I find myself asking “am I the monster?”  And for most games it’s a yes, I’m giving out a lot of 5/5’s.

Anyone else?

My seventh successful (and fourth consecutive) Ludum Dare entry, CRUNCH!!! An Interplanetary Meal Trip, has been out in the wild for a little over a day now and all the feedback I’ve gotten so far has been highly positive. For whatever it’s worth, CRUNCH!!! is the first time since Five Floors, Two Worlds back in LD30 I feel like I’ve gotten a complete game out the door – in fact, it might be the most complete-feeling game I’ve ever done.

It didn’t take me long after the theme announcement to decide on “ravenous space monster on the rampage.” At this early stage in development I called the game “Space Cruncher” (my work folder even used this name all the way up until I was ready to release it); the tadpole-like “space citizens” (or just “critters” as I ended up calling them) were firmly a part of my design at this point, but the project didn’t really take off until I started implementing the procedurally generated planets. At first I wanted to use trapezoid-shaped segments which I could put together into solid planet shapes, but when I couldn’t get the mesh-deformed sprites and the collision boxes to line up, I settled for square ones instead. The exact geometric arrangement of the planets was something of a lucky accident: originally they used multiples of four blocks per layer, but I wasn’t happy with the end result, so I bumped it up to six, as seen in the finished version. When I saw how the planets looked after that, I realized using multiples of six to approximate a circular shape should have been obvious in retrospect. ^_^;

Before this point, I’d already considered the fact that CRUNCH!!! was basically Squeeps, my LD26 entry, with its “helpless critter fleeing from implacable monsters” dynamic flipped on its head. The planets brought to mind something older than that, though: my early prototype idea for Corebound, my first-ever LD entry, which involved digging your way out of planets made of bricks arranged in hexagon patterns (hence the title, originally meant to suggest stuck in a planet’s core rather than headed there). Also like Squeeps, most of the game’s sound effects were made using Audacity and my own voice: Bfxr was brought in for the zaps, chomps, and explosions (with a bit more post-processing in Audacity than I’ve previously bothered with), but the critters’ yelps, the monster’s snarls and roars, and yes, the Space Police’s ineffectual calls for you to stand down are all my own voicework. (The Space Police is probably the closest to my regular voice I’ve ever put in a project so far – all I did was speed it up and add an echo.)

CRUNCH!!! was also, purely by accident, an experiment in graphical style: it’s my first Ludum Dare entry to render at 640×480, but not a single one of the game’s sprites was actually drawn with that resolution in mind: the end result is blocky sprites with smooth scaling and rotation (an effect I’ll admit I’ve deliberately avoided in previous entries for the sake of “authenticity”). And while the monster, the critters, and the Space Police all render at the same 2x display scale, the planets don’t: this was a holdover from the original plan to have planets in multiple scales, but I ended up using a 4x scale for all of them (tinier planets were harder to maneuver through). I think the blockier, chunkier style nicely conveys a sense of hugeness, though I’ll admit the planet cores do clash a bit with the rest of the game’s aesthetics. The rounded square particles, by contrast, were a deliberate choice; I really like the way explosions ended up looking with them. XD

The font was also the product of happenstance: when I was done with my title screen logo, I had a six-pixel-tall space at the bottom of my 32-pixel-tall graphic to wedge in a subtitle, and rather than expand the logo to accommodate a bigger font, I just drew the subtitle in a tiny little 5×4 font. When I realized I still needed an actual font for text, I quickly made one in the same style – legibility suffers a bit on some of the lowercase letters, but I kinda like the retro low-def look of the text. And speaking of title-induced idiosyncrasies, I couldn’t resist going with the three exclamation points on the “GAME OVER!!!” or (my personal favorite) “SYSTEM DEVOURED!!!” messages.

I’ll freely admit to using the entity framework I wrote for S-LAYER, my previous LD Game Jam entry, plus an off-the-shelf camera implementation. I learned my lesson back in One-Floor Dungeon with my disastrous day-eating attempt to roll my own collision detection system: don’t write any code you don’t absolutely have to. I also used the excellent Tactile library to handle controls: I backported it into both One-Floor Dungeon and S-LAYER as a practice exercise, and it nicely fixed an odd controller glitch in both of them.

As for the subtitle…I’ll confess I wasn’t sure “meal trip” was a real turn of phrase until I bothered to Google it after release. It just sounded like a funny, understated way to express the game’s concept. XD

Remember when you are playing MMORPG game and the first monster is slime? Well this game the role is reverse and you are going to change the rules of MMO and fight back as slime together with your ally!!!

Reverse MMO

Finally I did a release of my game for Android. You can directly download it using the link which I added. You can play, download and test my contribution here :

Forest Monster by Geckoo1337

I hope that you enjoy my little project on your mobile device. Feel free to share your advice or impressions about my game.

Have a nice day ++

Hello guys, here’s our obligatory ‘post-mortem’ from me & Foxel working as a team.

What went well! HURRAH! –

There were some key things that went really well during this attempt at Ludum Dare for me & Foxel, here’s our list in order of significance.

• We did the Ludum Dare in person! Our last 2 LDs were done over Skype as I live in the UK and Foxel lives in Finland. This time we did it in my house! It worked really great, and we had a really fun time making this game.
• Having game-play that works. This is nearly more significant than what’s above it.
• The sheer number of lines of code we managed to write that worked. There were things that had to be changed & updated, but we managed to write a lot of code we could keep and that worked.
• The dedication that went into making our game, that’s something we are honestly proud of. And we’d recommend anyone who wants to do this competition and has the time, should. You learn so much about your capabilities by having a go at Ludum Dare!

What went wrong… Oh no! –

• Too many big time consuming bugs. Things such as a z-sorting class that didn’t work, a set of code for AI that would throw null pointers around like a first time Java programmers attempt at an array! These things hindered progress and demoralised us at times. It’s not fun to have bugs, but it’s certainly not fun when you have a deadline that’s fast approaching and your bugs still haven’t been solved…
• Having to design a level in the last 2 hours before submission! This is not something we wanted, wished for or even asked for, but it happened because of the point above. It’s sad to think we could have had even more complex levels, but couldn’t due to the lack of time.
• Not having audio & in game feedback on things like distractions or intractable objects. We would really have liked to send feedback to the player that would tell them what’s going on in the game.

What we’d do differently! Hell yeah! 

• Be better acquainted with the tools or build a better framework to work with before Ludum Dare. We had issues with things like A*, Z-Sorting, Line of Sight which would have been easier to handle had we had more experience with the tools.
• Spend less time on features and more time on content. I feel like we hit a point where little features began overcrowding our vision and we lost time and therefore lost a lot of content for the game. A game looks & feels brilliant when features are in, but they shouldn’t push out content in a jam!
• Sleep more! For definite. We slept, but not enough. Sleep deprivation hinders logical thought processes, which means programming becomes a lot harder.

Here’s a link to our game – http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=26125

peaceOut(“Foxel & Mace”, (@Foxelbox, @Macecraft));

Hey, we’ve completed our little game about a little shadow who wants to grow big and eats people for that purpose!

Despite participating without some of our members, we managed to at least make a somewhat finished game. Of course it lacks relatively high-poly graphics of our last entry, but there are all the features we wanted to put in it. And it comes with a bunch of funny bugs which even may not hamper gameplay!

Anyway, you can play and rate it if you follow this link:

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=50610

Play as the monsters and help the hero beating each level. That’s weird, but interesting.

Hope you could try my jam entry, Hero Mate, and have a great time!
http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=3035

My favorite part about the concept of people writing “post mortem” documents about what they learned, how they could do better, and how much incredible fun they had… is that it includes the word “post” in the name and is a post on this page.

…

Puns. 😀

So it seems like my game is quite confusing, even after making a tutorial image. Oh well, I guess I had to expect this. it isn’t the clearest game ever. But considering it is one screen game where you barely do anything, I guess it is an accomplishment  😛 But I guess i will need to do something more accessible next time. For now, just let this game confuse you.

You can play it here if you want: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=21736

@MauiMc just got 22 rounds! This is the highest score we know!

But…can you beat it? Send us your screenshot on Twitter (@bigbuggames) and we will post it here!

Play ‘It’s Sunday!’

Thanks everybody for your comments and votes!!

Tags: LD #33

Come and play with us guys!

Little Prankster

Lich Rising – compo entry

[I’d put an image of the game here, but WordPress doesn’t give me that option…]

Lich Rising is probably best described as an RTS tower defense in reverse built by someone who hasn’t played an RTS in a long time. It was developed solo in 48 hours with C# and Monogame. The details and download link are through the link above, the rest of this post will be a quick post-mortem from my experience creating the game. I’ll to talk about what went well, challenges I encountered, and the design process.

Some background on me, I’ve been developing games for years, but only came to LD in the last year. I’ve got a lot of experience and boiler plate for working with C#/Monogame, so the platform choice was obvious.

I wasn’t real excited about the theme selection this time around. The idea for this game was the only real feasible and interesting idea I came up with. This one just didn’t hook me. The final result is fairly similar to my initial pitch. Since I wasn’t super excited, to keep things interesting I pushed in new personal directions for art and code style.

Art Style

I’m quite pleased with how the art style turned out. I settled on the direction very quickly and the results are appealing for how simple the core style was to create content for. It might be difficult to tell, but there’s no real 3D in the scene. The style creates a good illusion and it looks better than if all the sprites were laid down from straight overhead. Each object in the scene is comprised of several planes parallel to the camera with varying heights from the ground. I think the key to it working well is the bright solid colors, no borders, mostly angular geometry, and little anti-aliasing. The effect gives a good illusion of a more detailed 3D model for a very low time cost.

I implemented it with a 2D camera by offsetting planes from the center of the camera based on height. I’m more comfortable working with a 2d camera, so I went that route instead of 3D. 3D obviously would have been the better choice given more time to experiment.

Towards the end of the weekend, I added several new models to the scene in just a few minutes, and the characters took maybe half an hour each. Some of my janky animations break the effect if you pay attention, but not severely with all the other action.

Early on, I also made the decision to use bright and unusual colors for the monsters and props, and drab colors for the humans. I think that helped add visual interest and convey what was going on when there were a lot of things on screen. The coffins were a bit of a challenge. I knew I wanted to make it clear you were raising the enemies you killed. They also needed to be findable and targetable by the player. A grave or cross might not have been easy to see in battle, and I suspected a dead body on the ground wouldn’t look good with the art style. A coffin seemed like the best choice.

In retrospect, I am a little disappointed in the ground texture, I wanted something that conveyed camera movement, but the result doesn’t look as good as I had hoped. I also wanted to go back and change the tower to be octagonal. It stands out as particularly not angular with everything else in the scene.

Development

The style of game and art style pushed my game logic outside my comfort zone. Most of the games I’ve built before this have either been turn based, or built on top of simulations that are still compartmentalized. Most of my code library has been built for integers and discrete grids. That didn’t seem feasible with this game, so I had to get comfortable with floats and vectors pretty quickly. For most game code that wasn’t a problem outside of a few hooks in my library. The two biggest problems – collisions and pathfinding – came at the tail end of the first night.

Leveraging the grid-based pathing code I’ve used before was impractical. I didn’t have anything resembling a useful quadtree or navmesh, and six hours in is a bad time to realize how important that was. The original plan was to build several windy trails through the woods. I considered a system of waypoints or possibly directional slopes to funnel units into the players home base, but that fell apart as soon as a unit encountered a player unit and gets led off-path. I also briefly considered something like hugging the right wall to sidestep obstacles. That was probably closer to feasible, but still a lot of work and still not great. Additionally, even simple collisions require more than comparing each object to each other object and look for overlaps. Not even having a reliable quadtree available, let alone geometrical collision system, was a major problem.

Luckily, the two biggest problems had a single LD-style solution. I constrained collisions to mostly happen in a single direction, removed most obstacles, and used the simplest collision model. By confining the space vertically, it let me divide the world into vertical slices that could reduce the search space for any given collision (it isn’t quite that simple, objects can exist in multiple slices, but it reduces the algorithms complexity by a significant factor). That same tool was also later reused for fast access to what’s on screen and what’s under the mouse pointer.

Each character on the map used a relatively simple state machine, with only some small variation between player controlled units and AI controlled one. The collision handling was managed in the state machine for simplicity, and is slightly interesting. On the tick for each unit, a first pass collision check is done against friendly units. If friendly units overlap, they apply a small force against each other so they spread out a little. Then a stronger force is applied towards their state goal (nearest unit or the player base). Finally, the unit checks for collisions with props in the scene where it’s planning to go. If there is a collision, the prop pushes back outward from the center of the prop, and then that final normalized movement is applied to the unit.

I had to make a choice in how to build the map. I could build a simple map editor and place objects by hand, or I could generate the map procedurally. In the end, I chose to place all the props and spawn locations procedurally for several reasons.

1. Because of the issues with collisions there weren’t going to be complex path layouts
2. I was worried I might need to change the map size over time (and I did), which would likely mean rebuilding the map
3. Spending time to build a tool that then takes more time to use sounded like a lot of time total

Gameplay and Controls

The original goal was to have a single unit that would raise the dead, have direct RTS-ish control over the main character an their minions, and defend against waves of humans. Everything else I expected to would figure out along the way, and that worked out okay *this time*.

I sort of wanted to have the player work from a graveyard in the middle of a map with paths coming in from various directions, and obstacles like fences, trees, and graves. Technical limitations meant that probably wasn’t feasible, so I had to improvise. It was early enough in that I could still make large changes. I took some time to really think on it and work on some rendering and animation. It would have been easy to give up at that point. What helped the most was thinking about the subsystems I knew I would need and challenging myself to find a way to implement them quickly. If I built a simple collision system around circles intersecting, could I change the game to fit that restriction? If units only knew how to walk in a straight line and bounce off obstacles, could I change the game to fit that restriction? The answer was obviously yes.

So after making sure the game was feasible, implementing the collision system, unit state machine, and basic mouse controls, I had a mostly empty playing field early on Saturday. I still wasn’t totally clear on the goal of the game. Defending against waves can be fun if there is variety, but I wanted something more. I didn’t want it to just be a tower defense, and having a clear goal and end state can keep a player engaged. Taking the fight back to the humans seemed like a good idea from a theme perspective, maybe you attack a castle or village. That seemed like a lot of time. So thinking about limitations, what if I restricted it to just a tower as a representation of that? That could work, so then we had a goal.

So with that I had a barebones game. As I went, I took time to occasionally play around with the systems and imagine what I could add with a little more than a day left. I zoomed the camera out so you could better see and manage units, I made the map taller so it felt less like a corridor and gave some options for going around the edges. I spent some time on the controls.

I chose to have the spell casting be a two step process because I was thinking I might implement other spells where the location mattered more. Something like a corpse explosion or summoning a healing corpse flower turret thing. It wasn’t intentional, but it does have the side effect of adding more to do minute-to-minute, which is nice. I went with the cooldown time mechanic for spell casting because it was a safe choice. If I wanted to switch to like mana or something else, I would probably still have a short cooldown. After a bit of playing the game, the cooldown felt alright, so I left it pretty much untouched to focus on other things.

I then implemented some more thematic units, animations, projectiles. and wave spawning. Along the way, I noticed the map felt empty. Enemies trudged on a linear path, so the top and bottom were somewhat wasted. I had planned on adding random objects to the center of the map, but that would just mean sometimes the humans would look silly walking straight into objects. I also realized you could just send a unit along the back side and chip away at the human tower. Putting turrets in the middle as an obstacle was a logical solution.

I actually found myself with some time after implementing what felt like a decent mix of units. I could have added more units, I could have worked on the spell system, or I could have improved the progression. Those would have been nice, but a tutorial system was probably the best use of time. The controls weren’t going to be immediately obvious from within the game, and for an LD game there is a lot going on in this one. Tutorials and basic usability aren’t very sexy, but as quickly as people jump between LD games, it’s more important than many devs expect. A giant text dump or click through dialog is only somewhat better than nothing, so I definitely wanted some interactivity to it. It’s just a linear series of steps, and it was pretty easy to add a hook to progress the tutorial on certain basic actions. This was also a good opportunity to not just convey the necessary information, but give the game some flavor.

One of the last gameplay changes I made was to coffins. After a few waves, if you weren’t really keeping up with the spells, you would have a pile of coffins in the middle of the path of the enemies. This meant enemies could get stuck on the coffins and become easy targets, and you had all the coffins you could ever ask for. Removing collisions from the coffins was the first thing I tried, but the coffins looked a little weird when every unit was just stepping over them. I could have had a drop rate for coffins, but I felt something would need to happen to the enemies that didn’t turn into coffins. Luckily, I had a bit of a eureka moment. Making the coffins targetable by enemies was surprisingly easy to implement, and meant coffins weren’t a limitless resource and would never really get in the way of the enemies.

Sound

I’ve never been particularly musically inclined, but I wanted to push myself and include music this time. I had allocated about two hours for it, and had a looping track, but it obviously didn’t make it. I didn’t think it fit the game well. I was worried it was too distracting, and didn’t want a situation where music is worse than silence. I probably spent too long getting set up for it, I’l have to make sure I have a workflow figured out in advance next time.

I recorded quite a few sound effects, but only used 4 and really needed some more in places. I spent most of the time focusing on the battle sounds. I recorded a few dozen, trimmed that to 12, and then pulled the ones that weren’t speech after hearing them in game. Even playing with distortion and how often they’re played, the sound effects didn’t sound right in battle.

I also recorded a set of responses when you select a unit. I got as far as compiling them in, but then forgot to hook them up. Whoops.

In retrospect, I needed a few sound effects for a few other events. When a spell recharges would be really useful, and spell casting might be nice. Something when the Lich or altar is under attack would also have been good.

What went well

• I was really happy with how the art style turned out. If I want to implement another top down game, there’s a real good chance I go this direction again.
• I’m really surprised how much I got done. I didn’t really think I would get all the units in I did.
• There was a point in dealing with collisions and pathfinding that I considered scrapping the whole thing, but I’m glad I pushed through.

Needs improvment

• The controls weren’t great. Even after playing for a while I occasionally hit the wrong button, which is never a good sign. I did some research into control schemes, but I didn’t find one that made sense to really clone. I also forgot to add screen-edge mouse scrolling for the map. I meant to come back to that.
• Audio ate a lot of time, with very little to show for it. I need more practice with music, it would have been nice. I also recorded three dialog bits that I forgot to add to the game, and that’s just embarrassing.

In retrospect

• One lane of enemies is maybe too straightforward. I wish I had thought to break up the spawns into lanes. It would have added some variety and a use for the map edges. It would have been very easy to implement, but I just didn’t think about it in time.
• Unity is good at several of the things I struggled with. It wouldn’t have been a good time to start from scratch on a new platform, but it’s worth thinking about for the future.

Future

This post-mortem is really sealing the project. I don’t have a strong desire to polish this up an publish it somewhere. I learned a lot and it was a bunch of fun, but I have a long list of other projects in process.

Hi there, this is my first time participating and I’ve had a blast doing a game with Bob Morate, who’s done some more LD games in the past.

You can find the game here: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=35459

Basically it’s a 2 player (local co-op) arcade in which two mutants created by experiments have to escape from the lab killing soldiers to avoid being killed themselves in the process.

Although I managed to do level design and debugging, I spent most of the time doing the music, focusing in two instruments I don’t really know how to play properly (guitar and bass). I’m mostly a keyboardist, but wanted to step out of my comfort zone and composed everything in the guitar and bass, later adding keys to fill up the sound.

I’ll talk more about my successes and mistakes with this, as well as with all the other tasks Bob and I did, in a forthcoming post-mortem, but if you have any question fire away!

Can’t wait to participate again!

We couldn’t finish the game in time for this JDJam, but we’re not gonna stop developing it until we get to a nice, fun, polished game.

For that, we’re posting it on Gamejolt, where we’ll be sure to get you in sight of the latest dev news and ask you suggestions (maybe some ideas). So be sure to follow us there and give us your feedback!

Come test it there: 1925: Noire

Tags: development, gamejolt, jam, LD33, noire, progress, screenshot

Come on and try it out here!!

I hope anyone to be able to complete the level!!

If you complete it, please, comment!

Thanks for playing!!

So we finished our game. We are pretty proud of it. We wanted some very simple concept, that can be expanded by need but can be finished very quickly and iterated over if needed and if there is enough time. We ended up with 30 levels, which corresponds roughly to 2 hours of gameplay and all levels have their own meaning and concept and are making some kind of sense.

The basic game principles turned out to be a challenge even for other game devs though. But its is always like that. As we are making the game, we consider some thing as obvious, but they are actually not for a person who comes to the game for the first time. So guys, if you want to try our game remember following (we tried to put this info into level tips, but turned out people don’t read them and even if they do, they don’t understand what we’re trying to say by it.

• the DIRECTION into which you shoot is given by the line starting behind the alien and the end of his tail
• the more you STRETCH the tail, the larger speed the slime has and vise versa
• projectile with less speed gets more easily influenced by the gravity of the planet and they are more likely to get on the PLANET ORBIT and more likely to stay around for a while and hit some satellite.
• GET MORE SLIMES for the level if you manage to orbit the planet at least once with a slime.
• the glow around planet determines their GRAVITY FIELD
• RED PLANETS has stronger gravity field

These are basic rules. Every other and new mechanic is explained further in the game so I hope it is understable if you manage to get that far.

THANKS FOR PLAYING! And especially thanks for critique and your opinions. The more detailed and harsh critique the better! Can’t wait to play your games guys!

!!!Oh and if you are trying the game in WebGL don’t forget to allow LOCKING OF CURSOR. It is part of the game so don’t worry. Thanks!

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=35985

Here is a screenshot form the game and some photos from development

screen from one of the advanced levels

todo board, final phase

programmer, testing

I made a puzzle game, again. This is my seventh LD entry, written in Javascript, I wanted to try something new, and the new things this time were real drawn art and WebGL.

The Theme

When I first saw the winning theme, I knew this would be quite a challenge for me. The tone of the theme, “You are the monster”, not simply “Monster”, pushed me towards a subjective perception of being a monster, but talking about a subjective feeling required establishing a context first.  All the ideas I had where I could express the idea of being a monster for the others required a lot of content and story, and I’m not a great content-maker, even less a good story-teller.

The game is still rooted in this idea, altering your identity to fit a requirement and be accepted, it’s not just a veneer of monster graphic assets on a puzzle game, but I wish the relation to the theme was more visible, better explored and discussed.

The Tech

WebGL was pretty great to work with. I love the canvas, it’s simple and is fast enough nowadays, but I get frustrated by browsers taking shortcuts in rendering quality, bad banding in gradients, bad antialiasing, huge variations between the blend modes implementations (if they work at all…). The single matrix stack of the canvas is also annoying if you want a moving camera, the freedom gained by using WebGL is awesome here. Compatibility and performance predictability went much better than expected, I had a minor problem with Internet Explorer (just don’t use any GL extension and things will be ok), but I think it’s the first entry that works on all major browsers, HTML5 things are really getting better every day.

Next time however, I’ll prepare text drawing code, it’s the big thing that’s not easy in OpenGL and I knew it, I had to prepare a texture manually for each line of text, which is really not great when you want to work efficiently, hence the lack of dialogue in the game, which would have greatly helped establishing the story.

The Art

It’s the first time I really tried to draw something, I usually avoid the difficulty and go for a minimalistic vector-and-code style. This worked amazingly well given that I don’t know how to draw at all. I started on paper and vectorized the monster with Inkscape. Then it was a quite interesting challenge of layering to be able to recolor all parts of the monsters in the game (the custom shaders greatly helped here, I probably couldn’t have done this with a simple canvas with decent speed). I only animated the eye, but all three parts of the monsters can move separately.

Conclusion

Well, I almost abandoned mid-LD, so it was the usual emotional roller-coaster. But it was a great LD, and I’m really happy with the result, I took risks and did new things and it worked. Next time I promise, again, I’ll have music in my game…

If you’ve made a puzzle game too, please leave me a comment, I’ve not seen one yet while playing and rating and I’m curious to see what could be done with the theme. Meanwhile, you can play Detached here, or see my previous games there.

In a nutshell, me and my artist completed a Ludum Dare Jam that we weren’t supposed to be joining, but we were proud that we made the choice. We were busy and were loaded with college assignment, however, being inspired by the theme, I told him that we should definitely make a game now (as we have skipped the past 2 Ludum Dares).

Play our game here!

Some back story (skip this if you want)

It was 11am Saturday noon when I opened my eyes (yes, I am a night owl), I decided to scroll through Facebook. I saw the first post on the home page, it was one of my Games Development Club (GDC) members wishing me and three others (who are also in the club) good luck in Ludum Dare. I was speaking to myself “Dude, I thought I told you I am not joining??”.

But then again, as the president of the club (oh yes, I am), I decided that I should set a good example to the other club members who didn’t join. I was already late 2 hours (Ludum Dare theme was announced on 9am my time), but I have been even more late the previous Ludum Dare (with 6 hours in, holy shit!), and I am confident that I still have enough time.

While still lying on bed, I brainstormed with my artist and composer (he is new and has no experience in music making yet). I came up with an idea that you are a monster that hunts human down, and the gameplay is roughly inspired by MOBA games such as Dota 2 etc. They agreed, and we went on with the plan.

I woke up and prepared myself and had a brunch while brainstorming to myself how the gameplay will be like. My artist won’t be available until around 8-9 pm (he is out with his family, and he didn’t expected that we are going to join Ludum Dare this time), and I told the composer to go on and try to make some Dota 2-like music. And so, off we go for the next 7 hours. I will be focusing on programming the core gameplay features without the help of any arts.

It wasn’t until 8pm when the composer said he couldn’t make any music, and something is always wrong about it. He felt like he couldn’t continue this Ludum Dare, so I set him free. Well, its not like I don’t know how to compose music anyway, right?

And then, when my artist finally came online at around 9pm, and we continue the rest of the Ludum Dare until Sunday midnight. I showed the game to my GDC members and he showed the game to his friends to get some comment and test for bugs. We implemented the full tutorial slideshow that night, some few minor gameplay changes and bugfixes from the observation when we showed them the game.

We completed the game under 2 days, and the 3rd day is only reserved for beta testing and to make final adjustments and polishing the gameplay.

Tools used

• Game engine – Game Maker Studio: Professional Edition (me)
• Image editor – Photoshop CC (artist)
• Sound effects generator – SFXR (me)

What went right?

• Gameplay idea – Everyone (except for one of my friend) is praising the gameplay concept and encouraged us to continue making this game. Well, I didn’t actually think that this garnered much interest, but we think that we know what our next full game project is going to be >:D
• All planned features – Surprisingly, we were able to implement all of the planned features under 2 days, with the addition of few more features on the third day. Previously, we would have cut corners and do only bare minimum gameplay, but we have improved a lot since then and having much more experience helps too.
• All assets are original – Oh yeah, its the most indie-est of all indies! And we lived in the basement under the basement! Holy shit its so original 😀

What didn’t went so well?

• Music – There was no music, I didn’t have enough time to focus on it myself, plus I’m not quite confident in music composing yet, and wasting few hours just to get a crappy music? Nah, gameplay’s far more important IMO.
• Graphic – Since the artist came in late on the first day, he has a lot to catch up on, so instead of going for quality, he had to opt for speed. And that’s why it doesn’t look as pretty as it should have been, but its functional!
• Game optimization – Since I didn’t want to deal with any more bugs (as experienced in my previous non-LD game projects), I had to use tons of global variables in order to save debugging time and make sure that everything works. And I didn’t do any texture swaps optimization or stops drawing things that are outside of screen as well. This might cause those with lower specs computer unable to run the game without some FPS hell.
• Bugs – There is still one or two minor bugs left, particularly with the stars that is given to those who completed certain difficulties setting. However, since its not game-breaking nor its that important, I’ve decided to just leave it for now until someone complains 😛
• Balancing – I will agree that the game is slightly harder for certain people (including my artist as well, his highest score is only Level 5), and the spells mana requirement, the upgrades etc wasn’t very well balanced, but still playable. In the previous Ludum Dare, we had plenty of time for rebalancing the gameplay, but this time we didn’t have enough time and only the last day to finally find out what rebalancing we should do etc. But I think its still playable, as long as you have the right strategy to approach it

Conclusion

We were really impressed that we managed to squeeze in so much gameplay features in such a short time (2 days for core gameplay) for something we previously thought might take more than just 3 days of hardworking. We also found out that there is a great potential in this game (from the feedback of those who played the game), and we have decided to turn it into a full game in the near future, after we have gathered more ideas on improvement that is. We had great fun in this Ludum Dare, I hope to see y’all in the next Ludum Dare again!

Tags: post-mortem

Nightmare on “The Cookies” street

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=57635

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.barrelgames.ld33

I only had few hours for this ludum dare (I was at a wedding) and I wasn’t in my house with my computer and my tools so I decided to make a text adventure game.

I tried to write it in english, but my english is too bad  and I am too slow with it.

But I really wanted to do this ludum dare and this game; the only solution I had was to write the game in my language…

So I apologize for that.

One of my friends will help me to translate all the game and I ask those who are not familiar with French a little patience. I hope we will not take too much time to do this….

Hello

Just a small post to let everyone know INNER MONSTERS is now available
directely in WebGL => http://goo.gl/zrwkxs

This means : No more problems with Chrome blocking Unity web player by default
For Chrome : play FULLSCREEN or game controls are taken over by Chrome’s
hotkeys…. – so many problems with Chrome …)

Hey guys,

I’m online for a little bit.  I make it a point to play anyone’s game if they leave a comment on mine, so long as it’s Mac OS or on the web.  Mine’s only 5 minutes or less to 100%… well… 98%… 😉

Hey, mighty game developers! Team BSOD’s here.
Let’s talk about future of dis game. We really want to give it  a  shot. So, the main deal for us is to change graphics just a bit. Second, we should change engine (maybe port it on Lua-support engine), cos we want to bring this game to  other platforms. Third, we’re gonna make some kind of multiplayer and, well, we have an idea to make peer-to-peer network ( called “Get Rect Network”), but it very rough and we need to think it over (even our network  handle other Mp games on LD, we’ll get to that soon).
That’s it. That all we’ve got.  Check our game out here: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=44628

Good luck & Have fun!

We’ve updated the link of the Web version of Little Pranskter

Game Link:

Little Prankster

Hello everyone! This is our 3rd LD and we are ready to present you our game! Try it and don’t become the monster!

You can check it right here: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=44824

I hope soon we will make the post about our thoughts and process of development

Being my first Jam –and my first complete game-, my main objective was to deliver a complete product in 48 hours. Although I’ve been programming since 2006, I was very little experience with graphics, and almost zero with games.

I’ve tried different frameworks and engines to make games during the last years. I’d loved to deliver a game that can be played via web or -at least- in the three main OSs, but due to my lack of experience, I finally used GameMaker Studio (Standard Edition), cause I felt more confident with it. In retrospective, it was a good decision; I doubt that I had completed the game with another tool.

The Theme

So it was like 3:00 am here in Europe when the theme was published. I wanted to do something original, but keeping in mind that I had to keep it small. Fortunately, the idea came this same night:

Here is a draft of the mechanics of the game. In that moment, there was a single type of monster and two types -green & red- of characters. Nevertheless the main idea, that is, characters run away from the monster turning clockwise or counter-clockwise, was already there. I chose those colors to ‘guide’ the player, cause are the same colors used in planes, boats, etc. to indicate left and right.

So I had a somewhat solid idea of a puzzle ‘lemmings style’ but with a 2d-cenital perspective.

Day 1:

First day I decided to do the assets in the morning. My idea was do all the art and core mechanics in the first day, leaving levels & tutorial creation and SFXs and music for the second day. So I did a list of all the assets I needed:

I don’t have much experience drawing sprites, so I decided to keep them small, and choose a 16×16 grid that I’d zoomed later to obtain a 32×32 base size. Although I was to use Paint.NET, I decided to do a quick research for more specific tools, and I found Piskel, a free -and awesome- online sprite editor that I used to do almost all the assets. I need also a color pallette, but I quickly found this thread of Pixel Joint forums where an user provided a 32 tones pallete, that I ended using:

To my surprise, I discovered that I actually liked my assets, so I decided to animate them, so I spent some hours in it.

In the evening, I finally began to do some coding. I’ve already decided to switch the mechanic from two types of characters to two types of monsters, so I drafted the ‘monster detection algorithm’ and began the work.

That night I thought that I had almost all the code, so I did a ‘test room’ just to be sure that all was working properly. Here was where the bugs began :(. I apparently didn’t understand properly the collision system in Gamemaker, so there were a couple of corner cases where the characters ignored the monsters. I couldn’t finish the code that day, so I went to sleep and left the bugs for day 2.

Day 2:

So I spent all the morning solving those nasty bugs, and I was running out of time: I had like 12 hours to do all the SFXs, the scenes structure and all the levels -both the tutorial and the game ones-. I decided to skip the game music and I focused in the game structure. Fortunately, all went smoothly and a couple of hours later I was this problem solved.

For the SFXs, I tried to record actual sounds and equalize them to sound more creepy. I could do it with some effects, but I ended using SFXR for the rest of them.

I spent several hours doing the buttons, start screen, credits, etc. So I had only 6 hours to do all the levels. I though that it was more than enough -I didn’t knew how deeply wrong I was-. My initial idea was 5 tutorial levels + 10 game levels. I wanted to do them right so I planned to show 1 new rule in each tutorial, and a smooth learning curve in the real levels.

The process was simple, but time consuming: I first named that level to provide some initial idea. For example in Level 03 – Semaphore, you have a 1 green + 1 red monsters. Second thing was to draft my ‘ideal’ solution for this level (note the floor tiles in the image above), and after that, I looked for another alternative route to provide more than one solution for the player, and an ‘easy’ route without additional points to ease the level to the player if they can’t find ‘my’ solution. Finally, I added the ‘traps’ (ghosts, bats, etc.) to the routes, and complete the map with the rest of the assets. Unfortunately, I ended spending almost one hour per level, so I had to cut my initial idea of then levels to only 5.

When the submission hour was approaching, I ran the game and completed all the levels & tutorials to ensure everithing was Ok, and submitted the game. Unfortunately I only have ‘standard’ license to Gamemaker, so I only could generate the Windows executable -aparently you need a Mac to compile Mac version-. I’d really wished that I could have submitted an HTML5 version :(.

What went right:

• Gameplay idea: Fortunately it came very quickly and was solid enough.
• Tools used: I consider to use Löve2D, but I’m sure that I had not finished the game if I had used a different engine.
• Mission acomplished!: For my first jam, my main objective was to deliver a game. I did

What went wrong:

• Time (lack of): I had planned some little tweaks that I think that would improved the game playability, but I spent too much time with some bugs and I didn’t have the time. The lack of music is a pity too.
• Fast button: In the comments, one common issue by several players is the lack of a button to accelerate the game. I agree 100% with them, and the button it’s actually there -F key to fast-forward-. I mentioned in the info screen, but I had to mention it in the tutorials too. Lesson learned
• Learning curve and level design: Clearly, the difficulty progression that I’ve planned was not too good. And the ‘lack’ of fast button definitely didn’t help. I need to design the levels more carefully, and a ‘pass the level’ option when the player can’t complete it, maybe would had helped.

Conclussion:

This Jam has been an amazing experience for me. I honestly never think that I were capable to create a game like this in just 48 hours. And I think that the game can be improved with some tweaks, so I guess I’ll continue developing it in the next days. I’ve enjoyed so much Ludum Dare, both the event and the community, so expect me for the next! 😀

Tags: post-mortem

Today I fixed a bug that caused healing potions not appearing at all. That caused luck potions to appear too often and broke the (already broken) game balance. Also added a hidden easter egg (that doesn’t affect gameplay).

You can try Someone stole the Princess! HERE.

Now with 100% more healing!

First off, thanks everyone for voting. If you haven’t voted yet, and you want to, do so HERE

Beat Fortress in my game, show me proof, and I might give you a trophy 😀
TOOLS
Program: Unity
Language: C#
Graphics: paint.net
SFX: bxfr & sfxr
Sound Editor: Audacity
Music Kit: Bosca ceoil

THE GOOD
Graphics: I really liked my simple graphics style, which was actually based off of another more complicated pixel guy that I made previously. All of the characters have the same animations, just with different colors and body parts. The houses themselves were good, but I just didn’t have time to implement more. There was only one type of growing house. I got to use paint.net which has a “glow” effect, which was great for Fire and Fireballs. I added a fireplace in this LD, and I was surprised on how well it was. Of course, it was bad, but not as bad as my normal fire animations. I also added a lot of UI using Unity’s powerful UI tool, and particles, which worked wonderfully.
Sound: The sound effects I chose really fit, but I just wish I had time for more. I did make a footstep sound, but It is never used. Of course I used Bosca Ceoil for music, but that was the first time I ever used it. I made that music in ten minutes, and people said it was ok.
Idea: Even for this bad I guess theme, Inspiration struck, and I got the idea of being a monster that terrorized a village. I saw another well polished and fun game for the jam I think with a similar Idea, but they achieved it with a top down targeting based game. I wasted almost 2 hours thinking before making anything but a main menu. All in all, about 10 hours were wasted, but more on that later.
THE BAD
Time Management: I was really bad with time this LD. I started work on a detective game, But it was just to story based. The story was that you are a detective investigating murders, and it turns out it was you at night. But it was just too story based and ambitious for me. As the hours slipped by and by, and progress slowed to a crawl, I knew I couldn’t do the Jam with school. I would be tired enough of Monday. So I changed it. I went for a kind of 3d fps or horror game where it would be like Doom, or wolfienstien 3d, the 1900 version. I don’t know why I gave that up. It was going so well. Maybe that was inspiration.
AI: I had horrible AI in my game. It looked good preliminarily, NPC villagers walk around, build houses after a while, and guards guard it. Problem was, NPC’s never stopped walking. They just zipped around, and even pushed the player back. It was endearing. Next, Guards did’t have the proper AI I wanted. I wanted Archers as well. Time though xD. The guards at first had horrible AI. No matter how fast the player was, the guard hit the player at least once in every confrontation(another reason I made Fireballs). They Paced from point to point (Now, if there are no points in the array, It does the same as the villagers and randomly walks around) and just attacked the player. The animation said their sword was in the air and they were facing backwards. Game didn’t care. -5 health for you player! This was fixed, but still. . . What really would have made the AI better, was if they paused. If, JUST FOR one moment., just stopped. Stopped. Then walked again. It would just be so much better. I think. I was never really good at Random AI scripting or State Machines. Time to learn eh? Also, Villagers literally built houses like, Wait One minute, then spawn a house. I had also wanted them to tend to crops. While there are crops outside of each level that grow, the player never sees them.

THE UGLY

Thanks for reading,
Flygamer101

out.

My computer auto updated as I was playing a game the other day when I wasn’t paying attention. Didn’t catch the band of the game and haven’t found it since.

You were a little boy alone in a house with your teddy, at one pint had to take some pills and open a safe ( won’t say too much to spoil it). Had a Lone Survivor look and feel to it, really atmospheric.

Not sure if I downloaded or played on the web but currently have 40-50 LD games just called Ld33a-z/aa-az

Anyone know what I am talking about?

Hi all! We are “Blooming Buds” and this has been our first Ludum Dare as a team. We are proud of having finished the game (15 minutes before the deadline) and quite satisfied with the result.

Three days of hard work but having lots of fun. Here is the result, Wild Flirting. Hope you like it!

Also, we drop here a timelapse of the development (showing how crazy these 72 hours have been). Enjoy it!

Well it’s been quite fun but also pretty stressful since this LD was my first. To give some context for my post mortem before reading it, you can play my entry here: Monster Companion (sorry the title is horrible lol).

I’ll start by saying that I didn’t really know what to expect. I’ve made one social Flash game way back in the day and that was it (and that was with two others). Every other game project I’ve tried to start has been failed attempts upon failed attempts. I figured LD was a good way for me to break out of that habit and finally finish something. However I wasn’t even remotely prepared for how difficult it would be.

As soon as the theme was announced it was 9 PM and I didn’t have a clue what game I wanted to make. And here came my first big mistake. I knew that I would run out of time if I tried to create most things from scratch so I decided to use some third-party assets for Unity. There was this one 2D shadow asset I bought a while ago that I wanted to try so I started fooling around with it. Eventually through trying to learn how to use the asset and getting it to work the way I wanted I had some basic prototype of a lantern that would sway with physics and emit a light that would cast shadows. Cool tech demo, but not a game. It took me all night to do that and it was super late that I don’t even remember, maybe 3 AM or 4 AM and I didn’t have a single thing for my real LD entry. I thought maybe I could make it a game where you (as a monster) have to blow out the lanterns to scare humans but ultimately I just didn’t see any real game materializing out of this tech demo.

The next day I basically gave up on LD since I knew I wouldn’t have enough time so I just took it easy. However there was one game idea that I wanted to try to remake that I never had a chance to, and even though it didn’t match the theme I thought “why not”. I wanted to make a game similar to or even just a remake of Tether which was made in a game jam. If you haven’t played this game with other people you MUST! It’s absolutely a blast.

My inspiration!

As I began creating the fundamentals of the game such as top view 2d physics-based movement with chains connecting two characters I came up with a different idea which was to take some of the fun concepts from Tether but to make it into a single-player game. It was at this point that I thought that perhaps I could actually make a LD game after all. Since I was doing this solo and I’m a complete programmer, I used some sprites and sound fx from assets I’ve bought in the past, and used a song from PremiumBeat.com as a placeholder (which sadly stayed in the game… I should have removed it before entering). Long story short I just started programming this game out and came up with mechanics as I went. It was a horribly thought-out game and aside from the main concept of a pet that would drag you in whichever way it wanted (which may work with you or against you) I didn’t really know what else I was doing. I wanted the pet to have some sort of a personality where if you treated it well it would follow you and if you treated it badly it would hate you and work against you. However since the theme was You are a Monster, I decided to make the pet lend itself towards being used and abused and that’s where the idea of using it as a shield came about. I was able to program one pet that had some sort of decent AI. If it’s happiness level was high it would follow you, if it was moderately happy it would be a dead weight, and if it was very unhappy it would go in the direction opposite of you (fight against you). I also programmed in a “random” state where it would just move in a random direction but it didn’t work well in the game so I took it out. I had such a programming focus that night that I stayed up until 5 AM and finally went to bed after I had a pretty decent prototype of the game… although it wasn’t fun or worth finishing.

The next day I was out most of the day but I was able to finish up some stuff which is where I ended up realizing that the game was not that interesting until I added multiple pets along with enhancements to the AI which allowed the pets to go for nearby food. If they were extremely desperate for food their “food targeting radius” would be much higher. Then the game suddenly became a bit more fun, but there were balance/bug issues that I never ended up fixing (ex. if all the pets are fighting against you they can pull you outside the camera, I’m pretty sure sometimes the AI glitches and they just start pulling you in a random way, etc).

On Monday I went to work and had some last minute things to do before submission. I had to actually make a UI, main screen, create a main game song, high score saving, and fix a few critical bugs. I basically threw together the most disgusting UI and main screen of life which showed your high score but was able to barely get it in before the deadline. I also spent a good hour or two trying to make my own song for the game to replace the placeholder but I realized I don’t have a clue how to make music which I will probably have to learn for next time!

By the end of the submission I was simply exhausted. The Monday I went to work was brutal and I would definitely not do that again. Overall I’ve learned a lot from this and can’t wait for next LD!

TL;DR

Things that went wrong

1. Trying to come up with a game idea based on a cool graphical feature instead of coming up with a game idea based on a good game mechanic
2. Lack of sleep
3. No preparation before the event

Things that went right

1. I think the game concept and mechanics were pretty decent. It still needs a lot of polish to be fun though.
2. I finally finished a game project!

Things to do for next time

1. Try to prepare a few possible game ideas based on the themes in the final round
2. Possibly prepare some basic framework code that I can reuse in LD (UI code, player input code, high score code, etc)
3. Sleep and eat well no matter the deadline – it’s not worth it
4. Instead of rushing to the keyboard to program the game, plan plan plan the game first!

If you actually read all of this, thank you! I’m looking forward to the next LD where hopefully I can improve on everything I did wrong. It’s also super fun playing everyone else’s entries (and seeing how bad mine is in comparison lol). Cheers!

I made a post-compo version of my game. Here’s a list of changes:

• Better balancing
• The satisfaction meter drops faster
• A new chaining system. If you hit your husband multiple times in row, your chain counter will increase. A higher chain value will make your husband drop more and better coins.
• Game Jolt API features: leaderboards and trophies
• New title and story screens

Play the new version on Game Jolt

Play the original compo version here

On Tripadvisor they talk about us:

“The Force is strong with this hellburger.” Darth Vader.

“Well, better than spinach!” Popeye.

“Fight Club was the beginning, now it’s moved out of the kitchen, it’s called Project Hellburger.” Tyler Durden.

“Never had a better hamburger. Wait, I should ask them if they can make a few with kryptonite…” Lex Luthor.

“So I killed the guy for no reason! Ahahah! I really did! He was my best friend though and I love him. Oh, right, and then I ate an hellburger.” Deadpool.

If you want to try our game, Good as Hell!, and learn the Hellburger special recipe click here. And don’t forget to rate and comment!

I discovered so-called “incremental games” like CandyBox recently and was amazed by the amount of intrigue and interest such a simple mechanic could inspire. I wanted to explore the stripped-down style of those incremental games while tackling a simulation game. I wanted to answer the question – what does it take to make a text-heavy point-and-click simulation-style game fun? I think the answer I found was – more than I have here. I realized that half-way through but at that point it was too late to turn back.

Candy Box game

Simulation games always make me think of Sid Meier’s description of games as “a series of interesting choices” – interesting being the key word. Every choice should matter. As I was trying to balance the game, I found that if I gave players too much money to start with, their choice of buying a cage or table wasn’t high-stakes enough to matter. Seems obvious in retrospect, of course, but this simple fact really sank in for me during the making of this game. A player’s choices must matter. And any choices that don’t matter should be removed.

I kept referring back to Oregon Trail, the 1990 PC game about trying to survive on the trail. I spent hours of my childhood totally immersed in Oregon Trail, and it was just a series of text choices and simple animation clips. The difference, though, is that it told a compelling story – you and your friends or family try to complete an arduous journey across a dangerous, rugged country, with many of your crew dying along the way. I think it was the built-in drama of such a story that kept us all hooked and clicking despite its simple graphics and gameplay.

Oregon Trail

I also re-learned how much the “little” things like sound effects and subtle animations bring a game to life. At this moment, MonsterLab is more like a playing a spreadsheet than playing a “real” game. 

So, what would I do differently in MonsterLab 2? First, don’t release it with bugs. 😉  Second, add sound and animations. Third, tune the existing mechanic – make all choices matter, and figure out how to balance the cost and timing of everything. And fourth, focus more on the storytelling and increase the volume of content available (different types of monsters, different experiments to run) and maybe a new mechanic where you have to actually chase or hunt the monster instead of just purchasing it. If only the weekend could have lasted forever, I might have ended up with a decent game. There’s always the next Ludum Dare, though.

Tags: 2D, incremental, LD33, postmortem, simulation, text, unity, web

We did the detective game called “Jack vs werewolf.” The game has only one monster – but even he is hiding in human form. When the monster takes a bestial form, it kills less than one second (seriously – this is a monster, not a sheep :) )

Players often write: “I do not know what to do!” Alas, the game requires training, which is not out of time.
So, I will explain the werewolf.

A werewolf can not speak, it does not have weapons. He will not attack when the room is a lot of people (if not famine). After the attack, he takes the victim’s face and tries to get away as possible from the scene of the crime. He goes to the victim before the attack. Sometimes the monster scares people – this way you can also calculate the monster. You can try to stay with the suspect alone in the room – but it is dangerous. You can follow the silent type. You can even shoot all suspicious persons. You can come up with their own way.

How clean do you conduct an investigation – it depends only on you.

Good luck, monster investigator!

We know how hard it is to be a Mom these days.
You have to take care of the precious egg and keep it warm.
Oh, and also save it from imminent danger.

Dear Momster, find a safe place to put the egg before the missile makes a bonfire of you.
Die for your baby and rise again as a stronger Monster of a Mom.

This was our first LD, and it was awesome.

Try our game here:Momster!!!

So Ludum Dare 33 is over and somehow I managed to survive! Yay! “This is NOT a scam!” was an interesting game to develop because after I thought of the game’s concept, I believed coding it would be a breeze. (I was wrong) Anyway, that’s enough of an introduction, onto the Post Mortem!

The Good Stuff:

Dialogue: I think the end result of the game’s dialogue is actually quite good. When I began writing dialogue to test the conversation system it was wasn’t really good, but it wasn’t really bad either! The original idea for the first character James Johnson was that his computer got infected with Ransomware that accused him of accessing illegal pornography. The original dialogue actually suggested that he DID access the illegal pornography, and so I changed it to be more vague. By the way, he didn’t access any illegal pornography!

I decided to make the game a bit more safe for work!

Graphics: As you can see, the final game looks almost identical to the original concept art I created at the end of the first day. In fact, the whole game is rendered by Unity’s built in GUI which was interesting because I’ve never built a game using just the GUI system in Unity. There are only a few differences between the concept art and the final game. For example, the addition of the “Skip!” button and the font change. I originally wanted the use Window’s default font “System”. Unfortunately, Unity can’t render bitmap fonts, so I had to use a different font called “ModeSeven” which I really liked. My friend XtremePrime (who also helped playtest the game) suggested the font and so I decided to use that instead. One final thing I wanted to add (but it was too late to add) was a custom cursor. Something really pixelated. Here’s the one I decided to test out in Unity, but it just looked weird, so I decided to let Unity use the default system cursor. RIP Custom Cursor.

F.

The Okay Stuff:

Immersion: One thing I tried to do from the start is to make the game immersive, and I think I did a pretty okay job of this. I think the Virtual Machine bootup sequence really helped with this regard, and it kind of reminds me of how the hacker game Uplink handles this; by presenting the game as an actual program on your desktop. Of course, there’s a few things I didn’t like that I would have changed. One thing is that I would have allowed the player to choose their name when they start the game, and I also might have changed the game’s setting to be more modern. Although, I like the late 90’s feel of the operating system.

The bootup sequence for Unity VM

The Bad Stuff:

The game’s length and time constraints: The game is too short and each character hasn’t got enough dialogue. And this is going to tie into something I mention later on. My original idea was to have 10 characters in the game with much larger dialogue trees. I might have actually done this if I started the game’s development waaaay earlier. Like, as soon as the Theme was announced. Unfortunately, I didn’t have anything prepared so I spent the next day whining that I hated the theme and considering whether or not to even join this LD. I finally got the idea for the game and so I started concepting it. It wasn’t until Sunday morning (like 1 am) when I actually wrote any code for the game. I was so stuck for time, I even had to ask my friend XtremePrime to test the dialogue trees while I implemented the intro and ending of the game. Luckily, I finished about an hour before submission hour, so I was able to take part. I wouldn’t have been able to finish the game and playtest. So, a big thanks to Xtreme for helping get this game finished on time! 😀

The source code: The game’s source code is pretty neat, up until this commit on GitHub. This is when spaghetti code and global variables started to be typed into my code, and I desperately tried to get the game done! I mentioned earlier that each character had very little dialogue, and this was to make it easier to hard-code the dialogue into the game. I could have avoided all of the spaghetti code issues and perhaps even have enough time to clean up my code and add another character if I used an XML parser. Too bad I don’t know XML or how to write parsers. 😛

Oh god no, not static!

Spaghetti Code. Never again.

In conclusion: I’m really happy with how the game turned out, from my utter disappointment with the “You are the Monster” theme to going to bed at 4 a.m. two nights in a row. I’m really happy to have taken part in this LD, and I hope everyone has too! I think I’ve gone on long enough with this post, so I’m going to end it here

Play Here!

Hey, what’s up? Only three votes for our game at this point? No fair!

Go on, try it out! Westboro Binge needs you! Let’s make the world righteous!

I know, it requires downloading and running. Lots of trouble. But not everything can be web…

PLAY “Hammer Destroyer” 

This time I’ve been using Toggl to track what I’m doing during the whole development period.

This timeline could help me to review the time distribution and efficiency.

This LD I’ve spent less time at the starting brainstorming process. But it costs me several more hours working on things that not show up in the final build.

Again the last day is the most efficient day, I even added an AI and a scene in the last 2 hours.

I should make better plan and allocate the time in a better way next time.

Date Duration Action
08-22 2:09:39 Brainstorming
08-22 1:57:50 Prepare assets
08-22 1:29:22 Prepare
08-22 1:20:43 make scene
08-22 0:39:55 work on base mechanism
08-22 0:16:01 make a bunch of building models
08-22 2:23:28 make a bunch of building models
08-22 0:17:11 Prepare ground material
08-22 1:06:54 debris
08-22 0:38:45 runtime gen building
08-22 1:16:49 runtime gen building

08-23 0:38:25 runtime gen building
08-23 0:49:46 runtime gen building
08-23 0:41:22 loading screen
08-23 0:15:36 loading screen
08-23 0:37:25 HUD UI layout
08-23 0:45:54 player Data model
08-23 0:07:51 choosing BGM
08-23 0:24:49 Building hp
08-23 1:40:06 player control: Locomotion
08-23 0:08:20 player control: camera follow
08-23 0:30:45 fix: gen building
08-23 0:42:58 player control: turn around with mouse
08-23 0:50:19 fix: tails jittering
08-23 0:56:51 player control: punch
08-23 0:21:51 gen building collider
08-23 1:47:29 IK swing
08-23 0:43:20 IK swing : collider model

08-24 0:45:27 fix transparent rendering
08-24 0:24:43 fix idle action
08-24 1:48:08 IK swing: weight
08-24 1:09:21 collision stops player moving : collider on mesh
08-24 1:12:05 collision stops player moving
08-24 0:07:20 make arm bigger
08-24 0:29:04 make arm bigger when punch
08-24 0:00:06 adjust punch dir with cam
08-24 0:59:38 adjust punch dir with cam
08-24 0:40:39 attack building
08-24 0:29:01 attack building
08-24 1:40:53 prepare sfx & vfx
08-24 0:18:24 redo ik-collider
08-24 0:43:13 sabotage buildings
08-24 1:27:43 SettleUI
08-24 0:36:53 test basic play
08-24 0:16:17 fix footstep sound

08-25 0:00:25 fix hand rotation
08-25 0:34:09 add combo
08-25 1:07:04 fix hand rotation
08-25 0:15:30 fix hand rotation
08-25 0:26:14 road
08-25 0:41:07 doodad
08-25 0:43:53 title
08-25 0:57:25 fix hammer render
08-25 0:53:33 fix GS_Watcher
08-25 0:26:20 change IK mode rotation
08-25 2:12:09 helicopter

Ok, the boss is a little hard… but NOTHING IS IMPOSSIBLE!!! JUST DOO IT!!!

HERE!

Play it here

Or continue reading to uncover important life lessons.

Overview

This time around I tried something else. Historically my plan has always been to come up with an ambitious programming heavy design and get it done (with varying results). This time the theme didn’t inspire any kind of grand design so I decided to take a walk on the other side.

The very opposite side, where few programmers dare to venture..

Graphics first!

24 hours later I had created a single asset, the mech.

To do this I had to relearn my rusty Blender skills (they’d been rusting ever since last LD) and apply a hefty amount of new found graphic artist abilities on top of that:

Modelling, rigging, inverse kinematics, animating, texturing, the list goes on (no it doesn’t, but that sound more dramatic!).

The rest (not sleep, unfortunately [as you’ll soon see {foreshadowing!}])

With only one day left for programming (and modelling other assets) there was no chance to both reach for the moon and cook up a delicious pie from the sky masterpiece.

I settled for a simple design about the player, piloting a mech, attacking a non-military target thus triggering nearby militia to action.

I did come up with some further backstory in the darkest hours of my plight development process, but implementing any of that fell soundly beyond achievable limits, as did sound to that matter.

Impact (on body and soul)

Monday I got sick. I would wager a very pretty penny that this was caused by not sleeping enough thus disturbing the immune defense system from doing its job. This is the first time for me, so maybe I’m just becoming older. Nonetheless, next time there will be more naps.

The future

The cut features will be implemented in a Post Jam version. I have one additional learning opportunity to pursue, but the less I say about that the better. It might not work out.

Lessons learned

• Sleep a bit more
• Learning is great, but learning the tools sould be done before the jam

The next LD will be about over ambitious ideas again. It’s been a while…

Tags: animated gif, gif, LD #33, post-mortem, postmortem

Play & rate BIG BAD WOLF

Tonight, I won’t write much, I just want to post a bunch of video/gif to give you a little taste of what it’s about

I’ll try to write a postmortem tomorrow and work on an enhanced version of the game

Tags: gif

I’ve noticed that a lot of people rate games without leaving any comment. I don’t remember it being this much the case for previous game jams.

I think we can all agree that for the most part, Ludum Dare and other game jams are about learning from our mistakes and improving our gamedev skills. This is not a popularity contest (well, not at first anyway). If nobody leaves any comment, however harsh they may be, nobody will improve.

So, for the sake of self-improvement, please leave your opinions when you rate a game, even if there is not much positive things to say, constructive criticism is always helpful. 😉

Reaction so far to Beast Of The Woods has been very positive.  Even though it’s a pretty short game, all things considering, I was wondering if anyone thinks I should try to develop it just a bit more, as a post-compo version.  In particular, I think it could use some improved graphics, but even if I keep the graphics the same, I think it would be fun to make some kind of multiplayer version (one player is the beast, while the other is the human).  Anyone who’s played it, do you think I should go for it?

Patient Zero

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=25437

The game puts you in role of patient zero and your job is to infect all people on the map. At first you go sneaky picking victims one by one in dark alleys. Once your horde is big enough you go “frenzy” to outrun military post and spread your infection further.

Why should I play it: gameplay and mood

Ludzilla

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=14065

The game has the best idea for audio ever! Titular character is so awesome that it should become a logo of this edition.

Why should I play it: titular character and audio

The water ghost

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=47536

When I saw screenshots for this game I thought it’s going to be bad… and I was so mistaken. It short fun (lasting about 1-2 minutes) but comments made by children are hilarious! Especially refferences to “Tommy” and how “this whole trip was his idea”.

Why should I play it: humour

The Devil’s Daughter

This game is well made all around but the art is really what gets your attention. Pallette limited to black, white and orange. Style? Something between internet comics and Biding of Issac? See it yourself.

Why should I play it: art style

Humane Harvest

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=40341

Some games are good, some games are bad. But some games are wtf. So in this game you kidnap humans, put them in ground make them grow and once they are ripe you cut off their hands. Yey! If games you made where a form of Rorschach test a creator of this one should be in asylum by now.

Why should I play it: wtf of this edition

Who’s the Monster!

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=57628

In this game you ought to find out shapeshifter using given clues. Nice change from endless killings.

Why should I play it: genre

Can I Haz Monsters?

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=20557

This game is a mixture of platformer and puzzle game. What is amazing however is that solving puzzles involves talking to monsters => and by talking I mean learning their language word by word. Learning process runs so smoothly and is so nicely implamented. It’s so natural, not being forceful at any point. The desings for monster themselves arent bad either.

Why should I play it: learning to speak “monsterish”

Barrel Roll Ultra!

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=27438

There are many games that puts you in seat of the bad guy from classic game. This one is just well made.

Why should I play it: overall quality

Moon Base Shootout

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=25813

If you play action-puzzle game it usually goes like this: shooting, puzzles, shooting, puzzles. This game is a mixture of both and not by switch between these two genres, it’s a mixture all the time.

The action of the game takes place in space. Added twist to the game: if you break the window the space vaccum will suck everything until something blocks the hole. Everything meaning your enemies(good!) and sometimes YOU(not good). A simple idea of sucking things out allows you to use enviroment to your advantage which is great! No more shoot them till they die. Unless you want to solve it that way which is ok as well. Sucking allows you to move rocks blocking the pathway in boulder rash style giving a games a puzzles to solve.  Most of the time however you will be forced to solve puzzles under fire. So break the glass and pray you won’t be sucked out!

Art is fascinating, it’s tiny eye-candy.

Why should I play it: sucking mechanics, tiny art

————————————–

And if you still have some time you can check my entry as well:

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=34334

Hi. Me and Lokiman are playing your games right now on Twitch. Feel free to join us and send us your game.

OK, now that I’ve uploaded Windows, OS/X, Linux, HTML5 and Unity-web builds, you have no excuses for not playing this game. Go, be a teenager, experience a neverending nightmare, feel like a monster.

Enjoy Mornings of a Seventeen Year-Old Girl.

Hi everyone, here is our game for LD33 :

PLAY AND RATE “MOBS, INC.”

“Mobs, Inc. is hiring new employees ! The dungeon the company has been taking care of, has become so attractive that too many adventurers are visiting it every day.
Become one these new employee hired to maintain a constant challenge for these adventurers. If you’re doing your job quite well, the CEO might give you a promotion and enhance you with some new powerful skills.”

View post on imgur.com

———– MOBS, INC — INSTRUCTIONS ———–

Every monster in the company has to follow these three rules :

1. Kill adventurers with quick strikes (Left-Click to attack).
2. Kill more adventurers with your specials skills once you are promoted (Press Q / W / E ).
3. Do not upset the CEO, it will be fine. If you disappoint him 4 times, you will be fired. (and have to start a new game)

View post on imgur.com

Pietro Ferrantelli – Game Design & Programmation
Theophile Loaec (thomaslean) – Character Art & Sound Design
Augustin Grassien (anabir) – Environnment Art, VFx & UI.
OrickMcFly – Environnement Art, VFx & UI

PLAY AND RATE “MOBS, INC.”

YES! When we submitted, we were on a rush. We couldn’t make a web build of Psychoshark, we just thought about submitting, deadline was almost over…

But we did it, just today. So come on and try our game if you want, walk on a city and eat humans without a motive! No need to download! http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=56960

For the moment, we had to upload the game to AnaGF’s web, but we are looking into uploading it on itch.io or similar.

Thanks for your attention 😀

This year for ludum dare I branched into “real” games, or rather just not twine games. I stupidly looked at a predicted themes list and thought a world in the skies was going to be the theme, I had a great idea for a stealth game where you steal planets. Anyway, it was cool but that wasn’t the theme. You are the monster seemed to me at first glance a much better theme for an introspective twine story but I stuck to my guns and while listening to R Kelly I mocked up the Goose animation at 3am then slept on the idea. I had a solid idea for the game when I woke up (2 hours late) I set about getting the geese into the game. Day 1 consisted of getting the geese to honk and the sky looking cool, as well as setting up  buttons and some basic stuff. Day two, I made the start and ending screens and sorted out the code behind the game. It may not seem like much but it was surprisingly time consuming!

Issues: Stencyl was very unstable, it crashed numerous times and gave memory errors often, but luckily it saved lots so it was more of an annoyance than anything.

Stencyl had a few things like not being able to copy whole animations that led me to spending a lot of time reimporting frames etc.

What went well: I think the game works well, there are no massive bugs and I think it looks polished.

The music and sound effects which I made (especially the honking, which is very lifelike thanks to my throat)

The goose animation, it is very satisfying:

And apparently the humour of the messages, I have had some good comments.

What didn’t go so well: I would have liked to add some more messages, sounds and general content but mainly I would have liked to tier the level system more and add mroe challenges, as at the minute apart from the moving buttons after level five the speed just increases incrementally.

Overall: a big success, I look forward to further comments and the final scores!

PLAY THE GAME

TIMELAPSES:

When humanity colonized the planet Falco IV, they hunted the death falcon to near extinction. Fortunately, laws have been enacted – protecting the death falcon and forbidding anyone from interfering with its natural feeding behaviours.

Check it Out!

I find it quite interesting to read others post-mortem, so why not doing mine!

My game is Sweet Mom, a game with quite dark humor, more based on story telling than Gameplay. There will be spoilers in this post-mortem (saying there is dark humor is already a spoiler), so if you had nothing to do in the next 10 minutes and like to do inhuman things, go play it before reading.

Okay, now that everybody has been warned, here come the spoilers!

This game is all about how you, a mom of 4 kids, will manage to get rid of them with the help of various hazards in the forest. There are supposed to be 4 ways to kill them, one for each (but they are not namely assigned, almost each of the ways work for all children), usable once only.

The idea

Happily, I didn’t spend too much time looking for an idea, since I already had some vague concepts before, and I chose one that amused me the most and that I could adapt well to the subject. In the end, reading the comments, I think it was perfect for the theme

However, now that I knew I wanted to make a mom kill her offspring in the woods, there were several choices about how. First, I thought of some procedural personality for the children, like “this one loves to play hide and seek”, “this one lets some rocks behind him (so you could grab them and send him on a wrong path)”, but it seemed a little complicated to begin with, so I just thought of one random death, like being eaten by a wolf, and chose to begin with that, the core concept of the game: having a child die.

I made some very quick drawings (and realized at this occasion that a quick drawing from me can be much better than something I try to do really well, since I can’t draw), and very fast I had this first child I could drag around, that the wolf could eat. I added then a newborn that can’t walk (you have to carry him around), and when I could just put it on the ground for the wolf to eat while I run away, I began to be happy.

The game

I’m lucky I didn’t get into many technical issues (well I kept it quite simple on the technical side anyway), so I could go on very fast. I added the house, the dialogs, the dad, in order to have one complete game cycle:

• Talking to the dad so he gives us the name of the next kid to die;
• Going out with the kid;
• Kill the kid;
• Going inside to talk with the dad about that new dead child.

I think it’s very important to have early on something “complete”, on which you can then add anything comes to you.

From that, I spawned new kids, and began to think about new challenges. I finally gave up those specific challenges, because I wanted the player to encounter them in the order he would choose (and it was easier). I also thought about giving a lot of ways to die, so you could replay the game and find new ways, but ultimately I don’t think the game is attracting enough on the gameplay side to justify more deaths, given that some of the current ones are already tricky to find.

On saturday evening I had the game running, finishable, with three children and four ways to die.

The polish

This way, it let me the whole sunday to polish the game in any way I thought about. I began with some code polish the morning, and almost mandatory elements like a Pause menu with the controls. I then made the music with Cubase; not totally satisfied of it, although it brings that silly tone I wanted, but I was scared not to have enough time.

I made the voice-over with Audacity, trying 2 to 5 times for each sound until I was globally satisfied of it. Each character would have a generic sentence or noise, and then I also wanted to give some feedbacks on the monsters, so I added a child laugh when seeeing the butterfly, a monster noise for the “spider monster” with a death scream going along with the death animation (much fun doing this), a howling for the wolf (had to go check on Youtube what it sounds like exactly, after some disastrous attempts).

I also added something that in my opinion is primordial : that bright big reward screen with wings and party particles when you kill a child, with a satisfying little music.

Finally, after a little playtest, I added some tips and the current mission in the pause menu, fixed some other errors, and here it was, nearly 7 hours before the end.

Well, this was more like a story of my life than a post-mortem, I guess…

What went well:

• Sizable scope to allow me to have a complete experience, easily tweakable (I could add traps or children independantly).
• I kept the graphics, the particles and everything very simple, at my level, and it’s far better than if I tried too hard.
• I used a very strong structure with pawns and pawncontrollers, all of my elements inheriting from an InteractibleObject class, making me save a lot of time (for example the door and the butterfly use the same collision methods).
• Doing the voice over seemed like a mountain at first, but finally it was fun to do, didn’t take too much time, and add a real value to the game imo.

What went not so well:

• It’s my first Ludum Dare, I didn’t really know how to manage my time, if I would be able to finish something or what, and finally I could have been a bit more ambitious. However when I finished, I was quite exhausted (despite a good 8 hours of sleep) and didn’t have the courage to add new elements now that it was done.
• I could have given more advices to find all the ways to kill the children. One of them, on the bridge, could remain undiscovered for ages if the player just doesn’t walk on this side of the bridge. With the butterly, it’s hard to think about what you can do with him, but in addition to that you can feed the butterfly to the monster, and then there is no way anymore to kill your children (well, except launching them from the bridge in the water, but it was not supposed to be possible).
• I was quite stressed out when making the music, affraid it would suck or that I wouldn’t be inspired, and so when I did something that wasn’t too bad, I didn’t take the time to polish it more.
• Same with the dialogs: I wrote the dialogs very fast, and didn’t rewrite them a lot after that. In the hours following submission, of course, I had a lot of better lines coming to me…

I also made a little timelapse, if anyong is interested (I find it long and boring, but who knows, maybe you will enjoy!):

I should train on post-mortem . I feel like I have done what I was supposed to do at all.

Well, that’s too bad 😀

If you liked the game and would like to see other games from me, I have made a FB page for my personnal game dev activity. Right now there is only one other, in French only, but others will come soon! It’s here: https://www.facebook.com/3.50games

And by the way I usually test all the games of people letting me comments, so if you try mine, don’t forget to leave a word!

This was the first time I have competed in the ludum dare, and it went pretty smoothly! I finished my game on time, and now you get to play 100 games!

—
check out my game here

This was, I think, my fifth completed Ludum Dare. It was also by far my favourite.

We started off the weekend staring blankly at the theme. It was similar, not only to a previous Ludum Dare theme, but also to a game jam we had done on another website. It was uninspiring, and it took us a good three hours to come up with a concept. We initially had wanted to do something that involved a unique or novel game mechanic as the focal point, but quickly came to realize that everything we were coming up with had also been considered by numerous other developers.

For that reason, we took a slightly different approach. We made a strong effort to create an experience that was complete and professional. We wanted to develop a game that players might look at and think, “Wow, there’s no way this was made in under 72 hours!”.

I think we succeeded.

Now that a few days have passed, we’ve been given an awesome opportunity to receive bountiful feedback from strangers and friends alike. The commonality between each response is how amazed they are at the overall quality of the game. Blood Moon isn’t a game that will shock people with a crazy mechanic or twist, but I think that it is a game that will make people strongly consider playing it all the way through, regardless of the difficulty.

There are definitely some flaws with the game. The primary one that I think has hindered people’s enjoyment is a slightly uneven difficulty curve. There are a couple of saves that are much harder than anything else in the game. That sucks, because I think the game is absolutely worth playing to the end. But I can’t blame people for getting frustrated.

All the same, having the opportunity to watch streamers and friends play the game through, and to even watch some people enjoy it enough to speed run it, was an experience that I’ve wanted for a very long time. This is definitely a fulfillment of dreams in that regard.

Overall, I think that this Ludum Dare has taught me some very valuable lessons. Not necessarily in terms of technical programming, but in terms of user experience and difficulty. Our ongoing project outside of the Dare is another difficult game, and I want to make sure that it’s both fair and fun to fight through. Participating this past weekend will help me accomplish that.

If you’re interested in checking out Blood Moon, we’d love it if you left us feedback as well! Good or bad, we always appreciate your honest opinions. They make us better developers, and we really do care.

You can find Blood Moon at the following link:

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=3595

Tags: blood, moon

Title explains it all; I’m looking for games to play (yes, even broken ones like mine) and rate. Just leave your game in the comments section to this post and I’ll be sure to play it. I’ll keep checking the comments until it becomes outdated (after which I’ll comment on it saying that). Also, feel free to play my broken-ass game and give it all the horrible reviews you want right here:

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=43866

Become a true monster! Test your stealthiness, audacity, and pure power in Troopers’ Starship! This was Steph and I’s first game jam! We had a blast and look forward to many more. Let us know what areas we can improve on for the future! Thank you!

-Team Round Fork

Tricks and Treats its our first Ludum Dare game,  made by the students from the brazilian tecnology and image school Coruja.

The game consists in founding candies and making tricks in a old woman’s house.

Check out the game and say what you think about it.

Hope you enjoy =)

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=56606

Staff:
Maikon Mattiello
Pablo Rigon
Gabriel Tramontina
Leonardo Job
Luiza Aiolfi
Anderson Pagani
Douglas Dias

And so the Game Jam has finished, I’ve had a chance to relax and started looking through all the many other games have been made. The done thing is to now post a retrospective on the competition; spoilers it was a blast 😀

First the good:

Theme(s) I enjoy the excitement of waiting for the final theme to be announced and often have several game ideas bouncing around for many of the suggested themes. During this Ludum Dare there were dozens of themes that I liked the sound of so I did the sensible thing and combined them together into a project I was enthusiastic about. 😛 The final theme ‘You are the monster’ was simply the icing on the cake as I am fond of the likes of the Zerg or Tyrannids in strategy games. Being alien monsters is just fun 😀

Clear planning of code structure I have learnt so much since first starting off coding in Dark Basics years and years ago. This project was a chance for me to test my skills and show to myself that I can create something as challenging as the engine structure to a whole RTS. Overjoyed at managing to achieve this level of smoothly operating complex system. I had a mental plan of action and was able to churn out nearly all of it in a short space of time.

Achieving new programming challenges So many things in this game are novel for me; first Javascript game that is hosted and embedded into another webpage, team based effort with multiple people’s art/music assets, sprites with rotation, heck I don’t think I had ever used premade images in a Javascript project before 😀 Onwards and upwards!

Delivering a team based project This was a big one for me as I haven’t had much experience doing an interdisciplinary project before. Having to coordinate artists and musicians was a new challenge (even if they were my siblings :P) and it was more complex than working solo. The finished project is much richer for their efforts though and I feel everyone delivered some stellar work.

The not-so-good:

The genre of RTS is hard It was a real struggle to include everything I wanted into the interface of the game and I was always realizing I was missing something integral to making the game playable D: The game mechanics were all in pretty early but there are so many feedback systems needed to make the gameplay understandable. I feel like I could have done a better job on making the system transparent and fell into the trap of assuming players would be familiar with the control system I was going for -_-‘ Next time I’ll aim for a more intuitive experience.

Using pure Javascript This one is two-fold, firstly the coding I have done most recently has been in Java so my Javascript is a little rusty. I had to spend a lot of time looking at online reference materials and checking old code snippets for how to do things. Whilst part of me enjoys making programs from scratch another part of me knows that I would be much more productive using a pre-made engine. I keep wanting to get into using Unity, I just want a little longer to figure out the fundamentals ok? 😛

Aiming for two competitions at once Initially I wanted to attempt both the solo competition and the game Jam, probably because I only had experience of the solo compo and wanted to achieve that feeling of managing accomplish everything myself again. Essentially I got greedy… What this meant is that I spent a lot of time working on assets which ended up completely replaced in the Jam version. It would have been better if I had been incorporating my collaborators work from the outset. It was much nicer to see the program with all the aesthetic choices added and made motivating myself to finish easier Using art/music assets had some unexpected pitfalls, I had to take into account that the assets took much more time to load than code source files. There were some issues with some browsers not being able to decode the sound files too.

Time management No surprises that this is here 😛 Two/Three days is an awfully short time span to complete anything. Whilst I feel I managed to implement most of the features I wanted so much content was left on the cutting room floor; levels, dialogue boxes, more terrain features, some AI. What we managed to produce was more of a minimum viable product albeit a very nice looking and sounding one. With some more time this code base could be so much more. Next time I will probably allocate more time to planning and implementing game scenarios. Also sleep, goodness I was so exhausted as soon into the contest as Sunday :/

In conclusion. It was such a rewarding effort to take part, for the swarm! 😀

(sorry for the wall of text here…)

I used the free version of GameMaker Studio to make my game, so I couldn’t export my game for Mac and Linux. I am not really happy about that because, i’d love my game to be played by the maximum players possible. I think I will be able to buy the pro version of it for the next LD

But for now, if you are frustrated because you can’t play my game, a made a little playthrough of it on YouTube so you can have an idea of what my game is! I hope you will like it even if you can’t put your hands on it.

Cheers from France!

~°д°~   ~°д°~   ~°д°~ 

Where do I even start with this?  How do I write a postmortem for a gag game?  Whelp, here we go.

I wanna start off by explaining the decision to make this monstrosity.  The theme this Ludum Dare was “You are the Monster,” which, while sharing a striking resemblance to LD25′s “You are the Villain,” is just thematically different enough that it squeezed its way into the running and ended up winning.

I dislike the theme for a number of reasons.  For one, let’s just resubmit my LD25 game and call it a day, right?  And secondly, the theme could really only be interpreted in one of two ways:  1) You are a mythological non-human creature that may or may not actually do bad things. or 2) You are a human who does bad things, a metaphorical monster.

Post-jam update time now!

Html version of our ld33 game Tentacles is ok now.

Not test enough but hope it works well.

Note: If you really want play it in your browser, make sure your device screen is big enough( at least 1280 X 720). Since the game is is designed for PC at first time, so if you want to have best game experience please try our windows version.

Our ludum dare: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=54824

Now working on more post-jam updates, if you want to get latest information about the game or just want to contact us, you can follow my twitter here:@crafteverywhere.

I wanted to see if I can make my game’s mechanics easier to follow by responding to the feedback I have gotten so far.

Changes done so far:

• Blood particles
• Lighter fog (+ using linear color space instead of gamma)
• UI Background
• Animation timing tweaks

Game feels already a lot better. I am not updating the jam version, ofcourse, that remains untouched for eternity. But I am planning on releasing the game on Oculus Share and I’ll do these fixes for that version. Our animator also wants to fix some animations she did in a rush, our hideous run needs some more love.

If you haven’t tried the game yet here it is.

This is my jam game, Grow.

You can play, if you want, here: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=21736

This was my first LD and I enjoyed it immensely. Here’s what the final web-based game (LD page here) looks on a phone.

What went wrong?

• Way, way too ambitious design (strategy game, fuzzy logic, trying a zillion new things).
• Time management. Getting lost in playtesting. Procrastination.
• Several stupid bugs that stopped my progress for tens of minutes at a time.
  • Next time I’ll try out the technologies beforehand. And I might (might!) use a little bit of Test Driven Development. During Ludum Dare, it feels like wasting time, but I think it’d save me more time later, with the bugs.
• Result:
  • No endgame.
  • Half the features are missing (most of them have code prepared for them, too, I just didn’t have the time to complete). In case I get to implement those, these are SPOILERS:
    • The game was supposed to feature other monster factions (the Mothmen, the Bigfoots).
    • The People faction was also supposed to have monsters (like Chuck Norris, Silvester Stallone, etc.)
    • Options to eat people (to regain HP) and build a lair didn’t make it.
    • Once in a while, a hatchling was supposed to grow up and act independently as a “captain” in your realm. You could have (incestious) sex with it to get more fertile.
    • People’s reaction to your wrongdoings were supposed to escalate (from SWAT teams to jet fighters).
  • Map added at last resort and only visible once at the beginning. In a strategy game! (Although, it’s more complicated. See my comment at the game’s page.)

What went well?

• Way, way too ambitious design.
  • Yes, I think it’s both good and bad. If I made a more straightforward game, I think it would bother me in retrospect that I didn’t try something I always wanted to.
• Skipping visuals and audio altogether.
  • I really, really suck at graphics. The result would be horrible anyway, and I’d spend at least half a day on it.
• Going procedural.
  • Much more replayability and fun (more agency for the player).
• Using the fuzzy logic AI for player’s choices.
  • Allowed the game to keep the gamebook/CYOA feel while still being a sandbox.
  • If you want to know how I did it, I wrote an article about it.
• Doing it in a web technology (Dart + HTML in my case).
  • I would never get as many votes without it.

Thanks for reading this far. Go play it.

Haven’t squinted at the sunset yet? Hoping to play something that goes at your pace and no faster? Why not try out my game, Out West? Feedback’s been pretty positive. Can’t hurt. Or can it…?

If you feel like casting fireballs, you should definitely try playing our game, Save The Chest.

For my fourth (well, third completed) Ludum Dare game, I think it’s worth doing a lil writeup about the dev process. The game I made is called V8000 A.D., and the simplest way to describe it is “my personal love letter to Mad Max, by way of Luftrausers-ish pixel art”. It looks something like this:

The game started, as many of my projects do, with a simple mockup. The first piece of art about this game looked as simple as this:

“But Dante, that looks so similar to the finished product!!” Yes, I’m aware. One of the first things that I picked out about the game was the visual ‘look’ of where it was gonna go, and everything else grew out of that. (Sidenote: that ‘Kartridge Family’ name is still in the game, as a splash screen.)

The cars in the game are all loosely modeled after real world vehicles. That first one I drew was that lil Subaru Forester lookin’ one above, and it was soon joined by a Subaru Brat lookalike, a VW Beetle lookalike, and the main car- a 2014 Dodge Challenger lookalike (with added above-hood supercharger to look meaner). Here’s a look at all 4:

Days 1 and 2 of the LD were mostly focused on getting the cars to behave as I’d like. Many ideas were trimmed at this point- I would have loved to have little AI cars that chased you, but time wasn’t on my side for that one. The game morphed from a resource-focused game to a more action-smashy one, which I don’t particularly mind. If I end up working more on the game, I’ll definitely move more in that direction.

Another thing I spent a lot of time in the first two days was getting the scrolling ‘correct’. The parallax was important to maintain a sense of scale and emptiness to the world- figuring out the math for that was a bit of a fun challenge, but I’m very happy with how things turned out. The entire game runs on the ‘clock’ of the sun setting, which allows for easy tinkering if I want to mess with the speed of the sun.

After an unexpected setback (for personal reasons) put me out of a reasonable timescale to finish for the compo, I decided to submit for the jam, which also bought me an extra 24 hours to work. Most of that time was spent on audio and polish- squashing a few bugs and designing an audio engine for the game. It’s still, in my opinion, the sloppiest part of the game- even though I’m very happy with the sounds I got (and the amazing music, composed by Cullen in about an hour during our late-night coding session on Sunday night).

The whole game ended up coming out much better than I expected. I pushed myself to generate a LOT of art assets for this game (every sprite was done by me, as well as backgrounds and titlescreen, etc). It’s one of my favorite jam games I’ve worked on, and I’m very excited for the next LD. Check it out here! Thanks for reading!

I just put here gif with few shots from my LD32 game. Click it if you want to play short story-driven game and explore mystery planet to find out why you are the monster.

PLAY

…is first and foremost an awkward process!

We got the idea in a team of 3 on sunday evening and the others decided to leave the jam out of frustration and too less time. I was all alone…

However I said to myself SCREW TIME! I will do it!
I quickly realized that analyzing the frequency of the human voice does not work reliable so I decided to only use volume.

I also lacked an idea in which I could use the assets I had up my sleeve.
I ended up using 2 beautiful resource packs from the Unity3d Assetstore and decided to generate the levels procedurally:

I already had some experience doing procedural stuff but those sprites where giving me a hard time fitting the layers perfectly together. But then again SCREW PERFECT this is a game jam – so I just went with it.

The Mimic chest was chosen as the protagonist of my game due to my love to dark souls. I wondered why those things always have legs. And then it struck me! It is HARD TO MOVE WITHOUT LEGS!

With my newly gained wisdom I designed a movement system for Mimics that does not require stupid legs but only a GOOD DEAL OF MOTIVATION!

After like 15 hours prototyping the actual gameplay and screaming in microphone like an idiot with everyone around me thinking I am nuts I realized: IT IS NOT FUN!

I needed something over the top, epic effects of destruction. And I MADE THEM!

It still was not fun. But then I said to myself: SCREW FUN! Making a game is hard work so why shouldn’t playing a game be hard work as well?

At least it is hard work that makes you laugh. And if one does not like my game he can be at least be sweaty happy that it is over. Leaving early is cheating by the way. It is forbidden on Ludum Dares you know?

So in the end I ended up with an unfun experimental game that looks too good to actually be funny. What do you think?

PLAY IT

Tags: LD33, post mortem postmortem, post-jam

By charliecarlo, simply one of the most polished entry of this Ludum Dare (so far), made in 40 hours non stop by one single dev.

Amazing.

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=15812

We uploaded Ollie’s Journey on Gamejolt to those of you who don’t feel like downloading the game to play! Here’s the link:

http://gamejolt.com/games/ollie-s-journey/88893

We hope you enjoy our game and leave some feedback so that we can improve it.

Ludum Dare 33 was an awesome event and after cooling down for a few days and playing some awesome enties, I’d like to give a postjam update.

Underbed Monster – Play now

About the Game

Underbed Monster is a stealth game, where you have to get to under peoples beds without being seen. You can also eat kittens, so the game can’t be that bad!
I actually think this is my second or third best entry in Ludum Dare so far. As opposed to my previous two attempts, it is actually a completed game and not only some broken prototype.

What went right?

• Working with the theme
  Before the jam, I hoped that the theme You are the monster wouldn’t make it because it felt too similar to LD25s You are the villain to me. But when it was announced I had to work with it and I think it turned out great. Next time I won’t have any prejudice against specific themes.
• Using Pixi.js
  While I had some difficulties with Pixi.js (I haven’t figured out sorting yet), it allowed me to iterate faster and to focus on content, less on rendering optimizations. The scene graph allowed me to create scene transitions, a simple effect that makes the game feel way more polished.
• Using Tiled
  When I had the initial concept written down I noticed that this game would require me to build quite some levels. Since I didn’t wanted to spend time on a level editor ingame, I started Tiled that I had installed but hadn’t used before just to check it out. As I’ve seen that it can export .csv-files I immediately started using it for constructing my levels. It is an awesome tool I’ll have in my toolbox for the next LDjam.
• Doing the dirty things
  This time, I forced myself to write the most dirty code possible without any clear structure or “If you do it know you can later…”. You won’t. Due to this the source code of the game is a mess (you can take a look), but it worked and allowed me to get things done faster.
  That also included that some of the “game logic” is actually included in the levels. Walls are not solid because they are walls but because they are on the wall layer. Same with balls/boxes and alike. This allowed me to pixel some new stuff, place it on the wall layer and et voilà, a solid object.

What went wrong?

• Not finishing my toolchain
  I’ve setted up a grunt-based toolchain with automatic CoffeScript to JavaScript compilation including minification but it hadn’t included other gamedev related tasks like spritesheet construction nor image optimization. That should be included in the toolchain for the next time.
  I also plan to include a distribution process for the next LD so I didn’t have to extract all the necessary files manually but get them packed nicely by grunt.
• Not finishing features
  The initial idea for kittens was, that they make noise when they notice you so the people run there. That would’ve allowed to use them as a distraction but that would’ve meant I need to implement pathfinding. Thus I dropped it and made kittens an eatable gimmick.
• Not testing a last time completely before submission
  It seems like I introduced a bug during the final hour before submission. Whenever you get caught by a person, the level should simply restart but actually it resets the game and shows the end screen. That should’ve been corrected before submission.
• Not making music Music
  Yet another silent Ludum Dare entry made by me. I’ll probably never learn.

The future

I haven’t yet started on expanding it due to long working hours but if I get into making a postjam version I’ll post on my Twitter account and may here in the blog. May I never start expending it, who knows.

Thanks

Thanks to all those who commented or lets played my game and to all those who will. It makes me smile if I see people are enjoying my game, preferably with some kind suggestions that would improve the experience.
And a huge thanks to my awesome wife, who has supported and fed me the whole weekend (kinda). 😉

PS: I’d like to suggest a few other games. Misunderstanding for the depth hidden behind some nasty bugs, Poust because it’s awesome and The Slimy Jumper because I know the dev in RL. 😀

So, i had written an assembly coding simulator, including the assembly part, this Ludum Dare, called…

Stacktrace

And i made a timelapse out of it (using chronolapse – great program btw)!

Check out the game here

And check out the timelapse down below!

I updated my game right now because it was too much dark and even me found it too much dark, we couldn’t really see where we going, I put 2min onto it to put some brightness back. I hope you’ll enjoy this new lightning

You can give it a try, Search about “Evasion Master”

Stealth game with procedural maps generator, my first game also.

Simplify the main loop, modify some colour and voila for today

Devil’s Thoughts

I’ve been playing like twenty HTML5 games on my Ubuntu, and it’s already impressive !
Going on Windows soon to play some of your fancy games

Is there any list with all the games i’ve rated? I would like to revisit some games to see if someone replied to me or what is the final score of the game.

MONSTEROID

Here is the soundtrack for the game (ppl asked) and a video of a speed run!

Another Ludum Dare has come and gone, and I’ve managed to cobble together something that resembles a game. This time the theme was “You are the monster”.

Friday – Concept

I had some trouble coming up with a concept at first and started writing down as many ideas as I could. The idea of an old black and white monster movie came coming up. I was thinking about old monster movies like Godzilla which reminded me of Rampage so I played the NES version for a bit to help come up with ideas. The funnest part about Rampage is climbing on buildings and breaking them down, so I decided to concentrate on mostly that. At the time I wasn’t very confident on my idea though and was afraid to get moving very fast because I was hoping that a better idea would come up. I ended up wasting about a few hours adding some random feature to my game engine that wasn’t even used on this project.

The only real bit of development I did on Friday was to quickly block out what a scene might look like using the tile editor in my game engine. This screenshot shows about as far as I got the first night…

Friday night – 3 hours in – Rough concept

Saturday – Building Physics & Platforming Mechanics

I tried to hit the ground running on Saturday and worked through most of the afternoon getting the building simulation working. It’s a pretty simple concept. Buildings are made out of square blocks and connected to neighboring blocks in a grid. Blocks apply a force to their neighbor to keep them connected, and break if they get pulled too far apart. It took a lot longer then I hoped to get the physics tweaked out properly. It’s like if you apply too little force the the buildings just fall apart, but if you apply too much they freak out and explode. So getting that working took most of the day and I was discouraged at many times because I thought the idea would not pan out for technical reasons. One problem throughout development was that the physical simulation is fairly taxing and does not run at full speed in debug mode.

Saturday Night- 24 hours in – Physics sim on buildings

I also added some simple platforming mechanics and the ability to grab onto buildings. First tried using a distance joint for grabbing but threw that out in favor of just manually applying an acceleration to the grip point. Spent probably way too much time working on the player sprite and went through many variations. I started with my sprite from LD31, morphed it into something like Frankenstein, then went greyscale, and finally back to color with a more surreal looking sprite. I thought glowing red eyes would look cool, but it wasn’t visible enough and I wanted to draw more attention to the player so I switched it to be a glowing sprite with black eyes. There were a few revisions in between that I lost, and research into other ideas for characters.

Player sprite evolution

I wasted much of the night on Saturday. Took many breaks include a several hours long dinner with a friend. By the end of the night I was still not sold on my concept and it didn’t really come together until the next day.

Sunday – Fire, Enemies, Random Levels

I worked pretty hard on Sunday in an attempt to make up lost ground. Adding the fire spreading across the buildings was a major improvement in making the simulation interesting to watch. I also added a kind of electricity simulation that turns window lights on/off randomly if they are connected to the ground.

View post on imgur.com

One major thing still missing was any kind of enemies that attack the player. I ended up with only enough time to add one enemy type, planes that fly around shooting the player with a machine gun when they are in range. The flight patterns took more time then I expected because I wanted them to fly somewhat realistically to match with the realistic physics on the buildings. Since the game wasn’t much of a challenge with only this one enemy type I ended up making the fires damage the player, still not sure if that was the right decision because it can detract from the joy of destruction.

I spent about an hour on Sunday adding sound effects. I’m not very happy with the results, but it’s better then nothing. There was a lot of other features that I probably could have skipped. For example there is an intro section where the player starts small and transforms. It was a cool idea but I didn’t polish it enough to call it out and it will probably be overlooked by most players. Also the little tiny humans are kind of hard spot, and their physics/AI is wonky but I wanted them to give a better sense of scale.

The last thing I added was the random city generation which I banged out in less then 30 minutes. It was a risky thing to add at the end, but I didn’t know what else to do after you destroy the city. There wasn’t time to add any randomization on the trees or little humans, so they always in the same places from the editor. I would have liked to add a lot more variety in building type and stuff but there wasn’t enough time for such luxuries.

What Went Right

• Visually looks pretty cool and is fun to watch.
• Physics destruction sim is pretty cool.
• Gameplay demonstrates that this could be a decent game if polished.

What Went Wrong

• Building physics is a performance hog. Does not run well in debug mode.
• Sound effects are horrible.
• Got discouraged, didn’t trust my idea, and wasted a good portion of the weekend.
• Visual Studio keeps freezing up and I have to manually shut it down in task manager. This happened at least 10 times and throws off my forward momentum because I forget what I was working on and lose my place in the code.
• Wasted too much time working on stuff that got thrown away or didn’t matter.
• Needed to spend more time polishing jump physics.

View post on imgur.com

I’m glad that I participated in this Ludum Dare, though it’s not my best entry. I took a chance on a technically risky idea and it payed off pretty well. Also, I think this is probably my strongest in visual imagery in a Ludum Dare.  I will continue working on it and release an enhanced version with 2 player support soon.

Tags: postmortem

Come and visit us at “Good as Hell!”, you will enjoy our special hellburger!

They talk about us on Tripadvisor:

“When I’m tired of those dots, nothing is better of a good, tasty hellburger!” Pac-man.

“Fresh meat!” Pudge.

“Humans aren’t useless after all.” Magneto.

“The truth is out there… but the best hambrgers are right here!” FBI Special Agent Mulder.

“I had a friend for diner, here.” Dr. Hannibal Lecter.

So, what you’re waiting for? Come and try our special hellburger, click here. And don’t forget to rate and comment.

If you don’t, you might like to give it a try.

Up There – A Monster’s Tale is a little arcade game where you play as a mosnter that use a trampolin to get his food. Only thing is, his food are in fact little persons living peacefully in their sky village.

This game is more cute that it deserve to be but I think you might like it.

I’m really looking for some feedback so if you find the time, go and give it a look. Don’t forget to say Hi in the comments.

Tags: ajordaz, Construct 2, cute, gamedev, games, indie, jump, ldjam, monster, Otrora, up there, vector

I’ve released the first post-LD version of my LD33 game, The Slime’s Journey. Most notably, the new version adds in the ability to save (and a ‘hardcore mode’ if you want to play it in the original way) and changes the mutation mechanics to give you more choice over how you want to mutate.

Full changelog:

-ADDED: Saving and loading.
-ADDED: Hardcore/softcore modes. Softcore has permasaves, hardcore has
permadeath.
-ADDED: Options. You can now make the text appear faster/slower and
disable the ‘press enter to continue’ parts.
-CHANGED: Mutation mechanics: You now see all options instead of 3 random
options, and you can now cancel during mutation.
-CHANGED: You now see the current turn next to the your location.
-FIXED: Resilience will no longer activate after you’ve taken lethal
damage.
-FIXED: The game now manually sets the background color to black, making
sure it works properly on terminals that aren’t black by default.
-FIXED: Various minor fixes in events and text display.

Entry page link

Direct download link for v2

Tags: Game Update, LD33, post-compo, RPG, text-based

Hey everyone!

Check this time lapse of the weekend out and please enjoy! Like and sub if you can because it’s my channel’s first video.

Playing and rating games!  Come in and check it out!  Submit your game here!

Let’s get some viewers up in here!

Woo!

Wooooo!

Now that it’s all settled down a bit (and I’ve slowed down on rating all your excellent games) I thought I’d thank everyone who has played/rated/commented or tweeted me about this game. I really appreciate all your feedback and support, it really means a lot to me.

This was my second Ludum Dare and much like last time, it was a lot of fun, this time though, it went significantly smoother. I had an idea I was happy with very early on and stuck with it, which is what you see before you now. I think the key to this time’s success was the simplicity of the idea coupled with (in my opinion) the satisfactory feeling of obliterating ships, last time my scope was way out, causing me to have to can the idea half way and start afresh. This time my scope was almost spot on allowing enough time for the entire game to be finished in the first two days. The third day (after a split second decision) I decided to recode (Due to browser constraints) the entire game for HTML5 and release it on a platform I had never attempted to develop for before. Note to self: Although it’s good to try new things, don’t try new things while in a games jam. But I still managed to release an almost full version of the game on HTML5 in less than 14 hours, which is something I am very proud of.

Still having a few hours left on the third day I decided to add something I have wanted to do for ages in a game; Orchestra Mode.

Orchestra mode for those whole haven’t played it, is basically the same game but with unlimited health, the game runs in slow motion (with variable game speeds) and has some of my favorite classical musical pieces playing with all other sound effects removed. It has 10x the ships therefore 10x the destruction and is my favorite thing in the game by far. It’s just a time killer, it has no end and no point to it but sometimes it’s nice to just sit back and admire the mayhem without having to worry about health.

A few people have suggested that I further development on the game and expand it into something bigger/better, I probably won’t do this despite the amount of fun I’ve had creating it, simply because I’m really happy with it in it’s current state and it was never meant to be anything more than a bit of fun. I may release an android/iOS version of the game if the controls feel right when I get to messing around with it later this week (and with that may come a few new enemies) but as it stands this is probably going to be the final state (with a few bug fixes) .

Thankyou again to everyone who has played, double thanks to anyone who has voted or commented. If you have a game and want me to play it, send me a tweet and I’ll be more than happy to give it a play and a rate.

Until next time.

-Shaw

Well, 2 days had passed since the Ludum Dare 33’s Jam Submission ends. And I didn’t presented my game on a post?! Bad! Very bad!!

So, here is it: My game is called C.L.E.M. (the long name is a secret xD)

You can play and rate it right here. Also, I’ll appreciate if you leave some feedback to the game. It will help me to make a better game and a better game developer.

Thanks!

I didn’t find the time to finish my entry for LD33, so I thought I’d post my progress shots here for posterity, showing how far I’ve managed to take it:

Maybe I’ll manage to finish something next time.

Tags: LD33, ld33 postmortem, opengl

We hear you guys. During these few days, we have got lot of comments about our game. Thank you all for the reviews.

So now it is time to work on Post Jam improvements.

On today’s build we included below changes:

1. Decreased shoot power.
2. Single player mode. So now you can play against smart ass NPC

On next build we are going to add animations to our cute little monsters, and most interesting mode – “Online”.

See you soon guys. Enjoy our little game Galaxy Hop: CLICK HERE to play.

Tags: Galaxy Hop

The Old One

Beautiful graphics, great sound, fun and atmospheric.

No Credit, No Problem!

This game is implemented perfectly with lots of polish and humor that hits all the right notes.

Mornings of a Seventeen-Year-Old Girl

The scariest game of the jam; it delivers its message very effectively without using exposition.

I’ve gotten through 30 games so far, and I have to say this dare’s submissions are some of the best I’ve played so far.  Especially to the first time developers have made some creative, hilarious games.  I’ve laughed more this competition than in all the others.

Here are some entries from first time competitors that gave me a laugh:

Lock Ness Monster: The Game by Darius

Some monsters just want a quiet day.  But after dealing with one little singing sailor, nessie just can’t get a break.  This is flipping good fun.

Small People Problems by Brainfreezeman

Billed as a stealth consumption game, I have far more fun just causing absolute bedlam in the hamlet of Happytown.

Monster Quest by FiveIronFanatic

Don’t let that title screen fool you.  The game is hilarious, and does make you think and do a bit of research while playing to get through.

Give these first time competitors a hand for making some great games right off the bat, and I hope I see more great games as I play them over the next few weeks.

(yeah, made I game too, but go play there’s today, you’ll find mine in the random list once I get my coolness up).

Come on by, link us your games, and we’ll play them!

http://www.twitch.tv/ytpopcorn897/

I made of timelapse of the development of my entry

I haven’t had time to come back to this since Sunday night when I posted the game, so I thought I would throw up a Post Mortem and talk a little about this game.

Making MOONSTAHR:

The game was made in under 13 hours, and really came together quickly. Partly because it was late sunday morning when I started working on it, and I had a real cut off time because of work the next day, and partly because we suck at ideas. Well OK, actually we had a LOT of idea, but this time we were determined to not over scope ourselves and make something more complete than last time. That led to a lot of really neat ideas getting shot down. We started with four people on Friday night, and had no game and several scrapped starts by Saturday night. Then the idea hit us. We had been trying to make a top down 2d game, and I started playing around with sprites in a 3d world. It looked sweet. We talked it over and the idea of a Roomba like planet rover that gathered up resources was born. We talked over mechanics and how we thought the idea was clever because it would beg the question, is the robot the monster, or the humans that made it? Anyway, we wrapped up around 7pm Saturday night and everyone left for home, the plan was for me to code up the game and everyone else phone is some art and music.

What went wrong:

Really my only regret is we couldn’t think of an idea sooner, when we were all together. We had a great music producer in the group (Will!) and he had no theme to go on, so we ended up having to use pre made resources and opt out of the audio judging. I think he would have nailed it with some custom music as electronic and dubstep are his forte. Also Caden had made some awesome pixel art that never got used. With more time we had a lot more we would have loved to add! Also speaking of things going wrong, at like 1am I tried to make one of those cool GIFs that shows off some gameplay and totally hosed it up. Whatever.

What went right:

Despite the slow start all those failed starts and talking about mechanics helped us nail down things and just start coding when the time came. I wanted to take whatever we made and have an Oculus enabled version at the Tulsa Makers mini faire this weekend, so that helped me limit doing anything fancy with camera and spend more time on just getting solid mechanics down and keeping it simple. I was also determined to give this sucker a proper game intro, so a little time was invested in making the intro splashes. I learned how to use the render texture in the UI to play the video and used Unity’s built in animation tools for the splash screen. The mini map was my wife’s idea, and turned out amazing. During play testing for me she noticed that it was really easy to get lost, and it was to hard. So we wrote some intro text about spinning up satellite imagery and kind of just hung it out in “orbit” and had it follow the player while maintaining its altitude and rotation, giving it a sweet look.

Post Jam:

I knew that the storytelling was a little lacking so I built in some code that saved the PC name of the computer playing the game whenever a person won. I didn’t know exactly how I would use this data, maybe like an infographic that we could update as people played that showed how they had contributed to its demise. After dinner tonight was the first time I had any time to sit down and think about it, and will all the feedback I was getting, the number one theme was “hey, the story isn’t clear”. Dang it. Well what is done is done, but I could at least show off the little analytics I had built in, so I started working on it. Holy cow did it turn out sweeter than I thought it would. Mostly because the script I wrote to update an image with text couldn’t refresh the image on the ludum dare site, because it was hosted in wordpress and I couldn’t push a new copy to them. So I thought, hey I can just build and Unity webGL game and host in the built in iframe and then update it server side when someone beats the game. From there I had to learn how to get the image I was updating into Unity, which is actually way easier and cooler than I thought it would be!

Fin:

So thats it! You can check it out here, and feedback is appreciated!

I couldn’t be in the last Ludum Dare, and I barely made it for this one, I made graphics and sounds on my tablet during the road, and programmed it and merged everything on Windows…

I published it very late and only made a small description without even testing the game…

What went good:

Graphics: I had no problem drawing and coming up with stuff;

Audio: I recorded without a problem, I recorded what I wanted and that is OK.

Programming: I coded without much struggle.

What wend bad:

Merging everything: There were some problems with resolution, gameobject issues, and Unity couldn’t import sounds, so I had to import them one by one…

Publishing: First I published a version with a bug, after I fixed it, it was so late I accidently published only the Data folder and not the .exe file ( Some thkng was suspicious… ).

I didn’t have much time: Only had 8 – 10 hours total, maybe less…

Anyway, here is the game, I think I made something 😀

View post on imgur.com

Play HAX0R?

After many attempts of prompting for me to do Ludum Dare, I finally caved in to Jeviny, who I thank for having me do this. Ludum Dare was definitely a challenge for my first one. I’ve been to a hackathon before, but it was nowhere near as tough as Ludum Dare was.

Challenges

I have two major weaknesses when it comes to game making. The first is art. While I can make small things look “okay” I’m glad how my art turned out in the long run. The second would be music. The music was originally going to be made with DuncsAlgoMusic which is where you type a name into the program and it generates a song. These turned out bad since it would take forever getting the right music and because the audio was not fitting how my art was reflecting it. I instead used PixiTracker, a much better fit for what I needed. One more challenge was I lost myself through the first day and a half almost not understanding what I was actually trying to do. Then I had random Blue Screens of Death while streaming, which is always fuuun.

What could have been better

I think the game overall isn’t bad, but the internal code is not my usual polish of how I would have normally handled it. I’m not saying it’s due to time constraints, it was more of just-get-it-done hacks, which is never a good idea.

Future

Well, I’ve already begun working on a newer version of the game that supports both Android and iOS, fixes some of the hacky stuff as well, and adds fullscreen. Löve does have ports to Android and iOS but I can only do Android currently (mainly for monetary reasons).

DAMNED is now on GameJolt! Check it out!

And here a gameplay video:

I want to hear your feedback! Play, RATE and (if you want) leave a comment!

First Day – The Idea:

At first I was going to do a game where you were a dad monster feeding your baby monster humans.  Kinda morbid, but the artwork I would create would have lent a funny, somewhat non-disturbing visual of the concept.  I was not able to get much done during this day other than visually thinking about how the game would play, look and feel.  Why was I not able to do much the first day other than that?  I am in the process of buying my first home and the brunt of the work for that happen to land that Thursday and Friday, so yay for that timing.

Second Day – A change of plans:

Yup, the second I started drawing the artwork a different character emerged from the pencil and paper: Poppy.  A dapper, middle aged monster who got the chance to be on Bob & Bob A’s Dining Room Arena game show: Eat Humans.

The idea of the game was something akin to a cash shower grab booth, only this was for monsters catching and eating their fill of humans within a certain time frame.  There are different types of humans depending on their diet: Red Shirts = Red Meat Eaters, Green Shirts = Vegetarians, Blue Shirts = Seafood Eaters, Orange Shirts = Dessert Eaters, and piece de resistance (PDR) = Fancy Food Humans.  Then there would be the humans who would fight back, so Gray Shirts who would explode when close to you.  Each would have a different point value and the point value would increase if your monster “prepared” each human respectively by either Sawing, Chilling, or Cooking.  To defend yourself from the gray humans you would shoot a fireball at them to defeat them.

I ended up spending Saturday developing the artwork, most of the animations and getting controls working in Unity.

Third Day – Coding:

I spent the entire third day coding, dealing with physics and learning a lot of new things in Unity.

Final day – More Coding and Stress:

I started the day freaking out about the fact that I probably was not going to finish the game with a results screen that would give the game some kinda meaning at the end of play….well, my worries came true, so I guess I feel good that my worrying was not for nothing?  I don’t know.  Anyway, during the last 20 minutes was painful.  The console in Unity was going crazy with red flags and I was not sure what was going wrong.  Long story short, I just failed to delete a certain gameobject from hierarchy I was using for temporary purposes.  All was good after, so I built the game and submitted.

What I Failed To Do:

Produce a game with a clear objective.  Sure, it says Eat Humans, so I guess that is the objective?  Nope.  Maybe something more like eat X amount of humans withing X amount of time.  There was several different ways to go, but in the end I ran out of time to provide such an important aspect of a game.

What I Plan To Do In The Future:

Design a game with a clear and fun objective.  Although, I am pleased with what I managed to turn out during the jam.  Being this is the third game I have ever made, I still learning so much and I am pretty excited to dive back into very soon.  I also plan on doing more game jams or just challenging myself to finish something within a weeks time.  I have not done One Game a Month, though.  So, I might start there.

Here is the part where I ask the reader to go and play/rate my game…the link is below:

EAT HUMANS!

Leave me a comment and I will click on your avatar and rate your game within a day or two.  Thanks!

Death from above is a first person shooter, made in Switzerland.

You can kill several zombies with nice bullet time effect.

We have a online highscore system, can you be the best?

Have fun and be excited for the nice ending.

Let’s kill some zombies

Visit us

Finally i recorded my game in “good” quality, i have 1440×900 monitor, so i must record it in 1366×768 resolution in window.

Don’t Crawl is a multiplayer platformer game in NES stylistic.

One player controls the hero while the others take control of the monsters in attempts to kill the hero and take their place. The game features online multiplayer and can be played either directly (the “host” player will need to forward a UDP port) or by finding the opponents via “hub”.

Unfortunately, “hub” server is only supported in the post-jam version. While it was largely done during the jam, we couldn’t get it reliably working in time so had to take it out of the original jam submission.

Please, play, rate and drop us a line in comments, so we know how to make Don’t Crawl better!

Well I can certainly say that this Ludum Dare could have gone a lot better for me. I think that I tried to do too much for this, especially building an in-game level editor for it.

So this is what went wrong:

• Focusing to much on making this level editor for the game.
• Taking a few too many breaks.
• Trying to be clever with the theme.
• Not really having a solid plan of action done.

What went right:

• Managed to live stream it.
• Actually got the level editor working to the point of making levels. It just took all weekend.
• It looked ok.

So yeah as you can tell not much went right and a lot went wrong. Though out of all of this I do have a few ideas down from the other themes.

Well untill next time everyone,
just remember,  don’t make the same mistakes I have.