TIMEBUG is a game about managing time and surviving against swarms of hungry insects.

You have 10 seconds to charge the TIMEBUG and send it on its way. Click or touch anywhere to control the TIMEBUG. Evade the other insects and trigger the timebomb to clear the stage.

Click here to play TIMEBUG

# Programming by @konstantinkopka (www.konstantinkopka.com)
# Graphics by @filip_axani (www.acsany.de)

# Music (Creative Commons Attribution: http://www.freesound.org/people/Erokia/

# Made with
Construct (www.scirra.com), Sketch (http://www.bohemiancoding.com/sketch/)

** We will keep working on new versions of the game and post updates, soon **

Thanks for checking it out, comments and critique very much appreciated!

I’ve posted a 5 games selection on my website :
http://revolugame.com/ld-27-games-selection/.

On the menu :

• The Village of Lost Time by EpaceGames
• Subject 18120 by deammer
• Proletarian Ninja X by Deepnight
• Potato Lagoon by Rezoner
• Gas and Air! by tripleVisionGames

Came in to work this morning to see that our LD27 game had 1000+ gameplays on Kongregate. Turns out it’s featured on the front page of the site in the “Trending” and “Hot New Games” sections!

Our LD27 game is on the front page of Kong!

We really want to tweak some things and add weapons, levels and music to the game for the post-jam version, so hopefully this is the start of something cool.
Thanks to everyone who played it!

Play it here!

Tags: 2D, as3, flashpunk, game, LD27, Ludum Dare, motivation, update

Pretty neat as Newgrounds is a hard audience to crack (at least for me with the type of games I make). So that is a win for today!

LD page for Toilet World!

Newgrounds page!

The leaderboards for Total Spaghettification are growing! There’s some amazing sub 10-minute times in there too!

Current Scores:

1. Toni – 5 min, 59 sec
2. tobbez – 6 min, 2 sec
3. Spacelord Ghor – 8 min, 51 sec
4. Esseb – 14 min, 17 sec
5. Spongus – 15 min, 35 sec

Exciting!

Hello everyone!

Our entry, The Wrong Door, is generally well received, but there is a change people requested:

Pause between retries is too long (you have to wait for the sound to finish playing, and it is a bit long), and you have to retry a lot.

We could easily fix that (playing a shorter sound!), but will it go against the rules?

Thanks, team at Tangible Games.

I made first game in my life during LD. It’s kinda awkward and raw, but I made it. Finished it. Made my mom proud. That’s it, thank you.

Hey guys!

Just letting you know about our newest game, Mr Moore’s Last Seconds. It’s not the worst entry we’ve done, and we have learnt a lot from development, but if you like, check it out! *link below images*

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=5752

Version 1.1 is up! The bugs should be fixed… i’ll upload a 1.3 after school just in case though.
The link: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=27229

Short and sweet PM here we go!

What went well:
Coding: Actually figured most of it out on my own!
Finishing: I got it in on time!
Collecting assets: Got a lot of SFX, Music, etc. packed in there!
Story length goal: Topped my max word count!

What didn’t go so well:
Art: I was so focused on coding that I neglected this.
Theme: Though it’s there, I feel I could have done so much more with it.
Plot pacing and general cohesion: It’s a bit more than a little random at times. And I had to keep cutting to keep my thoughts in order.
Coding: Dear good God it’s still a little wacky for some stuff and it generally had me in fits.

I like my two protagonists way too much, so I made this real quick:

I had a real blast making Robots Save the Day! One of the hardest things after LD is probably coming back down again thankfully there is the review period. I have to say I’m absolutely humbled by the quality and creativity of the games out there. Everybody did a phenomenal job and this sets the bar very high – which is a good thing.

I’d like to talk a bit about the tools / the environment I used for my game.

Technology Choices / Lessons Learned

The game is completely browser-based, native HTML and JavaScript. Originally I had planned on making a 3D game for this LD, but alas I had to give that up halfway through because otherwise I couldn’t have finished on time (again, this happened at LD 26). Anyway, I want to sing some praise for HTML games now:

Even without a game framework HTML/JS is a combination that lets you get things done very quickly. My one headache though was I didn’t know how big the browser support for both CSS transitions and CSS element rotation is, as the game relies very heavily on it. So far, no complaints, the robot gods be thanked. Here’s the stack I ended up using:

– JQuery for DOM manipulation
– Handlebars.js for JS-enabled templates
– CSS effects for pretty much everything
– oh, and: PHP as a backend resource compiler

The graphics were made entirely in Cinema 4D, no post processing. Aligning the level layout with the grid had been somewhat of a challenge, but in the end I ended up liking how objects were often just a leeeeettle bit misaligned. That made the levels look more organic. For a bigger game, I’d have used tile-based levels, but for this one it was enough to render most of the scene in one go and use sprites for the rest.

I made the soundtrack with Garageband, it’s basically just some mellow synth throbbing, but it kinda works for the atmosphere I wanted. Again, this was absolutely the right tool for the job to get things done quickly.

As for the sound effects and the robot speech, that’s just me with a microphone and some Audacity effects/editing. The most complex one was Captain Hannigan’s “Abandon-Ship” message that plays over and over on the abandoned bridge. But even that was created just with my mouth 😉

So all in all I’m actually glad how everything turned out, even though I didn’t follow through with the original plan for WebGL. It’s actually kind of shameful how easy this project was to do with just HTML and I’d like to encourage more people to try it. I know the game dev frameworks out there enable great things, but it seems equally as often they’re stumbling blocks for the dev to fight against.

Which brings me to my final point on web games. I have to confess a certain bias towards trying and rating browser-playable entries way more often. A downloadable game on the other hand has to look very good in order to motivate me to download it. And even then, there’s about a 30% chance the executable just won’t run on my system. I feel very bad for these projects, because – more often than not – interesting games run into trouble at this point.

So that’s kinda my lesson from LD27: HTML for the win!

Plug: Try out Robots Save the Day and let me know what you think!

These two times I’ve participated in Ludum Dare have been awesome. During the compos, I’ve learned a lot about making games, as well as handling the limited resources involved. After the compos, I’ve had the chance to play awesome games made in such sort periods of time. But the most heart-warming thing is that I’ve got such great feedback, especially about the music I’ve made. That’s really something I appreciate, and I want you to know. Thank you!

Truth be told, I’ve never played my music for anyone and I have made it mainly for my own entertainment. As I’ve got so good response from you guys, I decided to throw the LD tunes – and some others as well – to SoundCloud for everyone to listen to. I hope you enjoy those tracks as much as I’ve enjoyed creating them, and please, feel free to share! I’ll keep uploading new tracks as I do them.

The final thing I wanted to say is that if you have a game project, a media production or anything that is in need of a soundtrack, let me know. I have some spare time left and I would be more than happy to make music for you guys, be it free or commercial project. You can send me e-mail to themanabreak (at) gmail dot com, or send a SoundCloud private message (or at TIGSource, I’m ‘manabreak’ there).

Again, thank you for your feedback and support. You’re awesome!

(Psst, my LD27 entry is Beyond Hope :))

Oops, posting this really late but…

PROUDLY PRESENTING “Boyfriend Simulator: Feed My Boyfriend”

wow this looks fun!

Boyfriends everywhere are very hungry and it’s your job to feed them. Take to the mall to go shopping for delicious treats that you’ll launch into the boyfriends mouth with a baseball bat. Don’t feed him the wrong thing or he’ll barf all over the place. Enjoy some rockin’ 10 second tunes and and and incredible array of upgrades! And for all of you saying the boyfriend is a stupid ugly loaf.. well watch it because he’s modeled after yours truly!

Click here to play and rate Boyfriend Simulator: Feed My Boyfriend

Tags: love2d, lua, moonscript

I’d like to present our first Ludum Dare game!

10 Seconds of Grey

50 Shades of him

You are Mr Grey and you have the power to change balance in the world, by annoying or pleasing the odd inhabitants.  Your job is to keep the balance centre, stray too far to the light or dark and it’s curtains!

Our team was:

Almax27 (Code)
Ezmeow (Art)
Zubrowka (Art)

Disclaimer:  Due to time restrictions we were not able to add in the world scorer so at the moment, the game is infinite.  trollface.jpg

(Web player)
Links :  Official entry / Post-Mortem version

Before LD begin

I wasn’t really enjoy by suggested themes, but I noticed the score of “10 seconds” (~+700). On final round I thought it might well be selected, and I imagined that I could do.  The idea of ​​the countdown and the launch pad have come to me very early, well before the start time. But few ideas about the form and the game-play at this point…

Hesitation and laziness

My first thoughts were that the player is the commander the launch pad, with several tasks. In addition to trigger the ignition, he should shake the controller, shoot ducks that obstruct the trajectory, choose between an astronaut a monkey or a dog to pilot spacecraft, remove the curious lurking around the reactors…
I thought that implement all these things would not make me easy. it seemed too complicated to the goal of the game were very simple. to choose from I chose to sleep and see it later.

Sunday noon

I lacked the time and had not decided yet.
So I started with the indispensable draw the rocket on the launch pad, put the title screen etc.. The final gameplay came in the way. The basic intention was to be a temporary feature, to see what happens, but on this form arose as evidence. This is where I started to list the 26 control checks, one for each key.

Sunday night

I started drawing animations, smoke and explosion. The result was not up to the time spent on it. I gradually simplified the way I do for a result that suited me just as much. It was then that I had less than an hour to upload my component I started coding the clause game over.
Without noticing, I confused a “<” with “>”, which blew 50% of the difficulty of the game .. Too bad.

Monday sleeping

zzzzZZZZzzzzzz

Tuesday

I undertook to finish the game for a post-mortem release. Mainly missing some animations, and ending sequences. I was able to correct my mistake “<“, and added the choice of difficulty.

Conclusion

This game-play is not as attractive that I made for Ludum Dare before, but I’m quite proud. I would not have thought I could do as much graphics and animations. Technically, code side, except this error “<” , I had less trouble than the last time.

Edit : Friday

I change my mind about implement sound feature. I made a new release of post-mortem version, with sound effects and music for winners !

Hello guys!

So, yesterday me and my team talked about ways to make Precious10 more “player friendly”, as it was too hardcore and not so fair…

>> Here’s the link to the postmortem version <<

Here’s what was changed:

1 ) Pause/Play button position corrected as it was attached to the screen borders
2 ) There’s a return button on the Game Over screen – better than “touching anywhere” to go back, as players could still try to kill a gem and wouldn’t see their scores
3 ) Sound feedback when the “do not destroy” gems are changed
4 ) Change in the rewarding system. Correct gems give the player extra 820ms while “do not destroy” gems take 180ms from the player. Maximum time in timer keeps at 10 seconds due to the Ludum Dare theme.
5 ) Visual feedback for correct gem touches (green ‘+’ sign) and for “do not destroy” gem touches (red ‘-‘ sign)
6 ) New score system based on how many seconds the player survived.
7 ) Opening angle for gems launching decreased from 30 degrees to 20 degrees, so that gems remain more in the middle of the screen than on the borders.
8 ) Time interval for changing the “do not destroy” gems went from 3 to 7.5 seconds.
9 ) Our artist designed a new icon
10 ) To avoid app installation conflicts, new apk is “New Precious10”

Regards,

Victor

I’ve pushed a new update to Duel that should allow for more strategy and less luck based play. Originially 1 shot killed either player, which meant if you had never played against your opponent before, it was completely a guessing game. Now you have to shoot someone twice for them to die, which means you have a chance to figure out your opponents patterns before you get kicked back to main menu.

Click the link to defend your honor!

Duel on Kongregate

Duel LudumDare Page

(NOTE: all non-vital updates are only being applied to the kongregate link)

Hunted is my entry for this LD – and last august I started making games, so it’s also some kind of gamedev-anniversary game.
(Play it here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=15985)

I want to write about 2 things, 1st about what’s special about this choice of game and how my skills changed over these 2 years.

1st points
So, playing it you could say it’s a usual horror game and according to the comments with good sound design and graphics, but the player being a bit lost.
Once you know that I’m so easily scared that I’m sometimes even scared of some dungeons in Skyrim, it becomes special – I wasn’t able to play it.

So, how do you make a game without really playing it?
– by making it entirely out of the design-perspective

Gladly I know the design of a good horror game and I know my engine (Blender Game Engine) pretty well, so the basics weren’t that hard. A flashlight, so the sight is reduced, some unknown enemies and fitting sound.
Also, I took very much education in game-design over the year, so I knew pretty fast, what is good and what is bad and until the end of the first day everything went perfect. But then I had to think about the actual Level-Design and AI. The player shouldn’t know, where and when the enemies are coming from. But I don’t know it either, so that was the point I couldn’t play for longer than 1min.
For the LevelDesign I decided to do a world that’s abstract, but still telling some kind of story. Now I think while playing you don’t get it, but just look at this picture, so you can understand the world: http://puu.sh/4d33k.png
As you can see, there’s a “forest”, a “city” (upper right), a field(upper left) and a “cave”(bottom left). It’s very likely, that the player will go to the city first, then the forest or field and then the cave, so you can find the “winbutton” at the “cave”-area.
A good idea, but I didn’t think about how long you really have to search. And it seems like far too long.

2nd point:

1 year actually isn’t that much time, but you still can do a lot during it.until start of summer, I spend lots of time in school and didn’t do very much for games. But since start of august it became much more relaxed and I can finally focus on making games again. Over the summer holidays. I also learned a lot and got tons of motivation from 2 visits at the “Games-Academy Berlin”. A great Games-school, where I would love to go after school, but it’s far to expensive, even with scholarship. Since I can’t really go there I’m working much more on my skills to join a real game-studio someday. And according to the comments “Hunted” is my best game so far and I take this as encouragement.

Keep it up and never forget: You can do anything if you work hard enough!

We didn’t manage to make a post about our game while jamming, so here we go!

Chrono Switch is a game where you control a knight and a skeleton, one at a time, to clear a level. in addition to an inverted gravity, each character have specific actions, the knight can fight enemies and cut rope, the skeleton push button and pull chains.

where the 10 seconds fit in all that, you ask? well, for each actions, you have 10 seconds to act, otherwise you lose one health point, each action allow the other character to progress further in the level, so switching is needed to see the end.

It have been my third LD, but it’s the first time I take part into the jam, working in team for the whole three day. It have been like a roller coaster ride 😉

The game idea was probably too ambitious to implement, even for the jam, so we had to cut corners to make it in time. Still, the game got this arcade feeling we wanted to have, and we manage to have some sound design in it (LabChirp is awesome for sound effect making, check it out!), which wasn’t granted at first , so it’s definitely a success for us.

[Play and rate here!]

Yes, I’m playing and rating your LD games! Be sure to submit yours (you can do this at any time, please don’t wait for me to finish the game I’m playing).

Of course it’s easy enough just to play my LD27 entry, but if you want to see how it plays, a gameplay video is now available.

Black Hole Runner is my Ludum Dare 27 entry, it’s about black hole and time dilation. I found almost everyone complains the slow vertical movement, which is caused by time dilation. To me, the slow movement has its reason, that’s just what I want, a slow motion effect. But why players don’t like it and how can I improve it?

The biggest mistake I made is let players waiting. Games should keep players busy, from receiving information (visuals, audios, texts and emotions) to taking response, always let them having something to do. Even in the turn based game like Go, in opponent’s turn, player have lots of brain work to do.

Yes, time dilation slow down spaceship’s movement, I can’t make it faster under this precondition, but I can give player more works. I found below possible solutions.

* Adding a laser weapon to break the asteroids.
* Pressing UP and DOWN to move a spaceship is so easy, increase the apm.
* Adjust the speed of background music to the in game time speed, emphasize the dilation situation.
* Adding fancy visual effect to attract players attention.

Tags: Black Hole, Ludum Dare, time

Hey everyone,

IMPETUS, our LD27 submission, was programmed to die (after being kept alive by its players) and went out with a bang after almost 12 hours. I wrote up a post-mortem for everyone interested in how the idea came about, how the game suddenly became insanely popular and why it had to die.

Read the post-mortem here.

For those who weren’t able to play it and would like to see how the game looked like when it was still alive, I put together a little gameplay video:

(Direct link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgdcQO6ZIbI)

Thanks for playing!

Tags: death, impetus, post-mortem, space

Got the web version of my game working! Play it here.

I’ll be writing a long post looking back at my first Ludum Dare today. Has been great fun and a lot learned.

Play and rate the game here

What went wrong

• 3 games in a weekend. My first idea was to make a Dungeon Master like game where the labyrinth changes every 10 seconds. But I gave up the idea after a few hours because of some problems I encountered with the pseudo-3D engine. Then I switched to a top down arena shooter where the gameplay rule changes every 10 seconds (like “pick the enemies to score and avoid bonuses”, “going to the left is forbidden”, …). The idea seamed cool in theory but proved to be really frustrating and not fun to play. Gave up again. And I finally got the Proletarian Ninja idea. I lost almost one entire day on these.
• Motivation problems. After the second abandoned idea (arena shooter), I decided to give up completely and went back home. I was really really down… Until I found my third gamedesign idea. I’ve been doing the LD for almost 3 years now. I love making games, and when I felt “bored” by the second game idea, I was really depressed. But I misinterpreted that feeling: it was not me being bored by Ludum Dare, it was just my game idea sucked.
• Music & sounds. I used LabChirp for the sounds, and tried a few things with AutoTracker. The final result is pretty weak and I didn’t keep the music part (sounded really too “AutoTracked”). I will definitely HAVE to work that part for the next LD.
• The theme. This theme had, in my opinion, a major problem. Most of the games you could make with a 10s constraint were actually better and funnier without the 10s constraint.
• A good friend of mine gave up. Benjamin was working on a point-n-click game, verb-based like Monkey Island. The art and the idea were both amazing, really. But he had to give up because of technical and code architecture problems. Point-n-clicks are really tricky to create.

What went right

• LD 24h. In fact, because of all of the motivational problems listed above, I actually made Proletarian Ninja in about 24-30h. Which is really cool
• Stealth and action. I’m a total fan of games like Thief, Dishonored and Trilby. So I’m really happy and proud of the way Proletarian Ninja X plays and feels. I would really love to expand this gameplay further (probably without the 10s time constraint).
• Level design. Creating the levels was rather easy (not fun, but easy), and I liked the fact that, even without real intent from my side, there was usually always a solution. So I usually created a level quite randomly, tried it, and if I could complete it, it was validated. Then i roughly sorted the bunch of levels based on a difficulty “feeling”.
• Haxe 3. The new features of Haxe 3 are really cool: abstract types, macro, maps… I will post a few articles about that soon.

Since many of you, eager to know more of the plot, could not wait the 2.5 seconds between dialogs.

I have made a PostCompo version with skippable text

Play “Back to you” here

Thank you very much for your comments!

(You can try the game here!)

What was good:

The theme:
Simple and concise as it is, was unexpectedly easy to quickly find motivation and inspiration to get to work, and I think if this is my first game ended LD has been precisely because of the simplicity of the theme.

The idea:
I started to work six hours late, but I had a clear idea as soon as I read the topic. I will not say it’s the most original idea in the world, but it was an easy idea with possibilities, and possible to do in a short time.

What was wrong:

Bugs:
I have worked in platform games before, but had always depended on outside code when dealing with collisions and such matters, which has led to cause several somewhat annoying bugs in the game (one commenter informed me that sometimes enemies suddenly teleport: I couldn’t fix that in time, but I think it is related to the code that prevent enemies to spawn within a platform. I have intention to continue working on this game (I want to make an HTML5 version) , and will do my best to fix that.

The Movement:
Several people have told me that the character moves too slow and jumps too high. I disagree about the speed of movement, but I could have improved the jumps.

The level design:
I’m horrible at this.

What was amazing, good, great and other synonyms for awesome:

The response from the community:
I know I will not get into a good position, but I don’t care. Simply reading positive feedback about something I have done, knowing that someone is enjoying my work, is a great feeling.
And, finally, thanks to that I will be participating in the next LD!

Tags: post-mortem

(Spoiler gameplay video)

I present to you, Legend of Troll

This game took me 3 whole days, only managed to implement one of the 10 levels I planned, and injured my index finger.

But it was SO worth it! I’m so proud

Stay tuned for more levels, and a post-mortem /making of. I promise you it’s worth your while.

If you haven’t voted for my game yet:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=13139

Tags: screenshot, success story

This has been my second LD and I’m very glad things went so well.  My last LD ( #25 ) was so horrible it couldn’t even play and I didn’t get ranked at all.  This time around things went incredibly well.  Here, I’m going to break down what good and bad happened.

The Good:

1) Getting a platform engine set up.  I had a solid engine in the first 3 hours of the LD and that was good for a number of reasons.  First of all I had an idea of the direction of the game.  It cut down on the number of ideas I had to sift through to get the right one.  Second, I could start making the game immediately.  This meant also that I could get a better idea of what my game was going to be.

2) Deciding on time warps.  The other major idea I had was having a platformer gauntlet where you had to get to a checkpoint in 10 seconds, then get to the next.  When I woke up on day 2, I realized my idea for having 10 seconds to do a level, but having the ability to warp back ( essentially a poor man’s Braid ) was far superior both in level design possibilities and in general innovation and creativity.

3) Utilizing streams to get playtesting.  I was often on dvcolgan’s stream, which meant I could talk to 50 + people.  This meant I could upload my game continuously and see what I needed to change.  I got suggestions that ultimately improved my game a lot, such as a suggestion to rename “respawn” to “warp” which made the main game mechanic far less confusing.

4) Having a final boss.  This was probably my best decision, even though it cost me 10 hours that I could’ve spent on more levels.  I was planning on finishing the game by just having a room with the Golden Scepter on  platform, but having a final boss changed a lot.  This meant the game ended with a challenge, that added a level of meaning to getting the Golden Scepter.

5) Spending monday off the computer.  By the time I had uploaded my game, I was practically seeing the world in lines of code and numbers.  By monday, I was almost content with never seeing a computer again.  So I took monday to walk, read a book, spend some time with my family, and away from this damned machine.  Very good idea.

The Bad:

1) Hacking in the boss.  I’m pretty sure the way I did it halved the games performance.  I was running 200 fps before the boss, but once I implemented him and hacked in a terrible lever system to accommodate for the fight, it ran 100 fps even when you weren’t fighting the boss.  I’m sure if I just created a separate entity for the lever instead of hacking the block class to do what I wanted, and made a simple boolean to check if I was in the boss room, then the game would have performed fine.  Instead I ended up losing tons of frames to a hackjob that made the game run like crap.

2) Being sick.  I had no control over this but my cold really did cut down on the quality as I ended up spending a lot of time sleeping and medicating myself.

3) Cookie Clicker.  I wasted so much time on that dumb game.  In fact, as I type this, I have it open in one of my tabs.  It is pretty much the death of productivity, so tinkering around with it made me lose so much time.  I bet I could have had 20 levels instead of 15 if I had never played it.

So that’s the good and the bad.  If you want to play Time Wizard, just click this link : http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=6412

So It was my first LudumDare ever, even though I have tried to take part in the past one with theme of “You are the villane “I came up short of Ideas, and I called quits in the first day, and I think what prevented me from creating my first entry back then is the fact that I haven’t created any game before, but this time I came ready with 5 games under my belt, four of them were part of much smaller Game Jams then #LD48.

When the theme “10 Seconds” been announced even though I voted -1 , but I was excited because the possibilities was as wide as the Human Imagination , the Idea of my game came when I was discussing the theme with my sister , a game where you can control the game monsters for 10 seconds being in my mind before but I let it go because the huge amount of content I had to make in order to do it justice , but I thought that this was the best Idea I have so far and I better start working ,I took a pen and a paper and I wrote a small to-do list , after making five games using to-do list I started to understand the time line that is needed for each to-do list .

I use the excellent Construct2 HTML5 game engine, it have a built-in platformer engine so I was able to start on the switching to monsters after an half an hour (with graphics of the main character being made ) , the mechanism had two main parts; the monster behavior when it is controlled and when it is not ,but it wasn’t very tricky therefor I was able to finish it with 3 types of monsters with their graphics ,but the tricky part was believe or not the magic balls maker , I just couldn’t find a good way to make it behave properly  ,so I made a crapy one that was “close enough” and called it the day.

I get up with sun the next day (I always am) , refreshed after a good night sleep ,I had the levels next on my to-do list ,so I took my pen and paper to the garden in my house and started sketching the levels ,I was shooting for 4 levels so I sketched them out , and started working , the graphics being my weakest attribute ,I needed a simple to make pretty art style that goes well with my pixel art elf , and Limbo came to my mind with it dark art ,so black colored art it is .so when six PM rolled around (I take a lot of breaks ,I watched a soccer match too to ease the pressure too)  I had my four levels finished lacking sound but playable , so I had my brother and two sisters to play it (I don’t have Internet in my house because a major telephone lines replacing that took 6 months so far XD)  thanks to them major level  design bugs have been found and fixed that I didn’t even noticed them at all , I added sound by using Bfxr and made a quick music loop using fruity loops and upload .

This was our first Ludum Dare as a team, and the first Ludum Dare ever for 2/3 of us, and we’re so pleased with how things went!

The idea of our game is that you plan out your turn and then watch it play our over the course of 10 seconds. You get to select your ships’ flight path, where to fire, and can divert/prioritise power between shields and fire-power if you like. Repeat. The first team to destroy the other wins!

Here’s a gif of our game doing some things:

Click the image to play!

Anyway, let’s dive in shall we?

The Good:

• We’ve created a game that we find fun to play, and that will serve as the basis of a future project.
• We’re happy with the overall visuals, including a parallax background.
• We managed to implement ship variations with different characteristics. These include: differing health, movement, damage, and AI behaviours.
• We find the ability to divert power between Shields and Firepower to be a really neat feature. We didn’t think we’d get around to implementing it!

The Bad:

• As a team we weren’t always on the same page. It’s hard developing over Skype when tired.
• There is no sound, which is a bit of a problem. Its lacking existence is definitely something we regret, and something we’ve all vowed to improve on vastly.
• The planning phase is not the most intuitive system, and could really do with an overhaul.
• The game would benefit greatly from a tutorial, or more in-depth instructions.
• Multiple levels with a difficulty curve would have been an ideal way to introduce game systems and slowly ramp up the amount of units.
• The screen is a little too tight. A wider view, or the ability to zoom in and out, would be a greatly beneficial.

What we’d like to add:

• Music and sounds – Bleeps and bloops and perhaps electronic “target selected” voices. That sorta thing!
• Improved Movement System – one that shows you how far the ship can move in the period of 10 seconds, to allow for more precise planning.
• Ship upgrading and purchase – An upgrade or ship purchase system between missions, perhaps with each ship having a certain amount of points to allocate between various stats and slots for upgrades.
• More specialised ships – We’d like ships to to able to use special abilities, or provide some kind of bonus when in the radius of certain other ships (or sometimes if not in a radius).
• Friendly Fire – We’d like to find a middle ground. Not too much damage dealt to yourself, but there still should be the penalty. We’re very into the idea of having the smallest ships not deal friendly fire to one another when fighting as a close unit.
• Improved Power diversion – The ability to divert power between Shields, Firepower, and Thrusters would be pretty rad.
• Multiplayer – Yes, multiplayer would be grand.
• Radar – This would be a nice way to figure out location of enemies and allies really quick, or incoming asteroids.
• Slight Auto-aim – It would be worthwhile for us to investigate a slight bias towards the bullet flow.

So there we have it! We’re so chuffed with the feedback we’ve received, and we can’t wait to work on the game further, right after we get another project out the door first.

Ludum Dare has proven to be such a great community, and the weekend was so motivating and inspiring. It’s been a growing experience and we’ll be back for more!

If you’d like to play Cosmic Commander, you can do so HERE. Bonus points to anyone who spots a rare cameo!

– Unorthodox Games

I recently discovered that my game, North Exit, has a large, game-ruining bug; I somehow omitted the code for detecting a lose condition, so the player can’t lose the game (no, no that game, but yeah).

However, that doesn’t really make the game unwinnable or less playable — it just makes it infinitely easier.

My plea for help is: is it okay to re-upload the game with that single bug fix? Will that break any Jam rules? I know the Jam is relatively lax on rules, but I just want to be doubly sure. :’D

Thank you to anyone who’ll reply! I’ll go ahead and play your games too if you respond! <3

Tags: bug, bugfix, jam, north exit

I made a gameplay video of my entry Demon Infiltration, you can see it here:

 (Click on the picture)

Video quality is low so if you have time I recommend play the game before see it.

The feedback are appreciated

Demon Infiltration Entry

This was my first LD and I’m very proud of what I made.

What was good:

The idea:

I started to work 10 hours late , but I had a clear idea when I started.

My engine:

In general, the use of my engine was efficient. I had learn a lot of new things and I will update my engine with that.

xTile library:

The use of xTile library was very easy. It’s help me a lot for the displaying of my map.

What was wrong:

Collision detection:

I had a lot of problem with my collision detection. At first, the collision detection worked around 50% of time. I found the solution at the last day. That was a very simple problem. I didn’t take the right coordinate so the collision detection was offset.

Level too short

I didn’t have the time to make a longer level.

What was very good

All the comments from the community. Thanks everyone !

The future

I will participate in the next Ludum dare and before that, I will continue to work on my game to make it better. I would like to add more levels, power-up, obstacle and other stuff that I have in mind.

Conclusion

If you didn’t played my game, give it a try : http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=24796

Gratz to everyone that made a game in the last LD. I have try a lot of game and there is a lot of good games.

Tags: postmortem

If you want to play the game, you can play it HERE.

If you want me to play your game, leave me a comment with a link to it.

The Aliens Came — Postmortem

I had lots of fun this Ludum Dare! It was my second LD, my first in the compo, and I was quite happy with my results this time.

I wrote a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure game about a citizen in a city that’s been invaded by aliens, and having everything conspire to make you revolt.

What went wrong:

• The timer for choices was the source of my original idea, but didn’t fit in the final product as well as I’d like.
• The timer shouldn’t have been on all of the choices, but I didn’t have time to make a system to disable it for some multiple-choice scenes.
• I created too large of a story to make art for in the time limit. With drawing as fast as I could for almost the entire second day, I still had to reuse art for about 1/3 of the game.
• The default font was broken on one of my test computers, so I made my own. I’m not really qualified to design fonts however, so it’s a bit harder to read than it should be for large blocks of text.
• I didn’t automate the resource handling quite well enough, so that slowed down some of my work.

What went right:

• I came up with a very achievable idea that was still interesting.
• I built an extensible system straight off, so making the content for the game was easy.
• I wasn’t overconfident, and used Unity again. I got all my cross platform compatibility for free, even though I didn’t make much use of the Unity editor and only  used one GameObject for my game.
• I built a flexible level format, and was smart enough to leave the linking to the user, instead of trying to make a really complex automatic link maker.
• I came up with an art style that I could successfully produce 80-something pictures in in only 16 hours, and it looks quite nice too.

I had a great time this Ludum Dare, and I’ve played lots of fun games. I’m excited to see the results, and eagerly awaiting next time. I’ll be ready.

Tags: I will play your game, play my game, post-mortem, postmortem

No Time to Stop is a classic puzzle where you can’t turn until you hit a wall, with an additional 10 seconds time limit. This was not just to follow the theme, it added something I love in puzzle game: optimizing solution. You also need to smash keys in fast sequence, which I am not a fan in music games, but here I liked it, because instead of simply following a track, you actually design the sequence and replay it using both memory and quick thinking. The game was done in less than 24 hours and has 10 levels offering a hard challenge.

What went wrong:

Lost 24H on another idea (a dirt racing game). The car drifting mechanic was done when I realized that a 10 seconds lap was too short to be fun. I scrapped that and fell back to something more easy to tweak and simple enough to be coded in 24H. Don’t give up, try plan B instead.

How to win. I suspect that some players didn’t understand how I intend the game to be played. You are supposed to ignore the time limit when searching the solution and then replay it quickly. I think some people directly stop and retry after 10 seconds, probably because it looks like you are supposed to do that (death sound and a red retry message, even if you are still free to move). Others seem to plan mentally before the start. I admire that chess-like spirit and it’s how I designed the level in my editor, but it makes some levels very hard. Don’t assume that players will play the “fun way”.

The difficulty. Because 10 seconds was a fixed limit, it was hard to balance the levels (IMHO that was a general problem with the theme). So, during development I tested with 8 seconds and added hotkeys to tweak that time limit if needed. Unfortunately this is not visible in the interface and some people will not see it in the description. Always show hotkeys in-game.

What went right:

Easy to code. This time it was really refreshing to have a game straightforward to code. My previous LD always had some tricky physics problems, which are often hard to tweak. Here, the core mechanic is very simple, and adding special blocks was just few lines. Pick an idea easy to fully prototype early.

The graphics. During most of the development, it was just a grid of colored squares, good enough to prototype, maybe even to release. I only added sprites in the last few hours. A simple trick with good payoff was the line behind the player. This obviously helps to follow your moves, but before that, there was no animation (for fast gameplay and easier coding), and that tiny effect really added a lot of life to the game. Always add a cool effect to the main action.

The levels. I really had a lot of fun creating them, and a simple pixel editor was enough. I am also happy about their number and variety. Without testers, it’s hard to balance but they are small, so hopefully determined players can finish the game. Making levels is fun and important, keep time for that.

Conclusion:

This LD started bad but ended well. My advice to people who give up during LD because their initial ambitious project failed: instead try to make a very simple idea in the short amount of time left, it’s very fun too.

Play it!

First things first: I’m happy about how the game turned out – it’s the first time for me that I finished a Ludum Dare game as I initially designed it, without cutting any features.

I worked with my girlfriend on ‘Dungeon Deadline’ and she helped me a lot coming up with the idea and refining the gameplay elements, while she designed all levels beautifully as well.
As you probably can immediately tell, I’m using Oryx famous ‘LoFi Fantasy’ set – the same set that many other games use (for example ‘Realm of the Mad God’ & ‘Legends of Yore’) so this part was settled. For the audio I asked Landon Podbielski for help and he composed a wonderful tune for it.

I’m very grateful to those two guys, since all that you see and hear in my game was made by them.
(besides the impromptu sound effects and some minor graphics that I did)
So my job was coding and actually developing that whole thing – and it took some very long hours to do so. however – since I’m by now basically fluent in the Flashpunk engine I was coding at an amazing speed and was surprised of myself for a few times – loved it.

Despite being a overall very positive experience I also had some minor downsides:
The code looks like hell … I’m always starting out neat and organized and end up hacking stuff together in a way that should give any compiler a heart attack. It’s still memory-leak proof and more or less reasonably performance optimized though.
Some of the features are a bit buggy, or at least under-developed – one of them being the warrior attack. It’s a bit unbalanced and simply not very well done – but I kept putting it off and ended up having to keep it like it is now. Please try out the other two classes to play the game in a balanced way.

After reading the comments that I got by now I’m happy to report that people generally like my game – some seem to like it quite a lot

Several people suggested that the time limitation hinders the potential of the game – since they want to explore the dungeons in a more traditional RPG way. While I certainly understand that feeling – this is simply an other type of game and the theme of this Ludum Dare is ’10 seconds’ after all. However – I might develop this further and ditch the time limitation to include up/down stairs and a shopping – which should make this a much more classical dungeon crawler. We’ll see.

I also have to thank the whole Ludum Dare community – all of you are awesome!
It’s amazing that so many games got made and I’m going to take my time playing as many as I can over the next days.

Have Fun!

The third and final entry in my Spacetime Adventure Post Mortem is now available.

You might find it interesting. For example:

I expected a pleasant weekend’s amusement, a chance to test my skills and, if they didn’t fail me, to show off a bit. I did not foresee how much I would learn, how delightful I would find the actual process, or how meaningful it would be to discover the often amazing, beautiful, clever, and entertaining games that others were creating.

See whatcha think.

Achievement Get: Beaten LD48 3 times!

So I joined LD again this time around with probably my best LD game so far! But as every game it has it’s good and bad sides.

What worked well:

There is nothing quite like it: Soo.. seen any other game when you play as a candy vaccum cleaner where you clean dust on big spheres of lollipops in outer space in another dimension…. I thought so! Having a game stand out among over 2000 games is quite a good thing.

Unity3D gives a lot of advantages:My two last games was made with Game Maker 8.1/Studio but this time took the summer and learned quite a bit about it. So because of it I could easily export to the web and beef up the graphics in a way I couldn’t have done with Game Maker.

The aesthetics, both easy to make and enjoyable: Around like 6 hours in I got the base idea to what would become the end product after 2-3 other ideas but most of the graphics was easy to make. The textures was easy to make, adding space took me barely 10 minutes and I found a great font that worked well with the game . The only thing that took time to make was the vacuum cleaner as I changed around quite a bit until I got the final version.

Easy to learn what to do: When a level only takes 10s to play you need to learn what do to quick and I feel that I achieved that.

Voice acting, quick to do but adds a lot: One thing I had a blast to do was adding voice acting to the game. I added a small countdown with a silly cute voice and so far it seems like the thing that people liked the most of it.

I leaned a lot!: Even if this would have been the worst game ever it would have been worth it because I learned a lot about game design, 3D game design and Unity.

What didn’t work well:

Waaaaaayyyyy to many hours used on stuff not appearing in the final product: This is something I had problem with every LD I’ve joined so far but doesn’t make it less painful. I spend around 4 hours with stuff that didn’t had much to do with the final game and and around half of the rest of that time working with stuff that didn’t end up in the final product.

Hard to control: As the creator I was used to the controls so I didn’t think of it that much. Even when I showed it to my family and they had problem with it I simply brushed it off…. Big mistake as that’s the most common complaint

Making a game based of a sphere gives a button of problem: I had the idea to have a game on a sphere for a while because it seemed easy and seemed really cool. I got right on the cool part but easy…. nah. Placing down everything takes so much more time because you have to rotate everything around the sphere and that made the level design take so much longer time than would otherwise. The visibility was limited so the levels became quite limited and I wanted to add walls but I.. just couldn’t….

Too level based… Yet again: For the last LDs I have made games that relied a lot on having a lot of content instead having clever design that didn’t as much content building… I felt that it was a mistake and didn’t want to do that again…But yet again I did it. At least I felt that was that would work the best with the 10 seconds theme.

Makes some people dizzy/nauseous: Not exactly something that I intended but some have reported that and that’s just…

Anyways. For people that haven’t checked it out yet I’d love to see you check down the game. (Link below)

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=18652

Tags: postmortem, unity, unity3d

The overall rating should be calculated based on all other specific ratings. It just feels strange.

Game
Could the theme “10 seconds” be interpreted as 10 individual seconds? Could a game be made where something interesting could happen inside of 1 second? From those questions came Snap Encounters, an RPG with no RPG elements due to lack of time.

Was the experiment a success? Feedback so far is pretty unanimous: 1 second is too short to make a real decision and there’s too much text.

Too Much Text
Since this is a story-based game, that’s like saying an FPS has too much shooting. Since reading is a free action and isn’t timed, I’m not sure this is a valid criticism or just an issue of wrong target audience. I can certainly tweak it a bit since my writing does tend toward verbosity.

1 second is too short
As implemented, a player must examine the 32×48 pixel encounter creature, examine their two 48×48 pixel choices, interpret all that, and pick a choice appropriate for the encounter. All within one second. Since there’s no HP, making the wrong choice means you die and have to slog through the same encounters all over again (or give up and go play a more fun game).

How To Fix
I think 1 second can still work, but there needs to be a lot less for the player to process for each encounter. My tentative idea is to remove the randomized choices entirely. For each encounter you get the same three choices: fight, flee, or fraternize. The tutorial part of the game will teach these to you, so that by the time you need to make a snap decision, all you have to think about is “oh, that’s an ogre and I’m level 1, RUN!” instead of “That’s an ogre, my choices are, uh, let’s see. Oops, too late, I’m dead.”

Also, the sting of making a wrong choice will be reduced when the RPG elements are introduced. Instead of “oops, I gotta go through all that again?” it’ll be “ouch, I hope I find a health potion soon.”

Play it!
If you want to see how hard making a decision in 1 second really is, go play Snap Encounters, it’s HTML5, so should run just about anywhere that has web and a keyboard.

Tags: post-mortem, postmortem

Think its about time to post this graph for #LD27

It shows the distributions of the coolness and votes for all entries, value being the number of votes and frequency is the number of entries with that number of votes …

Add your user name to the image url to show where your game is on the graph.
The graph updates itself so is always current.

Tags: graph

Not for fame, not for glory, I’m here for the fun! I love LDs, because almost every time after the submission I can say to myself: I still got it ^^

So this is my entry: Mr. Sushi! (Order Please!). I was stuck on the first day, because I haven’t really been programming for weeks, and as I wanted to move forward as a Flash Developer, I decided that this LD would not be about pixels, blitting and copypixels, but about Stage3D! A step that I didn’t take for way too long

What went well:

1) hahaha, I didn’t have the time to create music :D. On a whim I decided to do some voice acting with broken japanese-english like Matt Stone or Trey Parker always do on South Park :D. Broken and so bad, that you should know that no japanese actually talks like that ^^. And tell you what: It’s really fun to talk like that :D. That’s why the south park guys always do it^^!

2) Starling with Starling! I’m still not 100% convinced if it really runs faster, because on startup I get framerates of 30 or less. maybe I would have to build preloaders again 😛 But! I managed to create something that actually works

3) I created a new game! The game idea derived from dots (iOS), but I don’t like how the items fall down like in Bejuweluizzoausoi*censored*ioasd ^^. But there’s still room for improvements 😉

What didn’t went that well:

MY ASSHOLE BUDDY SET UP LIKE 10 ALARMS AT RANDOM TIMES AND HID THEM AT RANDOM PLACES IN MY WORKPLACE 😀 + I couldn’t really concentrate. what means it calls for revenge

I hope you play my game! And have fun doing so! 😀 Shameless adding of a link 😉 :

Play it here

So, this is my game.

Anyways, for my second Ludum Dare,  I decided to do something most peculiar.

This was actually the first thing that popped in my head when I was at my Optometrist when my eyes were dilated early Saturday morning.

So, what was my game?

When I heard the theme, I had two ideas. One of them was a horror game where you blink every ten seconds and stuff happens but I meant it as something I wouldn’t like making.

So, what ideas popped in my head, based on the theme, when I was coming up with “In Just a Moment”? Well, contrary to the comments, I thought of “YOLO”. Like, I think of a lot of things before I make any decision. A lot of those thoughts being negative.

If  I were to talk to someone, I’m always self-conscious about how I present myself as I assume these bad things. But seriously, what can go wrong?  That was the question I wanted to present when I was making this game. “What can go wrong with a choice?”

Granted, the way I did it needs loads of improvements but did it I tried to do.

What went good:

• I finished a game despite having my hands full with moving into college and what not.
• I made the game to the exact idea that was in my head.
• I didn’t have any headaches at any point in making the game.
• The music in the game fit what I was going for perfectly

What went bad:

• My message wasn’t presented clearly.
• The music loop thing.
• I relied a bit too much on “Show, don’t Tell”
• How the game ended. It seems that just ending the game without the player deciding to stop playing affected the idea I had for what I wanted to do.

I liked working on “In Just a Moment” and am still working to make it better than what I already made. Just, I need to learn how to present my idea.

I love the comments I’m getting, how people think of the game as an examination on relationships and life but that idea’s way more advanced than how I originally imagined the game.

Let’s compare it to my first Ludum Dare game, Princess Sheltering.

This was definitely a better organized game than my LD 25 and was a lot easier to make in terms of the idea that I came up with. To be honest, compared to Princess Sheltering, this is something I’d still play, even though “In Just a Moment” is so short. It was also awesome that I had someone come by and make music for my game! So this Ludum Dare was just so much easier than my last Ludum Dare.

This was my first Ludum Dare competition entry.  It was an exhausting weekend, but overall it was a great experience and I am enjoying playing and rating games and receiving feedback.  I am content with what I was able to put together in 48 hours.  Some things went well, and as always there is a lot of room for improvement.  I’d like to take a moment to reflect on the development process of Candelabra.

Each level of Candelabra begins with the lighting of a match, and ends with the lighting of a candle.  Matches burn out in 10 seconds. Matches also go out if you drag them too quickly.   Keep the flame alive by lighting other matches and flammables.

The Good

• Limited Scope – I aimed for the game to have 10 levels and I was able to accomplish that.  There are a few core game mechanics – clicking and dragging matches to light other matches, dodging water, dodging blocks, and lighting fireballs which travel along a set path.  Much more than that I think would be too complicated.  Any less would be too boring.
• Simple Controls – One thing I’ve noticed is that after playing 40 or so games from this competition is that it’s not easy for me to adapt to the multitude of control schemes I’ve encountered.  I haven’t come across many that are too hard to learn, but when you’re playing lots of games in a short period of time, it’s a lot easier when controls are introduced as you play the game.  Having to read a paragraph of instructions can kill it for me.  I wanted people to be able to play my game without doing any reading, and for the most part I think that is the case.  If you haven’t figured out what to do in 10 seconds, the word SPACE appears, which is all the instruction needed to get going (hopefully the player realizes quickly you need to click and drag the match).
• Unity – It’s a great engine and I have a lot of experience with it, so there weren’t any technical hurdles.  I’m no artist, so I used Unity’s lighting and particle system to improve the aesthetics.  All the text in the game was made with a Unity plugin called Polygon Tool, which lets you create polygons by adding and modifying points in the editor.  This was the first time I used it in-depth, and it was perfect for what I needed.  For the few textures I used, I made some quick random images in Paint.NET and took one picture of some rocks near my house.

The Bad

• Audio – It’s not that I thought the audio itself was bad, but it does not sound the same across different speakers.  I made the music with Linux Multimedia Studio.  I was wearing headphones.  The background music consists of three oscillating waves which shift subtly every 4 measures or so.  The effect is noticeable and helps set a weird, eerie mood IF you have headphones on.  If not, your speakers may not pick up the subtle changes in the waves and it just sounds like an annoying buzzing noise.  I wish I could have caught this problem because it would have been easy to avoid.  If you do play with headphones, I think the audio is ok.  Definitely could be better, though.  Also, I would have really liked to record the sound of an actual match lighting, but I could not capture a quality recording.
• Frustration – The main game mechanic can be incredibly frustrating.  Moving the mouse the slightest bit too fast will put out the flame.  You can do this 5, 6… 10 times in a row even when you SWEAR you won’t do it another time.  But you will… oh you will.  I did not have time to have other people test this mechanic or I would have a better idea of how sensitive to make it.  I adjusted the sensitivity a few times, settled on what felt right to me, and hoped that it wouldn’t be too hard or too easy for the average person.  I’m not sure if the satisfaction of beating the game outweighs the pain endured while playing, and for that, I apologize, but will not be held responsible for any broken computer peripherals.

Thank you for playing Candelabra.  I really enjoyed making it and would love to hear your feedback, good or bad.

14 matches were harmed during the making of this game.

Tags: postmortem

So, I used GameMaker 8.1 to make my game (I know, I know, kill me now), and my main complaint about my game is the file size – its about 107 mb! There really is no reason for it to be that big too. In a little while I will release the source code, and then if people could let me know how to optimise it I would be EXCRUCIATINGLY  appreciative!
Here is my entry.

Many thanks,

Taha

Check the let’s play of our LD48 entry on youtube made by a fan !

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2dnB42mZBA

And make sure to try and vote for it here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=19103

Tags: LD27, Let's Play

I’ve already written a post-mortem about what I personally learned from LD#27 and creating my first entry, Food court hell. However, I haven’t gone over what I’ve learned that will affect the future of my engine, LynxJS. After much thought and consideration here’s what I’ve decided is important to LynxJS development.

LynxJS is ready to make games

Originally I advised people against trying LynxJS as I thought it was extremely buggy, and basically useless. However, I would not have been able to complete the dare had I not used this library. I saved quite a bit of time compared to if I had simply prototyped a game with pure javascript, and much of my work was already done for me in terms of collisions, object handling and asset management. LynxJS, though a small library of only 1500 lines of code, is capable of game creation. That being said…

LynxJS is not ready to make games

A little contradictory, but it’s the truth. Though Lynx is capable of making the prototyping process easier and faster, it still isn’t ready to go beyond just that. I found that with my library it was still missing some basic features that I’ve overlooked, including collision settings, a better collision detection algorithm, and no ability whatsoever to go beyond the prototype phase. It may have simplified my development, but there were too many instances where the library had hindered me more than helped me. Lynx was originally designed with no specific targets defined. My goal was to create an engine that worked, not worked well.

In all fairness, Lynx has a long way on a short road to go before it could be considered a true game engine, which is something I will be working on over the next few weeks.

The future of LynxJS

Right now, the biggest problem I’ve found is that I haven’t completed the classes I’ve already created. Collision detection is buggy and overpowered, IO is not nearly finished and requires more precise events, and mouse support isn’t even added. At the moment, my plans are to touch up IO and Time classes, and I’m going to add components before changing collision from a built in class to a supported component. What that means is that this presents the opportunity for either myself or other developers to create collision components to help cut down collision checks and better algorithms to perform said checks, while still allowing the core to handle the onCollide event subscriptions.

While collision is being pushed to a supported component, it isn’t the only class that will be making that transition. Both the developer tools and Map classes will be converted to components. This is in an effort to reduce bandwidth and load times to be minimal, and both tools have instances where the classes would not be used.

With these changes in place, Lynx will become a more dynamic library, loading only what it needs to while remaining powerful and efficient. Lynx-CORE will be the only file you need to directly include in your applications, and a simple import command will handle anything else you need. I’m still looking into ways to make this even simpler so these plans are subject to change, but overall the goal is to keep Lynx simple and to make Lynx as powerful as possible.

After the above changes have been completed, Lynx will be at an alpha milestone and I will open the community, where hopefully developers will come together to help with library changes, creating components, and showcase their creations. I’ll also begin working on a visual editor for Lynx games to help simplify the process.

What to expect:

Honestly you shouldn’t expect much from Lynx in the near future. As a (somewhat starving) full time server, I don’t get too much time to work on my favorite projects. Another problem is since I’m working on this mostly by myself, I don’t have many people I can run ideas by/decide how things should work with. I’m looking for more people to join the LynxJS team, but I’m not expecting much considering it’s much harder to find a team for something that isn’t well established. LynxJS probably won’t become viable until at least early 2014.

If you are interested in contributing to the development, you’re welcome to send me a short message on twitter and I’ll get back with ways you can help. I’ll also be revamping my personal website as well as pushing these changes to the LynxJS website within the next week.

Thanks for reading, and best of luck in your future game creation endeavors!

-Cosrnos

This was my first Ludum Dare adventure and also my first game jam. I usually avoided game jams because I was under the impression that you must suffer sleep loss. Funny, I found a lot of Ludum Dare advice saying to get a good night’s rest, but that’s besides the point.

My best impression with Ludum Dare was the wonderful community here. There was a lot of positive energy, which I don’t usually see on the interwebs. I would like to thank everyone for making such a wonderful community of game developers and for making this game jam. And thanks to everyone who played my game. I was surprised by the amount of people who liked my game!

The game can be played here. Video here.

Design

Even though I’m not a game designer, the design stage of this project was probably the fastest. When I saw the theme 10 seconds, I was more than happy to work with it, but I wanted to make something a little unique. Then someone mentioned finding other definitions of the word “second”. This intrigued me to look up the word in a dictionary.

Seconds most likely refers to a unit of time, but there is also that verb that’s similar to “agreeing”. In that context, it would be like saying “I second you!” That’s where I got the idea of the ten diamond-shaped spirits revolving around you. If you do what they like (risking your health for a special relic) they will “second” you, as in support you in your fight against the opponent.

I’m not sure if that makes much sense, but that’s what I came up with. That’s also where the name “10 Seconds In 10 Seconds” derives. Not the most unique name on earth, but I figured it would be good enough. I surprisingly finished designing the first night (Friday).

Programming

Programming was where I spent the most time for this project. Probably the case with a lot of people. I would have to say that it was better than I thought. Of course, I studied programming in college and I already had experience with Unity, but I think all programmers know that you get this great feeling when you program something and it mostly works and you know what you’re doing. I certainly felt that way, even in AI, which I struggled with.

One of the hardest things I struggled with programming was the HUD, especially the healthbar. I haven’t done too much HUD programming in Unity, and even if I did, I don’t remember much. The biggest problem with the healthbar was to get the width to dynamically change. I was using a GUITexture in Unity to do healthbars, and GUITexture has a property called pixelInset, which is a rectangle. It took me a good night’s sleep to figure out that rectangles don’t like to be edited directly (such as pixelInset.width = 80), but the whole rectangle has to be replaced (pixelInset = newRect). That one dumb problem probably wasted a nice 3-5 hours, hours I could have spent on AI.

And that’s the main problem for me concerning AI. I started it late (about 3 hours before the deadline) and I could actually make it decent if I had more time to think over how the behaviors would work. Debugging AI is a very time consuming activity, so that doesn’t help much. I realized a lot of things in the AI I could have improved after playing the game post-release.

Art

I’m not much of an artist. Knowing that, I knew I couldn’t waste too much time on art. At the same time, I didn’t want my game to look bad. Early on, I actually wanted to use simple textures, but as I became more aware of the time limit, I stopped thinking about textures.

I decided on an art-style that mostly relied off differences in color and an appeal to simple polyhedrons (I suppose like old 3D games). There should be a sense that you are in an abstract 3D virtual world, not a realistic place you can compare to in real life.

The many cubes in the background, I feel, add to this art-style. They represent depth and location in the playing space, since you see all of them at slightly different angles. I also figured that I wanted a visual background of some sort. It kind of reminds me of the games made by Kenta Cho, so in a way this art-style is a tribute to his inspirational works.

I modeled everything in Maya except the pentahedron (the players) and all standard Unity primitives (capsules, spheres, and blocks). The pentahedron was borrowed from a game I worked on with a student team. I was surprised I still had the Maya license granted for being a student, but I want to learn Blender someday so that I don’t have to rely on very expensive software.

Conclusion

In the end, I actually had a really great time (I was uncertain of the outlook) with this game jam. The time constraint was actually a nice driving force to make me deliver something, even if it’s not the best thing on earth. You really do learn a lot from this, people are serious when they say that.

As for my game, I will make a post-compo version that addresses the problems mentioned in people’s feedback. I’ll tweak controls, but who knows how long that will take. I definitely will have a local two-player setup. The two-player mode will most likely use Xbox 360 controllers. I will make the tutorial much better because I know it does not explain the controls and that would annoy players. I’ll try to refine the game design so it’s easier to get ammo and get seconded by spirits. And of course, I will fix the AI. I will take my time for the post-compo version, so I can’t promise that it will come soon.

Anyhow, thanks to everyone who played my game and gave feedback. If you haven’t tried it yet, you can check it out here. Gameplay video can be seen here.

Tags: 10 seconds, First entry, First Time, first-timer, postmortem

I think I shall go with the time honored separation of Good Stuff and Bad Stuff.

Good Stuff:

• Choosing to do the Jam (solo): I wasn’t feeling particularly well this weekend, and doing the Dare, with its ridiculous and demanding pace, probably would have killed me. Doing the Jam was great because it allowed me to slow down a bit, meaning I could put a little more effort into my art and music.
• The Tiled map editor: Tiled is incredible – it works so well that it seems like it can read my mind at times. If you’re still editing maps with MS Paint, or God forbid using a home brewed map editor (like I was at one point), please do yourself a favor and check out tiled. It will save you so much time.
• Writing music: I’ve really honed my ability to write music quickly – I busted out the main theme in 2.5 hours and I think it rocks, and I even had time to write two other themes too! This is all thanks to One Hour Compos, which, over the last year, helped me get better at writing music faster than anything else I can possibly think of.
• HaxeFlixel: It gets the job done and it gets out of the way. Back in the day I used to have a lot of people complaining about clumsy controls and awkward interactions – all that’s gone now. This is wonderful because it means I can focus on the important stuff
• Clever concept: I loved the theme, and came up with 2 brilliant ideas almost instantly. I really loved the idea I eventually stuck with, though I felt like it had a LOT more potential than what I managed to get in-game.
• Art: I think this is certainly a step up from LD26.

Bad Stuff:

• I failed to get a beta tester… again: Actually not 100% true – my beta tester just happened to live in Sweden (I’m on the west coast of the USA), so our interactions were unfortunately super brief. Near the end of the jam he shot a ton of brilliant ideas at me, and I wish I had more time to implement them. But then again, isn’t that how all Ludum Dare game work?
• Forces outside of my control: I was feeling less than spectacular pretty much the entire Ludum Dare, and I had a lot of other crap happening during the first day (I had to move from 1 apartment to another). Can’t do anything about stuff like this, of course, but I’ll always wonder how much better the game could have been if this wasn’t the case.
• I didn’t really know HaxeFlixel: Know your libraries. Know your libraries. Know your libraries. I had used HaxeFlixel for maybe 5 total hours before LD27, and it definitely showed. Especially at the beginning, I was running into dumb bugs that were taking MUCH longer to resolve than they should have been. By the end I was starting to gain more proficiency, but with more expertise with my library I could have done a LOT more.
• No polish: I had a lot of great ideas for polish that failed to make it into the game – particle effects, gradual darkening of the background as the world was coming to an end, etc. I pretty much failed to get any of them in game. This is because…
• Poor planning: The first two days I spent programming a lot of features. Then when I finally designed some levels, I didn’t use them. Like, I had this whole complicated setup of lasers that required some raycasting and stuff, but I never ended up using them. So dumb! So I’ve learned a valuable lesson to apply next time: Build levels as you build features. Whenever I do this, I have a nice and playable game by the end (LD24 and LD19 come to mind). Whenever I don’t, either my game is too short (like this one) or too buggy and hard (like LD26 and LD23).
• Humor: I feel like my game had 2 or 3 genuinely funny bits, but honestly my LD24 entry was much funnier. Seems like the funniest bits came when two (or more) characters were talking with each other, so I’ll have to remember to make excuses to do that in the future. I came up with most of the funny stuff when I was taking a break from the code, so I should remember to do that more often, too.
• Art: I’ve practiced doing background tiles a fair bit since the last Dare, but I’ve never really practiced doing 1) sprite animations, 2) animations of any kind, 3) dialog pictures, or 4) detailed backgrounds of any sort. So when I had to do any of those during the Jam, I procrastinated, or took forever, and so some of my art looks great, and some of it doesn’t look good at all. This should teach me to practice ALL things equally, not just one thing!

Things I’ve learned:

• Build levels throughout Ludum Dare, not just on the last day. This is seriously the most important thing. It’s important so that I can…
• Stop being such a misanthropist and ask people to test my game! I’m positive that this would have helped more than anything else. I need to idle on the Ludum Dare IRC more And of course, I need to also…
• Know my libraries.

If you read through that, I’m massively impressed! If you just read the bold stuff, well, that’s pretty good too. Play my game and let me know if there was anything I missed, and I’ll hit you back with a review.

Original LD release: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=17178

V 0.2 alpha

Windows: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B-H5lq1kSggrQTd1eDBUN1pDTmc/edit?usp=sharing

Linux: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B-H5lq1kSggrLWhuMTUxN3RjdEk/edit?usp=sharing

WebPlayer: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/9938325/PostWebPlayer/PostWebPlayer.html

fixlog:
– shooting works, altho it awaits animations and a true projectile. ( DEATH TO THE GOBLINS!)
– goblins have sound and animation again
– added fall dmg settings and execution
– moved death control to a designated class that holds HP
– added swing and shoot sounds
– added walking sounds
– added running sound
– added jump sounds
– added jumpdmg sounds
– added pickups sounds
– randomized death sounds
– enabled the running mechanic
– improved jumping mechanic further.
– audio randomizer and manager still needs further testing, it loads audio, gets the messages, but the playback does not occur.
– audio configuration is fully text based. Gives us alot of flexibility.
– audio randomizer follow the children audio chain if child owns an audio randomizer.
– if you kill goblins in the wrong direction it crashes the game.
– we have a beta map editor from Skalniak
– we’ve found a fix for the web player, soon we’ll roll out the fix. MAC users unite!

Known Issues:
– Movement still feels weird
– No controller support
– No controls mappings
– Credits button does not work
– You cannot swing sword

v 0.1 alpha

Windows: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/9938325/PostLD.zip

Linux: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/9938325/PostLDLinux.zip

Fixed:

• Jumping
• annoyance with the any key presses on win/loose
• display timer with time left
• kill sound for main character
• added crosshair
• death sounds and looks cooler + blocking controls and timer hud.

Known issues:

• Unity web player does not work with keyboard input, does not play scripted sounds. Any help here will be great.
• You cannot shoot
• You cannot swing sword
• Movement feels weird
• No controller support
• menu sliders do not work
• credits button does not work

I guess it’s a good time as ever to reflect on things from the competition. If you haven’t seen my entry, Timeline, you can view it here or access the web version on my site here. I had a lot of fun, even if I didn’t work as hard as I should have. Participating definitely gave me something to do and I managed to learn a lot about how flexible I am in terms of design decisions. Lots of lessons learned, some more experience gained. All in all I’m glad to have finished in 48 hours.

What Went Wrong

• I promised myself I’d make something with really neat source materials, and then sort of threw that out the window. I ended up with this cluster of events by the end of it with no real discerning marks between them. If it wasn’t for last minute changes, all the objects would be using the default names as well. So, in the future, stick to a more strict system to get everything named and organized.
• Like everything, Construct decided to crash after having been running for 12 hours or so, and unfortunately I hadn’t saved for a while. I had lost all my work from the reverse gravity power-up to the first secret level (so the game was complete). Fortunately I managed to redo the power-ups and also get some of the levels back (good thing I posted them on Twitter), so it wasn’t all bad. I learned my lesson and saved more option (it would crash 2 more times before the end of the competition).
• Lack of sleep made me make a grave error in judgement and I accidentally erased all my animations and had to redo them from scratch. I never did redo the idle animation however, but I think the game looks better without it.
• I approached this like creating a small game without realizing that I’d be judged for it, so I might have made the game wildly too difficult and added too much content that was hard to reach. How many people found out that there’s a secret exit over the moon in the first level?
• If I did this game again, the timeline would be static and activities could not be moved. It would have allowed me to automatically put down actions in the right order (like parachute jump for clearing long gaps).
• I also made it so the timeline doesn’t reset between deaths. That was a stupid idea because it will mess with player rhythm in certain levels. Definitely a bad decision on my part.
• Of the 10 items ideas I had, I only managed to add 5. I also wanted to do more with the items I’d added, especially the really cool ones like reverse gravity and hi-jump.

What Went Right

• The timeline worked a lot better than I expected. Jumping was awkward as hell but the other abilities worked perfectly with it.
• I tweeted a picture of one of the levels I had lost and managed to redo it from the image. I really liked that level, so I was glad that I managed to add it back in!
• Because I went with Construct, it was really easy to port to every system possible. Not only does it have some of the best web support, but the ability to export to NodeJS made it a one-click process to port it to Windows, OSX, and Linux. Plus, the ease of use meant that I could get a lot of work done that would have consumed a ton of time in Unity.
• A lot of design flexibility meant I could change and balance a lot of mechanics in the game, as well as quickly come up with new levels, and I’m sure there’s a lot of brilliant combinations of the items in game that I hadn’t considered. Additionally, if I wanted something very specific to happen, I could give the player a new item that would do exactly that. Having an extremely vague design with a highly modular mechanic let me get away with a lot of things.
• Originally I was worried because I was supposed to be busy on Sunday, which would mean dedicating less time to the competition. Fortunately (or unfortunately from some perspectives) my plans were delayed and I managed to finish earlier than I expected.

What I’d Change

• Like I said before, make a static timeline instead of the dynamic, player-controlled one I have now. Giving the player control over every item collected meant that they could get stuck or not understand what combination to use to get through a level or over an obstacle.
• More states instead of actions like jump or attack. Reverse gravity is my favorite item in the game because it’s easy to understand, lasts for exactly one second, and lets you do some neat stuff with it. Things like jump don’t always last for a second, so even though I had combinations like parachute into jump, jump into parachute didn’t go as well.
• Probably a shorter timeline. The theme made me use 10 seconds somewhere, but when you’re controlling input it would take way too long to come around again if you mistimed a jump.
• An easier game with more content instead of secrets and tricks. Nobody is going to find the secrets during the judging period anyway, so it would have been better to introduce players to more interesting ideas rather than frustrate or confuse them.
• Make the item system a lot more family based. That would have allowed me to add new items a lot faster, though as it is, adding them was pretty quick.

Overall, it was a great experience! I’m proud of how the game turned out and I’ll definitely be participating in the next Ludum Dare. Now there’s nothing to do but twiddle my thumbs and wait!

It is a few days after the competition now, so I’ve had some time to rest and reflect about my performance over the weekend. Although I am not entirely happy with the outcome of my game, I am very proud that I managed to string together a functioning game with an actual goal. I would have loved to have more time to implement all the features I wanted, but I guess every LDer runs into that issue.

Play the game | Ludum Dare

I managed to render my ridiculous timelapse video after having a lot of trouble. The biggest lesson I have learnt this weekend is not to record a time-lapse in fraps because 10 hours of footage is about 500 GB of data. Sadly, this meant I only managed to record about half of my work over the weekend, but it is symbolic enough none the less. I’ve compressed about 12 hours of footage into a few minutes, but I had to render multiple times so it really screwed up the video quality. Oh well, I have learnt from my mistake. In the future, I will use fraps to automatically take a screenshot every 10 seconds or so, and instead use the image files to compile the time-lapse.

Click here to watch the video

What went wrong:

I spent way too long fussing over how neat and reusable my code was, that in the end I was very short on time. I managed to program all these brilliant tools for making maps, characters, and weapons, but because of the lack in time, I couldn’t make the assets to actually use the tools. I ended up with only a few building variations, 3 characters, and 2 weapons. It really doesn’t take long to add variety to the game because of all the infrastructure I coded, but because I didn’t have time to make any art assets for them, the tools proved to be useless. I really should have just hard coded everything. That way I would have been able to focus more on the art, and actually make some sound effects and music. Next time, I will definitely try to manage my time better.

The theme was actually another reason I ran out of time. I decided to do a more ambitious project in hopes of using the theme in a more interesting and unique way. I originally planned for you to play as the good personality, trying to keep your other personality out of trouble by hiding weapons from him, or taking pills to try to suppress the amount of control he has over you. Unfortunately, I realised I was running short on time and had to change the rules so that you play the psychopathic personality that is obsessed with murder. In the end, the theme felt very tacked on, and not an essential part of the game even though the whole game was planned around it.

Because of the lack in time, I really skimped out on the art. I didn’t have time to texture the buildings, floor and doors. And I had to design the characters as just emoticons so that it would be faster to make. I really want to focus on this more next time.

As I said before,  I didn’t have any time to make the music or sound due to the lack in time. To be honest, even if I did have a few hours, I’m not entirely certain I would have been able to make any. I have absolutely no experience in any sound software, and was very unprepared.

On the first day, I should have gone to sleep much earlier. I spent a good amount of the day doing proper work, but I started to slow down near the end. I started day dreaming, getting distracted and making bad decisions due to being tired and having worked on the game for so long. I would have been much more productive if I went to bed a few hours earlier and woke a few hours earlier the next day.

What went right:

I personally felt that I had done some very solid coding. The game is relatively bug free, works as intended, and has some very reusable classes. I spent too much time on coding properly, but that did mean it came out quite nicely. I might pull out some of the stuff made in here to keep for later as some basecode.

I think constantly forcing myself to step away from the coding to write a development log about my progress really helped me. It gave me a good break, and allowed me to take a step back and evaluate the choices I was making. This helped me slow down, think more about what I was going to do without just rushing into a decision that would have turned out badly.

I managed to get a few people to play the game and give me feedback. This helped me find a game breaking bug that I could not replicate on my own computer, but I managed to fix that. I got a lot of great suggestions, and I wish I had time to actually use them, but I didn’t even have enough time to fill in my own stuff.

In general, I thought development went well. I spent a total of about 25 hours of pure development (taking out breaks, etc), which is quite a lot in 48 hours. I also felt quite productive in that time, even though I might not have been producing the right things.

Conclusion:

Overall, while I wish the game could have come out so much better with all the features that I planned, I am still very pleased that I managed to make a functioning game. I think it can actually be quite fun once you understand all the rules and controls. The competition has definitely given me a kick of inspiration to continue with game development once again, so I hope to use this to be a bit more productive. My next project will likely be the October challenge, where you have to try to make at least $1 by making a game. I think completing a challenge like that will be absolutely crucial to moving up a level in terms of game development.

Platformer with 20 levels about Schrodinger’s cat!). By pressing the Shift character is in a superposition and can pass through walls for a while) This game should you enjoy it because everybody loves cats!)))

These postmortem posts seem to be a thing, so let me recapitulate real quick.

This was my first Ludum Dare and a great excuse to jump into the development of a new game head over heels. I almost stayed away because the theme did bother me initially.

I went terribly unoriginal and decided to base my game around defusing bombs with 10 seconds left on the timer. That instantly reminded me of a scene from Lethal Weapon and so I had the main ingredients for Hair Cop already together.

Since I’m a sucker for platformers and 8bit style graphics it’s no surprise that my entry would become just that. Kicking down the doors to start a level and some pseudo-stealth-ish gameplay made it interesting enough for me to go through with development.

Most of the mechanics and assets were done on the first day. The second day was mostly tweaking, creating actual levels and adding a few more things. All of that interrupted by bodily needs, lazyness and Saints Row 4, I would roughly estimate the development time at 8 hours overall.

The whole process went surprisingly smooth for the most part, only in the last few hours I kind of dropped the ball and didn’t use the available time to include a few things that should have been in the game. There was suddenly time-pressure and I had to tie up a few loose ends quickly.

I’m pretty happy with the result simply because it exists and it’s playable. That is enough for my wounded developer heart

Just updated my post too have mac and web compatibility. I feel like an idiot for not doing this so here is  the updates.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=27105

“10 seconds left, Mr. Pink Rabbit!” can get awfully messy depending on how much risk you are willing to take. I’ll leave a screenshot here as proof, just to make you wait before I finish writing our postmortem (which I probably won’t post until tomorrow because it’s already past midnight here in France).

Please do play, rate and comment! I’m pretty much addicted to comments now ^^

Here’s the entry:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=24728

Thank you for your attention!

— Foug.

First off, I have a web build up so if you’re not on windows or just don’t feel like downloading anything, go here

Multiple Personality quest is a roguelike where you switch characters every 10 seconds. There are four characters, with different strengths and weaknesses and powers.

The Bad

Overambitious Idea

While the game was really fun to make it was a bit too much to squeeze into the compo and almost too much to squeeze into the jam. I didn’t get as many skills for the characters as I’d like, as well as pretty much no time to balance combat.

Game Balance

Game balance is way off. It’s ok at level 1, at level 2 you get a bit powerful, at level 3+ you get way too powerful, especially if you get over level 5 since I MEANT that to be the level cap but forgot to actually cap it (Which is why you see your character have an “Unknown Sword” or some such when you hit level 6+ Oops). It’s actually possible to finish the game at level 8 and the boss is fairly trivial by then.

This also takes away some of the differentiation of the characters. Who cares if Geoff is a kickass healer if you never need to heal? Who cares if Chloe can root if you one-shot everthing?, Who cares if Dirk has really good armor if nobody else ever gets hit anyway? Who cares if Gloria can teleport if she can one shot everything twice over. (Well I guess you care if it gets you around the dungeon faster :p)

The Good

Gameplay

While the balance is way out of whack past level 1, I think the gameplay idea is pretty solid and with some tweaks could become a pretty fun game.

JSIL

I’ve used JSIL for my javascript ports for the last 3 LDs and each time I use it it seems better and better. Porting this time around went really smoothly.

The Jam

I like how the Jam can be a good fallback if you have too much idea and not enough time for the compo. At the end of the compo period, what I had wasn’t really a playable representation of what I wanted, but I had the extra day to get it working and that made all the difference.

Saving Graphics for Last

Since I had to strip out so many features to fit my coding into the allotted time, this resulted on more code time and no wasted graphics work, since when I started on graphics I knew exactly what I needed and no more than that. If I had done graphics first I probably would have a bunch of dungeon, armor and potion graphics I didn’t use.

If this game sounds interesting to you. Go here and play it.

Tags: postmortem

You might have already played my game

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=5959

Well, I decided to continue a bit on it. Making it work smoother, better balancing, LAN connection. s/tuff like that. So I decided to put in some more characters as well.

Introducing [Put a name in the comments], the Bomber and [post a name in the comments], the spear man. They don’t have names yet so put one as a comment.

The French guy will drop bombs, which will a second or so later. The spear man throws his spear to the very end of the level, but he will need to get it back, to throw again.

Character ideas are also always welcome.

The Ludum Dare game browser has all comp and jam games. I’ve also set it up to update ratings and coolness every 15 minutes. Enjoy! http://ludumdare.itch.io

Tags: moonscript

Hello again!

I have added the “Source code” for Pressurized (quotations because its a .GM81 file for GameMaker 8.1) for the kind people who offered to take a look at it for optimization purposes.

You can view Pressurized, my first Ludum Dare entry, here.

Many thanks,

Taha

The idea behind Perfect Ten was pretty simple. “I want to make a really hard game with the oh so clever ‘solve this puzzle in less than 10 seconds’ caveat.” Beyond that, all I could come up with was a simple teleporting mechanic, some spikes, and buttons that you press to solve each level. I tried my best to avoid anything complicated beyond just that and then the game sort of made itself. I did not encounter too many problems while making the game events in construct, other than figuring out how to go to the next consecutive level (it turns out the simplest things are sometimes the hardest to figure out how to do).

The teleporting mechanics are the game’s main feature and it turned out to be pretty cool. You click anywhere where there is whitespace and it creates a portal, and one second later the player teleports to it. If you create a new portal before your character teleports, it destroys the old portal and your player will teleport to the new one instead. Originally, it took 1.5 seconds, but it made the simplest of levels near impossible to solve in under ten seconds. To solve each level, the player must touch five different buttons and not fall into spikes. Trap doors were also added along with spikes that fall. The timings themselves were based on the different sprite animations. After making sure each of these mechanics worked, I decided I would make ten levels and then the game would be near finished.

I am relatively new to using Construct 2, and I am super glad I tried it out the week before the compo (obligatory “this is my first LD comment”). It saved me the time of having to learn something completely new in order to make my entry. So, the problems I ended up having were related to the thing I have never done before: level design. Making sure each level is solvable in under ten seconds, gauging how difficult each is, and putting them in the right order. So much time was spent playing, adjusting, and replaying each level until I felt happy about each one. When I got to a few of the “falling” levels I discovered that the player simply falls too fast for solving the level to be humanly possible. So, I started playing around with the player’s fall speed. It did give me the idea to add a level where the player does not fall at all, and has to teleport in order to change the height at which they are “flying.” An unplanned mechanic actually came out of my struggles with designing the levels.

Once I was happy with the levels, I spent the rest of my time working on music and sound effects. I used SFXR, and Terry Cavanagh’s new tool, Bosca Ceoil to make the sounds and music respectively. I made two different songs, but only used one and I am not happy with either one anyway.

The biggest problem in the compo version of Perfect Ten is the game’s difficulty. I like how the teleporting mechanics turned out and that’s fine, but the levels are really hard straight away and there are no simple easy levels to teach players the mechanics before the levels become increasingly difficult. It seems a lot of people enjoy the difficulty of the game, but they share the same sentiment. If I add any levels post-compo, it will be some really easy ones at the beginning to help teach the mechanics of the game better.

Sadly, I think a post-compo version will do away with the ten second countdown altogether. While it works well with the “10 seconds” theme, I would rather have a stopwatch that records the player’s best times for each level, and for each completed run through all the levels. That way, players who struggle with getting under ten seconds can finish the levels, and players who enjoy the challenge, can try to beat their old times. Doing this would allow for bigger and better levels, too. Perhaps I could add more simple puzzle mechanics. Buttons that change how fast the player falls, perhaps….

Since a number of people have asked, I’m posting achivement hints for my minimalist adventure game, 10seconds. I’ll post the names of the achievements–it’s up to you to figure it out from there. A few people got them all without hints, so it can be done!

1. gamer
2. paralysis
3. impatient
4. direct hit
5. heartbreaker
6. tease
7. died doing what you loved
8. married to the sea
9. reconciliation
10. deja vu

So my first entry turned out a lot better than I expected it to. But that still doesn’t mean I’m perfectly satisfied with it.

So I made the Special Limited Edition† Vacuous 2.0*! Which is mostly just small modifications to the game’s mechanics. No new levels or bosses, and it’s too drastic to be considered a bugfix.
*This is different from my actual entry, as explained below. The original entry here is still unchanged.

Downloads: zip | .love

Changes:
Bosses:
– Boss # 1 has 25% less health
– Boss # 2 and 3 have 33% and 66% more health, receptively
– Fixed boss # 3’s box spawns moving weird
– Random enemy infinite bonus level now spawns a random boss every 10 waves
Bombs:
– Bombs don’t do massive amounts of damage anymore (50% less). Because holy hell, you could throw 6 bombs at the last boss and kill him instantly. The boss’s bullets are still removed. They still function normally without regards to bosses
– Speaking of bombs, they now have a 3 second cooldown. Because you could still probably nuke the hell out of a boss even with bombs doing half damage to them.
– Bombs also come in packs of 2, because the power of one bomb isn’t really equivalent to the power of multi-shot.
– Added a visual for bombs
Enemies:
– Waves now come every 6 seconds, instead of 10. This will help the game feel faster, and more like a shoot ’em up.
— “But now that you made the waves not on 10 second intervals, how does it relate to the theme?” I hear you say, however, that was not the only thing relating to the theme!
— Bosses still have 10 second looping patterns
— You still have 10 lives. Which is 10 seconds in a somewhat odd and obscure definition of “seconds”: (think of it as “ten second( chance)s”)

[stextbox id=”alert” caption=”via http://www.thefreedictionary.com/” collapsing=”false” collapsed=”false” color=”000000″ ccolor=”000000″ bcolor=”8e8e8e” bgcolor=”ffffff” cbgcolor=”8e8e8e” bgcolorto=”ffffff” cbgcolorto=”ffffff”]tr.v. sec·ond·ed, sec·ond·ing, sec·onds
1. To attend (a duelist or a boxer) as an aide or assistant.[/stextbox]Essentially I made a bad pun.

Powerups:
– Powerups are now more noticeable
— multi bullets now has more spread
— speed increase makes you 66% faster than it did before
— firing speed now makes you shoot 33% faster than it did before
— big bullets are unaffected, because they already make you totally wreck bosses.
Misc:
– added a small box at the bottom to contain all your stats/powerups. Now you won’t be covered by words anymore.

† Not actually limited edition

Tags: post-mortem, postmortem

I’ve finally decided to collect my thoughts about the game I made for the Ludum Dare 27 Compo: This Game Will Self Destruct in 10 Seconds.

The day before the competition started, I was incredibly ill and pretty much certain I wouldn’t be able to do anything. When I woke up the morning of, I was still sick, but I decided to participate anyways. So for the next eight hours I sat on my couch with my trusty laptop and learned the syntax of ActionScript3, how to use Flixel, the and basics of music theory and foley sound effect making, none of which I had any experience with before. By the end of those eight hours, I was feeling pretty good, and had learned basically as much as I needed to know.

When the competition first was about to start and I saw the theme candidates, I was desperately hoping for “Death is Useful”. I didn’t know what I would do with it, but it sounded like something I could get behind and make some puzzle game with a neat mechanic, or maybe an action game with special techniques. I most certainly did NOT want “10 seconds” to win.

And then it did. And I was sad, because I thought I was going to have to do some lame minigame style game that would bring nothing new to the table. But within about a half-hour, I had the trolly and brilliant idea that spawned TGWSDI10S. I was playing Skyrim to try to spawn creative thoughts (The best way to spawn creative thoughts), when the game crashed. This wasn’t exactly unexpected, and I’m used to it by now because I have about 70 mods installed that don’t mesh perfectly with eachother. But it got my thinking: “What if a game actually INTENTIONALLY crashed?” And so spawned the idea. I would make a game that crashes after 10 seconds.

Now, originally, I was just going to make it a completely generic game that you can’t beat because it crashes after 10 seconds. It was just going to be a joke game to troll people. But I quickly scratched that idea as not great, and decided that I would make the game save your progress every time it crashed, so that you could continue the story if you hit refresh.

So I started work on making the platforming engine, and very early on decided to make you be able to move super fast. At first this was just to make debugging the map easier, but it felt very much right to be able to move that fast in a game that ends so fast. So from there came the major design choice that every aspect of the game was based on: This game needs to be fast. When I got the combat working, I made it insanely fast. I added a very slight delay to the damage so that the timing is just awkward enough to make the game very difficult without making it impossible to time. I then made it so that once you punch, you can’t punch again for 1.5 seconds. I feel that this makes the combat very stressful because if you miss, you’re basically screwed. So button-mashing is about as effective as trying to kill your enemies Mario-style. Next I worked on the enemy AI and made the enemies follow a simple but very fast-paced movement pattern. Basically, they run towards you, attempt to punch you, and if they miss, run away until the can punch you again, at which point they run back towards you. From the very first time I succeeded in killing an enemy, I felt giddy with excitement and couldn’t stop giggling at how great the combat felt.

From there I implemented the saving, the timer, and some other minor mechanics to flesh out the gameplay before I delved into level design. I added some small tutorial texts and followed the course of my dominant design choice by making the text stunted and feel like it’s supposed to be read really quickly, like in FEZ. I carefully looked over every piece of text I added and removed every unnecessary syllable.

I finally got to level design at the very end of the first day. I was planning on making it a very short game that ended in the generic “Your princess is in another castle!”, but I decided to keep adding levels until I ran out of ideas to make them feel variated enough from eachother. I ended with three, and decided to change the ending to slightly less used used satirical joke (Play to find out what it is 😉 ). I made every level just in text form editing the tile array directly and then testing it out in game, and it worked well enough. I got the levels done fairly quickly.

I went to sleep after finishing the levels and woke up with the idea to add the ray-traced shadows. The fact that you could see the enemies through walls ruined the suspense a bit. After fighting the evil forces of frame-rate drops for a few hours, I ended up with a result that worked, but was a bit ugly and I wasn’t entirely happy with.

After doing that, I realized belatedly that I had no sounds or music whatsoever, and the competition was going to end in less than 4 hours. I hurriedly put together some foley sound effects and then jumped into FL Studio to try to make an 8 bit theme that felt fast-paced.

That failed miserably.

I wasted an hour and a half trying to make the 8 bit theme sound good before I switched off to working with a drum loop and within half an hour it sounded pretty dang good, in my egotistical opinion. I added the beam last based on a dream I had whilst sleeping the night previous, and got that as well as the church organ piece (Just major 3rds and a Dracula-esque down-step) in about twenty minutes. Last thing I needed to was set up the HTML page and embed the flash element within. Two problems were realized at this stage when I had only 45 or so minutes ’till deadline: I completely forgot how HTML works, and I had no website to host it on.

The first problem was quickly solved through the might of Google, and I made a simple HTML page that embedded the .swf in record time. The second problem was a bit more of a challenge, but I called up a friend and he was nice enough to give me access to his ftp server for his website (It’s a fantastic website, check it out: jimmymack.org/world.html), and I solved issue number two in time to meet the deadline. Looking up at the clock I realized that I had made the deadline with less than 5 minutes left.

And so, after the stress that had enveloped me for the past two days, I did the only thing a man can do when faced with so much relief.

No, you pervert, not that.

I ate a bunch of fudgesicles. Seven of them, to be precise.

And that’s the story of This Game Will Self Destruct in 10 Seconds. Big thanks to Skyrim for the idea and Jimmy for allowing my game to be uploaded to his site. I’m gonna go take a shower.

Tags: final post mortem

Based on the feedback from the ludum dare entry I have made several updates to Forest Edge available on GameJolt:

+More Challenging Combat

+Forest Wrapping

+Better collision on win marker!

+Clearer Start Screen Text

+Bug Fixes on Victory Screen

+Improved Transitions on Trees

The ludumdare link obviously remains the same for the sake of the compo but please rate and comment the feedback so far has been very useful!

Rate and Comment

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=13718

Game Jolt Updated v1.0.0.5 Release

http://gamejolt.com/games/action/forest-edge/17196/

A little late to post it, but here’s the timelapse for Triad. 35 hours of work compressed into 3.5 minutes.

Tags: time lapse, timelapse

Just finished rendering and uploading the timelapse video of Apotheosis.
One important thing I’ve learned: It is really cumbersome to use twitch livestream data for a timelapse video. It is not a replacement for chronolapse. 😛
Well, here it is, in all its unreadable glory:

For some context, the gameplay video:

And the entry page, of course 😉

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=11939

Tags: timelapse

FSCK!!

Hey there just wanted to let everyone know I have updated my game so it is fully cross platform to run on Windows and Mac. I also have put up a gameplay video AND the source code!

Everyone enjoy my game FSCK!

Download here!

Hey guys, I made a short video talking about how we made levels in Chronodrive. Check it out!

Play Chronodrive

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Ya0BO53wro

This is my first video, an update video. Im saying this because, i have a dev channel too!

http://www.youtube.com/user/AceCreatesGames

Play it here
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=13139

It’s a few days after the jam is over and I’m still motivated to work on this game. This is a really good sign.

How it came to be

When I found out that the theme was “10 seconds” I was in the midst of a nice long walk, checking Twitter idly. I spent a while going through possibilities, particularly the pun idea of “10 secondaries” that has appeared a few times in other entries. But the idea of an online game where you only had 10 seconds to play was intriguing, especially when I added the idea of waiting in a line to do it. Enforced waiting is actually a big part of most sports, not just for logistical reasons, but because it sets the pace of the game. Even sports that are implicitly “always on” like soccer and basketball have defined time segments and will further break those up following goals or penalties. And when you wait and watch specific players, you can build some empathy for them. Multiplayer games where you’re just continuously fighting your own battle don’t build that kind of connection.

Simultaneously I had some interaction mechanics waiting around to be used – a challenging, high-momentum, low-friction 2D plane where collisions cause death. I had first used these over a decade ago in a long-forgotten jam entry called “Spaceboard,” which was a simple time trial racing game with lots of deadly obstacles. That game proved to be very addictive, and recently I had started playing the Mario series again and realized that the Mario games were satisfying in part because the controls were made to be this way too – at first, a bit too slippery and frustrating, but rewardingly difficult, when played at a high level.

With the Mario games in mind, I remade the Spaceboard mechanics and had a prototype sitting around with a character that could maneuver very rapidly, but needed precise control when braking to avoid overshoot. And so I combined the two ideas of a player queue and the challenging movement prototype, and then added taking a token to the goal(ball? coin? still not sure myself) and planting mines so that there was indirect interaction and a changing landscape. Mines were a major obstacle in Spaceboard – although in that game many of them had the ability to chase you.

Finally, I had usable technology sitting around since I had remade Heartbreaker, my entry for LD21, as a generalized rapid-prototyping multiplayer system with some ability to adapt to other games, handling details like the connect process, rooms, etc. while allowing each room to focus on the gameplay-specific protocol using Haxe serialization as the transport(no fancy efficient binary here). As a result most of my time was just spent knocking out the Heartbreaker stuff and reworking it to the new gameplay – the player queue and one-player-at-a-time stuff being a cause for major reworks. I only did one late-night crunch, on my last “night” before it was due, when all the basic protocol and player queuing stuff was out of the way and the game started to come together.

How I’m getting players

Online multiplayer has a problem in that it’s hard to get a playerbase started. Fortunately I have a strategy that is addressing this for the purpose of current development, which is to schedule a session every day at the same time (7 PM Pacific) and then advertise it a little across multiple IRC channels and my Twitter as the time comes near – IRC is particularly great for this, especially when you go to channels with “gamer” types. I manage to get a few players every time, pretty consistently. At least half of the players drop out really quickly after being frustrated by the controls, but the ones that stay tend to get very addicted.

The open question is whether I can sustain this and turn it into a percentage growth. As they say, nothing lasts forever, but I think I have a good chance to build a community here, especially since there’s a lot of stuff that is just begging to be tried out. The opposite was a difficulty I ran into with Heartbreaker, where it wasn’t clear where to take what I had already made, so I let it go.

What’s next

Mostly simple stuff! Little improvements to the instructions and indicators. There are bigger change ideas but they aren’t the most important things right now.

10×10 entry page

As Ludum Dare 27 has drawn to a close, I’ve been busy rating and reviewing as many games as possible. As always, the community’s output has exceeded my expectations—I’ve played through 100 games thus far, but over 2000 remain.

Unfortunately, I’ve found that a lot of the games that I’ve played thus far lack a certain polish, at least in the gameplay department—perhaps an unavoidable result, considering the rather stringent “10 second” theme that governed this LD challenge. Many of the games feel as though production was rushed. However, there’s been some truly stunning work in the visual department, as three of my favorite games (listed below) amply display. I advise you to personally check them out, but if you need convincing, here’s a few words of praise:

“Step Out”

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=24347

A very relaxing puzzle platformer, “Step Out” features gorgeous environments that mesh well with the bell-like tones of the sound effects. The otherworldly ambience is particularly suited to the game’s core mechanic, which is a 10 second “astral mode” in which your character steps out of his body to interact with the environment around him. Furthermore, the platforming mechanics were solid, leading me to conclude that the creators both cleverly and competently incorporated the challenge theme in “Step Out.”

“Loopy Lumberjack”

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=7580

Three qualities especially stood out to me in “Loopy Lumberjack:” the visuals, the music, and (by far my favorite component) the humor. It’s difficult to create a game where “the funnies,” “the arts,” and “the sounds” all come together to blend into a seamless whole, but the creators of “Loopy Lumberjack” managed just that. The only criticism I can offer is that the gameplay was not particularly complex, in that it mostly consisted of button smashing. Nonetheless, the game is fun—almost to the point of being addicting, when factoring in the leaderboard. What pushes this game past the “almost” in addicting is the dance mode—definitely check it out at some point, but I’d caution those of you with school, work, or “real people responsibilities” to wait until the weekend to do so.

“Mebby”

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=2958

Speaking of addicting, here’s another game to add to the list—“Mebby,” a schmup that’s a LD equivalent of drugs, chocolate, or both. Again, the game’s humorous elements were one of the reasons I enjoyed the game, along with the great sound effects and visuals. There were plenty of cool (and laughable, but in a good way, I promise!) units and weapons, such as the dubstep emitter, and my own personal favorite, the toilet. Like the previous two games, this is one of those games that are best played rather than talked about—so what are you waiting for? Get to it!

….. and of course I have to plug my own game!

“Keg Quest”

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=20961

Written by: Emily Hosokawa

This won’t be the end of There’s a hook, hopefully it will get launched on desura in a few months. There was loads of feature I wanted to add but left too late, I explain below

Software used:

programming: C#/xna (visual studio 2010)

graphics: Gimp

music: abundant-music.com

Day 1

So I live in gmt +0 so uk time but i live in Ireland. I sayed up until 2am to see the theme and then couldn’t sleep until 6am because my sleep pattern was messed up. I then had to get up at 9am with only 3 hours sleep and milk cows, then off to see my brother do a triathlon. He did 750m swim, 10km cycle and 5km run in 79mins and came 10th overall (fast). So I had to start ludum dare 14hrs late (4pm). I wanted to do a platformer because i had never made one before. So i build a working tile engine in  about 5 hours and had to milk cows in between. This day was getting tough. I thought a 2D platformer was kind of boring and i had no idea how i would implement my theme. So i decided to have a 3D looking tile. Shown below was my first prototype compared to my final one.,and the last one is what I’m working on atm to make it look fancier in the final version. I also spent ages making a funny looking character and a good walk cycle. The level art was inspired by 80’s retro futurism. I ended my night at 6am

Day 2

Got up at 9am again to milk cows. Still the gameplay seemed boring nothing could kill me so i had to add spikes and falling off the map and for a in game reward I also added coins. I wanted to add moving tiles, boy was this a bit of a challenge. it took me far too long to get this. The problem I had was when a tile changed direction that it would display in front or behind other tiles. I got it working enough to be happy with. A couple of thing that aren’t perfect say if 2 moving tiles collide the layers of display don’t work correctly, so i had to leave that out. During the day i came up with the idea to implement the theme. I would have a random event every 10 second that would either make the game harder or easier. I had used a matrix transform camera so it was easy for my to change the camera in game and used this for half of the random events. I noticed i only had 1 hours left and I only had 2 random events working and no levels designed.  At the last few minutes i started panic as i got 2 bugs one fairly major and where the player and camera would started to shake. I then just said i would enter the jam. Went to sleep at about 3am.

Day 3

I got up at 4am, a well needed rest. I was planning on polishing my art work but never got around most of it, i got a nice new hud and overlay messages (enlarge image above). I also made a nice menu and title screen. So in the last 4hrs left or so left i designed 10 levels, added music sounds, the ability to double jump and a new jump animation. Designing the levels were a piece of cake all i had to do was edit a text file. It took me longer to beat the levels than actually make them 😛 . Submitted it 10mins early and only just about. I came up with a name in literally 2mins and i thought it fitted perfect as coincidentally i had my character have one hand as a hook.  (Gameplay in link below)

Gameplay of There’s A Hook

Feedback

The biggest thing that almost everyone commented about was the camera turning upside down as one of the random event. It made it too hard. There was a small problem with the random events. They are supposed to last 10-30secs. When a event would be set to inactive it still had a good change it would be picked in succession so it would continue for longer. Also there was only 4 different events and only 1 that made the game easier. I think it was penalizing players too much for being bad at the game by constantly making it harder. I will take all this into account when making the full game. Please have a look and rate of my game it would be really appreciated.

Ther’es A Hook ludum dare entry

Yeah! Before I go to work… Here is the link for the web browser version for you all.

Link

I’ve started working on a post competition version of my game 10 second burn. If you want to play the latest version as I update it, the link is here:
http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/12021906/

Issues addressed in the new version:
* now easier to land
* sound effect volume reduced
* you can no longer crash into the warning messages

My plans for additional updates are:
* extra levels
* online high score table
* high score initials entry system

Additional levels will be based around geological features of the moon and maybe some fun ones too.

There’s a Show HN to pool the games made by fellow HNers. I’d be very interested in seeing what the community has been up to at Ludum Dare 27

> Show HN: The Ludum Dare 27 Entries of HNers

Woah. I found 3 let’s plays of our game on YouTube.

• IAmJ3richoholic Plays: Kamil The Kat – “PICKLES ARE IMPORTANT! (by IAmJ3richoholic)
• PICKLESSS – The Unbelievable Adventures of Kamil the Cat (w/download!) (by 90sgamergirl)
• The Unbelievable Adventures of Kamil the Cat (by NightPhoenix)

Awesome :3 Thank you guys!

N0_Named_Guy has been doing live reviews of games for people on his Twitch channel. He did one of mine, which was awesome. If you want to see it, it’s right here. My game wasn’t as understandable as I thought. Not terrible, but could definitely have been better.

Last weekend, I made a game. This game was called 10 Parsecs. (Because a parsec is the parallax of one arcsecond).

This was my third time entering the compo. The first two times I did “kinda okay”. This time, I’ve decided, was a rousing success. At the time of writing,  I’ve had three requests for a post-compo version and one piece of fanart from this guy (which would imply that I also have a fan). This is quite clearly awesome.

Musings:

This was the first time using Unity for the Ludum Dare. I already knew it quite well thanks to a super secret ongoing project I’ve been working on, and because of Quill18’s tutorials. I didn’t write any of my scripts in Boo even though I’m one of like seven people who even know what that is. I would like to see Io added as a scripting language in Unity, just to see how it would work.

I used blended for what little 3D modelling I did. I’ve never been good at Blender. I don’t think I’ll ever be any good at blender. It just intimidates me so. Yet, I managed to produce a somewhat acceptable spaceship model.

I used paint.NET for my images, because photoshop is a rediculous price and I’m vemhently against piracy. I used a method I invented for creating cool looking images, in which I create some pixel art and then scale it up bicubically. This doesn’t work for many things, but it does make really cool looking fire.

Finally, and I think this is kind of cool, one of the fonts I used in my game was made by Tom7, who has also entered the compo.

Regrets:

Due to time constraints, there was no sound whatsoever in my game. Clearly, something to rectify in the Post-Compo release.

You start to lose control over your ship after going through a black hole or collecting an orb. This gets progressively worse as you continue. I know exactly what causes this and will fix it post-compo.

The code is full of hacks (Due to a problem with the rotation of my models after importing them from Blender, I had to use “transform.right * -1” in place of “transform.forward”).

Even though this was my first “full” game with polygonal graphics, I did not manage to include the phrase “Strong Bad is on point”.

I had a great time rushing like a headless chicken to get things done. It’s great to have another game jam under my belt. I love all the feedback I’ve received on 10 Seconds in Hell, and seeing players’ reactions go above and beyond what I was hoping for.

It feels amazing to craft an experience in this short a timeframe that really impacts people on an emotional level. So much for needing millions of tris to get feelings out of gamers!

Thank you all! <3

[Update: I wrote a spoilerific post-mortem, which you can read here.]

Hello everyone!

So I’m super-thrilled that people have been getting in to Total Spaghettification, a lot of people have ‘clicked’ with the mechanics and have been perfecting their runs through the game.

There’s one point of contention that is proving to be an annoyance to people, and that’s arguably the most important part of any game: the controls!

Why are they so weird? Well:

I knew early on I wanted to strip the game controls down to a minimum. Canabalt + Nikujin was the base equation, and I wanted to experiment with not having the usual directional controls. I liked the idea in my head of the lil’ guy just charging around like a Lemming until exploding, and I felt that if you were flowing well enough in the game, just bouncing off walls like a pinball would be enough!

So as I started to put together the movement controls I went with an ‘A’ button to jump and wall-slide, ‘B’ button to floor-slide and dismount from walls. I developed most of the game like this, and got used to the way they worked.

Late on Sunday, I showed it to my partner and quickly found out that the controls were a useless mess, with no flow or form, and only served to make a frustrating game more difficult. Whoops.

So I spent a few hours furiously re-writing the movement logic, and settled on the ass-backwards way that it currently plays – different keys for jumping in different contexts. It was the only way I could get the game to feel like it was flowing again, as doing a succession of wall jumps was just impossible with the jump/wall-jump being on the same key!

I thought it was a fair compromise – if you managed to get to grips with the controls it would be rewarding, but there was a huge danger that I was asking players to get used to an unnatural control scheme, on top of being pressured by the time limit and fall damage. It’s like saying “Hey, I know you’ve got a bus to catch, but would you mind filling in this survey? Also we’re standing next to a wasp’s nest.”

This might have worked out better had I had time to implement a proper tutorial. In fact, this all served to highlight some major flaws in my development skills – how to best teach the player how the mechanics work in a way that is fun and compelling. I just banged in a practice level with no time limit to try and address the problem, which again was a compromise as time was running out, but it probably wasn’t enough overall to address the issue.

All of this is a perfect storm in the kind of environment were people don’t really have time to learn a whole wacky set of controls when going through and rating 100s of games. And not making the controls intuitive enough is a failing on my part, and a lesson for me to take away from this!

A non-usual mind-warping game starring Carl Sagan.

I’ve done a few Ludum Dareses now, and I have one rule in my brain for getting a game done in time: Don’t try and do something you haven’t done before. You waste far too much time troubleshooting and learning, and not enough time polishing and tweaking. But alas, when the theme was announced I knew I had to break this rule. I knew I had to figure out how to write a raycaster.

The reason was simple: Before the comp I complained about the theme “10 seconds” on IRC. I posited that it too-heavily implied a core mechanic – and avoiding this implication would only lead to novelty or quirky entries. Determined to come up with something different I formulated a plan; a plan that involved fractals, and crazy colourful graphics, and Carl Sagan. A plan that would eventually become Time Flies Straight: a novelty, quirky entry. Ah well.

The post-mortem

The game ended up pretty close to what I had in my head, which I’m really happy about. I had hoped to add some bad guys to stalk you through the labyrinth, And I planned for the little green guys and the related “happiness” and “wellbeing” level to actually mean something – but I had to scale things way back, having wasted so much time trying to do something I hadn’t done before: write a raycaster.

I had written the actually “ray raycasting” part for my last LD game and I thought the rendering part would be easy, especially thanks to this article which I was following closely. Alas, it took me much of Saturday to get a satisfactory texture mapping algorithm working.

After this hiccup, things went much more smoothly. The crazy wobbly time effect was nice and I had made some cool sounds to accompany it. The sounds were supposed to be chopped up and the various arpeggio speeds would relate to your depth into the maze – but, thanks to the time I lost on Saturday – it ended up as a straight looping mp3. Still, the randomness of it is kind of nice… suddenly, for no reason, things start speeding up and lends a strange air of expectation.

I had to work right up to the deadline – and was exhausted by the end. It was a bad time to be trying to do “level design”, especially when I was working with a massive 2D array directly in my text editor. The sea of integers pulsating and wobbling in my brain – made worse from having to playtest the results. It was an odd few hours.

Overall, I’m really happy with the result. I actually made a game that I had in my head – a game that has a “feeling” to it. I’m not going to work on it anymore after the comp… I think it’s just a nice experience more than a game. Now I can’t wait for LD28!

Hijack Humans Hastily was my compo entry for Ludum Dare #27 under the theme “10 seconds”. It was a game developed in pure ActionScript 3 (using Adobe AIR), with the OUYA as its main target but with a web version available (given the platform). Here’s a short gameplay video:

Here’s the mandatory post-mortem, with a few development snapshots scattered around the article.

First physics bodies

What went right

Reusing stuff I already knew about

In my previous Ludum Dare entries, I’ve rarely re-used many systems. I like to build my own stuff. In fact, so far I’ve refused to use full-fledged engines, and while I’ve used Unity previously, it was mostly an excuse to force myself to get acquainted with it.

Particles for thrusters

This time around, I had decided ahead of time that I would be using AS3 and a couple of frameworks for certain features (Nape for physics, Starling for GPU graphics). I had no engine, per se, but I complemented those by developing several additional libraries for game controller input, game looping, and physics level data loading (most of which are open-source and posted on my blog). I was certain I’d spend more time working on a game, rather than working on systems for a game (which, as fun as it is in itself, doesn’t make a good Ludum Dare entry).

Using image assets

The strategy worked pretty well. While I still had to use a pretty amount of time getting basic stuff working (due to my lack of knowledge of some Nape features, for example), I felt I was actually building a game earlier than on my previous entries.

More particles

Art was straightforward

I loved doing the art for the game, even though I hadn’t been drawing in a while. While a bit was dropped and unused (specially background art), I think the simple aesthetic I reached was pretty flawless even if it wasn’t brilliant.

Image assets being added

What went wrong

The idea

Getting a game idea is always the hardest part for me, specially under pressure. I spent the whole first semi-day of the compo (Friday) doing nothing other than dicking around online, or reading, just because I couldn’t figure out an idea. The idea Saturday morning – of a flying UFO capturing humans – was a mechanic I’ve been thinking of for a while, but to be honest I didn’t have the gameplay challenge or the relation to theme figured out for a while.

Making the UFO landable

Features were dropped (surprise)

While I tried having a smaller scope, some features were dropped out of the game. There’s only one level, for example, and while it’s randomized and it’s all based in easily configurable parameters (size, assets, etc), I never had the time to add actual level progression and assets for more levels. The current level used (city-ish) is a mix of my two initial levels ideas, park and city.

Adding human targets and background art

Worst of all, I couldn’t even begin to implement the enemy A.I. In the best Choplifter fashion, the second level of the games was supposed to game enemy tanks that would shoot at you. They would not do any damage, but their projectiles would throw you out of balance and make control a bit more difficult.

Making humans capturable

Not enough time for bug testing/QA

While I didn’t run into any huge problem, my entry still had some issues I had no time to test. Those include some bugs related to web playback (losing 3D context when switching between fullscreen, for example), and some OUYA pitfalls I wasn’t aware of (having the game suspended by the system puts it in an unplayable state when restored). Those are things that are likely easily fixable, but were noticed too late.

Adding building obstacles

Conclusion

I think this was probably my most well-rounded Ludum Dare entry so far. I’m pretty happy with how it turned out, and I spent plenty of time watching my own time-lapse video of the development process. It’s great seeing it slowly transform before your eyes.

Still, the relative smoothness of this Ludum Dare made me realize something. Ludum Dare is a lot more about the content, and I’m not sure I’m very happy with it.

Because of the limited time, it’s better to have a great idea, create a lot of content and gameplay, and test it out until you have something fun. Some of the compo and jam entries I’ve tested were really fun to play, more than just being an interesting concept that could become a game.

In my mind, I like to use Ludum Dares to explore new mechanics – mostly in the form of new code – and almost as an excuse for learning something. And to be sure, I’ve done a lot of that; all Ludum Dares have been a great experience, even the ones where I didn’t have anything very playable in the end. I learned a lot in a short period of time.

Still, having to be forced to spend more time with content and gameplay is something bums me out. Having to ignore bugs unless they’re showstopping, and having to get things to work fast (as opposed to right) is something that, over time, I’ve almost forgot how to do. Nowadays, I like to get a cool system to work as a stepping stone. In a way, it’s almost as if gameplay is secondary to that (in that it comes after that, not that it isn’t important).

Something else made me realize that. Over the past few months, I’ve been slowly developing a game prototype on my free time. It makes me really, really happy. I take my time to get some things right – be it gameplay, animation, or lower-level systems – and it’s very rewarding. I do one thing at a time. Putting a pause in developing that to do Ludum Dare #27 was good in technical terms – I ended up learning several features I plan on adding to my game, such as ray casting in Nape – but I also realized I wanted to get some things right rather than just getting them done. For example, my starling shape utility classes – to transform imported Flash Sprites and MovieClip into Starling textures – is a mess. It works, but there’s a lot of edge cases where it doesn’t work as intended, or where there’s a lot of redundant code. And I’ve used it in 3 projects already, with no actual time for refactoring them and making them elegant.

I know the usual solution for Ludum Dares it to use an engine. Some might say I should have used Flashpunk, Citrus, or any other engine. And they would be right. But the reality is that it wouldn’t have been as much fun for me. As weird as it sounds, to me, Ludum Dare is an excuse to write something from the ground up. Not just to get something done, but to appreciate the journey of development. And I’m sure that, for many people, seeing something done is what motivates them over everything else. It surely motivates me. But I’m starting to realize that I care too much about getting systems right. Maybe it’s an annoying developer thing. My own professional work is always done on tight deadlines, make no mistake, but over time I’ve learned to balance it all and use time well to get something that’s mostly right from the get go. It normally means a better, more stable project in the long run.

I’m very grateful for everything I’ve done and learned. Ludum Dare is an awesome idea. But I’m not sure what I’ll do with the next Ludum Dares. I might do them, but maybe as part of a team, or maybe without submitting anything. I may use it as an excuse to build a “demo” of a system – e.g. my game controller classes, which need a few additional features – rather than an actual game to be played. We’ll see.

Tags: as3, LD27, post-mortem, postmortem

The hyper-advanced V229 prototype battle pod now features an enhanced man/machine interface,  allowing remote pilots to control the vehicle from the safety of their web browsers.

ALERT! ALERT!

V229 power consumption is already beyond 5000% safety threshold.

Use of this module is not OH MY GOD WE’RE UNDER ATTACK~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=21279

—–

Ahem.

Forgive the delay getting the web build up guys, real life’s been pretty flat-out since the Jam.

Have fun, let me know what you think!

Uh… Yeah. I don’t really get this formula. Seems like a rather simple subtraction, but still…I’m not sure, if I’m *supposed* to play and rate as many games as possible, or if I rather aim to have more votes on my game than I vote others… There’s something in the legend about a “loser” badge, if you are trying to reach a high coolness rating ( = rate a lot of games by him/herself?) Is “coolness” a bad thing? I mean I played a lot of games, voted approximately for 20 others (as suggested by the LD website) and now, I’m not really sure… am I supposed to vote or not?

As I understood it so far, you shouldn’t vote for others too much, if you don’t have many votes on your own submission. Reason: Submitting 1 star on every other game to downvote these? I would never ever do that, it’s just that while I love playing a lot of games and submitting comments and/or ratings, I don’t want to “hurt” my own ranking, but I don’t want to not rate others at all, since they need a certain count of votes in order to even be taken into account anyway.

I know that there’s another post about this topic, but I still don’t understand. IF the coolness thing is good, then a low default score would make sense, but then what is that “L” thing all about? And if coolness is a bad thing, why would people vote at all?

Thanks in advance!

26.6 hours squeezed into 10mins. happy with the feedback on the game so far.

http://youtu.be/hJ7bpjFbZ1U

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=19384

First off, I want to say thanks to everyone who has made this my best Ludum Dare experience to date. Shuutshimi has been very well-received thus far and I was even able to learn a couple things post-jam from it. I mentioned earlier that I was considering skipping this one due to other priorities getting in the way of the 72-hour jam, but it was those interruptions that forced us to think smaller and more reasonably than we otherwise would. We had less than 48 hours all-told due to weekend and work commitments which shaped the way we developed the game, and it was a lesson that we – and I feel, myself in particular – desperately needed to learn.

What Went Right

Practically EVERYTHING went right. I know that’s going to kill the suspense of the remainder of the article, but it’s true – once the competition kicked off, Wanyo (artist) and I (coder) threw some ideas back and forth for a while. Once we had a list of ideas, we picked a genre for the game, discussed variants on that genre, and picked whatever would be easiest to develop. From there we culled the list of elements to what was relevant to our game, and then culled the list further on perceived ROI until we had a manageable list. Then we went to work. Once Any Yes (audio) showed up, we gave him a quick explanation, and we were all set to work.

The Coding

In the past I felt my coding to be notoriously sloppy – sure, the end product works, but I tend to refactor my code a lot as my understanding of the requirements grows. I kind of plunge in head-first and fix my mistakes later, or as I go. But with Shuutshimi, apart from extremely minor things (eg making it a one-line change to add more hats into the game from the existing 3) I did just about no refactoring. I guess I’m learning from my mistakes!

The Drawing

I feel bad that we didn’t stream Wanyo’s screen/our development studio, because the visuals are the face of the game and often where our character designs are fleshed out. I find it interesting how our character designs begin and evolve, because they reflect the overall tone of the game which, in this case, was incredibly silly. One of the biggest time-sinks from our last Ludum Dare was the unreasonable amount of spriting involved in the main character – well over 70 sprites. That’s not very achievable in 72 hours, much less 48, especially when other graphics are required. The design of our Cute-Em-Up, however, demanded at most 8 frames of animation per object, allowing way more time for polish and additional assets. We had to cut one of the enemy characters from the jam unfortunately, but what made it into the game looks excellent, in my opinion.

The Composing

I didn’t even consider how Any Yes was going to react when he was greeted with the following words: “We need as many ten second songs as possible!” Any Yes would have to elaborate on his process here, as it’s not something I can really observe. I understand the basics of Famitracker: My own words on it are “You put numbers into the program and it makes beeps and boops based on those numbers” but beyond that – in addition to music theory and composition and all that – are pretty lost on me. I can make a passable stand-in for visuals, but what Any Yes does is beyond my understanding. The shop music was replaced partway through the jam with something a little catchier, and I’m way happier with the change. I didn’t like the first draft of the title theme at first, but it took very little time to grow on me, and once the title screen was in place with scrolling backgrounds, it felt so perfect which is why, when he suggested changing/modifying it further to something way more energetic, I was reluctant. I should just flat-out trust what he’s doing because, as those of you who’ve played the game would agree – what made it into the final product is fantastic.

Hey, I’m allowed to think the game’s soundtrack is awesome, I had nothing to do with it!

What Went Wrong

No screenshots in the Post Mortem (this). I’m at work and supposed to be working, so I’m making this as quick as I can.

The fourth enemy got cut from the game due to graphical time restraints.

The bubble background was originally supposed to move to the left as well, but also bubble upwards. At first the plan was randomly generated, individual bubbles, but time and complexity got in the way. Not enough ROI.

The backgrounds in general were supposed to have their own scrolling rates to give a parallax effect but again, time restraints. In retrospect it’d be really easy to do, but we didn’t have the time.

The 10-second tracks. They’re great, I just wish there were more of them. In a 20 or 30 round game, you’re guaranteed to hear a lot of repeats.

Clarity. We thought it would be interesting to make the upgrades a “learn what they do post-acquisition” thing, which worked great for the most part, but there’s a decent amount of depth to it and a lot of subtle things going on in the background that I don’t expect anyone to know about unless they read the Sourceshimi. Also, the “Press X(B) to go back” style of displaying controls is probably confusing. (B) meant B on the XBox360 controller (the brackets are like, ROUND BUTTON) but I doubt that was clear.

Overall Impressions

Definitely my best Ludum Dare, and I’m sure my teammates agree. Learned a lot, FINISHED A GAME (though we’re still doing post-jam content updates), felt really good about my code, and delighted to see it so well-received that people are writing articles about it. This has been a hell of a learning experience, and an even heller of a motivational drive to keep doing that thing I love doing.

Making games.

(And…scene)

In case my game left you confused and frustrated but still curious, I have added a little video guide.

Also, some technical fixes have been made in the meantime.

Check it out.

Where I got the Idea from:

Mainly I got the Idea from my self after waking up at around 5:30 AM to brainstorm some Ideas. I then Got up at 7:45 to have breakfast and Set up the enviroment. I got the Princess From Mario. The Gameplay from Minicraft(Made by Notch, He made Minecraft!).

Things that went Well:

I managed Time effectively and to the best I could.
Code as it Was well Commented and easy to understand for other programmers.

Things that Sucked….Badly…

Graphics(Completely sucked in many ways…)
Sound… Sounded “Scratchy…” if you know what I mean.

Thanks to all the people for there awesome comments… 😛 thanks for the things I needed to improve on and the things I did well I hope you all enjoyed ludum dare have a great day!!!! 😛 😛 😛

That was One hell of a Ludum hey guys!!!

😛

-James

We’ve added a walk-through video to our entry, as a few of you were getting stuck with puzzles in StepOut. And here’s a gif byproduct of the video.

And if you haven’t yet…

go and play StepOut

Hello guys!

We’re glad to say that we’re now on Google Play with both Precious10 and Precious10 Unleashed (the version we did during postmortem phase).

Precious10 on Google Play

Precious10 Unleashed on Google Play

Regards,

Victor

Hi LD,

Since some people were confused about how to play my game Adventure Company, I did a video gameplay of myself playing and explaining what is going on.

Hope you like it!

~Mark

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=27070

Our team did it, we finished our first game in time, unfortunatelly the control are really messed up, mainly because of the collision system we created, and the flash events that didn’t worked as we expected them to work =/

Developing for this Jam was really fun, mainly because our team had a lot of fun while developing the game and the traps.

The result was not as we expected, but here is what we learned:

• Next time, we will choose the framework a few days earlier than the Jam.
• Next time we will develop the game in a framework that we’ve already worked before (Really important! Lol)
• Less Facebook, more coding/drawing.
• Pizza party!

You can see the game here. Play and have some fun

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=27070

Thanks!!

PS: Heeey

We also recorded a video winning the game, because some of our friend said it was impossible.

Watch only after playing, ok?

Here it is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcyh6fuYcHY

PLAY THE GAME HERE (Thanks!)

Hey all,
this was our 6th Ludum Dare. We almost did not make it this time. Not because we run out of time but because we said that we would not enter this time around due to some other commitments from the team members. However I (Dals) could not stand that our stream would break for a silly thing so I decided to make a small but simple game. We last all Saturday because of this but we actually had time to put like 6-7 hours into a small game in the end. On the sunday I was joined by my friend who helped out with the programming and gameplay.

What went right:

We knew that we had lost a whole day and because of that we made sure that we aimed on a game with a scope so small that we would finish it relativly fast. We stuck to this and that was very important for the success for this project.

Another thing that went right was the use of tools. We were not able to get togheter this time around so Skype and git really saved a lot of problems for us. Git is super great when you learn to use it and this time we really knew how to. We also used Java as a programming language wich we are most comfortable in. The new thing for this Ludum Dare was that we used the awesome LibGDX framework as the backbone of our project. In the weeks before Ludum Dare I had explored GDX and made a small API for it called Simple. That made the development of this small game even faster and it was blazingly fun.

Basically we knew our tech and made clear and structured goals. We also did not have time to suffer from feature creep which was great in the sense that we finished it.

What went wrong:

Apart from not being able to join in from the beginning almost nothing went wrong.
So well all that went wrong was that we did not have time to attend the whole event.

Conclusion:

Ludum Dare is a great way to make games and give out to your creativity. I was very happy with theme 10 seconds, as soon as I saw it in the last round I basically knew that it would win. I had lots of ideas for it but when it turned out that we were not able to attend the whole event I scrapt all of them but when I got a little time to spare I sat down and made the most simple game that come to my mind.

This time around we did not have so much time but we actually made a game anyway. Maybe our most polished and complete game as of what it is. We are proud of what we did and we are already looking forward to the next Ludum Dare when we can join in for the full event.

Cheers guys,
~Dals with team!

DalsGames was this time around:
-David ‘Dals’ Skeppstedt
-Andreas Brommund

PLAY THE GAME HERE (Thanks!)

Tags: dalsgames, jam, LD27, Space-Time

I saw that several people have made “post-mortem” summarizes about LD#27, so I also so it. I’m not the kind of person who follow others like sheeps, but community engagement is surely important – even though no one writes comments. 😀

The beginning

Theme was announced at 3:00 A.M. here. It’s kinda late. I took a smaller break before. When I returned I started checking #ld48 tagline on Twitter instantly – since IRC was a complete chaos for me.

Theme is “10 seconds”. Okay! I started planning and making some basic things immediately. Concept was ready for 3:30 A.M., then I started listening to the great Simcity 4 OST to get inspiration.

I stayed up all night, drawing and coding a bit. First issue: I couldn’t implement procedural “island” generating that would have been significantly important. Okay then, I started implementing a simplier procedural generation. That works but way too ugly.

Then I realised that adding enemies who are moving pixel by pixels are harder than I expected. Then I also realised that they should use projectiles, which would be another nightmare to do. It’s 11:00 A.M. and I’m helluva tired.

The born of Hackfield

Going to sleep for a while. Woke up at 2:00 P.M., and felt myself full of energy! Yeah, I don’t consume much energy – yeah, I’m kinda passive and lazy. Anyway, one hour was enough for me to realise that I’m unable to finish the original plan. Went back to Twitter and pass the time away. Then, I enlightened! Simple game mechanics, based on hacking! I created 9 tiles immediately – it took less than 15 minutes and these tiles mean the whole playground.

Concept was created kinda early, so I started designing tile behaviours almost immediately! Procedural map generation was also kinda easy, but you may even notice it in the same, since it’s not a big stuff.

Main elements of HUD were also made around this time. Everything about behaviour were finished before 4:00 A.M. (the 25th hour of the competition) with some additional bugs and improper level generating.

The final 14

Woke of around 11:00 A.M. on the second day. Yeah, I slept a bit more. I fixed the behaviour of dynamic firewall, created the starting sequence, and created some bsic texts for the main menu. Until afternoon, I created the level generations tested all of them (except sclevel6, that is proven to be annoyingly hard and time-consuming since) for the last 8 hours, I had to create all the texts in the game, the behaviour of the main menu, the ending, and adding sounds.

And that’s where thing have really became a pain in the ass.

 Boredom & deadline

For midnight, I was ready with every texts and HUD elements in the game. Drawing elements that don’t look silly but also don’t take hours to create was a kinda annoying challange. You know, I get that we have only 48 hours, but it doesn’t mean that everywhere should we use Arial font, thrown to the edge of the playground! At least I think, and even Hackfield was made with this philosophy. Writing the story was a different problem. I loved imagining the whole thing, including history, received e-mails and Hackfield Daily articles – but after writing all of them (including the tutorial) my short-term brain cells were totally depleted. It makes me a bit stressful while that, which was proven to be critical after midnight.

When I was finished with everything, and I added intro triggering again, I realised that intro is triggered each time when you leave a level. Nothing, and by this, I mean NOTHING solved this problem. I was there at 2:00 A.M., one hour before the deadline with a game that has no sound effects, and constantly triggers its intro sequence.

For a final solution, I added a new timechecker variable, that was proven to be a right solution, but acts like a bulletproff metal plate connected by bubblegums on an armoured tank. (I fixed it after the deadline anyway) Finally, I added sounds and checked everything  could – with this fact, I was finished at 2:30 A.M. Then I created the .exe from the .love file, but sadly, I screwed it up 2 times. Because I’m dumb.

Fortunately, I could post the game at 2:45 A.M. with links, pics and the description. Small graphical- and bugfix was posted once since.

Overall

The game was created under ~26 hours, but it includes Facebooking, Twittering, etc. Pure coding would be around 20 hours, as I estimate. I was kinda slow, but I also proud of myself since I’ve never done game with so simple gameplay mechanics.

Including the random computer name generator (which is kinda silly, with combinations like “Gas station supercomputer”), source code of Hackfield is 222+24+281+122+294+696=1639 lines long, including embarraing amount of enters and empty lines to make it easier to read. Longest file is the one that contains ending sequnce, intro sequence, menu behaviour and all the displayed texts. Shortest one (after Lua config file) is the name generator, which contains 3 tables of possible words in the name. If they’d have been separated to a custom file, the name generating function may have been put to main.lua.

I got critics for:

– 1280×1024 fullscreen mode that didn’t work properly on some computers
– the not obvious tutorial and consequently the not obvious gameplay
– logblocks which behaviour is not clear
– the tiles which are too similar and hard to notice certain elements between them (it was kinda fixed)
– the difficulty of security level 6
(- I’m surprised that no one mentioned the weird name generator combos yet)

These critics were significant mostly for gameplay issues, and I learnt from them.

After all, I can say proudly that making Hackfield was a great experience! As I mentioned, I’m seriously proud of the final result and that I could participate to one of the biggest game making jams in the world!

Katamori

Tags: post-mortem

Count2Ten is a simple party game for 1 up to 6 players. The goal is to get the best estimate possible about how long do 10 second last.

Each player presses a key and keep it pressed until he/she believes ten seconds have passed. The player with the best guess wins.

While you are waiting for the ten seconds to pass, some distracting sounds are played (a broken metronome for instance).

As there is no game if players look at a watch or other supporting gizmos, they all swear that they won’t use it.

I just received a screenshot from a player of what it looks like as a major high score: 10.081 secs, better than I ever did in playtesting using a watch

Anti-Grav Drive is a game about flying a half-broken spaceship through a planetary system and trying to survive as long as possible. Your thrusters are down and your only method of influencing your movement is through a cobbled-together, overclocked anti-gravity drive which you can turn on and off at will. Along with the long range scanners and a ten-second prediction routine, you aim to slingshot the ship around the planetoids and keep on truckin’.

What went well

My main criteria for the game was that I’d be able to make it in “about 2 hours” and spend the rest of the time polishing. These two hours only really included the basic gameplay, but it meant that I had plenty of room for error and improvement. It ended up taking longer than 2 hours (perhaps 3 or 4), but this meant that I pretty much had something that I could submit very early on, should something disastrous happen.

What didn’t go so well

I over-obsessed on the visuals during the second day. In fact, half of the second day was spent on visuals that never made it to the final product. The green-on-black space horror sci-fi computer look was a fall-back option that I ended up defaulting to.

Overall, my time management was pretty atrocious too. While I had a working prototype after only a few hours, these few hours were after I’d been sitting in the pub all evening. Most of the first day was spent chillin’ out, maxin’, relaxin’ all cool. I think I was quite lucky that I could pull together the music and the game balancing during the last hours of the competition.

Lessons learned

Get it working. Gameplay is the most important part of a game (certainly for the games I like to make). Although I did get a prototype working quickly, I think spending even longer on getting the progression and balancing working from the off could be beneficial.

Set time limits. It’s pretty easy to write down some numbers for the things Wot Your Game Needs. If I’d done this and was half-way through the allotted time for visuals without anything usable, maybe I could’ve stopped myself earlier and had more time for audio and balancing. Adding up a total number of hours also might’ve motivated me to work more during the first day to spread the load.

Don’t worry about it! Yeah, I was pretty chilled throughout the competition. Even though I criticised myself for this and maybe I just got lucky with the idea, I think it came out pretty well without too much stress.

Tags: post-mortem, postmortem

Alright, so my entry, Chrono Escape, is about a scientist kidnapped by the government, and has to escape using his time machine prototype.

You can play it HERE.

The Bad

I’m starting with the things that went badly, and I’ll begin with the big one.

Programming.

The programming is an absolute mess. I used GameMaker8.1, which isn’t fast to begin with, but I also use horrible lazy and inefficient programming practices to create the elements I didn’t know how to make.

For example; the lighting system. For that, I used a while loop to determine the distance from you to the block directly in front of your mouse. Next, repeat this 7 more times for the blocks at angles -20, -15, -10, -5, 5, 10, 15, and 20. Each while loop takes a relatively large amount of CPU, so it’s no wonder that the game lags so badly with 3+ people with lighting on screen. After doing this, it draws triangles between all the points given, then subtracts them from the black square drawn over the entire screen.

But wait; there’s more. Besides being horribly inefficient, the lighting was also inaccurate.
It was only accurate up to 5 degrees, and became very dicey at far distances. Now, to calculate if the guard sees you, it does the same calculating as above, with 8 while loops. And if he’s far enough away, you can still technically be in his site, but he still won’t see you because you “fell between the lines”

Cutscenes

I did all the cutscenes in the last hour of work, and they were, in a word, bad.

I mean, they convey a story well enough, but they don’t really fit with the rest of the graphics, they’re sloppily drawn, and they’re inconsistent between each other.

I really could have done them better, but I don’t see how in that time frame.

The Alright…

Music

The game’s music was an ambient track I recorded live off my keyboard in one take. That is, by far, the easiest way for me to get music, but the ambient style didn’t really mesh with the high-strung style of the game. I wish I’d had enough time to make a proper techno track that really would have done the game justice.

Level Design

I feel the early levels were very good, actually. It seems like I did a good job of guiding beginnings through the first steps under a controlled, yet extremely hard, environment. However, if a player is good enough to get past the first 10 levels or so, they might begin to notice a slow change. After I’m finished introducing the player to everything, my level designs became more and more hacky. I’d just throw a level together, test it to make sure it was possible, then throw it in the game. I’m also disappointed because I don’t think I did the concept justice in terms of complex, paradox based levels that are so clever that you’re astounded for minutes after you beat it.

The Good

Concept

Seriously, this is one of the best concepts I’ve ever come up with in my 7 years as a game designer. It’s really deep with clever puzzles, elements, boss fights, and a whole lot of other wonderful things. I might well continue the game afterwards just because it’s so damn fun to work on.

Graphics

Again, some of the best pixel art I’ve ever made. I think this is one of the first times someone’s ever complimented my graphics, without referring to it as an “interesting” style or somesuch.

So there you have it. My own, overly critical, opinion. I hope I do well in this LD, but I’m not sure I made the game for it.

Ah well. Just don’t forget to play the game HERE!

This was my first time to participate in Ludum Dare and I’ve enjoyed it way more than I thought possible.

Firstly, the experience of making a game was in itself a lot more fun than I’d anticipated. I’ve only worked on games as a writer in the past so getting stuck into the coding and art as well was a daunting task. But I found it really satisfying to have complete control over the game’s direction, even if it quickly headed off on something of a tangent…

My first inspiration was the title (taken from the film ‘Gone in 60 Seconds’) and my  initial plan was to do something of a straight car-theft simulation with the player viewing the dashboard from inside the car and clicking on various elements to steal it. However, I was never entirely sold on this. For one thing, I just don’t like the idea of glamourising car-theft. For another thing, the idea of a ‘master car-thief’ is inherently ridiculous. So after I had a dream in which Nicolas Cage, reprising his role from the film just for me, jumped in through the sun-roof of a car, I knew what I had to do. The result was a much more whimsical and story-based game with a willful disregard for the realities of automotive crime:

Gone in 10 Seconds

I had no idea how it was going to be received but I’ve been really pleased with the feedback so far, especially concerning the dialogue. I’ve even had some nice comments about the C64 styled art. In all, very encouraging!

I’ve also found the process of rating other peoples’ games to be very useful. Just considering and verbalising what makes a game work (or not work)  for me as a player gives me a much clearer idea of what I should be thinking about when making my own games. I’m resolving from now on to give much fuller feedback in comments when I rate games, breaking down exactly what I did and didn’t like about the experience. Hopefully this will be useful for everyone involved.

Finally, a shout out to the game which has most impressed me so far: Bomb Disposer. This one blew me away (pun intended). It has great atmosphere and a really wonderful mechanic which makes the story an integral part of the game. I think that with a few extra gameplay elements and perhaps a more complex system for randomly generating sentences, it could be turned into an awesome full game along the same lines as ‘Papers, Please.’