First I’d like to say that I appreciate all the good constructive feedback on Shafted!.  To all those who have commented – thanks!  I have a new version of the game which addresses some of the feedback:

• I’ve now mapped all controls to the keypad which works much better.
• No more mouse required. To start the game, simply press <enter>.
• Press ‘h’ to toggle display of the help text  explaining all the controls.
• I’ve moved the camera a bit to make more of where you’re jumping visible
• Pressing space on sign more than once no longer throws up more text
• The player now turns red when he reaches fatal fall velocity.

Note: This new version is setup to run in windowed mode by default. To run in fullscreen, find ‘command_line.txt’ and remove the ‘-window’ argument.

Download Windows

Download Mac [Coming soon]

I was waiting for a Windows port before doing a postmortem, but I wanted to add a walkthrough for people who don’t want to solve the whole thing.

General hints: There’s three parts: an “orientation” section, followed by a puzzle with three switches (orange pink white), followed by a puzzle with four switches (blue green red yellow). Each of these three parts is separated by a long tunnel, and you never need to backtrack to a previous part. If you think you’re going the wrong way, press Down to turn around. Also, hold Up or Space while walking to speed things up. Because all the steps are reversible, it shouldn’t be possible to get stuck. You might wind up worse off than you started, though.

In the walkthrough below, each line is one room. “Blue 1st right” means turn to face the blue switch, hit it, and then take the first door to the right of the switch. If the line doesn’t have a color, such as “2nd left”, do not turn to face the switch, even if there’s one in the room. Just take the second door to the left of the direction you were facing when you entered. (This is counting closed doors, so if the first door on the left is closed, “2nd left” is the first open door on the left.) Okay?

Part 1:

1st left
Cyan 1st left
Purple 1st left

Part 2:

Orange 1st left
Pink 1st right
White 1st left
Orange 2nd left
White 2nd left
Pink 1st right
White 1st right

Part 3:

1st right
Green 1st right
Red 1st left
Yellow 1st left
Blue 1st right
Yellow 1st right
Green 1st left
Yellow 1st left
Blue 1st right
Yellow 2nd left
1st right

Thanks for playing!

I uploaded the game to a friend’s host. I apologize for making you wait this long.

I couldn’t figure it out why it doesn’t work on vista.
I’m using directx 9.0c but i didn’t test it on vista.

I could probably because of the vertex codes without using shaders or because of fullscreen, i don’t know…

I’ll be glad if you send any error messages you’ve got to me  .

Thanks.

Ok I’m not gonna write that long name again :).

This was my second ludum dare and i again manage it make it :). At the first one i did choose a very ambitious project (making a post-apocalyptic rpg with car combat, yes it was really ambitios :)). In the end i had to cut lots of stuff to finish it before time ends. This time i was ready for this. I knew what i had to expect. But again some unexpected things happened, but in the end i make a playable game and have fun (maybe not all the time :)). So it’s time for a postmortem and i’m going to do this in a very cliché method :).

The Good:

– I finished a playable game before time runs out :).

– My framework really helped me a lot. I didn’t have any technical problem. And after the compo, making a windows port was really easy. Mac port is coming in a few days too. I don’t have to change a single line of code to make these ports, it’s all because of my shitty framework. It’s badly designed but it does its job well :).

– A couple of friend of mine entered to the compo with me. As they say: The more the merrier :).

The Bad:

– I couldn’t find a game idea that i was satisfied. Just this problem took my first day.

– While i couldn’t come up with an good idea, my code wasn’t better. I started coding a simple shooter but i don’t know why, i couldn’t code it properly and i write probably the one of the worst codes i have ever written :(.

– Maybe i finished it before time expired but game still lacks lots of things like there is nothing kills the player. So all those cave critters you killed actually just wanted to hug you :).

The Ugly:

– My graphics. That is what ugly is. Man, i started gimp and make those. But just i finished those i look at them and lost all my aspiration. It took lots of time for me to recover that loss.

So thats it. I can only hope that at my third LD i’ll finally come up with a fun to play game :).

To see the game i made click here.

Tags: postmortem

…because i’ve done all my voting now.

All 144 entries, 29 of which either :

1. I did not have the required platform. (linux, mac only games)
2. I did not have a good enough graphics card. (games needing 2.0 shaders etc etc)
3. Crashed at startup for reason (2) or other unknown reasons.

The lucky 29 entries that didn’t work got voted only in community, because(obv) I couldn’t play their games.

Cross posted from my main blog at http://www.caseydunham.net

This past weekend I took part in my first Ludum Dare competition, Ludum Dare #15. Ludum Dare is a community driven contest where a single developer has to create a complete game within 48 hours.  I have watched the prior competitions, but have never really had the time with family and school, so I was a bit surprised to find that last weekend was fairly open. So on Friday afternoon I decided I would take part.

Each Ludum Dare has an associated theme that the game must be created around that is decided on by community vote. The theme is only revealed at the start of the competition and for LD #15, the theme was “Caverns”. I immediately had a few ideas but nothing that seemed too out of the ordinary. Upon deciding to enter the contest, I also made up my mind that regardless of what the theme was, my goal was to complete a game, no matter how simple, within that 48 hour deadline.  I did complete a simple game, but as usual with these types of competitions, didn’t quite turn out as I had hoped. This is an effort by me to talk about some of the things that I feel went right in the development of Coffee Caverns and what could have been done better.

The Good

Probably one of the best choices was to use what I was already familiar with, C++ and SDL in a Windows environment. I know that some people like to experiment with new technologies during these competitions, but I decided to not risk it, my goal was to complete a game. Along these same lines I also decided that whatever I did would be small. I have started and never finished numerous game projects in the past much like every other aspiring game developer and I also know that one of the things that separates aspiring game developers from game developers is that game developers finish things. I had a decent idea of the scope of what I would be able to finish and decided to stick with it.

I didn’t start coding or designing anything until the Saturday morning after the competition started. I checked to see what the theme was going to be and than went to sleep. In the morning I ate breakfast and started a bit of mind mapping while having some coffee. I started thinking about caverns and I kept coming back to danger and falling, falling objects like rocks, and than somewhere in the mind map coffee came up so I ended up mixing coffee with falling rocks. Awesome, sounds a bit weird let’s go with it. It came naturally that this would be an arcade style game and once I decided on it I stuck with it. The total design of the game was probably about an hour and that was with sketching a bit of a development plan as well.

I also liked that I was able to get a couple of sound effects in thanks to the wonderful program Sfxr. I am glad that I got the title screen in without too much trouble as well. It only took a little bit of trouble and was I think worth it. Although next time, I am going to check for a specific key press to transition as opposed to any key, it made taking screen shots of it a bit tricky.

The Bad

I think that my biggest mistake was not getting the prototype up and playable as fast as I wanted to. My intention originally was to use primitives for prototyping and later put in the graphics. By the time I had the framework ready I needed a break from coding and decided that I would play around with Paint.NET a bit to see what I could come up with. I should also mention that other than SDL, I was using no prior written code, writing everything from scratch. In no time I had created a couple of graphics that I thought would work, so I figured I would just drop them in. It wasn’t a huge time waster since I was going to do it anyways and in some ways did work out in the end.

The Ugly

Easily the worst part about the game and what I would argue is the game, is the game play itself. The game is no where near as balanced as I would have liked it to have been, the scoring is very simple, and there is very little feedback to the player. I spent most of Sunday doing game play testing and bug fixing. I had the majority of the code written by Saturday night and it was a good thing too as I had a few things come up Sunday that might have kept me from finishing otherwise.

The little things that I didn’t fix that were pointed out to me in comments on my Ludum Dare blog are in retrospect what could have made the game better. The player sprite being about a pixel off during the animation would have taken me all of about three seconds to fix. I also never got the score out of the title bar like it should have been. This would have been another easy fix that would have added to the polish of the game.

The other thing that people complained a lot about was my use of an installer. I had mixed feelings about it but I know and understand the irritation I am sure it caused others as I started reviewing a few of the other entries. At a certain point I was annoyed that I had to unzip things and will next time not bother with the setup and provide a straight running executable.

Summary

Overall the whole competition was very rewarding and I learned quite a bit as well and would recommend everyone who is interested in game development to take part in these competitions as often as they can. I am definitely going to!

I started with the idea of doing a ‘cave flyer, plus something cool’. I figured i would make the cave flyer first and the something cool later.

Play the competition version here and the much easier updated version here.

Using ActionScript

I have only been learning ActionScript for a little while but I’m very happy with it. I quickly got the basics of a cave flyer going, and whenever I got stuck I found plenty of tutorials and discussions online.

I used free tools only (FlashDevelop and Flex 3 SDK) and found them perfectly sufficient.

‘Next Actions’

I think that the best way to write game fast is to act as though your next half-hour might be your last. If you could only add one more feature, what would you add? And how would you get it working as quickly as possible?

When I follow this rule, I get good results. When I don’t follow this rule, I get bad results. So I think it’s a good rule.

Distractions

I did not follow the rule. I wasted my first evening working on a feature that I didn’t need and didn’t finish.

I wanted to make an AI-controlled ship that flew around like the player’s ship, resisting gravity and avoiding obstacles. It would have been super-cool. I coding up a kind of crude AI navigation map, and made a big if-statement AI controller for the spaceship.

I realised quickly that it wasn’t going to work. My if-statement AI couldn’t handle the compexities of gravity, obstacles and thrust. But I was having fun and I didn’t want to stop, so I spent hours tweaking it. I only stopped when I had to go to bed.

The final game didn’t use the AI player. I should have spent all that time making life better for my human players.

Difficulty

The game is much too hard. I knew that it was too hard, and I made it easier, but not enough. I think the best thing I could have done is popped a link to the game in the irc channel – someone would have immediately told me that the difficulty was a problem.

Level Editor

I made a very simple level editor. It allowed me to lay out the terrain on each level with mouse clicks instead of hand-coding coordinates. This was my best idea all weekend – it did not take long to make and it let me create level screens in seconds.

Cutting Features

I wanted to combine my cave flyer with another simple game genre to make it unique. I had plans of making a trading game where you bought and sold goods at different cities (seperated by dangerous tunnels), or perhaps a Legend of Zelda-like game with a large world to explore and items to find.

None of that made it into the release. Partly because I couldn’t decide exactly what I wanted to do, so I delayed the decision.

Last Minute Save

I was running out of time. I had a flying game with multiple screens to explore, but I still had no goal or motivation for the player. I finally started following the ‘next action’ rule and attacking the most important problems first.

1. There was nothing to fight – so I added a simple enemy that hovered and fired at the player.
2. There was no goal – so I made enemies drop ‘metal’, and added a metal counter to the screen.
3. Combat was unsatisfying, so I added some explosion-effects.
4. The player couldn’t respawn, so I implemented respawning.
5. You collected metal but had nothing to do with it.

Number 5 hung around for a long time. Finally, I hacked up a simple upgrade system. I wanted to add icons for the upgrades, but cut it for time. I wanted to add some clever upgrades, but cut it down to what I could do with the code I already had – most of the upgrades simply change variables that were already in the game, like the player ship’s “mass” (resistance to impact force) or its refire rate.

The upgrade system was crude, but it gave the rest of the game a purpose – now the player had a reason to fight enemies and collect their metal.

Colours

I stole an idea from Meritous, where the world gets redder when more enemies are around. I like it.

Conclusion

Next time I’ll try not to get distracted on ‘advanced’ features when there are more immediate features that the game needs.

I will make sure to do a user test on my game, to catch obvious problems like “It’s far, far too hard”.

And if I’m making a “Classic Genre + Something Cool”, I’ll try not to wait too long before I add the “Something Cool”.

Ok, I better get back to rating entries now…

Finally, here is an updated version of Cavern Defense.
This is mainly a bugfix release and all critical bugs have been fixed, so it is quite playable now and there is now sound under Mac OS X.
I’ve update the menu, the intro and the instruction screen and it should be more clearer how to play the game.
For more information on what has changed take a look at the changelog.txt

Here are the downlod links:
Windows (6,2 MB)
Linux (4,8 MB)
Mac OS X (12 MB; Universal Binary)
Source (132 kB)

If you want to compile the source, you also have to download one the binary releases and combine those two because the resources folder is not included in the source zip file.

Tags: cavern defense, update

I’ve been working steadily on the post-compo of my LD15 entry, since it wasn’t a complete game, and I felt I hadn’t done the idea the justice it deserved. Here’s is the post-compo as of now with improvements such as better graphics and a quickly composed background loop. I plan to add combat and many other things outlined on my blog post here, if all goes well with development of the game.

Hello, I’m sorry for not writing more or getting on IRC during this LD.

Problems: Halfway through I got some bad news from a friend that took my attention for at least 12 hours and sapped my motivation once I did get back to finishing the game. I didn’t even try to name the game. There were other forces working against me during the compo. One was the unrelenting fury of the sun. A heatwave struck san diego with the start of the compo, and I was rarely in air conditioning. I did my best work under trees in breezy parks.  I was also without my mouse during the compo, something especially useful in the game maker development environment, even more so as this was my second GM game and I was learning new tricks.

Concept: When I saw ‘caverns’ it only took a few minutes before I was thinking down the rabbit hole from alice in wonderland. I remembered the scene (from the disney version) where she eats to grow big and drinks to shrink. I had the concept of using size altering items with cavernous environments to create situations that could be easy, difficult, or impossible depending on your size. I remembered how mario also grows by eating mushrooms, and so a mario-alice hybrid was born.

Didn’t get to: NPC’s to push a story: The characters and story would have come easily, simply by mixing elements from super mario bros and alice in wonderland. A grappling hook to swing over obstacles. Flame jets, pools of lava, more ice, button switches, and assisting NPC’s through rooms. Multiplayer co-op mode which would open access to new areas, the players would be able to stack.

Bugs: Any size larger than default will have to jump to clear the crest of a slope. Eating two mushrooms simultaneously causes player to embed in floor. Other occasional oddities. For these reasons, I included cheats, F to shrink (Fan), G to grow, R to restart. I was considering making F to shrink an item to obtain, this is based on elements from the original version of alice in wonderland (Lewis Carroll). However, it is possible to pass all levels without the use of cheats.

I’ve started playing the entries, good job everyone, impressive games. Thanks for playing.

Tags: postmortem

No, it’s not some kind of Linxu elitist thing.  😉

I’ve been feeling very ill the past few days. I apologize to anyone who wanted to play my game but couldn’t. I’m really sorry.

I seem to have come down with some sort of flu. I’ll be okay in a few days, I think, though.

I would really love it if a generous person could create a Windows build.

I’m sorry, but you’d have to set up the compile yourself. I used Code::Blocks, and didn’t have time to write a Makefile.

I still had a great time, and I’ll be here again next month, ready to try again!

—Mr. Dude

It’s been a while since I wrote one of these. Yet, I’m sure Eternal Seeker deserves it. So, I’m releasing a post-competition version of it along with this post; behold Eternal Seeker: Adagio for the Caverns of Doom!

New Additions:

-Quite different play styles for different classes (Assassin has a chance to assassinate, Barbarian is more resilient, Commander begins with a set of magical items, Dreamer is immune to traps)

-Potions: You can find and drink them

-Monsters: There are new monsters now

-Items: Added over 200 items; including  a unique magical armor.

-Descriptions: There are new area descriptions

Download:

http://trialofnight.googlepages.com/EternalSeekerAdagio.zip

Now for the post mortem itself:

What I Wanted and Accomplished:

I wanted to make a roguelike resembling Incursion, which features zombies who are able to cast spells. Knowing there had to be funny bugs, I gave every monster the ability to throw knives, and deliberately made sure they would sometimes get struck into each other (by partially restricting some of their movement abilities). The game, in the end, turned out to be quite fun; it’s always nice to get attention.

Where I Failed:

I wanted there to be NPC’s you can talk to, and some fixed city areas. However, time was scarce and I had things to do; some of these features I had to dismiss. However, I believe if I added these features, the game wouldn’t be as good.

How Should I Improve:

It’s the design that can turn a potentially bad game into a good one. Creativity is what matters most; and it is creativity I need to, somehow, learn. Well, I’m not sure if that’s easy to learn…

Hi,

I found out, that my game is not working on some computers. Grr.

After some tests I finally managed to reproduce it on my own computer and found out, that Löve is shipping without Microsoft.VC80.CRT .

If you look at the love.exe file, you’ll find, that the manifest describing dependencies explicitly lists this file.

So it’s nice from the Löve developers to ship msvcp80.dll and msvcr80.dll, but without the Microsoft.VC80.CRT is kind of pointless, because they won’t be find on computers that don’t have Visual Studio Redistribution Package installed.

I already filed a bug in the Löve bug tracker and added the file to my game. So if you couldn’t start it, you can now try again.

I assume it applies to all games that used Löve – so this is a nice standalone solution, that doesn’t force users to install VS redistributables.

The Good

Fun tech. Not only does some tech idea stuff you want to try out make it fun to actually program the entry, it can also makes the entry interesting. Or so I hope it did. There was two things I tried out: Destructible landscape rendered with marching squares and some sort of fluid simulation.

I’ve wanted to try out destructible terrain with marching squares for some time. Mostly when thinking about doing Blastup 3, though I’m probably more for doing pixel perfect (with alpha) stuff. But still, wanted to try this approach out. It worked pretty OK, though it requires more work to be anyway close perfect. As a note, the collisions just uses bilinear filtering of the nearby grid points and checks it against the threshold, so the marching square output is just for rendering here (which really simplified things).

The fluid simulation pretty much just happened. I had a world which was a grid of values of 0 to 1. There’s a lot you can do with that. I’ve thought about similar things for earlier LDs, for the theme flood, but that theme never won. Basically, it’s like those old water simulations where each pixel is a water particle, and it can either go down or to the sides if there’s room. I just had float values instead, so the whole of it didn’t have to move. Then marching squares on top. Anyway, the lava seems to be what people liked the most, so I’m glad I did it.

The actual game idea. With the destructible terrain etc, I sort of wanted a game in between Worms/Liero and Lemmings. Which I think is what I got. It’s lacking things though (see below). Overall, I think it’s a good game idea.

Once again used the D programming language, which was good and makes most things easy (except in one place where a thing I did in a loop became very slow, which cost me some time). Also used OpenGL, GLFW and Fmod. Stuff that works pretty well and that I’m used to.

The Bad

Time, time. Lack of time. Or too ambitious project, perhaps. I spent 4 hours away from the compo helping some people to move, but I’m not sure those 4 hours would have made a lot of difference. The time issue had most impact on the level design, I feel.

The level design started out sort of OK. I wanted to introduce every new element by itself in a single level, then start combining them and creating puzzles.

Well, to start with, not all elements that I wanted to introduce got introduced. There was only one weapon, there was only one enemy type. I had planned for more there. And I had planned some cool movement tools, like a jetpack (and if I really had had some extra time, a ninja rope).

Anyway, as it were, I did get the elements that existed introduced in the way I wanted (though some levels was a bit too long, making them annoying). But then suddenly I didn’t have time to introduce more elements, yet I didn’t have enough materials or ideas to make good puzzles. So that first lead to a platform/jump level.

Then there was the last level. It got too hard. A little too busy. Even its name gives it away, it was named: A little bit of everything. Basically it had become apparent that it would be the last I had time to do, so wanted it real, if you know what I mean. Nothing tutorially. As a base there was a single good puzzle. But after making it, there was lots of room left, so got another semi-puzzle, some jumping, some digging, and some kill things. Too much. But maybe it suited as being the last level. I can tell you, even I have had trouble completing it sometimes.

That’s not the only bad thing with the last level though. The last level’s win condition check is bugged. So you only actually need to reach the star to win. I realized this bug existed after having gone to bed after just submitting my entry. So I got up, “fixed” it, and re-uploaded (it was within the deadline, don’t worry). Only the next day I realized the check was still bugged. I had added the correct check, but I had also left in a call to the base class update function, which just checked the star. So that was a waste of time.

Graphics. They turned out rather bland and boring. And dark. Noticed today that even just making the game 50% brighter helped a lot. But I’m not good at creating good textures or animate stuff, so perhaps it’s OK given the time available.

The Other

Sounds. It’s thanks to sfxr that I got any sounds at all. All in all, it might have taken 15 minutes to get all the sounds in. It was a great improvement over no sounds, but beyond that it was lacking. In addition, it seems that the sounds cut out for quite a few people — I have no idea why.

Heads up

I really recommend maximize the window to get a look at the whole level (if your screen is big enough). It’ll look bad that the level just cuts off if you have too large a screen, but even then it’s well worth it.

There’s a skip level cheat — it’s pressing F1 and F11 at the same time (as in most of me entries with levels).

I used a bit of base code and some utility code for rendering, fonts, and sound. Not really a library, just some random stuff (it’s what’s available in stdf in the source folder of the package). This is probably bending the rules a little, but I hope you guys are OK with it. Absolutely not game code.

Also, it’s not like I came up with marching squares during the compo. I’ve written a few application using it earlier, and actually adapted some old code. Writing it completely new might have cost me extra 15 minutes or so but it seemed pointless. The idea is really quite simple: For each square in the grid, start making a polygon. Check one corner, if it is within the threshold, make a point. Check this corner against the next corner — if one is out and one is in, find the point in between. Then do the same for the three other corners and edges. And that’s it.

Outro

There were probably some other things worth mentioning too, but none that I can remember now. Think I’ve responded to most stuff that I’ve got comments on as well. Overall, people seems to have liked the game, so I’m pretty happy. It’s been a good LD.

Tags: cave, D, GLFW, ninja, opengl, postmortem, sfxr

See, it’s not so hard…

Caverns of Light Walkthrough

Because it never occured to me that I should do foodpics during LD48 itself(too busy coding!), here’s one.

I dub it the tower of meat – It is very tasty.

That is, some fried burgers with chips and a healthy lashing of ketchup.

Tags: deskphoto, foodphoto

I figured now that I’m done rating everyone’s game, I’d sit down and write up a little post-mortem for my game, Cave Dangerous. Cave Dangerous is a fun little exploratory platformer with a minimalist inventory system. I had lots of fun creating it for the Ludum Dare 15 competition.

The good

• I actually finished this time! The last Ludum Dare I was in (Roads), I did not finish due to some unfamiliarity with AS3, among other issues and time constraints. So, yay for finishing!
• Even though I did suffer through a short internet outage, I managed to make good use of that offline time to work on some pixel sprites for the game, which really helped to set the artistic “vision” for Cave Dangerous.
• First time using Visual Studio in a compo, and it was quite enjoyable. Well, except for some major deployment issues (see below)

The Bad

• Originally planned to do something in 3D, but was feeling uninspired facing the modeller. Also, a quick test revealed my .obj loader was (again) not working correctly. So, scrapped that idea.
• As with every platformer I’ve made for a compo, I spent too much time tweaking / fixing the jumping and collision code. I think in the future, I’ll see about preparing some basic tile-based collision code ahead of time so I can focus more on the actual game.
• This was my first time trying Visual Studio with a compo entry, and it was very enjoyable up until I had to package it up to release it. I ended up almost pulling my hair out in frustration (why do I have to package a C++ redistributable? argh!). A website that I found (here: http://llbit.se/?p=19) explains pretty much exactly what happened to me. I ended up using mingw32 to compile the exe, which worked perfectly. Sheesh.
• Didn’t have enough time to add an explosion sound effect for the bomb. Apparently this is what most people complained about (aside from the length of the game) judging by the comments I got from the ratings.

As another “behind the scenes look”, here are some pics of the miner before I settled on the final image:

It’s a little late in the game, but I’ve fixed my source download.

This should help my case a bit in getting a Windows port. 😛

Cavern Chase 1.2p*

This has more content. I couldn’t really think of more stuff to add, but it should be more interesting for those who thought it needed a bit more variety.

If you play and start to wonder “where did that background go?” Not a bug. Took it out because it was UGLEH.

*1.2p = 1.2 post LD

Tags: LD #15 - Caverns - 2009, Windows

I know it’s just under a week away, but I’ve got some ideas for my Mini-LD 12 game.

First of all, I’m going to use another programming language I’m unfamiliar with. It’s a fun challenge. This time, I’ll be using Ruby.

I’ve used it before, but not often, even though I really enjoy it. This gives me a chance to really get familiar with it.

My library of choice here is Ruby/SDL. I’ll fiddle with gosu/RubyGame at a later time.

Also, I will be using nothing but my netbook for development. I want to see how it fares with development, and Ruby is a good starting point for that.

As far as genre goes, I’m thinking about making a tile-based side-scroller. Something akin to the shareware of yesteryear.

I want to use an 8-bit pallette to give the game that classic shareware look.

I will also be using SFXR (Like most of us, I suppose) for sounds.

I’m not sure about music. I don’t think I’ll really have time, but we’ll see.

I may need a Windows port again, but I’m not completely sure how to convert a Ruby application into a native executable. 😛

I’m looking forward to this one.

—Mr. Dude