Please do not feed it!

Play it, enjoy it, love it!

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=53964

It was bound to happen one of these Dares. On the Saturday night of the compo, I lost power at my house and succumbed to sleep. Between the initial outage (around 11:30pm) and my ensuing extended power nap, I lost about 12 hours of development time in a 48 hour contest. Then I lost two more thinking that I should just give up and write this one off.

What was I thinking!?

For me, the spirit of Ludum Dare is that you make what you can and ship it. This time around, surprise: that limit was suddenly 36 hours instead of 48… and that’s it. Nothing else changed. Sure, 12 hours is a full 25% of the time allotted, and that means drastic cuts, but it doesn’t have to mean an unfinished experience. Does any of this sound familiar to you?

• Had to drop a number of features.
• Didn’t have as much time to polish as was necessary.
• Game felt full of potential but didn’t get a chance to deliver.

In other words, Demon Truck felt just like every other Dare project, just shorter. When I realized that, I was able to put the final hours into making the game a closed experience– one that starts and ends satisfactorily.

Enemies got cut and there are only two bad guys with two bad guy behaviors, all the other ones were dropped.

Upgrades are handed out in a static pattern over the course of four waves, and not randomized choices after each wave.

Waves are all built by hand in some awful code, and not the dynamic endless-wave style of previous LD projects of mine.

The game ends after a short set period of racing and demon-fooming, with a humorous nod to the power outage that made me cut things short.

Compared to many other LD compo entries, Demon Truck lacks complexity and challenge. However, the spirit of the Ludum Dare is not to make something complex and challenging, it’s to use the time you have to make what you can and ship it. Players can sit down with Demon Truck, have a fun ride, and be done in a few minutes. I’m proud of that, and it’s a lesson I’m taking with me to April’s contest as well.

Play it here if you’d like! http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=5448

 

Hiring new employees.

As voting draws to a close, I thought I’d write a bit about our jam game Trimmer Tycoon and our post-jam progress. Our original game puts the player into the role of a barber shop owner. Your job is to take in customers, shave and color their beards as close to their wishes as possible as quickly as possible. You get more money the more accurate your shave and color are, but you can’t spend too much time on a single customer, you have rent to pay!

We were very happy with how the game turned out originally. The player feels the rush of trying to get customers out the door while staying accurate. When we looked at what we wanted to work on next, we knew we wanted the shop to keep evolving. You should be able to use your extra money on something: hiring customers, developing your shop, buying ads, etc. That’s the first thing we did. In the current version you can hire employees of varying skill levels and buy all kinds of decorations for your shop. Additionally, each satisfied customer adds to your shop’s popularity, which in turn brings in more customers more quickly. Dissatisfied customers reduce this stat. Buying decorations also add to your shop’s popularity. In addition to these new features, we fixed a few quality-of-life issues: the color sliders now start at the beards current color. You can now hear and see if you gained or lost money on a customer and how much.

Decoration shop (placeholder items)

So what’s next? Next big target for us is art. I feel very good about our game mechanics in their current state; the only thing that’s really missing is proper sprites for all the new stuff. We’ve been thinking of redoing some of the old stuff as well. One thing we’ll add to the in-game shop is the ability to buy a bigger place for your salon, which in turn makes more room for employees and decoration.

Thanks for playing our game and for all the lovely feedback!

Links:
Play Trimmer Tycoon here: improx.itch.io/trimmer-tycoon
Vote for us: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=59894
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/improxgames
Twitter: https://twitter.com/improxgames
Website: www.improxgames.com

We have further developed Flobe into a full game!

Now with added content, including new enemies, increased levels of difficulty, extremely challenging bonus rounds and KEYBOARD CONTROLS!

Due to the major changes we have made and the massive amount of content we have added, we have removed the download option from our Itch.io page (voting on our game had pretty much stopped anyway).  We didn’t want our game to be judged on it’s current state, and with all the development we’ve been doing, we didn’t really have time to do a Post-Mortem for Ludum Dare.  We thought it was best to just remove the download option and be very happy with the Ludum Dare votes we did get.

We have however, taken our newly expanded version of Flobe to Steam Greenlight!

We would greatly appreciate our fellow Ludumites to please go visit our Greenlight page and cast us a vote.

Thank you once again Ludum Dare for helping us improve our video game development and design skills. Making games for your jam is always a blast!

Thank you to everyone that played and voted for our game and we really hope you can show us some love in Greenlight!

Cheers!

~Forever Humble PDX~

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=590068485

Hello! Happy new year!

It’s only 5 hours left and the Mocos are waiting for you!

Try it here!

 

Thanks for playing!

Right now I have 18 votes, so I only need 7 more. If you play and rate my game with some friends and leave a comment, I’ll rate your game back in time for the end of the judging period! Play Super 2-Button Growdown by clicking here.

So if you havent tried our game Double Helix you realy should – it’s fun (i hope)!

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=42427

This is our 4th Ludum Dare entry and our most accomplished game to date, we even have levels this time. Each time we do one of these we learn just how much we dont know and player feed back is a huge part in the learning we do on here. So we would appreciate any and all comments, be brutal, be honest, and help us improve.

Special thanks to Molpe for doing a let’s play of our Double Helix, we really appreciate it! If there are any other videos of our game in action our egos would love to see them.

Last chance to play and vote for my first LudumDare 34 Game Jam entry: Grow Big and Go Home! A big thanks to everyone who has provided feedback already.

Play it here:

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=62227

Game Walkthrough:

I told myself I’d be more involved after submitting this time, but I let the Holidays get the better of me. I guess I still have a little bit of time to get a postmortem in. As always, I’m blown away at the creativity and ingenuity of everyone’s submissions. There are always more to play then I ever find time to get around to.

So this was my second Ludum Dare and I am, for the most part, pleased with how I’ve progressed since last time. We will start with the…

PROS:

• Was happy to experiment with music this time. I didn’t get to practice as much as I had hoped between Ludums, but I made a push before the compo started to learn the basics of MilyTracker and was able to produce a loop that I hope wasn’t too annoying.
• Made a time table this time and did pretty well sticking to it. Taking time up front to plan out and schedule makes a huge difference.
• Liked the look of my art (much more than last time). I think I made some simple choices that allowed me to get a look that I liked in a short amount of time.
• Actually finished in time to enter the Compo!

CON – I’m only going with one, because I was happy with everything else:

• My game mechanic/loop.

I tried to stay away from “snake/nibble” games as I figured they would be in abundance. When I started on Friday, I created a prototype for a procedural side-scrolling runner that involved using one button to grow the player and another to grow the world (shrinking the player). The problem was the procedural world was either too difficult or didn’t work well in the puzzle aspect I wanted. Once I realized I was designing levels, I didn’t want to fall into the same trap as last time. So I went to bed, that idea scrapped and no new idea.

When I awoke I had an idea for a much simpler mechanic of a guy that that could either a) turn a crank to charge a battery/light or b) shine the light. The light would in turn keep the monsters surrounding our player at bay. The goal was to see if you could manage the two tasks and see how long you could survive as the resolve of the monsters would increase. I proceeded to code the prototype for this idea.

While designing visuals for the prototype, I somehow let the idea become warped and started messing around with the mechanic. I never really took the time to evaluate the whole picture/project as I kept making tweaks and changes. This was my ultimate mistake. In the end, the final game mechanic feels very muddied and confusing.

I look forward to April and entering my third LudumDare, where I hope to expand on what I’ve learned through these past two weekends. Thanks to everyone that has already tried and commented and Happy New Year.

If you haven’t had a chance, you can try out ‘The Cube of Zanigriv’ here.

Tags: ld34 Postmortem

With the final hours ticking down before scores are revealed, I thought I’d fill the time by doing a post-mortem for my LD48 compo entry. Revolver is an action puzzle game about growing plants by rotating the planet toward favorable weather conditions.  You can play it here!

What Went Right

A:\> Let’s build a time machine!

Time management. Unlike most other jams, the first time ever I felt in control of my time. I didn’t get in everything I wanted to, but I delivered the key elements I needed to. I chose an idea with core mechanic that was design-complete. The idea hit both theme targets. By the end of Saturday, the sandbox prototype was playable, which is a target I don’t always hit. I did a really good job of “layering” my needs, ensuring that every element of the game had a placeholder first, before several iterations of refinement. I don’t just mean art, I also mean text, sound, and code. In this way, as time became short, I could say “you know, that placeholder here is good enough” and polish where it is more needed.

Challenge. I tweaked the levels to be tough on the timer, particularly the last 3-4 levels. While this got some users cursing at me, most said it was on the good side of challenging.

B:\> I’m not looking for judgement, just a yes or no — can you assimilate a giraffe?

Unity. I entered previous compos using Flaxen, which is built on HaxePunk using Haxe. It’s great stuff, but I’ve been wanting to get more experience with a game engine that has 3D, a lighting model, and a proper scene graph.  (Hopefully, HaxePunk 3.0 will have these things.) I had a really good time using Unity. I’m not so much of a Microsoftie so was I  surprised to enjoy many of C#’s features. I mean I’m never going to love capitalized function names, and Unity/MonoDevelop makes it excruciating to use third party libraries (see how haxelib does it), but overall it was smooth.

In-editor configuration. As much as possible, I exposed all level data and configuration to the editor. Each level was a prefab that I dragged to the Level Manager array in the order I wanted them. This made it easy to tweak and change the levels and messages. Unity does have a really ugly built-in array management with no drag and drop reordering, but it’s passable, and you can customize the inspector view to some extent with a little more time. The configuration for the item types were also fully exposed.

C:\> Good job doing basically nothing

In-game tutorial. Not only did I fit several levels, I also worked in a couple tutorial levels to explain the controls and concepts. I was very pleased to fit this in.

Unfiltered sarcasm. Because I layered my time, I used placeholders everywhere first, and this included the level message texts. The requirement for a placeholder is BUILD IT FAST, so I did what comes to me naturally. That is, I was a sarcastic and obnoxious ass. As time wound down, other things took up my time, and I never went back to the level text. As it happened, however, my sarcasm turned out to be a popular aspect of the game. So yay me and my immaturity!

What Went Wrong

D:\> Please, sir? Can we have some more, please?

Moar levels. I put in just enough levels to introduce the three types of atmospherics (rain, snow and tornado) and three plants (smirkflower, smeggplant, and flurp trees).  Barely enough time to dip your toes in.

Less samey. I envisioned a more complex dynamic between the atmospherics and plants. Although I exposed a lot of the configuration to the editor, I didn’t tweak them much. In the end, each plant had an atmosphere it grew 4X as fast in, and an atmosphere that stunted it’s growth completely to 0X. These values could have been tweaked to be more interesting, but with as few levels as I had in there, it would be an underused subtlety.

Moar items. I also pictured two other atmospherics (flock of birds, swarm of bees) that could move around the planet – this would have looked cool! It would have also fed into new asexual and sexual plants which spread via seeds and/or pollen, and were endangered by birds.

Moar animations. My biggest regret on the art side was not making time for a better plant-growth effect. It just scales out along the length, which kind of looks like growth, and kind of looks like it’s rising from a deep bow. What I really wanted was a dynamic art that could support a tweakable growth pattern. If I did that, maybe I could have fit in more plants.

Moar UI. The level transitions were very minimalist. The font was hard to read on some levels if there was foul weather near the south pole.

Overall I had a great time this Ludum Dare. My feedback has been largely positive. Regardless of my scores, I’m still very pleased with the result.

Tags: compo, ld34, post-mortem, screenshot, unity

This was our first Ludum Dare competition entry.

Game took 5 hours from concept to submission.
Removed time for Dinner and watching Red Vs Blue

It is a pure gameplay focused game.

No animations to distract attention.
Used both themes: Two Button Control and Growing.

Lessons Learnt / Postmortem

The comments provided a lot of invaluable feedback.

The biggest theme to summarise this would be:

1) Do not stray too far from the standard of what is expected.

A common comment was that having no visual feedback through animation made it difficult to play.

Our internal thinking at the time:

• We were just focusing on gameplay.
• It was a 50 / 50 decision and as there were only two of us, TrollPiggy vetoed as he was the lead 😉 (Not pointing fingers, just saying it how it is)
• We made it purely so that the player would try to psych each other out.
  • Think of how cycling sprints work in velodrome, they will follow each other slowly and then sprint when they think they can get the upper hand.
  • This is why there is very little on the actual screen itself.
  • There is like a meta game built in

It turns out that by doing this, it made it too hard to play.

A more standard design would have had animation and/or sound to provide additional sensory feedback.

3) Remembered how powerful Construct2 was as a tool

We first picked up Construct2 back in 2011. At the time, HTML5 was not that widespread, so game performance on different platforms was not very good. Trying to target mobile was quite difficult.
Since then, we have used both Unity and Unreal Engine 4.

Getting back into using Construct2 was just like riding a bike. After not having used it for a long time (years??) it was easy and felt natural to use.

Remembering how easy it was to use, allowed me to finish the One Game Per Month Challenge (#1GAM) after this Ludum Dare. I finished an additional 8 games before the end of 2015.

In Summary / TL;DR:

Keep expected parts standard and Construct2 is just like riding a bike. 😉

 

Sam and Mas Two Button Attack Game was TrollPiggy’s 2nd game, richardboegli’s 4th.

TrollPiggy:

1) RunGunSwordPunchKick: YouTube

richardboegli:

Game Title Link Engine 1 40in40book – Match Face Game Web Construct2 2 40in40book – Carrot Attack Web Construct2 3 40in40book – Carrot Attack 2 YouTube Unreal Engine 4 4 Sam and Mas Two Button Attack Game Web Construct2 5 40in40book – Sam Smile Infinite Auto Runner Web Construct2 6 40in40book – Sam Smile Pizza Drop Web Construct2 7 40in40book – Sam Smile Flying Dodge Web Construct2 8 40in40book – Sam Smile Tap To Fly Web Construct2 9 40in40book – Sam Smile Infinite Jumper Web Construct2 10 40in40book – Sam Smile & Mas Turret Defence Web Construct2 11 40in40book – Sam Smile Auto Carrot Launcher Web Construct2 12 The Beginning Is The End Racing (TBITER.com) YouTube Unreal Engine 4

Tags: gamedev, ld34, ldjam

I just wanted to thank the community for all of your amazing feedback and lovely comments for FRUITWOLF. This was my first LD, and it has been the best thing to create and play amazing games.  <3

Here is a link to an ending which didn’t make it into the game due to time constraints (spoiler warning!). If you haven’t played it yet, here is a link to the game . Which ending do you prefer?

 

 

Don’t have much time but decided to write this little post mortem.

My game is here. It’s called Flower Power.

I didn’t have much time to make it so really went into minimalistic gameplay. First thing that came into my mind when I saw first theme “two button controls” was Timberman, made by developers from my country – Poland. I didn’t want to make 1:1 clone so I thought maybe I can make reversed gameplay – instead of cutting tree lets help it grow.  After some iterations and thinking with my girlfriend I immediately went to make what you see now.

All planets aligned all themes fit in After < 24h total the game was finished.

What went ok:

• themes fit perfectly
• challenging and nice gameplay
• graphics and animation

What went wrong:

• didn’t have much time to test it properly so there was little floating point related bug, when you have ~140 points plant is too high and collision detection goes crazy

 

What next:

People like to play this game, especially mobile build I made for android so it’s 100% sure I will release it for free on android with some ads to earn big $$$ 😛

 

Last words

I will try to spend the last few hours left to play some more games by you guys and I also encourage you to play and rate mine.

PS.: If you want you can also check my other game that is currently on Steam Greenlight. It’s design-based cyberpunk puzzle game – there’s demo version to download (win,mac,linux,android). If you like it please consider giving it your vote.

 

Cheers guys!

I’m so excited! That’s how I feel right now.

4 hours left till the Results come in! That also means, 4 hours left to RATE MORE GAMES! If you haven’t rated more than 30 games, you should try to get in about 10-20 now! And if you need more votes, drop a link in the comments and I’ll go check it out!

If you’ve already checked out my game, Arc, check out the Post Compo Version, it’s much better with more modes! But if you haven’t checked out my game yet, check it out! It’ll be fast, I promise. I also currently have 196 votes right now and would LOVE to get to 200! c:

Oof, families visiting for the holiday sure got in the way of scoring-period activities.

Oh well…

If you are looking for things to score last minute, I finished a browser port of our board game, Family Board Game Night: The Board Game, last night. It’s more a board simulator than a full video game, since you’ll have to read the rules and cards and figure out what to do, but this way, you don’t have to print everything out.

Here it is.

If anyone has a game that works well on cell phone browsers, let me know in the comments and I’ll score it on my bus ride home.

Unintended Acceleration gameplay

Just go here already.

Those of you who enjoyed my LD34 entry: Crashteroids are in for a treat, as development on a sequel is already underway.

Some obvious updates and some huge updates are due.

Keep playing and rating the original though people

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=64484

If you haven’t played my compo entry, now’s your chance!

Edo Arena gameplay

I’ll be finishing up the post-compo version. Thanks for playing and good luck with results!

The last chance to play, vote and comment

PLAY!

I swear, this is the best game you will play! Okay, maybe not the best…

Maybe not even within the best but…

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=46975 <– In this game you can not jump

Maybe not even in the top 1500…

cries