We decided to make a game where the player is a thief ready to sneak into a building in the middle of the night. The building is full of people sleeping happily in their rooms with no idea of what is coming!

The thief needs to walk carefully to avoid waking up the occupants. They can hear any subtle noise near them. And God they are merciless! They will shot you right away!

We were fighting all Saturday with the language so we couldn’t complete the game mechanics that day as we have planned. However, we could complete the player movements and a level generator that randomly creates a building with a given number of floors by a given number of rooms and places, randomly as well, a closet and a bed inside each room.

At that point we just had a bunch of colored boxes. Forget any fancy graphics for now. The red object was the player, the brown boxes were the closets the thief had to check to get the loot. The cyan rectangles were the beds where the occupants lay down, the orange objects were “stairs” to go upstairs and the blue objects were other “stairs” to get downstairs. Those weren’t stairs exactly but a kind of teleport between floors.

Sunday and Monday was devoted to program the occupants behavior and the thief’s ability to look for the loot. We also completed the game over screen. Then we create some skins for the thief and the occupants as well as some textures for closets, beds and stairs. At the end of last day we finished the background texture and the startup screen with some directions about how to play.

And that was all folks! We sent the game with no sound effects but we were so satisfied with all the work done. We enjoyed a lot this Jam and we’re looking forward the next one!

Entry can be found here. You can find the postmortem here.

Finally, a timelapse for your pleasure:

Finally got around to finishing and posting a postmortem for my Evil Gnome’s Revenge game. The link is http://blazinggames.blogspot.com/2012/12/ld25-postmortem.html . Here is a quick summary of the article:

What went right:

– going with a simple game

– Knowing my limits and getting enough rest to stay more productive

What went wrong:

– School shooting caused me to go different direction with game

– Too much time spent writing code that should be in the library I am developing.

Now back to rating games.

This is the first time I really completed a game for Ludum Dare!  I’m quite impressed with myself now. 

Misunderstood Monkey, as the title turned in to, is a game where you play a monkey trying to defend his princess from the forces trying to take her away from you.  I basically took the idea of Donkey Kong, and had little Marios coming up to snatch her away from your gentle touch.

The game idea didn’t come up immediately – my first reaction was to make a game in which you play an evil villain out to kill innocent kittens.  I spent most of Friday night starting out on this game.  I wound up with a kitten image and a kitten-spawner and a blob that couldn’t yet shoot things and thought “this game is gonna suck.”  And then I started bemoaning about how I don’t know any good 2D engines.

What went right:

Objective-C and Cocoa: I had planned on using Unity3d; my last entry used that, but as I was experimenting with my ideas I realized that I did not want to do a 3D view and it would be cumbersome to implement in Unity3d.  So, I switched to Objective-C/Cocoa. I did not want to; I wanted to use something a little more crossplatform so that more people could use my code, but I couldn’t think of a nice framework for 2D graphics that I know and can do stuff quickly in; except maybe C/SDL which I hate and wouldn’t be able to get it done in 48 hours.  I hope making the wrong prediction doesn’t disqualify me from any awesome prizes I might win.    However, ObjC/Cocoa was super easy to use and I got stuff done very quickly.

Super Pixel Time:  I don’t know what his user name on Ludum Dare is, but super extra happy extra special thanks to the guy who made Super Pixel Time.   Let me show you how that website transformed impressively bad programmer art in to fancy pixelated art!

became

thanks to Super Pixel Time.  For another image, here is the original monkey:

I may need to put together another build with the original art.

What went wrong:

Idea:  My originally idea was that you were going to be a guy who runs around murdering cute innocent kittens.  I spent Friday night sketching out the ideas and plans, and late Friday night (past my bedtime) I decided it wasn’t going anywhere before switching to my new plans.  While I like my new idea much better than the old one, I really didn’t start coding until Saturday morning.

Fast and sloppy coding:  As an example, the level is a hard coded array.  Changing level design is not easy, especially the first iteration involved some of the ladders in places that made the game much too hard.  I have moved them, and now the game is too easy. I decided not to move them back because it was too much work, however, I really would have liked easier-to-edit levels.

Sound: I had planned on using cfxr.  It’s actually not all that great.  I found Audacity with its noise generators and editors much easier to use.  There are random tutorials on using it for more than the things it comes with out of the box.  I recommend it.

Difficulty:  In my editing layout/speed/speed of barrel reloading/other tweaks, it seemed I had no choice between making it too hard or too easy.  I settled for “faster but easy”, but I would like some appropriate challenge.

Rating other games:  I had a final exam after Ludum Dare, and then the time after the exam I thought I’d be playing games, I got super sick instead.  I tried to rate games – I just got queasy!  I’m starting to feel better but I haven’t started on rating any games today (I’ll get at it soon, though, I promise!).

Future plans:

I have an artist working on this with me, and the vague plan is to replace the programmer art with his fancy artwork.  This is in progress, as it will require me writing up some code to alternate directions of heroes and add animations (the images will actually animate as they move!).  A screenshot in progress:

A further update, possibly as the October challenge, will be to port it to the iPad.  Also, I’d like more levels.

All in all, I’m quite thrilled with what I made, even though some of the other people out there made far more impressive games than I did.

I’ve finally rated 100 of the entries. I was quite impressed with many of them, and as with LD24, I wanted to take a moment to draw your attention to some of my favorites that I feel are underplayed (have under 50 ratings). Here they are, in no particular order (click the titles or images to go to the entry page) …
 

Trolling – permanente1600 – 48 Hour Compo Entry

A nasty troll does its best to stomp over the flowers planted by a unicorn.
 

the BRINK – radmars – Jam Entry

Top-notch visual style and audio; feels like a complete game.
 

Another Castle – RosyPenguin – Jam Entry

Break into each castle and run away with the princess!

 

Acidman – Stavu – Jam Entry

A clever puzzle game about a man who gains strange powers after an industrial accident.
 

hunt – Zillix – 48 Hour Compo Entry

Sabotage the villagers’ plans to end your curse using the knowledge of your own castle and its many hazards.
 

Battleship Texas – Yngar – 48 Hour Compo Entry

Great use of silly humor to tell a story.
 

A day in the life of the Minotaur – jfroco – 48 Hour Compo Entry

Eat the hearts of fierce warriors on your way to devour virgins in this simple, but well-executed board game.
 

Just Politics – brantkings – Jam Entry

Climb the political ladder and abuse your popularity as you siphon money behind the backs of reporters and the feds.

That’s all for now; I hope you enjoy playing these games as much as I did!

Tags: LD #25, picks

Here it is, a mosaic of Ludum Dare 25 made using all the main screenshot of Ludum Dare’s 25 games. (click on the image for the high resolution)

Like it? What about rate my game? Is free: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=14271

Tags: composition, mosaic, screenshots, wallpaper

A short while ago, I created a game in 48 hours. You probably already  knew that if you are reading this. It can be found here. You don’t have to play it before reading this as there is no story to spoil. It’s more of an arcade-y thing. Though it will help you understand what I’m talking about.

If you instead hate me enough to make me explain the game to you, read this paragraph. It is a game in which you play as the alien mothership invading earth while lasering the crap out of whatever stands in your path. Including soldiers, helicopters, tanks, stealth planes and some defenceless people just for fun.

The Good

•  It’s pretty fun to play, not an amazing experience but definitely enjoyable, being that it, like many of this compo’s entries, appeals to the human desire to kill stuff. And fun is the only thing you can really judge a game by.
• The music is thematic and I rather like it. There are two songs in the game, both created in “Garage band”, a menu song and a song for the actual game part. I tried to make the former sound sort of otherworldly and alienesque , which I feel I succeeded in. The latter I had felt should sound like a song reminiscent of those played while knights rode in to battle, something like this.  Though, in the end, mine was simpler and more of a reverie of a more brutish brawl. Still combat-like though.
• I survived my first time. Well, not strictly speaking my first time, I had a go in LD 23 but gave up rather early, and I had an “I’m in” in LD 24 but didn’t even really try that time. So I”m counting this as my first time.
• I had my idea early and stuck with it. I just heard the words “The theme is “you are the villain”” and instantly went to an alien invasion. I didn’t have all the stuff worked out by any stretch of the imagination, but the feature creep worked in my favour and I ended up with enough stuff for a full game.

The Bad

• There are bugs, the first was on relating to my use of a non-ascii character (♫) in the game, which seemed to disagree with some people’s versions of python. I fixed that but others have reported different bugs in which the game crashes, which I can not seem to explain. (As of 16/04/13 this has been fixed for a while)
• Worst aesthetic in the compo. No question. I’m working on my pixel artistry skills and have gotten better. I knew before I started that visuals would be a problem as I have never been good at anything artistic, so I tried to minimise time spent on graphics. If I tried to make them decent I would’ve spent far too much time on it.
• Some common complaints in comments are that the ship is too large to dodge bullets, that the enemies move too fast and that the upgrade buttons are too far from the main controls, all of which I agree are mistakes on my part that I will try to learn from in future.

Other stuff

• The game’s name, “Invasion!”, had no real thought put in to it. It’s not clever or anthing, but it works.
• The game doesn’t do anything special with the theme. I would’ve loved to do something like in the book of “I am Legend” where you are only revealed to be the bad guy at the very end.
• My original inspiration for the game, as you will have probably figured out, was “Space Invaders”, but as the competition went on I tried to move away from that and more towards the stereotypical alien invasion scene.

Yay, I’ve finally uploaded the timelapse! Within the 44 hours of development, I’ve used glapse to capture a screenshot every 10 seconds.

Thanks for watching

The game is available for following systems:

• Desktop (Linux, Windows, Mac) – Java required
• Web (Java applet)
• Android

You can play it here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=8574

Although it wasn’t my first game, it was my first LD. My first game was in HTML5 too, for a jam in two weeks, it was a TD with physics and A* pathfinding, made from scratch. It was completely broken, buggy and with bad programmer art.

However, I’m writing the postmortem for anoher game, a platformer. I couldn’t make a timelapse, as it missed the first 4 hours (programming,music,some art), and the last 2 hours(uploading the game somewhere). The link is here.

Stuff that went well:

• Knowledge of HTML5 and Javascript.
• It was playable by the deadline

Stuff that went wrong (unavoidable)

• Time. The first day was completely killed, and the second day, I was too tired to think straight. That probably caused the bugs.
• For some reason, my laptop keyboard broke. It was just after uploading it for the first time. Then I somehow managed to fix the mute button bug at least on Mozilla Firefox, but gave up, as typing i dfficult with a broke keybord.

Stuff that went wrong (avoidable)

• Writing collision detection from scratch. Do not try this at a 48h compo.
• Lack of audio skilz.
• Bad programer art (it was supposed to be placeholder, but as it was nearing deadline, I had to make cuts).
• The controls bug. I tried to do something cool with them, but failed trying. However, fixing that bug would probably make the game evr more borng.
• Wrong hardcoded values (too weak gravity, too strong stiction to ground, too much control in the air, too weak hardness of the protagonist

Tags: ld25, postmortem

Pointed at LudumDare by Frozen Fractal in the week before the Jam, my girlfriend and I decided to give it a shot.

Concept

I was absolutely convinced the theme would be “End of the World”, but it turned out differently. It took us about 4 hours to come up with an idea that would be simple enough to implement. A trainride forced us to think about it a bit longer than we would otherwise have. The player walks around on a grid, of which certain parts are occluded based on the player walking over “switch”-tiles. Stepping on a “spike”-tile restarts the level, so these have to be avoided, which can be hard in the dark. The goal is to black out the entire level (cover the land in darkness, following the theme). You can check out and download our game here!

Screenshot of Ninox the Nightbringer

Process

I really liked Python after some recent experience with it, and although Java and C are in general my stronger suits, I expected Python with Pygame to work better for this game (I had created a simple brickles game two days earlier to practice). My girlfriend did all the rest, i.e. graphics (in Inkscape), sounds, music (in LMMS and Audacity) and most of the level design (in Notepad). We took it easy: baking cookies, eating all of them, taking a walk, sleeping enough and finishing on Sunday. Despite this, we finished the game surprisingly fast, having a working game on Saturday evening. Sunday was mainly leveldesign and the imho boring polishing (graphics, “repetitive walking”, fullscreen-mode, intro and outro and of course testing). Half my Sunday was eaten by a futile attempt to create an executable from the Python code on Ubuntu.

The Good

We had fun, and thought the concept was original. Dropping the initial ‘pedophile searching his dungeon for a little girl’ made the game acceptable for my girlfriend’s mother, too.  We divided the work well and finished the game on time, with an intro and ending. The number of levels was okay (though some of them should have been left out). Both of us learned some (more) Python.  Drawing the graphics was great fun, and since they ended up so small, here’s a bigger version of our owl “Grog”:

The Bad

The biggest problem was deployment. I had no experience with putting stuff online, and the game required Python and Pygame to be installed, which most people don’ t have. Some programs exist to create a Windows executable, but it took us two weeks (combined >20 hours, ridiculous) to make PyInstaller work. The main problems were reluctancy to work from Windows, font, missing .dll files (for audio) which we manually included in the end. Maybe next time I’ll try Javascript. Anyway, we have an EXECUTABLE! 😀

Next time we could be a bit more ambitious. We were planning on adding more game elements (doors, walking goats), but with a working game, our motivation (aka pressure) wasn’t as strong as when we started. Also, see the previous paragraph.

Added live highscore table functionality for my html5/js game, SUPER Santa Punchout! Also more content added. Keep in mind I need to move the game files to a proper hosting site because DropBox is being used to host it and it’s response time is slow. But it works! And I’m very proud. I’m moving onward with game developing! From C++ and solid system executables only to HTML5/javascripting and os-agnostic playability. I feel free. 😛

P

eace!

Herein, I unearth a few more hidden games that I found by poking at random icons in the “Browse All Entries” screen. I hit a run of about 5 awesome games in a row, so two of these are from that streak.

White Rabbit – by kato9

We see a lot of first-time Unity users do the same thing, wherein they drop the standard CharacterController down into a scene with a standard 1st person POV camera, don’t change the control scheme, and proceed to experiment with importing some assets, throwing around some particle effects, and getting a handle on sending messages around the Heirarchy. While all these things appear to be true of White Rabbit, there’s a huge investment in attention to detail that make it stand strongly apart from others that do the same thing. The textures and shaders are gorgeous. The overall aesthetic makes it such that the floating text narration feels right. The dramatic timing and set design is thoughtful and masterfully executed. The theme is only tenuously followed, but I can forgive that in light of the polish and excellence in presentation here.

Life of a Boss – by Jiddo

This game gave me some very vague and brief flashbacks to Tecmo’s Deception back on the PS1, if that game had more of a board-game feel to it. I very much enjoyed playing around with efficient floorplans and dungeon layouts. Even lowly spike pit rooms have uses not just for proper spacing but because there are heroes that are particularly weak to them.

Vixen – by bentosmile

I actually felt pretty bad after I played Vixen. Sure, it’s a game. Yeah, I’m exploring all the options given. Still, the particular villain type you’re playing here is both low and all too common. The banality of the situation kind of got to me. Once you’re done being a jerk, it might be worth going back and playing one more time and find a way to *not* be one after all.

Tags: ld25, reviews

I recently participated in Ludum Dare #25. This was my third attempt at Ludum Dare. This time I chose to build a multiplayer game. It was much more challenging to do it this way.

Players start out as demons walking around a castle. Thematically I was trying to make it seem as though the players themselves were the “bosses” that had captured a princess.

Players can chat in the game.

Other players can join, and shoot fireballs at you – stunning you for 20 seconds.

I am pictured above being burned to death by a fireball from Ricky. Damn you Ricky.

The goal is to capture the princess by touching her.

The person who holds her at the end of every 60 second round, gets the point.

I spent 90% of the time getting everything working, and setting up the client/server architecture. I didn’t have time to do much else. It was only on the last day that I decided to implement the princess theme, and turn it into what is essentially 2d doom deathmatch mode. I took the art from “Oryx – LOFI Fantasy 2D/3D [FINAL]” pack, which is a free open-source art pack that anyone can use (google it). The rules clearly state, however; that I am not allowed to use an artpack, so I am probably disqualified. It was fun, though; and I don’t care too much about that.

The third Ludum Dare our team has participated in! Here we’ll post our individual thoughts about our game. If you haven’t played it yet, go do so! 

What Went Right

Rose

• Teamwork / Friendship: The four of us have worked on two other LD games, and have gone through college together. We work comfortably around each other and are not afraid to take risks/try new things. We have a handful of inside jokes that kept us giggling throughout the jam.
• Google Hangouts: Amazing how technology can bridge thousands of miles! We more or less were able to collaborate despite all being remote.
• Art: I have a lot of fun designing the quirky characters. I wanted to lean toward the whimsical and silly with my character designs. The ‘Goat’ sub-theme proved to be a fun inspiration. Also put more attention into animation than previous jams: animated in Flash instead of the silly Photoshop animation tool.

Iterations for the main villain.

Cast of characters.

Johan

• Teamwork: We coded together on the same project without stepping on each others’ toes. We also wrote tools that theoretically would let content creation be more separate from coding so we didn’t block each other. Levels and other settings were set up in XML where we had previously just put everything in code. Theoretically, it would have made content creation (aside from the raw art/sounds) extremely quick once the engine was set up.
• Google Effects: I don’t always use video chat systems, but when I do, I prefer Google+ Hangouts.
• Music/sound quality: The sounds came out pretty nice considering how long it took to make them!

Vu

• Task Separation: Once we had the game idea mostly figured out we were able to jump right into working. The tasks just seemed to split up on their own. Me and Johan worked with the same project in Dropbox. It was amazing how we hardly stepped on each other’s code.
• Data-Driving: Johan did a really good job of making an XML parsing system and data structures to store and retrieve content. It made tuning and modifying the game extremely simple. We could make dozens of levels in just a few minutes if we wanted.

What Went Wrong

Rose

• Art Consistency: I am usually a stickler for consistency, but this time I was focused too much on the technicalities and little details. The colors felt too muted for the villainous-yet-whimsical feel we were going for, and the logo style is completely different from the game style. A year+ in the industry makes me really critical of my work :/
  I also never got around to the UI/layout of information, which meant that some screens looked like art with default text slapped over it. Ugh.

Poop.

• Wasted Time: Not enough time spent brainstorming and fully fleshing out the game design.
  We were no longer in college, which meant we all had relatively healthy sleep schedules and couldn’t stay up as late as we normally do. 3 out of 4 of us had to work on Monday, making Vu the only one working on the game that day.
  The team was split up in three different timezones, which basically meant there was only a window of a few hours a day where all four of us would be in Hangouts at the same time.
• Scoping: You would think that as game jam veterans, we would have learned to scope games accordingly now. But I think this time we didn’t take into account the lost time on Monday.

Johan

• Incomplete Design/Scope/Work/Timezones: We had a lot of ideas but didn’t really take into account just how much time we would lose on Monday, since three of us work fulltime on weekdays. We brainstormed late Friday night and I could only work the full day on Saturday. On Monday, we didn’t have final music or any sound effects yet, and we couldn’t get in touch with Hal due to work, so when I got home (with a little less than an hour left!) I ended up taking/slightly polishing one of our drafts and making as many sound effects as possible! A good bit of those sounds didn’t quite make it into the submission version of the project, but will be in the post-jam version, whenever we feel ready to post it up.

Vu

• Late Start: Friday was the last day of my 8 month co-op and so my coworkers wanted to take me to see the Hobbit after work. It was fun, but it meant that I would not be able to join the team until saturday morning, so I missed out on a lot brainstorming and idea generation. I felt like this head us back a lot since everyone had to wait on me before we could agree on an idea and start working on it.
• Distance: Although we were able to collaborate well using google hangouts and skype, not being collocated meant that we wouldn’t have nice things like whiteboards, post-its, and just being able to look at each other’s works directly and give immediate feedback and inspiration.
  Additionally, when we work together it’s easier to stay up all night and work harder because we can see everyone else working hard and not sleeping either.
• Slow Prototyping: It look a lot longer than usual to get a prototype of the game up and running. We couldn’t really gauge the gameplay until the game was basically done. We had a lot of trouble deciding key aspects of the game such as whether or not the play should have HP, do enemies have HP?, where do enemies come from? These were things we should have had locked down before we started working.
• All Alone: On Monday everyone had to work except for me so I had to put together the rest of the code by myself and lacked support for sound, art, and general feedback on the gameplay. This put a lot of stress and pressure on me.
  I was scrambling to get all the basic screens and generally code in. I wanted to make sure that we had everything that makes a game feel more like a complete work than just a gameplay prototype. I wish I could have spent more time tuning the gameplay and adding features. I feel like I wasted a lot of time tweaking screens and chasing minor bugs on that day. Thankfully we were able to get some additional content and musics and sounds in at the very last second when everyone got out of work.

What We Got out of the Experience

Rose

• Extra practice working with the technical side and the full art pipeline. Animated bitmaps in Flash instead of Photoshop’s animation tool, which allowed me to create smoother animations. Then had to figure out a quick way to export into a spritesheet, which took some roundabouts (GlueIt) but I was pretty happy with the process. Also, XML!
• This was the first time any of us had worked on a game remotely, which is a good experience to have.

Johan

• Used Torrunt’s Developer Console in a personal project for the first time! Being able to type in cheats/functions that you want to call at runtime was pretty much amazing. Previously, we’d tie cheats to button presses, but in general, it’s tough to remember to clean those up, especially with time constraints. It was also useful when setting up features in code (especially with all of us working on the “same branch” at the same time), since I could do test calls/functionality from within the cheats instead of having to compile and use possibly-broken code.
• Wrote an AnimationBuilder class that lets you determine sets of Flixel animations in XML without going into the code yourself :D. Definitely going to add this to my code library!
• Mostly successful completely-remote working experience.

Vu

• A fresh new game! Although the game is a runner at heart, it feels different because of the spatial layout of levels and environmental involvement. It may not be exactly what we originally planned out but it’s definitely on the right track and illustrates the basic gameplay we planned. With a little more work we could expand the game into what we originally designed and incorporate the feedback we’ve gotten so far.
• Proof that remote development can work well. The HCI person in me wants to try to improve this and make more/better tools for communicating these kinds of ideas. If we had a simple collaborative animation board I think we would have been able to communicate some ideas better.

What Will We Do in Future Jams?

Rose

• I saw in some Post-Mortems that other artists would set up a moodboard before the jam to establish a style and color scheme without wasting time doing it during the jam. I definitely want to try this next time, and make sure the game has a more consistent mood throughout.
• It would also save a lot of time to have a nice library of fonts, textures, actions, and brushes ready in Photoshop. I spent far too long searching for free ones to use.
• Timelapse!
• I wish to be more involved with understanding the code side. I have done an individual jam once, learning AS3 along the way. More of this!
• Have the full art pipeline set beforehand. I’ll need to research more powerful and up-to-date programs to create spritemaps.
• I made an animatic to show the programmers how I wanted the prop-throwing mechanic to feel in the game. They did a fantastic job of recreating that procedurally, giving it realistic physics that varied slightly every time. I strongly suggest making plenty of mockups and animatics to make sure the team has the same vision in mind.

Early background mockup.

Johan

• I’d like to experiment with some more code/design patterns
• I’d like to have more patterns/setups in mind, so while not exactly copying code from previous projects, I’d be more prepared to set something up quickly to solve a problem I’d already thought about.
• Maybe have more of a hand in the gameplay coding…or be quicker with setting up tools. Also goes with my previous point though. Mental preparation!
• I’d like to better-design how objects in the world are set up, with a better relationship between XML (data) and code (behavior).
• Design with non-desktop platforms in mind!? It’d be a pretty fresh experience to try that out.
• Maybe it’d be nice to escape from Flixel at least once. 2D game development has considerably less overhead than 3D, so I’d like to stick with 2D/Flash for game jams. Flixel’s FlxGroups are just too handy though.

Vu

• For other jams we sometimes have two running ideas that are prototyped extremely quickly (by the end of the first night). I’d like to do that again to prove out ideas before going full force on any one idea. We didn’t have time to do it in this case since we lost a lot of time due to schedule conflicts and time zone differences.
• I’d like to spend some more time planning out the flow of the game and all the important systems and have them fleshed out way before starting detailed systems
• Do more art! I didn’t have my tablet or any good art programs on the laptop that I used for the jam so I wasn’t able to help out with art content at all.
• I’d like to be able to have the game pretty much done way earlier than the deadline so that we can just add polish and do testing much earlier
• Try out more some unexplored territory. We’ve tended to stick to single player games with a set of core mechanics. I’d like to branch out in future jams and do some games that are more story driven, multiplayer, and/or totally abstract.

Thanks for reading!

Stay tuned for a post-jam version!

Tags: another castle, postmortem, tl;dr

People post the best games they saw, or the most innovative, or something…

There has been alot of original ideas in the contest, and now, I’ll post the WEIRDEST ones. Games that make you go WTF:

BEWARE as some of these are pretty OBSCENE!

 Mitt Romney and the Case of the Sex Doll

This is a weird adventure game, where you play as Mitt Romney. The art and the music are really obscure. Play at your own risk here

You are the Evil Overlord

In this game you play as an evil overlord and all you can do is yell at your minions that are trying to defeat a hero. The whole game is choosing what to yell at them. It is actually pretty fun, and interesting stuff can happen. You can send your goat… Play here

The Filthy Coward

Here, you are some guy that goes in public removing people’s clothes. Your mission is to be as rude as possible without getting caught by the cops (which don’t really do much) Anyways it’s here

Gin Monster Bob

This is a drunken stealth game. You should get to the kitchen without bumping into anything and it all moves. Play it

Fisticuffs

This isn’t really a game, but a hockey fighting simulator. Bet for your favorite team – the Dicks or the Pussies – here!

If you know any other weird games, post them in the comments!

Go!

Hello fellow Dare’rs!

So for this ludum dare tmtowtdi and I decided to make a multiplayer game for a difference. I’d done a lot of action-arcade type games before and I felt quite determined to make something I hadn’t done before. So we got together with my friend tmtowtdi, which is an exellent server/web/js ninja, and got to work for the LD25 jam.

Tools:

I feel comfortable using flash/as3 so it was a easy desicion for me, moreover we wanted to be able to deploy to mobile so starling, a framework for making gpu accellerated programs in flash, was a great fit.

Determining what to use on serverside was a bit of a challenge. As I said, none of us really did a multiplayer game before so we looked into java, Scala and c#.. Since we weren’t familiar with any of these tmtowtdi decided to go with node.js with javascript, a framework he often uses for his work. And for the socket’s we decided to use Socket.io which is well integrated with as3 and js.

Setting up our stuff:

This was the easist part of the jam, Node.js and socket.io just work! We immideately got our communications running with flash and started exchanging packets right away.

Implementing game logic into the client:

Starling is a great framework, I’d written a small game library a few weeks back that uses starling and does basic asset and scene management. Using this code to make the game interface and game logic for the client was an easy task.

Implementing game logic into the server:

Now this part is a different story now since we used javascript we started banging into some problems as the game logic got a bit complicated. As you know, javascript is not type-safe, and also it is highly dynamic, that means you can declare variables and functions on the fly, these cool features of js kinda’ got us into trouble. We spent long hours ironing out bugs and parts of code just didn’t work for seamingly no reason. Features that enabled us to write fast code was breaking our game and small tasks started taking too long.

But by the last day we got things working, thanks to tmtowtdi’s experience with js and overall awesomeness 😀 and got to testing gameplay, adding small features like help messages and polishing the overall game.

tl;dr:

We had a blast working on something new, and personally it was my best LD so far. Yes, we missed quite a lot of things with game design and interface design. The game is obviously lacking a lot; most people don’t even get whats going on in the game :D. But it was worth it!

So if you feel like you want to do a whole new thing for the next LD and you have a friend that you work well together, just do it!

The game:

The result is BFG TD, a multiplayer tower defence game where two teams attack each other for all of eternity 😀 If you haven’t played the game please check it out here, and please comment on what you think could be added, what works or doesn’t.

Timelapses:

You can also check out timelapses of clientside work done on days 1 and 2. The last day was a bit chaotic so no recording was done there 😀

• Day1
• Day2

Cheers!

PS: Sorry about my spelling, my spell checker is acting up today 😀

Hey Everyone. I’ve been working on my LD game the past two weeks and wanted to share the finished version.

You can play it HERE

The game features better sound / music and a 2 player mode!
Now you can play as mario and attempt to climb to the top while your buddy hurls barrels at you or vice-versa. Unless there are any HUGE issues then I won’t be spending any more time on the game. I’ve got to say that doing LD 25 was a great decision. After being in a bit of a slump during my vacation, LD really revitalized my passion for making games and kept me motivated. I can’t wait for Global Game Jam and I hope y’all enjoy the game. Thank for playing.

So while I wasn’t able to participate I did improve my maze creation library.

Not only is it two orders of magnitude faster but it has a proper unit test. Full code coverage. No loops, there is a solution (unittest checks for the solution and even prints it out).

The code is far more maintainable now as well.

Let me say Visual Studio 2012 is very impressive as you dig into it.

On this one screen you can see I have full code coverage in by my unittests. There are two functions which are taking most of the time when running a performance test. There are no detected code issues (or they’ve been suppressed). Oh and on the bottom left, you can see how maintainable the code is. It can drill in further but I didn’t have space on this one screen shot.

You can grab it here: http://www.kins-home.net/ludum/timelapse/MazeCreatorLib_2.2.zip

Hello!

I really ought to be making a post-compo version (which was already started!), but I found the necessity of a map editor to my liking.

I could have used any from the tools section… but I wanted to try and develop one myself. xD So far, the basic functionalities are finished! It exports in a Flixel friendly format (for I use that framework a lot), which is also the format of the tilesets exported by Pickle. I didn’t delve into whether that is the default way of working with tileset, but it works for me.

You can check it out at my blog, or download it here (right-click and . I also wrote an kind of manual… just some guidelines on how to use it.

The next feature I want to add is a layer to add objects, which will be used to output custom code, referencing the position of the object.

Please comment your thoughts on it. =D

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 30th, 2012 at 2:23 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.

I had recently been watching a tv show called Venture Bros[1] which features villains, some of which have henchmen, combine this with some inspiration from a film called Bunraku[2] with the numbered killers, and I had an idea set in my mind.

What went right
Firstly the gameplay came out exactly how I thought about it, I wanted quite an abstract game with very little user control, which I have written more about later in this post. The naming on the henchmen amused me and I even felt some sort of attachment to some of the top henchmen I have had, this was sort of inspired by the names in the game cannon fodder[3]. The “combat” between henchmen and the other characters was inspired by the combat parts of half minute hero[4]. I was also quite happy how the graphics came together in the end, I don’t normally consider myself a graphics person but the consistent look of the game I felt was acceptable.

What went wrong
The thing most obvious I felt went wrong was the total lack of instructions. Given that I had been playing it most of the weekend of Ludum Dare I knew what to do, but didn’t really get to writing up some instructions or even putting some of the less obvious parts somewhere to give the player a clue as to what s/he was doing. I also neglected to add a losing condition that means the only way to restart after losing all your henchmen and money is to reload the page containing the game. Another thing that I wasn’t happy with was the unfinished title screen and game over screens that were just left as scans from my notes instead of graphics to match those in the game, although this has been fixed in the version on kongregate now[5] There was (and still is) a lack of decent sounds (a couple of bleeps and bloops from bfxr[6]) and music. Ideally I was going to make some music on my Gameboy with LSDJ[7], but I didn’t find the time to put anything decent together so this was left out entirely.

Thoughts on the lack of control
One of the major criticisms of the game I have seen is that there is little control over the henchmen and that it all appears too random. This was one of the points I wanted to make with the game to express my feelings of lack of control over various parts of my life and that despite the best instructions and intentions, not everything is totally under your control. Ideally I would have been able to make this much more obvious with the henchmen by implementing moods or something that would have made them less or more co-operative with the instructions given but time didn’t really permit me to do this totally and it may have to be done in a post-compo version

References
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Venture_Bros.
[2] http://uk.imdb.com/title/tt1181795/
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannon_Fodder_(video_game)
[4] http://www.halfminutehero.com/
[5] http://www.kongregate.com/games/henrypenface/hench-for-life-from-rags-to-riches
[6] http://www.bfxr.net/
[7] http://www.littlesounddj.com/lsd/

It took some training but I finally demonstrated that my game is beatable.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9MUukcCZrk