So I’ve added octaves into the piano. You can cycle through 5 octaves of keys (60 notes in total). The dragging mouse left and right or pressing up and down arrows on the keyboard work. All of the sounds still playback at the end of the level.

http://www.stencyl.com/game/play/28475

Next step for the flight demo is updating the enemies list/spawns. I also want to add extra routes that you can take so the game is not as linear. I will wait to put the new version on newgrounds and android until I have enemies updated. I’m also trying to figure out the apple development process to produce an iOS version.

Hey folks! 😀 For those that don’t follow me on Twitter, I thought I’d put together a list of changes, improvements, and things I’ve been working on these past 2 weeks.

Click for the headlines, or read for the nitty gritty details.

Related: The Future of Ludum Dare Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3. Suggestion Thread.

Initial Cloudflare Setup – Cloudflare is popular (and free) CDN that speeds up websites by hosting static files closer to you, wherever you are in the world. It’s now installed and working. This is just one of many things that will speed up the website for everyone, especially those outside North America. We’re still bound by how fast the server can fullfill PHP requests, which is next on the list.

Enabling Cloudflare is just the first step towards speeding up the website. Right now we are not optimized at all for CDN (well, not really). It handles those several megabyte animated GIFs people have been uploading great, but we’re wasting a lot of time in PHP and SQL queries, especially on static dynamic stuff. So like I said, next will be speeding up the PHP (OpCache, APCu), and doing various optimizations and updates to better utilize the CDN.

No more www in URLs – ‘www’ is so 1994. All www.ludumdare.com URLs will now resolve to their www-less counterparts. Hello ludumdare.com/everything.

(PS: I’m saving the migration from ludumdare.com/compo/ to ludumdare.com for later. If I was to just do it, it would break a lot of the internet (links). So LD in its current form (WordPress) will continue to live in the /compo/ folder. We’ll be free once we’ve obsoleted it)

Fixes to the Donation Widget – The donation widget is some pretty old code. It’s based on an abandoned WordPress plugin named Donate Plus, that I had to ‘improve’ some years ago. In a sense, it has almost never actually worked correctly. It was supposed to talk with Paypal and sync transactions back and forth, but that stopped working after a month. Fortunately there was a way to manually add donations, which I’ve been doing ever since. No more! The plugin is now fixed. I still instinctively go to the control panel when I get donation e-mails, but now it’s just to admire that it’s done. Ahh the wonders of automation. 😀

There were more bugs, such as only supporting dollar amounts without decimals, fixed. I’m also now saving useful information like Paypal fees and actual Paypal e-mail addresses (wow).

All that’s left is making it correctly record who (what user account on ludumdare.com) donated. This is where I left off. I had made a fix, but it apparently does not work. I’ve written a script to match e-mail addresses with user accounts, but it seems many folks have multiple e-mail addresses. I’ll eventually add a way to claim a donation.

Added “Pre-Donation Widget” contributions – There were a few-dozen contributions to Ludum Dare before I set up the widget. These contributions are now part of the database. We now have a complete record of everyone that has ever contribution to Ludum Dare by Paypal. This will be useful. 😀

Post Previews Bug – Apparently only me and the other admins ever saw this. Anyways, post previews (drafts) now work for everyone again.

Updated Twitch Embed – Twitch finally updated their embed code from a Flash ‘object’ to an HTML ‘iframe’, and I’ve made the change. This means that Mobile and Tablet browsers can watch Live Streams from the website too!

The new embed also supports the Chromecast, which if you have one is pretty sweet.

Broadcast Tracking (and hello LDtv) – LDtv you say? Well it is 2014 (soon to be 2015), and video is kind-of a thing. I want us to better support video throughout the website, and I don’t just mean the Twitch widget. I mean all video. From lets plays on YouTube, to alternative streaming services like Hitbox. I want video to become a bigger part of LD, so much, that I’ve given this advocacy project a name: LDtv.

As for broadcast tracking, this started when I noticed something kind-of amazing the other day.

It was a Tuesday afternoon, just after Lunch, and there it was: The Twitch Widget, full of Live Streams. Again, this was a Tuesday afternoon. Aside from the October Challenge, there was no Game Jam going on. It wasn’t even a weekend! It’s a weekday, and there are 7 people streaming development to ~60 viewers!

What!

In the grand scheme of Live Streaming, yes that’s a small number, but it tells me something: Game Dev Live Streaming is catching on. I always assumed streaming was going to be one of the ways LD would be relevant in the ‘off season’, but here it was, happening right before my eyes.

I started asking questions: How long has this been going on? Why hadn’t I noticed this? What can I do to help it thrive even more? And like most of my Twitter ramblings, I said what I had to say and moved on to the next thing.

Are we at 24 hours of constant streaming yet?

A couple days later I wrote a PHP script to start tracking this. A cron job, every 5 minutes, hit Twitch and see whose online. Left it overnight to see how that would go.

And the scary thing: Yes, some days, we are at 24 hours of streaming!

We are talking 1 person carrying the night shift, but it happened. The first night I started tracking the data, there it was. I’ve also learned Sunday nights and Holiday nights have a lull where us Canadians and Americans sleep. But when I wake up tomorrow morning, there will be streaming, and it’s great.

I’ve put together a special page where you can find additional live stream data. In a sense, this is the beginnings of the larger LDtv project. Generally, we need to start caring more about the video content people are creating, and in this case, the people putting a lot of hours in to streaming. Figuring out who those people are. I’ll have more stats, charts and things to share soon.

Hitbox.tv Live Streaming Support (LDtv page only) – It’s not yet available on the front-page Widget, but the stream tracking is also tracking Hitbox.tv streams. For those not in the know, Hitbox is a lot like Twitch, but they’re not owned by Amazon (for better or worse). A number of folks have been asking for Hitbox support, and we now have it. Coming soon to a Widget near you!

YouTube Live Streaming Support (LDtv page only) – Like Hitbox, this isn’t available on the Widget yet. Long term, I want LDtv and the Website to do something with YouTube videos, so I began doing some research in to Google’s APIs. One thing lead to another, and we now have YouTube Live Stream Support!

YouTube streaming supports both Google+ style “Hangouts On Air” and proper YouTube Live broadcasts. Curious about YouTube streaming? You may have to go to your YouTube account settings and enable it. To compare, Twitch and Hitbox work essentially the same, but YouTube has a built-in DVR. This means as a viewer, you can rewind and fast forward through a Live event, or hit the LIVE button to resume watching Live. It’s pretty cool. That said, YouTube Live is a bit like an aircraft with lots of buttons and switches. Powerful, but complicated.

Header and Sidebar Declutter – One of the ugliest parts of the website is the madness that goes on in the page header and the sidebar. I’m often asked where to find things, many are right in the sidebar or header. Obviously, what we have isn’t working, so I’m going to try to fix it. The Mailing List, IRC, and Reddit now have big icons on the sidebar. I’m told they act funny in some older browsers, so I’ll continue to tweak the code. This is just the start. I plan to continue tweaking and improving the layout as we go.

Steam Widget (Curator and Group) – Ludum Dare has a Steam presence. Originally we had a small Steam Group of 200-some members, and it was okay. But then Steam Curators happened, and with some effort, we managed to become a Top-50 curator. Unfortunately we have slipped, down to the Top-60, but that’s still good! That’s nearly 2600 people, LD’ers and Gamers, that will now hear about your Ludum Dare games as they cross over in to PC’s biggest game market. And the higher we go, the more people we can share your games with. 😀

We also used to have a ‘Featured Post-LD Games’ list that, to be honest, in recent years was just a Steam Games list. There’s just too much volume on iOS and Android, that I had to limit it to places with less volume. That said, of the 14 Ludum Dare games on Steam, 8 have come out this year, with the another coming next month, and 1 more scheduled for 2015. Steam is growing fast too thanks to Greenlight, and Valve has now made it easy for us to collect games.

Rarely talked about, we’ve had a Ludum Dare Steam Group for years too. A good 200 people found it organically, but now seems like a good time to open the floodgates.

So I’ve combined these 3 Steam things together in to a single custom Steam-like widget. Visit the website and scroll down; It’s hard to miss. The Featured games list is now a random 3 Ludum Dare games available on Steam. Currently, the stats update ever 10 minutes (I may bump this). It still needs some work, but check it out! I’m pleased with the results.

Unfinished: Patreon and Donation Goals Widget – It figures. The important thing as I saw it going in to this Ludum Dare update plan was to highlight how much money we’ve taken in, and how I’m doing towards my goal. Some of the first code I wrote 2 nearly weeks ago was a parser for the CSV file that Patreon spits out. Alas, this got back-burnered, to hopefully pick up and finish today (Monday). Nope, but I did get close.

To say I’m rusty with PHP would be an understatement. I’ve been spending a lot of time in recent months doing JavaScript gamedev, but unless I was going to rewrite the site with node.js, this doesn’t do me a lot of good. Part of me wanted to take on some less-scary code first (i.e. not Money), and the other part wanted to do things that sounded fun (like reverse engineering Steam’s website a bit to get curator data, data without APIs), which is how we got here. And now that my initial LDtv data gathering and Steam widget are working, I’m ready to finish what I started.

Wrap up – I think that covers all the big things. I’ve been doing some general research on other Web APIs (Reddit (OMG EASY), Twitter, Facebook) as well as some work on the rewrite plan for next year (LD2015), mockups, and lots of note-taking.

I have a video I may do this week, this time about something I’d like to change (the hashtag). Stats always tell us that half of all participants in an Ludum Dare event haven’t done one before, so the simpler we can make it, the better. And given that we’re up to our 31st event, of 48 or 72 hours in length, #LD48 or specifically “48” is about as vague as you could get (I’m thinking: #LDJAM or #LDjam). Anyways, this is a rabbit hole, so lets save this discussion for later.

You made it to the end! I’m finished my long ramble-rant! Hooray for you!

FYI: I’ll be kicking off our ‘5 week countdown’ to Ludum Dare 31 with a bunch of stuff on October 31st. Theme Suggestions will open, but I’ve got a extra special thing for the artists. Stay tuned!

That’s it! We’re done. Until next time!

* * *

PS: I thought about calling this the Ludum Daregest (Digest), which lead me to Ludum Daregeist, and to Ludum Der Geist, but that was too spooky. 😉

The 2nd week is over and I am proud to announce I managed to work on WoCS everyday since the end of september. That’s a little achievment for me 😀

Now onto the actual wrap up of the week.

UI, UI and more UI

Yes I wanted to be done with the UI by the end of week 2, but as it happens I’m not. Most of the functionality is done though. I still need to change the visuals for all the menus but this shouldn’t be too big of a problem. After that I would say the UI is done, until I have played with it a little and have a feel for the new UI.

I already have a small concern that I will need a new station UI because as it is now it might not work well on mobile devices. And as stated by a comment in the orignial LD entry this screen is taking you away from the action.

There are still some little tweaks here and there that need to be implemented. I need to disable the time controls whenever the player shouldn’t be able to use them i.e. when he’s in a menu. Also the time controls are just dummies yet.

Not only UI happened

Because working on the UI got a little boring I decided to throw in some fun work. I played a little with visual feedback. When the player earns money the counter will actually count up or down as seen below.

I also tried to add a trail renderer to the ships, but the result didn’t make me happy so I scrapped that again. I might reiterate over this but I’m not sure about that.

A small gameplay change made it in already aswell. I didn’t like the fact that planets closer to the player station were “better” because your ships would arrive earlier. It felt like I had no choice in the early game but that I had to hope that I don’t fuck up the universe by selling to the closest planet. Now the ships will travel the same time to each planet. This should enable players to control the universe a little better… I hope.

Another little change is that the player can play a 50 days game. Which usually is the point where the player gets full control anyways. The player can still play for 100 days, but to be honest unless you’re trying to get the highest possible score by min maxing and uber timing everything you aren’t getting anything out of it yet. I try to think of a way to change this. Maybe pirates start to show up after 50 day. Maybe the size limit on military ships will increase. I’m not sure yet. If any of you guys has any ideas let me know 😀

Random Thoughts

Again I’ll throw out some of my random thoughts and plans for the future.

Planets should grow over time and not just get huge with a big weapon shipment. This is pretty easy to implement actually but it’s still on my TODO list.

Ships that are waiting at your station can be shown flying in a circle around the station. I like the idea of showing my numbers in different ways. I’ll still keep the number in the header so you don’t have to count manually. I would like to show money and weapons aswell somehow. Like a pile of gold. But in space this seems a little dumb. Do you guys have any ideas for a nice visualization?

I like the time controls. They will definetly stay. But what I don’t like is that the game doesn’t auto pause when I am inside the planet menu or any menu except the station upgrade screen. It’s obvious that the player doesn’t want the game to run in the background while he is thinking about how many weapons he should sell to the planet. Also the UI buttons for the time controls should be hidden when I’m not supposed to use them.

The Graphics.

As a graphic designer and front-end developer, the graphics was a part of the game building process I was looking forward to. I’m no stranger to Photoshop and Illustrator or hand-drawing but I had never really designed game sprites before.

I wanted a retro style eighties look to my game and found various references on the internet. There are lots of game graphics sites but nothing really had the specific items I needed. Then I found the website of illustrator Chris Hildenbrand (find him at http://2dgameartforprogrammers.blogspot.co.uk/). Not only did he have the exact look of a cityscape that I wanted but he also had tutorials describing how he creates game elements. I bought the cityscape background tutorial and my look for the game was created.

Several game elements were drawn up before I was happy but they then had to be redrawn at the correct scale for the coded sizes of the game elements.

To add a bit of movement I used animated gifs but ran into problems trying to intergrate them into Box2D which didn’t seem to like them, so I had to solve this by positioning them on a layer over the top of the Box2D elements.

Then I came to do the instruction page and realised I needed to write the copy – not only for this – but also for the small preview pages for the Chrome store pages.

Then two major problems turned up that I didn’t expect. More in the next blog.

Just wanted you to know that i have ported my LD24 game Geomelution to Android and it’s free and without ads!

Get it here https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.johan.game

Here’s a timelapse of my second Ludum Dare game named: AIlocation

Entry page | Play AIlocation

If this embedded video doesn’t quite work here’s a link

Tags: timelapse

I want to compete in the next Ludum Dare but I don’t know how to program. I want to make android games so I should learn JAVA but I need it in 49 days! Please help!!

Tags: java, learn, programing languge

Hi guys,

First off, I’m already getting excited at the prospect of LD31, it seems to have come around so soon!

I’m new to Unity, and have got the latest version installed (as well as Blender) and was wondering if anyone knows any good resources to help me get a bit further in 3D or 2D and learn in a bit more precise way than the (very helpful) video tutorials that Unity provides. I’m not an absolute beginner as I know a tiny bit about C# and the basics of Unity. Any help would be appreciated as I’m hoping to use Unity for LD31 instead of Pygame (which was one of my most painful and long-winded game programming experiences).

Tags: help, learn, unity

This is my first Ludum Dare and super excited.  I had been working on a VR Mobile framework and this gave me the drive to actually make a simple game from it.

I started the game in a 12 hour GameJam at my work which I organise.  The theme was horror so I went with the simple get out of the maze before you get killed by the zombies!

My friends at work said they enjoyed playing the game and some even screamed lol.

Tags: android, Virtual Reality, VR

Just submitted POND to the October-Challenge.

It’s a meditative interactive experience about playing with lights and sounds.

This game is actually free. The plan, in order to qualify, is to
a) get ad-revenue from kongregate
b) divert attention towards by other, paid games

Android (Google Play Store) | Web | LD-Entry

-Matthias

Hey folks! Mike here!

I was going to do a video for this, but it’s a lot faster for me to just write.

I’d like us to change the Hashtag (#LD48). It’s a common source of confusion for new participants (“I thought it was LD 31?”), which is about half of everyone participating in Ludum Dare events. And given all the other Ludum Dare numerics (72 hour jam, 48 hour compo, every past event), it’s helping nobody.

My proposed alternative is:

#LDJAM

When we started Ludum Dare 12 years ago, the term “Game Jam” hadn’t caught on. Instead, we took our inspirations from the Demoscene (i.e. “compo”). Nowadays though, Game Jams are what people call what we do. And even if you don’t know what a Game Jam is, you probably know the music term Jam/Jamming, or the sugary spread you put on your toast (arguably both are accurate descriptors of what we do). 😉

It’s unfortunately to change something we’ve been doing for 12 years (calling Ludum Dare LD48), but it’s a necessary step towards helping more people understand what we do.

This doesn’t solve the confusion between the Jam and Compo, but I think it’s still a better problem to have than having no idea what we do.

PLUS: ldj.am was available. Should make a good URL shortener. 😀

Share your thoughts in the comments.

Took me a while, but here is the post-compo version of my #LD30 entry:

http://gamejolt.com/games/action/linked/33104/

(it has a little bug, but I’m working on it to fix it)

The second beta version is ready for testing. Everything should work now. The music in main menu screen is still missing, but everything else is there. Please test and tell me how you like it and if you think something needs to be improved.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bigosaur.gos.android

If you installed the first beta, please remove it from your Android. Due to updated libGDX, the application package name has changed (from com.bigosaur.gos to com.bigosaur.gos.android), so Google is treating this new one as a separate application and won’t update the game if you have already installed. You have to install this one as if it was a completely different game. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Almost a year ago I was posting my “I’m in!” post for the LD #28 (You only get one). That was my sixth Ludum Dare in a row.

I made a game in which you had to play some kind of 1vs1 soccer game and get the ball back when it got out of bounds. It was funny to play with friends, but I just let it sleep on my hard drive. Around February, I decided to give it a chance and started working on the game, changing some (many) mechanics but trying to keep the gameplay. And in the summer I released the game on OUYA ,Gamestick and Amazon’s Fire TV.

Today, I’m posting again to announce that the game is on Steam Greenlight, it’s fully playable and I’m still working on adding more awesoness to it! Like online multiplayer, 4 players, more game modes, etc.

It’d be great if this community could take a look at my game and vote. I’m not asking for a yes, just for your honest opinion.

Here’s the link: Soccertron on Steam Greenlight

Thanks, LD community!

Tags: SuccessStory, unity

I am doing the October Challenge this year! I like it so far.

Arround the middle of september, I came up with an idea for a top-down multiplayer boxing game. I started to work on it a little (with the idea in my head “Maybe October Challenge?”), but then the first day of october I realized it was boring and I wasn’t motivated enough.

Then I came up with a idea for a real-time defense game(when I later realized it’s a little like One Wall), and I started working on it but I couldn’t spend as much time I wanted because of school. I had much motivation thought. I wanted to push out a public beta-crap edition wednesday the 15th, but school and real life came in my way again. I got vacation which you would expect to work more on the game, but I had to go to many places. After the vacation, I had to “refresh” my mind again and it felt really weird to abandon my game for a few days. I felt like I should finish it. I also got the feeling like “how am I going to release this?”

Yeah. I am 15 and I feel like I am not a game-designer-programmer-professional-super-nerd-that-has-awesome-games. My goal was(and still) to release a game and make some money out of it, since I clearly have no job but I still have the urge to buy things.

I am wondering if anyone would buy my game. I don’t know if people like the game because it’s fun, I better hope so even thought I made the graphics in MS Paint and the game isn’t that original. To be honest, I rarely buy games(I rarely buy anything because of the money). I only pay for awesome games.

Now the trouble is to actually release it. I hope halloween will be my date, I only need to make it playable and then choose the humble bundle or itch.io, then it should be done(I am not saying I won’t work on it after it’s release! :D).

A screenshot taken while programming the spawn system for the weird enemys. Yes those are evil hamburgers. (taken October 20th)

I’m a bit late to this. 😮 For a while after LD #30, I was working on trying to get my entry to the point where it was sellable, but I’d ditched that a while ago to work on a different, more in-depth project (a 2D MMO) but I figure I’ll use the October Challenge as an excuse to dig back into it for a while.

Here’s the itch.io page:

http://bytestream.itch.io/invasion

I’m fairly certain that is still the original compo version, however.

Hi guys, I’ve just released a new Android Game called Two Dots, it is an endless addicting casual game and I want you to be part of it! Can you try it and leave a review on the play store! That would be awesome guys!

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.gikdew.twodots

I have a habit of restarting the same project over and over and over and over and over again. I usually find it easier than trying to fix problems so heavily ingrained into the project. I’ve been restarting this project forever and I’m proud to say that four days ago I started the final version.

For a very long time I’ve wanted to make a 2D re-imagining of the Minecraft Minigame, Spleef as a sort of Tech Demo for an online multiplayer engine. It brings me tremendous pleasure to say that earlier tonight the game finally reached playable status. The game can be won/lost and near everything works flawlessly. The game should see release before the month is out, and I can’t wait.

October Challenge, here I come.

This weekend almost 100 people signed up to an event called BrumHack, which is basically a hackathon event held in Birmingham for university students. It was supported by a variety of sponsors such as Bloomberg, Paypal / Braintree, etc. Prizes were given out to those who could use their API the best in their piece of software they wrote in 24 hours.

However, we went for something a little different. Having taken part in Ludum Dare before a few times, I knew that if we could pull off writing a game in 24 hours it would be great. All that “hard work” paid off, and we actually won a Raspberry Pi each for our game!

While everyone was making apps that could make purchases, or using a huge range of data, we made a goat themed procedurally generated hat collecting arcade game! While the screenshots don’t necessarily make the game, you really have to play it to understand why it’s brilliant :L

Click here to play our game “Manic Mountain”

(PS. I have been writing this blog post on having 0 (zero) hours of sleep since 7am yesterday. That means I’ve been awake for 33 hours at the time I originally wrote this. Send help, quick!)

So, I submitted my game for the October Challenge a little while ago, and have gotten some great feedback! Someone is actually following my game on Game Jolt! This has never happened to me before!

Screenshots:

The game is a text-adventure, and probably the third one I’ve made. The other ones were really ridiculous though, and I’d made them when I just started programming, so they don’t look as nice. It’s really weird. All the other games I’ve made have not been as liked as this one, (so far). And this is just a story! It makes me think I should make text-adventures more often. I sure have fun doing it!

Click the image to play, and tell me what you think!

Been a while since I uploaded a shitty great game, so here it is.

KamehameHAAAA simulator v1.1:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2Hj8tfbtIyoSk0wQUNyUDk3WjQ/view?usp=sharing

(P.S.:  I’m trying to make a better game than this, just wanted to release frustration over my bad art design)

October has yet to draw to a close and over the last week I made a game! It’s called Trapfall and you can now purchase it from itch.io!

Trapfall is a game in which you must try to defeat your opponents by destroying the floor beneath their feet. Each floor segment takes five hits to break. Be the last person standing to claim victory!

Purchase from itch.io

HIGH ROCKET

Hey guys, I’ve just released my new Android Game called High Rocket for the October Challenge.

It’s a simple arcade style casual game. You are a spaceship, travel through space and avoid the asteroids. Its an endless flying rocket with simple controls. Travel through space, unlock the achievements and compare scores globally. Master flying your rocket to reach the top of the leader boards.

I would love to hear some feedback from you guys on what you think about the game.

Just in time for the October challenge! Read more at my blog: http://bennysce.tumblr.com/post/101114208954/pyramid-jumble-now-available-on-iphone-ipad-and-ipod

Back again with the 2nd bi-weekly report.

These weeks were spent fixing the server, optimizing, and continuing to make things better. Try browsing around. The website should feel faster than it ever has. I’ve only just started.

Related: Digest Week 1. Changing the Hashtag.
The Future of Ludum Dare Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3. Suggestion Thread.

Server RAM Upgrade, lower monthly cost

Of course I didn’t install it myself, but it did take a couple days back and forth with our host to get it sorted out. We now have 12 GB of RAM, which used to be 8 GB. And at the same time, shaved $35 off our monthly cost for our dedicated server (now about $189 /mo, was $224).

I agree that we should be spending less, but remember we have 40,000 users and 7 years of data on WordPress, a piece of software designed for maybe a dozen users max. I’m amazed it works at all. 😀

Big Software Updates, Fixed Legacy Plugins

Apache 2.2, PHP 5.5 (was 5.2), and MySQL 5.6 (was 5.1), we’re now running the latest stable version of each. Some folks may have noticed a bit of downtime last weekend. Turns out some of our WordPress plugins weren’t compatible with PHP 5.5. If you’re reading this, then it’s fair to assume I fixed (or disabled) them.

Nitty gritty: PHP introduced something called “Strict Standards” some versions ago. WordPress enables this by default, and in early PHPs wasn’t an issue, but it is now. Something that happens over 7 years of running a WordPress blog, you pick up several plugins that are eventually abandoned by the authors.

More grit: I don’t want to do anything drastic like switch to Nginx or MariaDB yet. I totally want to do it, but what’s most important right now is that everything is still working. The PHP 5.5 and Apache upgrade was enough incompatibility for now.

Zend OPcache Installed (PHP)

One of the nicer optimizations, OPcache is bytecode cache now included with PHP 5.5+. Before, PHP scripts would have to compile every time before they ran. Now they only need to compile once. Ahh, so much less wasteful.

APCu User Data Cache Installed (i.e. Shared PHP Memory)

This is something I’ve wanted for a long time (and sorry, I’m gonna nerd out). By design, PHP scripts are isolated from each other. Typically, if you want to share data, you write it to a database (MySQL, etc). Talking to the database can be slow though. Indexing aside, communication with the database is done over a TCP connection, even if the database is on the same machine!! There’s also software like Memcached that lets you store shared data, but you also talk to it via TCP.

As a gamedev, one that’s done his fair share of low level assembly and graphics coding, I am not a fan of this slow way of thinking (variables over TCP). It makes total sense for scaling up to multiple servers, but is so wasteful on a one machine setup. Heck, it’s wasteful on 2 machine setups too!

And that’s where APCu comes in. APC used to be a popular OPcode and User Data Cache for PHP, but now that OPcache is bundled with PHP, it’s less important… EXCEPT FOR THAT USER DATA CACHE! APCu is the now standalone User Data part of APC. And as it should be, APCu allocates and stores your shared data right on the Heap, and is directly accessible with just a PHP function call. No time wasted with encoding and sending request/response packets, the data is right there.

That said it’s not perfect. I’ve filed a bug regarding a poor uptime problem I’m having (minutes to 2 hours before a reset). It’s still ridiculously fast though. And if we can get this uptime bug resolved, it’ll be perfect.

Page Query Optimizations

When I started looking in to it, ludumdare.com/compo was wasting a lot of time. Some bigger SQL queries, but more importantly a lot of queries: about 43 total (potentially 47, but WordPress does cache queries internally).

There were redundant queries. The website theme was based on a very old version of the default theme that shipped with WordPress (7 years ago). That stupid theme made 3 wasteful queries in the header. That code is soooo gone now.

Some of the bigger queries were my fault. The Steam Widget, I do an ‘order by rand()’ in my query, which has shockingly terrible performance. Also there’s something wrong with the top-donors widget (lacking useful indexes maybe?). Either way, I made them store a cached copy of their outputs in the APCu storage. The cached data expires after a minute or five, so technically they’re not fixed, but running a query once is far better than every time.

Also the black-header-bar at the top is now gone. It’s convenient, but the absolute worst query of all has that to blame. Some stupid comment validation check, which might be fine for sites without 70,000 comments. I’ve since created a replacement (see below).

And then we get to the meat. Remember when I said WordPress wasn’t designed for communities as large as ours? Funny thing though, they almost got it right. The way it generates post lists and threaded comments, it uses a query to retrieve all posts and comments… but then if you want to know anything about the person that posted the comment, it’s doing 2 requests per user! That’s for all posts, and all comments! The part they got right is that there actually is an undocumented function available to pre-cache a list of users by ID in a single request. So if you crawl the lists of posts and comments, collect a list of IDs, feed it to that function, then it will cache all the user data for all the users quickly in just 2 queries. That way better than 28 queries. 😀

So on average, many pages require 14 (or fewer) queries to complete, but the root ludumdare.com/compo page is still about 17 queries. Less than half of where we started.

There are several pages I still need to clean up, but under 15 queries is what I’m aiming for. After that, it’s going to require outright changes to WordPress to optimize more, and even then I think we’re better off replacing it outright. We’re still going to need WordPress for a while though.

File Permissions Bug

I think this one’s fixed, but do let me know if you see any more permission issues cropping up. Some of the security stuff I set up with Apache made things more strict.

ludumdare.com redirects to /compo/ now

Just a minor tweak. Rather than fix the hub website, since all the work is going in to the compo website anyway (the goal of making it easier for everyone), why not just go direct?

Again, moving everything in /compo/ to root will break the internet. A lot of links will just stop working. Yes I could do some Apache rewrite rule wackyness, but I’d rather keep all the “old website” stuff in /compo/. That way, when we do migrate over, I can better track URLs that need to be send elsewhere on the site.

New Hastag #LDJAM, more supported

Like this post says, I’ve gone ahead and changed the default hashtag to #LDJAM. All official tweets will now use #LDJAM, and #LDJAM will be the tag we recommend.

That said, the Twitter Widget actually supports multiple hashtags: #LDJAM, #LDCompo, #LD48, #LD72, #LDtv, #LudumDare, #LDGame, and #MiniLD. It also supports some silly ones: #LDJelly, #LDKittens, #LDPotato, and #towlr.

In the future I’d like to do more with Twitter and social media support. I’m glad I could do at least this one little improvement.

Page Header Cleanup

I’ve wanted to do this for a VERY long time.

The colors still need work, and I’m sure I’ll be forever tweaking it, but I hope you agree even in its current rough state it’s an improvement. Let’s compare:

Tell me, do you miss the old header? (I might, a little… but just a little)

Event Boxes

These replace a lot of the information scattered across the header. Gone are the ugly red rows of 63 days, 13 hours, 24 minutes, and 18 seconds, replaced with a nice compact digital’ish countdown clock contained within an informative box.

And just to be crazy, I’ve included an actual start-time guide in Ludum Dare 31 box. This also meant I *cough* had to learn a thing or two about UTC time. You lazy fake-‘merican Mike. 😉

The clock code I rewrote from scratch, so please let me know if you see anything weird.

The Login Box

When I disabled the WordPress Login bar (due to it being HORRIBLY designed, see above), that meant we needed a replacement RIGHT AWAY!

So, I took the opportunity to kill a flock of birds with an awesome rock (wuht). Welcome to the future, where the website can detect if you’re logged in or not! Instead of the “Sign in/Create Account” link constantly found in the header bar, welcome to the future: Context Sensitivity.

And then when you’re logged in…

Yes, it’s the stupidest thing, but it just goes to show how little time I had to work on Ludum Dare before this crazy project of mine. The little things get neglected… for YEARS.

Clicking on your name takes you to your profile page, and +New Post does something (what could it be *shrug*). Finally, clicking your avatar takes you to gravatar.com, something we used to link way down in the sidebar (where nobody saw it). Hopefully this means we’ll see more avatars and less blank faces.

The rest of the header

I’m trying out the navigation bubbles. I’m not entirely happy with the color scheme yet, but at the same time I don’t want them to overpower things.

The “What is Ludum Dare” (about page) and “Rules / Guide” buttons, I want them to be obvious, but I’m still not happy with them. Not to mention the content they link to still needs work.

Posts and Activity

I’m still working on this, but I think it’s a good start.

Post minimizing is a feature I did add earlier this year. One of the more frustrating parts of the site is the clutter that builds-up in this part of the site. But when there’s important things to say, it has to go somewhere (here or in the header… annoyingly). Anyways, minimized posts look a little nicer now.

A visual thing: I’m no longer using pure white on regular posts backgrounds. Special posts have always had their off colors, but now regular posts have a slight grey color to them. And had I not pointed it out, many people wouldn’t have noticed. That’s the magic of color. And now that we’re off white, white things in posts will stand out better. That, and I can do the subtle shine seen along the top of all posts now.

Also gradients. I like gradients. 😀

The #LD48 website… Oh, sorry. The #LDJAM website is looking a look curvier.

— Alex Taylor (@tayl1r) October 27, 2014

Oh yes, I’ve been rounding everything too. 😀

One tiny feature I snuck in today: Post ages. Long story short, I didn’t want to have to do the math in my head for “when did I post the Hashtags post?”. I shouldn’t have to do math. Let the computers do the math! And now I know it was 5 days ago. 😉

The Event Navigation Bar

Finally, the last thing, also the first thing in the picture above, the new Event Navigation Bar. It’s a bit rough right now (just to support the October Challenge), but I’m going to be doing a lot of work here very soon.

Coming soon: This little widget will soon be the hub for quickly getting information about your submissions. How many comments you’ve received, how many ratings, how many more before you actually place. In general, the whole idea of Coolness really needs a major overhaul. We’ll see how much I can do.

Coming soon: For users that aren’t logged in, the bar will soon unroll showing either a random selection of games from the current event, or a random selection of recent winners after events. One of the biggest complaints about the website is how terrible it is for finding games. So, once I’m a bit further along, random visitors will now immediately see games.

Funding

Well, I never did find the time to finish the automated stuff, so I manually filled in the numbers. We raised almost $1800 in the days before October started, and are close to $1000 for November. Like I said, I’m going to keep working at it for the rest of the year whether we raise enough money or not, but it’s looking like we’re going to have to consider sponsors.

Ludum Dare 31 Kickoff

Well, it’s almost time to start the big countdown to Ludum Dare 31! This Friday marks the 5-week mark. I’ve opened Theme Suggestions early (secretly), but Friday will be the official countdown kickoff day. If you have a Ludum Deal for us, contact me. The Deals go live Friday.

Art Jam?

If everything goes according to plan, this will also kick-off on Friday. We’ll see. Part of the *new* 5 week countdown extravaganza.

TODOs

Now that my “uh oh’s” are out of the way (mostly, the big server upgrades), I can give a clearer picture of what comes next.

• About Page – Needs Work. I’ve roughed it out, but needs work.
• Rules Page – Needs work too. I’ve had folks offer to help work on the page, but it doesn’t help that I might be changing a lot this upcoming LD. Effectively the same, but I’m hoping to introduce “opt outs” very soon. This is to better support pre-made assets, either by you or from 3rd parties.
• For the sake of explanation, I’m also planning to flip the order of events around, as the Jam is simpler and easier to understand. Come for the Jam, but if you’re feeling hard-core, stay for the Compo.
• LDtv Widget – The Twitch widget is fine, but you all want the new LDtv widget am-I-right? Well, I do anyway. As you can see on the LDtv page, we have support for Hitbox and Youtube Live as well, but currently you have click over to the LDtv page to see them. Not to mention, slots for just 4 live streams isn’t enough. I’m hoping to find time to clean up what we have, replacing the 4 streams with a nice side pop-out of more streams, more info, more TV-ness.
• New Submission System – This is the big one for me. I’m really really reeeeeeally hoping to get this going ASAP. It’s currently the thing holding back the Art Jam, since I want to use the Art Jam to test it out. Some things I’m looking to support: Multiple submissions (to make it more versatile, for things like the Art Jam and Tools page), opt-outs, user ratings (in addition to judging ratings), and eventually: Linkage. Eventually I’d like there to be a master database of development tools, added the same way as games (but to the Tools page), and I want it to be easy to say “my game was made using X, Y and Z”, which links back to those tools. Once-and-for-all, we’ll finally know how many games are made in Unity, and be able to generate all kind of useful data. Heck, we’ll know for certain what the most popular tools for creating assets are, and could even start tracking the growth of new tools. Again, I use tools as my example, but this flexible submission system is actually the root of my website redesign plan. 😉
• Search Box – No, this isn’t the magical search you’ve all been asking for. Rather, when I removed the login bar, I also removed our only way of searching the website for posts. Oops! I need to re-add this.
• Event Navigation Bar – I’m repeating myself, but I’d like to make a lot more information about your entries available to you immediately after logging in. It’s not quite the long desired “notification system”, but it’ll hopefully hold us over until the rewrite.
• Comment Styles – Speaking of rounding, I’ve neglected something big: the comments. Really there are a number of parts of the site that need some effort to make them more consistent with the new “look” I’m making. I can’t do much with the WordPress-Admin/Posting interfaces (not really), but I can make the rest of the site pleasant.

I hope to tackle all of the above in some capacity in the coming weeks. Oh, and running Ludum Dare 31. That’s kind-of a thing I should do too.

If you made it this far, congratulations! You win at listening to the ramblings of a mad-man.

And with that I’ll say adieu. Until next time.

PixelPub is also participating in this months October challenge.
KittyJumpr is a mobile game for iOS and Android. We made this game with the help of a designer within the past 3 months in a little more than just spare time. Effective working time is hard to measure with all the paperwork and stuff to be done besides actual game development.

Watch the teaser!

I know this is getting a bit late, but me and one of my friends just decided to give this challenge a go. Might not get all the game done in the next few days but we came up with a great idea so we are doing it anyway. We will probable end up finishing the game in November if we have to. The game should be on android and possibly itch.io.

… would like to design and create cool games, so I would like to know a game designing and creating website that is free (if there even is one), also for school I can only play games offline, so if anyone has any suggestions, for my chroombook that does not require downloading, I would be very grateful, Thanks!

I have just been approved on a steam store. I’ve started this game on LD26 more than a year ago – and it was enormous journey to take it from there to steam (and many other platforms). It is also my first commercial (and compo) game ever.

Original Ludum Dare

Steam Store

Today is the day I realize that 2 days isn’t enough to finish my game and sell it. I just had too little time to work on it. It’s mainly because of school, it’s pretty hard sometimes(effort) and it requires much time.

If I am going to sell a game, it must be good. I am not selling a half-finished buggy game that is not fun. I always imagine like my game is going to be reviewed by the AVGN.
The next question is what is good. What I call good is a fun game, that’s designed & progrmmed with care. Like most of the games here.

I am not abandoning my game. No. I want to release it. That’s why I am doing this October Challenge. “Make and release a game!” That’s why I came up with a plan with three phases:

1. The publish phase (2 october – 31 october)
   This is the phase where the game gets made. This one is free, playable, fun. But not the end product, it’s not good enough to set it for sell.
   This is rougly the current test version with the stupid things removed.
   Halloween will be the release date!
2. The release phase (1 november – 15 november(?))
   In this phase I’ll add more gameplay to the game, fix bugs, add more stuff, etc. I’ll set it for sale then. Then it’s somewhat finished.
   More “buildings” are added, headquarter is finished, things are finetuned, more enemies…
3. The finetuning phase (15 november – ???)
   In this phase I’ll just work on the game, while it’s actually released. For example: Planetary Annihilation is finished, but there are still people working on it and adding some features ‘n stuff.
   After this phase, the game is done. It’s finished now.
   So this will be just improving things and add moar stuff! 😀

Of course this is just a plan, my old plan didn’t work either! 😛
So yeah, I’ve lost the October Challenge. But I just don’t want to sell some crappy game just because a challenge is forcing me to it.

Okay. So expect to see me delevering some work the next few weeks! For the one dollar!

(Excuse me for my bad english over here. I am dyslectic and it’s late for my feeling)

Hi, I just submitted a game for the October Challenge. Enjoy.

After much delay, I am releasing a post-competition beta version of WORLDS2D. Beta, because the core features are there but I’m going to be adding more content. Right now there are 20 levels to play, which is far better than the paltry 5 levels the competition version had. The competition version was really just a teaser – there was no real challenge to the levels. Hopefully the new levels prove to be more of a challenge, and the experience will feel more like a real game. Please don’t hesitate to send me feedback! The feedback I got from the competition version really helped me polish the experience of the post-competition version, and I want to thank everyone who took the time to play the game and give me their honest opinions!

Enjoy!

I actually wanted to submit this game for last year’s october challenge, but it actually took me a full year of working on it in between other projects to finish it. At least I’m finished in time for this year!

Here is the game’s ludum dare page: http://ludumdare.com/compo/october-challenge-2014/?action=preview&uid=5496

Remember “Beneath the Surface”? Remember Divernaut? Well I’ve been working on turning my Ludum Dare entry into the game I feel it deserves to be. Introducing: SUPER DIVERNAUT! (the hype is real) Super Divernaut is the same concept and general mechanics from the original being remade as a roguelite. You’ve crash-landed and are at the bottom of the ocean. Find your crashed ship so you can send a distress signal and get rescued. What? There’s a wall blocking your path and your suit’s pressurization won’t let you swim up to get over it? Better go beneath the surface into and underwater cave beneath the wall, place some explosives (you found them, okay?) and take that wall down. Rinse and repeat through a series of procedurally generated levels and areas, throw in an army of scary sea monsters and critters (and a few friendly ocean dwellers to help you out), gameplay mechanic switching (play the original, you’ll understand), and add a gang of bosses and you’ve a long road ahead to safety.

As mentioned, it’s very work-in-progress, but I’m far enough along that I had to share with the wonderful event community I built this game for in the first place. We’ll have a playable concept demo soon. Stay tuned!

Super Divernaut

Dustout Games
Twitter
Facebook

Hello,

Twitchy Thrones, originally a Ludum Dare compo entry, is now available for iPhone:  http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/twitchy-thrones/id898649182?l=pt&ls=1&mt=8.

Right now it’s free, after November 5th it will cost $1.99.

Here’s the release trailer:

The official game website is http://twitchythrones.com/.

Thank you for your time,

Ricardo Moura

What a great opportunity and source of motivation, LD October Challenge. I decided Drones, a game I’ve been working on since May would be a prime candidate.

Drones: Blast Arenas, is kind of like my personal love letter to the Robotron series, particularly Robotron X on the PSX. There have been many clones and carbon copies of the infamous twin stick shooter over the years, so I tried to differ in my endeavour. I wanted to recreate the feelings I got as a young boy, the challenge and subsequent self achievement from beating a level, the game feel, the manic fast pace of it all and the up-tempo throbbing music.

So what can you expect from Drones.. ? check out this itch.io page to find out more http://blunt.itch.io/drones-blast-arenas

Blunt

Well its now Oct 29th an only 2 days to go. I now know my Game will not be complete for the October deadline but it doesn’t matter. I was going to wait for the demo to get over 30 users but this competition inspired me to start before that and now I realise how long its taking I’m gratefull I started early.

A big time delay – as mentioned earlier – is testing. Once the levels are finished they will need extensive testing to calculate the scores needed for Spanner awards and progress to next level. More importantly was getting other people to test it without any prompting from me. One tester found it impossible to get off level one because they didnt realise blocks could lean on walls. This meant a rehash of the instructions and background. Another tester reported the loud crashing noise of the building collapse was too loud (it was!) – so that was toned down.

I also keep coming up with new ideas for level obstacles, one of which requires me to research Box2D a little bit more.I would rather the game was late than not as good as it could be.

So I dont think it will be finished until December but I’m hopefull it will be good enough to sell a few units. I hope my blogs have not put anyone off making a game but have given them a small idea about what’s involved and how long it can take.

Please have a look at the Tower Block Builder demo on Chrome Web Store – any feedback is welcome.

The full version will be out soon.

Hi guys,
My latest game for the October Challenge 2014 has been live now for a few days and it is looking good.

Entry: Ludumdare entry

Download link: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bruynhuis.memoryheroes

About the game:
Memory Heroes is a refreshing card matching game with many themes and lots of levels to keep you busy.
This memory game is different from others, here you have to earn your keep.
Complete levels and unlock more as you progress through different worlds and themes.
How to play:
1. Easy game for all ages.
2. Try to match 2 cards of the same picture.
3. When cards were matched they will stay open.
4. Try to open all cards in a level to progress to the next level.
5. A level can be free to play, there could be a time limit or a pick limit.
6. Watch the scoreboard to see how well you progress.
Features include:
1. Different themed cards.
2. Unlock able levels.
3. Multiple themes and environments.
4. Kids love this game.
5. Help develop the brain.
6. Good for education and FUN at the same time.

Well, at least the first stadium of the game! 😀

At the beginning of the month, I expected that I’d have my game finished, and that everyone started buying it and I would make Minecraft-money(Okay not that last thing)… But it turned out to be different. I had too little time to work on it.
But instead, my game finished it’s first development stadium! And you can play it, thought it isn’t done. I’d love to get some feedback! Have fun playing it!

(Click the image for more info!)

EDIT: And oh, for the those who are interested… Here’s the timelapse!

All right – here am I and with a brand new game!

– As the October swinged down, I’ve publised my new game – Blades And Honor!

Here is the entry link:

http://ludumdare.com/compo/october-challenge-2014/?action=preview&uid=35464

And there is a youtube trailer, check it out:

…and some amazing photos:

It’s only $1.99 on itch.io and gameolith!

I remain, Tosic.

Just in case there are any of you in the LA area strapped for cash but still wanting to attend GDC Next, I wanted to share the following from their Facebook page:

Use code: GDCN14EX to receive a free expo pass to #GDCNext #ADC.

Make sure you select the $99 Expo pass, the price is taken off after you enter the code on the payment screen.  Not sure if this will still work tomorrow.

Deals! Here is this LD’s list of offers, bargains and other things.

Development

• AGK App Game Kit – Cross Platform Game Development Suite – FREE (reg $59.99) for Ludum Dare! Click this link to add a Free Copy to your shopping cart. Offer valid until January 1st!
• GameCreator – Cross Platform Drag+Drop Web-based Game Creator – Access to Premium Features including More Storage and Full Analytics for Ludum Dare weekend and the 3 weeks of voting. Use promo code Ludumdare31 after registration.
• PlayCanvas – 3D Collaborative HTML5 game dev platform – Get a 12 month Pro account, worth $180, for free if you submit a game to Ludum Dare using the PlayCanvas development platform. Email support@playcanvas.com with your username and a link to your finished game.
• CraftStudio – Cooperative Game Making Platform – Free Week for Ludum Dare 31! Get access to all the premium features starting Friday November 28th!
• Unity Pro – Cross Platform 3D Game Creation Suite – Starting Thursday at 1:00 UTC (about 8 PM EST, or roughly 2 days before Ludum Dare), visit this page for a Unity Pro code good until January 4th, 2015.
• Unreal Engine 4 – Cross Platform 3D Game Engine – We’ve got Unreal Engine codes good for 90 days of FREE access! Wow! Reg: $19/mo. Go to UnrealEngine.com and create an account (or sign in to your existing one). Then visit this page to request a code. You can redeem the code by logging in to the Unreal Engine website, and going here.

Content Creation

• Pixexix Pro – Projection Painting Tool – Get Pixexix Pro for 50% off ($15).
• Pickle Editor – Sprite and Animation Editor – 25% off (Reg $24.99) with coupon code LD31. Click here to add to cart.
• Pixel Maker PRO – Pixel Art Painting Tool for Android – Get Pixel Maker PRO for 50% off ($1.99).

Unity Asset Store

• cInput – User control customization – 50% off starting November 25th. More Info

Game Maker Asset Store

• kbinput – Custom Input for GameMaker. Reg $4.99 on for $1.99.
• Yoyogames Marketplace code assets, graphics, shaders and more for Game maker

If you’d like to submit your own deal, you can post details and a link in the comments below, or send me an e-mail. Keep in mind I don’t have a lot of time, but if you need a confirmation or just to ping me once it’s posted, go ahead and mail me. When I have a chance I’ll add it to the list.

Also it MUST be relevant to what we do here (i.e. make games).

Finally, open beta / early access version it available for you to play, and waiting is over. Unfortunately, I didn’t include all features in this build, but it will be included in final release. October Challenge Entry: http://ludumdare.com/compo/october-challenge-2014/?action=preview&uid=35966

Features:

• 5 unique levels to play
• 4 Power-ups to make arcade more fun
• Up to 4 player split screen multiplayer mode
• ‘Smart’ computer opponents.

Release schedule:

• First week of November: OPEN Beta/Early access/demo
• Last week of November: iOS and Android release.
• First week of December: OUYA release. And hopefully Desura and Steam.

Links:

Download from IndieDB

GameJolt

Newsgrounds

Itch.io

Don’t forget to play the game: http://ludumdare.com/compo/october-challenge-2014/?action=preview&uid=35966

Tags: final, game, html5, Ludum Dare, october challenge 2014, shiva3d

Coming soon: Bots Boom Bang
A Puzzle-Game about funky Bots

Gameplay video

If you want to join the beta (iOS 8 required), feel free to send my your email so I can add you to our Testflight-Beta-Testers. 😉

October ended and I’m glad to tell you that it went well

I made this little game as a side project, so wasn’t expecting much. Seeing that people are liking it is really cool.

Nevado is a simple auto-runner with 4 different worlds, 18 levels each, where you play as a dog; well, a particularly cute dog. His powers are a stunning bark and a collectable bone that give him the ability to fly. It is pretty crazy. If you haven’t try it yet, give yourself the chance and let me know what you think. The game is for PC, Mac and Linux and you have the options to purchase another version that include the source code, so Construct2 users may find it helpfull.

For 0.99 I think is a fair deal

if you fancy to adopt this nice fellow, go here:

http://otrora.itch.io/nevado

Tags: cute, dog, fast, itchio, linux, Nevado, october, october challenge, Otrora, vector

The open beta of Hello, Alien! is now available through itch.io! You might remember this game from LD30, if you have been one of the ~50 people who rated the game back then. We didn’t finish improving it within October, that’s why it will be in open beta for the rest of November. This still counts as a successful october challenge, or does it?

You can pay what you want, which also includes paying nothing (if you really want that?), so you have no excuse for not trying it out! Well, except if you are being abducted by aliens or attacked by bears. But we are thankful if you take the time to check it out nonetheless. We know bear attacks are really serious, so we’ll understand if you got no time.

Tags: aliens, bears

Well after a long night of rushing to finish.  I missed the October 31 deadline.  Just bad planning on my part didn’t think some menu work would take a full day.  Now that it’s over im am super happy to announce my first game that I released.  This challenge has changed me.  I learned how to make art assets I thought I could never make.  It also helped me learn more about coding.  Although now its time to sleep and rest after a long month.  Hope that you guys like my game.  It was fun to make, and its available at http://www.desura.com/games/king-of-the-dungeon.  Now It is time to go play other peoples games.

I’m prepared, I’m ready.

I looking forward the next Ludumdare compo/jam!
This year I will go for JAM, with a brand new (xna based) game engine which is in still development.
Oh and this year I broadcast everything on twitch.

So  brace yourselves, HERE I COME!!

(and good luck for everyone!)

October ended, but luckily we managed to publish the game in time! We are really happy!! 😀

We worked on the game we developed for the past 30 Ludum Dare entry http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=38790

People encouraged us so much that we decided to give it a try and try to finish the game for selling as the october challenge suggested

Game intro

A bit of gameplay :)

As it was too much work for only a month, we decided that the best option we had was to finish a pair of stages and then upload the game. We also told the possible buyers that the game is in expansion (we plan to develop three more stages), and that while it’s unfinished they can buy the game on sale (i.e. 1$ instead of its final price, that will be 5$).

Desktop version (Windows/Linux/Mac) in itch.io

Android version on Google Playstore

I’m very happy to say that there are already several buyers (I didn’t expect people to buy the game before we did a bit of promo at least ^^), and if everything’s going ok we’ll try to allocate the game in some more stores, like OUYA store and Steam

Thank you for the jump-start, Ludum Dare friends! And good luck for all of you too! ^o^

Tags: 8-bit nes action plattformer

Download the Mighty Retro Zero public alpha from @itchio here:

http://kronbits.itch.io/mighty-retro-zero

Mighty Retro Zero is a minimalistic game where you control a tiny player like megaman with full references to old great games using only 8 colors, pixels like punchs and addictive gameplay.

At the moment there are 3 game modes planned: History, Retro levels and Time Attack/Puzzle. Other modes can be added later but at least the game will have the previous ones.

The game is still in development and not have any release date yet.

The game is made using Multimedia Fusion 2.

Cool Features

• Great and addictive levels based on the old greatest hits.
• Funny encounters with your best characters of all the time.
• Portals and Jetpacks! :O
• Launch arrows that stuck on walls to walk/jump over them!.
• Carry/Push/Hit and launch blocks that can destroy enemies.
• All the bugs i’m sure you will find in the game.

Links to follow the project

Official page: http://dev.kronbits.com/myghtyretrozero
Itch.io Page: http://kronbits.itch.io/mighty-retro-zero

TigSource Devlog: http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=42252
Gamejolt Page: http://gamejolt.com/games/platformer/mighty-retro-zero/29923/
IndieDB: http://www.indiedb.com/games/mighty-retro-zero
Steam: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/308914920

Tumblr: http://dev.kronbits.com/
Instagram: http://instagram.com/matriax
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kronbits
Twitter(Official): https://twitter.com/Kronbits
Twitter(Personal): https://twitter.com/DavitMasia

Yes, livestreams… as in 4 livestreams. I decided that for my first Ludum Dare, I would stagger my time for development/streaming. Here are the times that I will be streaming for the compo:

— December 5th, 8PM – 12AM CST

— December 6th, 11AM – 3PM CST

— December 6th, 6PM – 10PM CST

— December 7th, 6PM – 8PM CST

I see people doing those posts already. And it was just August like a week ago. Huh. Time’s a weird thing. Anyways, here is a list of utensils:

Windows 7

Code:Blocks

SDL OpenGL

GIMP

http://www.bfxr.net/

This is my second go at LD and I hope I’ll be able to stream it better this time. Now for the theme. I hope for somthing with a quirk 😀

Okay, so I guess I have to do this as to establish witness to the fact I will be competing. So here’s what I got:

Programming Language: Java (as always), or maybe JavaScript (try something new)

IDE: IntelliJ or Eclipse (not sure which though), if JavaScript, then PhpStorm or Sublime Text 2

Libraries: Yamanu Game Engine 2 (Release will be soon!), if JavaScript Yamanu-Canvas (My JS framework)

Audio: Audacity, FL Studio (maybe), sfxr

Graphics: GIMP (for the win)

This is all I can think of right now. Yamanu Game Engine 2 will be out very soon. Just a few things to finish up. I’ll probably do a video on that soon, when it’s good for Ludum Dare. Hope everyone has a good time this time around! Best of luck!

– Gandalf1209

Honestly i dont know what tools im going to be using. Im learning a bit of python and i did mini ludum dare 51 in unity. So give me some feed back please and have a good day.

I’ll join based on the amount of homework I have.

So, I have a 10% chance of participating…

I think I’m in, but i might not have enough time because of homework and other stuff.

If i join I’ll probably use one of these for the code/engine:

• C++ w/ SFML
• Unity
• HTML5
• Java
• Python

, but it won’t probably be Java or Python since i haven’t worked with them in the last 5 months.

For the graphics I’m using Gimp or Paint.NET

I’m going for the JAM with a friend.

I’ll be participating in the LD31 if something does not occur to force me not to participate.

This will be my first LD. Hopefully it will be great.

I will be using:

-Eclipse

-Paint.net

-AudioTool.com

And food