YouTube, Torrent (782 mb) or Real time

I finished!

…Without music. I tried noodling on the guitar a little, but playing only electric guitars and getting RSI means I have neither callouses or strength for acoustic guitars anymore. XD

(I also apologise for the dialogue system. It’s clunky. I only figured out how to do it when it was too late today, and it wasn’t worth fixing when I could use the time making the levels better)

Yay XD

mix the framework implementation with the game wasn’t a good choice see you on next Ludum Dare !!

check on JAGA for the changes and news about the framework.

cheers.

Well, I’m finished. The game… isn’t as finished. 😛

Linky

But wow, I’m pleased I got so much done in the last couple of hours. There’s a game in it! Wow. You run around, biffing bodzhas, and exploring to gain XP and level-up – the only way to get stronger is to explore the map! That’s about the only interesting feature, but oh well. It’s over, it works, and I’m happy.

Tags: final

All done!
Get my creation here!

DOWNLOAD

So, it didn’t become much of a game but I like how the circular map turned out I will definitely create this game properly some day.

Super ugly code and choppy collision detection makes it very difficult to enjoy any of the (somewhat sparse :D) platforming elements. You can even walk across the lava! I guess this is the limit of what I can accomplish in around 11 hours, I should have started earlier!

I’m off to sleep, night and good luck!

Explore an island in search of berries!

LÖVE Source. (Requires LÖVE)
Windows Executable.

Special thanks to my roommates Greg & Sarah!

Tags: final

Here is Scavenger.

Of all my Ludum Dare entries this one I am most proud of. It’s one of those games that would be ruined if I sat here explaining it’s mechanics, so please just give it a go.

Ta.

Play and tell me what you think. Linux users should be able to build it as long as they have a c++ compiler, sfml2 and boost on their system. If you run into problems I’ll be happy to help.

I’ll upload a timelapse later this/next week as it’s 02.33(am) local time and I’m getting tired.

Tags: complete, progress

There was a condition which didn’t allow you to win the game 😛

Now it has been fixed

Best of luck to everybody!

-Martín

I’ve finished my first LD contest and I’m pleased with what came out of my work.

Link to Submitted Entry

I want to thank Summoner, Sjogras, Zarkith, and Zachariasmith for keeping me company on my live feed, for their encouragement and playtesting.

I forgot to make an actual post about it, but my game, Boboil’s Adventure, is done! It might not be the biggest/funnest game, but I think it’s still fun for the amount of time you’ll be playing it.

link: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-16/?action=preview&uid=1542

That’s a lie. It’s not finished. But it is playable and it  has been submitted. And I will likely continue working on it outside of the competition. Since there’s a lot wrong with it. maybe I’ll write a post-mortem later about how bad it is. It was definitely to ambitious for one weekend.

Here’s the entry.

And with 18 minutes to spare… pffft, easy!

There was a time when I thought I couldn’t complete it on time, but there you go, it’s done!

I lost one hour at the end making the “cutscene” system, but it was worth it… it really does polish the game up…

Lots of features I didn’t get a chance to add:

• The Kraken!
• Load/Save
• Savages on the islands
• Trail on the ship (would really help the visuals, but I couldn’t really find the time for it)
• Music

Still there was a lot the game could have, like puzzles for the maps (instead of getting whole maps, you would get map pieces that you had to jumble around to use), but for 48 hours, I’m damn proud…

Last minutes issues… found that the game text would become all screwed up in fullscreen! :\ Really pissed me off, but I didn’t have the time to find the problem and fix it, since the text is all D3DX… So the game is in window mode only…

Then, when I was uploading, the DNS server at my provider was down, so for 10 mins I couldn’t upload anything! Was starting to panic, to be honest…

Biggest lessons learned:

• Don’t only plan the game, make up a timeline so you are able to structure your work better
• Found out that I could actually do some very crude pixel art… it even looks allright in the circumstances… Got to learn how to animate stuff like that…
• Do proper code structuring, or else it will bite you in the ass later… I have 4 code files, and the code is just a giant bramble of badly coded stuff… because I was trying to be fast… that way, I lost more time, when I was trying to find stuff…

So I finished my game after a hard weekend spent working.

Pretty good in my opinion, considering the time restraint.

Play it

Bees n Flowers is finished.  I didn’t take the time to write any posts during development because I spent all of it … developing.  I had some prior commitments this weekend which cut a large chunk out of my available time, but I finished.  Check it out HERE.  I’ll upload the Mac version tomorrow.  For now … it is off to bed.  Wohoo!

Finally finished my game, now it’s time for bed!

Rex’s Junk Hunt

Better not fall asleep at work tomorrow! and I better wake up in the morning O_o

I look forward to playing everyones game, and even though mine is simple I hope people enjoy it

There are a few problems with my game which I didn’t have time to fix, which is a shame, (but I’m not a coder so it was hard :() although I intend to try and work on it more and make it a more lenghty game in the future

Catherine.

Tags: final, journal

I was really happy with my game from the previous Ludum Dare.  Not so much this time.

The idea here was to have a bunch of teensy games showing a variety of game mechanics and have them arranged in a big grid you can browse.  Unfortunately I didn’t get working on the actual games until very late in the compo.  Somehow I managed to lose a lot of time on the UI for browsing them even though it doesn’t look that complicated.

I guess I knew going into it that the idea was going to be terribly hard to pull off in 48hrs, but stupidly kept going with that idea instead of the others I had.

I guess I still finished a playable, silly platformer with five levels in 48 hours, and that’s still an accomplishment. 

I look forward to reviewing the timelapse once I put it together and take a look at how the time was really spent.  Should be educational.

Official Entry Page

Play Online

Timelapse

Source Code

Holy smokes! I just made it with 5 seconds to spare. I’m not kidding! Well that was fun. It’s a great challenge and I hope to take part in future ludum dares.

If you want to check out my game click here but I must tell you, it has not been tested so please notify me of any bugs and errors you find.

I hope everyone else had as much fun as I did!

Oof. Well, I submitted something.

I spent a lot more time in this compo fiddling with sines and cosines than I did designing or implementing gameplay.

Either I need to learn better APIs, or my next game’s gotta involve all rectangles. One big rectangle party.

And I’m glad I did! It’s not nearly where I had imagined it, but it’s playable. It needs more depth to have real skill behind it, but this time I’m dedicated to doing a post-compo, and making it as good as I had imagined. Hope that everyone had a good time!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-16/?action=preview&uid=434

So, I finished my game. It is playable, but not exactly what I had in mind and there are definitely better games out there.

There are a few features that didn’t make it into the game:
– Powerups
– Sea fights

Download it here

It’s 3:10 AM and I’m getting tired. Linux executable as well as gameplay and timelapse video will be uploaded tommorrow.

sorry for late entry there was a glitch in the engine and i had to rewrite part of it
-the game is named after the character

http://host-a.net/will%20x/exploration.exe

GOLD!!!

Well this weekend was great. I had a great time working on my first Ludum Dare and can’t wait to compete again! Although the weekend had its ups and downs, it was a great experience. However I was not able to actually deploy my game on time as an official entry, due to some stupid timing and unpreparedness on my part. My game is practically complete though, and I will post it up later in the week, as well as a description of how my first LD went, what went wrong, what went right, and what I will do to make the next LD a success.

Good luck to everyone who has submitted an entry!

Well I got my entry submitted – just.

It was nowhere near finished. I mean, it’s possible to play (if you ignore the bugs), but many of the graphics left in there were still placeholders, there’s no text on the title screen or end screen, no sounds, etc etc. If I’d not spent so much time on the procedural generation I would have had time for this stuff. Bah.

So, what did I end up with? As a daring adventurer you have broken into a long lost pharoh’s tomb in search of treasure. Can you find all 16 treasures hidden within the labyrinthian 5-level pyramid? If you are to do so, you will have to be on watch for sealed rooms and corridors which you can break open with your pickaxe (enter key). Every new game starts with a new random layout for infinite fun*

* actual fun may vary

There’s one big bug which I didn’t have time to fix – often when you start the game you get “assertion error”. I put an assertion in to check that treasures were being placed properly, and this assertion sometimes fails, meaning that not all the treasures can be placed for some reason. Hey – at least they game doesn’t let you start a game which is impossible to finish 😛

Timelapse to come soon

My space exploring game thing is complete.
Go fetch!

I was meaning to have the player go in and explore the tomb to find the skeleton leaders and defeat them, but I ended up spending too much time texturing the skeleton to build a proper battle system. It ended up being a game about a thief who runs around the tomb grabbing treasure, but then I didn’t have enough time to give the player a way to escape the tomb. So now it’s about a suicidal thief who runs around a tomb grabbing treasure.

Voting Page: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-16/?action=preview&uid=1128

I uploaded my entry, even though it isn’t near complete.  I figured it’s worth getting feedback on what I have for future reference.

I’ll probably write a post-mortem in a day or so, but I know the number one thing that I did wrong was that I didn’t organize properly at the beginning.  I didn’t know where I was going to end up, exactly, so I didn’t know how to get there.

Here’s the screenshot.

The compass isn’t linked to anything in this version, since navigation wasn’t completely implemented. The arrow keys aren’t supposed to move the ship.  The plan was to let the user select a direction, and then sail that way for a few spaces.  How far they traveled would depend on which direction the wind was blowing, and whether or not any events happened, like finding land, meeting pirates or running into hazards. Unfortunately, I never got the planned movement implemented and so the compass sit

Head on over to the entry page to check it out.

Tags: Explore, final, ld48_16, screenshot

Cubees: Age of Exploration.

This was my first LD competition. I took nearly the full 48 hours (definitely down to the last 30 seconds). I enjoyed the experience immensely and look forward to seeing what others think of Cubees.

For more details about the development, I’ve kept a log on my site. Now, I’m going to sleep.

So, I’m done. While I did finish something, it’s not much of a game. I spent far too long on graphics. The characters just skate around and do simple damage. The source code quickly turned into a mess as I approached the deadline. I haven’t even played the game myself, so I’ll give it a go tomorrow. I think I need to do more unique landmarks, i.e. more graphics to make the exploration worthwhile… and an actual game of course. Although, I think I will still consider it a game for the sake of my new year resolution (promised I would finish something).

Like many people here, I’ve been awake for far too long. Good night!

About twenty mins late as my archive manager decided it would make bad zips – cause it felt like it.

Didn’t completely finish.. sadly… but this is something I’d definitely like to finish at some point.
You do get hot-seat multiplayer for your efforts of downloading though!

Skills were not implemented, which makes the Alien Queen utterly useless ( it can’t lay eggs that spawn into brood ) but the other classes work fine as they have weapons 😉 AI wasn’t implemented either.. so you can wander aimlessly through the HUGE part-designed ship and kill them.. but that’s about it, sadly. Lockers weren’t implemented either, so you can’t even gather loot! Yea, time managed to get the best of me, it seems.. I’ll explain more in the post mortem.
There’s also no win conditions… I forgot that… heh

I’m quite knackered after all that.. here’s a final screenshot showing what GUI I managed:

I currently only have an AMD64 Linux build as my Windows running laptop is in need of a reinstall.. I’ll get a Windows build done ASAP. You can grab the engine source from the SVN though, and compile it that way if you wish.
Other source is actually in the data zip – it’s all Lua script.

I’ll post up a post-mortem after I’ve had some sleep.. it’s been fun again!
Good Luck to everyone!

-edit-
Seems like my laptop was alive enough to produce a Win32 build! it’s up now too: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-16/?action=preview&uid=267

I finished and submited it just 5 minites before deadline.

“Phish World” is simple 2D scrolling game. Only arrow keys are used for controll.

Absolutely, time mattered…. I couldn’t include musics.

.

– Tech:  python1.5,  Dependency on pyglet and pybox2d.

– Art: Done with Inkscape and sfx.

For windows users, I included .exe file generated by py2exe. For linux users, python(over ver1.5), pyglet, and pybox2d are required.

Thanks in advance for playing my game. Welcome any feedback

Tags: final

In the end I turned it into a gratuitous battle in space – basically RTS meets 4X. Managed to squeeze it in just in time – the ZIP was up just a minute before the deadline, and the screenshots/description came after.

I might have added too many alien ships…

It might look as though the graphics took up a lot of time, but really those were easy. The tough bit was the ship AI, UI and fine details – things like how the ships bank when they turn. I tend to get hung up on crap like that.

GBIS.zip

– It controls almost exactly like your standard 3D RTS – mousewheel to zoom, mouse on screen borders to pan, click, drag or double-click to select, right-click to move or attack.

– Spacebar pauses; you can issue orders while paused.

– To colonize planets, you need to build a colony ship, move it to the little circle above the target planet, and then click the colonize button (lower left). The button only appears when you have only the colony ship, and nothing else, selected. It takes awhile to colonize the planet.

– You can build ships from planets, provided you have enough money. The other 3 resources, sadly, do nothing – I forgot to put special-resource costs in the ship data. Sorry, no build queue.

– The aliens should show up before too long, or you can go look for them if you are so inclined.

– Yes, the framerate is awful in big battles. Didn’t have time to optimize it, plus I added too many missiles, explosions and other stuff.

– There is no end. Close the window when you’re done.

– Edit: Lol, I tested it and found a couple of major bugs. One, the alien “attack” results in the aliens doing a happy dance (working as intended!). Two, under certain circumstances you can see the aliens even when they’re very far away. But, for the most part, it works (apart from the framerate issues).

After quite a rush in the end I got “Lost in Exploration” finished. Or let’s say that what I had time for is finished.

Actually most of the time I created a platformer-egnine based on jMonkeyEngine. That took lot’s of time and when I started using it (with the help of blender). In the end it was a real good job when I compare the result to my first LD (one year ago).

The first scene:

The whole scene how it looks in the  my blender-“editor”:

Have a look here (hope the webstart works for everyone):

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-16/?action=preview&uid=479

So,..still the sourcecode to pack…

It was really much fun again…

Stuff used for creating this pice of software:

eclipse,java,jMonkeyEngine,blender,reaper,drpetter’s supersound-generator

Wow, that was close! I managed to have major tech problems at the end, but managed to submit it after all.

You can play it on the web here:  Penguinagain or grab a windows EXE HERE.

edit: or the mac one: HERE

Finished game just in time. Probably has a ton of bugs I had no time to test. But I think focusing on graphics was fun and actually a little inspiring. Next time maybe I can balance the graphics and gameplay a little better. I spent way too long in Photoshop cleaning up graphics this time. Oh well, it was quite fun!  At least because I used BlitzMax, there are PC and Mac versions of the game.

download here: http://www.bitjets.com/massacre.zip

So I didn’t get an actual game submitted this time, but I put in all the effort I could. Slept 3 hours since Friday morning, only break I took was to go to the store.. I like the concept and design for my game and am going to pursue it. Even if I rip the flash code to hell and back, I successfully prototyped an ‘infinitely’ (based on optimized server resources) persistent universe streaming through a flash client with mmo style multiplayer.

Play Live

I also am psuedo calculating the total gravity wells of all nearby planets and using it as propulsion. I’m pretty sure it’s not physically accurate, but didn’t have time to total up the force vectors of 100’s of fake planetary bodies myself. So it makes you move, worsk for me. I’m sure a little tweaking would make it more fun being able to fly around navigating by slingshotting around big planets.

For my first flash game ever it’s not too bad. If I go for a rewrite I might drop Flixel completely. Writing the crappy text input because Flixel completely seperated any event handlers from the game logic.. yea, shitttyyy. FlxSprite has no sprite elements, that was another fun one. What’s the point of using a graphics library, when you have to write pixel by pixel to the buffer to get around it..
On the other hand, there are several ways I could have used Flixels structure better. It seems really designed around using the tilemap class, which I didn’t touch.

I have a partial timelapse I’ll upload soon. I’m pretty sure it was responsible for the two blue screens of death I had this weekend though

Sweet, I managed to complete my first Ludum Dare! I was thinking of learning Push Button Engine for it, but after going through a couple of tutorials I decided I’d go for straight-up Actionscript instead. PBE has some neat features, but I need more time to get my head around its component-based programming model.

Anyway, SEEK*TOR is a game where you’re trying to locate the enemy by firing search flares from turrets. You have limited flares, and turrets have a limited range, so you need to carefully choose where you aim. It’s in Flash.

SEEK*TOR Voting page

Incidentally, I’m annoyed with Audacity because it added an initial silence to all the mp3 files I encoded with it. So all the sounds come in late. Also, I just realized that I forgot to have the background music loop…

Tags: as3, Explore, final, flash, ld48_16, screenshot

Given another couple hours I could’ve finished it up, but at the moment it’s not ready… I slept late this morning, and I also missed the first 6 hours because of a party… It was my first LD though, and I intend to do it again. So, lesson learned.

My game was going to be called “Electromigration”, it procedurally creates the level as you go, it’s an fps and the goal is/was going to be to keep exploring and finding randomly placed upgrades while fighting off enemies. I had the level generation working perfectly, and enemies and shooting are all there. But I still need to make the game generate enemies and upgrades in the level (at the moment all you can do is walk around the endless level and spawn enemies via the console).

It looks sorta VR-y, with colorful grids (as the player explores, the areas that have been walked through fade from red to green, so you can see where you’ve already been).

I probably should have prepared better, I used a custom engine, but all I had finished in the engine (which was meant for another project, and had been started a week before LD started) was part of the lua scripting setup and the basics of the graphics engine (I used Ogre) setup, so I wound up writing a lot of needless low-level stuff… on the positive, I really did a lot in a short time (that was a couple thousand lines of C++…) and an ingame lua-based scripting console was amazing for debugging/testing.

Here’s a couple screenshots; I might keep working for a few hours just to get it done…

Yesterday i have gived up, but when i awake today, suddenly i decided to continue work. And i was awarded! I made real great progress today, and impelement most features i have planned. Even i made some sounds with sfxr (dont planned sound in the start!).

So, to my game.

You own a space ship and decide to enter nearby asteroid field to explore it! You have prepared planetary landing module to land on asteroids and search for resources to upgrade you ship. What you will find? Rich mineral asteroids? Or space pirates?

Game can crash on ATI cards, sadly.

Tools used:
-Delphi 2007
-3ds Max 2008
-Photoshop CS3
-SFXR

Libraries:
-My own STLEngine2
-GLScene
-ODE
-FMod, free for non-commercial use
-Graphics23

Finished Northern Spy (Exploration, LD 16)

I have a vague sense of foreboding.

Thing is done. Last few hours were intense. I haven’t played the whole game yet, so it may be totally off here or there. Let me know of any major trip ups, if you decide to give it a try.

Game is about navigating a maze while running along the ceiling. Or something. Play it.

Grab some tiny pixel font here.

Tags: final, screenshot

realistically. I did not have as much time as I hoped to actually work on my project.

Shoot for the stars

Here’s the link for more info. Kind of simple and fun 3 levels in total.

The submission page is at http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-16/?action=preview&uid=412.

Windows & Source | Registration | High Scores

It’s some sort of MMO thingy. Arrow keys to move, space to minimap, esc to quit, mouse for other stuff
Because of the disjoint nature of the game, someone else might have claimed a hill before you get there. You’ll know this has happened because when you get there, you won’t hear the trumpety noise.

= Tools =
Language: C++
Libraries: Allegro, Libcurl, and my Allegro classes (included)
IDE: Code::Blocks
Sound: Sfx
Music: Stockboy to compose and Audacity to record
Graphics: The GIMP, Paint
Datafile: Allegro Grabber utility

Contact me in IRC if you can do an OS/X or Linux port for me.

This weekend was awesome! But also exhausting. I already thought, that i will not be able to finish anything — mainly because my plan somehow ended by a game playable just by 3 handed people, able to walk and interact with the game with keyboard and use the third hand for triggering sound effects and other things with mouse. But thankfully I just dropped almost all of this ideas away and worked last 12 hours almost solely on design and graphics. And i was still able to post my game just 3 minutes before deadline, so maybe i should have done it sooner…

Some random thoughts:

I’m sure that i’ve written the ugliest code in my life — i see almost only hard-coded text, switch statements (which i don’t like at all) and misuse of the language…

It was first time, i have tried to do some animation and it looks really unnatural, but i’m still relatively satisfied with it — next time it will be better. But first i have to find better sprite editor — paint.net isn’t really build to work with animations and dos-like allegro sprite editor is also not THE ideal program for me…

Besides animation, i also never tried to compose some music or create sound effects. I was looking toward it, but i didn’t manage to have time to do sfx, so this is my goal for next compo — create game that is not mute 😀

Preparation! I spent most of the time to learn to work with allmost everything i used. But it will be better next time…

I was happy to take part in this competition, and ‘m looking forward to play some of games created here… see you next time again

The game is here

Wowzers, that was quite the ride! I’m proud of what I was able to do. Even though it’s not much of a game, but its kinda fun.

Play it HERE:  http://www.ericmcquiggan.com/Gameuploads/ludumdare/LudumDare48.swf

Controls Below

W/A/S/D to move around

E  Builds improvements (lumberyard on forests, farm on grasslands, mine on mountains)

R to build Roads

T to build boat houses, you can use a boat house as a town.

You have to connect your improvements with roads.
Wagons run if you connect roads up, you get gold when your wagons are running!
I’m compiling a Timelapse and I want to fraps together some game play footage.

My timelapse is here!

YouTube
Timelapse dead link now

Tags: ld16, timelapse

Well, my game isn’t half of what I’d planned, but it’s at least playable, just one level. Jimmy was going to be a mouse, but I didn’t have time to draw his sprites so now he’s that yellow thing. As you explore the level you will find power-ups that will help you get further. There was no time for sound unfortunately.

I had never used Flixel before and I’m glad to have tried it out. I did spend a lot of the time learning it, so I could probably have done a lot better if I had studied it before the LD started. This was also the first time I used as3 instead of haXe and I must say I do prefer the haXe language.

Anyway, I’ll probably use Flixel again next time, and then I won’t have to learn it first, so I might actually finish a complete game…

You can play the game here:

• Play Jimmy’s Adventure

Hey, it’s a game! And I happened to decide to call it Echolon for no real good reason.

This game was made in around 8 hours today after ditching most of the work I did for another game yesterday. The theme of exploration was so broad I had a few ideas that are probably worth pursuing. What I originally was going with was a game focused on indirect control of a navigator that explores, but I ended up ditching that for something a little simpler.

Echolon plays a little like Asteroids where you’re exploring a really large room that that only gets illuminated when your bullets (made of light!) collide with walls. Shots have the ability to bounce off walls. There are enemy turrets scattered throughout the level that will shoot at you (natch). Destroy all the turrets to win!

Originally the game was going to be series of rooms and there was some vague idea of a limited upgrade system. Additionally I wanted other abilities and weapon types that would help illuminate the map in more meaningful ways. I didn’t have the time for that, but I sorta like the idea and may pursue that further.

Tools/engine used were Flixel, sfxr, Audacity, Photoshop, and FlashDevelop. I’ll have a timelapse video and a larger post-mortem up later.

Play the game here guys and gals. Thanks!

OK, so I submitted the game with 3 minutes to spare, and I’m no longer a Ludum Dare newbie. But why do i feel so… BLAH? I need to get away from the computer for a while, I think…

My game didn’t end up where I wanted it to, but that’s OK. I still managed to create a great foundation that I can continue to build upon. The game has serious potential, I think. It needs more refinement, content, and story, of course… but isn’t that the case with all games? I wanted to make at least ONE song for the game, but I just didn’t have enough time. I don’t even have any sound effects yet. I had music constantly playing during the development of Soulspark, so I never really noticed until I played my ‘final’ version. It’s terribly quiet, so please… if you play my game… put some music on.

Since the theme is all about EXPLORING, Soulspark is a laid-back, no-action kind of experience. No enemies and no weapons. Just you and the world. OH, and your constantly depleting battery power that you have to recharge. Think Wall-E meets Fallout… then throw it head first into Metroid… and suck out all of the action. Does it make a fun game? Maybe not at this point… but like I said… the potential is there.

Soulspark game page

So crunch time is OVER, which means it’s time to EAT!

The greatest food photos of Ludum Dare 16 AFTER THE BREAK:

GRILLED CHICKEN, BACON, AND ROASTED RED PEPPERS ON A RANCH DRESSING BASE

(click for ultimate taste-vision)

CHOCOLATEY RATMOUSE DELICIOUSNESS (click for ultimate taste-vision)

Tags: foodphoto food screenshot pizza chocolate

Wow.  So after 2 years of not using openGL…. I think I fail at this programming thing.  I guess I’ll leave the videogame programming to my talented husband (JonnyD)….  Can we have a team (real) LD sometime? Please? PLEASE?  Then maybe I could actually be part of one and feel accomplished .

Anyway, This is as far as I got…  There’s no game to this.  Just a scene with mis-aligned textures and crappy graphics (MS Paint style).  I’m glad I didn’t put much time into this.

You can see my entry here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-16/?action=rate&uid=57

I’ll do an updated version later on this week, fix some things that need fixing and add a few features that are missing. Maybe I’ll build a fullscale (?) flash game based on this, and sell it for iPhone. Then move to bermuda.

POSTMORTEM – What went right:
– Rule system for the crew was/is awesome.
– Flixel is great! Perfect for a compo like this, although I didn’t use too much of it…
– I thought for awhile about the theme, and made a short design document with my ideas which was a great help.
– It’s like, -40’C in my city which is really, really cold and was helpful in finding inspiration for exploring the icy north.

What went wrong:
– As usual I didn’t give myself enough time to polish it up at the end. I spent some time on features that were cut or I didn’t finish, but it could have benefited a lot from just a bit more playing.
– Developing on Windows wasn’t quite what I am used to. But I got quite used to FlashDevelop. I’d like to move this over to Eclipse/Linux but figuring out how to build the AS3 stuff is just a bit tricky.

This was fun, thanks guys!

Are you familiar to the feeling when you’ve just submitted a game and then realize that there’s a random game-breaking bug in? Then you spend 2 hours fixing it while acknowledging that the deadline is coming nearer and nearer and you should already be asleep.

I had such case yesterday; I had just submitted my game, when I realized that the map system doesn’t somehow work in the compiled game, even though it runs fine in the editor. It was already 23:00, and I was about to have school the next day, but I anyway had to fix that thing. And sure it was difficult, because there was no logical reason for it to bug like that. Way to go, corrupted objects.

Anyway, amazing LD as usual, I really enjoyed creating my game and there are lots of amazing entries this time! I’ll post a video where I beat my own game, again, because I guess I made it once again too hard for others than me.

This effort was really an excuse to try out my new camera. Surprisingly, I think the images inspired me with ideas when often staring at an empty text editor doesn’t. It’s amazing what can be made out of ordinary objects using creativity. For instance, the splash screen was from the front of my garbage can. Also, composed images such as the menu screen I think came out really well and were quite fun to create.

This inspiration lead to what I would have to consider my most complete entry in any competition. The game has a splash screen, a working menu screen, a working game with both win and lose scenarios, sound effects (using SFXR) and even a few humorous voice effects. When the game is over, the game will successfully go back to the menu screen, and finally, there is actually a win screen. That is a lot to accomplish in 15-18 hours or so.

I think also a lot of my success was based on the tool I choose, BlitzMax. It really takes a lot of the labor out of game-making that you have to deal with if you use tools like SDL and C++. On top of Blitz, I chose a game framework from Ignition that makes it even easier to build retro-style games. Having not used BlitzMax in years (and never having used the Ignition framework before) did cause some problems though. I spent way too much time looking at example code and the documentation in both BlitzMax and the framework.

Overall, I am pretty happy with my entry, in terms of what I expected to produce and what I actually accomplished. I wanted to create a really simple game with using some photographic imagery, and I think I met my goal. It also helps that I have done several LDs before and so it seemed like I could gauge my progress and was able to make quick decisions/sacrifices to ensure that something playable would be completed in time. For example, putting in animations in the misfit toys or making them non-stationary would have been very cool, but I realized right away I wouldn’t have had anything finished in time if I set out to complete either of these goals. Having some experience helps you realize what you can and can’t do in the time period you have left. I was able to avoid dead-ends before they became gaping, black, time-sucking vortices.

I think overall though I had some success with BlitzMax, I probably won’t use it next time. There are a few annoyances with the language and IDE and  I have to believe there must be something better out there. So far the best I’ve found is XNA, but I’m still looking for that perfect and language and framework for my next game to push me to the next level.

I have to say that overal the game-making experience of this contest is so much fun. I didn’t really start until Sat, and I only worked about 8 or 9 hours a day, but it certainly does get a little crazy at the end there when some bug was preventing my game to work at all with just a couple hours left on the deadline.

Can’t wait for the next LD, and look forward to trying everyone’s entries!

I used my favorite language of all time, Ruby. With 1.9 Ruby has picked up speed and with Ocra you easily make a ~1-2 meg exe-file out of it. Also the excellent (and german precision engineered)  Gosu enables OpenGL accelerated 2D. On top of that I used my own Ruby/Gosu-specific framework Chingu to get game states, re-usable game logic and a boiler plate “game object”. To get a speedy get_pixel() I used the awesome Texplay by John Mair.

I have a pixel fetish. I love retro-looks in games, and I love pixel-perfect-collisions, a fetish that probably came into existence playing hours and hours of Lemmings 2-player mode on the classic Amiga 500.

So, the most time was spent up building a good pixel-perfect-collision algo, and it came out very playable, but not perfect. I ranted about it in my last blogpost.

With Ruby and Chingu my level-building got very clean, I think even ppl not into Ruby could understand what’s happening here:

class Level7 < Level
   def setup
     self.background = "level7.bmp"
     every(1000) { Enemy.create(:image => "acid_drop.bmp", x => 150, :velocity_y => 5) }
 every(1500) { Enemy.create(:image => "acid_drop.bmp", x => 250, :velocity_y => 5) }
   end
 end

or here (this is from the mainloop):

player.each_collision(Enemy) do |player, enemy|
 unless player.paused?
 player.pause!
 Sound["die.wav"].play(0.3)
 after(1000) {  player.x = @entry_x; player.y = @entry_y; player.unpause!; }
 end
 end

It’s nice when it’s silly simple building readable levels.

I also got a very basic and simple Map-class going so I could build on my matrix of screens that made up the game:

map = [
 [LevelUp, nil, nil, nil],
 [Level1, Level2,Level22, nil],
 [LevelAir, nil, Level3, nil],
 [LevelAir2, Level5, Level4, nil],
 [nil, Level6, Level7, nil],
 [nil, Level8, Level9, End],
 ]

Basically if you exited a screen to the right I would increment a column_counter and fetch a new screen from the matrix. If exiting downwards, increment row_counter an fetch a new screen.

If you like OO, short readable code and scripting languages in general and haven’t checked out Ruby or Gosu yet, now is the time to do it.

The Good
– This is the first time I’ve been using OpenGL and SDL for something that is more than just a techdemo and I have to say the transition from plain SDL to SDL + OpenGL went quite smoothly
– The core gameplay elements made it into the game
– This is the first time I’ve been using Lua for scripting in a game. I wanted to use Lua more extensively, but it’s just a small part now, still I’m quite pleased with that element and how that went without any problems along the way
– Graphics and music are mostly how I imagined it, I also made some sounds with SFXR, but those didn’t make in the final game
– Basic AI: That’s really awesome, it was implemented like 30 minutes before deadline and it’s great that it works

The Bad
– I almost slept 24 hours of the time (my alarm was not working) and was too tired from staying up so late to get up early
– There was generelly a lack of time, for example, there were some things to be done for college and I discovered Mass Effect, which was a really bad idea to double-click the Mass Effect icon, it was time-consuming and took a lot of will power to exit the game and get back to coding
– I almost went with Unity instead of my own framework and the decision took a few hours
– There were some issues with my camera, that’s why there aren’t any deskphotos or foodphotos from me
– Since I’ve been using SDL + OpenGL for the first time for a real game that has actually been finished, some parts of my framework are still in its infancy (espacially the texture loader routines), that’s why there are some problems with washed-out textures and memory leaks

I’ve uploaded the linux port and there’s now a gameplay video on youtube. The timelapse video is coming, don’t worry.

Now I’m looking forward to try everyone’s entries.

Tags: post-mortem

I decided to use a weird tool for ludum dare this time: Mathematica. I wanted to try to a game that used dynamically generated sounds because usually I never do anything with sound. Mathematica is definitely a little weird for building an interactive application, but it gave me easy sound generation, and 3D rendering in a nice interactive development environment. It was almost kind of Lisp-y. I did find a fantastic reference for how to do interactive game programming in Mathematica taught at Rice University with a lot of examples here. Here’s an example of what playing with sounds looks like in Mathematica.

I thought I might try to do my entry Dark Maze using sound exclusively (requires free Mathematica 7 Player to play). I wasn’t the only one with the sound exclusive idea. The entry Soundscape goes in a similar direction. I ended up having some visual elements for the game. For instance, you can see yourself and the balls you throw by default, and you can also “cheat” to see the whole environment, at which point the exercise of navigating becomes trivial. I’d still like to see if it’s possible to do an audio-only form of maze navigation. Perhaps if the audio simulation were good enough to capture things like echos, or maybe it would just have to do something very artificial like different tones for different things.

I’ve included my timelapse as an embedded thing, but it’ll take a little while for the admins to make it work. Until then, here’s a link to it.

Hi all, I got some problem updating the [broken] link to my entry, so updated the file position on my server.

Also I cannot write commment on my entry, nor modify what i wrote when i entered. Hoping that it’s only my problem can i ask how do you update you entry?

The download link is, for all operating system:

http://donotjava.netsons.org/download/ludumdare/LD16.zip

On windows you will need cygwin [linux emulator] or something similar [like vmware or other emulator].

Many thanks to pythong that reported the problem.

Waiting for a fix [for my broken brain probably 8) ]:

GOOD VOTING AND TESTING TIME TO ALL!

Ok, i’m an idiot or maybe i got some big brain damage this week 8) Found the “edit my entry” link and all is fine now.

I just woke up and was able to play through my game. Here are a few things which went wrong:

• I spent too much time on enemy variants. I should have gone for more variants of the terrain tiles instead, to make the exploration more fun. Terrain tiles are faster to draw since they don’t rotate. A snow area and desert area could have been cool.
• The title/splash screen has a very flat landscape. I didn’t add any shadows or foggy background mountains.
• I could have avoided combat altogether and focused on stealth exploration, sneaking by and grabbing the loot. It’s difficult to do a satisfying combat system in just a few hours. I had no time to make fun AI either.
• The game gets too easy mid-end. I didn’t have time to play through it even once. Anyways, this means that it’s mostly laborsome to find the last treasures.
• I should have made a few sounds. Without sound, one feels detached from the game. It’s harder to understand what is going on (especially taking hits in combat). Music adds atmosphere too, of course. I had an idea where the tile map drawing routine would generate ambient sounds.
• I flipped two of the squid frames wrong. I didn’t notice because I had put most of them in a maze with high walls.
• The main character looks like it is ice skating because of the scroll focus, but drawing 2 walk frames * 4 angles * 2 stances would have been too much work for me. I suppose it would’ve been less of a problem in a game where you move less.
• Speaking of which, tapping the movement buttons is straining on the hand after a while.
• Str(ength) should have been Att(ack) in the sidebar. I was thinking of drawing a background for the sidebar, but had no time left. The treasure were supposed to do things, but I didn’t have time for that either.
• If Health = 0 Then FGameOver() … I guess this made sense at some point, but it doesn’t in the current version. I’m generally careful and put less than checks in because I know I might change stuff around or lose control of value ranges.
• It would’ve been simple to couple the stats-up mechanic with the player’s current def/att mode, giving the player a bit of a choice for stats development.

I can’t leave comments to my entry.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-16/?action=rate&uid=1447

Can please some one leave a following comment:

If you get this

“ODE Internal Error
Stepsize must be > 0″

Change system decimal separator to “,”

Sorry, it is little my fault (

That was fun.
Really, it was.. the majority of coding this was pretty good – as I had structured things fairly well for the most part.. till I went mad and started putting chunks of code in whatever file I was in at the time! Damn you Lua for allowing me to use any global function in any file at any time!

There were, however.. a few head smashingly horrific issues that did cost the game.

The Foul-Ups
————-
After designing a somewhat large play area, I needed a means of loading it in.
As the Moons of Subterrane loader was fairly decent, I decided to base it on that. Oops.
Due to the nature of Ludum Dare, you tend to code things just to that project, and not really leaving them agnostic or open. Case in point being the Moons of Subterrane loader – it was designed quite specifically for flip-screen gameplay. Trying to tear apart that system to include scrolling was not going to happen – and although realising this from the outset and trying to modify it as I wrote it up, I didn’t modify it enough!
A few hours later, and much swearing, I tore the whole thing apart and just loaded in each floor as one gigantic file, each.
I’d have preferred splitting them into screens – or even rooms – as it meant I could’ve done some semi-procedural stuff with their placement, but alas, it was not to be.

Once I got something loaded and on-screen however, things did pick up and I implemented a fair amount of stuff.. then came the Camera to allow scrolling the map.

2D cameras are strange in that they don’t really exist more than a hack to begin with. A 3D camera has position, orientation, and look vectors just like any other object; a 2D camera is little more than a viewport translation. Or so my textbook says…
Stupidly, I had implemented this properly in about ten minutes, but forgot to move everything in the opposite direction to counter the viewport translation. Nyargh.
Another few hours later and I realised my idiot mistake, battered my head off the wall, and put in the counter translation and it all worked.

Of course, attempting my game idea – specially with the amount of content I planned – within 48 hours was always going to be tight, those two bugger ups didn’t help, neither did nursing some sort of cold, as I did end up sleeping a total of 14 hours over the two days. Ouch. That killed sound, music, most game play and any decent graphics… and threw my timeline in the bin.

The Successes
————-
There are a few bits I’m quite happy with.
The game itself works, which is somewhat surprising as I pretty much bypassed all of my internal engine, save for loading and blitting graphics!
The horribly cheesy and cheap starfield effect really does work wonders to break up the Menu screens a bit.. a total of five minutes work for that, while pondering over the loader system. The typewriter text effect was also done in five minutes, though while thinking about the camera stuff – proof that if you go and work on something else for a bit, you’ll get better results

Splitting the units up into separate Lua classes was a good idea too, it meant I could deal with them all individually. Granted most of them are copy/pasted movement/firing code amongst each other, but the skills bits were meant to be different at least.. They’re also a bit more self-contained object like.. which made them easier to deal with too.

The Crew Selection bit is possibly the most polished part.. it works fairly well, but suffers like everything in the game in that there’s no feedback: up/down changes whether you’re Alien or Human in multiplayer, if you didn’t know…which you wouldn’t have unless you messed with the buttons, or read the source!

The Murky Bits
————–
There’s a general lack of feedback with everything you do.
You don’t know how many action points anything costs ( hint: movement is 1, opening/closing doors is 2, firing is 2 ) and unless you’ve just started and haven’t explored most of the map yet, your only indiciation of a door opening is your Line of Sight updating!

Speaking of line of sight, it’s a bit too exact on the diagonal and orthangonals… there’s no real in-between as it’s horrendously hard coded just to look on the eight axes. This is obviously quite daft, and is due to one major muck-up. I had a working LoS very quickly when I first got map loading going… then when I realised I wouldn’t have time to do much AI, I started jerry-rigging multi-player hotseat support in.. though I did this a bit too quick as a lot of the systems weren’t quite finished yet. So, this broke most of the game – unit movement, actions, line of sight, detecting other entities on the map at all. I very nearly had to pull out completely because of this, but things started to fall back into place in the final twelve hours!

Conclusion
———-
So, I ended up twenty mins late with my submission ( though it seems my laptop’s time was slow and I finished 5 mins late anyway *cough* ) due to Ark deciding not to zip things properly. After several attempts, I finally gave in and zipped it by transferring everything across to another machine. Re-installing your O/S the day before LD starts is asking for trouble 😉

Either way though, I think I did fairly well and did get a lot done.
Unfortunately, gameplay suffered from the cold, camera, loader and my Sunday panic. I think that given a few more hours, I could’ve gotten the skills in, and maybe some feedback as to what’s going on.
I need more practice to work faster, and sleep less 😉

This is something I’d like to continue, though!
And hopefully, I can feed some of the changes back into Little Quirks ( remember that? 😉 ) and get it done too.

While I did manage to submit something that’s playable, I think it could have been alot better with a few more hours. I had an idea of adding a time limit to make it more paced. Ofcourse it would be nice to have had collision detection working, but it became too big of a project to implement inside the two days

Still fun. I’m going to participate another time!

Here’s a slightly edited timelapse. I cut out the part where I got drunk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8buTL_uIWo

What a weekend! I’m still sad to have failed as I did, and I know I could have done better. Shame aside, though, I’ve learned some things.

First, the reason I don’t have a new demo up is simple, but embarrassing. I never updated the gameplay as I worked. Instead, I just built up crap in the background with nothing to show for it. If I uploaded what I have now, it’d just be a bigger file, I’m afraid.

But, here’s what I’ve learned:

Things I Did Well:

• Got an idea from a random blog post, and thus pulling an idea from an unusual place. More a creative lesson than anything, but worth mentioning.
• I dumped an early idea due to a lack of proper art skills. I think I’m learning where my limits are.

Things I Did Badly:

• I spent too much time on the background code. I wound up with a fox gliding around on the screen, but with lots of cruft in the background. Also, about 5mB of memory that would have been all the media for the game world, but instead just took up space.
• All of my images, once loaded, took up 5mB of memory. I can do better.
• I futzed with my cell-based world generator for too, long, as well. It might well have worked, but at the rate it went it might as well have not. I never actually tested the output, just the time it took.

The heart of my problem was diving into the background and staying there. I never made new things playable, so I didn’t have any game whatsoever.

On a happy note, I did get to do research on pathfinding and random world creation. I’m going to take that into the roguelike I’ve been working on.

I’ll be back in the upcoming Mini-LD! Just you wait!

—Mr.Dude

After deciding that I was going to enter the Ludum Dare #16, despiste the almost completly lack of time I`d have to work on the weekend, I was able to finish my entry, somehow. Of course, it didn`t turned out like I wanted it to be, most because of the lack of time, but also because I hadn`t really a definite set goal until the last hours.

Deciding to go with javascript was a lifesaver. At first I wanted to write my game with Python and PyGame, but I`d end up spending too much time on rendering and UI implementation, and with javascript that was already hard-coded into the browser for me, so all that`d be left was to write the game logic. Of course, javascript has its issues, like you`re not guaranted fully compatibility between browsers (even with the standard ones, something may behave oddly), and that`s what made me cut that M$ IEerie from the list of supported browser before I even started writing a line of code.

More about it after the cut :3 (It’s rather long, but has a concept art to make for it :D)

—the concept—

Is it cruel? Maybe, but not more than knowingly turning your face away from what you have done. What lies beyond those fragments of memory, lingering in the dark maze of consciousness? More importantly, will you have the courage to face the unknown or will you choose the large path, living on, in eternal oblivion…?

As you see, I think with stories. At first, I was going for a Turn-Based Strategy game with some dungeon crawling, however, since I couldn’t spend too much time working on a fully fledged procedural dungeon building algorithm, I went with the easier maze generation. Yeah, I could’ve just ported the algorithm I’ve written for Underground Tower, but it’s not really done, and there’s lots of issues there I hadn’t the time to address yet.

The player objective would be to collect memories and uncover the game’s story (which I still haven’t thought of besides that introduction up there). While exploring the maze of consciousness the player would gradually fade out by the sweet lies that lies at each one of the walls of the labyrinth, eating away any “silly” try to look at the “real” world. Therefore, collectable reasonings for staying alive would be found lying around the place.

The memories where when the story of the game would come, but I haven’t had the time to code this part. Not that it would be difficult to code the part of collecting memories (it was just a matter of inheriting the cCollectable class), but to arrange it to make a good story would.

It all could’ve work… if only I haven’t tomorrow’s trip planned.

—the goodies—

That said, there were some good parts about this game. First, the wonders of javascript prototyping. I was afraid to don’t even finish my entry, but I was able to accomplish a fair amount of work without really having a gaming library (mine isn’t complete and it hasn’t much useful things for games right now). Kudos for the Prototype and Scriptaculous libraries for making my life easier too, working with pure javascript is not that fun, must I say, but these libraries make your life a heck easier.

I’ve also learned to write a procedural maze generator using Depth-First Search algorithm. It was quite fun, easy and quick to implement, actually, and it works neat. I think I couldn’t ask for more, could I?

Surprisingly, I had time to sketch a main menu background and a javascript motivational. I wanted to color the motivational, but I’m dog slow at this and don’t have a tablet. So… yeah, it’d take me ages D:

Last, but not least, I had quite fun participating. Even with all the swearing while I was shopping and looking at the clock, seeing I was wasting a precious, precious time. Well, I wish I spent more time chatting with peoples on IRC and so, I haven’t really talked on IRC, I guess.

—the baddies—

Well, now to the part that really matters: what went wrong.

• Lack of time (and this must come first, as I planned a game without the proper time to implement it)
• Light handling on the maze has a bug which won’t fade the illuminated cells if they can’t be reached by the player’s light radius.
• Didn’t had the time to implement things I wanted, like the story and the auto-explorers (whom could be cast to search for something)
• Points are meaningless when they don’t mean anything in game.
• No sounds and music whatsoever. I’d want to put a suspenseful music together with the story, and maybe some footsteps sound. But haven’t time for neither.
• Lack of gameplay and difficult progression, since I haven’t time to test any other than “Does it works? Fine, submission where?”
• Things takes so long to load, and there’s no preloader for images. Minifying the javascript and putting everything on a single source file would solve this, though.

—the conclusion—

While I have other projects to work with (RED -spider lily- and some libraries), I think I’ll work on this game first. Either because it’s simpler and shouldn’t take me too long to finish, and because working on it I can work on my Lily library at the same time. And I’m thinking about porting RED -spider lily- to web, instead of continue on Python. But that will depend on some design issues I still have to address.

Some feedback on the game would be really nice :3

The timelapse video of me working can be found here.  It’s only 22 of the 48 hours, since I turned my computer off at night and deleted the frames which where black due to my screen turning off from inactivity.

What went right:

• I had a lot of fun.
• I chose to not worry too much about graphics, theme, story, etc.
• Ran into no major time wasting bugs.

What went wrong:

• Scope of the game would have been better for a PyWeek.
• It would have been better to start with a library or codebase that handled much of the grunt work for me.  Instead of working on a game, I spent a lot of time writing code for gui, animation, tilemap, resource management, collision detection, etc.
• I didn’t have anything a player could control until 3 hour from the deadline.

I’m thinking of trying to bring this game to a completed state within the next few days.

I have a new wallpaper!

Keep doing square numbers, guys!

This was my second LD48.  I flip flopped with ideas the first night and settled on something rather generic that I hoped would be fun.

The idea was to make a space shooter set in a random starfield.  You start with a shuttle and explore the universe making money, checking out planets, and battling other ships.  Stations allow you to upgrade your ship and weapons.

What went wrong..

I never came up with a design doc, which would have helped me budget my time, and realize which features to work on first.  At the end of the first 24 hours I realized I needed to limit the amount of objects in game by setting up a spacial hash.  It took all morning sunday to do that, and if I had done that from the beginning I could have saved a lot of time.

Lack of content:  I designed the game to make it easy to add new ships, weapons, and planet variations. Despite that, I only made 3 ships and 2 guns.

Cutting of features:  Some features would have been easy to add and made gameplay more interesting:

• Fuel: Having to buy or find fuel would have made money and exploration more pertinent.
• Shield and ship statistics upgrade:  Would have not taken to much time to add.  Especially random ship upgrades from visiting planets.
• AI teams:  I had planned to have 2 ai factions, and pirates who attacked any weaker vessels.
• Displayed statistics.  It would have been nice to see the health of enemies/asteroids when you target them.  I also thought about giving enemies random names.

What went right

Not spending too much time on the graphics.  I consider myself more of an artist than a coder, limiting my art making time was hard but necessary in the end.

Guerrilla coding.  My goal was to pound out features, as quickly and ugly as possible.  Making this game was like surfing a massive tsunami of bad code, but since I was working non stop, I could actually remember what I was doing.

Rethinking the player controls:  Originally you used the keyboard to rotate your ship.  Adding mouse control for the rotation and turret aiming makes for a pleasant user experience, and gives you a needed advantage over the enemies.

Sticking to my guns:  I got majorly overwhelmed by the amount of features that needed to be in place to make my idea playable.  I refused to give up, and in the end came up with an actual game with more features than I had originally planned.

Music:  I only spent a half hour playing music, but I came up with a very appropriate song for the game.  It’s short, spacey, and really sets the mood.

What I Learned

Well I think it’s time I branched out from using Blender as my realtime engine.  I love having my dev. environment be the same as my 3D modeling/sculpting/animating/texture painting tools, but I was discouraged with how my game is published (the .exe wasn’t displaying the font correctly and I ended up distributing the blend with a windows version of Blender)

I think I’m going to start working with Unity free engine.  People here give it good reviews and it seems to import art assets from Blender very quickly.

I just made last edits on my submission – turned out that platform compatabillity between windows and linux with python wasn’t 100%. Had to make events and graphics to run in the same thread. On top of that py2exe didn’t like opengl, so here i am without a .exe file.. :/ still i hope(,hope,hope) that all of you guys have have a python interpreter with  pygame and pyopengl installed(fat chance!).

Anyway, it was an awesome weekend with plenty of coding, drawing, recording soundtracks, drinking [beer, wine, whiskey,cola,coffee],  crap food, sugar overloads, transfat clogs in my throat,  caffeine overdose,  and so on.. I will be dreaming about pythoncode the next few days.. Good gaming and rating to you all 😉

Or a timelapse video of Echolon development. You know, same difference.

The first minute of this video shows me working on the first game I did which was jettisoned on early Sunday for a new game that eventually became Echolon for Ludum Dare.

The LD entry page for Echolon: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-16/?action=rate&uid=781

This was my first LD, and I had a great time! : ) Thanks to everyone organizing this, being in #ludumdare, and just working hard to churn out awesome games. THANK YOU!

There’s definitely something to be said for reflecting on the good and the bad, though. Let’s start with…

The Bad:

1. It took forever to come up with a platformer engine in pygame. I didn’t really have one till 2 pm on Saturday, and I spent forever wrestling with collision detection and never actually got it to work correctly. In the future, I would love to start with an engine that is much closer to my finished product that straight-up pygame.
2. I started with this lofty idea for a story, and viewed the game as a storytelling medium, relying on level-design and storytelling to make the game fun. Whoops, I have NO experience with either of those things and couldn’t really pull it off. Also the story stank.
3. As a result, my game is a very generic platformer, short, and… not actually very fun at all. Next time, I plan to think about gameplay first, and what ‘innovative’ things I can do in that department, and story, atmosphere, etc. second.
4. Again on the story front, I actually totally changed the story and concept to be less pretentious sometime really late Sunday night, which is part of the reason the story seems like an afterthough. :/ It was.
5. My plan was to finish on Saturday night and work on homework on Sunday, but that didn’t happen.

The Good:

1. I FINISHED! I’m extremely proud of myself for this. I usually have a short attention span and trouble finishing stuff, but I did this time. : )
2. This was the third game I worked on, and the first individually – for that, I feel very happy with what I came up with.
3. I was about to give up Saturday afternoon due to my problems implementing a platformer – but DIDN’T. I just threw out the bits of collision detection which weren’t working, which turns out I must not have needed that badly, because the game mechanics work alright without them.
4. The graphics are very atmospheric and cute and actually didn’t take too long to come up with. : ) I’m very happy to have struck a happy “simple, but effective” medium here.
5. I made music! I know nothing about music, and had never made any before, and granted I mostly just jiggled knobs in audiotool, but I feel very proud of myself for attempting and making something that fits the atmosphere even vaguely.
6. A few hours before the competition ended, I got a great idea to actually make the gameplay unique and fun! There’s no way I could have done it in 48 hours having started where I started, but I plan to work on it over winter break.
7. I got sleep, I showered, I didn’t totally wear myself out. I’m especially happy I just slept in as late as I wanted on Sunday, since that was much-needed rest for Finals week.

Conclusions

I had a great time at this LD, and I’ll continue working on my game, and hopefully participate in future mini-LDs and full LDs. : D Thank you everyone!

Well I think its safe to say I have totally mucked up my game. After getting some sleep and finishing my maths exams today I played through the game. I was horrified at the number of mistakes and errors there were. I also realised that I spelled the name of the game wrong when I submitted it. But I’ve learned some new things so that’s the good thing.

One question though. After you have submitted your entry are you allowed to fix errors and stuff in it? I don’t really want to fix anything (what’s done is done). I’m just stupidly curious.

P.S Maybe I’ll get the worst game award.

Tags: 0423, chip, epic, fail

Hi there, I’m wondering if I can change the preloader code to fix a bug. I promise not to touch the gameplay. Can I?

Nobody must move a finger but me (as I host the flash at my site)…

Thanks!

First, I’ve now posted OSX and linux/source code versions on my entry’s page.  I noticed some serious slowdown when testing on my macmini – this is because it uses very large textures (1024 x 768), and there isn’t really anything I could have done (not within the 48hr time limit anyway, it would have been too fiddly and time-consuming).  Fairly recent (/non bargain-basement) graphics cards shouldn’t have a problem, but I apologise if you find the game getting slower and slower the more moves you make.

Second, here’s my timelapses:

Coding etc.

Audio

There’s two because I did the audio on a different computer, and I’m too lazy to edit them together properly.  Read on for my post mortem.

This actually went surprisingly well, especially considering I spent the best part of 7 hours on Saturday afternoon at work.  It was definitely the most enjoyable Ludum Dare I’ve done so far.

What worked:

• Setting my alarm for 2:15 am to see what the theme was.  It may have been a fluke, or it may have been that my head was in a different place having just woken up from deep sleep, but literally within 5 minutes of seeing the theme I knew what I was going to do, and within 5 minutes of that I had the entire game fleshed out in my head (I don’t think I changed anything between then and the finish – I’m pretty sure I even came up with ‘Maggott’s Restorative Ship’s Biscuits at this point).  Another 5 minutes and I was back to sleep.  The whole thing was pretty much perfect.
• The map and background paper.    I did the map in black acrylic ink on cartridge paper, and I think it turned out really well.  The compass is a bit wonky, and I maybe should have drawn those lines you see on old maps to go with it, but that’s just nitpicking.  I was a bit worried about the background paper being too light and not stained enough, but a little fiddling with Paint Shop Pro fixed that.  I’m really pleased with how the whole thing turned out, especially when the coloured segments get drawn on the map as the game progresses.
• Research.  Getting to research old maps and food adverts on google was fun.  I think I did a fairly good job of getting that old-fashioned (Victorian?) look for the game.

What didn’t work:

• The AI.  The CPU players are useless and offer no challenge.  I should really have spent more time on them to make their actions less random, and I should have used A* to get them to move towards unexplored spaces.
• That’s it, as far as I know.  Maybe some comments will point other problems out, but I haven’t seen anything obvious yet.

What may or may not have worked:

• Not having the chance to play the game with other human beings yet, I’ve no idea whether it’s actually a good game.  I think it has the potential to lead to arguments and people storming away in a huff (the mark of all good multiplayer games), but really I don’t know.  The rule set is very simple, so maybe that’ll make it less fun to play, but until I can try it out properly I’ve no idea whether it works or not.

As a bonus for reading this far, here’s a picture of the stuff I scanned/wrote down during the competition:

Tags: timelapse

Okay so i just woke up after my long period of post-LD sleep and i discovered the the goal of my game (collecting the 4 heart pieces) is unacheivable because you cant move between rooms smothely and you get stuck in walls. i think i know how to fix it (i didnt have this problem before, and that is why i submitted it without checking) and just then i found this:

“After the deadline, we do allow bugfixes. You’re allowed to fix any bugs that stop a player from playing or finishing your game. Make your fixes and upload/edit your entry as appropriate.

New content however is outside the scope of what’s considered a bugfix. You’re welcome to and encouraged to make a “post compo” version of your game after the deadline. Feel free to edit your entry post and make a new posting on the blog to tell us about it.”

So please tell me, am i able to fix this and resubmit it now?

Crash!
|./bashplore: line 83: {-2..2}+15+(15-2)*121: syntax error: operand expected (error token is “{-2..2}+15+(15-2)*121”)
./bashplore: line 96: [: ==: unary operator expected
./bashplore: line 27: {1..20}+{1..20}*20: syntax error: operand expected (error token is “{1..20}+{1..20}*20”)

Nooooooooooo, gona fix it after a film, thanks BenHem

BenHem, don’t understand how you get the error because when i get this kind of error it always say something like File_other_then_bashplore: line … Cannot easly find the bug but i’ll try to fix it, that’s a promise 8p

I just made a timelapse video, you can watch it here. I removed the parts where I was away or asleep. The music is from a concert I played on Friday (from Brahms’ 2nd symphony).

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buC_zbkgDHU

Edit: programs I used: FlashDevelop, Tile Studio and my new pixel editor which is still work-in-progress.

First off: Wow. What a weekend. So many thoughts I want to share. So many emotions flooded out during the experience. Let’s see if I can try and compose this a bit.

LD Entry URL: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-16/?action=rate&uid=1277
Time Lapse Dev Log: via YouTube, via MobileMe

The Plan:

My high-level plan for the weekend was:

• Friday: Prove out key tech elements needed for the game concept.
• Saturday: Build the game. Make it playable from start to finish. Get to “content complete”.
• Sunday: Polish, Tune, add the nice-to-haves.

I’m glad to say I was more-or-less able to stick to this plan.

Friday – Concept Discovery:

The Ludum Dare theme was announced at 6:00 P.M. on my way home from work. “Exploration” was not the theme was I was planning for so I immediately panicked. I figured I’d try and explore a concept of “limited visibility in an environment”. There was a small problem with this… I hadn’t yet figured out masking in Flash.

Friday – Tech Prototyping:

Being able to mask areas of a layer was going to be key to my game concept so I spent a large portion of Friday night focused on prototyping technical implementations. Thankfully I was able to figure this out within a couple of hours and I had my first build showing a bitmap with a sprite masking it. I was able to addChildren to the sprite to get the dynamic effect I was looking for.

The rest of Friday night was spent shoehorning some of my tile engine code into my game concept. I called it a night at midnight.

Saturday – Fleshing out the Concept

It’s amazing how your dreams change when you are up to your eyeballs in a project. I was able to focus in on my game concept a bit better with a night’s sleep worth of brain parsing. I decided to scrap my idea of doing a platformer due to unnecessary risk. I focused in on the concept of a bat (easy to draw & animate) trying to find his way through a cave.

Saturday – Building the Content

I had to force myself to stop playing with my tech at noon on Saturday and start focusing on building game content. This is where I encountered my biggest stumbling block. My tile engine code was great at loading an overly verbose XML data file. But this XML file was not ideal for rapid prototyping. I ended up deciding that Excel would be an ideal level editor. So I rebuilt my tile engine to load a .csv file. While this was indeed a big stumbling block, it only took me an hour or two to resolve. And in the end, the time saved by being able to edit levels in Excel was well worth the investment.

Building the levels was very straightforward and it didn’t take long at all to build all 5 levels of the game. I focused on a learning arch that would guide the player through the experience. The game peaks in difficulty in level 4 then eases it’s way down to the end. By 7pm I had the game playable from start to finish. This was a huge accomplishment and really put my mind at ease. The rest of my time could be spent tuning, tweaking, and polishing.

Saturday Night – Audio

I spent about an hour in GarageBand putting together a straightforward audio track that would serve as the atmospheric backdrop music. Nothing special – but it certainly added something to the experience.  CFXR (a Mac port of SFXR) was the tool of choice for the sonar sound effect. Since I knew the player would hear this sound a lot, I made 3 variations of it that played at random. This partially minimized audio strain.

Saturday Night – Sleep

I called it a night at 1am quite confident in my progress. Trying to sleep was next to impossible. It appears that after 18 hours of straight game developing my mind and body started acting weird. My brain wouldn’t calm down as it continued to parse through a backlog of thoughts and ideas. My body felt like I was going through withdrawal. I was breathing weird, my heart was racing, everything hurt. It was a very very odd experience and it took 3 hours to get to sleep.

Sunday Morning – Book ends

Saturday night I came up with an idea for the game’s ending. I decided to invest a lot time Sunday morning building this out. I really really like how it turned out. A good chunk of time was also spent on the title screen which led to me changing the fonts throughout the game.

Sunday – Final tuning

Once of the last decisions I made was to remove the timer system from the main play-through of the game. I felt the timer took away from the feeling of solidarity and exploration. I wanted the player to explore with no pressure the first time through. I did however add the functionality so a second play-through (during the same game session) would trigger the timer and allow the player to race against a par time for each level.

I submitted the game at 3:00 P.M., very pleased with the final result.

Thoughts & Conclusion:

I’m very conservative in my development style. I’d rather focus on something small and polish it than stretch my time too thin. EchoExplorer was no exception to this rule. I cut many elements very early in development that I felt were not critical to the core gameplay. But even with this small core I attempted and succeeded with many new things this project:

• This was the first time I’ve made a game with “levels”
• I built a .csv parser so I could build levels in Excel. I’m so impressed with how well this worked.
• I got alpha masking working.
• I created a really cool ending sequence with dialog, timed sequences and camera panning.
• I made my most polished and awesomest game to date.

I wanted to create a small but polished experience. The game can be completed in as little as 2 minutes but there are lots of little things that I feel make this a richer game experience. I like the pacing. I like the graphics I was able to put together with my limited ability. I like the story and emotion the game delivers. I even think the difficulty and frustration is nicely tuned given the short length of the game.

What would I have done differently?:

I had a lot of time to be a bit riskier but I chose to err on the side of caution. Next time around I may loosen up a bit and try to bite off more. Though next time around I should also be able to progress faster from the tech-side. (I still spend a lot of time looking up Actionscript code as I write)

The bottom-line is there will be a next-time. This was my first “proper” LD. It will not be my last.

Well, my first Ludum Dare is finally over. The dust has settled and I finally have regained sanity from sleeping a combined ten hours over two nights. My game,  Lost? (spelled with punctuation to differentiate it from the popular television series of the same name), is pretty much a combination of Knytt Stories and Metroid (leaning significantly towards the Knytt Stories side). I’ve learned quite a lot about rapid development here, so I’ll outline it as the fallout has settled.

The Good

Let’s talk about what went right, first. While I barely planned out the game (I spent literally five minutes brainstorming the features and part of the game map), it turned out pretty well in the end. Pretty much all of the pieces fell into place in the last five hours pretty nice, and all of the bugs were ironed out within one hour of the competition ending. Every single goal of the game was met to some extent, so I now proclaim my first Ludum Dare a resounding success!

The Bad

Well, if someone says that their LD entry has gone without problems, they are lying. Developing a game in 48 hours from scratch is not something that is easy. One thing I would have liked to change is the ladder physics. I modeled them off of Mega Man 2, thinking it would be an good example as I have never actually implemented a ladder in a platform game before. Not only did it messy up my beautiful platform code by adding conditional statements everywhere, many people disliked the slow speed of moving up and down ladders, and not being able to jump up while climbing. I would have changed it during the last hour of the competition, but I was unsure how I could make climbing ladders easier but keep them as a challenging game mechanic.

Probably the biggest problem I had with the development was the music. Music is a very important element in the game, but I almost didn’t have it. First my tracker just failed to start up. I had to spend an hour trying to get it to work and trying to find alternatives, but I got it working eventually and made the music all on Sunday. The second problem with it is the tracker I used only saves in very outdated formats. So outdated, in fact, that the module files it saves are pretty much incompatible with modern computers, and the only format that works is Scream Tracker 3 files. Now, only one wrapper exists that can run the required DLLs to play the files, and the wrapper is really, I mean really annoying to work with. It is a pain to stop songs, see which songs are running, and much more. I had to jump through hoops to get it to work out, and I did some things I wouldn’t normally do. For example, when it all came down to the last hour and I had trouble getting the sound to stop after beating the game, I pretty much gave up, so whenever the game ends, the DLL is unloaded, the entire game restarts, and then the DLL is reloaded.

Lastly, I would have loved to have more time with areas and just simply planned the map out better. The game only has four areas when I originally planned to have at least five. The water area was removed as I didn’t have enough time to expand the already overcomplicated physics code to handle the changes in movement whilst submerged. Another unintended consequence of my lack of planning was that it was impossible to leave the fire area as the jump to the left of the save point was to large. So I added the lower exit, which increased the size of my game by a few screens. So I guess that was a good thing.

So, after my second LudumDare (the first being 14th, I forgot about LD for the 15th contest), I was rather disappointed. I made 2 entirely crappy games, one not even functional. I did manage to stick with my wheelchairs, but I really just made a platformer with spring platforms, and added some outline graphics to make the blocks look a little better, and little branches to hold the springs onto walls. But in all honesty, it was completely rushed (yes, I’m comparing this to a 48 hour timeframe) and played like crap. I couldn’t even be arsed to make the “PRESS ANY KEY” message blink in and out, or even use an outdated chiptune I made.

However, on the plus side, I participated, and I made ExciteMike’s wallpaper be square. I also learned I suck at making randomly generated mazes.

So, maybe next time I’ll think of a better idea. I can’t say I liked the theme. Don’t flame me on this, but I think most people just voted +1 because it wasn’t a bad theme, and it ended up winning (much in the same way that a tournament participator could be getting 3rd place every single round and still win).

This was my first Ludum Dare and my first game I programmed too.  My game was very simple but I wanted something I knew I could finish and finish I did.

What went right:

• The game got finished
• Fixed any major bugs

What went wrong:

• The goal of the game: it never really happened
• Bugs took a long time fix
• Ran out of muffins

What went into my belly:

• 6 muffins
• lots of soda
• Rigatoni with pasta sauce
• Angus burger
• bagel
• chow mein

What I learned:

• You can make a very simple game in 48 hours while knowing practically nothing about game programming
• What a SIGTRAP is
• How to use Code::Blocks and its debugger
• You can never have too many muffins
• Pasta sucks without parmesan cheese

Tags: postmortem

Cubees Entry: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-16/?action=rate&uid=1481

Ludum Dare 16: Cubees – Timelapse Video

Ludum Dare 16: Cubees – Gameplay Video

http://www.platymuus.com/goods/junk/asploreheim_bugfix.zip

Contains a new Asploreheim.exe. Replace and enjoy the lack of fancy, laggy road rendering. I also tweaked the hill placement slightly so it ought not to be so center-biased.

View my Timelapse.

What went well:

• Finished a game!
• Learned Lua and LÖVE inside and out.
• Made some decent (by my standards) looking pixel graphics.

What could have gone better:

• Had to scrap most of my planned stuff in order to finish on time. Originally Missing was going to be a survival game with a lot of roguelike elements.
• Spent way too much time making a procedural maze generator, which didn’t end up being important to the final product.
• Didn’t have enough time to add gameplay, ended up adapting the planned food/water element of exploration into a collection game.

Tags: post-mortem, timelapse

So this was my first Ludum Dare. I did the Global Game Jam back in February, so I had some idea of what to expect, although the GGJ was teams rather than solo. One thing I do regret is not interacting more with the community–IRC, Twitter, etc. I could have used more feedback than I got, instead of relying almost entirely on my husband’s comments.

Friday night I spent brainstorming ideas and thinking over mechanics. Saturday morning I started coding. By late afternoon / early evening, I had the major mechanics implemented, but it wasn’t fun. At that point the turrets were just yellow diamonds (and they were warp portals which your cyan circle teleported between), and the hint circle always disappeared before you could fire again.

Screenshot of older version of SEEK*TOR

The best thing that happened for the game occurred when I sent my Saturday prototype to a friend for feedback. He told me two very important things:

1. He had the most fun figuring out where the hint circles intersected
2. He wanted to know why you had to aim and fire to reveal the map instead of just placing light bulbs around the “platforms” (yellow diamonds)

So I made the hints persist but fade over time. That means you can see the hint circle intersections, but the screen doesn’t become overly-cluttered with old hint circles. It also means the aiming mechanic is important, since if you take too long, the previous hint will have faded away. I also changed the theming of the game so that the portals became turrets and you selected a turret to fire from, rather than teleporting between them.

Sunday was mostly a day of polish. The big feature changes were implementing multiple levels, scoring, and flare limits. I also added the start, game over, and between-level screens, made the graphics, (such as they are–hooray for GlowFilter!) composed a background track, and created the sound effects.

In the end, I was successful in terms of having a pretty-much finished game at the end. On the other hand, seeing some of the other entries, I kind of wish I’d done something a little more ambitious…

Things that worked out:

1. Using abstract glow-y vector graphics instead of trying to draw. (I spent about 20 minutes attempting to draw a single turret before deciding my time was better spent elsewhere.)
2. The game selects from 4 (hand-crafted) turret layouts and randomizes the enemy and player locations. That turned out to be enough randomization that I didn’t need to make a turret layout generator. In fact, I only just realized that I left the game in debug mode where it always chooses the same turret layout.

Things that didn’t work out:

1. When I started, I implemented everything in one file just to see if the core mechanic would work. I made such a mess of my code that I spent hours late Saturday night moving code around so I could add levels. Spending hours working on code without actually adding new functionality–even regressing at times–was very hard on my morale.
2. I spent too long trying to make my git history tidy. I’d keep forgetting to add a file to the commit or not commit for a while and wind up with a gigantic commit that involved 3 features and all the source files. Then I’d try to figure out how to break up or revise the commits. (And how to use vim, since that’s the default git editor…) Given that I never had to revert to a previous version, it was kind of silly of me.

Tools and Libraries Used:

1. FlashDevelop
2. TweenLite
3. git
4. ACID Music Studio
5. Free VSTi soft synths: Crystal, LazySnake, and ErsDrums
6. Audacity
7. sfxr

Tags: Explore, flash, ld48_16, postmortem

Fixed PATHWAYS so that it would properly show two of the “events”, uploaded the source, and I also moved around some text to avoid overlapping.

There are a lot more entries than I expected, I will try to fairly judge as many as I can.

I reset Asploreheim’s universe and made changes to the hill allocation setup… it *ought* to work now. I’m pretty sure I’m operating within the rules as they state that I can fix bugs if they’re game-breaking (which this is)

Apparently the login crash and hill-claim freeze happen when the game can’t handle all the data the server is sending back… happens scarily quickly. I’m not going to mess with the game any more. So there, if it breaks, I’m sorry :/

In retrospect, an MMO was a bad idea…

Heartiac Arrest

I fixed everything and made the entry more readable / aesthetic. Also uploaded the Source.

Pro:

– Even though I wasn’t planning to take part, I still did and don’t regret it

– Managed to create a new game!

– LD is always kinda fun, and coding with Gosu is allowing to code in Ruby very fast

– Created a shooting game with a lot of enemy fire. And the flower effects went surprisingly well

– very happy that the radar worked correctly!

Contra:

– when I was creating sound effects, they didn’t sound right and I took them out again. That was lost time. should have made bgm instead

– shouldn’t have made the enemies’ movement “random” :D. So some of them are having flowers, others don’t

– i know, the shootings are kinda crazy, but they aren’t crazy enough! ^^ should have been MUCH more

– i didn’t wanted to use wingdings as enemies, but, you know, no time and such. i also wanted to have them animated, but that would have taken even more time

– there’s a big performance problem if you get to the end. Reminder for myself: don’t make the collision calculations in the laser shots if you create around 360 every second, lasting for at least 10 seconds each

– i also wanted to add a possibility to move left and right, but having the calculations in euclidic dimensions crashed my brain at hour 42 😀

So, this LD was a nice experience again! To all alpha-testers and fellow programmers: have fun!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iy-dLGBFMcw

Finally got my timelapse uploaded.  I used chronolapse.

Now I’m going to start chipping away at playing all these great entries

Tags: exploration, ld16, timelapse

Game-crashing bugs for 5 Colors fixed, readme expanded, hints added.

You can get the new build here:

http://necessarygames.com/5_colors_pandora.zip

For the record, I changed one line of code, and inserted two small objects… amazing how small yet game-destroying some bugs are.

TimeLapse Vid

Hey Crew! I did it, I got through a Ludum Dare! I’ve been wanting to get into one of these for at least a year and a half, I didn’t have the chance, mostly because they happen right in exam season, but I done graduated!

The theme of “Exploration”, which isn’t much of stretch for Video games. It got my imagination rolling though. One thing that my mind grabbed on was Lewis and Clarke, probably because I listened to a pod-cast on the death of Meriwether Lewis on the way home on Friday. I wanted to make a game with some historical roots, other thoughts are a ‘space exploration’ or something more abstract. But my mind kept returning to the idea of the famous western explorers and their adventures.

I set the game on an island because thats an easy way to create hard boundaries. I wanted you to be able to find new and interesting flora and fauna, name them, and sell them to distant aristocracy for exorbitant prices. But I could only manage the unfettered expansion of your settlements into the island itself, turning its tranquil simplicity into a criss-crossed bustling seaport.

I named it after the first lyrical part of my favourite Decemberists Song “The Island”. The idea of an untamed island untouched by human hand, explorer expeditions venturing into its untamed wilds, finding riches to bring back to the empire. That idealistic Romantic idea struck me and I ran with it.

-I like it!          – I am proud of what I made, and it’s fun in a relaxing way.

-World Generator     – I wrote this in the first half, I’m really happy with how the forests came out, they feel really organic, the scalability is excellent as well.

-Wagons and roads    – The most interesting part! I’m really happy that the roads run and can check their distance from a dock or town, I also like that the wagons follow their paths correctly. If I had another hour, I would’ve made the wagons adjust their path if a faster one becomes available.

-Flixel rocks socks  – I feel more confident in my flash game crafting then before!

-I am excited for more game making! – Got me out of a funk I’ve been in a while.

What went wrong

-Inconsistent Art  – I tried out a couple different things. So the character is an bizarrely coloured and abstract, the sea is WTF, and the rest is stylistically ripped from the first 2 Civilizations.

-Shallow game-play – There isn’t any challenge, and there isn’t much to do.

-No sound!         – This is really lame, I just ran out of time.

– Ran out of time  – I didn’t really plan on what I wanted to do, I winged it from start to finish, I came up with the ideas and came up with too many, got stuck doing things that I should’ve not attempted. Oh well!

The Game:
http://www.ericmcquiggan.com/Gameuploads/ludumdare/LudumDare48.swf

Controls

W/A/S/D – Movement
E – Build Improvement
R – Build Road
T – Build Dock

Man. I have made a game! Thats pretty unbelievable. Wow.

Why the heck did I join Ludum Dare? And why now?

Hm. I guess Notch simply, or just accidently pushed me over to it. Also everyone else that randomly yells “JOIN LUDUM DARE”. Theres quite a lof of those people.

And there I was, having a registered account, voting for themes, hoping it wouldn’t be Twilight Fandom, with barely any game making experience more complex than if statements.

But it turns out I had an idea for exploration. A simple one even I could realize with a bit of experimenting around. How that idea came, I don’t know anymore. I think it was a fluent process after opening Game Maker and simply starting by making a platformer engine, kind of. Saturday was kind of depressing in the beginning. I think Iwas trying to figure out how I could use FMOD to use the simple stuff I wanted it to do. That took about 6 hours of my time. I have found simple solutions to my problems by not using examples of how it could work but instead of just doing my own shitty code. But it worked like I wanted it to! And that makes me… a tad happy.

If I would make another game like this, I probably would rely more on the 3D stuff FMOD has. It gives you more of a feeling where you are going to. Would I have tried to figure it out while being in Ludum Dare, I guess it would have sucked all my blood, eh, time away.

The way the game looks was something that evolved naturally too. At first I had some kind of placeholder graphics for the very beginning. But the rest never changed.

Hm, I seem to have overwritten most of it. Ah, here is how the game start initially looked like. After I got to the endings on sunday, changing the cheesy look of this was kind of a good idea.

I think most of the time was spent on sound. I didn’t notice, but making 36 sound effects and master them so they kind of have the same volume or destroy speakers, that takes a lot of time.

Look at the mess of project files I created.

For people that are interested, I used Ableton Live Suite 8. Lots of it’s internal Synthesizers and Effects. Also FM8, Absynth 4, Reaktor 5 and Massive. All VSTi from Native Instruments. Yeah, I own that shit. God damn, I’ve spent too much money on this.

I’m very happy with the sound results. I think some loops are really cool.

What else… after I got my code working, everything was just straightforward work. I actually worked most of the Ludum Dare. Although it’s such a small game. I blame my shitty coding. I could have made scripts so I don’t have to repeat steps over and over. But I was fast enough to finish what I have initially kind of planned, so it’s not that bad. Okay, to the pros and the cons!

PRO!

• I MADE A GAME.
• Good sound!
• Interesting experimental experience!
• Happily finding out 2 days are exactly the time needed
• Replay value!
• I MADE A GAME.

CON?

• The controls are confusing. Some people get it instantly, some don’t even know there are in total 8 different routes.
• The sound is sometimes confusing. Sometimes you don’t really get the difference. Using “3D” sounds or panning would have deminished this.
• The game is quite short. Some people might give it a shot once and then never open it again.
• The visuals could have been more involved.

Do I have something else to say?

APRIL.

I think it would be fun to have a race to see who can play, win and rate all 121 games from this contest before the time runs out for voting. There will be no prize for the winner and the challenge starts now. So far I have played 2 and beat none. But I’ll get there soon. Exception: if the game is not win-able you do not have to win it.

Okay, ANOTHER BUG 😮 was fixed. you can now (finally) beat the game. I’ve played it through ;3

Also, i was planning on keeping this a secret but i cant hold exciting things in for long >_<

A secret path!? Could it be?!

Oh, and by the way, if anyone liked that font i made and used in my game, you can download that here.

I have the following question: unfortunately I used Wingdings as enemy graphics, and those are not allowed in the rules. I didn’t know about that, but that also means that I disqualified myself.

Question: is it still ok to change the graphics now? I don’t want to be a spoilsport, so I have these to offer, intentionally making them worse to indicate that

Old graphics

new graphics

So do you think this is ok? Elsewise I will take back my entry by also deleting the links

pythong

I’ve put together my timelapse video! It’s on youtube here:

Frimkron’s LD16 Timelapse Video

I didn’t leave it recording while I was asleep and I stuck footage from the 2 days together – that’s why there’s a jump in the middle. As you can see I spent the entire first day working on the maze generation *eyeroll*

Tags: timelapse, youtube

pythong says …

haha, I have the most evil book in the world, but which is worshipped by mages? i always thought it would be the manual for windows ^^
nice game!

Mages can be evil too Just because it has a skull+crossbones cover, doesn’t mean it isn’t a manual for Windows 😉

SonnyBone says …

I thought the skeleton was a villager at first, so I just kept bumping into him. HE MURDERED ME.

Nice use of the theme.

You are indeed surprisingly weak at the beginning of the game. I was hoping to have a whole level-up system but I decided it would have taken too long.

Hamumu says …

I really liked it, except that you have to go past all these guys who are lethal. After reading the walkthrough, I thought I’d give it another shot and when I got to the mountain I got one-shotted by a guy standing in the middle of the passage. I couldn’t have avoided him! I want to see more of the game, but it’s just too vicious.

I really like the graphics.

Would appreciate auto-repeat on the keys!

Thanks! It took me quite a while to get the graphics the way I wanted but at the time it was very much early days You should play left handed, your sword is longer :fnarr: it doesn’t affect gameplay though.

It’s possible to get to the top of the mountain without being hit – dodge moar 😉
Auto-repeat was planned but I guess I never got round to it.
A couple of cheats if you want to see more …
Pressing F7 will remove all the fog.
Pressing F8 will give you 40 HP, The Sword, the Lantern, the Book, and enough Skill to kill just about anything before the Dragons.
There comes a great price for such cheatery though…

Frimkron says …

I was killed by a Trogdor 😛 I must come back and finish this one. Really enjoyable!

You’re very near the end! I’d read the walkthrough, it has hints on how to deal with those pesky dragons

My LD entry, Boboil goes Exploring, will no longer ‘melt your laptop’, as I’ve fixed the memory leak.

Also, as some people said they were on laptops, I’ve added support for arrow keys too. So play it NOWZ!

Tags: bugfix

Well, I choose to took the challenge as a double-experiment: it was my first LD as well as my first Java game (or something like that, called Mars Rover). I wanted to learn more Java while making a quick game. I can say the experiment wasn’t a total failure, just a half-failure, ’cause I’ve learned more about the Java language. The other half (the main one, should I say), in contrast, was a horrible failure. I started the game Sunday 1:00 PM (GMT -2) and “finished” it by 7:00 PM. I was locked in my bedroom trying to avoid external noise but it was terribly hot (and just now, writing it, I remembered I have an air conditioner ¬¬). So I released the game with the minimum features needed to play it. I didn’t know the best way to work with good performance 2D graphics in Java, so I ended doing it like a normal desktop app with some 2D drawing in the background. The original idea was to have some nice icons for drag-drop instructions and nice sprites and tiles for the rover and scenery, as well as sfx and bgm. I think I had enough time to implement it after my submission, but I was really tired (I know, you guys worked almost the 48h we had and aren’t complaining… shame on me).

For the next LD:
– Learn how to make real games in Java (BEFORE the contest) OR
– Use Python with Pygame OR
– Use Ruby and learn Gosu OR
– Use JavaScript with some pre-made games lib
(I’m much more comfortable with those 3 languages)
– Think about the themes BEFORE voting ends
– Turn on the air conditioner

OK, here’s my story of the LD48 compo this year.

First, it was my 2nd LD48 so I quite knew what I could expect. The main restriction for me always is that I have a family that keeps me quite busy at the weekends. But this weekend my wife was invited twice to go out, so my actual time was:
Friday 3am-5am
Saturday: 12am-1pm, 8pm-12pm
Sunday: 8pm-12pm
Sum: 11 hours.

But that’s fine for me. I’m bad at polishing things. I’m quick at prototyping.

What went right:

• The idea. Really, I sat there for 2 hours thinking of a game I could do in ~10 hours and I was close to give up. then came the idea with “explore the fridge”.
• Music, Sound. I’m bad at anything about sounds. I have no idea how to make music and how to make sfx. So for the sfx I just did some “chip chip” and “squeek” sounds using my voice. That gave me the idea, that I do have 5 hours left in my MS SongSmith free trial version. I wrote a few lines in the IDE, launched it and just “sang” as it came to my mind. It was bad. But it was so bad, that it started to be good, again. I kept the first trial w/o any improvements. Had I tried to improve it, I think it would have failed horribly

What went wrong

• MS Paint. Really, usually I use CorelDraw for graphics, but I just wanted to do a quick prototype to see if the idea just works at all. I wanted to redraw the gfx with Corel later, but got no time. The gfx suck totally, but at least the game is fully playable.
• Sleep. I was so excited on Friday, that I woke up too early. I was dead tired on Saturday and close to be sick on Sunday.
• Communication. Really. I was so busy and had just too little time to chat and look what others did, that I have the feeling I missed a good piece of the compo. Might have been because I had so little time, too.
• Sleep. I’m still tired.
• Highscores. Next time I should try to find time to implement a simple online high score table. That might add long time fun to the game, since no one cares how much you can score if you can’t compete with others. Maybe.
• Sleep. I slept too little and feel like I can’t remember what I wanted to do the very second ago

Tools I used

• GLBasic. I’m the author of that language. I hope not to get a pimp hat for that 😉
• MS Paint. Next time I’d better use CorelDraw, because the results are worth it.
• AC3D. For the fridge door I used AC3D, which is a very nice modeller for low poly objects.
• Audacity. For the wav sfx recording I used Audacity with the “save selection as wav” option. Was very quick.
• Microsoft Songsmith. Really, they all post YouTube videos about “Enter Sandman” with MS Songsmith, and they suck. But if you use it in the way they designed it for, the results are quite funny. Don’t expect anything serious. It’s a toy that will produce a joke. I should have saved the file as WAV and convert to MP3, later. That way the Linux version had had music.
• Nettalk. It’s a slim, free IRC program. I can’t program w/o IRC, I’m afraid of being alone 😉

Final thoughts
The game was thought as a joke. I didn’t like the theme a lot, because all my “exploration” ideas were too big to realize in that little time. The feedback so far is overwhelming. Thank you so much. I really thought it’d fail miserably, thus I chose “cheese” in the game’s name. I’m happy that it doesn’t stink in the end.