Evolution

“You are the villain”. My immediate thoughts revolved around men in diabolical capes with greased back hair, big nose, moustache and evil cackling laughter. Railway tracks. Ladies in distress. Cartoons…

I put those thoughts to one side.

What I like most about the pressure of 48 hours is that allows one to take big creative risks. This, for me, is the most satisfying part of Ludum Dare. When I play other LD48 games what I most want to see is originality – a spark of brilliance born of panic and enthusiasm – a glimpse into a gaming universe which no sane gaming studio would seriously explore.

I wanted to create a game which, rather than shrank away from the grotesque possibilities of “you [the player] are the villain”, embraced it with perversion and panache.

The (admittedly obvious) theme of initiating a mass shooting grabbed my attention.

During day one of LD, as I progressed with my design, news came over the radio: a massacre had occurred in Newtown, USA; a massacre of mostly young children. A sad day for humanity.

I decided to pursue my current game idea regardless. But the tragic events at Newtown helped me focus on what I considered important to such a game concept.

There was to be no romanticism, and the game would itself accuse the player of being a coward.

The visuals would be abstract, a representation of a cold calculated killer. Killing shapes is easy – killing people not so.

There would be no screams from the victims, nor graphic spurts of blood, nor spasms of death – figures would simply fade, as if fading from memory, fading from consciousness.

The gun would not let out a satisfying “BANG!”, but would be a simple muted “click”.

All of this would help distance the player from the act, but the fascinating twist is that I wanted this abstract interpretation to represent a very literal interpretation of the mind of the killer. What you are seeing in this game IS what the killer sees. This is the only way the killer can shield him/herself from the awful truth.

There is also a simple blood overlay with opacity and movement changes which reflect the players current health. It begins to obscure the player’s vision as health gets critical. As the veil of blood descends, it fogs the player’s vision… disorientation… panic… a sense of inevitable death… and finally, an urge to die.

The only tenuous thread connecting the player with reality would be the background noise – a blend of street sounds and general panic. These sounds represent encroaching reality – the thin line between  the killer and victims – and would attempt to worm their way into the ear.

I am happy that most people seemed to pick up on this idea, with many comments reflecting upon these stylistic devices.

Did it work?

The fun challenge here as a game designer is to make this style work, while trying to embed the mechanics of a fun game.

I think I succeeded, in that if you take away the cosmetics, you are still left with a game. That being said, definite improvements could be made.

There are a couple of interesting mechanics used. The first, is that civilian targets score more than police targets, even though civilians can not defend themselves but police will fire at you. Presently, a civilian scores 10 points, while a police officer only scores 5. A miss costs you 1 point to discourage mouse mashing type play.

The second game mechanic is the suicide mechanic. There are many ways the suicide score calculation could work, and originally I wanted it to oscillate a little. But in the end I used this simple formula:

suicideBonus = Math.floor(health/4) + 10

There is an annoying bug somewhere which makes the shooting collision tests a bit iffy.

More graphic feedback for player health would be better. For example, the player foreground sprite dims/flashes when damaged/low health. I am a little disappointed I didn’t include this obvious idea in the original, as I think it’s a small addition that would make a lot of difference.

Some floating score indicators could help too, appearing when you shoot a target.

More graphic variety would is also an easy thing to add.

Cheers,

Play the game here.

Tags: postmortem, snap

Hello everybody! This is the third of a series of four postmortems for our LD25 game “President vs Eevol“. Every article will cover a different aspect and point of view on the game’s development. The following post-mortem is on the game’s art design and is written by animator Daniele Piscitello.

President vs Eevol
Postmortem #3 of 4: Art

Good day! I’m Daniele Piscitello, and I worked as the only artist for Team OmniaRing’s first game “President vs Eevol”. As the other members of our team are doing I’ll talk a bit about some aspects of how the art and the animation of “President vs Eevol” have been done.

The game’s main idea was to have a sort of evil british gentleman infiltrating in the President’s mansion. The player’s objective is to find the hidden key and take it to the door in order to reach the next level sneaking silently and fooling the president’s armed bodyguards. When we came up with the game’s design I understood that, in order to properly follow the theme, we needed to give our protagonist an high level of characterization. In a few hours the basic look of “Eevol the evil” was ready. Most of the first of the three days was spent only on making that exaggerated sneaky tiptoe animation that immediately gave life and an evilish look to Eevol.

I decided that our protagonist should have had a very peculiar and evilish walking animation.

After that I designed his signature bomb. I opted for a classical looking bomb immersed in a teacup. That was very funny to do and I hope that it made the players smile for a moment.

I tried to follow a priority list for the graphic and the animation, so, after completing all the main character’s animations I noticed that half of our time had already passed and I still had to make all the other graphics. After I completed all the tiles that compose the game’s levels I understood that I didn’t have enough time to make a proper walking animation for the enemies. At the beginning the idea for the enemy’s design was to make them human. I have to admit that I never liked the idea because I thought it was too common to have human guards and that something different could have make the game atmosphere funnier, so I decided to make some floating robot bodyguards, which were easier to animate due to their lack of legs.

You need to make some compromises if you develop something in 72 hours, and
animating a floating robot was easier than animating a human.

I would have loved to make animations for the enemies in all the four directions, but the thing I regret the most is that the levels are too much empty for my taste. In my mind, the levels should have been full of furniture and little things, but I fortunately understood in time that such level of detail is almost impossible to achieve in only 3 days.I hope that with the help of all the experience I’ve earned through this Ludum Dare, by the time the next one comes I’ll be able to produce a lot more in a shorter amount of time, even though I realize that animation is always a looong process.

I’m an animation student, but I started my course just this October so they haven’t even started teaching to animate anything yet, and therefore everything that I made for this game was absolutely self-taught. This was also the first time I seriously animated something and I’m very happy of the result and of all the amazing feedbacks I received for my animations. Thank you all! It was very important for me. If you want to know more about me in the future be sure to check out my Twitter account!

You can reach Daniele Piscitello via Twitter at: https://twitter.com/danipiscitello

Next up is the last of our four postmortems for President vs Eevol: the music postmortem by composer Matteo Gagliardi.

Tags: animation, art, eevol, president, vs

This is my post-mortem for my 1st Ludum Dare game, Death Star.

What went right

• Finished the game in 48hrs! This was my 1st priority.
• Using Web technologies (HTML5/CSS3/Javascript) really sped up development
• Ate 3 meals a day and got some decent sleep during compo

What went wrong

• Game controls suck! Apparently everyone who played the game complain about the crosshairs being too difficult to control with the arrow keys. I think part of the problem was that pressing a key would cancel all other keys. So, once you were ready to shoot (by pressing the spacebar) this would cancel the crosshairs from moving. I think using a mouse would remedy this fine
• Game only renders (correctly) in webkit browsers
• Music track does not loop properly
• Not a orignal story nor game, but what do you expect in 48hrs 😉
• I left a boiled egg too long in my microwave which resulted in a big mess!

Timelapse

Conclusion

Participating in this event was a lot of fun. The people here are just awesome! I love reading their posts and viewing the in-game progress screenshots.

Here’s to an awesome 2013 year and I wish you all success!

Play Death Star!

All in all I wasn’t very pleased with my entry, but have seen a lot of good stuff. I think the quality this LD was very high.

There is just some time to do a postmortem for my game called: ‘You naughty beast’.

So what went right:

1.  I finished the game within 48 hours, which was one of my goals. It was very tight, and in the last minute I had to come up with a title (which I hate now).

2. It was more of a game then my previous effort (‘fun but not much of a game’).

3. Faster, tighter coding. I did some planning, made an actual class diagram, had a good system for difficulty tweaking, better imlemented intro animation technique.

4. Better preparation. This was my second LD, but I also made some games during the mini LD’s and had some experience with Flashpunk. Also, I brainstormed all the top-10 themes so my brain would come up with an idea moer readily.

And what didn’t go right:

1. My worst mistake: No practice in my method. I have had some experience with Flashpunk since the last LD, but decided not to go with pixelgraphics this time. I made sprites in Flash and wanted to convert them to spritemaps.  This gave all kinds of unforseen trouble and cost me WAY TO MUCH time.  To get the graphics at the right positioning and the collision the right way was a big pain. And Flashpunk did throw me some curve balls. It turned out, I didn’t understand it enough.

Because of this I ran out of time, I had no time to tweak the difficulty and some of the humour and gameplay had to be sacrificed (for instance no real end, just a score, no cutscene).

Conclusion: I should have used the warmup weekend.

2.  No objectivity. I  tried to finish my game in 48 hours, which didn’t leave any time to sit back and try to see how other people would play the game.  Ludum dare people play a lot of games in three weeks. They wont take the time to master a mediocre game. Most of the feedback was about the controls. I played my game so much during development, that I didn’t realise how troublesome they were.  Because of this my game was too difficult.

3. Finish within 48 hours. It was one of my goals this LD, but after investing a day for a post compo version, my game was A LOT better.

4. Take more time for my idea. I hated the theme and I grabbed the first idea that came up. It wasn’t bad, but could be better.

Next time I’ll aim for 48 hours, but 72 will be OK if that is what is needed. try to do it more  more relaxed and less ambitious, but have more fun.

For this LD25 I came up with the game “Crime in the City“. This is a cardgame where you compose a deck of baddies and send them on raids throughout the city to raise the crime level in the city and, ultimately, take control of it.

What went wrong

The theme
I wasn’t very fond of this theme, “You are the villain”. Partly because with my partner we had just finished a game that let you play as the villain (Demons vs Fairyland). It made the theme feel somewhat old to me, and made me feel uninspired. All I could think of was the villains in super hero stories.

During these last two weeks, I played and rated about 80 games. I was really impressed by the ones that put the player in the opposite of the role he usually has. I wish I could think of something like that.

Bugs
I used AS3. As soon I do my second compilation, everything is all broken ! My little base code doesn’t work anymore and it’s an error message I never had before. The compiler enumerates all my classes and says they’re undefined or something like that… It wasn’t a good start !
Turns out I had given a class the same name as a package, which was a very bad thing to do. I was lucky it only took me a few minutes to figure it out.

I also made my usual mistakes a few times :
– write “lenght” instead of “length”. Where is auto-completion when you need it !
– write “i < array" instead of "i < array.length" in a for loop…
– instructions happening in a bad order, but at this point the code is too tricky for it to be obvious so you have to go through the long debug session to spot the problem.

What about you, do you have "usual mistakes" ?

The plan
I thought I would have a full day to work on the graphics and the sounds. I had big plans. I wanted to do an interface inspired by Inspector Gadget, with the hand of the villain moving when you push the buttons (It was actually done in a LD game ! Villain OS 8). And instead of a cat, I would have drawn a goat.
But it was highly unrealistic given the amount of options in the game. The number of game design pages should have given me a hint.

What was disturbing was that the features felt almost finished at the end of the first day, only one was missing. But I had worked too much and without breaks on the first day, I was very tired at the beginning of the second. And when I saw it was late and I wouldn’t be able to work on the graphics, I stressed out and it made things worse.

What went right

Game complete
I finished the game in the 48 hours, which is better than last LD when the game I started as a compo became a jam game (Lucas’s Quest Backwards).

Game complete (bis) !
When I look at the game… it actually has a lot of options ! I’m very happy I could do it in only two days. It’s amazing how jams make you surpass yourself.

Bugs
They weren’t that many. Considering how the code was rushed and how tired I was, it could have been a lot worse.

***

A second jam

With my partner we decided to participate to Folis’ New Year Game Jam. The result was another cardgame : a team for the job.

On paper, it looked a lot simpler. A few different cards, a few interactions, very little procedural content. The game design documents were nothing more than a few notes.
Once again, things didn’t go as expected, and we couldn’t complete the game for the jam, we only released it 2 days later.

What went wrong

Bugs
The code was done the first day, but there was two or three very nasty bugs which took a lot of time to fix during the second day. As the IA needs to temporize for the player to understand what’s happening, there are a lot of callbacks in the code, which made debug sessions a lot more painful.

Time
We didn’t have a lot of time to work on the game (the jam was december 31 and january 1st). And anyway, as far as I’m concerned, I didn’t have the motivation to work 16 hours a day like I did for LD25.
In the end, it’s not very surprising that a project that seemed simpler than “Crime in the City” took more days to finish.

Next ?

So far, our projects have always taken more time as we thought they would. Jams are a good training to help us get better at evaluating the time needed by a project. That’s why we decided to participate to One Game a Month. You can find us there as StormAlligator. Aside from our regular projects, we’ll try to do a game in jam conditions each month. We publish regular updates on our facebook.

Reading back this article, bugs seems to be part of the problem. Bugs are a big time consumer and cannot be planned. A good thing before choosing a game idea for a jam would be to evaluate if it’s likely to attract bugs and if the code will make this bugs easy or hard to remove.

Thanks for reading !

Play Crime in the City
Play a team for the job

Classic gameplay gets dressed up in a cosmic story and evil is heavily incentivized, for good or for ill. The story of designing a game about retaliation and violence.

You can read the postpartum here and play the game here.

I managed to finish my first LD entry and I now present you a post-compo version of it. Play it here. Title screen:

I made improvements based mainly on what people said about the game:

• Added music (from http://www.nosoapradio.us/)
• Added sound effects (with sfxr)
• Added intro/help screen (as seen above)
• Polished the graphics a bit, lowered window size
• Increased player control
• Made it more game-like instead of a simulator
• Let the player control destinies of Igor and Dmitri

Some post-mortem thoughts:

Comments gave mixed feedback about the graphical style of the game. Graphics were made in about 10 minutes, and I doubt more time would have made them any better, considering my interest and skill in art.

Lack of music and sound was perhaps worse than I thought. Next time I’ll try to include those in the compo release. The post-compo sounds are not impressive by any means, but I guess it’s better than nothing.

Intro screen to explain the game and controls is also something I’ll try to get into the actual release next time around.

Player control was a central issue in this game. The player can only vaguely affect the behavior of a large number of independent AI agents to indirectly achieve his goal. Many players reported they didn’t feel like they were in control and I’m not entirely satisfied with the improvements of the post-compo release I made to address that.

The game was an experiment in emergent gameplay created by multiple AI units – a simulator type of game. I think the emergence was limited as the minions do not really interact with each other, only the Hero. That is, the game wasn’t complex enough to be really interesting. I have a feeling I’ll be trying something similar in the future, using what I learned here.

In conclusion, I think my first LD entry was quite successful. I learned a lot and want to make more games in the future. I was also very impressed by entries by other people and look forward to seeing the results of voting!

Tags: emergence, goat, post-compo, postmortem, pygame, python

Based on some of the feedback I got for my game, I made a post-compo version. There are still improvements to make, like adding audio for more villainy pixel destruction fun.

(Compo version here.)

So with voting coming to a close soon, I’m very eagerly awaiting the close of my very first Ludum Dare. Overall, I’m happy with the result of my game, Minion’s Defense, even if the list below says otherwise. I’m astounded by the amount of feedback I’ve gotten, and I think this entry makes for a very good baseline for proceeding competitions. This post-mortem is a bit late from what I’ve seen of others, but I really wanted to let the game slip out of my mind for a few weeks and revisit it with rejuvenated eyes. So onto the list!

What I did right

• Art: I’m not an artist. If I pick up a pen and doodle something, it usually comes out as a pile of squiggles. That said, I’m very pleased with how the game looks. While simple, it conveys what it needs to and is consistent, which is good for me. Other than the fact that the player minion looks like the rest of the minions, there’s not much I’d change.
• Finishing: This might not seem important, but I’m bad about finishing things that aren’t for other people. Bad as in, I never finish anything.
• AI: While nothing special, my favorite part of the game is watching the minions swarm the knight. I probably spent way too long on getting it to feel the way I want. Each action a minion does has some random jitter, and at certain intervals they’ll just pause. This adds a lot of variety to their movement, and I just can’t stop watching them. fun tip: Start the game, make your “town”, and then switch to a different tab for a minute or so.
• Joined the IRC room: Ok, this doesn’t really have anything to do with my game, but being in the IRC room made the game so much more enjoyable. Though I didn’t talk much, seeing the progress everyone made was a ton of fun, as was showing off periodic builds on Friday and early Saturday. I highly recommend that EVERYONE who participates joins in.

What I did wrong

• Motivation: I was very motivated for Friday and most of Saturday. I went to bed on Saturday feeling a bit discouraged, and woke up on Sunday with a bad headache and the feeling that the game wasn’t worth finishing. I did some shopping that could have waited and watched some 30 Rock on Netflix  and with 3 hours before the end, decided I might as well get it ready so I could submit at least SOMETHING. I was completely amazed at how quickly the game shaped together in those three hours. I kick myself thinking about what I could have submitted if I had worked the entire day. Next Ludum Dare I’ll remember this and keep working all weekend long.
• Theme: A lot of people complained that the game didn’t fit the theme well. Looking back on it, I feel a little dumb because that’s such an easy thing to fix. If I had made a sprite of a princess tied to a stick on the right side of the map, I don’t think anyone would have had any trouble with the connection. It would have had the added side effect of putting the build mode in better context. I’m sure most people put down huts on the left side not knowing the night would show up there and lost prematurely. Next Ludum Dare, I’ll be sure not to make the same mistake.
• Balance: At the last moment I panicked that it would be too easy and bumped the knights health up by 50%. I smoked tested it to make sure I could beat it, but didn’t stop to think about the fact that when you make a game, you always perceive it to me much easier than the average player will be.
• Framework: This will probably seem crazy to participants that have been through a few of these competitions, but I went into this with a blank project. Most of Friday and early Saturday was spent on basic things like movement, collision detection, and getting animations to play. These are game agnostic components that I really shouldn’t deal with during a 48 hour competition. I could have had a much more polished game if these things were done ahead of time.
• Sound: Sound? What’s sound? This one might not even make it into the next competition, because making sound and music is so far beyond my grasp it’s barely funny. To me, it’s some kind of wizard magic.

All this said, I’m already super excited for the next Ludum Dare. I’ll probably be doing my next entry in Java as I’m trying to get into android development. I’m very much looking forward to applying these lessons and making an even better game. See you then and thanks for reading!

I’m also posting this on my blog, scott.mcb.ee, where I’ll (when I can remember) be posting about a different town building game I’m starting. Check it out if you want!

Well, there’s under 11 hours to go, now. The deadline really crept up on me. I’d been meaning to do some write-ups on my favourite entries, but with such a small amount of time left, it’s not going to be anything fancy.
In no particular order, I really think you should check out:

The Visitor, by avaki : Play as an alien sneaking onto a spaceship to kill all the humans by cutting the power supply. The catch? Humans are radioactive to your species, turning the wandering crew NPCs into toxic hazards. The level of polish and unique twist of this game impressed me. It only has 8 ratings right now, though, so go check it out!

Young Villain, by Rubsrub : All the pieces come together in this game, where you play as a future villain who hasn’t quite grown up yet.

Sealed Evil, by Neonlare : You are an ancient evil, sealed away…in a can. Squish innocent victims in a variety of locations to earn souls, used to buy some really fun powerups and more levels to stomp around in. Don’t let the slow start and a bug or two get you down. This game is the most fun I had during the competition, and the game I spent the most time on.

Sorry it’s so brief, but I really thought these three games deserved a mention, even with just a little time left. Try them out!

Hello everybody! This is the fourth of a series of four postmortems for our LD25 game “President vs Eevol“. Every article will cover a different aspect and point of view on the game’s development. The following post-mortem is on the game’s music and is written by composer Matteo Gagliardi.

President vs Eevol

Postmortem #4 of 4: Music

Hello, I’m Matteo Gagliardi, the composer of the President vs Eevol soundtrack and one of the original founders of the OmniàRing Project.

1. The OmniàRing Project: An introduction

This post-mortem will be mainly focused on music, but Sun asked me to write something about OmniàRing itself so I will start with that.

In early 2006 I was a lot younger and I used to spend most of my free time playing and talking about videogames. I was involved as admin in a Nintendo fan community, we were quite small and I decided to create a webring of Nintendo communities to help us grow: Nintendoring was born.

Shortly thereafter all the communities of the webring merged and we realized that we were mostly more interested in our various artistic projects than talking about videogames: I was composing my first EP (called Tetraktys), Sun Shiranui was making his first videogame (a Zelda ALTTP clone as he recalled in his post-mortem) so at the end we changed our name to OmniàRing, from the latin word “Omnia” (Everything).

The OmniàRing Logo

2. Making music for flash games

I worked a lot of times with Sun Shiranui but we never made a complete game together.

When he gathered this incarnation of the OR Team for this Ludum Dare, initially I wasn’t supposed to join as a composer, since I was busy working on the final mix of my latest album. So what happened is that he wrote a song on his own, and when he sent it to me I started arranging it for fun. In the end, he asked me to join the team and the song became something completely different and new.

Since we were working on a flash game, I had two important goals in mind:

1) Make something easily loopable

2) Make something short and lightweight

One of my main concerns were loading times

3. President vs Eevol: The main theme

The main theme is thirteen seconds long. I used some drones and a sparse beat to give a subtle rhythm.

I wanted this to be hypnotic and mesmerizing.

Usually, working on a soundtrack for a videogame I prefer it to be interactive and bounded to the action on-screen, but since the team was working very hard on the core of the game they coudn’t give a lot of feedback on my work, so I had to keep it simple.

The use of drones makes the track easily loopable

4. President vs Eevol: The boss theme

The boss theme was more of a problem because Sun suggested using electric guitars. I worked on it during the second day while nothing of the boss battle was ready, so I had no idea of the precise scene I was supposed to make music for.

So, using only the general description Sun gave me, which consisted in a room where you have to kill the president using your bombs while he runs around, I started working on the piece.

I’m a keyboardist, so I don’t have any real guitars. I tried some synths, but in my mind the sudden change of style from drone ambience to something like Doom’s OST wasn’t good at all.

So during the third day I decided to try something else.

The track is mainly based on some huge percussions played on a Korg Wavedrum, but I used also the same drone of the main track to have a feeling of coherence. It was finished way before the team even started working on the boss battle, so I was really clueless, but listening to it now I think I made the right decisions.

The drone loop is synched with the wavedrum

5. Last thoughts about developing the game

So, did I accomplish my goals?

In a way, yes, I did.

The team had some difficulties dealing with the looping of the tracks. They tried mp3 and they later found out that for some reason mp3s don’t loop well, so to make the loops work they had to use uncompressed wav, compressing it only later using the flash IDE.

The main track of the game is only 580 kb and the boss track + all the SFX is 380kb.

I wanted them to be even lighter, but time constraints forced the team to work on more important things.

I think it’s really important, working on a web game, to have really short loading times and it’s even more important on a Ludum Dare, where you can try thousand different games in a short period of time and maybe you can even drop one just because the loading time is too long.

At the end it was a really interesting and compelling experience and I want to thank all the people who enjoyed (or will enjoy) the soundtrack of President vs Eevol.

Thanks again for joining me in this review of the composing process.

My home studio at the time of President vs Eevol development

Thank you kindly for joining us during our series of four postmortems for our game President vs Eevol. You can read the other postmortems here: design, code, art. See you in the next Ludum Dare!

Tags: eevol, music, president, president vs eevol, sound, vs

Just realized I hadn’t posted this timelapse of our jam entry recorded by Toinane (thanks!) here yet:

The first 16 minutes show us working an infiltration game (first 24h), but then as we realiezd we weren’t going to be able to do something fun and complete in the short time left, we decided to switch to a simpler, more directly fun project involving a dictator shooting tourists hogging his beach. You can start watching at 16:45 if you want to see the second project directly.

The software we used to work together in real-time is called CraftStudio (I’m the developer of it), it’s a blocky, pixelarty 3d game-making platform with a strong focus on being easy to use for people of all backgrounds / ages and featuring fully collaborative editing tools over the Internet.

If you haven’t already, you can play Beach, please! here. It’s fun, I promise.

Tags: craftstudio, jam, ld25, LD25 Jam

In your opinion, what is the best way to make a game?

Tags: antvenom, help, lol, mcpixel, oppinion, PLEASE, question, themonkeystaff

Congratz to all !

This Ludum Dare was a ton of fun. I’ve always loved villains – my main project puts you in the role of the villain as well – so I was very happy with this theme.
Besides having a coder as a roommate makes for a very easy and instantaneous team setup at home which was awesome. We’re still working on Tyranoforce. It will take some time to get a new version because of our full time job but we will do it. We really want to push it further, no only because we got cool feedback, but also because its a game Idea I’ve been wanting to explore for a long time.

Xewlupus even got http://www.tyranoforce.com/ up haha! That shows we’re serious about it 😉

Check it out sometime for updates

See you soon for another Jam!
-blob

PS: Here’s a WIP at the boss look. Prepare yourself to punch some wannabe hero.

PLAY CLOSE MY SIDE

This time I had a lot of time to tinker around the game, and I placed decently, comparing to my previous entry. See my entries.
EDIT: 42% Coolness!

My dearest fellow gamedesigners!

Although the submission deadline has passed I haven’t left my project barely finished. It was still in a state where a continuation of development was possible (although the spaghetti-mess in the code seems to be increasing by a power of two with every additional feature), so I continued implementing what I had in mind but did not came around creating before submission deadline.

I took all your feedback in consideration, redesigned the visuals and implementing most of the suggestions, and here we are at version 0.2! So thank you for everyone who played my game during the voting weeks, and I hope you all enjoy this next release.

Features list:

• Two new minion types: shadow beasts and skeletons
• Three new enemies: pest doctors, villagers (they run away from you!) and wolves
• Zoomed in the view so the pixelart graphics are better visible on high resolution screens
• Press CTRL around a claimable area to assign your swarming minions to that area, and stand in the middle to recollect them
• Updated colours to match better (not my strongest point) and made some more graphical details

The most important feature not implemented: a winning condition :-). Just conquer all you can and create a large minion army!
Unfixed bug: claiming castles is often bugged, try to stand on the exact middle of the square that appears when pressing CTRL.

Kill any enemy to convert it into a minion. Some enemies are too strong, find the weaker ones first. Your minions by themselves are also quite weak, try to create a lot of them first and then swarm the villages.

I would gladly see more of your feedback!
Have fun playing.

Also, screenshot:

The Plague screenshot version 0.2 (update after the contest).

Okay, seriously, didn’t expect that! My game got in 3’rd place(tie with Happy Little Murder Friends), I did really not expect that! This is only the second time I enter the competition(third if you count miniLD) and I think it’s the 5 game that I actually finish. Damn did I get a confidence boost from this!

I’d like to give a huge ‘thank you’-hug( and kiss( and slight fondle)) to everyone who played my game! Also thanks a million to the wonderful people who make Ludum a reality, this competition is so great for game-creation-training it’s unbelievable! I’d also like to congratulate everyone on their games, I’ve played a bunch of awesome stuff in the past weeks, great job!

I’ve convinced one of my programming teachers to enter next Ludum, so that will be extra special. I don’t really enter the competitions to win, but next time I actually have to win over him at least! See you guys then!

test

Although it’s a positive experience either way, it’s really cool to be able to quantify how much better I’ve gotten over the last 3 months. I’ve worked really hard since the first Ludum Dare, so I’m glad my skills are actually improving. I can’t imagine anyone else climbed more than 328 spots (being so bad the first time helps 😉 )! Can’t wait to see what 2013 has in store for me, see you in the top 100!

Ludum Dare 25:

Ludum Dare 24: