Hello, all! We Tech Valley Game Space are at it again! We’ll be streaming on Thursday and Saturday nights, from 7:00 PM to midnight, EST. Check us out at Twitch.tv here:
http://www.twitch.tv/techvalleygamespace
Want to submit a game? Our submission form is available here:
In my first participation I have stressed, irritated, tired, frustrated … but I also have fun and I discovered the charm of this type of event.
It is not a challenge to others, it’s a race against yourself. In addition to creating ideas that may never imagined, it requires you to know your limits and exploit your strengths in the shortest time possible.
Our game “Dead Love” is a concept that we liked, incomplete, but it shows our intentions.
Personally, the jam is comparable to the Dark Souls saga, it is difficult and you have to give everything, but once you finish it … the self-satisfaction is unparalleled.
Congratulations to all participants, and remember:
“What leads and drags the world are not machines, but ideas’
So, I survived last weekend (my first jam) and ended up with a playable game (shameless plug) which seems to have been generally liked (although the feedback on most games seems to be very good and supportive. It’s definitely nice to have supportive feedback, but I slightly worry about people just being nice might make the feedback less useful. I’ll definitely try and turn on anonymous feedback next time, anyone have good/bad experiences with this?)
I managed to play and rate 42 games so far, hopefully I can get this up to at least 80 in the coming week.
I did learn some neat things though:
Definitely looking forward to LD34, but until then I’ll keep up with www.onegameamonth.com which I’m sure most people here already know about, and if not, check it out!
Just started my new prototype, voxel turn based game with angry farmers! #screenshotSaturday
Stay classy and make more games!
After playing some games (about 100 now?) I though I would share some games that I enjoyed playing.
“Platformer”, Story, Nice graphics
Game about talking foxes stealing stuff from peoples homes. Has some dramatic turn of events story wise 
“Turn based rpg”, cute graphics, Randomly generated allies
You are the slime who has to be the hero who saves the world. Well, you and your monster friends need to deal with the increasingly harder enemies. The game is interesting due to random element of buying new units to your team. Also most of the units are unique looking and well thought!
“Platformer”, Very funny story and dialogue
In internship adventure you jump into shoes of new guy posing as monster on the level. Your boss tells you what you have to do (like annoying the hero but not killing him) and if you do something stupid (or even correctly) then you get funny dialog from your boss. The intern also has some good one liners to boot.
“Action-Puzzle”, Unique gameplay, Funny physics sometimes 😉
You are ghost stuck into your tomb. You can project your tomb closer to people to enable you to scare them. The more people you scare the harder you can propel the tombstone.
“Action”, Growing up by eating, The ultimate bullying simulator!
In this rather simple game you have to eat other blocks to grow your block bigger. As you grow bigger your facial features turn more and more to represent bully. Watch out for the teacher though!
… you don’t leave a comment on games you rate.
Ok that may be a tiny bit too strong. But people are waiting for your comments! Don’t you love comments? You’re obsessively refreshing the page to check your vote count, and you see you have one more. Then you open your game’s page and it’s all sadness and disappointment and crying puppies, because there’s nothing new.
I think some people don’t leave comments because they didn’t like the game, and don’t want to leave something negative. But that’s the kind of feedback that can be most useful to the developer, and there are ways to phrase it so that you don’t crush their souls into a million pieces.
Here’s how I usually structure my comments:
<What I liked><Suggestions for improvement><End with something positive>
Example:
Fun to play, I really liked the sound effects. I would have liked it to be faster paced though. Nice job overall!
Even if you didn’t like the game, you can always find something positive to say, even if it’s just that one sprite or sound effect. And if you really really can’t, you can congratulate them on making a game in 48/72 hours, because that’s always an achievement worth celebrating.
So, this Ludum Dare I made a game called SnakeLike, which is supposed to be a cross between a RogueLike and Snake.
You can find it here:
http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=12883
The premise is that you meander around the levels, one move at a time, and can fight enemies and swallow their corpses. Each enemy you swallow gives you one extra segment, which takes on the properties of that enemy.
Each segment you get from an enemy is capable of attacking to either side, so as you accumulate new segments, it becomes advantageous to surround your enemies, and strike at them from multiple sides at once.
Stronger enemies give you segments with more attack and/or HP, and you can let their corpses run through your body to add on to the end, or else digest them before that to replace and upgrade an existing segment.
So, how did that work out for me? Well…
The timing of things
This ended up being a little tricky, as I actually had work during the weekend. So my time was a bit limited. And to start, I didn’t have any good ideas for the theme. So I pretty much spent the first evening coming up with whatever ideas I could, and trying to refine the mechanics in my head. I think it ended up being a good move, but I would still have loved to have that time back to code.
What went right
I think the concept ended up pretty solid for something so straightforward. I was really worried that it wouldn’t come together, but a lot of the feedback I’ve gotten has been positive.
I think that my approach to the theme this time wasn’t as… clever? as what I had attempted in the previous couple LDs I participated in, but I kind of feel like that worked in my favor. In my previous entries I kinda shot myself in the foot for concealing the theme a bit more than I should have, trying to go for a more dramatic reveal. With SnakeLike you can pretty much see all there is to it right there.
What went wrong
Boy, where do I begin…
I ran into so many technical problems and bugs while creating this. Many of them were my fault, but I spent way too long just reading and re-reading pieces of code, trying to see what the heck was going wrong.
But beyond simple bugs, I was meaning to rely on a Multimedia Fusion extension I’d never used before called the “Dungeon Object” in order to relieve some of the stress of generating dungeons. But it turns out that this extension isn’t compatible with Clickteam Fusion 2.5, the newest tool which I had set up my code base for. It was either do without the object, or work in an older program.
I went with the latter. Of course, my code base was no good any more, so I snapped up the one I had made for LD 30, and had to re-code the bits that were missing.
Even though I had never used the Dungeon Object before, it was really straightforward, and I got it working in my game fairly easily. The Pathfinding Object, however, gave me no end to grief. Despite having dealt with this one before, I ended up wasting a lot of time just trying to figure out what little things were making it crash.
And once I got all the extensions working as intended, I kept running into huge bugs with movement and collision, where enemies would sometimes stack on one another, or even move onto a space occupied by the snake. I hacked together a solution as best I could, but there are still remnants off bugs here and there (like these invisible barriers you might occasionally have to chomp through).
By the time I got the mechanics stable, there was almost no time left to make actual content. I scrambled to make really basic-looking enemy and tileset graphics, and in the last couple hours I was just sort of developing without thinking, running on some kind of stream-of-consciousness mode. I still don’t know what’s up with the end of the game, but I hope nobody gets so far as to see it.
So ultimately…
I think it was kind of a neat concept, and I think I managed to pull it together just in time, despite all the troubles I hit. There’s probably a lot more I could add to it (there’s no shortage of RogueLike ideas that could be implemented), but I’ll mostly likely leave this as it is.
So I’ve been hard at work polishing the game and adding some things I wanted to add that I didn’t have time to add before.
You might not know if you only played it once, but all the paperwork in the game is randomly generated. Right down to the specifics of the tax rules in the instructions. I wasn’t really happy with how some of the notes looked but I had to release. And now I’ve finally spent some time working on nice letterheads.
Here are what complaint notes from nobles and shopkeepers looked like in the jam version.
Here’s what they look like in the update.
I think it’s a big improvement. Also, the shops all have cool generated names now.
Other improvements:
But the coolest new thing is Print and Play Mode! You can print out the game and play on your own desk or table! Print right from the browser.
How to print and play
Other ways to play
If you’ve not seen my game, click here!
So, along with a lot of other things, I’ve learned a bunch from this experience. Though I tried ( very briefly ) to participate in LD32 I never did anything that made LD meaningful. So this is my post-LD report.
WHAT WENT WELL
I definitely had a positive experience this go around. Though in retrospect the game I made is very simple and could have done and meant so much more, for my first LD ever ( and the fact that I had to cramp it into the Compo ) I’m proud of it. I learned how to do animations, collisions, and basic graphics, which I’ve evolved into my own 8-bit style ( you can see my most recent character here ). I also tried my hand at music and story, and though they didn’t come out as good as I wanted, they were there and did make my game a little bit different than all the others.
WHAT WENT… NOT SO WELL
I don’t have any horror stories to report this time around. Everything went okay; the game came out and nothing was sacrificed due to time. It came out the way I made it and the way I wanted. The story was all over the place now that I look at it, and the music is a little off, but I guess it does the job. I could have put a little more effort into the graphics, and I went back and revised them for a post-LD version, but I don’t see it worth it. I’ve got bigger plans to work on ( hint hint ).
So overall I had a good LD! I’m certainly planning on returning in the future, and I hope to see you all there!
Again, if you’ve not played my game, click here.
For our first LD we created an inverse-stealth game called Guard-Master. You can play it here. The core idea was to create a typical stealth game where you control the guards rather than the intruder. Simple right? Well not quite.
What went right
We started the jam with an epic 3-hour brain-storming session. Peter had read about the 100-10-1 rule on Reddit and we were keen try it out. You start by coming up with 100 simple ideas and then culling them down to 10 of the best (and doable) ideas. Finally we selected one of the top 3 ideas that we felt was easiest to get done. We liked one of the other ideas so much that we’re actually prototyping that one now as well. You can checkout our list of ideas here. Be warned though, some of them are very outrageous! I’m really glad we took the time to work through this process. In past jams I have been in teams where we jumped on an idea way to quickly, just because it was easy to visualize and then regretted that decision later.
The other thing that worked well was creating the levels with the Tiled map editor. At first we were worried that we wouldn’t be able to find a level editing tool for the perspective we had chosen. As it turns out Tiled not only supported it but also exported in a format that Phaser could load and display easily.
Finally, something that I think we did well was the aesthetics. We chose a simple pixel-art style for the characters and tileset. Peter did a great job creating all of the environmental bits and pieces. Visually everything came together quickly. In fact we had a lot of props that didn’t make it into the final game because we didn’t have enough time to code-up their behaviour.
What didn’t go right
We’ve read over and over again that you should prototype the minimum viable product of your game first. Everything should be coloured boxes and all you should care about is the core gameplay. I’d be lying (a lot) if I said we did this. We didn’t really have anything playable until the end of day 2 and that would be being generous with the term playable. It was only once we started playing our game that we realized how not-fun it was.
In our original concept for the game, the intruder would try and sneak his way to the exit without being detected. We also wanted him to incapacitate unsuspecting guards along the way. I spent ages tinkering the A.I. to try and get this to work, but it was a bit too hard. More often than not the intruder would just wander into the guards field of view and be easily disposed of.
Eventually we scrapped this idea and went with a much simpler hide-and-seek approach. The intruder will now just pick the furthest hiding spot from all of the guards and if you don’t find him within a minute you lose. This approach was a bit more fun. We also changed the guards from auto-firing to manual shift-click fire. This made it a bit more of a challenge to hit him once he had been discovered. It is still a bit broken though. Since the intruder always picks the furthest hiding spot, he will predictably be in the same place once you reload the map. Bah, well at least the first playthrough might be fun-ish :p.
Final thoughts
Overall we had a lot of fun. It is also really encouraging to see the feedback we’ve gotten. Even though we made a broken game, people seemed to like the idea and could see its potential, which is all we could really hope for. The biggest lesson that we’ve learned would be to always prototype the minimum gameplay first!
Tags: postmortem
We are now streaming! Give us your Ludum Dare games to play and comment on.
Here http://www.twitch.tv/onlyslightly/
Or you can tweet me your @jetpackfandango
p.s. we are a bit drunk so I apolo0gize in advance for any lack of fine motor skills.
p.s.s. You guys are wonderful. I’m honored to play your creations.
I just wrote a novel blog post on my personal website discussing in detail our experience during this Ludum Dare. In short, we had a lot of fun, met some interesting challenges, and created something we felt was really cool.
If you have a few minutes to spare, please read my post, play our game, and give us some good, honest feedback. We’ll be sure to go through our comments and play your games, too!
Hey! Its time for the Dev Log / Post-mortem for our game “One of Us.” This was the first Ludum Dare ever for either of us, and it turned out to be an awesome experience.
Just thought I’d give you a small glimpse into how this fairly *ehem* “unique” game came into fruition.
The Creative Process:
So Friday night we found out the theme and started brainstorming up ideas. The main idea that stuck out to us is that we wanted the player to be the outcast in a world of monsters. A world where to the creatures living there, the humans were the monsters. We also had wanted to have the player be living among the monsters disguised, and accepted as one of them.
And then for whatever reason, we decided that the disguise should just be really bad and super obvious, and that the game would have a much lighter tone. (And then it turned into really obvious fake cat ears, and cats, cats, cats…not sure how that happened….)
Gameplay-wise, we wanted to create a fast paced time-challenge platformer that was a race against time, where you are still fighting the clock during the room transitions. However, somewhere in the early stages of development, this ended up changing to a more slow paced puzzle platformer. Art / Sound Effects (Benignbrett): Art: So for the art I wanted to go with a more hand painted and bright style, which I think turned out fairy well. I decided that for the levels, instead of piecing the tiles together a strict sheet of prebuilt tiles, I would just make every room individually. In each room I would end up using a lot of the drawings from the previous room pasted and melded together in order to save valuable time. This meant that each room didn’t just look like a bunch of squares from a tilesheet, but that they also didn’t take forever to draw. The thing that I was looking forward to drawing the least was definitely the bird boss, as I haven’t really drawn birds (well, cats either, for that matter), and there were a lot of animations and things I was going to need to get done. Like most of the characters and monsters in the game, I didn’t really have time to sit down and come up with various concepts for the bird, so I just drew the first thing that came to mind, and got to work on the animations. Because I was working in photoshop and haven’t done much animation, I didn’t know how I was going to view the animations as I worked on them. Thus I decided I would just draw out the whole animation before actually seeing it animated. This worked surprisingly well for all but one of the bird’s idle animations, which just looked really bad. (This drawing was born when Matt decided to take a break from programming, in order to properly make fun of my animation, hahaha)
Although it started as my least favorite asset to draw, the bird definitely turned our to be one of my favorite, and I’m super happy with how it turned out.
In the past I have found it hard to get anything looking good quickly, but this project really forced me to work faster and more efficiently. Although the art isn’t nearly as polished as I would have liked it to have been due to time constraints, I am really happy with how it turned out.
Sound:Level Design (Platforming)
One of the big challenges with designing this game is that even from the beginning it didn’t have much of a sense of identity. We had ideas for a lot of different mechanics we might implement, but had never really thought about how to tie them together. Originally we wanted a fast-paced “microgame” type of game loop, but it ended up being a lot slower paced. I would say that the two factors that really prevented a faster-paced style were the platforming mechanics, which were too complicated for fast play, and the small space we limited ourselves to on each screen. With so little room to play with, and such huge tiles, crossing a room directly would have been too short and samey.
In the end, the puzzle platformer approach was certainly a better choice, but it had it’s own problems. Early in development I had built the engine around rooms that were exactly the size of the screen – and then meant I only had 16×10 tiles to deal with for designing maps. That’s not very much room at all. Even when we could think of novel ideas for level designs (“what if they have to jump over a mushroom without touching it?”), there wasn’t even height to make forcing the player to double back feasible and not enough width to arrange more than a simple puzzle horizontally. In the end, every level is EXTREMELY compact and I didn’t have the opportunity to make small adjustments to level layouts to adjust difficulty without it all falling apart.
Basically, I learned not to paint myself into a corner with the engine right off the bat. I implemented all the transitions and parallax backgrounds before we had actually made any real levels, so then found that the levels that I wanted to design wouldn’t fit in the limited form factor of the engine.
The Bird Boss and Limiting Content
Anyone who has played the game all the way through should agree with me when I say we packed far more content, and far more DIVERSE content, then you would normally see in a Ludum Dare game. All in all, there are 4 different kinds of scenarios: the platforming levels; the free roam hub world with its NPCs; the side scrolling fast-reaction minigame; and the actual boss battle at the end. While the core of the engine is the same for all of these, each one is essentially a completely different game in how it functions.
Really, the morale of the story is that we didn’t know what type of game we wanted to make. We had lots of ideas for things to put in the game, but we definitely should’ve taken more time at the start to decide which of those things would actually end up being “fun,” as well as which ones would work together. What ended up happening is that we would finish one part of the game, and instead of expanding on it we would go ahead and add something else new that we thought might work well with it. This was a horrible choice. The game did end up decently fun to play, and nothing in it is clearly “broken” – but at the same time, I can’t help but feel that we could have done better by focusing on one piece of the game and embellishing it until it was extremely polished and interesting in a standalone setting.
Somehow the game launched pretty much bug-free, but it’s completely unmaintainable code – every time a new feature got added, I had to pretty much override the whole engine and hack the functionality into just that one scene. It’s a feature-creep nightmare.
Music:
As with sound, the music was all made in only 30 minutes. Some of the loops are grating enough that I can’t stand listening to them for more than a few seconds (the town…). While I would say this reflects how poorly we paced our work for the rest of the time period, no one has complained about it, so maybe sound isn’t the most important aspect as long as you have at least SOMETHING appropriate in place?
tl;dr:
Design your levels before your engine, and fit your engine to the levels.
Know the scope of what you want to end up with before you start, and aim small.
Find a balance between difficulty and creativity (hard to do without playtesting?).
To play with this game is to play with shit! 😀
A 2-player game!
Play and rate Excremonsters! >>here<<
Of the things I didn’t finish doing for my compo entry, Art was a big one. Since then, however, I’ve managed to paint a lot of images that are gonna go in the remastered version of Campaign Trail. Here are a bunch of them — Enjoy!
Hi! I you didn’t make it to Ludum Dare, or if you submitted your game, but still want more challenges, now a 72-hours GameJam on FGl is running.
Theme: Simplest possible game (I’ll try to fit withing 48 hours or less having such theme )
Besides honour and respect the winner will get $100, 2nd place $30 and 3rd place $10
Tags: contest
Find the Pepe – and your soul – within.
5 days have past, yet the Pepe remains undiscovered.
Will it be you to uncover this generations old secret? To uncover this demon from the past?
The reward for finding the Pepe is self satisfaction, and knowing you have achieved something that is greater than all of us.
Save the world, save yourself, with Jamie Oliver: What’s cooking? today!
To show that you CAN complete all the stages (even if it’s a bit unfair at times) here’s a complete play through. With some of the tougher parts that required several runs sped up to make it a pretty short video.
Check out the LD page here, and a post jam version (which makes it more fair) over here.
Hi, I hope you’re all having a great weekend. A chance to relax and play some cool ludum dare games.
Speaking of cool ludum dare games, would you please take a moment of your time to play my game time monster.
Thank you for your time!
If you like single dad creatures that eat fishermen only for the best reasons and if you say “yes” to puking on your babies – then you should really play Caring Creature. It would also be lovely if you’d let us know what you think of it. Thank you and have a great Saturday!
Always saddening (but hardly surprising) when not many read your post mortem or make comments, so I strive to do it for as many games as possible, and I thoroughly enjoy reading post-portems.
So I shameless plug for my game here, and the post-mortem here.
I am scum, I know.
Another thing is how better my games would be if I had the faintest idea as to how people draw and animate, for I can do neither of these things. So if anybody hates programming and likes wink wink nudge nudge
Also, this GIF because I like it:
Taha
The game had a problem: many people who did not respond to your actions (other than murder). This is fixed. Now you can sow panic and provoke the werewolf! 😉
LINK!
Hello and nice weekend to everyone,
I am writing on the behalf of my little shy monster he needs some help to reach his dreams. Becoming a Movie Star!
Help him by playing my entry, and if you feel like also rate it and comment it. For every that reply I always return the favour.
Hope you enjoy!!
Spoilers! Play the game before watching! This is for those who got stuck somewhere but still want to know how to get through without skipping a level.
In this game you are yeti struggling in icy forest to survive.
Now you can play it online, using Unity Web Player (sorry, no WebGL yet).
Thank you everyone for support!
Play and Rate
Hey guys! Thank you all for voting and leaving feedbacks, it’s been instructive and fun. Lots of you asked me about a bug in the drawer and I’ve fixed it. The second issue was about aiming, seems like that aiming without a crosshair was odd and hard so I’ve added this little feature.
Here’s the page of the entry, have fun and keep up leaving comments and votes! 😉
We were a team of four people this time, though one person had to leave after the first night, and I was busy Saturday evening and Sunday morning. Since we were especially limited on time and resources we really needed a simple idea. Besides, I like simple ideas because it’s easier to focus on making one concept polished and fun. Of course all of our initial ideas were very complicated, until…
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Once we had the idea, and we knew it was going to be a parody, then the issue was how to do the art in a way that paid tribute to the source without copying it. I do a lot of traditional/fine-art (My work: http://alwaysfromlife.com/) and I’d been thinking for a while that it would be interesting to do a game in a very painterly style. I did some quick sketches of mario in ArtRage and then used Aseprite animate them and export a tilesheet. It looked pretty good so we decided to go with it:
Even though we wanted a more organic look to the game, I decided to use Tiled to create the level, because that would make it easy to experiment with different layouts, and the excellent Tiled2Unity tool would generate the collision meshes for me. Once I had the level laid out in a way that worked well with the bouncing marios, I used Tiled’s “export to image” feature, and Ian used that as a reference to paint the lovely background that you see in the game.
Probably anyone who’s used Unity for 2D has made the mistake of leaving the “fixed rotation” option off on your sprite’s rigidbody and then watching your character spin and flop around unexpectedly. For this game I wanted mario to have a silly, clumsy quality, so I left it off intentionally. The challenge then was getting a reasonable amount of these clumsy marios to the end of the level. I used several invisible triggers to tell mario when to jump. Each trigger had a percent change of triggering, so we would end up with marios taking random paths through the level.
While Jesse made a mario spawner and worked on the plants, I painted the title screen as quickly as possible. I’m sure I didn’t spend more than 20 minutes on it. My plan was to hand paint the title text as well but that just would have taken too much time.
At the end of Saturday we were at the testing stage, and while it was already making us laugh (a good sign!), we had a lot of ideas for how to make it better. I assumed I wouldn’t have time for any of them. But Monday morning I was determined to add them. I added the “withering” plants feature and the heart counter as ways to add challenge and excitement to the game, and Brian added a score counter and cleverly tied the rate that marios spawned to your score, which leads to a hilarious avalanche of marios if you get far enough. At this point I think it went from being a silly game to one that was actually fun to play.
Of course I always forget how stressful the submission process is, especially when you’re already exhausted from lack of sleep. But in the end I’m very happy with what we made. There’s only a couple of minor things I would have done differently. Much gratitude to my team, and to everyone who has left feedback!
Adam
Thanks, again, for all the comments! Getting feedback on what I’ve made (and trying to write constructive and useful feedback to others) is one of the reasons I really like taking part of Ludum Dare! This community is the best!!
There are two main issues that people seem to be having with my entry: gameplay feels clunky and it doesn’t seem to relate with the theme. I’ll write another post to explain all the possible actions and how combat actually doesn’t works, all with animated GIFs to illustrate everything.
For now, I’ll address any lingering confusion about the theme (even though quite a lot of people seemed to get it).
But, before that, I’ll quickly talk about this game’s future. I really liked the original idea, and I’m quite happy with how the combat could work if fixed. Also, finally having big sprites is great after using small 16×16 sprites for so long.
So I do plan to extend this into a “full short-game”. Something that should take around a month to make (and I’ll probably take three or so), just to make it into what it was supposed to be. I may still fail, so it’s more of something I’ll try to do, but don’t get your hopes up (I’ve never been able to finish a project that requires as many assets as this game will… and I’ve tried quite a few times, already…).
Now, on to talk about the theme! It will be a kind of spoilers, so be aware of that before reading on…
One of the issues is that the theme isn’t clear… and that’s intentional! I like to leave it to the player to interpret the game as they want… but that requires proper story telling, something that I usually fail do.
Adding the story quite late into the game’s development (I did it pretty much before the SFX, which was the last thing I did), also didn’t help. I didn’t want the story to take too long and the small virtual window (160×120) didn’t allow for a lot of text on screen at the same time… So I just decided to make the text scroll quickly and didn’t add a confirmation button afterward… Terrible decisions, I know…The resulting game is quite different from the original idea. It was supposed to be about a hero getting confused and despaired about the current situation (and then becoming a monster), but it came out like this:
You think you are a righteous hero. Sometimes, you do have doubts about yours instructions, but you follow them, nonetheless. This time, you were asked to kill “dangerous” monsters on the forest. When you get there, you find cute little slimes. After so many people passed through here and annoyed them, some of the slimes even did become aggressive. Instead of doing the right thing and letting the slimes be, you blindly follow the orders and begin to kill ’em all. No matter if they fight back or not… You are truly a monster…
Someone said on the comments that this would had been clearer if no slime fought back… and that guy was probably right… I didn’t think about this during the jam, but it would really had helped to tell this through the gameplay…
Well, I gotta keep trying! One day I will make an awesomely polished game that doesn’t fail to tell its story (nor has terrible gameplay).
http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=57635
The Sacrifice (jam entry)
A cruel management game with amazing arts and music.
Cutthroat You, Homesick Me (jam entry)
A short story driven game with nice graphics and character design.
Separated (compo entry)
A sad and moody little exploration game with great gameboy-style pixel arts and music.
Monster (jam entry)
A well written interactive narrative dealing with some heavy topics.
Melody Muncher (compo entry)
A simple rhythm game with a generous soundtrack of 7 nice tunes (plus some loops).
That’s right, 7 tunes for a compo entry.
My own entry, Subterranean, is available here.
Puzzle terminology is unclear. One of my favorite game genres is what I used to call “puzzles” until I heard some games of chance referred to as puzzles. So these days I say “logic puzzles”. I can’t give you an exact definition but if you find yourself frequently thinking “but if I put that here, then this has to go there, but then that can’t go there, but… oh, er, hmmm…” while playing a game then there is a good chance that it is a logic puzzle. A few other characteristic features are:
Logic puzzles can have a cult following but they aren’t so common so I thought I would share a list of such games that I have found this Ludum Dare so other like-minded players can find them easily. I’m listing these games in no particular order, although I’m excluding obviously incomplete games.
I’m super sure that the list is not exhaustive so please let me know of any others you find! (Suggestions for better terminology are also welcome!)
Logic puzzles (according to my meaning of the phrase):
BaseCase – Delicious Ships!
khahem – Detached
Draknek – Slime Saga
thegdr – Splat
madlee – Unfinished Piece
panda – You! Are the monster
lessmilk – Gravity Snake
sprawl – Entropy
VelvelaJade – Zevy’s Puzzlers
Fanaen – Mindvasion
reheated – Milky Helps People (that’s mine)
The following games combine logic puzzles with a component of observing enemy movement. They really are logic puzzles but not all the information is on-screen at once.
ehtd – Eat Sheep
person124 – A Monster Is You!
Jacic – Team S.T.E.A.L.T.H
lubos – Dungeons Deep
Other games with a major logic puzzle element:
daveh – Lure.Lair.Lunch
bowlercaptain – The Terror of the Night of Day
TMW – Quarantine Zone # 1
avultima – Collateral Choice
Open Rift – Shadow Wolf
966623 – RGBlob
MSiddeek – Monster and Hero
Timelapse time~
I am incredibly happy with this summer’s Ludum Dare results. Not only feedback has been overwhelmingly positive in areas we only started experimenting in, the game managed to get 3.11 on kongregate which is huge new record for us and motivation to keep ever going.
Now, what is this game, you may ask?
It’s an interactive story with a somewhat uncommon interpretation of the theme: instead of straight up Godzilla-style destruction we went for the more subtle dictatorship-building kind.
What went well:
) and it allows the player to place the characters of their own imaginings into their place. We had a very clear idea of how our monster would look but others from all around the world would probably have different ideas so we settled for an evil-looking hat.What went wrong:
Very sinister!
Gameplay
Play the game by clicking here!
Tags: post-mortem, postmortem
A lot of procrastinating in this one, mostly due to the lack of ideas. Enjoy! 😀
Here is my postmortem for the 33th edition of LudumDare. Theme was “You are the monster”. You can read it on the vikindie blog.
My game is a basic tycoon game where you have to organize the “triangular trade” : get soldiers in Europe to capture slaves in Africa and produce new world’s goods to send them to Europe.
Final game
When doing LudumDare, I try to be original in the theme interpretation. I’m a little disappointed because my game doesn’t reflect what I planned initially to match the theme. I was thinking about moral choices for the player (“Pay 100 for a medic or 10 slaves died”, …) and I wanted to have an authority in the game trying to fight slavery, with some navy tracking your ships, and laws passing like Habeas Corpus. The goal was to create frustration for the player so he could say “Oh, fuck, humans right bill passed”. The idea was that “YOU are the monster” don’t designate the game character but the player himself.
I love tycoon games and was very happy to create one for LudumDare (I usually create character centered games).
I used HaxeFlixel. It’s my 4th ludum dare game using that fantastic game engine. For the first time, I used it fluently (I praticed a lot last months). That was awesome.
The HTML5 export had never worked for me, so I planned to create a flash game. I live in France, so the end of the jam is at 3AM. Midnight, I said to myself “Hey, it could be a good idea to test if the game works with flash !”. Spoil: it didn’t. It was VERY slow and buttons was all the same color (the button’s color is an important thing, I will speak about it later). I spend some minutes to optimize the game but it was still too slow and buggy. So I tried the HTML5 export. I didn’t belived. It worked. That was awesome (let’s be honest, I don’t like flash).
I still use a proven and reliable IDE : vim, tmux and my personnal configuration ;-). If you are interested, here is my vimrc.
I used Krita… and tried to do something. I spent one hour to draw the map (saturday night, 1AM, before bed). Probably something like one hour more to create all buildings and the boat. No animation, no different images when buildings upgrade, … That pretty sucks and lead to a static game. But I consider that graphics are not very important in a tycoon game, and I hate those business simulation games where graphics go AGAINST the game (think about Railroad Tycoon 3 where the 3D hype leads to unreadable informations).
Yes, this is a Mapmonde. This was my game before assets creation.
It was the last thing I did. It was probably midnight past thirty, I plugged a MIDI keyboard, opened LMMS, then Pixitracker, tried to do something audible … Nothing came. So I used Abundant music, it generates music procedurally. In less than one hour I had one music that correctly fits my games. Really happy about it, the game without music would be boring. The main problem, there is only one music, no sound effects and the music don’t transparently loop (you can hear the transition).
Next step, learn how to tweak the generated midi to humanly customize it.
Honestly, I was very lucky, my game system pretty works. I created the concepts and tested them individually but I only tested to play a complete game once. I changed things after that and never tested again before submit.
After submit I saw some issues :
When harbour storage is full, it displays hundred same messages every seconds. Logger window become useless and it may hides informations (like events).
The soldier price is not updated when you upgrade barracks, so I suppose many persons didn’t understood why upgrade barracks. In fact, the soldier price raise each time you buy one. When you upgrade barracks, you divide by 4 the soldier price.
When a boat is in USA, it loads tobacco first, then sugar if space left. Unfortunately, you can have big reserve of sugar in America but you can’t sell it. As you don’t sell it, price raise. But you can’t sell it, so it’s very frustrating. (And the sugar price raise too fast).
My saturday afternoon fuel : carrots and sun.
LudumDare games are usually played in something like less than five minutes and you have one minute to convince the player to continue his game session.
The best I could do would be an interactive tutorial, or at least, a visual help. I absolutly did nothing like that. The only help was a special screen with boring text.
To let people understand the game, I made color changing button depending of actions availables. With that, even if you don’t understand anything to the game, you just have to click green buttons and something good will happens.
The only exception is the boat parts which is always green but is not always a good choice to make.
My theory is that if the player randomly play by clicking on available actions, he will progessively understand what happens and the meaning of the actions (and of the game). After some time of random play, he will be able to do more intelligent actions because he saw what happened with his choices.
At the begining of the game development, the buttons which can’t be used (not enough gold, …) was hidden. This solution seems bad for me because the player is not aware of all actions available in the game and what to do to unlock them.
Theorically, there is a loose condition : if you don’t amass 5000 Gold until Jan 1700. There is an ending with a fucking awesome sentence, but nobody will see it because you can’t really loose. During my tests developements, I was able to do bad investments which leads to a situation where you can’t do anything (not enough money).
I didn’t want to frustrate the player which don’t know the game by letting him loose in the ten first seconds without telling him before 20 minutes of play. So I changed some part : now, all essentials first investments are done automatically : there is a village, a plantation and a slave. The first soldier is free. Even by doing whatever stupid, you will be able to slowly earn money to make better investments.
I’m very happy with this game. I hope you will enjoy playing it as much as me developing it. I wan’t to participate to october challenge, maybe I will reuse Slavery Simulator and continue the development, it depends on the users feedback, ideas to enhance the concept (already got some) and my motivation. Follow me on Twitter if it may interest you.
Here is my compo page : Slave Simulator 2015 . To play the game, it’s here.
Ps: don’t forget to look at Am I the monster?, game made by a friend who invited me in his appartment to do LudumDare and prepared me good tasting coffee.
Tags: compo, haXe, HaXeFlixel, postmortem
Hi! I’ve been working on my entry after the submission date and implementing many of the features suggested by users. While still it is not complete (you’ll find bugs), this is the changelog compared to the original jam entry:
New and shiny version!
Still to-do:
And some pro-tips:
You can play the post-jam version HERE and the original jam version HERE.
Don’t forget to drop a comment if you liked it!
Hello! In case you missed it, allow me to introduce our team’s submission for Ludum Dare 33 jam. Ladies and gentlemen, meet the monsta! 😉
It’s a homemade apocalyptic action game about handmade Martian with truly deadly heat ray. The setting is based on our childhood playing experience and also inspired by HG Wells and PJ Harvey. We think the game turned out very consistent and we hope you’ll have fun playing it.
http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=39357
Don’t hesitate to rate and comment! 😉
Yours, Schrödinger Games Team.
I have written a post-mortem for my compo game Hue and Cry, published on my website:
http://jpp39.user.srcf.net/2015/08/29/hue-and-cry-ld33-post-mortem/
We’re deeply sorry @MauiMc, @ziggy2764 just got 22 rounds in 66 seconds!
He scored while he was streaming his gameplay http://www.twitch.tv/imtheziggy/v/13075735 (7:14:00).
Who can beat the new record? Go for it!!
Tweet an image with your score on #itssundaybbg!
We have recieved a lot of feedback with a lot of positive comments, thank you so much!
Have you tried our game? Play It’s Sunday!
Hey friends: the post-comp version of Campaign Trail OF BODIES, now named Campaign Trail OF BLOOD, is almost done! I’ll be composing and recording the background music today, but in the meantime I’d love to get some testing eyes on this sucker (I’d love it if you could play and rate the comp version first, though).
You can play the post-comp testing build at:
http://inurashii.xyz/CToB
Please leave a comment if you find any typos or bugs.
Cheers,
Cae
If you haven’t played it yet, here is a gameplay video of Impassioned Fowl very kindly made by Freeware Games on Youtube, you can play the full game (in a browser if you so wish) here:
http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=49589
This was my second Ludum Dare entry, and I am much happier with it than the first one I made.
I wrote up a post mortem on my blog, but here are the relevant bits.
Click here to play my awesomeo game!
A lot of participants in Ludum Dare have been writing post mortems for their games — a way to talk about what went well and what didn’t go so well. So, here’s mine.
I think the music in my game is definitely its strongest feature. Since I knew my artwork wasn’t amazing, and trying to make animations still scares me, I wanted to make the music a focal point of the game. I think I was able to capture the feeling I was going for.
Since I’m not a game developer, I don’t know much about what is considered “good” game programming practices. I knew that I wanted transitions to be nice — things fading in and out, that kind of thing, so I spent quite a while making constructs in the code that would fade things in and out based on the game clock. I leaned heavily on EndGate’s tutorials and samples to get me pointed in the right direction, and, in the end, I think that the transitions were (for the most part) pretty smooth.
Once I had some of the “engine” working, including the Dance Dance Revolution game part, I was able to fill it in with content. The “Climb the Rope” song, the “Lunchroom Victory” song and the “It’s Only You” song were all recorded between 3:30PM and 6:00PM on Sunday, giving me less than two hours to put it all back together again. Considering the short time frame, everything managed to come together in a somewhat cohesive ball, and I really was proud of what I had accomplished.
I was overly ambitious. I think that’s pretty common in Ludum Dare. My four levels got whittled down to “if I can just get this one level done…” And even then, I started programming in a “victory” vs. “defeat” condition but just ran out of time… so there isn’t a way to lose, and you basically automatically win. Since there aren’t any other levels, the game just ends after Freshman year… which is kinda funny because the song Climb the Rope ended up being 173 beats per minute, which is a pretty damn fast when you’re trying to hit arrows.
I was also very concerned with the medium in which I was presenting my game. With an HTML5 game, you don’t necessarily have full control over everything, especially timing wise. There was a distinct possibility that when people came to play the game, it could get off… and if the sound was off, the arrows would be off, and it just wouldn’t work. I think having a Win32 executable might have alleviated this in some way, but I didn’t really want to learn a new framework (I didn’t do my homework before the competition, so I just wanted to use a framework that I was at least somewhat familiar with).
My intent was to add more self-doubt into the story as you were accomplishing the tasks. This might have helped solidify the “You are the Monster” theme. Since I didn’t have a chance to do that, a lot of the comments I’ve been getting have been “I’m not sure how this fits the theme,” because the connection to the theme is buried into the lyrics of the songs. The songs are hard to listen to while frantically pushing the arrow keys, so my intent was somewhat lost in translation.
When I finally submitted it, I sent it to a couple of people (my brother, one of my coworkers, and my good friend). Two of them were using Internet Explorer, which I never tested on. I did all of my development using Google Chrome, and it turned out there was a bug where it wouldn’t play on Internet Explorer, and upon further investigation, Firefox. It ended up being a simple thing to fix, but I didn’t get a chance to fix it until Monday morning, about 12 hours after the competition ended.
I am not a game programmer. I don’t even pretend to be one. However, I did my best. All things considered (48 hours, doing everything myself, etc), I am pretty proud of what I built. I’m not sure if I’ll ever “finish” the game, but it was much more fulfilling to have a kinda complete (albeit very short) game.
Hello everybody! How are you today? We are feelin’ good! We are Datamosh (a small indie studio, from Argentina) and this is… frankly, I don’t remember. But it is not the first time we take part in a Ludum Dare jam.
Our team consist of a 2D artist (me, Kaeru) and a programmer (Pablo). I think this time the idea stroke us by surprise and in a very organic way. In about an hour after the theme was announced, we had a very clear approach of what we wanted to achieve. The final result is far from perfect, but we feel that is nice, friendly and approachable. Our biggest concern is always to come up with something way over the top or “overworked”.
I want to share some quick tips in -what I think-, had a very good impact in our productivity:
So, was this your first jam? How did you came up with your idea? Remember, you can play and rate our LD33 game!, leave yours in the comments below!
Tags: argentina, art, datamosh, jam, kaeru, LD33, pixel, pixel art, pixelart
Hey everyone! We hope you’ve been enjoying all these awesome games – we sure have! 😀
We’re a three man team based in the UK, like most of you looking to create awesome games and level up whenever possible! We also had a friend of the group, Ollie, join in this LD to try his hand at doing 2D sprites & animation – he did awesome!
This is our fourth time entering Ludum Dare and will most definitely not be the last!
In Player Rush, you play as the final boss in a newly released RAID dungeon. Players from across the globe are partying up take you down and steal your loot. Your objective is to survive and kill as many of them as you can!
So another Ludum Dare over, another game made! Here’s how it went:
We’ve decided to make a post-compo version with a few of the things we didn’t have time to implement such as:
Here’s a quick preview of the new ‘rage mode’ attack:
So far we’ve had some really great feedback, both on the LD website and on Twitter – we’d like to say a big THANK YOU for all the kind words AND any constructive feedback, it really is appreciated. Who knows, you may see this as a full release in the near future…
We’ve also been having a blast playing all these awesome submissions, there are so many creative and whacky ideas out there! We’re doing our damndest to play as many entries as we can and so far we’ve managed to play every entry that has come our way on Twitter, so keep em’ coming!
Stay schwifty,
Late for the Show is what I consider an unusual achievement for me, I have now taken part in six Ludum Dares, as well as other game jams that take place in 48 hours and some that last a week. However in this case, I wasn’t sure if I could manage to make something in time because of other plans, not to mention already finishing a game for #gbjam a week prior.
However, from around 9PM on 22nd August to around 10PM on the 23rd, I managed to complete Late for the Show and submit it to Newgrounds and Ludum Dare. While I’ve had a few comments with criticisms about the game’s controls and difficulty, I’ve had several comment praising the graphics, audio, the intro and other aesthetics. Plus it’s currently sitting at 3.32 stars on Newgrounds.
There was some slight inspiration to this, since I have woken up on occasions to the realisation that I need to leave as soon as possible to travel somewhere, so I have to quickly grab all the things I need and would sometimes forget something. To fit with the theme, I also decided to include the story of the player being an costume actor, so you need to collect your costume to go to the theatre.
First off, some of the appraisals, to those who said they really like the graphics, thank you. All the pixel art was done with the aide of Piskel, the online pixel art and animation tool. I’ve been using it since GBJAM 4 and it’s been great to use. I like how you can manage your palette, compare frame by frame, mirror draw and do it all online and offline by saving via browser. I do wish it had more options when selecting sections, since you cannot select and area and drag it by hand. I hope people liked the designs of costumes, I’ve already drawn a few more that I can add in future updates.
For those who like the music and sound effects, please send your appraisals to my best friend Lyserdigi, who accepted when I asked him for some retro music for the game on Sunday afternoon. He’s a professional and went through a lot of effort for the track, I think he even bought some sound packs for Elastik in order to achieve the 80’s retro effects of the track. The effects were done with the good old BFXR, a brilliant asset for temporary sound effects.
Also, thanks to those who like the intro. I wanted something that is simple and clearly describes the in-game plot, and some humour. It was really satisfying hearing some comments from Ludum Dare and Reddit saying they loved the intro and found it funny.
One of the criticisms made for the game was really short and only took place in one small room, while it would be easy for me to blame that on time, it was also my intention to set the “find the costume” part of the gameplay in a small room, because I wanted to give the setting that the player recently woke up and left everything in his/her bedroom. However I do really like one Twitch user’s recommendation of expanding the levels into several rooms and extending the time, giving more room to explore and possible hiding spots.
I’ve also had a some issues in early playthroughs of the game, there was an issue with how you check items. Originally, due to how collisions work in HaxeFlixel, you had to be walking into items while pressing the check buttons. This was really difficult to make clear so before the jam deadline was up, I quickly made a build that included a box collision function that allowed the game to handle the collision between the player and objects, and check if the player is still nearby. It’s not perfect since I had to reposition some objects to avoid some conflicts, but at least you were able to check an object without going through it.
If I had some time I’d like to expand on this game with some of the comments made, it would be great to make a larger game with the idea of being late and having to rush to your destination.
What went right:
What went wrong:
Tags: ld33 postmortem
Based on the feedback and statistics, I have updated Hell Court to version 1.4!
Hopefully players will now actually encounter a flamer.
Changes:
If you haven’t played the game yet, now is the time to do it.
Wanted to let everyone know the source code and time-lapse video are available for our game. It’s a jam game but we still wanted to make the source available. I wish more jam games would post source. Sharing is such a big part of this competition.
And now the obligatory plug and animated gif…
Who are you? Why are you here? And what happened?
Turn off the lights, put on your headphones, and enjoy…
A psychotic supernatural thriller
I added a not-so-obvious improvement to the post-jam version: audio is now streamed instead of preloaded thanks to the buzz.js library.
This makes the game loading much quicker (as the biggest files were the background music in ogg and mp3 format) and opens the possibility of playing many different tunes without increasing load times.
The downside is that with slow connections music might take a few seconds to start, but that doesn’t affect gameplay at all.
Should I keep the music streaming or should I go back to preloading?
Play the jam version HERE or the updated post-jam version HERE
Simple platformer made in two days for the ludum dare. Few physics issues but working nonetheless.
Please play and rate 😀
The global performance has been increased by removing redraw calls (only changing transparency), now Firefox runs it with a decent FPS
Devil’s Thoughts
THIS POST IS HUGE! You’ve been warned! 😛
Hi! I’m Fabio, the developer of Look Into The Mirror, and this is my post-mortem. It might be a bit long (actually, might be WAY TOO LONG) and poorly written, but here’s how my last LD went. :3
This is a story about how I came from a “lasagna monster” type of game into my own abstract/narrative platformer.
Ludum Dare started on Friday at 22pm (I’m from São Paulo, Brazil ;P).
From the moment the theme was announced, I knew I’d have to go for the jam. The theme wasn’t the one I wanted the most so I also knew I’d struggle to brainstorm one idea for my game. I also had a lot of (real life) work to do, so I’d have to juggle between webdev and gamedev.
Between work, I spent the whole first day trying to think about an idea. The first concepts were humorous in nature, and kind of childish. They both involved lasagnas:
I started sketching ideas, but my sketches sucked, and I struggled to develop this idea on my first day. Work also didn’t help much, as I’ve been behind schedule for it, so I was a bit desperate and nervous. Also, my lasagna monster sketches looked like a sliced up version of Spongebob with cheese and meat, dripping lots of tomato sauce while running.
That’s right, a lasagna.
While the idea could turn into a funny game, I didn’t like it much, so I discarded it (might work on it later, but for this LD it didn’t feel right :P).
Later, still on the first day, I went to the supermarket with my parents and that’s where the idea came in, just after receiving a message from my GF on Whatsapp. She gave me the idea of using a “mirror”, just right after this message, I saw two things happen at the supermarket:
Liking or not, unfortunately, sometimes we stumbled upon this kind of people. That’s when the idea of monster parents came to my mind. But after thinking a little bit, I decided to expand upon the monster I believe that lives within us.
Coming home from the market, I wrote the basic idea on paper and recorded a few song fragments on guitar (both of which I shared on soundcloud).
The whole second day I tried to build and work over this idea and build some basic mechanics, all of this while still juggling work. I kinda ended up with a base storyline and some basic mechanics for the game.
The engine I chose for the game was ClickTeam Fusion 2.5, because I wouldn’t have much time to code and I wanted to try doing something with it, since I bought it.
The last day started with me working on a few abstract guitar pieces, recording on an iPad with AmpKit. It was just some guitar lines and sounds with delay, which I thought would build up a nice mood.
Most of this last day I spent working on the blueprint level and how transitions would work, while drawing the main character and some objects for the game.
To draw and animate, I chose to use Inchworm, on my Nintendo DSi, since it would be faster, and also because I wouldn’t have to switch windows on my PC. I exported the basic animations to PyxelEdit, so I could build the sprite sheets to use in the game, while trying the animations.
The pink color in the game came as I was too lazy to think about colors, so I just picked up whatever color came from the base color palette in PyxelEdit and used it for most of the art.
Jam version of the “work” level, quick and poor level design.
The last few hours of the last day I spent building the five levels, “animating” the text on the cutscenes and inserting sounds and music to export the project for LD.
And I made it in time! Whew!
Having said all this, some good and bad points of this LD and things I might do next time. Might be missing some points, though.
The Good:
The Bad:
Things I plan to do next LD, based on my current experience:
And, here’s the basic outline of the game (SPOILER ALERT):
We’re all some kind of monster, but the majority of us (I believe) keep this monster under control and tamed deep down inside of us, so it won’t cause harm. But some people just don’t have enough strength to hold it and it takes over.
The monster in my game is just an ordinary person, he’s married, he’s got a daughter, he works at a nice company and he has friends. But not everything is perfect:
These factors start to stress him up, feeding his inner monster, and he starts to drink, smoke and things get worse for everyone around him.
The game, though, doesn’t follow this story in a linear way, taking on an abstract form based on some inspiration I had from some religions and beliefs I hold.
The game would start without giving an insight on the story, having the player collect fragments of his memory to remember the things he did, and looking into the mirror inside his soul to repent and ask for redemption.
As the game progresses, the dream would start to end (if you notice, the sound when you touch the mirror gets more distorted) and the cutscenes would guide you to darker/sad dialogues, until the last scene, where the fragments are some drink bottles, a cigar, keys and a car tire.
Then you would get to the “hospital” cutscene, where you would have the whole explanation for the story: for the whole game you were hospitalized, because of an accident provoked by drunk driving.
Those memories and the whole adventure happened inside your head, as you wished not to have done everything you did and were asking for forgiveness and redemption for being a monster in life.
In the last scene, the wife would start a monologue, not noticing the player could still hear everything, telling that they could’ve just talked to solve everything, and things didn’t have to go that way.
Telling the player what he did was too hard on himself, and wouldn’t even be able to properly live, she unplugs him, ending the game.
Basically, that’s it.
I might work and refine this game further, while making it more player friendly, as soon as I finish work and judging ends.
I already did a post-jam version of the game, reworked from the ground-up, with better controls, collisions and design, but I plan on going further with this. 😉
Same level as above, on the post-jam version, more refinement, better hitboxes.
Overall, I’m quite happy with the results this time too, as it feels more like a proper game that my first LD entry, it feels more “complette”.
Thanks for reading this! Thanks for playing, if you played!
See ya in the next LD/Mini-LD or whatever game jams we might go for in the near future!
Cheers!
P.s.: If, after reading, you still want to play this game for judging, please do so here! The post-jam version isn’t for judging, so if you’re not doing it, you can just go for post-jam. 😉
Play the game
http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=56101
Run OGRE Run is an infinite runner, where you (the OGRE) run through a medieval village causing mayhem. With an angry mob hot on your heels, and an outraged citizenry hurling anything they can get their hands on at you. You must avoid obstacles, dodge weapons, consume pies, and drink ale along the way to stay one step ahead.
We’re a two-man team out of California and Texas, and this is our first game jam. In fact, we only heard about this competition three days before it started and figured it would be a great experience. We have a handful of games in our development queue, but we’ve struggled along the way with scope creep and the daunting reality of large game projects. We were very excited by the idea of a game jam to force us into managing the scale and scope, and avoid getting bogged down as we have in other projects.
After reading the winning theme on Friday, we connected over Skype and shared a Mischief session to sketch out ideas, figure out our base mechanics, and conceptualize the general game flow. Once we had a high level view of what we were going to build, we jumped into a google doc and wrote up a basic game design document (GDD) of the systems, art, and sounds we would need to complete the game, and then split up ownership of tasks. Since we’re both pretty comfortable bouncing between code and art responsibilities, our plan was to build all the logic first using primitives, then tag-team art creation while merging and testing systems, and spend whatever time we had left polishing the results and adding as much candy as time allowed.
Mischief concept sketches and GDD…
We started by building systems in separate projects, then importing them as asset bundles into the main project, and used SourceTree and Bitbucket for our version control. We assumed once we had basic functionality in the main scene we could both switch to it and proceed with a Commit, Fetch, Merge, Push routine. After a few of these however, we realized git wasn’t working well with Unity specific files such as levels, materials, etc, so we stopped trying to work on the scene simultaneously and ended up doing most of our refinements in separate projects and merging only once we knew things were ready, or close enough. By the end of day one, all the primary systems were built to at least the first pass stage.
On day two we took turns working on the main project while the other worked on art to deal with version control issues. Art was produced in Blender, Photoshop, and Gimp. Everything is our original art, but the character and houses were originally built for another project so we opted out of the graphics category. The character and houses still had to be modified for this project and the remaining art was created within the 72 hour window, so art still consumed a chunk of our available time. It was great to replace the primitives with final art, the transformation was exciting.
Core logic in place with primitive graphics…
3D asset creation and testing…
The music and sound creation occurred throughout the duration of the project, but really started coming together towards the end. The songs were created in GarageBand, and audio processing was done in Audition. Getting audio into the game was another aha moment that added a lot of polish to the overall project.
Day three was filled working out remaining code issues, creating the logo, theming the UI, and plenty of play testing. Time restrictions forced us to cut a handful of ideas, and take a few shortcuts, but we managed to submit the initial WebGL build by the deadline, and followed that with desktop versions for PC, Mac, and Linux.
Ludum Dare was a fantastic experience for us, the time restriction forces productivity over all other things. It’s been so fun to see other perspectives, play other games, and have an immediate audience for our own. We can’t wait to do it again. As for Run OGRE Run, our current plan is to polish it up, add all the things we were forced to cut plus more content and touch controls, and publish it on mobile.
Our software toolset for the build…
Additional software to make it easier to deal with our geographical difference…
High score (1857) play through…
Play the game
http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=56101
Yet another Game Jam game complete! This is the 10th jam game I’ve completed thus far, but not any less challenging! This is the first time I got a jam playable on Android! (but still playable on PC and Web)
I wanted to try something a little different this time around, and do something with a simple but “variable” mechanic, and all puns aside, I ended up choosing to do something related to math.
Not really sure, but for some reason I associated “monsters” with “numbers/math” at the time, maybe it had something to do with my antagonistic perspective of the subject math?
DAY 1
High concept wise, the game’s concept consisted around the idea of having the monster attack jets and stuff by “doing some calculations” that allowed him to “accurately” shoot down foes. (apparently he’s a genius, so 2+2 is enough for him to shoot down a moving plane)
First Draft of the Gameplay Window
I immediately knew that I wanted a lizard/dino like monster, and started drawing a bunch of lizards. I didn’t think a lot of my original drawings looked “Monster” enough, so I added some “kaiju” dino to his design and added in ears.
After the design, my co-partner and I started thinking of a bunch of other ideas for the game, but eventually settled around something similar to the original concept. We began prototyping right way.
DAY 2
I started working on the bulk of the game’s graphics on the second day of the jam. I was struggling with coming up with the style of the graphics, and settled for going with an Arcade/Sega Genesis look.
Video: Getting the Animations Working
I tried to stick with a limited palette with limited colors, and used no more than 4 frames for the animations.
DAY 3
Video: The First Playable
Of course, the bulk of the work was done one day three. We were having some surprising issues with enemy spawning, as well as trying to get most of the game state stuff in. The music was created towards the end of the day, and many of the backgrounds weren’t present until the final polish.
Updated Interface
We updated the GUI with more colorful buttons, and added a couple as well when more of the features made it’s way in. I started working towards getting a mobile version of the game ready, which took a while, since I haven’t developed for mobile in a while, but alas:
Deployed Game on Android
Overall, this was a pretty fun Jam for us. A lot of friends playtested this during development, and actually wanted a copy for them, their kids and siblings to play.
If you want to play it yourself, check out our submission page:
http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=23642
I created a small bug-fixing patch for my entry that you can play here!
Also, if you haven’t seen my time lapse, here it is:
Thanks for reading!
Can you adapt a puzzle detective game for preschool children? Yes! I made a special version of “You! Are the monster” for kids. The puzzle is now age-appropriate and the font nice and big. Plus it still works nicely on your phone!
Go check it out! And you can compare this version to the original one, which you can still rate!
Still having a cold decided to continued working a bit on my Ludum Dare 33 game Monster of the Matrix. In the game you play as a skeleton trapped inside a dungeon crawler. But something is wrong… You realize that you are trapped inside a world that is shutting down. You must escape…! And something is hunting you….!
New version
Old version of game
Links
Tags: game, jam, LD33, Ludum Dare, post-mortem, postmortem, progress, unity, unity3d, update, video, Windows
Check us out at Twitch.tv!
Hey guys! I’m here to share with you the experience I had creating the game PURGE, to those who understand a little bit of portuguese, you can check out this video:
And you can also check this video, it is something like a trailer
Thanks for your attention! Also, if you are interested in my game, you can please here.
One of the best thing of GameJam is that, unlike the full games, most games in Jam are created aiming at only one or two main points, just like dishes made with fewer kinds of ingredients. It made easier to pick out each ingredient, taste it, think about how the cook made it, and why it tastes so.
Of course, the skill of “cooking & combining ingredients” plays a large part in the final result. But as a cook, it is very beneficial to know the taste and characteristic of every ingredient before cooking.
Here are something I found in these entries:
Violence is an instinct-level desire within people. Blood, brutality, screaming, broken limbs, etc. could stimulate such illusion of violence, raising the dopamine level.
Youkai uses the human enemies, it increases the feeling of violence too.
Youkai has equipped a dash-based killing system, player needs to rush through the enemies to take them down, and in the same time player needs to keep notice of other enemies around who are ready to attack. The pace of the game is relatively fast, and become faster with more and more enemies.
The game grants an invincible buff when players got 10-kills combo, the combo reward is good in itself, but IMHO, the buff is granted too frequently and breaks the FLOW state of player.
This is a well-made reflex game, hard, fast-paced, with strong beats, simple graphic is perfectly programmed to match with the music beat. Also have high requirement of precise control and unforgiving death.
All of this helps to bring player to focus on the game and enter FLOW state. Of course it could scare off many players too.
It reminds me of the “Super Hexagon”, but this one has more features and the difficulty is lower.
Well, we all know that instinct-level desire Freud paid a lot of attention to.
This game is quite straight to the point: keep the starfish away, the basic action is click and drag, when the starfish is red, the dragging will rip a piece of clothes.
Yeah, it fits the theme well.
It looks like a plain idle game, its name suggests an idle game. But it’s not.
You will get no spoiler from me.
This game is not aiming at instinct-level or manipulative-level pleasure. Its main feature is humor and surprise. Such features are often one-time use and make them very low cost-effective.
But good humor and reflections-level stimulation might be more effective to make people to remember longer time.
==========================================================
At last, a shameless self-promotion of my own game, hope you would have a play and give some opinions.
Well after a first LD comes the first Post Mortem
I have to say, when I first decided to participate this year, I had no clue what I was getting myself into 😀
As it turned out, it was waaaaay more amazing than I thought it would be.
Here’s why:
And so in the 72 hours Jam, a friend and I made Day in a life of a NPC.
Things learned:
One week after the LD, we finally got some free time, and we looked at messages from our friends who spotted some bugs, and we got around fixing them (mostly menus being broken and game crashes).
The updated version has been linked to from our entry page which you can find here . If you like it why not give it a try and a review
What’s next?
We really enjoyed working on this game and find it fun. We have decided that we will release it for free on itch.io with a few more additional features, based on the comments from the LD community and input from other sources.
Some of the things we plan on adding include game speed changing depending on how good/bad you are doing in the game, in order to make it slightly more challenging, reworking the player controls to make them a bit tighter (I believe that it will be important with the faster gameplay) and adding local co-op multiplayer. We’ll see where we go from there.
Massive props to the LD community, you guys are awesome, we’ll definitely be back for the next one 😀
Well I really had it fixed on Monday and the fixed version was released the same day but I had to go on a trip for a few days so I forgot to post this. So here is a youtube video showcasing the game:
If you want to play it, click HERE!
And here is his face. For reasons.
Be a shit monster against another shit monster in this 2 player game
Make shit together is way better!!!
Yay!! Grab the shit in the neigbohood!!
Excremonsters!!!
Excremonsters!!!
Excremonsters!!!
I’d like to share what I did in my game to procedurally generate puzzles. The cool thing is that this technique is quite general, so it may work for your games as well. If you’d like to, you can play “You! Are the monster” before reading on.
In my case I generate a “whodunit” type puzzle. There are four people and they say things about where they were, what they wore, and who they saw. Sometimes it’s vague, like “I saw someone tall at the bar”. The bad guy is a monster, of course, and they can lie but no one else does.
We can’t just generate those statements entirely at random, because some puzzles may end up unsolvable. So here’s what I do instead.
I start with only a few statements – one per person. I pick those at random. Then, I try to solve the puzzle (more on this later). If there is more than one person who could be the monster, then I add more statements. If instead no one can possibly be the monster, I start over. This eventually leads to finding a solvable puzzle.
Then I trim it down, removing statements that are not necessary to the puzzle being solvable. This results in a puzzle that is hopefully fun to solve.
One thing I only realized after the compo deadline is that this technique sometimes generates trivial puzzles, where the monster says things that contradict themselves. I fixed this is the post-compo version.
Now, you may ask, how do I solve the puzzle? I use brute force. Each randomly-generated statement is not only a bit of text, but also a bit of code that can check if what it says is true. I cycle through every possible choice for who is the monster, and then look for a combination of choices (people,location,color) such that every non-monster person tells the truth. If I find one then it means that that particular monster can be a solution. There can be either zero, one, or more solutions. I stop as soon as I find two since I know that’s not a puzzle I’ll want to keep. So a good puzzle has exactly one solution: if I remove the monster, then there exists a scenario that means everyone else tells the truth. If I pick anyone else as the monster then the remaining statements (including the actual monster’s) don’t go together – there is no scenario where they can all be true at the same time.
Surprisingly enough, this generation is fast enough that I can run it at the client as you load the page, and I didn’t even feel the need to put up an animated spinner or other “please wait” indicator. For more complicated problems, though, this may become necessary.
So there you go! With this simple technique you too can generate procedural puzzles to add to your game. Let me know what you think in the comments!
in the unity , I want to delete a element in the Array by index, so I called the function array.remove(index); but it remove the first match the element. I realize that I should call the function like this, array.RemoveAt(index)
game is here:http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=55854
For those who are having trouble getting the GIFs to run (for example, past me), follow this advice: when adding, click edit and select full size, otherwise WordPress will remove all the frames.
If the GIFs end up too big and become compressed, go to the HTML view of the post (top right corner, switch from Visual to Text), look for these lines where the picture is embedded:
width=”432″ height=”243″
And set them to be approporiately sized (no wider than 500 px is a good guideline). Also, do not forget to keep the width/height ratio the same or the GIF may still end up looking as if an elephant sat on it (or pushed it sideways).
So, here’s some from our game!
Very sinister!
Gameplay
http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=55854
A super fun game~~
Do you like it？
Come and challenge！！ lol
The timelapse for my compo entry: Dungeon Hunter
I’m away from my computer this week and only got my phone so I can’t record new gifs of my game Earthpocalypse. So have the same one I posted in 3 other posts. I’ll be playing the games of all those who have commented when I get home at the end of the week.
It is my first Ludum Dare (not my first game jam though). I made my game Birdy Bridge. I could never imagine I finished a game with such completeness in 48 hours. Graphical and musical effects are out of my expectation. It is a game with new ideas for the gameplay and fairy-tale-style art.
This game is inspired by Chinese folktale The Weaver Girl and the Cowherd, but the ending is totally different because you are the monster. Acturally it doesn’t matter if you have no idea about the story itself.
Now here is what I’ve done in 48 hours (originally written in Chinese). I hope my English is good enough to express.
Theme
I am mostly a front-end developer, so I was prepared with HTML5/JavaScript with CreateJS. CreateJS is a good framework for prototyping games, though not perfect. I have used it before. It could decrease my coding time and solve some browser compatibility issues for me.
I voted for all candidate themes and gave -1 for you are the monster. I do not like this theme at all. I do not want players to act as monsters, and I’ve never drawn monsters before 
But I had to make it. I was considering a game “finally find that I am the monster”, something like “princess finally find the prince and eat him”. Later, the folktale came into my mind (because Qixi Festival in China just passed two day before). Then I designed a game “prevent lovers from reunion”.
Originally in the final level, players should act as the boss. However, I gave up this idea for I thought it bad for overall gameplay, so it was somewhat away from the theme. Sorry.
Graphics
40 minutes passed when I finished thinking about the theme. I thought I should hurry up. I had to do the following myself: graphics, programming, level design, texts, music, and final fixes.
I started from graphics. Here I made an important decision: using vector graphics. Vector graphics would meet the folktale, and could save me lots of time! I did not wasted much time in graphics, and improved overall quality and completeness.
In the next 1 hour, I drew a girl in pink and a bird that not moving. Both of them are replaced by better sprite sheets later. Then I spent another hour to structure basic code. Before lunch (LD started at 9 a.m. for me), I could see a girl stand on a bird.
Programming and Level Design
Coding went well for me. I met a bug about path detection and fixed it soon. Some gameplay details were decided while coding. Stars were drawn. Before dinner, 3 levels and a simple game cover were done.
Then it took me a whole night to design levels, play, and fix bugs. Code were always changing. After the first day, I could see
I had to do on next day
I did some graphical fixes and slept late. In the morning of second day, I had the background image embeded into the game.
Music
Music is important to my game. I preserved a whole afternoon to create music. I planned to make two sound tracks, but finally I made 3 sound tracks in 6 hours. Crazy?
The first sound track are used in title page. It is the most important one and took most of the time. It was a combination of imagination, sorrow, and bravery. The second were created for difficult levels, and the third were used in boss fight.
Later I decided to add sound effects. It differs when jumping onto birds with different heights.
Final Fixes
The final fixes include
I finished these late in the night.
After then…
Next day, I discovered some bugs and fixed them.
Some players suggest that the game is difficult, so I released an “easy mode” several days later.
Overall, it is a great experience in Ludum Dare. I feel greate to make this game. Hope you enjoy!
Hi everyone!
I have modified the web version so it now fits the screen space and can be correctly played directly on the game page here.
That has been my very first game jam, and I appreciate so much all your comments.
Thank you all again, and have a nice play!!
a middle ages UI with stylize is difficult for me …
so,maybe i need to explore some new way with other method….
Scheme 2
Scheme 1
the old UI(final show panel) was use from our team’s last game < Double Cross> : (cyber-punk survival game)
[evening]
bugs still alives,woym and Mr.Hitman have been working hard to fix them…
Tags: conditions, screenshots, UI, witch
Hi there,
I’m doing a remake of my LD33, with Unity and Playmaker this time ! Prototype is soon ready, I need to have a working inventory and keys / doors system with unique numbers.
Here is the graph for Guards :
I need to make new 3D assets (they are on paper atm) and I try to improve the gameplay.
Stay tuned !
You can play my entry there (UE4 version) : WHERE AM I ?
Time to destroy a village and wipe out the population.
They sent an army? Wipe out that to.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KteGX3ge0TI
Tags: destruction, LD33, monster
Hello guys, after a long week receiving feedback for our game, we finally posted it on Game Jolt
Here is the link of the Road To Hell In Game Jolt: Road To Hell On Game Jolt
Also here is Brazil we have an event called Power Up, in this event a lot of professionals from the local industry come to make lectures and so we can show then our games from Ludum Dare, so being able to receive their feedback is awesome, not only this, but this event is great for making networking, so thank you Ludum Dare for all of this!
Also here is the link for my game in Ludum Dare, if you want come by and leave a comment: Road To Hell On Ludum Dare
Tags: gamejolt
Have you tried to destroy the world today? PLAY OUR GAME and try it.
After ld33 we all have some social businesses need to deal with, but now we come back and manage to improve and polish the game by following many constructive feedbacks’ guide.Boats come from both sides at the monment!
Lets show some new features by a gif:
NEW FEATURES:
If you want to try and rate it please click here:
http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=54824
So, I was trying to play some entries but can’t download them because dropbox is giving error 500, it seems that the whole service is down. Anyone else having the same trouble?
tl;dr
What went right
Graphics – I love the brain!
Cut scenes – I think they’re funny!
Gameplay – Controls and such work and feel pretty much how I wanted them
What went wrong
Levels – Too many levels for 48 hours!
Music – Not my forte.
Bugs – I had too much content that I was generating too fast.
Lessons learned
Don’t nest too many actions in C#
I can build a fully featured and relatively large game in 48 hours
I suck at music
Well, my first Ludum Dare is done, and it was awesome! I’ve done game jams in the past but LD is a whole other ball of wax. This time out I decided to be ambitious, insanely, stupidly ambitious!
The theme came as a surprise to me. I had planned for lots of them but “You are the monster” slipped through the cracks. Fortunately, a few months ago I had come up with the idea of a “space invaders in reverse” game. The only problem was, my concept was for a full scale game with cutscenes, hand crafted levels, and full 3d! Way too ambitious for me to do all by myself in 48 hours!
Well, never let it be said I lacked for ambition! It turned out to not be that tough. I started with the 3D modeling. I used Qubicle, (the 3d designer that cross road used), I wanted to use a limited Atari style palette so I used 8 total colors. I’ve been using Qubicle for a while and like it. My approach was to draw a “sprite” first in 2D. Then extrude into 3D and then carve out details. I’m super happy with how my models came out, especially Emperor Brain. He is my favorite character I have ever designed!
I also needed 3d text. I used Cheetah3D which is kind of a leaner, cheaper, Maya. I like it better than Blender because Blender has a UI designed for people from some planet that has more arms and fingers than Humans do! Anyway, creating 3D text in Cheetah was really easy.
Finally, I could move onto code. I’m genuinely happy with all the code I wrote on Saturday. I built all my classes as state machines. My idea was that if I took the extra time to structure everything correctly at the start then I would be able to greatly simplify the “crisis code” I knew I would be writing on Sunday. That was the best decision I made during the jam!
So, in addition to all this I also needed to script and voice cut scenes. I know I’m insane! The scripting was really easy. I’ll be the first to admit it could be tightened up. But for something that was more or less a stream of consciousness, not too bad. The script itself took me about an hour. Recording dialog took another hour. I used Audacity because it is the only recording software I have a clue about! For the actual recording I used the Blue Yeti microphone. I’m pretty sure I used the wrong settings on the mic and I forgot to use the spit guard (my wife knows about recording audio, not me, so I was SOL). If I had set myself up like I normally would for recording it would have sounded a lot better!
One thing I wanted to do was edit the audio files to make the whole thing tighter, but I didn’t have nearly enough time for that! I also didn’t have time to rerecord for anything other than serious issues and flubbed lines.
Another thing I needed more time on was level design. For some reason I decided I needed 9 levels. There was no way for me to make 9 hand crafted exquisite levels. This was a huge mistake. I wish I had focused on making 4 perfect levels rather than 9 decent ones. Live and learn!
One really interesting thing I learned about Mono is that if you have too many nested actions it will freak out, use 100% of the CPU and hang. I’m not sure why this happens. But it didn’t make for a fun Sunday surprise! I ended up needing to remove the ability to skip individual lines of dialog. This little surprise took a couple of hours to fix. It was the only major technical hiccough.
Generally though, I’m super happy with how everything came out I definitely plan on being back for LD34!
P.S. I screen caped all the cut scenes in case anyone is interested in the entire ludicrous story!
Alien Rush is mine 6th LD entry and mine 5th Compo entry. You can play it here.
What I’m happy about:
What I have mixed feelings about:
Also, learning curve is too steep IMO. I should add easy level 1, which also would serve as tutorial.What I don’t like:
What I hate:
Anyway, I’m very happy with result. You can play my game here.
Other things about my game:
Tags: 2D, compo, LD33, postmortem
So, a lot of people have been complaining about my entry, GROWL.
The main drawback of my game is that people can’t seem to understand the gameplay mechanics. To me, it just summarises as “inverted Hexagon”.
There’s been a very annoying bug in GROWL for the past few days : the green path to the next note was not displayed properly. I think this has confused many players, so I just fixed it.
I also added a fullscreen mode -which you can enable/disable by pressing the “F” key-, and lowered the difficulty as a (very) few amount of people survived longer than 15 seconds.
I hope this little yet efficient update will let you, players, enjoy GROWL more.
Tags: l
The post-compo version of Undetected is now updated with sound effects, a brand new soundtrack and several new levels. Still need to tweak some of the levels but overall things are coming together.
^click the image to play the gif as ludum dare hates me^
This a “short” little post for my LD33 entry – Drack’s Mansion or more accurately what I learned about the competition by making it. I did do a post-mortem about it but I felt the need to make this type of post as well, not only for myself but also for others that maybe thinking of entering the jam in the future. I am quite happy with how the game turned out and feedback has been very positive but the self-critic in me will simply not let the flaws with it slide without analyzing them. So without further a due, let’s begin.
The number one thing I learned about Ludum Dare is: Freaking plan like crazy.
It may sound simple enough but trust me, not following this rule is the main reason for the my game’s flaws. I simply did not brainstorm nearly enough which lead to a failed idea I scrapped down the road. Let me elaborate so you’re not kept in the dark. When I heard the theme I started brainstorming as you would do. I quite quickly came up with the idea of being a scary monster in a randomly generated cabin where new tourists came along every week and you had to kill them. You had to use cool abilities to accomplish this and all of them were powered by your fear bar. You used some of it every time you did something cool or killed someone. To recharge it you did typical horror type stuff like banging doors, making stuff levitate, shutting off lights etc. If you lost all your fear bar, the game was over. It was a simple stealth game idea that had an ok horror spin to it. It seemed fine in my mind at the time so I did no further brainstorming and jumped straight into making it. It was around the end of the compo’s first day that I realized I had not put nearly enough thought into how things worked. I had the game mechanics down in my head, as in what I wanted to do, but I did not have any clue about how exactly I wanted to do it. This simple mistake and rushing straight into making a game rather than knowing what I wanted to make cost me pretty much most of my first day and made the game much worse than it could have been (eg. no music, some unpolished areas). So to recap: Until you have every main mechanic for your game figured out 100%, DO NOT stop brainstorming. Main mechanics are the ones that make a game functional and playable. Secondary ones are the polish (eg. Mario’s running around in levels and jumping on bad guys are main mechanics. The different enemies and level obstacles are secondary). Speaking on mechanics…
Second lesson I learnt mostly through playing other entries is: The simplest entries are usually the most fun and well made.
Often these games have one or two mechanics at most. But they are taken as far as they can go without getting stale. What I mean is, the game is essentially just one or two mechanics, but the player is presented with variations on them that function similarly to one another but are different enough to be interesting. Most great Ludum Dare entries follow this principal and I wished I did as well. Games that do this (or similar things) that I have seen are: Bunny Inferno, Grave, Takodemon and Super Chop. Now in terms of how those mechanics are made, we move to the next point…
Think about the depth of your mechanics first, and not their presentation.
With well-made mechanics even the most mundane things (such as chopping a tree, getting bunnies across a pit etc.) can be made fun. So focus mostly on making good mechanics fist, and presenting them later. That does not mean: Don’t think of a clever idea or take on the theme as soon as possible. It simply means, think about cool gameplay concepts first before adding polish. You might have noticed I mentioned depth. Basically, the more of the aforementioned in the above paragraph variations your mechanic can have, the deeper it is. So don’t only think of how your mechanic stands on its own while making it but also how you can expand it later. And also, think outside of the box as much as possible. It makes for more memorable games that are better in people’s eyes even if they are not as polished.
That said, hopefully my little ramble was useful to y’all and to me for my next jam as well. If you feel the need to see my entry and get some more context about the personal stuff I tackled here, you can always give it a go over here. Happy deving!
Tags: LD33, ld33 postmortem, ld33compo, LD33GC
So I was able for once to stick to a game for more than just a weekend. The post jam version of Grow is now out! More than enough to celebrate!
The new version has a few things going for it. First, graphics are improved and sound and music is added. The game is very atmospheric now, even more than before. I am really pleased with how it came out.
The gameplay has been balanced a bit. Now your health decreases in bigger amounts the more you survive, meaning there is an added challenge. I hope that helps with the repetitiveness with the game a little. Now you see the time you have survived too!
There are a few minor bugs fixed, and the game is now stable.
So I hope you like the game. If you have already played and voted, thank you! You may want to check the postjam version to see if you like it more. If you haven’t played it yet, try it! It is a fast load and fast play. It is a bite sized game. You can find it here: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=21736
Thank you all again for making this Ludum Dare possible. I really really love this competition.
Andrea
I updated the post-compo version of my procedural puzzle game, “You! Are the monster” so it can now do bigger puzzles, with 5 suspects instead of 4!
You can play the compo version or the post-compo version with its new 5-people mode. It still also has the “preschool” version for your kid!
Hi. I wrote a postmortem about my game here on my blog. Check it out to see how much my game changed over the weekend!
Also, you can play and rate my game right here!
Tags: LD33, ld33 postmortem, postmortem
Went through and made some improvements based on comments, as well as some other things I thought of after the weekend was over. There’s a link at the bottom of the page where you can download it.
– All new art.
– Fire can no longer miss.
– New descriptions for attacks.
– Now able to pick up something you’re standing on.
– Added new action. Leaping will you let you move around fast, but also makes you prone for a short while.
– Corpses no longer block movement and can no longer shoved.
– General bug fixes.
A new edition of the LudumDare; and No Wand Studios, a small studio of four Spanish young people, participates for the second time to show our craziness.
This time we liked the theme more than the last one. The brainstorming was shorter and better ideas came out of it. In the studio, we are big fans of the tycoon genre and we also love kaijus (Who doesn’t?). So out of all the ideas we decided soon to join those two concepts.
As in all brainstorming we began with great and very funny ideas … but very costly in time. So we had to reduce it to a single gameplay mechanic. You would have to blend kaijus and send them against cities. When this was done, we saw that the battle may be somewhat boring. As we were (or we thought) on timetable we decided to add some of the features that we had though during the brainstorming. We also included some goodies for a feed stage and world news with a lot of references to geek & freak culture.
This complicated the game a little more. Now the kaijus had three stats and towns responded to the attack. All of this went along great until the last two hours until delivery. The last two hours were absolutely crazy, our programmers almost collapsed, but they withstood the pressure well.
Thus, we face Kaiju Tycoon, a simulator where you carry the kaijumancer and you send your creatures to destroy the world.
Summarizing, we talk about the pros and cons:
Pros:
Cons:
If you’ve read up to here, simply thanks for your time and check it out: KAIJU TYCOON
Stay tuned!
Tags: Kaiju, Kaiju Tycoon, Kaijus
Hi again, here’s an update. I’ve just added touch controls so that my entry is now playable in Android (either in the browser or as an app). It’s also on Google Play.
Glad to see so many positive comments on my game. Thanks all for the feedback!
Justice Five is a boss-run kind of game. Each level consists of a boss fight which upon completion, leads to another. Justice Five is also a game about super heroes, and when we think of super heroes one of the first things that comes to our minds is: super powers. This also came to my mind when I thought of making a game with this settings but… how do we create and adapt super powers to gameplay?
In this post I will talk about the design process of the two first bosses.
The first boss
The first boss invokes the Superman cliché: strong, flies, has a cape… I could use super strenght as a power to this one. He could keep flying and hammering the player from time to time but, based on the ‘lore’ I wanted to create, the eye beams would suit him so much better. I tried to make his art to look imponent. He would keep flying, just standing there and shooting his beams at the ‘enemy’ (aka the player), that inferior being. Why use super strenght when he could just wipe that monster with little effort?
The next thing in mind was: how to make the beams work? If they were too fast, the player would have little time to respond and no time at all to predict where the next beam would be fired. If they were too slow, they wouldn’t seem “real”.
Here’s how I solved this: by indicanting to the player, through a target icon, where he would fire next. A few seconds later the beam would be fired in that direction. The targets for the beam are chosen randomly but within a certain area of the screen, that way the player always know where are the danger zones. Initially the boss was firing only one beam at once. This was making the fight very easy, because just one beam covers little screen space. This made me decide to make the boss also fire 3 beams at the same time, with the quantity of beams (1 or 3) being chosen randomly (40% chance for each). Now, with a decent amount of screen space covered, I had to create a ‘break’ for the player. Since you can only attack this boss in a certain angle, sometimes players could find difficult dodging the beams and reaching him. And to fix this I created a special attack. During this attack, the boss stops firing beams and becomes completely vulnerable until he unleashes it.
With these settings players who enjoy a challenge can try to hit him while dodging his beams, and players who wants to play safe can have their time and only attack him during the special animation.
The second boss
Upon finishing the first level I opened Photoshop and started designing the second boss sprite. I wanted him to have lightning powers but until then I hadn’t created any mechanics for him. After adding his sprite to the game I made him shoot lightning, but… the first boss also shot things at the player. To create variety I had to add more to it and… why not a shield? Characters that uses energy as the source of their power often use it to attack AND defense. I then created a shield for him. Immediatly that connection between lightning and triggering something just clicked in my head, so I created two devices that should be activated with the boss own attacks, disrupting his shield and letting him vulnerable so the player can hit him.
You may note that fighting this boss is like fighting the first one using the ‘safe way’: you have to dodge his attacks and wait for a opening. But in this case you create the opening.
This was one of the trickiest boss to balance. There was the speed of his projectiles and the time bewteen the barrier being destroyed and rebuild again. To test the projectile speed I was using the two lightning devices as reference: when standing next to the device, motionless, am I able to escape a projectile if I start running/jumping at the time they are shot?
As for the barrier time, I did it by brute force. Started with X seconds and tried to hit him (always using the longest way). Many times I would end up stuck inside the barrier, dying right after it. Evey time that happened I would add 1 to X and check again. I think in the end I found an optimal time.
Feedback
So far I’ve received some amazing feedback over here. The game is far from perfect, but recognizing its flaws make me learn so much. I wanna thanks all of you who used your time to check and rate my game. If you haven’t played it yet, you can check my entry on the link below:
Well, good day to all! We’re a new team for this 33th LD. How should I start with…ok, a bit of intro first.
Firstly, this team is formed originally for participating in this event. All members of this team come from the same country (well, duh), same university and same club named Games Development Club (GDC). And when we were informed to take part into this event, we just joined in with solely a little of game making experience that can be referred as “next to none”. However, thanks to the other club members’ advices, we managed to come up with a playable prototype entitled “Monster Guider”.
Here’s the overview of the game. Monster Guider Link
Now here’s a bit of self-introduction. I’m Ang, a proud member of Team Kast and at the same time the current team leader (you see, we exchange leaders sometimes for better ideas).My current main role is being a Core Programmer in learning(and also doing a little marketing).
Next up is Gordon, the Ultimate Audio Designer. Why he’s “ultimate”, you say? Well, the songs he composed was astoundingly awesome to hear so it’s natural for me to say that. He’s a pro-to-be as he has the music root deeper than the rest in the team.
As for the Graphics Processor, the fame goes to our Koh. Although Koh is an average pixel artist, but he’s got the best artwork among all of us in the team! He’s still in learning process, but he’s got the highest art potential among us.
Ok, that concludes our greetings to the Earth. So…why’s the name Hegback in the post, you say? Well, that’s just a random name I thought out with no reason. Haha!
Finally finished cleaning up the mess I made when first making the end turn logic. Now it’s much more accurate and readable and adding or changing actions isn’t a huge pain any more, as a result I could make most of the actions more varied and unique.
Also added 2 new enemies to the game and made dying more interesting(it just sent you back to title but now it tells you what the humans find after killing you).
Next I think I’ll make it so that you level up(gain maybe 10 health and pick action to improve or something) by eating more enemies without resting than you have so far.
After that I’ll probably try to do AI, I have no idea but I think making it evaluate each of the 120 options it has each turn should be a reasonable way to do it, if it is I could see if I can make it compare some of them to your options though I think that could slow it down a lot if I’m not careful.
I just setup Some Knights Left on Gamejolt. Thinking about implementing their Highscore API but not sure yet.
You can play here. Happy smashing!
We had only a day to make a game, so we went through very few ideas before finally deciding on the one that was the easiest for us to make and funniest for you to play.
What went right:
What went wrong:
Conclusion:
We still have so many ideas for new puzzles (we only implemented about a fourth of everything we thought of), that it would be bad to abandon this game. Right now, we are going to revamp the menu, animations and update some graphics. When that part is solid – we will keep adding more puzzles until we run out of ideas.
If you really like this game, you should follow us on Twitter (@Patomkin, @MrLevich) so that you will not miss the new build in the near future!
You can play the game here: Dude, Stop
Recently I have found out that you could get stuck on some of the levels, this has now fixed and has made the game work again.
If you haven’t had a chance to play it yet, then now’s your opportunity!
Well, first thing first how do you do a post-mortem on your own?
Hmmmm…
Second thing is – how do you do a post mortem to a short game as mine?
I think I still have lessons to share though so … call it the irrumabo you want!
How To Begin
Well, try anything! Just make something! How I usually begin, and how I began this LD is like that:
Plan vs Result – Close enough
Write any idea! Even silly ones! It might turn upside down!
For example – I wrote “Anti-cheering”. This is of course a maybe wierd maybe dumbest idea ever – A game about getting down on the player (the computer). Next I wrote 3D Pacman. Sounds good at first and than you realize all pacman monster do is following the player hoping to touch it. Not that intereseting. Key rule: Never make the player do something you (the programmer) can do yourself. If you can make the character pathfollow pacman, unless you add some punch this isn’t a game, this just sucks. Among other ideas were “Clumsy Situations” which apperantely was taken so I’m happy I didn’t use this. The wierdest thing was “getting hit or acting cute or nerdy gets you points”. OK what? XD
Okay maybe not EVERY idea is good, but bad ideas can turn into things later – for example the anti-cheering became a mocking laughter in the beginning of each level, to help the mood. Try to use the ideas even if you won’t make the game around them! You spent time thinking about them, so use that effort!
Know Your Tools
My claim this LD was that I can accomplish making a game with a tool I don’t know. I took two-three days to study it and that’s it. Finito. Ut ‘eam.
Making it worse I chose Blender Game Engine – a very unconventional, undocumented annoying engine which has all the tools just hidden in its core offering no help getting them. Unpolished, lacking simple and trivial operations like making a copy of an object to another scene without loosing it’s logic. Indeed very annoying stuff, and I’m not talking about the bugs, crashes and BSODs yet.
My point is – get to know your tools a little more than three days since this means you practiced less than the time of one LD to prepare to LD. If the keynote this year wasn’t clear – KNOW YOU TOOLS!
Sleep Before-hand
Beacuse tiredness is never good at LD. It’s better sleeping than writing buggy code or having struggle to concentrate.
Do DARE, but Don’t Get TOO Ambitious
There’s always a cost. In my case – I was making a simple AI using the tools blender gave me but even with the help of an engine – getting to do an AI that have over the game two different weapons with different mechanics, having him following coins, aiming at you and retreating when you’re too close is kinda a long thing to do when it’s basically my first time making an animated 3D character, and don’t forget you have to texture all those. This gave me though LOTS of mechanics to play with but don’t forget – there’s always a cost (as I stated in the beginning of this paragraph). In my case it was the length – lots of gameplay but merely 6 levels. It made the game basically a prototype of something that could have more levels, and it might make you lose some points.
The Good: Learn, Enjoy & Make a Game You’re Proud of
Oh I surely learned a lot. I DARED this Ludum Dare, even though it had its cost I’m pretty proud of the amount of gameplay I achieved in 48 hours, knowing this is my first time making a game with this tool.
I think the game is pretty fun once you get the goal and controls – it’s a puzzle platformer based on color-mechanics correlation. Obviously you’re told nothing in the beginning about this but Shhhh keep it a secret! The players need to figure stuff for themselves and I think that this is one aspect I might actually done right. Making a vague beginning might draw some people in! Not too vague though cause then you’re just making ’em all go away!
Playing My Entry
We all know that’s why we actually make this thing – shmeless advertising. But I hopefully shared with you my lessons and also explained myself – why the game came out so short.
A mini-game, A prototype, call it whatever you want. I had an idea in mind and even though I procrastinated I actually managed to transfer it into something playable!
So.. it was all worth it =]
>Play “Being a Video Game Monster”<
It is an intrigging short strory in a 2D sidescroller and i hope you play all the way to the end : p
( we didin´t updated yet so it have some bugs when you die X) and the end is not a crash it is just the lack of a menu)
It is our first entry in a LD!
We tried to create a good strory with a nice connection to the theme with a powerfull mood. The game itself is short, because of the high amount of work in it and we didn´t had time to do more :S but we had a blast doing it!
hope you enjoy !
http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=56160
Concepts/final ideias
Hi all,
I’m one of the developers behind G.A.M.E, created for this month’s Jam. We were a team of 3, spread out across the world and with an urge to sleep make a cool game. After seeing the theme announced, we bounced concepts back and forth until one stuck – this concept was one that resonated with us as developers and gamers – that you would play as the head of a large games company, a-la EA, and work to instruct the creation of the game without much of a care for those that played it.
We took inspiration from Papers, Please, creating a similar (we hope!) area of play, where you go about your job with messages coming to interact with you rather than you going to interact with anything. We came up with a quick messaging system for some quirky humour and interaction from your employees, and later expanded the system to include the main gameplay – the proposition system.
This was a system which required you to make split second decisions, and one which we decided was necessary to be as hectic as possible, to make it both a more challenging experience and to stop these propositions clogging up the screen too much. We created an extensive system of many results and reactions, and let the timer decide if it ran out. We linked these to a number of variables, such as your current income, profits, expenses, employees, fans, etc. We then decided that each game would take 7 days to create, and some results would increase or decrease that time, such as fixing bugs or moving office.
It was at this point we realised some further player interaction would be necessary, so we created Floppy, our version of ‘Clippy’, who ended up with a few chains of dialog explaining the systems of the game and getting angry at you when you attempted to quit. We had bigger plans for Floppy, including a rough sketch of an actual story that he would be involved in, yet as is always the case with Ludum Dare, that was not to be in 72 hours. After about 68 hours we had created a game with a mixture of cookie clicker and papers, please gameplay mechanics, with graphics which we were pleased with and some (unfortunately) minimal annoying background sounds to make you feel like you were truly in an office. The hectic nature lent itself well to our interpretation of the theme, leading you to not actually care too much. A quick leaderboard system to drive players and we created something that was enjoyable to play for us, however we must admit it lacked replayability.
tl;dr We are happy with our final product, however it misses our planned story and probably gets annoying after a while.
And of course, if you’d like to check it out, go here: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=57508 it would of course be much appreciated!
-FlamingKiwi
Rate mine and I’ll rate yours! I’m off to work, but I’m playing afterwards!
http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=51802
