[My name is Carlos Leituga, I’m a Game Designer, and once again I joined the Make A Game team to create a game in 72 hours for Ludum Dare #29.]

We were a smaller team this time: two programmers, one artist and myself in the same room, while another artist was about 1 thousand Kilometers in a straight line from us, and we could only talk to our musician through email. We couldn’t afford to be too ambitious so… no pressure.

It’s been a while since I did any game design from the ground up. With the exception of two months doing freelance work at the start of this year, I’ve been unemployed for more than a year now and I felt a bit rusty. My focus lately has been shifting from completing older design docs, to learning Game Maker Studio, and then deciding that I should read up more on logical thinking for programming, and at the same time spruce up my memory on an easy to learn language that I was still familiar with, Processing.

This led into choosing Game Maker Studio as our framework, besides the other three local team members having some experience with it, during any design downtime I could jump into the sprite or level editor and help them out. Hell, I could even help search for solutions if we’d get stumped by some of the different ways GMS does things, I can say I’m way too experienced in that.

This is what this whole past year felt like

The Idea

We probably broke our record of how long we took to decide what to do with the “Beneath the Surface” theme. We scribbled 20 subjects on our whiteboard while we discussed. Of all the ideas, I recall two the most: one where the Devil would manipulate events on the surface to make people sin and get pulled to hell, and another one that had a lifeform, on an operation table or petri dish under a microscope, defending itself against probes that would penetrate its shell or shield.

Psychology because… deepness

The Devil idea was giving us some trouble, we weren’t sure how it would play or what type of events were at the player’s disposal, but without the time pressure we might return to it someday.

The lifeform idea had us debating more about simplicity and presentation, a sign that we were on the right path. The original vision had the player choose between four sides of the lifeform, where energy could be increased to expel the probes, or decreased to be used on the other sides. It reminded me of managing your shields in Star Trek Online’s space battles.

But I guess that vision went to hell when I drew this dumb thing with moles from outer space, flying drills straight into a planet.

I’m so sorry

What went right

– Graphically sound

So vibrant! It was like everything clicked for our artist from the very start. We quickly had a very visually appealing style that kept us motivated throughout. It would be enough to inspire the remote rest of the team, we hoped, and we were right!

I tasked myself with doing the sound effects for the game but our musician unexpectedly started delivering on those very early. Only in the afternoon of the last day, when we were one team member fewer and getting tired, was when we got a sample of the song, and we went nuts! It was perfect and stayed on repeat for nearly an hour or so.

Technical problems on our end kept our other artist from helping out more, but she whipped out the best game logo we could ever wish for.

YOU’RE SUCH A DUMB LOOKING BUNCH OF MOLES

– Wax on, wax on wax on wax on

We are getting better and better at polishing our games. And I don’t mean having all the bells and whistles to catch someone’s attention, but in giving proper feedback to the player. We put flashes and screen shakes to good use, for landing a hit on the enemies and getting damaged, and the moon loses opacity after a dash, bouncing back when it’s ready to be used again.

During a game jam, polish is usually put aside due to the time constraints, but by participating more in these competitions, you start to get a feel for how long an idea will take to be made and you can start saving some time to concentrate on the visual feedback of the core mechanics.

Our motto for this Ludum Dare

What went wrong

– Keeping ourselves connected

Four team members together and two off-site, we could handle this, we just needed to progress a bit further with our work so that the other two could base their work on ours. We even had a second musician interested in our project, but technical difficulties of his own kept him from joining.

Our technical problems weren’t that far off though, suddenly our shared mobile internet stopped working. Our connection went from 30 Mbps to a whooping 128 Kbps and Skype wouldn’t even log in. There goes using Git and Dropbox out the window. We had hit an invisible traffic limit and there was no way to pay to increase that limit, we could share our credit card numbers with the provider’s customer support staff all we wanted, they wouldn’t budge.

Two of us could share mobile internet from our phones, but it had to be done in a hit and run manner so we wouldn’t spend too much traffic. We could no longer have those Skype calls with screen sharing with our remote artist that we had in mind.

Later that night, we fared goodbye to one of our programmers. He had work in the morning and couldn’t stay with us any further.

The remaining three of us then decided that in the next morning we would drive to the artist’s home so we could resume our work with some proper internet, which unfortunately shaved off around 2 hours of possible progress, but we endured.

RIP
25/04/2014 – 26/04/2014
“One had to go to work next morning”

– More like Game Breaker

Prior to the jam, I toyed around with the 1.3 beta of Game Maker Studio and found out that some of my code had stopped working. Further inspection pointed out that the change in variable scope was the cause. Granted, I’m not a programmer so my code is faulty 99% of the time, which causes anything I compile to crash or freeze or both. The problem is that crashes aren’t as graceful with GMS 1.3 as they were with the previous stable versions, and some of the times the actual software – not the game – would also freeze and crash.

I warned the team about this, but there was one new feature that we coveted: having proper pixelated rotations. We could achieve this by disabling interpolation between colors and resizing the application surface, but 1.3 makes it so much easier to set up surfaces that we bit the bullet and took some time to get used to the changes.

We also had a running joke/issue with the planet’s rotation. Drills would target a slice of the planet and miss it, but they would think they were on the targeted slice and not the adjacent one. The only way to destroy them would be attack the slice they missed. This took forever to solve, but somehow the ghost of that semi-invincible space drill return to haunt us, in the shape of an actual invincible drill that randomly appears during the game. We’re still scratching our heads with that.

Lastly, it was also somewhat challenging to port the game to HTML5. Performance isn’t great and we still haven’t had the opportunity to fix the bugs that aren’t found only in that version.

Look at all those beautiful square pixels

What’s missing

Too much is missing. Remember earlier when I wrote that we couldn’t be too ambitious? I was wrong, being ambitious is what drives an idea, you just need to keep a list of things you might not accomplish and then cut them when the time comes.

The moles were spared this time, since we decided to not implement the damage they would cause to the surface of the planet, we also didn’t add their reactions to the elemental attacks. Though we should have added a default death to avoid slowdowns when there are too many moles on screen, which is noticeable on the HTML5 version.

Such a tease

The biggest feature that was left on the cutting floor was the Elemental Combo Attacks. Players would gradually unlock these stronger attacks by destroying the invaders and collecting Experience Orbs. There are three circular slots at the bottom right corner of the screen, two of which are locked. Unlocking them would allow Elemental Attacks to be quickly cued up, creating a combination of two or three elements. Besides unleashing a powerful attack against the incoming waves of stronger enemies, it would also terraform the surface of the planet, creating harsh environments to fight against moles that would come prepared for a different type of climate.

Every planned biome was made and the planet’s
surface is randomized on each game

Conclusion

After so long, this game jam exceeded my expectations, it was another great experience. I still feel a bit rusty, I mean, I haven’t put much thought on how to balance the game, but that might be because I’m now looking at the current version of the game and forgetting some of the cut features, like some of the drills crash landing instead of going towards the core (I just remembered this!).

There was a great team chemistry and constant communication, to my knowledge there wasn’t one problem that we weren’t all on it and attempting to solve together. And taking into consideration the time wasted fixing issues outside of the jam itself, or relaxing with some TowerFall, we were able to exceed our standards from our previous entries.

Weirdly enough, this is the second game about planets that we made, where the player can interpret some kind of underlying message about colonization or nature. We are on the path to becoming true planeteers!

You can play “Orbital Burrow” at Ludum Dare or at http://makeaga.me/orbitalburrow/.

I recommend that you download and play the Windows version if you are able to.

Have fun and don’t forget to rate. 😉

Make A Game team for Ludum Dare 29:

Filipe Caseirito (@FilCaz)
Tiago Franco (@Alarka)
Filipe Jorge (@deejorg)
Carlos Leituga (@CLeituga)
Sara Mena (@_saramena)
“Minty Buns”
 

Tags: 2D, 72h, Beneath the Surface, jam, ld29, LD72, Make A Game, Orbital Burrow, post-mortem

I’ve created a Facebook page for my LD#29 entry, The Last Beacon. If you like it, then please like this page to get notified about future updates!

If somebody didn’t do is yet, please review my game: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=36343

We had couple of similiar games to ours, if you want to play and review the game, go here !

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=12048

Thanks

Get ready to jump on ice as long as you can to survive in this first update !

Play the compo & post compo here !

Tags: 48hcompo, Beneath the Surface, ld29, unity

Before LD29 voting ends I must finish off with a shameless plug for my game. Enjoy!

Have you played Inferious yet?  It’s a first-person-shooter that would fall into the genres of horror, platformer, shooter, and puzzle. It is available for Windows, OSX, and Linux and also can be played through the web using Unity Web Player.

Inferious can be played here.

…so don’t forget to take a screenshot of your “Previously rated entries” list if you want to keep a record of how you voted. If I recall correctly this list just disappears after the voting is closed…

As the end of the voting period looms, I decided to write a postmortem for my Jam entry, Neath. This is my second Ludum Dare. I had some troubles coming up with what the game would be going which led me to miss the competition deadline, but eventually completed it, with a short playable section, for the Jam. I focused on creating a great mood, simple gameplay, and creating a visually striking game in the time period I had. You can play it Here. In the spirit of my first entry, Crew, I’ll be listing some of the things that went right, some of the things that went wrong and what I hope to do differently next time around.

What went right:

• I finished the game in time for the jam I lost some sleep on this one, but made a concerted effort to get enough sleep and remain vigilant in working on my game.
• I decided to use Unity last time around I utilized GameMaker: Studio for my entry. This time I told myself I would tough it out and Use Unity for the first time to complete a game. The things I learned in the process were invaluable and it helped give me more confidence in the engine, which I wanted to move to full-time for any game development.
• Polish I spent a lot of the time implementing features that really didn’t need to be there, but made the experience classier. I also implemented some features that were there just so I could learn how to do them. For instance, despite having only 2 letters in the game, I created a system for handling any items and any letters with variable text. The same is true for the simple dialogue system in the game, which is triggered and custom, and displays text via script. The motions of the paper swooping in, the flickering of the flashlight on, and etc. were all fun to finish and see in action and I think added a lot to the game.
• Atmosphere I spent more time than I’d care to admit on the sound alone. I am no sound designer by any means, but wanted the game to have a lot of atmosphere and a heavy mood. Luckily, it wasn’t in vain and a lot of people actually noticed how much work went into the sound design. I had initially planned to finish by the Compo time, so many of the sounds are self recorded, but when the time passed I decided to include some snazzy royalty free stuff to boost the level of quality.
• I didn’t overstep my abilities Last time around I messed around with random generation and in the process created a sort of broken game. This time, I kept it simple for the most part and tried a lot of new things that I needed to know eventually. It made me more confident when I figured something out, and it kept me going until the end.

What went wrong:

• Ran out of Compo Time As the competition ended a sigh of relief came over me. I was a lot of pressure and I missed the gate because I was too hung up on what the game should be. Admittedly, the game kinda came out incrementally. Instead of having that grand vision in my head like my last game, I was confused about what the game was trying to be. As a result, a lot of the game occurred naturally, which was fun, but also lead to a shorter and kinda plain game-play experience.
• Brevity There wasn’t a lot “too” my game, but it also was a quite brief experience. If there’s anything people remarked about negatively it would be this. In its briefness, the game did feel more like a mini-demo  or a “slice” of game-play than a full experience, which is interesting. I don’t feel too bad about this, being the sole developer and having it be my first time going full-sail with Unity.
• Lack of Interesting Mechanics I wanted the game to have a mechanic that related to the theme of “Beneath the Surface”. Unfortunately, I just didn’t think of anything clever enough to get the pass from me.

What I would do differently:

• Spend Less Time on Prep Last time around I told myself I should have spent more time on prep, but after struggling to come up with an idea this time around, I realized things would have gone smoother if I had just taking a shot at something. I think this part is going to depend on the theme and the options that I’ve come up with, but overall just jumping into something helps grease the wheels.
• Gameplay First, Next Time! I want to do something interesting with game-play. I think adventure games are a hard sell during Ludum Dare and it’s not the most fun to see in action either. For Crew, I hated myself for trying to do something I knew I wasn’t insanely good at with random generation. This time around, I felt like I tried hard and learned a lot about Unity to go forward and make something more interesting to actually play. Next time I think I’ll focus on creating a simpler, but more fun game.
• Create a post-comp version? To be honest, I dislike post-comp versions. Not only because when I’m done I just don’t want to look at the game anymore, but also because I think – at least within the voting period – that it’s against the spirit of Ludum Dare. Some post-comp versions I’ve seen have completely changed some aspects of a game or added more levels that weren’t there initially. For anything but game-breaking bugs, a post-comp version is disingenuous to me, but I understand its place in the Jams. Next time around maybe I’ll work on a post-comp version just to see if it’s worth it and if my opinions have changed on it.

Final words: 

Like my previous jam, I got a lot of kind words and some coverage from sites like Warpdoor and IndieStatik. This time around it was a lot more positive because the game worked, hah! It was once-again fun to commit my time to this and helps me realize more and more that this is what I want to do with my life. Thank you!

Here is a short post-mortem of my third Ludum Dare Entry (Jam): Below Earth.

In it you play an adventurer (bomb throwing maniac) that is exploring an underground cave only to find a rather hostile environment.

This time I also tried out some new tools like IntelliJ (IDE) and Aseprite (Pixelart) and I have to say I like them.

The somewhat good things:

• Brainstormed the idea long enough and then sticked with it.
• Prototyped graphics really quickly.
• The game is actually fun to play.
• I successfully drew my own pixelart with aseprite.
• I didn’t neglect my personal duties during the weekend.

Don’t mess with the local wild life.

The rather bad things:

• I originally intended to procedurally generate levels, but then I realized, that I have absolutely no experience with procedural level generation. I ended up with uninteresting and lazy “random” levels. So I later created a level parser to read text-files and made some quick levels, but I also left some of the generated levels in it.
• It’s too hard. I slowly start to see a pattern with my Ludum Dare games. I always balance it in a way, so that I still have a challenge, but that might not be an acceptable difficulty for others. Having difficult levels itself isn’t the problem, but having a too steep difficulty curve is a problem. I should learn to slowly(!) ramp up the difficulty of the game. Giving the game to playtesters often and early can really help with this.
• Hiding content in later levels. Because of it’s difficulty, some players never got to see every enemy that the game has to offer. This might be something not true for game-design in general, but it holds true for Ludum Dare, where most people probably don’t have the time to try and master your game. This means all the main game features should be available within the “easy” levels, and only combine them and challenge the player after those levels.
• This is another entry without music. Music is important for a game, but before I hastily make some annoying 10 second loop I rather leave the game without music. This might be a personal goal for my next LD to focus on music and create some for my game. I just have to find a program I can make some with and learn to use it….
• I created pixelart. It’s not good, but it’s better than anything I’ve created yet. Still it took far longer than it should have.
• No Web version. I really tried to get that GWT build to work, but there are so many things that go wrong when they somehow possibly can…

Time spent (aka everybody loves statistics)

During the whole weekend (Saturday to Monday because it’s a Jam Entry) I recorded my development time with toggl.com, which is really useful for such things. I ended up spending more time on graphics than I thought I would. Programming seems to be so big, because I was always testing my game inbetween bigger changes and played it over and over again. I also spent a whole hour setting up the project because I was using Libgdx without eclipse. 😉

That’s how I spent my weekend.

Conclusion

Every Ludum Dare helps me in some way to become a better developer and even a better person. 😀

I found some new nice tools with which I will continue to work.

I also should try to make my future games not too difficult for the average player.

I already started and will continue to develop a post-compo version of this game, because this is one of my first games where I feel like polishing it is worthwile.

If you want to play or rate or try out the post-compo version, you can do this here.

Tags: ld29, postmortem

Judging will be over in just over 24 hours. I had a blast with this competition, and I thought I’d sum up what I learned, what went well, and what didn’t.

Hide-n-Stab is a multiplayer stealth game – player characters and NPCs are identical cloaked figures, and your goal is to stab other players in the back. Attacking will reveal you to everyone around as a human, so you have to be careful and wait for the right chance to strike.

This was my first Ludum Dare and only my second game jam ever – I previously entered the Game Boy Jam, which gave 10 days. 48 hours was a very different experience. I wasn’t even planning on entering this time, and was out at dinner when the theme was announced. I checked Twitter, saw the theme, and immediately came up with the idea for Hide-n-Stab, and I knew that I had to give it a shot.

Anyway, here’s what happened:

What went well

• I used a fantastic technology stack. The game was written in Haxe, with a Flash game client and a Neko server. I used OpenFL with the HaxePunk game engine, which I’m a contributor to. I’ve been using this stack for a long time so I was able to get right to work and build something quickly, and the server and client were able to share a large amount of code.
• I had my asset production pipeline down solid as well. Graphics were drawn in Inkscape with individual body parts as separate layers; I used the Inkscape command line tool to split each layer into a separate image and used Spine to do skeletal animation. I had the fully animated character finished, in its more-or-less final form, the on first night, only a few hours after hearing the theme.
• I serendipitously came up an idea that fit the theme well from the start. This let me tailor gameplay to fit the theme as closely as possible throughout the entire process.
• I had just moved to a new apartment and was starting a new job on Monday after the competition ended, so I had focus and free time to devote to the competition. Also, my very patient wife kept our 3-year-old occupied so I could keep working.

What didn’t

• Developing an online game in 48 hours is insane. I spent probably half of my time debugging esoteric networking bugs. Some of the more elusive had to be solved after the competition was over.
• I posted Hide-n-Stab to Hacker News and did not anticipate the outcome – it was on the front page for an entire Saturday. The server was instantly filled with players and remained so for several days. I was completely unprepared – the server had never been load tested, it wasn’t running on the most robust VM, and it didn’t even have a limit on the number of concurrent players! I spent the weekend running around with my hair on fire, migrating to a better server and trying to tweak things to accomodate the huge influx of players, eventually opening a second overflow server. To be clear – I’m very glad to all the people who played from Hacker News, and it was a great chance to test the game, fix bugs, and get feedback. The reason this is a negative is that I wasn’t completely ready for it.
• I didn’t have enough time allotted to fix bugs. As a result, the final version was playable, but had some intermittent breaking bugs.

Next time

• I’ll definitely try to use HaxePunk again. Great experience, can’t recommend enough.
• I will almost certainly not attempt another MMO-style game in such a short time period.
• I’ll plan to enter the competition from the beginning and brainstorm theme ideas instead of waiting around and deciding to enter after it’s already underway.
• Allocate enough time to thoroughly test the game before release, and aim to put out a fully functional version.

Thanks to everyone who played and/or voted! I played some fantastic games this round so the competition is fierce. Good luck to everyone!

Also, if you enjoyed the game, tune in to www.hide-n-stab.com – I’m working on a post-competition version of the game, with browser, desktop, and mobile versions. It’ll have new features and unlockable cosmetic upgrades. You can also follow me on Twitter (@monsterfacegame) to hear about progress.

Before:

After:

You can play compo version here.

A brand news!

Forever Alone Snake – NO MORE
We have published an awesome update,
from now on, snake is no more the “forever alone guy” that we all knew from school.
From now on, snake have got himself some new friends, but no one stays friends forever
when only one can win.

In the last week we developed an online version for our game WWE (Worms War Evolution)
It may have some bugs, but it’s still playable
All you have to do is to click “Network Game” then “Host”
and tell your friends to connect to your ip/port! (hamachi is the best solution for porting)

Known Bugs:
-When the game is over, everyone will recieve a lovely error. So everyone will have  to re-open the game.
-Bodies may not be exactly at their real place
-The bigger your ping is, the bigger the delay for clients is.

YOU CAN DOWNLOAD THE MULTIPLAYER VERSION RIGHT HERE

Thank you for following : )
If you didn’t rate our game yet, please do, your votes are important for us!

Enjoy guys!
Let us know what you think, we worked hard on this one !

Thanks!

RomAndTom

You can follow Rom’s Blog for more

Tags: rom, romandtom, tom, trasoside, worms war evolution, wwe

Right, I should probably have written and posted this much earlier. But my life doesn’t always give me enough time for these things…

Regardless, prepare your eyes for the wonder that is;

Not Your Average Mining Emulator*

* Gameplay may actually be average

N.A.M.E.

This would be my fifth finished game, but also the seventh Ludum Dare I’ve tried to join in on. And I’ve got to say that this was not one of the themes I was hoping for myself, but I still did what I usually do; Sit down for a few hours just after the theme’s released (3am here in Sweden) and sketch up a few game ideas. And then I can take those ideas and polish them after sleeping on it for a few hours.

The ideas I managed to sketch down for this LD were of a Diablo UI inspired rougelike, a submarine hunting game that also spun off as a wreck hunting game idea, an idea for a submarine shoot’em’up, and finally something of a clone of the old game Motherlode and Clonk. In the end I decided to go for the final idea, as that was the one I felt held the most promise with the lowest amount of graphical work (my weakest point).

So, with that in mind.

What went right?

• Had already prepared a simple framework that worked well for a 2D sidescrolling digging game, helped cut down some on the development time. Inputs and things prepared in advance is really nice, since otherwise such things would eat development time.
• Streamed everything, every second I was at the computer. This really helps with the focus, and I even managed to keep enough attention on the chat to be able to answer some questions that arose from viewers.
• My art ability seems to have improved slightly since I started Ludum Dare, so the first sprites I did for trees and ores came out looking really well.
• My thoughts on UI design turned out perfectly fine too, I’ve noticed that many people’ve commented on how nice and smooth the in-house UI looks.
• A crafting system turned out easier than expected, so I was able to throw it together and put in two recipes in only about one and a half hour.

What went less right?

• Didn’t think to grab an existing physics engine like Box2D, so lost a huge amount of time writing physics and debugging them. There’s actually a collision bug that slipped through when I was working on ladder support, since I moved some code about and accidentally removed the part of code preventing you from jumping when you have a wall above your head. I really need to cure my NIH syndrome I guess, but it’s just so much fun to recreate the wheel.
• Didn’t feel I had enough time to really work towards sound or music in the game, so it’s a very silent game. This is something I really suck at doing, so I guess I won’t be releasing any games that take in high scores on Audio any time soon.
• Still can’t draw a player character in any way, so the player stayed as a cube saying ‘IDLE’ until the last couple of hours. And even then I only really managed a simple stick man.
• I failed to put together an inventory system like what I originally thought of making, so lost several hours of development rewriting that. In the end I figured that only having a single object on the player was acceptable, and spent more time getting the house to be able to store things.
• Because the inventory system failed to be finished I had lots of code that was supposed to be used with in-game tools that you couldn’t craft or carry.
• Didn’t have ingredients for proper food laying about, so ended up with simpler food and that just doesn’t feel as good. No food photos from me this time.

Other thoughts.

• Another entry made from scratch in C++ using SFML, this is starting to look like a theme for my entries I think. Maybe I should sit down far in advance of the next one and create a larger base framework so I could use that instead, based on SDL maybe?
• This Ludum Dare I decided to try a simpler game without using my home-grown entity component system Kunlaboro, so this game is more of a statemachine based game. And while it feels really good to go back to my roots for a simple game, I can’t help but feel that I could’ve gotten so much more done if I’d used Kunlaboro for it…
• I should try to move game logic away from base C++ code and towards scripts, maybe using Lua or Angelscript. This needs for me to have more time before the start of the compo so I can properly prepare the framework though.

To finish, thank you to all the people watching me work. And those of you that commented on the entry, both during the stream and during judging, every bit of criticism helps.

I’ll be seeing about maybe cleaning this up later on and releasing a post-compo version, though I don’t know how much of the original code would be left afterwards. It started off so nice and neat, but now the codebase if just a horrible bunch of duct tape fixes.

Tags: 2D, C++, ld29, postmortem, screenshot, sfml

Yoohoo! My game “Upstream” achieved it’s 100th rating today!
That puts it in the top 3.5% of the most rated games in this LD according to itch.io – I never thought that it could achieve this.
Thank you for everybody taking time to try my little game, and for the kind comments!

And if anybody else wanna try it on the last day of judging: http://j.mp/1mO1tUK

I’m completely rewriting AHH LAVA! in unity instead of game maker, I’ve learnt unity from scratch in a few weeks! and now I have a swanky new submarine in THREEEEE-DEEEEEEE!

I’ve always loved this kind of pixel texture 3D artwork so I’m super excited I got to do it! Im gonna keep polishing up the game to be released as a couch multiplayer brawler of some sort! 😀

Check out the Compo version here give it a vote if you haven’t already

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=24533

Post Jam version of our entry is up! We fixed some bugs, added the plot, improved graphics and added even more selfmade sounds You can check it right here

Tags: jam, ld29, postjam, postLD

Hi folks, it’s my 3rd Ludum Dare, but I guess it’s my very first post mortem, for my LD 29 entry, Fish Goes Fishing (click here if you’re still to play it). So, with no further delay, my time lapse video, followed by the post mortem itself.

The Idea

When I first saw the them i was like “blergh”. I won’t deny it, I’m more an old school C/C++ programmer than a designer, and”beneath the surface” only ringed an underwater game to me. And that’s what I did, a game where you’re fish, constantly hungry, struggling to survive by eating other fishes and avoid being eaten by the fish you can’t eat at all. At first, I wanted to have a fisherman passing by a boat, which could mean an instant death in case the fish was caught, but this idea was scrapped along the way, as time was getting shorter. I also planned to have two gauges, one with the hunger factor (fish dies if maxed out), and another with an energy usage factor, that would be depleted when the fish moved, but would recover when the fish would rest. With that in mind and a very rough sketch on paper, I started my 3rd Ludum Dare.

The Code Base

Doing a full game in 48 hours is already challenging, leave it alone doing the full code to make the magic happen. Since I did Ludum Dare 26 I’m building a basic code framework over SFML. To bootstrap Fish Goes fishing, I had the menu system ready, plus a character hierarchy and controller code in place. This time I added character animation and very simple animated particles (the bubbles, plants and anemones). Maybe for the next Ludum Dare I’ll have tile map support with some physics library in place (Chipmunk, maybe).

Highlights

1. Mockup graphics: I wanted to have a sense of how things would play together as soon as possible. Both in sense of gameplay and how they’d look together on screen. For that I made characters that were simple rectangles to get myself going soon. This allowed me to focus on what I had to do first (the code) and to scale the time I’d spent to polish those resources later.
2. Do a game that your library or code base makes it easy for you: while we can have very complex ideas, it’s not useful if we can’t make them happen. It’s OK if we need to code something specific for the game, but getting it up from scratch is a hard task. use a library or framework if you can. If you’re old school and is starting out with a library like SFML or SDL, try to make a game that uses the libraries basic resources, and then, for the next time, you may improve upon that code base. I’ve been doing that for a while and it’s working well.
3. Generalize first, specialize later:when developing the game, I focused on creating the basic characters, and the other character were built upon those previous elements, by adding more states and changing animation frames.
4. Prioritize efforts: a game is much more a sum of parts, rather than only one individual aspect alone. Something I did was to question what’s required from here to get a build that plays like a game, even if we need to balance things to make the game more challenging. I was about 26 hours into the jam and the fish could eat other fishes, which was a good milestone.
5. Using well the right tools: I’m no musician, as I’m no graphics artist. But I can overcome those limitations (a bit, at least). Music and sound can always be generated by automated tools. For SFX, I used bfrx, and for musics I used Otomata. These can save a lot of time and effort, and give some mood to the game. Just for the record, I’ve also used in the past Punk-O-Matic, and I’ve also seen other procedural music generator apps that allow me to export files to MP3. As for graphics, Gimp is more than enough for pixel artist making, and also has very easy to use too to rotate layers that I used to make the scuba diver animation.
6. Not being afraid to scale back: the earliest we see something is too big for the original deadline, we need to remove it ad minimize impact. This goes well with number 2 above, and I had two occasions were this was important:
   1. Missing fisherman:I thought about the fisher man, but this character would have a moving part for the line and required a special hierarchy. To avoid expending too much time with this guy, I decided to drop it before I couldn’t finish the game. While it was hard, and a hit on my original idea, I fully understand it was for the best (as I’d complete the final build close to the deadline).
   2. Gauges mechanics didn’t work out:the idea to have two bars to control both how hungry and tired the fish was seemed awesome. Once I tried it out, it wasn’t working out as expected. To solve that, I change it to a single bar, which would go down faster when the fish was swimming, and slower when it was idle. Also, it was simpler for people to understand the game.
7. Life can get in the way: working at home to do a Ludum Dare and still having the regular responsibilities of a regular weekend is a tricky challenge. In my case, that meant shopping for groceries, taking kids to swimming classes or doing a BBQ for the family. This may manifest differently to each person (going to school, doing a report, whatever), the fact is that life is still there and we should be prepared to accommodate other activities rather than just doing the game. In other words, try not to procrastinate, as this time will be missing later ;).
8. Pressure can make simple mistakes become nightmares: when I was doing the Windows build (I only use Linux), i made a Makefile to cross compile the binary. And it wasn’t working at first. I had my entry in place, I had the source code uploaded, and it wasn’t before 5 minutes of the final deadline that I had my Windows binary after I found a small typo in the name of a file. Was under normal stress, I would have noticed and laughed this off, in the submission hour I couldn’t even see what was right or wrong anymore. Try to avoid the pressure of a ticking clock at all costs.
9. Oh, you may get sick as well: while normal life may get in the way, and I’m used to it by now, I wasn’t quite ready to deal with illness. I had food poisoning Sunday, and the last three hours were not fun to get over the final tasks. Had it happened earlier, I think I’d have retired from the compo. As most of the hard work was already in place I decided to push forward.

Conclusion

Every time I go through a jam or Ludum Dare I learn something, and I also enjoy the challenge to come up with something even if the theme is not the one I’d liked the best (like this time). I may try jamming with friends some time, as soon as we can match our schedules, but until then, I can get into the compo by myself and have some fun :).

Ever since the end of #LD48 I’ve been working on improving Landshark Missile Attack (what a mouthful), and seeing as it’s the last 24 hours of voting, I’m NEVER going to get all the changes I want to do before the end of that. But damn there’s a lot already, so here goes:

SUPER ANDSHARK MISSILE ATTACK POST-COMPO EDITION V2!

(and the orignal LD48 Compo version)

Changes made to this version that I can remember:

1. A thumpin’ track by Tim Harbour! Unfortunately hadn’t gotten to sound effects yet.
2. Focussed on one level, removed others for now.
3. Screenshake! Of course!
4. Removed time limit.
5. Fixed stuttering bullet time.
6. Health + death mechanic added.
7. Eat people to heal.
8. Removed swimming up walls for now.
9. Added enemy dropship.
10. Aerial dodge – double tap forward, left or right while airborne!
11. Missiles and dodge energy reload when you land.
12. So wow, so much. Can’t remember.

This was my first Ludum Dare and it has been incredible! There’s still A LOT MORE to add and improve on SUPER LANDSHARK MISSILE ATTACK, but I need to know if you think it’s worthg persuing! do get in touch if you wanna see it get further / finished!

Or did I even go the right way with the changes? Would love to hear your thoughts!

Thanks for your time! 😀

Here’s an instagram video cos my gif capturerer thing doesn’t wanna work  http://instagram.com/p/oKTdcXN1aF/

And now, bed. 4AM >_<

Play and download SUPER ANDSHARK MISSILE ATTACK POST-COMPO EDITION V2! And tell me if I went in the right direction since the original LD48 entry! XD

I had a lot of fun making my LD29 entry, “Seed“.  For once I decided to make a game that wasn’t tense, scary, or overly monochromatic; I think I did it that way just to prove that I could.  This also gave me a chance to write some pleasant music for a change.

Things that went well:

1.  I was worried that the method I was using to draw the plant (spawning multiple objects) would cause massive slowdown, but it turns out Unity handled it well.

2.  I was actually done after only 24 hours, but there were still a few minor bugs (the flower would sometimes grow out at an angle at the surface), and I wanted the plant itself to look better as it was growing.  I’m glad I took the extra time to draw the little roots that come out of the side of the plant randomly; it really looked cool in the end.  On a similar note, my script for it worked right on the first try (save for a few number tweaks).

3.  The four layers of music fading in and out at different times made the music feel dynamic and was worth the extra effort to get it all to sync up.  (For reference, the cello part always plays, the medium piano part plays only when the bud is moving, the high piano part gradually fades in as you get closer to the surface, and the low piano part gradually fades in as you start running out of water.)

Things that needed improvement:

1.  First, the “endless” method of adding additional rocks and bugs works as a short game, but doesn’t offer much variety.  If I go back and revisit this at all, I’ll probably add additional things to find underground (like worms, for example).

2.  It looks fine on my monitor and is supposed to be dark as you’re underground, but the darkness was a common complaint.  If I had time, I probably should have put some kind of brightness adjuster.

3.  As much as I like how the music came out, a much longer piece would offer a lot more variety and be less repetitive.

Overall:

I had fun, and I hope other people did as well!  Bring on LD30!

[blatant self promotion warning]

An idea that came up for me during a few ludumdares combining a tile matching puzzlegame with anagram solving. I never did end up using the idea during ludumdare itself, but I did make the game, which is currently available for free so I thought I might share while I’m still in a good mood before the current LD results are announced and I go into depression/hibernation/the liquor cabinet:

GemWords is currently free for Windoze/OSX/Android from http://voxel.itch.io/gemwords