I just put together a timelapse of my jam entry: “Omnis”, the reverse-god-sim-hack-and-slash!

Play it here: Omnis entry page

 

 

 

Tags: timelapse

ORIGINAL BLOG-POST (with fancy quotes)

Greeting my dear friends! Nice to see you again. One week has passed after Ludum Dare 30 deadline. I had enough sleep, played a lot of (300 actually) LD’s entries and also I’ve got a lot of feedbacks about my game “the Beginning”. I think it’s a good time to write a postmortem and share some thoughts about competition. Here we go!

ATTENTION!
Following post contains spoilers!
PLAY THE GAME BEFORE READING!

Pre-conditions

First of all I would like to tell you about some circumstances that preceded the competition. A couple weeks before LD weekend my boss told me that I will have a short business trip exactly the same weekend. I was pissed off. But then I checked flight tickets and realised that I will come back Saturday evening. So I would have a couple hours on Saturday and whole Sunday to participate in competition.

Another thing that should be mentioned is that I’m living in Shanghai and the competition started at 9am Saturday morning and deadline was at 9am Monday morning in my time-zone. This circumstance gave me some advantage in my situation.

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Theme

So, Saturday 9am, theme has been announced and the competition officially has been started.

Honestly, I don’t like the theme. I believe that there were some more original and more interesting themes, but… whatever. When I read the theme first time it was like “Oh, there will be a lot of games about literally connecting planets, controlling twins and swapping dimensions… boring“. And after several hundreds of entries been played and watched I can say that I was right. Anyway, I had no choice. I started thinking about my game and how I can stand out from crowd.

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Idea and concept

I spend about an hour thinking about an idea. I rejected 4 ideas that came to my head and then I ended up with “the Beginning”. This is the game about baby who lives in 2 worlds at the same time – our world and a world inside his mother’s womb. These two worlds are obviously connected – mother can feel when baby moves and baby can hear and feel what happens in “outer” world.

I decided it should be a  journey from the moment of conceiving to the moment of birth. My initial idea was to make 9 levels, each represents 1 month of life inside the womb. I also wanted to show how baby growth – appearance changes each level, the character obtains new abilities (eating, grabbing things, rotating, etc.). I made some short research regarding a process of growing inside the womb. After all this activities I was able to plot basic storyline and key-milestones.

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Art style & mood

There are 2 main reasons why I picked minimalism as a visual style for my game:

1. I didn’t have enough time to produce quality pixel-art.
2. I wanted to keep things abstract to maintain mystery about what happens in the game.

I really wanted to show process of growing but keep it as abstract as possible so player won’t be able to figure out who is the main character and where he is until the very end of the game. Since game supposed to contain only 9 levels I’ve made 9 “stages of growth” of main character:

To set up some tension I came with the idea that there won’t be any music. Player can hear only heartbeat (of main character’s mother) and each level it becomes louder and faster. Players who have managed to complete the game say that it’s really cool and contribute to the mood very well.

Speaking about mystery it worth to mention that it became the best and the worst feature of the game at the same time. This is the game about story. About mysterious story. A lot of players mentioned that they really liked the mood of the game. Another feature that helps to set up mysterious mood is the dialog between a mother and a father of the main character. At the very beginning players don’t know who are these MAN and WOMAN, and why they’re watching him. Some player wrote in comments that he was convinced that he was playing some creature in lab.

So, players get hooked from the very beginning and its really cool. But to figure out what this game is about, to experience this “Wow!” moment and understand why it’s about connected worlds players must complete the game… And this is the worst thing because the game appeared to be so difficult and hard to complete for most of the players. I managed to fix it only in post-compo version of the game.

---

Post-compo

In a first day after deadline some players complained about difficulty of the game. Levels are very long and there are no checkpoints. A first solution was to make a walkthrough video. It was better than nothing, but still not enough. I started to think about simplified version of the game. I decided that making checkpoints logic from scratch would be time consuming so it was better to fix the existing levels without changing gameplay.

I started working on this version Tuesday afternoon. I uploaded simplified version Tuesday evening and it was really worth it. I’ve got a lot of positive feedbacks, because most of the players were able to complete new simplified version. Since that moment I could spend all my time playing other entries and working on promotion of my entry (twitter, twitch, postmortem, etc.).

---

What went right

• Idea. I spend a couple hours on brainstorming and detalization, so I started developing process with strong and clear concept in my head.
• Development. I didn’t encounter any significant problems during development process except some minor issues with physics and camera jitter.
• Controls appeared to be very smooth and responsive.
• Minimalist art-style and mood.
• Walkthrough video.
• Simplified version.
• Twitter and Twitch activity.

---

What went wrong

• Difficulty.
• Prioritization. I spend whole Sunday working on levels. I ended up with 8 level out of 9. Most of these levels appeared to be very long and difficult, so I had to spend even more time to make simplified version. It would be better if I made less levels and spent some time to implement checkpoints in the game.
• QA. Since I spent all Sunday working on levels I didn’t have time for proper playtest. Initially I was thinking that my wife and some my friend would play it and give me some feedbacks. Unfortunately, deadline time was 9am Monday (Shanghai local time). I built my game about 7am so it was impossible to ask someone to play it. I just tested it by myself, prepared some description and screenshots and uploaded all the stuff to LD website.

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What’s next?

I don’t want to rush with this project. I need time to rest, to clear my mind. Also I want to collect more feedback from players. Then I gonna look at this project again with more self-criticism. There is a chance that I will continue working on this project, but I’m still not sure about it.

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Conclusion

It was a great experience for me. It was tough, but definitely worth it. I can’t wait to participate next LD or other game jam.

Thank you for reading. If you like “The Beginning” let’s stay in touch: follow me on Twitter and Facebook. Stay cool, stay indie! I’ll come back soon!

Tags: postmortem

Okay, I’ve let this sit for a while, and I think I’m ready to unpack how this jam (and my entry, which you can play here) went.

What went right:

Execution of style

When we decided the plot of the game (which I’ll talk about later), it didn’t really take much discussion to find out how we wanted the game to look. Our pixel artist, Gordon, has a very distinct, angular, heavily-stylised look to his illustrations, perfect for a game that is heavily about style and doesn’t take itself too seriously.

The artwork I produced for the game was a bunch of photomontages. For a game about bringing separate realms together, I liked the idea of my pieces being all kinds of stock photos smashed together and those montages juxtaposed against much cleaner and precise pixel art.

The hexagon motif kind of just… emerged. It started when I made the graphic for the item window, which was initially square until I started using that rad hexagon font for the text. And soon it was everywhere. Even Akachi’s wallpaper at his house is made of hexagons!

More of this post under the cut.

Coding aims

This is the most complicated Visual Novel I’ve coded yet. While a lot of people who played said that the game is rather simple (or at least straightforward), the inner workings was actually a lot of new territory for me.

After my last game, Thought Police, I wanted to learn more efficient code than the hackjob I did to get some parts of that game working, and new concepts, like map screens and inventory.

The inventory ended up being a hyper-simple system designed to only hold one item at a time, and the map screen had no sound effects, but they were a solid start that I can build on in the future.

 

What went wrong:

Time management

This is partly unavoidable circumstance, partly my fault. Because our artist was overseas, communication was entirely limited to when we were both online – and even then our connection wasn’t great (and that lead to us not having all the graphics ready for the official Jam entry).

On my side, I actually took a large chunk of Sunday off to entertain guests, which I could have used to do much more complex pathing. One idea was to have the conversations with each character have their own branches, that increased/decreased relationship values. And then at the end of the game, that would dictate what ending you get.

As things stand, conversations don’t branch (although the characters all have something new to say if you ask them the same question twice), and you just choose the ending you want. That kind of downsizing is definitely not unusual for Ludum Dare, but I was pretty bummed out over not making that system work.

Minority factor

I make a (rather strong) point of having characters in things I write be diverse – mostly because that’s the only way I can see people of colour and people of different sexualities/genders in my gaming at the moment.

We, uh, sort of managed that. Manuel is the character that I had the most involvement in designing and writing, and people who know me well could probably tell that easily.

That rad dress-suit is by Jean Paul Gaultier, by the way.

He’s the only character who even vaguely flirts with the (gender ambiguous but with a West African name) main character (and since the dialogue is linear, Akachi reciprocates). But it could also easily be misinterpreted as being platonic, and I ain’t really about ‘will-they-won’t-they’ romances.

On the other hand, we got a good mix of genders and races up in there, so I can’t be too hard on myself.

Plot concept

Okay, that’s harsh, the plot worked out pretty damn well. But I can’t help but be a little mad at myself for making a game about space. After turning my nose up a little about all the underwater/underground games in the Beneath The Surface jam last time, I figured I could do better than that. The plot was also decided upon three-ways, which is not a problem inherently (with a team size so small it would be shitty if someone didn’t get a say!) but it meant that a lot of ideas were more neutral that I would have liked, or sounded like they’d be a nightmare to work in properly.

As you might guess if you’ve played the game, the GALAXY CAT is one of those latter things. I think it was at the point we had that in the game, I decided to write the game in a SCUMMVM/LucasArts way. Ridiculous and off-beat with no fail state. A rollercoaster ride more than a hedge maze. This gave the game a very unique tone (which I’m definitely happy with), but I’m a little sad that I didn’t get to write something more intimate and personal.

Oh, and typos. Typos are the bane of my life. (And because there’s a lot of incidental and hidden dialogue, some parts were consistently skipped over. Shit.)

Future goals:

I always can push my skills in Ren’Py further. I do recognise that most other LDers tend to diversify in the platform and genre they work in, but I’m the kind of person who likes to hone a single skill (and I never want to have to deal with things like collision detection because hahahafuck that.). I’d like to make a more complex inventory system, and maybe a beastiary-style menu.

I got a tablet for this LD, with the intention of doing more in the way of digital art. It really helped make the photomontages better and faster to produce, but that’s about all I did with it – I shall have a more hands-on approach to drawing next time.

I want to learn how to use a basic music program, too. Kevin MacLeod has saved my bacon for three games in a row, and it’s time that changed. I’ve heard that Famitracker… exists, and that Frooty Loops is good for arranging building blocks of riffs like that old PS1 game, Music, but other than that I dunno what would be a good fit for a not-especially-musically-trained beginner.

Tags: post-mortem

This was the first Ludum Dare I participated and I wasn’t even supposed to do so. I wanted to. I thought about it. But didn’t try to organize anything with anyone that would complement my skills before the weekend.

I basically got inspired by a friend of mine who is learning how to code and that was going to participate by herself, and I started thinking on what I could do with little time (I had a busy weekend) and very little art (my artistic skills are severly challenged).

So I came up with Star Trucker:

planets! galaxies! relevant title screen image.

 

It’s kind of a slow paced minimalistic resource balancing simulator that you’ll fail at (get those genre defining buzzwords in).

Although it starts very slowly and admitedly potentially boring, it ramps up difficulty quite nicely to a point where everything gets a bit hectic. Succeeding at keeping that hecticness steady until the player eventually drops the ball due to having to juggle a bunch of planets and transports at the same time. There’s no winning condition.

 

here, have a screenshot.

 

I’m quite happy with how it turned out. It’s definitely a higher quality product that I usually manage at game jams and I think that that had all to do with the limitations I knew I had going in (lack of time and lack of art). This forced me to come up with a very basic concept whose mechanics were as simple as they could be. Thanks to that, I managed to get the core game loop working in a handful of hours which allowed me to take some time to draw the planets, pay attention to player feedback and deliver those tiny bits of polish that make a huge difference. There’s some balancing and tweaking to be done, for sure, but the more I worked on it, the more I felt that this was a concept with room to grow.

Inevitably, I started thinking on how this could be developed further and I started outlining a couple of new features that could add depth to the game. I was keen on doing more with this concept and the next couple of days gave me the motivation I needed. I don’t know if people are just being really nice, but everyone’s feedback has been incredibly positive and the ideas that have been thrown at me have been helping me a lot in shaping the direction of where I’m going to try to take the game.

Thanks to everyone that has tried the game and that has been giving me invaluable feedback and ideas. Please keep them coming.

 

The vision for Star Trucker is lining up to be something that is right up my alley and I’m quite keen to see how far the mechanics can be pushed and how much depth can be added to it. I’m confident that I can make something good out of this.

I’ll be updating my blog (half-done games) with progress on the game. If you’re interested, follow it or my twitter feed.

Thank you for reading.

Tags: LD30, post-mortem, Unity 3D

A little late, but you can read my just-published (second) LD Post Mortem here:
http://henklein.com/post/96286164366

I didn’t post it here, because it’s german (my english is far from good enough to express my thoughts)

Beside the post mortem, you can play and rate my entry here:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=12061

I would also love to play your games, if they are playable on a linux machine
Leave a comment!

Tags: post-mortem, threejs, webgl

Hey guys I am  taking requests on making youtube videos of your gameplay for LD30.

If interested please play and rate my game then leave your game name and video request in the comments on my game page..  My game is Holiday Nightmare.  I put up 2 videos on the page that I have made for my game.  Its a pain in the ass so please spend 5 minutes playing and rating my game since it will most likely take me an hour to make each video so it looks nice for everyone.  Anyway let me know guys!  Thanks!!

This post is about developing my game Matters of Perspective for after Ludum Dare. In it, I’ll talk about a quick level editor I made to save tons of time, and how I’m reworking 2D physics for better player experience.

If you haven’t seen my game Matters of Perspective, a game about changing perspective from sidescroll to perspective to explore eerie rooms, please do check it out and let me know what you think!

Even if you don’t rate it, any feedback in the comments is very valuable to me!

Here’s a quick gif showing a change in perspective:

Level Editing

I’ve spent some time figuring out the fastest way to iterate level designs. A fast iteration time means a better level design is approached much sooner. During Ludum Dare, I manually placed a ton of cubes (around 1500-2000!) in all the levels. Iterating those designs was painstakingly slow, and took roughly the last 16-20 hours of my time. After trying a few methods, I’ve settled on writing my own simple editor for level geometry.

With this new level editor, I threw together a large level in about 30 mins, iterating the design extremely easily. Iterating a level’s design includes improving navigability, layout, wall heights, directing the player’s view, hiding an easter egg, etc. Here’s an example of what I threw together:

 

It looks like creating good levels is going to be a heck of a lot easier than I thought 😀

Reworking 2D Physics

As you could expect, the physics in the compo version of the game were hackishly put together to have something playable, rather than something that was necessarily the best experience for the player. 2D sidescrolling was achieved with a SphereCollider, doing various 2D-style checks to make it work like a 2D character controller. The biggest problem with this approach is ensuring the sphere can pass through gaps as desired. At least once during play, players usually find the sphere catching on geometry that should be the foreground or background.

This issue can be fixed by instead using the 2D physics system in Unity3D. However, this brings up another issue. The sidescrolling I want to do is all done on a horizontal plane, with gravity going down along the Z-axis. The sidescrolling built in to Unity3D’s 2D physics is all done on a vertical plane, with gravity going down along the Y-axis. To make matters more tricky, 3D colliders (like ones I could use to collide with a Sphere) don’t collide with 2D colliders at all, ever. In Unity, 2D and 3D are two totally separate physics systems.

To address this issue, I’ve used procedural generation. In the editor, 3D geometry and colliders are created (a rectangular prism with changeable size), then 2D colliders are generated during play. Depending on the player’s height, different 2D colliders are enabled and disabled, which ensures players won’t catch on “invisible” geometry as they run around in sidescroller mode.

Hey! How are you doing! ;D

I’ve finished recompressing & uploading the video, and I thought that maybe someone could enjoy watching it, so here you go ^^

But beware!! There are spoilers in the video! D:

So if you haven’t already played it, you can click here and download it (and rate it as well while you’re at it ^^).

Best wishes!

JJ

Tags: 30Jam, timelapse

Hey guys, since the end of the LD we were working on updates to “Dear Kitty“.
We received a lot of feedbacks (thanks for all of them, btw!) and we worked to improve a little of our gameplay and level design.
Enjoy!

Page Link (HERE!)

Holiday Nightmare Gameplay

Theres The Video if anyone wants to watch some funny shit click on the link not the pic thanks everyone

Here you can see our game for Ludum Dare 30.

Data-Man, our vision of a Pac-Man in a 3D-World.

Hope you enjoy it!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=23927

Hi guys, this is my second Ludum Dare, and my first post here.

This competition is great. No matter how many times I lose motivation during the year, that a Ludum Dare comes and both the theme and the time frame turns me into a game making machine (a humble and basic one yet :P)

I’m surprised too, as I find myself enjoying voting and playing others games just as much as making the game! Specially when people rate my game! And even more if they complain about difficulty! Wait, I shouldn’t enjoy that… but it’s nice when people takes time to find bugs, problems, hidden secrets, and get into the game, enjoying something you created.

I need more of this, so please rate and complain about my game! 😀

 

Gravitous is a space-action-shooting-slingshot-graviting game where you need to destroy all robots (or weirdly constructed sprites, aka programmer art) by firing lasers while graviting from planet to planet. Be careful! Dark space is dangerous, so travelling needs to be done among different planets, with different gravities and colors and things.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=30782

Web version (unity)

Please enjoy it! (and use the map, Luke)

This is a gif that should move

Gource git video – see out development in action. Git for the win!

Saturday

We awoke in our various residences and hit the hangout to begin discussing the theme and tossing ideas about. The original plan was for us all to start at Chez Pillbrain at 1000 on the Saturday (we are on UK time so starting too near the theme announcement screws up the tail end of the weekend). Like all good plans this didn’t survive the heat of battle and it wasn’t until after eleven that Hnjslater, Eskoala, Pillbrain and Tompudding finally started the nittty gritty of working out a theme (and playing with Pillbrain’s various coffee making machines). Lots of ideas were tossed around but we ended up settling on the idea of something with a game mechanic similar to worms but in space with gravity and circular planets to jump between. We’d already decided to use pygame with Tompudding’s wrappers around opengl and felt that it’d be a good idea to get some box2d in there too for realistic physics.

We’d all played with pygame but there was a good amount of lively discussion when, a couple of hours in, it became obvious that tom’s engine put the origin in the bottom left. There were tears and hugs and a fist fight but we eventually forgave him.

At this point, ComaToes had finished having his haircut and requested a pickup from Pillbrain (amongst his other roles, he was chief taxi driver). Hnjslater asked him to get a title screen together. Diner was pizzas and we discovered that ComaToes wasn’t actually working on the same game as everyone else, rather he’d been doing his own game based on ours and using eskoala’s assets. We were pretty pissed.

What we did:

• TomPudding, get the physics in, parallax
• Eskoala: Lots of sprites
• Hnjslater: game elements, got the wrapper working with the debian stock box2d
• Pillbrain: frank discussion with box2d, pygame and python (he was the only one using windows), mouse selection.

What went well:

• Except ComaToes, we’d all practised with python and pygame so that made it quicker.

What went bad:

• We all had pygame working but picking box2d at the last minute screwed up windows support.
• We should’ve done more pair programming at the start.
• Hnjslat sat awkwardly and as a consequence did his hip in and spent the rest of the weekend limping

Sunday

We all arrived at Pillbrains between 10 and 11 (well except ComaToes obviously). Eskoala arrived with a veritable orchestra of instruments. We all had things to get on with so we did. Tompudding carried on with bits of physics, some gameplay and teleporters. Hnjslater started making a level and added in a basic AI and some gameplay mechanics. Pillbrain did some gameplay stuff and the heavy lifting of firing projectiles. Eskoala created the game theme and set to work on the incidental noises. Dinner was Sushi and it was off the hook. We also had our first major spat in the team over a class design. If there had been a door, it would’ve been slammed.

What went right

• We’d all got the hang of git merging and produced a good amount of code
• Tompudding bought his Aeropress, this entertained the group.

What went bad

• We should’ve got Eskoala doing some code, she’s a talented dev and we wasted that.
• We should’ve worked out the gameplay mechanic better, a lot of time was wasted on interactions which didn’t make it to the final game.

Monday

Having stayed up late watching Dr Who, it was an emotional start for some of the team but we eventually all started before midday and got down to making a proper game. There was much to do, more sprites and sound effects, weapons, teleporters and a working AI. Ahead of time, being a group of big personalities, we’d agreed that in the case of disagreement, Tompudding gets the last word. To make it clear that he was ending a conversation, we agreed that he was to speak in a Pirate voice. It was possibly one of the best ideas ever. As tensions rose, this was required a few times.

After dinner, we began testing in earnest and found far too many bugs for such a late stage. Meanwhile, efforts were continuing on getting a working AI. We left both too late really. We called it at midnight and Pillbrain once again ferried everyone home. Like the hero that he is, Tompudding was squashing bugs right until submission hour. In particular, there was a horrible interaction between a __init__ and a global that let to a pseudo-infinite loop.

What went well

• We all wasted too much time enjoying playing the game

What went bad

• We should’ve found more bugs earlier
• We should’ve got the AI down well before Monday afternoon

Hey guys, had some good criticisms for my game and have made adjustments (and will do for the foreseeable), be sure to check it out! Over the next week I will be adding a tutorial level and further down the like there is a much larger series of ideas to come into place!

(I suggest playing the original version first and feel free to leave any suggestions in the comments, THEN try the updated version!)

Check it out here!

Now, I’ve stayed true to my promise of adding further polish to my game. Here it is, version 1.1.

Enjoy!

I’d figured that maybe it was time for a postmortem of my entry,  so, well… Here we go. Be gentle.

 

This was my very second Ludum Dare, and for it I entered a short visual novel named “A New and Beautiful World.”

 

WHAT WENT RIGHT

 

• Writing a “real” story within the 48 hours– This was, more or less, the main objective I strived for through all of this. The personal challenge that I’d set for myself was that, “pretty much everyone in the world can make a better game than you in 48 hours, but can they create a better story?” Essentially, my coding skills are utterly amateurish and embarrassingly immature at best, though not nonexistent. My writing skills, though? Well, pretty much anyone that’s been to school can write good enough prose. That’s not bad, however; it means, I’m one of them. I don’t consider myself that great of a writer or anything; I just liked that it meant I started on even ground than on the gross disadvantage I’d have spawned on were I to go code-heavy with the game.
• Livestreaming  Apart from some stupid messing around with gaming and whatnot, this LD was the first time I’d ever livestreamed anything. I livestreamed the entire of my development of the game from beginning to end, and I feel like it’s what drove me on to the finish line. People, when reviewing the game, sometimes express how impressed they are that I managed to make that much content in such little time; that was absolutely all due to the stream. Not that I had a large audience, or anything like that. I think the very highest amount of viewers I ever had on at any time was 11.  What’s important isn’t that anyone was actually watching me. It’s that Twitch said there was at least someone out there who was. It just drove me on, subconsciously, is what I think. The fact that I was being recorded, and that that recording was available for everyone else in the world to see, just kept itself lodged in my mind. It made me think, “people are watching you do this, man; you ought to not screw up,” and it’s probably the reason why I made the deadline.

WHAT WENT WRONG

• Writing a “real” story within the 48 hours– Actually going forward and shoving all my weight onto story did have its cons. Er, it had a lot of cons. For one thing, I did not get to make as many branching paths or choices or endings that I’d wanted to. I wouldn’t have been able to keep up the quality throughout all of them, or I just wouldn’t have had the time or energy to pull it off, due to how taxing writing the story was even completely linearly. Furthermore, focusing so much blood and sweat on the writing meant I just didn’t have time to produce any art or music at all; which is my greatest regret with the game.
• Not a game– Essentially, then, I just feel like I failed to make this project an actual game, due to the reasons described above. I spent too, too, too much time on writing a story. I forgot that, in the grand scheme of things, what I wanted to make was a visual novel, not a short story. My first fault was not having enough paths. Having only one choice in the entire plot doesn’t even constitute it as a VN, let alone a game. That’s what I admit; that was my failure, was my undoing. I just don’t think “A New and Beautiful World” was a real game. And that’s the single most important thing that any Ludum Dare entry should be.

 

POST-COMPO

 

I’ve completed a post-compo release of my game, which also includes an Android version that you can side load onto your mobile device!  Things added include music, drawn backgrounds, credits, spelling and grammar corrections, and more. The downloads are available on my personal site, right here. Unless you have a certain affinity for total silence and black backgrounds in your visual novels, I’d probably play it over the compo version.

I’m preparing the post-compo version with responsive controls, 2 players modes and levels + polish !

The current version has some bugs with controls, heroes not jumping when they should, etc…

Here is the link to the compo version : here

Can you make them be together again ?

 

Hey, I just uploaded a post-jam version of our LD game, Shattered. We’ve fixed some bugs and added support for the 360 controller.

Check it out here, and feel free to leave suggestions for further improvements. Have fun!

 

 

Yes! After a week in Greece (very nice place, thanks for asking) with no computer <GASP!>, I can finally start rating entries.

Ouch. I’d forgotten how buggy my game was. So, after spraying my game with some insecticide, I’ve re-uploaded, and encourage you to check it out!

Yes… Encourage… No, not force, I would never do that… No, I wouldn’t dream of using the Terminator up there to “encourage” you to vote… Would I?

2

This entry was posted on Monday, September 1st, 2014 at 5:56 am and is filed under LD #30. 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.

OVERALL
1.NEXUS (brokenbeach) >> 41470 [Compo]
2.Chipset-0 (deepnight) >> 2982 [Compo]
3.Crystal Keeper (3CGames) >> 40729 [Jam]
4.One Ship Two Ship Redshift Blueshift (01010111) >> 11474 [Compo]
5.The Lion’s Song (LeafThief) >> 3923 [Jam]
6.Mor (Ditto) >> 14669 [Compo]
7.Heart Star (AdventureIslands) >> 11391 [Compo]
8.Close Your Eyes (nonetheless) >> 36254 [Compo]
9.Notes from a Mad Mage (Razoric) >> 27935 [Jam]
10.Orange (JaJ) >> 5496 [Compo]

GRAPHICS/SOUND
1.Schrodinghost (Carduus) >> 7279 [Jam]
2.Starpiercer (Schrodinger Games) >> 39357 [Jam]
3.Uninhabitable (Slikker) >> 38414 [Jam]
4.Sinister (Joe Williamson) >> 28182 [Compo]
5.Hello Worlds (dustyroom) >> 33150 [Jam]
6.Waterfly Octus (gillenew) >> 40452 [Compo]
7.Courier (Conk) >> 40797 [Compo]

INNOVATION
1.Matters of Perspective (nesis) >> 2726 [Compo]
2.Get Connected (sephyka) >> 23770 [Jam]
3.Elemental (Aru Nyan) >> 1645 [Compo]
4.Warmageddon (schizokoa) >> 31786 [Jam]
5.This Little Piggy… (InfectionTeam) >> 37445 [Jam]

I will update the list later, after adding up new entries that I found out.

Hi everyone, I just would like to make a surprise here,

Great games you’ve made there ! (For those I’ve tested)

I’m working on a post jam version of the game. Trying to finish the polishing.

I’ve made new characters, more unique, more “world”

and here:

Souzou Cliff is a story about a guy named “Edan” who one day got lost and happen to find himself exploring another world. On his way to find out where he is, he met a girl named “Estelle”, a native to that world. The game is all about telling a story of boy meets girl, inocent feelings, promises and getting back together after a few years have passed.

The game features a refreshing storyline, lovable characters, wonderfully crafted pixel art world. With platforming as its base gameplay put together with storyline elements you are sure to relate to and love. Dual platforming with split screen portraying two different worlds at once. Move two characters with a single controller and help Edan and Estelle meet once again!

Check out the game here!

What went right:
– Finish a beatable game
– Deliver the game story
– Make a beautiful pixel world
– BGMs that blends with the game

What went wrong:
– We ran out of time testing and debugging the game
– There are still some collision bugs

Aftermath:
This is the best Ludum dare experience for me yet, I am well prepared than the past jams and we have a team. The game also receives nice publicity.

Next Ludum Dare:
– We will spare more time for testing and debugging.
– We will invite more game dev peeps into our team
– Need more preparations, specifically on the Audio part.

Check out the game here!

Hey everyone! We are the Button Masher Bros!

It might be labor day but that won’t stop us! Today we present Ludum Dare to Believe! S:2 Ep. 3!

With so many submissions, there was absolutely no way we could play them all.

Special thanks to our friends at Reddit, twitter, and youtube who all stepped up to give us suggestions – you guys are the BEST!

If you like the games you see, be sure to check them out of Ludumdare.com and let the developers know what you think!

**Today we will be highlighting**:

Title: Sinester
Category: Compo Entry (48 hr)
Creator: Joe Williamson

Title: 1*5
Category: Compo Entry (48 hr)
Creator: Eyeofbri

Title: Our Worlds
Category: Jam Entry
Creator: Davisan

Finally, we’d love to hear what you think!
You can comment on the episode linked above, comment in this thread, or tweet us at:

@ButtonMasherBro – Show

@MathBlasterRitz – Chris

or @jwowBMB – Josh.

Thanks Everyone and HAPPY LUDUM DARE!

 

I made a video of The Lion’s Song getting made.

Watch me start with graphics, tumbling over my lack of writng experience/skill. Switching back to graphics, because it’s something I’m more comfortable with. Missing the compo deadline. Almost giving up. Deciding not to give up and finishing it as a jam game. 

Maybe it’s interesting to watch? I don’t know. I love to see games getting made and thought I’d share. Because why not?

I’ve also decided to make a post-compo version of the game that’ll add story and dialog, graphics and a nice satisfying ending. I’ll keep you up to date. Until then maybe you could check out and rate The Lion’s Song? Thanks ;D

Saturday morning, August 23, 2014. I arrive hungover at the Rhodesfield station to be picked up by Kevin who’s also hungover to design and code up a game in a weekend for Ludum Dare. We’re already 5 hours into LD with no idea what we we’d make.

The theme for the weekend, “Connected Worlds”. Both of us thinking “what an obscure theme”. I, like 90% of the people participating jump straight to thinking about planets. I quickly throw that idea in the toilet to try and come up with a fresh idea that won’t feel common.

After throwing around some ideas we had a basic idea that we’d flesh out as we went along. The idea was that we’d make a 2 player co op game with each player in a different world interacting with each other to achieve a common objective.

I spent most of my time in Inkscape and Gimp focussing on the art and Kevin wrote the game code. We used the Unity 4.6 Beta to play around with the new UI system which was fun but annoying because we were alone in the dark with very little resources to shed light on a few things.

After several arguments, bugs, and cups of coffee we came out with A Hat’s Trick a 2 player (easily playable by one) puzzle platformer.

– Cukia

Hey guys!

My first ludum dare! So please play, rate and leave a comment!

 

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=38779

It was my second ludum dare, but my first alone.

I live in France, so the beginning of the competition was at 3 am. I woke up, see the theme and returned to sleep.

The morning (I woke up early) I had a super idea, perfect fit to the theme, make a space paperboy where papers were weapons too! (to see what is paperboy ) (amstrad version because I had an amstrad). After two hours, I had a revelation: I don’t know make cool space ship. I returned to bed.

After that I was sad. I decided to make a point n click and made some sketch. But new problem: I don’t know write in english (a friend was agree to correct some text, but a point n’ click is a lot of text…). Sad again.

But there was a sketch I liked: an inspector and a lot of suspects aligned (as in the poster of Usual suspects). And it was, finally, the good start…

What went right:

- the idea: it isn’t perfect, but I played with some friends and always had fun.

- good warm up: I use two things I had never used. phaser (because gre was used it) and sunVox (because jsmars was used it). I only had 3 days to warm up, but I don’t had problems with it.

- I had time: I finish the game early and take time to add some suspects. No stresse. Cool.

- animations: I have a lot of fun with animations: try to make different ways of walking was fun. And suspects are really differents.

- the music: it isn’t good, but it was my first try so I’m just happy to have try.

- it’s a two players game: I like two players game.

What went wrong:

- the theme: Connecting worlds made me think about the mafia: different people from differents “worlds” (I don’t know if it works in english, in french we can call social class “world”) but secretly connected. After that I stopped worrying about it. Finally, it wasn’t a good idea…

- focus problem: I try to correct a difficulty of the game (the focus of the inspector was changing too fast), and I made it more difficult (now it’s more hard to change it).

- rules: I don’t know write rules. The game is simple why my rule explanations are so long?

- settings menu: I had time, but I prefered make more characters than polish my game. So the settings menu is bad (nobody understood that we can choose the number of suspects…)

- it’s a two players game: it’s hard to have a friend near to you when you play at ludum dare games (and I already make the mistake in my previous LD with the copain team); I made an AI so you can play the inspector. But this isn’t the same (and the better (most stressful) is to play the Godfather)…

If I made a post-compo it will be:

- with more suspects!

- with a complice (simple idea to make the game harder for the inspector: a second character lies, but is idiot: he just say the opposite of what he should say)

- with a better focus system.

- with a better menu.

- with asking someone a good music.

play Everybody knows where the Godfather is.

(and sorry for the bad english…)

I made a video of my game: Youtube

It’s a Stargate fangame heavily inspired/ripping off X-Com: Enemy Unknown 😀
Instead of investigating crash sites, fighting aliens and stealing their tech to research, you go through the Space Gate, fight Goa’uld and Jafa, steal their tech to research… you run a Space Gate base, managing staff, resources, weapons, then dial up a planet on the Space Gate, go through and fight some aliens in a turn based tactical combat game 😀

A lot of things were cut, I intended the various alien metals to actually act as a resource (ie: you need $5k + 2 Naquadah to make a staff weapon) but I didn’t have time to implement that, so you just need to research the staff weapon + naquadah, then you can buy staff weapons just with your money. The ‘Staff’ units don’t do anything, they were going to maintain the base, run the cafeteria etc. but now they just consume your funds 😛 I wanted to be able to train more than one unit at a time, and pick what exactly they are training in (earth weapons/goa’uld weapons/generic training/etc), I wanted to have some random invasions where if the goa’uld reach the surface elevator you lose (there are invasions currently, but they only happen if you go through the gate and get a random event, and it doesn’t have that lose condition), I wanted to have a way of storing which planets you have visited so that each planet’s dial code would be the seed to generate that planet – which I did implement, but as I had no way of storing which ones you had visited, you could just find a resource-heavy planet and spam farm it – so I just made the planet dial random seeds. Mostly, I wanted way more variation in what kind of planets you visit, and the things you encounter there. Right now, all you can encounter are:

Fight goa’uld and jaffa

Find ancient ruins + resources

Find and recruit a rebel Jaffa

Space Gate Command gets invaded

I wanted to have villages that would trade resources, villages that ask for your help in defending from an incoming attack, more variety in aliens (Unas etc), all that kind of stuff. And the level generation is kind of meh right now, very wide open spaces and not a whole lot of variety. All could have been better, but time limits 😛
Also I guess the medkit/shield/hand device/cloak could be implemented a lot better. Ideally they would give you extra commands you could perform instead of just attacking, but given the time restraints I had to just make them function automatically, which isn’t so great.
(edit: also obviously, better graphics/sounds/music would have been good, but I knew from the start I wouldn’t get to those…)

You can play my entry here: Link

Howdy everyone!

A quick post to invite you to play and rate my game, Delta Space Line, a trading game.

Your goal is to gather 10,000 credits in a minimal number of travels.

To do so, you control a ship with 6 slots (right sidebar) that you can fill with merchandizes and passengers.

Hovering a planet shows you the exchange rate of the 4 types of merchandize (food, metal, weapon, crystal). It should help you making money by buying goods at a cheap price (the current planet market is shown in the left sidebar), then selling them at a better price on planets where the demand is higher.

In addition to goods trading, carrying passengers can help you optimize your moves by filling the empty cargo slots. Passengers pay their journey and take off your ship as soon as they reach their destination.

Counting on you guys for feedback, even negative…

I hope you’ll enjoy!

Tags: cargo, delta spaceline, goods, LD30, merchandizes, passengers, planets, space, trading

Hi guys. I’m very happy with the result of my first ludum dare participation. I start to make games this year, and i like to always start my games from scratch to learn more, and i start my ludum dare game from scratch as well ( i made a base code some hours before compo start, anyway i had to change a lot of things in my tile-map render).

I got the idea to the game faster than i thought, so i think was a really good theme. My idea was connected worlds where you can travel between and solve puzzles to reach somewhere, so you can travel to a different world when reach this place. In my mind the worlds are connected like this:

I spent some good time on level design, but have some mistakes where the player could get stuck. Make a complex puzzle game in 48h it’s not easy (make a game in 48h isn’t easy).

Post-compo Version

In the post-compo version i made some performance improvements, i tried to make the player’s movement better, added a nice transition when switch the map, made a new music and i drew a character.

I drew this yesterday:

I really wanted to make more maps and add more features, but now i’m going back to the development of my js13k game. Maybe someday i’ll make a big game with this idea.

Thanks to everyone that gave a feedback about the game, it was really cool! I Hope  i can see you in the next ludum dare! 😀

(my twitter)

First I want to say “thank you” to artist Alex. All arwork was done by him and this is the best part of game.

You can touch the game via web version (ludum page: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=31999)

What went right

 – Simple concept. We had time to think and do what is truly important to the concept itself. “Occam’s Razor” works everywhere.
– Presence. We didn’t  want to do focus on the player itself (“or magic glob”). The background and levels should exist by their selves. This has reduced the technical work and fit everything in one scene, even the initial screen is a small element of the gameplay. As well as the final screen. (No triggers , no switching elements and so on.)

– Sound transition effect, as were mentioned above. Enviorenmet exist undependatly from the player. Imagine building. On each floor are discoteques and you shifting between them. I wanted to add some effect like this.

-Verlet trails. Globe has a trail elements, which computed by verlet algorithm. It gives viscosity to the enviorenment. Liquid background.
What went right or maybe not

-Game mechanic. Main idea was that every touch creates wave that has influence on the globe. But phyisically it behaves like slow explosion. Pushing force is inversily to the distance squared between globe and wave center. We’v got a lot of feedbacks that saying mechanic is not obvious.
-Hardcore. Our decision was create maybe not demo, but little acomplished game, and high difficulty was one of  the tools, which could help… But very powerfull gravity elements could add random omponents to gameplay and sometimes frustrate the player.
– Music. Honestly saying, music was added at the last moment. We have a really small amount of time and it was like (“Check this out, I think it should be first level” or “I think second level looks like dwar fortress (Thank you mister Edvard Grieg).”)).

Next steps
Revisit all components of the game. Determine target platforms (currently tablets are the main target platforms). And continue to work on it (This is the most important ).

Thank you for reading this article,
Please leave your opinions and feedbacks. We appreciate it very much!

Greetings lords, lordettes, and ladies.

We provide thy highnesses our enhanced version of Schrödinghost, the “Quantic Bawwwls MK II version”.

Added reworked ghost mode effects ( /_\  Caution may cause slime projections thru the screen) , animations, cut scenes, and few sounds.

 

CLIC HERE TO HAVE SOME LOVE AND PLAY

 

Schrödinghöst Entry Page

 

Theatrical spotlight with powerful monologs:

 

 

Dat ghost mode light effect of Doom: Scary !

 

 

In this one you can clearly see the addition of sound effects:

 

Game is phat and takes a little time to load, allowing you to answer your mom on Facebook, Twitt about politics, or continue your intense internet researches about special kind of movies (and I mean there Japanese Samuraï Action Pr0n)

Hope you’ll enjoy doing, or redoing our game and havin’ a super funk time.

 

And as today quote: “Live for nothing, or die for something”

John Rambo.

For our 8th straight entry in Ludum Dare, we created The Asteroids I Call Home.

“Using your super powered cat spacesuit, bash through those that threaten your home.
Mining ships have invading your peaceful asteroid sanctuary. Defend your home the only way you know how: violently bashing through spaceships.
Fly at highspeeds with the help of your jet pack and the gravitational pull of nearby asteroids.
Stop the minors by breaking their chains, ships and defense droids. ”

The Asteroids I Call Home

You can play our entry here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=12839

What went wrong:
– Rigging problems
Since this was the first time our artist was doing 3D work, we had a lot of trouble
at first trying to rig our 3D model, due to automatic weight painting.

– Unity animation problems
As we were unsure of our animation pipeline, we had some difficulties
with getting our animations into unity. Although we worked it all out,
it definitely took up more of our time than we would have liked.

– Lost day for the artist
Our artist still had work on the Monday of the jam, which lost
us a day of polish and touch ups we would have liked.

 
What went right:
– Picked a game idea and finished planning out the details quickly
After just a short brainstorming session, we had an idea we both liked,
and quickly made a few nice pages of planning, so we could focus later on
creating the game, and not having to stop constantly to work out details.

– Doing 3D
Although rigging was stupid, and we had trouble with animations in unity for a little while,
we are quite happy with our results of making a 3D game in just 72 hours.

– Completed all the planned features
Although it took a ton of work, we were really happy that we managed to get evertyhing
into the game that we wanted, including timed mode

– Our best entry yet
We really feel like this was our best entry yet. It had more polish than many of our
other entries, and definitely felt a lot smoother and controlled better than
most of our prior work.

 

Our 256x speed timelapse can be viewed here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-F0_s6mz3Bs

64x speed here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJrYeUrR9Yg

We are having a blast playing the other entries for Ludum Dare 30, and as always can’t
wait for the next competition. Good luck in the voting everyone.

 

The Asteroids I Call Home death

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=12839

Guess what? If you rush things, you do them wrong.

Who’d have thought, right?

It turns out, that, although I have been uploading bug fixes, I kept forgetting to change the link to the download on the game page, so everyone has been playing the old, bad version. I know, it’s terrible. It should be fixed now, hopefully.

Until the next time I make another dumb mistake, you should be OK to play it this time.

HAVE FUN!!!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=40978

Hello, In addition to creating Games, I also record YouTube Videos. I started a new series this week for Ludum Dare 30 Games, it will run until September 15th. Each week I will have videos for at least five games.  The release Schedule is Mondays at 3pm PST.

 

Youtube Playlist

 

 

Week 1:

Introduction

Connected we Run by Sandcrawler

Alter Axis by sylarisbest

Shadows by apiotrw

They Were Just Pixels by Ohems

Taxi Space by DrCicero

 

Tags: Videos

After giving myself a week to reflect, I’ll say my piece on how my second Ludum Dare went.

I keep a full text log when doing Ludum Dare, and I may publish the entire thing if there’s interest or I feel like it. For now, here are some highlights:

Day 1 – 6:46 PM
    Test build worked the first time. I’m not sure if that’s a good omen.

Day 1 – 10:50 PM
    So evidently entire matches are getting decided by minute differences in ship position. That’s what I have to assume because I’m getting inconsistent results and nothing else is random.

Day 2 – 11:20 AM
    I could never have had this many ships on screen in vanilla Flash.

Day 2 – 1:02 PM
    This game is still missing any kind of player interaction whatsoever.

Day 2 – 4:47 PM
    Got four power buttons working, but since I only implemented the explosion power, they all linked to that. Proceeded to spend 5 minutes trying to blow up everything with all four copies of the explosion power. Failed.

Day 2 – 9:19 PM
    Managed to unravel my game mechanics and successfully allow the player to exit a level. That took more effort than I wanted it to and less than I expected.

Day 3 – 9:37 AM
    Sound is done.
Day 3 – 9:44 AM
    …unless I decide to change the victory noise to something that’s not an ear-piercing whistle.

Though The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly is a good movie, I think my experience categories during this LD are better described with a different set: What Went Right, What Went Wrong, and What Was Facepalm-Worthy.

What Went Right

-Schedule Once again, I was lucky enough to have a fully open weekend for Ludum Dare. I also like my timezone, as I kind of get three days to work with. Ludum Dare started at 6 PM for me, giving me a fairly relaxed first day where I could just get my basic concept down. Then I had a full day in the middle to really flesh things out, and the last day for polish. At no point during this structure is there any incentive for me to lose sleep, because if I stayed up too late it would just hurt my next day. As things worked out, I was able to get the basic concept down in the first hour, get a working demo by the end of Day 1, get all combat mechanics and powers plus music, graphics, and a lot of menu stuff done Day 2, and have plenty of time the next day for polish, level design, sound design, and finishing the menus. At no point did I find myself wishing for the extra 24 hours I would have gained doing the Jam. In fact, I was extremely relaxed for the last 6 hours, figuring that I had plenty of time to do whatever was needed.

-Code I love Starling now more than I ever did before this project. So much stuff that was convoluted in regular as3, such as angles, object disposal, and event handling was made much cleaner. Texture Atlases are a really convenient way to manage graphics once you’re used to them, and the performance boost is amazing. I was also blessed with a relatively bug-free game – there were a few bugs, but nothing really show-stopping and very rarely anything that took more than 5-10 minutes to resolve.

-Graphics I should focus some time on refining and improving my style, but I think I might be on to something with simple, clean vector graphics. They work really well for Ludum Dare because I can get something decent looking without having to spend too much time. It’s not the most amazing aesthetic, but it works.

-Concept The first thing I do when the theme is announced is open up a text file and start brainstorming (I think better with a computer than with pencil and paper.) I considered doing a game where you played two games simultaneously, but they interacted in a fundamental way, such as if enemies in one world could only be defeated by attacks from the other. My second idea was a more plot-oriented one, where you played in a world being invaded by demons, and to stop them you needed to go through the portals and break the machinery in the demon world. I rejected the first because I wasn’t really inspired and the second because I didn’t think I could do it justice. The idea I settled on, as written in my log, was this:

Alternatively, I could do something totally different and try to find a non-standard definition. Wikitionary gets me this:

(usually with “well-“): Having favorable rapport with a powerful entity.

    The idea that comes from this is a game where planets are connected by warp lanes, and send ships down those lanes
to try to capture other planets. Pretty standard stuff, the trick would be that the player doesn’t control any of this. Instead, they are a god that is aiding a particular civilization. This would mostly involve raining divine wrath on your enemies.

I think this one worked pretty well.

What Went Wrong

-Audio I should probably have focused more on this. My composed-in-an-hour Ludum Dare music has gotten mostly negative feedback, and I’m not exactly a master of BFXR. I’m supposing that SFXR and similar are more suited to more ‘retro’ games and that perhaps I should look into other options. Even if the audio’s not to everyone’s taste, I had time to put in mute buttons, so it shouldn’t interfere with the game too much.

-Submission Hour First of all I’d like to point out that I can’t seem to find this mechanic anywhere in the Ludum Dare rules. I legitimately did not know about it my first LD, and found myself scrambling to get the thing uploaded before the main compo deadline. Not having my own website or a good plan, I eventually uploaded to a Google Site and hoped it would work. I hoped this time would be different. My final submission time of 10 minutes before Submission Hour ended says otherwise. I tried the same Google Site, and I am still using it for the download and source download, but after half and hour of failing to pass wmode=’direct’ into the page embedcode so the game would actually show up, I concluded that the effort was going to be fruitless. With half an hour remaining and my stress-o-meter near the point of exploding, I ended up registering for itch.io and putting the game there. Success, but after much more difficulty than I would have liked.

What Was Facepalm-Worthy

-mimeType is case-sensitive. And that’s why my XML import took 20 minutes longer to get working than it should have.

-AS3 Vectors are a feature I should have known about a year ago. I’d been coding in a language for over a year without knowing I could do the rough equivalent of strongly-typed arrays.

-LD29 Since my last LD was LD28, I forgot that I’d skipped one and labelled all my files, project folder, and even the log with “LD29” instead of “LD30.” Took me half the compo before I noticed.

-BFXR I thought I’d somehow lost my copy, couldn’t find it anywhere, and was midway through downloading a new copy when I noticed the desktop icon for it.

Conclusion

Overall, I’d consider this a successful LD from a production standpoint, and I’ve been getting mostly positive feedback – certainly an improvement from last year when most people were complaining about having trouble leading shots (to be fair, it was too hard.) I’d like to thank the organizers for giving me and so many others this opportunity, the makers of all the great games I’ve played so far, and everyone who’s given me feedback so far. You guys rock!

Iter Bellum Deus is available here.

 

Pily is a kid who has to go for the bread. In the way he can die because to go for the bread has his dangerous, for example spikes or meteors. , if he dies he go to the gray died world (he becomes phantom), the world change and in 3 seconds he resurrect but if he dies in the died world you lose the game.

 

Play it here : http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=17946

 

FIRST DAY: FRIDAY

The theme was given at 3 am zzzzzzz. I just thought to watch the theme and going to sleep maybe i can get an idea sleeping :P. I saw the theme and i went to sleep, in the morning i was thinking idea until zzzzzz so when i woke up , i got a new idea!

 

SECOND DAY: SATURDAY

The idea was a game of a character in 2 worlds (lived and dead) both worlds (they are similar but different) and they are connected in x and y positions for the character so the map design was not easy.

 

I started with rectangle map papers  for doing the map, that was great!, I got 2 maps that it looked match more or less and different..

 

Next, to know is thhe size of the tiles. So first I decided to do the character size.

I took a paper and I started to scratch. This was a good thing . Because it’s about death, I remembered the grim funny “billy and mandy” cartoon so I decided to do a character with Billy style :D, I called Pilly who loves the bread as much as i do :P, yeah, bread power!!.

 

I decided to use Multimedia Fusion 2 (MMF2) in this ld because i bought in a humble bundle and i wanted to learn it. The problem i didn’t know how to use it yet :S, so i watched several tutorials for the basic

And i got some problems to get used to MMF2 and implement different features( not normal features) like save position between transactions in worlds and movement controls, collisions stuffs and I couldn’t export to web :(. So next time I will take some days before to know what can i do with the tools.

Anyway I finished the main character and the basic mechanic :D.

 

SUNDAY

Designning more maps and the mechanics, this day was good, some problem doing the music but i got something funny 😀 haha that match with the game character and the bread.

I got problem with the Artificial intelligence stuffs for meteors with MMF2 and it was given me strange bugs, maybe because the pixel levels..

Anyway i got to finish and I was laughing a lot times when i played, something that few games get on me.

 

Finally, if someone know something that i can improve and they can give me advices I would appreciate it. Thanks! I hope that you like this post-mortem orr how-to .. thing not sure what I wrote yet 😛 but I looked cool in this way (day per day).

My

Harmony

Post-Mortem & Story

Hello folks,

I know this might be a bit late but I’ve had a busy week, so here goes anyway. This post is divided into three parts (sandwiched with unashamed self-promotion at either end). The first tells the story of the event and what I went through creating it. It’s quite detailed, so if you’re not interested in that bit please jump ahead to the post-mortem and feedback sections, in which I critique my work and reflect on feedback from you guys so far.

The Game

For Ludum Dare 30: Connected Worlds, I created a game called Harmony, one of the many space-themed entries that made it into the gallery for the event. The game revolves creating an equilibrium in military (often accidentally spelt with two ‘L’s throughout the game, forgive my sins) and economic powers between the inhabitants of six planets so that they can live together peacefully. This is achieved by the player carefully selecting the geographic properties of the planets each of the six races start on and using various powers throughout the game to influence the rate of growth of the civilisations.

The game essentially takes place over three phases: the setup phase, in which the player creates the planets and settles the races;  the pre-space phase, in which the player is given time to balance each of the races strengths pre-emptively; and the final space phase, in which planets start  to interact with each other, the results of which can be catastrophic should the player have failed to setup and balance in the earlier points in the game.

You can read the story (with pictures!), post-mortem and feedback after the jump.

My First Event – A blow-by-blow of my LD30

Before the Event

Around the start of August, I felt confident I had finally built up the necessary skills (and self confidence) to participate in my first Ludum Dare. Not only would this be my first ever LD, but the first time I’d ever tried to create a game from scratch, as opposed to following a  tutorial or working from the results thereof. I was looking forward to the challenge and spent time almost every day floating on the LD blog, picking up whatever precious nuggets of information the kind community were willing to offer via their own blog posts

In advance of the event, I had a good idea of what I was going to do: I was going to work with Unity and, in order to keep things simple, I was going to build a platformer. So, in the few weeks before the event, I spent plenty of time familiarising myself with the new Unity2D system and working with the (highly recommended) Pyxel Edit. In the week running up to the start of the event, although I didn’t create anything for the warmup (which I will try to do next time) I was tentatively confident in my skills both programming-wise and with my chosen software.

That all said, I can’t help but feel I may have left it a bit last minute, which will be discussed later.

 

The Theme Announcement

Being bang on GMT+0, the event would start at 2am. This meant I was largely torn between going to bed before the announcement and see what my not-a-morning-person self could come up with after a decent night’s sleep or to stay up until 2am, get the theme, jot down a few ideas and then turn in. I unintentionally opted for the latter, having spent some time agonising over the decision between youtube videos, I suddenly realised it was 1am, what could 1 hour more hurt?

So, I sat around and at 2am, lo, the theme was announced: Connected Worlds.

My immediate reaction was that it was not a particularly hard theme and it naturally leant itself to flow networks etc. I ummed and erred for ten minutes of so while lurking in the LD30 irc (the website was practically down at this stage) and came up with two ideas before turning in:

1. A parallel world platformer, in which the player could freely move between 3 parallel worlds. The main idea was that switching between parallel worlds would modify the behaviour of mobs and terrain hazards, making them more or less hazardous depending on which parallel space was occupied. The focus would then be on the player choosing the appropriate parallel world for any given section to make advancing easier for themselves.
2. A cyberpunk-esque detective game. Inspired by a combination of the Matrix and Uplink, the game would focus around the player stopping cyber criminals by digging up incriminating evidence and relocating their physical self via the internet (teleporters!) to allow them to approach targets from a different angle, potentially allowing them to bypass security measures.

With both ideas jotted down I turned in for the night…

 

The Event: Saturday

I got up around 9:30 ish the following morning full of excitement and eagerness to get started. However, over a rushed breakfast of cereal, I kept turning both ideas over in my head and couldn’t help but notice some major flaws in the two ideas I’d come up with.

• The first idea was, ultimately, predictable; chances are, hundreds of other people were going to come up with near identical ideas to mine and I was determined to create something unique that stood out (or at least, didn’t get lost in the mob of games that’d been thrown together from the first idea).
• The second idea was a lot more exciting, however it’s scale was far too large, what I wanted to create and the time I had didn’t see eye-to-eye. It’s definitely an idea I’ll be revisiting but, due to its scale, not something viable for LD.

I resolved that if I couldn’t come up with something better by the time I’d finished breakfast I’d roll with the first idea. By the time I’d finished chewing thoughtfully on Cheerios I had it. The idea for Harmony came strolling into my mind more or less fully formed: a game in which you balance the powers of various interacting peoples in order to achieve balance. I turned the idea over in my head multiple times, determined to find fault and could only come up with one…

It wasn’t a platformer game. It wasn’t the exact genre of game I’d been preparing for all this week.

My final LD30 brainstorm

 

However, I felt far more passionate about this idea than either of my others. So I decided to throw caution to the wind and run with it. Grabbing a fistful of paper and some pens I went back up to my room and jotted down the various mechanics of the game before cracking on with the art. I didn’t want to jump straight into programming mechanics as I wanted to give my mind a while to go through the various design decisions and pick them apart where necessary.

The canvas from Pyxel Edit of the final planet tiles and civilisation rings

As you can see from the above, I initially designed the planets to appear differently depending on the type chosen. Also, I would like to have done more for each planet type, however, time marches on. So, turning back to my paper, I worked out remaining issues for the components I’d be tackling today got on with the unity project and started programming.

Firstly, I started with allowing the player to be able to spawn in planets and settle races on them which suddenly meant I had to look into using the libraries for the mouse as well as creating GUI buttons. This was something I’d not anticipated during preparation earlier in the week, as my original plan had been to create a platformer that didn’t require mouse input. I’d really been thrown for a loop by this and it threw me right of course. My progress became agonisingly slow as it felt like I had to consult the unity documentation every 30 seconds to find out how to do something I felt I already should know how to do.

By the time I’d got what should’ve been very simple functionality implemented, it was approaching 4pm. This was possibly the lowest point in the weekend: over 25% of the time had gone already and all I had to show for it was a clicky button thing. Not good.

The race icons…

and planet icons from the ‘clicky button thing’

I took 20 or so minutes off to try and bleed off some of the frustration before re-engaging with the project. By the end of the day, I at least wanted the planets to be doing the basic job of growing their economy, military and science relative to the type of race and planet combined together. My recollection of the evening becomes somewhat patchy after this as I started programming again, my passion in the game rekindled by the fact that I was now working with the back-end data structure (something I was far more comfortable with).

As day turned to night I completed my target. I was now able to create a planet, settle a population on it and watch the numbers rocket upward thanks to larger multipliers I’d put in for testing purposes.

However, I quickly realised that I’d been reading the numbers out of the unity object inspector the entire time and my end users would have no way of doing that. For all intents and purposes, they’d just see spinning blobs and that would be it. I was very burnt out at this stage as I had now spent nearly 10 hours sat in front of my computer, elbows deep in C# and pixel graphics. I resolved to resolve the problem….after the much anticipated Doctor Who season opening.

One dinosaur and a cafe full of robots later, it was back to the coding and I once again met my goal.

Then promptly went to bed exhausted.

 

The Event: Sunday

I’d overslept.

Not ‘just 5 more minutes’ or ‘an extra half-hour beauty sleep’.

I’d overslept by three whole hours.

Three whole hours, and I still had to turn what was still essentially a clicky button thing (now with climbing numbers) into a game.

So, today’s objectives in more limited time than I’d intended were:

• Designing, programming and creating icons for the player powers.
• Making the planets interact to create the ‘connected’ bit of the Connected Worlds theme, including win condition checking.
• Final polish, including all sound, the main menu and game over screens

I allotted 4, 5 and 6 hours for each respectively and am pretty pleased to say I hit all of the deadlines more or less square on. In terms of telling you anything there’s not much to say, as Sunday was definitely a lot less of a bumpy ride compared to Saturday.

My ‘planning desk’ (read: camping table) with all the ideas creation going on. I made extensive use of paper when I was planning or unsure about something, right up to when I finished player powers.

 

It got a bit stressful toward the end, making sure the game ran well in the web client and with the 2pm deadline rapidly approaching. I ran into a few problems:

• So far, the mouse cursor had been changing in Unity without any bother to reflect the currently selected tool. However, the web player just showed lots of grey. It turned out, I needed a separate asset marked as a cursor (not a sprite). This ate into a lot of my polish time as I had to duplicate all my icon assets and rework a few areas of the code.
• At some point, I’d created a bug where the game will create several (as opposed to one) coroutine for each planetary relationship, resulting in hundreds of ships being spawned. The problem was one of those that seemed to fix itself for no apparent reason. It still sometimes happens in the final release after game over has occurred and I still don’t know what’s causing it.
• The game would sometimes appear to be ‘frozen’ when first loaded in browser (I only assume it was loading assets through). I need to look into this in future, as nothing is more off putting than a game that has seemingly locked up the second you load it.

I submitted my final piece at 1:30 am, with half an hour to go.

Then I realised there was still a submission hour…oh well.

I wound down the evening, basking in the glow of my own success of having completed my first Ludum Dare and checking out one or two entries by other people. It was lots of fun seeing what others had done with the theme.

So, that’s the story of how I made Harmony. The first in hopefully many games created by me.

The Harmony wall of text …err, I mean, Main Menu

End

 

Post-Mortem

Having been well aware of the flaws of my game even during the development process, I’m going to take a critical look at my game. Overall, however I am extremely pleased that I was able to create a functioning game and submit it within the deadline.

Good

• The mechanics feel and respond very well. This being a simulator type game, where mechanics are important, I’m proud to say these are probably the best thing about the game.
• The plan I came up with wasn’t too complicated as to give me too much to do in the time, nor was it too simple as to let me finish too early.
• Despite the hiccup on Sunday morning, I was able to keep time very well
• I’m pleased with how all the software I’d used worked with me. The ability to bring everything together in Unity was wonderfully seamless. I know many people aren’t a fan of unity games due to them needing the web client but it’s such a joy to develop with I think I’m going to keep using it for a while.
• The code itself was largely comfortable to work with. At no point during development did I feel my ability to implement something was hampered by what I’d written earlier.

Bad

• Getting snared up in unfamiliar libraries on Saturday. I lost a lot of time getting the project off the ground due to being unfamiliar with the mouse handling classes.
• Code structure. While it was largely good, there were areas of repeated code that I could probably compress further if I took a good long hard look at the overreaching flow. Similarly, an enum I’d originally intended for use in just identifying GUI buttons ended up being used virtually everywhere, however, a bit of renaming and maybe a touch refactoring would largely resolve this
• No music
• Limited graphics, I would’ve liked to add particle effects on ships moving/arriving and added other graphics as races moved toward space-faring capability.
• The planets: a strong lack of artistic theme hear meant planets weren’t as distinctive as I’d have liked them to be. Planets probably would’ve not only looked better but communicated their type better if I’d gone for a non-realistic colour palette.
• User feedback (the planet info panel). If I had more time, growing bars as opposed to numbers would’ve been a better visual cue for the player.

Ugly

• The UI. Both too many buttons and too small text made the game far more esoteric than it should have been. I knew this even at an early stage of development, but didn’t feel I had the necessary skills or time to change it.
• The ‘thousand ship’ bug, which still occurs sometimes during a game over. Thousands of ships spawn and lag out the game.

Despite my long list of cons here, I’m still very proud that this is not only the first ever Ludum Dare I’ve taken part in but it’s also the very first game I’ve made from start to finish.

Going Forward

• I’d like to remake this game at some point, iron out the bugs, address the various issues above and expand on the general concept (colonising new planets? more factors to balance? random events?)
• The second idea I had on the initial brainstorm is good. I’d like to go ahead and actually make it. Following the aftermath of LD30, I’ve decided to do #1GAM, so that might be my September game.
• I’ve learnt that I need to spend more time learning libraries. Too much time was lost on Saturday over something trivial.
• Although my code discipline is good, it still needs work. I need to start looking into the more abstract areas of C# (such as generics) in preparation for future work. This should hopefully limit a few duplication issues I had.
• I should probably spend more time with Paint.net, as when I had to use it, it was a bit of a ‘google everything’ moment.
• In future, I probably shouldn’t angle for a specific type of game, as a lot of my planning had revolved around me creating a platformer. This created a few snares on Saturday.

 

Feedback

Before I wrap up, I’d like to respond to a few comments made by people thus far. Thanks to everyone who has left a comment, I assumed this game wouldn’t be most peoples cup of tea, due to the nature of the game. I’m positively glowing to hear so many of you enjoyed it.

For the many of you that left constructive criticism (you’re awesome):

• The text is too small – I completely agree, and was aware of this before release, I’ll definitely keep this in mind for future. Due to my unfamiliarity with Unity’s GUIStyle classes, this was awkward to fix on the fly.
• It’s too slow getting to the interaction stage – I agree again, unfortunately, I didn’t leave as much time to playtest as I should’ve…you live and learn…
• It’s difficult to understand the state of affairs at a glance – Continuing the theme of ‘the GUI needs serious work, dude’ critique, I completely agree. The original plan was to implement coloured bars to show their size as opposed to numbers, but time was an issue again.
• Would be cool if the planets changed with their progress – You read my mind, this was going to be one of the first things I’d do if I found myself with time to spare.

The general reaction was the UI sucked. Therefore, I know exactly what I’m working with in preparation for LD31.

Thanks again to all you lovely commenters so far.

Finally, and in an attempt to spark some discussion in the comments, Joror mentioned he would like to see a multiplayer version. Although I can think of a few abstract ways of doing this, I can’t see how they’d add much to the game. Discuss 😛

 

 

Finally

If you’ve read this entire thing, you’re a saint, many internet cookies for you. If you’ve got a few spare minutes please feel free to check out my game: Harmony

LD30 was huge fun, I will continue to lurk until the results and LD31, when you can expect me coming back at full force! Bai for now.

 

Harmony: Interplanetary peace keeping

Tags: 2D, compo, deskphoto, final, LD30, post-mortem, postmortem, screenshot, unity

The theme, Connected Worlds.
The duration, 72 hours.
The intensity, overflowing!

Developing confLINKted was a thrill ride, both for things that went really well and things that should’ve worked but slapped me in the face.

[Try and rate the game HERE! I always rate all of my rater’s games :)]

Have you ever seen a 2D character moving in a rave-like dance?
Prepare for the worst, after the jump!

Brainstorming: 15% Brain, 85% Storm

For the 30th edition of Ludum Dare, I was thinking of making a little survivor game, like I did with my LD26 entry, Minimal Shifting.

But that game used 2D movement with a somewhat overhead perspective à la Zelda ALTTP, so, in order to avoid repetition, I went with a 2D platformer approach.

My idea was pretty solid “on paper“, having planned the main mechanics and figured out some obstacles to add. My mind was overflowing with ideas when I remember about my experience on 2D platformers in Unity, which was none.

Since I already established that this was a Jam Entry, I dug around for some simple 2D platformer system for Unity, and I found one by Prime31, available for free in their GitHub.

That system, while solid in practice, made me realize another flaw in the plan: I had Unity 4.3, and most 2D things in Unity only run in 4.5 with the Sprite class.

So then I thought to myself: “So, Alberto, you want to make a 2D platformer when you don’t have the specific tools you need to make them?“. I felt like somebody was sarcastically slow clapping in my brain…

So, roughly 45 minutes after that, I got Unity 4.5 and installed it. Got to test P31’s system and everything was great. They used the sprite from the main character in Spelunky so I had to get some sprites. Time to go to OpenGameArt!

This character sheet was probably my life saver, since I don’t consider myself an artist at all… So I started to use them for both characters and they turned out great (as long as they were not animated…).

Adventures with Unity2D™

Aside from the inexperience on making 2D platformers in Unity, I also hadn’t tried Unity2D by itself since I was still using 4.2.
The change from 3D to 2D wasn’t that much of an issue, since most components (BoxColliders, Renderers, etc) translated well in 2D, keeping the most common features intact.

Obstacle needed to vanish as soon as they get out of the screen limits, so I arranged them to destroy themselves as soon as they collide with Obstacle Blockers located outside of the screen. The issue that emerged was that those blockers will only work with other GameObjects with both BoxColliders and RigidBodys, but those RigidBodys would depend on their mass to move, and no matter how much of mass they had, they would be pushed by the obstacles little by little, so they would eventually fall, the obstacles wouldn’t get generated, and the game would be going on with no challenge at all.

I was lucky to catch this potentially game breaking little bug, but I didn’t even reach the surface of what I had to handle next.

To rave or not to rave: Platformer physics and animations

As previously mentioned, I was using Prime31’s platformer system for the game. Luckily for me, this system allowed me to manage collisions by using hitpoints like I did before on Flash, so that was an advantage. I implemented the system on my game scene to the letter without regarding the animations, since they were to be dealt with when the main game would be properly tested. So, when I get to the animations, this happens:

The perplexity of the situation was palpable. I mean, how the fuck was this happening? Animation glitch? Some physics voodoo?

Well, yeah. Apparently the BoxCollider2D uses 4 points on each side to determine what specific collisions are we receiving. I think I found a bug where the player’s BoxCollider2D would be standing on one frame, and since the physics are dependent on a call from the Update() and the current Time.deltaTime, any hint of desyncronization would confuse the collider system and make it think we are actually falling, sending that message to the animation system. We are actually falling constantly, but when we are standing the velocity is almost zero so we need to specify that to the animation system so it doesn’t improvise a 2D rave. This velocity tweak saved me hours of theorizing about the nature of the problem, but it didn’t come easily.

Finishing touches

Being a fan of Soundcloud artists myself, I totally wanted to have some really talented composer to provide the theme for confLINKted! After the chaotic platformer implementation, I had to deal with the audio features on the last 6 hours of the compo, so all I could do was reach some composers whose work I already picked as a possible theme song. Unfortunately, none of them replied in time for me to put any of their songs in the game, so I went with “A Journey Awaits” by lemon42. Even though it wasn’t exactly what I had in mind, I like how the song is not just some cheap chiptune loop and periodically progresses, inviting the players to survive longer so they can enjoy more of the song.

The menus are done with NGUI and iTween, and even though NGUI already has a tweener class ready to use, it’s aeons away from the versatility that iTween has. Totally recommended!

TL;DR, the summary

Like any other project, confLINKted gave me headaches and reliefs. I’ll try to compress all the experience in the inevitable…

WHAT WENT RIGHT:

• Unity’s accessible 2D engine and the things I quickly picked up from it.
• The fact that I could design the game in a really short span of time.
• That almost every idea I had in mind was implemented.

WHAT WENT WRONG:

• Relying on a platforming engine I hadn’t even tried yet.
• I went out a couple of times during the jam. That is why there are no more varied obstacles
• The character animations are not entirely correct, and my velocity tweak could’ve been better.

All in all, I’m super proud of my new game. It already has a page in my portfolio (like everyone is doing, duh), and it got mentioned in the spanish gaming site AnaitGames (well, they were looking for their reader’s LD entries, but let me live the dream!). The best thing is that I still got ideas flowing about this game, so I’ll try to expand it as much as I can!

While I was able to produce something playable this Ludum Dare, it was not one of my favorites. I failed to manage the time and scope of my project. As a result my entry falls far short of my goal.

When the theme was announced I brainstormed three ideas:
1) A 2d platformer where the player shifts between two parallel planes of existence. By touching an enemy the player is either kills it or is killed by it depending on if the player is in the correct plane.
2) A top down tower defense game where monsters appear through portals (to connected worlds). The player needs to survive a set period of time.
3) A 3d platformer where in a surreal floating dream scape. The player would collect journal pages as they explore the 3d level.

I went with the third one, in part because I had been wanting to do a game like this for a while, but also because I would not have to program enemies. The collectable Journal pages would allow me to add some flavor to the world and do some basic tutorial stuff.
After settling on a concept I dreamed up a feature list that included Momentum based air movement, bouncy blocks, moving platforms, and wind patterns. The wind patterns were going to be the main feature of this game, allowing the player to rise on up currents and glide about the level. I spent a lot of time implementing the wind system and the particle effects that the player would use to visualize it.

I spent Friday night programming the movement, platforms, and wind system. I planned on having the core game play done by Saturday morning. Then I could spend all of Saturday afternoon doing art. Sunday would be reserved for making levels. The schedule began to slip when I spent a good chunk of Saturday refining the wind system and making the journal/portal code. I finished up the level art assets Saturday night on schedule. When I awoke Sunday I felt the need to mess around with the code some more. The first real level I had made was behaving oddly, and I had to go back and fix several bugs. I didn’t get to proper level creation until 4 hours before contest end.

Ultimately I managed to make two levels that would instruct the player in how to use the jumping, double jumping and moving platforms. I had wanted to make 1 level for each of the game features. As the player mastered each feature they would be able to explore more of the central hub level and discover more levels and journal entries.

What went Right:
* I used tools I was very familiar with: Unity3D, GIMP, and Blender. I was able to bash out the core of my game play and art in very little time.
* Picked an idea that involved dynamic movement (one of my favorite things to program)
* I kept my art style consistent and did not try and steal textures from google image search.

What Went Wrong:
* Did not allocate enough time for level design.
* Did too much playtesting on a non level.
* Focused too heavily on features that would never be implemented.

Conclusions:
I managed to produce a good prototype for a game concept that has been lurking in the back of my head for ages. For games like this movement dynamics and level design are make or break the experience. I focused too heavily on the first and neglected the second.

Hello there! I am Dmqza, I joined 1-2 days ago. I wanted to upload a game to the Ludum Dare 30, but I started after the entries closed. You will see it on the third page of the warmup weekend games, titled ‘Warmup Entry That Was Supposed To Be A Ludum Dare 30 Game’. I hope you enjoy it. But it is not very good, so maybe not. Anyway, to sum it all up: I’m new here, can’t upload my game, in the warmup, not very good. Bye! P.S: LD30 seemed like the most interesting one. But now it’s (the entries are) over.

Tags: introduction

AFTER you’ve played and commented on my game, you can feast your eyes on this mosaic ↓

↑ Your game is in that parrot! You just have to find it… happy hunting

I picked a parrot picture because in my game there are still some wild animals to be found on the map in some of the jungles… happy hunting there too

You may also like my interactive map of Ludum Dare participants ↓

Its really really fun to watch your pins appear on the map when you play my game, and light up and reveal the ahem annotated map as you comment on other LD30 games!

Please do comment on my game too so you light up my map when I play my game! That’d be the nicest compliment of all.

This isn’t the first mosaic I’ve made for this Ludum Dare 30; you may also enjoy hunting for your entry in this map:

Ludum Dare 30 has been a very unique experience for me. It’s shown me my abilities and limits in game development. It’s been a whole lot of fun rating everyone else’s game, too. Great ideas out there.

I believe I did very well for my first Ludum Dare, check out my entry,  Alternation:

Click me

Thanks for all the feedback by the way! Please rate if you can on Kongregate because I am getting few ratings.

 

Now, I made numerous mistakes and wrong turns with my entry, but I also did some great things with it. Here’s how Ludum Dare weekend basically went along:

Before the theme was announced, I was focused on making a 3d game with Unity, preferably a platformer. I also wanted to enter in the Jam.

When the theme was announced, I immediately started to brainstorm for ideas, among these ideas:

• A top-down where you have to get to other planets by shooting other spaceships.
• A platformer where you travel through dimensions to a goal.
• An FPS where you shoot things that attack you (so unique).

I went with the second one and I begun to make a prototype. I decided to make the entry a puzzle fps without combat, much like Portal (couldn’t help it, love that game so much). The prototype took a couple hours to get to a point where it functioned. I then began to build the first level.

Upon finishing this level I determined the core gameplay, the ability to switch between dimensions by clicking. I started to work on level two when I realized I should introduce a new gameplay feature. I did just that with the addition of levers. I later added “death blocks” to level four. I made six levels in total, and play tested them multiple times.

I finally got to a point where I liked the feel and mood of the game and I submitted it around 8:00 pm Sunday. I thought the game was decent enough for Kongregate, so that’s where I hosted it.

After release, I slowly received feedback and I saw the good and bad of my game. Feel free to read the list:

The Good:

• The audio I used was completely awesome. Thanks to audionautix.com.
• The dimension switching was (almost) free of bugs.
• The puzzles proved to be challenging.

The Bad:

• The puzzles turned out to be a bit too difficult and awkward for some people.
• Only six levels are present, sorry guys.
• Most of the levels rely on parkour/reflex skills, which was a really bad move.

 

Overall, this was a great first Ludum Dare for me, hope you all like my entry and do well with yours!

Thanks for reading and extra thanks to everyone who posted feedback! See ya!

Tags: #LD48 #LD30

I made an HTML5 version but when I try to put it online the screen never loads any thoughts its just a black screen that says created with gamemaker sometimes I get a Browser doesnt support canvas error.  here is my link maybe im just stupid please let me know if it works.  Also any better way than dropbox to load a game??

shttps://www.dropbox.com/s/aqxlgzugrbwm7gf/index.html?dl=0

   

A week ago I was just finishing up the most ambitious game jam project I’ve done to date. Compared to projects I’ve worked on in the past, Voyage of the Magpie is less immediately rewarding – there’s no jumping, no shooting, and no skill points to spend. There are, on the other hand, coins to pick up, mazes to run, tickets to manage, and click-heavy mini-games. The goal of the project was to create a set of three smaller games that were somehow connected to meet the theme requirement for “connected worlds.” As a secondary (but more obvious) nod to the theme, the game involves navigating a network of interconnected locations all over the world to find lost treasure.

In the over world section of the game, the player flies their zeppelin from location to location by using tickets associated with those destinations. The tickets are consumed, but more can be purchased in cities or found in mazes. Tickets sort of represent leads on where treasure might be. At non-city locations the player will run a procedurally generated maze in either a temple or jungle setting. Gold, scrap metal, and tickets are gathered in the maze, which must be navigated before the sun sets. The more damaged your zeppelin, the less time you have to run the maze. Barriers in the maze are chopped through with the heroine’s machete, which dulls with use. In the third section of the game, the player attempts to repair their zeppelin and machete before setting out again to explore the unknown. The only way to succeed at the game is to be good at planning your moves, navigating mazes, and rapidly completing tasks. These different jobs are supposed to feel like different “worlds” to the player.

What went wrong:

Conveyance

Conceptually, the game was way too ambitious for a 72-hour jam. It was terrifying to work on because you can’t really get a feel for what the final game experience will be like while building THREE GAMES at once. It started to come together at the end of Sunday, but just barely. Though the end product was playable, there was no time to implement a tutorial. Given the complex inter-connection of the game phases, a tutorial was sorely needed – or at least better conveyance of what the connections were so the player could discover it themselves.

As a brief summary, here’s how the player was intended to see the connection between zeppelin condition and time in the maze: on the over world a zeppelin condition bar is on the far left. When entering a maze the bar on the far left is at roughly the same location but is now a sun icon.

Hopefully they would also see their machete condition lowering as they chopped through the jungle and would notice it improving during the repair phase. The biggest oversight was not adequately showing the player how to use scrap metal. The repair screen features a prominent central symbol that the player is meant to click to extend the timer. Unfortunately, the button is a baked-in image I was unable to give an effect when hovering over. Also, the timer and metal display are so small and far away from the button that even if the player were to press it they would likely not notice what it did.

Conveyance Again

Some minor cuts were item pickup sound effects and walking animations. More seriously lacking was a statement of the overall goal – find the Golden Magpie in the city of El Dorado. Without knowing when the game would end, players got confused. That combined with an ear-piercing sound whenever you try to sharpen your machete made for an unintentionally grating experience.

Yet More Conveyance

The least amount of work went into the maze-running section of the game. I shied away from working on it even though I knew that everyone would see that as the “main” game mostly because I didn’t know how I’d be trying to populate those mazes. In the end it was too big of a problem to tackle last and I ended up with the system you see – one gold piece per room, with either metal or a ticket at each dead end. I didn’t put an explicit end to the maze since I wanted the run to be timed. This was also a problem of conveyance, since the player could explore a really small maze and have to sit and do nothing for about 30 seconds. Pressing Enter will skip to the repair phase when the player is done exploring, but with no visual button I had to try to tell the player in the comments. I intended to auto-transition the scene by counting loot left in the maze, but abandoned this idea due to time constraints.

What went right:

Novel Systems

While working on disparate parts of the game in parallel was scary since the fun couldn’t be seen until much later, it did allow for me to squeeze as much productivity out of myself as possible. Once I was sick of working on one thing I could switch attention to something entirely different, which was nice. Also, despite the lack of tutorial I’m fairly happy with the systems that emerged. They play off each other in an interesting way, encouraging the player to be close to larger mazes to maximize the amount of time they have to explore them, and to plan their ticket usage.

Shops

I’m also happy that I was able to get a shop system implemented. It’s cumbersome to try to buy multiple copies of the same item, but pulling off click-toggled menus wasn’t easy to begin with.

New version

After finishing a jam with a lot left to do, I like to go ahead and make improvements  in a version with “Super” at the start if its name. I’ve tried to address many of the conveyance problems stated above in Super Voyage of the Magpie, as well as recording some sound effects for item pickup. I’ve also color-coded the locations by tier, so that the player knows how close they’re getting to the end. Higher tiers provide better tickets, with El Dorado as a possible drop on the top tier. From lowest to highest, the tiers are white, blue, and purple, with El Dorado a golden/orange color. After checking out the LD30 submission I hope you’ll check out the improved version too!

Hi there,

Not sure whether to say something or not.  But I am somewhat frustrated…
I’ve been assiduously rating Web browser playable games since competition ended.  Probably looking at about 80 per day, based on playing for between 30 seconds (if game doesn’t work, or is very incomplete – in which case not rating but leaving a comment ‘not yet rated’ and explaining why), or playing for up to 20-30 minutes when completely engrossed, which doesn’t happen often. Then I’ve been trying to leave a thoughtful comment based on my experience.

I freely admit I’m bad at twitchy and ‘hard’ games, but try to leave an honest comment.  My own game is probably a reasonable mid to average (48h) quality of game, based on my very personally biased view of course… however hard I try to be objective!

 

I’ve been swapping 1st place on the coolness ladder with Mallot1 for a few days… Not trying to outdo, but just overtaking sometimes, then he/she overtakes me back.

 

Last night Mallot1 rated 500 games!!!
Approximately the same as we had each managed to rate in 8 days (since the main competition closed last week).  I don’t think I could even look and read the webpages for 500 games in the 10-12 hours elapsed when Mallot1 went from 495 (approx) to 1030.

Is this reasonable ?

 

I’ve been a bit stressed since… Have I been trying to hard to rate games ? Is it best to just carry on with development and stop looking at my peer group at work ?

 

I’ve been back and forth about whether to say something.  It really isn’t that important to me to be first on coolness, I was mainly just enjoying making a list of things I need to get better at programming and design-wise, while playing and rating lots and lots of games.  I wasn’t even expecting to feature on the cool list, but as I’m currently out of work it seems that my free time has enabled this to happen.

 

Should I have said something or not ??  Am I taking it too seriously… and other self-doubt.  Hmmm….
Would appreciate your thoughts.

 

< /rant>

After you’ve played my game, you can feast your eyes on these stats ↓

As my game scrapes the LD30 game contest entries, I gather a lot of stats about who comments on whom.  And, I believe, comments are a good proxy for playings and ratings.

We’re over a week into the 3 week voting time, and already the activity on the site has dropped significantly.

Here’s the comments over time (PDT):

The high peaks are at 12 noon each day; it seems people play and rate in their lunch hours!  Even as the number of comments per hour drops steadily, it still has a local maximum at 12 noon each day.

I know I play, rate and comment during my lunch breaks … but I’m not in the PDT timezone.

In fact, I have the supposed location of 617 players so far (seen my game?) so I could actually do an ok job of determining the local time they comment, and perhaps its not their lunchtimes?  I may do this…

I was expecting the comment rate to pick up again at the weekend, but seemingly not.

There are 2,539 entries, of which 1,044 are jam entries and 1,495 are 48-hour comp.

There are a staggering 43,495 comments!

3,536 of those comments are replies by the entry author, commenting on their own entry.

764 of those comments were posted by 365 Ludum Darers who didn’t enter LD30.

18 entries have no comments at all, and 1 entry has only the entrant commenting.  Sad!  I’ll put a list at the end so you can go do something about it!

---

The top-10 commented-on games (so far) are:

212 Close Your Eyes – nonetheless (Web, Source)

195 Sinister – Joe Williamson (Web, Source)

187 Heart Star – AdventureIslands (Web, Source)

175 Connecting LD30 to the Real World – Will Edwards (Web, Source)

161 Chipset-0 – deepnight (Play (flash), Source (Haxe), Timelapse (soon))

153 Waterfly Octus – gillenew (Web, Source)

136 Starpiercer – Schrodinger Games (Web, Windows, OS/X, Linux)

133 NOODLE FEELING – Magdev (Web)

128 Super Alien Bro – nerd burglars (Web, Linux)

128 This Little Piggy… – InfectionTeam (Web, Windows, OS/X, Linux, Behind the Scenes Video)

---

The top-10 commenters are:

530 ConnectTheWorlds – mrexcessive (Web – HTML5, Source)

234 Salvation – 43iscoding (Web, Source)

220 Star Tycoons – MechanicMoon (HTML5 (Web), Windows, Android)

216 Data-Man – Hyoga-3D (Web, Linux)

200 Super Alien Bro – nerd burglars (Web, Linux)

180 Connected Retro Worlds – yodamaster (Web, Source)

180 Alice Anxiety – jukimv1986 (Web, Windows (21mb))

175 Abstrakt – ViliX (Windows | Linux | OS/X | Source (Java), Walkthrough (Youtube))

174 Close Your Eyes – nonetheless (Web, Source)

161 Where Did The Stars Go? – mechabit (Web (Unity), Tumblr, Twitter, Website)

---

And the following 19 have no comments at all

< Alien Defense – swipefaststudios (Windows)

< Schizoscreenia – nothke (Web, Windows)

< Either Side of The Power Cord – oobie (Windows, Source (.gmx))

< Temp Placeholder! – Filth and Money (Web)

< Crossover – Lafolie (Love, Windows)

< WhaleCommander – wolfengange (OS/X)

< Dependant – Abominas (Web)

< don’t touch red blocks – chadheim (Web, Source)

< The Plague – Zim the Fox (Source, READ BELOW!)

< Dependancy – Colecf (Source)

< Boffin Battle – ClocktowerGames (Web, Windows, OS/X, Linux)

< HappyGreetings – Tadepex (Web)

< dude – spx (Windows (OpenGL 3.3, x86), Source)

< TheyAreWatching – goodbyeworldwill (Web)

< Loopzilla – Bernhard (Windows (167kb ZIP), Source)

< Gravity – kaitokidi (uep, Windows, Linux, Source)

< Nile Delta – Auron2030 (Windows, Source)

< Monochrome – Monochrome (Web)

< Dragon Theatre – vipper (Web)

Do something about it!

Our game, this time, was started in a different way. I would like to make a action game, with explosions, funny controls and a charismatic character. I like this kind of game, and I like make this kind of game. When the theme was shown, the brainstorm started and my idea for the game was a guy who connect islands. Get resources, put on the right way and done! Of course, some island would have enemies or NPCs. So, the coder decide to participate with me, and he want to make a game about aliens who abduct cows or others things. So we stop. We had two good games! And then, like others jams, we decide start again. Always we have a idea we think “maybe some other dev will make the same, so let to do a different game. New. Something we never made”. I like play music. I didn’t play very well but computers can make magic! And we start the LudumDare30 with a experimental game for us. A music game. We use the metaphor about our connections with the universe, the noise of informations that go away to the void. (A good movie start with this purpose). Universal Feelings was, for me, who rate a lot of these LD30 games, something unique (for now). And it’s a great thing! We get what we want! A different game! Of course, he isn’t a perfect. The music didn’t sync, we try to made a easy game and it still difficult for someone… It’s a simple gender to make but difficult to be well made. To do some game with sync, and complete music would use more the 72h just for that, but it’s ok. The game have 21 achievements, a progressive difficult, a lot of sounds, and the planets Spin! (no… they don’t, but the light work very well) That is our game, for this LD30. Universal Feelings. Enjoy!

 

 

 

 

————————

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tags: LD30, postmortem

 

When the theme of current Ludum Dare was announced, and I read it in the morning, I was kinda puzzled. Even though I voted for it in the final round, I couldn’t come up with any ideas that felt original and  were possible to realize in such limited time span. Which worlds can be connected? The world of living and the world of the dead? The world of rich and the world of poor? The world of dreams and the real world?  It also turned out, that I didn’t have almost any time to work on Saturday, and hope for finishing a game for the compo was lost. So I was a bit discouraged by lack of time and ideas, and was not even sure if I should participate at all.

But I’ve missed previous LD and was eagerly awaiting for this one, so I pulled myself together and started making the freaking game. I decided to stop wandering between ideas in fruitless search for the perfect one and settled with the idea of connection between real and imaginary worlds in child’s vivid imagination.

When I was a child, things around were never ordinary. Take a stick from the ground, and it turns into a mighty sword. And a crooked stump in the forest is actually a scary monster. You are not just a kid, but a superhero with limitless powers! You can fly, you can lift mountains and become invisible. There’s no definite border between reality and imagination. So in the game I tried to show how ordinary things trigger child’s imagination, and how it turns usual trip to school into exciting adventure.

For development I chose Flash, because I thought it would be faster to put stuff together there then in Unity. It still works well for rapid game development and allows to quickly add some graphics and animations, though sometimes I felt regret about this choice.

After making the basic setup for character movement I started drawing some stuff. I wanted to go with some unusual graphic style, but there was no time for experiments so I just settled with something plain and cartoony. At some point I also considered making trixel graphics as I did in my previous LD game, but then discarded this idea for some reason (I don’t actually remember why). And I didn’t want to work with pixel-art, because I don’t have much experience with it and, well, I feel like it is a bit overused nowadays (sorry guys).

When I started making music I got and idea to make different tracks for each part of the game but with the same melody. I still think it was a good idea, though now I don’t really like the melody. It sounds fine in real world and, probably, in fantasy world (the last one), but other versions don’t sound good for me anymore.

Eventually, I’ve managed to finish the game and submitted it for the jam. Unfortunately, I was too tired to notice and fix major gameplay issues and the game ended up being too difficult. And the biggest problem was that the most difficult level was the first one (at the same time being the one with the worst visuals), so most people couldn’t even see anything beyond that point.  So on the next day I uploaded the “cheat” post-jam version, where the character was invincible during first level. It didn’t fix everything but at least made the game more beatable (though some people sad that they finished the original version without much problem ).

It is my general issue with game development. I tend to focus on aesthetics rather than on gameplay, even though I realize it is wrong approach. But I’ll learn to keep things in balance, I promise

You can play the game here.

Thanks for reading! Share your thoughts in comments here or get in touch on Twitter.

Tags: LD30, ld48, post-portem, postmortem

Seeing as there is another graph a few posts down, I thought I may as well post mine for LD#30
It shows the current vote distribution across all entries, ‘frequency’ being the number of entries with ‘value’ votes.

You can add your user name to the image url to show where your game is on the graph.
The graph updates itself so is always current.

And wow that is a horrible graph, at the time of posting there is apparently someone who has rated 1030 games, and 744 people haven’t rated any. Perhaps I should modify the it to disregard outliers.

Edit: Added an ignore parameter scale the graph a bit. set to zero to see the full graph. Alternatively you can use maxvalue= and maxfrequency= to manually scale the graph. Perhaps I should make I fully interactive…

— I know this post is looong, but I would be so happy if you would read it and maybe comment your thoughts —

So I finished my game very tight to the deadline, but I finished it! YAY

About the game

So you are an (evil) empire that wants to take over the universe. You start by choosing your own name such as “Ludum Dare Galaxy Empire”, “Das Dritte Reich”, “Little Tim’s Multi-World Domination”, “DPRK” or something else creative for you to come up with. (HAS TO BE EVIL) To connect worlds to your empire, make a spaceship by resources and start connecting!

–> Play Universe Connector here <–

Bad beginning

First of all I started making the game too late. I stayed up all night and waited for the theme to be announced at 3:00 (danish time) and went to sleep after that. I woke up at about 13:00 and was kind of too lazy to get up and start Ludum Dare’ing. So I got some food and started making a game. I thought I would use Unity, but I just wasted my first hours to find out my idea was too hard to make (I have only made one game in Unity before…) So… I ended up using Game Maker: Studio like last time, and I had to come up with a new idea…

The thumbnail for my game

The progress

Time passed and I finally had an idea but it was kind of unclear, so I started by making the graphics. I worked and worked and checked twitter and facebook and worked and checked youtube and worked and got distracted again and worked and so on. When it was around 4:00 and I decided to get some sleep my game wasn’t even near a game yet. Half time; not at all half done. The next day I was a bit more concentrated, but my idea wasn’t clear enough yet. I made some sketches on paper to get a better overview of what my game was about. I worked a lot without being sure what the game would turn in to. But around 6 hours before deadline I thought my idea was done enough, and I just had to finish the game too.

The original idea:

At that point my idea was something like: You have a planet. The population grows and there is a maximum number of people the Earth has room for, so you have to get the population over to other planets. To get to different planets you need spaceships, you make by resources. The Earth also has an amount of resourses that grows. There are different planets, that have different: number of spaceships needed to connect, speed of getting resources and max capacity of people. So you had to populate all the planets without getting overpopulated and getting a lot of resources.

But… All I had done at that time was: The system for getting resources and population, displaying everything over the planet, and upgrading and buying stuff. Now I just needed to make the player able to connect to the other planets by using the spaceships… And long story short: I used some hours to figure out how to “copy” the system to more planets and ended up not getting it to work. So it was 2-3 hours before deadline I only had one working planet, and no connection-stuff.

The final one:

So… I changed the idea totally, so you just connected to other worlds with spaceships, and it just said “connected”, instead of the idea of every planet having different population, stuff to upgrade, buttons etc. And by doing that the “population” thing would make no sense, so I removed that too.

So the deadline came closer and I worked as fast as I could. I remembered there was also the “submission hour” and quick made some music, and finished the game itself in the last 10 minutes of the submission hour (Yes, it was technically over deadline, but fuck it…). I uploaded it, and did the porting after the deadline. SLEEP. The next day I made the thumbnail and uploaded the source.

Conclusion

The game:

I feel okay about the final result, but the game turned out to be a bit boring… Overall this was probably the worst – out of 2 LD compos, and 4 total game jams I participated in – game I’ve made. But again, it’s okay; A nice little game.

Looking forward to see the results!

What I’ll do better next:

Next time I will work more focused instead of the on/off-work as I did this time. Get up. Food. Jam.

I will learn Unity more, and test some ideas before the compo starts AKA do the warm-up weekend, so I’m ready to make a game.

Timelapse / follow

Soming soon – follow me on Twitter and YouTube to keep updated.

I made it with ChronoLapse, nice software!

How to know you have played my game too long (will not happen, you’ll quit) also, Israel took over the universe :(

Tags: 2D, final, game, LD30, post-mortem, postmortem

Since more than a few people had problems getting past the first or second level in my game, I decided to post a video of the full game played through with no deaths. I did keep one in though, because it was hilarious. 😉 Should be useful for people who don’t want to spend forever becoming mega pros to see the whole thing!

You can check out the post mortem here if you’re interested in how I accidentally made a sequel to my LD27 game, or if you haven’t tried playing the game yet you can have a go here!

This is my fourth ‘best of’ post. Hereafter I’m abandoning the categorised approach, or else I’ll risk leaving shit out. Please do check out my past posts: the best romantic/erotic games, the best sci-fi games, and a mini-feature on a fascinating little game titled Any Moment.

Where Are Your Friends Tonight — This is one of those games that many people can doubtless relate to. Who hasn’t been moving on in life, finding out that you’re no longer tethered to certain friends as once was the case. Reunions become loquacious bouts of nostalgia but nothing more, until gradually the people you once new most intimately just fade from your life. And it’s all done with nice-looking graphics and a simple, accessible social network-esque interface.

 

Circling Circles and Oval Opposites — These are two of a perfect pair. Apparently both developers know eachother and decided to pair up to create two “connected”, thematically similar games set in the same world. Probably one of the most inventive takes on the theme I’ve seen. And the games work really well too. They’re minimalist, casual games with distinctive designs and moods.

Familiaris — A gorgeous Twine game — both visually and narratively — centred round  a dog and his owner. It’s all written from the dog’s perspective, which makes for an interesting, and ultimately engaging experience that I can heartily recommend.

 

 

Intranet — Another Twine game, but this one’s much more creepy than it is cute. And it uses the theme wonderfully. I don’t really want to say much more. You’re better off playing this one without any foreknowledge.

 

A Ludic Proof of the Difficulties Inherent in Finding a Proper Skull — Few! That’s one hell of a title. And it’s one hell of a game too. Like with the last one, I’m going to reserve to right to say no more. Narrative-based games like this are best played with a wholly unaffected mindset, I think. Just go play it. (You might not get it immediately though. It has a fascinating, but at first kind of subtle, take on the theme.)

 

Connecting — An involving conversation game written with utter believability, and set against pleasant graphics and atmospheric audio. You are texting your partner after a trip visiting a past love (or old fling; it’s not overly clear, nor does it need to be). The text messages can take multiple directions, and all the one’s I’ve found are engaging and affecting.

 

Alice Anxiety — Beautiful artwork, stunningly moodful music and notably interactive for a visual novel. Sadly, the game is very much still in embryonic form — just as things start to get really interesting, it ends. The developer obviously ran out of time. But what is here will keep you engaged, just be prepared for a lacklustre ending. I truly hope a post-Jam version is in the making.

 

And if you want to play my game, you can visit its page here. If you leave a comment I can promise I’ll check out your game and repay the favour. It just might take me a couple of days, considering my to-play list is expanding at a stupid rate.

And also because (self-serving plug coming up) I’m a bit distracted with the RuinJam 2014, for which I entered A Tale of the Cave, a hyperlink-based hardcore-but-short cave-crawl nearly entirely written using William McGonagall’s tremendously inept poetry. And I intend to make another game for jam in the next few days. I encourage anyone else interested to join me in ruing the game industry.

–Snoother

Tags: best of, highlights, list

So I’ll be going live again to play your games (from 5:40pm – 7pm-ish GMT+1)!

EDIT: Not currently live but I will message you on Twitch when the stream goes back up!

Watch live on twitch:
http://twitch.tv/TomboFry

Submit your game:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1YdGFp_Ogk-9V2gVhKVbJBV327amgxbACtCn5JfxYXws/viewform

Don’t forget to play my game too!
http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=20850

I spent the weekend with some friends and they fought each other on Warmageddon… Why don’t you give it a try?
project page

Hi there,

the controls of my Compo entry are really terrible, so I decided to eventually add PointerLock controls to a Post LD version \o/ hooray \o/.
And because I found a lot of other bugs, I’m going to work on this little gem a while

Play the PostLD version here: http://www.lobsterlove.de/LD30/

Please let me know, what you think.

And of course, I’d like to get a rating for my Compo version here:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=12061

Thank you

Marc

Tags: postLD, unnona, webgl

I’m going on playing LD entries, commenting on them while streaming and adding the best ones into my list.
If you’d like to watch the stream or recommend a game, go ahead, post the link into the chat.

STREAM

Well, things have gotten a little tough around here, but we are still at it! After a nice long break, we are coming back at it with full strength

Gimbal ship

Items that we’ve integrated since last time:

• Warp Gate Health
• Better Heat-Seeker dynamics
• New enemy ship “Striker” – designed to destroy warp gates

Items that we would like to add for next time:

• New enemy Drone: Small-fry pesky little ship
• player lock-on seekers
• warp tunnels

Items that we would like to add next-next-next-next….. time:

• improved Holo- UI
• Storyline and progressive intro levels
• full strategy map with Enemy army AI

In the mean-time, please feel free to check out our latest version in the (Post-Jam) link

(Please remember to not vote based on this update, this is a post-submission update, but we would appreciate your thoughts!)

Link to Gimbal Fighter!

Tags: flight, FPS, Gimbal, space

Why do people call these things postmortems? I don’t know about you guys, but my game is (hopefully) anything but dead.

So my game was actually made for this scholarship-giving thing I might win, and I figured I might as well do Ludum Dare and double-dip. It had to be about a social issue, and connected worlds = networking, which = internet safety, so my game was pretty much cut out for me.

Anyways, enough Trojan horsing around (rimshot), let’s get this biopsy on the road!

What went right:
*I think I made my graphics look reasonably nice, at least good enough.
*Pretty cool gameplay! It’s got a bit of an addicting feel, and the fact that levels are randomized means that you might have better luck next time.
*I learned how to make a rage game! (purely accidentally, but hey)
*I have a decent chance of winning the competition! (wooo)
*The music is good. Like, so good, I whistle it in the shower. Random music generators are great.

What went wr-
GAME IS TOO HAAAAAAAAAARD.

No, really.

Many people made it only to level 3 out of 5 + boss level. Some didn’t even beat level 2. It goes to show how difficult internet safety i I actually can’t justify it, no game to help the general public understand internet safety should be this hard. So I made amends!

The newest version of Networkaholics (which I’ll submit into the scholarship thingy as opposed to this) comes with an easier mode. Still difficult, but not so much. That way you can beat it for yourself (or if you want to, go all hardcore to impress me. Really, if you beat this game as-is I’ll have to give you some sort of reward).

So, so long and thanks for all the Ludum Dare.

Play my gaaaaaaame over here, and enjoy.

Also, don’t click on suspicious links.

Hi !

Great games you’ve made there ! (For those I’ve tested)

I’m working on a post jam version of the game. Trying to finish the polishing.

I’ve made new characters, more unique, more “world”

 

Play the jam version of the game : The Salt Pleeease

ORIGINAL BLOG-POST

What’s up guys! Today I have something really cool for you. As I mentioned before, I played and watched several hundreds of LD30 entries. There are tons of cool games, but I want to share with you my personal Top15 of Ludum Dare 30. It contains entries from both 48 hours Compo and Jam. If you didn’t play some this games yet, then you definitely should. They’re all worth it. Btw, I don’t insist and don’t try to convince you. I just want to share my personal opinion and I hope you will find something interesting here. All entries unsorted and appear in (almost) random order.

So, enough talking, let’s check and play some cool games! Theme – Connected worlds.

Schrodinghost

by Carduus

Competition page
Web version

---

Mansion on the hill

by BuffaloPhil

Competition page
Web version

---

On the edge of Earth: 5000

by Hypnohustla

Competition page
Web version

---

Chipset-0

by deepnight

Competition page
Web version

---

Notes from a Mad Mage

by Razoric

Competition page
Web version

---

Heart Star

by AdventureIslands

Competition page
Web version

---

Close Your Eyes

by nonetheless

Competition page
Web version

---

Astroz

by sputnik

Competition page
Web version

---

Superdimensional

by PixelMind

Competition page
Web version

---

100 Days

by CJ K

Competition page
Web version

---

The World Within

by Oxeren

Competition page
Web version

---

Any Moment

by Jakub Koziol

Competition page
Web version

---

Ex-Fraktion

by Robotic

Competition page
Web version

---

APOLLO

by graebor

Competition page
[Web version

---

Alien Gift Exchange

by zazery

Competition page
Web version

---

Thank you for reading! I hope you found something interesting and enjoyable. Feel free to share you favorite entries in comments below. It’s almost impossible for one man to play all ~2500 entries and I’m pretty sure that I missed some hidden gems there. So, if you have some, please let me know.

Thanks again, stay tuned!

Tags: LD30, top

After you’ve kindly played my game, you can ponder this:

If you take the game thumbnails (pretty mosaics here!) and average them all together, you get – logically – the average LD entry!  And here it is:

 

See the faint Windows window border title bar at the top?  Undeniable proof!

How average is your thumbnail?

(Previous analysis of LD29)

Warning!
Reading this before playing the game may diminish the amount of enjoyment you would get out of it! I recommend you go HERE first. It’s not very long.

About The Game:
The game I ended up submitting to this Ludum Dare is a bit of an odd one that doesn’t really fall into any pre-defined genre, but it has elements of platformer, puzzle and adventure games in it. You navigate several worlds from a first-person perspective, try to figure out how they work and try to reach an arbitrary ending.

 

What Went Right:
-Getting ideas
After the announcement of the theme I went through my usual Ludum Dare routine of talking to people I know and then going for a walk in order to figure out what I should try making. I was able to come up with how I would implement the theme reasonably quickly, in that the player would be able to travel between the normal world, heaven, hell and a weird intermediate world.

The Four Worlds

-Aesthetics
Despite being very simple 3D graphics, I think I managed to make a fairly interesting looking game. Each world had its own atmosphere. (Although I think heaven was a bit lacking as it was added towards the very end of development) The water in the city world and the tentacle and eye filled things in hell are the elements I thought turned out the best

Tentacles, Water, A Sacrificial Altar and Platforms

-Gameplay Mechanics
I managed to keep the interactions the player could perform fairly simple in this game, but I feel they still made the game fun enough. I re-implemented an item picking up and carrying system I had used before in what is probably my favourite of my prior Ludum Dare entries: Reach the Moon

-Programming
I had very few problems implementing the features I wanted to and so minimised the amount of time I would spend scratching my head at a problem. Drawing diagrams on paper to help visualise the problem really helped me.

What Didn’t Go So Well:
-Time management
I had a bit of trouble staying motivated during the 48 hours, primarily because I wasn’t certain what I wanted the final game to be like, and so I took a fair few breaks. By 9pm on the Sunday evening (Perth time, so with about 12 hours remaining) I was very doubtful that I was going to finish. Thankfully I managed to stay focused for a few more hours (Thanks in part to the over-cheerfulness of the Katamari Forver soundtrack) and had my entry submitted by 2am.

-Audio
There is none. This was primarily a result of my time management. By 2am I didn’t really want to launch up SFXR and start putting sound effects where I thought they needed to be, and so decided near enough was good enough. I also know absolutely nothing about creating music. None of the Ludum Dare games I have ever made have any.

-Technical Issues
I only tested my game on my own computer. So by the time I woke up on Monday morning I had discovered that most PC’s could not handle the city world of the game. (Turned out all the people created too many vertex buffers for graphics cards to handle) I managed to sort this out eventually and make the game runnable.

Bonus findings:
This Ludum Dare I also tried hosting my game on some other websites, namely GameJolt and itch.io. It’s been really enjoyable being able to see how many people are viewing and downloading the game, with GameJolt having much greater amounts of people than itch.io.

Overall I think this Ludum Dare went very well and look forward to seeing the results and participating in the next one that I can.

Tags: LD30, post-mortem, postmortem

Hello all.

I just wanted share a fiew creations that you folks have done because we find them awesome !
Siphon Ent Garr Fon Kull is also a artistic game, at least if creating your homeworld defense is considered “art”

No more talking, just need to look below, or you can also try the game !

Hey, so a few days ago, I released this Ludum Maze thingy, which is a collection of all Ludum Dare 30 games inside a maze, and it got featured on Gamejolt (Thank you, Gamejolt!).

Since it got a bit of attention, a YouTuber named JustMoistGaming made a video of it, and tried out 3-4 Ludum Dare games along the way. What’s interesting is seeing the perspective of someone who has no clue about Ludum Dare, play Ludum Dare games.

Check it out:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zL36x5qv-o0

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I didn’t manage to track down which games he played, but by chance you might recognize yours!

Tags: ludummaze

Oh boy, what a Ludum Dare that was. 😛
Firstly, the LD page is here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=28661
So, this is my third time participating in the Ludum Dare, but my first time being in the Jam, and being with a team!

My team was somewhat unorthodox, with me (Josh) being the programmer/designer/artist/writer, my friend Kelton doing the music (and he did an amazing job!) and last, but not least my friend Matt, who tagged along last second to basically fill the gaps and help out where he can (we gave him the title “Voice Acting Director” in the end. 😛 ).

The start of it all

We screwed up. Almost immediately.

BASICALLY, Connected Worlds is the one theme we did not want. It is so open-ended, and I didn’t want to take it literally and make a game about space or planets or anything like that.

So we spent the first fourteen hours developing a military side-scrolling shooter where the player is actually just a guy controlling the soldier, and at the end of the game the soldier kills the guy. It was meant to be this big “Woah, I didn’t see that coming!” moment, but as it ticked over to the fourteenth hour, I realised we won’t have time to actully implement the “Connected Worlds” part of the game.

So I made the hardest decision I’ve made in a jam so far. After fourteen hours of animating, art, programming and designing, we completely scrapped the idea.
A working functioning prototype tossed to the side. It was honestly painful.
Here is a quick screenshot of what could have been our LD entry:

 

So basically here we are, sitting in our rooms at 2 A.M trying to come up with a new idea after wasting our first day, and then the idea hits me.

THE CHANGE

We possiblt had the biggest change in game possible.
We went from a side-scrolling 2D linear military shooter TO a 3D fully voice acted non-violent game based around exploration.
Talk about a pivot. 😛

 

The above GIF was an early prototype of the game world and Orbs.

ORB

Orb was the game. We knew it. I pitched it as a game thats only job is to immerse the player so much that they believe they are interacting with this real living world, through their computer.
Then while discussing immersion I had the idea that will change First-Person games forver.
THE NODDING MECHANIC

I decided this game, that we are voice acting, needs to have the option to choose yes or no kind of answers, which result in different dialogs, but I didn’t want to break the immersion.
Thus the game’s main mechanic was born, nodding.
Giving the player the chance to respond to in-game NPC’s via nodding/shaking their head increased immersion so much!
Watching people play-test my game I could tell that the connection between them and these little floating orbs was so much stronger simply because they were there. The Orbs were there.

Final gameplay screenshot.

PROBLEMS

Well, having those first 14 hours back would have been nice, but as that seemed impossible, time very quickly became an issue.
You would think we had the foresight to realise making a huge fully voice-acted 3D exploration game in just 58 hours was stupid, but we thought “Screw it, we can handle this”.
The other issue was not having a real artist or 3D moddeler. This led to me doing any “Art” and I just used Unity for all 3D level design (I believe this is like the biggest Unity sin ever, but I was desperate).

OVERALL

I am so happy with what we achieved. Kelton smashed out some awesome music (Buy the album here: http://keltonhallomusic.bandcamp.com/), Matt did some awesome work editing the voice clips, and I showed myself what is possible when I push myself to my limits. 😛
Kelton also produced this cover photo for the game and its soundtrack:

WHATS NEXT?

Someone told me, if this was bigger project with more to explore and mor people to talk to etc, they would kickstart it. That is by far the best compliment I have recieved as a game developer, so I figured, seeing how I go in the near-future, I may take this and turn it into a much bigger project, with a small world to explore instead of a very small area.

Anyway, if you have read this far, you are awesome. Thanks to the LD community for being awesome as per usual, and I will see you all here for LD31!

 

 

Everyone who played my game:

I updated my game so now FPS is approximately 5 times faster and

other small bugs updated,

so please rate my game again.

Explanations of theme using in my game:

1. Story is to connect game worlds in war.

2. Big world (Level 1) is connected with Mini World (if you have better result in Mini World you will have more laser).

Since people seem to post fancy statistics recently, I decided to make some of my own, too. However, I don’t really have an easy access to LD data nor a friendly bot to retrieve these for me, so instead I came back to some idea I had some time ago, but eventually forgot.

So here it is: a complete list of all themes proposed across 4 rounds, with the themes from final round being italicised. Maybe someone will find it interesting. Of course, I wouldn’t mind if you decided to play the game in question first. 😉

Planned and executed (4/81; 2/20):
(themes that I wanted to allude to in one way or another, and succeeded in doing so)

• Choose A Path (you’re making your own paths)
• Connected Worlds (guess you have seen this one already); I even managed to integrate it into gameplay, i.e. make it so that without the theme one of core game mechanics wouldn’t have much sense
• Manipulate The Environment (yay, topology~!)
• Potato Salad (that’s what Iri’s dad would make, as mentioned in initial dialogue)

Spotted and executed (11/81; 4/20):
(i.e. themes that I was aware would be present in my game, but didn’t really tried to include)

• Another World (well, duh)
• Chaos (to be fixed)
• Do No Harm (quite a feat, considering someone else couldn’t resist making a shooter in relation to CONNECTING PLANETS WITH OPTICAL FIBER)
• Experimentation (them students…)
• For Science! (them students again…)
• Human Stupidity (…and again…)
• Labyrinth
• Lost In Space (depending on definition of “space” – it’s very interdimensional)
• Unexpected Side Effect (…and again…)
• What Could Possibly Go Wrong? (…and again…)
• Wonderful Apocalypse (…and again…)

Planned, but not included (11/81; 4/20):
(i.e. uses of themes that I wanted to allude to, but eventually didn’t have time)

• Artificial Intelligence (overlords in cyan levels)
• Brainwashed (the people welcoming robot overlords, obviously)
• Break The Rules (possibly to be personified with some rebel in cyan levels)
• Destroy The System (similar to Break The Rules)
• I For One Welcome Our New Robot Overlords (to be repeated word by word by one of people in cyan levels)
• No One Can See You (kinda planned as one of abilities)
• The Power Of Machines (sort of; didn’t plan that theme specifically, but wanted machines to have power)
• Shadows (the No One Can See You ability)
• Things Are Not What They Seem (cyan levels… kinda sorta)
• Transformation (one of abilities)Maps
• You’re Not Supposed To Be Here (wanted to include a character somewhere that would have different colour than surroundings, remarking how it’s probably not the place they should be at)

Unintended, but somehow included (5/81; 0/20):

• Don’t Save The Princess (clearly, you don’t)
• Maps (in Theory; though they would be useful in field, too…)
• Speed (tuuurboooo~!)
• Strange Physics (very interdimensional)
• You Can’t Fight Back (you must have something to fight against in the first place)

Ignored and not included (50/81; 10/20):

• Alchemy
• Break It, Fix It (only fix it – breaking was in backstory)
• Day and Night
• Dreams And Nightmares
• Don’t Stop Moving
• End Of The Road
• Everyone Is A Monster
• Flow
• Forgotten
• Forces Of Nature (unless infinite supply of shruberries counts)
• Fortress
• From The Ashes
• Glimpse Of The Future (pfft, too deterministic!)
• Growing
• Illusion
• Infectious
• Isolation
• I Think It’s Alive
• It’s A Trap!
• Knowledge Is Power (knowledge = power = energy = matter = mass…)
• Limited Capacity
• Limited Control
• Loot (unless topology circuits count)
• Love (definitely not as leading plot – it’s pretty overused at that point…)
• Losing Control
• No Return
• Nothing Is Real
• No Way In, No Way Out
• Off The Grid
• On The Edge
• The Other Side
• Points Of View
• Randomly Generated (initially considered, but it would have been way too much mess)
• Rise And Fall
• The Space Is Getting Smaller
• Something’s Out There
• Strength In Numbers
• Supply And Demand
• Survive (several orders of magnitude more overused than Love)
• This Happens To Me Every Day (no switching light, sorry)
• Time Travel (too wibbly-wobbly, space is already enough)
• Trust No One (meh)
• Under Pressure
• Unlimited (I’d like to see someone combining this theme with Limited Capacity and Limited Control)
• What Is That In The Distance?
• Where No One Has Gone Before
• You Are Already Dead (no, you aren’t)
• You Are The Weapon (no, you aren’t)
• You Can Never Have Too Many (no, you can)
• You Must Leave It Behind (just got reminded of someone ranting about “You [something]” themes)

(hmm, I really could use some spoiler tag here…)

To sum it up in fancy images, because we all know everyone likes fancy images:

I wonder, how about others’ theme coverage; in particular, what sort of other themes appeared the most in LD games in one way or another (Another World, perhaps?), and whether every theme has related game (I know for sure “This Happens To Me Every Day” has at least one). Perhaps we should play some sort of Ludum Dare theme bingo? ^^”

Thanks to @Deozaan for playing Parallel rift!

I think you found a bug!! haha, you shouldn’t of died there.

 

Thanks again!

Hi. My name is headchant and I made Annex Kharon for Ludum Dare 30. It is a weird roguelike with spaceships about connecting planets to a trade network and is very much inspired by games like 868-HACK or Hoplite.

Spaceships in space!

>>>Play It Here<<<

I don’t want to write a full blown postmortem so I will keep it simple:

What went right?

Had a lot of fun making this one. I tried to focus on something simple and after a couple of revisions the gameplay. I think I did manage my time quite well this time: A whole mock of the game was finished after day one. The second day was used to polish it and fix all little bugs.

What went wrong?

The first sketch used asian ascii symbols but I wasn’t quite happy with the looks so I used PFXR as inspiration for the ships. But I sadly didn’t have time to draw nicer ships. Connecting planets was a nice simple idea but I have the feeling that I could have used it more especially for the abilities. I also didn’t have time to make more abilities.

Conclusion

I am did some minor fixes and alteration to the game for the post-compo version but I don’t think that ever will make a big game out of it. As said earlier: I had a lot of fun making it and that is the most important for ludum dare.

Scary title,  but it’s just the timelapse for my game “Fear – Friendly Extraterrestrial Assembly Robot”.

Three different locations within 1.5 days, try beating that!

Anyway, you can play and rate the game here if you want to.

Out of the 101 games I played so far, 15 stand out. Click on the pictures to try the games.

1. Heart Star (AdventureIslands)

What it is: Retro, balanced, polished and complete with fantastic pixel graphics and short, compelling puzzles.

Why I like it: There is something nostalgic about it.

This is the one game I saw which could be sellable as is.

Heart Star (AdventureIslands)

 

2. Planetary Marriage Counseling (WeaselZone)

What it is: A hilarious game where you and your spouse are chained together and go on dates.   Works well as a two player co-op game.

Why I like it: It’s fun even when things are going wrong. Epic when things are going right.

It made me divorce my wife over and over again….for the fun of it.

Planetary Marriage Counseling (WeaselZone)

 

3. Dino Bolt (GeorgeBroussard)

What it is: An endless runner where dinosaurs are escaping a zoo helicopter.

Why I like it: It is fun and addictive. It shows you don’t need a complex idea to make a great game.

I lost time playing it.

Dino Bolt (GeorgeBroussard)

 

4. Mammoth Monkey Mole (ehtd)

What it is: A puzzler where different creatures have different abilities.

Why I like it: The sounds are hilarious and the puzzles have a good learning curve where you never feel it is too difficult.

You get to play a mammoth, a monkey and a mole. Need I say more.

Mammoth Monkey Mole (ehtd)

 

5. Hop Hop Planet (SnoutUp)

What it is: A 2-d take on Super Mario Galaxy.

Why I like it: It has great look, with lots of variety and a good replay factor.

All the things that can kill you look friendly, but looks can be deceiving.

Hop Hop Planet (SnoutUp)

 

6. Space Breakers (DJWizardCop)

What it is: Breakout with a Space Invader twist.

Why I like it: My wife will kill me if I don’t.

My wife wouldn’t give the keyboard back and she did the same when my daughter was rating it.   In fact she is probably still playing it now (I’m hungry – she hasn’t fed me this week).

Space Breakers (DJWizardCop)

 

7. Red Thread (NickZangus)

What it is: Two linked characters have to negotiate obstacles to reach each other.

Why I like it: The looks that the characters give each other when they die – it’s those little attentions to detail and some wicked, mean puzzles that make this game.

It’s cute and deadly.

Red Thread (NickZangus)

 

8. Galactic Bonding (alvarop)

What it is: You are a baby planet copying your dad planet’s facial expressions.

Why I like it: It’s short, hilarious and could be played by a toddler.

My daughter (not a toddler) keeps following me around trying to copy my facial expressions.

Galactic Bonding (alvarop)

 

9. Stanley Squeaks and the Emerald Burrito (Two Scoop Games)

What it is: A puzzle platformer where you play a hungry hamster.

Why I like it:  Cute as hell, and a great game mechanic.

I kept killing the hamster just to hear its death scream.

Stanley Squeaks and the Emerald Burrito (Two Scoop Games)

 

10. Lethal Reflection (Steve)

What it is: Geometry Wars.

Why I like it: Geometry Wars.

By the guy who wrote Geometry Wars. Need I say more.

Lethal Reflection (Steve)

 

11. Space Train (SupSuper)

What it is: Snake on a train…. in space.

Why I like it: Quirky and amusing.  It’s fun, but you really don’t care that it’s difficult.

I wore my train driver’s outfit while I played.

Space Train (SupSuper)

 

12. Burger Beat (TrickFishPie)

What it is: A running game where you bash the keyboard to operate your runner.

Why I like it: It is so bizarre that you have to admire the mind that created it.

Is it wrong that I find it hilariously funny when your man fails to jump a hurdle?

Burger Beat (TrickFishPie)

 

13. Orange (JaJ)

What it is: A moral tale in a Zelda-esque world.

Why I like it: The use of colour is good.  It does not feel worthy despite the subject matter.

A thoughtful idea, burdened by an overly long maze.

Orange (JaJ)

 

14. PRISM (rantt)

What it is: A puzzle platformer where they keep changing the rules.

Why I like it: There is a heavy emphasis on the puzzles themselves, not the packaging (which is not missed).

When I first saw it, I thought “not another of these…” but its strength lies in its puzzles.

PRISM (rantt)

 

15. Savior: Saver of Souls (John Drury)

What it is: Like Super Crate Box with rising lava.

Why I like it: Fast paced, short, and a classic example of the genre.

If only I was as good at this game as I was at killing time with it.

Savior: Saver of Souls (John Drury)

 

 

Tags: best, LD30, picks, reviews, top

By the power of big data here is a composite video featuring the first 2000 players of Trappy Tomb along with their (i.e., your) hilarious “messages to eternity”

I can’t tell you how much fun it has been watching these replays roll in, thank you all for making this a very special Ludum Dare and for your wonderful comments on my game too!

I made a post in my blog telling my experience within this ludum dare.

http://guineashots.com/2014/09/03/my-experience-within-ludum-dare-30/

 

TL;DR version:

• I made a game based on behavior trees, a technique for game AI which I implemented from scratch (spent >20h on it);
• The game is about connecting people;

GOOD:

• First Ludum Dare that I didn’t change the plan in the half of the compo!
• Behavior Tree worked very well and there were no relevant bug at the final version of the game;
• Despite the time I spent on it, the visual of the game is pretty good;
• There are very few games on Ludum Dare that uses AI as this one, I’m very proud of it;

BAD:

• Constant fear of failing to finish it;
• Very hard to model behavior trees programatically;
• VERY hard to debug behavior trees without visual helper;
• Mechanics is incredible boring and repetitive;
• I couldn’t finish several aspects of the game, but the worse was the sound and not fixing the crap mechanics;

(VIEW LUDUM DARE ENTRY | PLAY LOVE CRAFT)

Tags: behavior tree, game jam, love craft, ludum dare 30, post-mortem

I was never able to get my project as far as I had hoped to, so with the positive feedback I’m eternally grateful for by those who have tried what I was able to accomplish and submit for the LD48 Jam, I have continued forward with development for a Post-Compo release.

Above you can see me experimenting with the latest addition-the elemental effects your weapon will be able to gain through the destruction of boxes dropped by mini-bosses (the larger enemies seen). It’s not actually effecting anything yet, but I’m really happy with its implementation and the visual representation.
Your weapons attack will leave a trail based on what elements it has gained and to what degree, and crystals of each element will appear on your head-the slower they spin the less time left before its effect disappears.
A fun note-something I often hear is ‘I wish the enemies would be damaged by their attacks as well’, so a fun quirk I’ve kept is that while enemies won’t cast effects on each other for balancing purposes and to keep the experience fun, I have made it so they still deal damage-at 10%, and knockback. So it keeps all the fun of knowing they are being damaged without poorly effecting the experience or balance (having the mini-boss wipe out its minions before you even attack isn’t the best haha).

Other things I’ve changed/added since the competition.

• A lot of refining of the satisfaction of dealing and receiving damage along with more visual recognition (The sounds, color tint that builds up with consecutive hits-red for normal hits/yellow critical hits, and knockback).
• Background music from our music artist Kevin Green (heard in the video above).
• Refinement of attack mechanics (the orb on the left/right of your characters head shows your left/right mouse button attacks charge), the left attack continues to get faster as it is held-when the left orb is empty you can only swing once consecutively, the right-attack requires an initial cost and auto-casts when the orb is emptied-it also has twice the chance to deal a critical hit.
• Some noteworthy quirks with the elements-you’ll gain them separately for your left/right attack depending on which attack you break open the box with, and upon each swing you’ll have a ‘chance’ to cast any element you have up to its level (nothing is guaranteed). This keeps your normal attacks valuable and each swing playing a vital part while balancing out the experience (and if you manage to get away from an enemy after one swing you might escape the full wrath of their elemental damage too). It really expands the experience in a fun way instead of the traditional mechanics for this.

I hope you enjoy what you see in the video and look forward to more progress on this, hoping to complete it for a release soon after the Ludum Dare judging is finished.

 

 

Tags: jam, LD30, post-compo

Hey guys!

I made a video for my post-mortem version of my game! The original LD30 game is here, whereas the port-mortem is here. Post-mortem has and is being modified based on feedback I received from people who played it. Thanks to everyone who gave feedback, as you were featured in the video, which is here.

Thank you guys so much for playing the game!

– Gandalf1209

Hey everyone! We are the Button Masher Bros!

The amount of request we’ve gotten is incredible! Thanks so much you guys!

Let’s keep this party going with LUDUM DARE TO BELIEVE S:2 Ep. 6!

With so many submissions, there was absolutely no way we could play them all.

Special thanks to our friends at Reddit, twitter, and youtube who all stepped up to give us suggestions – you guys are the BEST!

If you like the games you see, be sure to check them out of Ludumdare.com and let the developers know what you think!

**Today we will be highlighting**:

Title: Pully Planet
Category: Jam Entry
Creator: Patacrow

Title: Connected Worlds – The Adventure
Category: Jam Entry
Creator: snake5

Title: Infiloop
Category: Comp Entry
Creator: Komjaur

Finally, we’d love to hear what you think!

You can comment on the episode linked above, comment in this thread, or tweet us at:

@ButtonMasherBro – Show

@MathBlasterRitz – Chris

or @jwowBMB – Josh.

Thanks Everyone and HAPPY LUDUM DARE!

Here is a personal selection of games from this 30th edition:

Compo 

• DrOpLeTs by Nicso
• Jeru’s Tower by Ncannasse
• Tinyverse by Xaychru04
• This Is Your World Too by Akurn
• Transfer by Mystakin
  

  
 

 

Jam

• Dominions’n’dominoes by Benjamin
• Shattered by Guimonpa
  
• Rift Knight by SecondDimension
• Growing To The Moon by Stending
• Blend and Bobble by Rezoner

 
 

So, following the thought from my previous post, I decided to make a list showing which themes are being covered by which games. That list is by no means complete, and is likely to be updated in the next posts (possibly sent every one-two days, depending on how much I get to find at later point). I’d really like you people to help with spotting the themes as well, especially since I’ve played only about 5-6% of all LD games out there. >.<

It's worth noting that themes that have strong coverage found are bolded, while themes with weak or no coverage found aren’t (no coverage can be recognised by lack of linked games). I decide whether coverage is weak or strong arbitrarily, but there’s some measure decisive in most cases: if theme usage needs explanation, it means that it’s probably weak. Also, if there’s at least one game with strong coverage found, the ones with weak coverage won’t be linked. Additionally, if there are many games that cover the given theme strongly, only the most noteworthy will be picked.
Additionally, themes that made it to the final round of voting are italicised. Just because.

Also, I don’t include my game in the list, since I want to be a good girl and do my best to break the habit of shamelessly linking it.

Enjoy~!
(I decided not to give names explicitly, in case someone could find that too spoiler-ish; I guess there should be no major spoilers, even in You Are Already Dead, but…)

• Alchemy
• Another World
• Artificial Intelligence
• Brainwashed
• Break It, Fix It
• Break The Rules
• Chaos
• Choose A Path
• Connected Worlds [1] [2] [3] (I sure do enjoy overly literal intepretations every once in a while)
• Day and Night [LINK]
• Destroy The System
• Do No Harm
• Don’t Save The Princess
• Don’t Stop Moving
• Dreams And Nightmares [1] [2]
• End Of The Road
• Everyone Is A Monster
• Experimentation [LINK]
• Flow
• For Science! [LINK]
• Forces Of Nature
• Forgotten
• Fortress
• From The Ashes
• Glimpse Of The Future
• Growing
• Human Stupidity
• I For One Welcome Our New Robot Overlords [LINK] (I guess some people do…?)
• I Think It’s Alive
• Illusion
• Infectious
• Isolation
• It’s A Trap!
• Knowledge Is Power
• Labyrinth [LINK]
• Limited Capacity
• Limited Control [LINK] (but it works well enough)
• Loot [LINK] (well, he gathers some goods along the way? O.o”)
• Losing Control
• Lost In Space
• Love [1] [2] (seriously, if I were to list every entry that strongly uses this theme of ~150 I played, I’d do quite a lot of linking…)
• Manipulate The Environment
• Maps
• No One Can See You
• No Return
• No Way In, No Way Out
• Nothing Is Real
• Off The Grid
• On The Edge
• The Other Side [LINK]
• Points Of View
• Potato Salad [LINK] (someone had to…)
• The Power Of Machines
• Randomly Generated (there must be something out there)
• Rise And Fall
• Shadows
• Something’s Out There
• The Space Is Getting Smaller
• Speed
• Strange Physics [LINK]
• Strength In Numbers [1] [2] (I need you!)
• Supply And Demand
• Survive
• Things Are Not What They Seem
• This Happens To Me Every Day [LINK] (really glad to see such outlandish theme somehow got covered! XD)
• Time Travel [LINK]
• Transformation
• Trust No One
• Under Pressure
• Unexpected Side Effect
• Unlimited
• What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
• What Is That In The Distance? (that’s no moon!)
• Where No One Has Gone Before [LINK]
• Wonderful Apocalypse
• You Are Already Dead [1] [2] (boo~!)
• You Are The Weapon
• You Can Never Have Too Many
• You Can’t Fight Back [LINK] (except when you can)
• You Must Leave It Behind
• You’re Not Supposed To Be Here

Coverage found so far: 17 strong, 2 weak, 62 missing.
Can you spot the games using the missing themes? :3

Cosmic Conqueror: A Radical Imperialistic Space Adventure

 

Play Here!

 

Cosmic Conqueror is a space exploration game we did for the jam and worked pretty much until the last minute on. We’re happy how it came out and we enjoy the concept so much that we’re actually gonna keep working on the game past Ludum Dare, we’ve already added a bunch of features! (But I’ll touch back on that later)

How It Started: The game started with a base concept, explore planets, kill the aliens, get followers and make money. We didn’t really have an endgame goal for the game and we probably should have, instead the goal was just to collect as much money as you possibly could, which ended up pretty alright. We had a difficult time coming up with ideas for a game initially, we shied away from two world puzzle concepts and deep personal type games. We just wanted something simple and engaging, so what’s better then cosmic dominance? We discussed our planetary concept ideas and quickly got to work, we started within the first hour or so of the jam.

Ending Rush: At the end we finished up bridge building to connect the planets (which makes you more money) which was a bit of a challenge. We had to get the bridges connecting properly and menus in within about 6 hours and everything was coming to a sudden end, it was late at night, we hadn’t slept the night before, and we knew we had to iron these things out before we could release, so we got to work. Gage worked on getting the bridges to connect properly while I finished up some miscellaneous graphics. Finally the bridges were done with about an hour left, and us tired ready to submit dudes still had to make a menu; so we just quickly slapped together a somewhat buggy menu and it was good to go! Our submission was complete, and we were pretty excited about it!

POST LD: We released a post LD submission on the page a day later fixing some bugs with menus and bridges and it helped out quite a bit, we felt pretty good about it at that point. We’re still working on it now, fixing bugs, adding cool new things and expanding it quite a bit to make it into a real game! It’s a really neat project and we are very excited about it. Isn’t space just totally cool?

And, if you have any interest in what’s gonna happen to the game, you can follow us on twitter. Programming: @MunkeeBacon Art: @KeatonRMoody

Tags: 2D, LD30, love2d, post-mortem, space

To battle! Glory awaits!
Not that you can take any part in it yet.

Gameplay is next on the list, you have my word on it.

And as promised, Time to Gif!

(I should probably remove the trippy background next time….)

For a more controllable/zoomable/immersable experience click here!

Tags: battle, conquest, gif, progress, simulation, war

After you have read my plea, have a pie:

Note that large part of theme coverage comes from Boulevard of Broken Themes entry, which is why it has separate positions in the pie-chart. Note that “non-Boulevard” here means “is covered by something else than Boulevard”, not necessarily “isn’t covered by Boulevard”. Also, some special links were added, marked as [B]. Obviously, it stands for “basement” and has no relation to the game mentioned earlier in that paragraph.

Themes that have strong coverage found are bolded, while themes with weak or no coverage found aren’t (no coverage can be recognised by lack of linked games). I decide whether coverage is weak or strong arbitrarily, but there’s some measure decisive in most cases: if theme usage needs explanation, it means that it’s probably weak. Also, if there’s at least one game with strong coverage found, the ones with weak coverage won’t be linked (unless it’s one of weirder theme usages in Boulevard). Additionally, if there are many games that cover the given theme strongly, only the most noteworthy will be picked.
Additionally, themes that made it to the final round of voting are italicised. Just because.

Enjoy~!
(and beware of random links; they’re very random)

• Alchemy
• Another World [B]
  • An Otter World [LINK]
• Artificial Intelligence
• Brainwashed [LINK]
• Break It, Fix It
• Break The Rules
• Chaos
• Choose A Path [LINK]
• Connected Worlds [1] [2] [3] (I sure do enjoy overly literal intepretations every once in a while)
• Day and Night [1] [2]
• Destroy The System
• Do No Harm [LINK]
• Don’t Save The Princess
• Don’t Stop Moving [B]
• Dreams And Nightmares [1] [2]
• End Of The Road
• Everyone Is A Monster
• Experimentation [LINK]
• Flow
• For Science! [LINK]
• Forces Of Nature [LINK]
• Forgotten [B]
• Fortress
• From The Ashes
• Glimpse Of The Future
• Growing [LINK]
• Human Stupidity
• I For One Welcome Our New Robot Overlords [LINK] (I guess some people do…?)
• I Think It’s Alive
• Illusion [B]
• Infectious
• Isolation
• It’s A Trap!
• Knowledge Is Power
• Labyrinth [B] [LINK]
• Limited Capacity
• Limited Control [LINK] (but it works well enough)
• Loot [LINK] (well, he gathers some goods along the way? O.o”)
• Losing Control
• Lost In Space [B]
• Love [B] [1] [2] (seriously, if I were to list every entry that strongly uses this theme of ~150 I played, I’d do quite a lot of linking…)
• Manipulate The Environment [B] [LINK]
• Maps [B]
• No One Can See You [B] [LINK] and you’re dead
• No Return
• No Way In, No Way Out
• Nothing Is Real [LINK]
• Off The Grid
• On The Edge
• The Other Side [1] [2]
• Points Of View [LINK]
• Potato Salad [B] [LINK] (someone had to…)
• The Power Of Machines
• Randomly Generated (there must be something out there)
• Rise And Fall [B]
• Shadows
• Something’s Out There
• The Space Is Getting Smaller
• Speed
• Strange Physics [LINK]
• Strength In Numbers [1] [2] (I need you!)
• Supply And Demand [LINK]
• Survive
• Things Are Not What They Seem
• This Happens To Me Every Day [LINK] (really glad to see such outlandish theme somehow got covered! XD)
• Time Travel [LINK]
• Transformation [B]
• Trust No One
• Under Pressure [B]
• Unexpected Side Effect
• Unlimited
• What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
• What Is That In The Distance? [B]
• Where No One Has Gone Before [LINK]
• Wonderful Apocalypse
• You Are Already Dead [B] [1] [2] (boo~!)
• You Are The Weapon
• You Can Never Have Too Many
• You Can’t Fight Back [LINK] (except when you can)
• You Must Leave It Behind [B]
• You’re Not Supposed To Be Here

Can you spot the games using the missing themes? :3

It’s been more than a week and we finally managed to make a timelapse video of the Ludum Dare 30 game creation.

If you haven’t played “Linker” – you can play it here: http://stals.itch.io/linker
LD Page: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=25969

For some pic’s and updates on other games we develop you can follow
https://twitter.com/StalsKnight or the blog here: http://letsmakeagame.net/

Play!

After you’ve played my game, you can ponder this lovely stats table:

jam 48ers web,
flash,
html windows linux unity android osx,
os/x jam 1044 0 680 531 249 37 27 197 48ers 1495 1005 746 348 81 22 257 web flash html 1685 580 364 113 23 291 windows 1277 534 59 21 439 linux 597 63 8 382 unity 118 0 37 android 49 7 osx os/x 454

How to read it: the columns and rows are labelled by the terms I searched for.  The numbers in bold for each column show the total entries, and its also split out by jam and 48-hour comp.  The other numbers show the intersection of two groups, e.g. there were 8 entries that provided by Linux and Android links.

In my own game, which was a kind of meta-game, I originally meant you to be able to filter people by target.  Sadly time run out and the feature was cut 😉

The most-commented-on games are also Web games.

Ergo, LD31, focus on a web game!

Interestingly, there were 1685 “web” entries, and 5 Unity entries did not mention a “web” target…

I’d like to write a few a short post mortem about my LD 30 entry called “Two Worlds” (second prize for original title?). I think if I’ll wait a few days longer I’ll never finish it. So… This was my first Ludum Dare and I’m very happy with my results – I’ve made a finished – but pretty simple and unpolished – game. I was able to overcome my usual difficulties with game making – low motivation, focusing on some time-consuming useless features and, mostly, unfinished, half-working parts.

Two Worlds – interactive “strategy” game.

What went right:

1. Fixed GUI. I was using old version of NGUI for Unity and wasn’t sure how it will work with modern scaleable UI. I decided to use fixed elements size and position. And that was one of the greatest discovery for me. On my another project I spend about 70% of time making “cool” interface, with scaling, draggable elements etc. If only I made something simple and fixed before – I think that project would be finished by now, not frozen for X months. For my compo game, I’ve made UI in about 2 hours and didn’t change it at all for the whole two days. And that was amazing.
2. Feature cut. I’ve got a lot of elements planned. Most of them made it into a game, but wasn’t as deep and complex as I wanted at first. Usually, i’d like to make some complex system with many elements, random text generation, results etc. For the first time I said “Stop!” to myself and made everything just simple and fuctional.
3. Focus. I’ve spend two days just. making. a. game. I think I was going to a shop for some food, but that’s all. Good sleep, comfortable room and no distractions – I think that’s all you really need to make something.

What went wrong:

1. Presentation. Black screen with colored buttons just doesn’t look cool. And it’s completly lost on screen with other competitors. And it doesn’t look interesting at all. Also, I’ve spend too much time in development, missing all the “Developer Logs”, streams, discussions etc. I think things would be much better if I spend 1/4 of my time just writing about game, talking with other devs, and maybe improving my visuals a little.
2. Playtesting. I didn’t understood that some of my cool features like “second trade option” was used by really low percent of players and the most used game options are the least fun. I think it’s really important to give someone your prototype and watch how fun it is to play and what actions the player will actually do instead of what YOU think he’ll do.
3. Polishing. Everything is working, that’s a good thing. But there are many parts to be improved. And thou feature cut saved me a lot of time, some parts could be better.
4. Progress bars. I always loved turn-based text games, like my own. But in some compo game I saw progress bars. You click on action, get the progress bar and just wait a little. And then you can click again. And then I realised, that I should use progress bars instead of turns and actions too! This can really improve game dynamic. You can have one huge progress bar for portal opening (like 30-45 seconds) and cooldowns on each possible action (grow resource, train troops). This can be really fun! And it’s really easy to balance the whole thing just by adjusting time! But then I understood that 48 hours passed about two days ago and became sad. But I’ll use progress bars and cooldowns in some future project.

I hope you’ve got something interesting from my post

Tags: Two Worlds

PLAY HERE

Ports Ahoy! The Age of Trade is best described as a tycoon game. Buy ships, draw out trade routes, and build up your empire! The game was made by the 5 of us here at Literal Games: 2 programmers, 1 artist and 2 music/SFX. This was our second Ludum Dare as a group, and I think we came on leaps and bounds since last year!

I was the main programming force behind the game, and I think now is a good time to reflect on what did and didn’t go well.

WHAT WENT WELL:

Doing an hour’s planning before bed

Being in the UK, the theme was released at 2am. We stayed up until the theme was released and spent an hour throwing down ideas and words that came into our heads. Then, with all those ideas and concepts buzzing around our heads, we went to bed and slept on it. The result was, in the morning, a group of people well rested, ready to make a game, and with lots of good ideas.

Concept Art!

Settling on an theme early

After breakfast, we managed to decide fairly quickly on a trading game. At first we were going for space – then someone suggested boats and we were all quickly on board. That meant that, even without a solid game concept, most people could get to work. Our artist made some boat concepts and our sound guys started working on some naval music.

Setting a schedule

Before we even started we had decided on a rough schedule – Day 1 was basic gameplay, Day 2 was extra features and Day 3 was polish and bug fixes. I’m not going to say that we rigorously stuck to that schedule but it allowed us to know when things were taking too long.

Debug mode showing connections

Writing decent code and knowing my base code

If I do say so myself. Even though I’d never done a game like this before (I’d never implemented zooming in a game before!) because I’d written the engine myself and knew it inside out, and had been working with AS3 so long, I knew exactly how I wanted to attack this game. I had a few problems with maths of zooming and positioning, but it all worked out on the end. The code I wrote the first two days was surprisingly clean and clear and allowed me to add features and functionality quickly and efficiently – like the debug mode we used to remove connections that went over land!

Having a GREAT BIG whiteboard

We took the whiteboard that usually resides on my wall down and used it for everything – planning, concept art, feature list, bug list, doing maths, listing out ports, and more. It was so useful being able to explain something to others by quickly drawing a sketch, or feeling the satisfaction of (literally) wiping off a bug. It kept us organised and on task.

Planning on the whiteboard!

Deciding who was cooking what when

If you’re working solo, you probably don’t realise that working in a team has some disadvantages – we had to feed 7 (the 5 of us, my girlfriend and my brother) people in my house for 4 days! But we had meal plans set out and dinner ended up being a stress free welcome break for everyone. Another good idea was having a takeaway on the last day – everyone managed to keep working and got a nice meal!

Streaming/Blog posts

We had a stream up last year, but it didn’t really take off. We had a couple of regulars last year, but this year we had loads of people who stayed and some who even came back again! We had two followers on Twitch at the start of the Jam – and now we have 23. Having people talk to us in the chat and interacting with them was so much fun, and hearing people compliment the art and the concept in the blog posts we did kept us on task and excited about working. Our artist made loads of graphics for the stream like borders for the webcams, splashes, and a countdown that I made, which I think contributed greatly to the look and feel of the stream. Making GIFs and writing blog posts gave us a quick break and broke up the monotony of doing the same thing for many hours a day, and having new people come and watch the stream after reading the posts was always nice.

GUI and the upgrades screen!

Polish

Our motto for the weekend was “Simple and Polished”. Looking at previous games, the ones that did well were the ones that kept to that idea. We’ve had so many comments about how polished the game is, so we definitely managed at least half of our goal! Simple… maybe not. Simple things like tweens, things fading in and out, drop shadows on EVERYTHING, and well designed GUI meant that the game feels very polished. I think something that really shows this is the upgrades screen. Clicking the shipyard button doesn’t just pop up the upgrades screen – it slides out, and not just that – it also bounces. That took an extra minute to add in, but adds so much.

Music and SFX

Our two sound guys did such a great job. The music has received so many great compliments. It fits the game perfectly, with seafearing riffs and maritime instruments giving the game the perfect feel. The vast array of sound effects they created from nothing but their mouths and what was lying around my house, I think, is extremely impressive. If you want to hear the finished tracks and some in progress tracks, check out our SoundCloud.

WHAT DIDN’T GO WELL

The concept

We said last time we entered Ludum Dare that we would never again do anything that needed balancing. Somehow, we forgot that. The game is not balanced at all – a few good trade routes in Europe and you can buy all the upgrades – you don’t even have to cross the Atlantic, which was supposed to be the main point of the game! The type of game also meant that there was lots of GUI involved, which hampered progress for both me and the artist.

This is what pirates do.

Endgame

On the last day, with about 6 hours left, we realised – there’s no way for you to lose or win the game. We quickly decided that you could win by discovering every port and lose if you lost all your money, but neither of those things are really feasible. There are too many ports to make it fun or viable to catch ’em all, and with the balancing issues we had you never really have to deal with ever getting close to losing.

PIRATES

We struggled a lot with how to do pirates. We decided at the beginning that they shouldn’t be visible so you had to watch where your ships disappeared to find out where they were. However, whilst we were playtesting on the last day, we realised it didn’t really work – but what to do about it? We left it, but we have had comments about how annoying and nonsensical pirates are. Yarr…. we know. Pirates invading ports was added in quickly as a last minute thing, but doesn’t occur often enough to have an impact or for most people to even see it!

Drawing trade routes!

Interface

As we all knew how to control the game, we never realised this was a problem. People didn’t understand how to make trade routes! All we said in the help was click and drag. I watched a livestream of someone playing our game, and they tried to make a trade route to Rotterdam to start with. They dragged straight from Bristol to Rotterdam, which I’ll admit, makes sense, then were very confused when it didn’t work. Maybe the waypoints aren’t visible enough or we need to explain it more, but it is definitely a problem. In a similar vein, Privateers needed more explaining too. No-one realised you could move privateers once they were in the ocean, and the idea that you can’t move then into ports unless there are pirates attacking is very unintuitive.

“Vector” graphics

The amount of scaling and zooming in the game means that vector, rather than bitmaps would be preferred – even the art style, mainly block colours and straight lines are perfect for vectors. Except… neither me nor the artist knew how to make or use them. So we ended up having to deal with huge bitmaps and spritesheets, which was less than desirable. It also means that the game takes up almost 300MB in RAM! I also didn’t realise it doesn’t run at a steady 60fps on any low spec computers. Work could definitely be done on that!

The game at the end of Day 1!

Time management/Feature Creep

I said earlier that we didn’t stick to the schedule. At the end of the first day we were on schedule – just. The core concept of the game was finished (just). The second day, however, was a bit of a shambles. Lots of polish that could have been saved for the final day was done, when really I should have been focusing on making the gameplay engaging and other basic things. Hell, I didn’t even make ships turn around until almost the end of the last day. And feature creep was definitely an issue – with about 3 hours left on the last day we decided we should add wealth to ports. It turned out okay, and was definitely a huge improvement, but it so should have been done a lot earlier.

Multiple Programmers

I’ve never had another programmer help me in any game before. We set up git and did use it, but finding things for our other programmer to do was hard, and transferring assets and keeping folder structure means we lost time when he did start to work on things. We should have been working on everything together from the start, and comments were few and far between in my code which was definitely a problem. This is definitely something that went very wrong and could have fixed many of the problems caused by not having enough time.

CONCLUSION

Wow. This has turned into a mammoth post. All in all however, I think we’ve all improved hugely since our last Ludum Dare. We’ve learnt new lessons, and reinforced what we learnt last time (DON’T DO ANYTHING THAT NEEDS BALANCING!). Thanks for reading if you’ve got this far, and I’d love it if you gave the game a try if you haven’t already.

The finished product! Click to play the game.

Are you a lover or a fighter? 😀

Play it here!

<3

When one finds themselves adrift in space… snacking can be a very important past time. Especially when it’s potato salad. Especially when such a snack has had a massive Kickstarter recently. Just be sure you aren’t near any potato related piggy cults when you make it. But we have to be quick. We have Spirit Crows and StarLord coming over to snack with us. Just be very careful you don’t accidentally fall into the Dead World or somebody elses Dreams!

The Games Showcased:

StarLord by Lowcade

Lucid by Fisholith

This Little Piggy by Infection Crew

Tags: game reviews, Video Showcase

THIS  is our 2nd entry for Ludem Dare Jam and we decided to write a short post-mortem on our thoughts and experiences.

Goals

• Complete a functional (and fun) prototype of a game adhering to LD30’s theme.
• Create a Starfox-esque arena battle game

What went well

• The ship controls are fluid and intuitive.
• Atmosphere feels grand and otherworldly
• Music pairs well with the action
• Gameplay feels fair albeit unforgiving

What could have gone better

• We would have liked to have more varied combat, flying enemies, different types of things for the player to zip and dodge around.
• The game is quite unforgiving. To balance it, we’d want to implement a player health system, possibly checkpoints.
• Mouse isn’t stuck to the game window, so there were reports of players accidentally clicking away from the game. While fullscreen mode would help solve this problem, we’d need to change the way the cursor works in general to get rid of this issue altogether.

Thoughts on this Ludem Dare Jam

Tim

This jam went really well! As this was my first experience with 3D modeling, I spent a good chunk of my time learning the tools, and fixing my silly mistakes. Luckily, now I know the tools (to an extent), and have a semi-solid workflow for creating basic models, and then texturing them.

Audio was very functional, but nothing special. If we decide to iterate on the prototype to make a full game, I’d want to create more obvious and unique cues for enemy fire, goal completion, and improve on the player ship’s thrusters.

Mark

I had fun participating this Ludem Dare, I feel like my teamwork with Tim has improved greatly since the last LD

In the game itself we had to shrink down the player ship A LOT, when next  to the terrain or buildings you’re like an ant in comparison.  This was done to create a massive world feeling and had the effect of appearing to travel fast and long distance while only moving a tiny amount.

The ship controls and movement  is actually fairly simple and was a quick way to imitate a rail shooter. It consists of a camera acting as the main movement piece and following a long combination of the ship, targeting reticules, and a giant plane mesh collider which was used for steering. The collection of objects always pointed towards the mouses world position projected on a plane and  the camera simply moved forward and rotated  towards where the collection was pointing in world space. The issue with using this is I didn’t have time to make a system to keep the mouse in screen on the web build. Overall though I’m happy with the result and I hope to participate in the next LD.

 

Our Game

If you want to check out our LD30 page you can find it HERE , and a direct link to our game over HERE

Any comments or feedback are appreciated greatly and we hope you enjoy playing it!

Who we are

Mark Swick –  Programmer who began as a hobbyist and started pursuing it as a career. Currently working on unannounced titles while a college student.

Tim Rurkowski – Composer/sound designer with 3 years of experience who has previously worked on titles such as Six Sided Sanctuary, 10 Second Ninja, Dudeski, and Two Epic Tortoises. He dabbles in game design, tortoises, and art on the side.

 

Tools used

Unity3d – Engine
Blender – 3D modeling
GIMP – Texture editing
Logic Pro 9 – Music Composition/Sound Design
ProTools 11 – Sound Design

I watched this video today:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXaZCdM5i9o

Yeah! That guys are really awesome! But they’re totally didn’t understood how to play my game. So I was inspired to record masterplay of IMPOSSIBLE DIFFICULT:

If you want another try, here is link to my entry: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=14848

Ok, my compo entry is imbalanced now, because weapons are useless. I working on this project and already re-reviewing gameplay and added useful things. I don’t know when I’ll release new version. Work is going very slow.

Tags: gameplay, gameplay video, playthrough

 
  
 

Hello! I’m writing here in a first time, so just trying it out.

Post-mortem and pixel art tutorial are coming soon.
If you haven’t played yet, check out my game, Shift Keeper.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=23565

There are 9 days left for voting and I decided to make a post morten ^^

MyGoal
– Since I had some problems finishing a projekt in the last time my main goal für this LD was to complete my ideas
– Do some art and sound. I´m a good coder but a terrible artist and musican i i wanted to make some arts and sounds that at least not look like crap

I´m lucky to say, I reached both of these goals 😀

What went wrong

I begin with this section because it´s much shorter then the things that went right.
Basically nothing went wrong. Everything worked together in first attempt and I had nearly nothing to correct

What could have went better

In the end I messed up balancing a bit. Because I had no playtesters I had to play the game by myself and correct balancing issues. This is really not recomended. You ALWAYS should have playtesters
Also I used the new Unity 4.6 UI system. It worked like a charme but all of this was new for me, so I wasted a bit of time, learning how to achieve a certain goal

What went right

This was the best game jam I ever had. I´t took me 24h to upload a playable version of my game. The other 24h I completely had to polish and extend my game. There was no stress, no time pressure, nothing. I slept alot, I had time for my family and all in all it was completely relaxing.

What i leaned:
– Brainstorming at the beginning is essential. I did this nearly an hour and after that I had a clear idea what type of game I wanted to make
– Keep your idea simple. At first i thought, making a simulation would be much work, but it wasnt. My concept was small but promised fun. This is the perfect start to LD
– Keep out math. I could have done some calculations to determite how many users you gain per tick, what every feature has to cost etc etc. But i decided just to set a value, play the game, adjust the value, play the game again and so on until it feels right. If math isn´t your strength this should be your way to go
– Upload early. If your idea is small enough to finish it hours before deadline upload it! People will test your game and give feedback that really helps you to polish your game. Updates can be done on the fly. I uloaded the first version after 24h. There was no way to loose the game, there were a lot of bugs and balancing was terrible. But I hat a day left and so I made some fixes, some polishing and some new features and uploaded this “patch”. Then I did the same process again. I´m proud to say. At deadline my link to web player version got clicked nealry 300 times.

And last but not least: TANK YOU FOR YOUR FEEDBACK
Your comments were motivating as hell and I´m really looking forward to your votes.
Here some of your comments:

Zer0 says …
Aug 23, 2014 @ 8:09pm
This is kinda like Plague.Inc but with a sozial network. Great Game tho 😀

xWarZonex says …
Aug 24, 2014 @ 1:30am
This is amazing! How did you do this so quick?

ViliX says …
Aug 25, 2014 @ 12:32pm
One of my favourites. You should do some post-compo version.

Robinerd says …
Aug 25, 2014 @ 12:50pm
Cool concept. Thought at first it would go on to infinite, but then I realized the troubles of gaining a larger user base. Well done and very interesting! Creds for the instructions and the ability to turn of the music. Great learning curve.

Geckoo1337 says …
Aug 26, 2014 @ 6:25am
One of my favorites for this LD32. Well done ++

If you whant to play (and rate) my game “The Social Network” you can to that here

Why? Because I told you to. And people said this!

Wertle says …
Sep 6, 2014 @ 6:29am

Nice work on this, I liked seeing the Ikaruga-style mechanics in a runner, which I don’t believe I’ve seen before. If you continue this I would recommend a method of ensuring you don’t get “impossible” spawns or long stretches of spawns where you don’t have to interact (you can do this a couple ways, one way is pre-designing segments that work really well and just procedurally generating the segments, or you can figure out the minimum distance needed to swap and make sure things don’t spawn under that distance). Since swapping is the only mechanic you could really play up the polish on those characters and have them animating super cute! Playtest with the colorblind Overall really nice work!

43iscoding says …
Aug 27, 2014 @ 10:41am

You seem to use both this LD theme and previous theme aswell 😀
Simple game, simple graphics, but it all seems very organic and lovely!

C_Walden says …
Aug 26, 2014 @ 7:33am

Aside from the die-for-no-reason bug, that’s pretty fun! I think it can be a little tricky sometimes to tell what’s a power-up and what’s an obstacle. The music sounds a little harsh, but the sound effects are nice. Overall, I liked it.

cardboard says …
Aug 25, 2014 @ 7:01am

The pixel art is very nice, and everything blends together fairly cohesively. The music is nice and fits the game well. If there were no bugs, I can see myself enjoying this game (even more). The random deaths were quite funny to me, but basically eliminate the competitiveness since it is more “player versus game” than “player versus player”.

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PLAY SAID GAME

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Rift Knight Post Mortem

A Post-Mortem for my LD30 game Rift Knight, a fast-paced action platformer.  Play it Here

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Part 1: The Story of Things that Mostly Went Wrong

Despite it all working out in the end, there was a time on Sunday when I was really close to giving up.  Initially this was going to be a team effort with 2 of us, but James has to drop out almost straight away (he is still recovering from a detached retina, so he is forgiven).  So on Saturday night I found out that I had to do all the art myself as well as the gameplay and sound, and I had already lost time as I was travelling back from Scotland most of Saturday.  I stayed up really late Saturday getting the movement and platform mechanics working, but was a bit worried about finishing everything.  Sunday I got up early and made music and sounds, as I knew I could at least do this bit.  That went well, but after that things started to go downhill.  I tried to create some graphics, and ended up scrapping everything and starting again 3 times!  I gave up and worked more on the gameplay to try and get that ready at least.  By late Sunday night I tried doing some more artwork, only to hate it again.  At this point I had a black & white game with some squares jumping around a screen, and although I knew I could use the Monday and submit to the Jam, I was very close to just throwing in the towel.

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Part 2: The Story of Snatching Victory from the Jaws of Defeat

Monday morning I woke up very early, so decided to sit down for one last attempt at making the game work.  I played through the one level I’d made and thought that it actually felt really fun to move around, so it was worth trying to finish it off.  Knowing about my terrible art experience from the rest of the weekend I decided to leave that until last (better to submit a finished game with no art than risk the whole thing failing).
So for the first half of Monday I created a few more enemy types, designed 5 levels and did a bit of a tutorial.  I put in some blank title and intro screens too.  So after lunch I had an essentially playable game made of black and white squares.  Then I set about trying to make some graphics.  Attempt number 5 went a lot better, with the enemies I stuck to my normal style of drawing the weirdest things I could in a simple child-like way.  I animated them in really simple 3 frames by just moving legs up and down.  Luckily they were moving so quickly in the game that it didn’t matter.  With the main character, I ended up creating each body part as a separate layer in paint.net, then I would copy the file and rotate them accordingly.  This is a new technique for me and it worked really well, so I ended up with some almost convincing movement animations.  From there things got a lot better, I put all the animations into the game and added some screenshake effects and it all started to feel pretty good.  I threw in some very quick text for the beginning and end of the game and I finally had something that felt worthy of submission.  I tweaked a few things, uploaded and submitted with about 4 minutes to go before the Jam deadline on Monday night.

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Conclusion

The main thing that went right was the way the game feels.  I spent a long time tweaking all the movement variables to try and make it feel fun; I wrote down “joyful movement” on a notepad right at the start, and I think I came fairly close to getting that right.  It’s definitely not perfect, but a good starting point.
The other thing that accidentally went right was the graphics.  I still think the game looks a bit rubbish, and art is not my strong point, but I was pleased with my animations.  They were simple 3 or 4 frame animations, but they did fit with the controls and conveyed a nice sense of movement.
I was fairly happy with my music again this time, I was worried it got a bit repetitive but I think it fitted the mood of the game.
Finally, despite all the problems, I’m glad I managed to pull it all together by the end!  I got 5 relatively playable levels with simple beginning and end screens, so I ended up submitting a short but fully complete game.

In hindsight I am really happy with my entry, as it’s the first time I have made something I would consider genuinely fun in terms of how it feels to control.  I would like to build on it, so this game will definitely go on my list of ongoing projects.  Plans are to expand the main game as well as adding challenge and speedrun modes.  It could possibly be a pretty fun local multiplayer game with some tweaking as well, we’ll have to wait and see.

Thanks to anyone who has already played it, if not you can give it a try here

 

It’s almost two weeks since I made Two Islands, and I’ve had some interesting feedback.

Firstly, here are the problems with the game:

• Two difficult to understand at first
• Little (or no) tutorial
• No sound
• Too easy

This is all really good, and more or less what I had expected. I was a little surprised to see that people wanted a tutorial. I agree that the game is difficult to understand but it seems unusual for a 48 hour game to have any kind of tutorial.

The feedback was generally positive though, and people seemed willing to put in some patience, for which I was very grateful. For the first time I actually found one of my own games fun, which is a benefit.

Given extra time, I’d have worked on the AI more. If I were to start again, I’d probably leave out AI altogether. It’s a lesson learned though – 48 hours is not enough to create challenging and interesting AI.

If you’re interested in playing Two Islands, you can find it here.

I made this little tool now during LD30, in order to get “sprites” that sorted correctly when rotated and displayed in 3d. Someone else might have some use for it as well perhaps.
All it does is to generate a quad and a double side shaded unlit material based on the layout of a sprite in your scene. It offsets and scales the quad and texture accordingly. It cannot handle off-center pivots correctly though(and maybe other things as well), so feel free to expand upon the script if you wish(its source is also in the game repo).

.unitypackage

Sprite based tree (left) and quad based (right).

The gadget.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tags: sprite, tool

Hey all! Still hard at work on the final version of my Ludum Dare entry, Flicker papacheech.itch.io/flicker

I am adding more enemies, animations, a graphical overhaul, and other things to make this game really fun and give it more longevity. I hope you all will play it when it is finished.

For an update when the game is released as well as all the latest news, follow me on twitter @danforstinger.

Cheers

Dan

Here is the post mortem for the Stellarlink Corp., built as a jam entry for this 30th Ludum Dare (and my 8th edition).

 

Theme

As always, theme is announced Friday 22:00 here in Brazil, and right after it the overall idea came clear to my mind. I’m somewhat cautious about using themes literally (there would be room for much more creativity) but working alone with limited time, you simply can’t have the best of everything in your entry – a legacy knowledge from previous Ludum Dares.

Initially this game should be in 3D space but after a second thought I saw some problems with this approach. Mainly with player interaction and the strategies to fix/improve it would lead development beyond jam deadline, so fixed camera was chosen leaving the game environment in X/Z plane.

Stellarlink Corp. idea is that player controls a company that provide data links between cities at planets. These planets orbits a star and have their own rotation movement with random settings every game (angle, velocity).

There would be upgrades to apply on city transmitters, links and satellites to buy.

 

Environment

Heavy work started at Friday night and by Saturday dawn I had a functional environment with cosmos background, proper planetary movement and a cool random perlin surface generator. This last one took me like 40 minutes and I really liked the results. Morale was high so I went to bed.

 

Saturday – Gameplay gameplay gameplay

Cities and their attached transmitters were created and fixed at their planetary sites (thanks Blender).

First gameplay tests proved that this game could be fun but it also made clear that (then again) it would be a hard game with an unusual player interaction where one must split attention between precise aim and overall surveillance about planets motions to spot possible link paths. As the player progress, the links requests start to come in row and more often, turning the link delivery business into a chaotic experience for the unprepared. It was time to upgrades.

 

 

 

Saturday night – Upgrades

I had enough time to code every single planned upgrade and they really do a lot of difference in gameplay. The last one coded/modeled, Satellites, were one of the top reasons that convinced me, back in Friday planning, that the whole idea had potential. And I really loved how they fitted to game;

I spent some more time on balancing and tweaking values and prices, adjusting satellites control/function and by Sunday dawn Stellarlink Corp. was a complete game.

Sunday – round the edges

Some work on UI, some more balance/tweaks, intro and game over sequences, bug fixes. Then, for the first time in all Ludum Dares that I took part, I had a clear chance to submit a game in the 48 hours compo, except by 2 little details: 1) The game would go with no sound/music and 2) that would forbid me to use the only previous made asset in game : The blue cosmos background. So, I decided to stick with JAM 72 hours and start to add sounds.

Monday – real life work then sounds/music

As JAM rules allows, sounds from several sources were used, with some remix at the amazing Wavosaur.

Then I got my old keyboard from under the bed and started the music creation at Monday 20:00 in FL Studio 11. I had some problems trying to make a seamless loop to fit nicely in gameplay but at Monday 21:30 time was up and I had to upload as is.

 

As always it was amazing to take part of Ludum Dare. This one was a breeze, no rush, no stress, things worked as planned and I’m liking players feedback.

Thank you, see you in LD#31.

Time for my wrap-up for LD30. This was my second LD, and I have to say first and foremost, this one was much more enjoyable for me. Things were very confusing and almost frustrating the first time around. Now that I’m familiar with both the site and the competition itself, things came much more natural this round. My entry is called ‘WithU’, and is the story of a lost boy and his deceased grandfather.

Setup via the Game window

I spent a lot more time with both my notebook and my pillow this time around; that is to say I spent a lot more time designing and I slept pretty consistently. Both of these worked out well.

My original plan was, of course, actual planets. This was thrown out almost immediately:

After a lot more doodling in the notebook, my next idea was a boy and a girl who fall in love but are separated by a void. You must help the boy and girl work together via a split-screen setup so they can be together. Here is my setup for that idea:

Screenshot of my Unity3D setup from earlier

Next, I decided to try out a first-person view and mechanic. It too was short-lived:

Back to the notebook! Finally, I landed on an idea that really inspired me. The plan was to swap the girl out for the boy’s late grandfather, and using my cube layout from my previous idea, it wasn’t long before I felt like I had something.

Setup via the Unity Scene view

After landing on the boy/grandfather idea, the new mechanic and map started coming together pretty quickly.  A big help was using a cube of 1x1x1 alongside Unity3D’s built in snapping system… which allowed me to duplicate and place the cubes really quickly.  There wasn’t enough time left to design an entire game around this mechanic, so I settled on a few puzzles and added the optional “side quest” of collecting coins.

This game is mostly narrative and environment, although there is one puzzle in particular that I’m pretty proud of.  To see it, and more of the game itself, you’ll have to play!

WithU: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=35774