This was my first Ludum Dare. And it was Awesome!

Big thanks to organizers and other developers!

My submission – Cubic Run.

People here mainly focus on web/desktop platforms, however I am mainly developer for Android and iOS. Only because Corona SDK has no desktop support publishing yet.
This led to people frustration about running it on Win and Mac. You have to install Corona SDK and then open my game with it.

Sorry for that! But it’s better than nothing. Plus I made a video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MALCLtG6ZtI

There was a little problem with music as well. I didn’t make the music, but I made an additional version with music included. I put links for this on my personal website away from my entry’s page.

For sure I will continue working on this game, I will add multiplayer, scoring and will release for iOS and Android.

Thanks to everybody who played and rated my game! I rate back if possible.

Normally I’m really concerned with optimization and processing time. I’ve read about static variables and function calls being slow in as3, with some pretty convincing tests (which I’ve never tried, but seemed reasonable).

But, this LD I didn’t want to waste time encapsulating stuff, creating a .xml file with all my constants and keeping references/constants in the proper place. I’ve simply made use of a “Registry” class which holds everything that need to be accessed elsewhere.I’ve also added some many groups, each with lot’s of objects, to simplify things when recycling/drawing. Well, I’ve just checked how long update and draw was taking and (surprisingly) update was 10 times slower than drawing! It should be the other way around!!

Now I’ll have to try to find all the slow parts and rewrite it… and that’s probably most of the code…

I’m working on a post compo version.  Until then you can check out Ten Seconds of Thrust on its LD48 page here

Also, earlier in the week I posted a few thoughts about my LD48 experience.  You can read them here.

I’ve seen and rated a lot of great games.

While rating I began to get curious.. how would I rate my own game?

So I did.

However, I am biased since I already understand the motive behind car-chase style physics vs asteroids-style physics. I am also fully aware of the infinite random nature of the game environment. I anticipate the subtle nature of these concepts might be less noticeable to the passive bystander. Guess that’s why we don’t self-rate!

Click Here to play & rate.

Final Moments is what I’ve decided to call the post-compo version of my LD27 entry, in lieu of the last-minute, very uncreative original title 10seconds. It was my first Ludum Dare, and I’m more or less pleased with the results. (Although seeing some of the truly awesome games other people have made has made me determined to do better next time!)

I wrote FM in C++, using a fairly minimal framework I’d thrown together in advance of the competition based on code from various other projects. I wrote a little bit about it in my initial post so I won’t repeat  any of that here.

Anyway, I doubt anyone will even read this, but for my own benefit at least, I’d like to get down some thoughts about what went well and what went…less well. After the break…

Good Ideas

• Working with familiar technology. Using C++/D3D11/FMOD may not have been the most efficient way to make a game (especially a very simple 2D game!) but it’s what I’m used to, and that familiarity helped a lot. I was able to get up and running very fast.
• The “art” style. I originally did the solid-colored rectangles as placeholders, but ended up liking the look, and decided to go with a really minimalist visual style. I’m no artist; whatever I might have replaced it with would probably have looked worse!
• Achievements. This was the real “aha!” moment in designing the game–I knew I wanted the basic ten-seconds-to-live element but wasn’t sure how to keep the player interested in multiple playthroughs. Then, I remembered how much I enjoyed this silliness, and it all clicked.
• The sound. There are only two sound effects in the game (the small meteor crash and the big meteor crash) but I spent quite a lot of time working on them to get them just right, and I’m pleased with how they came out.

Bad Ideas

• The font. It was one of the first things I chose, and although it’s a cool font, it doesn’t really fit the mood of the game, and can be a little hard to read (especially in smaller sizes).
• Windows-only, EXE. An unfortunate side effect of my development environment and framework. I might explore Flash or HTML5 development for future LDs. At least I managed to avoid requiring an installer or any prerequisites, with some last-minute research into which DLLs to include…
• C++11 features: I used lambdas very extensively to simplify certain things–timed events, for example. This was mostly really useful, but when it went wrong, it went very wrong. If you’re, say, low on sleep and in a major hurry, it’s very easy to accidentally capture something that won’t be around when the lambda gets executed, leading to some surprisingly hard-to-diagnose crashes.
• Caffeine. I may have overdone it a bit with the energy drinks. I was massively crashing by the time the deadline was approaching, and probably could have fixed a few more bugs if I wasn’t so desperate for a nap.

ALL RIGHT! Got around to rating my 100th game!

The 100th game that I rated is: hellish copter

I guess it’s about time for my Post-Mortem!
You can play and rate my entry here.

gettin rocks

What went right.

Pretty much nothing actually. I guess the only thing that went right, or the way I intended, was the sound and graphics. Nothing much else other than that.

What went wrong, or how this game came to be.

When I first started I was originally going to do some 2d cinematic type story game on time travel. Only took me about an hour to realize that would take a lot longer than 48 hours. So I sat and thought for a couple hours on what else I could do. I came up with the idea for a real time strategy. I thought about how it was so fun to see hoards of your troops gathering resources and attacking enemy units. I came up with the idea to make each unit last only ten seconds.

I immediately started on the graphics. I went for a simple style for all the units and buildings. I started working on programming the units and buildings. That is where I messed up.

I didn’t necessarily mess up in terms of glitchy code, I messed up in terms of making generic code. I tried so hard and took so much time making it easy to make units and houses from their base that I had four hours left to make the actual game play fit together. I decided that the most fun of the unit types to play by itself would be the villagers. So I pretty much chopped up and stuck together a lot of my code right at the end in order to get what I have now. The up side to all this is that I can now easily add to this game and improve it. So if you like what you see now, look forward to a bunch of improvements on the gamejolt version in the near future.

After I rate a bunch more games I’m gonna make a list of my favorites. I’ve been havin a ton of fun playing all these games so far.

100 games rated already,
here is a personal selection of games you should play if it’s not already done:

Compo

• Hallucivian by Hypnohustla
  
• Solitude by rxi
• Time Shifter by Split82
• Too Many Bullets by mklee
• Pleading Rain by Brassawiking

Jam

• Argentum Form by blackotus
• Hyper Furball by DDRKirby(ISQ)
• xhon by savethejets1
• Robots Save the Day by udo
• BeautyIsTheBeast by Valandre

Once again, decided to enter Ludum Dare just few days before the competition started.
To get ready, wrote one basic idea for each of the selected themes.
Unlike the previous LD26, this time i couldn’t spend all of my time working on the game due to some family meetings, so i had to change my initial plans slightly to make the game like a point & click, instead of a classic adventure game. My LD26 game was really longer, but im more happy with this LD game

Play and rate Choice Matters

Stuff that went Right:
Point&click change (Did the game interesting)
Code organization (Could add new rooms and objects easily)
Music and sound speed (Got music and sounds done in less than 2 hours)
Graphics style (At first wanted to do it realistic, but due to the tight timeframe and the social breaks, decided to do a shadowed boxy and colorful style)

Stuff to improve on the next LD:
Graphics took too long to do (After the shadow matted renders, had too much shadows info around and had to manually clean each rendered object)
Had to think all the possible interactions before (Half of the code about objects is really dirty because i didn’t think about many interactions before)
Timelapse sucks (Gotta take more pics of the process)
It’s Simple, We Kill The Batman (Gotta try to write full story before to add more references during the game)

Hope you enjoyed my game

Tags: LD27

It’s just that my game is too simple for post-mortem. The code isn’t cool and there is nothing awesome in the details of what I’ve done apart from the final product getting a lot of likes.

Link

I know that it is possible, because I have seen other posts with embedded videos. But whenever I copy the embed text from youtube into the edit post window, the text disappears when I save draft or try to preview.

I have gone as far as trying to copy the html code directly from a post with a video in it, but the end result was the same.

Can anyone help me?

Thanks!

EDIT: Thank you all for the help, it seems that I only need to copy the video link in text form to get the embed automagically. Personally, I think this is a bad solution – what if I DO want just the text link out there? Anyway. Now I know.

Tags: help, video

So, this Ludum Dare, I have decided to do most of my reviews as Video Revews. It is a slow-going process, but I’ve managed to make 26 videos so far. Here are some of my favorites (click on the name to play the game):

Ecostar vs Aeronox – Awesome ‘schmup, with a changing seasons mechanic:

Lost in the Darkness – A 2D “maze” game, where the maze boundaries change every 10s:

Anachroma – A very unique “survive the boss” game. Great difficulty.

Entropy – 2D platformer with great production value.

Forward Motion – A very charming 2D puzzle platformer.

If you want to see more videos, please check my entire playlist! It was very fun to make those videos, and I’ve learned quite a few things in the process. Pointers and suggestions are welcome.

If you want me to make a video of your game, I’d be happy to. Please leave a message at my game’s page for that 😉

Tags: reviews, video

Pep Quest, the game formerly known as Tän Säck (or Taen Saeck, for the latin1-bereft masses), is probably our most complete Ludum Dare game yet.

We started out with the story. A depressed Hero, cheered on by a Squire, making their way through hordes of monsters. We had a ton of ideas on what you could do with the Squire, like throw bombs, solve puzzles along the way, or have a mini platformer game running in parallel where the Squire jumped around above the hero looking for hidden treasure. In the end, we decided to limit the Squire’s role to Motivating, managing loot, and healing, so we could get something resembling a game out in three days.

Second came the content: How do we deal with that? An upgrade game needs visual feedback, the player needs to feel like they’re progressing. We’re both programmers and are primarily technically inclined. Fortunately, Udrian’s wife offered to help, and managed to crank out some really nice background art. The intro, weapons, armor, Squire, Hero, motivation bubbles and non-slime enemies are still programmer art, which clashes a lot with the other style.

A note to add, all the programmer art was drawn on a laptop with a touchpad. Lesson learned: Your fingers will murder you, get a mouse.

The music was a last-second thing, created with WolframTones. One of the main complaints we’ve had is that it’s repetitive and grating. Those are very valid points. We just didn’t expect people to play this game for so long >_>. If we can manage it, we’ll get something nicer to replace it.

Lastly, the upgrades, the tweaking, the balance. This is where we should have spent a few more hours. The absolute #1 complaint we’ve had is that the pacing is too slow. On the one hand, that’s to be expected in Ludum Dare, where every second spent playing a game is precious rating-time wasted. On the other, the game is pretty slow, especially in the beginning when the Squire doesn’t really have anything to do most of the time. You have to convince people right away that your game is worth investing time into, and for people unfamiliar with this kind of game we probably failed pretty hard in that respect.

Come the last few hours before the deadline, we were busy making late-game content. The last tiers of weapons and armor, enemies that weren’t just palette swapped slimes. We were so focused on those aspects that we forgot to test the early game thoroughly. At the last minute, we doubled the value of the early coins when we realized that non-cheating playthroughs were moving like molasses in the beginning, but we didn’t playtest it enough. Exhausted, we just went to bed.

We still haven’t found the time to do a proper tweaking session, since work and a team-wide mysterious illness has taken up this past week. We have, however, added a much sought after feature: Save games! Which we hope will alleviate the pacing problems a bit.

We’ll continue to work on Pep Quest, at least for a while. It’s grown to be very dear to us. Finishing up the last pieces of weapons and armor, tweaking the pace, removing the 10 second timer and making enemies spawn based on distance instead (yes, the theme was forced in there with a crowbar) and maybe making something resembling an end goal, are our top priorities. Hope you’ll try it out then!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=18950

//Jonoleth && Udrian

Hi guys, pretty pleased with my first LD entry and really enjoyed both reading comments on what I’ve done, and cruising everyone elses entries, here’s my thoughts on the birth/life/and hopefully growth of my game

Concept

The initial idea was an RTS with buildings that spawn their respective units every ten seconds, as well as enemies that spawn every ten seconds. Mental playtesting, (saves a lot of time), made me realise that controlling this huge flow of units as your base expands would be both very time consuming to program, and very difficult with the ten second spawn rate, so I decided to have the drones behave in an automated fashion, following a circular path around the edge of your base and moving outwards as the base expands, I’m happy with the way the mechanic worked out but the game feels more TD than RTS. Not a problem I <3 a good TD.

Constructing The Game

Having a solid grasp of how I wanted things to work, meant I could crack on very quickly and get something working, I’d also like to mention that stencyl is one of the finest tools for transforming a concept to a prototype I have ever met. While some things were a bit of a pain, (nobody likes trig), hammering out my own brand of bad art was fairly quick and painless, as for sound… um.. well… don’t really know what I’m doing there at all

The End Result

Drone ring, a game that quickly escalates to impossible, or if you’re winning becomes a lag fest as hundreds of good and bad guys run terribly inefficient distance calculation at each other. But it had cool explosions and that made me happy. Sometimes I walked away from my computer without looking back as stuff was exploding. The game is unwinnable, that’s entirely deliberate, the bad guys keep growing stronger and keep multiplying in number until you lose.

Play Drone Ring

Here http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=26686

What went right (planned or otherwise)

• Getting things done went right, the game was finished in the allotted time (high five self!)
• The way drones circle and move outward, looks awesome in motion and I think conveyed the feeling of a massive and continually growing force really really well.
• The sound, because I managed to make some.

What went less right (or wrong if you’re a negative nancy)

• The art is a little weak and too repetetive, the enemies have a cool randomised evolution system that really should have had some graphical representation even a colour change, but I didn’t think about that till after the comp. As it is the only way the evolution is represented to the player is when they do particularly well or badly and aren’t sure why.
• Bad maths, the checks for distance between drone and bad guy are calculated too often and inefficiently, leading to slow down as gameplay progresses and the two opposing forces grow.
• Lack of information, it’s not immediately obvious that the loss condition is bad guys reaching the centre of your base, and the resource system needs a rethink, as while it works okay it’s very counter intuitive.
• Sound, because it was last minute and I don’t know what I’m doing, I wrote a song about it which you can listen to on the upgrade screen, it’s terrible, I kicked the entire family out of the house while I sang badly into my awful built in laptop mic.

Where from here?

While conceptually fairly strong (I think), an entire reboot is underway, which is already so different to drone ring it’s barely recognisable as the same game. Lots of (if only I had the time) extra gameplay mechanics are conspiring to turn drone ring into a fairly complex and fun mission based RTS/TD. I can’t wait to finish it and show everyone, but it will probably be a few weeks.

Cheers for reading guys!

MyChairHasALooIn.

My game at the main page of Newgrounds already a week. It’s cool that it have promotion for Ludum Dare games. Got positive feedback.

Play and rate PULL THE WIRE.

Here my timelapse:

Greetings. We are the Pixelfan team and we want to share with all you our experience lived by the members at this last Ludum Dare. We have to say that it wasn’t our first time, but not for all the team, because for some members it was their first participation in a ludum.

Team members:

Jastro – Programmer

Roger – Designer

Juanfra – Designer

Xoty – History & Game design

Ainim – Music & SFX (First time working with us)

Jastro’s experience:

For me, ld27 has been a mixture of stress and fun. First day gone without problems, and the second-one too. But on third-one a blue screen on my computer blew away all my code. Thanks to an archive recover program I was able to recover part of my work, but I lost half. So I had to work the code again in one day. It was an stressful and tired experience. But thanks to jokes that we did on Ts3, it made that all the pressure I felt in that moment were carried easily.

Ainim’s experience:

When i accepted the proposition that pixelfan made me and I began the ludum dare project, i could not imagine how i would like this informatics madness. few hours after ludum began all the project was ready, the job was divided with the team members and we were ready to start hands to work. I could say that it was hard and i suffered to make the music the team needed, but fortunately it was not this way. the music grew alone and i felt like i had a mental connection with the game designer to imagine and be in right with all he got in mind for each sequence. All those things mixed with all the great moment lived on the Ts3 – three days without sleep fine makes that every stupid thing become extremely ridiculous and funny- made I want more and I am implicated with the team for future projects. Thanks guys for your welcome.

Juanfra’s experience:

It was my second time in a project for the ludum. And I have to say I become a ludum addict. I don’t know why, but i love this three stressful days. Is strange because I hate work under pressure. This time it was so hard, and really stressful. Each animation, each background… all takes more time than ever. Even it took more time that we calculate do all things in these three days. But, I think the best way to summarize that weekend is saying that I feel so pride with the work this ludum. We worked to do our best, and even with a game unfinished, I can feel we are growing a lot. We have a lot things to learn, but we’re going on the right way. Or maybe no, but that is what I feel. I have to thanks you all a lot friends for the weekend, and I am in for the next ludum. An thanks to the people comments, because we can learn with them. Thanks you all.

Thanks for read. You can play our game Here and ou can follow us on Facebook and Twitter

My game is beatable in two ways.

Maybe you already find the easy one,  can you find the hard one!? U_U

This Gif show the hard way!

BombUniverse

Tags: animated gif, bomb, defuse, Lidfrid, puzzle

Are there any sanctions against obviously gaming the coolness ratings? This guy is currently at the top of the coolness, but he only comments “good job”, or at least I’ve seen him do that on my game and on this one: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=27796.

I think it’s a shame, since it degrades the quality of the otherwise pretty good feedback  that this site has, if people can just do that without any consequences.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 1st, 2013 at 10:07 am and is filed under LD #27. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Part of the fun of Ludum Dare (the compo) is having to make every bit of media yourself. This leads to lots in insight/inspiration on all kinds of creative input processes.

I needed a whip sound for my game (Escape From The Temple of Eternal Dooom), so I grabbed a belt and started hitting chairs, trying for that ‘smack’ sound:

The hilarity at the end is Jod, who watched me whackin the poor chair, and could only contain himself for so long… and my sensitive Tribble. 😀

This was my 4th game jam and my 2nd LD. I managed to (more or less) finish a game that I’m semi-pleased with.

Here‘s the game and here’s a time-lapse video:

I tried to display my “productivity” over the two days with a green bar on the left.

What went right:

♦ Existence of idea. Since the theme was already quite obvious before it was officially announced, I had enough time to think about something I could make in a fairly short time.

♦ No art. I suck at drawing and pixeling and all that stuff. In previous game jams I just threw something in that looked like it had been thrown up, but now I realize that I can make games just as well (or just as poorly) without any fancy images. I didn’t need a single image file for my game. I just drew rectangles to the screen.

♦ Shaders. I had never really used them before, and I was actually quite scared I would mess up by using things I’m not very familiar with. But I am very happy about my decision.

♦ Familiar tools. The tools I used were my all-time favourites, and they still are. They allowed me to have a comfortable flow of work and no aggression.

♦ SFML.Net. SFML is an amazing library. I’d done very little with it before LD27, but it’s so intuitive and well documented that I had no problems at all. I used wrapper for .Net since I suck at C++.

♦ Audio. I wasted some time composing music in LMMS until I decided to screw it and recorded all the sounds with my microphone and edited them in Audacity. It turned out much better and fit the atmosphere of the game.

What went wrong:

♦ Concept. I liked the idea of having a multitasking experience. Now I don’t like it that much anymore. But it was something I could do with my skills and my time.

♦ Time. I originally wanted to finish the game on Saturday in order to have Sunday free for homework and stuff. But I ended up needing a little bit more time, so I screwed my homework. Hoo neids english Aniwey.

♦ No playtesters. Since I don’t have any friends, I couldn’t give the game to anyone in order to see if they would understand it.

♦ Mini games. The game consists of mini games, so I wanted to make as many as possible to get high replayability. A lack of ideas hindered me from creating more than 7.

I’ve already got some nice and useful feedback. I’m not going to develop this any further, but once more I’ve learned a lot.

Thank you, Ludum Dare community, for giving me the opportunity to do something enjoyable and sensible while sitting in front of my computer screen. Thank you for motivating me to learn and to use my knowledge. Thank you for being awesome.

See you in December!

I normally put the game’s soundtrack on my timelapses, but for this game I wrote 3 10 second pieces and that wouldn’t loop well. So I spent way too much time making all the music into a 5 minute piece, you can listen to it either on the video or here: https://soundcloud.com/leafo/feed-my-boyfriend

Play and rate here:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=4321

Tags: timelapse

As a key part of my Ludum Dare entry The NSA’s Where’s Snowden? game I wanted you – the elite NSA Analyst – to be able to hack the game world.  Imagine you could put your agents onto flights, or fiddle with the flight manifests so that targets were refused boarding or even arrested… and how would you do this?  I decided I wanted you to have SQL access to the world’s flight plan database…

SELECT T.* FROM MANIFESTS AS M, MANIFESTS AS M2, TARGETS AS T WHERE T.PASS = M.PASS AND M.PASS = M2.PASS AND M.FLIGHT = 'AF-321' AND M2.FLIGHT = 'IB-794';

But I couldn’t find any working SQL engines for Javascript!  The only thing I could find was TrimQuery, but I couldn’t get it to work and its quite old and not actively developed.  There’s are also a few LINQ-likes but they are not really SQL.

Now SQL is the lingua franca of structured data querying so I was surprised at this sorry state of affairs.  Whilst LINQ is nice (because of the VS tooling!) I feel that a lot of the LINQ-likes are driven by hipster cargo-culting and that a solid SQL that can query conventional JS objects and arrays would be a powerful and useful thing.

So I set out to build an SQL engine in Javascript (sql.js).  It was perhaps more fun to develop than the other parts of the game and more fun to examine than the game is to play   This blog post describes how it works (and how it can be done better):

How to use sql.js

It consists of a single function SQL().  The parameters are:

• the SQL statement,  e.g. “INSERT INTO …”

• the definition of the tables, which is a Javascript object acting as a dictionary.  Each table is itself an object, detailing the column names and specifying any constraints on them (e.g. if they must be unique or can be null) and optionally a description.  E.g.

  {
  airports: {
    code:{description:"IATA code",unique:true,notNull:true,},
    name:{notNull:true,},
    country:{notNull:true,},
    category:{description:"level of CIA infiltration",},
    lat:{description:"latitude (decimal degrees)",},
    lng:{description:"longitude (decimal degrees)",},
  },
  airlines: {
    code:{unique:true,notNull:true},
    name:{},
    country:{},
  },...

• table access; an object where each table name that the user can update has a boolean e.g.

  (
  airports: false,
  flights: true,...

  Any table name that is omitted is read-only.

• The data; an object where each table is a key and each table is an array of objects e.g.

  {
  airports: [
    {code:"LHR",name:"London Heathrow",...
  ],
  manifests: [
    ...

• params.  This object allows you to override things like setting the default row count LIMIT.

If the SQL cannot be parsed or if the table data does not have the expected fields then it throws an Error() exception.

Otherwise it returns an object with a columns key and a rows key.  The columns are an array of strings which are the column titles.  Rows are an array of arrays.

Parsing SQL

To parse a language you often use a parser generator like lex/flex yacc/bison.  There are parser generators for Javascript too – jison and peg and so on – but I haven’t used them and, to be honest, its quicker to just write our own parser from scratch.

To parse SQL we can eat the statement a token at a time.  A token might be a number, an identifier or a symbol like an opening brace.

Normally when I hand-roll a parser – its a bit of a recurring hobby of mine – I write the tokeniser to see what the next character is, and then based on whether that is a number, a quote mark or the beginning of an identifier or so on loop through until the token closes.  In sql.js however, I took a messy shortcut.

When asking for the next token, I pass into the tokeniser the list of terminating strings e.g. when consuming table names in a FROM clause I’d ask for the next token (which I expect to be a table name) which can be followed by a comma, the word AS or the word WHERE or a semi-colon.  If my engine supported it, I could just add those additional possible keywords that follow a table name in the FROM clause e.g. ORDER, LIMIT and HAVING and JOIN and so forth.

This meant that the next() function only had to do a Javascript string search – indexOf() – to find the nearest terminator.  However, this approach does have limitations e.g. it doesn’t properly parse strings (if the terminator occurs in the string the indexOf() will incorrectly find it) and words that contain keywords (the Airport table namehas OR in it, for example).  By the time you’ve added code to address this, you end up with a proper tokeniser anyway.  So in hindsight I should have doubled my line-count and just gone with a classic tokeniser in the first place.

Executing SQL

Once the query is parsed and the array of table names built and, its just to execute the query.  And this is surprisingly simple using the Cartesian Product.  If table A had two rowsand table B had two rows then the Cartesian Product would be:

SELECT A.V, B.V FROM A, B;
A.V | B.V
1   | 1
1   | 2
2   | 1
2   | 2

No surprises there.  But what if we add a WHERE clause?

SELECT A.V, B.V FROM A, B WHERE A.V = 2;
A.V | B.V
2   | 1
2   | 2

We can get that by first generating the Cartesian Product – simple by iteration and recursion – and then filtering the rows by evaluating the WHERE clause against each line!

This is thoroughly inefficient.  If there are 100 rows in one table and 100 rows in another then the Cartesian Product is (100+100)^2 = 40,000 rows!  It would be much more efficient to evaluate – and cull – candidate rows as soon as possible e.g. before recursing into every B row first check if A.V is 2.

In the NSA game it’s easy to be evaluating a Cartesian Product that is hundreds of thousands long, and this can take several seconds.

The engine supports SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE and DELETE.  It doesn’t support the JOIN keyword but it does let you join in the WHERE clause (as described above).  It doesn’t support IN.  It additionally has SHOW TABLES, DESCRIBE table and CHECK table which provide utility.  Because of the needs of the game there is also some rudimentary access control so the ‘hacker’ can’t really hack – and break – the game itself e.g. rescheduling or deleting flights and other havoc.

I made the whole thing case-insensitive but that could easily be removed for data values and comparisons themselves.

I added support for literals but the only literal I added was ‘NOW’.  I treated all dates as strings and this allowed simple Javascript string comparison of dates.  I didn’t support any functions, but this would be very easy to add too.

Improving performance

A proper SQL query planner (the code that decides the order that table rows are evaluated) has to understand the cost of retrieving rows (from disk and so on), but in Javascript RAM access speed is fairly equal and without indices you need full table spans so its just to filter tables by the parts of the WHERE clause that reference them as greedily as possible.

Each table is an array of objects.  It would be straightforward to support arrays of arrays, and objects of arrays and objects of objects.  Using objects as the collections themselves would effectively be a primary key – an index!  Knowledge of this could dramatically speed up joins.

The engine turns the incoming SQL into a chain of closures.  TrimQuery, by comparison, turns the SQL statement into a Javascript fragment that is then eval()ed.  I am not sure that is faster; doesn’t that cause the Javascript VM itself to abandon a lot of cached JITed code?  But it may be faster to instead compile the SQL down to a simple VM.

If you are running the same query again and again it would certainly help to ‘compile’ or ‘prepare’ the SQL statement once and have a way to run it again and again against data

sql.js is surprising short given what it can do, and surprisingly simple.  I found it easier to write SQL statements myself to work out what was happening in the model than to use array.filter() once joins were involved.  With a better tokeniser and an expanded grammar and a simple query planner it could be widely useful.

sql.js is doubtlessly more interesting than actually playing the game 😉

Hi there

we took Ludum Dare as a reason to finally get our website running.

http://fluffytigers.com/

Fluffy Tigers in the Sky is just a collective of Friends and people we met on the Internet, who are working on different projects, mainly on a game with the working title Spaaaaaaaaace.
I wanted to show you a few pictures of the first scetches for the artwork below.
Ludum Dare gave us a lot of new ideas and new motivation to keep on working on Spaaaaaaaaace.
I dont want to give to much away about our game, but you can follow us on Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/fluffytigers

or our website and as soon as we figured out a twitter name that’s not taken or to long, you can find us there, too.

Hope you had/have a bit fun with our first Game “Granny Death” we made for Ludum Dare 27

Ten Second Sprint was made in 48 hours for Ludum Dare 27, in August 2013. As my second Ludum Dare entry, I knew how the competition was going to go down, but I still didn’t have much experience or expertise. Here’s what went right, and what went wrong.

What went Right

Preparation

Of all the Ludum Dare theme options, ‘Ten Seconds’ had the most votes by a long shot. With this knowledge, it seemed that ‘Ten Seconds’ would be the theme for Ludum Dare 27. So I started thinking of a game that fit the theme. I knew I wanted to do a platformer for Ludum Dare 27, so I though of a simple idea, not too complex, a platformer with a ten second time limit.

Sound Effects

I used sfxr to create the sound effects of Ten Second Sprint. Even though sfxr is really easy to use, I managed to get great sounds for Ten Second Sprint. I feel this made the platforming a little better, as having a pleasant noise when you jump is very rewarding.

In-Game Music

The clock alone didn’t add enough tension to the game, so I wrote a musical piece with that purpose in mind. The music gets continually higher pitched until the end, where it cuts out as you run out of time and lose. This adds the tension that was lacking before. This also lets players know when their time is running out, they’ll remember that when when the notes change pitch, they’re running out of time.

Precise Platforming

I’m no great programmer, so that restricts my game development quite a bit. It took time and lots of trial and error and I’m very pleased with the final collisions. I feel it all worked out well, it was very precise in my testing. Precise collisions were necessary for making Ten Second Sprint fair and fun to play.

Focus

I often get frustrated or bored during the less exciting development tasks, but the 48 hour limit of the Ludum Dare is a great motivator. It never gives you a break, so you don’t have a chance to postpone. Constant pressure is a great short-term motivator, but having it all the time could be damaging to your sanity.

What went Wrong

Switching Programs

Not too long into making Ten Second Sprint, I realised I would need more rooms than GameMaker: Studio Free Version’s 5. So I switched to GameMaker 8.1 Lite, where I had unlimited rooms, but a small watermark. I am able to use any other software or programming languages, so I’m stuck with GameMaker for now. I don’t have the paid version, so that restricts me from making the best game I could, as the restrictions limit my ability to implement my ideas.  Buying GameMaker Studio has been on my todo list for a long time now, and I hope to have it by the next Ludum Dare.

Unimplemented Ideas

I had many ideas I wanted try during the creation of Ten Second Sprint. Different types of color schemes and different blocks were some of them. Unfortunately due to my lack of skill, I couldn’t implement them in Ten Second Sprint. I still have interesting mechanics in my head that could make their way into future projects of mine.

Slow Physics

The physics of Ten Second Sprint are very basic. The player does not move fast or have any fancy sliding mechanics. This is acceptable, but I made the player fall unnaturally slow. I feel this breaks the pace of the game and feels wrong. Increasing players moving speed would have been a good idea too. Next time I’ll focus more on the feel of the player’s character.

Confusing Code

Ten Second Sprint was coded very poorly. My GameMaker Language code is all messed up. It doesn’t follow a strict format and it`s impossible to understand. Next time, I’m definitely trying to work on this and make it easier to read and edit.

Theme

The theme of Ludum Dare 27 was ‘Ten Seconds’, so I made a game with a ten second time limit. This wasn’t very creative on my part, I was hoping to think of something super creative. Maybe I should change my expectations next time.

Ludum Dare 27 went well for me. I’ll definitely participate next time, if I am able. I have learned a lot from this experience. I didn’t have to make a masterpiece to feel accomplished.

Ten Second Sprint can be played here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=21642

Tags: post-mortem, postmortem

(click me to play the game!)

Intro

GitGirl is the game I made for the 48-hour Ludum Dare. It’s a 2D platformer game where you, as GitGirl, must resolve the conflict that plagues the repositories scattered across the galaxy. It doesn’t really make sense, but let’s just go with that!  In order to resolve these conflicts, GitGirl must throw a 5 megaton bomb into the heart of the conflict.  These bombs are designated to explode in 10-seconds and you must escape before that.

About GitGirl

There really isn’t much story behind GitGirl, but there is a sort of history.  She was a character I designed for a game jam hosted by GitHub back in November 2012.  The theme of the jam is anything that relates to Git or GitHub.  The little metal face above her is suppose to mimic OctoCat(tm).  The intergalactic space hair represents pushing and pulling. 😛  Let’s just say the game is pretty loosely based!  This is a significant history for me as it got me to discover Ludum Dare when I was researching about game jams.

 (GitGirl concept art, November 2012)

GitGirl Ludum Dare Edition Postmortem

(Early Work-In-Progress of the Post-Compo, stay tune!)

• Unity 3D – At this point, I have very little problems with Unity3D, in fact, I had no snags working on this game.  I’ve been accumulating a framework I pretty much use for every game development I do with Unity.  This framework is called Mate.  Mate pretty much started since the first Ludum Dare, accumulating useful utilities that I pretty much use a foundation for games I start.  Here’s the repo. Mate has helped me get UI flows, scene management, save states, input done much much quicker than I would if I go with the bare-bones Unity.  I’m pretty happy with it thus far.
• Production – Getting all the UIs, game-flow, and art assets working together was pretty fast during the compo, I pretty much blazed through those.  In fact, I had to…because putting them together was pretty much during the final hours! 😀
• GitGirl – After getting all of the mechanics of the game out of the way (which took a long while), I was pretty much demotivated.  I decided to think about what sort of character this game will have.  I was looking around for inspiration and seeing old sketches of GitGirl, I knew she was going to star in this Ludum Dare!  (mostly because she’s fun to draw)
• Art – Speed drawing was the most fun I had for this entry, even though I still need to work on my art skill 😛  I’m getting more comfortable drawing with a stylus and using Graphics Gale.  But for pixel art, I use mouse pretty much 90% of the time.
• Music – I’m not a musician, so I heavily rely on cgMusic to compose! I was pretty lucky that it was able to produce some decent tunes after just a couple clicks.  All credits to music goes to the author of cgMusic, btw.  Also for those generating music with midi, look for a way to use custom sound fonts if possible, it makes a world of difference! Most noteably SGM v2.01. Solmire comes with this.

• Late Start – When the theme 10-seconds was announced (6pm PST), I had no idea what kind of game I would make.  I think I pretty much stared blank on the screen and doodled dumb things for an hour or two.  I had two thoughts: Make the obvious run before time runs out or something out of this world.  I pretty much decided on the former 😀
• Complex Mechanic/Level Design – I really wanted to get gravity fields working for this game, it looked pretty awesome as I was testing it.  The problem is, making levels with it.  Also plenty of edge-cases I still need to iron out.  Another issue is trying to implement too many gameplay mechanics.  At some point, I wanted grappling hook for this game…grabbing and throwing enemies/objects…crazy moving platforms.  I ended up with just: jump around, gravity fields, throw/grab bomb.  It wasn’t that bad at all and might be better off just being like this.
• Random Computer Reboot – it was right during level creating when the computer just randomly froze and just reboot.  Considering I had the power on for 2 straight days during a pretty hot weather.  This actually took a good chunk of time and motivation.  First, Windows getting stuck during the start screen…so I have to do a restore from last recovery point (luckily it was fairly recent).  After that, the project was pretty much corrupted.  Luckily I have the project backed up recently from GitHub (considering where this game is inspired from!).  How recent that was however…is no levels and all of the tweaking I made gone.  Could have been worse, so always backup your project in good intervals!

Characters that didn’t make it into the game…for now!

Designing a level

All sorts of values for tweaking physics!

Timeline editor.  If you guys hate the animation editor in Unity (who doesn’t), this is a great alternative.  It’s a plugin I revived after the author abandoned it.  Here’s the link to its github repo: MateAnimator

The old and the new, they grow up so fast! Or shrink in this case!

Thank you for reading, and don’t forget to give this game a try!   Also stay tune for the post-compo edition of the game with loads of improvements!

I finally have time for this thing. Let’s do this!

I’ve been waiting for this LD for some time. A whole lot of time, actually. So you can imagine my disappointment and disbelief when I tried turning on my computer when the LD started and it wouldn’t boot. I was crushed. Add to that the fact that I was forced to start 13 hours late (as always, it would seem), and that the theme wasn’t inspiring at first, and I was seriously considering passing this time. I still wanted to make something, and I had my mom’s computer, so I drew some sketches, and came up with this-

Day one

Day two

I know how much you guys love these pics. I know I do

Anyway, I had a nice, simple concept for the game, which I was happy with. I decided that I won’t code anything before I sleep on it some more, and the next day I slept in. Great start.

I had to attend this meeting up at my school for a few hours, so I started coding the basics before that, and then I went to the meeting. It took a while, but it was interesting and refreshing, so I’m not complaining. Problem is, it was really hot outside, so on the walk back home, I got a serious headache. Like, a really bad one. I knew I was supposed to go to school for the whole day the next day, so the only time I had was that evening. I was in a really bad mood, and I went to bed early.

The next day, after the compo had already ended, I was feeling a bit better, but I decided not to go to school, and instead stayed home all day and wrote the game. I’m so happy I did this!

As opposed to last time, I had a lot less time this jam, but I still feel like this is a better entry than my first one. On to the actual post-mortem!

What went right:

• I had my own game engine! I’m constantly improving it, and the LD was no exception, but this isn’t a bad thing. I was able to deliver on a better experience than my previous entry, and keep the positive stuff I learned along the way in a very ordered fashion.
• I was able to achieve my full vision of the game, without cutting back on content. Granted, there isn’t much of it, but that was all I could think of, and I think it’s wonderful.
• I have a lot of motivation to keep working on the game right now. In fact, I already made a few changes, polished a few corners here and there. I think I’ll take this game to the next level. I already have a lot of ideas to flesh out the concept, and I’m working on a post-compo version right now!
• Graphics- are terrible. Even though I made an animation last time, and I worked a lot of time on the graphics, as opposed to this time, where I spent about 30 minutes on it, I still like it better. I feel like I’m progressing in a field which isn’t supposed to be my territory.
• Level editor- from a programming perspective, it was a life-saver. I spent most of my coding time writing the level and level editor framework, and I’m proud of it. I didn’t realize it back when I posted the entry, but built-in level editors sale big time! I’ll try to keep this trend in my next entries.

What went wrong:

• No time (I love that song, BTW) – as I said earlier, I had no time at all. For several reasons, which I will list below, I experienced the time-crunching madness of the last hours of an LD.
• No content- I had no ideas for levels, save for a few simple puzzles. I had the time and the tools to build levels, but I didn’t have any ideas, so I was really stressed out to make the levels I had perfect in the little time I had left.
• Turns out Java is a bitch. That’s right. Java is a fucking bitch. Why? Because I almost couldn’t enter my game because of its shenanigans- apparently, files can’t be read in the traditional  way when running the program in a jar. I made the mistake of not making a jar until a couple of hours before the end of the jam, so I didn’t know that my level storage system wouldn’t work. I tried opening the files containing the level data through some methods I found after frantic searching on the internet, but it didn’t work. Finally, I copied the data and put it in an array inside the program. Fucking disgusting. It got the job done, but I almost had a heart attack along the way. Being so close to the finish line, only to be dragged back by your own tool was almost too much to bear.

So here’s my game – http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=22590

Please rate it and enjoy! Happy rating, everyone!

I just uploaded an untested Linux build for Signal Delay.  If you have a Linux box, please run it and let me know if it works!

Uploaded the timelapse of creating The Unbelievable Adventures of Kamil the Cat!

WATCH IT HERE!

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

In Summary:

It looks pretty good and sounds okay but needs more facing angles on the moving characters not just side on and some sound fx to go with the music.

It’s hard to workout to begin with but the actual game mechanics really click with people once they figure it out fully (HINT: THE OLD DOCTOR GUY CURES THE FLASHING RED PEOPLE!……)

The levels work well enough but needs to be more of them and the Collision detection needs some refining.

Overall:

For every success there was a catch but the success i wanted was to introduce a decent game mechanic that worked well and i feel i did that. thanks to all who played and review my little game, every one of you made valid and useful remarks and certainly food for thought if/when i decide to take the game further!

……bring on dare 28!!!!

p.s. GO PLAY DEADLY SUNRISE!!!!, it’s pretty damn awesome, best of the jam for me by far!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=17903

I played and rated exactly 100 games. Here’s are six games you should try. I played a lot of others great games but I would like to present you games who haven’t yet a lot of ratings.

Hyper Furball

It’s a really fun action game where you can increase caracteristics of the main character. All the arts, audio and scenario are awesome.

Way of the gun

You’re a sort of cow-boy who have to get revenge for his brother in killing enemies during duels. These ones are really full of tension. And the first part of the game before duels is really interesting too.

Too many bullets

This arcade game has really good mechanics and can become very addictive.

Stoppage Time

It’s a good reflection game even if you are not a football fan. I spend a lot of time on it. Too bad there’s only four scenarios.

The Lost Fleet

I love the gameplay here, where you have to delay some of the ships at precise moments to avoid bullets

Highway Hero

It’s a good strategy game but a bit difficult. It’s really interesting though.

It was my 6 favourite games. You can try my entry too if you wish : The Curse of Chronos.

Tags: LD27

Thanks to everybody for your feedback, I just uploaded the post compo version of ultimate survival lab.

It still is a bit buggy, especially with the menus, but i fixed most of the complaints.

Here’s what changed:

• Redone the graphics.
• Added the ability to use jetpack and slow motion
• Fixed the jumping and the bug that gets you teleported out of the game(I think)
• Tweaked the difficulty

You can play it here

And here’s a screenshot:

Well, I’ve managed to rate 40 games so far. People seem to like “Best Of” lists, so here are my favorites of the ones I’ve played:

• Make a game Game – This is definitely my absolute favorite I’ve played so far in LD27 – a clever little game about making a game. This is the kind of thing that anybody who participates in Ludum Dare can really appreciate.

• Lost Pixel – Underneath this unassuming exterior is an addictive little puzzle game that will really get your heart racing. You are given a grid of random pixels and tasked with finding one particular pixel in 10 seconds. Each time you succeed you’re given a little more time and a larger grid. I got to level 30! Can you beat that?

• Royal Decree – There wasn’t much to this game, but it charmed me all the same with its wit and packaging. All you have to do is watch the story, and then click twice waiting as close to 10 seconds between the clicks as possible. What really sold me on this game were all the crazy endings. I also did end up having a competition with my wife to see who could get the closest to 10 seconds.

• Impact – A 10-second endless runner… does that make any sense? I don’t know, but I still love the style that just oozes from this game. Fantastic pixel art that sets a great mood for the end of the world.

• Time Slime Arena – Nice little arena survival game w/ a surprising amount of depth and player choice. Lots of nice touches of polish in this one.

Tags: best, best of

I’m streaming while playing and rating games

http://www.twitch.tv/danielsnd

Would you like to see me playing your game?
Submit your game link here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1I2SgP3-W1SAcVYw7ZSZECBxqMylPqqE2-lOMPz5VMkQ/viewform

- Edit -

Stopped streaming, here is a link to the Archived recording: http://www.twitch.tv/danielsnd/b/455412389

Here is a list of the games played:

I’ve uploaded a post-compo version of my game, “Tokyo Station” to Kongregate.

The new version has:

• Better music
• Improved feedback on collisions
• More varied gameplay

Play Now!

I finally got round to uploading a little time lapse video of me drawing my player and enemy characters, it also has some game footage at the end. If you fancy playing and rating my game please do (link), I will play and rate the games of the people who leave a comment if I haven’t already played it

Play Notes on departure here

I had heard about Ludum Dare a couple of times, seemed like porpentine – who got me into making Twine games in the first place – had made quite a lot of her games for these kind of game jams, but I thought I’d not be able to make one for a jam myself, as me writing under time pressure doesn’t work very well.

Seems I was a little bit mistaken.

Ludum Dare 27 had been going on for about half a day when I by some chance stumbled upon it. The theme suited me perfectly; I wanted to do something minimalistic and the idea of having something that would only last for ten seconds made me thinking that this will actually work out.

Click on the picture to play Notes on departure

I wrote the script almost entirely in Swedish (my first language) to begin with, using OneNote and Word, I then began translating it with at least two different translating tools and one online dictionary, and I actually texted a friend of mine a couple of times too just to get his opinion on the translation.

When I code in Twine I always consult porpentine’s twine resources, and it’s thanks to her and Leon Arnott’s macros that the games turn out the way I want them to. Be sure to check out their games this LD too; they’re amazing.

I’m not sure how long it took me to create the game; I’m usually only creative in short bursts, the rest of the time I’m consciously thinking or doing something else.

Apart from writing it, what took me the most time by far was making it look the way I desired; I’m always having a problem with the colours and how the text lines up.

These things considered, turned out I had a couple of hours left until the deadline, but I didn’t want to change or expand on anything. I know everybody thinks my game is short, personally I don’t have such a long attention span – especially when it comes to reading on a computer – and I’m more interested in getting the player to think and contemplate on the experience, rather than for it to actually be lengthy one, so it has both to do with this, and the fact that I’m a slow writer.

I had an explicit idea of what I wanted to do with my game: I sought for it to remain open to interpretation so that the player could put in their expectations and wishes and let the experience kind of be what they wanted it to be, or perhaps the way that seemed most natural to them. The interactivity had to be meaningful, and had to be approachable and able to interpret in a lot of ways, and as I didn’t have the time to try and expand the game as that would have jeopardized my vision, I focused on making what I had as good as it could be.

By doing that I hope that instead of bringing a longer experience the tale would live on and expand in the imagination of the player, as it really is their experience and story, and I have no idea of what they choose and how they choose to interpret this, though I would love to know.

This has been a very inspiring and fun thing to be a part of, and I’m thankful for all the comments I’ve been getting and have really enjoyed playing your games. If you’re interested I have a tumblr where I publish my games (or interactive fiction if you prefer) just two of them so far but I’ve got some under development and some just waiting to get translated.

Thanks for reading! I appreciate all your feedback and comments!

Tags: interactive fiction, postmortem, Twine

Click image to play and rate my game!

What went right

>ART

Once I come up with an idea for the theme I like to spend the first few hours creating the graphics I will need for the game. This normally is not all of the art though as when I’m programming I’ll think of something really cool to add. Normally these are little effects to give the game more of a polished look. I was really happy with the way the art looked. Though looking back now I do see there were a couple of things I could have done differently. I don’t normally make a post compo version of my game but I may do one for this game and one of the changes I will make will be the level tiles. I should have made them match the area the player was in.

>PROGRAMMING

Having participated in #1GAM and in 4 Ludum Dare’s I like to feel I’m getting better with using the Flixel framework. This LD I was able to do a lot more than I have in previous LDs. Several weeks back I had brought my NES and Genesis over to my brothers and we did a little retro gaming for a few hours. One of the last games we played was Sonic the Hedgehog, I drew on that as inspiration for this game and I was really happy with how many new effects I was able to get in. Making a platformer with scrolling backgrounds was new to me. Hopefully I can expand on this in future LDs.

>OVERALL LOOK AND FEEL

Once I knew I was going to make a platformer everything just fell into place. I was really happy with the background art, with the way my player looked and animated and with the way the tiles came out. To be honest though, the jump mechanic was not intentional, I had forgotten to check if the player was touching a level tile before allowing the player to jump but it turned out to be a really cool feature so I left it in there and I really believe it gives the game the difficulty I was looking for. Not too much changed from my original vision of the game. Yes there were tweaks to aspects of the game, like the backgrounds were the same length as the level, but when I had them scroll and made them just a little slower than the level itself, I noticed you never got to see all of them when you reached the end of the level. So I did some math and reduced the size of them. I played around with the emitters for when the player dies and when the player gets a star to get them where I wanted them, and I’m really happy with how they turned out. All in all I’m overjoyed with how this game turned out, some of my best work to date.

What went wrong

>THEME

For the past 2 LDs I’ve written down all of the themes which made it to the finals, then I try to come up with at least 3 ideas for each theme. This LD was no different and I actually had 4 ideas for 10 seconds. Then the theme was announced and I went to my list, read it over and decided I hated every idea I had… *SIGH* so I spent the next 3 hours trying to come up with an idea I liked. The funny thing is, the original idea I had for the game came from twitter which I’ll get into in the next section. So I lost 3 hours right at the beginning of the LD to coming up with an idea, which is normally used for making art and graphics for the game.

>THEME IMPLEMENTATION

The original idea for my game was to have the level tiles disintegrate 10 seconds after the player touches them. But when it came time to implement this I ran into several problems. The first problem I ran into was Frames Per Second. When I changed all the level tiles into sprites my frames went from 30 to 3! Totally unacceptable :). So I redesigned the first level and the FPS jumped back up. Next problem I had was collision. With Flixel, collision with a tilemap and collision with a sprite are handled differently and I had forgotten this. So when the player collided with a level tile it pushed the tile which ended up going off screen.  I wasn’t able to find a solution to this problem, perhaps I don’t know the framework as well as I thought I did :/. In the end I decided I needed to switch how the theme worked in my game or risk losing all the time I had already invested in it. Which is where the weird story in the beginning of my game came from as I decided on using the theme to instill a need to rush.

>MUSIC

While I am no musician I can sometimes make music that is somewhat pleasant to listen to. Yes it will be repetitive, but it will for the most part fit the game I am making. This was not the case this LD. I really didn’t like the the music I came up with and I feel my game suffers because of it. All the music was made with drum circle, which I can normally produce interesting music with. I’m not really sure why this time was different. I have 4 months until the next LD so I  may look into other musical programs and see if I can find another one I like.

Conclusion

Every LD I like to push myself to do things I’ve not done before and this LD was no different. I had several problems in the beginning but I overcame them. I am really proud of the game I created for this Ludum Dare. I had a great time making and playtesting my game and I look forward to seeing what you all thought about it.

If you would like to play and rate my game you can click here!

Note: I have since the compo figured out how I could have implemented the level tiles disintegrating. Perhaps I’ll make that game for #1GAM instead.

Hello there,

I’d begun reading the book “Reality is Broken” by Jane McGonigal, a visionary Game Designer, who believes that games make us better and that they have the power to change the world. It’s a pretty intriguing read, but that’s not all; I was reading the first chapter, and the little developer part of my mind caught something: a small paragraph in which McGonigal, backed by research, explains the four defining traits that make up a good game:

• The goal: The outcome the players want to achieve. It provides them with a sense of purpose.
• The rules: They limit how the player can go about achieving their goal, meaning they must use their imagination to find a way round the obstacles. (eg, you have health, so you cant go rampaging through a corridor filled with spikes and monsters)
• The feedback system: the way the player can track their progress, be it through the GUI with points, or it may be linked to the story’s progress, or even just the knowledge on how not to die.
• Voluntary participation: The acceptance of the goal and rules. Also, the ability to do better than win. (eg. in a typical game, their are coins that increase score. I don’t have to collect these coins to win, but I have an urge to collect them, to increase my score, to see my name higher than the rest on the highscore table (link back to the feedback system!))

Anyway, I just thought this was interesting, and wanted to know what other people think. This list does leave out a surprisingly large amount of other aspects: graphics, storyline, audio etc. and I wonder if other people disagree with it?

Any thoughts or comments would be greatly appreciated.

Also, here is my game (totally relevant, I know), it’s actually lacking a few things from this list, I knew it sucked, lol.

Many thanks,

Taha

No download yet. I don’t want to screw up the judging or anything.

Though I’ve only played 55 from the minimum of 100 games I intent to play, I’ve already started to make some adjustments to my game.

I’ve rework some sprites to try and make them clearer and fixed the overlay (which was turning everything a little gray… I blame the lack of sleep at the time xD). Also, I’ve already took of the overheat feature… it was indeed a stupid feature (perhaps I can put it on again in a ship with two shoots… one that overheats and another normal).

But, what I’ve been focusing the most (for now) is the menus. For this, I’ll leave you with this image (notice that I’ll redo the main menu to match the options menu style (that means, no more FlxButton)):

It’s really *animated* now!

I’m afraid that I may be overdoing it… xD

I wanted to play with you again this LD, maybe with 48h, who knows? However, though I had some trouble in real life, it seemed like I completely forgot about this edition. As I see the theme was “10 seconds”, and I think I’d have just silly ideas, maybe that’s better for me?

Anyway, hope to see you next time.

What went right:

I had a lot of fun making this one. I think the mix of platformer and tower defense rush actually work really well. I really like how fast and chaotic the gameplay feels, and definitely want to continue to improve this game post-compo.

HaxeFlixel is a great game engine, and Haxe is an awesome language. I have a bit more confidence in my tools this time around, and I think the amount I got done in 48 hours really shows that. I would use Haxe and Flixel for Ludum Dare again for sure.

Things I would do different

I think the biggest complaint was that the gameplay got a bit repetitive, and I would have to agree with them. I definitely had more plans for variation that would have made you move around the level a bit more, but the usual story goes that I just ran out of time.

I did plan to have a few different weapons, and powerups. This is why the base weapon was not auto-fire. I was going to add auto-fire as either a powerup or as a separate weapon pickup or reward.

I also planned to make a few very different enemies. Fast ones, big heavy armored ones with shields that would protect the others, and small ones that wall run along the walls and ceiling. This would force you to shoot all angles.

But overall I think I made a pretty fun game with a lot of potential, and some pretty sweet gib action. I am super stoked with the response and the comments have been awesome to hear.

Thanks to everyone who has played already, and if you haven’t, then you can play and rate Barricade here.

Tags: post-mortem

Started working on a post jam version. I may eventually make an awesome game and hopefully port it to Android.

I’ve changed:
-godly tower is 4x faster
-poison is 1/3 as deadly
-pauses
-randomly generating waves
-basic missile is costs 50
-countdown

Link to the link of the post jam:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=22460

Have fun! 😀

Didn’t really get into the theme of the dare so I ended up dropping out :/

My body is ready!… again!

lets go >> http://www.twitch.tv/skyllartor

Tokyo Station

Mini-post-mortem

I tried doing something a little different for this Ludum Dare – I spent the first few hours putting together the soundtrack, then tried to build a game around it. I thought I’d post up a soundcloud link to the original soundtrack:

http://snd.sc/14fnJBr

(Can’t seem to get the soundcloud widget to work )

The good

I’m pretty happy with how the music turned out.  After a few youtube tutorials, I’m starting to get my head around the FL Studio interface, and there’s a huge range of instruments and effects to play around with.

The visual side of the game just came about through experimenting in Unity. I set up some walls moving towards you that you needed to avoid, which was nice enough, but giving them all rotation speed just gave the whole thing this mesmerising, tumbling sensation, which I loved. The epic background countdown came from my hatred of blurry 2D Toolkit fonts

I was also able to get the game up on Kongregate, so that people can compete for high scores (although the actual recording of scores doesn’t seem to work that reliably for some reason). I haven’t been able to work out whether Kongregate have some sort of dev environment where you can test things like submitting scores, if anyone has any idea, please let me know!

Naming my games is also a lot easier now that I delegate that decision to wikipedia’s random article…

The bad

Controls are always the part of game dev that I find hardest, and Tokyo Station was no exception. There are a few problems with the current controls, and I have a few ideas on how to possibly resolve them in the future:

• Its hard to estimate the distance between you and oncoming targets, and the perspective of the camera, which makes it hard to tell if you are going to collide with an object. I’m thinking it might be possible to resolve this by having some sort of laser-targeting line emitting forwards from the player. I don’t want to change the perspective of the camera, as that would kill of the sensation of falling, but the chromatic aberration effect should probably be toned down a bit at the edges.
• The controls feel a bit floaty and imprecise. I think this is because there isn’t a 1:1 relationship between your mouse position and your player position. I might be able to get around this by just hiding the cursor.
• Some of the powerups get spawned right at the edge of screen and are impossible (or very difficult) to collect. This is a bit of a symptom of how quickly the game was made (the original version was created on the Monday, for the jam). There is no fixed “play area”, the player can move around in a certain zone (which is probably slightly too large) and the walls and powerups spawn in a roughly overlapping zone. I just need to lock everything to the same play area.

Now its time for me to put the game to one side for a while and rate more games! 😀

I had a run at a few LDs before, but every time something came up that didn’t leave me the space to flesh out my concepts (which also happened to be quite ambitious most of the time). Between the last LD and this one I gave in and picked up Unity. For a while the proprietary/closed nature of it and the scene/gui-centric design scared me (as did the reporting of information about my machine during installation). Unity itself clicked with me quite quickly after I started doing things with it, and it is just what I needed for prototyping. I start (way too) many small experiments, so I want something that allows me to easily setup lightweight projects. In regards to that I only wish Unity would let me setup an empty project with metafiles and text-based assets from command line.

Also “error CS1061: Type `int’ does not contain a definition for `f’ and no extension method `f’ of type `int’ could be found (are you missing a using directive or an assembly reference?)” some day will make me break something.

Visionary

I designed ReTurtle) as some kind of puzzle-shooter. You would have 10 seconds to beat a boss, so you need to find out how to do enough damage to him in the time. To make things interesting you would record 10 8 6 5 characters, one after another, where the coordination would give the game some depth.

At first I was worried that coordination would be trivial. To fix this, friendly fire would make the player have to actually adapt the path for each incarnation to keep them out of each other’s aim. That doesn’t necessarily make for non-trivial coordination. Every character could still have his own small space he would stay in and just move a little now or then to avoid attacks. So it became the enemy’s job to make them move. I designed a set of attacks to get this done:

• Motion: He would move everywhere once, and cover some space with bullets, so the whole group would be pushed around the stage, having to avoid bumping into each other.
• The Grid: Having attacks that separate the playfield into cells would force the player to pick different safe spots for his individual characters if he wants to keep shooting at the boss.
• Grenade: The grenade aims for the current position of every player. This way you have to consider where your previous incarnations will move to, while picking your path, which adds another aspect to the puzzle. The second use of it is that it avoids any completely safe spots.

Now having an idea of the base concept, I wanted to add a bit of depth, so I added two mechanics.

• Gun Charge: Friendly fire is already there to keep the player’s finger off the trigger, but I didn’t want to make him feel bad about it, so I added a small challenge. While not firing, the gun charges for one second. Firing once the gun has fully charged does quite a bit more damage but getting the most damage out of it requires focus. This creates space to improve.
• Shield: You would have a shield that reflects attacks (by either player or enemy), making them more powerful in the process. To make things more interesting the shield is not able to reflect projectiles right back (which would leave some space for abuse). A frontal deflect would just destroy the projectile, while bouncing it around at 90° would maximize damage.

The numbers were designed so you can do 25% damage with one character through rapid fire. This means you need four of your five incarnations to beat the boss that way. Using all perfectly timed charged shots lets you raise that to 34%, which is just enough to win with three characters, but requires to not waste time between the shots (and of course every shot to hit). An optimal reflect doubles the projectile’s power, so reflecting a charged shot adds the equivalent of another on top of it (without needing charge). This way the first character can replace the third, if all shots are perfectly reflected by the second. So every mechanic was designed to cut one character by perfect use (note: due to projectile flight-time it probably doesn’t, but gets close).

Back to earth

For the first day I planned to make all core mechanics work and do all the visuals. That’s quite risky, since I couldn’t tell whether the parts would work together at all. So after day one I had incarnations being able to get recorded, shoot and reflect shots. The boss just sat there and fired a shot straight down now and then. Modeling the boss took me longer than it should have and he didn’t look much like my sketch (I suck at blender). To make up the time the player built from a few 2D-Layers without any animation. The stage suffered the same fate. Planned were multiple layers of tech-y plates and a stripe in the center with numbers running through it to show you the remaining time. But to close out day one, I made what is in the game now instead.

Schedule for day two was boss-actions, menu and intuitivation (that’s a word now), sound was pushed to what would be left. After attaching a hitbox to the boss and making him move through the stage, I could finally test some of the feel. To my surprise coordinating characters already was more interesting than I expected at that point. One of the challenges I didn’t think of is that under pressure one tends to react to an attack the same way every time. This makes the act of creating different paths for all characters challenging by itself, since any time you have to rely on reactions you end up in the line of fire for another incarnation.

Fireballs were already there from day one, so I only had to implement lasers and grenades, which went smooth. Unfortunately not everything went this well. With most gameplay in place, shield just didn’t work out. I boosted its value by making the scaling multiply. That doesn’t help if you can’t set it up though. It’s still too powerful due to a bug, but quite useless for proper gameplay.

What threw my schedule off was the upgrade for player-visuals that got pushed over from day one. I wanted only the ‘head’ to move and the game also needed something to point at the currently controlled character. Some information on the charge-state and something to show the number of an incarnation was critical too. With all of this done I was already closing in on the deadline.

I still had to add a menu, and link everything together. So I threw together the atrocity that is the main menu, added some hit-detection for clicking, and moved handling of the game-progress to the new scene. That left me just enough time to set up a dropbox-account until the submission-hour started. What fell off was sound and any kind of ingame-instructions, including any hints on what you have to do on the main menu.

Conclusion

I’m mostly ok with how the game turned out, I got to play with a few mechanics and they didn’t rip each other apart. It is desperately in need of instructions, some tuning for the core and an overhaul in regards to presentation. I gave myself a week to tweak everything, before I let the game go and focus on other prototypes. The time is up and I’ve added the post-compo-version you might want to try after playing the compo-version. You could also try to beat these informal challenge-times in the post-compo-version: under 6 seconds as a ‘silver’-mark and under 5.5 seconds as ‘gold’-mark. I’ll follow up with an overview of the changes soon, this post is long enough already.

Tags: LD27, postmortem, unity

I wanted to post some technical stuff about how our jam entry, Dango Rush, was developed, but it has been hard finding a time to do so while we have so many interesting games to play and rate! But, I finally decided to take a break and write down some development notes! So, let’s start!

PLAY AND RATE!

The game’s title screen! =D

Tools we used

I started out using FlashDevelop and the Flixel library to code, but ended up using the FlashPunk library instead because of some helpful stuff it has already implemented. Also, because I was completely new to Flixel but had already read a lot on FlashPunk and found it more comfortable to go on a weekend-long project.

Aline used a Bamboo Capture drawing tablet, along with Adobe Sketchbook Express (that comes with it), to draw all the graphics. I also used it a little to draw some sketches. Paint.NET was used for editing (adapting) the drawings to a format acceptable by Flash/FlashPunk.

For the audio, PxTone was used by Carvalho to compose the music for the game and I used sfxr for the sound effects (as usual).

Early sketch of the game’s ideas.

First intentions and end result

Initially we decided to make a mix between The Binding of Isaac and Mii Force. The player would have to explore randomly generated dungeons while collecting and equipping different power ups, each one providing a different type of bullets you could shoot at enemies, while avoiding being hit by their bullets as well. These initial mechanics turned out very difficult to implement and we decided to simplify the game.

Aline suggested that we used “dangos” as characters in the game because they are very simple to draw (she’s not a pro artist) and very cute. The title “Dango Rush” was immediately adopted. =p

In the end, we removed a lot of stuff we wanted to put in the game, simply because we wouldn’t have the time to implement. It turned out to be more of an Isaac-like game than Mii Force-like. But we were very satisfied by the results, nonetheless. Of course we knew the game had problems (I’m glad people pointed out some of them while rating the game) and we plan on releasing a post-jam version pretty soon, fixing some stuff we couldn’t because we didn’t have the time, and adding some stuff people are pointing us to on the comments! So that’s your chance do play and rate, and contribute to the post-jam version of our game! =D

In-game screenshot.

Final regards

This is the fourth time I participate on a Ludum Dare event, second time on the jam and first time actually finishing the game on a LD jam. The first time we had some problems, maybe because we were too large a group or because we lacked intimacy with each other as game developers, and ended up giving up. This time I went for a more decentralized approach. While we had some specific ideas and goals, everyone on the team had a significant amount of freedom to do whatever they wanted. I think that’s a good way to work on a game jam. We also worked in different things in parallel (programming, drawing, composing), while the previous time we tried to focus on having a working prototype instead of focusing on different aspects to create a good synergy.

That said, I believe LD28 Jam is confirmed for me and whoever wants to take a role in my team. LD27 was definitely a good experience and we are loving to read all the feedback we are receiving! =D

Evening everyone. I have just released an early version of my chiptune composer. It only works in chrome for now.

Example songs:

Giana Sisters
Tyrian Shop
Demoscenish

Composer itself (click the image).

TL;DR: Somehow not a complete failure.

I’d basically written my game off as being completely terrible. It evolved from being a simple test of the game loop, and I basically felt like I did it because I had painted myself into a corner. However, there seems to be a lot of love for the game. A lot of people think the mechanic is interesting, but the game is too simple. It probably is at that.

If I were to do it again, I’d refine the mechanic by making the planets “stick” together instead of disappearing. This would change the difficulty curve of a level: instead of becoming harder and harder as the level went on, you would balance that somewhat by having a much larger “planet” with which to smash the smaller “left over” planets. One person suggested that I stop the planets from entering too tight an orbit, which was something I was considering, but the game becomes simply too difficult. With the planets “squishing” together, I could decide to make the planets bounce off the sun or keep distance some other way like suggested.

I didn’t tune the difficulty curve of the levels enough I think. They become slightly too difficult too quickly, which I think was picked up on.

On the sound / graphics front, it was noted that I had no sound and the graphics were very minimal. I definitely wanted a refined “fun” mechanic before I moved on to the more visceral aspects, and I just didn’t get there in the end. I’m actually far more confident in my ability to fine tune the graphics and sound than I am in game design, so that’s where I was concentrating this LD (and I will probably continue to do so in the near future).

However, one unforgiveable sin was having no sound at all. I really should have had a minimal soundscape and sound effects. I was disappointed with createjs’s sound capabilities. I was hoping I could pipe through sine waves and I couldn’t. I really wanted that minimalistic vibe, and I really didn’t want a point when I was putting sine waves into an MP3 and playing that.

I could also have chosen slightly more representative colours for the planets, the sun, and space, although, being firmly in the ludologist camp, I actually feel happier that they’re not representative — I want the game design to talk to the player, not the graphics. That’s one thing that’s great about a game like Osmos or Eufloria: You can be at planet-scale or at microscopic scale, it isn’t clear, but the behaviour of the system shines through. However, the bigger problem was I did nothing for the smashing of the planets. Disappear or not, they really needed to have a visceral impact on the player — the thrill of catching two planets in orbit and then having them smash together needed a far bigger pay-off than I was giving (which was none). It’s a lesson learnt though: a simple visual flourish actually has a huge effect on the game design. I wouldn’t have said that before this competition.

In the end I had a great time, and really want to try again, and that’s really the whole point, right?

So I think this one was my all time favorite of the games I have made for Ludum Dare. During the voting I wanted castles to win, even though that wouldn’t be a good theme I still wanted to do something with castles. Decided that the best way to do this was to have something to do with castles that only takes 10 seconds.

What Went Right

The Castles- They are not perfect but I like how the castles looked, I didn’t get time to go back and make better textures but I think they look decent

Rigid Body Control- Making this game using a character controller just wasn’t going to cut it. So I programmed a character controller that uses the rigidbody add forces and velocity for movement. It needs work but it’s a good starting point for other games in the future.

Terrain- I spent too much time working on the Terrain of a few of the levels. I find them rather nice to look at.

Basic Catapult Launching- It launches you in a up direction…which is what its suppose to do.

Music- It’s simple, but I think it’s fun.

What Went So Wrong

Catapult- the model was a placeholder that I ended up not being able to redo. Main issue though is the power, in my sleep haze I decided that the catapult needed to be able to reach the castles on zero power…which meant that you never went over like 20 power on most maps. Also I didn’t have time to make a simple animation for it

The Super Jump- Because of the way I controlled the player with a ridged body you could run at the catapult and launch yourself much much further.

Moving Catapults- There were several glitches with this, you could get them stuck in the ground or flip them upside down if you are not careful

Terrain Size- I underestimated just how far and how high you would launch, so you can see outside the map, which is just not cool

The Correct Spelling of Trojan- I need spellcheck everywhere…at all times…

I learned a lot while making this, going to be able to use my new knowledge in a game I am working on. I am hoping to gather together a team before the next ludum dare, would really be helpful.

Here is a link if you have not played it.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=13308

Tags: post-mortem

It was the first LD I patricipated in, and I’m quite satisfied with the game I made. I found the theme a bit too constraining, though I managed to get an idea of my game fairly quickly. So, without breaking everything in good and bad aspects:

• Graphics. My programmer art really sucks so I went for a minimalist graphical style. My inspiration was Super Hexagon which manages to look really good without having sophisticated graphics. I think my game looks quite well, and that’s mainly due to particles flying everywhere.
• Music. In short, there’s none. I found out I couldn’t make a good-sounding soundtrack and I didn’t want to resort to autotracker.
• Gameplay. It’s unoriginal and repetitive, as it’s just your everyday top-down arena shooter. Magnet phase makes things a lot more interesting, though I got comments saying that it’s confusing.
• Scope. I didn’t pick a complex idea, so I was sure that I could complete it in 48 hours. I was right about it, almost all mechanics were done during the first day.

Taking part in an LD was a great experience, and most of all a fun one. Looking forward to next compo!

Click on the screenshot to play my game!

Tags: postmortem

Hey! So, my LD game was a text based “Dungeon Simulator” really, it is just a puzzle game in text. (I know, a recipe for disaster. Hahah) If you want to play it:
Dungeon Simulator 2013

This is what the menu looks like.

Anyway, I worked really hard on it, maybe you can’t tell, but a lot of work went into it. I know for you all of you Expert Coding Ninjas, 540 lines in 48 hours is NOTHING, but to me it was actually a bit of a grind. I won’t go into details, but if you want to read more about it you can read my post mortem. Anyway, I have a little announcement:

My game will be having a post-post mortem release!

That is right, I was inspired enough to do more work! Whoa!
No, no, but for real my game is actually fairly buggy. Most notable the tutorials and some level bugs. This was mostly do to the lack of play time and testing I did the “finished” game. As I said in my post mortem “I might have played through the whole game maybe…Three times all the way through? Sorry.”
Anyway things I hope  to bring to the next release:

-Fixed tutorial(s)
-Re-build level three from the ground up.
-In addition to new level three, add three more COMPLETE and PLANNED levels. I will draw them out this time and make sure they at least work on my machine.
-I will try and make the “engine” (If you will.) a bit more robust.

I will be releasing this on the 20th right after voting (Sorry, I don’t want to mess up voting and I start school here in a few days, so my schedule is going to be tighter than normal. :c Be patient.)

I will be doing weekly “Updates” with what I have been working on. (Maybe even a preview, maybe?)

Stay tuned for more! If you have played my game and you have input or things you think should be changed, that I didn’t say ^above, please feel free to say it! I would love to hear some more opinions from you guys. After all that is what keeps me motivated. (:

Good luck everyone.

~Blade

So I’m already developing a mobile version of my LD entry. Time Annex will become Overflow. If you enjoyed my LD game you can follow progress on my blog here. It will be released for both Android and iOS. Here’s a new visual style I’ve been playing with.

I’m glad I joined in on the fun for the Ludum Dare.  This was my first game unless you can count a four line program from when I was 8 years old.  Well it was my first push into actually finishing a game.  When I don’t have a deadline I work on a project hoping to finish it but of course I say to myself keep it simple.  1 week later from the moment I say keep it simple i’m trying to make my own AI and every other extremely complex thing under the sun.  The challenge of making a game in 48 hours was good because I knew I could not do this.  So I went with an idea then stripped everything I could till it was done.  I then added more to it but not something I could finish in the time I had.  This seemed to be the best method to making a game.  Hopefully another LD will come soon because I can’t wait to have a good solid, non changing deadline.

The Ludum Dare #27 is over but I decided to enhance my entry Logic Bomb a bit further. According to the comments my game was quite enjoyable but was a bit too easy up to level 10. So I updated the random level generator and it is now a lot more complicated to cut the right wire!

I also added the ability to cut multiple wires at once – this gives an advantage especially when dealing with more complex bomb layouts.

Furthermore I ported the game to Android because I think it is perfect for being played on tablets! Unfortunately because of some problems with Google’s Play Store, I uploaded it to Amazon’s App Store first. I will post another update when Logic Bomb also becomes available on the Play Store.

But for now: my entry Logic Bomb for Android tablets:

Sky Trader is my third game made for LD48 and my first game of arcade genre. I only made point-and-click games before so making such game was a truly new experience for me. In this article I’ll try to describe what I’ve learned while creating the game.

Theme

Almost everyone who rated my game mentioned it doesn’t match the theme. I definitely agree with this. The only thing that somehow matches the theme is fuel – each can lasts exactly 10 seconds. But it’s definitely not enough to say that the game matches the theme. However, it can be easily explained: I tried to create a fun and interesting game first and make it match the theme later. Obviously, I failed to make it 10-secondish enough

Skeleton App

During previous competitions I always started development from empty folder. I created Rails application, added all required libs, configured deployment, etc. it usually took from hour to several hours, depending on the weather.

This time I decided to create a skeleton app which already included a set of libraries I was going to use, tested deployment scripts, and some boilerplate game code I use for my other games. It took several hours on Friday to make this app usable and it definitely saved me a lo

t of time and mental power to focus on the game itself. Instead of setting up the app I started coding the game itself from the first minute.

Coding

I decided to make the game with HTML5 and JavaScript using pixi.js framework. I already had some experience with it so it was a good choice. Pixi.js is pretty simple and it doesn’t restrict you to a certain game structure, genre, or development cycle – it just takes sprites from you and renders them to the canvas with WebGL. It also automates some simple game routines such as sprite atlas loading, animation, rotation, and transparency.

I began the development with some mockup arts and spent the whole first day implementing game logic – ship movement, clouds, pirates, fighting, viewport movement, trading with cities, etc. My coding skills are much better than my art talents, so I decided to make as detailed experience as possible and focus on the art later.

At the end of day one I had fully working version of the game deployed to Heroku. Being able to test the playable version earlier helped a lot – I was able to submit the game as soon as the submission form was open.

Art

I was pretty much surprised that the art for this game got so many positive responses. I’m not an artist and I was extremely pleased to receive positive feedback. I’ll try to describe the art development process in details, probably it will help someone to succeed during the next competitions.

Initially, I was going to draw everything in pixel art, but after trying to draw just one sprite I understood that it will take a day to draw the ship alone, not to mention animations, pirates, cities, and so on. So I decided to try something else.

I started drawing simple sketches in Photoshop at 10x scale of the final image I would like to get in the game. Say, I want to have a city sprite 100×100 pixels. I started drawing it 1000×1000 pixels. Sketches were terrible, but they allowed me to draw images without focusing on precious details of every pixel. Here’s the sample sketch:

After drawing the sketch I started adding layers one by one, painting every surface of the object. I focused on colors, shadows, and texture, tried to use Photoshop effects where possible. Half-painted image looks like this:

The final image at 10x scale looks terribly, but when scaling it down to the designated size it looks OK (large vs. final size in the top right corner):

Animations

After making a static version of the image I created a frame-by-frame animation by copying layers in Photoshop and adding motion blur effects. I had about an hour for each sprite, including animation, so I decided to add just one animated element per sprite – rotors for ships and cities, flag for upgrade stations.

Even the simplest possible rotor animation for the main ship made the game much more live and visually appealing. I decided to add animated elements to every object in the game. But I had only few hours left before the compo submission is over, so I had to find another way to animate things rather than drawing everything in Photoshop.

Pixi.js provides simplest API for object rotation and transparency – I decided to use them. Instead of drawing two separate states for static ship and flying ship I decided to simply change inclanation of the ship depending on its speed. It game perfect results – the ship started to feel like real, it got some kind of visual inertia. I decided to use the same effect for pirates, added tilting for bonuses, made cities float up and down.

Audio

I didn’t have enough time to make any sound effects or music for the game, so I decided to just skip this part. My skills with audio software are poor and I don’t think I can produce something satisfying in less than a day or two of trying. I should practice it outside of the competitions to be able to properly use the skills in the limited time frame. I think that the game could be much better with proper sounds and many voters think the same.

Conclusion

I think that I pretty much succeeded with the game – I made a game of a kind I never did before, its visually appealing, it feels good, and I’m even thinking about the post-compo version of the game.

Here’s the short instruction I would recommend myself to follow during the next compo:

• Make a skeleton app with as many features as possible, excluding features specific to a certain genre or setting
• Try to stick to the theme – it’s one of the most important things to get good rates
• Art and sounds are crucially important and require at least 50% of the time limit.
• Good animations can be done with rotations, scaling, and transparency – and they’re very easy to do.
• Early feedback is very important. Show your game to your friends and family as early as possible – it will give you new ideas.

Vote!

I would be glad if you’d check my game and let me know your thoughts.

Tags: html5, post-mortem

WHOA! I HAVE 48 REVIEWS ON MY GAME! This actually means a lot to me.
Half of the fun of making games is reading input people give you. Not to mention that this is only my second LD, so, to get this much recognition from the community already is just wonderful. 48 is special to me, because that means for one hour of work, I got one review. Whoa. (That is pretty much Minecraft status, right? Hahah.)

Thank you so much guys. (‘:
~Blade

For the fifth time I took part in the Ludum Dare, this time I decided to use this oportunity to learn libGDX library. One week before the competition I read oficial wiki and write some prototype code that included all basic operations like key input, movment, sprite handling etc. I haven’t thought about game ideas for final round themes as always because I didn’t have time due to my work/home/family responsibilities.

Game idea for “10 seconds” struck me very quickly but it was a little bit different then what I ended up with. I wanted to create a platformer where a main character has a bomb that will explode in 10 secounds and he have to carry it all around the map and recharge timer in special points. During the weekend idea has evolved into what you can play now, mainly due to programming problems and lack of time.

What went right:

– programming
As I said before this was my first real game using libGDX and I must say that I’m realy supprised how easy it is and how many features it has. I will definitely try to better understand it and use it again. If you write in java I realy recommend you check it out.

– art
I’m very happy of how game ended up looking. This is far the best looking game I ever made. I spend lots of time drawing sprites (it took me more than an hour to create a crate).

– level design
The best part of whole LD was when all programing and drawing was done, everything worked and I was creating levels. It was pure fun to create and test them.

– sound
Until last moments I didnt know if I will manage to create audio. I always left this for the end, because audio is my weakest point in whole game developing. Happily there was still enough time to create some simple theme.

What went wrong:

– programming
Because it was my first time with libGDX there were some problems. I couldn’t generate TextureAtlas (still don’t know why). I had big problem with adding a font and then scaling and I ended up using standard font. But all of those issues was caused by my lack of knowlege in lib. Besides libGDX troubles I had to face my old nemesis with was collision detection. I had big problem with proper collisions for crates, character and map when it was all working together.

– controls
The worst thing about my game (as I can tell from comments) are controls. During development I knew there was bad and I wanted to change it but only if I still had some time left. Character animations was directly connected to them and I was too afraid I will break everything.

Conlusion:

I must say that when I run game with graphics, and sound for the very first time it was a beautiful moment and I couldn’t stop smiling playing. And for moments like these I participate in LD and I will participate as long as I can. Overall I’m very happy with how final game looks like, and with all the comments I have received. Thank you all!

If you haven’t playd my game you can do it HERE

Well, it has been a little more than a week now, and since I got some feedback, I might as well do my postmortem now.

So yeah, this was my first Ludum Dare, even if I try to participate since roughly two years now. I did not make much games before that, the biggest one was a 7-level platformer on Nintendo DS in C which was basically my learning project for the C language. Even so, I had a good grasp on the basics and I knew I could at least produce something. It is also my first game jam, although I did do a tower defense in  weekend as part of a school project.

Well, on to the actual entry now. I enjoyed the voting rounds, and with each one I tried to prepare myself to at least the wining theme, so as to be able to start right away with the code. The theme “10 second” was one of my favourite, because it was easy to use (you could do mini-games as well as almost any kind of gameplay with an added time-limit) ; but even so, I was failing at finding that great idea that would make me completely motivated to make something great. I guess I was more or less waiting for an idea to fall in my head, saying “You cannot do anything else, because that is the greatest idea you ever had”.

This game is a bomb – well, the Bomber toy is, technically.

I then chose to solve the problem the same way I do when I fall short of inspiration : add some more constraints. One of the theme I also liked a lot was “Death is useful”. While thinking about a way to mix the two of them together, I thought “Well, I could make some sort of game where the player dies every ten seconds ; and the level cannot be completed without dying several times, each death unblocking the path in some way or another”. As I could not think of a unique way to die that would allow for several different game mechanics, I chose to have several characters, each one with its own way to die. That happened during the Friday, so that when the theme got revealed (it was around 3 A.M. on Saturday in France), I already had a pretty good idea of what I wanted to do (the platformer format more or less imposed itself to me on its own. Besides, I suck at making graphics viewed from the top).

That was the genesis of the project. Now is the classic good/wrong part :

What went wrong

– Collision code : I knew it would be the worst part to write, and it was. It took me almost half of the time I spent coding (or at lest it felt that way), and it still is not perfect. I went through three separate approach, rewrote  the same piece of code several times, and ended up chosing a dirty “test one pixel at time” way which will surely slow down the game with more entities (the player is the only entity in the game as of now, save for the spinning vortex which spawns you).

– Playtesting : I did do some playtesting by making sure each level was achievable, but most of it got eaten up by “ok, collisions seem to work, see if I can break it again with some tricky falling-on-a-tile-form-the-upper-left corner case”. I did see that waiting could be annoying, but adding a suicide button felt cheap and, worst of all, allowed for playing a life in less than 10 seconds (in my mind, I was being disrespectful toward the theme). With some thoughts, I think I was so annoyed by the collisions not working properly that I brushed of this problem as being a “mere balancing task, something done when all the rest is working”, even though I knew by experience that in a 48-hours project, there I rarely time left at the end to polish things up.

– Submitting my game : although I knew I had a slow Internet connection, I did not expected my game to be 15 Mo ; that was the first and last time I packaged libraries in the same jar. As such, I almost could not submit my game before the compo deadline, and it was because of the music, which took roughly half the size of the game, and ended up not even playing correctly. The Submission Hour totally saved me that time, and I was happy to learn it even existed.

What went right

– Graphics : the only times I did pixel art, I did not have any time limit, and I spent around 2 hours doing a single 13 frames animation with Paint. This time, I went for simple graphics, but since I learned one thing or two about color palettes, I tried to put it to good use (yeah, being colorblind, that was the right part to start from…). I ended up creating every piece of graphics in grey (most of the time, four tones were enough, although I used five at some point), then choosing the colors and doing the substitution. Anyway, that part was fun.

– Music : I did some music ! That is an accomplishment, since I had little experience with the software I used (Aria Maestosa). It ended up being also quite fun, although finding the right note is harder than finding the right color. I spent 2 hours and a half on the main theme, and 1 hour and a half on the level background music.

– Code : I started warming up during the summer by learning libGDX, and started a basic platformer on Friday to be able to identify right away the most problematic issues. Turns out, the only one I encountered was the collision code… But there was no other big, time-consuming bugs or features (even the circular selection went good ; Mathematics classes were really helpful with that one !).

As a conclusion…

Of course, I am working on a post-compo version of Ephemeral. I think I will let the title as it is now, but some changes will be made according to the feedback  I got and the ideas I want to implement. Right now, this means I already have a suicide button and animated tiles in the game. I also corrected some of the code, which will make it easier to modify the map dynamically for me.

I enjoyed participating in my first Ludum Dare, and I hope I will be able to enter it again as soon as possible. I hope I will be able to make games I will be even prouder of than this one!

I have played and rated about a hundred games by now (by the way, is that a lot? I have no idea). Overall, the quality and creativity are impressive. Almost every single game has at least one aspect that totally rocks!

However, I don’t know what to do with entries that don’t use their own music or their own graphics. These may sound or look good, but do they really deserve a good rating for something that was not in any way made for Ludum Dare? I don’t think so. In a way I feel like these people are gaming the system with content they didn’t make themselves. Am I being too harsh here?

I’ve finally had some time to sit down and write this.  It’s also my first Ludum Dare, so I wasn’t even aware I should do this until just the other day.

So I created C:\\Bluescreen.  The game turned out surprisingly well and I’m actually pretty happy with it.  It’s one of my better games, only because I believe it’s completely bug free and I didn’t try to pack a thousand ridiculous features into it (though I’ll admit at the end feature creep started to show up.)

The process:

So when the theme was announced I wasn’t really surprised and I was actually kind of rooting for 10 Seconds.  But once I realized it was official, I had absolutely no ideas in my head.  Luckily I was stuck at work (undercover loss prevention agent) so I had plenty of time to walk around and get my imagination going.  Finally I had an idea.

The idea spawned from a situation one of my developer friends had just recently gone through.  He updated a new driver for his graphics card and suddenly his pc bluescreened on restart.  After restarting several times he learned that he had approximately 10 seconds to delete the new updated driver before his pc shut down.  Eventually he got it after a dozen tries.  So I decided that because this kind of thing happens often, I’d use it as part of my theme.

So the original idea was to have a reflection of some nerdy kid in the screen who was constantly downloading viruses which you had to destroy before they bluescreened the computer.  Due to time, the reflection didn’t make it into the game, and due to the 1980’s theme downloading turned into installing software.  The software that contained the virus ended up being “Busty Cops II” and at the top of the installation screen in tiny font you could see the Paladin Virus Hunter Software (which you’d know about if you read the readme.txt from the title screen) warning you that the software contained malicious files.  Of course…. you install the pixelly goodness anyway and the game begins.

Language:

So I used Stencyl to code the game.  I’ve been learning C# in my downtime, but I knew I’d never be able to create anything worthy of LD in 48 hours with my knowledge so far.  So I went back to what I know.  Stencyl is really easy to use once you know the basics of logic and what each logic block does.  For a prototyping engine it does wonders for game jams.  As soon as I had the outline for the game I started writing the pseudo code in my head while I was at work.  By the time I finished art and was ready to start coding, I had the entire game written out already.  The only thing I had difficulties with was adding the power button to the PC.  I added multiple copies because I changed tactics halfway through and it was causing the PC to shut off and turn back on immediately which was a very frustrating 20 minutes.

The Challenges:

I think the only part that was really challenging for me other than time constraints was the music.  I’ve never actually created my own music for games before.  I usually have a friend do it, or borrow it from a website.  So after multiple hours of attempting to create something using various softwares I decided to find a random music generator.  Finally I went with Sfxr for sound effects and Wolfram Tones for the music.  It turned out pretty good for randomly generated music.

The Rewards:

After the planning stage I went immediately to art.  I hate using placeholder art because I call myself a game artist.  Creating sloppy boxes for placeholders is too difficult for me to do when I can just create the finished product with just a little more effort.  When I decided that I was going to mix pixel and vector art in the same game I got really excited.  I’ve used both in games before, but never together.  I decided to make the computer as realistic as possible (given my lack of vector skills) and then use the 80’s theme for pixel art, which was ridiculously easy since I only had to settle on one color…. green.

The fact that the game came out bug-free (to the best of my knowledge) within less than 12 hours of actual work makes me ecstatic.  Bug testing and fixing is the worst part of game dev to me.

In essence:

I’m thrilled with how it turned out and at all the good feedback I’ve had.  Usually I get a lot of “Why didn’t you do this?” or “This part is too difficult”, etc.  But I really haven’t had any negative feedback that made me cringe while hearing it.

Thanks for reading!  Go play the game!

Tags: compo, flash, post-mortem, postmortem, screenshot

I don’t understand a word “postmortem” here, on the Ludum Dare. Is this means “my game is good but i don’t have any feelings to it and i don’t want to do anything with it, so i will let it die”? Not good for me.

“Routine decisions” is now on clay.io (publishers are welcome) and it was on the newgrounds.com (deleted for a reason described in the next block).

I’ve noticed a great difference between people here and people outside ludumdare.com. Those people outside are customers – they probably see an idea but they judge a game by it’s graphics, action, motion… The surface of the game. They can’t see the main, the root, what it has in its substruction. Yeah, that sounds like “i’m an unadmitted genious and nobody can understand how deep my game is”, but no – i’ve just noticed, i don’t care about those who say “heeey, your graphics made in 4 hours is not good enough”.

So, the postmortem. No, postmortem for a postmortem – i don’t want to write it down, i don’t like an idea of postmortem. As people in Russia say, “don’t show your fists after the fight” (bad translation, but you may catch up an idea). I had emotions, i had an experience, i spent my weekend in a perfect way.

But what i really want to say is “Thank you, ludum dare, for the way you are. One of the best communities in the world i was a part of”.

All right, so NitroX from Diptoman’s team here.(3 of the team members are out to rate the games)

So looks like we’ve played about 200 games in total, I haven’t been keeping count of how many games I played individually. But it’s still quite a lot, and here are the most noteworthy titles I came across.

Wing

The feel to this was absolutely amazing. The idea’s pretty original, too. Has a steep learning curve, but you get used to it.

Seconds x Seconds

Probably the most innovative use of the theme(out of the ones I’ve played), makes for an awesome puzzle/action combo.

Hyper Furball

This game is addictive as hell!

Argentum Form

Not a fan of creppy/horror games but this one just blew my mind. An amazing entry.

Solitude

The graphics with the interlaced filter on the pixel art and dynamic lighting, plus the aesthetic soundtrack create a great atmosphere. The story kept me hooked to the end.

Well, those were my top 5. Look forward to more posts like these from our team! If we haven’t played and rated your game yet, let us know!

And oh, how could I forget inserting a link to our game here(aka shameless self promotion): Angry Guards

I have some time on my hands, so I thought I might write a little postmortem.

Overall — I’m quite proud. I feel the game meets the idea of what the game should be like (the controls are a bit slippery, though. This seems to happen with all my platformers).

Art — The art, for me personally, is a bit of a flaw in the game. I didn’t change it from the tester images I gave it for some reason; It escapes me at this time.

Sound A bit bleh.

Music I’m really proud of the music. I composed it all myself in pxTone. The melody isn’t the best, and I understand that that’s kind of a crutch, but overall I’m happy with it.

Story It was kinda tacked on. I like it but I have to accept that it was tacked on and not very explained.

Engine and Coding Flashpunk worked brilliantly. I originally wanted to write the game in plain AS3, but I figured a pre-built engine would help.

Community Goddammit I love the feedback. I thank anyone who played it, and those who commented. Thanks so much.

Thanks for reading, everyone!

Hi everyone,

Finally played enough games to feel like I can pick my favorites fairly ;D

Here they are in no particular order:

Bug Buster
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=15810

This is less of a game and more of a really, really cool gimmick. It’s a side-scroller shmup where you can press a button to slow down time. Nothing new here, right? But the brilliance of this game is showing you a real-time replay of your match after it ends. It’s incredibly cool and you will feel like Goku or the Flash after you watch what you just did.

Total Spaghetification
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=20697

I beg you to give this game a chance. The controls are weird, but the designer really incorporated them into the tightest level design I’ve seen in a jam entry. Really good game all around. TIP: to wall jump, you need to hold the jump button while you press the slide button to do the actual jumping!

Chrono Blood Ninja
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=25095

This is very raw and simple, but I had to include it because it impersonates what I feel like should be the guideline for every jam game: do very little, but do whatever it is that you do very well. And this minimalist game really delivers on this regard – the very little art, gameplay and sound that exist are all exquisite. I would love to see a more developed version of this little game.

Every 10 Seconds a Window Washer Falls to Hit Death
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=1893

One of the most polished game in this jam. Really funny as well! I won’t spoil it, just go and play the damn thing.

Antidote
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=27803

A 3D game that actually does not suck is a feat in and of itself in a game jam. This is not an original idea for a game by any stretch of the imagination, but the feel and controls are spot on. Really enjoyable!

SwapArcade
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=13748

I won’t spoil this one either. It’s just a good laugh, but what a good laugh it is!

Royal Defenestrator
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=25048

The funniest entry in this jam, bar none. If I could give this 6 out of 5 stars for humour I would, since I was laughing my way through the entirety of it. That’s how mature I am.

10 Seconds Until the World Ends
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=25182

Really moody and a very interesting idea. One of the most well-realised entries in this jam overall!

The Super Fair Trial Show
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=11099

The most playable game I’ve tried in this jam. It’s not original in gameplay, but the theme and atmosphere are amazing, and it’s a game that you will actually want to keep playing instead of just quickly switching to the next one.

And of course I have to plug my own entry, Adventure Company:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=26269

I am proud of what I was able to do, especially considering this was my first jam by myself. If you like tactics game, Gauntlet, and/or ridiculous depictions of violence, I guarantee that you will like my game : D

(I’m not a Latin expert but, hell, my game didn’t just die! So there.. Post-Partum, after birth, I like it.)

Oh, hello, didn’t see you there! I’m the creator of Poisoned Wizards (working title) and this was my first entry into Ludum Dare. My first take was that it was a lot of fun and a great incentive to make something, which is the hardest thing to do sometimes. Setting myself to work within the limitation of 48 hours and organizing the time while working out stuff happening in “real life” was a neat experience while working on my passion instead of the regular work.

The 48 hours went by faster than expected, and because it was my first time entering I was a bit nervous that I would mess up the timing or the whole organization of my time.Here in Portugal the Compo started at 2 AM so I decided to wait for the theme, work only on some ideas and design for the game and sleep on them until the next day.

When I saw the theme “10 seconds” the first idea that came to me was something on the line of using time altering mechanics to make a sort of puzzle game around only having 10 seconds to complete it. This was scrapped because it would require me to work out some pretty complicated mechanics for the base game and probably make a bunch of levels by hand.
I didn’t feel this first design was flowing as I would like either, so I tried to think of something more on the lines of a mechanics focused game, with replayability and more extensible from a features point of view.
This second design, one of a strategy game with some bits inspired from the combat of the Heroes of Might and Magic games but on a faster loop and with a scope in line with the Ludum Dare, came to mind then.I think I also preferred this design because as a programmer/game designer it’s easier for me to work on game mechanics and systems than on the artsy part of games, so a more mechanics focused game would probably work better for me.

And so Poisoned Wizards was born, a game about wizards summoning creatures in 10 seconds to destroy each other’s base before running off to the bathroom. The full design included many features that I knew were going to be mostly cut, like, for example, besides summoning being able to cast spells, mainly buffs and debuffs for the summons, but also damaging spells that would hit the first thing in their path.

I initially was planning on having a bunch of different creatures, like archers, clerics to heal your summons, and strong beasts like dragons that would be really strong and possibly fly over ground units, but would eat a lot of the very limited casting time you have at the start. These ideas were mostly left on the side when I had to dedicate most of Sunday to visiting parents and friends, and only had time to work on refining some details and make up some sort of interface and restart mechanic.

The Good..
On the first 24 hours I was able to hit my goal of having a working game cycle, including the different phases, which was great to realise the design.

The game’s replayability and the simple scoring worked better than I was expecting to be honest, I believe the simply random positioning of units for the AI provides a fun if somewhat random opponent.

THE AWESOME MOUNTAIN BACKDROP!!!!!

The Bad..
There are some collision bugs that look a bit messed up because of the underlying scripts for behavior.

The interface is too plain, but I’d have to admit the arts are not my strong suit.

The Ugly..
That grass..
Those basic Unity models..
All the amazing model animation..

The Undone..
Not fully realizing the plan to add more than one type of unit to the game.

Was planing on adding more of a setup to the game and the setting, by having a short dialogue between the wizards before the casting time and when they run off.

Was also planning to have a more fully realized AI, or possibly a way to do local multiplayer.

There’s no sound. I wanted to have added sound to the units strikes and summoning but it was pushed in favor of some polishing on Sunday.

And thus we have Poisoned Wizards. Even with all the undone and hastily done features I like what I accomplished and think it could be used to build upon and make something fun to play.

Please check out the game and leave some ratings and comments if you feel like it. I’m grateful for any feedback and welcome any chat or exchange of ideas so feel free to send some my way!

The Entry!

Thanks for reading this too!

Tags: compo, LD #27, post-mortem, post-partum, unity

This was our first Ludum Dare, and only our second game jam ever (first being a Molyjam a few months back). We absolutely loved the experience so far, and the amount of positive and critical feedback we got on our entry StepOut has been really great and unexpected.

So we want to thank you all who played our game thus far, you’ve really boosted our morale to continue working on games, and will probably continue working on StepOut (well a spinoff rather) from now on.

As for Ludum Dare, the system and the community is awesome and we’ll make sure to participate often from now on.

For those of you who might find it useful, here is a list I compiled of all the web submissions for LD27:

http://robertshenton.co.za/ludumdare/27/ld_web_games.html

It’s been more than one week since the end of the last LD and we haven’t made a postmortem or a post about our game yet. Here it is!

This was our first Ludum Dare (and finished game) but we are really proud of what we made in 72 hours. It was a great experience, very fun, and we are thinking about making a new version of the game with more content.

Our game

One of Reload levels

Reload is about a crazy scientist who creates a robot to conquer the world. However, this robot is only a few centimeters tall and has 10 seconds of battery. Through a puzzle/platform level design where speed is as important as reflexion, the player must reach a teleporter without dying.

We implemented several elements the last day, such as turrets and fans. Our artist did a really good job by animating all the possible states of the robot. About three hours before the end, we decided to add an intro and a boss. We did not have time to make a boss, but we have an introduction scene featuring a crazy scientist!

The introduction scene of the game

What went right:

• We had loads of ideas about the theme. We were 3 but we decided on the theme in the first few minutes, and we were immediately ready to work.
• Our team (a developer + an artist + a game designer and audio creator) worked very well.
• The first hours were very productive. In less than 8 hours, we already had a playable game.
• There wasn’t any big bug that took me hours to fix. They were a some bugs, but they got fixed really easily.
• My sister cooked waffles for us. You need energy to create a video game.
• We had a lot of fun

What went wrong:

• I did not have a computer with windows so I had to ask for help to make a windows version of the game. Happily, the LD community is the best and someone created a windows executable within an hour.
• I thing that we didn’t work very much the second day, but we really needed to rest.
• Our second developer would have been useful, but he could not be here in time

Can’t wait for the next LD!

Tags: fulmen, LD27, postmortem, reload

Hi, after playing a hundred games I want to show you the best I found.

PROBE TEAM

Step Out

Dungen Dogan’s Cursed Crew

Hallucivian

Stay Alive 

Whodunit

Clockwork Cat

Time Surge

My game don’t  deserve five stars so I won’t link it, but thanks to everyone who tried it.

And now back to rating games!

Indiegames.com just published an interview about the Art of Antidote, talking about the differences of doing art under a Game Jam deadline. You can check it here:
http://indiegames.com/2013/09/screenshot_daily_game_jam_week.html

If you still haven’t played Antidote, please check it out!
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=27803

Would you like for me to play your game/rate/comment? Send me the link using this form 😀
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1I2SgP3-W1SAcVYw7ZSZECBxqMylPqqE2-lOMPz5VMkQ/viewform

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=27098

The spiritual successor is in the works as we speak.

This has been my second Ludum Dare, and I’m so glad I finally have the right tools. In LD 26, I had to cut out 3/4 of my game’s content due to free version restrictions, leaving Tinge a rather dull game with an interesting idea buried in it. This time I had everything I needed, besides time. Balancing school, college prep, and Game design was a daunting task. I’ve gotten the hang of programming games in a short amount of time, as minigames were essentially many games put into one. So instead of making one game, I ended up with 7 or 8.

The Good

*The name was pretty clever if I do say so myself, pointing to the game of hot potato, only played with minigames (there’s no relation to LD 26’s potato theme)

*I Enjoyed the “Wario-Ware” style of genera, as it involved all ideas from my friends to be incorporated, and added to the intensity of timed games.

*Compared to my last game, Tinge, It was actually fun.

The Bad

I didn’t have the time to get a product I was totally proud of produced

*The kindergarten artist graphics. In the race to make a game, artwork was low on my priority list, and, well, the art sucked

*The music/Sound effects. I have gotten complements on the music, but I don’t think anyone realizes it came from Microsoft Clip Art. I wanted sound effects, but again, time was an issue.

Overall it was the best Ludum Dare yet. I enjoyed both how Hot Potato came out, as well as its play-ability. It had several bugs when released, but for the time I had, I’m Proud of the product.

Play it here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=21618

My more polished, but much more cruddy LD26 game: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=21618

Twitter:  @Tater_Hater2

Hey guys, I’ve posted a gameplay video about our game.
Its a parody game about an old meme where this German kid gets pissed off
at his computer and smashes everything in sight(keyboard mainly).

In the game you need to hexxor his computer in order to anger him to the max.
You win the game when he quits!

Click image to open Youtube gameplay video and extras:

Hello everybody! First of all I want to give thanks to all people that have rated and commented my game. They have given to me a lot of strenght, and due to this, now I am working in a port to Android with an improved version of Scorpio 10. Today I wanted to write to show you what I am planning.

First, I am working in a vertical version, with bigger buttons and adaptable to every resolution in android devices. The game will be similar but with new features.

– This time it will have 10 chapters x 9 parts = ¡90 levels!

– The difficulty curve will be less tought, with less colors to begin. It will have more time in advanced levels with more colors.

– The game will have multitouch, auto-save and spanish/english traslation with an improved hack story and some new art.

– And of course, it will be free (with a ads banner).

I plan to release the game at same time that the results of Ludum Dare 27 will be released. That means .. I have to return to work!

See you next time!

Scorpio 10 Entry

Is “porting” to support more players allowed long after the deadline?

Ludum Dare 27 game jam concluded and Deconstructeam gave birth to a little dungeon puzzler called Dungen Dogan’s Cursed Crew. In this game you play as Dr. Dogan, who along with his men just raid the tomb of an ancient god whose curse fell upon them: just 10 seconds of life left. Luckily, the weak spot of this god is the black amber, and the dungeon is full of them. In order to escape the temple, you’ll have to combine wisely you team skills and manage accurately the 10 seconds of life of each crew member if you expect to making out alive.

You can play it here.

We are pleased with the result, a humble game with a correct duration. However, this time we had other motives beyond the pleasure of making a game in just a weekend: with the Game Maker: Studio license recently acquired (thanks to the funds of our recent crowdfunding campaign), Ludum Dare presented itself as an excellent opportunity to make an intensive training and finally take the leap from ImpactJS to this new game engine.

I had already made my first steps with the free version of Game Maker, but never made and finished a full project, pretty important matter to me. So, since this game engine is going to be my intimate partner during the development of Gods Will Be Watching, I grabbed the documentation, and stepped into making a game in less than 72 hours. The result stands for itself, a proper game, with several flaws, but a game nonetheless. My verdict: highly satisfied with what Game Maker: Studio has to offer and with how it’s going to improve our production power. Even having to learn along the way, the development speed increased notably in comparison with my beloved ImpactJS, not to metion of its huge variety of supported platforms. With few adjustements, Dungen Dogan’s Cursed Crew was working perfectly on browser and Windows.

I don’t know about you, but personally had many prejudices against Game Maker, particularly through the “Make games without programming skills” slogan. Once I tried his drang’n’drop interface and procured to keep myself far away from it. But knowing that Locomalito‘s games or the same Hotline Miami, were developed with this game engine, I finally decided to give Game Maker a chance, taking as guarantee this games which I worship for their high quality. Great surprise since once left behind the point’n’click programming thing, I took a deeper look at this scripting language GML (Game Maker Language) and discovered its high flexibility and the variety of tools and functions at your service which make your life quite easier regarding the most usual practices when developing a game (mostly about the collision handling).

I’ve never programmed with such agility as in Game Maker, and with no doubt Dungen Dogan’s Cursed Crew would have been much harder to create with ImpactJS. I’m happy knowing that Gods Will Be Watching is going to become a highly polished product and, despite the fatigue that brings a game dev marathon of 72 hours, I’m eager for working even more than before.

Tags: Game Maker, Game Maker Studio, post-mortem, postmortem

A Music Version, I’d better say. Yeah, that’s 8 bit Skyrim theme by chubbiercherub, making a dungeon exploration process a waaay more atmospherical.

There’s a bunch of new features as well, such as new items and locations. Now you also drop your sword when you’re slain, so you respawn completely defenseless! Oh, and beware of that skeleton guarding your loot!..

Tags: post-compo

Hello Guys, this is a bit of news that have been added to The King’s Spin. May the goblin wrath begin.

Patchnotes and Download is located here:

 http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2013/08/28/polishrad-post-ludum-dare-bugfixes-for-the-kings-spin/

Voting page is located here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=17178

I’ve done two game jams now as the sole programmer(7drts and ld27). They both turned into multiplayer games, one being a single screen game and the other being a pure online system with a matchmaking component. I’m not sure why I prefer multiplayer, but all the ideas I come up with just happen to include it as a feature. Both online multiplayer and single screen multiplayer have extreme drawbacks for game jam titles in my opinion. For online games, the player traffic is VERY low for the most part on these online games, so only 1 in x people are going to actually encounter someone else on your game. To fix this problem in my game, I decided to implement an extremely basic AI  that players could play against, just to get the feel of the game. Not a perfect solution at all, because I feel like the experience is much better when you know that your opponent is actually trying to read what you are going to do, and not just randomly picking attacks.

On to single screen multi. The biggest problem is that most people who rate games, do it alone. I never have a friend present to jump on single screen multi games with me when I am rating jam games, unless I happen to be at the office(but even then it would look a little suspicious with people crowded around my computer).

Anyway, I guess my question is: what do you think of including multiplayer in an LD(or any game jam for that matter) entry? Is it worth while? And I guess there’s the larger, over-arching question of: does the fact that a game is for a jam limit what you can/should produce, or should you just make what you want to make even if there is not an audience that may be able to partake in the full experience?

Due to several reasons (sh*tty Internet connection, being lazy, being busy, being stressful, not dealing with LD, etc.), I could test only 50 games yet. I can’t imagine, how some people have patience for testing 1000 games…!

As I mentioned, I’m lazy, so don’t expect full reviews for every entries. 😀 instead, I choose the aspect I think the most important (fun, graphics, mood), and I make a descending toplist about the games for each.

There are games (Delayed, 10 Second Card Game, 10 Reactions, 10 seconds of fear, Kidnap Commander) that I gave N/A in every mentioned aspects; they can’t be seen on the list below.

All-1s are italic.

Enjoy!

THE MOST ENTERTAINING GAMES I’VE RATED:

5 stars:

Barricade
Atomic Time Raiders
Flippin’ Matrix
Ludum Dare
Clonogram
Tower Infinity
AntiVirus
Time Annex
No Time for Nibbles
Mission Luna
Faster Than Before
Urvas
Barrage Trigger
Thief Escape
Flooded Dungeons
Twitchy Thrones
Entropy
Lost Pixel

4 stars:

The Lost Robos
10
RocketCar Rampage!
Bomb Squad
The Day Magic Died
John Q. Adamant
Diesel May Care: Quest For The Ten-Second Car
Chronobender
NodeNetOS

3 stars:

Key of the Ruin
Castle of Doom
Was a Rougelike
Mashals of Knaveland
Move It In 10 Seconds
Gas and Air!
Time Crystal
The Barrier

2 stars:

Realities
The Manipulator of Space and Time
Maze of Torment
Unexpected Security
Snooze Button
Flash Memory

1 star:

Test Chambers
Teenage Dream
10 seconds of hope

THE BEST LOOKING GAMES I’VE RATED:

5 stars:

Test Chambers
Barricade
RocketCar Rampage!
Castle of Doom
Realities
Mission Luna
Move It In 10 Seconds
Flooded Dungeons
Gas and Air!

4 stars:

The Lost Robos
The Day Magic Died
Clonogram
Tower Infinity
AntiVirus
Time Annex
Twitchy Thrones
Entropy
Chronobender
NodeNetOS

3 stars:

10
Flippin’ Matrix
The Manipulator of Space and Time
Mashals of Knaveland
No Time for Nibbles
Faster Than Before
Urvas
John Q. Adamant
Barrage Trigger
Thief Escape
Lost Pixel
Time Crystal
The Barrier

2 stars:

Atomic Time Raiders
Key of the Ruin
Ludum Dare
Bomb Squad
Was a Rougelike
Maze of Torment
Unexpected Security

1 star:

Diesel May Care: Quest For The Ten-Second Car
Teenage Dream
Snooze Button
10 seconds of hope
Flash Memory

THE MOST ATMOSPHERIC GAMES I’VE RATED:

5 stars:

Barricade
The Lost Robos
Atomic Time Raiders
Realities
AntiVirus
Mission Luna
Flooded Dungeons
Twitchy Thrones
Gas and Air!

4 stars:

RocketCar Rampage!
Flippin’ Matrix
Castle of Doom
Tower Infinity
The Manipulator of Space and Time
No Time for Nibbles
Barrage Trigger
Thief Escape
Move It In 10 Seconds
Entropy
Lost Pixel

3 stars:

Ludum Dare
Clonogram
Diesel May Care: Quest For The Ten-Second Car
Time Crystal
The Barrier
NodeNetOS

2 stars:

Test Chambers
The Day Magic Died
Mashals of Knaveland
Time Annex
Urvas
John Q. Adamant
Maze of Torment

1 star:

10
Key of the Ruin
Bomb Squad
Was a Rougelike
Faster Than Before
Teenage Dream
Unexpected Security
Snooze Button
10 seconds of hope
Flash Memory
Chronobender

OVERALL

Fun: 18 five-stars, 10 four-stars, 8 three-stars, 6 two-stars, 3 one-star.
Graphics: 9 five-stars, 10 four-stars, 13 three-stars, 7 two-stars, 5 one-star.
Mood: 9 five-stars, 11 four-stars, 6 three-stars, 7 two-stars, 11 one-star.

Conclusions:

– I can call most of the tested games funny. -> I couldn’t find only a few boring games.
– most of the games have decent graphics for me.
– I was strict in the question of mood.
– twice as much games were outstandingly entertaining for me than outstandingly nice or atmospheric.
– distribution of mood between games is big.
– I disliked most of the least entertaining games overall.
– same with graphics; however, there were an extraordinary exception: Diesel May Care is a hilarious game!
– most of the “weightless” (=low mood rated) games are not bad overall.
– either I’m not strict enough with “Fun”, or there are some seriously talented guys here! 😀

Thanks for reading,

Katamori

Tags: entries, entry, statistics

I’ve played and rated over 100 games which were all amazing and creative. Here’s the top 10 that stood out the most to me.

Step Out by bitserum – Step outside your body to solve puzzles.

Step Out

Clockwork Cat by patrickgh3 – A cat needs to make it to the end before midnight.

Clockwork Cat

Captain Pico and Ensign DeGaro in Ten Second Time Bomb by dalbinblue – Help two characters reach the escape pod in time.

Captain Pico and Ensign DeGaro in Ten Second Time Bomb

10 Second Happy Rocket by Starspell – Assemble the best rocket you can.

10 Second Happy Rocket

Feather & Son by Carduus – Help a father and son find the missing mother.

Feather & Son

BeautyIsTheBeast by Valandre – Chase and be chased as the prince or princess.

BeautyIsTheBeast

QuickHunt by MvdLaar – Be the fastest rock-throwing hunter possible.

QuickHunt

Chrono Blood Ninja by theholychicken – Fast-paced ninja slicing action!

Chrono Blood Ninja

Orction House Panic by Dry Tree – A funny fantasy auction sim.

Orction House Panic

10 Second Sculptor by nathanhoffer – Sort of like a combination of Lego and pixel art.

10 Second Sculptor

Focusing on the post-compo is starting to pay off. Except for the HUD, particles and background, every other graphic has been redone. As soon as I finish reworking the graphics, I’ll begin to modify the gameplay. That will be the ‘post-compo version’. I plan to later redo the game itself, adding enemies, waves and bosses (there’s already a new ship, though :)).

I usually make a black and white sprite and then use an “multiply” layer to color it. This helps me to make sprites quickly (as I don’t have to bother select exact colors every time, only the tone) but makes the sprite somewhat plain and boring. Now I’m using 8 tones with 4 shades each, what made everything better looking (and clearer).

Take a look at the boss graphics evolution:

Tags: animated gif, filter, gfx, gif, graphics, pixel art, post-compo, postcompo, update

Looking forward to a winter beta everyone on here is invited.

Just finished writing the postmortem to my Apple Harvest game. The link is http://blazinggames.blogspot.com/2013/09/apple-harvest-postmortem.html . Here is a quick summary:

What Went Wrong: Wedding.
What Went Right and Wrong: Flash
What Went Right: KISS.

I’ve made a slightly different post at my blog talking about this experience but I’ll present a more technical and less philosophical post mortem here.

How did it go? I don’t actually know. I seem to have blanked a large portion of my memory of those 48 hours. I made a game about mazes and pathfinding.

• Tweaking movement and fighting  while writing them from scratch. This was definitely too much time doing a lot of things I could have had done for me. Too much last minute thinking.
• Theme communication. I wished I had presented the 10 second mechanic better. I chalk this up to being a rookie. I coddle myself that way.
• Not making a browser game from the get go. It’s just a better delivery mechanism.
• Ambushes and sneaking. I really wanted cool ambushes and sneaking things to happen I just didn’t get there.

• Feedback and rating the other games. I really learned a lot playing the other entries and getting feedback on my own entry. That’s not just pandering.
• Writing my own collisions and nav. This was time doing things I could have had done for me. But I was able to work the nav into the game mechanic in a way I wouldn’t have thought of if I were using it as a library.
• Processing. I played around with a few frameworks but Friday morning I realized I should stick with something I know at least this time. I kept things simple enough and I like Processing for playing around and so it worked for me.
• Processing.js – sort of. Processing has this capability to produce javascript and play in browser. It’s not seamless, I didn’t start out intending to stay compatible with it. But I was able to make it work (outside of the 48 hours though).
• Debugging. I was able to keep bug load low enough to power through at the end.

I decided to take a break from rating very good-looking games, since these ones usually have already a lot of ratings. I went on to play those entries with a low number of ratings and a good coolness and found some gems that are not getting enough comments/ratings! I’ll list them below:

Red/Blue

Coloured Block Swap

TenToDead

RELAY

I’m very sleepy right now, so I hope these pretty screenshots are enough for you guys to click them and check this entries out!

Doctor Drown (Ph D) was my second dare Ludum Dare entry (Bayou my first), my second doing it with Sam too, and probably my 5th/6th game jam where I finished something. You play a corny 60’s Super Villain who floods his chambers with sharks. Simple. I’m happy to have made it, but I definitely learned a few lessons I thought I should already know. So let’s start with that so we can end positively.

What went wrong:

- A focus on mechanics, AGAIN. I’ve become increasingly disinterested with game mechanics, at least the traditional forms of them, beyond being a means to an end, and the real lasting appeal of digital attractions for me is in their sustance. By ‘substance’ I don’t mean “hours of content” or even exactly a thematic total but the volume, maybe density, of detail/love/personality/experience/gamestuff/expression/ units of resonance a game contains. Expression might be a good word actually. Often things that have no functional reason to be there. Example! Earthbound & Mother 3 are full of it. The black & the white pixels you can talk to or don’t in the desert, that’s substance. In Problem Attic, the entire game is built upon distorted memories and methaphor, everything drips substance. Psychonauts is mechanically not the greatest platformer ever but it’s dearly loved by huge numbers of people. In Stephen Lavelle’s Missing the world is full of characters despite them all saying the same thing, no they haven’t seen your son, and every character is aching substance. It’s not necessarily textual either. In Proteus, the standing the stones, the crabs, the owl, the abstact reactive music itself is all substance. So, a fairly ill-defined, nebulous idea so far but an idea all the same. Strange. Funny. Heartrending.

What went right

It has taken me four LD games to finally write a postmortem of one of them.  So here we go with the postmortem of Subject 127.

The game is a fast paced platformer that take place in a dystopian future, where everybody had a 10 second innactive bomb implanted. If Mr. Evilthorne didn’t like you for whatever reason, the bomb would be activated and your life would finish within 10 seconds. Subject 127 didn’t like that and she started her quest for Mr. Evilthorne lair to put an end at his reign.

THE GOOD

• This is my second attempt at a platformer, being my previous try at LD24 (you can play). That first platformer was… well, pretty bad, with a lame jump mechanic, a strange character movement and odd collisions. Most of those problems have been solved in this game. It’s far from perfect, but I’m happy with the result.
• I’ve managed to keep the feature-creep at bay. The “won’t be cool if…” is present in all my previous LD entries and, as result, they all seem unfinished and unpolished, but in this one I tried to keep it simple, and this is really an achievement as a game developer!
• I started this jam thinking I was working alone, but Monday came and with it, some help. The cinematic characters were redrawn by someone who knows what she was doing, I was given ideas to make some intereseting levels and the story changed to something a bit more interesting (there’s a bit of info in a wall-text tutorial talking about gas, that was something about the previous story, now is nonsense, lol).

  Subject 127 designs

  

  Mr. Evilthorne designs

• Vector art. My art skills are very rusty, but using Inkscape to create the game graphics allowed me to create clean drawings and some animations I’m proud of.

THE BAD

•  At first, I thought the game was machine independet, but when I played it in my laptop, the character behaviour was slower than expected and her jumps weren’t high enough (the odd thing here is that my laptop has better hardware than my main PC, hence there was code that made the game run slower in better machines, madness!). As I didn’t try the game on other computer until the third day, I had to rewrite the code to make sure that issue was solved.
• Related to that point, it’s the collision detection. The game is using Unity’s Physic.Raycast to check collisions, which I think it is time dependant; while the character movement uses the default Unity Update(). I believe this is what causes the character to pass through the floor or some wall, a critical issue in a fast paced platformer.

THE UGLY

• I wanted to feature from 20 to 40 levels, but using the final day to fix the machine-independency issue left me with just three hours of level design. So I rushed 10 levels, just making sure they were beatables and that they went from very easy to hard (although level 8 is the hardest because of the poor testing of the jump over the three saws).
• Lacking a proper camera script made some jumps riskier than intended.
• Not using enough testing subjects. For example, I felt the difference between the short and long jump was all right, but after some testing, people told me that it was too easy to miss the short jump window.

You can play Subject 127 here.

After rating a decent amount of games, I have to admit that some of them are quite good. Unfortunately this post is not about these.

A more exclusive club is this of the funny games. When I use the word “funny” I don’t mean “amusing”, or “giggle worthy”, I mean those select few that make you wish you had a spare set of underwear nearby.

To this date, I’ve found two extraordinary entries that I’d like to share with the reader together with five others which deserve an honourable mention.

Note that all these entries were judged by my unusual sense of humour. If your game isn’t here it’s probably due to a combination of the following reasons (from least to most probable):

1. I don’t find it funny.
2. I haven’t played it.
3. No one finds it funny.

Entries Extraordinare

Romantic Comedy/Tragedy – Forever Alone

Well written and well executed, this game creates a solemn atmosphere surrounding a ludicrous plot.
The result is magnificent.

Similar to many games in the humorous genre, the gameplay has a small impact on the player’s enjoyment. Well, except the falling pianos I suppose.

 
Lavatory Humour – MY ASS

What can I say, while many had smoke coming out of their ears trying to conjure a witty narrative, a hairy ass just swept by and found itself drowning in a pool of diarrhea.

It’s not elegant nor smart, but it’s what the audience wants. It also shows the importance of silly sound effects.

Honourable Mentions

The main reason games found themselves here isn’t because they’re less funny, but because their creators held other priorities above humour.
The Storyteller – Extreme Trauma Surgeon

While the game itself isn’t much more than amusing, the intro is priceless.

The Musician – Keep Flying

Who needs to compose music when you can sing nonsense. (There’s also some cat dung and photon potatoes)

The Sadistic – Royal Defenestrator

Throwing cats, guards and whatnot out of windows cheers me up.
A good example of implementing simple game mechanics and giving the player the freedom to do whatever makes them laugh.

The I Couldn’t Think of a Title – Detective Awesomepants

This game is too good to be disregarded as humorous.

The Meta – 10 10 Second Game Design Lessons

It might not be universally funny, but here in this jam it definitely is.

That’s all, I hope you enjoy them as much as I did!

Yeah! It’s a rare genre. Did you ever seen a puzzle game post-mortem? So let’s do this!

BEFORE LUDUM DARE – PREPARATION

You must prepare yourself to the event. Sharp your tools. Prepare a code template. Training in your coding IDE, graphic editor, music and sound editors is also a good idea.
I did nothing of these things.
But I did one important thing: Warn my wife weeks before the event, and repeat the warning time from time. Otherwise she surely would ruin my plans.

FIRST – THE DESIGN

When I first saw the theme, I did think that 10 seconds was the countdown approaching to zero. I hit F5, and again, and the 10 second remains. I though “Man, it’s locked in 10 seconds!” Finally I realized that 10 seconds was the theme. Holy crap!
So I hated the theme. The first and obvious interpretation should be a 10 seconds time limit. You should never take the obvious interpretation. Later I was shocked that everyone took the obvious interpretation.
I spend the night thinking about a different take on the theme. After a while I had the idea about the ordinal second. The second one things. Finally I get rid from the damn time limit.
So I needed a design. And that night I thought in no one. Then I went to sleep.
In the next morning I woke up without an idea. I took a breakfast and start to work. After half an hour I made the design of the game. Probably my subconscious worked during the sleep.

THE CODING

I had planned to use Construct 2. But after finish the design, I realized that for this kind of puzzle game pure Javascript would be more productive. I didn’t need collision, physics or other things that Construct 2 usually help you.
The next step was coding. At the end of the day I had the first prototype, with scratch graphics. At night I started to draw the final graphics.
Testing was a serious problem. Finish the first stage could spend five to ten minutes. I could run just a few cycles of testing.
At sunday morning I continued making graphics and some testing/debugging. After the lunch I
had a problem. I had planned to go to the Escher’s expo at the city museum. That was the final day to the expo.
The game was almost finished, so I went to the museum. I expected to spent just a couple of hors but I spent six. It was a huge expo!

So I returned to home lasting only some hours to the timeline. I rushed to finish the graphics, add basic sound and make some testing. 15 minutes before the timeline the game was finished.

WHAT WENT WRONG:

•     Graphics are poor. It’s not the worst, but certainly is not the best graphics. I need drawing lessons.
•     Sound are poor. The last thing I did of course.
•     No music. No time to think about it.

WHAT WENT RIGHT:

•     The design was very appreciated. An uncommon mechanics.
•     Javascript is great. I’m really amateur in Javascript. But the language was so productive that I made the game easily. The source went very short: just 296 lines.

THE BALANCE

I really enjoyed the experience. Now I know my weak points and I will train hard to the next battle. See you soon guys!

NOW PLAY THE GAME!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=24602

I like my entry this time. I don’t know how to write a post-mortem. Thanks for all the feedback; it is great. I enjoyed all the games I have played and reviewed thus far, and will enjoy the games I play and review in the future. You are all awesome. You being everyone that submitted anything. Anyway, time to talk about me and my game. No, this will not be in Swedish, sorry.

Here is a screenshot:

Things that are the things that I think went well:

• I like the overall feel of my game. I haven’t really experimented with atmosphere and mood before, but I think I did fairly well on mood. I guess I’ll know how I did when the voting results come out.
• I like my game’s sound effects. I recorded them with a crappy desk mic and Audacity.
• My game’s music doesn’t bombard my ears with badness like the music I make usually does. Or at least not as rapidly and harshly.
• I wasn’t sure if I would be able to make an adventure game, and it turned out to not be so hard (after I did a lot of brainstorming and planning about the best way to create the game that would allow for me to expand my game at a later time or create new adventure games from scratch.)
• I like how my game looks. Plasticine is awesome. Stop-motion animation is awesome.
• I feel like the framework I’ve created allows me to create other (similar) games super quickly. Well, editing/creating the graphics takes way too long, but at least putting everything together and adding sound effects, music, etc is super quick.
• Adventure games are cool, and I’m glad I made an adventure game. I have only seen a few other (point-and-click) adventure games in the Ludum Dare, so my game is at least somewhat unique. I wish there were more though; they are super cool.
• I’m sure other things went well, but I don’t want to make this list too long.

Crap:

• The main bad thing that I can think of is that I didn’t get to make my game as big as I had originally planned. Here are some stats on what I had in the game and what was supposed to be in the game:
  • THING: IN GAME / PLANNED
  • Unique Objects: ~14/36
  • Views: 4/12
  • Rooms: 1/3
  • Puzzles: 2/7
• Views are just the different sets of (objects and background image) in a room. For example, the room is called ‘bedroom’ and the views are ‘bed’, ‘closet’, ‘door’, and ‘medals.’
• Not getting to add all the content I had planned is all I can think of that sucked. I guess the major headache after the comp ended sucked too, but that was after the comp, so it doesn’t matter.

ComPost / Post-Comp Version*

*There are no additional puzzles in the ComPost version, only additional rooms of different art styles to explore.

I’ve just looked through Youtube and found another video review of my game. Awesome! 😀
If you want to try it: –> play it here

I love reading everyone’s postmortems. Either people do clever things that I would never have thought of, in which case I’ve learned something; or they don’t, but then I at least get to feel smug; it’s a win either way. Here’s how my Compo entry, Jack and the Alarm Clock, came to be.

Concept

“10 seconds”… what to do with that? I expected many time-limited games, but I wanted to do something different, which got me thinking about other meanings of the word “seconds”. In particular, the one about having a second helping at dinner. This led to the idea of a game about Hansel and Gretel, where you play Gretel who has to collect ingredients for the witch to stuff Hansel with seconds, ten times (actually, thirds, fourths, …). I dropped this idea because it would force me to build 10 levels, ideally with different ingredients on each, and I wasn’t sure I’d have time for that.

But the fairy-tale idea stuck, clearly, and so Jack and the Alarm Clock was born. A time-limited game, as I tried to avoid, ironically… but a game nonetheless, and that’s what matters most. A platformer is probably the least original I could have done, but I had never made a platformer before (unless you count I Am A Ninja). And it would allow me to do both the objectives I’d set myself: to use pixel art, and to implement parallax scrolling (just because it’s super easy and looks cool).

Coding

Before I had decided on the final concept, I’d already started setting up a WebGL canvas (using my own support library Gladder) and writing a Tiled importer. I was worried I was going to have to parse XML with a compressed blob of data in it, but no, Tiled supports JSON nowadays! So that was a lot simpler than I thought.

A tile map loader could have gone many ways, for instance a tile-based puzzler, or a Wacky Wheels-like racing game. When the loader was done and I still hadn’t come up with a more original idea, I decided just to go for the Jack game, platformer or no.

Collision handling and controls presented some interesting challenges. This article led to the key thought of updating x and y positions sequentially instead of simultaneously, which made things a lot easier and more robust. Aligning everything to whole pixels nicely dealt with all the roundoff problems that you have in a general-purpose physics system. That also had some aesthetic effect: in pixelated games, it always bothers me if the individual sprites are pixelated, but they don’t align to pixel boundaries between each other!

I got pretty much all the coding done on day one, including graphics, sound, winning/losing, restarts and level progressions. This is what it looked like at the end of the first day:

Sound and music

By the end of the first day my brain felt like porridge, and coding had slowed to a crawl, so I decided to turn to music instead. Because I suck at composing (proof) I picked two traditional jigs that I learned to play on the Irish tin whistle. The slow(ish) tune is From the New Country, the fast one is Scatter the Mud (although I learned to play both a bit differently). I had done some experimenting with LMMS‘s C64 synthesizer emulator in the days before, so I felt confident I could use that to make a decent-sounding chiptune.

All sound effects were done in bfxr, with the exception of the game-over sounds. Both the “fee-fi-fo-fum” sound and the victory tune (notes shamelessly stolen from Mario) were done on the same C64 synth, taking care to transpose them to D so they would blend in well with the rest of the music.

Sound coding was a huge nightmare in my first HTML5 games (so much that I once dropped it entirely). I tried various sound libraries like SoundManager 2 and SoundJS but they either failed to deliver low latency, or failed to work at all in some browsers. But shortly before the compo I discovered Howler.js, which worked perfectly out of the box and made me very happy.

Graphics

This was the first time I tried my hand at pixel art, and I’m fairly satisfied with how it turned out:

With tile-based levels, there’s an interesting interplay between the level and the tile map, and I found myself switching frequently between Tiled and GIMP. Fortunately, both tools make this very painless. And while making levels, I discovered that my tile map supported something I hadn’t planned for: you can see the branching beanstalk in level 6.

If I have one regret about this game, it’s that I wasn’t able to put in as many graphics as I’d have liked. Some variety in the beanstalk, some more detail on the ground and in the castle, some birds flying through the air or clouds moving, some more different types of platforms…

Somewhat less faithful to the 256-colour era is that I threw in some noise to make the sprites look more interesting.

Fun fact: the most detailed-looking sprite is probably the cottage, but I only drew that in the last hour of the compo. I think I was improving; this also shows in the hen and harp sprites, which were also among the last ones. I wonder if Jack would have looked any better if I hadn’t started with him…

Level design

I’ll admit, level design is not my favourite activity. Perhaps this is also because I have very little practice and am not very good at it.

Tiled made the mechanics fairly painless, but there’s still a large amount of iterative test-adjust-test involved. Worse, by the end of it I had no idea if the difficulty level was about right. I tried to rope in some playtesters, but didn’t get much useful feedback.

Due to lack of time, there is also much less variety across levels than I would have liked. I made each next level by copying the last and putting in a new beanstalk, but the giant’s castle looks identical (and identically uninspired) each time. Worse, it’s in the same location, because moving it meant moving tiles around on three different layers, and (to my knowledge) Tiled doesn’t make that easy. It would have been nice if the beanstalk got higher, lifting the castle up, instead of just becoming more twisty.

Hacks and goofs

I thought it would be nice to end this post with some dirty secrets. Of course it’s horrible spaghetti code to begin with, with loads of global variables, public fields, and interactions and interdependencies that should not be, but here are some particular gems:

• There are hardcoded constants all over the place. These mostly represent coordinates inside the sprite sheet. But this is OK since these are also used inside the level tile maps, so they cannot easily be changed anyway.
• The fences on the left and right side are made impenetrable in code, rather than in the tile map. As I developed the first level, I increased its height several times, and I got tired of having to extend the invisible wall upwards!
• Someone reported that they couldn’t make a particular jump, even though I could easily make it on my machine. I figured this was a problem with my physics implementation, which used a variable time step and therefore could have slightly different results depending on the speed of the machine. I ended up using a 50 millisecond fixed timestep. If not enough time has passed when it’s time to draw a frame, the elapsed time is added to an accumulator, and when it reaches 50 we do another step. No interpolation or anything fancy, but it looks smooth enough to me. (If the frame time exceeds 100 we still only do one step, in order not to end up in a death spiral where frames take longer and longer to compute.)
• The clouds were one of the very last things I added, to spice up the background. It’s just a hardcoded grid of 256×256 tiles, 15 in the horizontal and 5 in the vertical direction. I knew this was sufficient because none of the levels are larger than that! (They run out near the top; this is intentional.)
• When the giant’s hand appears and lifts the player up, the player sprite’s update method would still try to apply physics to him. Instead of adding extra state handling to the Player class, I opted for the quick way out, something only JavaScript will let you do:
  player.update = function() {};
  I used this same trick for the alarm clock’s digits, which would otherwise be animated sprites cycling through the numbers 0…9.
• When you run out of time, the giant’s hand still appears from the top of the screen, even if you’re standing right next to him and he remains asleep!

Long story, thanks for reading. Now go play and rate it if you haven’t already!

Hi. I’ve been receiving a lot of (mostly) positive feedback on my game Ten Down, and I’ve resolved to stop moping around and get cracking on a post-compo version of sorts. I’m thinking large-ish, super stylish, randomly generated maps where you fight against a variety of monsters and have to explore the area to progress. The main complaint I’ve been getting on my game is the (apparently) odd control scheme it uses, and I’d love to get some feedback on the new (hopefully more familiar) setup I’ve got going now. The controls are as follows: WASD/arrows for movement, space to shoot and shift to sprint.

You can take it for a test drive right here

If you’d like to follow the progress of this game I’ve started a WIP thread for it over here.

All the best!

Tags: post comp

I think the most learning from this jam came from a 1 hour postmortem we did with another team who also submitted an entry. We got together and discussed things like technology choices, how long we planned and most importantly what we felt went wrong. Of course many of the problems existed in past jams as well. It is hard to truly learn from your mistakes being creatures of habit. But we keep trying and eventually we’ll get it right.

Our entry was T1me Twist0r, a game of 10s mini-games. Our triumph was to ensure that the mini-games work together seamlessly in a clock like manner and to this end we succeeded. We also added quite a bit of custom audio and some funny effects. We also felt this went over well. Don’t want to spoil too much, so if you haven’t played and voted on the game do that before you continue.

So how did things play out?

Technology:

We decided to go pure HTML 5 and Javascript. We’ve done this in past competitions as well. This works well on a large array of devices, but can evidence performance problems. Our team is expert level at understanding and working with Javascript performance problems as it directly relates to our day jobs, yet we still find the fill rates of the different browsers on lower end devices to be true bottlenecks. In our case there were some glitches in the animation and things weren’t quite as seamless as we had hoped, but overall we think we hit the mark.

For hosting we used Windows Azure. Generally this works out really well. We got one complaint of slow load times for the game. We traced that down to what looked like a really slow outgoing bandwidth amount and not related to latency or server load of any sort. In the future, it might be good to use CDN services for larger files especially media components like audio or large sprite strips.

Development Environment:

Visual Studio 2012 + Visual Studio Tools for GIT + GitHub + Azure…

This worked out way better than we thought. The VS 2012 to GitHub connection was seamless. We had a single merging problem that we were able to resolve by going to the command line. Other than that we had 2 developers partying on master and no other conflicts. We pushed directly to master and had Azure listen to and deploy the site directly from there. Turnaround times were seconds in the single digits.

There was some confusion around a .deployment file to pick which project to deploy, but that was easily configured. In the end we also need to branch the jam version from the post compo version so we created a branch and built a second website that pointed to the jam submission. We still had the ability to push game breaking bug fixes this way. Again, branching and building out a second site was also a seamless experience.

Not having issue tracking built into VS is a big issue, but with 2 developers we didn’t even notice. Sticky notes are where its at. In the future it would be nice to have GitHub Issues as a window inside of Visual Studio, which is actually quite doable using the Web Browser window and just pointing it at your GitHub repository.

Planning:

We planned all of Friday. At least 4 hours of planning before we wrote the first line of code. We did have the source control already set up so we weren’t worried that our technology wouldn’t work for us starting Saturday morning. At the last hour on Friday we pushed some basic sprite framework code up in preparation for Saturday.

I will probably never do a Ludum Dare again where I don’t plan this hard. We had so many ideas and were able to think on them all night while we slept and have a really good feel for the best ideas in the morning. Had we started coding the previous night on some major features it would have been a big mistake.

Our failure in planning was in establishing the later task list. We knew what we were going to do, but we didn’t have a task list. Previously in our jams we had done more much task list creation and that allowed us to scale out to more people. Somehow having fewer people we didn’t see the point and it hurt us in the end. Every now and then I’d poke my head up, say I had checked something in, would grunt for a few seconds, and then proclaim my next conquest. Not very good if you want to maximize your working time, but great fun.

What Went Wrong:

It starts with a capital P and ends with a laytest. We needed more of it. Earlier. We needed playable aspects of our game done earlier to facilitate it. Reality check. Your first choice is not your best choice, instead without playtesting it becomes your ONLY choice. Doesn’t sound as good when you call it your ONLY choice does it? We would have fixed 2 or 3 very minor coding issues that affected our released game without having to have all of our initial players experience it. Better initial experiences would certainly lead to better scores in the Jam.

The second thing starts with a capital P and ends with a laytest… Wait, I see what you did there… Some of our mini-games didn’t work quite as expected in all scenarios. Trackpad users are slower to mouse around for instance and so found the games more challenging than touch users or mouse users. This was unfortunate. We also had a game where it wasn’t obvious that your taps were actually doing anything. Too much filtering and noise added to the results was making it sometimes do nothing when it should have been giving the user solid visual feedback that they were doing the right thing.

Never underestimate user frustration with waiting. The challenge is 10seconds, but if they finish faster, give them something for it. We initially gave nothing and had to gamify the left-over time. We actually had some of this in our planning, but wait, we didn’t write down a task list and so it got easily forgotten in the time crunch. Always give the user positive feedback. When they do something fast, give them bonus points whether or not they have to wait.

Finally at one point in the game we had some issues around the transitions. As a result we coded in a little countdown timer to the next level. This actually made the game play way too slow and after we had fixed all of the transition issues we never removed the countdown. When we implemented that countdown “Brilliance”, but when we failed to see it lacked further use in the final game, “Idiocy!” Really think about how each of your temporary decisions are impacting the game and make sure you revisit short term decisions to see if they can be made better.

Conclusion:

We hope everyone can learn from some of our insights. With just under 2 months to go for the October Jam we are already thinking of ways to improve one of our existing games to ship quality. I sure hope we apply everything we learned from this Jam and finish a truly stunning submission. See you in October!

DigiTec

Tags: postmortem

The people who made Antidote made a video of themselves playing Slime Quest.

Antidote

Check out their game if you haven’t played it already, you won’t be disappointed. If you are interested in seeing the video on Youtube click here. Thank you guys for playing our game and sharing it on Youtube.

summary of ludum dare version: platformer where something random happens every 10 seconds

I now have an update on the game with some images at the games indieDb page

http://www.indiedb.com/games/theres-a-hook

There is also an article which is in a queue to be authorized so you may not be able to see it yet.

Alot has changed in the past 10 days or so of this game. In the full game the random events will be optional. I think that people who want a challenge or for the fun of it can turn on the random events. Also alot more events are being added along with the several new blocks an textures added already.

play ludum dare version here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=27122

thanks to @danielsound for the let’s play 😀 it’s awesome the see how someone that i don’t know play my game. pure feedback, 100% vitamins.

check it out, it’s only 3 minutes long!

if you like what you see, play the game here.

you can follow Daniel on twitter or twitch. maybe he could do a let’s play for you? :P?

This was our first ludum dare.

Anticipation

We live in South Africa, the comp starts at 3am Saturday and ends Monday, having to work meant loosing an entire day. I went to bed at 11pm and got up at 4am like a 6 year old on Christmas morning

Because of my inexperience with unity and the fact that this was our first ludum dare we decided from the start to keep it painfully simple, a single screen with preferably a single button and definitely 2D.

Theme

We struck gold with the theme, what could possibly be easier to do than to guess when 10 seconds have passed, an interpretation I initially thought many people would use but later realized it runs the risk of being too simple or boring.

We made a quick priority list of features we would like which looked something like this:

• Press space to guess when 10 seconds have passed
• Distract the player by scene transitions
• Distract the player by having to somehow interact with the scene
• Distract the player by using sounds
• Distract the player with animations

Revelation

Clem sketched out the scene.

Since we committed to one scene we needed to make the most of it. We decided to start zoomed in and progressively reveal the rest of the scene as time progressed. This gave an initial low expectation as no sound or movement was present… very very sneaky sir

He then suggested we cut it into pieces to help give the illusion of depth when the perspective camera moved.

As the camera moved through the scene we kept trying to hide the fact that we have multiple layers, but decided to embrace it and reveal it in the end for … dramatic effect.

The white border around the final frame makes the zoom out feel floaty in a browser because the browser background is also white.

Directors cut

We wanted to add sound to each section that fit the objects, another part of me wanted to joke around which is why we added the directors cut.

Score server

I built a quick rails app to submit scores so that I can see if anyone is playing the game. Seems like there should be a service somewhere that anyone can use to submit ludum game score. I might implement this if it hasn’t already been. The scores are woefully lacking any form of statistics, it basically just lists all the player and their score per section.

Did not have time for

• Scene interactions. I struggled finding a reason for the player to explore the scene. It would not have added anything to the guessing. I for example at one point had it rain when you mouse over a cloud.
• Sound on each level
• Sprite animations: There was suppose to be a person proposing under the tree and children running towards the fisherman with a kite
• Having the camera zoom out to a point where the scene is a picture on a wall in a room

We had fun and will definitely join the next one.

Hi there, Daniel here, I made a Twitch stream while playing and rating games a while ago, and created a form for people to send me their games to play on the stream. But even after I stopped streaming, I guess people still found the form and sent more games, so every moment I find some free time I ended up playing some more, recording and uploading to youtube.

Here are some of the games I played:

I figured people would appreciate watching someone play their game for the first time, see where they get confused (I get confused a lot, trust me! lol.) I know I love to watch videos of people playing Antidote ^^

So, here is the form if you want to send me a game to play and record:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1I2SgP3-W1SAcVYw7ZSZECBxqMylPqqE2-lOMPz5VMkQ/viewform

Can’t promise it will be quick, I’m working on some other things and I’m doing this when I get bored/want to take a break, but I intend on playing all the games people send over there. (Which I hope won’t be 2211, lol).

Cheers!

Dan