Hi folks. I did a little platform game for this 34th LudumDare session with a cute aesthetic and a quiet mood. For this project I used Unity (code C#), Gimp, SFXR for the sounds and SoundTrap for the music. I am very proud because I think that I did something (more or less) interesting with funny physics – even if this game is really hard. Now I am working on a post jam version with enemies and more features. If you dare, try it. I wish you the best and see you later friends ++
I have responded to all the comments that my game has with a post-mortem with some fixes and additions. I fixed the loud sound when you kill a tree and added some obstacles to make the game a wee bit more challenging. Oh the Christmas Trees have more detail.
Check out my LD 34 Game: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=39898
Made this during the compo. Thought I was going to do a text adventure with 2 buttons for a bit there. Changed my mind. But not before creating this: link to download
For my third LD, i think it went really well. my 2nd LD game sucked, so i’m really proud of this one.
First things first, what did you guys think of my LD game?
1. “Its really hard”. I’m well aware of the difficulty of my game. i wanted it te be challenging, yet not impossible. the random generation CAN rarely screw you over, but there shouldn’t be any situations in which it was 100% the game’s fualt for your death.
2. “The controls are frustrating”. To be honest, i never thought this at all. During development, i thought having shift as attack was pretty convenient. apparently i’m the only one who thinks that.
3. “The music is great, but repetitive”. I tried making it similar to an arcade game. they usually have repetitive loops, but they are catchy and sound good.
4. “It’s impossible to play this game without a huge, stupid grin”. This was one of my favorite comments. i’m definitely going for humor on this one, and this comment made my day.
Thanks for all the feedback! i’ve fixed some of the errors in my brand new Post LD version of my game! but what all does the post LD version have to offer?
PRESS ENTER TO ATTACK INSTEAD OF LSHIFT
A HIGHSCORE SYSTEM!
MOUNTAINS!
“RIP” CAN NOW BE SEEN INFRONT OF TOWERS!
BELT RANKINGS!
BETTER RANDOM GENERATION!
MORE!
(There were pictures, but imgur kept breaking. sorry about that.)
Check out my game here and enjoy! thanks for a wonderful LD34!
Hey guys!
Look at this youtubers playing our game:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPLMJ567hNc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkHGGh0jVJE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mQJ7U-0Sx4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UgPbHOQSon8
We were really impressed when we saw these people have dedicated time in their lives to tell us what they think about 2Door.
So I think that’s what Ludum Dare discusses: mutual collaboration, learning and, most importantly, experience in game development.
Thank you, really, to all those who have also made a comment with reviews, positive and negative, and who believe in our potential. 
You have not played our game? Oh really!?
No problem, we’re still open to comments and suggestions.
So, we did some user testing (read: watched some let’s plays) and discovered that some players were having trouble with the PUSHING aspect of OSHIYA! PUSH! In our entry, you push people into crowded subway trains by HOLDING the space bar. But first, you have to TAP the space bar to get the passengers to group together. Alternate the two for MAXIMUM POINTS and get a DOOR BONUS when the door closes!
We’ve added a small extra message to try and help new Oshiya learn how to push. As you can see, the Oshiya above has successfully gathered passengers together by the door: they’re much closer to each other than the ones at the next door over. Now it’s time to PUSH! Holding spacebar will more efficiently get the passengers into the train, and once you’re at the door, it will close. Then hold enter to move over to the next door and do it again!
Try it out by playing OSHIYA! PUSH! now and tweet your highscore to us @inbetweengames!
Since I was working this week, I had not much time to compile for other OS or edit a playthrough of my game. It’s weekend now, so I updated my entry a bit.
I added compiles for the Unity Webplayer, Linux and OSX (untested), so everyone can play the game. It always had a WebGL version but I like native versions more (especially because you can rebind the buttons in the launcher).
I also added a playthrough, which was a bit of work because my game is rock hard (intentionally), so I had to edit out all my fails. I added a level selection at the beginning of the Video, in case you are stuck and want to see a specific level.
If you rather want to play than watch, please do so here: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=39869
I also wanted to add a timelapse of the creation process but smart me went outside for a cigarette, paused the video recording and never started it again.
In this post, I’ll be going over what went wrong and right in my LD 34 entry, Deceit. Play it here. ( Hey look, a extra link! )
“Deceit is the story of a where a madman loses his memory, and the voices in his head take him over. The voices tell him to do stuff he doesn’t agree with, but he complies out of fear. You play as the madman, where you must follow the voices is this horror shooter game.”
What went right :
There was a lot put into the Vo-coding ,and it was very complex! I couldn’t even fit 1/5th of it all in a whole screen!
I guess It was a lot easier to draw when u have everything so dark you can’t see anything.
WHAT WENT WRONG
I did this to keep the game from breaking, but people seriously hate having to click stuff… Its weird…
I had like 1 beef jerky stick that I had to proportion out to last 30 more hours XD.
I had to replace where I normally put my dubstep, with dark ambience.
Summary
Overall, I had a blast this LD! I learned so much about the structures of a song. Because of having to create ambience and background effect, I now realized how important the stuff in the background are to the overall song. I also learned, NO MORE METAPHORICAL INTERPRETATIONS! Next Ludum Dare, I am going to stick 100% to the theme, and focus more on the gameplay than the storyline. I’m super excited for the next Ludum Dare, and I can’t wait to apply what I learned in the next dare! This is probably the most fun I had participating in Ludum Dare, so I’m excited to keep it going! Goodluck with your games!
Check out my sound cloud page!
AND LISTEN TO MY LUDUM DARE SONG!
If you haven’t already, take a look at my entry Stickman Sam in the High Fly Sky. I’ve recently updated it with a Web port that is available on Newgrounds.
Man I haven’t made a post mortem for a ludum dare game for a while but I was quite happy with how this turned out so I decided to write one for my current compo game.
What went right!
I wrote a long post about this already so you might want to check it out if you want more details on that. Long story short the game feels good because I focused on to make it feel good.
A big problem I had in many of my previous dares is the fact I needed to craft the levels myself and that lead to either they became boring/repitive or the game became too short. This time however I used a simple chunk level generator that took me around 1-2 hours to make. It both saved time and added replay value to the game.
A big problem in my earlier LD games is that focused on the visuals of the game even if that’s not my strong suit. This time however the main time was spent on programming and instead using quick ways to make visuals look decent and otherwise just focus on the game. Even with me taking my time coming up with the idea I pretty much had the main mechanic ready and working well day 1.
A lot of my earlier games was focused on throwing thing after thing at the player trying to impress it but creating all that content was tireing and many of those things ended up half harted. This game the main mechanics became just “Climb high”. I was planning to add spikes and many different obstacles like spikes but I realized that hitting the walls hard killing you worked well (and was easier to make) I decided on that. It made it so there was only you and the walls and focusing on only that alone created nice dynamics from a simple base. The only other mechanic that’s aside from walls is ice blocks that you can’t grapple on.
Day 1
What went wrong!
Ooh boy. I was never sure what tone I wanted to go with this game and the final product shows how indecisive I was there. I was both thinking to go with a more serious climing from a prison cave like in Batman the dark knight returns. But at the same time I wanted to go a more wacky game with a more fun vibe. In the end it ended up more towards the wacky angle with a colorful smiley character with anchor hooks and silly scream. But at the same time I place it in a abstract gray cave with a dark bruiting music (That I lowered down so it’s barely noticeable because I felt it was so out of place in the end). If I decided from the start when I started working on the graphics it would look better and maybe even save time.
I envy the dare people that say “I got the idea immediately and get started and worked hard these 2-3 days” . I always lose at least a half or a whole day on being unsure or doubting myself before or after. This time I spent a long time on another idea where you first just could moving diagonally north west or north east on a grid trying to find stuff that that made that you could move in different ways. a kinda “growing movement system”. The idea was something I thought sounded neat at first but after starting working on it I realised that it was not much to it.
I also tried out many different engines like the Defold beta and then Mono game to see if that worked and that ate up a lot of my time. In the end I went with Unity and I could play much more to my and that engines strengths there.
It took me around 6-8 hours from waking up the first day to working on the final concept. I did salvage some parts of that idea like that the crystalized visual style and the diagonal hookshots was inspired by that game but it still wish I didn’t spend as much time as I did with something that unrelated to the final product.
I spent like two hours just getting it to work on a mobile. It was kinda stupid as I should have spend that time after the combo so I could port it and focus instead on the main game. Not as big as the other two but eh. (I still need to upload the apk later.)
Day 2
Other thoughts
I made it vertical due to the having mobile design ideas in mind (and vertical felt more fun with the controls) as I felt two button world work great with it and I might be able to upload it into the future. It made it kinda ugly in the Desktop versions though but web works nice.
I made it without a tutorial, while the buttons and what they do is easy to understand the controls might take a while to get used to as you die fast if you make a split second mistake. I was kinda going with a flappy bird style of gameplay of trowing directly to the main gameplay and I’m not sure if it worked in the games advantage or not.
The name sucks.. I combined the words Caving and Grappling but it’s not that obvious and doesn’t roll that well on the tongue.
Conclusions
In the end I’m really happy with the results. I find it my most fun Ludum Dare game yet and judging from the comments that seems to be a shared opinion. Many people stated how addicting the game is (and that is without any progression systems of any sort) and some think it’s the best ones they seen in this LD. I’ve been thinking on working on it further to make it into a mobile game so hopefully that will work well.
If you are curious to play the game here’s the link to it.
http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=18652
First of all, here it is!
Credit to Killswitch423 for the great video
This LD has probably been my best learning experience so far. I made it my personal mission to utilize everything I learned from this video about “juiciness” in games. My previous entries have been more focused on engagement and depth of content than on feel and tactility. With Bubblegum Uppercut, I wanted to make something that was more about making something that just feels good.
First up was the character
This thing is my most basic, no frills character yet in terms of the pixel art itself, but the one I put the most thought into how it would move and animate. Rather than detail in the art, I was going for creating a feeling of elasticity and energy. Also the gin helped. I did a bunch of stuff with squashing and stretching that I’ve never done with a character sprite in a game before and I think it paid off, but give it a try yourself and let me know what you think :]
Next was the set piece. I may have taken the “give everything eyes” tip from the juice video a little more literally than intended, but what would this game be without the 20/20 rose and the panic-stricken falling rose petals? I had originally planned 3 different levels each with its own theme (rose vine, volcano, skyscraper) but time constraints forced me to cut out the other 2. That’s definitely the next thing I’ll work on if I continue on Bubblegum Uppercut. What do you think? Would you play more if you could escape an erupting volcano or climb a skyscraper?
Probably the best thing I learned from this Ludum Dare is how great an experience it can be to work with another person in an event like this. The super talented Gregg Wright of PageWright Media created the epic music for the game. I can’t even begin to tell you how useful it is to have someone to talk about ideas with. It give you a chance to not only get feedback on the fly for thoughts and concepts, but it give new perspectives on ideas. Maybe you have the greatest idea in the world. That’s cool. Share it with someone, and they may have a different angle on it that could make it even better.
And finally, I learn this a little bit more every time I participate, but DON’T OVERWORK YOURSELF! My day job and general life situation currently are a lot more stressful than they have been for past events, so I decided to give myself that extra day by entering the Jam instead of the Compo, and I’m glad I did. Not only did it give me the time to take care of myself (eat, sleep, breathe, etc.), but it allowed me to enjoy the process a lot more. If you want to challenge yourself, and do the compo all alone in 48 hours, by all means, do so! It’s a great experience. But don’t think you have anything to prove by doing so. Be honest with yourself, and really put the thought into deciding if it’s the best choice for you at the moment.
Well, there it is. I hope you enjoy Bubblegum Uppercut!, and I hope some of you found this write-up interesting :] Keep exploring and playing those LD games. There are some really unique entries this time around.
Thanks for playing!
Last weekend, we took a stab at creating an online multiplayer shooter. If you haven’t seen it already, it’s a fun 2-player experiment where each player can hack the controls of the other player, disabling up to two buttons. Since the original release had a lot of technical problems, we’ve created a post-jam release that improves on the following:
Hopefully these simple changes will improve the playability of the game.
Tags: hack.source.net
I have just made a walk through guide for my Ludum Dare entry, Growdom just to help anyone who is having difficulties.
Congratulations on another great Ludum Dare, everybody. I’ve been having an absolute blast playing through the mountain of games.
I’ve never actually written a post-mortem for a Ludum Dare entry before, but figured that for my fourth go-around I probably should. As such, here is the post-mortem for my entry, Xtreme Crop Duster Simulator ’82.
As mentioned above, this is my fourth Ludum Dare entry (having previously participated in LD30-32, taking LD33 off due to a family commitment.) However, this was my first time making it in for the compo deadline. I used my usual tools – Unity/C#, etc – with the exception that I used Photoshop instead of GIMP this time around (as I finally shelled out for a subscription) and gave Chiptone a spin for sound effects, which worked very nicely.
If you’re interested in a more detailed play-by-play of the weekend, it follows below the break. Otherwise, why not give the game a try and let me know what you think?
With the themes revealed, the first thing to do was some brainstorming – I typically use XMind for that, as it’s a good way to get ideas down in a quick and dirty fashion with some structure to it. The mind-map ended up looking like this:
With none of those ideas greatly appealing to me, by 11pm I had started in on the crop duster idea. I wasn’t thrilled about anything I had, but that was the best one on the list, so off I went. First thing was a single airplane sprite, and a controller to let it fly around – at this point, it just moved at a constant speed in the direction it was facing.
How things looked at the end of Friday night
I knew from the first that I was going to use a retro graphics style, as I had done in my previous LD entries Smugglers! and Red Threat, so started with a 4-colour CGA palette. One thing that left me dissatisfied about those two games is that they didn’t compensate for the non-square pixels of older systems, so I wanted to find a way to do that in Unity. I hacked together a dirty two-camera setup which came close, and left it for the night. After that, feeling limited by the 4-colour palette, I made the choice to go to a Commodore 64-style 16 colour palette, drew the 8 sprites for the different airplane angles, and called it a night. My last commit clocked in at 2:41 AM.
When I went to bed, I wasn’t thrilled about the idea for the game – I was fully prepared to wake up in the morning with a better idea, and scrap everything. That didn’t happen, as it turned out.
Saturday morning, I woke up around 10am feeling somewhat sleep-deprived, and got right down to work. The day was a real flurry of activity, so I’ll just summarize it in point-form:
End of Saturday night – looks a lot like the finished product.
Even at this point, I was having doubts about my idea, but feeling very good about the scope of what I’d taken on and my ability to complete it for the compo. In my past three tries at Ludum Dare, I’d aimed at the compo each time but taken on too much, so my games were only finished in time for the jam. This time, I put the project to bed for the night with a clear vision of what was required to finish, and a positive feeling that I would be able to finish in time for the 9pm deadline.
My final commit went in at 3:29AM, as I went to sleep with visions of the finished game in my head.
If Friday was a sprint, Saturday was a marathon, and Sunday was a mad dash. My band typically rehearses on Sundays for a few hours, and Ludum Dare weekend is no exception, so for most of the day I had that looming over my head – being away from the project for two hours in the final stretch of the compo was not something I looked forward to. On top of that, sleep deprivation started to catch up to me – while I aimed to be awake at 9 and get right down to work, I actually slept in to almost 11.
Thankfully, none of this was actually a problem, and while I didn’t feel good about my prospects when I left the house for the practice, taking the time off really let me focus on what was actually left and I came back with less than three hours to finish, but with confidence that I’d be able to do so.
The list of things I did on Sunday is a bit smaller, because I only had 10 hours to work less the two hours I was away. Before the rehearsal:
And after the rehearsal:
If you want to see what the game looked like at the end of Sunday, you’re in luck – it’s right here on the Ludum Dare website!
Tags: compo, ld34, post-mortem, postmortem, unity
One week later after all of this started and I have to thank you all. Thanks for playing the game, for saying good and bad things about it, I’ve never felt so happy for a game that I’ve made. Thank you, Mike Kasprzak, and everyone envolved in Ludum Dare for the opportunity of making a game and have people playing it.
Really looking foward to extend this game, make it to something great. So if anyone have any sugestions, critics, or just wanna say hi, comment here (LD Page) or here(Google’s form).
If you haven’t played it yet, play here!
Hey everyone Just wanna say that i’ve finally updated my game Torque, sorta.
I was only able to get out two new levels in this update, since all feedback has been talking about how there should be more levels. Doing this post-compo update taught me one thing: That I could never turn this into a full game like I was putting into consideration.
Yes I think this turned into a very great game for me, but the puzzle levels are just so hard to create. I might be able to do another post-compo update with some more sounds, polishing, etc. And maybe get back to figuring out an efficient way to design levels. But no promises. I’m also thinking of porting it to andriod, which i’m finding shouldn’t be all that tough.
Anyways, if you haven’t already tried my game try it Here.
And thanks to everyone for the great feedback.
I almost have 100 votes for my entry: Arc. I absolutely love all the feedback I’m getting! I want to see if I can make it for iOS and Android devices. If you haven’t already checked it out, check it out!
Also, people have said that they really like the music, do you?
Kudzu: I Can Grow Forever… makes my eighth successful Ludum Dare entry, and my fifth entry in a row. A shout-out to the devs of Love2D for making this achievement possible.
The tied vote caught me off guard (has that ever happened before in the history of Ludum Dare?), but I was up for a challenge. It didn’t take me long to decide I wanted to make a game where you controlled a perpetually growing vine with two-button left-and-right steering controls, and with that concept in mind, Kudzu! seemed like a natural choice for a title (though obviously not the final one). So I spent my whole first day hammering out the look and the feel of the vine-growing effect – not to mention figuring out a way to keep the ever-growing plant from overwhelming the draw and update loops.
Once that was done, I realized I was facing a dilemma I’d never encountered before: I had a gimmick and a pretty graphical effect to go with it, but I didn’t have a game.
Days 2 and 3 were spent taking my vine and figuring out how to make an actual game out of it. The first prototype limited the game world to a single 640×480 playing field; the final version adds scrolling (which was tricky to get to work right with the method I’d used to keep the vine from eating too many resources), and a little feature I’m particularly proud of where the vine will automatically turn around when it approaches the edge of the world. I have to confess I was inspired by Race the Sun to add chasing after sunlight to extend playtime as a mechanic, though I’ll admit the sunspots don’t make make a lot of real-world sense (let’s pretend the field the game takes place in is covered by randomly-moving clouds with the occasional perfectly circular break in them). Before I decided on the sunspots, I had it in mind that you would be chasing down and eating randomly-spawning bugs (which is why, even in the final version, the flower on the end of the vine looks like a chomping Pac-Man mouth) – ironic given how the bugs ended up spawning to chase down and eat you. I’ll admit they’re slightly, ahem, bugged: the idea was they would swoop across the screen and try to pass at you, but I made their turning radius too tight – they’re fully capable of taking multiple passes before they pass beyond the edge of the world and vanish. Maybe in a post-compo version I should put in something at the edge of the arena for them to run into so that this accidental mechanic actually makes sense?
The main game code comes out to only 550 lines; there are some utility snippets in other files more or less copied from my past projects, as well as copious use of the hump and Tactile libraries (the latter of which made it trivial to support a bevy of control options – six different two-button configurations between keyboard and gamepad!), but I take an odd bit of pride that I didn’t recycle the entity framework I wrote for S-LAYER and reused in CRUNCH!!! (which probably should be thrown out and rewritten from scratch anyway), nor did I write any new classes for this project – it’s all functions, loops, and arrays. Of course, I could get away with that because Kudzu officially has the fewest number of unique object types to keep track of in any game I’ve written…
Sound effects were made using my own voice and copious use of Audacity filters. I didn’t feel I had time to fiddle with Bfxr and get the sound effects juuuuust right, but I think the SFX turned out surprisingly good regardless. The music was composed in 15 minutes using FL Studio. I accidentally used the same instrument for both the back beat and the main melody, but I think the tune ended up nicely capturing the whimsical feel I was going for regardless.
On a final note, the background was made using Love2D’s built in random noise functionality – though not on-the-fly. I actually had it set up to generate the background at the start of play, but this resulted in an uncomfortable loading pause, so I temporarily added a line that saved the image to PNG and then used the saved image (with a little color tweaking after the fact) as the game’s background.
I hope you all enjoy playing Kudzu: I Can Grow Forever… as much as I enjoyed making it!
As this was my first Ludum Dare, this is my first Post-Mortem, So I hope I cover everything that people generally cover in this! ^_^ I was debating if I should even do one of these but I figure why not, right? So here goes.
Oh and here’s a timelapse if you’re interested!
What went wrong:
What went right:
Details of the Weekend:
So usually I miss ludum dare by a few weeks or sometimes just a few days, but this time I learned the date two weeks ahead of time, and posted notes and reminders to myself all over the place so I wouldn’t forget. At first I was excited, and warming up with my tools, and learning new tools just in case I decided to use them. Then as it got closer the wait got excruciating, I didn’t want to practice anymore I just wanted to get the theme and make something awesome. 😀 Well anyways the waiting was painful, but once the theme was announced I felt great!
I was pleasantly surprised how smoothly the weekend went. I started with a pretty strict time schedule, and I prepared meals ahead of time, because I figured it would be a mad dash and non-stop working once it started. But I was incredibly wrong. Perhaps that was because I had a pretty low bar to reach, my goal wasn’t to make a masterpiece, but to make something fully functional within the time frame. It would ideally have audio and graphics and solid gameplay. I didn’t really care if it was a great game, just that it was complete, and I must say I feel like I accomplished that pretty well.
I only allowed myself an hour and a half for planning and brain storming, because I wanted to have tons of time to work on the first night. The goal being to have some prototype ready before I went to sleep on night 1. That went well, and by the middle of Saturday I had pretty much finished most of the gameplay aspects and mainly had level design, graphics and audio remaining. I felt like I was doing well. Then I lost a lot of my motivation, I spent quite a few hours on Saturday evening watching streamers and I even watched a movie with my roommates.
When I got back to work, I did the basic audio loop for the game, and decided to leave the graphics as simple colors for multiple reasons, I didn’t know what else to make it, and the minimalism seemed to fit for the style of game I was making. Once that was done I slacked off again, returning to Twitch to check in on the progress some streamers were making.
I’m pretty sure I know why I slacked off so much, and at one point I even considered not finishing at all. It’s simple really, I chose to make a platformer, knowing that I don’t like playing platformers. I like them as games, but I’m terrible at them so once the functionality was implemented, and I was working on the level design I quickly got frustrated having to play test them constantly.
I didn’t get the level design finished until an hour or so before the deadline, and I ended up going with endless generation from premade modules rather than the initial idea of having completable levels. I decided this because I was having trouble coming up with ideas for the levels, and I didn’t think I had time for true procedural generation. Instead I just made 10 segments that the game randomly chooses from as the player progresses. It’s not the best, but each segment it completable and they’re long enough that you’re not likely to survive to see all 10. ^_^
Anyways I feel like I succeeded in my initial goal but I feel like I didn’t have enough faith in myself. I feel like I took the easy way out when I could have challenged myself to make something more complicated. Regardless though I’m glad I participated and I now have an idea for how to approach the next one.
Tags: compo timelapse, final timelapse, ld34, post-mortem, postmortem