My long-winded post-mortem for my Ludum Dare #16 entry, Cubees.

Background Information
This was my first Ludum Dare game. I’ve been working on games for about a year, and programming for about a decade. I’m not much of an artist, but I make due. I try to make up for that with more creative scripting techniques.

What Went Right

• Solid Start. Fifteen minutes after the start if the competition I starting outlining the core gameplay mechanics. After another fifteen I had finished with the essential elements I needed to have in this game.
• Rapid Prototyping. Four and a half hours in, I had a prototype for basic island generation and character movement. Five hours in, I had the hidden/reveal mechanic implemented. Nine hours in, I had the procedurally-generated islands completed. At this point, the game itself, save for a Win condition, is done. This allowed me to focus a day and a half on polish.
• Optimization. I’ve never used meshes this extensively, but because each tile, fog for each tile and decoration (mountain or village) were additional meshes, the graphics because very expensive, very quickly. I had never used the combine mesh functions, but they performed extremely well, reducing draw calls by 90%.

What Went Wrong

• Downtime Scheduling. I had slept most of Friday leading up to the start of the competition, in the thought that I would be able to work for 48-hours straight, which I may have been able to do a decade ago. I did get 7 hours of sleep Saturday night, and I took a 3 hour nap on Sunday, but I didn’t realize how exhaustive hour after hour of intense mental work really was. My scheduling for breaks, downtime, and sleep, weren’t ideal and it caught me by surprise.
• Music Prep. I didn’t have any music in mind. I had succumb to the realization that I had no idea how to generate this, and would just leave it. Late in Day 2, though, I figured it out, and it cost me at least an hour trying to find the right software, playing around with it, exporting, converting, and importing. Had I prepped for this, I could have changed this 60 minute chunk, into 5 minutes.
• Final Build Prep. I had never built for Windows using Unity before, and with my first test I only copied half of the files I needed. This was a pain considering that I only had about half an hour until the deadline. Figuring this out before, just as with the music, would have saved time in the critical last few hours.
• Not Difficult Enough. I focused on function, before design. This is the sign of a programmer who can design, instead of a game designer who can program. Many people have commented that the game is too easy. The problem is the island-generation equation. Current what happens is that as the levels increase so does the potential size of the island, and the possibility of resource, obstacle (mountain) and village tiles. What should happen is that the size of the island should increase and the amount of obstacles should increase (costing you more turns to find new ways to get around them), but the bonus tiles (resources, villages) should always have the same chance of being found, possibly decreasing after a certain point.

What Could Have Been Better

Future

Over the holiday break, I will be continuing to work on this game. I am satisfied with how it turned out with 48-hours of work, and I’d like to see what this could look like after three weeks. I think by that time it could be quite a fun little Facebook game.

I had plans for achievements and more of a story in the original 48H version, but those were cut because of a lack of time. I’d like to put those back in, especially in a Facebook app, with leaderboards and friend lists.

The video proved out to be terrible quality, but I wanted to record a playthrough of the game. I think I might also do a run with all the crystals (the “all out run”) and a run with the secret ending.

anyway, enjoy this bad-quality video at vimeo: link

Here is little gameplay video (interface was not recorded by fraps, music not from game!) and timelapse of making my entry.

Gameplay

Time elapse

Enjoy! )

…I updated my game to have diagonal movement too. (Linklink! And it is faster as well.)

But don’t worry, the main windows download on the entry page is still the old version.

So I thought I’d write up a post-mortem on my game, so I’ll just outline the key points which I have come up with.

What went well

• The art – I’m quite happy with the images I created for it, it could have been a little better in some cases, but I’m quite fond of it.
•  The audio – A lot of people have commented on how the audio is cute, or funny, the voice of my boyfriend proved rather successful for Rex the dinosaur.
•  The menus – I quite like the colour scheme of the menus, although looking at it now it’s very Bonsai Barber. However there aren’t many clicks needed and it’s easy to navigate around so I’m happy with that.
•  All the little bits and bobs – I love that in the last remaining 5 minutes I managed to pull together an icon file along with all the other little touches that makes it feel a little more finished.

What went wrong

•  Not being a coder – I was limited in what I could make, so I thought making a seek n’ solve game would be easy. However I was wrong as it was a lot harder than I thought.
• The pop-ups saying you found an item – I had to keep these in to have it work properly.
•  The fact that it repeats items and never ends – I couldn’t figure out how to get my game to work the way I really wanted it, sadly this is the huge downside of the game, showing no progression or reward.
• Items staying there – Yes I realise they still stay there for everyone that seems to point that out, I couldn’t make them disappear and also because the game doesn’t work how it should, so no need to point out something I already know please. I know this means it shows know progression for the player, why else would I add the quit button, it was the only way I could make the game end.
• Not enough images – For the game to work really well I’d have to of increased the number of images by about 500% as this would then add the complexity needed for the game, and then the gameplay would be down to the placement of the items.
• The controls – Having right click as a drag button would not be the first thing  a player would think of, I could have fixed this many ways, either by telling the player when they start the game in a pop-up with arrows or something, or the better way. By having items over the edge of what is visible on the right side of the screen, then encouraging the player to look. However if the player reads the instructions they shouldn’t encounter this problem.
• Zelda – Unfortunately The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks came out so I had to stop myself from playing it all the time, although I did play it a bit over the weekend at times.
• Sleep – On the Friday night I didn’t actually stay awake for the theme to be announced, and had a large amount of sleep, although this was mainly down to having a long day at work, doing food shopping and my podcast in the evening. So I was quite tired, and I had about 4-6 hours each night, so that knocked a fair bit off my development time. However if I had less sleep I’d not work as well as my brain wouldn’t function properly.

What I would improve

• More images – I would add a large amount of images to populate the space and make Rex’s living room more junk filled, originally the game was two times the size it is currently, unfortunately I didn’t have the time to make enough, but now that I can improve on the game in my spare time I will attempt to create more assets to populate the space.
• Learn a bit more code – It was pretty much the first time I’d really made something on my own in Game Maker, which was so vey hard, I am a designer, however not a designer in any way of programming. I hope to try working on my programming skills a little, not that it’s really essential for my job, but it’s always good to know a little of everything.

Final thoughts

•  I intend to work on the version and perhaps make a version 2, when I do it’ll be posted up on my blog
• I’m extremely happy with the outcome of the game, not being a programmer, I made something that i feel was a little successful. I know of its failings, and I hope to work on them so it can then become a better play experience.

You can give Rex’s Junk Hunt a try if you want, don’t expect an completely engaging gameplay experience though

Tags: final, postmortem

This was my first Ludum Dare, but have been following the competition for the last couple years if not longer.  I did not manage to finish my entry in time, but did really enjoy the process.  Having family time at the weekend is very important to me, so my coding time was limited to around 5-6 hours over 2 days.

Time lapse:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KeIedoXsfIQ

Game play: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALXlAzhhi30

Download Game: http://blog.codheadz.com/file.axd?file=2009%2f12%2fJungleExplorer.zip

Download Source: http://blog.codheadz.com/file.axd?file=2009%2f12%2fLDExplo.zip

To run this you will need either the XNA studio 3.1 or the XNA redist from the link below:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=53867A2A-E249-4560-8011-98EB3E799EF2&displaylang=en 

What did not go so well

• Did not finish the game to a level ready to submit before the deadline
• No sound
• No prepared engine, other than XNA
• Lack of time
• Giving up with an hour to go, when so close

What went well

• Keeping the concept as simple as possible to give me a hope during the very short amount of time available
• Coding with high velocity freed from my usual constraints of IOC and unit testing
• Ignoring my ball of mud engine and coding from nothing
• Getting 90% of it done

Here’s looking forward to the next one.

Tags: post-mortem

Bah.  My game is crashing for samel on OSX, but the comments system for entry pages is a bit … unwieldy for communication purposes.  If someone on OSX can get my game to crash, I’d appreciate if you could

1: launch the ‘console’ application and let me know if you see anything there relating to the program (ideally paste the results in the comment to this)

2: let me know what version of OSX you’re using (I only aim for intel osx 10.5+ , so if samel’s crash was on PPC or 10.4, and other people can get it to work, I guess I’ll just relax and forget about it )

Probably a linking thingy, but I don’t know.  I used a completely new setup for building this version, so amn’t sure what might be going wrong exactly.

Two days after the end of Ludum Dare 16 I finally write my post-mortem. And you will find it after the break.

This was my first Ludum Dare, although not my first time trying to make a game in a short time frame. Twice before I’ve participated in the 24 hour games competitions the game development club at my university holds. I must say that having 48 hours, which allows more time to sleep, is much nicer. And certainly less detrimental to one’s health.

My entry, I Never Missed Anyone Until They Were All Gone, to give its full title, is here. I never really finished it, I guess it was overambitious. Though I think that mechanically it’s where I wanted it in that you can walk around and you would be able to explore if there was actually something to explore. Drawing all the art by hand took far to long.

I would like to continue working on this. Hopefully I don’t lose all motivation now the LD is over. I think my next step will be to try and create some sort of level editor where I can assemble the the world visually and have it calculate the positions of the areas and the lines of the paths for me. Having to write out everything that defines an area by hand and typing it into text files is a pain.

I’ve noticed that it’s difficult to tell where the paths that the character follows branch, since he does follow fixed paths. I think I will keep him on fixed paths but I want to make it clearer where the paths branch. I might do this by having him stop when the path he’s following branches until the player selects one, rather than having a default path for each branch. I will have to try some things out and see what works.

Other than that the large part of what needs to be done next is creating the rest of the world, which means more art I need to draw. I’ll also need to figure out a point for the exploration as well as maybe add some puzzles or some such thing into the game to flesh it out. I’m wondering if I can design puzzles based around observing the environment, rather than necessarily interacting. This might be difficult though.

To finish here’s some photos that I couldn’t be assed to post during the competition proper.

All of the work I did off of the computer, mostly art, and a lot of blank papers dumped rather unceremoniously on my bed near the end of the competition.

The results of a trip to the grocer. I grabbed snacks, only a quarter of which I went though during the competition, and a cooked chicken.

The chicken and leftover rice from my fridge served as most of my meals during the competition. Plus apples.

What I drank during the competition, juice and chocolate milk. Sorry. Chocolate Dairy Beverage. I’m still not sure why it was labelled as such.

Now I need to get started on playing the other Ludum Dare entries and continue working on my game before I lose interest.

Why is there never enough time…

Now that the ludum dare is over I get to laugh at myself. I made a spaceship that shoots yellow balls in my game that would help players get higher up and guess what… I never used it. I spent time drawing it, programming it, balancing it and never used it… I do the silliest things sometimes.

On the plus side everyone seemed to like the music in the game. Funny part is I spent about 10 minutes making the music and 10 more minutes adding it to my game. Whereas I spent a total of about 5 hours on my game.

Another funny thing… I gave my game 2 names. One is Reach for the Stars and the other is Shoot for the Stars.

Ok I’m done mocking myself for now. Have fun everyone.

Shoot for the Stars

Entry: Echolon (check it out here)
Timelapse: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_toZ_YeZ6U

Summary:
Nothing is a more effective motivator than a hard dose of reality and time constraints. Also it’s way easier doing something you’re familiar with than trying something new in 48 hours.

What Happened:
Developing what eventually became Echolon was a tale of two games. Saturday was spent on one idea that failed to pan out and Sunday was spent primarily on what ended up being my final submitted game for Ludum Dare. This essentially means that I gave myself around 9 hours to go from near-scratch and create Echolon.

This was my 3rd attempted Ludum Dare and my second consecutive successful one (along with caverns from Ludum Dare 15). There were two points during the weekend I was unsure if I would finish, but some radical redesigning and acceptance of certain limitations allowed me to push until the end.

The initial game attempted to approach exploration in an indirect way. The basic idea was that you as the player never went exploring yourself. Instead you used a rover/robot that would explore in your stead. There would be little to no graphical component, most of the exploration would be conveyed in text reports and other feedback. As you explored the landscape outside you would find equipment to modify your rover and allow it to explore new areas, carry new items, and extend its capabilities in general.

I spent most of Saturday working on the background mechanics and trying to figure out the best way for the player to interact with the rover. The game ultimately started becoming heavily UI-dependent which was the worst thing possible. In my experience user interfaces tend to be time-consuming and tedious to craft and ultimately are the biggest time sinks in any project I’ve done. The trade-off between UI creation and time is pretty piss-poor.

The first game on the left and an early image of Echolon on the right

This wasn’t help by overall poor time management on Saturday. Part of Saturday night was spent going to the movies with my family (Princess and the Frog) and doing other tasks unrelated to Ludum Dare (you know, the important stuff). So by the time I had crashed on late Saturday night/early Sunday morning I basically only had the fragments of a game in hand.

Waking up Sunday it quickly dawned on me that at my current rate the first game would never be complete on time. After this realization my mind quickly scrambled for a second idea that could be implemented in a short amount of time. I ended up thinking about a game where the player explores a cavern with no lighting except his own bullets. I added on the idea of illumination through shooting along with some basic reflection mechanics and I had a game idea to implement.

Afterward development was fast and furious in the final 9 hours of the competition. The basic game controls are pretty much Asteroids and Flixel pretty much allows that kind of gameplay to be implemented immediately. Things like shooting and reflection were also implemented with little to no problems and basic enemies quickly followed.

Echolon in its near-final state

The biggest obstacle in that 9 hours was spent on creating a procedurally-generated level. I originally had planned a more ambitious generator that would construct various rooms of differing sizes that would be connected with hallways at various points essentially creating a large maze. Over time this became less and less feasible as I had a hell of a time figuring out how exactly to create “screens” that didn’t conflict with each other. I spent roughly an hour on this before abandoning it near the end for a much simpler solution. What I ended up implementing instead was one large room that had random blocks placed inside. There’s no real smart logic to the placement, but overall the result was passable for the purposes of the competition.

To demonstrate how much I was pushing time in this case level generation was complete with about 45 minutes left in the competition. The final 45 minutes I had to create a pretty terrible menu screen, victory/game over screen, add the final sound effects, finish up the UI, and make sure everything sorta worked. I pretty much finished with 2 minutes left before 9 PM.

The big question in my mind is if things had gone exactly right would I have been able to complete my original idea? Possibly if I had worked the full 48 hours, but even then I feel like nothing of the scope I had imagined would have been completed. The idea was a radical departure from any thing I’ve done before – attempting to create a limited simulation game with a heavy emphasis on stat manipulation and menus. When this failed to pan out my second idea relied on simple game mechanics I’ve done before and could easily mock in before focusing on newer ideas. I still really like the idea however and would like to return to it in the future.

Overall my feelings on Echolon are pretty muted. It’s not very fun nor very playable and it comes off slight (although for 9 hours I don’t know if I personally could have done better). I like some basic ideas, but having even an extra hour to tweak some of the gameplay variables would have been nice. I had some additional ideas I would like to implement and I wouldn’t bet against me returning to the game in the future.

What Went Right:

• There was a game. After everything I managed to submit a final game. That by itself is a win in my book.
• Accepting failure. After realizing the first game would never be completed on time I completely shifted gears to developing Echolon and never looked back.
• Not rebuilding the wheel. Echolon was a game well-suited to the tools I was using and also similar to other games I’ve created. Getting to first playable took little time.
• Rush rush rush. With 9 hours pretty much uninterrupted for coding I managed to get in the zone and almost never left it until the deadline.

What Went Wrong:

• The first game. Oh god did that not work out.
• No playtesting. Echolon as you may note is not balanced in any sense. Chalk that up to limited dev time.
• Remaining overambitious the second time around. Things like trying to implement the full-fledged procedural level generator and an upgrade system was far beyond the possible scope of a 9-hour game.

What I Ate:
4 Eggos, a Jimmy Johns sub, some chips, popcorn, lots of tea, some lemonade, and a roast beef sandwich.

Finally:
Still an awesome experience. Plus I made a game! Score!

Tags: postmortem

If you’re having trouble finishing the game, this walkthrough should get you there.  (Otherwise, don’t watch before playing, as the video contains MASSIVE SPOILERS!)

YouTube link:  5 Colors: Pandora – walkthrough

I’ve fixed a stupid issue in bashplore for people using laptop. Now you can play without the numpad!!!

I’m sorry

Download link  :  http://donotjava.netsons.org/Download/ludumdare/LD16_latest.zip

c-ya

I will soon be spending Christmas vacation in a land where non-dial-up internet access is somewhat hard to come by.  So to prepare, I have downloaded offline copies of almost all the games.  Now that I’ve put that together, it occurs to me that maybe others would like that?  If one giant download of (almost) all the LD16 games would be useful to you, you can get all 327 delicious megabytes of it here.

I think there are only 2 games that I couldn’t get working offline copies of.  One was Linux only and the other looked like it would be nontrivial to steal from Kongregate.  For all the games whether I could rip them or not, the folder contains shortcuts to that game’s page on ludumdare.com.

EDIT:  Link fixed.  Thanks, Jonny D!

Xplorer the timelapse

Tags: timelapse

There was a pretty severe memory leak in my game which either caused the game to slow down to an unplayable state or crashed entirely. This issue has been fixed.

Furthermore, a readme has been included which specifies the goal much clearer (well, at least I hope so). Also there was a problem with shooting cannon balls which prevented the player from winning if used uncorrectly, so shooting has now been removed completely. It didn’t really work anyway.
And I found out that you need the Visual 2005 C++ Redist package to start the game, so the required DLLs to launch the game have been included as well. The Mac OS X version also works on Mac OS 10.5 now.

The links have already been updated. If you had any problems earlier, I strongly suggest to try this version. For those of who already downloaded my game, you can download a patch here (90 kB). (Just replace the exe.)

Thanks to everyone who played and rated my game and especially to those who gave their feedback. Much appreciated.

Tags: bugfix, colonial age

I’m updating my entry with a couple typos fixes and using much more coherent wording in one sentence.

Tools
Visual studio 2005 express, paint.net, sfxr & Turtoise SVN for development
DestroyTwitter & Chatzilla for community
Firefox, wikipedia & google image search for information gathering

Languages & libraries
C++, sfml2, boost & stl

The good
Retained focus on a easy game and trying to polish it. I originally wanted to do something with a hex-based map, but since I hadn’t done anything close to that, I decided to go with a traditional square based map. I also decided to make a random level making my need for a level editor pretty much null.

The bad
There was no time for polishing.

Missing, but wanted features

• A better gui, with buttons and a in-game tutorial
• More than 2-players game
• Increase the positive reinforcement when picking up treasures, with animations etc
• Computer opponents!
• More treasures, I had plans for some inca gold and some western/money treasure too
• More environments such as rocks/mountatins that you can’t pass, quicksand that forces you to wait a turn and, in general, more pleasing enviromental grahics. I guess once you stop working on a texture, in ludum dare it is finished
• Bonus items, such as binuclear that allows you to see far and lantern that illuminate the area around you.

Well this is my 2nd LD and I must say I thoroughly enjoyed it once again.

Tools I used

Novashell

Paint .NET

Notepad++

Audacity

sfxr

Here are some random thoughts both good and bad about my experience making Bees n Flowers:

• This time instead of spending time trying to do pixel drawings, I drew my graphics freehand, scanned them in, and touched them up using in Paint .NET. I got this process down pretty good and felt pretty good about the results.
• Aside from a few annoying bugs I fought with, the Novashell engine worked out well for me and it also has the advantage of being able to generate both Windows and Mac packages (which I still need to do). I know, Unity can too.

• I had originally intended to learn Unity beforehand and do the game with it, but alas I just … dropped the ball and didn’t get to looking at it until it was too late.
• I really wanted to get random generation of the sequences, and at least one enemy (a wasp)  into the game but was unable to do so before the deadline
• I think the game could have used actual levels that change after you get a certain number of sequences. Then the locations of the flowers could be changed and maybe keep things a little more fresh.
• I had more flower types but they didn’t make it into the game
• I wanted to do more with the flowers as far as player interaction goes but again with the time…
• I had a list of features I wanted in my head, but I still found myself thinking “now what?” every so often

In the end it all comes down to how prepared you are beforehand and how well you manage your 48.  A few things I want to do do better next time:

• Get all my tools installed beforehand and familiarize myself with any new tools I plan to use.
• Figure out my process for generating art and sound and practice executing it.
• A written and prioritized list of the features I want to shoot for broken up further into ‘must haves for a complete game’ and then ‘icing on the cake’ features.

Okay, so I was baffled by some of the comments on 5 Colors that indicated that some of the structures in the game were partially invisible for some people (when people compared playing the game to watching the walkthrough).   I was completely unable to reproduce the bug on my system, and the really puzzling bit for me was that the background sprites used in the game are one-piece sprites.  So it seemed that random bits of otherwise visible sprites were invisible for some people.

The mystery was solved when I was finally able to reproduce the bug by playing the game on my wife’s netbook. It turns out that non-dedicated graphics cards have a hard time handling textures that are longer than around 2000 pixels on one side, which some of my background sprites were (my laptop has a low-end Geforce 8400 GS, and there’s no problem, but I’m assuming some people were playing the game on laptops with no dedicated video at all).

I chopped the larger sprites into bits (a process that is going to make any changes I want to make in the future incredibly painful), and the game now plays as it should on my wife’s netbook — and I’m assuming it will work on everyone else’s laptops as well.

So you can see that the bug was not entirely my fault, at least, not in the direct sense that my programming caused it  — though I will take responsibility for  it, since my ignorance did cause it 😛 .

Thank you very much to everyone who has commented on the game so far: I wouldn’t have found this bug without your help! I would be incredibly grateful if some of you who were experiencing this problem could try the game again, and let me know in the comments if the it is now working for you properly. Incredibly grateful.

You can download the fixed build here.

Seen that people have found my game boring (which it is, tbh)… but there’s a note I’ll have to make: the “correct” way of winning the game is by destroying enemy ships, you’ll get 10g for each one you sink, get 100g to buy a map, and go to the map location…

You can find some enemy boats to the West of the starting position, for example…

Don’t forget you have infinite lives, the only drawback of sinking is that you lose half your gold…

Think I should have given the player a starting map and/or some money, so they feel more the need to explore more…

I would add this to my entries post, but I couldn’t find a way to edit it…

Bring back the ability to comment on my own post! 😀

LD16 was a lot of fun, despite continually running into killer bugs that took ages to fix.

What went well:

• I managed to pull it all together in the last couple of hours and actually end-up with a game. I very nearly didn’t.
• People seem to like it, too! Didn’t expect that one.
• After releasing, I managed to locate and destroy one last memory leak. Otherwise it would have been unplayable.

What went badly:

• The aforementioned bugs.I probably spent at least a third of the time I was working on the game trying to fix memory leaks, infinite loops, and the like. These were often related to…
• I didn’t prepare. DESPITE knowing very well that I needed to get a basic framework, in the end I was just too lazy, and started the compo even without most of the libraries I needed.
• I didn’t spend enough time at the start thinking about what my game would be. Instead, I charged ahead with a turn- and tile-based engine, assuming I’d think of something later. Fortunately I did, and the idea was reasonably fun.

What I would improve:

• There are still a couple of glitches – one is that sometimes monsters manage to get on the same tile as you and you can’t attack them – not sure why.
• The view is too small. This is mostly so I could avoid trying to do any ray-casting and what-have-you. Though since I let you see monsters for an extra tile away, you can still see through walls. Whoops.
• You automatically climb down ladders, which isn’t ideal. In fact, I think I accidentally left it so that you’ll go down a ladder if you attack a monster which is standing on it. I ran out of time, and it was easier to code like this. Sorry!
• I had ideas for more things you could ‘explore’ and earn XP from – such as each time you come across a new animal or plant. But I never got time for it.
• The difficulty increase is really naff. Or at least, what’s meant to increase the difficulty – each time you go down a level, the monsters get +1 to attack, defence, and hp. But each time you level up, which can occur 2 or 3 times per level, you get +2 max hp, are fully healed, and your attack and defence increase by 1. So it’s very, very easy to quickly outpace the monsters. I didn’t take the time to balance it, as it was about 1:30 am by then, so yeah.

Final notes:

• I do have some ideas for expanding it, and I hope I actually get around to doing so this time. I think I will do, as I’ve wanted to make a roguelike for a long while, and after I lost all the code to my other one (Nooooooo!) this is a good opportunity to get back into it.
• Hanging out in #ludumdare made the whole thing a lot more fun, even when it seemed I would end the competition with only a mediocre level-generator. 😀

Tags: post-mortem, postmortem

You guys, a good feature for the website would be for game developers to be able to reply to comments on their games. It helps to say thanks and clarify things. I love that people play my games and I’d love even more to be able to tell them personally. This is the only way to do it currently.

C418: Brilliant. Shame I couldn’t get the Spacestation into my little space ship

I lolled. Thanks.

eli: The lonely, introspective feel is really great. Artwork is excellent, the music is cute. However, the back-and-forth mechanic was a bit tiresome for me. Overall effort: 5 stars at least.

Thanks for the comment. Music is cute? That’s different! The back and forth mechanic was kind of on purpose, the idea was that the game was forcing you to travel further to get more valuable items so you could upgrade your ship and make getting even further than that more viable. I wanted to have things to shoot, like space pirates but I never got round to it, so I would have added more mechanics eventually.

SonnyBone:This game looks REALLY NICE in motion. The pictures don’t do it justice. The game is very relaxing, which is what I think of when I hear: EXPLORATION. Everything works well together. For a 48 hour game this is incredibly polished, as others have said. NICE!

This LD I made a very conscious decision to polish things as much as possible as I went along, assuming it was viable in the time. It only takes a few lines of code for me to make something popout or fade, or highlight etc. It seemed worth it as it enhances the overall feel of the game. It seemed to pay off. (Thanks for the trophy recursor!)

refrag: Beautiful. A simple premise, beautifully executed. Well done!

Thanks! My initial idea wasn’t simple. Infact the debris sucking up and upgradinfg thing was meant to be a side thing that you could do in addition to the main game, but as time went on I decided to shift my focus to it.

madk: Good and well-executed concept, and it’s a relaxing game. However, more variation of gameplay would be nice. I got bored of just riding around and absorbing debris after a short while; some sort of enemies would be a good addition.

Go further. 😉

Codexus: Nice little game with a good ambiance soundtrack. I would have appreciated the option to play in windowed mode, playing low-res games on a 30″ monitor isn’t too great. (with distorted aspect ratio too due a nvidia bug :/)

Jees, it’s ludum dare! What more do you want from me?! Hehe. Really this comment confuses me, how many LD games let you decide to play it windowed or fullscreen. I felt having it in a window would ruin the insular feeling  of the game.

TenjouUtena: Great game! Full of fun stuff to do, fun places to go! Great to play, will probably pick it back up after the compo.

Thanks! With luck I will too.

ExciteMike: I love the atmosphere! I played for a long time before I got down to the enemies. Form some of the other comments it sounds like many never made it that far. Two biggest problems: 1. Hold meter catches up too slowly, it looks like I still have room when I filled it, it just doesn’t show it yet. 2. The enemies were killing me before I even got to see what was shooting at me, and it’s really not easy to dodge so that’s where I stopped.

You’re not the first person to make that comment about the hold meter, I noticed it upon extended plays after the 48 hours too. I know how to fix it, but it didn’t occur to me at the time. As for the enemies they are kind of meant to stop you going down there since it’s where the most valuable items are, I appreciate that their range is perhaps a little on the long side though. If you hear the pew sound then just run, you can outrun the lasers easily!

Arne: I like this. I think I’m going to write a clone, if that’s ok.

Uh, that’s a bizarre comment. Okay, I guess.

recursor: Wow. This game has an impressive amount of polish for a 48 hour creation, and it is quite fun. This is one of my favorites so far. I hope you do even more with it.

Thank yoooou! With luck I will!

localcoder A couple of things almost stopped me getting into this game. First, I pressed escape to get out of the inventory screen and the game quit. Then on my second attempt, I collected junk because that’s what I thought you were meant to do, and when I sold it and got no money I thought the game was bugged. But once I worked out what was going on, I really enjoyed the game. I love the creative items, both the funny ones and others that suggest the story of the destroyed fleet. The variety keeps the game interesting and I wanted to keep exploring to find bigger and better treasures. The surprise hostilities at the end were great too. The only disappointing thing is that there is no ending, so once I had all the upgrades I was left with no reason to use them.

Yeah the escape thing is silly. I’ll mentally put that aside. Even though I had time to have a start screen, a quit screen never occurred to me.

The not really knowing what to do aspect was definitely part of the design. I intentionally didn’t say much about the game (if you notice I don’t say that you can even tractor with the mouse button, you just sort of discover these things). To keep with the theme as much as possible I wanted to make the game mechanics themselves explorable as well as the playing field.

Once you twig that the further you go in the more items are worth you end up all “Oh alright it’s on now.” and try to get to the end of the field, about half way you run into a mine and don’t know what the hell. Putting the turrets right at the end was definitely the right decision I think, the shock when they first blast you apart after there’s been nothing like it for the whole game is cool I think. Discovery and exploration go hand-in-hand.

Yes there’s no ending, I had big plans but time and all. Thanks for the nice comments!

And thanks very much to anyone who has played it but not commented!

Massacre at Misfit Toy Island

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-16/?action=rate&uid=258

I know my entry is way too hard. Changes I made at the last minute turned the game from way too easy to way too hard. And I didn’t have time to balance it. That’s the breaks with a 48 hour contest I guess.

Also, stupidly, I set the key to continue from the Win screen to “space bar” and during the game you fire by pressing the “space bar”. So what that means is that if you do win the game, you are sure to bypass the win screen!! Haha, well, just reward yourself by viewing the win screen in your favorite graphic software I guess if you actually get so far.

But I have actually completed the game. It is possible, though definitely CHALLENGING.

My idea of the game came from the great PS2 game Shadows of the Colossus. In that game, you roam around a landscape looking to fight a few gigantic and incredibly difficult to kill bosses. So I wanted the misfits to all be difficult boss battles and my influence on boss battles is pretty much from the 90’s SNES games where killing bosses takes figuring out the bosses weaknesses and then applying a huge number of hits using a repetitive process. I guess I just have the belief that a boss battle should be like playing a match of tennis, that is to say, exhausting! Call me Old School, hehe.

Well, that’s exactly what it takes to beat the Misfits. For example, the Tootsie Roll takes 50 hits. If you are able to kill it, you will get 25 health from it. Some bosses require as many as 600 hits to kill. Generally, the bigger the misfit, the more hits it requires to kill. The key to beating the game is understanding that you get half the hit points of every misfit you kill, so what you have to do is find the biggest, easiest to kill misfits out there and kill them first. I would recommend starting with the Jägermeister or the Electronic Battleship game. What you want to look for is big misfits that have a slow rate of fire. The slower the rate of fire, the easier the kill. If you kill the Battleship game, you’ll get 300 health.

Now that extra health will really come in handy. You see, if you touch a misfit, immediately death to either you or the misfit will occur, depending on who has the most health. This can be very dangerous at the beginning of the game. Once you have built up a lot of health though, you can quickly kill some super tough small misfits such as the bottle of Bengay or Snoopy by just touching them. You will know they are super tough when they unleash an endless stream of bullets that make them virtually untouchable.

Some big misfits you will need to battle rather than touch because they have so many hit points. The teddy bear is a good example of one of these. During these tough battles, you need to figure out the weakness. What you will usually find is that you can position yourself so you are at such an angle that it is difficult for them to hit you, but you can hit them repeatedly. Usually you need to play around with the angles, and aim for a corner of the misfit that maybe sticks out a bit. Eventually you will find a location where you are relatively safe, yet able to hit the misfit with regularity.

Also, after each misfit you kill, you move faster. So by the time you get to the last misfit, you are really able to fly around the screen and can pretty easily dodge the bullets. So in this sense, the game does get easier as the game progresses. I had also intended to increase your rate of fire as well, but I guess I forgot and this never made it into the game.

Hope this helps you conquer those misfits!

Folks who are getting a white frame — would you mind posting your browser version/platform in the comments?  You may also try running it in Safari (where it was developed) or Chrome (which uses the same rendering engine).

(Edit:  maybe I have written this post-mortem too soon, i.e. without having enough feedback about the game. Post-mortem of the post-mortem.)

This is my first LD entry. I intended to work on another game (not related to the competition) in order to benefit from the worldwide good vibes emitted during these 48 hours. But things turned out differently…

What went right

• Initial research. After reading the theme, I thought about it peacefully for about 3 hours, with ideas coming in naturally. The result was an extensive list of the elements of an exploration game.
• Keeping it simple. I selected the absolutely core elements to implement first. Finally, I even had to remove one of these elements after performance troubles of the implementation, without much loss (the knowledge of a location is either 0% or 100%). Maybe the result was too simple, but the aim was to complete something, even if too simple. Despite this simplicity, I managed to get somewhat addicted to the game.
• Iterating. I have probably spent as much time playing the game as programming it. Playing the game showed the need of additional controls or warnings to remove some tedious tasks. Adding these features sometimes completely changed the game feel. For example, a very late addition: right click to go back to the NEAREST source, instead of the previous source. This allowed a faster gameplay because going back or to a recently found source doesn’t require precise pointing anymore.
• Sounds. Creating sounds with sfxr and Audacity didn’t take too much time, and the result is at least consistent.
• pygame. Starting from scratch using  almost exclusively the online reference documentation was much simpler and faster than I thought. Note: this is not my first game made with pygame.

What went wrong

• Using a never-used library. This was not the time to discover a library I was not familiar with (numpy). Lots of time spent stumbling upon gotchas. Reading the documentation in a rushed way is not so fun either.
• Programming some of the audio events. Making sure that some sounds (especially the alerts and the reload sound) were played at the right moment and not repeatedly was trickier than I expected (this problem didn’t appear in the visual part, more forgiving). I even added a (minor) display bug who made it to the initial release (sound was added at a late stage of the development, so there were less tests to detect bugs).
• pygame and py2exe. Too many time lost at the worst moment figuring out why it wouldn’t work. For some reason, switching to Python 2.4 did the trick.
• Graphics. I didn’t even try. Not enough time,  energy, and knowledge. I plan to play with Gimp more often.
• Music. Same here. Maybe a very discrete ambient loop would have helped. PureData?
• Full screen. I didn’t make sure that the game would be the same for a different resolution (mine was 1280×1024). So monday I had to send a new version to make sure that the difficulty is as intended. The game would have been too easy with 640×480.
• A random game level. Maybe handmade levels with an increasing difficulty would have been better, with more time. A bitmap would have been a way to store these levels and benefit from an image editor used as a level editor (a colored pixel = an energy source).

Surprises

• While it was not intended, and while as few mechanisms as possible were implemented, the result seemed original, even somewhat addictive (discovering an energy source, even an easy one, is always a pleasure, even without a sound effect).
• While there is no hint, no way to know where the energy sources are, the end game is not totally random. Moreover, it might be how exploration or research works: there is a safe, mechanical, yet somewhat pleasant activity of moving around the known sources; then, when the safe routes have been explored, there is a risky, “no way back” activity, with calculated risks, and yet depending on the ultimate factor: luck.

What’s next?

This game could evolve in several distinct ways.

• A single player version, very similar to this game, with a quick gameplay and few additions  (graphics, background music, maybe gray out known zones).
• A single player version with more mechanisms: hints (legends gathered from visited settlements) , enemy AI, etc.
• A multiplayer online version with a slower persistent gameplay, using waypoints (add color warnings when tracing routes); the discoveries would be published or not, etc.

Using a 3D engine with nice light effects (still with a “from above” 2D gameplay) might be fun too. Maybe the energy sources could be also light sources, and give hints about their location (some kinds of satellites with big orbits might be interesting too).

Includes a trailer.

Very interesting. Can’t think what else to say, really!

Yeah, me neither!

Wow, a very original idea! It’s exploration, but not in the visual way. You made it incredible! The music is fantastic. I found two endings!

,o/\o,

This is a cool little experience. The audio is TOP NOTCH, as it should be. Good implementation of theme!

Okay, responding to compliments was a bad idea.

This was refreshing. I can just imagine what may be done with this given more time…

I tried to think of something, came up with some crazy ideas and thought it would be a bad idea to try that out with my missing programming knowledge, so I migth try … later.

Excellent use of audio and minimalistic graphics.

I say!

Five stars for audio from me – I really like it. I like the visuals as well, very nicely styled minimalistic graphics.
The game itself doesn’t feel all that much like a game.

I don’t have mushrooms you jump on. But I may or may not have, well, you do the interpretation

I like this game! And it remains me, how much atmosphere i have lost by not being able to add music and sfx in my game… are there just two endings or more?

Eight D:

Concept is shore interesting.
Not shore game play is tough. Passed it in two ways. Not shore there are others and not shore sounds are that expressive on where you should go. May be it would have been better if there were 3 buttons. 2 for turning right or left and two for going in current direction + going somewhere and turning changing direction from which sounds go.
Or my be I do not get it…

Problem was, controls were the least issue I had, so I didn’t experiment with the around. And as I’m inexperienced, I didn’t want to try out other stuff while having a Ludum Dare. I have ideas now, but now it’s too late.

Original idea and good use of a minimalistic approach. The sounds are great!

Can I marry you?

Very compelling. Interesting use of sound. Interesting experimental game concept. I’d like a little more feedback as to how much I’m supposed to change directions, or what input are required from me. I got 2 different endings, anyway.

As I said, didn’t experiment enough with how to control the game.

Ive played a game like this before somewhere….But this was better 😀

Ezo Ripoff?!

A very simple idea. Though I don’t like not having a sort of character visible onscreen, but I guess this is just what the game is meant to be like.

I like those sounds/music! Really nice!

Yeah, I guess that was the idea of the game. I should ask the responsible person, wait a second.

Oh, and are you married yet?

I liked this.

Marry me?

I *love* the idea here, and hope you continue to pursue this… I think you could end up with something really incredible. As it stands, very nice prototype. Will definitely pop open your source code at some point, as I’m interested in exactly what going on down there. I’m curious: did you have any particular inspiration(s) for this? In any case, kudos.

NO. DON’T DO THAT. You would see the horrible, HORRIBLE smileys to try out the controls. DON’T!

PS: You mentioned that you were having trouble finishing 5 Colors: Pandora, and I just wanted to let you know that I now have a walkthrough up.

Not having troubles really. I accidently found the next room button and felt cheated by myself and didn’t want to start all over again. But I should play it again I guess. It was good.

Get to it from the ratings page or take the direct link to the download.

A bit late perhaps, but here’s my timelapse video, on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9eYLpt8P0Jk. Enjoy the polka

I used a bad codec, and some of the files randomly disappeared, so the video represents about 24 hours of the 48.

Hey, and if you haven’t played 5 Colors: Pandora yet, now’s your chance! (Or, you know, later.)

since people might be wondering

the “music” should be best appreciated as textural rather than melodic

falling off is the end

the fact that there’s no gameplay is intentional

the only part I didn’t finish is windows on downtown skyscrapers

the game does have meanings but none of them are related to each other

I get a kick out of the love/hate reviews

everything was drawn with a mouse

sfernald sank his teeth into the game engine for my LD#16 entry – the light in the end of the tunnel and the results came out swinging!

He’s used the game engine better then then me, making some winding, fun, hard to beat, acid-filled caves.

Check it out:

Source:  http://www.bitjets.com/thelight2.zip
Win32 exe:  http://ippa.se/games/the_light_2.exe

Maybe I’ll make a sequel too since the original game was so tiny. Actually I already started hacking on it. Some ideas/goals:

• The collision detection wasn’t perfect (for example you couldn’t jump while running into an obstacle)
• I’m thinking level-building from One big image instead of several small, but there’s quite some things to work out before that’s possible.
• More interaction with the world, could be levels to pull, buttons to push, doors, modification of terrain or living enemies, not just acid pools/drops.  Preferable additions that don’t complicate the level building to much, now it’s basically drawing a new image and creating one class — liberating easy.

Tags: gosu, ld16, remake, ruby

Some people notified me of a pretty bad bug in Cat Planet where you can fall through the floor and get stuck and have to restart the game. I didn’t completely fix it because I couldn’t replicate the glitch no matter how hard I tried and I don’t know what causes it, but I added a cheap workaround that makes it possible to continue playing if this happens. More details on the entry page.

So yeah… the only thing I added after the compo was this whacky easter egg.

If you’re not into artsy games you’ll probably enjoy it, try it here:

http://www.2bam.com/magic/FindingHerV051.swf

When it finally loads, type “duke”

Cheers!

Here’s the source for This is Infinity:
http://cactusquid.com/games/expfps.gmk

It’s been updated since I posted my entry, I didn’t know sources were a requirement for the competition. And I can’t figure out how to update the entry info or how to post a comment on the game… Pff.

Tags: LD 16, source

What went well:

• Obviously I got good game idea
• Physics turned out well
• Game mechanic was fun
• Interface turned out to be simple, not buggy, etc. For 12h spent it is weird

What well wrong:

• Failed to make more complex graphics because most I tried made it lag fast
• Made mistake of making game time constrained. Should have been some ind of resource constrained. Thing is that most fun is aiming probe well and exploring planet or even few in one show. Time constraint rather made you shot a lot of average shots instead of aiming really carefully which is bad.
• Probably 1/3 of time spend was spent on things that did not work… Would have been good to spend it more on polishing core mechanics and game aims.
• I added only a mouse-wheel based zoom. That was a mistake as Mac users have problems in Flash with that (tough I head Flash player release on 9 December 2009 should have fixed that, can’t confirm)  Also users playing on notebook without mouse had problems too…

What now:

• Well firstly I think I will make one more version of it removing time limit and adding some “probes per planet” limit. Should make it more fun. May be I will try adding a little bit more graphical things.
• As for large game based on idea I think I will but it on hold. Needs a lot of content and thinkering on technical sides of it(there are some). Exploring idea for enemies and war, AI, etc. I have some other game ideas that have less of such complications so for time being I will not make it in to a full game. In time being I welcome anyone to try and make their versions of the idea Just bother to send me a note/mail. Would like to see it  and play it
• Need to add alternative to mouse zooming.

Longer version of how it went

Day 1.  Well woke up and read the theme. Started brainstorming for ideas and come to two options. First I considered was some top down exploration game based on this my older experiment Alone in the Dark But quickly came to a conclusion that it will be aether boring or too complex(high chances on not finishing) so started to think about second idea.

Second idea. Basically solar system exploration game based on rocket lunching with trajectories. In short idea was to build some model of solar system with planets divided on to regions. First you need to send satellites to find planets and then orbit them to find info on the regions. Then you can send colony ships to colonize some regions. This is that some regions give bonuses and on some it is not possible to land at all. So you also have test probes. They fly in a same way as colony ships but should be something like a lot cheaper. So you lunch those until you are shore you can hit needed region with your colony ships. Of course all ships should have some fuel/distance/view area limitations. Idea seemed very basic and not so hard to make + original at least to some extant + probably fun + easy to extend in myriad of direction adding tech tries, enemies, some defense mechanics, anything

Well all that planing cost me 1-2 hours. I had still 2-3 hours left that day to start making something. Well I set down and made solar system generator with all the rotation and simple graphics in a half of an hour probably. And then hit my first problem. In usual strategies stuff is usually stationary. I mean level and usually buildings are. But in my case everything was always in a move… So I went for following camera target scheme without possibility to wonder with it around but with large zooming. Was not shore it would work well. Also I got stuck here for probably some 2 hours not managing to make proper camera code It is simple but probably long week of work had it toll on my brain and I spent probably 2 hours on thing that really should take 15-30 minutes… Well another thing I spent my time on thinking how to make regions on the planets and how to color them. That was really problematic… Did this in a process. Turned out that it was too laggy and would take time making textures. There was another idea for how to make it but my time was up. Spent something like an hour thinking about this problem and trying this radial texturing.

Day 2. Well it was clear that I will not have regions in time so I scraped that part. Added physics, simple probes, collisions. Took me some 3-4 hours. Then got stuck for 2 hours making fog of war… Turned out that adding even very minimalistic effects (smooth transition on a border of fog, separate view area circles for planets and probes so that you can see which sees which etc) was bringing performance to some 10Fps with 30 probes flying Well you can see what I ended up with. Good I can have more then 30 particles without lags there. Haven’t tested how many tough.

Well spent two more hours polishing parameters, adding screens and sounds.

Tags: post-mortem

Ok, I’m not going to spend any more time on this project, but a few things were really bugging about the game and it only took about 15 minutes to fix it.

What this new version fixes is:

* Win screen will not be skipped when you win the game

* You can hold the space down to fire – makes it much easier!

* Each time you kill a misfit, now your rate of fire will increase slightly

* The bullets rotate as they are fired

* And I shrunk Santa a little bit making it easier to maneuver him around the screen

In all, I think these fixes make it a more enjoyable, easier game. Now it is much more solvable and I think more fun too. You now have a fighting chance against those misfits!

I’ve tested the game on Windows 7 and Windows Vista and it works fine. I think it requires either DirectX7 or DirectX9, not sure which. If you are having problems, it may be your graphic card. I am using some huge bitmaps that may be causing some problems with some graphic cards when they are loaded as textures. Maybe try a beefier machine.

Anyway, here is the Windows version:

http://www.bitjets.com/MassacreV2.zip

I won’t post a fixed version for the Mac, unless there is some sort of demand.

Take care!

Topsy Turvy post-mortem

What went right:

* The concept. I’ve had the idea in my head for a while, and I’m very glad that I used the competition as an excuse to make it rather than forcing myself to think of a game idea inspired by the theme. And the game ended up pretty much how I imagined, so that’s good too.
* Inkscape as level editor. AS3 has some rather lovely XML-parsing abilities, so reading the SVG file was surprisingly simple. It’s very much hard-coded to the specific output that (my copy of?) Inkscape generates, but it should be fairly easy to fix if it ever stops working.
* Abstract graphics. I am not an artist, so I decided to save time and just draw everything out of lines. I think the results fit the game fairly well, even if they’re not actually good.

What went wrong:

* The goal. I added the collectables to provide an incentive to get to the more difficult areas and also as extra landmarks for getting your bearings. Unfortunately, with time running out and no win conditions implemented, I made the decision that you would win if you could collect all of them. In hindsight, I should probably have added a level exit instead.
* Difficulty. The game is ridiculously hard. I knew I wanted to have some areas which would be tricky to get to, as a challenge, but when the goal became “collect everything”, those areas suddenly became non-optional.
* First day motivation. I wanted to have all the basic game mechanics done by the halfway point, but I was just procrastinating like crazy. I’d come to the conclusion that it just wasn’t technically interesting enough to hold my attention, but then on Sunday morning I added death and respawning. Suddenly my game idea was in front of me and I could start constructing devious routes through the level, and I spent the rest of the day excited by it.
* The name. It actually changed name twice between starting and submitting, and I’m still not really happy. Currently thinking about maybe renaming it “Jump-Zap-Flip”.

Lessons learnt:

* Get death/respawn implemented earlier in future
* Think of a win condition as part of the design process
* Don’t make ridiculously hard challenges required to complete the game

Tags: flash, post-mortem, postmortem

Better late than never!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ScV5QMFUB6U

Tags: timelapse

Taking advantage of the “bug fixes are allowed after submission” clause, I’ve fixed a few more bugs in 5 Colors, having to do with collision detection. I don’t think you can get stuck in walls anymore. If anyone still has any bug trouble with the game, I’d really appreciate knowing. Thanks!

Clarification:  the collision bugs I fixed were critical, because people were getting stuck in the walls and not being able to continue the game. I did not tweak the collision detection at all in so far as it effects normal movement or anything: the game plays just as it did before, it is not “smoother” or anything like that–you just don’t get stuck in walls now.

You can download the new build from the game’s entry page.

From a comment on bashplore’s page:
“dertom says … Hehe,…a game in bash. That is really hardcore :D”.
YYYYYYYEEEEEEESSSSSSSSS It is, but it adds a lot more fun!

What went right:

– bash it’s good, i like its feeling
– bash can do stuff for you
– save/load it’s super-easy
– bash teach you tricks, a lot of tricks! :p
– bash is great for roguelike
– bash give you sound for free!!! [got no time to add some, sorry]

What went wrong:

– bash rendering it’s slow
– bash doesn’t have data structure
– bash syntax it’s a pain
– bash it’s a iper-pain for non-roguelike game
– I was not so good at bash to write a game

Final thought:

– if you want to use bash for a roguelike game, that’s fine but you have to prepare some good utility function BEFORE the 48H.
– if you want to make games other than roguelike, then DON’T USE BASH, NEVER THOUGHT ABOUT BASH!!!!
– if you want to have a great fun makeing a game, just use the strangest programming/scripting language, that’s worth the effort.
– never forget to add graphics using color in the terminal 8)

What next time?

I’ve already some very very sick yet fun idea in mind and i’m already coding something. Keep an eye on samel’s perversion 8) 8) 8)

c-ya next time!

Tags: post-mortem

Ok, more than a week after the compo finally ended, here my short summary what went fine and what was a fail (again?)

Good:

– After about one year experience with jMonkeyEngine and blender the comparison between ld13 and ld16 is really a progress.

– clear gameplay (platformer game – 3 buttons to use)

– added music. actually I’m quite happy about that smooth music. Wasn’t that difficult to create 😀

– added soundfx (thx drpetter :D)

– webstartable java game. (most of the people was able to start it)

– timelapse

– created quite extendable platformer-framework for jME and blender

Cons:

– created quite extendable platformer-framework for jME and blender (although this might be good for the future it was not good for the compo! I hadn’t enough time to really show its capabilities)

– christmas-party the day before + 2h earlier starttime

– webstartable-game: not everyone was able to start it

– too less gameplay  (4h more time and……. )

Ok, even I’m not happy about the low-level gameplay I’m quite satisfied with the overall-experience. Next time I will for sure not start with jME from scratch again. It’s time to concentrate on gameplay! 😀

Ok,…here my timelapse (3:30min)

http://thomas.trocha.com/misc/timelapse_ld16/ld16.htm

LD-Preview

One last think: To the people that are not able to start my game: Plz post me your configuration (OS, Browser and if possible installed Java-Version) THX…

I posted a little while back about a fixing some bugs in 5 Colors. Codexus was (appropriately) worried that I was fixing non-critical bugs, so I clarified that the bugs I fixed were indeed critical: I haven’t made any additions to my game, or fixed any bugs that were not game-stopping.

However, I do have some questions regarding the rules as they apply to bug fixes, because the LD rules wiki is not entirely clear.

On the one hand it says: “After the deadline, we do allow bugfixes. You’re allowed to fix any bugs that stop a player from playing or finishing your game,” which suggests that non-critical bug fixes are not allowed.

But it then goes on to state: “New content however is outside the scope of what’s considered a bugfix,” which would suggest that bug fixes are allowed, as long as you are not adding new content to the game.

So my question is, what is the LD policy/consensus when it comes to non-critical bug fixes? This seems to be a fairly laid-back community, which I really appreciate, but at the same time, it’s clear from peoples’ posts that everyone wants to “play fair,” so a clarification of rules seems like it would be good.

Personally I don’t see why people should not be encouraged to fix bugs, as bugs really aren’t part of the design of a game, which seems to be what LD is about (and even if bugs are fixed quickly, they will still effect some people, and hurt the game)–but others may feel differently. If bug fixes other than critical are not allowed, I think that a “technical” category should be added for judging the games.

Something to consider is that it may be a bit tricky to distinguish between “critical” and “noncritical” bugs at times: what if you have a bug that doesn’t make the game completely unplayable, but which makes it really frustrating all the way through?

Perhaps this is something to vote on?

I had some connectivity issues at first, but my router is cooperating now. I invite you to check out CollabRL: the multiplayer dungeon! The concept is simple — you can move around, and you can drop letters for others to see. Updates to the map happen in real time.

The map started out as a complete void, but slowly the explorers left goodies and now it is pretty interesting

You can grab the bugfix version (and the freshly compiled Linux version!) at the entry page.

A screenshot of the initial area:

More screenshots after the break.

Thanks

I wanted to try how that worked on a game.

Check the “memory” icons on the bottom to figure it out

Yes, I should make every character have a “SPACE” when you move over them.

I thought that doing that just on the grandpa at the start would be enough.

Even though the icons are not that descriptive (have to work on those), I think that the best way to understand it is through imagination.

I think platforming, with gravity, would be annoying. Flying around hides the fact that the map is quite big 300×300 tiles (9600×9600 pixels!!)

But it could definetly profit from some sort of puzzle elements/mechanics

Thanks!

Thanks! I need to work on the information thing, I never actually did this indication-with-icons thing so it’s good to have so much feedback

About debris and stuff, it was planned but, as you say, didn’t quite make it in the 2-day limit.

Thanks man!

There was a story to be understood, but it highly depends on imagination. There’s a premise (“Finding her”, lol), but the story is just whatever you make out of it. If you managed to feel tension then, at least subconciously, you felt the story.

The fun thing is that the story is actually not about the character as in most games, but about his society. It kind of mimics several aspects of the human being (later on, it get’s really harsh). If someone doesn’t feel anything at all after going through the game, he/she’s not living in the real world or not paying attention.

Yeah and sorry about the backtracking, I need to figure out a way to give hints.

It could, but I like it the way it is. It ended up being like a methaphor: We only care about what surrounds us, even with the big world we live in.

I agree there should be an ending animation (and a different one when you get the “happy” ending). I’m really glad you liked it. Even though I’m not a devoted musician and the notes are not in tempo, I felt great while recording that

Yes, as I answered to some questions before, I completly agree this has to be worked out.

This was on purpose. You’re on a cave, but the cave is not the universe 😉

The asking system isn’t it’s strength, I agree… but that’s sort of what the game’s about. I guess not everybody will like it.

Now I have a question for you!

How do you think controlling the player with a mouse would feel like?

Clicking somewhere would move the character in that direction and clicking on a character would start the conversation.

Thanks for your interest and best regards to you all.

Replying to comments posted on 5 Colors: Pandora.

TenjouUtena says …

Hard to figure out. Some hint about what keys to press would have been appreciated. Also I kept getting some sort of bug while playing through the game, and it did eventually make it unplayable. Kind of a fun little puzzler / indie style game.

Thanks for pointing out the potential for confusion Tenjou… I updated the readme and added hints and a walkthrough, which should help. As far as the bug, I think I know what it was (getting stuck on the purple room?), and I think I fixed it.

sdnitrasm_cero says …

Weird puzzle logics, I love it

Got to the part with the gradient colors near the dor but got stuck there and didn’t finish the game. I should play it again when you release the walkthrough
(and I think I found a glitch, the first time I entered through the door it sent me down for some reason).

Released the walkthrough, and I think I fixed that glitch.

C418 says …

The puzzles were sometimes a bit too confusing for me. But I think this is a good game. The visuals remind me of Small Worlds. A bit.

Small Worlds was definitely one of the inspirations I had for going super low-res, though my style ended up being sufficiently different to satisfy my need for “originality” :P.

Sos says …

Astonishing, but I’m too dumb to beat it…

Hope the walkthrough helps

Frimkron says …

I finished it! *bows* . Unique and intriguing, if a little frustrating in places – I was glad of the hints included in the readme.

Thanks for the compliments Frimkron!

ippa says …

cool, ultra retro gfx, odd, good combo

Thanks ippa!

Risko says …

This is the best game i have seen in this competition so far in every aspect (except audio) — the idea is great and greatly done, the graphics are absolutely great — mainly the buildings (great combination with that green background) and it was really fun to play (except the buggy part — see below). And naturaly good audio would make it even better, but i just listend to Coil and it fit the game very well

some criticism, though — the loading screen is awful (mainly in comparation with the beautiful graphics in game. And i’m not sure, if i have overseen some kind of switch, but if not, than you have some strange bug there — i had the whole part from 3:20-4:00 in video + the house in 2:00 white(on every try), so i was trying to find some other keys on keyboard to get colors in, or some new strategy to cope this white level, but after 10 minutes of trying to get through this invisible level i was so frustrated, that i watched the video and played just 2 of the colors and let the other to for some other time.

Thanks for the praise Risko! Yeah, the loading screen is pretty terrible… Game Maker default, which I should have taken 10 seconds to change :(. Regarding the crazy “invisible” bug that you ran into, I posted about that a little while back. Anyway, it’s fixed now :).

philomory says …

A “game about colors, and their consequences.” Absolutely brilliant. This absolutely embodies exploration, like towlr but good.

This game needs only three things to make it absolutely perfect: first, it *cries out* for some sort of ambient soundtrack. Second, I’d have liked it if at the end, after Blue, you made your way back to the Color Room for some final room before the credits. Third, motion could have been smoother. Sometimes it looked a little jerky when you moved around. Those three things aside, this game is still pretty much 5 stars all around (I dinged one graphic point for the jerky motion rendering).

I liked this game so much that, when I accidentally quit the game by hitting escape trying to pause when I got a phone call near the very end, I played it all the way through again just to finish.

EDIT (Beware of spoilers): I have to come back and note, after watching my girlfriend play this game, and watching the video walkthrough… there are a LOT of bugs in this game. In town area, for instance, several of the buildings present in the video walkthough manifested only as invisible walls when we played it. We also occasionally got stuck in walls, and in the last room, where you’re supposed to go through the ceiling, neither of us ever figured that out, but we didn’t have to because if you just exit the room and enter again, it puts you in the top half with the colors.

I’m not going to subtract any points from the score I gave, because these things honestly didn’t detract from my enjoyment of the game… at the time I thought they were intentional, and took them in stride. None-the-less, it does make me wish there was a ‘technical’ category to vote in.

Thank you very much for the compliments philomory! You ran into the same bug that Risko did (a product of a non-dedicated video card), which is now fixed :). I do hope to add a soundtrack to the game, and maybe some sound effects.  I’m a bit puzzled about your comment regarding “jerky motion,” as it seems fairly smooth to me, but maybe we just have different standards. In any case, the resolution would probably have to be bumped up to make the motion any smoother than it is… something to think about.

Maple says …

This is pretty awesome.i like the transform thingy XD and the puzzles were kinda hard for me.

Thanks Maple! Sorry if the puzzles are too hard

SonnyBone says …

This game is deceptively deep. I had no idea what was going on at first, but EXPLORATION brought me knowledge. Great use of theme!

Thanks SonnyBone, for the encouragement, and for understanding my use of theme!

dertom says …

Yeah,…good job! Keep on rocking…

Thanks dertom!

Hempuli says …

The idea was nice, but it was slightly too buggy to be enjoyable; I got stuck several times and pressing N teleported me weirdly around.

Hm… sorry to hear that your experience wasn’t enjoyable Hempuli . Could you maybe provide a bit more detail regarding what bugs you were running into? I think I have fixed all critical bugs in the game, meaning that you should no longer get stuck in such a way that you can no longer continue.  Pressing “N” should just take you to the next level, which is what it seems to do for me… I wasn’t able to reproduce any “weird teleporation.”  Perhaps if you explain the problem a bit more I’ll be able to fix it.

gimblll says …

Nice complete game with a good idea supporting it. The controls were a bit too “fiddly” for my taste though. I didn’t have the patience to continue after I would’ve had to start backtracking the levels. (Thanks for the youtube footage so I could actually see it played through!)

Hm… could you explain what you mean by “fiddly” controls gimblll? Are you referring to moving around with the arrow keys? Or transforming? Or jumping? The controls don’t really seem to give me much trouble, so I’m a bit uncertain what you mean here.

sinoth says …

Thank you for this beautiful entry. I may be a bit biased because I had Sigur Ros – Takk going in the background The slight spin in flying mode is perfect. My favorite entry so far.. if only it had some audio!

Ah, Sigur Ros! Yes! I’ve tried playing with Takk in the background myself, and it seems to fit pretty well — though I’m not sure about the first track. Anyway, thank you very much for the encouragement!

Thank you again to everyone who has played the game, and especially those who have provided feedback! Much appreciated! I hope I can be as helpful when it comes to your entries!

ok, I’m a whole compo behind, but here’s an update for my LD15 entry (Caverns). For that compo I hacked the game out in two 4h sessions, so it was missing a couple of vital elements: sound, and the ability to shoot physhaxey bullets at the attacking circles. There’s also a little bonus tune when you finish the game (thanks to Flash Module Player). Hope you enjoy it!

Also, I should have posted this earlier but the organizers of Sense of Wonder Night (TGS) have uploaded the presentations on youtube. You can see my one on Swarm Racer (LD08) here

I plugged LD in the Q&A section, but they cut that part ):

Hello fellow survivors (or survivors-so-far, where applicable) of various holidays, yule-tide celebrations, mid-winter feasts, and zombie infestations.

Since LD16 I have done some additional work on my entry, “Ruins”. (And thanks to everyone who’s commented on the entry!) A lot of what I’ve done has been technical and a bit behind-the-scenes, but I wanted to share a very short (3 room) demo I’ve put together of both a new mechanic for the player and several smaller features of the engine.

If you’d like to give it a try, you can find it here:

http://www.thewasabiproject.com/flash-games/play/ruins-demo-1220/

(This is more of a tech demo than a “game” — you can “win” by completing all three rooms, but there aren’t any gems to collect or any leaderboards to deal with.)

And here’s a couple of quick screenshots:

From a gameplay point of view, the interesting change in this demo is the addition of a brief (about 6 seconds) period of time after dying during which you can exist as a spirit. During this spirit existence you can still interact with objects like levers and switches, but you are immune to damage and cannot attack. If you’ve created a “Patch of Life” before dying, and you reach it as a spirit before your 6 second time limit expires, you will be restored to life.

Smaller updates include moving to flixel 1.47, adding levers, moving gates and bridges, pressure plates, pushable blocks, and bats (well, a rough of draft of bat AI anyway — they’re still just brown blocks that flap around the room). I also took advantage of the post processing support in flixel to add some very basic lighting effects and some blurring and color effects during “spirit mode”.

I’m experimenting with the tilesets as well: this demo includes tiles either taken directly from, or based on, art assets released by Daniel Cook (http://lostgarden.com) and they’re certainly nicer than what I was able to whip up at the tail end of 48 hours, but for the next Ruins demo I’m planning on trying to put together a couple of more abstract (and simpler) tilesets just to see how that might change the feel of the game. (I’d like that next demo to include a rough cut of the introductory scene for the game, that way it might give you a bit of flavor for the story rather than just a bunch of technical doodads to poke at, but I’m not sure when I’ll have that ready.)

As always, feedback on any part of the demo is more than welcome.

And finally, just for fun, here’s a screenshot of the first draft of the second cave in the demo as it appears in the editor:

Phew. Voting is a lot of work :). Downloading everything, unpack them into folders that include the author name (makes things easier afterwords),  fixing broken entries, maybe even installing extra stuff, playing the game, thinking up fair votes and commenting.

Playing the game

I feel you have to give the game a chance. Even if it looks really boring in the beginning. Sometimes it turns out to be really boring, but I feel more often it stuff can grow on you if you open your mind, try to ignore any irritating bits and concentrate on the mood the developer try to create. I found myself really trying to finish several games (and succeeding) and steering a little grey dot over a paintbrush map for at least 10 minutes (and enjoying it) :).

Voting

Voting is hard. You want to be fair (naturally). After I’ve played about 5+ entries I get a feel for what I consider a music 3.. or a humor 4. I can only decide on ratings by comparing the games.  Is this how everyone does it?

Commeting

Getting positive feedback and comments is probably the most fun, and could be a big part of the motivation to make a game for LD.  Since I enjoy it so much I feel I should write something (sometimes more, sometimes less) to 99% of  the entries I try. I doesn’t need to be much work commenting, just say what’s on your mind and focus on what’s good in the game, or how something could be made even better. If you “force” yourself to comment on every game you get good at it after a while

Courtesy of Critical Distance, Gamasutra presents the best 99 free games of 2009.

http://www.gamasutra.com/…/The_99_Best_Free_Games_Of_2009

Numerous Ludum Dare entries and regulars make up a respectable share of the list, which is something we’re always proud to see. Check it out.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 31st, 2009 at 9:49 am and is filed under LD - Misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

dertom says …
Hehe,…nice nice! I really was a big fan of the old c64-textadventure of “The Hobbit”. Would be cool, if you had this effects were the pictures are drawn “realtime” and “real slow” 😀 But the graphics brought me back to that time…
Good job

I’m glad the game had some nostalgic value for you! The graphics were more of a last-minute thing, so I didn’t develop them that much.

SonnyBone says …
Was that a Joker reference in a text adventure game?
I THINK IT WAS!
I enjoyed the twists and turns here, but some of the text was hard to follow as it jumped up the page after a command.

I expirimented with different ways to pop the text up, and this way seemed best, though it does have its imperfections. During the 48 hours I wanted to make a game with an impressive gameplay, so I lost focus on making the text presentable.

C418 says …
Hm, I think it’s okay. I’m not a real sucker for text adventures. I don’t think I’ll rate it as I didn’t play far.

‘Okay’ is still a good thing to hear!

Cosr says …
That was very amusingly written. Takes maybe a few to many tries to find everything when searching.

Yea, I probably should’ve made necessary items come up more frequently.

Hamumu says …
I couldn’t get past the priest… I even went all the way back to see if the servant would give me what he needed, but either no, or I couldn’t word it right (actually yes, but it doesn’t count). I have to say that even once I understood the concept of how it would make you press enter and that the yellow line indicated it was actually command time, I still CONSTANTLY was typing ignored commands to my endless frustration. Some text adventure conventions would’ve been very nice, like the prompt meaning you can type things, and I for inventory, and the NESW movement. Nice artwork behind the text!

Yea, I might have fixed that had I adequate time to give some thought to this. It annoyed me too, but I was so concentrated on bugfinding that it slipped my mind to fix that. As for the priest, if you got the dagger and the King fell out the window, you can find the necessary item by searching in the loud room.

Hempuli says …
I can guess that it’s hard to make a proper parser-based text adventure in 48 hours!

You bet it was 😛

ippa says …
first about your comment: the area you got stuck in was about the only red herring I had in the game, it’s not very hard to jump out of though. Give it another shot, go to the right in the beginning and find the way out from there, it will take 3 minutes of your life and I’ll promise to put a smile on your face in the end :).
Onto your game: I liked the pixely gfx, the whole setup reminded me of early kings quest but without the animated character. I haven’t played many text-based games, and that might be the reason I didn’t get very far. I tried asking the servant for various things, a key and crown being the first ones :).. but he didn’t seem to understand anything I said. I would love some tips there, is it “give me the key”, “get key” or just “key” or any other combination.. nothing seemed to work. While the gfx was nice I got really hard to read on certain backgrounds, maybe putting it in a black box at the bottom would have helped with that. Or even better, in a full-length black box at the right side.
I really wished I could have gotten further on this one since it seemed like you put some serious work into it.

The servant is actually there just for kicks, sort of meant to be a little bonus. No, you can’t actually get anything from her except some backstory. (Ask her about dragons, the king, the queen, who you are, etc.) In order to find items to progress with the game, you’ll need to search for them in a couple of places. Hint: the copper key can be found in the loud room.

I got a lot of positive feedback on this game! Thanks for the comments guys, and I hope you enjoyed playing it as much as I did making it

Now that I think about it, I actually messed around with the source after the compo – the aliens were commented out in preparation for improvements to the strategy side of the gameplay. It shouldn’t be too hard to uncomment the relevant lines.

My compo page with the download link

So when Christmas came around I got my usual cool Gifts, but one particularly stuck out. Mainly because it matched my entry for Ludum Dare. I got a blanket that had moons and stars flooded all across it which is much like my game shoot for the stars.

Christmas Suprise

Alas, Coincidences like this are my life and I love them.

Bonjour!

Play these, they need more votes.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/1447 (I uploaded a working version of this)
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/728
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/43 (requires browser plugin)
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/507 (python source) ***

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 2nd, 2010 at 10:30 pm and is filed under LD #16 - Exploration - 2009. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

THIS GAME IS SO HARD!
I like the concept, but it could stand to be more forgiving. Falling from the very top is a saddening experience.

If I ever get around to making my post compo I will be adding a feature to take you to checkpoints.

The game is pretty fun in it’s way, but the controls feel extremely awkward. I did love the music, though.

Thanks, I find that most people liked the music in the game. Of the 5 hours I spent making the game I only spent 20 minutes on it making music. I was surprised by this.

Couldn’t run it, got a “Unexpected error running game.”

I apologize. As to why it didn’t load I don’t know.

Audio is kickin’ here. Everything else is kind of meh. It’s a good complete game. The music is awesome, though.

I like the idea of ‘non’ platforms, but I had too hard of a time progressing!

Thanks. I was going to add a sparkily sound effect for bouncing on stars but did not find the time.

It was addicting! I enjoyed the first level totally.

My original plan was was to only have 1 level and have it go about 3 times higher into the skies. with checkpoints. having a easy medium and hard mode difficulty based on how many checkpoints you would get. However, Once my player got so high on the screen, gravity reversed! Since I never fixed this bug, instead I made 3 small levels 2 of which were done at last minute. The first one was the start of my original course.

the game’s so quirky it owns

My personality is quirky so it figures that bleed through my game. Thanks Zecks, you made me smile when I read that.

Wow, too hard for me. The first row of blue stars is tough, and it just gets tougher. I got up to the orange sky.

It’s nice to stand on stars instead of collecting them for a change.

I’m glad you liked standing on stars, or bouncing on them in this case.

slightly too hard.. I think you suck gamers in better if it’s easy in the beginning and they can feel skilled :P. Cool concept, of all the ratings the highest went to Innovation.

I agree with you completely here. First level is much tougher than the 2 following it. This was a bad move on my part. Next time I enter I will keep this in mind. I don’t feel too bad though, this being my first ludum dare.

that is one irritating tune

I  felt bad because I didn’t add an option to turn off the music. Next time I enter there will be a off/on switch for music for those who don’t enjoy the quirky music I do.

The game I submitted to the contest (http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-16/?action=preview&uid=28) wasn’t a game in the sense that you could like.. do anything. Objectives? nah. Plot? nah. What I did was essentially a tech demo- flash space exploration mmo. except more than a couple people turned my crappy vps into a flaming heap, but theoretically it was an mmo . Well, anyone that likes the idea of a cross between Elite and Eve Online, I’m continuing work on it and just finished a large rewrite of the backend:

I am currently aiming at getting something more playable in for TIGSource’s Assemblee contest by the 10th (all the art/music I’m using is generated earlier from their users). I just finished a full rewrite so that everything runs of Python/Django on Google AppEngine . Added bonus- game accounts can attach to google authentication

Play at http://play.drifting.thegup.com

Currently the appengine framework is pretty much complete with datastore models for players,stars,planets,civilizations and npcs. I’m still tweaking the galaxy generation process but will be moving on to solar systems soon, along with multiplayer chat and pilot profiles, and some more ui options .

The game plan is to make it into kind of a multiplayer Elite – civilizations are generated along with the galaxies including homeworlds, npc ships and npc space stations you can interact with. You represent whatever civilization you choose and can later switch civs based on a reputation system. War against other civs and plunder, go freelance pirate, or do missions they give. There will be a limited resource you can use to claim new planets in the name of your civilization and either set up defenses or mining bases.
Each sector will be generated when a neighboring sector is first discovered.. ie a player enters sector 10,10 – the 3 neighboring sectors that haven’t been generated would then be created. There will be randomly placed wormholes or warp gates as well to connect to either other solar systems in the same sector or other sectors, to make exploring less linear.
Eventually I want to make planets explorable as well. They will be procedurally generated with a unique seed combined with the physical traits described by the ACRETE algorithm when generating them. I was looking at Away3D for making planet exploration a separate flash app

Congratulations to everyone who entered LD, there were some great and amusing entries

This has come up in the ‘Should Game Maker (etc. al.) count’ thread, but I thought I would split it off here, so that we can keep the conversations topical, and because I’m interested in what other people think.  Also, I do agree with a few other people in that thread, that coming to an agreement about what LD is about will assist any rules or voting changes that may or may not take place.

What I’m going to write here is a lot my opinion, but is also collected and paraphrased from what I have heard other people said.

Ludum Dare is a community of Independent and Hobbyist Game Programmers

I think the community that surrounds Ludum Dare is one of the most important things about us.   Several of our members have used designs or even experience gained here to launch successful Indie Game Programmer careers.  And everyone here is excited about programming, and willing to talk shop almost all day.  Personally, I think Ludum Dare exceeds places like Gamasutra and Gamedev.net because here you know who can bring the goods, and who’s just pretending.

Ludum Dare provides an experience for learning game programming from many experts; and metering one’s own programming against a vast array of talent.

One of the things I see people often talk about is that Ludum Dare is for learning, for getting better.   I think the sharing of source code, and the encouragement of development journals enhances this a lot.   Also, I know I use it to judge what I can do vs. what others can go.   I also get an opportunity to have people comment on my designs and labor in a constructive way so that I get better.   Finally I do get a score where I can see where I rank in the categories I was concentrating on.  This is a great judge of where I am, and where I can go.

Ludum Dare is about the rush and community of hundreds of game designers working at the same time in a short amount of time to create new games.

It’s fun to know that there’s hundreds of people working at the same goal along side you.  Not only does it force me to put aside a weekend and just work on my programming, I also get the encouragement of my peers once I hit that first wall of ‘I’ll never have anything good!’

This is just what I think and what I’ve observed. Feel free to comment on anything I’ve missed or gotten wrong below.

My entry Asploreheim has been retired – I deleted the database tables and set it to give an error message on login. I have, however, preserved the scores at the scores page.

Blackduck says …
Fun game, kind of laggy because of all the flags at the start. Gets quite repetitive eventually.

I’m glad you thought it was fun at first (and that I fixed the superlag bug). It does get repetitive, I admit, but you’ve gotta keep Exploring!

AtkinsSJ says …
It seems like a good start, but never really feels ‘gamey’, unless I’ve missed something. And yeah, the paths around the middle make it really laggy – perhaps it would work better if hills only drew paths to nearby hills.

Yeah, it’s more of a tech demo than a true game. And I fixed the bug, thankfully.

C418 says …
The game is now pretty much completely… uh… flagged up.
At first I thought the brown stuff was a weird kind of background, but after seeing this screenshots, I realized that it’s actually paths. As there are lot of flags now, I presume the game is a bit popular? 😀

Heh… “completely” was a side effect of the terrible lag thing and the center bias. If you managed to move out, it was pure empty. The idea is you have to just keep going. And it was popular at first, hence the “oh crud I released my game an hour ago and it’s already asploded”

TenjouUtena says …
Every time someone needs to try a MMO, right? Obviously ambitious, but relatively unfinished. You need some sort of scrolling background to indicate that you should walk outside of the paths.

Ambitious and unfinished – that about sums it up. I’ll remember some better UI and polish if I ever revive Asploreheim.

philomory says …
This is such an awesome idea, I wished it had actually worked for me.

The registration and login went ok, and I loaded the game world and heard the music and could walk around, but as soon as I walked onto an unclaimed hill, asploreheim.exe spiked my CPU and never went down. I had to force quit. When I tried to log in again afterwards, the game immediately crashed on login. Alas.

After some testing, the infinite loop on hill get seemed to be a side effect of the client not being able to handle all the server’s data. Oh well

SonnyBone says …
This thing killed my internet connection, I think. I logged in and then 3 minutes later my router went down. lol

All joking aside… this is a neat idea, it just doesn’t work as well as you’d like.

Routers are silly that way :p
And that seems to be the overall consensus… cool but broken.

Covenant says …
It crashes everytime I move the cursor on top of the button to register and/or login…

Clicking if the “too much data” thing occurs, but just moving the cursor over it? I haven’t a clue why that happens.

NiallM says …
I found it very buggy. Most times it would crash as soon as I hit the login button. As others have said, it could use some kind of background to indicate that you’re moving, and it really needs some kind of goal beyond the basic ‘flag as many hills as you can’ goal. Maybe the ability to build your own castle once you’ve flagged enough hills?

Very buggy indeed. Castles are something to remember should I revive the project.

Wiering says …
If I try to register, it says Server not found.

That… is a problem? Did you register from in-game or out? I know I completely forgot to implement the in-game button.

pythong says …
nice idea with the multiplayer

Thanks.

Hempuli says …
Interesting, though shortlived.

True, true indeed.

ippa says …
I want to play without registering, create a test / test account! 😉 Or make use of facebook connect ..ppl hate another reg

I don’t have Facebook myself, but a test account would have been a good idea…

hazman says …
Awesome idea.

Really buggy.

That’s it, essentially – clever but nowhere near complete.

sirGustav says …
unable to register and cursor blinked too fast

Unable to register in-game I bet… button did nothing. Cursor blinking fast? I don’t know of “too fast” but I didn’t framerate-inhibit on the main screen.

In conclusion, Asploreheim was a great idea, but I did a horrible job at it. I forgot to implement in-game register, allowed the data to grow to unhandleable sizes, and generally it was hard to play. Mega-congrats to Moltanem however who got 81 hills! 😀

The 2nd Global Game Jam happens at the end of January, one week after the upcoming MiniLD. I’m curious as to how many LDers will be participating, and where — I’ll be at the Scottish Game Jam in Glasgow. Anybody else feeling up for some slightly more social game dev?

Tags: ggj

My game this time around will be a fighting game.

It will be written in Lua, using an SDL wrapper linked with Alien. (Alien is a Foreign Function Interface binding written for Lua. It’s cross-platform, too!)

Over the course of the next week or so, I’ll be writing out the plans and getting some plans ready.

Excelsior!

—Mr. Dude

I get these in the mail every so often. Seeing how this one relates to the community, I thought I’d share. My apologies, it seems my scanner is dead, so I had to photograph instead.

A suspicious letter showed up in the mail today.

Wow, "THE" Domain registry of Canada... I didn't realize we had a domain registry

It seems very professional.

How considerate! A return envelope!

I guess it’s time to renew our website…

Wow! We can save $40 by renewing for 5 years!

In case you didn’t know, we also own ludumdare.org as a backup site, in case something crazy happens and we lose the dot com to domain thieves.

If lawsuits are threatened...

Alternatively, you could use a registrar like Godaddy, then google for coupons. I usually spend less than $10 a year myself. Get hosting elsewhere though.

Have a nice day.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 22nd, 2010 at 11:01 am and is filed under LD - Misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

It’s a time honored tradition of the gaming industry.

Take a look at these screenshots and see if you can tell what all of these games have in common.

Your assignment, if you choose to accept it, is after the cut.

EDIT: SUBMIT HERE

Mini LD #15 – Clone

Picture this: You are a designer for a fledgeling video game company in the 80s or 90s. Your options are unlimited. You could create an innovative, amazing experience, with mechanics and graphical technology that has never been seen before.

Or.. you could make a knockoff of something that actually sells.

This is a competition about the latter technique. Your assignment is to remake your favorite game of all time in a kitchy, video-game-clone-style. You’re not allowed to steal graphics or sound.. just ideas. Remodel the game as you see fit. Alter things just enough to avoid an impending lawsuit. Use as many horrible cliches, video game stereotypes, and thinly-veiled stand-in characters as possible. Keep in mind, just because you’re making a clone doesn’t mean you have to stop having original ideas. Galaga was theoretically a Space Invaders clone.. but obviously, the designers didn’t stop there. To take a more modern example, Dead Space certainly had a lot of elements (thematically and game-mechanics-wise) in common with Bioshock…

The game you choose to clone doesn’t need to be well-known. In fact, it would probably be best if it wasn’t – my intention is for this MiniLD to produce some hilarious clones of more obscure games. Your game should be instantly recognized as a clone by people who have played the original. You don’t have to say what it is you’re cloning, and it might be better if you didn’t; part of the fun of this contest is in viewing the entries and saying ‘that looks awfully familiar..’.

Take all the time you need, use any code you want, develop for whatever platform you wish. Again, please don’t just rip graphics or sound from the game you’re cloning.

Good luck.

It didn’t take me very long to come up with a game I wanted to clone, because I had thought about it before. I might skip destructible terrain, and the weapon selection will likely be very limited. I’ll also be trying out a gamepad control scheme instead of the classic keyboard controls. I’m calling it “Mato” for now. The screenshot should be pretty recognisable for anyone who’s played the original.

I’m starting out with the Löve game engine, but I haven’t actually used it before so I might scrap it if I feel hindered by it. I kinda do want to use scripts for defining the various weapons and stuff though, so Lua will most likely be a part of the project.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 22nd, 2010 at 9:10 pm and is filed under MiniLD #15. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Actually I just wanted to go to bed and checked a last time for news about MiniLD….

Argh…the theme was there ==> no sleep! Clone,…yeah! Always had in mind to clone once one of my favorite games of my childhood. So I started immediately. And of course as always starting with the content, hehe. May I present: the three protagonists.

Does anyone recognize the game?

Well,…my history in finishing games is not the best. Nevertheless I’m optimistic as ever to finish this time  😀

Stay tuned and good night

I’ve decided to clone Lost Vikings. The title of my game is Beasties.

The three protagonists are:

Krull – An Orc who has a shield and a claymore

Penelope – A Centauress who can run fast and jump and has a crossbow and dagger

Eric – A Dwarf who can move heavy things and has an axe

A few notes:

Krull’s shield protects from everything that hits it. It is made of “Orcish steel” that can deflect anything. Simple at that. And his sword has about 1.5x the reach of Eric’s axe.

Penelope has unlimited bolts for her crossbow, since ammo management isn’t part of the game. It takes about as long to fire as it takes one of the boys to swing their respectice weapons. Her dagger has about half the reach of Eric’s axe. When not running, she moves about 1.5x as fast as Krull, but when running, she moves three times his speed. She can jump about half the screen high and a full screen long.

Eric can lift heavy objects, break fragile terrain, and force heavy mechanisms. He moves at about 75% of the speed that Krull moves at.

I have yet to decide on a story for this thing, though, so stay tuned!

I have no clue what game I’ll be cloning. Maybe a game about cloning or some such silliness. But I am going to clone/port/provide bindings of Allegro for the Tcl scripting language. A little mini-project.

I don’t know how much I will be able to accomplish over this weekend, but I made a mess of graphics for “More Exciting Bike.”  It’s like Excite Bike with explosions!

I’ve flip-flopped, and chosen a new idea.

The title of the game is Ladybird, and it is a Megaman clone.

My next post will have details.

—Mr.Dude

I’ve written up a design docs for my game.

I’ve posted it in its entirety after the break.

—-

Section 0 – Premise

In the, the play takes on the role of a Vulcan Industries Ladybird MKV General Purpose/Combat Android. Her name, for the record, is Luna.

Luna’s town has been attacked by eight Android Generals! It is up to her to save the city and be THE HERO!

(Why not another combat robot? Well, then Luna wouldn’t be the protagonist, would she?)

—-

Section 1 – Generals

Each android general’s equipment, once salvaged, can be turned into a new combat armor for Luna.

The Android Generals are:

-Lordi Kometo : Gives flight armor

-Craig Ballister : Gives gatling armor

-Matilda Kruhntch : Gives heavy armor

-Freddy Redrocket : Gives missile armor

-Viviana Tempo : Gives speed armor

-Ken Nirigatsu : Gives ninja armor

-Dr. Richard Pindt : Gives laser armor

-Cat Carlyle : Gives blaster armor

After defeating these baddies, Luna must face Reginald Fairlance, who will put her up against three levels of fortress, then all eight generals, then a couple more levels, then… THE FINAL BOSS BATTLE!

—-

Section 2 – Armors

The game’s nine (Including the default) armors are:

Ladybird Armor:
-Normal Stats
-Plasma Blaster | Grenades
-Jump Jets

Flight Armor:
-75% Defense, 125% Speed
-Machine Gun | Small Missiles
-Flight Jets

Gatling Armor:
-125% Defense, 75% Speed
-Gatling Gun | Machine Gun
-Jump Jets

Heavy Armor:
-150% Defense, 125% Ammo, 50% Speed, 75% Jump
-Heavy Plasma Blaster | Cluster Grenades
-Glide Jets

Missile Armor:
-125% Speed, 75% Ammo
-Rocket Launcher | Swarmer Missiles
-Jump Jets

Speed Armor:
-150% Speed, 75% Defense, 75% Ammo
-Laser Blaster | None
-Dash Jets

Ninja Armor:
-125% Speed, 125% Jump, 50% Defense
-Laser Blaster | Sticky Grenades
-Dash Jets

Laser Armor:
-125% Ammo, 75% Defense
-Heavy Laser Blaster | Pulse Laser
-Jump Jets

Blaster Armor:
-175% Ammo, 75% Speed, 50% Defense
-Chain Shotgun | Concussion Swarmers
-Jump Jets

—-

Section 3 – Weapons and Thuster Systems

—

Section 3.1 – Weapons

Notation:
-Ammo: (below) (type)
Energy: per-shot / maximum / charge-per-second
Bullet: per-magazine / reload-time (Seconds)
Explosive: per-salvo / reload-time | “Thrown”
-Damage: per-shot / radius (Splash) | (Non-Splash)
-Rate of Fire: per-second | “Reload”
-Speed: speed | “Hit-Scan”
-Special: flag_a | flag_b / args | …

Plasma Blaster:
-Ammo: 1 / 25 / 1 (Energy)
-Damage: 10
-Rate of Fire: 4
-Speed: 25
-Special: None

Heavy Plasma Blaster:
-Ammo: 5 / 50 / 2 (Energy)
-Damage: 25 / 25
-Rate of Fire: 2
-Speed: 45
-Special: None

Laser Blaster:
-Ammo: 1 / 25 / 4 (Energy)
-Damage: 5
-Rate of Fire: 6
-Speed: Hit-Scan
-Special: None

Heavy Laser Blaster:
-Ammo: 5 / 50 / 2 (Energy)
-Damage: 50
-Rate of Fire: 1
-Speed: Hit-Scan
-Special: Pierce

Pulse Laser:
-Ammo: 1 / 50 / 2 (Energy)
-Damage: 2
-Rate of Fire: 10
-Speed: Hit-Scan
-Special: Automatic

Machine Gun:
-Ammo: 50 / 1 (Bullet)
-Damage: 10
-Rate of Fire: 6
-Speed: Hit-Scan
-Special: Automatic

Chain Gun:
-Ammo: 150 / 2 (Bullet)
-Damage: 25
-Rate of Fire: 12
-Speed: Hit-Scan
-Special: Automatic

Gatling Gun:
-Ammo: 250 / 2 (Bullet)
-Damage: 10
-Rate of Fire: 16
-Speed: Hit-Scan
-Special: Automatic | Spread / 15

Chain Shotgun:
-Ammo: 25 / 1 (Bullet)
-Damage: 10
-Rate of Fire: 4
-Speed: Hit-Scan
-Special: Automatic | Spread / 30 | Shotgun / 8

Grenades:
-Ammo: 1 / Thrown (Explosive)
-Damage: 25 / 25
-Rate of Fire: 2
-Speed: 10
-Special: Thrown | Bounce | Timer / 5

Cluster Grenades:
-Ammo: 1 / Thrown (Explosive)
-Damage: 10 / 10
-Rate of Fire: 2
-Speed: 10
-Special: Thrown | Bounce | Cluster / 6

Sticky Grenades:
-Ammo: 1 / Thrown (Explosive)
-Damage: 40 / 25
-Rate of Fire: 1
-Speed: 5
-Special: Thrown | Sticky | Timer / 5

Small Missiles:
-Ammo: 2 / 1 (Explosive)
-Damage: 30 / 15
-Rate of Fire: 0.5
-Speed: 20
-Special: Homing

Rocket Launcher:
-Ammo: 1 / 1 (Explosive)
-Damage: 50 / 25
-Rate of Fire: Reload
-Speed: 15
-Special: None

Swarmer Missiles:
-Ammo: 8 / 2 (Explosive)
-Damage: 25 / 15
-Rate of Fire: Reload
-Speed: 25
-Special: Homing

Concussion Swarmers:
-Ammo: 10 / 2 (Explosive)
-Damage: 5 / 40
-Rate of Fire: Reload
-Speed: 25
-Special: Homing

—

Section 3.2 – Thruster Systems

Jump Jets: Jump in mid-air at 50% jump speed once per second

Glide Jets: Slow fall speed to 25% and move left and right at 50% run speed

Flight Jets: Fly in any direction at 2x run speed, ends on collision, collision stuns

Dash Jets: Dash in any direction at 3x run speed, collision with enemy damages player and enemy, collision with wall stuns and damages player

—-

Section 4 – Stages

The stages are as follows:

Introduction: Ruined highway, simple enemies and collapsing terrain

Generals:
Kometo: Airship armada, lots of little ships and a few bigger ones. Some areas inside of big ships. Boss fight on the deck of a small ship.
Ballister: Arsenal, lots of turrets and many small enemies. Boss fight in ammo dump. Fairly simple level.
Kruhntch: Demolished buildings, lots of fragile terrain that can be broken with explosives, but none critical to progress. Boss fight in ruined factory.
Redrocket: Factory, lots of moving platforms and hazards. Boss fight in engine room, which has moving platforms.
Tempo: Gauntlet, moving platforms, moving hazards. Lots of pendulum hazards. Boss fight on floating platform with moving hazards.
Nirigatsu: Dojo, level consists of waves of enemies. Boss fight is last wave.
Pindt: Research facility, level consists of several mini-boss fights. Boss is in last room.
Carlyle: Bunker, lots and lots of enemies. Many traps, but not near enemies. Boss fight in command post, many places to take cover.

Final:
1: Area outside fortress. Sparse level, fairly easy.
2: Base of fortress. Many traps, but few enemies.
3: Arsenal. Re-fight all generals.
4: Lifts. Elevators with waves of enemies.
5: Final Battle. Control room with final boss.

—-

Section 5 – Enemies, Bosses, and Mini-Bosses

—

Section 5.1 – Enemies

Basic:
Mr. Fodder: Little treaded robot with plasma blaster, 10HP
Private Kenny: Android with a shield and plasma blaster, 50HP
Private Suzy: Android with a shield and grenades, 40HP
Sarge: Android with a machine gun, 100HP
Sentry Turret: Little turret with a machine gun, 100HP

Kometo:
Mr. Aviator: Mr. Fodder, but flying, 10HP
Private Reese: Flying android with machine gun, 30HP
Private Rachel: Flying android with missiles, 40HP
Drop Beetle: Flying android that charges player and explodes on death, 5HP

Redrocket:
Mr. Grenadier: Mr. Fodder, but with grenades instead of plasma blaster
Specialist Marco: Android with a shield and rocket launcher, 80HP
Jugo: Android with small missiles, chases player, 40HP

Nirigatsu:
No Basic Enemies
Chibi: Tiny, quick android with melee, 10HP
Inu: Small robot dog, charges player and runs away, 25HP
Tengu: Flying android, dive-bombs player, 15HP
Private Kendo: Android with beam sword, 125HP
Private Akane: Flying android with beam sword, 100HP

—

Section 5.2 – Mini-Bosses

Ballister-1: Defender Turret
Gigantic gun turret. Does not move, fires weapons in sequence. Destroy weapons to defeat.

Redrocket-1: Stinger Swarm
Bees that explode on impact with player, weapon fire, or any explosion. Fly around randomly, occasionally charge player.

Nirigatsu-1: Hachi
Robot dog. Charges player and runs away.

Nirigatsu-2: Toshi
Small android with machine gun. Attacks player at a distance.

Pindt-1: Laser Crusader Prototype
Slow-moving mech with huge laser and swarmer missiles.

Pindt-2: Security Measure Alpha
Fast-moving android with laser blaster. Attacks player at a distance.

Pindt-3: Assembler
Machine that spawns small enemies. Stationary.

Pindt-4: Security Measure Beta
Three robot dogs. Identical to Nirigatsu-1, but takes turns charging.

Pindt-5: Security Measure Delta
Faster-moving version of Pindt-1, laser is less powerful, but has 2x health.

—

Section 5.3 – Bosses

Kometo: Android with Flight Armor. Attacks from a distance. Calls in flying minions.
Ballister: Android with Gatling Armor. Attacks from short range, retreats to reload.
Kruhntch: Android with Heavy Armor. Stomps and makes debris fall from above.
Redrocket: Android with Missile Armor. Attacks from long range.
Tempo: Android with Speed Armor. Attacks relentlessly from close range. Stops to reload.
Nirigatsu: Android with Ninja Armor. Attacks relentlessly, then retreats.
Pindt: Android with Laser Armor. Attacks from long range. Occasionally charges player.
Carlyle: Android with Blaster Armor. Attacks from long range, then takes cover to reload.

Fairlance: Android with Chain Gun, Rocket Launcher, and Dash Jets. Cycles between general tactics.

Hey, this actually is kinda like a game now. I can move around with the red worm and dig holes. Well, I guess I’ve got the destructible terrain covered already, even though I thought that would be a really difficult thing to nail. Frankly, I expected the simple approach of modifying the image on the fly not to work fast enough, especially because Löve is using OpenGL behind the scenes, so I basically need to upload the fullscreen texture to the GPU every time I modify the terrain. I guess the real hard part will be making the different weapons.

Tags: clone, liero, Love, lua, mato

Ok…finally I will call my game “Plague”. So far I have my character in game, moveable with keyboard-controlls. Still lots to do but I’m on the way.

Btw: For those people how don’t know about the game I want to remake (and I think this might be 100%!?) here a screenshot from original:

I’ve added shooting and aiming to Mato. I’ve also added gamepad controls, tailored for an Xbox 360 controller. The game currently has just one weapon, similar to the chaingun in Liero, but I’ll be adding more as I go on. The aiming is done with the second analog stick, while you can use the first analog stick to move left and right as well as control the direction of digging, so you can dig straight down, for example. The gun has analog control over the firing rate, with a maximum firing rate of 8 bullets a second. The clip is infinite right now, but that will change for the final version.

One thing I’ve noticed when writing Lua code is that it’s pretty easy to write horribly bad code. I don’t have to define classes, I’ll just use create an ad hoc table with the necessary fields. My code is a horrible mess right now, but I am going to refactor it eventually. It’s kinda nice to just make a mess of it all and write quick hacks.

Tags: lua, mato, shooting

I got a late start today, so not much got done.

I wrote the design document (Which I posted earlier), first of all.

I also wrote a base class for game entities, and got most of a game agent class done. I’ve laid out a bit of other code, as well.

All in all, a slow day. But there’s still tomorrow.

For tomorrow, I plan to get the game agents and weapons working at the very least, and possibly get a basic level in place. This will involve making some artwork, which I look forward to doing. It will also involve some sounds, which will also be fun.

I’m happy to finally have something compelling to work on. It’s a nice change.

—Mr.Dude

Super Game Boy changed my life.

Progress:  Spent WAY too effing long in Photoshop.  It’s way too easy for me to get distracted tweaking pixels.  I have an intro that I’m really happy with, but no gameplay at all yet!  Time to focus on that now.  Definitely NOT time to play my copy of Umihara Kawase DS that arrived yesterday.  Focus, Mike.

Hello everybody! Yet i have a first game screen. My game is a remake of an old russian game about a frog jumping on nenuphars

(guess what it is!), i’ve called it “funnyfrog”. It is written is java using the lwjgl library. graphics are made with inkscape and gimp.

funnyfrog

I finally implemented NPCs. Well, they are dumb as hell, but they are moving from their own will. It is quite funny to watch them trying to break the wall! “YOU WON’T SUCCEED, LITTLE BLACKHAT-GUY!” 😀

With just enough Allegro bindings to allow for a simple point-and-click game, AllegTcl 0.9 is usable. Check out documentation.txt in the zip!

I thought I’d like to make a Road Rash clone, cause that game was awesome. I was going to style it like road rash 3 and do everything fake 3d style. I wasn’t sure how to do the road in fake 3d though.
Then I remembered Away3D, a 3D engine for Flash I was looking at before and decided to give it a try. It’s a pretty complete engine, but Flash performance is still not the greatest so I can’t use all the pretty things like ‘shaders’ or ‘correct z-order rendering’ or really most anything that makes doing a 3d game worthwhile.

I did get a kind of demo for how it might go though at
http://thegup.com/samples/flashy/lolbike.html
I also had to learn 3d modeling so my bike is kinda.. jaggy. And the textures didn’t load propery in MilkShape.

which leads me to maybe making a tron clone .. simple if any textures..

If I can get billboards working and scaling right then I might actually be able to make a game

I don’t have anything to show for my effort just yet, but I’m nearing the point of being able to demonstrate something.

Right now, I’ve got the world code mostly finished, and I have the majority of the code for the generic game agent.

I don’t have any artwork, and the first “Playable” thing I submit will be filled with colored blocks. Oh well, I want to get something I can play with, then I’ll worry about art. I was hoping to have the art for the default armor all squared away and have some baddies to blow up by the end of today. This is taking longer than expected, though.

By the end of today, though, I should have something playable. Don’t know that it’ll be pretty, but it’ll be playable.

Here’s hoping…

—Mr.Dude

Still need to add missile launching, enemies, crashing, exploding, mayhem and destruction.

I fell into an old trap. I put backend code before playability. As I’ve worked, I’ve gotten further and further from a playable demo. It’s a shame. I liked the concept, but I’d have to start over at this point.

Given that, I’m still going to be doing a game. It’ll hopefully be playable by Tuesday (That’s my personal deadline for having something done), and it might well be complete by then.

My concept this time around is much, much simpler. It’s a Rampage clone set in a fantasy/medieval world.

Instead of requiring mountains of hand-made content, this game will only require a moderate amount of it.

Each level will center around a castle that needs to be destroyed (The player, being a giant monster, needs to destroy these things, after all). Around that castle will be various towers (Including wizard towers), houses, and forts. The player will be assailed by wizards, cavalry, and footmen wielding all manner of weapons.

There will be three types of castle: White, grey, and black. White castles will have lots of cavalry, grey castles will have wizards, and black castles will have lots and lots of footmen. Also, white castles will be much bigger and have no houses outside (They will all be within the castle walls), grey castles will have smaller castles on the sides, and black castles will have numerous forts.

The player will have four monsters to choose from:

-Gregor – A hill giant with a club and big rocks

-Helga – An ettin with a hammer and big rocks

-Reginald – A dragon with claws and fire breath

-Alexis – An amazon with a sword and bow

I have lots of other ideas in my head, but this will do for now, I think.

The Greatest Game in the World... Tribute

A clone of Gameboy Donkey Kong (a.k.a Donkey Kong ’94).

(there’s no winning or losing, just platforming around and watching the levels change)

compo entry page

PLAY ONLINE

Fixed version for folks without a sound device

Source code

Timelapse

Tags: final

At the time of writing, I just got done playing a game of Rampage in MAME. Very inspiring, and very, very cathartic.

Hookay, tomorrow. Tomorrow, I’m probably going to be at school ’till the early afternoon, but I have the entire day after that point, and will use it.

Tomorrow, I plan to get the tiles for at least one color of castle done. I will also try to get one of the monsters done. I’ll post a screenshot once I have a complete building.

I’m thinking that I’ll make the hill giant (Gregor) first. His art will probably be the simplest, and he’s also the reference point for the balance of other characters.

For the rest of the evening, I’ll be hanging out on IRC, and then I’ll go to bed.

Here’s to inspiration, and doing what we love!

—Mr.Dude

I took a little bit of a break today and didn’t accomplish as much as I could have.  Since the animated gif I pretty much just added the title screen, a land mine that explodes, and the damage meter.  I still need a few more enemies, levels, sound and music, and a few other things.  The hardest part, I think, will be in trying to make tracks that are actually fun to play.

So, I’ve been building a nice clone to a game probably only a few of you know. I’ll give you a hint: Maxis published this game in 1994. And for those of you who played the original probably already knew which game I’m cloning when you read the title.

And here is a screenshot of how I far I’m along:

Yeah, that’s not very far. Damn you, exams and stuff.
I’m planning on finishing my game by the end of the week.

I’ve sumitted my game clone “funny frog” yesterday, here is the link to the entry:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-15/?action=preview&uid=1655

Try it and say me what you think!

I have something to show for my efforts!

Download it here!

Click the building to damage it.

Left click is a small attack, middle click is a large but weak attack, and right click is a big, powerful attack.

Press R to reset the building.

It doesn’t fall down yet, and that’s for tomorrow, I think.

I’ve got a good feeling about this one.

—Mr.Dude

Here’s this years list of IGF finalists from the community.

Independent Games Festival

Sparky – Star Guard – Excellence in Design
crackerblocks – Enviro-Bear 2000 – Nuovo

Independent Games Festival Mobile

tonic – Stair Dismount – Technical Achievement
dock – Tumbledrop – Technical Achievement

Honorable Mentions
mrfun – Mind Wall (Ludum Dare 14) – Best Mobile Game Design

Congratulations everyone!

If I missed anyone (especially student competition finalists), let me know.

The mobile winners will be announced in a couple weeks (ahead of GDC).

- Mike Kasprzak (PoV)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 26th, 2010 at 1:00 pm and is filed under LD - Misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

I’m releasing a new demo! (Grab it here)

Now, the building will collapse if it takes enough damage. Damage to the bottom affects it more than damage to the top, so it will collapse under its own weight if the bottom is more damaged than the top.

Also, the building is randomly generated.

I’ve got a good feeling about this one…

—Mr.Dude

Have you ever found yourself in a situation where the more you mess with your game the less fun the game becomes?  This Mini Ludum Dare I decided to skip good programming practices and just hack stuff together to get gameplay up and running quickly.  The problem is, many of these messy ad-hoc solutions are now causing me trouble.

I don’t want to disappoint anyone, but I think I may take a break from this project.  If/when I pick it up again I will most likely do a complete rewrite of the code.

Dock’s game Tumbledrop is a finalist in the IGF Mobile, but he needs some help getting to GDC. For a small donation, he’s offering a nod in his current and next game’s credits. Visit his blog for more details.

http://starfruitgames.com/blog/?p=103

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 27th, 2010 at 7:26 pm and is filed under LD - Misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

I thought I’d post a new screenshot here since I changed the main character, and was hoping to get some feedback. A lot of the work I’ve done since my last post was trying to make collision detection and response work right. I think it’s ok now, but I have a new idea that’s simpler and probably works for the benefit of playability.

So, any comments on the little moles? Or the old worm characters, as seen in an earlier post.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 28th, 2010 at 1:52 am and is filed under MiniLD #15. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

I was going to do a clone of Berserk for my game.

I never got around to actually doing the game, but I did do some music for it.

I use a vocoder extensively in it. Some of it is kinda funny. You might enjoy it. There is definitely a lot of influence from the game Portal, and some stories I’ve read such as I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream.

Intro Song

http://www.bitjets.com/Music/StartGame.mp3

Level 1 Song (my favorite for some reason)

http://www.bitjets.com/Music/Level1.mp3

Level 2 Song (retro)

http://www.bitjets.com/Music/Level2.mp3

Level 3 Song

http://www.bitjets.com/Music/Level3.mp3

Lost Game Song  (this one is funniest I think)

http://www.bitjets.com/Music/LostGame1.mp3

Lost Game Alt Song

http://www.bitjets.com/Music/LostGame2.mp3

*** Note, I updated these files to MP3s so they would be more accessible.

Enjoy!

I thought I’d take a break from coding, and share my next plan.

I’m planning a Java-based web game.

The premise of the game is this: It is a turn-based strategy game where instead of directly controlling your units, you must write their AI. There are more details about the game after the break.

Also, I’m looking for a host that can support the game. quin and demize have offered, but I’m still open to other offers. Support for Python on the site is definitely a plus, as I’d like to develop the site using Django. It’s not necessary, but it’s definitely something I want.

Units and structures behave individually in all ways, and there is no central control structure unless the person who wrote the AI implements it. This includes resources and movements, as well as communication between units. Units can run into each other and talk to each other. Also, producers (Both structure builders and unit factories) must be holding the necessary resources to complete the things they are trying to make.

Units will consist of a body (Such as a wheeled base or a boat base) and a turret (Ranging from guns to sensors to building tools) which can be paired arbitrarily. Additionally, some buildings can have turrets, and can have any turret, including builder turrets. This should allow for some interesting strategies, such as a line of regenerating defenses that has a direct chain all the way back to the source of the resources, allowing them to pass along materials to the front lines.

Initially, the game will only support AI being written in Python, but I may add support for other languages.

Hey there folks–I’m hosting the Mini LD for the month of February and I wanted to announce the date!  It will take place the weekend of the 19th-21st.  I’ll have more specifics as the date approaches of course.

EDIT Feb 16th: More information posted!

Tags: announce, date, MiniLD

GDC is coming up soon, and it does seem like we have a reasonable sized group attending. The traveling part does suck however. So I thought I’d open up a fun little discussion topic. Can you LD on the go?

There’s a thread on TIGSource that reminded me of the idea. One key point this thread brings up is battery life. In their case, they were on a train without outlets, so they had to make the battery life of their laptops matter. Traveling by plane though, there are often several connecting flights, so there may be opportunities to find a power outlet at airports. Charge up for the next run.

Another point brought up is art, how it’s rather difficult to draw a straight line while on a train. In LD’s case, good art is never really necessary anyways, but it’s always nice to see.

Not to mention, catching flights often involves getting up early. You’re perhaps not in the best of moods, groggy, feeling ill, sitting a small uncomfortable seat, or such. Plus you need to spend a bunch of your time doing your travel duties (going through customs, waiting in a lobby, eating). So on an 8 hour+ flight, you’re not going to get 8 hours of work in. On the other hand, it’s an 8 hour flight, and what would your rather be doing?

Post your thoughts.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 8th, 2010 at 10:24 pm and is filed under LD - Misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Having started and gotten bored with any number of projects recently, I’ve decided to go in a different direction.

Instead of big projects, I’m thinking minimalism.

My current project is titled “Dash”, and it will be a stripped-down platformer with randomly-generated levels.

I currently have the majority of the sprites I need done, and have most of my engine. I have the code to generate uneven ground, as well.

I do not have the code to generate a full level just yet, but that will come once I’ve got the code to generate the types of level segments I want. After that, a full level structure, and then scoring.

The game will feature sound, as well. The sounds will, as per usualy, be made in sfxr. If I find the motivation, I may also make music.

I’ve made a demo of what I have, which anyone who is interested can download here. (It requires Python and Pygame)

I’ve made some progress on Dash.

Spikes will now show up in some areas, first of all. Second, there are now floating platforms, complete with pits of death below them!

Next, I’m going to make sounds. That’ll be in the next release.

Anyone who’s interested can pick it up here.

Screenshots after the break.

This won't be easy...

I do believe that it's time for a flying leap!

Can our hero make this jump?

I’ve made a new set of sounds using the flash sfxr at superflashbros, after having issues with the sdl sfxr.

The new demo has sound! Jumping, landing, dieing, and starting each have a sound, and sounds for other events have also been made.

You can pick it up here.

I’ve got a new release done.

This time, the level generator is complete, and levels now have end points.

The rudiments for the scoring system are also in place.

The next release will be the finished product!

Pick up the latest version here.

Hey,

So remember Galcon? It was a Ludum Dare entry almost 4 years ago, and yeah, I’ve re-made it about 500 times now. And this time I re-made it in HD with a swell soundtrack and other goodies, and got it on Steam. And it’s available direct for Windows / Mac OS X / Linux too!

Anyway check it out

-Phil