Because everyone else is spamming links to their games, why don’t I?

Because I’m here to talk about playing Ludum Dare games on Linux. As you might know, most games are Windows-only, they are either distributed in .exe format or they require Unity Webplayer (which means they also work on OS X, but not on Linux). To play those games, I had to boot Windows. And I prefer not to, for various reasons (which I stated here: http://www.64digits.com/users/index.php?userid=JNyknn&cmd=comments&id=503836).

I suggest you should upload a Linux-friendly version of your game if possible. Html5 and Flash games are probably the best alternative, but not the only one:

1) Linux binaries: many game engines allows Windows-users to port their executables to Linux. If it’s possible, do it!
2) Jar-files: they are platform-independent (almost), so they should work on Linux. NOTE: when you add a link to .jar file, do not name it ‘Windows’, because that means many non-Windows users think they cannot play your game!
3) If you have made your game using Game Maker or Unity, your Windows executable should work if run on Wine. But do not name your download link: “All platforms” if the .zip file has only Windows executable!
4) Python games should also work on Linux, but they usually require PyGame or other library, so most users may not want to install additional libraries for a single game

Why I’m saying this? Because I want to play LD games on Linux and I rarely give bad ratings, even though the game is not very good. I always try to find something positive in every game I play. So if you want me to rate your game (that works on Linux, of course), share a link to your game!

Or you can play my game (it works on every OS that has a browser that supports Html5): http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=26965.

(Link to the game)

I managed to finish a second Ludum Dare. On game jams, I always find I stumble on a few things:

1. I have trouble finding a way to use the theme properly, in a “clever” way.
2. I spend a most of time implementing a weird mechanic, ignoring the game design itself (whether it makes sense as a whole game, trying to create levels on paper beforehand, etc.)
3. I dedicate almost no time on making levels. Also I suck at it, I never manage to think of more than 5 or 10.

And then I look at other entries and some of them are really smart and well executed and I feel like I should be able to do better.

So this time I decided I would not try to think to do anything too clever, just make a game and finish it, with polished aesthetics and sounds and music.

The end result is that I’m not too proud of it because it’s nothing special. But, it’s more practice for me, I’ve learned how to use the new Unity GUI and I’ve used A* pathfinding for the first time.

All in all, not bad I guess.

But after playing some of the other awesome games, I just want to make a game that you can play forever, instead of once and it’s done. That would be a nice change from these 10 level puzzle games

First off, Once again here is a little game, Just a Little Screen Time, it’s a Point and Click (more Move and Use, but i’m not sure that’s a thing) adventure. You play as a TV that’s become lost after a malfunction with the force field in your attic home, I guess the idea was that you are an old discarded television that’s sort of gained sentience and live with other discarded toys and tech from the past in the attic of this big futuristic house which is part of a bigger TV show that you exist inside of. How ever you look at it in simple terms you’re lost and you need to get home but the front door is locked so you can’t get home, and initially you’re drifting off in to space so you need to act fast….

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=43512

So I want to talk about the Mechanic first, I basically woke up at 3am, saw the theme, had this idea pretty instantly, thought it was too obvious, and too much work, ditched it and went back to sleep…. after having a little scrum meeting with Blair and Zoe and having run through a few ideas which we weren’t exactly happy with, the idea came back to me so I pitched it, and it seemed unanimous that we all wanted to do it, but it would take a lot of work. At this point we knew building a point and click adventure was going to be tough, and neither of us had ever built one before. But it’s Ludum Dare, isnt that what it’s about?

So by 4am on Sunday morning we had a full environment and a character with animations, almost all the props for the scripted narrative, and I was fairly happy with the direction the artwork was going. Zoe had scripted out the events for the game and was ready to make a start of the music, while Blair had built a huge bank of scripts that we could just drop on placed items with a ‘Use this item with this other item’ functionality so when it came to connecting up the events it should have been easy… right? Nope… Hardware failed us and we ended up building the game solely on my computer, as Blairs laptop just kept misbehaving. I would say we were lucky that I decided to work through the night on the first day so that my computer was free for most of the second and third day for Blair to use. Sitting around, talking through the game while Blair worked was actually a lot of fun, and watching Zoe reel off new sounds that were just waiting to be brought in to the game felt very organised. In the end we worked well as team and I feel that the end product is something to be proud of.

I guess if we were to do it again, and build the exact same game I would probably have liked to sit down with Blair and Zoe for longer at the beginning, worked through the story and maybe had a bit more input, although I think the story is great and it is quite nice to play through, the story itself was sort of thrown together around the mechanic and we could probably have told the story better. Also the interactive items aren’t as clear as they could be, we all agree that replacing one of the items (trying not to give spoilers) with a hammer would have made one of the puzzles a lot easier to work out. Also the dog should be animated and have a growl sound making it clear that you cannot get up the stairs in the Western Channel. After watching people play through the game last night at a Indie Dev meetup and seeing everyone take the Knife and the Gun to the dog to try to kill it….. it’s just clear that we needed a different way of blocking off those stairs….. also people can be scary when playing games 😉

Finally it would be great if it was an actual point and click game instead of a WASD to move game, and a mouse over on interactive items would have made the game complete and much easier to play. Whether we finish the game, add the extra floors and new channels that we would like to add to make it a complete game and release it is another question all together. I think it would be a fun project but with so many other projects on that I’ve already put a lot of my time in to I think this may have to be set aside for now.

Thanks for reading, and playing 😀

Also, if enough people get stuck and comment on this post, I may make a walk through video, because I understand that point and click games can be frustrating, and so point and click games made in 72 hours must be undoubtedly even more frustrating!

Martin

Hello guys!

I’ve just created this timelapse video, so if you want, you can check out how the Life of a Geek was developed:

And don’t forget to

Hey everyone ! Here is the post mortem of my Jam game GSOD: Grave Screen Of Death.

Click here to play and rate ! Thanks !

What went right

Theme

Many hated the theme, rating about it being only a technical limitation. But that’s kind of the point of a theme. And I think this one is not more or less limiting than “10 seconds” or “minimalism” for instance.  It’s just that it really said (maybe more than the other theme) “Do whatever the heck you want, but maybe on one screen (please ?)”.

Anyway, this flexible theme gave me the perfect occasion to make a top-down shooter, which I never had the chance to do before. Plus, I had the idea pretty quickly and was able to stick to it, so that’s at least nice for that.

Graphics

This is the first game for which I use model animations and fake shadows. It was actually fun to tweak the animations and the general look even if it’s still very much programmer’s art.

Overall, I think the game looks pretty nice to me. But yes I more and more really want to team up with an actual artist !

Webplayer

As explained last time, web games are really convenient for people to play. It’s even more convenient now since you can embed web games directly in your entry page on the LD’s website.

Except for a bug that was quickly fixed by CraftStudio’s creator, everything ran without a inch ! The webplayer was even improved these past weeks and run equally good in Chrome or in Firefox.

What went wrong

Innovation

I could have done absolutely anything but did a boring, classical top-down shooter… Thankfully some had better ideas !

I really need to improve at this, too !

Theme

Almost everyone (including me) did the exact same thing : a single level game ! The variety in the interpretation of the theme is incredibly low this time…

So overall this was a bad theme but only because we were completely unable to do something interesting with it !

Gameplay

It’s after submitting it and people started to play it, that I realised  that indeed, the game was essentially void of gameplay. Even for a classical top-down shooter.

The current gameplay is ultra repetitive and since the game is too easy, you got bored before reaching the game over screen.

Obviously my TODO list basically said “MORE OF EVERYTHING !!!”, but as always, time and motivation drained out fast !

Procedural Random generation

It’s often nice too have environments that change every times, but retrospectively it was not the best idea this time. I would have been better off hand crafting one nice environment.

First, the generation is just random so it produce results that greatly vary in quality (that most often stay low…).

Second, the environment doesn’t influence the gameplay in any way, so that was basically useless.

And third, due to the theme and camera setup, the level is actually quite small. So I could very well have hand crafted one pretty easily and in the same amount of time it took me to implement and teak the random generation.

Webplayer

CraftStudio’s physics engine still doesn’t (and never will) work in the webplayer. That left me with no collision, nor pathfinding system easy enough to setup to prevent the character to traverse some areas.

It wasn’t that big of a deal but that’s actually why the trees are floating: so that it doesn’t look “weird” that you and the mob could go through their trunk.

(Floating and oddly cubic trees aren’t weird, right ?)

Conclusion

I worked a little more than the previous time, 26 hours over the 3 days of the jam. That’s still not much, and not much to create alone even a simple top-down shooter.

So I am still really happy how the jam and the game turned out ! The lack of gameplay is what I regret the most.

Overall it was a very interesting experience as always and can’t wait for the Global Game Jam 2015 were I will rally with the same fine folks as last year.

They were pretty busy this Ludum Dare too and managed to produce a very much working 2D action game “Hunt The Yeti” with a very much WIP game maker. Be sure to check it out !

Tags: craftstudio, jam, shooter, web

Time for Plankton‘s post-mortem !
I’m thinking about making a post-LD version of this game, so any feedback is very welcome!
I’ll try to do not make the same mistake than the last time, when I dived directly into further development of my jam game without getting the time to think about it properly and getting enough feedback.
This made me give up the project as I ended up polishing a broken game before reworking the basics first.

This is my second participation to the LD, and as the last time, I have been using :

– Construct2 for development : easy to use, and allows to export to html5 (which is more practical for players than an executable), but with plugins from Rex this time
– Bosca Ceoil for music : really easy to use and a lot of fun sounds
– Bfxr for sound effects, Audacity for sound editing
– Photoshop for graphics, but any image editing software can do the trick

Workflow / Development process

• What worked out
  – I have been way more efficent and organised in my process than last time
  – In learned about finite-state machines and wrote some for the first time
  – I did a few prototypes, which I didn’t do the last time, and spent more time thinking about my project on paper and preparing it
• What didn’t worked
  – I should have prepared better, next time I’ll do the warmup jam the week before
  – As the last time, I prepared some animations and sprites for mechanics I didn’t implemented
  – I had to create some music at the very last moment (half an hour before submission), because I realised I could’t use the creative commons field recording I found because it doesn’t fitted the rules. I lost a lot of time because of it
  – I think I overused booleans in my code, where I could have found more interesting or differents methods

Bugs
Suceptible to get edited as people report more of them

– The planktons evolve into frogs but then do nothing (missing feature)
– Evolution2 planktons returning to “dividing” state when clicked on
– Planktons tend to get stuck and not being able to move

Feedback
This is some feedback I got so far, it is suceptible to get edited as I get some more

+ nice graphics
+ people enjoy seeing the planktons evolve

– lack of interesting gameplay
– the feeding process is not very interesting
– lack of a clear objective
– maybe need a more complex gestion of population
– the green frog is too bright and distracts from the planktons
– Planktons need to me more active for getting the food

 >> Play and rate the game here ! <<

Tags: post-mortem

A timelapse of my entry Serenity.

Entry’s page is over here.

Here are my favorites. These games either had me playing longer than expected or simply made me smile.

Parable of the Broken Window

Handsome Joe vs Fearless Shadow Gang

Coin Toss Simulator 2015

Quintuple Dimension Room (my favorite-favorite game so far!)

I kind of like my own game and I hope you do too 😛

Elf Hunter

Thanks to all who played it so far!

Keep posting these “favorite games”-lists!

Thank you very much to everybody who gave freedback, they are greatly appriciated, truly. I know about the bugs with the retry button, and know that I should have included more clear instructions, but sadly that’s all I could do in the small time-frame I had. I might try to solve the bug with the retry button when I got a bit of time though. Anyway, thanks again, and have a nice day kind sirs /ladies

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=44205

Hey everyone! We enjoyed developing Disco Kitty Nightmare so much over the past few days during the comp that we want to further expand on the game. Fix everything that was wrong with it that we didn’t have time to fix and continue learning from our mistakes. If anyone is kind enough, try out our game and leave feedback, positive or negative! I don’t care, I just want to know everything that you guys hate/love about the game or if you just want to listen to some groovy music. Check us out at

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=39494

Tags: 2D, compo, im in, ld31, Ludum Dare, music, unity, unity3d

Hi guys! This is my second LD and HO man!  Am I gald I joined! Am I the only one impressed by the quality of games this year?
I came across some beautifull games! Here are my favorites:

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=20321

I’ve got a fetish for fibonacci so I might be biased

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=31759

This one is amazing, it starts quite easy to set the mood and ramps up the difficulty at an interesting pace! Absolutely amazing! can anyone beat my ‘After the end 4’ achievement? 😀

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=33989

this one I had low expectations going into it. I was expecting a funny stupid racer. and wow, it is the best funny stupid racer I’ve ever seen xD

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=45480

this one is a must play aswel! inovative mechanics and silly story

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=24741

who said you couldn’t do anything creative with this theme? here it is!

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=4159

just a great experience

hihi, almost forgot to make some advertisement for my own game

http://vulturetamer.github.io/Color-Company/

be sure to check it out 😉

Hiya all! As I couldn’t find time to post anything during the development of the game, I decided to provide some initial thoughts on my outcome so far.

First of all, before the theme was announced I was actually planning to do a simple rhythm based game which I wanted to make some music snippets for a while. Oddly enough, after I saw the theme, I suddenly came up with this ridiculous concept of people yelling at each other in an abstract environment – an online debating arena – and went for that instead.

So far so good, I got this “multiplayer 2d online shouter” game worked out at the end. You can give it a try using the link below:

Play DEBATE

Why was it a “horrible” idea at start?

• For starters, I haven’t done any “real” multiplayer games before and had no idea how to create and manage a non-stop running server (probably I also suck at the terminology ). While Unity provides really useful stuff for network implementation, as I wanted all the people playing the game to join the same arena, the authoritative single server thingy was still a complete mystery to me. Which led me to struggle tediously the whole day on setting up the connections and all without any real work done on Saturday.
• That being said, I should admit that, as my very first Compo entry for Ludum Dare, it was yet too ambitious to go with it anyway.
• Last but not least, even when everything is set up and ready to go, it remains as a risky choice to submit a solely multiplayer game without any single player features.

What about the end result?

Even though I was totally aware of all those above, obviously, I went for it anyway! Gladly, it didn’t come out as “horrible” as expected at the end. I was able to actually finish the game and made it to the deadline working more or less properly, without any disastrous bugs and all. However – here comes the “but” part,  there were of course a few unexpected issues after the submission.

The major one was when I realised the server was crashed for some reason and not running at all after I woke up the next day. As a result, the very first people who tried the game could not run it at all. It was slightly disappointing on my side to suffer from that kind of technical issues, though, I recovered everything as much as possible the next day, and it seems like the server runs “almost” stable now. So, one problem down?!

The other issue was the lack of players in the server. As it’s a fairly short-breathed concept and players often come and go, there were many times people could not find anyone to play in the arena. After some point, I also tried to stay in the arena whenever I’m available to keep it live, but still it’s been so rare that more than 3-4 people played at the same time, which I’m still really curious about. Having said that, I would like to schedule specific time intervals or such, so that more people can join and play at the same time. Please comment on that and let me know if you’d be interested.

Anyhow, all in all, it was quite an experience at my end, and was a really fun one too! I am frankly grateful to finally be a part of this kawaii event. Also, muchly appreciate all the people who gave great feedback!

I hope it’s been a useful read for you. Then, it’s time to play more game entries for me now!

Cheers

                                                               Supermarket Bagman

by  Pixelfan Games – Jam Entry

SUPERMARKET BAGMAN is the new Pixelfan platform game!

Help our superheroe BAGMAN to scape and win the epic battle versus the malicious BADBAG! 

PLAY GAME:  http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=20908

SEE YOU NEXT LUDUM DARE!

Hi everyone, I had a great time over the weekend making my game “First of Many”, but I wasn’t really satisfied with it yet. So i spent a few more hours on it, doing a few improvements that would make it so much more accessible, thanks to everyone who already pointed out some flaws. Play it here and tell me what you think.

More feedback is always welcome.

Of course I would also be very happy if you’d Play & Rate my compo game.

Play & Rate First of Many.

I uploaded a walkthrough video of my entry. If you can’t play or beat the game. Here’s your cheat

Summoning of the Santa

The first one is Teeny Tiny Little Ball

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=45480

The other one is Greeny GRUB (mine)

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=36239

Those are somewhat minimalistic games. I like them both.

Retaining visibility is important for any game, so I made this 1 minute long gameplay video.

Whatever it takes to get those minimum votes, right ?

Game Url : http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=8374

Tags: 2D, compo, html5, ld31, video

My LD31 entry, Blind Maze, contained flashing lights without a warning. At the time, I did not consider that this effect, one of the many effects employed to create a scary atmosphere, could be potentially unsafe to a person with epilepsy or a similar condition. I have removed the line in question in both the Web and Linux versions of the game (it is still in tact in the source, however); the game should be safe for all players from now on. However, I offer the sincerest apologies to anyone who may have played my game previously and especially to anyone who suffered ill side effects from it.

Hey peoples. Thought I’d do a quick self review of my game, Super Pong Quest.

Link is here

So the game was the result of very little planning, and terrible time management. It’s still the closest thing to a ‘finished’ game I’ve made in the past year, which is kinda disappointing if you consider that I made this in 2 days.

Theme
Like pretty much everyone else, I wasn’t a fan of the theme. In fact, this was the one I was least wanting to get. But oh well. I think the main problem with the theme was that instead of it being a ‘concept’, it was more of a ‘limitation’, and you really had to think ‘does this count as one screen?’. If you wanted to be nitpicky, my game doesn’t fit the theme at all, as it takes place in two screens(views)! :O

I actually started off with just making a pong clone that had powerups and special abilities, but I found that to be a bit boring, so I decided to take it into 3D, which went okay.

Gameplay
The gameplay in my game is pretty terrible in my opinion. The pong clone has a fair few physics issues(such as the ball sticking to the top or bottom of the screen) and having so many mesh colliders makes this game fairly tough to run on less powerful systems.

The picking up/throwing mechanic was really slapped together in about an hour. Originally I had it running off of a lerp that followed a raycast, which was a terrible idea as whenever the object wasn’t centered, you could still pick up other items at the same time, it was terribly buggy, and objects could also just get stuck in midair. I eventually revised it to a more usable system. But it could have definitely used some rotation controls.

Graphics
The graphics were simple at best. I’ve never actually 3D modeled before, so that was a fun experience. Blender seems to have a lot of stuff that isn’t really needed for 3D modeling, like that built in game engine and other stuff, so seeing the interface gave me a minor heart attack. All of the objects in the game are very primative, with none of the objects having over 150 polygons.

I didn’t manage to learn how to texture objects in time, so I had to use coloured materials in Unity to get close enough visuals. You can really see it in the keyboard and the bed, as they are both just plain colours.

Sound
The sound in my game ended up surprisingly good. For the object collision sounds, I used my phone’s recording app to get some pen drops for the smaller objects and also some wallet drops for the larger ones. I then checked them into Audacity and removed some of the noise using the built in tool.

In Unity I made a quick script which put the sounds into an array and played them at random. It worked well. For the pong sounds, I used the ‘twang’ generator in audacity.

Overall, I think I learnt a lot in this LD, and it’s definitely inspired me not to be so terrible at 3D modelling. I may end up fixing up some stuff and adding some objectives, and generally fleshing out the game more for a post LD release if there’s any interest.

Since everyone posts games they liked playing, I decided to play a bunch of LD in my lunch time and pick each day 2 that I really liked and present them to you :

1. Space Taxi  : Click here

You’ll like if : you like playing “QWOP” type of games with some neat humor at each chunks of levels. What I loved the most about that game is the clunky, but well executed physics and tight controls you must have while playing.

1. Ring Ring Ring :

Click Here

If you like : Survival horror type games. The goal is to get to the phone ringing, but the path is fulled of creepyness. If you see one : one advice – RUN the opposite side until you don’t hear it again!!! What I liked about the game is the athmosphere, the music and the tension of surviving. It seems also that each level is randomly generated.

So, my Tower Defense game was crashing for a lot of people. I originally thought “New version of Unity, must be a broken web player”. I was wrong.
I had set a variable to some random sprite, so the towers were having a fit when they spawned because of a type mismatch. The problem, of course, was rushing to get it finished. And the worst part? I’ve made a load of GUI/mechanics changes between fixing the error, so I can’t re-upload it as a glitch fixer, because I would be adding content.

I’ll take this as a lesson for next time:

Rush efficiently.

Updated version of the game (not part of LD, just if you are interested in seeing the progression):

http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/649986?updated=1

Hello Ludum Dare community!

I thought I would do a little post mortem on my game Dust Sorcerer developed in 48 for the compo.

Its an arcade arena shooter where the player controls a dust sorcerer.

Here’s a short youtube video if you don’t want to try the game yourself:

The Good

What I personally really liked in my game was the art. I am no artist and it is therefore pretty hard to get some decent looking game, but the last 2-3 months I had been practicing a lot of drawing and some modelling and it really paid off! Not only did my art get better, I also discovered new aspects of game development. Previously I was focused so much on gameplay mechanics, that I didn’t even notice that gameplay is only a part of a game(others are story, look and feel, even emotions). I would advise every programmer to get a basic understanding of drawing and modelling.

Another aspect I really liked how it turned out was the spellplay. The first spell, a flamethrower, was actually discovered by accident. In the first iteration I implemented a fireball that shoots continously, but I forgot a cooldown on it(e.g. only shoot it every second) so I got this weird ray of fire. I left it at that and increased the size of a fireball over lifetime and it became this amazingly satisfying effect.

The Bad

What I really didn’t do well is balancing. Many people in the comments claimed that the game is too hard for them. This is a big contrast to my gamer friends who said it was just the right difficulty. Next time I should probably think about some sort of difficulty slider so everyone can adjust the difficulty to personal preference or doing more testing with a broader audience would also be an acceptable strategy.

The Ugly

The upgrade system was the last thing I implemented. And I think that is the reason why it turned out pretty boring. I knew I didn’t have the time to implement an awesome upgrade system with spell modifiers(e.g. flamethrower now shoots in 2 directions). I should have planned this a bit more and for many people I can imagine that it got too complicated. There are 8 different upgrades in the game and to unlock all you would need to play many hours and each upgrade doesn’t give a reward worth it. They are pretty boring. They either upgrade damage of some spell by 20% or decrease the cooldown.

Resume

Although I hated the theme, I am still satisfied with the result and think that I learned much about how to design combat.

If you now think you need to play my game, here it is: Dust Sorcerer

Marelda

I learned a lot from LD31. I made a game called Marelda. I have always loved procedurally generated content but never felt my abilities were so that I could implement that into a game in 48 hours.

I proved myself wrong.

This game draws inspiration from games like Zelda, Castlevania, and Mario. It is a procedurally generated platform game with elements of rpgs and roguelikes. This was also my first platform game. When the theme was revealed, I wasn’t completely sure what direction to go, I just knew I wanted to use the theme in a creative way.

I knew the obvious idea was to make a game that fits on one screen. But then I thought, what if the games used one continuous view that is never broken? The player would transition through different play styles and areas, but the screen never cuts from the moment the game starts. When you play the game it makes more sense. Check it out!!

Post-Mortem: I am very happy with my entry this Ludum Dare, especially for only my second one! I feel as though I made a fairly complete game in the time allotted. Let me know what you guys think

Play Marelda

Stay Fast

This is our company’s first game jam and we could really use the support. It is a fun and minimalist game. You should give it a try!This game does require XNA framework 4.0 and .NET framework.

 PANIC GANG

Let’s fast forward to a fairy toy factory of Santa Claus.

Here gnomes to make a gifts that will become a symbol of celebration in every home.

But alas, because of from a large number of toys going out on the conveyor, Santa doesn’t have time to distribute them in the correct packaging.

Become Santa’s right hand – help him save the holiday!

You should to distribute toys to the relevant conveyor while they are still going on tape!

Now more:

On the screen there are 3 continuously moving conveyors.

Top of the screen, on the conveyor, randomly going out puppet dummies of 3th types.

On the bottom of screen are three doors, each of door for specific puppets.

The aim of the game is to correctly distribute the puppets on the relevant conveyor!

The control is performed by dragging a finger puppets from one conveyor to another using SWIPE!

Avoid collisions puppets with inappropriate dors!

Avoid collisions between puppet s!

FREE DOWNLOAD :

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tooflya.jams.panicgang

Entry Page | Web Game

Yes its another shmup :/ However I only realized that LD was on halfway through the weekend, so I enlisted some help from some friends and we quickly put something together within 24 hours in time for the Jam submission. All of us are pleased with what we presented though, and will see what we can do within 72 hours next time! 😀

Also appologies for the gif quality and color saturation, never used a gif recorder before and I have no idea what software/configuration is good. If anyone has any good recommendations please let me know!

I made Johnny Snow VS Hot Stuff with a friend over the 72 hours.
It was our first game jam experience so it was rougher than it needed to be, with better planning things would surely have been smoother, also would have allowed for a more polished gameplay, though I am pleased with the end result.
All in all it was a really cool experience and it’s great to receive feedback about our work.
In the end I wrote about 500 lines of code and Tiolol, our programmer-turned-pixel-artist, drew some 45 or so sprites.

Very cool to see all these great games created in such a short time, great work everyone!

After spending several months preparing and learning new material, and setting aside things I probably shouldn’t have, a fellow programmer and I set out to work on getting to know Unity3D in preparation for this Ludum Dare.  Along the way, I found a couple more people who were willing to give their time and attention to working on a game as well.  Well, all in all, I’m glad I did it because now I can say that I made a game…and I want to make more.  I am definitely a beginner at game design along with my fellow team mates.  Four programmers, an artist, and a musician came together as one to make: T-Rekt – A game that is stupid difficult.

I definitely learned a lot and I’m sure my teammates did, too.  We can’t wait for the next Ludum Dare and you can bet your sweet a** that we will practice until then.

Vairse has submitted our game so here is a link: T-Rekt

It says voting is only allowed for participants. How do I vote?

This was my first Ludum Dare, and I have to say it’s a great community! It’s awesome to get so much feedback, thanks! =)

The theme caught my by surprise, and I set out to make a stealth game. But how to make several levels when the theme is “Entire Game on One Screen?”

My answer was to change the level around the player, when you’re “not looking”! Since it’s a stealth game, you never see the entire map. So with a sleight of hand, everything changes without you noticing (“Deja Vu”?)

Quite a challenge! I’d never expected so much difficult vector math involved in something like this. But visibility checks and pathfinding in a vector-world was not that easy to get working. I spent a lot of time on technical issues of the AI and user interface.

Some of you reported that the game was too difficult or that the guards were not easy to predict. I guess everyone has different expectations of when a guard would detect a player. I would love to get more feedback on this particular game mechanic from you guys. Do you think it’s too hard? Do you like the “detection” mechanic? Are the guards too smart? Too dumb?

>> Play the Game (Web) <<

Looking forward to checking out more games! Cheers

All I want to say is thanks to the LD community of developers.

I have over two thousand free games filled with great content and gameplay and visuals and IDEAS. I could play these for the next four months until the next Ludum Dare and never be bored.  I could study and learn from them as well.

And somehow it’s all free ?????

Thanks you!

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=44551

HELLO MATE! MASCARPONE .. HARDEST GIRL(GAME) on Ludum dare ? Or not ? Give us some feedback guys!:)

Thanks for support and ratings and feedback !!

I added a web build for The Stickman Cometh! Unfortunately, HTML5 support in Unreal Engine 4 is still experimental, so a 64-bit browser is needed, and even then there may be issues. I was only able to get it to run using Firefox Nightly: https://nightly.mozilla.org

The Windows version is still recommended. Blood particles are toned down a bit in the web build (no GPU particles), and there’s no gamepad support.  I’ll continue to try and port it to other platforms if possible.

Greetings traveller!

for our JamEntry FrenzySnomanSmasher There is a Timelapse video availible on Youtube.

We also added an ultra hard version with insane difficulty, since many players told us that the game would be too easy. I hope this is ok with the rules, since we changed only 3 numbers fo doing that.

Best an happy voting!

runvs

Hello everyone, I rated a lot of games, couldn’t help it

Here are some of my favorite games so far:

Core by MrSun.

Screen Mover by Sh1rogane.

Pixel Trapper by Vanatoth.

Break The Limits! by Volute.

Rainbow Maze by FrozenCow.

Hello there! Have you played Jamception yet?  No? What do you mean you can’t? Damn it’s because that thing with the Unity web player… right?

Well you know what? I just uploaded a couple of completely new builds completely UNTESTED of course! And they are for Mac and Linux! Check it out:

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=36237

Jamceptioooooon in the captionnn

So, just to be clear, I compiled these two versions automatically with Unity and since I don’t own a Mac or Linux system I don’t know if they even work!

If there is something extra to be done to get them to work properly, please tell me so I can do it. This way I can learn to make games available to more people in the future 😀

Enjoy!

CHECK IT OUT

I made a shmup this time. It has a map switching mechanic and shows both maps on one screen. I tried to make it hard and I think I succeeded. The boss shown in the screenshot will probably never be seen by most of you. I will most likely upload an easier version to itch.io in a couple of days. Still, I hope you have some fun with it and let me know what you think!

Try to defeat the boss through 6 levels with a swarm of enemies that sprout without notice. Jump all you want to run away from them (use space for this) and get to the goal.
ASDW to move, left and right mouse to fire. A tip, accumulate as much amoo for the boss.

Do not forget to leave your feedback is very important to me. Play it here.

I did 4 LDs (not to mistaken with LSDs) so far.

LD27 was awesome.

LD28 I did submit while being sick the second day(not due to drugs).

Ld29 was a jam, where all my team-mates broke they’re equipments or got sick, and two days after it I passed out.(not because of drugs)

I couldn’t participate to LD30, met John Conway instead

And LD31:

Here’s the entry.

First LD in a while that went well.
As usual, I forced my self through the painful hours to reach 3 AM using drugs ☃(yes,where I live, the theme is released at that time).
I was really motivated by the fact the theme could be ☃, ☃☃☃☃☃☃☃☃☃☃☃☃☃!!!!
But no, “the entire game on one screen”.
No idea. Very wordy theme too… Slept, woke up.(without drugs)
Still no idea, decided to definitely add  a ☃ in a shop giving items to the player, while shooting other intruders with a frigin’ gun!
Right, the player,  he moves around. He’ll get jumping, a sword and double jump.
So I made the entire first game part with boxes, and then animated the character:
(not showing the boxes, they would make my drawings look bad…)
And drew some enemies: etc. And a background.
The drawing took me more time than coding on the first day(maybe because I am on drugs so bad at it?)
Then I had the idea of… not saying what this is, go see yourself.

Damn I was so motivated to do a post-mortem, seems I’m not after all, have some cat instead 😛 (he is not on drugs)

Hey guys, we’ve got some android support and are curious to know how it performs, please review
Also reviews for other platforms are welcomed and appreciated! 😉

Eternal War

The Making Of

I’ll admit, at first I really did not enjoy this theme.  I almost thought about passing Ludum Dare up this time around; I’m pretty tired of these “technical/mechanical limitation” themes.  I’d really love for Ludum Dare to branch out in its theme choices, more akin to Global Game Jam, whose themes range from words and phrases, to sound bites and images, with the technical limitations being present as optional Diversifiers.  Anyway, that’s a different story.

READ MORE

Complete with music written in a true Ludum Dare style… which is to say written in just 30 minutes.

You can play the finished game here.

Today I decided to do a a 1st remake version of my entry “A Game Of Life”

The new version is much closer to how I envisaged it should have been, but Ironically life got in the way and I didn’t execute my ideas as well I first hoped.

You can play the new (by no means finished, but a heck of lot better) version at:

http://gamejolt.com/games/strategy-sim/a-game-of-life/41499/

Point your devices at -> http://liamtwose.com/games/agameoflife/

Hey!

I’m currently porting our “a TV Show” game from Unity web player to desktops (win|mac|nix).

I love how Unity make most programmer’s tasks a two click deal. But you still have a lot of places to screw up.

Our biggest problem was to learn how to correctly handle different screen resolutions. It’s not a big deal in case of 3D game because by default Unity just clips a little bit of visible space from the sides of the screen and scale UI elements. Which is in our case is totally inappropriate – in our 2D game we want to fit all content without clipping any media or changing the aspect ratio and all UI elements should also stay in place.

This not only make game look bad, but also make it completely unplayable, which is really a pain in … ‘dat place, you know! =/

So, go test your entry’s playability with various screen resolutions and different aspect ratios (as far as I understand, fixes are allowed by the Rules). And if you are using Unity – here is nice solution for screen ratio problems.

Good Luck!

OK, so i created a game. Simple one. I used Unity + RagePixel + Bfxr. I didnt have much time over this weekend, but i managed to complete all features i planned. Maybe its not so challenging, but im making progress every LD i participate in.

Try it here.

Good luck everyone and rate some games!

Tags: 2D, compo, post-mortem, screenshot

Not played HeadButters?

It would be important to us receive your feedback.

We are excited to trying to improve the game every second.

We are putting together a list of suggested improvements.

^^

Play and Rate

A cool french blogger has written about my game, The Rose Processor : http://oujevipo.fr/general/3898-the-rose-processor/

Yesterday we had an event called Power Up here in Porto Alegre, Brazil.
The event was held by a local association of game development, the ADJogosRS, with the support of Uniritter University, they made a awesome work.

The event had two parts:

First we had two incredible talks by local experienced developers.
Game Design of Spooklands – by Felipe Dalmolin (Luderia)
and
Animation for games – by Andre Souza (Napalm Studio)

The second part was a space inside the university to show games made in Ludum Dare 31.
People brought their games and everyone was able to play then, give feedback and have fun!

Photos:

And of course, the event ended at a bar. =D

Following the example of fellow LDers, here are six of my favorite games out of the 60 that I’ve played so far. Give them a try
It was really hard to put together a list, considering all those cool games I already played! I can’t even decide which is my absolute favorite, because all of the games listed here are so different and can’t be compared with each other directly. Good luck to all of you and also those that didn’t fit in here anymore, I played more games that I can see ranking really high up!

When I reach 100, I will update the list, and make it a Top 5.

And here they are, divided by Compo and Jam, and not listed in any specific order.

Compo Top 3:

SumoBall!

Pinball + Space Invaders + upgrades? Yes, please! I think this is the game I spent the most time with, so addicting!

#CorporateCrimewave

A stealth game like I have never played one before with lots of challenging levels, especially impressive for the short development time. Wouldn’t be surprised to see a future version of this in the mobile charts.

A Link Between Screens

A Zelda-style game with (jigsaw) puzzle elements. I wanted to make a game like this once, but I couldn’t figure out how to make it fun. This game shows how it’s done. I’m curious if more will come out of this in the future.

Jam Top 3:

Entomophobia

This twin “stick” shooter is super intense and very polished.

Midnight Delivery

A cool box puzzle game with relaxing music.

Kenny’s Adventure

A puzzle platformer with telekinesis.

And if you still have some time to spare, try out my own game, Maze Escape. If you do so, please leave a comment, so I can play yours too!

Hey guys,

Thank you again to the people who gave feedback on my little game.

Today I started working on it again and I’ve planned a few steps already :

– Since I am no longer bound  by the Ludum Dare theme, the camera will follow you + I will activate the mouse rotation. It should give a more immersive feel. You will also be in pitch black space instead of starring to ugly panels.

– Second I will give visual feedback such as this one when you hit a wall. It will work like a sound wave (think Daredevil sonar thing but not as good looking because I don’t know how to be honest) Instead you’ll have these things light up around a small area when you touch a wall. Obviously to prevent abuse the drawback of this will be that the monsters will see this too and move towards that when you do it too much.

– I will also correct the big bug I have as fast as I can.

After that I will improve the general polish of the game, I will completly rework the UI for example. And I’ll probably add some actions like maybe throw a rock at a wall to light it.

The feedback really motivated me to continue so thank you for that.

You can still play/vote/rate it here.

So, our second jam entry is posted and we’ve regained enough sleep hours to interact with the world again :p

There’s a lot of things we didn’t have time to implement, and the game balance sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t, depending on which speaker(s) you shut down and when.

Here’s a short list that looking back we would’ve put in given more time:

– More levels / track options (we were a bit constrained by the file sizes on the tracks)
– Music could have been specifically written to fit the game better OR Pre-analyse tracks to enable music imports (that would take us a while and would be hell to balance)
– Smooth screen transitions
– Powerups (the ship we made actually had 5 guns, but it was a bit too easy so we cut it back)
– Enemy design
– Background
– Smart bombs
– Different game modes (Survival, Time Attack etc.)
– High Score / Leaderboards
– Better UI
– Persisting Upgrades
– More varied particle effects
– Shields

So, in the last LD post-mortem we posted, we specifically said we’d use tools we were familiar with. Well, we didn’t. We decided to switch up to Unity to see what all the fuss was about. And it’s pretty awesome, if not a bit contradictory to our usual programming styles (public variables EVERYWHERE!?).

Next time we will be using Unity again, and now we’ve got used to it hopefully come up with something more polished, or something more adventurous that we can struggle to get working :p

We had fun making it, and fun playing it, hopefully you will too, check it out:

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=27791

With all the posts people have put up recently about their continued work on their entrys i thought i would take the time time talk a little about my own.

So I sat in front of my PC on Sunday the clock ticking down from 5 hours. I sat with my notes open, and a list of features before me.  My plan had been simple but unintended bouts of hibernation had stolen what little time I had, some things had to be cut, ignored and even avoided.  I still had general bug testing to do, a memory leak and a whole lot of sprites half finished.

I’m not saying what I entered is that different from what I intended just that it was a modified plan that would hopefully fit with in the time I had left.  I pondered the decisions over pizza.

Like many people on here I have decided to release a fully tuned version of my entry, now this wont be released for download till after LudumDare31 has completed its rotation,  I don’t feel right releasing a different version of a game already out there, when its being judged and played,  but hope that my vision and all the things i intended can be strengthened or adjusted by the feedback i receive from you lovely people.  So here is a slight Change-log to what you can expect next year.

• Features unlocked rather then simply present.
• Highest score displayed on “Start screen” (this was a major oversight I’m almost embarrassed i didn’t put it in the entry)
• Extra fire-modes for the player to thrash around with.
• A more tuned enemy generator.  (The current works, but is designed to stagger difficulty, most people only manage to get around 30 points, the first difficulty step up is after 45).
• I plan to look at controls, as well as offer a game-pad support
• Working on a Android version.
• Much more.

The game will be as jump in and play as it is now, just with a more Directive nudge in terms of what you can do.   I entered this compo on a whim, a fresh faced dreamer, and i’m glad i did, to all who have played my game and enjoyed it, you have my thanks.

Hi everyone I suggest YOU to play my game.

As some ome of you said in the commet “this music will change your life”.

Here it is a Pro player (ME)

PLAY

Frosty is a swag ninja snow man living in a desert zone of Antarctica.
As we know with great powers comes great responsibility, and your responsibility is “SURVIVE”.

This is the lyrics of the song

Lyric of the song:

You better watch out
You better not cry
Spikes and canon are evil
and will make you die.

Frosty ninja is so swag x2

He’s jumping so high
left and right
trying to save is dangerous life

Frosty ninja is so swag x2

He die when you’re AFK
He run when you’re awake
He knows if you’ve been pro or noob
Sooo be PRO for goodness sake!

Ooo! You better watch out!
You better not cry.
Better not poop, I’m telling you why.

Frosty ninja is so swag x2

We have never really finished a game before on a jam, so this was a good challenge to each one of us.

So, what went well:

– The team

We worked together and spent every possible second making the game feel good. There wasn’t any of us that were just waiting around for the game to be finished, everyone worked really hard and that was great!

– Construct Classic

Simple to use and free ( as we haven’t bought C2 yet ), the only downside is that it’s windows-only but that’s not a big issue

– Original Music!

Tais has done a great job. It feels great to have original songs on our game!

– Two artists/programmers

When one of us got tired of programming or drawing, we could switch. That definitely gave us extra strength!

and… what didn’t go so well? Nothing!

The game is not perfect but the experience was. This ludum dare was the best! Playing, rating and receiving feedback on our game is being awesome too!

If you feel confident, you can try to beat the boss on our game: From Well !

Hey everybody!

Just wanted to do a quick thank you for all the people playing, rating, and commenting on INtire! We have plans to work on it some more, taking in a lot of your suggestions, and then release a more polished version. We’re seeing a lot of other fun games out there this dare, and we’re voting on/rating as many as we can. Hope you’re all doing the same.

Keep on gaming!

~Jesster

A Flat Miner Studios Post-Mortem Executive, Post Fluffer, and Title Enthusiast

so so happy to participate again in Ludum Dare, here’s my short story:

( Odds tell me you probably haven’t played ‘The Human Experiment Show’. But if you are volunteering, please leave me some comments, good or bad, comments are great..thanx! If you don’t want this morted post spoiling the fun, here’s the link:  The Human Experiment Show

Day One,

Thrilled to find out the actual theme is ‘entire game on one screen’. I had some backup operation snowball idea’s but this theme lifted me up instantly..i was thinking donkey kong or pacmanisch grid level, but someway I have to reuse this screen/level and be able to rearange it when the game progresses. I quickly came up with a grid where platforms could come out to form the level, combined with the idea for a some kind of freaky game show laboratory I guess in about 30mins my gameplan was set. I had planned to set this whole thing in rabbit world, or another creature that is normally experimented on, but didn’t have time for the actual tv-intro-rabbit presenter

I tend to overfocus on the looks and sound, yes polish and this is even where I kind of start, I guess most people would not recommend this, but I find it important to set the style and mood, so I know what game I am making. This to get out of hand, and end of day one I had the grid which was generated by code, the whole lighting texure setup, character animations and a sample of the live audience, and a very funny game-opening..

Day Two

Instead of working on the level and game mechanic I decided to do some more polishing and I wanted to have these decals on the walls, but they would have to stay on the individual blocks as they were moving, not projected. Ok FFWD halfway day two, the decals were finally working as I made some code to offset the uv’s correctly. Day continued with work on sound-effect and collecting crowd samples. And I even did some work on the actual platforms, which would come out, when 2 of the game-switchboxes were set at a certain combination..i might even be making a game. I hooked up the old yamaha dx-5 and 30 minutes later the music was done aswell.

Day Three

I don’t know why I was even thinking to enter the compo, maybe after a few more LD Jams I’m ready..anyway time to make the game. I found out my plan to set different platforms with two switches was way to complicated to play and also very boring as one would have run back and forth between the switches without much happening. So it would be better to have each switch trigger different platforms, and you could find the correct path..All good except the platforms would have to go back in the grid, in stead of falling apart..I had to totally redo the code for the platforms and another switch, work out the puzzle and code like there was no tomorrow. I was getting a bit stressed, whished I started sooner on the level, but I somehow managed to complete it again with about 5 mins on the jam clock..

spoilers:

All in I learned a lot more about Unity again and I’m see my LD games are progressing, next time I might even make a compo game.

A lot of ideas that didn’t make it (yet):

• game-intro presentation by a white lab rabbit with a hat
• edge-grabbing and climbing
• better player controls all over
• player falling and die-ing
• more feedback from the audience when things go well or go wrong
• platforms that fall apart and might kill the player (audience laughter)
• a group of mad guard dogs set loose in the lab
• time-limits
• guards coming in with tazers when the player idle’s too long
• guns and general violence to extend the game above the puzzle/platform concepts
• audience throwing stuff at the player
• commercial break
• presenter giving some commentairy
• more thing I might have forgotten already

Already working on some post game stuff, starting with better player jumping and the ledge grabbing.

volunteers sign up here:  The Human Experiment Show

Props to all you game creators..keep it up up up..

I would like to give a huge thanks to everyone who has played and voted for Gorilla Rampage. It means so much to me to read all of the comments. I am glad everyone is enjoying it. If you haven’t already, go check it out here!

I’ve finally recovered from this past weekend, and had some time to sit down and make a playthrough video of our submission OMNI.

Check it out!

If you want to play/rate the game for yourself, here’s our submission page.

So, finished my second Ludum Dare jam. This time I was on my own, but got som really good original music made by a friend during the jam. I admit I really wasn’t thrilled about the theme at first and considered sitting this one out. Then I remembered an old idea for a jrpg-like combat system and decided to give it a try.

If you like jrpg-style combat and tactical games like XCOM you can give it a try here.

Was pretty pleased with the result, I might actually keep on working on this project. But like last time I was really pressed for time and didn’t really have time to implement all of my ideas or give the game all the polish it needed.

Here are somethings i would have implemented given more time:

– Start and help-screens (Probably transparent overlays to still be on the “same screen”).

– More balanced gameplay.

– More enemy types.

– Several levels (same background but different setup of enemies and harder each level, with a bossfight at the end).

– Improved feedback. I knew on launch that some players might find some aspects of the game confusing.

– Cooldown on certain skills.

– Better AI.

– Improved graphics, animated characters.

– Possible levelling-system (would never have made that in 72 hours).

I’m also thinking about learning another engine/framework for the next jam. I only really do 2D-games and Unity feels a bit complicated for this purpose, and obviously designed for 3D from the start. I’m not sure on wich framework to learn. HaxeFlixel? Suggestions are welcome!

Hello everyone!

We’ve shoved together an Oculus port for our LD31 game. Now experience the imposed force feedback even more!

Check out our game here!

And remember to tell us what you think! We love reading your comments.

Cheers

One of many tries to break the record in Hard mode.

I invite everyone to try out the two new modes in Lumit, esspecialy the Hard one. Thats definetely my favourite on.

I’m supposed to be making mobile version today and I just keep wasting my time on breaking the record 😀

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=45380

Enjoy!

Have you hatched your egg yet?

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=24404

Play our little virtual pet simulator we made with as much love and care as we hope you provide to your eggogatchi but don’t let the battery run out!

*We also want to vote on your game so please leave a comment and we will respond to each and everyone one we can manage!

Thanks!

So according to the terms you can fix a bugafter the deadline if  it’s make your game unbeatable.

So, I fixed a little bug that made the game easy and almost unfinishable.

Now the name is legit, Hard Winter is hard as it should have been!

Because I’m kind here’s the victory screen you’ll probably never see 😀

This is somewhat shameless self-advertising, but…

Join our game! It’s a multiplayer space shooter game!

We’ll be playing for around 30 mins after this post.

Join us HERE!

Be sure to rate HERE!

Here’s my favorite game so far. MINE. AROOOOOOOOOOO!

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=46521

HexaPong is our first Ludum Dare game. You can play it here.

The feedback we’ve gotten so far has been great.

So lesson learned. Don’t update the controls of your game to work for a homemade arcade stick at the last minute, because you’ll accidentally leave those controls on when you push out your builds for the Jam.  So that is fixed, and if you have the chance, please check out:

PLAY HERE!

Vanishing Point

So this is the first time I’ve entered a solo game jam or participated in a ‘real’ jam. I started far too late but still managed to produce a game and most importantly it was fun and I learned some things. I’ll just say now that although I didn’t like the theme I did try and stick with it and still have fun but I think I ended up a little further off than I intended. My initial thoughts were that I wanted to go 3D – I had Unity doing 99% of the hard work so it’d be simple enough. This also meant simpler art as I could do it all with primitives within Unity. Then I thought about the images of the vanishing point image you often see in drawing or at in early 3D maths classes and how this might help be keep everything on the screen. Although this is not a game idea I immediately started coding to get the 3×3 movement working on WASD and Arrow keys as I figured I should enforce a restricted movement space and concentrate on simple mechanics to build the game. At the same time I wanted the movement to feel immediate without feeling “jerky” which I’d say is almost true in the final game. I also wanted the game to feel fast but not run into technical restrictions down the line due to high velocities and object spawning etc etc. So I started cranking up the FOV on the camera and ended with something quite high. Normally I would have interpolated this with the velocity but in the end I didn’t feel the need to since  half the time there’s nothing around you other than stars, blackness and the bright orange collectables.

The grid was primarily used to show the controls to the player although I believe this needed more work.

Next I threw in a quad with a grid PNG texture I created in a few seconds with GIMP (border select and fill yey!) and positioned it somewhere which looked correct in the game view. That is to say it didn’t eat up too much visual real estate and yet it showed the position of objects in enough time for the player to react. I felt this was important reinforcement for the player and a great place to throw in the controls which as it turned out could have done with a little more explaining.

Grid was used as an attempt to reinforce your position relative to other objects in space.

Again the grid was intended to help further when flying through the “stations” highlighting the relative change in position.

The controls seemed to feel good to me as hold to stay and lift to return but I did consider changing them early on to the more normal move into position on key up. However, the way it was was making me think a little before moving rather than simply and idly pressing keys was intriguing. Some might call this artificial difficulty and I’d agree it is in some sense but people I’ve spoken too, once they understand the mechanic appear to be rather goaded by the idea that their brain can’t process the movement. Still I would have rather the difficulty be in a another area of the game too rather simply than this sort of control as interesting as it is.

So here the player is holding down ‘S’ and in the middle lower portion of the grid. To go back to the centre and not die they must lift their finger off the ‘S’. People got this easily.

So this is where it got ‘funky’. Here you’re in the bottom left of the grid holding ‘A’ & ‘S’ and must return to the centre which is simply ‘S’. People found this somewhat unfathomable initially even when telling themselves what to do.

So these “stations” which fly towards you had to keep coming and they had to be different and challenging and contain these bright orange things as long as you could stay alive. It was simple enough to build an algorithm which “burrowed” a path through the stations and to stack them in sections end to end which sort of ‘spooled’ in as it where. However, the time I lost starting some 11 hours late (okay less if I didn’t wait up for the theme and start) meant I didn’t get much time on this mechanic and a dastardly “I’m too tired for this s**t” bug lost me an hour during implementation. Had this not been the case the stations may have been a lot more interesting.

“Stations” were made up of cloned sections of a double-depth 3×3 cube grid with alternating shades of grey. They each had a script which controlled their appearance when spawned by disabling one or more of the 9 ‘cells’ of the grid.

1. The first missing block is selected randomly from all nine

2. Next we consider the potential next blocks for the ‘tunnel’ to move into. So we take the four in direct contact with the block and pick a random one.

3. Awesome so this is our next block we stick them back to back and the player dies, so there’s one more small step.

4. There must be a block between the two inorder for the player to transition between the positions. This is simply both the missing blocks from the two – in the code this is simply an “or” operation on the booleans for each cell.

The distance allowed for the player to transition was initially hardcoded but eventually the speed became too much and I scaled it. Another thing which I’d have done with more time would be to tweek these values fully.

The next thing I wanted to focus on was music and I wasted a little time here as I had never attempted any sort of music what so ever. Except playing the drums – I can play the drums. But ask any musician (especially guitarists for some reason) and that counts against me more than anything. Anyway, after some stumbling around prodding at various tools I found something which was easy to edit the drums and the rhythm and so I ended up with a short but slightly interesting loop. For sure next time, I’ll have to do better.

Towards the end of the game I realised there was no humor what so ever. I had an intro story (which is too long) but that was quite straight and typical. By this time I had also realised the restart time was quite high (time from death to respawn and moving again) so I thought I’d add a little marque with some short retorts from some sort of commanding officer or supervisor who was making sure you did your job. Whilst I liked some of them a lot of them were last minute and forced so they didn’t quite sit correctly but if you’re interested and die enough times you will see all 8 or so of them.

Sargent threatens to send his monkey along in one message and then later asks his wife to get the monkey cage, yeah it was almost 1am at this point and I was very tired! This can also happen out of order since it’s just Rand.Range(…).

Fastest speed I can survive at, taking a screenshot at least!

Quite apart from the lack of gameplay tweaking I got to do was the fact that by the end of the 48 hours my Unity was very upset with how I was generating the world. This is because I’d simply been spawning new objects for every new block I wanted (whether it was space or a station). This was a bad idea but the game ran okay and so I never fixed it – it did however cause Unity to crash on one occasion. Suffice to say next time I’ll create my objects upfront from the start!

I feel this could have been a good ‘best score’ or ‘leaderboards’ game but I had not considered it until I was well into the 48 hours by which point I had no idea how to implement it. In hindsight however even a locally cached ‘personal best’ leaderboard would have been enough, atleast better than it being cleared each time. I’m still unsure as to whether I progress with the game beyond the jam but I did have many other ideas for it I wish to try out.

Good luck with the vote everyone and enjoy the games everyone else!

Tags: compo

I’m going to post my favorites in a few days. There are so many games! It’s really amazing.

My plan is to post about my favorites that are not already someone else’s favorites, in order to give exposure to more games.

As I am on a two week trip in Japan that started the day the Ludum Dare ended, I am unable to rate any other entries until I get back in the final week of voting.

So if you rate my entry Mr Fish’s Awful Adventure and leave a comment in the time before then, I will be sure to return the favour when I get back.

Entry: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=4470

Create a rube goldberg machine and link it with everyone else’s to create one big machine!

After working tirelessly fiddling with Javascript and the accursed HTML standard, I’ve gotten Coinslot and its various components finally fully working. Add your component to the Global Machine by playing the game!

Play it here

Finally I’ve got time to record some video clips for my compo entry:

A tiny dungeon crawler full of fire balls, explosions, upgrades and skeletons.

Play & rate BLOCK DUNGEON!

With three Ludum Dare in a row, one would think that things would be easier. More experience handling the stress, better use of time and some more advantages. The truth is that this was my third Ludum Dare and the most complicated of all. Moonlit Crawlers has been in my head for a while now and when I knew the theme of this edition I knew it would be a good opportunity to make it a reality. Unfortunately the game was more complex than expected.
I decided to incorporate some features that I haven’t try before, like Ladders, Ropes, Day/Night cycle and a Collapsing Bridge. All within the same screen. I may have taken the theme too literally. However, after two days of madness and although I could not complete the game as I wanted (I had no time to add sound, for example) Moonlit Crawlers ended up being a good start and left me wanting more. So I decided to continue working on it, as if Ludum Dare had not ended. Thus was born the Director’s Cut version that I share with you now.

You can also try compo version and let me your kind rating. Hope to be back soon with more progress

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=32989

Tags: #OneScreen, gamedev, ld31, ldjam, Ludumdare, Otrora

After looking through the game list a couple times, I really can’t find any that interest me. I don’t want to vote because of bias against them, so I’ll have to whore for votes instead (only at 17 so far).

[edit] To clarify, I have nothing against any of the games in particular, I just started out a bit strict in what I was looking for in the list. I’m sure there’s a lot of good games in there that I missed.

I’ll be playing my game (Bit Raiders) for a while, and since it’s multi-player this means you’ll definitely have an opponent this time if there wasn’t any for you last time. This tends to be an issue, as people will only wait for a couple minutes before looking at other games, so hopefully this also helps get ‘fairer’ ratings, if that even means anything.

I’d like to not whore out like this, but I really need more votes and can’t bring myself to vote on other games. I’ll take a look at the game list a few times in the next couple of weeks before voting ends to try and strike a balance with any votes I get.

Also, if you do come, make sure you check the controls. Half the people who played didn’t seem to know that either you can charge shots, or that right mouse propels yourself instead of firing. There’s also tips there, to elaborate things you can do and how some things work.

With “entire game on one screen”, my first thought was to make an arcade game. The same kind of game that you could play during the golden age of the arcades. So, what’s the main difference between those arcade games and most of the PC/console games? If I think of games like PacMan, Donkey Kong, Space Invaders, etc. most of the golden age games don’t have ending, they only become more and more difficult, fast, until it’s game over. From the first “PC” game, SpaceWar! the objectives of those games (non arcade games) were to simulate a complex environment that the player will eventually master to some degree, then he will win. It’s the same thing today. But in an arcade game, you can’t win. The only winning you will have is to put your name on the scoreboard. All the people on the scoreboard are all losers, but much less than people who are not on it… So, what is at the core of an arcade game: chaos. But not absolute chaos, only the progressive chaos perceived in the eyes of the player who will inevitably lose control.

I don’t know if I succeeded in making this kind of chaos in my game, but you should give it a try and tell me!

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=38770

INTIAL QUANDARIES

Being my very first Ludum Dare, I had a lot of questions for myself and the jam, mainly that revolved around my decision to use Unity (a program I just started learn a week in advance!) for it’s ability to export to multiple platforms (specially since my main system with all my graphics and audio software right now is a Mac)

THE THEME

I literally fell to my knees and shouted for joy on the announcement of this LD’s theme! I love the concept of minimalism and small worlds/single screen games.

I had TONS of ideas going into the Jam and actually started programming on at least 4 of them!!!

TOOLS / SKILLS

I’m a graphic design by profession and degree but I come with a background history of programing since my father got me started creating little game concepts on Visual Basic since I was a teen. I also love music and making my own electronic tracks and playing new instruments.

So naturally taking these skills and combining them into on 48 hour game sounded like pure joy condensed into a palpable thirst quencher!

Tools used:

– Unity 4.6 with both C# and Javascript

– Photoshop and a pen

– Garageband

THE GOOD

– I MADE (what can loosely be labeled as) A GAME!!!

– Despite my lack of Unity knowledge prior I was able to get the core features down within 48 hours

– The dynamic audio system I wanted finally worked after trashing the idea and redoing it three times over

– I finally settled on a visual design I could be somewhat proud of

– Ability to expand this come Post-Compo

THE BAD

– Scrapped and restarted SEVEN different ideas (of completely different genres and gameplay) within the first 15 hours (SO much wasted time!!!!)

– WORST OF ALL: I ended up fixing a simple problem with idea #1 and went all the way back to that one!!

– Had an obligation that took up 6 hours of day 2

– A core mechanic of the path following based on collision detection on corners of the track was broken from day one….I just never play tested long enough until the end of day 2 to notice that the mix of realtime audio listening and collision based turns resulted in the note placer object to be just a hair slower ever time it hit a corner eventually resulting in the player to overtake him and be in-front of the notes by 1.5 minutes in!

– Fixing the above took 2 hours of struggling before I just went old school and manually typed in the X,Y coordinates to turn at for each corner

– All this lost time = No visual or audio feedback for players, only one song/level, really vague instructions, a dull menu, no program icon (total inexcusable to my graphic designer side!)

SCRAPPED CONCEPT #6 of 7 (only one I have screenshots of)

Reason: I got the music to spit out notes from left/right side of screen towards the 3×3 grid where the player would jump from square to square and dodge….I just could get my head around how the random angles of bullets would fair with such a fixed movement system

FINAL (and also ironically my First!) CONCEPT

Result: A music-based, twitch game I’m VERY happy about…and if I can’t make more than one level…might as well sell it as a feature!

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****  NOTE: I will be making a version 2.0 very soon! So please don’t rate my game (I have enough, go join the Rescue Rangers) BUT DO leave comments on improvements and features you want to see, THANK YOU! YOU GUYS ROCK!!! ****

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Tags: beat+trak, ld31, post-mortem, postmortem

If you enjoyed playing Poo Dee Pie: Dee most horrible game in dee universe and/or loved Steffen Wittig’s art, be sure to check out his online store and pick yourself up a couple of Poo Dee Pie shirts!

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=39189

Nothing says “I love you!” like a hot Poo Dee Pie… T-Shirt!

http://steffenwittig.spreadshirt.com/

I just ordered my wife and I shirts and they should be here for Christmas, how romantic!!!

Back with a GIF! Don’t be fooled though – the real game runs smoothly.

Play as a cheeky computer bug called ‘Dabug’ that kills data in this fast-paced arcade shooter! Can you beat my highscore? (22450 MB)

Click on the GIF to play!

So I’ve decided to publicly reflect on my first LD experience! To begin, I’ll just put out there that I was tremendously excited for this event. I’d been wanting to do one for over a year now, but always came up with excuses for why I was too busy over the weekend. This time however, I manned up and got down to business!

Let’s talk about preparation for a bit shall we? I remember seeing I believe the week before LD31 that there was a Mini LD with the theme of preparation. This genuinely got my gears turning. I hadn’t thought about preparation prior to that. My plan was to wing it! Realizing that planning ahead for the event would be to my benefit, I started thinking about how I should tackle things. After getting set for food, work station, and company (my lovely girlfriend who passed her time studying in the same room :D), I started to think hard about how I wanted to make the game. I was stuck, not knowing what I should use to create this game! I thought back to the few games I’d made in the past and the tools I used to make them. I was most comfortable using C# and XNA, however about a year ago I decided to  let go of the XNA days altogether. I was quite familiar as well with C++ and DirectX, however – though I like lots of coding – this route would require too much coding for me and I wouldn’t finish on time most likely. Other options available to me were the various game environments advertised on the LD tools page. I’ve really been wanting to become adept at Unity for a long while, but like I said, I like visualizing things in code and also my familiarity with Unity wasn’t great enough for me to go ahead with it for the Ludum Dare (on the contrary, perhaps that’s the reason I SHOULD have gone it).

This dilemma became a last minute issue. I waited until the theme was announced before deciding to once and for all go with what I’m comfortable with – XNA. I should clarify an important plot point (yes, plot point – this is going somewhere). The XNA I will be speaking of, until further clarified, is not actually regular XNA, but Monogame. I’m sure many of you have heard of it – it’s quite a wonderful thing I suppose, if you still enjoy using XNA.

Moving forward, when I found my dream of snowman being the theme shattered on the floor, I picked up the pieces and came up with an idea so brilliant, Morgan Freeman’s voice pales in comparison to its wonder.

(Dramatization: Morgan Freeman’s voice pales in comparison to nothing)

So now seriously, let’s talk about the game. My original idea right away was to somehow show snowman getting back at voters for not voting for it. Actually, before the voting even ended, I wanted to do something similar, but with Kittens (if you’ll recall, Kittens came last be a LOT in round 2). My ideas for how the game was going to work were FAR beyond what I could accomplish in the time period, however, that’s not to say I’m not happy with what I got done. I wanted to make the theme evident by making the game take place inside a snow globe, and then potentially I would have events where an actual sized human hand would grab the snow globe and shake it up, killing anything inside and making it snow nicely again A BLOOD SNOW MUAHAHA- excuse me… I got carried away. But yeah, there would be spots for cover which the player could reach before the globe was to be shaken up, and you could tell when the globe was about to get shaken by how the snow fall had faded to almost nothing. That was the idea anyway. I also wanted to add some more minor things to the game than what you can see now: some HUD, a dive/dash mechanic for the player, more animations, more/better sfx, music, etc. The list goes on, but really all of that is beyond my skill level for short periods of time, not even factoring in time lost running into problems….WOAHHH

PROBLEMS! What a seamless transition to the topic. So let me tell you ALL about my actual production period. I began with a simple drawing of a snowman. I wanted it to be pixelly – I like that style. I whipped open Visual Studio, made my Monogame project, and started to code from scratch, cause I’m hardcore like that (does using a framework or library really count as working from scratch? In fact, if it was truly considered to be from scratch, wouldn’t I need to build the computer myself too? Perhaps forge the parts – gather the natural resources? I digress.) I coded away for a while until finally, I decided to add some sound to my masterpiece…and BAM! A warning which I had seen before. ‘Fixable’, I thought. *Applied assumed fix*…BAM! Same warning. I was so confused with what was happening. I’ll cut to the details as I remember them: Monogame still requires the XNA content pipeline (or something like that) to process certain types of content, so things like sound and spritefonts just were not working out for me. I spent SO MANY hours trying to fix this. Finally, for some reason I had the idea to copy this project into an OpenGL Monogame project, because OpenGL is more portable I believe, and HEY! I was able to get SOUND! But there was still no obvious way for me to load spritefonts. At this point I didn’t waste too much time; I thought, ‘Why not just use a regular XNA project?’ And so I installed XNA onto my machine and copied the project AGAIN to an XNA Windows Game project. From that point onward, I had no more content issues, however, the damage had already been done. I’d also like to mention that I’d slept for 16+ hours over the weekend, so does that qualify me for like a Ludum Dare ‘Super Compo’ category or something? JAM – 72 hrs. COMPO – 48 hrs. SUPER COMPO – 30 hrs. No? Okay, I won’t complain.

There were only minor problems besides the huge time wasting content problem I had. My artistic skills held me back a bit, but I think I made something nice looking this time around.

My final thoughts on this game actually come from reviewer feedback. So far I’ve received decent feedback for my game (my coolness isn’t quite up there yet, so my exposure is low, but I’ve gotten some hits). Basically, I realized after reading some of the comments that I didn’t even test my game…woops. Allow me to elaborate. I saw people commenting what level they got to in the game, and I was shocked at how BAD people were at my game. I had played it and remembered getting to around level 52. I decided to play my game again seriously and was surprised AGAIN at how BAD I was at my OWN GAME! Level 30!  Then I realized it…I only played the game serious once during development, and it was before adding a final difficulty increase per level. As a result, at a certain point, the game becomes not really about skill all and more about how fast you can click a mouse xD. This made me laugh, but also came as a relief, since I think for some reason it adds a nice touch. Sure the average playing time for this game is about 3 minutes and then drop, but hey, it’s my Ludum Dare entry and I’m proud of it.

Go check out its page if you feel like it! And thanks for reading my LD31 adventure.

Hey, guys. This is Taro Omiya from Tech Valley Game Space. Jamey and I have been busy fixing bugs and porting Laundry Day, but I’m finally able to make some spare time playing your games.

There’s also the fact that here in Troy, NY, the snow is falling like crazy, so I won’t be driving outside anytime soon.

Anyway, after getting some good night rest tonight, I’ll go crazy playing your games and will even record a few gameplays with my commentary. Let me know in the comments if you’d like to have your game and rated.

Pickup Styx

Pickp Styx, my team’s submission for LD31, was certainly the least buggy jam game I’ve been able to crank out and had great music and art to go with it – it’s okay for me to brag since I didn’t touch the music or art. I’m happy with the result overall, but I find myself questioning whether I over-explained the game or under-explained it.

Communication

Communication with you – the player – has always been a challenge for me. This time around, we decided to have a voiced manager feeding you goal and the rules of the game world. You play as Death, who has somehow lost or broken his boat. Still, you’re role as metaphysical ferryman cannot wait and you must deliver souls across the Styx using Frogger-like lane navigation. Some of the more obscure mechanics in the game – like moving around special stones that appear in level 5 – we explain with dialogue, but I’m not sure whether or not this worked. I found myself playing through the game and getting frustrated by the platform spawning and had to step back and remind myself that I could move stones to my advantage. The game became much less frustrating after employing a little underworld magic. Other mechanics went completely unexplained as I tried to estimate player assumptions.

The number of souls you can move around is limited. Nobody tells you that, but the player should be able to see that after they have 3 souls following them no more will join. Additionally, a red soul appears each level beyond the first – also unexplained. Each red soul you collect increases the number of souls you can lead by 1.

I’m not sure if the clarity added by explaining this in the game would outweigh the mystery of not doing so. It makes me think of the film concept of “respecting the audience.” Essentially, spelling everything out for your viewers/players insults their intelligence. Of course, players are in the position of making choices so they need to have enough information to make them fairly.

So did this cross a line? Maybe. A player might spend some time trying to get a fourth soul when they can’t actually add them to their merry band. Hopefully they’d learn from that experience, and the cost of failing to know their soul limit is just a detour. Teaching the player about moving rocks would have been good too, but I’m not sure how I could have forced them to use that knowledge… Also, ahnks = checkpoints for souls.

Design Choices

I tried to mix up the frogger gameplay by adding stepping stones to the river that can be used as resting points for the player, and that divert platforms into different lanes. Different sorts of platforms have different behaviors, and they’re introduced one at a time as you progress through the game’s 12 levels. Each level is 30 seconds long, meaning that you need to play at least 6 minutes to complete the game. This may have been too long for the average jammer. Even so, I’m happy to have been able to program a progression system and difficulty ramp, and view the later content as a reward for those diligent enough to stick with the game.

Whether or not you’re the patient type, I hope you’ll check out my submission, have some fun, and rate it!

PLAY

Also, here’s a post-jam version with a few tweaks: PLAY NEW VERSION

First off, if you’ve yet to play my game and would like to you can do that here http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=26320

Alright, now into the post-mortem!

Why did I make this game?

Well, you see, it was simple really. I wanted to learn how to design some puzzles and had never done anything like it before so I thought to myself, “Awh heck, why not”? More realistically, a top down game (3/4 perspective) seemed like one I could fit onto one screen (with some trickery of course!). Anyways, I think I made a good choice, but I also think my lack of puzzle design shows in the amazing catalog of 9 levels.

The Tools

To make this game I used a pretty standard set of tools; Unity was my engine of choice, along with Blender for the 3D jazz and I used cgMusic and LMMS to generate and prettify me some tunes. I also used Photoshop to do the textures and the (minimal) GUI. I’ve been using this suite of tools for awhile now, since before my first Ludum Dare game for the most part and I’m pretty familiar with them so I can generate a lot of junk in 48 Hours, which is good for this kind of thing, but I am learning other tools as I progress through my education and life.

The Trickery

Earlier I mentioned some trickery; I used some visual trickery in Unity to fit my game into the theme. This trickery was that I would Tween every object on and back off of the screen between switching scenes, which personally I though was a pretty nifty trick and with iTween it was really easy to make it look “cute”. Now making the objects all fall onto the screen is the easy part, the hard part is taking them all off of the screen at the same time. While it may not actually be that hard, My method served another purpose as well. When all of my objects drop onto the scene they also “Check In” with a level manager and then I have cached references to all the objects in my scene! Pretty awesome I think.

My Problems

LEVEL DESIGN LEVEL DESIGN LEVEL DESIGN.

Level design is hard.

I was able to make 9 levels, of varying difficulty and they do have an order and I tried to teach the player how to play the game through the gameplay rather than a tutorial. I’m not sure how I did, but I think in some regards I did okay. It’d be helpful if you let me know what you think!

What I did right

(I think)

The aesthetic. I think that I designed the different parts of my game in a way that is suited to my abilities and pleasing to the eyes. Some things could have been better of course but I think it fits my “cute” aesthetics. Also on a related note, I recently adopted a black kitten and he’s constantly getting into things he shouldn’t so I felt I should model my protagonist after him, heck they even share names! Here is Orion the (real) cat!

Rawr!

Conclusion

• Always try something new to you
• Always be learning
• Draw inspiration from life
• Use cute cats.

And with that I think I’ll go back to rating games!

Once again, if you want to try out my game it is here : http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=26320

This Ludum Dare felt like such a dream. There wasn’t much sleep to be had which probably contributed in part to it, but I also started late. I didn’t even get my “I’m In!” message up till after Ludum Dare had started. In the end, I didn’t even get a game finished and withdrew from the event at the very end. Mostly, this had to do with my inexperience with level creation and collision detection, things that I’ve been struggling with for a while, but havn’t yet completed outside of a jam.

Regardless, I learned plenty and did manage to get a somewhat simple map/level creation bit setup. It takes the pixels from a small image and in-turn uses the colors to generate something on the level/map that corresponds to that specific hexadecimal color. It took a bit of work and I learned a lot about bitmasking, but I lost all progress when creating my collision system. I understand how axis-aligned bounding boxes work and I’m familiar with spatial partitioning, but for whatever reason (I still havn’t sorted out the bugs), collision just isn’t happening. In fact, my scripts break and the whole game freezes up. Yay! I suppose I should have should have some fallthrough so things don’t completely halt if something breaks.

To make matters even worse, my game engine has some as of yet unidentified memory leak. While it’s not particularly awful (yet), I imagine after running for a while it’d be pretty detrimental. I’ve isolated it to a few functions and plan to fiddle with it in the weeks to come.

So where do I go from here? Well, after reading Rami Ismail’s post about making a game every week, I’ve decided that it would be interesting to give his ideas a try. After all, I already spend lots of time fiddling about with miniature projects. If I were to focus and aim to finish them within a weeks time and then start over on something new every week I’m sure I’d learn all sorts of things. Outside of game development fun I also want to start teaching myself PHP/SQL. I’ve been interested in working on back-end web development for a long time but I’ve been distracted with front-end stuff so much that I simply havn’t had the time. No longer! I’m going to try to take any extra time I have and devote it to learning some back-end stuff!

I know I can do this. I just need to focus.
If you’d like to see my various projects I’ll be writing about them on my website regularly.

Oh, oh! And to those of you who did complete your games: They’re lovely! They’re beautiful! I’ve seen some amazing submissions!
And those of you who didn’t make it in: I know it can make one feel down, but there is always next time and there’s always something to learn from this jam!
I love you all~

For all who gave your opinions, I’m doing a series of fix in the game, starting with the camera that is now static, moving by rooms. Also added a checkpoint where you take the upgrade skill.
Soon I plan to add the attack on the move and jump

Here is a link to the new version (is out of the compo but I would like you to test them as well) > Animal Roar v1.1

My compo entry

Tags: Animal Roar, ld31

Check out our game Orders of Magnitude.

Orders of Magnitude High Quality soundtrack

We took a loose interpretation of the theme where you zoom in by orders of magnitude to play different parts of the levels. There are some game play issues that we didn’t have time to address, but i feel given another day we would have has a very solid game that could be considered retail ready.

__________CREDITS________________
| CODE : ADAM MARTIN |
| 2D ASSETS : ROB WITWORTH |
| 3D ASSETS : JOHN TELFORD |
| MUSIC+SFX : AMPLITUDEPROBLEM |
| VOICE OVERS: ELIJAH LUCIAN |

Fireman vs Fire vs Snowman is an avoid-the-bouncing-obstacles game with a rock/paper/scissors twist.  The game takes place on three TV screens, each only showing the same picture but with the objects all different (e.g., whereas one TV shows a fireman, the second shows a fire, and the third a snowman).  You control which one screen is active. On the inactive screens objects blissfully ignore each other, but on the active one you control one of these objects and if it confronts another object something violent happens: either the object kills you (the object’s predator), the object stuns you (a matching object), or you kill the object (the object’s prey). To know what the interaction will be you need to be aware of which screen you’re on (which determines which object you control) and which objects are predator or prey. Killing something causes two new things to spawn, so it can get hard quick! But there are some tricks to make it easier.

This game was written in Haxe 3 using Flaxen, which combines an entity component system (Ash) with a game library (HaxePunk).

What went wrong

So … some things went wrong.

Ran out of time

My usual #1 item from “what went wrong” is running out of time. I fancy some day might occur where everything I put together works perfectly the first time out. I’d be done in four hours that way. Partially it’s caused from rustiness, partly from not having a clear architecture in mind and trying to use agile development. Iterative coding is a great way to focus and reduce bugs, but continuous refactoring is possibly a luxury in a game jam.  Also to blame is trying to take shortcuts that I eventually have to undo anyway, along the way these shortcuts introduce bugs during development that eat up an enormous amount of time. Also, frankly, I’m old and slow. I used to be young and slow, but I’ve never been a fast developer. I was told by an employer once, “You’re slow, but your work is ten times better than anyone else’s.” That’s what I call an affectionate slap. How do I get faster? Reuse of methodology. I’m always coding in different languages with different toolkits in different industries. If I just focused on one way of doing things since I started coding, by know I’d be the fastest coder on the planet. It’d be in TRS-80 Color Computer extended basic, but I’d be the fastest in it…

Lack of animations and special effects

Are these things important? Honestly having sound effects and a musical queue for the titling and between levels was far more vital, but how much better would this have looked with some more graphics? The fireman could actually hose the fire and leave rising steam. The fire could spread over to the snowman who falls apart before melting. And the snowman could freeze the fireman, blowing a cold wind and turning the fireman into crackling ice that then shatters. How lovely that would have been. Ah well. NEXT.

Not a pixel artist

Some of the pixel art from LDJAM participants is freakin’ amazing. I’m very envious. I’m not one of those people who believes you can’t learn, and I’ve done some pixel art tutorials in the past, but I have not practiced. I’m fairly bad at it. I’m better with non-retro art, where I can just go crazy with boxes and circles and photoshop filters, but in this game the main characters were so small there was no way around it. As such the fireman looks more like a hunter, making his relations obscure. (Hunter shoots fire?? Snowman beats hunter with own rifle??) I should practice it more, as it would help my programmer art all over.

Lack of final gameplay tweaking

Although the game was playable at the end of Saturday, it was hard to visualize what the experience would finally be like. On Sunday, I never really got to a point where I said, “Okay, here’s the completed game. Play it for 30 minutes, see what needs changing.” I had an idea that the game would be improved with wave system, bringing out a certain number of enemies at a certain rate, and giving a pause for the next wave while you feel a sense of achievement. But I had this idea too late, and if I got to play it as much as I did in the past couple days, I would have had tested a lot of changes to the difficulty ramping.

What went right

You know, I submitted a game to the compo in 48 hours, so by that very notion my game was a great success. But there were some things that stood out.

The right idea

As usual, I drum up three ideas for a jam before I start developing. I rejected the one that was easiest to develop because it bored me, and after conferring with my significant other also rejected the most exciting one because it would have been hardest to develop. Yay for mediocre? Nah, instead I look at it as a simple balancing issue. The idea has to be interesting, and realistically achievable in the time frame. And this was both. I can always go back to developing the “exciting but difficult” one on my own, later. In retrospect, the idea I chose was also the one I understood the most, mechanically. Those kinds of ideas are easier to prototype.

Focus on playability

I set my goal as having a playable game by the end of Saturday.  As a consequence, I stopped designing even though I didn’t have a fleshed out thematic layer for my idea. I had a list of 15 possible rock/paper/scissor replacements but didn’t like any of them. So I delayed that decision and focused on the mechanics. This meant I could go straight to coding, and it also meant I wouldn’t spend a lot of time on art, and would spend no time on animations, sounds, or special effects until the game was playable. I put together some crappy R/P/S icons and a dull, lifeless game frame, and got to the core gameplay by my self-imposed deadline.

I also was better with my time management. I kept a prioritized checklist on Sunday of things I needed to do and what could be eliminated. I came down to decisions like “do I need two distinct sound effects for these two variant events, or just one?” and “what’s more important, trying to throw together a short music track in 20 minutes or adding a rumble to the screen whenever you’re stunned?” (I chose the former, and barely snuck the tune in.)

Honing my tools before the comp

I moved this May and we sort of took an extended vacation to settle into the Charleston area. We were hosting visitors every other week for a while there! I stopped developing for all that time, and could sense the rust on me.  I updated all of my Haxe libraries. I forgot how much of my library Flaxen works, so I some time to improve the documentation while reminding myself of this toolkit. I fired up Renoise, which I hadn’t used in a year, to discover it was no longer operable. Redownloaded the latest version, found the license key, and then stared at the screen and blink while I tried to recall my workflow and any of the shortcut keys. I throw together some basic tunes just to stretch my old muscles. I should have spent some time putting together a practice game, but this was the next best thing.

Making the theme my bitch

I did not like the Ludum Dare theme “Game Entirely On One Screen” all that much.  It seemed like a very polarizing theme. I generally vote against themes that imply any sort of design limitation, as that can lead to too many games exploring similar ideas or implementing the same mechanics. Also I look to the theme to inspire, much like a writing prompt. Some folks said you shouldn’t let the theme stop you, but you do get rated on theme. I did not realize that this year you’d be able to exempt yourself from categories, although I’d probably feel dirty for not meeting the theme. To cover my bases, I met the theme in three ways:

1. My game does not scroll, have separate backgrounds, does not have ancillary pages. My instructions are right on the screen the whole time. There is no main menu. The title, like the instructions and the UI, is made up of wooden signs that sit in the upper-right quadrant. Even the start button and “you died horribly” message are signs that peek out from under the pile and slide out when needed.
2. The game actually contains three TV screens, but because only one is active, the game is entirely on one screen at a time. Some folks felt the need to point out that 3 > 1, as if that feat of mathematical comparison had slipped my attention. I think the three screens was my way of meeting the theme while simultaneously thumbing my nose at it. And I have a considerable proboscis to thumb.
3. I added a snowman. Many Ludum Dares have a mascot, or some recurring popular secondary theme (potato, for example, in LD #26), and unofficially snowman was it for LD #31. Some might see this as me expressly NOT meeting the theme, but I see it as just another way in which I’m awesome. (YMMV)

It felt really good to complete a Ludum Dare. I hadn’t done so in a year, since LD #28. I failed to complete my game for #29 and I was unable to participate in #30. Thanks Mike.

Tags: Ash, Flaxen, haXe, haxepunk, LDCompo

ＣＨＲＯＭＡクロマ２

ＣＨＲＯＭＡクロマ２

I found three games, guys. Here they are.

Papercuts by Tasteslikefuture

Snowball juggling Olympio by Benjamin

The Operator by little-burrito

You really really have to play them.

Hey guys,

there were so many cool games created for Ludum Dare and we really want to play and rate as many as possible. So if you think your game needs our attention, we would be happy to give you our honest opinion and helpful feedback. Because that’s what we like to get for our game too
In fact, we are planning on working on a post jam version and maybe even bring our game to mobile. So any kind of positive or critical comment would be very much appreciated, so we can see, what people like about it and what needs some fixing and what we can improve on. Thank you!

And you are allowed to kill some mutant children on the way! 😉

Our game “Of Carrots and Blood” is a funny shooter about a bunny defending a giant carrot from hungry mutant children in the woods.
Sounds good? Then please give it a try and tell us, what you think!

▶ Link to the game: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=47531

RATED R FOR RED!! (it’s kinda bloody so not appropriate for children ^^)

One of my favourite things about ludum dare, is the let’s plays of your games. This made my day and made me laugh…

“Change” is a homeless roguelike survival simulator. Enjoy!

CHECK OUT THE GAME!

You have games, I have an addiction. Perfect combination, don’t you agree? Post your game in the comments to this post and I will play them as soon as I get the chance! I’ll be doing this semi-daily so, yeah;

Time to play your games, I guess.

Also, since I’m a dirty business man, how about you go play my game, if you’re feeling up to it?

Here’s the link: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=43866

I mean, it is a win-win situation; both of us get coolness AND ratings!

Hi everyone,

Am I the only having a hard time finding Compo entries to rate?
On the main page of ratings: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/ there are always way more jam entries than compos. I don’t like rating jams, I don’t feel it’s the same competition and I often feel like it’s gonna change my expectations, like expect more from games that were actually made by one person. Anyway, my question is: is there anything that displays only compo/jam games? I kinda remember a time where it was possible but I might be mistaken…

Thanks!

In addition to the ludum we participated in the OLD (Omsky ludum dare).  At that time the game was very raw.
And we have tried .. but still left a lot of things to do)  We are waiting for honest comments and rates.

Some DESCRIPTION:

Horror with procedurally generated house and scare girls )

Some INSTRUCTIONS:

many people do not understand how to play and whether there is in the game to an end. It is infinite, but conclude the round is still possible)

During levels we need to find a telephone, which woke us up. Need to find him to wake up again ..

Play, rate, enjoy.

===========PLAY============

P.S. sry for my set of tags instead of speech)

Here are a few things I learned from this Ludum Dare:

With HTML and swfobject.js, there seems to be no way to get initial mouse and keyboard focus without using wmode = “opaque” or possibly “window”, both of which apparently have performance problems.  If you use wmode = “direct” for embedding Flash, people will have to click the flash video first for Flixel, and that click will apparently get ignored.  Modifying Flixel might be one way to fix it.  I just worked around it by making the game initially pause so there is a big arrow that makes it sort of obvious people need to click.

Sometimes FlashDevelop seems to stop detecting compile errors, but when you run the standalone Flash player, it will freeze without doing anything.  In this situation, if you close the Flash player and restart FlashDevelop, the next time you compile the error(s) should be properly detected.

The standalone Flash player seems to have a bit of lag playing sound effects.  However, playing the game in FireFox seems to make it better, so don’t panic!  The “0.2” master volume in BFXR seems to work with 22 volume on my computer.  However, BFXR annoyingly seems to reset the master volume with each new sound, so be very careful if you are wearing headphones.

If I do something silly with a title/menu page like making it a minigame, some people may like it, but other people may be annoyed by it.  My conclusion is that I should include a skip button or keypress in that case so the people who get annoyed can jump straight to gameplay.

If you haven’t played it already, here’s the link to our game: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=11347

My next lesson today is IT and I’ll test out your games on it, because at home I can’t due to my computer is broken.

So testing start 3…2…1..

(sorry for my bad english)

Listen while playing (music included) and try to stay alive : here !

Game levels:

There are some games that lead you to another level, but just the same scene over and over, just with shifting of screen and stuff like that. User tend to get annoyed, especially when they do not tell you how many levels, and then after a difficult level, you go back to a static screen as level 1: Rage quitting!

Please guys, at least two levels can add more fun to the game, and time user needs to play it.

Multiplayer (2 player):

There is a numerous number of games, where you can play with another player no the same keyboard (or game-pad) . But think guys, what about single sibling gamedevs/players?

Wouldn’t it be nicer to make a 1 player mode, where he can play against a CPU, and a 2 player mode, in case he has a friend, which in both modes he still gets the same feel of the game?

Multiplayer (online servers):

There are really cool looking games that you can play online by joining a server, and fight/work with other players. However, there are many times only 1 person is testing/playing your game, and would just move around in the empty void looking for a meaning to his existence in the game. I’ve experienced that as well.

Wouldn’t it be much better if you added at least one robot or more, that’d act like a player on the server (maybe a different colour or named bot_348) so even lonely players can enjoy the aspects in the world, and even several players still playing and having fun even while spamming the bots to death? XD

Unbeatable games?:

Of course, if your game is ‘unbeatable’ player ought you rate you low. But what if the game isn’t ‘unbeatable’, but just the players cannot beat it? They would still rate you low, thinking that it is ‘unbeatable’.

Why not make a video of beating it, just as the same as you make time-lapses of your games? Or find a video someone made on how to beat your game, and send a link to that video instead?

I could not add in this to me game, so I’m out:

I’ve read many of these posts while the jam was still going on. Either users think they would not have enough time, or they do not know how to add it and give up.

You’ve already gotten countless features in your game, so use it as a prototype for when you actually figure out how to add in those features.

You can also decide to leave out voting categories in case you could not add in music in time, or the game was filled with moving boxes, and gamers are so user friendly, even during rage quitting, they still leave awesome comments, and even if it is a 30 second game, who knows, it might be re-played hundreds of times, just to experience that fun again!

Also, nothing is wrong with google-ing how to draw in text box in flash, or how to enable full-screen in Unity (Jam members, not sure about Compo) It does not even matter if you forgot a line in Java as to how to import a class, or make the JFrame work, and scratch, of you’ve drawn the character in the opposite direction that you wanted it to be!

Don’t let that stop you!

Think about it guys, there are really many things that let us down about our games, or others about it, and there are many ways to deal with them.

Just be patient and do not give up. Even the community give you help for your games, tell you what to take out, and even ideas while livestreaming it, and/or tell you the lines of code you wrote that gave the game the error that you could not fix! 😀

Also, if you’ve got any more tips while in the process of game making, please comment them below. :3

I removed some elements to make the most simple game. Much simpler and fast … try it

I need feedback.

I am very pleased to have participated in my first ludumdare.
I would love you to experience and comment on my game so I can have a better participation in the next event.

Help the character to find the level exit.
But be careful not to enter the darkness because of abstinence character by computers.

Play Game – Go Out Screen

Here’s a little timelapse I did of my Ludum Dare 31 progress. It shows you how I built our game The Agency. At least the first two days of it. Unfortunately I forgot to record the third day. Regardless, I think it’s a fun look at game development. I hope you enjoy it.

As for the game: We came up with a pretty interesting twist on the “Entire Game On One Screen” Theme and I’m mostly happy with the result. A few things could have gone better, as always. For example: I think it takes too long until the player reaches the first really interesting point in the game.

Ah, you never stop learning.

Tags: game development, timelapse, video, webcam