Get ‘Got time for that?’ for Android on Google Play

Attention Humans! Anachronic Design’s ‘Got time for that?’ is now available for Android on Google Play.

Please act accordingly.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.AnachronicDesigns.GotTimeForThat

All earthlings who download the game will be spared appreciated. Have a good night.

Tags: AD, Anachronic Designs, android, Google Play, Got time for that?, Imminent Alien Invasion

Hello, LD community!

Like in a previous LD, I’ve used my LD crawler and some common sense to provide everyone who cares with a filtered list of links to mass download the games by platforms; and the full list of all the links, grouped by equal names.

LD27 all Links.zip – 729 different items.

LD27 filtered Links.zip – includes Windows, Win, Linux, OSX, OS X, OS-X and Mac variants.

Have a good time!

Well, my LD entry flopped…  I only had about 10 hours to work on it, and I’d like to think it looks pretty good for that amount of time.

I do intend on fixing Network Intrusion. (I wish I had named it Network Intruder and made a spin on Bed Intruder) I will keep fixing things outside of LD and post them to my ‘homesite’.

I don’t know if stuff links here, but below is the entry itself and my homesite:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=27775

https://sites.google.com/site/sacrificespacegame/

I made a little timelapse with some silly commentary of me making stay alive:

Try the game here:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=17060

Well another Ludum Dare in the bag! Hope everyone had a good one!

My ludum dare started off pretty hectically, as I organized a local meet up for other developers in Calgary and had to sort that out before things got started.

I spent most of Friday chatting with some awesome folks, (sorry for distracting 😀 )

We had a pretty solid turn out; and from the looks of it everyone successfully made a game!

I’m pretty happy for everyone that took part! (It also sounds like most people are interested in joining again in December, which is great news!)

My entry:

If I had to sum it up it is like pikmin meets VVVVVV.

Anyways enough yappin’ here’s the link.

CLICK ME!

The physics I used for my space-ship game is extremely contraversial, so let me explain why I chose Car-chase style physics over asteroids-style physics.

Asteroids is a great game and the controls are classic, don’t get me wrong. The game was originally asteroids style.

I even changed it to mouse aiming at one point.   I didn’t like it,  it didn’t suite my game.

You had to be really careful when exploring.  It was too slow and plodding and besides, it’s been over-done.

I chose car-chase style physics with an accelerating throttle instead of the basic thruster mechanics from asteroids because it represented the game better.

It wound up being faster, more exciting,  more interesting to explore the world with.

It also makes the action remind me of one of my favorite games,  GTA2.

Click here to play & rate.
Click here to view the time lapse.

So in conclusion, it’s not a bug… It’s a feature

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 27th, 2013 at 2:50 am and is filed under LD #27. 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.

In “Decay”, you are playing as a radioactive atom which have only 10 seconds as half life. After that it Decays. You had to collect the atom’s 4 protons before it decays, to be able to move to the next level.
The current version now have13 level, as i used to make my demo games only 13 “i don’t even no why i choosed this number :)” The game have leaderboard which is broken at the moment. You can enjoy playing it, and keep an eye on the game news, lots of people recommended it for Tablets, and this is what am doing at the moment

You can access the game page HERE

For any feedback, or to keep an eye on “Decay” and it’s news, you can visit my blog !

Muhammad;

Firstly, it’s late and I’ve been kept up by all kinds of cross-platform build shenanigans, so I haven’t been able to play anyone’s games yet, but I really hope everyone had a great jam and had a lot of fun.

Now, however, it’s time to talk Smack.

Who wants to bring the Smack?

I don’t like to toot my own horn, but Card Smack was a rousing success. From flawless cross-platform support to AI that can outplay the sharpest of tools, Card Smack has it all.

Who uses Windows, anyway?

In all seriousness, though, I am quite pleased with CS. While all of its advertised merits are entire falsehoods (it *does* in fact work on Windows – just not all at once), the game and its graphical representation work fairly well, in my opinion, and I think it looks pretty cool too.

Someone’s about to deliver the smack.

However, I prefer to focus on the negatives:

• The AI is horrendously broken. It wasn’t even intended to be good, just to look like it was playing, and it couldn’t manage that. It just sits there in a corner worrying its cards.
• Abilities are purely decorative
• Our soundtrack sounds deafeningly like silence
• The user-interface isn’t at all informative enough – how much damage did I do?
• And more!

With that glittering review, who could restrain themselves from trying Card Smack?

Oh, everyone? Oh.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=19270

Apparently there were some problems to do with IMPACT, and I fixed them

Thank you for your time

-ENDESGA

I had a nasty bug in my game that prevented a good number of people from playing.  The issue?  It was how I was parsing floating point values from the level data.  I wasn’t doing it in a culture neutral fashion, so anyone that used a comma instead of a period as the divider between integer and fractional portions of the number would crash.  The solution was to make all the parsing culture invariant.

Thanks to everyone who helped me find the bug on IRC, and especially Deinonychus for getting me the stack trace of the error.  If possible go play his game because he is such a nice guy: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=19103

Also if you want to play my now fixed game, you can find it at http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=13960

I was missing some of my source files, also fixed a typo , and made it so that it no longer auto closes when you loose. Timer still counting down after you loose.. but you can now see your final score before you close and restart the game.

Left it like this so that i don’t break the contest rules , I will still be updating the game after Voting is completed.

Sorry for any inconvenience.
please look , read , download , play , vote
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=23091

Watching Them Go. V1.12

—-

Some minor clerical errors during the haste of our final “wrap-up” led to our initial version being unwinable.

We’ve since gone through and weeded them out for your playing pleasure.

Be sure to check it out, play it through if you can take it, it get’s pretty hairy at the end. 😉

Be sure you let us (and everyone) know what you think of it!

–Davey @Irony Interactive.

Dream Team started as an idea to form a group of proven Ludum Dare vets and game jamming badasses in an effort to create world peace. In a weird sort of way, we accomplished that goal. With 7 combined Ludum Dare medals and 15 total competitions between us, we combined our efforts to create one large, frightening mass of game design ooey gooey goodness. We hope you like it!

So what exactly IS EcoStar vs Aeronox?

The evil Aeronox forces have sent our planet into hyper orbit, sending us spiraling out of control and fast forwarding our years at breakneck speed! You may think this is just another shooter, but that’s where our interpretation of the theme comes into play. The seasons change every 10 seconds, and it alters the entire world around you… the sights, the sounds, the foes, and even the power of your own ship. Each season has a corresponding elemental power that is absorbed and unleashed by EcoStar’s stellar charge blast. Combined with elemental enemies and shields, this creates a shoot-em-up unlike any other… where the focus isn’t always on shooting the fastest… but on making the RIGHT shot a the RIGHT time.

Play it! – EcoStar vs Aeronox

And please be sure to read the included HOW TO PLAY document for an explanation of the rules and controls. We also have Xbox 360 gamepad support, and we highly suggest that control scheme if you want to win!

We’ll be back at a later date to discuss what went right, what went wrong, and to deliver a radical post-compo version. In the meantime, we’re going to get some much needed rest. Ditto worked on squashing two game breaking bugs after the initial submission (Sweden vs U.S.A. decimals & commas? Really?!) and SonnyBone stayed awake for 36 hours and is now typing this sentence. He is going slightly crazy and is starting to refer to himself in the third person. He sure is attractive and very smart. XXXOOO

———-

Lead Programmer / Assistant Artist
Ditto
@Dittomat

Lead Artist / Animator / Assistant Programmer
Arne
@AndroidArts

Sound Designer / Assistant Artist
SonnyBone
@Phantom_Green

———-

Tags: complete, done, finished, reveal, screenshot, submitted

Mishlike is a simple time base rougelike game .
You have 10 seconds to exit the dungeon and your Actions will cost your time .. so be quick and think .
Left click to move or fight enemies ( fight one turn )
Right click on a enemy multiple times to multiple your damage in one turn ( but in cost of more time ) .

Play Mishlike

Mishlike

Mishlike

Mishlike

Impact LD27 game

Tags: fan art

Well it sure was fun. I think that was one of my best weekend for the past two years. So how it was:

It was our first ludum dare and first time working together. And of course we collected all possible mistakes =_=.

Team

There were four of us. 1 Programmer, 1 Programmer/Artist, 1 Artist and 1 Gamedesigner. We knew each other before, but never worked together.  LD27 was the perfect occasion to try.

Idea

Actually we had the whole different idea at first. It was really complicated, but we thought that it will be fun. We started doing it and after 6 hours first wave of despair covered us. It was not good. It was boring. So we went to the kitchen and ate a pie. After 2 hours of brainstorming we got the new one and that’s when Knight of Ashes was born.

New gameplay was known for years, but we tried our best to change it to something fresh.

Coding

Cocos2d html5 was chosen for coding and we still thinking that it is awesome.

Art

We wanted to make it looking oldschool so – pixelart. Here is some art from game

Dialogues

We planned to make full dialogue system, but time was against us (bastard). So it is pretty much visual novel style.

Balance and music

Here comes the most tragic part. Actually we had music and balance, but at 3 last hours the project made KABOOM and there were SUCH a huge panic that we didn’t deploy it. After we saw what was submitted … well we wasn’t really sad. It was 6 o’clock in the morning and the only thing we were dreaming of is to fall into a coma. But here is the music (the funny thing is that we included authors into “thanks to” part =) )

–Gameplay

–Main menu

The same goes to balance

That’s the most of it. But we will come back next time and we will be 20% cooler than now. Candyland team – roll out.

Thanks to all the great constructive feedback I’ve received from you, I decided to make a postcompo version of my game.
It mostly adresses the default controls and tries to fix some of the collision bugs.
If you’ve already played and rated the original entry, give it a go at:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=11939

Tags: bugfix, feedback, postcompo

So I made it. First time in Ludum Dare.

It’s fantastic experience. A lot of experience.

First I wanted to take part in the compo, but deadline came too fast, so I focused on the JAM.

More time to deadline gave me the opportunity to expand the game.

However, more expanded game == more bugs, and this are sometimes very hard to notice.

Most nerves brought me bug in the collision detection and I spent most of my time tried to fix it.

BUT 20 MINUTES BEFORE THE DEADLINE I DID  IT!

Now, after the patching game probably hasn’t too much bugs, I hope, and is playable, so I want show it you.

It is difficult to make a bright screenshot of the game because most of the game take place in dark, so I upload here menu screen.

Positions and scales of the pictures in the background are random.

When light is enable, you can look around, but you lose one life.

Full description of the game is here :http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=21095 and there you can rate and give comment, please play and do it!

HAVE A GOOD DAY!

PS Sorry for my english, it isn’t my language, google translate helped me

Tags: #10seconds, about, C++, dark, entry, game, house, jam, light, muciojad, sfml, silent, sleeping

Time Slime Arena LD27

Tags: fan art

Being my first LD, I didn’t know what to expect. Part of me predicted a sit-down-and-crunch-code session to go on throughout the weekend. After my first 6 hours, breaks had to be in order. Between copious amounts of testing during development and a wandering attention span, I’m proud to say that I did make it.

Without support from our artist (Matt), sound engineer (Ace), #Ludumdare for getting me past that KeyboardState hump, and my wife…we probably wouldn’t have a game.

This isn’t just 2xH Studios’ first release, it’s actually my first personal full release. In a mountain of unfinished projects and bad concepts, I suppose a theme and a deadline were just what I needed to get something done.

I’m proud of our team. I’m proud of our work. Yeah, it’s clunky…but its coded from the ground up. It’s a mess, but its our mess.

Here’s to many future Ludum Dares.

-Bryan

Me and my friends made a typing game, but it contains grammatical errors.

Does it falls on the “typo” category? I mean, since typing is essentially the gameplay, I wonder if we are allowed to fix that for the Jam.
No features added, just words being corrected.

Any thoughts on that?

Hi people

Unfortunately I didn’t sucess with my entry but sincerly I liked the idea and game mechanic to explore in futur.

So I like timelapses =D I’d like to share my short timelapse with everybody

Best!

Tags: peacemaker, timelapse

This was my 2nd Ludum Dare, and only my 6th or 7th attempt at a game since I started developing games last spring. Figured I’d do a post-mortem post on this one.

What Went Right:

We got the game finished (well…sorta; we’re not gonna talk about that pole vault thing).

This was my first completed project in Monogame; everything went pretty smoothly in that regard.

My partner (who hadn’t completed a project like this before now) was super-impressed with almost everything I did, even though I half-assed a lot of things, so I was super-encouraged for the majority of the development time.

When it became clear that 10 seconds would probably be the theme, I was determined to not interpret in a “you have 10 seconds of time to do a thing, go!” way, since I assumed that’s what almost everyone would be doing. So, I spent some time trying to find a more creative interpretation of the theme, came up with 10 2nd places, and managed to implement it.

I got to make a game that actually uses multiple screens, which I’d neglected to get around to until now.

I also got a really light introduction on working with camera movement vs. just player movement, which will probably be the most useful thing I take from this. Looking forward to doing a better job with that on other projects.

Potatoes, goats and the Flying Spaghetti Monster all get brief mentions.

Testing that gorram 400m event has reminded me that carpal tunnel exists and should be avoided. It also made me love putting secret cheat modes into things (oh, btw, there’s a secret button combo for super speed that was part debugging tool and part scrapped feature). Yes, I realize this sounds more like something that went wrong than something that went right, but it’s kind of both in a weird way.

Finally, I learned that I am much more comfortable with week-long game jams, but I am also much more likely to get distracted and not complete them. Ludum Dare operates on such a short schedule that I actually get things done.

What Went Wrong:

The game had too much going on. I knew at the onset that it’d be tough to work in all 10 events, but I didn’t count on my partner’s computer (and math homework) refusing to cooperate, which made it hard for him to code anything, making our time crunch that much worse (though he did do most of the art when we hit an impasse with compiling on his machine).

There’s no sound. I really wanted to get some sound effects in there, at least, maybe even some simple music.

Pole vault–just didn’t happen. That one would have been interesting to to around with, though I imagine it would have been atrocious with that jumping/throwing code we ended up using (more on that in a second).

That jumping/throwing code we’re using needs desperate improvements. It does ok for some things, but other times it just ends up looking terrible. I’ll confess I had no clue what to do with it and ended up getting lucky with a few alterations that made it passable. After that I just didn’t have time to tweak it.

I’d rather be working on Yesterday’s Papers or Push Out, my two partially-developed ideas from failed game jams over the summer.  While I liked the story of this idea, I barely even brought that into the game; apart from that, this game just didn’t interest me as much as I would have liked. This probably led to more willingness on my part to say “eh, at least that part’s done” rather than actually trying to make things good.

Things I’ll keep in mind for LD28:

The idea is too big and needs to be stripped down.

The idea is still probably a little too big.

“Eh, at least it sorta works; I’ll just leave it like that,” might be okay in a couple spots when you’re down to the wire on time; however, it is not okay for a mechanic 70% of your game depends on.

Ludum Dare is not the proper time for roommates, friends, concerts, or super-long not-really-important conversations with people I can easily talk to on Tuesday.

Earplugs or noise-canceling headphones are a beautiful invention that significantly improve coding performance; however, they are difficult to utilize when working on a team.

When it comes to a time crunch, I think I prefer working alone. It’s lonely and potentially miserable, but I get things done when you lock me away with only my code and some energy drinks.

Tags: LD #27, post-mortem

Game name: Evit Tag
Author: Just me (Tgwizman)

I’m not completely finished with my game, but I did get everything working.

I wanted to get the graphics for the game done today, but ended up designing a whole map for it. It turned out that when I coded the player positions, I didn’t account for the fact that I would need to account for tile sizes. The player positions are straight pixel data. I had to re-re-re-write more of my code, and then I started running out of time. I figured that I would simply use my last posted chrome store packaged app. I had to undo a lot of those updates, and then had to leave the player positions as straight pixel data and work around that -_-

Here’s the link to the JAM submission:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=26589

Didn’t have time for sounds, graphics or the map, but all in all, my game came out pretty dead on what I was going for!

You don’t have to download anything, the chrome store will do it all for you, since my game is a chrome packaged app. My game takes less than a second to install/uninstall it.

I am so happy to have finished something for my first Ludum Dare. I still need sleep from yesterday.

I hope this will give me an idea of what went right and what went wrong (I don’t know, probably nothing and how to work more productively for the next LD.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=17470

Today I will start playing and commenting the bunch of games (wow, they are too many!) after I return back from work.

.

c:\run g̨̣̱͖̮l̮̹i̶͎̩t͙c̩ͅh͕͖̗̞͉̻͖̕

Beyond hope LD27

Tags: fan art

So we completed our Jam game, Orction house Panic, and we are very pleased with the result…

It was a tiring but really awesome weekend. I was glad to welcome two new members to the team at Dry Tree, they brought a new art style, great voice-overs and a general boost in creativity (and puns!). I think we should have spent a bit longer during our get-together on the first morning writing down an actual design instead of just winging-it based on our verbally-described concept; as the weekend went on the lack of docs lead to some confusion over exactly which direction things were moving in and what assets were required. Working remotely also presented issues because not everyone could use the same communication tools so there was a lot of passing messages around and delays in getting answers to questions. But overall the process went really well and we’re proud of the great game that we have to show for it.

Getting the Android version of Orction Hose Panic onto the Google Play store was a personal first so I’m very happy with that. And if anyone would like to see the time-lapse video of the game being programmed you can check it out here:

Let me know what you think! Cheers all.

The contest is over, but porting is still cool and ongoing. For anyone who enjoyed playing 10 Second Paths you now have download links for Windows, OSX and Linux ports of the Web game!

Next up, porting for iOS and Android.

One more thing I learned as part of LD, even after a project is over you still need to upload it everywhere, manage your website, write blog posts, handle some PR. The contest still rocks after it finished!

Well lets see now…

Finished the game in time, got a few bugs and doesnt have nearly as many levels as I would ahave hoped unfortunatly.  I think my downfall was realising how quickly I could churn out levels once my mechanics were made and then spending time on scenes and backdrops rather than the things I needed like decent audio, balanced play and more levels. Still, rounded game, pretty good feel to it.

I think the biggest problem is that it isnt clear on each level what the goal is and coupled with the fact that restart takes a few seconds longer than it should, it can get frustrating. I will fix this in time though once I have some sleep!

Would have liked to make more of the ending and I think i will probably make a “final” version of it after the compettition. So, check it out, have a play and let me know what you think

Good work everyone!

XopsX

TenSecWep Title screen

Failing like a Trooper – My First Ludum Dare

Ok so I was hoping this going to be a more self-congratulatory post on how I completed my first Ludum Dare in time and produce something with a fair amount of style.

I wanted to regale you all in my adventure of picking up the mythical sword of Stilton and destroying all that lay before me with great taste and pungent aroma. Alas that was not the case as I made two errors which doomed me, both of which I should have foresaw. The first error was costly the second was fatal.

Error #1: Going out for an old colleagues leaving drinks the night before the event, this led to seeing many old friends who I’d not seen in a while and led to a lot of ale being consumed and a hangover awaiting me. I thought I could fight through the lethargic beginning and make something, this assertion was correct yet the resulting code I’d produced was sloppy, piss poor and generally broken. Thankfully a nap in the early evening and some Justified resolved my state of mind, helped me rewrite the dross produced prior and also had the effect of making me talk like I was from Kentucky. So ultimately I’d lost 14 hours of the day to the night before but thankfully I’d survived.

Error #2: This error was actually part of the plan, me being a smart arse thought it was a good idea. It was a long weekend, a Ludum Dare and event which I’d always wanted to start doing and a local event which I didn’t want to be a party to happening  outside my front door. So I thought in my great wisdom that I’d get rations, stay in doors avoid the event on my doorstep (Notting Hill Carnival) and make an awesome game.

Oh I was a fool, I’d not been at home during the last carnival having thought it was better to get out of town and avoid it all together (Pro Tip: The Correct Way To Survive Carnival Weekend Is To Get Out Of Town).

This time I thought I’d avoid it by just being indoors, wrong answer! I couldn’t sleep more than 4 hours on Saturday night because of the racket and then tried on the Sunday to work but sleep was beating me but I thought if I forget the Comp and just do 6 hours and rest and then I’d focus on the Jam. As you probably would have guess the Sunday night was worse and got 3 hours if that due to the 3/4 street parties that went on all night, this broke me and I didn’t even attempt to finish the Jam.

I’m not ashamed to say that giving up was the right idea and the only thing to do, I was not in a good mood, ultra tired, fed up fighting bugs and not enjoying myself. I’d never not enjoyed doing a jam and I didn’t want my first LD to be tainted by this experience, I decided to give up on this one and put my efforts into the next one.

So I know I’m focusing on the next LD and to Never, EVER Jam during carnival.

Here it is, a mosaic of Ludum Dare 27 made using all the main screenshot of Ludum Dare’s 27 games. (click on the image for the high resolution)

If you want to say “thank you”, consider playing my game:

The Value of Time

Tags: composition, mosaic, screenshots, wallpaper, wallpapers

Seven challenging levels of block stacking, balancing, and praying… how few blocks can you use??

10 Second Topple

Will rate and comment in return!

It’s done! It’s done! The Windows port just about killed me — not that Linux is any better — but it’s done!

TRUSTY SWORD is about two space combatants: one armed with a TRUSTY SWORD, and the other with a ROCKET LAUNCHER. The twist? The combatants exchange weapons every 10 seconds, like some sort of sick, twisted game of cat and mouse. Sheesh.

The future, right? Those weirdos.

Download TRUSTY SWORD today!

It almost looks as if the people rating my thing haven’t actually tried out the game, I think they just paraphrase the description with some random words thrown in. Is that normal? Am I too paranoid? o.O

I believe that writing a post mortem is always a good thing after LD. Makes you think why stuff happened the way they happened.

Pre-Compo

I was about to skip this LD, because I have so much on my hands right now. The company I worked for went bankrupt a month ago and I’m currently looking for a new job as a programmer. I’m also trying to catch up my c++ skills because I’ve been using Unity at my previous work and most of the biggest company here in Finland requires strong c++ skills.

So, I thought a week before the LD to do something with c++ for the LD. Well, a week went quite quickly and when the theme was announced I was nowhere near ready to do anything in 48 hours in c++, sadly. So, I decided that LD would be a little fun break and I’d do it with Unity instead.

Badland for iOS by Frogmind

Ideas

First thing that I did with the theme was to check out the background of the word ‘second’. I found out that ‘second’ comes from latin word ‘secundus’, which means “following” and an idea of 10 guys “following” each other popped into my head.

I remembered a moment in Badland where you take a power-up and your character splits into tens of small versions of yourself and you need to guide them all. I wanted to achieve the same chaotic but fun feeling that they had.

10 sec boxing proto

At the same time I had a little brainstorming with my friend, because I was not comfortable with settling on the first idea that came to my mind, and we came up with an idea of a “10 second boxing match”.

The idea was that it would be first-person turn-based boxing with two players. You’d need to control your hand’s joints by adding forces to them and then you would see one second forward to the match and do the same things again.

Match would go on until one of you hits the other in the head and knocks him out or ten seconds(ten turns) runs out. The idea sounded hilarious and I decided that I would make a quick prototype out of it to test it out.

You can test the prototype here. Click on limbs to select them and then use mouse wheel up and down to turn them.
Even though the proto seemed potentially funny, I decided to go with the first idea.

Flock of Steel, my #LD 27 entry

I came up with an idea of 10 characters following each other, these characters ended up being little robots that were “on training” to be part of some kind of police forces. To create some chaos into it, I wanted some delay in the commands that player gives to the robots, so that each robot would not jump when you pressed the jump button.
So, I came up with an idea of one of the robots carrying a “transmitter” and all the other robots would get the command from player input based on the distance they are from that transmitter. End result was as chaotic as I assumed.
There’s some traps scattered around the levels and each trap is activated by a button that is placed somewhere near the trap.

A friend of mine who lives 4 hours away from me was visiting me during sunday so I pretty much lost one day of work and ended up running out of time in the end.

Pros

• I had time to prototype another idea before settling on one.
• I had fun doing the game.
• Basic gameplay is fun and little robots turned out to look funny when running and jumping around the levels.

Cons

• Gameplay has no room for skill and is pretty much based on luck.
• I ran out of time and most of the objects were untextured and ended up having just one color diffuse.
• Didn’t have time to create as many traps as I was planning.
• Didn’t have time to create as many levels as I was planning.
• No sounds or music either.
• I would’ve wanted to highlight the traps and the relation between a button and a trap better but didn’t have time for it.

The game didn’t end up being anything particularly awesome, but I had fun for the weekend.

And that’s the most important thing right?

Tags: LD #27, postmortem

Hey guys. Try my Compo game. This is my first ludum dare game. Use WASD for control and use Space Key for slowing the time. Thank You. Click Here

“i don’t think the skeleton had that many skulls before i blew it up”

shameless plug

This is my fourth Ludum Dare entry! The only way I can really describe how it went is SortaOKGoodNotBadTerribleFantasticNo.

It didn’t really come out as I had envisioned at the start, but then again it never does. Even though it came out as something totally different, I’m actually satisfied with it as it is!

Stuff that worked:

• The game! Even though it’s very tight on graphics assets and levels I think the outcome is fun to play and I enjoyed playtesting it 2 minutes before the deadline.
• Using pxtone again; I managed to make all the game music and melodic sounds within the last 30 minutes of the compo.
• Using javascript + canvas! It’s really fun coding engines from scratch instead of using prebuilt ones like stencyl or gamemaker, and it’s always a learning experience, assuming that each time the game is a different genre/requires different types of asset. 😉
• Skeletons. Skeletons always work.
• The particle effects! The ones coming off of the player were originally me testing the particle engine, they stuck and I made them look a ton better. The skeletons exploding into a lot more bones than they actually have is hilarious and will probably never get old ever.
• Player physics, I did a lot of tweaking on the first day, liked it and stuck with it.

Stuff that Definitely Didn’t Work:

• OGMO EDITOR. God jesus I hate everything about it. It closes all your open levels every time you want to add a layer/tileset/entity and forces tiled placements of entities. Not to mention it had some interesting bugs such as throwing an exception as soon as anything has a space in its name and you try to save.
• Don’t code games while watching TV. I code like 3x slower.
• Leaving the levels till last minute. I only had level 3 (was originally only going to be the test level) done until 1 hour before compo end, where I had to make fun levels and test them as a batch process for 30 mins before music. Because of this the game only has 4 levels. :'(
• Wake up earlier during Ludum Dare. Those extra hours could have been more levels/an actual background tileset/more enemies!
• Dropbox kept dropping asset requests randomly, so if you’re asking “Why is this game hosted on a site for a Javascript Gameboy Colour emulator” then that’s your reason! It also loads a lot faster too, as I have the site under CloudFlare CDN. Hopefully that and this bloody 10MB gif I just embedded don’t get my cloudflare account shut down for unleashing 300TBs worth of bandwidth on them. >:)

Stuff I enjoyed doing:

• Designing levels with a tool like Ogmo Editor and writing the parser was actually really fun, despite the tool being not what I needed. I’d like to find and use a better level designer for my next ludum dare game, if it happens to be tile based.
• The particle system was really fun to set up and play around with, but maybe I shouldn’t go so overboard with particles next time. 😉

Though despite all this, it has still been a blast, and I’d definitely do it again. Since I didn’t make it in last time, I’m extremely chuffed that I managed to create this game in the time I forced myself into, and from what I’ve played so far, you guys should be too!

javasctpript + htemml5 5 ever

Tags: 2D, final, post-mortem, postmortem

So for those that played my game, I got the sense they never passed more than a F rank on the ending (which is the lowest ending hehe). So I’ve added a walkthrough so you atleast can get out alive.

I really hope that people will try to get all the endings. Here is really zoomed out image of the entire game. As you can see, there is a lot that can be done =)

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=13137

Hey ! Here are the two soundtracks of our jam game 😉

> Click to go to the Soundcloud set <

Want to listen these song while playing ? Just click the image below

Of course, don’t forget to vote & comment !

Finally we finished our game, but  as always at a gamejam, we didn’t reached all our goals.

We are very happy about how far we have reached and as always it was fun.

The game is about a robot, trying to escape from the acid underneath him. You have to run to escape from the acid…there is only one problem, its endless…

You can try it here : http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=27420

Hope everyone had fun 😉

– Headless Hobo

So I’ve decided to write a post mortem for my first ever ludum dare entry Turn Fighter Foo. I’m really proud of what I had achieved in such a short amount of time and I just wanted the opportunity to share the story and the thought processes behind it.

The first day

When the theme “10 seconds “was revealed on the ludum site at 10:30 am local time, the first thing I did was to brainstorm and write down every idea I could come up with related to the theme.  Ideas for mechanics like 10 second power ups, 10 second lives and 10 second timers floated around mixed in with game ideas like escaping from a monster with only 10 second of stare time (yeah I ripped it off amnesia), a 10 second hundred meter dash and even a …ahem “reproductive” game with the control system of dance dance revolution to try and get a 10 second climax result.

My initial attempt was to build the monster game with a flashlight with a 10 second battery life that you could use to scare away the monster using Construct 2. Eventually, I got bored with the idea and ditched the monster game and was back at square one. I had a look at my list of brainstorms again and fell upon number 10 on the list which read “10 second to decide what to do in a situation – Each turn is a second”. I then started to think about creating a turn based game where you had a limited amount of time (10 seconds) to make a decision like timed chess. I remembered a previous game that I had stumbled on from a previous ludum dare called RockPaperRPG which was a game where players took simultaneous turns to select from melee, block and magic to defeat an opponent. I was going to extend upon that idea but with timed limited turns. This meant that I needed a greater range of actions to choose from so that time became a precious resource for the player. It so happened that I had just bought Mortal Kombat on steam that morning too and I thought about whether anyone has built a turn based fighting game before. And so the basic idea behind what would become Turn Fighter Foo was born. I tried to create the initial prototype in Construct 2. Below is a picture of that early prototype.

By late Saturday afternoon I was beginning to become frustrated with Construct 2 and I was ready to throw away this prototype too. However, I really liked the concept, I just didn’t like the way I had to manipulate arrays in the editor. I made the hard decision to give up on Construct 2 and fall back to coding the game on flash via the flixel library. The other problem was I had agreed to go to my friend’s birthday gathering and so I was going to lose my whole Saturday evening. I decided to make a quick appearance and get back home in time to do more development. The quick appearance saw me coming home at 12:00 am and slightly intoxicated. I started quickly banging away on the keyboard and within a couple of hours I had a white square moving within a grid which was more progress than I had made with my first prototype.

The second day

After six hours of sleep, I got up at eight and proceeded to start hammering away code. Most of what you can see was made on Sunday. Progress was slow but steady. By around lunch time I had the basic input and battle replay system up with a white square moving around. By late afternoon, I had two squares duking it out on a grid. I spent most of Sunday night actually programming the structure of the game, I had a battle engine but I still needed a game structure to handle the flow of the game from beginning to end plus reset conditions. I also needed all the other UI stuff that showed status (like healthbars). I also spent a bit of time doing the sprite graphics on Sunday night.

Most of the early morning of the Monday was spent fixing up issues and making sure that there wasn’t any major problems with the code flow. I also took some time to create sounds using bfxr and that Sakura tree in the background. By about 4 or 5 am on a Monday morning I probably had the final build and spent the next hour working out hosting on google drive, writing the readme and going through the process of submission. The title “Turn Fighter Foo” was selected when I had to fill in the name box in the submission process. I wanted something that was a parody of Street Fighter 2. Originally, it was going to be “Turn Fighter Too” but I took a play on the term Foo Fighter (I originally had in mind the band Foo Fighters) and with the word “Foo” in a programming context.

Positives

• I like the basic concept of the turn based fighting game and I can see areas where I can iterate upon it.
• I made a playable game! It’s a bit bare bones but it does have all the elements of a game’s structure.
• I really enjoyed the experience and the 48 hour time limit really stopped my procrastination habit in getting the game out.

Negatives

• No AI player. That means no single player mode in the version I handed up.
• The moves aren’t really balanced. The play matrix code is pretty horrible and copy and pasted at various sections.
• No music … I didn’t really plan this part at all.
• There was a lot of time wasted.
• I only had two hours of sleep on Monday morning before I went to work.

Lessons learnt

• Know your tools well. I was never really comfortable with Construct 2.
• Don’t try to fit in too many other things on a ludum dare weekend.

Going to go play and rate some of the other games now. Hope you enjoyed reading what I went through. You may find my ludum entry here

Tags: beat-em-up, Ludum Dare 27, postmortem, turn-based

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=7905

I made this in 72 hours, with the help of a musician and artist.
All code is me. I also did some really minor changes to the art.

Honestly, i’m super proud of this. It’s available for Android as well as desktop, and that’s where it really shines. It’s a perfect game to be playing on the toilet or w/e.

The multiplayer was a little rushed (though I coded it with multiplayer in mind from the beginning). So I’m amazed it turned out as nice as it did. It sort of relies on the player not cheating. But it still works well. Gives a spaceteam vibe (which is what I was going for).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NeHZP7NUgaQ
I did a sort of let’s play of it, showing off the single player video.

As far as a post-mortem goes. I honestly couldn’t be happier given the circumstances. Having an artist was touch-and-go for a while, which delayed implementing things (But did give me time to focus on design + backend code), and the musician basically didn’t turn up until the last minute. But this all comes with the territory of being a person. Everyone is busy at times.

My only regret is that I didn’t have anything to show at the game jam meetup I went to. And as much as I love it (and will always go), the 4 hours round-trip of travel does take out of potential dev time.

Lastly, I put the game on the play store. You can grab it from the Ludum Dare page, but if you want future updates, it’s gonna cost ya! A grand total of £0.50 ($0.80). I probably won’t update the free version from here on, but either way, I’ve found more than that behind the back of a couch. Go get it
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.omnomcom.joat

I might port/push to iOS too, if I get the chance.

It’s the last day for the jam. I have until 3am to publish my entry. I have still a lot of things to do but I think I will have the time. I have to do sounds, another music and created the map, quests and all the dialogs. As my game is open-world it’s very big and very important part.

10am : I created some extra sprites and add sounds. I manage to do one sound for the fight, one for the death of the hero and one when the hero pick an object. It’ not a lot of sounds but it’s ok for my game. I’m quite glad about their quality.

12pm : It’s lunch time. I haven’t yet the time to cook so it will be a ready-prepared dish.

1pm : It’s time to create the map. It’s not really big but for a 72h-game it’s ok. I begin by recover all the map by tiles and it’s a very long and very dull task.

3pm : Now, i put all the objects like buildings, trees, npcs.

4pm : I think about the plot and begin to write all the dialogs.

6pm : A quick dinner and it’s time to go to work until 11pm.

11pm : I’m tired and a bit hungry so I take little break.

Midnight : Still 3 hours. I plan to use two hours to finish the map and one to create an extra music. I finish to write all the dialogs and I add them in the game. I’m very glad about quests and dialogs. In only several hours, I think I manage to do something good.

1.30 : The map is finished and I have to test the game. The main problem is the difficulty and the balance of the game. It should be not too hard but not too easy and this sort of task take a lot time. You have to try the game, make some modifications, try the game again, etc… and there’s only 90 minutes left. The tension begins to increase.

2.30 : Do you know that feeling when there’s still only 30 minutes and you have just discovered a damn bug who can wreck your game if you don’t fix it ?

2.35 : I think I will throw my computer by the window in a minute…

2.45 : The bug is fixed. The map is finished. I have to publish the game.

2.50 : Oh, damn ! I need screenshots. I’m about to explode at this moment.

2.57 : Done. I published my entry !

3.01 : I have just remarked that I had still one hour to publish it…

It was a really long day. I will write a post mortem later. Here’s a last screenshot :

https://www.dropbox.com/s/zpku70s6zy0b9v6/timelapse_2013-08-27_11-04-00.mpeg

I forgot to keep the timelapse going after I came back from a break towards the end of day two. In my defense I’d just eaten my birthday cake and got drunk. The only tasks completed were some explosion fine tuning, and singing. But the less said about that the better.

Richard Was Afraid of the Dark

This was my first attempt at completing a game, and I’m pretty happy with the results.  I came into the challenge with a very limited skill set, but found myself learning a lot over the course of the weekend and finding creative ways to implement the things I learned.  “Richard Was Afraid of the Dark” is definitely something I’m proud of being able to create, and that I’m planning on developing further over time.

What went well:

Graphics – I am definitely not the most artistic person, visually, so I was dreading coming up with graphics for the game.  For all of the world elements I kept the design simple, mostly black with simple bump-maps to enhance the lighting, and very little color (green for the door, red for fire).  Allowing the light/dark contrast to be the primary focus really seemed to work out well.  The game ended up looking way more polished than someone with my artistic ability should have the ability to create.

Level Creator – I spent time early on making a way to instantiate objects based off of a bitmap file.  I wasn’t sure how necessary it would be, but as I neared the deadline, it was my saving grace.  As I got within an hour of the deadline I realized that I only had a couple playable levels.  In spite of the time constraint, I was able to pull together the rest (i.e. most) of the levels within that final hour.  I was able to do basic playtesting and iteration fairly quickly, although a few bugs did rise to the surface in the later levels.

Music – I am definitely more experienced with music creation than game creation, so this was far more comfortable territory for me.  I came up with the core music idea and then split up the layers so that the music could progress alongside the player.  I had several ideas that I didn’t have time to implement, but I think the basic result was pretty effective.

Story integration – I’m really happy with the mechanic I implemented for storytelling (not necessarily the story itself).  I wanted to make the story feel present and relevant but never force a player to pay attention.  I think I found a decent balance between giving the player freedom to stop and read the text or to just run straight through.  As I was developing the game, this was the element that really made me feel like I could add something unique to the compo.

What went poorly:

Time Management/Theme – I had come up with the idea for this game in response to the 10 second theme.  I had gameplay ideas in mind as I started the process, but I got bogged down by all of the other stages of development.  I ended up not having time to develop any of the theme-relevant elements and was unable to do anything other than a brief allusion to the theme in the story text.  That’s a pretty significant failure.

Gameplay – The core ideas for the gameplay worked (running, jumping, getting to the exit) but all of the larger gameplay ideas (obstacles, the ten-second gameplay mechanic, control refinement, etc) went completely unrealized.  I had created the fire blocks with the intent to use them as obstacles, but ended up only using them for aesthetic purposes.  In the future, I’ll definitely need to prioritize the necessary gameplay elements earlier on.

Animation – As with the graphics, I dreaded the animation process.  Unlike the graphics, this didn’t work out quite so well.  I spent quite a while working on getting the animation together, but eventually decided to scrap most of the ideas I had worked on.  As the visuals developed, it seemed most suitable to allow the character to only be a silhouette, which glossed over how bad the animation really is (although if you stop right before a door, it still looks like the character is doing Gangnam Style).  This is my least favorite part of the game.

What’s next:

Overall, this was a great experience for me.  I learned a lot and gained have a much better idea of my strengths and weaknesses as a game designer.  I’m definitely planning on continuing work on this game, add the elements that I didn’t have time for, and see if I can release it during the October Challenge.

Thanks everyone for all your feedback and for making so many awesome games.

-John

I just added ports for my game for Windows and Linux (not tested) in addition to the web player version.

Will be writing a post-mortem later. You can play it here.

For those with lower spec machines or people who are just curious to see the game, I have captured a short playthrough of Tensecwep

Link below! Enjoy!

So, I started learning Unity recently and did the Ludum Dare as a learning experience. I definitely learned so much, and I’m really happy that I participated. However, my game isn’t that great, I guess, but I don’t think it’s too bad for a first game. I’m probably not going to keep working on this for too much longer, I’m kind of discouraged after being ridiculed so many times. The only thing to do is fix the game, and don’t make the same mistakes twice. I think the other problem is that I didn’t really like the theme, and didn’t think of anything for it.

Anyways, without a further a-do, my game..

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=20531

Please leave feedback! Thanks.

Fantastic!

I really should have known better! This is my third Ludum Dare, but I’m still unable to manage my time correctly. I spent almost all of the first 36 hours on asset creation, and I really failed to get my programming going until way too late.

What went right:
– My core mechanic is intact. Time rewinds every ten seconds, just like I set out to do
– A decent soundtrack made by me. This is a first!
– A full compliment of pixel art for the game
– relatively bug free platforming physics with moving objects
– A decent auto-tiling system

What went horribly wrong:
– Ran out of time
– Had to nix a ton of features, corpses of which remain in the assets bundled with the game
– Wasn’t able to design any provocative levels
– No menu and no win screen
– Game breaking bugs that could only be fixed half an hour after the submission deadline

My takeaway: Next time, start programming the second you hammer out the basic idea. A game with placeholder graphics and generated music, but lots of gameplay, is way better than one with pretty assets and little game. Here’s to hoping for a better tomorrow!

Play ‘Dungeon Deadline’ !

Well I’ve charged through a few games in quick succession!  If there’s a pattern, its that most games use the “10 seconds” theme to limit the gameplay to, eh, 10 seconds.  There aren’t many platformers this time, and I think the theme has really limited people; there’s not much innovative slants on it all from my quick sampling.

Its difficult for me as I’m not a Windows user. I can run Unity Web these days, which is a saving. I wish more people made web-playable games; I really don’t like downloading your untrustworthy binaries and neither should you!

This is not all a bad thing; there are buckets of really good games that I’ve found already:

↑ 10 sec. Fast Beef is as addictive as Angry-Birds!  You’ve been warned!  Definitely no just playing for 10 seconds to be had here!

↑ Notiempo is a multi-player FPS that looks gorgeous.  I’m dead keen to know how the multi-player bit works, since I’ve had no luck with it myself in pass LD contests.

↑ The Value of Time is a pleasing little puzzler where you help yourself out in a weird and wonderful way.

↑ 10 Seconds Before the World Ends is a nice use of a physics engine.

With over 2200 games, I’ve obviously only scraped the surface and not found the truly great games!  In most LDs, I haven’t even played the winning games and am completely surprised – in a good way – when the results are announced and there’s a whole bunch more recommendations to work through!

My own entry was a bit of a miss this time, because the beauty is in the code and not the gameplay:

↑ The NSA’s Where’s Snowden? Game.  Please appreciate the Windows-ME-style interface and full SQL parser written in Javascript!  😀

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go play lots more games!

That’s it! I consider it to be one of my best Ludum Dare games ever 😀

As always, I managed to somehow wake up naturally at 3:58 AM (2 minutes before the theme announcement) , saw the theme and then returned to sleep. I streamed the whole gamedev process and it was actually really fun, almost always there was someone on the stream chat and it was nice talking with you guys, thanks! When I first woke up in the morning I started writing down ideas and later I decided to continue with the first (and quite simple) game idea, actually, it turned out to be a good decision!
My main goal was to make the game as polished as I can and I think that I accomplished that goal very well. All in all, I had a lot of fun making this game, I had a lot of encouragement from my friends (which really helped me 😀 ) and I even had time to take a few naps during the jam!

The Cave Of Light

Join our little friend on his journey into the depths of The Cave of Lights.
Wisely spend your 10 seconds of light each level to find your way through the cave…
What will you find at the end?

Play and rate “The Cave Of Lights” here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=5971

Tags: as3, compo, final, game, postmortem, timelapse

I saw everyone doing it, seemed fun to do the same.

First of all, I am a Game designer with some code skills and very poor skills in other areas, aka sound and art.

This is my third LD, the second I managed to deliver something. My first was the “You are the villain”. I was going to finish the game using GameSalad but the program stopped working and I had to start over in Unity with a huge learning curve ahead.

The second one, Minimalism, was made using Unity, I already had developed some skills. The problem was that I chose a genre that I am not very good at: Puzzle.

For this one I decided two things:

1. It would be a shmup or a platformer

2. I was going to use pictures (of me or my kid)

When the theme came up I was lost. 10 seconds… hummm hard choice.  At that time I recall an article I read regarding alcohol and creativity.  I went for it. Grab a couple of beers and went to bed to watch cartoons with my kid. And suddenly the idea came to me! A shmup with increasing difficulty every 10 seconds. At that moment, when the 2 beers hit me (yes, alcohol is super effective against me) I made a 3rd decision: No decisions made under the effect of alcohol could be changed, as insane it could sound.

At the peak of my “alcohol” rush I took some pictures of me and cleaned them in PS.

Then it was easy. I made several experimental shmups and it was kinda easy to develop it.

One thing that I HAD to do, my doom at game jams, was keeping the game working and not focusing on stupid features. So, after finishing cleaning my pictures, I went to the game and made it almost to the end and then came back to the “funny” part of the game. That part could be left out if there wasn’t time to finish it. This is called, if I am not mistake, the 80/20 error, where you spend 80% of your time in the 20% least important features. This worked out.

As always, I would have several things fixed, but the time was short. One small fix that I made was add a mouse support (only joystick available for the compo). The High Score logic was wrong, first because I made a very noob mistake when comparing the scores, and second because I forgot to comment the line that erased the scores when the game loaded.  Besides those, take the stupid label that I placed in the game to trace the mouse 😛

One thing that I wanted was to make the game have an end. The game ends after 240 seconds (24 cicles) with a drunk message from me 😛

Instead of making a what went wrong/right, I made this text, everything is inside id

Thank you for reading these lines and if you can, here is the link to the game, I would love if you play the game and leave a comment.
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=4736

… also now with a more detailed description and a few small fixes.

So you can now explore the derelict space lab on Windows, Mac and Linux.

Curious? Check it out!

Hello everybody. I would like to join to the last Ludum Dare, but I’m very worried about the situation on Syria and a possible intervention of EE.UU and his allies that can lead us to a third world war with high risk to be nuclear. I wish be wrong.

Just that. I really like Ludum and make games and play games from other entries.

My best wishes.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 27th, 2013 at 10:26 am and is filed under LD #27. 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 always wanted to create video games, I did some tests, but aside from one game, 2 years ago, (http://www.kongregate.com/games/tet2brick/lost-colony/ if you want to test it) none was finished or published.

LD was a good opportunity to have a deadline … and it worked!

I’m pretty happy with the end result, it could be improved, but for a developed 48 I think it’s pretty cool.

What I’m happy about

– The design in general and in particular that of the character … I’ve never done pixel art before a few weeks ago, so it’s not too bad.

– The gameplay is functional, I think the difficulty is well balanced and evolutive.

– The game is fun (I enjoyed playing it myself… :p )

– The music is ok and was done in less than two minutes, that was a last minute addition.

What I intend to improve in the next version

– A prettier start screen

– More levels

– More ambient sound

– More scenery

– More graphic details (tree, plants, rocks, tombstones, etc..)

– More different traps?

– Enemies?

– More levels

– Mooooore levels

– A better title.

Well, that was a really interesting experience that helped me realize that I could develop full games more often.

Feel free to test and give me feedback!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=25030

Tags: as3, finished, postmortem

… or “Why I ended up doing the 72-hour Jam” 😉

After a weekend ride on the rollercoaster of emotions (consisting of mostly rage and frustration…)  I finally finished my entry last night. You can check it out here:

10 Seconds – Jam Entry

My original goal was the 48-hr compo, but after the initial 16 hours on Saturday, I was ready to call it quits. Weird bugs started popping up everywhere, and I hadn’t even really decided on much more than the genre (platformer). I woke up Sunday with a few ideas – never underestimate the power of sleep 😉 – but not much time to complete them. Another 10 hours in, and only 5 left in the compo, I threw in the towel (again).

By that point, I had mostly working controls, and one basic level. The visual style was pretty much set and I even had the basic music laid out. I figured I’d just work on it as a 1GAM entry and leave it at that.

I decided last minute to take the day off work on Monday – just felt burnt out I guess, and not in the mood to lay out business cards and flyers 😛 Didn’t really plan on working on the game any further, but it just kind of happened. It started to feel like I’d actually have time to get at least a basic entry in for the jam, and so another 12 hours later I submitted my game.

What went right

Not much 😉 At least, none of it came easy. I’m happy with the end result overall though – of course there are a million things I’d like to fix, but I feel much better having submitted something.

What went wrong

The biggest thing was not knowing the tools nearly as well as I thought I did. I can fight my way through Unity & C# pretty well when I have the time, but the pressure of a deadline lead to some dirty code and nasty bugs.

I also, for some reason, felt way more compelled to give up early this time. That didn’t happen to me in LD26, so I’m not sure where that attitude came from. It’s definitely something I need to keep in check.

Final Thoughts

Oddly enough, my biggest drive for completing the entry was to be a part of everything that takes place afterwards. I enjoy the voting process, I like getting feedback (good and bad) and I crave the high of a completed project. I guess it’s important to keep these things in mind early on, step back and breathe when necessary, and to not give up so easy.

Congratulations to everyone – to those who tried and those who succeeded. Looking forward to the next one

Check out this video review of my LD 27 game:

Check the game out here!

Big thanks to caranha who made the reivew!
Check out his game too.

I finally published my game made for the Jam. I have been trying to make some games earlier, but never finished or published any of them  But here it is:) And I am pretty happy about the result, at least since I am just 14. So if you like paintball or first person shooters, please try my game and tell me what you think.

Game is Here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=25985

So, the game is complete, im getting some great feedback and reccomendations for future dev, but as it stands im happy with what i submitted, just wish Unity and my plugins hadnt crashed so often, and maybe id have got more done!

Really enjoying browsing the games on here too, a good majority are really creative and different so I know what I’ve got planned for the rest of my day 😀

anyway, the post mortem essay, of which im condensing to bullet point format:

STUFF THAT WENT REAL GOOD:

• Design stage: so i sat down for like 3 hoursbrainstorming sidescroller mechanics and top down shooter ideas, even had a fps at one point. Then I sat with cuppa tea and cig staring at my bookshelf where a rubix cube lay, thinking of the good old simple addictive games like snake and pacman, and yh this game idea just suddenly occurred, That was like full steam ahead moment!
• ARRRT: I spent the entire of the first day designing / blocking out the meshes! I Knew I only had really 5 objects in the game so i really wanted them to be crisp. Ive had good feedback on that so GG!
• CODE!: The many codes happened, my favourite was the raising and lowering of mazes and the customisable lengths of time in which levels pan out. Made it so the longer you play the more maze / puzzles you experience, randomly evolving etc. I think its a cool mechanic makes for almost a memory puzzle game on the slow level, and a hectic dash int he fast level! happy with how it all turned out!
• reaching deadlines: awww yh, best feeling! Those last moments when everything goes wrong, the red errors occur from things outside of your control and your like “WHY NOW” lol, but all worked in the end and was a relief!

STUFF GONE DUN BAD:

• Time management: I think i may have spent too long designing on paper! I have tonnes of ideas for what i can ADD to the game, but obviously, if id just thought of those things while modelling i would have actually implemented them xD
• Backing Up: Had a few golden moments of failure where ive edited some content or some code and im like…wait shit, wheres the NOOOOOooooo, so yh, next time, 1 backup per build!

THE FUTURE….and beyond!:

• Expect Turrets
• Expect DEATH FLOORS
• …….AND DEATH WALLS
• and high score tables
• height difference
• expansive levels / campaign
• online cash shop (woah…wait…thats a lie 😉
• more levels
• more guns (working guns would be a start, as i never actually coded it in 😛 )
• ALL the enemies!!
• possibly procedural puzzle generator using raytraces to calculate whether there is a usable paaaaath! (thats a big maybe!)
• more fun
• more frustration
• better audio (and more annoying audio!)
• all the mission objectives!
• more explosions! Everyone loves explosions!

So yh, i had fun, im on a high, time to play and rate some more awesome games, first LD…Greaaaaat Succeeeesss!

You are a fan of platformers and/or puzzles? Then you should not miss this entry.

In this game you have to remember a ten seconds long level and make the right moves to reach the chest. The problem is, you have to move while not seeing the real world. The cool thing, you aren’t doing it in a boring click planning phase,  no, you will play it in real time like any other jump an run.

Watch out for burning and rolling barrels and use the elevators, platforms and trampolines  to succeed.

Have fun in 30 levels in 2 worlds

Good luck

<<<    http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=25952 >>>

Now the Day after, I still have yet to fully recover from the lack of sleep with work commitments. The upside is that I have the opportunity to  show a few colleagues the game and gather some friendly feedback. It was quite refreshing to have a break from coding and discuss some of the experiences while working on the project and having a moment to laugh at the things that went wrong and seeing how the things that went right have been able to come across in their feed back.

So today I’m looking at promoting the game and putting out some feelers to gather as much feedback as possible. Afterwards I plan to go back to the team for post huddle and share that feed back with the other members. I’m hopeful of producing a comprehensive post mortem on the project so stay tuned for that.

Link to game

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=22368

It has been since the game was finished. I had just forgot to put the link to the online version on the LD page when it first went up. But now all you Mac and non-PC folk can enjoy the same amount of confusion and light headaches that the PC players can!

Several folks have tried the game and have not figured out how to survive, so I updated the summary with more hints. This is what happens when you don’t have testers Those that were frustrated, please try again. I’m sure you’ll like the survival technique. See my entry here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=27425

Hints for survival
Hint 1: Pay Attention and don’t be rude
Hint 2: If you talk to your buddy, check your surroundings
Hint 3: Don’t Text and Skydive
Hint 4: There are other 10 second driven elements in the game, like timed events (even when it seems like nothing is going on)

So, my second LD resulted in my first entry. Not bad.

What went right

Personally, I liked the theme. I’m always one to take it more as a game mechanic, so this one was pretty clear while offering a fair number of choices.

I had the game done after the first day. This gave me the second 24 hours to polish, draw, compose and add new features. I spent several hours obsessively tweaking numbers until I could win about 50% of the time, which seemed fair.

What went wrong

After tweaking for hours the girlfriend and I cooked dinner, watched a movie, and killed a bottle of wine. That in itself is not wrong, not at all. I thoroughly recommend it. However, it sort of put the idea of “The game’s done, I could add some graphics and music but would I be really happy with them and there’s another bottle of wine in the fridge oh stuff it let’s just relax” into my head. I need to be more committed. ^__^

Also, despite basing my entry on the engine code for my previous attempt, there was still a fair chunk of tech to write. I mean, if I knew I was going to do a shooter no matter what the theme, I should have written a weapon class ready, right?

I picked a stupid size for the screen (1280×720). Next time, I check it on my laptop before submitting.

Lastly, the browser variance got me. I developed in Chrome, one of the more forgiving browsers, but when my first comment was “It freezes in Safari 6 on a Mac” I thought I’d better check it out. Horrifyingly it ran in NO other browsers (except Opera, which uses the same V8 JS engine as Chrome). Hurriedly researching and fixing a combination of transform, keyboard and audio problems got it running reasonably in all browsers except Safari, in which it still runs at 3-4 FPS instead of the 60 FPS of everything else. Post-compo (and therefore not in the entry version) I’ve played around with different methods but nothing has helped Safari. I also don’t have a Mac, so I’m limited to version 5.1.7 (the latest version on Windows) which doesn’t implement requestAnimationFrame, which is the recommended fix for buffered frames – although that’s not the whole problem. >__<

Still, I'm pretty happy all told. Javascript seems to have stayed in my head despite neglecting it for eight months, and the game itself is pretty fun. If you like bullet hell shooters, you can play it on the web right here, please let me know what you think!

Aaand see you all in four months. 😉

Tags: advice, javascript, Mortem, Post, post-mortem, postmortem

This was my first LD.

So,I had finished things just on time two days ago, and submitted…

Yesterday,I played everyone’s games and really enjoyed it.

Today I realised  I had made a mistake around half way of the game preventing it to continue,totally dissapointed I thought like:

“I’ll double check next LD…”

Until I accidently read:”MY GAME CRASHES, IS UNBEATABLE, OR I MADE A TYPO: We allow you to fix crash or win condition bugs after the deadline (in a sense, like “porting” to support more players). We also allow “typo” bugs. I.e. A true that should have been a false, a word that should have been a different word, very tiny changes that you would have caught if you had more sleep. We leave this open to interpretation, but generally speaking your game should be identical to the game you submitted. No new features, just things you messed up last minute. Typos.”

So I corrected the mistake and reuploaded the .jar!

I felt relived.

But then I learned about the D=R-5*C^0.5, C topping at 100;

So I could deduce every game gets  about 50 ratings for a 100 coolness,which means, since 27 people played my game ,23 are left.

That’s less than half.

Thats why I posted this here, to get more feedback on what I really did.

Game link: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=25208

PS: improbable question : What is L = loser?

Tags: Typo

Race through the grass! Experience the brushfires!! Get the crystals!!!

Over ten million blades of meticulously simulated grass! Fresh grass, cool on your skin! Dry grass, quick to burn! Embrace the mystery…OF THE GRASSFIRES OF VELDSTAR

MY ENTIRE FUCKING HEAD IS AN EYEBALL

I’M A SEXY CRYSTAL WITH A HOT VOICE

Think. Cooperate. Survive.

So, this is my first entry into Ludum Dare, and I must say I think it turned out pretty well! After three days of grueling work, with a very bad cold, I think the key to a successful game is lots and lots of Nyquil. I’m fairly certain the continuous sleepy haze I was in had a strong impact on the games style. I don’t know much about getting people to view your game, so I’ll have to check around and various places I can get some visibility.  Now it’s time to sit back and review all the entries out there!

All in all, I would say LD27 was a fantastic, if not completely exhausting, experience. I’ll probably do it again.

The Lost Robos Teaser

Years after the extinction of mankind all life on earth has ended, and the planet has grown cool and still.

But somewhere deep within the earth something is stirring! Help Mankind’s creations, the little orphaned Robos, to navigate their way to the surface where the sun can breathe new life into their drained power cells! Each Robo only has TEN SECONDS to act on each level before their power cells run dry. Find a way to overcome the limitations of each individual by working together.

Think. Cooperate. Overcome.

Controls

• Arrows to move
• X to jump
• Z to activate special abilities
• R to restart the current level
• SPACE to pause all Robos and halt their power cells draining
• 1,2,3,4,5 to select the corresponding Robo.

My jam game is a murder mystery about a professor’s mysterious death during a 10-second blackout. It was a bit too ambitious for 72 hours, but I’m pretty happy with what we got done.

Here’s what the game looked like on Saturday:

And here’s the final look:

I’ll post a longer post-mortem later. For now, you can play my game here!

Cut together the timelapse of the development of Cogri Is Missing. Turned out pretty good!

Cogri Is Missing Ludum Dare Timelapse from David McDonough on Vimeo.

Linux support added to our game! We compiled it so Mono shouldn’t be needed, it works on our machines, but we would love if some Linux users could test it for us.

We are also working on an OS/X version, but since only one of us has a Mac, it will take more time, sorry

You can see the game HERE

Entry

With the weekend behind us there’s finally enough time to write about our dev journey. Before hand we had chosen our technology stack: libgdx and Scala. Both were relatively new to us so, with a hard lesson learned during LD#24, decided to keep the game simple. We started the first morning brainstorming some ideas, such as a factory-simulator with 10s cycles and various running games. We settled on recreating an old classic with a new twist: gauntlet with a timer.

The pure basics were already laid out, but it still took an entire day to get familiar enough with the tools to get a solid foundation up. Some place holder graphics were scribbled into place. At this point there was nothing except a map and the player movement, with collision detection almost working :). No complete images survived this stage, the earliest screenshot I had stored already has final floor texture.

Crude wall assets, early weapon and player character

Day 2 continued with more of the basics getting set up: level transitions, loading, enemy logic, item pickups. We kept experimenting with the game play the entire time, tweaking variables and assets pretty ad hoc. The code quality also took a slight nose dive with “getting it done” taking priority. Before turning in for the night I had taken a stab at implementing the enemy movement, with poor results:

Experimenting with the UI

We quickly wrapped up major missing functions during the third day. We hadn’t yet decided if the game would feature random levels and never end, but decided against it. We implemented some auxiliary features such as the red potion to boost weapon damage, and spent the last hours before submission on level design and packaging the product. The video below is from early Monday, testing video capture.

It would definitely been nice to document the development process more to see the evolution of the game and our process. We did generate a video of the code changes in the git repository using gource. Documenting the dev process is something for us to work on when entering more competitions.

The finished product feels like a game, an aspect we especially wanted to concentrate on, with good controls and a clear progression. The goal of the game should maybe be more evident, and the lack of music and quality sound effects are something we should see to in future endeavors . All in all we are pleased with how it turned out, and how much we learned while making it.

remote… remote control.

Well, that’s 9 for 9 in a row for LD compos. Happy, exhausted, all the usual emotions plus a handful more. Congrats to all successful entries. The following is reprinted from the official project page:

What Went Right

1. Continued Apolicy
Once more total radio silence on the theme proved a good strategy. I wonder what would happen if no one voted? But then again I think about that every time there’s any kind of democracy.

2. New Environment

The new Dark Acre office in Nanaimo is game development heaven compared to the apartments in the West End of Vancouver. I felt more relaxed, focused, & at ease throughout the compo, despite complications (see 1 below).

3. Outside Time
Went for walks, something I hadn’t purposely done in previous compos. Also smoked a bit of pipe tobacco, a dirty habit I hadn’t really touched much for the past 5 years. Not advocating, do what you want. Did it help me think clearly? I believe so, health concerns aside.

4. Riding a Wave of Successful Ludum Dare Compos
I’ve done this so many times now it’s become routine. It’s a major advantage but also something of a drawback (see 2 below).

What Went Wrong

1. That Damn Cat

The Dark Acre cat, Pon Pon, escaped a few days before the compo began. We recovered her with a dislocated jaw and chip in her spine. This was stressful in itself, but we were glad to get her back in relative safety.

Then on the Saturday of the compo I was carrying her to the vet for a progress check up & she broke out of the carrier. She holed up in an inaccessible crawlspace under our apartment for 10 hours, causing stress & distraction. We once again recovered her, & were forced to re-schedule the check up for the Sunday of the compo. More lost time.

I’m never one to make excuses, but accidents do happen. Due to the lost production time I was unable to process audio & expand the level design. This was the first time 9 compos that such a thing happened, so I count myself lucky in that regard.

2. Familiarity Breeds Contempt
I love the compo. It’s the closest I’ve come to feeling like there’s actual value in hardcore production. The sweat, the tears, the neglected health & family members. But in the last year it’s come with ever-diminishing returns on educational value, & only reinforced my belief that long-term projects are where it’s at.

3. Overall Lack of Practice/New Tools
I think I executed well, given the circumstances, but it could have been better not only with the full amount of time but with a little more time spent in the new tools. I’d recently upgraded to the ’14 versions of my Autodesk stuff, 3.6 of Substance Designer, & I hadn’t even opened Unity3D since the last compo. There were a few minor hiccups, like losing all my keysets for Max, or completely forgetting how to assemble a Substance, but overall I was pleased with how the coding went & the discovery of the improvements Unity’s made to its engine.

Tags: cat, KINGINDIE, post-mortem

Damn, we spend around two days jaming with you guys, and that was such a great experience. The ammount of great games in the final is surpassing the boundaries! 💡

I already had checked a few dozen of games by now(and only empty cup of tea managed to stop me), and they are simply perfect!! Every single game have its strong and weak sides, but mostly all of you could balance them properly, and that is so nice..

There was some realy polished ideas, and some realy crazy ones and some offtopic(but still cool by the way)…graphics, mostly in pixelart is stunning(I can’t help myself, when i see pixelart i give 5/5 because it rulez) we must definetly meet on the next jam!

As for us, everybody talked not to use new engine, sleep well, don’t drink to much cofee….well, it was our first jam with you guys, here at Ludum, and now we know why people are keep saying that

But, we managed somehow (no, we didn’t sell our souls to devil…well, at least not all of us :twisted:) to finish the game.

Here’s the screens from early stages of the game:

If You haven’t play it, please do, we would love to hear your opinion about it!
PLAY THE GAME

So our first Ludum Dare is over.

Firstly I would like to share the timelapse I’ve recorded with you all (There’s a bit of gameplay at the end of it).

The game can be found here:

www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=25133

Now onto the pros and cons.

The pros:

– I learned a few new things along the way.

– I have a much better understanding of developing with XNA now.

– We ended up with a game that could turn into something fun with alittle more work.

– It was a blast!

– Posting these blogs and talking to new people doing the weekend was fun.

– Playing other peoples games and seeing new interesting concepts.

– Getting feedback on our own game of course.

The cons:

– I should probably have prepared some of the basic and core code before the contest started as I spend way too much time doing that once the theme was announced.

– Partly because of the previous I didn’t get to implement all the stuff we had planned.

– I ran into a few problems along the way (Some easy to fix, others were just bizarre).

I now know what to do and what to avoid for next time and I’m definitely going to participate in the next Ludum Dare!

I will not continue to play all the awesome games that’s been submitted!

Thank you!

 Around 3 months ago I visited ludumdare.com for the first time, I was immediately hooked and decided that I must enter in LD27.  In July I entered in my first game making competition, 7dRTS. Somehow I managed to write a game in PHP (a language that I barely knew) which placed 4th in Humor, even though it wasn’t even that funny!

My 7dRTS game, which is called SyncMind was a great learning experience for me and also a lot of fun for me to code.

Anyway a few weeks later I discovered 7dFPS which I proceded to enter in a game called Challenger 34502 which was a puzzle FPS with  platformer elements in it. I made the game in Unity, wrote it in UnityScript, made the art in Paint.Net and models in Blender.

Challenger 34502 can be played here

Wrath Of The Decem:

After the theme (10 seconds) was announced I went to bed and slept for 8 hours, then in the morning when I got up I took the dog for a hour long walk. For the rest of the day I worked on my game,  finishing levels 1 through 4. I slept for about 9 hours, then realized LD27 was still on and jumped out of bed and finished the game.

What Went Well:

Windows 7: My computer held up fine, no crashes or lost data.

Kitten: My kitten model actually looks like a kitten

Almost Everything Else: Everything was fine, no bugs that took more than 15 minutes to fix or (severe) file loss.

What Didn’t go Well:

Timer: The giant timer in the corner of the screen had a Unity crashing bug that took 15 minutes to fix.

Windows 7: WHY U USE SO MUCH RAM!

Time Lapse: The order of images got messed up so the timelapse is rather weird.

Gameplay Video: Camstudio Recorder lagged like heck during the recording of my gameplay video.

Time Lapse:

The timelapse video can be found at this URL because WordPress doesn’t let me embed videos:  https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B6XSI0zltIQUNUJ0R1diWGlzQ1E/preview

Gameplay Video:

The gameplay video can be found at this URL because WordPress doesn’t let me embed videos: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B6XSI0zltIQUWTg3ODB5NGNUTlE/preview

Anyway, if you haven’t played Wrath Of The Decem yet you can at: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=24589

Tags: LD27, postmortem, unity, unity3d

AKA: balance your game!

DMC:QFTTSC is a game about stealing parts from cars. It is also about many things besides, but I want to focus on that because it’s the part that is kind of borked. Everything else (the writing, the sound, the programming) came out more or less awesome sans a few minor errors which were quickly patched up.

The crux of it is this: I had 4 hours at the end of development in which I could EITHER balance the game or do the sound. I chose to do the sound, which paid big dividends, but I wound up with a game that is absurdly easy.

Why is it easy?

It is apparently possible to finish the game without adding a new engine or nitrous. These are how you give the car more power, so plainly that is an issue. I also gave the player too much time to get parts in most cases, so the tension which makes up a lot of the gameplay is frequently absent.

Well that’s dumb! What balancing did you do?

As I was designing the various available parts, I focused on using real world numbers. This meant looking up how much a typical exhaust weighs, or engines of various capacities, and then using those numbers as a guide. This gave me a realistic spread (to some degree) which is what I wanted.  Where it all broke down was in the testing area.

The testing algorithm calculates the car’s distance and speed in real time, but keeps it out of frame until the very end so that I didn’t have to spend time making it look realistic. Because of this, I could use a relatively simple formula to calculate the car’s speed at any given time. I balanced this formula by taking the stock car and testing it until it took about 40 seconds to do the standing quarter mile. I then put in a much more powerful engine and tweaked until that took about 12 seconds. I figured that if the player got a couple more improvements for their car and one good enigne, they would be set. I tweaked the time to get an engine accordingly, and job done.

That’s not so unreasonable, but I gather it didn’t work

You gather correctly. The problem is that I adjusted the formula to make weight more important, and reduced the base weight of the car to compensate. This means that swapping out the brakes or exhaust for lighter ones makes a huge difference. Remember, the car with stock parts was still about 40 seconds! Since the weight reduction was factored in over time, a tiny reduction would continuously affect the car over the whole lap. The end result is that James May’s Phat Pand can do the standing quarter miel in 10 seconds…with a 90 horsepower engine. If I had spent my last few hours testing various configurations I would have written a more complex algorithm and weight would have been a more reasonably balanced factor. But I didn’t.

What’s the lesson here?

Don’t just test numerical extremes, and always test tweaks to ALL of your factors. I don’t know if I made the wrong call (the sound may be more valuable than a balanced game), but I definitely regret not spending even 15 minutes more on balance. Next LD I will be including balance time in my schedule.

Oh yeah, when making an LD game you should always have a schedule. Always. Have. A. Schedule.

PEACE

Now that I have a moment to step back I figured, like other people, I do a little post-mortem of how things went with Viral Attack.

Design/Theme:

I figured based on the past voting that “10 seconds” was going to win as a theme. I’d been cooking up a Dig Dug meets bomb disposal game set in post WWI France, s I figured “10 seconds, that’s a timer… bombs have timers DONE and DONE”. However once the theme was decided it felt a bit kludgy to stick a defusal or other strict 10 second rule onto that game so I bailed. This left me to come up with a new idea ASAP. The core idea that surrounded Viral Attack was holding a point for [x] non-consecutive seconds (In this case 10.) I like games that force you to play a mix of offense and defense. The rest became a wrapper around that idea.

Controls:

I’d planned on it controlling a bit like asteroids, but Osmos is a game I really enjoy so I decided to emulate part of their movement mechanic. This turned out to be good AND bad. It’s a really un-intuitive way to move by adding force to an object on the opposite side from where you intend to go, and Osmos does an incredibly good job of introducing that by giving you a little risk-free tutorial, Viral Attack needed this. This control method also ended up giving me a rude awakening to two other things that I stupidly looked over.

1.) Mouse games aren’t that fun in windowed mode.

Especially when you’re only concerned with relative movement of the mouse NOT the actual pointer. I should have forced the game full screen but that would have screwed up the web game and I wanted that to reach the more people…  (Seque!)

2.) RMB doesn’t work on web games.

The whole weekend I’d been testing on Windows without a thought to web. When I finally loaded up the web player I was confronted by this horrible truth and had to go back and add LCTRL support for use on the web. This control doesn’t feel quite the same to me, but was a necessary evil. What I should have done at this point though is generate two versions of the game with/without RMB turned on as required. I didn’t and the web game suffered.

Originally the repel wasn’t limited by stamina but instead you had to hold to charge it and the repel was proportional to length of time held. I liked this as it required a certain about of preparation for defense. I ended up adding the stamina meter to give the virus a reason to move away from the host cell from time to time. This naturally worked well with the repel ability and because a little risk-reward decision “Keep my little bit of meter to push away the white blood cells and escape, or take down the host cell by a bit more…” etc. However I didn’t revisit the control input for the repel button now you were burning two resources (time and stamina) to repel enemies and you couldn’t do it as an “oh shit” maneuver. This became obvious when I watched my wife play the game and saw her furiously mashing on the space and getting little tiny repels or none at all. She asked “Why do I need to hold it?”, and I realized by answer didn’t work any more so I changed it. I think it feels much better now.

I hope you enjoyed this, and the game. Please feel free to jump over and rate it.

Cheers and thanks for a fun Ludum Dare.

– mikegbrown

For this Ludum Dare I was so hoping for another theme than 10 seconds. The reason: for the last LD I made a game called 20 seconds and I didn’t want to create the same kind of game again. I was pretty disappointed when it became the theme with such a huge lead. Even though I was hoping for some other theme I also thought about what to do for 10 seconds. And this is my game:

Alien Attack

About the game:
Because I already did it, I did not want to create a game that was made of many games that last 10 seconds. I decided to create a game, that would get more features over time. So every 10 seconds, this game gets a new feature. In this LD version these features include graphical updates, sounds, enemy types and a simple message system/achievements. There is a lot more I would have liked to add.

What I liked:

• For the first time I made several status updates and regularly deployed the current version. This allowed me to get a little bit of feedback and see whether the idea itself was good or not
• I really liked the way the pencil drawn and scanned graphics worked out. Wouldn’t have expected explosions to look so cool when drawn with a pencil.
• The way I do the loading of required resources. Only 10 seconds before a feature becomes active, I start to fetch the required resources. So at the start of the game neither sound nor other graphics are loaded. This keeps initial loading times low

Things I learned:

• I did not do any collision detection for polygons before. Read about it on Saturday and started to implement the algorithm while reading about it.
• How to do (single frame) explosion graphics. They were the last thing I added on Sunday before I submitted my game. I just was too tired to make them right, so they are kind of cut off.

Things that went wrong:

• The name. I forgot a name for the game. Didn’t want to call it some variation of ten seconds. Came up with Alien Attack when I filled out the submit-form, because the player ship looks kind of alien. By now, I’ve come up with a name I like much more: Featurama. If I am going to add more features to the game I’ll definitely rename it.
• Implementing collision detection for polygons in the evening is kinda bad. I added some bugs and never got it running in the evening. Only in the next morning I was able to see the bugs and fix them. Should have gone to bed earlier.
• Graphics. I don’t like creating graphics and I don’t like the graphics I create. But as with the explosions, at least I still seem to be able to learn a few things. So maybe I’ll get better. Hopefully.
• My submitted game contained a bug that made the game freeze up. It didn’t do so in my development environment but if I had tested with another browser I would have realized. So, another thing I learned: Test your game one last time, even if you are too tired to go on.

With that, another link to my game and I’m off to play and rate a few more games of you.

5 LD27 games:

Kannas: 10 Seconds
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=18332

Infernet89: The Value of Time
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=14271

teamenschede: Placeholder
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=27808

myachin: Descent Alpha
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=10579

Tange: Exocolony
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=1012

I feel like I’m re-iterating myself, but I’m a bit surprised for someone having a hard time ever finishing any programming task, that this adventure actually progressed in a very timely manner.

What felt right

• The quite simple idea of a FPS with a revolving world made for quite easy game development when the revolution was finally working. Not having to deal with a character sure saved me some hours.
• Using Unity + Blender definately helped in focusing on the game proper and not writing code in i Phython from almost scratch as I’m used to. In fact there was never anything truely stressful about the whole thing, I had something I could have submitted early Saturday afternoon.

What didn’t feel so good.

• I should have taken the time to learn the built in character controller module importable in Unity, the controls are definitely lacking some.
• It was a bit of a learning curve in Blender, and it would have made for a more enjoyable game if there had been a more deliberate world with levels that were not only built from static right angled blocks.
• My initial idea was that the power ups would have side effects such as vertigo and a pack of dolphins obscuring the visual field. That would have made the game about 112% more cool, but I opted for having a menu system and high score board instead. Next time I’ll go for the dolphins, I promise.

In all it was an extremely rewarding experience, and many lessons learned. Can’t wait until next dare. I’m going to be so much prepared, I’m going to be familiar with the tools, and it is going to be so much fun!

Give it a try, my game,

So this was our first LD, and I must say, it was an awesome experience!

On day 1, after declaration of the theme, the first problem was, of course, coming up with a game idea that could stand out. Add to that 6 people from 6 different parts of the country, without Skype (’cause of slow net), this took a pretty good part of day 1. 10 second levels, shooter with stuff changing after 10 secs (everyone loves shooters!), 10 second powerups – a lot of stuff popped up, but we finally decided on controlling different characters for 10 seconds to coordinate a prison break idea.  Granted, this was way too ambitious, but it seemed like a good idea, even if we managed a small prototype. Most of the day was spent on coding the basic engine, and coming up with level designs, and then discarding them due to complexity.

Day 2 and day 3 were huge! Specially day 3, with all of us having college and all. Stuff didn’t go according to plan, cut off many of the ideas, decided on 5 short levels, showing the core mechanic pretty well nevertheless. We wanted it to be real time at first, but later decided against that. So the game as it is now, is more like setting up the pieces before letting it all play out.
Our artists did an excellent job with the art, even if I say so myself. We got a friend to do the soundtrack on late notice, which he surprisingly produced really fast.
We didn’t get enough time to do proper cutscenes or tutorials in the end, and pretty much everyone else was against having a serious story to this, so we skipped that.
Finally, with 2 hours to spare (that’s 4.30 am here), I barely managed to complete it. Didn’t have much time to playtest for all the scenarios that may pop up however. (Updated the game with crash fixes later.)

The final result is pretty much a prototype rather than a full game, but I think we pulled it off quite well. And of course, it’d be awesome if you guys check it out. We may develop this further based on the feedback we get: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=25325

And now, time to start rating all these awesome games I see up here!

This was my first Ludum Dare aswell as my first game jam I made a game where you have to destroy as much as you can in a city in 10 seconds by clicking

everywhere.It was so much fun and I made a great game. Coming back for the next Ludum Dare.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=25019 I hope you enjoy my game if you can play it.

So this weekend I made a game.

THAT IS AWESOME

So this weekend I made a game that I am actually proud of.

THAT IS FUCKING AWESOME.

So this weekend I made a game that I am actually proud of AND people in the comments seem to like it*, especially the story which is what I am the most proud of as well.

The feeling I get from that is indescribable.

If people keep posting comments like that, I think my head might get so light with happiness that I float all the way to the moon. This might have been my first Ludum Dare, but it sure as heck won’t be the last.

But anyway, since I really like all the post-mortem lists of rights/wrongs, I am going to copy that very idea. Here goes:

Where I rocked

• Good idea choices. Got an idea that I liked very quickly. I scrapped that after a few minutes of thoughts. Then I had breakfast and showered and got a much, much better idea, which is pretty much unaltered in the final game.
• Awesome work ethic. I looked at the theme, went to eat, shower, stuff like that, had the idea and then worked pretty much uninterrupted until night, where I actually went to bed at the responsible time of 11 pm (which seems to be an extreme exception to 5 am in this jam). I was then well rested for the next day, and worked till 12:30 pm the next night (2½ hours before time limit). Never lost motivation, probably due to how much I liked the idea.
• Story. Wrote a, in my humble opinion, touching little story, and put it nicely into the game. And the thing that I am much more proud of is that the gameplay actually supported the emotions of the story, especially towards the end. I’m very very happy about having achieved that.
• Gameplay. Although not as flavored or challenging as I would have liked, I am rather content with the gameplay. The main mechanic, spinning, feels very good.
• Game feedback. Something that I once had a lot of problems with, now came pretty easily. It is quite clear to see/feel when you get hit, when you hit enemies and so on. <3 particles <3
• Finishing. Yay! I could have added a lot more, and there are some small tweaks that I could have made, which would have improved the quality of the challenge a bunch, but which I only thought of later, but I had to sleep, and so I just told myself that it was finished and submitted. Feels good.

Where I sucked

• The tools. I had not prepared them, so lost at least an hour downloading and setting up Flash Develop and Flixel. And I wasn’t really comfortable using them, since I haven’t made a game with them for a while, so had to spend a lot of time refreshing as well. Rookie mistakes, I know, but it is my first time.
• Sound. Never made/got it. A nice quiet soundtrack could have improved this game by miles.
• Art. Just look at it. I am not good at art, and I never had time to even try.
• Testing. The only ones who I had time to test with were my parents, and neither of them know how to play video games. Part of the reason why the game is too easy, probably.
• Challenge. As stated before. The initial idea involved more types of enemies. Another way to make it more challenging in a good way that is glaring me in the eyes, would be to require the player to kill a set number of enemies before being able to grab the night stash. Boom.

All in all, I am so happy about participating and about my game, that something VERY important will have to be scheduled in the next LD weekend for me to not participate again.
Thank you for reading this
-ZC

*Of course, on all the games people are very polite and mostly say the good things, so I can’t really be sure if it’s actually any good, before I see the ratings. I am aiming for a relatively good mood score most of all.

Tags: Half the Time, post-mortem

UPDATE 27.08.2013:
Added additional Keybindings for Arrow Keys + CTRL for shooting + Movement
Limited Rate of Fire + adjusted enemy health scaling to that new RoF.
Enabled Lazymode (keep Space pressed to shoot – no more RSI)

Apart from that, everything stayed the same.

Feel free to decrease your rating if adding this things upset you.

This is Bit, he is happy the jam is complete!

So we finished our Second Ludum Dare! It feels great

Boy was this one FRUSTRATING

But we learned SO much……

——————————————————————————————————————————–

-POST – MORTEM-

First the things that went WRONG

-1. LIMIT THE AMOUNT OF BETA SOFTWARE USED-

Heres the first thing I did wrong. I am running on a OS 10.9 beta. I am writing my code in Xcode 5 beta

Besides all of the crashing, one night I hit a total dead end bug in Xcode where I could not distribute my app. I almost QUIT the dare.

-2. MAKE SURE IF YOUR STREAMING/TIME LAPSING THAT ITS SET UP AND WORKING BEFORE THE JAM-

I spent too long trying to make sure my stream was exactly the right way, plus because of rule 1, it kept crashing, total productivity bust

-3. PREPARE YOUR TOOLS/CODE BASE/LIBRARIES BEFORE THE JAM-

This jam I switched over to SDL for the first time. I hit so many little snags that were simply because SDL works different, a number of times my productivity stopped was because SDL would be handling Floats as Integers, and leaking memory when it renders text, or flat out dropping sound because of an extra curly bracket.

———————————————————————————————————————

Things that went RIGHT!

-1. Work with friends-

Luckily I had the support from two close friends of mine. Both of which worked with me in the previous jam, but had dedicated time this jam to help. Having three people working on the game felt nearly perfect. The conversations were always motivating and productive. Also having two other people critique your code/sound/music/art is always great. A number of times Id find myself implementing something , and because of lack of sleep/reality/food one of my friends would remind me that what I did looks or sounds RIDICULOUS

-2.Have a Plan-

My friends and I prepared better for this jam. Last jam we did not realize the theme was announced so soon, so we scrambled after work to get together. Not this time, we were together as soon as the theme was announced and spent a good 3 hours whipping up ideas. I have a HUMONGOUS white board that worked so well in capturing and reducing our ideas to the very best ones. We could then get down to work, and glance at the checklist of things we needed to do on the whiteboard.

-3. Share often –

Try to have people test your game as soon as you can, some of the weird little things you know about the games rules or how it plays may not be apparent to others. You have to develop a sense of “communication” to your player , and there is no better way than to see how another player plays your game.

Overall, I feel extremely accomplished having finished a second dare. This time the pieces fell together much better than before. We had the idea down the first night, then got cranking the next two days. My friends and I discovered new talents and developed some since the previous jam. We look forward to finding out when the next jam is, and now I can’t wait to try some of your games!

—Don’t forget to try our game FSCK! Bit needs your help!—-

Download Here!

Tags: 10 seconds, 2D, C++, game, post-mortem, postmortem, progress, SDL

Pushed an update to Duel today(only the kongregate link, the dropbox link will remain the original version).

Duel on Kongregate

Duel LudumDare Page

Fixes:

-Added “Allow Bots” button so players could choose to play against bots or wait for a real person to join. If you choose to disallow bots please be patient as there is very low player traffic at the moment.

-Improved matchmaking. Matchmaking should be much faster than before and has a much higher chance of actually getting you a game(allowing, of course, that there are other players in the network)

Go defend your honor!

This was my entry for Ludum Dare 27. It was made in around 15 hours with most of the work done on Saturday. It is a simple arcade style game inspired by Pac-Man, but it automatically moves onto the next random “maze” every 10 seconds with more enemies added in over time.

My primary goal was to simply finish something, even if it’s not too original or amazing of a game. I’ve been participating with Ludum Dares off and on for five years, but I kept biting off more than I could chew and running out of time before nearing a completion. This time I tried to keep everything as simple as possible — a character that lacks complex geometry, has only two bones, simple animation, and minimal texture mapping. Even though I did not have the full 48 hours available to work on it, I succeeded in creating something and I consider that is a pretty big accomplishment considering how little time there was.

What Went Wrong

Because most of Saturday was spent with family before I head off to college, I was pretty much short a day.  This extra time certainly could have been used to add more to the game and polish things up a bit.

I Jumped straight into development without spending much time brainstorming game ideas.  Halfway through making this I came up with a few game concepts that I think could have been more fun, unique, and funny, but I didn’t have the time to scrap what I had and start over.

I kept having a weird problem on Kongregate where my game gets moved down a little and cuts off the bottom of it.  No matter how I tried to change the size settings nothing seemed to fix it completely, so I just tried to have it cut off as little as I could.

Near the end, the project started to get a little hacky and messy.  I was experimenting with using a heavily component based style of game design, but I wasn’t entirely certain how to handle some special case problems, since I was trying to keep everything generic with pretty much no specialized gameobject code.  I think I now have an idea of how to better handle entity state switching.

What Went Right

I with into it with the plan to keep things as simple as possible.  There were very few assets and what it had were extremely simple.  Probably the number one reason I failed to complete any of my previous Ludum Dare projects had been because of spending too much time making too detailed of graphics, so I managed to avoid making this mistake again.

Although though there were times when I had to really push myself to keep going, development went pretty smoothly without any major problems.

I finally completed something!  I first discovered Ludum Dare five years ago, and this is the first official competition game I actually finished!  I also finally have something put up onto a web game site, which is kind of neat even though I don’t expect too much from it.

Conclusions

All-in-all it went pretty well and has left me wanting to make more games!

The Ludum Dare entry page can be found here:
10 Second Mazes Entry Page

The game is available through Kongregate:
Play 10 Second Mazes On Kongregate

Tags: LD27, postmortem, success, timelapse, video, youtube

Hello boys & girls,

as many before me I decided to throw in my two cents about the compo.  A small spoiler before I start – this was fucking awesome!

So, this was the first time I took part in a Ludum Dare and I must say I’m really disappointed that I’m gonna have to wait another 3 months to do this again 😉

The entire experience was epic – from the hectic schedule, to sleep-deprived coding and the last minute heart attacks induced by game-breaking bugs you found but can’t wrap your tired brain around. I think I lived off of bananas & energy bars on Saturday and forgot to eat on Sunday >_<

The first “Thumbs Up” comments I got made it all worthwhile though 😀

Without further adue, here’s how it went for me:

• The Ups:

Well first of all, the process of making a game, from start to fin.. *cough* a working demo, as you all know, is very rewarding in itself

Also, as with any Game Jam, it put pressure on me as a whole – from my skills, to my ideas, to planning, performing under stress and even taking some very hard decisions what to let go and what to work on till the very end so I can say I pushed my limits which is always accompanied by the liberating feeling of “Hell yeah, you’re the man!” (I’m sure you ladies out there can relate :P)

• The Downs:

Uhm, nope no downs, everything went according to plan and the game is already making millions..

.

.

ok ok, maybe that’s not entirely true Planning was ok overall, but I underestimated the time it would take to animate the entire storyline – the game is like a pre-recorded movie that you control yourself, and so I was left without time for proper fine tuning which led to a few mental breakdowns from “Fuck, I’m so not gonna make this…” and “Come on code, you’re a good fella, you can debug yourself.. pretty please?” to begging, threatening and physically abusing the computer until it finally worked.

• Thoughts:

To all of you that made it: Kudos, you guys are awesome and I can’t wait to try as many of your games as possible! And to those of you who didn’t, well, I know the feeling but don’t let it eat you up – it was more likely than not a great experience and I’m sure you can make something of it

• Wrapping it up..

I leave you with a short timelapse in pictures :

– Model creation .gif – and yeah, I use the term Model quite loosely 😉

– Proof of concept – Check 😉

– Versions 0.1 and 0.2

– And the final export

If you wanna try the game, here it goes:

Click to play!    (Opens in a new tab)

Hope you all had as much fun as I did and I’ll see you guys & girls in 3 months 😉

Ciao,

~Konstantinos

Well, that didn’t go according to plan. In a Somme like way it was two days of carefully preparing my troops, bombardment of pixels followed by one day of complete slaughter with only a few gains here and there.

Captain, your report :

What went right: 

 Initial Set-up – Got my DropBox set-up in advance with a template folder structure. Everything nice,  neat and clearly laid out.

Base Code Set-up – As part of my Unity template I’ve got some character movement scripts based on a Rocket 5 tutorial from yesteryear.  These can quickly and easily be adapted. Drop in a character sprite, drop in the scripts, tweak and you’re done.. Although saying that, they do need a lot of fine tuning.

Reference Code – From the last LudumDare and from everything I’ve been playing around with since I’ve managed to keep all the code in a reference folder. This is a great help even if nothing applies to the current project.

Initial Idea – Got a pretty sound idea in my head straight away. It didn’t actually pan out the way I wanted but the ground work was there and was easily adaptable.

Graphics –  I’m more comfortable with graphics and character design than anything else. Photoshop and I get on pretty well and it didn’t crash once!

Unity and Orthello Pro – It’s a breeze to use and wonderfully quick to get some ideas up and running very quickly.

Unity Support – If there is a stupid, newb code question that I’m asking, someone, somewhere has the answer.

Planning in the initial stages – I had one core idea but also had some fall-backs if that wasn’t achievable.

What went wrong: 

First off the silly mistakes.

Texture Packer – If I save out as .plist one more sodding time!! So yeah, Saving out as .plist and not .xml proved to be an easy miss. Why has nothing updated? Best check that first rather than cycle through C# files trying to find out what you did wrong.

Tiled – Alright it’s super easy to use and super fun as well. However I’ve never used it for a project before. I didn’t have the auto-update for TileSheets turned on and couldn’t work out why my tiles were not updating (cmd+T).

I also found out that updating my tile sheet would result in the entire level design becoming totally fecked!

Tiled + Collision + Unity = ARGGGGHHHH!!! – Every time I updated my tile sheet it would reset all of the collision detection meaning a manual update. This may have something to do with my collision detection being set to a layer but it also reset all the tags for Triggers. This was a bit of a mare.

The BIGGER issues:

 Screen Resolution – Ok there is something I obviously don’t get here. I need to do a lot of reading on this cause my brain obviously can’t compute how to get anything looking decent on different resolutions. Full-screen = funking stretched mess.

GRAPHICS – GRAPHICS – GRAPHICS – I spent soooo long pouring over pixels – most of which you can’t even see in the bloody level!

Environment – Not being at home with a heaving 27″ beast of an iMac. I’ve never missed that screen so much in my life!

Programming – It’s weird cause I can visually see what I’m trying to achieve but my knowledge isn’t there yet. I spent longer trying to get one thing to work that would have taken a semi-decent programmer seconds to implement. I think it’s best summed up by, “I’m playing all the right notes but not in the right order”.

The language isn’t hard, C#, and I know this is just down to experience but it’s incredibly frustrating. There are so many things I don’t know and so many things I’m sure I’m doing poorly.

Play Testing – There was none. I’d literally finished a bug fix with 10 seconds till submit – leaving the other 20billion bugs to roam free.

Over Ambition – Oh boy did I get carried away with the idea and added more things to it than I could ever hope to achieve.

First it was going to be the  wonderful dialogue scenes to introduce the player to the trenches.

I had a cast of characters laid out each with their own dialogue and quirks. Each to bark out orders, make requests etc..

Each Order had a level of importance based on who was making the request. High command , regardless of the order, took priority. The Captain at the front was second making desperate pleas for Ammo and supplies.

The actual battle that rages in the background would be affected by how well you carried out commands. Ammo doesn’t get delivered then the chance of a counter attack is raised a notch. High Command doesn’t have a clue what is going on at the front, they might refuse reinforcements. All of this was to have a hand in how the game played out.

The dugouts were supposed to have a really claustrophobic look and feel to them, dust filtering through the air from blast aftershock. Purely aesthetic addition.

Artillery was supposed to crash out of the sky at set-intevals making the rush over No Mans Land a real life or death situation. Wounded soldiers stuck in the mud would pop-up in dialogue boxes pleading for aid. The graphics of the explosions would light up the background and the surrounding area, mud, debris + body parts would blast out from every hit, there would be a nightmare of obstacles.

Achievements – The Battles would only rage for so long for each level. Depending on how may wounded saved || supplies delivered || messaged delivered checked against bombardment level would result in medals being awarded.

If the front was lost or you were KIA  then Game over.

So that was in my head and on paper. That is not what is on screen.

Unity Build – I wanted to build this for web but for some reason it doesn’t like the tile map and I have no idea why!

Notes to self –  I don’t think timing was a major issue on this. I think I could have achieved most of what I wanted if I’d done the following:

Graphics – kept things simple to being with. I spent too long pushing pixels.

Sound Files – grabbed / created these early.

Built basic intro, Won, Lost and Pause screens as a first measure. These would have been incredibly easy to do and would have bookended an actual game – it’s not a game unless you win or lose something!

Code, Code, Code till it works.

PlayTesting and more play testing.

Refine graphics – they’re in a sprite sheet so one update and you’re done… DOH!

Summery :

I really wanted to push myself on this one and get out something that looked good and played well. However, poor planning on my part let me down and I ended up having less time on my weakest link – programming. A reversal of that might have produced something different.

So, this was almost not submitted because it’s not ready for submission by a long shot. However, after all that time spent crouched over a screen is it better to show what you achieved in that time and the general thinking / execution behind it  or keep it hidden in the trash?

Ho-hum till the next one…

Cpt Nick Claypole – 1/5 Essex

A lot of the entries for Ludum Dare #27 have been created using Unity (including my entry), and I wanted to pass along some information that might be helpful for Unity developers to make their games as accessible as possible for all players.  Users on Windows and Mac don’t need dedicated builds as frequently, given that the Unity webplayer is readily available to them.  For people using Linux systems, however, they must download and play the game directly on their system.  Here’s a few steps to improve the experience for Linux users.  The instructions that follow are for Windows, but I’m sure there will be similar solutions for Mac

1: Download 7-zip.  This will allow you to create archives in Linux-supported formats (.tar and .gz).

2: Export for Linux in Unity:
I’m not going to post a tutorial for doing this, as Unity’s interface is fairly self-explanatory.  But you should end up with a folder that looks like this.

3: Put both files together in one folder and name it something that makes it easily identifiable.  LD27-YourTitleHere should be adequate

4: Right-click on this folder, select 7-Zip>Add to archive…

5: This will bring up a prompt that allows you to package the directory in a variety of ways.  For archive format, select “tar”.  Leave everything else with the default settings and click OK.  This should give you a new file called LD27-YourTitleHere.tar

6: Repeat step 4 on this new file (Add to archive), but in the prompt, select the Archive format of “gzip”.  Leave everything else default and click OK.  You should now have a file called LD27-YourTitleHere.tar.gz

7: Upload your new Linux-friendly game to your hosting site and link it on your page.

This may look like a bit of work, but keep in mind that the few extra minutes this takes can really improve people’s impression of your game and open the door to a broader audience.

Hi !

I just played my game and I found a lot of mistakes. Am I allow to make a V.1.1 without mistakes and adding change some little details of the game and post it in order to replace the first version ? I ask because it would be considered as cheat, I thought.

Thanks !

Day 1

This was my first time creating a game in javascript so I kept the game design simple.
On the first day of LD27 I made notes on what the game will be like and drew a simple view of the playing area.

Day 2
I did not work too much on the game during day 2. Most of the time was spent working on the game design and learning javascript. I added some basic javascript and HTML/CSS for the layout and very little game logic.

Changed Mechanics
Some of the mechanics were changed or dropped as the game was being made.
Some notable differences are the store, running away action, disappearing skills, stalling, and popularity.

The store was changed to allow healing and refilling all skills.
Healing gives the player another decision on what to spend money on. With how random the final game is, buying healing felt too punishing. A full heal after each round may be able to stabilize the randomness more.
Disappearing skills was removed in favor of skill refills. Refills allow the player to decide if they wanted to reroll or keep their skills.

Stalling changed from adding turns to being a stun. Adding turns went against the theme and it would have made the player’s skill usage choice in combat trivial. A stun allows players to heal up or ignore healing skills so that turns are not used by them whereas adding turns would allow the player do everything unless the client damage was very high.

Popularity was originally going to be used as another way to lose the game and get stronger clients. Different levels of clients would show up based on the popularity which would allow the player to choose which client to work for. Popularity would be decaying after each client and more after each failure. I could not think of a way to balance this in time so I went with a simpler route and had the game be level based. Popularity is now just a way for the player to level up their maximum random skill limit for rerolls.

Day 3
Day 3 was when I added in most of the game logic. When implementing game logic I also refined the design a bit more.
Some attempt at balance was done with client stats and costs. Due to the randomness of the game and how little skills were involved in playing, balancing with just those parameters was difficult. A more fair rerolling method would probably have had a greater effect on game balance.
Polish was added to the game such as attack messages and descriptions for each client. Colors were added during the last two hours of LD27.

Closing Thoughts
Javascript/HTML/CSS turned out to be a good fit for a game that’s text and buttons. Changing states in the game was as simple as setting the display to none and resetting displays when changing back. All the core objects in the game were global and public which is good for prototyping but does become harder to maintain. Having everything public caused some problems during the end. I sometimes set variables directly instead of through a method that updates the variable and the display at the same time.

I did not like how reliant the player was on getting good rolls. Money is too limited to allow players who got bad rolls to reroll again due to the costs of healing and popularity increasing. Having a longer game would have allowed the player to build up skills. A longer game would prevent a single strong roll from winning the game because the player would still have to level up to get even stronger skills.

Here’s a link to the game – LD27 – Sleep Consultant
The LD27 page – LD27 Submission

Tags: postmortem

I’m developing my LD27 post mortem about Spacetime Adventure, my physics-based time-travelling game, on my website. You might be some of the few people in the world who actually think it’s interesting. Please check it out.

Dear Ludum boys and girls,

The directors of Bird TV are still looking for a ambitious cameraman.

Do you think you have it in you to show the world what they want, then prove it!

What do I need to do to become a Bird TV cameraman?

1) Click here

2) Download it

3) Play it

4) Enjoy it and let me know if you’re the right (wo)man

Sincerely,

Eddy93

This is a post mortem of my LD27 entry Lost in the Dark”, a maze-horror game.

Day 1 (Friday night):
I sat in front of my computer at one o’clock (I live in Iceland) at night when the theme was announced. “10 Seconds” it said. I thought “Oh fudge, this will be hard!” and went into brainstorming mode. I ended up thinking about various concepts revolving around a maze and ten seconds. Since I expected many of the entries to have some maze elements and maybe a “get from here to there in ten seconds!” thing going on I wanted to do something a bit different. I decided on a mechanic where you are walking around a maze but time is an added pressure. maybe the maze will lock up as soon as the time runs out, but I thought ten seconds to complete mazes was too short. The maze would have to be tiny or the controls super fast. I eventually hatched the whole “Repeating darkness for ten seconds and then ever shortening periods of light” which gave the player lots of time to escape the maze. To make things interesting I added a bit of a survival element in it where the player would not be alone in the maze.

I fired up unity, created an empty object and started work on the most important aspect of the game, the maze! I implemented a variation of the sidewinder maze algorithm which resulted in nice tree-like mazes so the path would be pretty clear while the player could easily choose the wrong “branch” of the maze and end up lost.

This would take up the friday night and the first few hours of saturday to complete. But I was satisfied with the result:

Lost in the Dark maze gen

day 2 (Saturday):
I fired up Blender and quickly mocked up a character model (which ended up staying in the game as seen in the “victory” screenshot:

After the player model was modeled, rigged, textured and a couple of animations hastily thrown in I created a second texture for the zombies which inhabit the maze (green and purple screams “zombie!” right? 😉 ):

After adding a couple of block types (walls, floors) as well I had all my major building blocks set up, now all I needed was the gameplay.

I had rarely used unity3d before this so I had very little idea on how to make the characters actually move. This took a couple of hours to implement.

I added a timer class which would keep track of what should happen when and control the camera angles as well as light intensity levels. When the player enters the game the view is like this:

But every ten seconds he gets a few seconds of “light” which changed the camera angle and illuminated the maze:

This felt right to me. After adding a victory condition “Yay, you got out! Have another level!” and a losing condition “Yay, you lost! Have a death scene!” I had my gameplay set up.

day 3 (Sunday):

With my game almost complete I went ahead and added some atmospheric and smoothing elements (Lerping is easy in unity as I found out that day. It made my “snapping” angle camera transition to the illumination view much smoother) such as zombie speak (Credit for that idea goes to my girlfriend) and tweaking the lighting all I had left was sound, gameplay testing and bug-fixing.

I “bugged” a few of my friends and my girlfriend into playing the game and hunt for bugs. None of them found much  so I chalked that part “done”.

Sounds gave me trouble. I wanted to keep within the spirit of the competition and make everything myself. But everything I attempted to make was crap. In the end I decided against having sounds since no sound does less harm than crap sounds in my opinion. (Many have said in the comments they miss the sound, so I kinda shot myself in the foot there I think 😛 )

The good:
I learned heaps about Unity3D, it is a nifty little toolkit which I see myself using again in the near future. I am also pleased with myself for releasing a “completed” game for once. I usually end up tinkering with the mechanics until my enthusiasm for whatever I am working on is gone.

The bad:
Not many things to be said that went wrong. I almost wish I had changed my entry to be an “jam” entry instead of the 48 hour challenge so I could have added sounds. But hey, I decided to to 48 hours and gosh darnit 48 hours it would be!

Summary:
All in all this was a good experience. I created a game, learned about unity and had fun

My entry page is here (I urge you to try it out and give me a rating/comment).
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=25925

See you all next time

A Screenshot of our game that made us laugh, thx @ Termite