Santa’s First Christmas it’s a game about being the new Santa, we made this game for you, check it out!

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=13541

Santa’s First Christmas Stage 2

We like the december ludumdare cos we can made a game about christmas, christmas is love, christmas is life.

It’s ogre now.

Hey guys,

we have been asking a lot for feedback and received a lot of good criticism and advice for improvements on our game. Tomorrow we will be attending the December Berlin Mini Game Jam and we might take the chance to work more on our last Berlin Mini Game Jam game from November and also implement new features (rising difficulty, some incentive to walk around like upgrades, different enemies) and fix bugs (sound volume, collision boxes, score in web version, game over state and many more) in Of Carrots and Blood. We will keep you posted with updates on our post jam version.

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!

PLAY Of Carrots and Blood HERE

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

Hi guys!

Here’s a timelapse of my side of the work for our LD Jam entry, Electric Jezebel. It was tons of fun! Make sure to try out the final product if you are curious. And if you do, please leave us a comment! We are looking very closely at all the feedback we get. We really appreciate any opinions and suggestions on how to improve our game.

XOXO,
Diego

We’ve now added Linux support to our game!

(Better late than never, right?)

Play it here!

First, if you have not yet played my entry for LD31, Towards Light, take a look and maybe rate http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=41895

So, first I will start with the map. I simply draw some lines where I thought it would  be interesting to see the light bend around and guide the circles through. I ended up scrapping and redoing the map collision twice and went through with my third attempt. The first thing I tried was to keep the pixelated lines I drew in photoshop and attach Unity’s  polygon collider to it. Unfortunately, Unity’s polygon collider does not have anywhere near accurate so I began the painstaking journey of moving each vertex to each pixels corner. After about 3 hours I realized this was the worst possible way of doing the collision. I then tried to separate the map into portions and try the same thing, thinking maybe the polygon collider would be a bit more accurate with a smaller sprite to work with. I was wrong, and barely bothered trying the same thing again. This ended my friday night, and in the morning I had the idea to just make box colliders and place them in about the same place over the pixels. It took took about a total of 3-4 hours to place all the box colliders and I was happy enough with the outcome.

Towards Light map at the start of the level

Next, the logic. The tool I use for the light does include a method for checking if an object is being lit with the light. The problem was, this did not work, and instead just checked if an object should have been lit, regardless of walls interfering, basically just a complex distance checker. So, I had to make my own method for this. I first checked if the object (the circles to guide) was in range of the light then drew a linecast between the object and the player (the light). If the linecast was not interrupted and it was in distance, the object had a direct line of sight with the player and was in the light, therefore it could move towards the player. That is, at it’s core, the only code for gameplay needed. The rest of the code handled basic functions like menus and buttons and loading the game, or checking to see if the player has won the game yet.

For expert mode, all I did was set the background to a constant black instead of the changing colors in normal mode, and I have to say I find expert mode much more fun.

In total, Towards Light took about 22 hours (First idea for LD31(4 hours), first night sleep(4 hours), gone for most of saturday (10 hours), second night sleep (8 hours)). I loved working on it and was pleased with the outcome. Creating more maps would not take long and I might be interested in making more maps and possibly releasing it later possibly for iOS or PC/Mac/Linux. Remember to rate Towards Light, only at 21 votes at the time of writing and so far the comments have been positive and enjoyable to read!

Sooo …

Play it here (You will have to imagine the dance mat)
http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=12942

Tags: compo, dance, pixels

12 cool games from Ludum Dare #31. Send me links and I’ll get your games on video!

Tags: video

Well, that’s an interesting coincidence with the donation meter:

My LD#31 jam entry Gifts Galore! is now available on Android as part of my mini-game collection: Uncle Scotty’s Arcade At The End Of The Universe (AATEOTU).

Now play with tap/swipe controls, and also enjoy three other mini games: Gravity Tubing, Forever Flappy, and Galactic Invaders. AATEOTU (name acrynomized due to Google Play’s 30 character limit for app titles)  is currently in Open Alpha. Expect new games and features in updates coming soon!

Get the Android version on Google Play, or check out the original Web release on the Jam page.

Gifts Galore! Mini-game added to Uncle Scotty’s AATEOTU

Hey fellow gamedevs,

We are a team of four german students. We name ourselfs “Banana4Life” and have developed the game “Legendary Legionnaire Winter Massacre” for the third ludum dare we took part in. I (Jonas) made a quick LetsPlay of it here:

You can rate and play our game here: Legendary Legionnaire Winter Massacre

But now lets get to the post-mortem. Like last time we didn’t have huge problems and got even more stuff done than last time. But lets start with what went right.

What went right?

• The game was playable and apparently fun to play.
• We all met up at one place and were really productive.
• We developed a cool idea during the game. Things like unicorns and aliens were spontaneous ideas.
• The graphics were developed steadily parallel to the code and thus weren’t a product of the last minute.
• We implemented our core gameplay first and after that improved upon it.
• We partly had a lot of features that we wanted to implement, but cut the right features at the right time.
• We slept a reasonable amount of time (and weren’t completely destroyed after the weekend).

As you see the most important parts went right and I think we did a pretty good job developing the game this time. But we had some small problems anyway.

What went wrong?

• We didn’t have the final idea from the beginning on and had a hard time with the theme.
• There were a few graphical features I wanted to implement, like random props(grass, stones, …), that I did not have time for.
• Not all of us could work on the game  for the whole third day, because they had to go to university.
• The rendering of the walls and floor tiles could have been solved better.

Most of the “What went wrong?” stuff could be solved with more time and maybe some more structured code on my side rendering the wall and floor tiles. (But it worked anyway)

What we want to do better?

• Think a bit more before writing code. (maybe, maybe not)

So I think we have an action plan for the next time.

1. Try long enough to come up with a good idea.
2. Make the game.
3. Play more games.
4. Enjoy the internet fame.

I hoped you liked our short writeup. Greetings,

Team Banana4Life

P.S.: Play and rate our game please.

This is our second LD jam entry. We decided to go for an endless runner game this time around. It is very different in style and gameplay to our LD 29 game. Also a lot less bugs. We focused mainly on keeping it simple and dishing out a fun product.

SQUISH AND BOUNCE

Playing these games is tons of fun! Here are some I enjoyed so far:

Network Programming – Oh man, the audio on this one is not to miss. You’re trying to reclaim your soul from within a series of TV channels, by doing minigames while some hilarious background audio plays.

Escape Character & OMNI – There were a few “trapped in a computer” games, and these were the best. Escape Character is really on top of its look and feel, while OMNI is really clever about moving the screen (but a little tough to control).

Squishi – There were also a few “rebuild the screen” games, and this one does it best, I think. It also ramps up the difficulty slowly, which is a nice change from lots of the platformers.

Hit and Slide – A networked brawl? Count me in! Has a few mechanics issues, but I found myself playing a lot more of this game than I needed to just to write the review. It’s just fun!

Owls Ever After – Explore your memories and find inconsistencies to get around the fuzzy areas in your past. Also has a really great visual style.

Microphyla – Very Metroid-y. Solid mechanics, lots of fun, very well designed.

Shifting Dungeon – A dungeon exploration game where the dungeon scrolls and shifts around you. Another great take on the theme.

Photo Bound – Took me longer than normal to “get it”, but the concept is solid and pretty clever. Nice visuals, and decent controls.

I’ve been really impressed by the creativity and technical prowess of many of the entries. Really cool games, guys and gals! Keep it up!

Thanks to Reddit player super_aardvark for this awesome screenshot of my entry:

Play CUBE Clicker

God I was a little sick the past week and spent all day in bed with the computer! I ‘ve played 200 games! I’ve never done such a gaming ‘pot pouri’ and I must say that it is a great experience!

I’ve played so many good games and saw many great ideas that only indie games can achieve !

This is my first Ludum Dare and videogame effort ever  and I must say that I can’t wait for more !

Well next week I will  fix some minor bugs and i’ll try to create a Mac export for my little game.

I hope you enjoyed it!

Thank you all for the support and for believing

Hey!  Check out our gameplay video!!!

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC98E1RZPbSf79hi40vGdOsg

Follow us on Twitter @DiscoKittyNight

Follow Archive Studios @Archive_Studios

Kuch Bhi ! is an arcade game with no logic.

GAME LINK

Together In Thousands is a lot of firsts for me; first game jam, first time using LWJGL, first of my games that actually has an ending (sort of).

Description – Use drops of fluid to guide your bacterial colony toward total domination of the petri dish. Each fluid represents a different attribute that will boost the ability of your colony. Together In Thousands (currently) features four individual levels and six fluid types.

Here are some gifs of the first level.

I used the following programs/libraries;

Eclipse/Java

LWJGL, Slick-Util

JarSplice

GIMP

You can play and rate my entry here.

This was a great experience. I really enjoy the positive, supportive atmosphere of the LD. It is awesome to see a lot of good feedback on a game, and it is fun to see what other developers with similar time constraints are able to produce. Count me in on the next LD!

Moral of the story: Give up.

So yeah, I was able to finish my first LD entry. The game is “Walk to the door”, a simple puzzle which involves to move windows around.

It got some really cool comments, I’m so glad people liked it!

So here is what went right:

-I got a pretty nice game.

-When I got the idea, things went really well.

-The code is nice in my opinion.

-Made a game for the mini LD, so everything was set up. (Angline)

What went left:

-Wasted most of the first day, It was hard to get an idea that wasn’t a shooter.

-Live streaming really distracted me, even if no one watched me.

What I learned:

People really like innovation, it is better to be original than to make really nice graphics and stuff.

I loved participating on LD, I look forward to the next one!

Click HERE if you wan’t to try my game! I hope you enjoy it!

I will stream while playing your games today. Here’s a countdown as a timezone independent way to tell you when I’ll begin (maybe a few minutes earlier or later):

I basically only ever stream to rate LD games. I did it for the past three LDs and had a blast!

I will play games of people who are in the chat with higher priority and will do the ratings off screen.

So add you game to the queue right here! I hope to see you very soon in my twitch channel!

Well, that’s my entry of the Ludum Dare 31, and I’m happy with the results and I received some great comments! For if anyone wants to play, i’m leaving the link here: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=44355

It is our’s first LD and Jam at all and we are very excited about all this atmosphere and feedback!

We invite you to play and rate our game:
JamEntry: Houston, We’ve Got a Problem

And this is a information bulletin for new astronauts:

Tags: game, ld31, Ludum Dare

And the least productive one :p

I made Swotch and pOp during this time-lapse… but also played video games. I’d not be a good worker !

Here’s the time-lapse for my game.

If you haven’t played it yet, click here!

Tags: flashpunk, time lapse, timelapse

Well we completed our first game Standoff.

Many attempts have been made in the past to complete a game and none of them came to fruition. We decided that a hard deadline and dedicated development time might give us the push we needed to complete something. We are really happy with the result despite it’s many flaws and this experience has inspired us to begin development on new games.

Thanks for the great comments!

Remember when I was going to not have the flu and work on the game this weekend?

Yeah, the flu heard about that and decided that now would be a GREAT time to visit.

I don’t know my schedule now, I have so much to do and so much flu brain mush.

… AND WHY DOES THE LD SITE THINK I AM IN STOCKHOLM?

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=33937

This is the first time I participated in LD, so I’m pretty excited about everything, including the voting phase.

Being in western europe, the theme announcement came at 2am, so I was worried that I’d miss precious time. I woke up at 4.30, read the theme on twitter while still in bed and went back to sleep to let my brain do the hard work! 😀 Woke up 2 hours later and in 30min of brainstorming I came up with what seemed a cool idea for a game: Layerd

I started working after breakfast (around 8.30), and during the first day I only stopped to cook, eat and meditate (things I can’t miss :). Most of the day was spent coding and brainstorming the ideas. The second day I improved the artwork, did the background music and finished the puzzles.

I had plenty of ideas that unfortunately I could not include in the game due to time constraints, from 100 steps I had to come down to only 50 steps. But between that or having no sounds, music or a lousy mood, I preferred to cut back and look it this is a tech-demo 😛

Funny thing was, as I was coding and play testing the game, I actually thought this could turn out to be a “full” game after LD, since the mechanic is really nice (sorry but you won’t get it by looking at screenshots, give it a real try 😉 )

Many comments I received point me in the same direction, so I’m really considering putting more time into it to turn it into a real game.. but I’m still undecided. What do you think? My plan was to develop a custom map editor that could create custom levels for the game’s mechanics, and maybe have people also create their own levels and share around online. I guess I still need some words of encouragement to put my time on this, not sure if it will be worth it…

We made our game Enter the Murderdome for the jam, but decided to release the source code anyway. I’m a huge fan of open source, since it’s always interesting to see how other people do things and it’s a great way to learn. I’ll admit the code is not the best, but it works pretty well for what it is. I used Render Textures to render the game with a pixellated look. Unfortunately, this means you’ll need Unity Pro to get the most out of it.

• Play Enter the Murderdome
• View Source Code

If there are any other games that have source code available, I’d love to play them and check out the code. So please leave links in the comments.

After 72h of hard work here comes the post-mortem of Colosse Duty, well at least mine. My teammates probably feel the same but this is from my point of view.

First Day:

The beginning of the first day was harsh. Trouble setting up our graphist computer and other stuff made us lose more than 2 hours. We performed a little brainstorm an decided to go for an action platformer where the character can switch size depending of his hp. The game would take place in a antique tower in the desert. While my friends worked on the graphics and music I struggled to implement the basics of the hero moves and attacks. I had not used Unity in more than 3 month and my code was messy. So when Stardust joined me on the programming I decided to refactor everything. This helped solve the bugs we had. Meanwhile the monster were being implemented. At the end of this day we had a few nice graphics, a cool music and the beginning of the game engine.

 Second Day :

After quite a short night, the second day began. Tyrannas was working on the design of the monsters and on their animation. Stardust focused on finishing the scripts for the monsters and creating an AI for them. For my part I implemented a lot of things : lighting, particles, health-bar for the hero, implementing the sounds… At this point the graphics and the music were awesome, the game engine was almost done but the gameplay lacked something. As the game design is the only artistic contribution I can make, I was quite disappointed to have such an average gameplay. And then, as the clock rang midnight, oh my god ! I had the insight I was waiting for since the beginning of the ludum. I would sleep later. I had to implement that last minute mechanics. Stones that would control the camera.

Third Day :

The third day was a tricky one since we had a few classes at the university but still needed to work on the game. Hopefully we managed to do both successfully. Tyrannas and Stardust were working on animating the monsters and the character. For my part I was finishing to code the new mechanic and started to work on a bit of polishing. The mistake was to leave the level design for the end. But a few last minutes bugs kept us working on until the last hour.

Conclusion :

As always when it’s Ludum Dare, this three days were awesome. Doing it with two friends was thrice the awesomeness. I’m quite happy about the game but I still regret not having spent more time on the level design and not pushing the last day mechanic further. But what can I say, if I had had the idea on the first day, things would have been quite different.

Anyway if you want to play our super moody game, with a gampelay not as good as it could be, go ahead and don’t hesitate to leave a comment, every criticism is welcome :

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=30088

Thank you everybody for making this Ludum Dare so awesome !

Hi fellow game developers!

We have been working a little bit on the Ludum Dare version, to make it feel more complete. Fixed several bugs and added visual enhancements. These were planned in the LD version, but due to lack of time we had to skip them.
So here are the changes & fixes, feel free to try the game:

http://ludumdare.sakergames.com/ld31-game

And of course, don’t forget to play and rate our Jam entry: http://goo.gl/d1gAZl

Thanks a lot!

As the jam neared the end, I realized I needed to get the game in a fully playable state, finish the menu, and make sure the win/lose conditions worked. As a result, we weren’t able to get a few things in. Cameron had even made the assets for the next enemy we were going to put in the game, but ultimately failed to do so. I decided I should release our ideas and talk about what we were going to do, because that’s interesting, right? Eh, maybe.

Play game

Early draft of the game, getting core functionality in

The next two assets to be put in were these two. The fish is a moon fish, and the image on the left is a collection of eggs. The goal of the moon fish was to wander the screen aimlessly, occasionally spawning this ball of eggs. If you fail to destroy the ball of eggs before they hatch, a school of baby moon fish erupt from it and swarm you. We’re talking 30-50 mini moon fish, with one goal in mind: attack that jellyfish because it’s after our momma. The light for the moon fish would most likely end up being a bright orange, fading to white, then back. Not too intense, more of a dimmer light, to help express the notion that it’s not a threat.

We also wanted to add some lights to the salp, but I knew that was going to get messy with the way I imagined it (only have lights the connections of salp, rather than the salp nodes themselves), and I never got around to implementing that feature. But you can see the salp above, they were pretty interesting by themselves without having to put any lights on it. Speaking of lights, I implemented a system that we hardly scratched the surface of. Lights have three properties in this engine: radius, intensity/alpha, and color. You can assign as many of these as you want to a single light, as well as a time, and it will linearly interpolate between the values, allowing for a range of effects. We did end up utilizing it in a few spots, but overall was a pretty big waste of time for what could have been a great addition to certain spots in the game.

The boss introduces itself with a ripple effect (thanks Kyle Pulver for the shader!) and pushes the player out of the way (one of those little extra polish things I put in there that makes me feel all giddy inside). I wanted to do it for all enemies, but unfortunately I added it to the boss and not the base enemy class, and didn’t feel like ripping apart the code to add it to all of them. Everything worked fine, so why break it even more? Plus, I did try adding it to salp, and it looked awful.

We originally also planned for multiple bosses. The second boss was going to be a multiple portion boss, as I like to call it, where it has armored body parts, and the body parts become vulnerable after a while, and then you can shoot one of them off, revealing a little nest of enemy fish that swim from the newly created wound.

Another enemy we were prototyping was the starfish. We found this really cool starfish and wanted to dynamically create starfish with 3-6 arms, each of them shooting bullets out. This enemy would just wander aimlessly, bounce off of other enemies, and add a new dynamic that I feel was missing from the finished game. The starfish (typo’d it starwish at first, which is a pretty neat name) would have been broken into two images – one that would be the base body, and then another with the arms. I really like the inside design in this starfish, which is why I chose it. Not too sure we’d have the additional tentacles coming out of it, though.

The above jellyfish was our original reference art for the jelly. I was going to program some sort of tentacle script that would allow me to create some nifty tentacles coming out from this jellyfish. In the final version, it’s obviously not there, mainly because I realized I had no idea how to do it in a way that would look good. Or even exactly how to draw something like that using the Otter engine. It would have been an amazing addition to the game, especially if I would have gone all out and made the tentacles themselves glow, illuminating the area around it. The jellyfish also had one other thing I wanted to add, which would have made aiming even more impossible than it already was, and that was to have it swim in a sin wave-esq shape, to give it more of a swimming motion.

That’s it for this post! Check out the game if you’re interested, and I’ll try doing another post next weekend if I can think of anything. Happy Saturday!

Tags: cameron erickson, jam, ld31, mike leroy, otter, to fight the sea

Kuch Bhi ! is an arcade game with no logic.

GAME LINK

Hello guys, I’m happy to tell you my improved game after my LD30 entry is bundled on groupees for 14 days.

Get the full bundle for 1.25$ min. !

You can vote my LD31 entry as well ! : http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=29477

Before the final episode of GameARTMonday – the best gameart of the week – I’d like to do a Ludum Dare special.
I’d be happy if you drop me a comment with your favorite games so far! 😀

Previous GameARTMonday’s:

Episode 11

Episode 10

Cheers!
Rick

1. Play only with your left Hand 😀
( this is why they are how they are; thought of making local multiplayer possible… and imagine a split personality playing against itself then…! 😀 )

2. Gamepad is recommended
( During LD I had no Gamepad and tested our stuff only with keyboard-controls. I’ve got
pretty good at this fast I think… so it’s possible! But after LD I played it with gamepad
and just set the world-record (as far as I know 😀 ) to 19k points… )

😀 pointless post though 😀

If you want to play just search for RRR and look for this:

To set the stage, check out my LD31 entry “Slope Challenge³” here: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=42145

I’ve done game development for a long time, as a hobby, although not much in the last 5 years or so. I usually just worked on engines and graphics and that’s what I loved. I think the only ever polished, finished game I made was a PacMan clone way back in high school. It had modding tools and texture editors and all that stuff (DOS-based but in graphics mode, using Turbo Pascal).

So, game design is definitely new to me. And I’m still getting used to Unity and some other tools. I knew going into the dare that I was going to have to take the experts’ advice here: keep it small and manageable, work within your limitations. When I watched other jams play out, I always wondered what people were thinking working with levels and having to generate that much content. Of course, that’s exactly what I ended up doing here.

So what went well?

Mostly everything, given the time constraints and this being my first time entry. I stayed away from generating much art (well, besides designing buttons I didn’t create any), and the music is very minimal – just a quick loop. I think for this type of game both are acceptable anyway. But, I did go to sleep around midnight both nights, and started again around 7/7.30 am. So not bad.
And, I did end up using Blender for the coins, for whatever reason Unity kept screwing up the cylinder rotations and after spending too much time trying to figure it out, I just made a model in Blender for the coin. Yay, I used Blender (minor personal victory dance).
Kudos to myself for creating the whole structure in such a way that adding an extra level was really no effort at all (prefabs for the win!).
The fact that I had never done audio in Unity before scared me a bit, so I kept putting it off. It ended up being easier than I thought. I had also never created sound effects etc, but a hollow wood coffee table worked wonders: rolled a can of beans for the game ball’s sound, tapped some tools on it for the collision sound effect. Used keys in my hand for the coin collection sound.

What lessons to learn?

Work on my art tool skills. If I can work blender properly and texture, I could do more interesting things. Or, I could go for 2D of course. Also, I’m still of the opinion that working with levels is not such a great idea, because you have to create them all. I think I did ok creating an easy and a difficult level, to show the potential of the game.
Had some computer trouble with music. I wanted to use my new PC for music, but I just didn’t get to learn Ableton Live Lite at all prior to the compo. So I switched to GarageBand on the Mac – which then had issues with the keyboard. I could have done more with the music, I had time left, but I was scared of putting it in the game. I hadn’t done any audio in Unity ever, and I had to put in a mute button for the music (especially since it’s short loop).

Conclusion

It was really fun and I did a whole lot better than I had imagined. I didn’t think I was going to be able to do this (or at the very least switch to the jam to get more time and use pre-existing assets), but I did and got into each category (except humor) – although art leaves something to be desired but it’s not very relevant to this game anyway. And of course, learned a whole lot. Proud of my first ever compo entry, it’s a decent game. And definitely proud I actually pulled off something pretty ok in the time allotted.

Slope Challenge

I think it’s worth exploring the game further. Some good comments and watching some people play has resulted in some good ideas to work on. Shortcuts to switch blocks and visually seeing a “ghost” block while you’re trying to place it are the number two things that need to be done. If I create more challenges there will be more opportunity for other types of obstacles and blocks.

OMG, guys it’s so fun to play all these games! There are 2636 entries in the list, and we’ve played only a couple, there’s and entire lifetime of great games ahead.

The comments are awesome too, it’s so nice to have all this feedback. It’s especially pleasant to realize that our game it not just fun, but even improves some skills 😉

Although I found that the gameplay suits all genders, and is even better for girls if playing on touchpad, check it out on YouTube.

Please leave your comments below. Do you know other games that are good for any kind of skills?

Meanwhile, we are still working on Sentinel. We have a new version with global leaderboards and ‘Endless mode’ which you can find here.

The game-making period for LD31 has drawn to a close. And the results?

Well, unfortunately, I didn’t quite make it. The major change in my development approach really slowed me down. Its disappointing for sure, as Ludum Dare really is something special when it comes to the community and the feedback afterwards.

Nonetheless, I was able to take a lot away from this Ludum Dare, and I don’t consider it a total failure by any means. Let’s break it down:

• Base Code: Oh wow. Yes, have good base code. Now, in my defense, I’d spent a good week or so prior hashing through the basics of the entity-component system and making sure I could at least do simple things like get a graphic on screen, move it, and play sounds. But in the end, I was still firing way too much from the hip. Combine that with my relative lack of inexperience with OpenFL and it meant getting through even simple tasks could chew up time. Had I not had the base code I did have, I would have been sunk probably right out of the gate. So now I’m taking away a lot of ideas for what I can do to polish my WIP engine up and get ready for next time.
• Paradigm Switch: Oh wow again. When you switch from object-oriented practices to more data-driven practices, it can be a bit jarring. Again, I got slowed down as simple tasks were no longer encapsulated in single objects but managed by multiple objects. Since I didn’t have much in the way of base code and I’m not supposed to use member functions as adamantly, it sometimes meant I was writing more code and the same code more than I wanted to. This will hopefully also be covered in my engine polish, so that I can still keep things neat without heavy encapsulation.
• Momentum: I did have other things going on over the weekend. But this combined with basic functionality taking longer-than-ideal times meant building any sustainable momentum was tough even when working over longer spans. It meant breaks became more appealing and I ended up having trouble garnering motivation. So for the sake of momentum, taking even more time to wrap my head around the other two things above is crucial.
• Experiencing Something New: I used to think people were mildly crazy when they would say things like “I’m going to try learning a new engine/language over Ludum Dare.” O_o. And guess what? I’m not convinced that its NOT crazy to some degree. But if anything, it exposes you to new ideas and ways of doing things. Being able to walk away with a little more experience and familiarity with my new toys and use it to get stronger is so big. So I get the appeal now. Be crazy people. Try something new. Just be prepared for increased mayhem over the weekend!

So there’s my LD31 experience in a nutshell. Hopefully you found it helpful for yourself in some way. Thanks for reading, and hopefully we’ll be right back at it for LD32!

• Fixed game breaking bugs.
• Added necessary game-play features.

Much Adoge about Chocolate

So far we played and rated just 171 games, we want more (MOAR)=)

And, of course, we are very excited of getting feedback about our game.

Play Houston and we’ll play and rate your game too:
Jam Entry: Houston, We’ve Got a Problem

Top score for now is: 13 657 scientific data
Second place: 8 000 scientific data
What will be your score?

Tags: game, im in, jam, ld31, Ludum Dare

We have a four player game open, we’ll be online for about one hour!

Join now! ( <- Downloads and instructions on that page)

Hello everyone,

We’ve been getting positive feedback lately on our 3D Bouncing Arena Brawler – Bounce ’em Up,  and we’d like to thank everyone who played and enjoyed our game! Thanks for the feedback guys and gals.

If you haven’t played yet, go check it out HERE!

B00M!

Also, send us your games so we can play and give you feedback on it.

Cheers!

Kuality Games

Hello everybody!

For anybody who was not seen Dwindling Fire yet, check it out!
We personally think it is a really cool game!

Here’s the link to our entry, click!

Here’s some quick snaps from the game!

Tags: dwindling fire, jam, ld31

You really have to try it … it is even crazier and cruel … we add some crazy car drivers … they don’t care about no one …. get out of their way … jojojo

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=45161

Thirteen more cool games from Ludum Dare #31… Send me your game and I’ll record a video!

Caved In
KudukuForgiveUs (Compo)
http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=28928

That Dangerous Bridge
Shackhal (Compo) @shackhal
http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=10863

The Harrowing
K.Chplr (Compo) @kchplr
http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=46806

Stay Frosty
trenchgames (Jam) @TrenchGames
http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=46155

Last Ark
Nuclear Napalm (Compo) @NuclearNapalm
http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=38866

Sentinel
kipelovets (Jam)
http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=46923

Walk to the door
el-pepi (Compo)
http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=38693

Space Cube
lxd1 (Compo)
http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=34792

Thermonuclear War
panda (Compo)
http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=16086

CoinSlot
SuperDisk (Compo)
http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=11035

On The Field
redoxkun (Jam)
http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=40073

Vanitas I
ProgrammerPony (Jam)
http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=43889

Towards Light
Last Man Standing (Compo)
http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=41895

Greetings traveler!

with LD31 having taken place about a week ago I thought it’s time for a recap and why not do a postmortem?

Play Frenzy Snowman Smasher here

Good Stuff

Framework

With HaxeFlixel we decided for a tool that was quite new to us. Having worked with SFML, SFML.NET and Unity recently on various (Ludum Dare) projects (please feel free to check out our site) we felt like using HaxeFlixel this time. To make it short, it worked out great!

Creating a project is as easy as it can get with templates. You don’t need to introduce libraries or tweak linker settings. Instead you start with a game loop and you’re ready to go for mechanics.

HaxeFlixel might not be as well documented as Unity, the community is not as large (ever tried googling a Unity problem? Chances are high you’ll find a solution), but HaxeFlixel ships with an equally equipped tool kit (at least for 2d) for maths, tweens, timing, sprites, audio, pathfinding and even some graphical effects. This is one major advantage, since you can do most stuff super fast and without checking an asset store.

Additionally you can deploy to different plattforms without any hassle. The web target can be met using Flash (works fine) and HTML5 (works partially) which is great to lower the barrier of getting people to play (and rate!) your game.

Teamwork

We (@Thunraz and @Laguna_999) have worked together on numerous projects and know the style and preferences of the other one very well.  So while I was responsible for the audio stuff, I left most of the graphics to my partner. Both of us worked on the code.

The experience of a teammate is worth alot and I can only recommend working in a team. You will definitely  have much more fun and you can achieve more in the same time (probably not 2.00 times as much for 2 people, but with well trained teams it surely can be around 1.85). But you will also learn a lot from your teammate and get another view on game mechanics, aesthetics and content.

Someone to talk to about your ideas, concepts and algorithms and who gives instant feedback is very valuable!

Being in the flow

For me this Ludum Dare I was really “in the flow”. I didn’t notice this that much when I was doing all the work, but when I skimmed through the images for my timelapse video (always check if  you need to drop any, because of private chat sessions, passwords or addresses visible!) I realized I worked very straightforward and was very concentrated. Ok, I did surf the LD page very often but this is part of Ludum Dare for me.

In retrospect this was a great experience!

Social activities

We both joined social activities on Saturday evening. It is important for me to get my mind free to talk to some people and to get away from the screen – at least for some hours.

One day early

For the jam you have additional time (compared to the compo) but since I had to get to work on Monday, we finished early on Sunday evening. Which left us plenty of time for letting some friends test our game and receiving really valuable feedback.

With the additional time we also had some distance to the project and could judge (at least some parts) of the game better and add some improvements.

Scope

One thing we both liked about developing Frenzy Snowman Smasher was that the scope of the project was very clear and limited. There was not much place for feature creep (but the features implemented are hopefully very juicy :D) and this was a good thing.

Especially in hindsight of our LD30 entry that has been very ambitious. We implemented features to the last minute, leaving us almost no time for improvements, play tests and further iterations. We did a lot better on this Ludum Dare.

Bad stuff, room for improvement & what we have learned

Scope

Which immediately brings me to the major disadvantage of our project: it’s not special (you can find plenty of top down shooters this time) and the idea is almost generic. Ok, the game was built in a very limited time frame but when I see what other people have accomplished in this short time, I think we could have done better.

Balancing

One point almost everyone mentions is the difficulty of the game. We created a super hard version after the jam has ended though.

This is a hard one, since as a developer you spend playing your game a lot over during development. You know all the tricks and flaws of controls, how power-ups or weapons behave and how enemies react. For me it is really hard to get the numbers (like enemy spawn rate, health, speed, damage, etc.) to feel good. This is probably due to the game’s genre where balancing is more crucial than for e.g. a platformer. But I should look for some literature on this subject, because it feels like I can approach this on an almost scientific level.

Presentation

When it comes to presenting our ideas or even game play, I think we lack some talent. I forced myself to write tweets now and then and also did some posts on the Ludum Dare blog, but I think more people would probably play or even notice Frenzy Snowman Smasher if there were more high quality screenshots, some pre-finished soundtracks, or even funny bugs.

A big thank you to everyone who has read this far! As you can see we are quite happy with the result and how it worked out.

Let us know how you tackle those problems. There is always room for improvements!

Best Regards,
runvs

Play ProtoBot!

Hey all! We made a few adjustments to ProtoBot over the past week, and we thought we’d share our improvements with y’all, including:

• PS4 controller support (it’s great, if you’ve got one – use it!)
• 1UPs (bonus points if you’re doing well, or an extra life if you’re struggling..)
• UI improvements
• Fixes & balance changes

If you have any interest in robots, arcade games, swords or lasers, then check our game out! Thanks!

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

I just added a README to my entry’s repository explaining how to compile it. I how this helps those that failed to compile it or couldn’t run after compiling…

Check it here (or on the repository’s home).

So I blew it. My game is too hard for people in a hurry to beat which is bad news for Ludum Dare and very bad news for my LD31 entry’s score. I can live with that: I view each Ludum Dare as an opportunity to learn and improve and I now know that “furiously difficult” is the wrong approach to take. Even including a full playthrough video wasn’t enough. Fair enough.

Sure — in my entry for this Ludum Dare — it feels like you’re jumping through treacle. You can’t jump again until you’ve stopped bouncing. You have to be incredibly precise with how long you tap ‘up’ for. You have truly evil inertia to deal with which means you have to anticipate and correct your horizontal velocity to land properly.

But that’s the challenge. The game’s map was designed specifically for these controls. And so far only a tiny handful of people have actually beaten it… even though it only takes about 5 minutes to play through the whole thing once you’ve mastered the controls.

What I would love…. I would love to get this game into the hands of people who thrive on this sort of challenge. Not because I want more votes, because honestly I think I have enough and I’m sure the verdict is already in… but I just want to find the small number of people who look at the dark world levels in Super Meat Boy and go, HELLS YES. The people who’ve done Veni Vidi Vici in VVVVVV even though it took hundreds of attempts because, well, it was there. It needed to be done.

If this is you, then this game was made for you.

Screened, Penultimate and most difficult level..

Screened’s entry page is here.

I have written a post on my blog summarizing Ludum Dare 31.

You can read it here.

Ladies and gentlemen, the “online database” for our entry Coinslot:

It’s an early 2000s IBM Thinkpad.

Our game: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=11035

After I’ve heard the theme of the LD31, I’d immediately thought about making a multiplayer local game. I’m surprise to not find any bomber man like, in all games I have tested (If someone find one, please send me it!) Plus, as far as I knew, Unity3D had no problem to manage gamepads. So all of this, sounded like a very good idea.

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=37446

During the development I always tested my game with my two gamepads :

• MadCatz F.P.S PRO for Xbox 360
• MadCatz Street Fighter 4 for Xbox 360

And I’ve got no problem until some hours before submit the game in compo. I took gamepads from friends and plug four to my computer, and I discovered really annoying bugs. Specially when I plug/unplug gamepads.

• Some gamepad controlled two characters.
• Some gamepad controlled no character.

After writing some logs. When I plug four controllers to my computer, Unity3D thinks there is 6 controllers. And start to have this strange behaviors.

After some search I read this interesting blog post :

http://www.gallantgames.com/posts/27/details-on-the-xbox-360-controller-bug-in-unity and I also found this plugin on GitHub : https://github.com/JISyed/Unity-XboxCtrlrInput

It’s work really well and the rewrite of my code was not very long. But after some comments on my entry post, I could notice there still some bugs.

1. The webplayer version continue to bug, I think it’s because the plugin use two dlls, and if one got native code, it will be not include with the webplayer build.
2. It doesn’t give the name of the gamepad so I cannot use my Sf4 controllers (no joystick).
3. Logitech gamepads don’t work, I thinks it’s because the plugin is really oriented for Xbox 360 gamepads.

I’m still happy to  develop this game, even if without this problem I could add more features of course.

But because I want to continue developing multiplayer local games. I’m looking for some good wisdom :

Do you use 4 controllers with Unity3D 4.6 ?

Do you have equivalent problem ?

Also, do you know some Unity3D titles in local multiplayer, (with four players)  ?

Thanks for reading !

Damien;

Ps : Last pro tip  for myself. Next time, don’t forget to also manage the keyboard.

So I am a programmer and I’m looking to collab with a 2D artist on a number of projects. If you are interested just leave a comment or email me at nathan.day98@icloud.com.

LD31 was my fifth jam and it went in some ways better than previous jams, but I also experienced new issues I never hit before.

Snowman’s Quest is a top-down survival shooting game with a little twist – in order to win you have also to collect carrots to beautify a Christmas tree. While doing so you have to protect the tree from lumberjacks trying to hit it.

Click to try the game

What went right

Idea

As soon as the first 4 rounds of the voting were finished I started thinking over an idea of a  snowman game. When the final theme was announced I found that my game idea fits it so I didn’t have to change anything.

Art

I don’t have much art in my game, only few objects which I had to animate. I drew all images by hand on paper, then made a picture with my tablet, and made final versions of the art in Photoshop on top of the hand-drawn drafts. All sprites are drawn in a significantly larger scale and then down-scaled – it is much easier to manipulate larger objects than object of a size of a pixel. In photoshop you can use smart objects to contain larger versions and resize them according to your requirements.

Coding

This is my second jam where I use a base code with a very simple app skeleton and all necessary libs. This time it was even more useful than before – after previous LD it became much more solid, so I was able to start implementing actual game logic from the first minute.

Scheduling

I planned my development in the following way:

• Draw basic art with no animation
• Code basic game logic using basic art
• Add basic sounds
• Deploy the game to make it ready for submission
• Improve art by adding animation
• Improve experience by adding particles, visual feedback of attacks, snowflakes, etc.
• Improve sounds, add music

In the end didn’t have enough time to do the last task in the list, but it wasn’t mission-critical. I had a working game at the beginning of the second day and spent the rest of my time polishing it.

What went wrong

Lack of drive in the first day

Due to some personal reasons I wasn’t that excited about the jam as I was during previous events. After thinking over the idea I started working on the art and coding, but everything had a slightly bitter aftertaste because I understood that I could’ve done everything better if I had enough drive and passion for what I’m doing. At the end of the first day I spent half of my time   browsing LD website, reading status messages from other devs, and wasting time on trifles.

The second day started the same way, I didn’t feel any drive. I forced myself to finish some, started working on animation – and it hit me! As soon as I made the simplest possible animation of the rabbit (see it in action) – the game came to life! I started working on it like mad, it was exciting again.

Audio

My base code contained a library named Soundmanager2 which I was going to use for audio. However, after trying it I found that it didn’t provide the quality I was looking for. I used it for some projects before, but mostly for background music, so lags and long pauses when playing samples didn’t bother me. In this project however it was a critical issue – I wanted to synchronize audio and animation. I decided to re-write audio effects using pure HTML5 audio tag but it seems that it provides poor API and requires some dirty hacks to make everything work smoothly, so I spent a lot of time and didn’t manage to make it the way I wanted.

HTML5 technology

Despite the fact I was using a pretty stable framework and a modern Chrome browser I hit a very strange issue – frame rate in my game was stable at 60fps and dropped down to 30fps when closing developer console. I didn’t find any reason for this, not even clue. When playing in Firefox frame rate floated around 30fps with sudden drops to 15fps with no reason – I didn’t have any processes running on background, no actives, nothing. For sure, such drops immediately broke synchronization between audio and animation, spoiled the experience, and made me mad. I was thinking about trying Unity for this entry, but decided to go with a technology I already familiar with, and now I see that by doubts had a reason. For the next entry I’ll try Unity, definitely, since it’s the most mature technology for indie development at the market.

Conclusion

Choose technology wisely

It’s always a good idea to start with a technology you already know, but it doesn’t mean that the technology you already know is the best suitable for the mission. If your current tool set doesn’t allow you to make a game of a decent quality – it’s better to spend some time to learn a new technology before the competition. Otherwise you may end up fighting bugs in a mediocre framework or hacking your tools to make it possible to implement your ideas instead of polishing your own game.

Have a base code

Even simplest skeleton with vey basic things such as libraries you’re going to use will save you some time. You’ll also start your 48-hour journey working on your game, not setting up your work environment and tools.

Do something fun first

If you’ll start with boring stuff – you can fall into a trap of lacking motivation. All boring stuff can be made at the end when you already have a working game with something that makes you excited about it, you’ll be in a good mood to finish what has to be finished.

Deploy and test ASAP

You may not notice certain flaws until you see the game in someone’s hands, on a different machine, in a different environment. It is also very likely that at the end of the 48 hour race you won’t have enough time to think about deploying your game. Now we have an additional hour for submissions, but what if something will go wrong and you won’t manage to deploy your game in that time? It’s better to think about submission upfront, at least few hours before the deadline. Deployed version of the game will also allow you to give it to other players, show it to colleagues and friends.

Hopefully this post  will be helpful for your future developments and will give you some ideas how to improve your own workflow. What kind of issues did you hit in this jam? Please share!

Previous Posts:

• 12 Recommendation to get higher rates
• You have to continue voting! Here’s why…
• Sky Trader Post-mortem

Tags: post-mortem

Avoid Rage is a minimal reflex game where you must avoid enemies coming at you from opposing tracks. Control with arrow keys or WASD. M to mute.

Play Game

This was my first submitting to Ludum Dare. I tried and failed on two previous occasions. It felt so good just to complete something and make the deadline. That was my main goal when going into things, so I consider this a success.

I stuck to my original goal of keeping things simple and I didn’t stray from my initial idea the whole weekend. I wanted to explore so many different variations and routes, but I knew that would put me at risk for missing the deadline.

The Good

• Simple Premise – The game only required two lines of instructions: The goal, and the controls. You can jump right in and play.
• Rendering – I used HTML/CSS as the main renderer for this game, with all game logic written in JavaScript. I typically use canvas, but had experimented recently with animating via CSS properties for mini games. This worked out well because the animation was performant, I was able to code in a familiar setting (I am a front end developer full time), and I was able to make use of custom fonts without any headaches.

• Stat Tracking – I personally enjoy seeing some sort of status as I play the game and come back to it. Total moves, total deaths, and total active time played are all stored locally. This is of course in addition to your best score as well.
• Track Highlighting – Any track that currently has an enemy on it lights up subtly. This was put in purely for aesthetic reasons, but it turns out some people were using it as a guide to help them avoid enemies. Had I considered this, I would light up the tracks brighter, and make the transition occur faster.
• Music – I didn’t have much time to work on the music, so it is not full length. However, I feel like the music complements the gameplay style.

The Bad

• Too Simple – Despite the simple premise of the game going in The Good section, I think adding one more goal or mechanic would have benefited the game. Perhaps collecting items, or hovering over a highlighted square for bonus points would work.
• Not Enough Juice – Properties of games like Super Hexagon were my inspiration for this game. They have such high excitement, polish, and a hectic nature to them that pumps up your adrenaline. My game ended up being a little more on the calm side. I would love to spice things up with a more dynamic background, screen shake, more interesting enemies, reaction to the beat of the music, etc.
• Collision – I reduced the hit box size slightly on both the hero and enemies for fairness sake, however, this caused a few instances where collision tunneling was possible at the faster stages. I didn’t witness it much, but it was possible. I was just using very simple AABB testing, but next time I need to implement something better.
• End of Game Flow – For quick retrying, I made the game start playing immediately if you had died and subsequently pressed a movement key. This worked fine for trying to beat your best score, but I often am moving so frantically when I die that I immediately press another movement key, and the next round starts too quick after I die. The only problem here is that you cannot review your score for the previous round and see how it compared to the best. I should have added a proper gameover animation, but still kept it quick.
• Boring Difficulty Ramp – The difficulty ramps up linearly, with the game getting slightly harder every 4 seconds (this is marked by the color changing). This was a quick and easy method, but it is boring as hell. I think having something more dynamic would improve the game. Something such as having bursts of craziness that then cool down, or getting harder the more you move, or sending enemies in by pair or formation, instead of one by one.

The Future

I have a few ideas I’d like to tinker with down the road. Perhaps diagonal moving enemies, larger level grids (4×4, 5×5, etc.), touch controls, and of course, improvements for everything mentioned in The Bad section above.

If you have a moment, play the game, let me know your feedback, and post your best score! Mine is currently 124 (as seen in the gif above).

Credits
Music: Fruity Loops
Sound Effects: as3sfxr
JavaScript Helpers: Howler.js and Modernizr.js
Fonts: Oswald, Droid Sans Mono, and Entypo

Tags: minimal, post-mortem, reflex

LD31 has been my first LD / Game Jam ever. I was a bit skeptical at first because I had just discovered Löve2D a few days ago when LD31 started. Some things went better than expected, while some others not.

First of all, I had time to create two games instead of only one. I first had the idea of pOp, a local multiplayer game, but a lot of people told me not to develop such a game, because it would be harder to try than 1-player games.

So, I decided to develop Swotch, an intense arcade game, before digging into pOp. I didn’t know I would have time to make both, though.

So, what went right ?

-Two playable and finished products

-Lots of polishing compared to all of my other games

-Good feedback from people, this really motivates me !

And… What went wrong ?

-I didn’t manage to add online scores. It worked at first, but I decided to remove it because it would make the final version lag a lot.

-No AI in pOp. You can only play with other people for the moment.

I would like to get even more feedback from you, players, to help improving my games !

And… Last thing… I’m actually porting Swotch and pOp to iOS and Android.

Swotch

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=43753

pOp

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=47489

Almost a week has passed since I submitted Coin Simulator 2015 and I figured it was time for a post mortem.

First of the feedback I’ve gotten so far is amazing! Personally I am also quite happy with the entry I’ve submitted this time. – You can check out my entry here:
http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=20130

Below is a video of me showing most of the things you can do in the game- But I advice you to play the game yourself first as the video is sort of a spoiler.

What went wrong

The Theme

The thing I had the most problems with was the theme. Since I really wanted to work in 3D I struggled with finding an idea that  fit the theme. I therefore decided to “honor” the theme by basing my “intro screen” on the theme. I also removed movement from the player so that the player had to stay in “one frame” – But I’m not really sure about that interpretation. – So basically I felt that I struggled with the theme- How I did, is up to you when you’re rating!

Stuff I had to remove

I actually had 2 more things implemented that I had to remove. One was the ability to unlock another coin by doing some specific things- But what I had implemented didn’t really feel like a good idea, so I ended up just giving the player the extra coin right from the beginning. The ice coin (silver coin) is slightly heavier, but it is better at sliding.

The other thing was the refrigerator. As it is in the game now it is just an nothing else. I actually had mechanics that made it possible to open it, and get access to even more stuff inside of it, but I ended up struggling with physics, because the shelves where too thin inside of the fridge, and sometimes the coin would simply get stuck inside the fridge door. Eventually I decided on removing that feature, and just keep the refrigerator as a static object.

What went right

Planning and Time

For every single Ludum dare I’ve participated in I’ve always been struggling to get things done right up to the end. This time however I had it all planned out much better. I made sure that all the more “boring” stuff like UI and general structure between the scenes was finished way before I actually had to deliver. Roughly 12 hours before the Deadline I was actually ready to hand in the game. After that I managed to add a few more things, as well as play around with the aforementioned coin unlock system, and the refrigerator. If I hadn’t had that extra there would have been a bit less content, and maybe the bugged fridge would have made it into the game.

3D modelling

It’s fun to think about that my Ludum Dare 29 entry (which wasn’t that good graphics wise) was my first attempt at making my own 3D models. Since then I’ve been improving.
Every single model in Coin Toss Simulator 2015 was made within the time frame by myself. Most of the textures are also homemade or derived from other textures. Although the models and textures could be way better, I am pretty happy with the results.

Final words

I really like the idea of this game, and I would love to take it further. I am already working on a somewhat bigger version of the game

With all that said- I’d be happy if you’d try out and rate my game- If you leave feedback I’ll definitely also try out and rate your game

Thanks for reading!

So this was my fourth Ludum Dare, and I’m very happy with the result. During this Ludum Dare I made the game Carrot Chaos. This was probably one of the most successful Ludum Dares on my part.

So let’s talk about what went wrong and what went right during this Ludum Dare. Let’s begin with:

What went wrong?

Time

I think the biggest constraint for anyone during Ludum Dare is the time. During Carrot Chaos I was especially stressed. I had a lot of features planned which I didn’t have time to implement. I wanted the world to be a lot more beautiful and I wanted more variants of snowmen, but I just ran out of time. I focused a lot on the graphics for this game, and I do not regret this, but it meant I didn’t have as much time to implement more gameplay features. I also prioritized audio before more features which I think did the game good. Some features I planned were:

• Different kinds of snowmen. For example: A bigger, slower, but stronger snowman. And some kind of boss snowman.
• More powerups. Hot chocolate for temperature regeneration, something for increased damage and more.
• A more beautiful world, with frozen lake, abandoned houses and more.

Procrastination

In the beginning I procrastinated a lot. I played games as well, and talked to friends. It did give me refreshing breaks, and gave me some time to think about the game and features, but I might’ve taken a bit to many breaks…

I can’t really think about anything else that went wrong, so:

What went right?

Planning

Yes, planning. I spent a lot of time planning the game and idea before even starting development, which meant that I knew what to do the entire time. I never stopped to think what I would have to do next. The development process benefited from this A LOT, and it went really quick. This meant that the game turned out very much like the original idea, which also means I’m very happy with the result. Although it’s lacking some of the planned features, it got the core of the original idea, and nothing else. This is my advice to any game developer: Plan your game, I didn’t do this before, and I regret it. Planning before you do leads to much easier and faster development, and the it gets even more enjoyable.

Graphics

I spent hours on graphics for this one, and I must say, I’m quite satisfied with the way the game looks. I’m no pixel artist, it’s nothing compared to some other entries, but I’m proud of what I’ve done. I also spent a lot of time designing the GUI, which I think did the game good. It’s not the best UI, but I made sure that it would fit in with the theme of Entire Game on One Screen.

Instructions

The game I made for Ludum Dare 30, I.A.N, had no in-game instructions. I just had text instructions on the post. This meant that a lot of people didn’t understand how to play. For this game, I knew that it required clear in-game instructions early on. I’m very happy with how the instructions work, where the instructions come up as an overlay over the game scene, and doesn’t allow you to continue without pressing the up key. I personally think they’re very clear, without spoiling to much. It’s hard to miss the instructions, and I’ve already got some feedback from people saying they like the instructions.

So that’s the conclusion for Carrot Chaos. Now that you’ve read everything, why don’t you go play it here?

It would also be really nice if you would check out my website.

Greeny GRUB comes now with music for a soother game experience!

Play Greeny GRUB

Hey again!

Recently I’ve made a post – http://ludumdare.com/compo/2014/12/06/puzzle – where I show off progress on the random puzzle generator I created for LD31. A few of you were interested in how I created it, so here I am to explain it!

First of all, here’s the newest gif of me playing the first couple randomly generated levels, and an image of one of the higher levels:

If you want to try it out yourself, here’s my submission:
http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=11407

The idea is simple:

Create a random level generator that provides the player with a challenging, yet always solvable, sliding puzzle.

Here’s the trick!

I programmed a simple noise generator (loops through all tiles on the screen and sets them to a random tile). Then I made a pathfinding algorithm that starts at the spawn point and finds all possible moves. It’s kind of like A*, where if a move gets you to a spot quicker than a different move, it over-writes it. Then I simply determine which spot took the highest number of moves to get to, and place the end there! If the spot with the highest number of moves isn’t “hard” enough, I generate another level from scratch and try again, until the level meets a certain difficulty.

The water.

You die when you touch the water. That was pretty easy to put into the generator. Basically I tell it the same thing as I do to the snowman: if there is water along the path, you can’t go down that path (restart the player). The generator has no problem dealing with that.

The coins… oh the coins.

I really wanted to give the player something to collect as an added challenge, as they solve the puzzle. The goal here is not to place coins in the middle of the path to the end. That would be way too easy for the player. So basically I created another algorithm that tells me if Point A can lead to Point B (or pass through it, even). I found the best way to make coins was to check these:

– You can pass through the coin safely from the start.
– Wherever you land next, you can pass through the start, AND reach the end (if you can’t reach the end, it’s in an unsolvable position!)
– If you can get from wherever you land after you pass through the start BACK to the coin (basically, if it’s possible to get other coins).

I’m kind of worried that there are very specific “corner cases” where this generator doesn’t make every coin collectable. But I’ve never seen it happen, so maybe it is flawless!

How fast does it generate?

Fast for the small levels, and quite slow for the end levels (30 seconds some times).  So what I did is make the generator create the rest of the levels while the player is solving the first ones! It can create all 20 of them by the time you reach level 5. Also, I did a lot of fooling around with the density of water and blocks, and found some densities are better for the generator to quickly create harder levels, quicker.

Alright! Well I hope you enjoyed the post! I also hope this inspires you to try out random generation – it’s not all that hard once you get the concept down. 😀

Thanks for reading,
– Zanz

I have played a lot of interesting action and reflex games in LD, I believe you have played a lot too.
Well, before taking next batch of control challenges, why not have some changes to play a pure logic game?

Play Detective vs Killers

Wow, even in the team, we can’t reach this score!

But he’s lost his arm in this war x)

PLAY IT 

Post compo version is coming along pretty nice. Since last weekend I’ve added a new background and some tunes. Now it was time to tweaks the controls a bit and put some emphasis on characters animations. Check out the game in motion with this gif and give it a try if you haven’t.

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

Tags: #indiegame, action, arcade, compo, gamdev, jam, ldjam, Ludum Dare, moonlit, Otrora

The theme for LD31 was ‘Entire Game on One Screen’, this can be interpreted in many ways. my interpretation was to have a game where everything is on one physical screen. No popup menus, no scrolling levels, no switching views of any kind. After the last LD I thought about what type of game I would like to make for the next LD. This is a practice I am no longer going to do, I won’t tell anyone else not to do it but as for me I am DONE! Let me explain. Normally I start with ‘what went right’ but because this section isn’t going to be very big I will start with…

What Went Wrong:

1. Multiple restarts

This is going to be the only entry in this section, but it is the main issue I had and all of the other issues will fall under this as sub issues. Let me start at the beginning (usually I good place, amirite? 😉 ) So I did my voting thing for this LD and I actually voted up the theme of this LD in round 4 and the final round. I thought it was a great theme for an LD. I still do. Fast forward to Friday night, I’m home from work and waiting for the theme announcement while watching the IRC Chat.

We were all sure the theme was going to be Snowman, everyone was talking about what type of snowman game their going to make. Others are like ‘if the theme is snowman I’m quitting!!!!’. Then the theme is announced, I was a little anxious prior to the announcement but I already knew what I was going to do. So as I do every LD I start in on the Art, there wasn’t much I needed for the game I had in mind and I even figured I’d be able to get some coding done before I went to bed for the night.

It was at this point I realized my idea wasn’t going to work (should have seen this as an Omen. I mean come on! If I’m at the Art stage and I already know the game wasn’t going to work I should have dropped the idea and thought of a new one!). So I quickly modified my idea and continued on (The blinders were fully extended and tunnel vision was engaged!).

I was able to get some coding done before going to bed. I got about 5 hours before I woke up and started in on a full day of coding. I coded for 9 hours before I stepped back and said, ‘this isn’t going to work’. This is not something you want to say 20 hours into a 48 hour challenge. But I said it, and boy did it hurt! This was a real let down.

I really wanted this to work, but I knew if I kept going with it I wouldn’t finish the game on time. So at 5:10pm I decided to start over. I quickly came up with a new idea which was much more reduced in scope than the last game. Again I started in on Art, but only on what the player was going to look like. I wanted to get the player working then I would add in the other sprites.

I spent a little over 3 hours trying to get the player to do what I wanted him to do. I looked at the clock, and all I could see was time that I could not get back. Frantic at this point, I again decided to do yet another restart, but I didn’t need to think of another idea I just needed to rethink my approach for the one I had. Which is the game I actually finished and submitted.

So those sub issues I talked about in the beginning are the following:

A. Limited Knowledge/Limited Ability of the Framework

I fell in love with the Flixel framework when I found it back in 2010. It was easy to use and I could quickly get a game up and running in no time. It is good for Platformers and Shooters, but in my opinion not really much else. Yeah I was able to make a strategy game with it but it was pretty limited. It is no longer being updated by the author anymore, although there are some community members who have taken it upon themselves to do some updates, but the last official version is 2.55.

The problems I was having stem from this issue, either I did not have the knowledge to do what I wanted to do or it just couldn’t be done with the framework. Many of the big contributors to the project have left and either created there own frameworks or are using other frameworks. I told myself before the LD began that I this would be my last LD using Flixel and that I would be moving to Unity3D for all future LD’s. I’ve been tinkering around with Unity for a few months now, but I’m no where as proficient as I will need to be to compete in an LD but I have 4 months to learn what I need

B. Scope of the Project

George Santayana once said “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.“, Oh how true this quote is… I think from now on I am going to read my past Post Mortems before I start any future LD just so I do remember what my previous issues were and hopefully I can avoid them. This is the 2nd LD I’ve had to restart a project because of either scope issues or framework issues. Interestingly enough in each of those LDs I already had an idea of the game I wanted to make… Like I said above, I’m done with that… going in blind will be so much better! What sucks is before the LD started I told myself I needed to make a game that could work on a mobile phone and it took me 30 hours before I actually did that.

C. Ideas Cut Because of Time

There was one thing I remembered from one of my past LDs, LD23 I made a shooter and of all the comments I got from it 2 stuck with me. 1. let the player hold down the button and fire and 2. add in some powerups. This time around I did add in the ‘hold and fire’ ability but I had to cut the powerups from the game. I just didn’t have the time, the game itself was made in a little under 18 hours. Now had this been my original idea I’m sure it would have been better than it already is.

D. Polish, Polish, Polish

You hear it every LD, ‘this is a great game, just add some more polish and this could be awesome’, yet another thing I didn’t have a lot of time for. Which kinda explains why the game is harder than it should be. I was kinda going for the ‘bullet hell’ look and feel but perhaps I should have built up to it. I was too focused on actually completing the game as time was not in abundance for me.

E. Lack of Planning

This is definitely my most weakest point :). Alexander Pope once wrote “For fools rush in where angels fear to tread“, yeah that’s me with planning LOL! Some LDs I have an idea and I’m able to see it from beginning to end and not have a problem, other LD’s I see the finished product but not the route I need to go to get there, or I have a good understanding of what needs to be done but I don’t see the pitfalls until I bump into them. I really need to work on this.

F. Overwhelmed by the Grand Scope of Things

Create a game in 48 hours! HOLY COW IS THIS A HUMUNGOUS UNDERTAKING! Can it be done, of course it can, thousands of games have been created in 48 hours or less, heck I’ve done it 9 times myself! But every LD I get the theme, think of an idea and then freak out about what I need to do to complete said idea. I really need to hire someone to smack me when this happens and then smack me again and tell me how my idea is to large and needs to be reduced in scope. This is essentially what I did to myself which each restart. I reduced the scope of my project until it was very manageable.

I could go all day with ‘What went wrong’ but I think you get the point… So let’s hop on over to…

What Went Right:

Hmm… let’s see… ummmm… Ahhhh… well…. OOO I got one!

1. Completed a Game

Yes, I completed a game for the LD. Its a decent game too, a little rough around the edges but very playable. You can try it HERE.

Yeah, that’s about all I can come up with. Its really sad that this is the one thing I can think of that went right but I have to be honest with myself, this was my worst LD experience ever. Hopefully the next LD will be a better experience and I’m pretty sure I will not forget the events of this LD for a long time. I also hope I never need to repeat them in a Post Mortem ever again. I really hope your LD experience was better than mine. See you all in April of 2015 for LD32!

You can play our game HERE!

A week has passed since we worked on the development of our game DisChord. First of all, we’d like to THANK all of you who have played the game for all the feedback we’ve recieved. Now, the main points of our adventure working on this project will be discussed here!

First, we started working together a week before the LD, with our little Mini-LD project: S.O.S. Seas of Solitude.  It was such an ambitious project, we didn’t manage to accomplish half of what we had intended. Given what we learned from that game, it would become our kickstar for what we hoped DisChord would be.

What went right:

• Implementation to the theme: We think our approach to the theme (a single screen where the maze components are “projected” into it) was something creative that we managed to get working in a proper way.
• Simple mechanics gave us more time for the design of the concept, the levels, and debugging
• Teamwork was awesome during the whole project, by communicating only through Facebook, we did understood each other quite well!

What went wrong:

• Our game ran short: Even though we had time for working on other things than mainly the mechanics, we initially expected to have around 15-20 levels in our LD entry, but time wasn’t enough for doing all these levels.
• Lasers: Jorge and Beatrix lost around two and a half hours working on the implementation of the lasers, which then resulted with some of the other audio implementations being rushed into the game.
• Post-building bugs: We finished the game around an hour before the deadline, so we didn’t have time left for checking bugs after building, and we had some. There are performance issues after going between levels, and also the problem with level 11 which makes the game unbeatable and which and Jorge (our programmer) hasn’t yet found the solution to.

What we learned:

• The best approach to working on such a tight schedule as a game jam is the simplest: keep it simple!
• A complex game can’t be made in 3 days, period.
• Brainstorm shouldn’t last too long, work with few ideas, pick the best one you find, and go for it!

Conclusion:

We’re satisfied with our work, and we’ll keep working on it next year and hopefully GET A VERSION FOR ANDROID/iOS, so guess you’ll keep hearing from our game DisChord and us 😀

Play and rate game here

Finnaly got to converting screenshots in to a TimeLapse of my part of coding.
You can see there that we use Pahser.js and Invaders as template to start from. There were 2 other programmers also working on it trough bitbucket repository.
We also did it during Garage48 GameDev Riga so at some point for example you can see me writing/preparing a 1:30 seconds pitch before the judges panel there

P.S We took second place among ~12 teams

Tags: timelapse

You really have to try it … it is even crazier and cruel … we add some crazy car drivers … they don’t care about no one …. get out of their way … jojojo

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=45161

ludum dare is great to creatively approach approach new ideas in an improv style.

just a quick note to followup my first ludum dare experiment at #LD26, temporary-babel2d,  and wishing this might motivate others to complete their dreams.

my core game engine was coded in 2 days at the jam, then it got upgraded to an art installation with a very funny arduino joystick which toured some media art exhibits during last year.

i finally got a chance to distribute the game as an ios & android app, with proper multitouch and sonic input joysticks, and am super happy with this code.

you can find out more about my project here http://s373.net/x/TemporaryBabel2D/

Tags: LD#26, temporary-babel2d, TemporaryBabel2D

The Game

PLAY ME NOW!

The History

I guess I should start out by saying that is my fourth Ludum Dare. I haven’t been able to participate in a while, for reasons, but I got the opportunity to participate in Ludum Dare #31.

If you are curious, my previous Ludum Dare entries were Voxterium (LD22), Mage Duel (LD23), and # (LD26).

Preperation

My three previous Ludum Dare entries were all done in XNA. For my next “real” project, I wanted to get away from the XNA framework, and try something a little more… um… well… supported. Also, wanted to finally do a web game for this competition, to get rid of all the stigmas of running a windows only game that required a redistributable.

I decided to give Haxe a run, as it seemed to be pretty straight forward, and of course it’s cross platform features are extremely interesting. And, hey, making a game in 48 hours is a good way to learn a new language, right?

The Build

When the theme was announced, my mind was blank. After like an hour of pacing my office and staring at a blank screen, this one just sort of popped in there.  No idea where it came from or why.

Having done this compo three times before, I had a pretty good idea of what pacing should be… but like the other LD’s I threw that to the wind. Taking into account I was learning a new programming language, I allotted more time for programming. That being the case, when I got into the programming part, HaxeFlixel was sooo easy to use, and so well documented (for this sort of game), that I felt like I could spend more time on the audio and graphics, and I did. Overall, the process went really well and I actually finished a couple hours early.

Targeting the web was kind of a cool experience as well. I was able to post early builds, and get feedback. This helped a lot with finding some glaring issues. One was a bad design decision with the second control (below), that would have been disastrous, had it not been pointed out to me early.

What went right

• I think the game turned out pretty ok.
• I learned a lot about a new language.
• I made a web game!

What went wrong

• Some of the controls are awkward. Some extra time could have been spent on making them more intuitive.
• Would have liked to spend more time on the music

Plans for the Future

I would like to spend some time on a post-compo version. It doesn’t feel complete right now. Some games just feel like they deserve to be fleshed out.

I have received a number of good suggestions and insights on where this game could go, and I totally agree.  I also have a lot of ideas I would have liked to implement.. but you know… time… It will also help me to get even more familiar with Haxe, as I believe it can be a great platform for my next game project.

Conclusion

Had a blast last weekend making the game, and have had a great time playing your games. Can’t wait to play more! I wish you all a great Ludum Dare!

Love,
Ross

Tags: haXe, HaXeFlixel, knobs and buttons and stuff, Music Game, postmortem

So far we played and rated just 195 games, we want more (MOAR)=)

And, of course, we are very excited of getting feedback about our game.

Play Houston and we’ll play and rate your game too:
Jam Entry: Houston, We’ve Got a Problem

Top score for now is: 13 657 scientific data
2-d place: 11 395 (edve98)
3-d place: 10 610 (sapermysz)
4-th place: 8 085(Kabukki)
5-th place: 8 000 (Robber)

What will be your score?

Tags: game, jam, ld31, Ludum Dare

Hello, guys, I know it’s LD right now, but I made a flappy – bird like game and it’s on sale, it may be simple, but it’s fun and addictive 😀

You can buy it w/ PayPal or Skrill

Go to the page of Bouncing Box 

If you are not feeling like it…

check out TEGOOS – my LD #31 entry:

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=35464

Oh.. and please, no negative comments 😉

So this was my first ever game jam, I decided to not pressure myself too much and allowed myself to extend into the Jam instead of just the Compo if needed. Which it was! I couldve pushed myself and completed on sunday, but I wasn’t 100% so felt it was a reasonable trade off.

It started out pretty terrible, the theme was so broad and useless I hadn’t got a clue where to start. I got really angry and frustrated! I spent about 6 hours messing around with a simple rts-esque idea that just wasn’t going anywhere good. So decided to scrap it and start again at about 6pm(GMT) on Saturday. I’m seriously happy I did though.

The Good:

– my final idea was simple enough but still left me with the  feeling like I’d at least tried to be a little innovative on the whole match-3 thing.

– I liked the colours that I chose, I like the way they look together.

The “meh”:

– I’d mentally decided that I wanted to do pixel art for this jam. So I’m a little disappointed that I didn’t get to do any pixelling under pressure!

– The controls to the game were not quite where I wanted. However I feel I made a good choice in not spending too much time trying to figure out the camera rotations, and just settled for something workable.

The Bad:

– My game idea and premise really would feel much nicer if I’d had sound and effects involved. I think it would bring it to life a lot more, and make it more satisfying to get those matches.

– Horrible initial experience, I was angry at everyone who’d voted for the themeless theme! Eventually it worked out. Ugly mood swing though 😛

I feel this went remarkably well considering I picked unity up for the first time roughly 2-3 weeks before the jam. I’m utterly grateful for the people who’ve played my game and given me some great feedback. Those feels <3 thanks guys!

Try MatchCube Here

First off, the timelapse.

Post Mortem

We faced several problems right off the bat. My original intentions was to program it in Game Maker: Studio completely by myself and submit for the compo rather than the jam.

A friend of mine offered to team up with me about 5 hours before the jam. I wouldn’t be able to help with the programming due to the language he was using, but I agreed anyways. It was decided I’d work on audio on concepts.

Fast forward towards the beginning of the competition, and I was running off of 2 or 3 hours of sleep. I’d tried previously, but couldn’t get to sleep, so I just opted to stay awake until we at least had a concept done. ‘We’ included me, the friend from earlier, and one of his friends(an artist).

Then we get to the theme being announced. We all dabbled with some ideas for about 10 to 20 minutes before the programmer decided to opt out and leave me and the artist to our devices. I prepared to program while we continued to concept.

Our initial plan was a top down twitch reflex maze. The walls would be moving at you at an accelerated rate and you’d have to us WASD to navigate without hitting a wall or falling behind. We in a way kept this concept, but just changed it around to being an endless runner.

He began on the art, I began importing it. About an hour in, he went to sleep, and I followed shortly after. Luckily realizing I had forgotten to start the time lapse. I started it, and ended up getting some sleep.

A couple hours later, I woke up, and started on the main game. I faced quite a bit of problems. The floor was initially tiled, and I was hoping I could make it sync to the obstacles. I eventually gave up and just made the floor one seamless line and added in some obstacles. After that, I had my initial concept of how I was gonna do anything, and added in some more obstacles. A short bit later, Brad(the artist) woke up and I sent him a build. We ended up getting a bit addicted to it, and didn’t get much work done for about an hour.

From then on out, it was pretty much just him doing art, me hacking away at the programming, occasionally sending builds to him and some friends, occasionally us finding ourselfs in a skype call, and a lot of the time us joking around about things.

We ended up finishing about the time the regular compo was ending, and submitted for the jam(albeit with some undiscovered bugs) and the rest is history.

Fast forward to a week later, I just released a bug fixed version of it, and Brad and I have decided to carry on development from scratch on an entirely new version of Duck, Jump, Die for mobile!

The Good

We ended up with a final product! That broke a 6 competition long quitting streak for me, with my last completed Ludum Dare being LD25.

We ended up making a pretty fun game! Even after the horrors of the battlefield, I still find myself playing it when I get bored(on occasion).

We ended up meeting each other! We actually work out pretty well as a partnership, and if it hadn’t of been for this Ludum Dare, we never would’ve met.

The Bad

We didn’t use the remaining time we had on polish and bug fixing, when it really could have used it.

The game is highly unoptimized, and tends to slow down for some people.

The music is incredibly loud, and ends up hurting peoples ears first time around.

Play The Game!

Obligatory Cross Promo!

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=9732

Tags: motivation, post-mortem, postmortem, progress, screenshot, timelapse

Hello everyone! I wrote Sad Little War-Bot for Ludum Dare 31, and now I would like to talk about the process of creating the game. This is an exercise in reflection, and I hope my good decisions and foolish mistakes can be useful for other developers to know about as well.

I really, really, really love games. I love playing them, I love talking about them, and I love designing them (on paper). Going into the Ludum Dare, I mostly wanted to just stop making excuses and start making games. My “stretch goal”, if you will, was to make something people could enjoy, that expressed some story or emotion that they would find worthwhile.

Pre-Compo Decisions

Despite being good in general-purpose languages (C++, Python), my past attempts to write a game were all eventually shelved. Recently, though, I’d had a lot of success porting games. I recently ported both Iji and An Untitled Story to Linux and OS-X, using the open source game engine ENIGMA. Even though Unity is more industry-standard, C++ is more hardcore, and Haxe is more interesting, I figured “Well, I want to make a game, and I know ENIGMA, so I should probably use that!” And this decisions is the only reason I completed my game.

Themes and Angst

Let’s talk themes! I was not a big fan of the theme when it was announced, because it was second-to-last on my list of pre-compo theme ideas. Some items higher on that list, for reference:

• Artificial Life, Machines  — I had this idea of a world without humans, where “AI” (advanced robots) look down on “Machines” (human-created robots) because they were only programmed to mimic awareness, while the AIs were actually self-aware. I figured our hero would be a machine who goes on a quest to construct an awareness module.
• Chaos — I had this idea of a shooter where you could only fire grenades, and enemies would chain-explode.
• ☃ — Based on the games I’ve seen so far, everyone kind of expected this to be the theme, and had some clever snowman-related game up their sleeves. I did too, and it’s a secret! But it involved a snowman boss jumping around an arena.

In the end, I punted on the theme, and just weaved together the three themes listed above to create Sad Little War-Bot. I guess the theme actually helped me, though, as it kept the scope of my game in control.

Time Breakdown

Here’s a timeline of development, compiled from my time-lapse video. There’s also a total breakdown of time spent.

Total Time Spent (top) and Full 48-hour Timeline (bottom)

I took a lot of small breaks, because maybe I’m getting too old to pull double all-nighters without losing my focus. 😀

Tools

Pretty standard stuff:

• Audio: sfxr and Abundant Music for generating, Audacity for editing. Liked Otomata, didn’t end up using it.
• Graphics: GIMP for most things,  Explogen for explosions.
• Game Engine: ENIGMA

Early Design Evolution

Because I was upset at the theme decision, I spent the first hour generating audio. I also imported some fonts, and did some basic game engine setup tasks (plugin selection, etc.). After that, I had my first design chat, and decided to make what is basically a top-down arena shooter. I knew early on that I wanted to integrate the “chaos” theme, because escalating object interactions are pretty easy to do in ENIGMA. At this point, I had the idea: “you are a spy working as a baker who is uncovered by a spy working as a toy maker. Both of you have explosive tools related to your cover jobs”. No robots yet!

Our Hero

I started implementing the basic mechanics. I actually had a really hard time implementing collision detection, so it’s a good thing I didn’t decide to make a Zelda-esque game! Instead, I “faked it” (that’s a term the pros use) and then immediately cut from the game anything that relied on precise collision detection and movement. I then moved on to implementing the first weapon (the grenade launcher) and the first enemy (the toy ducks). I originally envisioned multiple weapon and enemy types; the latter actually happened, while the former was cut.

You get the idea…

At this point, I was really unhappy with my game at a fundamental level. It felt too much like an excuse plot to remake Hyper Princess Pitch. Call it artistic integrity or plain old stubbornness, but I didn’t want to even submit the game if I wasn’t proud of it. So, I reviewed my list of pre-compo ideas, and decided to tell my Machines vs. AIs story, but with a twist: you’d control a robot designed for war that was to be decommissioned, and your only means of defense was an over-the-top grenade launcher. I was significantly happier with this idea, and it also let me shake up the enemy types a bit. I figured the AIs could be using merchandise from various mall shops to attack you in the courtyard. Thus, a toy shop, a gardening shop, and another shop –at the time, I figured some kind of hardware shop that had tiny robots (this eventually became the comic book store). I had the idea that if you killed enemies (rather than, say, them killing themselves with explosions) then you would get a star, and that the north wall of the room would contain vending machines that you could buy health from with stars. I also wanted it to be possible for you to complete the entire game without killing anyone yourself, and that would change the ending. I didn’t have time for the latter, and I removed the vending machines (in favor of the “beam of death”) for another reason, explained in the next section.

Game Design Is Hard!

I am in no way a game design expert, but I try to be diligent. To that end, I’ve been watching Extra Creditz, which I would wholly recommend to anyone looking to design games. Every episode, they talk about how design decisions impact the player in potentially unexpected ways.

So why didn’t I make multiple weapon types? Simple: it gave the player too much choice. I put myself in the shoes of someone playing my game: I would be lucky if they gave me 5 solid minutes of attention (hey, there’s 4,000 games in my LD31 queue!). More weapons meant more controls (e.g., a “switch weapon” button, or a “buy” button for the vending machines), which meant ~1 minute spent learning mundane details. More weapons also meant more potential play-styles, some necessarily better than others. That meant the player could waste ~1 minute playing through a level in a sub-optimal (i.e., “not fun”) play-style. So that’s 2 out of 5 minutes wasted! Instead, I added variety another way, using an idea I borrowed from Super Meat Boy: don’t vary the player, vary the environment (enemy count and lineup, in my case). I think the key here is that I made the right decision for my game at its current level of scope: if I added 100 more levels, I’d probably re-examine weapon customization.

Georgi used to have a mustache.

The inter-level cut-scenes were another time sink, but I was 100% determined to get them in there. If you’ve played the game, you probably agree: they allow me a few quick lines between each level to establish the motivations of Georgi and Dash, as well as the story of the game world itself. I also wanted a “break” between levels (but I didn’t want a pause button, since it ran counter to the chaos theme) and I wanted to give players something to look forward to after each level. I’m not a writer, but I think I was able to get people to chuckle while still drawing them into the world. Establishing Dash as the antagonist (but not a villain!) was my goal, and it was challenging!

Start! Go!

As for the complicated “zoom in” level intro, part of that was me just wanting to make something fluid and engaging. But it also served a purpose: it gave a consistent pattern to each level, rather than just dumping the player into the action. This was most important for the first level, but it also built anticipation for the final level (since it seemed that “9” would fit but “10” would not) and then the final boss (the “Oh my goodness, is he actually bringing in the snowman as a boss????” moment). And, it helped you track your progress, like slide numbers on a presentation.

The decision to make grenades explode if they hit other explosions was intentional. It had to do with another decision. One of the design chats brought up the idea of either a cooldown or a limited set of ammunition. This is pretty standard in shooter design, but I was strongly against it. Again, taking the perspective of the player, ammo caps and cooldowns just aren’t fun! In, say, a survival horror game, they serve another purpose, but my game was just a fun, spammy shoot-em-up. At the same time, I didn’t want to make the gameplay too reliant on button mashing. So, I built in this mechanic where your explosions could trigger your own grenades, adding a natural feedback loop that encouraged players to exercise self-control. In the end, some people hated it and some people loved it.

The beam prevents you from shooting the cactus.

Let’s talk about cactuses. The insane malefic nature of them served a purpose. In fact, each cardinal direction of the room had a distinct feel to its spawns. In order of creation:

• East — Mostly harmless. No contact damage; no intentional action against the player. I tended to put them on the top and bottom of the screen in long lines, to encourage players to stay towards the middle.
• South — Overwhelming but avoidable damage. Takes a long time to build up, then does massive damage. (I got the circle idea from Hammerwatch.)
• West — Intelligent, focused and deadly. These guys track you, and they can’t accidentally kill each other.
• North — Pattern-based damage. Easy to exploit, but they block your grenades, so North+West is especially dangerous (level 9).

The “hard mode” is the original mode of the game. I was worried people would be frustrated at dying and wouldn’t complete the game, so I made “easy mode” where every hit deals 1 damage. I still included “hard mode”, because I didn’t want to spoon feed the hardcore gamers who could take the difficulty spike. To unlock hard-mode, just start the game once and quit. The next time, at the title screen, press H for hard.

I specifically made a “cute” enemy the first thing the player sees, so that the player can empathize with Georgi’s intent to avoid harming things, if possible.

I originally planned for 20 levels, but I wanted it to be obvious when you were approaching the last level. Then I planned for 16, because the robot uses hexadecimal and everyone knows that right? (I think I was sleep deprived and delusional at this point.) Then I settled on 9, because only a single digit fit in the level intro scene. (Then I added the snowman boss and custom levels.)

When I was younger, I used to chain-play RPG Maker 2000 games. I just loved how so many people expressed themselves through game design. One thing that I hated from that era was the samey feel that you get when using a game engine. So I tried really hard to add tiny customizations when I could. The neon “Toys” signs, the flashy level intro zoom, the spinning crosshairs, and the overuse of particles were all under this category.

Intuitive!

The dots that “trace” to your crosshairs were an early design, and intentional. I first had the crosshairs follow the mouse, but found that it pulled the action too far away from Georgi. So then I bounded it to a circle around Georgi, but it was hard to see sometimes with all the explosions. So I added the dots and animated a path to the crosshairs. This really made it clear that the grenades were your primary means of interacting with the world. Many other games have done this kind of thing.

Ow! Ow! Ow!

I made the damage a “string of numbers” pouring out of Georgi to give the player some idea on how bad the situation was without requiring him or her to look at the health bar, way at the top of the screen. I also played a jarring noise, to try to make it clear “this is bad, step away from the (cactus|duck|laser).”

Final Thoughts

I am extremely proud of the game I made: I was able to finish on time, and it expressed to the people who played it exactly what I wanted to express. Reading the comments, I am overwhelmed by the positive feedback, and I’m so glad that I could make something that people enjoyed playing. And thanks for your constructive comments; you all had some good suggestions for improvement.

In terms of the Ludum Dare, I feel like I budgeted my time well, and was always aware of my limitations. I think I did the best that I could given my current skill set. I will definitely enter the Ludum Dare again. I’d like to focus on tighter mechanics next time, as well as more mood-oriented environments.

Overall, this was a very positive experience for me.

Goofs, References, and Pure Luck

That’s it for the main post, thanks for reading this far. Here’s some random trivia:

• The cacti are named after a character in Wandering Hamster, “The Mad Cacti”, which is also one of the OHRRPGCE’s developers.
• “Start! Go!” is from Minecraft Bingo. I’m a big Lorgon111 fan.
• I listened to OC Remixes, the Radiant Historia soundtrack, and the Bravely Default soundtracks while working on this game.
• I wrote a string parser for each level, so that I could write, say, “W5:S2D:”, which translates internally to “wait 5 ticks and then spawn 2 ducks”. I did this entirely to speed up level development, but when describing it during a design chat, someone thought I was talking about a level editor. Then I thought “huh, I could just read this from a file and allow custom levels”. And voila! Custom levels almost didn’t make it in, because the game would crash upon loading them unless you built in Debug mode. So… I built in Debug mode. But it was down to the wire.
• I totally lucked out with the OS-X port; ENIGMA can be a bit flaky across different platforms, but it only had a tiny bug on OS-X. I actually did all the development on Linux, so for both Windows and OS-X my thoughts were “well, maybe it’ll work”. Props to the ENIGMA developers: it worked just fine!
• I had a hard time coming up with the design for Dash (the AI). At some point, someone suggested that Georgi looked like Wall-E, which then motivated Dash’s sleek design (based on EVE, of course).
• I accidentally deleted the “screenshot” program at 2am on the first day. So my time-lapse, naturally, blips out at that point for an hour or so.
• I took a ton of small breaks, and this helped me stay sane. Where possible, I had design discussions with various friends so that a break wasn’t entirely wasted. I also lost 2 hours going for a long walk and grabbing dinner, and 1.5 hours with an unplanned nap. I think I had a mini burnout in the middle of the compo.
• I always tried to keep Georgi and Dash gender-less, but I sometimes slip up and call Georgi “he” and Dash “she”. But canonically, their genders are up for interpretation.
• I only crashed the game engine once.
• During one of my meals, I watched an HCBailly Let’s Play episode.

In the comments place the link to your game and there is a chance that I will rate and comment it. This  will not be streamed at all.

These games will not be immediately reviewed. Please be patient.

Platforms I can run games on:

– Windows

– Web

– Android

I participated in Ludum Dare 31, and it was totally awesome! Now that the dust has settled and I’ve had time to clear my mind a bit, it’s time to look into the process of the actual Ludum Dare, and… Evaluate!

There are quite a few good and bad things to talk about, but the most important thing to mention is probably the on-site event. A few dudes from my university (Play their games here and there!) and I decided to share a location during the event. One of the dudes had some connections so he was able to provide a university space for us to work at during the event. It was really cool! You still end up working non-stop for 48 hours, but it’s cool to be able to take a breather every once in a while and chat up with other devs. It’s especially nice to see other people’s games develop over the weekend. If you get the chance to join an on-site event, I totally recommend it. Also, having a coffee machine within 20 metres is absolutely amazing.

Now, let’s talk about a bad thing: locality. In short, when I woke up saturday morning and the compo had already started I was still 2+ hours away from university. This meant working and planning a bit while travelling. This is not a very bad thing but it was still irritating and distracting. So next time I should make sure I wake up at the right place, at the right time.

One thing I’m really happy with is how I managed to complete the compo with exclusively my own resources. And with my own resources I mean my own art & graphics, my own idea, and my own utility library. This is ofcourse mandatory if you want to participate in the compo, but it is still a new experience for me. It was very cool to see functions from my utils library pop up all over the place, and I could really notice I was coding faster than before. Downside was (again) that my utils library had a few bugs and hiccups here and there. This includes a *very* very very grrrr stupid bug which caused 2+ hours of frustrating debugging near the end of the compo. But anyway, this means my game has a very distinct style, both in visuals and code.

Something I have mixed feelings about is my game idea and the gameplay of it. On one hand the idea was very applicable. It integrated nicely with the themes, was perfectly within scope of 2 days work, and had enough possibilities for extending in case I would have time left. On the other hand, it was a quite rubbish “game” idea. The actual gameplay was barely there, and if you’re not *really* curious you probably won’t finish it. Since in the end the entire compo is about making a **game** this is a crucial point for me to focus on next time.

Now lastly, the compo had two nice side effects. First, I made a timelapse:

It includes screenshots, webcam pictures, and pictures I made with my mobile camera over the course of the two days. I spent some time (coding a program that can do the) editing, and I think the end result is pretty neat. It’s quiet but clear, and it shows accurately what I worked on that weekend. It also shows me taking a break every once in a while.

The second side effect is that I found a bug in SDL2! I already posted it to the mailing list, and I hope it will be fixed soon. Luckily it’s not a deal-breaking bug, and it’s only a problem if you do weird stuff with SDL_SetRelativeMouseMode. Which I did. Grr.

So, to wrap it up:

• On-site events are cool!
• Plan the start and end location carefully.
• Don’t rush the game(play) idea.
• Lastly: be proud of your own assets, even if they are hideous!

(This blog post is also readable on my blog here)

We need your feedback !  If you like the concept, we had maybe an idea of continuing by adding levels and making more use of the swap mechanic shown here, something like involving a puzzle-adventure type of game with pacing sections where different kind of enemies would attack you like in our LD!

Anyway, we got a lot of bug fix and improvements in this new version ! Let us know what you think :

Click here to play the Post-LD version

If you want, why not get by our entry page and rate our game ?

Click here to access our LD entry page and vote !

To the menu :

• Bug fix for spiders turning 180 degrees and not following you when they spawn.
• You’ll not be stuck sometime in the Game Over screen.
• Added a tutorial for those who don’t want to read the entry description.
• Added a few visuals and visual effects for more understanding and juiciness !
• Objects have been replaced at their original position at each restarts.
• The spider will now react and attack if you get to close to her.
• Finally : A target will be displayed on the ground when starting the swapping action . This is where the object will swap.

Let us know if you like those changes or if you would like to see some more improvements !

This LD was a lot of fun. It was my first LD I made together with my wife and our first project we did as a team. It was very hard at the beginning to find something we could make out of the theme but after a day of intense thinking we decided to make a point and click adventure. We both like point and click adventures.

After that first decision we had another to do. How we part the work…

That wasn’t much of a decission because in that point we know each other very well. Because I love her drawings and writings, she draw the characters and the writes the story. My task was it to write the code and animate the drawings.

Sadly there were two things left. Music and sound… This point I wanted to do after beeing ready with the game. But because I was working until the deadline to get everything ready, music and sound was canceled.

After releasing the Treasure Quest we were super proud of us. But when submission hour had begun and the first feedback came in, we have had a big problem. Errors…

Because I just tested the game in firefox and firefox didn’t tell me that there was a problem with a function declaration chrome, safari and everything else denied service. Fixing that error didn’t took so long, but it was a shocking moment for us.

Now, after a little cooling down and reading our feedback we are lucky to have done the step of working together. We are proud of the story, the graphics, the characters and the mechanics but, we’ve also pointed out 3 main cruelties we’ve done to you. The textspeed, the font and the lack of sound and music. I hope you can forgive us. :] We are working on a post jam version. The textboxes and the font are ready and we just have to do some music.

We will let you know if it’s ready, till then we hope you enjoy the jam version and have a lot of fun playing it.

ruerob.

Treasure Quest

So far we played and rated just 199 games, we want more (MOAR)=)

And, of course, we are very excited of getting feedback about our game.

Play Houston and we’ll play and rate your game too:
Jam Entry: Houston, We’ve Got a Problem

Top score for now is: 13 657 scientific data
2-d place: 11 395 (edve98)
3-d place: 11 145 (Mike Mezhenin)
4-d place: 10 610 (sapermysz)
5-th place: 8 085(Kabukki)

What will be your score?

Tags: game, jam, ld31, Ludum Dare

So I haven’t posted much about my LDJAM entry, but it’s been getting some votes so I figured it would be a good idea to post about it here. Simply put, my game is a poor Super Crate Box clone.

Sadly, the game didn’t get balanced, or even really finished. The menus were slapped together in a hurry and a bunch of artwork didn’t get completed. Me and my artist were not really well prepared to enter the jam, which is why I didn’t make a post announcing that we were going to enter. We weren’t sure if we could get anything done in the time allotted.

We had opposite sleeping schedules. He’s from South Africa, and I’m in the United States. Working with different timezones probably hurt us more than anything. While I was waiting on HUD, he ended up making more weapons. When I needed enemy artwork, he was busy with sleep, or rolling blackouts – as South Africa has some kind of power issues at the moment.

So needless to say, this game isn’t complete. But it’s still sorta fun, and the graphics look pretty sweet if I do say so myself. (Thanks Unity Pro Trial!)

So check it out if you want. I enjoy feedback – but believe me, I already know the game isn’t great.

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=20238

I also made a video about the development of this game. Sort of a timelapse/summary.

I also streamed about 7 hours of development on twitch, so if you wan’t to watch me do stuff in the past, check it out!

http://www.twitch.tv/trent_sterling/profile

Tags: 2D, jam, post-mortem, timelapse, unity3d

Good news everyone ! My entry  ” deathmetalslug ” is ranked #667 of 22055 on IndieDB , this may be a lucky number to me ! Quite pretty isn’t it ?

Please everyone celebrate this with me and give me feedback ! Do you think i deserve this great occult rank ? Try the game and tell me !

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=46874

Thank you LD guys, IDB guys and SATAN  hahahaha

CHEERS !

KNARF

So feedback is quite good so far. If you didn’t check our first LD Game, do it right now!
http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=47430

By the way Mac version is on it’s way. Also just so you know we decided to continue working on this game and on Christmas holidays we will surprise you with something. Stay tuned!

Hi guys!

Some of you liked our BGM from Walled, so here it is! 😀 (by Jérémy Gaucher)

BGM: https://soundcloud.com/j-r-mygaucher/walled-gameplay-music

Menu: https://soundcloud.com/j-r-mygaucher/walled-menu-music

Sarah & I have gotten a lot of valuable feedback on our LDJAM31 entry, The Lonely Realm of the Space Wizard. Like many of you I imagine, there were several features for the game that were in our notebooks but we simply did not have time to implement in the scope of the competition. What we end up creating is quite fun & a neat little game that we feel can be taken a whole lot further.We have decided to do just that.  We’ve got a ton of ideas for game mechanics to implement, power ups to add and an interesting story line.  So far, we want to include:

A tutorial level
Enemies
Power ups
An expanded realm with some measure of procedural generation.
Permanent wizard leveling
Player controlled zooming
More spells
Good reasons to use the new spells
An arch nemesis
The goal of players building a realm that’s a little less lonely

As the specifics get hammered out, I’ll post updates. Meanwhile, we appreciate every comment & vote. Feedback helps us make a better game.

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

You really have to try it … it is even crazier and cruel … we add some crazy car drivers … they don’t care about no one …. get out of their way … jojojo

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=45161

Of the games I played, I found these the funniest … until now.
These are my suggestions, if you have not played it.

1º – SumoBall!
An army of crabs has invaded your prefecture. It’s up to you to stop them… SUMO PINBALL style!

2º – Piano Racer
Enter the artistic delirium of this musician and experience the race for personal fulfillment!

3º – MACHO KNIGHT
You play as the mighty Macho Knight. Macho Knight only has one goal in mind, to protect his Lover from the Hooligans that are trying to kidnap her. You must use your mighty Macho Shield (machoman belt) to fling the hooligans off the fort!

CYCLE ————————————————————————-

My entry does NOT have humor, but if you want to play it just click here:
http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=36629

Entry:

After a few days and some honnest feedack from the community on ludumdare.com, twitch and others, I’d like to draw the conclusions of my very first game jam. I decided to enter alone, in the compo competition using Game Maker witch i’m starting to love and hate at the same time. I’ve been eyeing Unity for some time but it’s still a bit unclear for me.

The theme was pretty inspiring to me as it meant basically, “you can make a very simple game that takes place only on one screen”. I immediately thought about an “auto-maze” that can generate an infinity of mazes using a system of pillars that go up and down. A MAZE inc. was born! In my head… Then I had to go to sleep.

Process :

– First thing to do was that pillar system, as it was the core idea of my game, the rest would go by itself (…)

I drew my pillars directly in the paint-like editor inside Game Maker as it was supposed to be temporary, the first idea was to go with a metallic look within the hole game. And once i finally found a good way to control them i realized the hardest was to come. I wanted to create a random maze with a start, an end, some “monsters”, weapons (like bombs) and coins. The game would feel like a random pacman mixed with some bomberman. I felt exited.

– I knew the auto-maze system was ambitious but once it was done, the rest was easy it it would kind of spare me the level design phase.

I researched a lot on auto generated mazes and dungeons on GM. I haven’t found any working source that could inspire me. But what I should have seen was that most of them were pretty complicated. I spend so much time on researching and experimenting, I could have programmed an entire other game during that time! Finally I abandoned that system, I knew I didn’t have the time to make it work even if I was starting to get some results. At this point, I almost abandon the jam, then I had a game saving idead!

– I would abandon the auto-maze system and recycle the controller system so the pillars can be controllable by myself.

But I still wanted my game to take place in one single room, as it was the theme and the hole reason to my pillar system. I started to create controllers designed to move the pillars in that single room as i wanted. But it turned out to be a horrible lost of time. It was too much complicated and abstract. With much more time it would have worked but still I had to construct the different combinations in an other room, so i could see the end result. That’s when it strucked me.

– I could just construct different rooms and the player couldn’t really feel teleported as long as these rooms look the same and I have a good transition system.

I didn’t have much time left but it worked pretty good and the effect was very efficient! I felt relieved, this was a good frame for a real game. I started to create a few levels, added a very simple controllable character and an advanced AI system that can find you no matter how difficult is the maze, like i knew how to make. I made all the game stripes and created a music from a huge bank of samples (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZhwRobYmps). It seem a like a big step (and it is) but it’s really not the most time consuming phase, I didn’t get stuck one second and I’m proud of how fast I came through that process. Untill…

– I went to the restaurant with my familly!

It seemed like a good idea at first. I would rest and eat well before the final straight. See, I live in Lyon and we have a traditional festival the weekend of December 8, “La Fête des Lumières”. Basically there are great illuminations all around the city and many people from everywhere come to see them. The streets are crowded and the restaurants too. And my family and friends choose a restaurant in one of the most touristic places. I didn’t know where it was, I lost time finding it, plus my family couldn’t enter without me (given the ton of people they don’t allow partial groups). And you know, it takes some time to eat in a real restaurant. Oh, and the subway was crowded too, I had to walk.

– Finish Express.

With my easy built-in level designer, I felt confident that I could wrap up the game easily. But the restaurant issues made me loose so much time that I had to rush the end! Fortunatly, we had one our to submit the game after the ending time. If I learnt anything it’s that you should always schedule ahead and take this matter seriously. I eventually compacted a roughtly finnished game just a few seconds before the gong. But because I fifn’t have time to test it before I ship it, there was a horrible bug! A never ending loop of explosion right on the player. The game was unplayable. It took a few minutes to fix that bug and a couple of others. I consider my game standout but then again with the restaurant episode and my late start, I can say that A MAZE inc. was made in less than 48 hours.

End result:

A MAZE inc. is not exactly what I wanted it to be. I was stubborn to make an auto-generated maze but I’m not a programmer. I lost time in the process and gained nothing. I’m glad that I found a compromise but I didn’t have the time to use it’s potential to the fullest. People who played my game all loved the transition system, and the overall presentation of the game but found it not exciting enough. Some said it was too slow, some said repetitive, some were bored by the enemies… All in all, I didn’t spend enough time on the game system, too much time on the superficial. I’m still proud of my entry and i feel that with a few tweaks and addons, it’s a good recipe for a nice little indy game. Bigger mazes, more different enemies and obstacles, and a basic enigma system with boxes and switches, that’s what I’d do to improuve that game. Most of Compo entries are pretty basic or not finished compared to it, so I think it’s not too bad for a first game jam 😉 See you next year!

If you want to test it, rate it and add your feedback, the game is still as it was on the first day:

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=46758

This is the first Ludum Dare where I’ve had a “full-time” partner through the entire weekend. My brother Spencer was able to work entirely on the art while I focused entirely on the programming. Clark Aboud was also able to contribute some amazing music as he has done in my previous entries like TIMEframe.

We wanted to do something a little outside the box with the theme of “Entire game on one screen” so we took it literally and decided to have the game revolve around an actual TV screen. So, how do you make a game mechanic out of that? How about trying to keep your family happy by finding something to watch.

We set off in this direction with a goal of getting high marks in the Humor category by having lots of really funny little micro-parody shows on the television with unique art and audio. This idea was ambitious to say the least. With a family of four we settled on 16 unique channels and 64 unique shows.

This was probably our biggest mistake setting out. We could have managed to get largely the same gameplay out of a much smaller set of possible shows and it would have saved us tons of time. On the programming side it took me countless hours developing a system to randomize the various channels and shows to have a unique experience every playthrough. On the art and audio side it became obvious that we could not craft each and every show by hand. We settled by creating unique music for about 17 shows and unique art for the channel logos and commercials. The rest of the show images were grabbed and filtered from actual shows and the rest of the audio was done “Charlie Brown Adult”-style with Spencer mumbling hilarious parody versions of all the remaining shows. In the end we were extremely satisfied with the humor we managed to squeak out of concept, but we certainly could have done much more with a smaller selection of shows from the start.

On the plus side I did learn a ton about randomization of game elements. This should really come in handy for some things I would like to do in our professional project, Lacuna Passage. I’m also quite happy with the art style we came up with for the living room and family members. The cel-shaded style lends itself well to the comic-nature of the game and it was extremely fast to create without needing to worry about textures.

The actual scoring mechanic is something that we didn’t actually add into the game until the last 2 hours before the deadline. This was a bit scary not knowing if the game would actually be fun to play, but thankfully we had a pretty solid base built up for tracking which characters liked which shows and a scoring mechanic came from that pretty naturally. The only thing I think feels a bit off is the fact that you are playing as one of the characters that you must also keep happy. That perspective is not the most intuitive when needing to display the scores for each family member. Your score (the father’s) is placed down towards the bottom of the screen which is difficult to quickly compare to the scores of your other family members at the top left of the screen. Ultimately this is a minor issue and with some additional time I think it could be adjusted to make more sense.

I’m extremely happy with what we managed to put together in such a short time and that is in no small part due to the fact that I had a more dedicated team for this jam. I’m looking forward to the next Ludum Dare so that we can apply everything that we’ve learned to a new entry!

Just to show it is actually possible.
Need to do it now without losing any lives.
Anyone out there want to take up the challenge?

I’ve taken note that a lot of people comment stuff like “Well done”, “Good job”, “nice” etc. just to increase their “Coolness level”. The coolness level should be based on the quality of the feedback, not the amount. I’m not sure if this is the right place to suggest this, but to one way to combat this would be some form of minimum letter limit (which on it’s own doesn’t solve the problem). Of course i love hearing whether something is good or bad, but it’s the juicy part is the reason behind it

Shameless self promotion:
http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=26961

Hello indie gamers!

i have a challenge for you,  that will also be a challenge for me in completing this game.

Reach 130 points on Super Touch and i will personally send you final release of the game.  (DEC 31, 2014)

if you beat my challenge send us a shout on twitter or leave us a comment or send email.

twiiter account here, be sure to follow us ^_^ we also promote your indie games and content !!
link to game here

So I decided to make a game focused on one of my favorite math things, the Fibonacci sequence. I had fun and I’m fairly happy with how it turned out. So to the nit and grit of a postmortem post (the good, bad, and confusing?).

The good:
-I learned A LOT!
-the game is well received by most that play it.
-I actually finished this time, and I like the game I made.
-the animations and time I put into them paid off
-I designed the game with mobile in mind and have something I can take to market (maybe)

The Bad:
– I suck at writing music
– I thought the core mechanic was simple enough to understand and it wasn’t
– I should have added a tutorial
– I had some crash bugs on release
– I completely misspelled Fibonacci the entire time I was developing (corrected since)

The confusing:
I made a concious effort to have people playtest my game, and was under the impression that the”adding” mechanic was simple. While some folks are getting the idea either right away, or shortly there after, most are confused.

MORAL: Dont assume everyone reads the description on the page, and if it is needed that much then put it inside the game.

Tags: #gamedev #ld31 #art #ld48 #jam #game, Andrew Adams, cool, Fibonacci, fun, game, math, postmortem

hello indie gamers,

Im searching for new and upcoming indie game contests where we can post our games,

Do you know of any, if yes, post links here!!   as a resource to our fellow game devs. thanks all

So far we played and rated just 211 games, we want more (MOAR)=)
Please, tell us about your game and we will play and rate it =)

And, of course, we are very excited of getting feedback about our game.
We invite you to play Houston game too:
Jam Entry: Houston, We’ve Got a Problem

Top score for now is: 13 657 scientific data
2-d place: 11 395 (edve98)
3-d place: 11 145 (Mike Mezhenin)
4-d place: 10 610 (sapermysz)
5-th place: 8 085(Kabukki)

What will be your score?

Oh, and if you like our game – we will be happy to see you in our FB group.

Tags: game, jam, ld31, Ludum Dare

Not an LD31 entry, but I did start coding this during the LD warmup weekend so it’s at least kinda relevant 😉

Anyway, now that the main event (for which I made Bugged Out) is over, I’ve gone back to this project and am releasing an early test build with the hope of getting some feedback. The game is essentially just a barrage of mate in one puzzles which you have to solve in less than 10 seconds, so it’s probably not going to have all that much appeal for non chess players. Anyway if you do decide to play, I hope you have fun!

Play here: http://sebastian.itch.io/mate-in-one

Since I’m making this post, I figured I’d promote Bugged Out a little bit more with the little behind the scenes video I put together ^^

Tags: chess, ld31, warmup weekend

Click here to play Ultimate Reindeer Advenutre

Elmobo, our sound wizard, has made the complete OST of Final Swap (about 10 minutes of music !) available on Bandcamp for free (type zero when asked for a price).
This soundtrack is a tribute to JRPG music,  SNES style !
Click on the cover below to grab it !

Don’t want to go on Bandcamp ? Listen to the boss music here !

And don’t forget to play and rate Final Swap !

I’m really proud to introduce my fifth LudumDare entry ‘The Mosquito Effect’ (The Mosquito Simulator).  Try this out to feel like a gint mosquito mutant for a while.

Here is a trailer to check this out. Watch it. Play it. Play it in Oculus Rift as well. And please, comment any wishes you like to make things better!

The Mosquito Effect link

Tags: goat simulator, ludum dare 31, mosquito, mutant, simulator