art is ok, the code is ok and the levels are ok. We wanted it to be great. We all got very sad about our failure to manage our time and complexity.

What went Right:

We finished it! :  Even  if  ”Rest in Pixels” is not the great game we wanted it to be, it will always be our firstborn and WE MADE IT TO THE END. The feeling of being able to finish the game was enough to make us feel awesome at the end.

We learned A LOT :  After all the struggle and hours of development, we have learned more about making games than we had in the last six months! This was an amazing experience and we´ll absolutely be comming back!

Thank you all for the comments and ratings. We are doing our best to rate as many games as we can!

if you have not played “Rest in Pixels” yet, CLICK HERE to play it!

This entry was posted on Monday, December 24th, 2012 at 12:36 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.

As a gift I made you all a desktop background to enjoy.

Click here to download the full size version

This entry was posted on Monday, December 24th, 2012 at 1:11 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.

This article is a copy from my blog.

On December 15th, Ludum Dare 25 started. As usual, this was an interesting experience, as exciting and awesome as it was soul-crushing. But this might be just me.

Like before, I didn’t have the right idea for the theme. This time it was “You are the Villain”, which was a better theme than usual, but unfortunately it only triggered gameplay concepts for me which all belong into the “that was already made before” category. So the first thing coming into my mind was “Dungeon Keeper”, and as much as I’d like to do a game similar to this awesome piece of gaming history, it just would be a clone without the right amount of innovation (or would it?). Among the other ideas I had were a “Pirates!” roguelike, a game where you control four bandits at once (robbing innocents and wandering around) and a board game creator where you’re the dungeon master placing the monsters (think “HeroQuest” or so).

None of these ideas were the incentive for me to actually start developing (although I still like them). In my mind, I combined them, added features and the result got bigger and bigger, and after finally deciding that it would be too much of a hassle, I started at zero again. Then I came back to a thought I had days before, namely the thought that often, good ideas for games (mostly puzzle platformers) are those which are inspired by childrens’ fantasies. So I imagined a bit what a child could think, and being able to grab the moon with the fingertips and move it around just like that, well, that seemed like a good candidate. At this point, the theme was still in the back of my head, but I tried to ignore it mostly as it obviously would just hinder me to actually develop anything. I never was good in the “Theme” category, and for that I’m sorry, but I don’t think it’s the category I want to shine, really.

I tried to create a Unity3D prototype out of that idea with the moon. Of course, prototypes become the real game eventually when doing a game jam, but first I wanted to see if I could actually create something like that. The main problem to begin with was the scale of the object currently grabbed, as it always has to be the same size for the player, no matter how far or near it would be away. I read something about the focal length of a camera before and I thought I had to factor this in in any case. I experimented (using some basecode I already announced in my “I’m in!” post) and searched on the internet, but it just wouldn’t work right. The object’s subjective size didn’t stay constant, and being very frustrated, I stopped after a while.

Thus, I re-evaluated the idea of the four bandits. This one would follow the theme and I’d really like being able to control a group of (evil) adventurers – in first person perspective! In order to make it easier for myself, I started programming the movement (again in Unity3D), which would be along the cardinal directions only and also on a grid. Just like those age old games you might know, “Dungeon Master”, “Eye of the Beholder” or “Legend of Grimrock”. In the end, the movement worked somehow, and you could add NPCs to your party, and press a button to see all four viewports at once. Probably I could have made a more or less full game out of it, but at this point I didn’t see how I could add “fun” easily and I stopped yet again.

second prototype, no fun

With the thought of fun being the most important part of it and without really expecting any results for this Ludum Dare anymore, I got back to the first prototype, and suddenly, the old problem was gone. Thinking about the focal length was a dead-end, and just getting rid of it was the way to get it work. The only problem now was the collision detection of an object that would get bigger the further it goes. Using Unity3D’s SphereCast() was the wrong direction, because the size of the collision sphere would be always the same. So now CheckSphere() gets called with a gradually increasing size of the radius parameter, and it does that a lot of times every frame – because of the simple nature of the rest of the game, this was possible without any noticable performance hits (at least on my computer). Of course, this means that every object basically has an additional bounding sphere, and that’s why most objects sometimes don’t behave as expected, especially those which don’t have uniform dimensions.

first prototype, working

I uploaded the first prototype of the game – just a simple demonstration of the gameplay – late in the night, and those who actually started it and “got it”, said it could be awesome. Yay, motivation! Also, I earned myself some sleep. The next day I “only” had to make levels and fix any occuring bug. Also, story. Also, sound. Also, …

I planned five levels at the beginning, and because of some very sad events before Ludum Dare, I didn’t think about it too long when I realized that I wouldn’t have time for all of them – as one of the levels would had have a kindergarten setting. So, three levels were made (in 3dsmax), and they describe how the protagonist is a kid with just an overly active imagination, and how this leads to an unfortunate outcome. I didn’t have time for more, and the ones I made aren’t really balanced/tested, so I am sorry for that. On the other side I am just relieved that the main gameplay works and can maybe be the foundation of a cool game; the Ludum Dare version of the finally named game “Tale of Scale” is mainly a sandbox game which happens to have a subtly communicated goal in each level.

the end result: Tale of Scale

A short summarization of What-Went-Bad:

• The start, or rather the theme. Either it is the start of a game for me, or it just stands in my way. Harumph. I squeezed the theme into the final game, but as most people won’t play it through, they probably will wonder where it actually is. I got a bit inspired by the movie “Looper”.
• I still can’t make music. I tried composing some once or twice before, but I’m always embarrassed by my own efforts, so I don’t ever get over a certain point.
• I don’t have a cool base code which actually would free me of the burden to do some stupid and boring stuff again and again. At least that’s a learning and can be helped … some day.

And What-Went-Good?

• The idea was cool enough to let people ignore the crude levels and graphics, hehe.
• I actually managed to make three levels, even in the timeframe I wanted to make them. Seems like I finally get the hang on estimating such things, and this is one of the things a game jam really can help with.
• I made most of the sounds myself with a microphone, and they sound okay enough. Nice.

That’s it! Thanks for reading, and don’t forget to play the game (here’s the entry page) – or at least watch this gameplay video:

Tags: ld25, post-mortem, postmortem, puzzle platformer, Tale of Scale, unity, unity3d

Happy Christmas everyone, may your hearts be filled with joy and happiness!

Tags: christmas

Hello, Mohammad once again, here to once again explain why I wasn’t in the ludum dare, again. I really was blown that end of the world didn’t win, but also embarrassed because I also   chose “You are the villain!” as well. I already had the plot down. You as a Exno-Phobic human, now has to purge the world of foreign when furries introduce themselves into our war. It was going to be kinda hitman kinda gears of war.When the theme came out, I stopped staring and instantly opened up blender, and well… tried to install Unity. Remember about the posts I made a few days ago regarding my potential freedom…. Yeah, well… two things on that:

1: This was AFTER the ludum dare ended.

2: All the tools that I used that LAST ludum were on that computer, the computer I was using didn’t even have word installed on it.

So as you can see that was one 2 reasons I couldn’t get it done. Another reason was that the computer kept logging me out at 2:00 because of the basic windows vista parental controls. Finally the last reason I couldn’t get it done was because I couldn’t finish the models. I spent 2 WEEKS, working on a M22 Silenced pistol. I would have gotten more work done if it wasn’t for the damn parental controls. Then there was school. I had a F in Algebra and I had to do Khan academy or flunk math. I had no choice, so I gave up time on the ludum to work on that. Another downgrade. Then I was down with fever for 4 days. By the time everything cleared out, the ludum judging was halfway over, and I missed the ludum.

-Sorry I couldn’t be in it, Mohammad.

This was my first time doing a jam game with other people, and it was a lot of fun getting incoming graphics to work with. I was kind of busy that weekend and couldn’t finish a complete version, so I came back to it last night and added sound, music and some gameplay improvements. Click for the flash version: