maybe

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 19th, 2013 at 6:42 pm 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.

Fellow LD’er VDZ  has been helping me understand why my games aren’t more fun. One thing he said was that my latest entry, Pro Crastinator didn’t present enough clear challenge, reward, or risk.

If I’m going to make games, they should really be fun! So, I’m trying to better understand what VDZ is trying to teach me.

To that end, I did some “Homework.” I took it upon myself to look at some of the top-ranking LD games in the fun category, and try to figure out what makes them so fun. I tried to pay particularly close attention to the concepts of challenge, reward and risk. I thought it would be useful to share here, so that you guys can “Grade me.”

Trevor Thompson

Ludum Dare 09/19/13

6th period

Understanding Fun

Antidote:

There’s a very simple game mechanic:
you shoot, you pick up gems.

• On top of that, there’s a risk: die if you don’t make it to the potion in time (and lose your progress)

•     On top of that, there’s another risk: you lose the opportunity for gems if you get the antidote too fast

Challenges include getting further in the dungeon and getting as much $ as possible (or higher than last play / higher than your peers). [It could be improved by clearly showing the amount of cash picked up upon death, like Coin Rush does]

Rewards come in the forms of seeing new dungeons, seeing and hearing effects of the gun, destruction or shuddering of enemies / objects on shooting, seeing shiny gems pop out, hearing sounds of gems hitting the floor, hearing sounds of picking up gems, seeing indicators that your money is increasing

Every ten seconds a window washer falls to his death:

Movement is difficult but fair; player has just enough control to not feel frustrated, but not so much that the job is easy or boring. Player has to decide what area of the screen they should be in and also manage their velocity in order to do so (subtle decisions need to be made regarding bouncing off the edges vs changing direction).

Challenge is to get the building clean(er than last time)

Risks come in the form of leaving a washer unattended for too long, leaving birds alone for too long, and not catching falling washers. The player is allowed to manage those risks themselves. The scream sound and splat effect reinforces with the player that the risk is “real.”

Rewards come in the form of audio and graphical indicators when a washer is saved or when a bird is kicked. It is perhaps worth noting that it’s not as “rewarding” to the eyes and ears to focus solely on repairing the ropes.

Proletarian Ninja X:

(Frankly, I think this one is more frustrating than fun)

Challenge is to move through the levels. Hitting multiple enemies with the shuriken is a challenge the player can set for themselves.

Rewards come from killing enemies in the form of a screen flash, sound effect, and spawned blood and guts.

Risks come from being seen, having corpses be seen and the ticking clock. Player is allowed to manage risks, to some extent, by choosing when and in what order enemies can be killed. The shuriken mechanic adds another layer of choice for the player.

PUNISHMENT(!) comes in the forms of a bright, fast screen flash and a grating noise.

Clockwork Cat:

Good ole’ platformin mechanic. Tight controls.

Challenge is to make it to the next section before time runs out.

Rewards include seeing more of the level and completing the story, hearing the noise and seeing the hands move when you are reversing time.

Risks include running out of time and falling to your death. The player feels like they have a certain amount of agency over their risks, because they can often run back and rewind time as often as they like, until they feel ready to move to the next section.

Coin Rush:

Again, a good ole’ platformer.

Challenge comes from wanting to get the highest score, or a higher score.

Rewards come in the form of the enemies bouncing off the screen, coins popping out, sound of coins hitting floor, sound of picking up coins, counter increasing when enemies pick up coins, watching your score increase and getting bigger coins when the enemies have multipliers in effect. The player is able to manage their reward, to some extent, by how many coins they let the enemies pick up.

Risks come from touching enemies and having enemies run away with your hard earned loot. Again, the latter is left up to the player to manage, to some extent.

Conclusions:

I think it is quite clear that some patterns are emerging with regards to risk, challenges and rewards.

One thing I didn’t mention is that all of these games, if I recall correctly, have great music. However, I don’t know much about what makes great music or what makes great music for a fun game.

Well, I’m crashing vrld‘s party with other things I was curious about

In particular the difference between Compo entries and Jam entries.

Unsurprisingly,  jam entries get higher ratings in graphics:

Similarly their audio is also rated higher:

My theory is that these two give the Jam a boost when it comes to mood:

But are jam games better? The overall doesn’t show a major difference:

And neither does fun:

Same for innovation:

They certainly are funnier (disregarding a certain outlier…) which I wasn’t really expecting:

But the coolest thing is that there’s one category where the compo gains the upper hand (not by alot, but you can’t deny it’s there):

All in all, nothing too crazy here, but I wonder why the compo entries get higher theme ratings.

… or: A Guide on How To Score High Next Time.*

Recently, ashdnazg posted a handy CSV containing all Compo and Jam entries that received a rating. Being somewhat of a data-nerd, I decided to take a deeper look at the results. In particular, I was interested in one question:

“Do ratings in one category influence the ratings in another category, and if yes, how much?”

One way to answer this question is plotting the ratings in category A against the ratings in category B using a scatter plot. If A depends on B (or vice versa), we will roughly see a ‘line’. The line will become more ‘blurred’  the less dependent the categories are.

You can also put a number on the dependencen using MATHS. More specifically: Pearson’s correlation coefficient. The correlation coefficient measures the correlation (dependence) between two variables. As result, it will give you a value between -1 and 1, where -1 and 1 translate to “highly correlated” and 0 means “no correlation”.

Before jumping to conclusions, it’s time for a disclaimer: 

“Correlation does not imply causality” – i.e. high correlation of ‘Theme’ and ‘Mood’ can mean that a high rating in ‘Theme’ will lead to a high rating in ‘Mood’ or the reverse. Or it can mean there is no causality at all.

Anyway, here are the results of my analysis (correlation coefficient is shown in the lower right of the plots):

“Overall” Rating

As suspected, the overall rating is highly correlated with fun:

Surprisingly, it is less correlated with good graphics or innovation:

Here are the remaining plots. As you can see, the overall rating is almost independent on the humor rating, but surprisingly very correlated with the mood.

 Audio and Theme have a moderate correlation with the overall rating.

Conclusions:

There are two things we can take from this:

1. If you want a high overall rating, make you game (a) fun and (b) pretty. If you have time, try to evoke some intense feelings (mood).

But perhaps more important:

2. The Fun and Overall rating could be turned into one combined rating (“overall”).

Bonus:

This post is too short to show or even analyse all the correlations of each category with each other category. However, I created a zip containing all the graphs (including jam results) so you can draw your own conlusions. You can download the file here.

* Not really though. See the disclaimer.

So this was my first main Ludum Dare and I had a lot of fun. But I have now seen two posts accusing people of cheating the system. One guy was being accused of cheating because they commented ‘Good Job’ on every game they rated. ( http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2013/09/01/l-for-loser/ ) In the second one, people who don’t leave comments are being accused of being cheaters. ( http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2013/09/18/dirty-cheats/ ) I understand there are probably more than a few real cheaters out there. They will always exist. But I do not appreciate that people who don’t leave comments (and somebody that always left a comment) suddenly being lumped in, as if not leaving feedback or leaving too much feedback just meant you were rating randomly.

I rated 191 games. I might have left about 10 comments on various games, almost none of which was more than a Good Job. I played every single one of those games and left an honest rating as I am sure a whole lot of people did. Just because I didn’t have much or anything new to say has no relation to my rating habits. Maybe some games I should have played a little longer. Maybe next Dare I will try and leave more feedback since it is obviously strongly encouraged. But leaving a comment with your rating was not required and insinuating those of us with little to say are cheaters is unfair to say the least.

I am not against requiring feedback next time around as suggested in the second post but I can only guess that game pages will just be filled with a whole lot of “Good Job”‘s and “I don’t know what to say but I need to fill 100 characters. And Good Job”.

I don’t know how to actually catch cheaters but I feel like actively looking for them is only detrimental to my enjoyment of the entire process and being indirectly accused of cheating myself is even more so. I don’t know how the people running the show look for them but I assume they are doing their job. In the meantime, I am going to happily continue on with my life assuming everybody here wants the same thing I do, to make a game in 48/72 hours, and that any cheaters that are out there will get what they deserve.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 20th, 2013 at 8:29 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.

Available for free on the GDC Vault. This is an incredible (and sadly missed) magazine. I recommend any aspiring, hobbyist, or independent game developer peruse through this archive. Many insightful articles for all fields related to game development.

I previously wrote about how you should subscribe to this magazine. Alas, the magazine is now gone, but you can read everything in PDF form.

Just wanted to say thanks to everyone who took the time to play and rate my game!

My previous entry (LD26) was a decent game but was rated very poorly in audio because I ran out of time and didn’t get around to adding any at all. I actually managed to score a 1.31 in Audio that time. I guess there were actually some reviewers out there who felt that silence was worth more than a 1. heh.

Anyway, I knew I wanted to make sure that I didn’t have a repeat of my audio performance this time for LD27. I wanted to make something where the audio was central to the experience of the game. So, I got all crazy and ended up deciding to make a music game with some original music that I’d record over the weekend.

I knew I’d do better in Audio this time around… but I still didn’t have a full complement of sounds – no UI sounds or anything – just 30 seconds of original music. I definitely didn’t expect to get 3rd place in Audio across all Jam entries, and I’m not entirely sure that I deserve it, but I appreciate it all the same!

Anyway, this has been a great 2nd Ludum Dare for me. I’m very happy with how everything turned out and am looking forward to the next one!

Tags: audio, music, rankings, ratings, thanks

I really like the idea of this Mini-LD so I couldn’t resist doing something. As part of the purpose of this challenge is to learn something, doing a C/C++ game wouldn’t really cut it for me, so to meet the learning requirements I figure it would be best to develop a game for a platform I have never worked with before. I decided to go with the NES as I really loved 6502 assembly language and I figured it would be similar to programming my Commodore 64.  I have spent the last few evenings learning how the NES works and creating some skeleton code for creating a game this weekend. While I think I have the weekend free, this is not guaranteed.

Tools: JEdit, NESAsm, yy-char (tile graphics editor), possibly tiled

Skeleton: http://blazinggames.com/gamejams/minild45/miniLD45.php

Good luck to everyone who plans on entering this one.

So against my better judgement, I decided to participate in this month’s Mini Ludum Dare!  I will be building a game in C++ using the SFML framework, and creating my game assets in Paint.NET.  Unfortunately, I don’t think I’ll be able to get a whole lot done, since I also have homework to attend to, so I am scoping very low for this project.

My game will be a one-screen, top-down monster shooter set in a labyrinth; nothing fancy on the experience side.  However, I am using this as an opportunity to teach myself new things, in the spirit of the compo.  Specifically, I implemented a new AI pathfinding method I’ve never tried before, use cellular automata to generate my levels in a way I’ve never done before, and am going to try to practice my pixel art a little more.

The following screenshot is a debugging view of the pathfinding technique I mentioned.  It is essentially my own implementation of the technique described in this article, where it is called “diffusion-based pathfinding”.  The brighter the tiles, the nearer they are to my player character, as you can surely see; the data is updated constantly, in real-time.  Monsters will use this diffusion- or scent-based grid to navigate towards the player at all times.

Hope everyone’s having fun, and getting their proper rest!  I’ll be cross-posting to my personal blog as well.

Tags: MiniLD #45

It’s meant to be my main character’s adorable sprite image… almost. All these C compilers written after the 1980s have left me spoiled — It’s probably not a good idea to write hundreds of lines of code at a time without testing when you’re using TurboC (1988).

I started learning to program on the MSX. Back in the day I mixed BASIC and some assembly code with the aid of the trusty MSX Red Book. So for this Mini-LD I decided to go back to it and try to make something in pure assembly language. I am using z80asm to build the “cartridge” binary and OpenMSX to run it. After so much time, I really needed help to remember things like memory organization, BIOS calls etc. I found very helpful information at the MSX Assembly Pages and the MSX Info Pages.

I have set up a GitHub repository with the source code of my experiments and hopefully, the full game if I get to it:

https://github.com/rinaka/rinaka_minild45

My first “experiment” was the good old “Hello, World!” program (hello.asm). In this case it also loops receiving text input and displaying it on-screen. Nothing fancy, but good enough to test the tools setup and information about the cartridge header.

The second experiment involved switching to graphics mode, setting up a sprite, and moving it with the cursor keys (interact.asm). Main loop timing is achieved in a crude way: since the video display processor generates an interrupt at 50Hz or 60Hz (depending on the system), I simply use an HALT instruction at the end of the loop step. It is funny to think that I can get away with it since the machine is dedicated to running a single program. It is also a joy not to have to worry about word alignment, large memory spaces etc.

In the third experiment I tried to use a technique that, if I remember well, was common in MSX games: using part of the character table as a tile set to build the game levels, in 32×24 text mode. Each group of 8 characters can have a different combination of two colors. Storing a room map this way is probably not a good idea as it takes 768 bytes. I am thinking of either doing some simple compression or using less tiles per room…

So far, that is all I have… It has been a lot of fun to make, due to the fond memories brought back by this. I will not have much of my weekend available for the jam, but I will try to submit a small, complete game…

I think I found an error in one of the compiler-made error message I got.

Never gotten this one before — I guess we’re not going to have super massive levels. Writing any streaming-from-disk-levels-cleverness using 16bit DOS probably isn’t the best idea given the time constraint.

Not 100% happy with the walk cycle, animating a 1bit sprite is surprisingly hard to get right.

Firstly, a big apology that this has taken so long. Life seemed to have gotten in the way after the two days at Ludem Dare. Secondly this is a short summary of my game the full length one can be found on my youtube channel later today.(Watch this space).

What went right:

• Using unity, going with something you know really, really is the best thing you can do to help your chances of “winning”.
• My level design workflow; this would be a post on itself but by the end of the compo I could make a level in 5 min flat.
• Trading Extensibility for Simplicity, in the beginning I had one hell of a OOP class diagram with singletons and factory’s to make my mobs and store my data. However in the end they were made into static variables and Instance() commands.
• Um… …I finished? No really this was my first project that I can put my “This is a game” sticker on.
• Even worse… …I started. You know that guy? The guy who thinks they suck real bad and so don’t ever do anything. That was me

What went wrong:

• The difficulty. This I think was a major downer to most people. The fact that they didn’t get past level one, it might have caused them to rate fun lower than they might have as well.
• Innovation. this speaks for itself. 986th isn’t that bad…. Right?
• How I got 2.07 for humor when my game had no DIALOGUE.
• Secrets, most people didn’t seem to get that all you needed to do to find a secret was shoot at a wall. If( !Wall.HasBulletHole ){ SecretWallFound(); }
• My overall 435th rating, A bit disappointing. I was aiming for at least 399th.
•  I forgot to add blood particles.

Another thing that I forgot is the link

Hi! Just saying that I think I’m making something for the mini LD running over this weekend. I had a reasonably awesome idea: make a game for the gameboy advance. I’ve been working on another project recently (Portal for the gba), so I have a bit of experience

I’m using an ancient version (circa 2005) of the Dragon BASIC compiler for the gba. It’s pretty neat, and of course, the language compiles to actual machine code to run on the gameboy (duh!).

I have to use bitmaps for all of my graphics, so paint.NET will be the way to go. I also need to do some amazing magic on most of my images, so that they are actually 16 color, and properly 4bpp.

If I do ever actually finish something worth playing, it’ll be in the form of a gba rom. This means it’ll need either an emulator (Visualboy Advance is great) or an actual GBA and a flash cartridge to run.

Hope to see some interesting entries in the low-level jam 😀

So, here’s what I’m working on, after several hours of trying to get tiled backgrounds working. I still cannot scroll the tilemap though, I’m working on it.

I think that I’m making some kind of sandbox/exploration game, I don’t really have any full idea on what I’m gonna turn this into though! A top-down minecraft-esque game could be nice to experiment with on the gameboy.

Sprite loading all over again, trying to get tilemaps to work. Hard to imagine how we had computer software in the 1980s — then again, this is far more fun than a segfault.

It took me way too long to get this much working:

I am sooo out of practice with C++. Lua, Python, and C# have spoiled me!!

I’m not exactly new to C++, but the last game I made in the language was years ago. For this miniLD (my first foray into any LD) I thought it might be nice to revisit C++ and also try out SDL2 which just came out

A little late, but I’m in for the Low-Level Jam! Going to be using C and Libtcod to make a roguelike of some sort! Good luck everyone, have fun :P.

Libtcod – http://doryen.eptalys.net/libtcod/

There. I said it. Enjoy your jam.

For the record I got a good little turn-based city-sim/roguelike going (who knows which game UI I just ripped off?), it’s just not going to happen this weekend.

This is my first foray into developing with C++ and Allegro (as well as Visual Studio,) and I’m quite happy with the process so far, except that it took me so long to figure this “bug” out:

floor = ceil =+ floor;

At first I was pretty shocked that this had happened and not been caught, but after staring at it for a minute it made sense; this was interpreted as “set floor and ceil equal to the positive of floor” which was not what I had intended. I guess this should teach me to be a little bit more careful when I’m trying to press the plus key quickly!

Ok, another little “experiment”: cell-based movement. On each keypress the character slides 8 pixels left, right, up or down, thus keeping aligned with the tiles. Also, the character’s position is constrained to the inside of the “room.” Next up: solid walls and some cell-based collision detection (i.e. divide coordinates by 8 and compare…)

On the game design front, this is turning into a series of rooms that the player has to traverse avoiding hazards and maybe solving simple puzzles. Vague and yet not very original, I know… ;P

Ok, not much time to do anything, but I decided to join. Maybe I can do something in a few hours? (since I won’t have much free time tomorrow?)

Wish me luck!

A zombie and the player

I’m working on a wave-based platformer where you have to protect a building from raids and sieges of different kinds of monsters. There are different kind of weapons and support gadgets you can use to protect yourself.

Ok so I think that once again I started writting something over-ambitious, but anyway here’s my progress shot after the first day of coding on my MS-DOS first person dungeon crawler game (not gonna happen): Deepstone…. (details after the pic).

I’m running this on my old Pentium 200mmx MS-DOS machine, as seen in the pic. It still sucks a lot, but I’ve got crappy affine texture mapped polygons, 256 color palette managment which automatically manages the gouraud shading color ramps on textured polygons, 3D polygon clipping,  and first person shooter-like camera control with free mouselook.

It’s not all from scratch; some of the code I’ve ripped out of a simpler DOS 3D hack I wrote about a year ago. For the most part what I did today was port the code from 16bit BorlandC to 32bit WatcomC, rewrite the rasterizer, write a 3D polygon clipper, and fix horrible bugs all over the place. The 3D scene in this shot was ineptly created in blender.

The idea, which doesn’t look like is going to happen, is to have the player walk around a small pre-modelled dungeon, and collect treasure, while ideally fighting a couple of “monsters”. Realistically, it’s very unlikely that I’ll find time to add monsters, so it might become just a dungeon “exploration” “game” (note the amount of quotation marks

Tags: DOS, dungeon crawler, MiniLD #45, software rendering

Today I whipped up a proof of concept for MiniLD #45. It is written in C.  My tools of choice are MinGW and SDL2, everything being 100% open source.  I wanted to do OpenGL as well, but since I am totally unfamiliar with either MinGW or SDL, I figured this would be a good enough start.

I managed to get all the basics to work, that is: bitmaps, sounds, keyboard, and mouse.  In C I got a fair performance, of up to about 20,000 moving objects.  The code is pretty simple, so it may be useful for some of you who want to participate in the MiniLD or another LD as well.

It’s not much of a game, though it’s playable and fully functional.  Maybe tomorrow I can turn this into an actually interesting game.  I hope it works decently on other computer as well! The first level has 1000 enemies, the second one 2000, etc, up till 5000.

You can download the game + source here:

tmtg.net/ludumdare/pix-l-tron/pix-l-tron-prototype-20130922.zip

Pix-l-tron level 1

So today I got most of the fundamental gameplay in place for my game.  There are now two enemy types who pursue the player, one which shoots at the player and the other which tries to swarm the player at close range.  The player also has three weapon types, though two of them are effectively identical at the moment.  There is also a rudimentary GUI that tracks player health, monsters killed, and weapon type current equipped.

Tomorrow I am going to focus on adding content and creating a progressively increasing difficulty curve.  I am not sure whether to add audio, but if I do, it will be fairly primitive.  I am actually having quite a bit of fun with this, which is probably helped by the fact that I chose a super low-scope game to build.  Hope everyone else is also enjoying their MiniLD!

As usual, I cross-post this to my personal blog.

Tags: MiniLD #45

Aw yeah. Got the tilemap loading / drawing / collision working! This is all the main tedious parts out the way. I managed to write the worlds smallest (and worst) .TMX loader so I can just load the Tiled level files right into the game. It felt a bit funny using tech from the 80s to load XML, a format which wouldn’t be invented for another 8 years.

I think the game is going to end up needing a Pentium at the very least, I doubt I’ll get it running well on a 486 given the time constraints. The sparse colour palette was a stylistic choice, I could display up to 256 colours — more colours will probably come into play later.

Could not get anything decent working on time, and I have a lot of other things to do, so… that’s it for me. I love the theme, but my personal life got in the way. Maybe next time.

At least I learnt that my OpenGL skills are VERY rusty. I really need to practice a bit before I try to do anything with it again. It was good using a bit of C++ again, though. C# really has spoiled me a bit, and it was kinda refreshing, have to worry about things like memory allocation/freeing, references, linker errors, build events and all that hellish thing. I love it

Good luck for you guys!

I spent a few hours yesterday wrestling visual studio and blender. It’s unbelievable how many convenience shortcuts and refactor tools Visual Studio C++ is missing in comparison to what I am used to from eclipse and Java. Maybe I am just to stupid to find the cool features of Visual Studio, but I really wish I had started with CDT from the beginning…

Nevertheless I was able to establish a very rudimentary workflow that enables me to uv-map things in blender, create basic scenes in xml format and display everything with lights and shadows in a Horde3D scene. I also got Coment – an entity component framework for C++ – to work. Everything takes really long because there’s so many things that I either don’t know or that are just overcomplicated

Horde3D is based completely on shaders and doesn’t use the fixed pipeline. That leaves room for a lot of things you can do with it by writing own shaders and I think I want to focus on writing my own shader for the rest of the day.

Don’t know if I will come up with a game  in the end, but I am really enjoying to learn some new stuff and leaving my java/libgdx/2d comfort zone for a while. I have a cool idea for an educational game (yes, educational games can be cool) but I think everything takes far too long for me to get it done this weekend.

Hope you guys are having fun too

MiniLD “Progress”

I just posted a post-compo version of my LD27 entry, The Vengeful Baby-Men, to Kongregate.

It’s largely the same game with a few minor fixes/enhancements. The biggest addition is integration into Kongregate’s High Score lists. See if you can get the best time!

The Vengeful Baby-Men on Kongregate

My Mini-Ludum Dare #45 entry has been posted and is located http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-45/?action=preview&uid=15656 . It is my first NES game written in 6502 assembly language. I was already familiar with 6510 assembly language from my Commodore 64 days so the big learning curve was understanding the NES hardware. This worked surprisingly different from the C64 making this a more interesting challenge than I expected. Needless to say, if you want to try this game you will need a NES emulator. I plan on looking for a web-based emulator so I can have the game running on my site but that won’t happen for a few days. The goal of the game is to get to the treasure chest while avoiding the ghosts. There are 4 levels in the game.

So I just finished Monster’s Maze and uploaded it to the main thread!  This has been a very whirlwind experience, since I didn’t at all expect to participate in this MiniLD, especially not since it only lasted 3 days and I had other work to attend to.  And yet here I am, and I think I can say with confidence (I hope!) that Monster’s Maze turned out even better than my MiniLD #44 entry (Jumpstarter).

The development process was incredibly smooth, with only a few major blockages.  I think it helped a lot that I chose to make such a heavily restricted game world; that helped me focus my efforts on gameplay and balancing.  I’m happy with the end result; it may be a little too hard (I can’t even survive until unlocking all weapons!), but it’s frantic and hopefully fun.

I also learned a few things.  Diffusion-based pathfinding is amazing, really, and I will have to pay close attention to my future projects to see if they would benefit from an implementation; it’s such a useful technique, that alone was worth getting into this MiniLD for.  I also learned about using cellular automata to create mazes (and how to deal with the mazes if they aren’t completely navigable – interestingly, diffusion-based pathfinding really helps fix broken mazes!), some minor SFML details, some debugging techniques, and had my first real clash with the need to balance numbers in my game, both directly and algorithmically.

Great and rewarding fun, all in all, and I hope everyone else enjoyed their time too!

As usual, cross-posting to my personal blog!

Tags: MiniLD #45

Oh well, weekend is over and I am not close to finishing my little game for Mini-LD #45. I intend to keep working on it but there will be no submission for the jam…

Submitted the “game” last night, but I was too tired to make a post about it. Game is over here.

I unfortunately didn’t didn’t get a chance to finish it, so it’s very short. That being said, I’m rather happy with the results. I was using a very old 16bit DOS compiler (turboC, 1988), I had to run it with warnings disabled as it wouldn’t shut up and no amount of brackets and casting could make it understand that I meant to do something a certain way — the lack of useful warnings was a massive contrast to how I’d run GCC, with -Wall. This lead to a lot of bugs, glitches and issues throughout.

I’m also convinced that as you approached the 64kb global/static memory limit in TurboC that some variables would begin to overlap or something to that effect. I did a little reading and discovered TurboC was prone to a lot of weirdness, so it doesn’t seem out of the question. Knowing the compiler would be less forgiving in terms of warnings I specifically approached the code with the intent of avoiding malloc (I did use it for allocating memory for the images, though), I only discovered later on about the global/static memory limit. Despite turboC’s 64k limit there was something quite nice about only using the stack and global/static memory, as if you get a much clearer idea of exactly how much memory you’re using and don’t need to worry about memory leaks or other memory issues, everything has a preset upper bound. This has made me consider writing a game that doesn’t use malloc at all in the future, although I’d have to use a different compiler.

I may do a longer write up on the technical aspects of the game and its code, but I question how relevant the information might be in 2013 😉

Looking forward to trying out some of the other entries, I saw some impressive screenshots being posted. I’ll hopefully get a chance to give them a go this evening.

I submitted Pix-l-tron yesterday night.  The “low-level” tools used are C in MinGW and SDL2. The graphics suck.  I didn’t spend any time on them, so consider them placeholder graphics.

An advantage of using C and SDL over my usual tools of choice is performance.  So, i figured, I want this to be a game with massive amounts of objects. Since I was pleasantly surprised to see that my LD27 game (two minute mayhem) scored #144 on fun (3.5 stars), I took some ideas from that game and turned them into an arena shooter.

I wrote a minimalist game engine from scratch. The entire game is about 800 lines of code. It does most stuff you need for a basic game: bitmaps, sound, fonts, tiles, keyboard/mouse.  I figure this code may be useful for anyone who wants to make a game in SDL2, so I’m releasing it as open source (BSD).

You can find the game here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-45/?action=preview&uid=14520

The video quality of the gameplay video sucks, set it to HD to get a fair quality video.

I also “finished” my “game”. Or at least I don’t have time to work on it any longer for a while. It doesn’t have any real gameplay elements. But it is more than just a personal tech-demo. As I didn’t have the time to explain things in the game I will have to make a video. Everything in the “game” is different than normal. Especially the controls and the visual part. But it all has a reason. I was able to add saccadic supression and saccadic motor-control today but I don’t have more time now. I might elaborate on it some more in the future. I have some problems with the executables and dependencies so you can’t even try it right now. But here are some screenshots:

Aware of the dangers of TL;DR, I constructed a handy pie chart to help do my explaining:

As you can see, I spent a lot of the time not working on Ludum Dare stuff (including various sicknesses and having a birthday). Most of the programming time actually comes from me switching to the Jam instead of the Compo.

And the results?

I did surprising well in innovation, and mood, weirdly. Overall I didn’t go amazingly, which I think was largely due to the lack of clear instructions on how to play.

Still, these results make me think that I should maybe spend a little bit of time actually finishing my game. Maybe.

Anyway, if you’re interested in playing a chaotic and difficult to understand game, then check it out!

Well, it’s been long overdue, but I am finally posting my reaction and conclusions from my first Ludum Dare competition in the Ludum Dare #27. I did recently also complete a submission for the 7DRTS, but it was nothing like this in terms of time restraints, so I consider it child’s play (pun intended; laugh at your leisure) compared to this competition.

To remind everyone, I created a game known as “Hot Dawg Dash” for the competition. The goal of the game is to eat as many hot dogs as you can in 10 seconds time (hence the theme). The game would record your 10 second record during the course of gameplay, which would allow you to know what score to beat in the next 10 seconds. Some strategy was involved in the course of gameplay, which involved not choking as much by drinking water (eating hot dogs is impossible if you can’t even breathe, which seems logical enough).

(If you want to chance to play it, go to http://www.kongregate.com/games/brgarnet17/hot-dawg-dash)

To the left are my ratings for the competition. I was pleasantly surprised by the humor and theme rating (especially since I did not even expect that high of a ranking in any area), but there is definitely room for improvement in the future.

The only thing that puzzled me about the ratings is my fun score. I thought it might be higher, but it may be a result of my mechanic being so short in duration (since 10 seconds is not a long time for the completion of a game).

Overall, I did some things in my design and process that I was really proud of, and other things that definitely need work. Without further adieu, the pros and cons .

Pros:

• Completed the game. This by far was the top goal of the competition. I had done other design projects before, but most of them I did not finish. I am glad to say that this was one of the exceptions to the rule.
• Fun game mechanic. The mechanic of the game, though simple, was driven by the fun I found in the idea of having a game centered around a hot dog eating contest. Not only that, but I did manage to add a little strategy in the gameplay as well, mainly through the use of the water.
• Small scope. The projects I did not finish in the past in other competitions or assignments was due to the problem of big scope in the design. For the sake of this competition, I decided early to have a small scope in relation to the actual experience I have had in accelerated game programming, while is small but growing at this point. This decision, in the end, made it possible for me to finish the project on time and entertain a few people along the way.

Cons:

• Little digital art experience. Though the gameplay was decently fun to be involved in, the art and animation of the game could have been more engaging and entertaining. This flaw in the design was due to my failure to find artistic direction and experience from either myself or anyone else. For the next jam, I probably need to find someone else to do the artistic side of the design process.
• Needed longer sprints. To pace myself, I would take programming and design sprints in order to remain fresh in those periods of time. Though this was good, the sprints during the design of this game were not long enough and the periods of time between these sprints became too long. Hopefully, this mistake will be avoided next time due to this experience.
• Short duration of mechanic. During the design process, I decided to do a 10 second sprint of eating hot dogs. This mode of play, though fun, is very short and proves to bore the player after a long period of time with only 10 seconds to create a record. I hope to create another mode of play that will prove to engage the player for longer periods of time.

Future Plans for the Game:

This game, though not the best in the competition, does have potential with a little bit of polish and added game elements. I will continue to develop on this game for two reasons: the game’s potential and my learning process (second reason is the main one). For the time being, I will polish up the Kongregate version of this game. In the future, I may use this game to create an Arduino arcade cabinet for the sake of learning more computer systems and gaming technology.

Thanks for all of your support, and congratulations to all who finished!

Hey folks!

Instead of taking the usual way and making a game using as3+Flixel and then uploading it to MochiMedia, I’ve been working for the past weeks on a remake of Loneliness (my first “real” game and LD) on C++ (using SDL for event handling and window managing and OpenGL for the rendering). I’ve already got most of the work done, there’s just audio, collision and the game itself to be done! (well, I’ve already got things spawning on the screen and to the player following the mouse)

Then I’m thinking about uploading it to http://itch.io/ (made by LD user leafo). Let’s see how this works out…

On a side note, my LD #27 post-compo version is currently on a “On Hold” state… I’ve already made some lots of tweaks, but the game itself is still lacking. So, after completing this remake I may (or may not…) go back to working on it. I actually want to finish this game, I really like how it came out. (check out the current version here, if keyboard fails, use the mouse to navigate menus)

Later!

I really want to do MiniLD #45. 

I set up Devkit Advance, and dug the internet for some tutorials. But, I haven’t even gotten started yet, and I presume I only have two more days. Oh well.

Also, I definitely intend to participate in the October thing, probably doing something for Windows Phone 7. It’s XNA, compatible with WP8, and WP7 dev doesn’t require Windows 8.

I have decided to remake one of my favorite iPhone games. The plan is to keep the base game mechanics and add powerups, leaderboards, better graphics and so on. I’m also thinking about making levels more diverse, taking advantage of 3D world and not making cubes lie on a single plane.
Here’s 2 screens from the first day of development:

So I’m remaking my Ludum Dare 26 game currently due to me liking the idea enough to pick it back up again, and my determination to participate in the October challenge. My LD26 submission was Pix, a 2D puzzle game that tied 100th overall. I am overhauling the graphical style and changing some gameplay elements, but the core features will stay the same.

I am not to sure whether Pix+ (the name of said remake) will succeed, but I can try my best. The common complaints to the original were the annoying beep sounds played when your pix was moved, the constant button pressing to move, the level order fluctuating in difficulty, and some problems with certain pix being too similar to players with limited color vision (aka colorblindness). To address these problems, I aim to:

• New Audio – No more BEEP – BEEP – BEEP – BEEP. It’ll have new sounds and background music, with options to actually change the volume (or mute it completely)
• Graphical Overhaul – I liked the original design, but I feel like it needs to be a bit more fleshed out if I wanna actually want to improve it.
• More challenge! – The original 30 levels lacked challenge and could feel repetitive after multiple failures. I will hopefully try and increase the satisfaction achieved when completing levels. Maybe add a timer, a score system, achievements. I dunno, I’ll come up with something 😀 Also, MOAR LEVELS!
• Alternate Color Scheme – I will be making grey scale graphics, colorized in the game itself. There will be color sliders so you can manually change the pix color scheme yourself. There will also be presets for the lazy people 😛
• Android Port – I’m hoping to make an android port as it seems the game would suit mobile devices pretty well.

This is an essay of a post, but I wanna get my point across to the few of you that actually played and liked the original. To the right is the graphical style I hope to use applied onto the tiles.

Anyway, my fingers hurt and I need some sleep. G’night all, and good luck 😀

I made a stupid maze game. Does anyone want to buy it for a dollar and help me be an October Challenge king? http://sbx.sk/Akar

Tags: challenge, october, SuperMazeX3

Lets do it!

So October Challenge has come and I’m really excited. Nothing like Ludum dare to boost my determination and productivity.

This month I am going to be working on a Top down multi-player Batman Arkham game that I’ve been building  for 2 weeks. I am going to rebuild it as it’s become a bit cluttered and I’m going to stream most of it HERE.

Why did I put “Prepare to die edition in the Title”? Well I am a fairly inexperienced game designer and I just like a challenge even if I don’t end up succeeding.

October Challenge: Prepare to die edition! :

1. Finish your game! (I haven’t finished a full game before, so that’ll be a challenge for myself and a few others I guess)
2. Restrict your game! Don’t let the compiled file get bigger than 64kb(or w.e limit you find suitable for your project)! This helps keep it simple and challenges you to keep it small.
3. Port it to something! Even if it’s just porting it to mac/linux. (I’ll try for OUYA) 
4. Submit your game to the IGF! Deadline is October 19th. So only 21 days from this post…
5. Make months rent off of your hard work! Or whatever you feel like is a really high goal…

I hope your guys’ bodies are ready! Because mine  sure is!

A long time ago I programmed a little on a Commodore 64.

I found programming in assembly hard and being a lazy teenager soon gave up.

Many many years later (just after an unsuccesful Ludum Dare) the Mini Ludum Dare ‘Low Level’ was declared. This REALLY inspired me. I immediately knew I wanted to do something for the Commodore 64.
The next day (after a mind storming sleep) I had a complete idea in my head.
Because I had no idea about design tools for the C64 and not much experience in making sprites I decided to keep it very simple. Here’s  a first sketch I made:

I found out, that the cross assembler I previously used, didn’t work on Windows 7.  I had to look for a new cross-assembler. C64PrgGen looked nice so I used that. Looking back, maybe not the best choice, it had some bugs that really cost me a a lot of time. But after one day I had become reasonably comfortable with it and I got up to speed. For the graphics I settled with making them in Excel. Probably not the best choice, but easy to alter to my own wishes. Here the design for the title. It’s made up of 96 altered characters.

Programming in assembly gave me some challenges, but fewer than expected. Because I kept it simple I didn’t run into memory problems or problems in using too many cycles.

These two books (yes young people, physical books!) helped me a lot with the workings of the C64 and where to map my graphics :

The end result looked like this:

I was very pleased with the result. It took me a week to do, but if you had asked me a year ago if I thought I could make a game in assembly for the C64 in a week, I would have laughed.

So Mr. Sosowski, thank you for this inspiring theme and giving me a chance to redeem myself for my lazy childhood!

(link to the end result)

Tags: assembly, C64, Commodore 64

Hi,

I don’t think you will remember us, but we had this idea to release an Android game for the October Challenge 2012. The game was TreeVolve a Jam Entry for Ludum Dare #24.

We failed badly, the game was not ready and we had to give up.
Months passed and we continued to develop the game (Daniel and me), added new features, new graphic, new audio and now and after one year we are very close to release it on Google Play. We added new abilities, new tutorial, a Multiplayer mode, Google Cloud saving, Achievements and a leaderboard.

Can we do it, one year later, for the October Challenge 2013? I hope yes!

We are looking for android beta testers. Do you want to help us? (we really need more feedback and bug hunting)

• Subscribe to this Google+ community with your Google Player account
• Wait for permission
• Click here to download the game from the Play Store

We really would love to hear your feedback.

And we just uploaded on YouTube a small video teaser. Hope you will enjoy!

After Ludum Dare 27, I had made up my mind that I would port my entry to Android. Thus I set out to do just that.

This past couple weeks I’ve been giving my all to get it ported (and improved)  from the LD version.

My great friend who joined me in Ludum Dare 26, joined the team, greatly improving on the visual aspect of the game.

It just so happened that the October challenge lined right up with my release.

So, after the last sleepless 24 hours, I can proudly present to you…

This Google Play badge!

I’m so happy with how Phase came out, and I hope you will be too!

It feels so good to finally have released something!

Here’s my entry page.

For the October challenge I’m going to be working on my most recent project entitled Nephollow.

The project itself is done using the PSM (Playstation Mobile) SDK, in C# which I’m hoping to have completed by the 23rd of October, maybe even before that.
If all goes well with the PSM version of it I’m thinking of porting it to put on the Windows 8 Store and maybe have it ported to android…

If you want updates on the project itself through out the month, follow my twitter @moongateuk.

Also good luck to everyone doing this.

Tags: game development, Nephollow, Playstation, PSM

This is my first Ludum Dare. I contemplated creating a game for Android for some time and this LD just pushed me enough to get started. I’ll report my progress daily here and on my blog at http://bigosaur.com/blog

Lately I have been playing Subway Surfers and got really passionate about it. I usually don’t like the “endless” games, that you basically cannot finish, so I always set an arbitrary goal to reach. This time it was reaching 30x score multiplier. While I did that, I got some skill and really got addicted to the game. It also made me realize that Android games don’t have to be a AAA title with huge story and complex gameplay. Something simple and casual is OK.

Anyway, I thought it would be nice to have a game where you could simply point your finger at something and shoot it. With a system of Missions, Daily and Weekly Challenges and weapon upgrades it could be fun. My first idea was to create a game where some cute monsters would run around a beautyful scenery, hide behind the trees, old houses, or even in the clouds and you would need to shoot as many as you can. By cute monsters, I mean something like Gremlins. They would also bring in some huge machines and do other stupid things that would make you laugh. Of course, being an indie game developer with zero budget, I decided this would require too much art and too much of my time because of complex animation I envisioned. So I decided to use a different setup, something I can produce myself in a reasonable timeframe.

My goal now is to make an interesting, playable game for Android in one month. You can follow my progress on Ludum Dare, my blog or my Twitter feed at @mbabuskov.

I hereby welcome back my entry to the 37th mini-Ludum Dare jam of about a year ago: Stargazing!

This was one of my little Flash game ideas that actually felt like I’d hit something interesting and different. It’s a very simple concept at heart but that’s ideal for my first marketable game. And I see it as a great fit to touch-screen devices, which will be my market of choice. I intend to attempt submitting to both Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play store by the end of the month (*gulp*), with the actual release following thereafter.

Stargazing 2012 in Flash (above) and Stargazing 2013 in Unity

I’ve moved the old Flash game into Unity, which wasn’t actually that painful a process at all. Everything from the Flash version is in place here (except audio for now). I think a big challenge now is making the game a worthwhile enough experience for someone to throw a bit of loose change at. For certain there needs to be more content (the Flash version can be finished in no time at all). I will be adding more areas of sky, and in fact there is already a second “stage” implemented with a bunch more constellations. I’m happy to say I have moved to data-driven definitions of stars and constellations as opposed to the many hard-coded lines in the original Flash game…

I’ll update my progress here as well as on my blog. Good luck to everyone else attempting this, should be good!

Got a few games under my belt, see http://amos.me/games/ — but I’ve never sold anything

Let’s hope this month changes that.

I’ve decided to participate in the october (fest) challenge! I’ll be working on a hack n slash type of game of mine that i’ve had in the works for a few months, altough it’s only been a few hours here and there.  For the challange i’ll be trying to put more time into development and hopefully have something ready for the november deadline. It’s really a win / win situation even if i don’t manage to complete the challange, as i’ll have something much more complete moving forward and thats a great motivator for me.

The content creation chain still needs some work, but here is a screenshot from the client:

The working name of the game is Cager and as you can see it’s set in a isometric-ish perspective, also present is a very, very small character sprite.

Target platforms are any devices with a browser that can handle some of the “new” features in html5 (websockets, canvas, audio). I haven’t thought to much about how I will make money off of it other than through microtransactions, but that’s more of a long term goal and is probably not feasable for this challange. I’m not sure that anyone, except maybe forced friends and family (does that even count for the challenge?), would pay for an account, so thats something i’ll have to figure out as soon as possible. I also need to look into setting up paypal to accept payments as i have no idea how that works right now.

I’ll also be streaming when possible at this location.

So LD27 helped me finish and publish my only game from the summer. A little discouraging considering some of the other stuff I had been working on and what have you, but hey, it’s something. Any substantial progress of that sort is good.

So time to use LD again as a form of motivation. That’s right: October Challenge time!

I already have an idea. I’m thinking a simplistic run-and-gun platformer similar in nature to MegaMan, but with a twist. To gain extra powers, it comes down to also destroying regular enemies. As you destroy them, you absorb residual energies from them, and over time you inherit special abilities. This wouldn’t be solely weapon-based; the player might inherit different defensive or mobility abilities. As some examples, some potential abilities might be “Comeback” (short duration power boost after getting hit) or “Urgency” (charge attack speed increases as health decreases), and the player will get to choose which ones he wants to equip before entering a level. Some might even “level up” if the player manages to destroy enough of the same enemy throughout the course of the game.

So that’s my idea. Not going to say too much more until I have some actual work to show. I’ll probably be using Stencyl again, and I’m thinking for the monetary part I’m going to go with Kongregate. My last game (last time I checked) scored me somewhere in the 15-30 cents range. I think it’s a reasonable goal to shoot for $1+ this time. My primary concern at this point would be how big the project might end up being, specifically since I do have other obligations to attend to, but I guess I’ll see it how pans out. Feel free to leave any comments about my game idea; I appreciate feedback!

Looking at some websites with animation stuff, I found some nice, freeware, zombie animations. They have even animations for zombie being shot, crawling, etc. So, maybe this game could be a zombie shooter.

Your character would sit on his/her porch and shoot the zombies coming out of the cornfield. The game would be called Backyard Panic. You could switch different characters from the old granny, redneck with a shotgun, to a member of the Marines with some long-range rifle. Here’s a really, really rough sketch:

Update: I just played Zombie in USA. Interesting game, but gets a little bit boring to tap the device like crazy. I want a single touch equals kill type of interaction, at least for non-boss enemies. As I think about it more, the whole zombie topic seems too gloomy for me, and having yet another zombie game is hardly called fresh. So, I’m not sure about this. Also, it seems it would involve 3D graphics, and I’d like to stick with 2D, at least for my first Android game.

Stay tuned. I plan to post my progress at end of each day.

I love this idea and it might just be the push I need – which is kind of the point I guess! Recently I’ve been trying to decide what to do with my Molyjam 2013 entry Metritron. If you’re interested in a breakdown of its mechanics I have written them up (although this is the Molyjam version).

It was a C# + XNA game so I thought the best course of action would be to turn it into a full XBLIG title since it would be easy enough to port. However after I’d finished up working on MetritronST (with a whole bundle of improvements), and dropped $130 on the subscription and cheesy trace music, I found out it is actually impossible for me to release. Not because I’ve done anything wrong, but because random Microsoft accounts just have an error where they cannot access the developer website or do anything. You can read about it here if you want but the short version is I got annoyed and, well, gave up.

album

However, I recently decided maybe it’s time to have another go at it (becoming unemployed again maybe helped). I created MetritronHF with a big list of improvements: several times the enemy variation, specific levels, specific bosses, mouse support, better screen use, screen configuration, hi-scores, etc. It’s also distinctly lacking in metrics data now but, while that was the shtick for the Molyjam I do think it looks much better without that gimmick in the background. I still have work to do but this might be the second wind I need and I thank you.

Currently my plan, once I’ve done the whole finishing a game part, is to register at itch.io which sounds like a decent solution for people who just want to get something on the Internets without any fuss.

Edit: I have also created an absurdly large gif that I could not in all good conscience embed directly onto the blog. http://i.minus.com/iD5tw6dwCDuNI.gif

I will be a first time participant  in October Challenge 13′ as well as the www.onegameamonth.com ‘s month long game jam. This being my first game jam, I would like to mark the occasion by writting several blogs about my development cycle as the month progresses.  If you are interested in hearing my development adventures, consider following me on my twitter account @teslacraft .

I will be posting these blogs on my facebook page, if there are any areas in particular that you would like me to cover in my blogs, please feel free to contact me via twitter or facebook.

https://www.facebook.com/teslacraft

Good luck to the rest of you; Ill see y’all at the finish line

Jeremy Kleve

Hi guys, I recently found out about great set of Jams going every month, check it out here: http://www.onegameamonth.com

I didn’t work nearly the whole month but it was a ton of fun and I made something new. Check my game out here: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/87884956/Exagons’%20Frontier.exe

I’m working on expanding and polishing my entry from LD27 (Richard Was Afraid of the Dark) as part of the October Challenge.  LD27 pushed me farther in development than I’ve ever gone before (first time finishing anything), and I’m going to take advantage of the October Challenge to get it all the way to a releasable form. My plan is to get it up on Kongregate by the end of the month. Here’s a rough outline of my to-do list for the coming weeks:

Revamped controls – Instead of using Unity’s built-in character controller and collision detection, I’ve been working on developing a controller with more precise movement and much more stable raycast collision detection (no more falling through floors).  I’ve added variable jump height and speed modifiers so that you feel much more in control and I’m taking time to tune the player’s movement to the environment.  It’s already feeling significantly better than the compo entry, and I’m sure that it will improve even more as the month wears on.

Better gameplay – If you’ve played my entry (or read my Postmortem) you probably recognized the significant shortcomings in my level design.  For the compo, I designed most of the levels in the final hour before submission, which left absolutely no time for testing.  As a result, the levels felt purposeless and never gave the player any sense of payoff for their time with the game. One level required a lot of tedious jumping, but there was no other challenge to be found. I’m developing some puzzle mechanics that make use of manipulating the environment as well as some platforming that requires precise movements from the player.

Varied aesthetics – This goes for the visuals as well as for the audio.  There was one texture set for the entire game and one piece of music (although the music expanded as you beat each level).  Music is going to be a much more relevant component to the game and I’m working on redeveloping the level art and the animation and design for the character.  Art is not my strong point, so this will be one of the hardest areas for me, but I’m determined to have a strong showing.

Stronger story – Mood was my highest rating in the compo (getting #72), and I think that a lot of this is due to the way in which the story played out.  It wasn’t particularly compelling or revolutionary, but it seemed to connect with the players. I’m trying out a few story concepts, but I can guarantee that this element will make a return in some form.

As I’ve said before, I’m completely new to game development (and particularly this stage of it), so any words of advice from the community would be greatly appreciated. Feel free to give my game a play and leave the harshest reviews possible. 😉

Looking forward to working through October alongside the rest of the community.  Good luck, all!

So after a weekend of working on my Top Down Batman Arkham game and I figure it’s a bit to big of a project for only 3 weeks time.

I made an unfinished prototype of a Top Down JRPG with Randomly generated elements with a rts spin when you get into a battle. I’m going to play around with that for a few hours to see where I’m at and I may as well stream it… HERE!

My body is ready!

I’m just going to add to a OneGameAMonth Project I started later last month. In fact, I plan on taking my Hexagon game and adding a candy making mechanic to it for this month’s project.

It’s not anything fancy, but whenever you left click, all of the hexes turn green; right click – turn hexes red. I’m going to implement a way to detect the bounds of individual hexes next. 😉

I downloaded Android bundle and set up my Linux machine with Eclipse. I was able to run Hello World on my Galaxy S2. Hello Java. I really have to remember all the Java stuff as I haven’t used it since 2002 or something like that.

Looking at all the 2D/3D OpenGL stuff, it looks like it would be a good idea to use some toolkit/library to build the game. I got some free licenses for Unity3D at NordicGame 2013, but those do not include rights to release on Google Play, so I guess I’ll skip Unity for now. I’m now looking into CoronaSDK and some other libraries.

When I first saw that there’s some October Challenge on LD page, I thought I don’t have a time for this… But then I read the rules and realized that I am already working on a game that fits this challenge! It’s a flash game I started to make in July and I already have planned to publish it on Kongregate this month, and eventually earn a few bucks. I must say that participating in last two LD’s (#26 and #27) was a big motivation for me to keep working on my game (not to mention the experience I gained). The thing is that this game is already about 95% done – I just need to design last two worlds and do some final polish – but I hope it is still ok for the October Challenge.

Well, something about the game now. The title is

The Ancient Eye

and it is some kind of shooter/defense game. Basically you are the giant, ancient, magic eyeball and have to fight against hordes of different enemies that come in waves (there would be 10 worlds, 6 waves in each). After each wave you visit the shop and buy weapons – and that is the most important element of this game. Diffirent weapons have diffirent powers and strike areas, so you have to choose the most suitable weapons to deal with different enemies types and their configurations – and this is the key to victory. Sounds easy, but you usually you don’t have much time to think about strategy when you are surrounded by enemies. Enough of speaking, here are some screenshots:

Level selection screen

Some in-game screenshots

Statistics displayed after each world

Bestiary

and weapons book.

I think I will publish this game in  about two weeks – so stay tuned!

Tags: flash, flashpunk, october challenge, the ancient eye

So, some backstory from last year first:

I entered the October Challenge last year with my first commercial game Super Grid Run and finished submitting the game to Google Play and Apple late January (late or what, huh?) It went down really well with the android marketplace and is still selling a copy or two every day. An updated version is coming out at the end of this month for the Gamestick console as a featured release title which is fantastic, I never thought this would have happened!

If you’re one of those people who are on the fence about entering the October Challenge, I reccommend you give it a go, even if you finish late like I most definitely did. Going through the publishing and marketing post-game making is quite an experience, submitting your game to review sites is always a bonus, just don’t, DON’T go for any of those dodgy “pay-for-review” ones.

There are loads of resources out there that can help you out with getting your game out there, a quick search for something along the lines of:

“Top [insert platform here] Review Sites” or “Youtubers who cover indie games” May well gain you some unexpected exposure!

Also. I’m in for this again this year, it’s a blast and I ‘m working on a retro shooter, targeting mobiles this time around, more details will be posted most nights on my twitter, http://twitter.com/refreshcreation/

Have fun making games everybody, you’re awesome!

Hey everyone. So I did some more thinking, and I’m not sure about my last idea (as stated before) due to the timeframe. But then I ended up getting hit with something else that I’m now considering. I’ll copy some of what I posted on my blog today:

“I already shared one of my ideas on the LD blog (http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2013/09/30/second-wind/), but I’m a little concerned about the size of the project in terms of getting it done in a month. But today, this new idea hit me. I would be sticking closer to some stuff I know I can get done, particularly graphically and musically (I still need to work on these skills). My idea is Pixel Ninja: Reset.

Why “Reset”, you ask? That is the main concept behind the game. PN:R would be a platformer much like Pixel Ninja, but with a more linear level structure as opposed to the survival schematic. As for the “Reset” part, that is one of your Ninja’s key abilities. At nearly any point in time when navigating a level, your player can use the Reset Code. It does pretty much what it sounds like: it resets the entire level EXCEPT for your player’s status and position. That means obstacles, enemies, hazards… nearly everything. I think this has some crazy potential to it; this could range from simple resets to restore a fallen platform to a more impactful reset that puts all doors and bridges back to their original locked/unlocked state (for better or worse). Those are just examples. Imagine the creative situations that could ensue!”

I like this idea, and I think I can handle the graphical and musical side of things too. Any comments? Hopefully I’ll make a decision soon and get the motor going!

Also, for those who don’t know my original Pixel Ninja game: http://photongamedev.wordpress.com/games/

I’m in for this years October challenge I’m looking to start, finish, and sell a simple game. I’m still in early brainstorming but I will use Unity and want to release on Mac / PC at the minimum.

Last year for the October challenge I polished up my Ludum Dare 24 game Panspermia which took longer than I thought it would and released it for iOS and Android in mid December earning my $1. I contacted several blogs and despite follow up from a couple smaller blogs never was featured. I think the majority of my sales were word of mouth or random stumbling. Sales peaked around release with friends and family picking it up and sharing it with others, but petered out over the course of this year to maybe 2 – 4 sales per month.

Panspermia on Google Play
Panspermia on the iOS App Store

I’m still thrilled that I was able to get a product polished enough that I felt good putting a price tag on it, and even had some people I’ve never met pay me for it.

I’m hoping to release another game this time around. With any luck and what I’ve learned since last year it will have a bit more success but even if it just gets one sale I’ll be very happy.

This MLD45 coincided with my girlfriend and I acquiring a freshly baked Puppy!

We’ve been in a perpetual state of pee dodging, sock changing, fragmented sleep, and overdosing on cute.

Still eager to participate but with diminished mental capacity, I tricked a friend into  ‘just making a game’ together. Bwoehahaha!

He occasionally sprites you see, but lacked a coder to get things out there. Each Ludum has been a great boost to everything I needed boosted, so figured he might enjoy it as well.

Out of this collaboration Sword, Stealth and Sausage was born, is a top down dungeon crawler/puzzler with a focus on a class switching mechanic to solve puzzles and a disturbing overdose of sausages.

Looking at all the other entries MLD45 entries it didn’t feel right submitting the game. It’s not exactly a text based Pac-Man. Instead we’ve decided to give it a proper polish and release it separately. It’s progressing great so far!

Tell us what you think!

Dev banter and some (low resolution Twitch.tv) gameplay:

Coding timelapse:

What do you think, should we use it for the October Challenge?

So I just woke up in the middle of the night, and the first thing that pops into my head is a awesome name for the game I’m working on for the October Challenge, Candymonium! I am also doing the One Game a Month challenge as well so…… themes rock.

Any way, a little bit about Candymonium. It will be an action RPG where you take on the role of one of four protagonists that just happen to be trick or treaters, among them  a vampiress, lycanthrope, mummy, and a witch. These young champions will have the  fright night of their lives  as Candymonium rises from the depths, converting the much beloved town into a candy filled hell on earth.

Looking around the net for ideas, and browsing Android forums, I found an ad for Revenge of the Titans. Cool game with retro graphics and nice animation. I can do retro graphics. So, instead of monsters, aliens would descent from space into your backyard… well…

No! Backyard does not seem like a good idea. I guess I’ll need a new game name as well. I have two ideas here:

1. Aliens attack a remote defensive station on the border. They disable the automatted system, so you have to manually override the controls and shoot them. The game would be called MANUAL OVERRIDE or EMERGENCY OVERRIDE. I looked up on Google Play and Internet, it seems these names are free to be used.
2. Aliens land on a docking bay of a large spaceship and you have to keep them away. They could hide behing some barrels, landed spacecraft, etc. I’d like to have some stuff in the game beside enemies that is destructable. The game would be called DOCKING BAY or DECK 42, or something like that.

Not very exciting titles? Oh, well. I hope something better will come to me as I’m making the game.

DOING IT

Most of the game I currently have is done, I just need to juice the hell out of it so it looks like a real thing. First things first, I need to figure out a good way to switch between screens.

Now I just need to stop watching so much breaking bad and just dev.

So, I can now play sound in C++, neato. Sadly I am using the Windows header, still looking for a way to make it cross platform. Maybe I can find a clever way to do it. Anyway, I am not doing the October Challenge because of school and things, and I missed out on the MiniLD, keep you guys updated. I am still learning more and more about C++ and OpenGL, so maybe next LD I will have sound and graphics. Who knows.
Keep you guys updated.
~Blade

Well, we’ve not done so well in trying to do Ludum Dare this year! Let’s change that and take part in the October Challenge.

Raiding my archive of past entries, we’ve decided upon taking Yargh! from prototype to completion, and hammer it on to as many devices as we can.
Those that may remember Yargh! will probably remember the art being somewhat wacky, and that’s something we’re going to be keeping!

So, without further ado, I present Pegleg Pete.

Dance, monkey boy dance!

Pegleg Pete is the backbone of your pirate armada, serving as your ground troops in capturing as many forts, docks and gold mines as quickly as you can.
Capture more than the other players before the time runs out to win, also acquire more gold than everyone else, and perhaps blow everyone’s ships out the water for good measure.

Octopi has been cleaning up my original art, and Pegleg above is an indication of where we are heading. We thought the two frame “dance” animation was mad enough that we just can’t not put it in!

Anyway, we shall keep you updated with our progress, and hopefully we’ll be on our way to shaking our booty at the end of the month!

Tags: arcade badgers, octopi, stuckie, yargh!

A bit late but yep, I’m in.

(Copied from my blog: http://photongamedev.wordpress.com)

So today, I did more brainstorming. I decided to start jotting down the different things that could have an impact on the game if they were reset. Among some of the interesting ideas:

• Single-use items that can be reset and used again. You might have a bomb for instance, and three blocked gateways. You might use the bomb on one gateway, do what you need to, and then reset to get the bomb back for another gateway (while blocking off the other again). Perhaps the player might need to get a key from one area first before going to another blocked area (remember that the player’s status, such as collected items, is unaffected by a reset).
• Trap walls and ceilings. A spiked ceiling might continually move down and the player would have to reset before he gets crushed.
• Movable objects. You might need to move a crate over a trap so you can get over it. But what happens if you traverse the trap, reset and put the box back, putting the trap between you and the box?

I think, creatively speaking, tactically mixing different elements together in a level will be what causes the player “grief”. “I need to reset, but if I do, that door is going to close on me.” Stuff like that. So the gears are certainly turning!

The end of day 4/21 has come and gone what do I got? A lot.

The other day I went and dusted off one of my old projects and started working on it again. The game is an RPG with RTS and rogue like inspiration. When I came up with the Idea I was just going over cool games I liked and smashing their game mechanics together, this game is the combination of Binding of Isaac and monster hunter and Zelda and Pikmin.

Yesterday and today I spent my time implementing file Loading/Saving and and fixing old features that I stopped working on the game because of. I will leave that part with a screen shot of hoodos.

AND NOW…

Have you seen the new episode of Adventure Time?! Train Dungeon!!!?

I can’t tell if you answered that or not… but anyways, Tonight I am going to make a small side project based on the train dungeon!

Wanna watch? GO HERE!

My body is double ready!

Wrote up the code for a title screen and a quit-confrim screen.

It took way longer than it should have, but it works. Now to just put up the mode selection on the title screen. So yeah. First thing off of my todo list. And its only day 3.

Tags: october challenge

I’ll finish my LD#27 compo entry – Candle Man and publish it on Kongregate.

It’s a great challenge for me to actually FINISH one game in my spare time during October. So I’ll strictly follow the K.I.S.S rules:

Keep it simple, stupid.

I’ll spend more time purify the core of the game and polish the game’s FEEL. I won’t add too many levels into this game, but I wish each of them is interesting and challenging.

Honestly I’ve felt off my game the last two LDs.  My entries were technically pretty good, but lacked inspiration.  I was on the fence about the October challenge, until I got my OUYA.  It’s a lot of fun, especially playing mutliplayer games with my girlfriend.  It brings me back to the days of having friends over to play console games with each other, and I decided I have the perfect game to make for it:

  escausage was my entry for LD21.  Each hand controlled one end of a sausage, and you had to get it to the exit before the time ran out. Some levels gave you multiple sausages to control, and as long as a certain percentage of them made it to the exit you would win the level.  Although the physics were a little glitchy and the levels were kind of quickly designed, it was to this day the best game I’ve ever made.

In the OUYA remake, Sausage Party, each player will control a sausage as you compete in various game types.  Racing to a finish, king of the hill, longest sausage wins(via growth increasing powerups), climb to escape the rising lava survival, etc.

My biggest challenge will be picking up Java development.  I’ve only toyed around with it, and in general I have a hard time with languages that have any sort of compile time (because I’m the kind of coder that makes tons of dumb edits until things work)  I’ll probably use libGDX for the game engine and a box2D port for physics. Hopefully I can target the desktop for my builds until the basics are in place.  It would be great if I could get sublimeText building the project, but will settle for eclipse if it seems to be taking to long to set up.

I want to thank all you guys who’ve brought a game to market for inspiration.  It makes me so happy when I see something I recognize from LD on one of the game markets, and I see them quite a lot

I have been trying to draw some docking bay graphics and it looks like s***. So, I’m diching the “docking bay” idea. The combat will happen in space. Yep, that’s it. Aliens would come from one side of the screen, and you would shoot them before they leave it on the other end. At the bottom there will be some destrucable stuff. Aliens could hide behind that, and maybe you can shoot it down or make holes in it by shooting. Here’s an example with a tower, satellite dish and some other things:

The idea is that you have limited time (say, one minute) to shoot down as many aliens as you can.

Since the game will have a space theme, I’m browsing my font collection, to find some cool gallactic font. So far, ArdourGM looks like the one I’ll use for in-game text like points, option screens, etc.

The graphics above are created using Gimp, and insipred by this nebula tutorial. After reading that and doing some my own tweaks I was able to draw the above picture in a couple of hours. I hate when I lose that much time on a single thing, but this background would be used for most of the game.

(Entire project history is on my blog: http://bigosaur.com/blog/)

I’m seriously considering to participate at the October Contest.

I’m evaluating some idea. The more  concrete Idea is to make a shmups.
A vertical shumps, without  pixelarts, but with simple 3d models for the ships and backgrounds. I’m not decide yet if the models will have a little animations. I’ll inspire at Shikigami No Shiro II and Ikaruga two of my favorite for this genre.

I’ve only gone and bloody done it! I realise we’ve got the whole month but Metritron has had a lot of work poured into it since the Molyjam 2013 that spawned it. However, the October Challenge has definitely been the push I needed to get it out the door and it’s previous incarnation MetritronST did lose a lot of momentum.

As you can tell from the above animated gif, which I managed to not include the mouse pointer in this time, it’s an arena shooter where you shoot things in an arena… using either mouse + keyboard or a 360 pad. If you’ve played the Molyjam version – which you haven’t; I would assume you’ll appreciate my moving away from Robotron controls and more of a PC focus.

It has forty stages made up of 6/12/20 waves depending how deep you are into the game and 20+ enemy types – all of which can be upgraded into boss versions as well as having some unique bosses as well. Difficulty wise it starts of easy but assumes you know how to spin around in a circle firing at stuff. If you like this kind of thing then it’s neat.

Oh yeah, it’s pay-what-you-like (including nothing) here: http://tayl1r.itch.io/metritronhf

Hey guys!

We, Dixum has decided to join the October challenge. As we are a new game dev company  we see great potential in this opportunity. We are at the moment two persons at the company, me and my friend. I have participated in Ludum Dare challenges many times and I really love it.

We think that the October Challenge will be  a great way to get us kick started into game development. I have made a lot of small and fun games in the past. I have also published a few. My partner is a great friend of mine and his responsibility is to do the marketing and business.  We do this primarily to learn and have fun. If we will be able to turn this into a profitable company and make a living by doing this it would be awesome!

We have decided us to niche our products, our games that we will develop . We want to create high polished, friendly, safe and educational games on handheld devices for the Swedish market. Targeting young children.

For this challenge we will create a simple math game that we will release onto Google Play  and hopefully later to App Store.

The idea of the game is to help children learn basic math skills and how to make calculations faster.  A simple concept that you need to know if you want to improve you calculation abilities is the so called “ten buddies”.

For instance,  7 + 3 = 10, 9 +1 = 10 and so on.

Here is a screenshot from the current build.

The awesome numbers are created by : http://www.vickiwenderlich.com/

It is a very simple game at its core and we hope that we will be able to earn a dollar.

I will try to post as much as I can and I will update you with other ways to follow us in the near future.

Cheers guys!

David – game devloper at Dixum.

Tags: challenge, children, diuxm, game, kids, math, october, swedish

I had a game made that i have been upgrading and i decided to publish the alpha soo people can buy it.

You can but it here at sellbox

To check pogress of the game go to:indiedb.

I selected the library I’m going to use. It’s Java, and it seems pretty complete. I managed to build and tweak a test application very quickly. I’m still confused whether to use Sceenes, Actors, and all the other features or build the stuff myself as I’m used to. The docs are lacking examples and explanation how to tie in some stuff, I guess I’ll have to google a lot. For example, there is no explanation how should you wire up the Actor and Sprite. And what if you have like 20 sprites with same graphics and stuff like that.

For this first project, I guess I’ll learn just enough to manipulate Sprites and then build the rest myself using my previous experience. For some future project I’ll probably be smarter and figure out which stuff did I build that was already there. I just hate learning so much up front and then figuring that framework/library is not flexible enough for some out-of-the-box ideas I might have in the future.

Here are some of my ideas for retro-graphic aliens. Most of the time I first draw stuff on paper. Maybe it’s just a habit, but it helps me concentrate when I’m away from keyboard and monitor:

(Copied from my blog)

So after  a bit of radio silence, and a fun late night session: I fixed a major bug with my GUI and menus! I know menus aren’t that exciting, but in the context of a finished game its great. I now have 3 levels with one boss encounter.

This represents the first mission of the game. As it stands now, I can release this game on Kongregate, and maybe my own web page. My plan for next week is as follows:

1) Post Demo to Kongregate

2) Finish enemy layout of rail yard level

3) Complete a second simple boss

4)create briefing screens for mission 2

It’s close. And I’m tempted to do more, but in the spirit of finishing, I will FINISH the project. This is the push I need to put this baby to bed. (For good, for now at least)

SCREEEEEENZ!

It’s amazing how something as simple as a main game screen can make your game look more complete.

So far i have prototyped a terrain generator. Its similar to the one in terraria but MUCH more basic. This could serve as foundation to the real thing but im still planning out what to do. in the mean time, check out this picture showing the two different worlds it generated…

Hey, all:

I don’t have any screenshots for what I’ve finished in the last couple days (due mainly to the fact that most of what I’ve been working on is actually for User Input purposes and have nothing to show yet).

Just like the title has stated, since I’m using a hex-grid system instead of a traditional square-grid system, I’m having to use triangular coordinates to detect where the mouse is in relation to each hexagon. I’m dividing each Hexagon into 6 isometric triangles and then doing a coordinate check on each one. Whenever I get this finished, hopefully, I can start selecting individual Hexagons instead of the whole group. 😉

I had a game made that i have been upgrading and i decided to publish it soo people can see it.

You can but it here at sellbox

it costs $1

To check pogress of the game go to:indiedb.

I love the reception that the ludum dare has been giving me. Ive become a true ameture hobbiest in circuitry (I even have schematics!), Ive gotten around and finnaly been working pretty well with arduino, and I wish I could do game-making, but high school is too stressful. Miss you guys!~Mohammad

P.S. Ill try my best to squeeze in as much time to make atlest 25 cents for this challenge, even if that means mising 1 or 2 pages of homework. Having a 5.0 GPA isnt too easy to manage.

I’m working on this game since May/July, so I think it’s time to publish it! I’m planning to start pre-orders as soon as possible!
Also I’m seeking for help: I need beta-testers and an english proof-reader. My native language isn’t english and even in this trailer I noticed(to late) a grammar mistake:
Youtube trailer

Sym indiedb page

Timelapses! More timelapses! Ok, LD27 is far behind us, but getting things done counts right?

Dubstep Hairdresser Timelapse

Love Your Pets Timelapse.

Hey everyone! I’m just dropping by my favorite ol’ game compo site to let you know my solo indie project Chess Heroes is on Steam Greenlight! Please give it your vote, and if it really piques your interest, share it on teh twitterz and facebookin’s! Thank you! =)

I wrote a blog post announcing my participation in the October Challenge, and explaining a little bit about my game concept. You can read it right here. I’m pretty excited!

forget this post ever happened.

OK, I got some really retro aliens, and they are flying around. Sorry for no demo, it’s an Android game, all I got is .apk and you probably wouldn’t want to install .apk from a complete stranger. Basically, the background loads, and stars load, and stars slowly move. To scroll the stars I’m using setV() and setV2() on the stars texture, slowly increasing the timer. Like this:

scrollTimer -= delta*0.014;
if (scrollTimer < 0.0f)
scrollTimer = 1.0f;
sStars.setV(scrollTimer);
sStars.setV2(scrollTimer+1);

And then some aliens show up and they move to the right. That’s about all that works now. I’m still learning libGDX, so a lot of time goes into googling and reading tutorials or watching videos.

Helpful tip: I noticed that some games built with libGDX have fixed screen orientation. If you flip the device, the game shows upside-down. I found a very simple solution to this in some obscure comment in some SO thread. Just replace landscape with sensorLandscape in AndroidManifest.xml and device flips the screen automatically.

(Copied from my blog)

I’ve decided that I’m going to take my minimalist puzzle from LD#26, Unst, and turn it into a game on Android. I think the actual programming of it should be relatively straightforwards, since its mechanics are very minimal, but naturally, there’s a lot of content creation to be done – I should probably pay special care to the puzzles, since the main feedback I got on the original was that the difficulty increased too quickly, but I think using a combination of friends and having a fairly good formula for determining how difficult a level could be (I am a mathematician after all), I should be able to make a nice set of levels. It seems easy enough to publish things on Android, so I’ll start there. If I have time, I could easily write it for iOS as well.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 5th, 2013 at 9:30 am and is filed under October Challenge 2013. 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.

This was cross-posted from my development blog at wally2069.blogspot.com

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 5th, 2013 at 12:13 pm 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.

A match three game I first designed about 7 years ago seems to be of about the right scope. I do still need to find an artist and a composer somewhere though. Doing it all myself in one month might be too much of a challenge for me.

Hey there,
We are making a new game for the LudumDare October Challenge.
The first game concept is pretty simple but if people like it we will add a lot of things that is in our minds.

Name: About Men & Guns
Genre: Tactical Shooter
Theme: Western
Players: Single Player
Engine: Flixel
Platforms: Windows, Mac, Linux, Android

Overview

You are a nomad gunslinger who found a city full of outlaws and decide to take their heads off(for money of course). You will find some interesting and weird folks to help you all the way.

Combat System

The Combat System is pretty simple:

You have Life, when your life is zero, you die.
You have Energy, energy is used for all actions like Skills and the Default Attack (except items use).

Your Default Attack is based on your Minimum Damage and Maximum Damage (you can upgrade them).
When you attack, a dice will roll a number between your minDamage and maxDamage, the enemies will roll a dice with their Minimum Defense and Maximum Defense and the damage will be calculated.

Some enemies will just shoot you and others will have items and equipments during the battles.
So you will need to adapt your strategy for a bunch of different enemies through the way.

Current Challenges

– Add more enemies and AI
– Add more backgrounds
– Add more levels
– Do the skills animations
– Add some story through the game
– Other minor things

About the Android Version

We are really working to get a good performance on Android Devices but the game is made with Flixel and Adobe Air so it’s almost impossible to get it PERFECT, but we’re trying.

Hope you like it, thanks for reading!

You can track the game at http://www.indiedb.com/games/aboutmenandguns/
Our site is http://beardfishstudio.blogspot.com
Our Twitter https://twitter.com/BeardFishStudio

Till the IGF submission I mean.

Yesterday was the release of Wind Waker HD. My initial thoughts(I didn’t play the original): Great Game, Beautiful Graphics, Camera is a bit irritating, Hero mode is definitely hard, story is pretty good and it’s going to be a distraction from working on my game. grrrrr.

But I did manage to get some work done. I’ve got the concept and direction nailed down. I know how I want dungeons, events, enemie encounters and… Other kinds of encounters to turn out.

I wont go into it to much right now, but tomorrow I will post a video here  to showcase the game! Wont that be exciting? It better be…

Happy Ludum Dare