Sorry we are a little late for our Post Mortem, but here it is folks !

This was our first game jam together, and even the first game jam for some of us. We are quite satisfied with what we were able to do, and we have learnt a lot. Of course not everything went perfectly, that’s also why we learnt so much, so here is our post mortem in the classical ‘what went right and what went wrong’ format.

What went wrong :

– We were a bit too ambitious during the brainstorming phase. There were a lot of features in our initial project and we had to cut off a lot of it. But even with a “lighter” project, we finished our game ‘just in time’ letting very little time for tweaking and debugging. That’s probably why our game play is so tricky and our hitbox strange.

– Mapping and level design. We left it for the end and then rushed to make some maps. That’s why some map were buggy. Due to our game play, we had to make a LOT of map.

– We didn’t knew our tool. We never used haxeflixel before and weren’t really ready for a project. We lost a lot of time searching for way of doing things we needed.

– Our developping environment wasn’t fully operational and we lost some time configuring everything.

– Random world generation was a really tricky part, even though it was a must have feature for the fun part of our game.

What went right :

– General feedback were good.

– We were pretty happy with the final result.

– Using haxeflixel was a huge gain of time.

– Despite our problem in the begining with our environment, we had a really good workflow. Everyone knew what to do and the task repartition went seamlessly.

– We were able to release the game in time. We included all the feature we defined after the cut off.

So, here we are ! If you haven’t played at our game yet, don’t hesitate to take a look at it !

Link to our game

As the results are being calculated, the winners posted, the scores tallied, and the cheese being eaten, I would like to take this time to say thanks to this community for an amazing ‘first’ LudumDare.

The feedback I got was great, the games I played were excellent, and the posts I made were lame and unoriginal, so all around this was an amazing experience.

So, Good Luck to everyone, and don’t give up if you don’t place high. After all this is about making games, not ‘winning’! The point is that people played YOUR game, how fricken cool is that!

GG, everyone, GG

This entry was posted on Monday, May 19th, 2014 at 6:06 pm and is filed under LD #29. 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.

Warning spoilers and loud language below.

Radioactivity

What does a warehouse full of radioactive tutu wearing ninjas have to do with my post compo update? NOTHING!**

But this sample of some new commands does:

Consider, Train, & Kill

Sick of that tutorial woman talking about her favorite game? MURDERED.

Give

A cute little teddy stranded in your inventory? FREEDOM FOR THE BEARS! I wonder what else you can give…

Rest

Feeling a bit tired from all the reading err murdering and pasting? REJUVENATE!

Yeah no gif for this one. Use your imagination!

Skills & Skill Reset

Need to reveal really far back, to dig up stuff beneath the surface  of time but just got your slay on? ADAPT AND OVERCOME!

Wordwrap, Spelling, & Placeholders

Words. You can read them as intended now, whole. Spelling – fixed. Placeholders – eliminated.

IDK WHAT THIS IMAGE MEANS, BUT I’M YELLING ABOUT IT

1800 Lines of code, 1200 statements,  complexity, and other data I’m not yet sure how to interpret. But look! I’m in the green hoop sometimes! If I can’t green hula hoop, life is not worth it.  Thanks source monitor you give life purpose again.

*The surface of Cuer is radioactive. That’s why the game takes place beneath the surface.

**Oh wait there is a radioactive heart…I wonder what that’s for?

Holy crap that blue bird with feathers website!  I always for get to say Follow @Crefossus . Not this time. If you got this far you know you want to increase my followers over 11. We can do it! You can help! If we get to 100 I might ask for money to make stuff. Oh wait…I’m not supposed to say that here. Are you delving me? Get out of my head! Stop seeing what’s beneath the surface.

After today I can’t make that joke anymore. But I probably will anyway.

Hey there, fellow jammers!

Results are almost out!

Have you ever noticed how, during voting, you always play one or two games that make you go like “Holy Crap, this guy is totally winning this LD!”, but then the final results come out and you actually haven’t played many of the greatest games? So many jewels are hidden right now beneath the surface (ha!) of the voting system, and in a few hours they’ll be revealed! What crazy, marvelous games I have missed this time? PRETTY ANXIOUS RIGHT NOW!

Anyway, since we have to wait a few hours longer, I decided to write about this struggle that was very present during the development of our game Last Dive.

In a nutshell, as you grow into a “mature” indie developer or whatever, you usually lean more and more towards being really minimalistic, going for the smallest possible scope, and then adding lots of polish to it. However, for this theme in particular, we got ourselves into an “all or nothing” feeling, where we felt that it was either a boring theme, or the most awesome theme EVER for us – as long as we had the time to make the game that we wanted to make. It wasn’t a minimalist game for a 72 hours timeframe, but if we cut anything out of the scope, the design breaks and we don’t wanna make it anymore…

Stupid and crazy, right? Have you ever felt that way about a project?

Anyway, I wrote a little thing about minimalism versus giving up your vision, in the context of this Ludum Dare. Considering the irreversible path towards simplification that we have been trailing over the last few years, our participation this time was quite a thrill. I honestly don’t think we could pull this together if we hadn’t been participating in Ludum Dare for a few editions now.

Here’s the game, if anyone still has the stamina to play through one more game! http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=11099

So, as always, a big THANK YOU to this community! The things we learn here we are being able to apply on our main project, and that is invaluable to us. Seriously, dude. Pixel Cows is very much *defined* by Ludum Dare right now! 😀

Cheers!

High five for a good Ludum Dare.  *High fives you*

This entry was posted on Monday, May 19th, 2014 at 6:39 pm and is filed under LD #29. 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.

Play the LD29 COMPO HERE

Here it is some screenshoot about my game, if you didn’t play it , what are you waiting for, there’s no more time…..Play it.

Ripple Runner now has an official post-compo version!  Ladies and gentlemen, please enjoy Ripple Runner Deluxe!  Featuring 3 new stages, more difficulty, more parallax scrolling backgrounds, extra level mechanics, and of course, more awesome chiptune music!

For a complete changelog (we’re at v1.22 now), look at the submission page here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=7285

Here’s a look at the new backgrounds and stages:

Ripple Runner has already received a lot of positive feedback and support from you guys, and I really appreciate it!  Hopefully the new post-compo update will satisfy those of you who were left wanting more from the original. ^_^

And last, but certainly not least, I’ve included the 3 new songs in a new album release, so grab the new music here!

http://ddrkirbyisq.bandcamp.com/album/ripple-runner-deluxe-original-soundtrack

It’s not too late!  4 hours remain in voting, you can still play and rate Ripple Runner now!

I was initially going to submit a post compo post, but the lack of time during the past weeks changed my plans. Perhaps I should do one in the upcoming, even though everything is over soon.

I’ve had a blast, and no silly migraines this time :). I would just like to share a gameplay video and timelapse video I made for Cubulis.

(I believe the GUI got messed up due to a programming mistake)

The timelapse is still uploading I believe, so please be patient. Good luck guys, and good night

Play Cubulis here!

How did I do this??

I got first place in Innovation. What can I write about this? I don’t even know.

Tags: first place, innovation

Hey, here’s a coding time lapse for compo entry PLANET CORP. We used Coffeescript and HTML5 to drive our game. Enjoy!

You can play the game here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=33058

Just 2 hours..  And my first LD is over. I am little sleepy. If you want, play and rate my game Beneath your feet.

I now open this:

And go watch Step by step.

Finally the post-compo version of Pond Tycoon is released on both Android and iOS!

The original version as well as post-compo can still be found by simply browsing to the Pond Tycoon entry page if you prefer that

Feel free to check out my game if you think it looks interesting, and if you feel like sharing your thoughts, I’d love to hear your comments!

Finally, many thanks to everyone for making this a great ludum dare! Special thanks for the guys at Sony Hackathon as well! Hope to be back next time 😀

Hello,

now that LD29 comes to its end, I wanted to write my favourites post. I’ve tested much games so far, but not enough I think. Many gameplay, graphic or sound jewels are lying beneath the surface of untested games. But from the list of games I’ve tested, these are my favourites:

Ripple Runner for all it is. Great music, graphics and Gameplay.

Le Ver for the mood that let me shiver.

Platform Hero for the music and gameplay, which i liked very much.

Thought Police for the story, the drawings and the amount of good written text.

Scary Ugly Face for the story, the well made graphics, it makes me smile and Sir Face.

Giant Pumpkin for the graphics, the sound, the gameplay and the pumpkin.

Room Cleaning because I never had so much fun cleaning a room like in that game.

The Sun and Moon because I couldn’t have stopped the game before solving the last level.

Mine Cannon for its gameplay and the jewels.

Me & my metal detector because of its sounds that make me lough everytime I hear them.

This list is not sorted in any order and I’ am happy to take part at LD29.

Bye and hope we see us again next time at LD30,

ruerob.

This year I was short on time and ideas so I didn’t post much throughout the competition. I wanted to say thanks to all who played and rated my game this time around and say that I had a great time overall with other games. I also wanted to take the time and publicly thanks and point out some of the great tools I used to create this game in such a short period of time.

First off is the game engine, Stencyl, which has proven over and over that it is an excellent tool for those dedicated enough to develop a polished product. A great community and helpful individual worked with me to get the lighting effects in later levels to work, something I had never done before.

Graphics: Well I used photoshop for my graphics and unfortunately waited until after the jam to purchase, Pickle. Pickle has since been the best tool i’ve used thus far in creating pixel graphics and most importantly animations and sprites. All of which have improved since my purchase. Please support this excellent tool.

Finally I would like to address the audio. The SFX were generated using the very popular CFXR while the music was generated randomly using an amazing website (abundant-music.com) that I was directed to during the jam. The game is flash and browser based so please if you have a minute head over and CHECK IT OUT HERE. Thanks and good luck. 

With my first Ludum Dare coming to a close, I’d just like to say thank you to the moderators for putting this together and to the community for making it such an exciting event!!

I definitely plan on doing more, and plan to do even better, regardless of the results tonight.

I played over 40 games (which I thought was a lot, boy was I wrong), and all of them showed true creativity and skill. Even though some games may fail in certain areas, I can honestly say I found something unique and fun in each and every one. Great job, LD Community! Everyone should be proud!

Best of luck tonight and congrats to those who meet or exceed their expectations!

Regards,

– JimmyBoh

I’d just like to say Goo djob to all the participants and everyone involved 😀 I had alot of fun playing and rating the different games. I look forward to the next Ludum Dare Good Luck in the Final Round! 😀 -Mallot1 www.codingrevolution.blogspot.com

This Ludum Dare was a lot of fun! I played a lot of awesome games and I’m looking forward to LD 30! After seeing a lot of post compo versions of games, I was motivated to flesh Cry Baby out a little more. One of the main things I added were some sound effects. I’ll probably update this a bit more in the future, but for now I’m rather happy with it. You can check it out here: Cry Baby

What was added:

-You can play as a boy or girl

-You can get hurt by getting hit by enemies

-Enemies can shoot lasers!

-SOUND EFFECTS (some thing are still silent though)

-Hidden pathways containing hidden items

-“Special” ending if all hidden items are collected

-Some bug fixes and tweaks here and there

I was so curious about the Ludum Dare ratings I decided to sleep in tomorrow and view them on release.

For my relaxed approach to the jam, I’m pretty fond with the ratings.
I hoped to get a higher rank in mood, but place 48 of 1004 Jam entries still is OK.

Getting into the top 25 has become so much harder!
5 Jams ago I would have gotten with such a score at place 2 …

Anyway, it was a great jam to me!

I created a game which is meaningful to me and learned a bunch on my way.
I hope that the gameart I released as CC0 will help other gamedevelopers (maybe you?) with their future projects!

Best wishes,
Rick

P.S.: You can play my game here, in case you missed it.

I have to say my first Ludum Dare has been pretty incredible!

What blew me away the most was how nice everyone is! There were multiple people who couldn’t play my game, decided to take the time to look into the problem, and then commented or e-mailed me how to fix it. I mean, that’s crazy how much effort some folks put into just trying to play my game! They could have easily just rated it N/A and then moved on to the other ~2,500 or so games. Heck, they could have spent that time rating games and raising their coolness!

Honestly, thank you to all the LD people who spend time fixing problems in other peoples’ games or who take the time to give meaningful comments and constructive criticism! The vibe here is just awesome!

Also, now that results are out, I’m pretty blown away with how my first game did! I really liked the LD theme, but I never would have expected to win a medal for it!

I can’t wait ’til August, I’ll definitely be there! 😀

My game: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=35365

I’m so happy because of the released ratings that I created a graph in LÖVE about my progresses during my LDs.

You can download the file here, if you are interested in.

I made a video as well, it shows my absolute first impressions. Check this out! I’m kind of pleased anyway, and even though I expected a little bit more, it was still far my most successfull Ludum Dare event!

I hope everyone else feels the same way.

– Katamori

Tags: ld29, statistics