Many thanks to mjau for porting my entry to Windows!

So far, it’s only been tested with WINE, but it should work okay.

Sorry it’s so late, but my source link was broken, and I was absent for a while, so I didn’t find out until a couple days ago. ^_^;

Still, it’s there now! Yay!

I have yet another version of Shafted! with the following changes

1) Increased deceleration when parachute is open

2) The game now keeps track of your high score

3) Fixed collision problems while running on platforms

4) Bats now fly properly in Mac version!

Get it for Windows here

Get it for Mac here

A few of us in IRC did a Micro-LD to test out the blind date concept – each participant makes a set of graphics, and then gets assigned someone else’s set to use to make a game.

Myself, Edwardoka, fydo, Almost, and MrDude did graphics. Fydo didn’t start on a game, and Edwardoka and I gave up – that leaves two (very good) entries:
FLUTTER by Almost (MrDude’s graphics): http://filesmelt.com/downloader/FLUTTER.zip
Space Dodger by MrDude (fydo’s graphics): http://pycron-ld48.googlecode.com/files/Space-Dodger.zip

Just thought I’d give a shout-out

Tags: blind date, irc, microLD

I haven’t fixed the help yet, but I have added another control scheme, improved the ship-to-ship combat, and (in my opinion) improved the graphics.

Windows zipped folder with .exe and all required .dlls here: http://jerryfederspiel.org/exes/PostCompoAdrift.zip

Edit: I’ve gotten the GoogleCode page up!

I’ve decided to keep working on Byte Vs. GNOME.

I’ve recieved some encouraging comments, and feel that it could become something really nice with some polish.

I’ve got the following planned:

• Actually making the random world generator
• Multiple weapons, including a machine gun and a rocket launcher
• Multiple types of enemy, including bosses
• Activators including doors, retractable bridges, and switches
• The game-type bits that were missing from the compo version, like a health bar and a score counter
• User-configured key bindings
• And perhaps even more as it evolves

I’m currently tearing my code apart to allow it to be extended. This is the most troublesome part, after which Good Things can happen.

I’ll be making a GoogleCode page. Once it has gotten reasonably nice, I will likely make a SourceForge page.

Here’s to having a good idea in a crucible, and then refining it into a jewel.

—Mr. Dude

Made by myself, Matthew Hyndman.

I present: Cave Bounce version 1.1 (Windows executable, 1.8MB)

The premise is simple: there are two superimposed caves on top of each other, and you can change which is active at any given time. By doing so you must navigate through puzzles, collect coins, and dodge missiles.

A pretty screenshot: (the player just died and was reset to the start of the level point, hence the seemingly floating)

Changes include:

-drawing the thin outline of the back layer in front of the frontmost layer, so you have an idea of the shape of the back layer.

-a color indication (light/dark green)  of whetehr or not the player is currently able to change layers.

-Several minor changes, including slight tweaking of missile speeds and such; they’re still roughly the same, but they are a little slower/turrets fire a bit less often.

-A subtle gradient background (before it was solid black)

-More levels! I scrapped and redesigned some of the ‘boring’ older levels, and added more new exciting levels, some of which are puzzle only and some of which are missile oriented. There are now 25 levels to the old 20.  Some of the coin locations are now more realisticly obtainable (the staircase screen should be doable for 100% coins now), and there are some new difficult to obtain coins.

-Before, as long as the centre of the player was not a wall on the back layer you can switch, which caused curious half of the player is in a wall situations. I added in a quick feature so that if this is the case, the player should be popped a little bit over to be out of the wall.

-I added some more HUD ocunter stuffs: you now see the FPS and how far you have progressed. seeing that you are on screen 22/25 is more motivation to finish than just knowing that you’re 20 some out of who knows how many

-When the player dies, he is reset to the start of teh screen. Before this did not change the layer, so it could potentially stick him in a wall, so it now also reverts the active layer to the layer of incoming.

-I reduced the number of particles somewhat so things will run a bit faster (not a lot), while still looking the same.

–

–

Postmortem stuff: (After Death?)

Woo! This was my first LD ever, and I loved it, came out great. I’ve entered another 48 hour comp before, but I was less experienced and more or less failed at that one. ( We made a game, it just wasn’t very deep)

The good:

no big problems, I had a fairly cool idea and it all seemed to flow.

Missiles and coins were both last minute additions, and yet the game would’ve been pretty boring without them. I’m quite glad they ended up there.

I made a game. in 48 hours. that is fun to play. I’m happy.

The bad:

No music or sound effects. They are, at the moment, somethign that I do not do. Sorry all.

I overused particles a bit, and so it runs slowly on weaker machines. this slowness can cause bugs like skipping through walls in extreme cases.

the art really wasn’t great (the player is a circle), although it did end up being fairly stylish.

Map design was somewhat rushed, and so wasn’t great (although it’s still good)

Difficulty level is a bit high and intimidates some. Unfortunately for them, I like action games as well as puzzlers, so this is likely still the case. Fear not, it is all quite doable, and there are several screens that are missile free.

Summary:

I had fun and am looking forward to future LDs

In playing through people’s entries I found a lot of them just jump straight into the game and stop when you win or lose.  This is a post intended to inform anyone who doesn’t know how, about a quick and dirty way to create a simple ‘start screen’ -> ‘game’ -> ‘end’ -> ‘reset’ loop in thier game.  I’ve no idea if there is a more ‘proper’ way to do this, but this is quick, dirty, and works.  There may be some differences depending on how your game is structured, but you can fit the idea to most.

First you will need to add one integer variable to tell the program what state the game is currently in (i.e. the start screen, the actual game etc.) called something like ‘gameState’.  Initialize this to 1, corrisponding to the menu screen, so that when the game starts up it shows the menu. You’ll also want to pull out any specific initialization that needs to be done before the game starts into a separate method, not the image loading or any of that, just things like generating maps, reseting scores to 0 and the like.

Now for the magic, wrap any parts that are involved with updating your game in great big ‘if elseif’ statements checking the value of ‘gameState‘.  Leave the normal playing of the game stuff in ‘gameState == 2′.  Now, when at the menu (gameState == 1) draw whatever is needed for a main menu (instructions, keys, intro, etc.) and check for whatever causes the game to start (clicking a button or pressing a key) and when that happens call the game inialization stuff you pulled out earlier and set ‘gameState = 2’.  In the actual game (gameState == 2), when checking for Win/Lose conditions, when they occur (or after a button is pressed after they occur etc.) clean up anything that should be from the game and set gameState to 3 or 4 to go to win/lose screens (or alternativly just back to 1 to jump back to the menu).  If using a win lose screen make sure to have a point in them that will set gameState back to 1, to put you back on the menu.

Using this simple idea it’s quick and easy to create game flow for your game.  You can also have the nice aspect of being able to restart easily by calling the reinitialize method, or to even quit back to the menu from the game easily too.  So please to the peoples out there, add game flow to your game.  It ends up making the whole thing feel like a much more complete and rounded game experience, with only a few minutes work.

Thank you to all the people that have played and commented on my entry, much obliged.  I left it alone for a week, wanting to come back to it with a bit of a fresh head and hopefully fresh eyes.  In replaying it a bit there are a few particular points I think are worth talking about, important aspects of the game which I fell I either did or didn’t get right.

-Enjoyability-

Games should always be fun to play in some regard.  Quite frankly, I don’t think the game is very fun.  Winning is largely up to luck and there isn’t much payoff in a play where you lose.  However, most of the aspects discussed below deal with things which would improve this.

-Exploration-

I feel this was simultaneously the biggest success and the biggest failure of the entry.  The torch mechanic made walking around and feeling your way through the darkness fun in itself, giving a real sense of exploring a dark area.  The problem is that there is nothing to find in the darkness, no payoff for the player, destroying any real motivation for the player to explore and making the fun not last.  The ‘monster’ could pretty much be done away with if the area was interesting to explore, using that as the driving motivation for the player to move.  However, during the time frame I couldn’t come up with any good way to generate a random interesting cave.  Which leads nicely to the next point.

-Level design-

Half way through the development the working idea for what I wanted was actually quite different to the random cave with monster.  I wanted to instead have the player start at the entrance to the cave and venturing in.  The cave would be rough at first but slowly leading to a more structured area, with interesting things to see on the walls and such.  Things would slowly get spookier and the area more ancient-temple-like until you got to the heart of the temple.  At this point something would happen and something would start chasing after you, leading to to a desperate sprint for your life, going back along the way you had come and out to the entrance.  Of course I soon realized, as I was getting caught up in the details, I had no chance of doing all that with the time I had left and my ability with the engine I was using.  I instead focused on having some sort of random map, adding a win lose condition and putting some sort of drive and gameplay to the mix.  Speaking of which…

-Game flow-

I think everyone should add a full ‘start’->’game’->’end’->’start’ loop to their game.  I actually got distracted and wrote a whole post on this here.

-Fear-

This was the biggest emotion I was playing with.  I wanted to make something that induced a sense of fear in the player.  I must have succeeded in this to some degree, having had plenty of comments along the lines of “It scared me!”, however I’m not sure if it was the type of ‘scare’ I was after.  What I wanted was the feeling of blindly running from an unknown fear, but what I got was more of the sudden jump scare.  There is some of the former, but I felt more people experienced the latter.  I think a better level design, as mentioned above, would have achieved this better.  However, another aspect of this that I feel I succeeded with was never really giving you a clear view of the ‘monster’.  Trying to look at it when it’s close causes it to speed up greatly, so you can only ever catch a glimpse of it before it’s game over.   Or alternatively. you can only see the tentacles skirting the edge of the light beam.  I did however, want the ‘monster’ to instill more of a feeling of ‘wrongness’, so prevalent in Lovecraftian horrors.  I’m sure there would be a way to do this with introducing/playing on classic game concepts, then breaking them, but that’s still a bit hazy in my mind.

-The rest-

– Sound worked ok, but would be a lot cooler if I could have added left/right stero pan to give sense of direction.

– Ties into level design, but better and more varied floor/wall graphics would be great.  I got caught up in how to deal with perspective and having things covering other things should work with the light.

– Having the ‘monster’ always just move towards you was a mistake in my part, but the simplest way to do the ‘AI’ for it.  A bit more intelligence would be good, but I again got caught up in how to do it.

– Another concept I wanted to play with was to have some aspect of ‘seeing things in the shadows/darkness’.  Just the kind of stuff that might make you suddenly flash your torch at something you thought you saw, only to find nothing there (or perhaps actually find something…).

– It’d actually be really easy to add in the code things which the torchbeam hits that change the colour of the light.  I’m sure there has to be a cool way to use this, but I can’t think of things that fit (Crystals? Stainglass?).

– Sound should have been done in sfxr, which I couldn’t get my hands on during the comp, but have now.

– A col idea from philomory: “Now I think of it, it’d be really sweet if the map changed around you, but I’m only thinking that because this reminds me of House of Leaves.”

-Finally-

There are a number of directions I could take this if I want to expand on it a bit. The torch mechanic would totally work for a quite a few different styles of game and could be a bit of fun to toy around with more.  I think making the more structured level mentioned in the level design bit above might be something I’ll try, if in my head I can work out the small niggles to it.  Any other suggestions people have are welcome too, for anything that I might have missed or things they felt differently about.  Also, thanks for reading (if you made it this far).

This was my first Ludum Dare, and I was really looking forward to it. Well, I did have fun making a game, but there’s one major problem: I don’t have Windows, I don’t have access to Windows, and I couldn’t find anyone to port my game to Windows. So I kind of feel left out. Not only can nobody play my game, but I can’t play most of the other people’s games.

I always have such a great time with PyWeek I thought for sure I’d like this too. But I really have to consider whether Ludum Dare is for me. If I needed Windows to participate, I would easily choose not to participate. But maybe that’s not necessary. I could write in C++ instead of Python, and maybe more people could run my source. Or I could learn Flash or something highly portable. I still couldn’t play most of the other games, but it’s a step up. We’ll see.

Anyway, it’s been enlightening. And at the very least, I enjoyed making something, so it’s not for nothing.

I’m going to do a last call post some time tomorrow.

If your game previously didn’t work on Windows, but you made fixes after several “it doesn’t work” comments, leave a comment here. I’ll collect up a list and try to make them nice and visible to everyone. Hopefully that will give all the neglected people more proper/updated votes.

Also, we’re short 1 Windows port from the port request posting. Details and a link to the source can be found in the comments here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2009/09/08/defenestration/

Thanks!

Public/private/whatever. I figure there’s no reason to hide this away in emails.

We’d like to try out the compo system again but for the MiniLD this weekend. Phil added a special mode for the end that will let us showcase the entries, and not require user voting.

I’ve set up a page specifically for this weekend here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-12/

Submitters should go there to add their finished entries. I’ll update it to mention the theme… eventually.

Good luck everyone.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 9th, 2009 at 9:53 pm and is filed under MiniLD #12. 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.

So I’ve tried again, and this time I think I’ve finally managed to wrestle a working Windows build into place: download it here. For some reason I had a much easier time packaging my last (non-LD) game. Suffice it to say, it is probably best for everyone involved if you don’t ask why it’s necessary to distribute SDL_mixer.dll with a game that has no sound.

Tags: Windows

So I’m finally getting around to writing a post-mortem for Mole Cave Tactics. I know it’s better to do it fresh off development, but I needed a break.

Since it seems to work pretty well for a lot of other people, I’ll go with the time-honored format of

The Good

• The concept: I had my concept in mind for this theme (and the many related themes on the list) since well before the theme voting wrapped up. In fact, I had been bouncing ideas for some sort of tactical rpg around in my head for quite some time prior to the compo.
• I finished: The game didn’t have nearly as much content as I had included in the concept, but it was pretty obvious that that would be the case from the beginning, anyway. Given that this is my first LD, I’m pretty happy I managed to upload a game which runs, has things for the player to do, and has defined ways to win and lose.
• The graphics: Ok, so it could be reasonably argued that my sprites would be better classified as ‘bad’ or ‘ugly’, but, I’ve never done any graphics from scratch by myself before, and I actually rather like how the moles turned out. They need some tweaking, but I think they’re pretty good. The terrain I’m less happy with.

The Bad

• Mismanaged time: I kinda knew from the start that this was going to be too ambitious for a first time LD entrant, but above and beyond that I did a poor job prioritizing different aspects of the game. In particular, I spent way, way too much time on AI. I didn’t really appreciate just how difficult a problem doing AI for this kind of game is, I went for way too much sophistication, and as a result I didn’t pull it off at all. I should have known immediately I was doing something wrong when I started writing code to have the AI units look ahead multiple turns in planning their movement. Random walk may not have been very satisfying, but it would have been more than compensated for by the extra stuff I could code in the time I saved.
• No readme: I didn’t ever get around to writing a readme or even specifying a license, so the player is kinda left on their own to figure out what to do.
• Only one map: This game could *really* have used multiple maps, or a random map generator. This is one of those important things that didn’t get done because I was tinkering with the AI.

The Ugly

• The interface: Oh, God, is the interface bad. I should have taken it more seriously when I started adding undocumented keyboard shortcuts for nearly every mouse action in the game. I didn’t think the interface through very well at all during the competition. Having thought it through after reading the complaints, I think that if I want a mouse-driven interface, a radial menu centered on the unit under consideration (think NWN) would be best. Alternatively, just ditch the mouse and switch to all keyboard.
• The Windows port: for some reason, the Windows port was incredibly painful to make this time. For a long time I actually somehow managed to have a build posted which wouldn’t even run on the machine I built it on. I love Ruby, but packaging Ruby applications is a terrible, ridiculous mess. Next time, I’m going to look into Crate.

Pre Vita

All that said, I had a huge amount of fun doing this compo, and I definitely intend to enter again. I also plan to rework and expand Mole Cave Tactics into a full-fledged game, when I have some time to sit-down and code again. Don’t expect a release soon, though: my other game, Operation Lambda (shameless plug) took half a year to complete; it’ll take a few more LDs before I’m able to crank out games of any appreciable quality in a short time period.

Tags: journal, postmortem

EDIT: Oh jeez, I thought it ended on Friday!

Tags: motivation

I’ve been working on my game, and it’s come a long way.  It now looks better, the character moves faster, and there are 5 levels that were not in the competition version.  I think the new levels present some interesting puzzles.

Play Online

I still need to work on making the wall collision less sticky.  Also, I’d like to animate my character and explosion sprites.

I’ve made my decision.

Unless the theme is something really, really interesting, I’m just going to ignore it and do something else instead.

Why not? After all, Mini-LD is just for fun!

That said, I’m more than likely going to ignore the theme.

Instead, I want to make a 2-day roguelike in under 100kB.

I will be using C, NCurses, Vim, and GCC.

I’m very excited about this.

—Mr. Dude

Because I lack the coding chops to access data from a website in my game, I’m going a different route.

I was in IRC lamenting my lack of ability with regards to the theme, when GirlFlash suggested that I simply pick a topic in Wikipedia and run with it.

With that, I’ve chosen m’topic.

Yes, River City Ransom. A clone of it!

I’m going to make it as true to the original as possible without it actually being the original!

(EDIT: I’m actually leaning more towards Python/Geany/Pygame right now, so I really don’t know ’till I write some actual code :P)

And I’m doing it in C++! In Code::Blocks! Using SDL!

Here’s hoping…

—Mr. Dude

I’ve posted about my progress on my blog. Until I get PoV to hook me up with some syndication, here’s a link:

http://pekuja.com/ludumdare/92/wikipedia-mapping/

I’m still having trouble deciding on my idea. >_<;

The RCR clone may not really be what I want to do.

I’ll post again when I have something to show for my efforts. Until then, I’m going to refrain. I just thought I’d get this out so I don’t feel so obligated. 😛

—Mr. Dude

I wasn’t planning on entering miniLD 12. But the theme was just so interesting that my mind won’t let me not enter it, so here I go.

My original plan was C++, SDL and cURL. However, cURL refuses to work at all, so I’m stuck with PHP, the only other language I know reasonably well. This limits my choices significantly, but since I didn’t have any to start with, this isn’t really a problem.

So, my current plan is a choose-your-own adventure made of wiki pages. First name I could think of is ‘Wikiventure’, which is awful, sounds like a Wiki-based investment company, and is probably going to stay as the name because I can’t think of any others. 😛

It’s located here, and currently just outputs the wiki page, not that exciting.

Tags: php

I really, really, really shouldn’t be participating this weekend, as it’s my son’s first birthday and there are relatives from all over filling my househole.

But the theme!  It’s too good!  And worse, games with this theme will probably be LESS good if you just decide to release them later on, because they will require way too much explanation.

I don’t have a lot to show yet, just a title screen really.  I’m reading data from the wiki (specifically, from http://www.minild12.sophiehoulden.com/index.php?title=Special:Random ), but that’s not evident here.  Game will be a frantic shooter, I guess.  Probably smash TV style.  Also I looked on the rules wiki for “profanity” and I didn’t see anything preventing it!  So!

oh f stop sharing information title

OK, so I have a working prototype!

Kind-of pointless screenshot.

Not very exciting, but it works. Create and edit pages here (starting with ‘Adventure/’, link them up, and it’ll let you navigate between them. To make it easier, pages that don’t exist will give you a link so you can write them. To jump to a page, simply add ‘p=PAGENAME’ (without the ‘Adventure/’ bit) to the URL. It’s case-sensitive.

Um, not really sure where to go from here. Making ”’ become <b> and ” become <i> would be good. Then maybe some kind of inventory…? I really have no idea. 😛

EDIT: The best bit about this is that other people are already writing the actual game pages for me! 😛

Tags: php, screenshot

So, theme announced at 3am. I actually got an idea very soon, and decided to go with it because it is both simple and fun (more about it later).

However, I went to be at 6am, woke up at 2pm, and spent most of the day coding a curses-like library for SDL and my wrapper evöL. Of course, it’s always during the time limited compos that I finally motivate myself to do what I wanted to do for a while…

And now, after 13 hours of work, I have… the title screen, hurray!

My god, it's full of ASCII!

Fortunately I had coded a part of my html parsing right after theme was announced.

Now, gameplay!

Tags: screenshot

I’m in the process of adding in codes you can use in area pages.

First, there’s [[GET:Foo]], which will let the player pick-up an item called ‘Foo’ from that area. The item will only appear there if they do not already own it.

Then there’s [[IFHAVE:Foo|Bar]]. This checks if the player has ‘Foo’ in their inventory. If they do, ‘Bar’ is displayed. Bar can contain formatting, but I think it won’t work if you put anything with ]] inside it. I’ll have a go at changing that.

I’m keeping an up-to-date list of codes and formatting that work here, if anybody wants to start messing around with them! 😀

I think I’ll go to bed soon, so that’s probably it for today. It’s been really fun so far, especially considering how clueless I was to begin with.

Tags: php

That’s definitely going to be a long night…

Weeeeee, rainbow!

Tags: screenshot

http://pekuja.com/ludumdare/100/intergalactic-planetary/

So yeah, I guess I’m still posting in my own blog. Sorry about that.

I’m currently working in Python, but I’m finding more and more that I kinda… Dislike it.

I’m going to start remaking my game in Ruby. I don’t have a whole lot of code right now as it is, and I’d be much happier working in Ruby.

That said, there’s a pretty good chance that I won’t finish in time. I’m going to try to have something by the deadline, though.

Edit: Using Ruby/SDL instead of Gosu. Prefer raster to sprites-on-polygons… :-/

I’ll be using Ruby/SDL for my graphics, sound, etc. SDL is one of my favorite libraries, and has yet to let me down. I’m not sure how it is with rubyscript2exe, but it should be fine.

Read on for more explanation, if you’d like.

I have found myself more and more draw to Ruby as of late. It’s strange.

I’m not sure why. It’s… Beautiful.

Maybe I’m getting too emotional about this. I feel very strongly about this, though.

I’m going to be coding more in Ruby in the coming weeks. I want to see if this is really for me.

In other news, I’ve decided to remake Byte Vs. GNOME in Ruby, as well.

The code is just too hairy to do much of anything with.

Work on Byte Vs. GNOME will continue alongside OpenRansom after Mini-LD is over.

I’m not going to make huge plans at the moment. I’m just going to start working, and try not to look too far ahead or too far back.

Here’s hoping.

—Mr. Dude

So, since you all obviously can’t wait anymore with my unbearable suspense, here’s my concept:

It’s actually a quite popular game, which consists in starting at a random page on Wikipedia, and trying to reach a certain goal page in the smallest number of internal links possible.

Now with shotguns.

The idea is to use each Wikipedia page as a level for an action platformer, where the links are the exits. With lots of baddies on the way. And of course, the goal is to find Duke Nukem Forever’s page.

Platforms and ladders... Random level generation ain't that easy...

As you can see I’m far from done.

Oh  and of course, Wikipedia -> text -> console based game. Now that I spent most of my time coding my curses libs, it’d be a shame not to use it…

If I still have time at the end, I’ll use GirlFlash’s wiki as a highscore/hall of fame thingy. But let’s face it, it’s unlikely that I’ll have time left…

I really like this theme so I’m throwing something together here between family duties… not sure if I’ll make the official deadline or not.

Here is my screenshot, you can sort of see what I’m going for here… it’s a word association game made from wikipedia data that is loading in the background as you play.

In the pic, underlined words are “correct”, but that is temporary… going to show hits/misses on the left side of the screen later.

Unless I limit to certain categories or something, it’s going to be .. weird… I sort of like the complete insanity of it so I might leave it “very” random.

So.. pretty simple concept, but would like to bring it up to a level of polish where it really “works”.

I’m using my iPhone framework, but targeting windows for now.

Alright! This is a totally kick-ass theme (thanks, GirlFlash) and I’m glad to see lots of people running with it. Too bad I’m not one of them, though — this is just about the most straightforward Wikipedia-reliant game you can imagine. There are two players, a runner and a chaser, each of which starts out on a random page. It’s basically a game of tag with the chaser chasing the runner through article after article. The chaser moves faster, but the runner has complete freedom to duck into “Lists of Phoenician Rhetoricians” and hide all night, if they like.

It really just looks like a two-player browser, doesn't it?

While technically two-player, you can only (at the moment) play as the chaser against a simple AI runner — I’m currently trying to figure out how to adapt an existing bit of code that calculates the distance between two phrases (actually, my PhD project truth-be-told) into this without making you download ~80gigs of word-vectors.

Tags: wikipedia

As the title would suggest, I threw away a good portion of the day on my romantic, emotional choice to redo everything in Ruby.

I… had a wakeup call. Using Ruby/SDL was my reality check.

In short, the thing threw tantrums at random, denied having methods that the manual listed, and generally misbehaved.

I’m not going to sit here and rant. I’ve got things to do. I just want to take back what I said in my last post.

I’m sorry for all this emotion, but I get alot more wishy-washy when I don’t feel as much pressure. (IE: When the game doesn’t count for a score, and I plan on working on it past the compo anyway)

I’ma shut my trap and get back to work now.

Peace.

—Mr. Dude

http://pekuja.com/news/106/wikipedia-galaxy-forever/

Now with a playable demo!

Well, it’s done, I guess.  Not a lot of improvements since last time really, but it’s got interactivity now at least. Oh, and score. Also made it request about 4 pages from wikipedia per question overall, in stead of infinite.

entry page

thats 48 hours folks!

to submit your game go to:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-12/

and to view all entries check:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-12/?action=preview

you guys clearly took the theme and ran with it, very far indeed it seems! I have to say you guys once again impressed me. I cant wait to check out what everyone has done

if you havent finished yet dont sweat it, its only a miniLD after all and I’m not going to hurt you if you want to take an extra hour or so to clear out any bugs and the like

also, voting for August’s LD ends in 3 hours so if you have time to spare you dont have long left to vote.

Items can now be gained and lost, there are IFHAVE and IFNHAVE to conditionally output text, and you can click on items in your inventory to use them: if that area has a [[USE:Foo|Bar]] tag, then it will display Bar if you use Foo. Tags can contain other tags, but not perfectly if there are multiple tags at the same level. eg:

[[IFHAVE:Foo| [[GET:Fish]] [[GET:Chips]] ]]

The Get tags are at the same level here, and so will display oddly. Though I think they might still work.

If anybody has any ideas of other things they’d like in, please comment below! And feel free to use tags in pages: They make it a game rather than a wiki browser.

Tags: php

I’m forfeiting from Mini-LD. It was fun, but I’m tired, and likely won’t get a game together.

I had alot of fun, once again, but this time I just lost too much time dicking around with things that didn’t work out. :-/

Oh well. I’ll be posting a link to my game tomorrow, once I have an actual game.

I got alot done, all things considered. I got a 3D collision engine, mapped 2D images to 3D collision boxes, and got a little dude running around, punching and kicking.

Tomorrow, I’ll add enemies and a camera. Then, a scoring system, and so on.

Today, though, I’m just too tired. I need to rest. I’m not happy about it, but it’s just gotten to be a real struggle for me.

It’s been very fun. I’ll still be around on IRC, and will probably post updates on OpenRansom as I add to it. Less frequently than I did over the course of today. ^_^;

Well, it was fun. Time for me to call it a day.

—Mr. Dude

I knew I’d seen a game like this somewhere; HybridMind surreptitiously reminded me that it belongs to Jeremy Bushnell, whom I dearly hope doesn’t mind my stealing it shamelessly. Perhaps I should ask.

I should ask.

Anyway, soldiering on in the face of an almost certain copyright violation:

Progress! Even though things look the same.

I’ve got both AI players working — they’re not the smartest in the world, but they’ll do. And the Chaser will give you a run for your money if he picks up the trail. Pretty pleased about that. Still have a few bugs relating to turn length and whatnot floating around, but I welcome criticism! And suggestions!

You can download a windows build here, if you want to give it a spin. Or click mindlessly for half an hour in something other than Firefox. Same thing, really.

After re-discovering HybridMind’s friend’s ruleset, I realized I’m doing a pretty mediocre job of enforcing those rules. I may go back and make this an explicit version of Wikipedian Tag, just to go with the tried-and-playtested rules they’ve hammered out. Not without getting very definite permission, though — that would feel overwhelmingly like theft, even moreso than now.

Tags: intellectual property, wikipedia

So I had this cool idea about faeries living in the net, and you could browse webpages and recruit them, help them fight off boss critters, etc..

The problem is that I screwed up my time management; I didn’t get started until today, and the deadline is actually much closer than I realized (who uses UTC?!? @_@).  But anyway, I worked up something which is not a game but is still kind of neat.

FaerieNet – Create a Faerie

I probably won’t be able to work on this any more before the official midnight UTC deadline.  So, this is it for me for this MiniLD.  However, I might just continue working on this project in the days ahead…

Tags: php, procedural generation, web-based, wiki, wikipedia

Yes, ASCII art additive blending. Oh yeah. But it fails…

Edit: I just fixed it ^^

Ludum Dare 15 voting has finally ended, and the results are now available.

Top 10

For the press, we have a special link just for you. If you want to know who “won” Ludum Dare 15, go here for the top 10 games (expandable to the full 144).

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-15/?action=top

“Winners” are decided by the Overall category. To our surprise, we had two ties in the top 10. Neat!

Categorical Top 5’s

For us LD folk, the full categorical breakdown of winners.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-15/

*NOTE*: Click on the titles of the categories for Top 10 style lists per category.

Ludum Dare 15 as Screen Shots

And since it looks cool, the full list of 144 entries, as screenshots.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-15/?action=preview

Next Time

Our next major competition (Ludum Dare 16) will be in December. The exact date we’ll know as the month approaches. To keep informed of the latest news, you can sign up for our mailing list here:

http://www.gamecompo.com/mailing-list/

You can also follow us on Twitter:

http://twitter.com/ludumdare

Or alternatively, you can watch user news‘s RSS feed.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/author/news/feed/

Can’t get enough? Then stop by next month for MiniLD #13 hosted by nilsf.

Suggestions

If you have any suggestions for the compo, we’re collecting them in the comments here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2009/08/30/suggestion-post/

Thanks everyone for coming out and making Ludum Dare 15 such a huge success.

– Mike Kasprzak (PoV)

Less than an hour until the deadline. It’s gone midnight. I am rather tired. The most complicated tags so far have just gone in, (SPEECH and TALK, for enabling conversation trees. And probably anything that needs a choice actually. Whee!) and I have an infinite loop somewhere. Oh goody.

Anyway, it’s been an awesome Mini-LD. MUST… FIX… INFINITE… LOOP…

EDIT: FIXED! YAYAYAYAY!!!

Turns out, it’s because I’d got the position in a string, modified the string, then still used that position. Silly me. All works now! Time to update the documentation, submit, and go to bed, and only 25 minutes to spare. 😀

Tags: infinite loop, panic, phew, php, tired

Wikirunner (aka Wikipedian Tag) is a go:

Every screenshot I post looks the same...

Wikirunner is a game played on Wikipedia articles. There are two players: a runner and a chaser. Both start on a random article; the chaser’s goal is to end up on the same page (at the same time!) as the runner. The runner is simply trying to evade the chaser for as long as possible. You can play it single player, as either player, or hotseat with a friend. Woo! It’s based on Jeremy Bushnell’s Wikipedian Tag rules — be sure to check him out as well.

I spent the last two hours or so giving myself a crash course on python threads, and re-writing all my internet code to be asynchronous. I’m certain this was a good use of my time, too — the little throbber that flashes up while it’s downloading from Wikipedia is so very worth it. Plus I have (tentative, indirect) permission from the author of the ruleset I’m using (‘Wikipedian Tag’) to re-use it here — something I need to actually obtain, as it’s licensed CC-BY-ND, and this is pretty clearly D.

I made some changes based on the feedbacks !

• fixed animation, to animate only when the char was in movement
• add some instrunctions of how to fire
• increase the distance of the border of the screen to avoid zombie-suprises
• changed the torch throw to allow multiple torches
• fixed level 3 and add a level 4
• criated a windows exe
• fixed some screen flickering
• reduce the maximum speed of the zombies
• generated some random textures for the ground

thanks all for the feedbacks !! this helped a lot to enhance the Java engine that Im building.

glaucon and the cave  v2

Tags: cave, glaucon, LD #15 - Caverns - 2009, post-compo

Well, I placed 91st overall… Woohoo, eh? I expected to at least place somewhere in audio… Anyways, time for a postmortem of what went well and what didn’t.

Good:

I created a roadmap of what I *wanted* to do, that was realistic for the given time

I rapidly got the framework running

I got the basic generation of the caves going in the first night, albeit, I had to tweak it the next day.

I was satisfied with the music, considering it was done in the last 10 minutes of the competition. ;P

Bad:

The song should have been MUCH longer

The AI never did get worked on at all. That was to be the main playing point – the enemy would chase the player through the maze and create a sense of urgency. I can still see the original vision for this in my head, a suspenseful somewhat scary chase in a cave

I had VERY LITTLE time commited. Of course, something major had to go on that weekend. My sister and nephew moved down from Duluth, MN that weekend back to our house, so I had to help with that and put up with a 2.5 year old running around, when I wasn’t used to that. Otherwise, I may have gotten my top priority at the end, AI, implemented.

Movement speed was very slow in the game.

The cave did not look natural at all. It looked like a maze (Was made of rectangular prisms…)

The cave was very rarely continuous (Players HAD to use the wall-glitch)

The Goal was unclear in my description.

Textures wound up ugly

Some people had issues with framerate and the like. I’m sorry, but I couldn’t account for that.

I could go on and on, but those are the major issues. Next time, I’ll have a whole, undisturbed weekend to work.

I did make some updates to Xue after the compo, which I spun into my “game of the week” for this past week.

I’m not really super pleased with the result (in the end, I think the game still has too much “oooo… parallax” and not enough “wow, that was fun!”), but I also don’t have a clear direction that I’d want to push the idea in at this point, so I’m letting it stand as is for now. Maybe someday when / if I get a better sense of exactly what I want people to do in those caverns I’ll spin off a different game based on the entry.

Anyway, heres an updated screenshot (once LD was over, I immediately and shamelessly plugged in some graphics from LostGarden.com):

It’s playable online here: http://www.thewasabiproject.com/flash-games/play/play-xue/

As Kobel suggested in the comments on the entry, I did use a color matrix to tweak the background layers (actually, the original entry did that too, but it only darkened them, so it wasn’t much of an interesting effect). There are a few different “atmospheres” that the game uses for the caves, each of which fiddle with the colors of the background layers in different ways.

Gameplay-wise, I added some fireball spewing monsters, along with items that restore fuel. I also fiddled with the controls for the player’s ship (and actually I’m still fiddling with them, even with the game already released online), and adjusted the way the crystals spawn.

The map is also completely enclosed now, so there shouldn’t be any more invisible walls, and there’s no longer a way to fly off into space off the top of the map. Technically the map generation got tweaked a bit too, but nothing terribly interesting (the maps start out at half size and get scaled up, which both speeds up the generation a bit and cuts down on some annoying small-scale features).

I’m always happy to get feedback (though on this one, like I said, I’m not sure if I’ll stick my fingers into it again for a while unless a really compelling new direction for it comes up).

I also realized when I was getting ready to write this post that I never posted the updated version of my LD14 entry — so I hope nobody will mind if I tack it on here!

That entry was Crushing Pressure, and it turned into this little Flash game:

You can give it a whirl here, if you like: http://www.thewasabiproject.com/flash-games/play/play-crushing-pressure/

The original entry for LD14 had the same basic goal (rescue the little people while avoiding the walls), but it didn’t have any other obstacles to avoid (the updated version adds the DoomCubes and WhizBlades). The released version also added music, and little extras like an honest-to-goodness score counter and some quick transitions between levels. It’s still a pretty simple game, but there are a few minutes worth of gameplay hiding in there, I think.

Thanks for the feedback everyone left on both the original entries!

Tags: LD #14 - Advancing Wall of Doom - 2009, LD #15 - Caverns - 2009

Oh hey!  If I make a blog post, then people will actually have a place to comment on the game!

Latest upload of Blow Up Wikipedia is here.

PLAY ONLINE

This is a post-compo version where the game is more like what I actually meant to make.  The original and post-compo versions are marked as such on the game’s page.

It’s like some weird mashup of a broken typing tutor and Space Phallus (NSFW!  Play it at home!).  Only mine has no genitalia.  Well, depending on which Wikipedia articles it uses.

Compo troll of the year: http://www.youtube.com/… – REMOVED
Mirror: http://v.youku.com/…
Transcript: http://etherpad.com/indiebaycriticism
Soundboard: http://www.swfcabin.com/open/1253602778
Samples: http://blogs.microsoft.com/ichiro/ibaysamples.zip

Remix (Video): http://v.youku.com/… – NEW
Remix 2 (MP3): Offended

ExciteMike’s right, an actual post would make commenting easier!

Wiki Warrior is a generic top-down shooter with elements pulled from random Featured Articles on Wikipedia. The enemies in-game are generated from the article’s links, and the background is pulled from the article, too; in the case where an image couldn’t be found associated with the article, a random image in the Cityscapes category at the WikiMedia Commons is used instead (I happen to think that, for the most part, random city panoramas make for okay background images in this context).

I used python and pygame to create this, with sounds made with DrPetter’s sfxr, along with python-wikitools to handle all of the MediaWiki API stuff. Of course, I didn’t discover it until after I had already learned most of the details of the API, but it was still nice to not have to implement all of it myself.

This was my first LD, mini or otherwise, and I have to say, it was quite enjoyable. This project ended up being my first real pygame project, and  all in all, I’m pretty satisfied with the results. The code is very unorganized and kind of thrown together haphazardly, but the fact that it works and is still manageable enough that I can still extend it further is enough to make me happy. Dead simple gameplay, to the point of being almost too shallow is probably the biggest problem I have with it at this point, with the relative lack of polish coming in a close second.

Two things I learned this weekend:

• 48 hours is actually a really long amount of time.
• Despite that, it’s never as long as you think it is.

I’d like to polish the game up, implement a few more complex features, etc., but we’ll see how well that idea holds up after future consideration.

Any thoughts, comments, or questions regarding the game? Problems running the Windows executable? I tested the py2exe build process as best as I could, but I figure there’s always an outside chance of failure.

Thanks for reading and/or playing, and my apologies for rambling.

Six degrees of separation. With a shotgun.

I finally packaged stuff properly for Linux,  and made the Windows port. Grab them here.

Notes:

• It does crash at exit. Will fix later.
• You can get stuck at the top of the screen. I’m sorry but couldn’t find a way around.
• Sound can get irritating, be sure to lower your volume first.

Otherwise, I’m quite happy with it. Awesome theme idea, GirlFlash!

Here is the included readme:

Duke is dropped in a random Wikipedia page and has to get in as few links as possible to the article on Duke Nukem Forever. But the evil googlebots have invaded the pages, so it won’t be an easy journey…

Each level is made of platforms and ladders, and has one exit for each link found on the Wikipedia article. It also has the “Exit” exits, which brings you back to the previous level, if you need to backtrack.

Controls
——–

Left and right arrows: run
Up arrow: jump/go up a ladder
Control: fire
Shift: switch weapons (machine gun has a hight rate and range, but lower damage,
shotgun kills in two shots, but needs a second to reload and closer range)
Tab: bring up the history of visited levels
C: open the radar screen
Space: enter an exit

Escape: quit the game/close the radar screen

Radar
—–

To make this holy quest a bit easier, Duke has a radar. Hitting C opens a list of all exits of the level (links on the Wikipedia page). Use up and down arrow to highlight one, and space to select it, then escape to go back to the game.
In the lower right corner will be indicated the distance to the target.

Shift + up and down allows faster browsing of the links.

Notes
—–

– Entering a new level restores health entirely, and dead robots stay dead when you visit back a level.
– Requires a working Internet connection…

License
——-

The source code is under GNU GPL v3.
Sounds are cc-by-nc-sa.

http://pekuja.com/ludumdare/143/globehopper-post-compo-release/

Now with 70% less disorientation!

I just finished porting sfxr to Haxe, but as a library instead of an app. Instead of generating a WAV file in sfxr and storing it in your SWF, you can now generate it while your program is loading, or the moment you need it. Why? To save space in the final SWF and to provide more flexibility, like being able to vary a sound a little depending on something in the game.

http://www.wieringsoftware.nl/ld/sfxrhx/

There are several ways to use it:
– you can start with making a sound in sfxr and save it as a .sfs file and use the load() function
– generate random sounds in your program and simply save the random seeds of the ones you like, use create(), randomize() and mutate()
– if you need to fine-tune a sound, you can also edit the individual parameters in your program
– use generate() to create the wave file in memory
– finally, use play() at any time to play it

Tags: haXe, sfxr

It’s been a few weeks (!), but I feel like I’ve been sitting on this retrospective for so long I may as well post the thing. LD #15 had a fantastic theme, Caverns, and I got a kick out of participating. As usual.

Shelter From the Rain

Looking back at my past LD and MiniLD entries, I really feel like I’m improving. My games for LD15 and MiniLD12 just feel more polished, somehow — a feel which makes me inordinately happy. I did something a little different with Shelter From the Rain; I knew I didn’t have a very strong gameplay idea, and that my mechanic (running around picking things up) had more holes in it than a ten-gallon coffee strainer. So I got the basic game together, then spent most of my time working on little polish-type features. Things like my (relatively) slick menus, configurable options, and online high scores — not to mention some, for me, pretty good atmospheric audio. In my previous entries I’ve always tried to focus on improving my skills in a particular area; this compo was no different.

If I were to go back and re-do Shelter From the Rain, I’d break it up into a series of ‘quests’ — tasking the player with going out and collecting, say, 10 cans of beans. I’d also add more hazards to both the above- and below-ground: fallout, soldiers, survivalists. In short, I wish I’d made the basic game more complex. I also feel like the visual style was crazy-disjoint, something I’d love to improve. “What are these black geary things?!” you cried. What, indeed.

Wikirunner

Oh man. I’m so pleased with this one. If I’d realized it would receive any publicity at all (ohmygod, indiegames.com. I feel legit) I’d have spent way more time working on it this weekend — as it is, the game is basically the product of some hasty Saturday morning programming, and a little polishing on Sunday night. It’s rough, and ugly — but, I like to think, actually Fun.

This is promising. I’m working on a post-compo now, to fix some of the glaring usability bugs people have been reporting and clean up the AI a little. Breath, held.

Wikiventure went far better than I was expecting. Mainly because I wasn’t expecting anything remotely interesting. I’m still working on it, in fact, adding new things – just today I added user-input via a text-box and tags which react to that input, and score and cash variables that can be checked and modified. I’m really enjoying it, and plan to add a basic battle system like in proper game books. 😛

What went well

• The basic game, taking pages from the wiki and letting you travel between them, was very quick and easy to set-up. Then it was just a case of feature-creep for the rest of the weekend, which was perfect for me!
• People took an interest and wrote some content for me! 😛

What went badly

• Spent rather a long time at the start battling with C++ libraries before moving to PHP. Though that did help me come-up with an idea.
• Also spent rather a long time at the end trying to fix an infinite loop, but managed to do so before the deadline, so no real bad points. 😀

What I would do differently

• Plan-out code structure before writing it. I spent quite a while on the Sunday rewriting all the tag-parsers to remove a lot of repeated code. There’s still a lot now.
• Put time into writing content! I only actually created two areas, as a test right at the start before I’d added any tags, and then I kind-of expected people to write my content for me. Which some people did, but it was horribly lazy of me.

Things I’d like to add

• Cookies or some other way of keeping things persistent between sessions. Could tie it to user-accounts on my site.
• Combat system, mentioned already.
• More levels of persistence than ‘IFVISITED’ and ‘IFNVISITED’, so that the player wouldn’t necessarily have to follow the same set of actions multiple times.
• Any other stuff I happen to think-up.
• Content!1!1!!1!!!

So yeah, it went pretty well. I’ll keep working on it and maybe it’ll become something really interesting.

Tags: php, post-mortem

I’ve released a post compo version of Cave Ninja. Nothing exciting, it just fixes two bugs:
1. Win check for last level corrected.
2. Divide by zero error fixed that occurred for certain OpenGL implementations.

To be honest, for most people there’s no reason to update. But for those that got the divide by zero (might also seem like it just shutdown at once), it might be worth it.

Windows binary (should run fine in Wine).

Tags: bugfix, cave, divide by zero, opengl, post-compo

Ludum Dare #15 is over, and I already wrote that the results are in. Aside from placing well in Community, which shows how much I love participating in LD48, I also saw my overall ranking come in at around the 40 percentile. I was ranked #63, which sounds good, but there were a number of ties for previous rankings. Out of 144 entries, Mineral Miner was 87th. It’s much better than coming in almost dead last in the previous Ludum Dare (and not completely last only by virtue of two other entries not getting rated at all), but I’ve done better.

Let’s look back on this project and see what happened. First, let’s go over a summary of the game. Mineral Miner turned out to be a puzzle game in which you drive around a cavern in a tank, getting out to collect minerals. You can only collect one mineral at a time, so you need to drop off collected minerals in your tank to collect more. If you are near a monster lair and not inside the safety of your tank, a monster will come out and chase you. If a monster catches you, you lose. If you collect all the minerals, you can leave the level and win.

What Went Right:

• Rapid Prototyping on Paper I took a free, online game design course at GameDesignConcepts.wordpress.com, and I was able to put use those skills to great effect. During the competition, I posted about my prototypes. With only 48 hours, it can feel painfully slow, but I iterated through the design, adding a new mechanic, trying it out, and deciding whether to keep or remove it, and then repeating until I had something I thought might be fun. Painfully slow? It took me almost no time at all. In previous LD48s, I’ve been known to add mechanics at the last minute in an attempt to make a game out of the code I was writing. This time, I knew exactly what mechanics I needed, and there were no real surprises here. The finished game ended up playing exactly how I hoped it would.
• Quick ‘n Dirty Graphics I’m not terribly familiar with art tools, such as The Gimp, and so every LD48 I find myself looking up how to use it to create what ends up being ugly art for my games anyway. I decided that this time, I wouldn’t try to make anything fancy. If I have any images that need text, I will use the basic text tool instead of the script-fu that creates cool looking logos if you tweak parameters just right. The tank? A square with a dot to let you know which way is the front. The driver? A yellow circle. Hey, it worked for Pac-man. I was able to focus more of my time on making the game because I wasn’t frustrating myself with trying to create halfway decent artwork.

  

  

• I Made Sound Effects This is my fifth Ludum Dare, and only the second time that a game I made had sound effects. Because I had a game that pretty much worked the way I expected it to, I had time for some polish. I made a list of sound effects I thought I would need, used sfxr to create the beeps and boops, and wrote the code to tie it all together. Adding sound really makes a big difference to a game, and I was glad that I could do so for this one.
• Faster Build Times and Lighter Distributables Because I had been doing some work on my Vampire Game, work that involves using TDD from the first line of code, I also did some work on my build scripts. Going from a 10 minute build time with a distributable that is already 10+MB due to including source libraries to a build that finishes in seconds and is less than 2MB is amazing for productivity, especially as it comes down to the final hour of the competition. Everything happened so much faster, keeping me focused on game development instead of getting distracted as I waited for a build to finish. Now, it isn’t as if my builds always took 10 minutes, but going from checked out source code to a complete build would. Once the libraries were built with my old system, compiling and linking would still take some time, much longer than the time it took with my new build scripts. Plus, one of the complaints I would get from previous competitions is that my game package was so large, so that’s one complaint I did not see this time around. B-)
• Simple AI Goes a Long Way I remember taking a few minutes to think about how I wanted the monsters to interact with the level. Should they obey the walls and other obstacles, like the player has to? If so, that would take a bit of AI programming. I don’t have much experience with AI, and I didn’t want to take the time to learn it for this LD48, so what did I do? I made the monster head towards the player every step, ignoring the environment. I could explain it away. It’s a monster. Maybe it climbs walls like crazy? The big surprise was how well it looked. Besides making it move towards the player, I also made the monster randomly move horizontally or vertically to do so. Combined with the sound effect when it comes out of its lair, the twitchy looking monster moving really fast at the player actually feels scary.

What Went Wrong:

• Distractions I have two cats, and both of them have been featured in previous LD48s, so I won’t focus on their antics too much. My home office wasn’t in a usable state, so I was out in the kitchen or living room. The cats love distracting me from productivity, and LD#15 was no exception. The one thing I did my hardest to control was external obligations. Anytime someone wanted to make plans with me for the weekend of LD48, I would politely tell them that I was busy. And it worked! I was able to focus almost entirely on eating, sleeping, and LD48ing…except for the Chicago Fire game.

  

  I won tickets to the Fire vs D.C. United game, which happened to be the same weekend. They were really good tickets, too, and so I made an exception. In practical terms, I lost a good chunk of Saturday. I was able to get the game finished, but having an extra hour or two would have been good for tightening up the graphics and audio. On top of knowing that, the Fire lost, so it wasn’t even as fun a game to watch from the 2nd row as it could have been.

• The Sound Effects Were Very Rough By far the biggest complaint from people playing my game is that the audio hurts. I was able to get audio in within the last hour of the competition, but I didn’t have time to adjust it. I knew that some of the sound effects were loud and obnoxious, especially the one that plays when you bump into walls, but I couldn’t dedicate the time to tweaking it. The deadline was looming, and I still had a few more programming tasks to complete.
• There’s Only One Level Right before the end, I realized that I did not have a victory condition. I had programmed a way to lose if a monster caught you and also if you tried to leave the level without collecting all of the minerals, but someone will eventually collect all of them. What then? Ideally, I would have added code to load the next level, created that level, and kept going. In fact, Level 2 is in the distributed game, although it is a copy of Level 1 and there is no code that knows about it. I was thinking about taking Level 1 and breaking it up into at least three levels, with each level introducing new puzzles and getting progressively more difficult. Three doesn’t sound much better than one, but it would have made a big difference. The player would have felt that progress was being made, and the later levels could introduce the trickier ways to deal with monster lairs.
• Level Loading Bug I could not figure it out in time for the deadline, and I still haven’t looked at it since, but every so often, the level loading code would choke on the data, bringing the game to a halt. Sometimes shutting down the game and rerunning it would work. The data came from a text file, and my code is supposed to load a single character at a time, mapping the value to a tile. Sometimes, however, it would choke because a single character variable would have a value that is two characters long. For a time, I was dedicated to fixing it, but with only 48 hours, a good chunk of which I couldn’t make use of, I decided that since it wasn’t a show-stopper, I would keep going. I really wish I could have figured out why that bug was there. Besides ruining the perceived integrity of the game, I know at least one person didn’t review it due to this crash.
• Making a Puzzle Game I didn’t set out to make a puzzle game. I didn’t want to worry about creating a lot of content. One level might not be such a problem if the level was varied and fresh each time you played. I could have created a procedural level generator, but I never built one before. I didn’t want to spend time learning how to do so, nor did I want to spend the time tweaking the algorithm to make nicer levels even if I did end up accomplishing it. Out of all of the ideas I came up with, the game I liked the most ended up being a puzzle game, which unfortunately meant I was either going to spend a lot of time making clever levels or finish a game with hardly any levels. It ended up being the latter.

What I Learned:

• Rapid Paper Prototypes Work My game design skills are sorely lacking, but I’ve been able to practice what I learned in the game design concepts course, and it really paid off with Mineral Miner. I’m not claiming that it’s a fantastic game, but it did rank #45 in the Fun category, putting it in the top 50%, and #27 in the Innovation category, which puts it in the top quarter! It feels good to know that the game design I prototyped early on before writing a single line of code came together, and the comments for my entry showed that people saw a lot of potential in my game. Everything I wanted to put into the game, I learned from minutes of drawing on paper and messing around with tokens. I didn’t need to have a game engine coded up to explore, discard, and introduce mechanics, which means I saved a lot of time that would otherwise have been wasted on code that would get thrown away and changed needlessly.
• Quick ‘n Dirty Graphics and Audio Can’t Be Permanent My art and audio work was minimal and saved me a lot of time, allowing me to work quickly at getting the game play up and running. Unfortunately, my overall rating got hurt here. I was near the bottom in the Graphics category at #104 and surprisingly a little better in the Audio category at #77. I was hoping for time near the end to replace crude art and sounds with better ones, but it didn’t happen. On that note, even if it did happen, it wouldn’t be more than marginally better since I don’t have the practice and skill with my art tools. One suggestion was to use images of my prototype work, and I agree, the drawings look much nicer.
• My Pacing Still Needs Work I felt much more confident about my entry this time around, but I still found myself finishing the game at the last minute. There’s very little time for polish when the complete game forms only an hour before the deadline! It’s especially a concern since I decided to go with quick and low-quality art in order to get the game running as quickly as possible. I probably could have set mini-deadlines for myself. 48 hours sounds like an incredibly compressed period of time to make a game, and it is, but it’s still enough time to flounder. Early on, I have two whole days to worry about everything. In the last 5 hours, I’m in crunch mode. I could stand to manage my time and prioritize my tasks much better.

If I could do LD#15 over again, I would try to manage my time better. I could have had the prototype work done much earlier on, leaving me with more time to do the actual programming and arting. I might have been able to get more levels and variety in if I didn’t waste 5 or 10 or 20 minutes at a time wondering what to do. Still, even though Mineral Miner wasn’t a winner of Ludum Dare, I felt it was a success. I designed early on paper instead of designing with hard-to-change code, and I was able to focus on making the game I felt had a chance of being fun. People said they enjoyed the game and wished there were more levels. It was a complete game, meaning that aside from the level loading bug I mentioned above, everything that happens in the game happens because I designed it that way. In 48 hours, a complete game that provided some entertainment for others is a good accomplishment.

I participated in yesterday’s Glorious Trainwreck. My self-imposed theme? RAIN.

Play it! (Windows)

Tags: rain

I participated in the last Klik of the Month Klub over at Glorious Trainwrecks, too.

For those who might not be familiar with GT, here’s the spiel from the front page:

Glorious Trainwrecks is about bringing back the spirit of postcardware, circa 1993. It’s about throwing a bunch of random crap into your game and keeping whatever sticks. About bringing back a time when you didn’t care so much about “production values”, as much as ripping sound samples from your favourite television shows to use in your game, or animating pictures of yourself making goofy faces on your webcam. Where every ridiculous idea you had, you would just sit down and code. When you would make up a “company name” to legitimize dorking around on the computer with your friends.

It is not about unfinished, unplayable games. If any part of a glorious trainwreck is terrible, it is terrible in a way that is AWESOME.

Klik of the Month (FAQ) happens on the third Saturday of every month, and it’s about coming up with whatever you can come up with in two hours. Usually using Klik & Play (a horrible Win3.1-era game authoring tool), and usually by gleefully abusing stock sounds and graphics. Personally I find it a fantastic challenge to turn out something interesting (although that’s certainly not mandatory) in such a short space of time with such a limited, primitive tool. Hope to see some more LD people there next time it rolls around.

This time around for KotMK#27 I wanted to try doing some pretty bullet patterns in KnP, so I made a horizontal SHMUP. I wasn’t sure if it would work, seeing as how KnP suffers once you hit the limit of 255 sprites, but it came out pretty decent. Check out KILL GOD.

Fellow Ludumer Hempuli missed out on KotMK#27 due to timezones so we decided to have an encore mini-klikkening. I was pretty tired and just wanted to see how far I could get with adding features to a little Dwarf Fortress fangame inside two hours (again, the object limit of 255 being a huge problem). Yesterday I added a bunch more features. It’s hard to stop adding shit, in fact. I can sort of see how someone could do it full-time  with the kind of love Toady does. Check out Lonely Hermit Dorf.

In general I’ve been on a bit of a KnP bent lately. If this stuff interests you, I also recently released two KnP RPGs:  MOTORCYCLE COCK and Mathora VI.

I decided to steal an idea from the 7DRL people for the October mini LD: while I will announce the rules sometime on October 2, the contest starts whenever you want in October. Just post a message right before you start and than post your game at most 48 hours after that.

Ludum Dare entrants are really on a roll this year.

The latest in the continuing legacy is Seth “mrfun” Robinson’s Mind Wall from Ludum Dare 14. Mind Wall is on it’s way to China for the inaugural Independent Games Festival China competition.

IGF China Info: http://www.gdcchina.com/events/igf.html
Finalists List: http://www.gdcchina.com/events/igffinalists.html

Download Mind Wall: http://www.codedojo.com/?p=104

Mind Wall was created for the 14th Ludum Dare’s theme Advancing Wall of Doom, and took place in April of this year. Seth has since improved on his Ludum Dare entry, and even ported the game iPhone!

One of our favorite Mind Wall moments has to be this youtube video recorded by a player. His girlfriend captured this tense and tender moment as he conquered the unforgiving beast that is the Mind Wall.

So hey, Ludum Dare. Not bad ‘eh? First it was Phil and I at the IGF Mobile in March, Lexaloffle at the TGS Sense of Wonder Night last week, and now mrfun at IGF China. Not to mention our record breaking 123 and 144 entries the past 2 compos. A fantastic year for us all.

Lets keep that going!

The Independent Games Festival and Independent Games Festival Mobile are now accepting entries for 2010. We’d love to see more of you keeping this little streak of ours going. Both competitions require an entry fee, and for you to provide your own travel if you make it. But if you ask any finalist, they’ll tell you that attending is totally worth it.

Independent Games Festival (Due November 1st, $100): http://www.igf.com/
Independent Games Festival Mobile (Due December 1st, $50): http://www.igfmobile.com/

I’ll be there at GDC next year (perhaps with Phil). Not that meeting me in person is all that monumental an event, but hey. If we get enough of an LD crew out there, we’ll totally have to do something.

Keep up the great work everyone!

– Mike Kasprzak (PoV)

Tags: press

2009…

200 years ago Charles Darwin was born, 150 years ago he published “The Origin of Species”.

400 years ago Galileo was the first to gaze into the heavens with a telescope.

To help commemorate these important birthdays for Science, your task will be to write a game that’s not only fun, but also educational. Bonus points for teaching us about astronomy or biology (or astrobiology ).

Collaboration with non-programmer scientist friends is allowed and encouraged.

As I mentioned in my previous post, there is no fixed deadline this time; post a message just before you start and then post your game at the latest 48 hours after your announcement post. However since much of the fun of Ludum Dare is hacking along side others, I propose next weekend (9-12 October) as the preferred period.

Finally, since one of the really cool things with the real LDs that we (or I at least) miss during the minis is feedback, as compo host I’ll commit to reviewing all the games posted. (Unless there are a bazillion entries in which case I’ll review the first 20 or so.)

Unfortunately I lost my home internet connection so I’m not online as much as I’d like, but feel free to contact me either in a comment or by email (nils dot fagerburg at gmail) if you need any clarification.

Happy hacking!

– – –

Submit Entries Here:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-13/

View Entries Here:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-13/?action=preview

Deciding on an idea for an educational game was a tough one, but when I was complaining on GameJolt, KniteBlargh came along and gave me the greatest idea; ‘why not show your dislike of the theme by having facts as the enemy?’

GENIUS!

Straight away me and my good friend GhostDev91 got to work on this, a de-educational SHMUP!

Control your ship with the arrow keys and spacebar to destroy incoming facts into Jack(C)’s head! The facts are all written in a handy txt file along with the game, so feel free to append and edit this file as you will! INFINITE REPLAYABILITY!! (ok not quite)

After the round you will be given a grade depending on your score. If you are unfortunate to go down to -1000 points during your run, however, you will automatically be given the A* grade.

Coding – GhostDev91
Graphics, Music and a teeny weeny bit of coding – JMickle
Concept – KniteBlargh

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-13/?action=preview&uid=1328

Contact:  jaymickle at gmail.com

Oh, man. Has anybody else noticed that we’ve had a truly excellent run of MiniLD themes lately? I’m in, and on time too — I started thinking seriously about things this morning, but didn’t make a post until now. I’ve got something on the order of seven million ideas for this one, ranging from the totally reasonable to the downright Vista-esque, but instead of actually fitting the theme properly I’m going to engage in a little quick-and-sly reinterpretation. It may not be educational, but it will be for education! I present a ludicrously rough version of PopCat!, a collaborative offline-multiplayer wordgame:

A bit of backstory (warning — academic-speak to follow): I’m working on my PhD in cognitive science, and my research revolves around something called categorization — the process by which people recognize objects and group them into logical categories. I’m trying to build a computational model of this using only words, but there just isn’t any data to be found. So far I’ve been getting folks on Mechanical Turk to fill in dumb little surveys, but maybe, just maybe, I can make the task fun enough (and competitive!) that people will produce my data for free. Maybe.

/end academic speak

Anyway, the game is something like Scattergories played in reverse; you’re given a bunch of words and have to come up with a category for each one. There’s a timer, so you have to think fast, and you get points for each category proportional to how many other people came up with the same category. The idea is to make it something of a mind game — do more people thing “tomato” is a fruit or a vegetable? Which is worth more?

The game is in Flash and Flixel (well, B-Flixel specifically), while the data server is in PHP. Joy.

Finished!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-13/?action=preview&uid=1168

It’s a pretty simple game, with minimal graphics, and math questions as the primary feature. Making an “educational” game is really weird.

I tried to keep the content difficulty pretty low so as to make sure most age groups are able to do it.

My first time working with flash, turned out alright. (Though there are those things that don’t work as I expect and drive me crazy until I figure them out)..

No sound; just numbers.

48 hours later, Dragon Genetics is finished. Dragon Genetics teaches the principles of genetic inheritence including dominant/recessive genes, epistasis, and  sex-linked genes. It uses a browser-like window to explain concepts and the player can click on links to get more information on a word. The player gets a set of missions to breed specific dragons by choosing the parents.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-13/?action=preview&uid=1128

The game was written in C++ with Ogre and CEGUI. I found the new version of CEGUI nice since it’s able to embed widgets in strings which is what I used to make the information browser. For content I used Photoshop and Blender. Most of the gui graphics are a CEGUI default. Also this is my second Ludum Dare (First Mini) and also the second time Photoshop has refused to work correctly during a Ludum Dare. I think it may have been a memory issue this time though since it stopped crashing on startup after I closed the visual studio with CEGUI source and an extra blender window I had open…

Hey,

So November 7th is the weekend whereby you must have your swimsuit calendar picture taken by.  The week following that we’ll be doing some photoshopping of pictures to get them overlayed on game screenshots and other stuff.  So it’s time to get ripped people!  Remember this is for the LD!  I plan on having the calendar available for sale a few days before U.S. Thanksgiving day, so it is ready in time for Christmas shopping season.

-Phil

This entry was posted on Monday, October 19th, 2009 at 10:37 am and is filed under MiniLD #13. 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.

So, I finished Excavatorrr today. There’s now even an online highscoreboard included!

Download from here

Tags: post-compo excavatorrr

My clock officially started Saturday at 9:48 A.M. PST. Unfortunately as I’ve approached bed-time on Sunday, I’m not yet “Done”.

But I’m going to submit my Work-In-Progress anyways. The first 2 levels (of 4) are available. I should be able to complete the others tomorrow evening.

Literacy Damacy is a game about the importance of education. The player must traverse through four stages of literacy. Within each stage the player will be able to “absorb” tasks or objects they can comprehend at their literacy level. Some objects will help the player improve their literacy level while others will be out of their reach.

Play Literacy Damacy (WIP) Here

UPDATE: I’ve completed Literacy Damacy to the level I was planning (12 hrs after the end of my 48hr deadline). The above link will still take you to the latest build. The 48hr compo build is saved and available here. The difference between the two is only 2 work hours.

This may be of interest to LD-ers, if there’s any of you that don’t already visit TIGSource

Assemblee is a two-part game-making competition!  Each part has its own rules.

1. In the first part, artists and musicians will have a month to create as many art and music assets as they wish.  These assets will be voted on at the end of the month based on the quantity, quality, and variety of the assets provided.

2. In the second part, designers and programmers will have a month to take the assets created in part one and make games with them (assets used need not be limited to one person or team).  The programmers cannot make any changes to the assets unless it’s done during runtime.  The best game will be voted on in the normal fashion.

Full info here: http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=8751.0

Sounds like this one could be a lot of fun!

MiniLD 13 is almost at an end, but you still have a few days left to decide to make an awesome educational game.

started on some graphics late last night. a tiny thing, so hopefully will have it finished before long

The October MiniLD is now over (as is October). Thanks to all who participated!

I’ll post mini reviews of all the entries soon.

Heya Ludum Dare!

So it looks like I’m hosting this month’s Mini Ludum Dare. I’m going to suggest the weekend of the 13th-15th as the date, though if you’d like to participate and that doesn’t suit, speak up and we’ll find something that works for everyone.

[edit: ok, since there’s been no major objections, let’s make it final – November the 13th-15th it is!]

I’ll post the theme that Friday. For now, I’d like to announce a rule change – Ludum Dare and Mini Ludum Dares are normally solo challenges; for this one though, you are required to collaborate! Get on the IRC channel, find someone else who wants to take part and agree to work together! Any number of people can contribute to a project in any capacity – the only restriction is that you cannot work alone.

Tags: MiniLD #14

Hey everybody,

For Ludum Dare 16, we’re looking at December 11th-13th weekend. I’ll be sending out a proper announcement e-mail this weekend, but I wanted to get some initial feedback.

December has always been a tricky month to schedule. Some people have exams to deal with, others have work, and many have family holidays and gatherings to consider. Nearly any weekend we choose is going to have problems. For myself even, the first weekend is a little too tight for my tastes.

So, I’m looking to hear some thoughts.

As far as I know there’s no game industry or notable demoscene events conflicting with that date… not that I’ve checked.

With that date, Christmas falls on Friday before the usual 2 week voting ends. That’s a hard date to avoid entirely, unless we were to start on the first weekend. So, an idea of mine is to do 3 weeks of voting this time. That way there’s room to do your family thing, then come back and play a few games. Not to mention, we’ve been averaging well over 100 games these past 2 competitions, so a little more time may be appreciated.

That’s what is on my mind. Do share any comments if you have them.

Thanks,

- Mike Kasprzak (PoV)

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 5th, 2009 at 10:38 am and is filed under LD #16 - ??? - 2009. 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.

Hey everybody,

I just thought I’d pass on a little note.

MiniLD #14 takes place next weekend (November 13th-15th weekend). Terry, the host of MiniLD #14 has let us know than it’s going to be a team competition. So find a friend or two and join in.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2009/11/02/mini-ludum-dare-14-find-a-partner/

Now, normally we don’t do voting during MiniLD’s, but it’s been suggested that maybe we should this time. Phil and I are both OK with the idea, but I’m going to add a little stipulation. The voting system currently only allows people that enter to vote, so if we get 20 some team entries in this MiniLD, we’ll enable voting. That’s why I’m sending this e-mail, to drum up more support. It’s still a MiniLD, so start and end times will be slightly more lax (from when Terry announces the theme until we think the weekend is over).

So grab a friend or stop by IRC and form a team for next weekend.

Regards,

Mike Kasprzak (PoV)