I’ve been participating since Ludum Dare 33, and I made an Excel thing to compare the data.

In the placement chart, lower is better. In the score chart, higher is better.

EDIT: The picture looks stretched. CLICK HERE for the link to the image.

Thanks everyone who played my game, which you can find here.

Hi all,

LD34 was my first ever Ludum Dare or Game Jam for that matter. And boy, did I have fun.

Anyway, I would like to share some of my experiences and talk a bit about the results for my entry: Tail Power (Compo).

What went well?

• Submit a complete game &&
• Within 48 hours &&
• That is fun and playable
• Stuck to the plan: keep it simple
• The feeling of accomplishment after clicking the “Submit” button.

In other words: my main goal was to actually deliver within 48 hours. I had no idea how long everything was going to take, so chose to play it safe. This meant to make sure to keep the game design simple. To use technology I’m familiar with and don’t try anything risky. Also, I knew I had to find time to trim the tree somewhere in those 48 hours and also spend some time with family. Note: submitting actually takes quite some time, so I was happy to have allowed enough time for that.

What didn’t went well

• Input controls and build targets: I chose Unity WebGL as the main deployment target. On my Mac / Safari combination this has some issues with control. For instance, the standard fire button (left-control) and an arrow key trigger Exposé (switching between virtual screens), so you can’t really use left-control reliably on a Mac together with arrow keys. “No problem! I’ll just use the [space] key to fire then!”. Nice try, space key in Safari scrolls the page one page down. So I ended up using the ‘/’ key to fire.
• A frame within a frame: the actual game is hosted on itch.io within an embedded frame. This frame embeds the Unity WebGL page. My target screen sizes (960×600, Unity default for WebGL) ended up with introducing several scroll bars. Worse, using the arrow keys started scrolling the frames in addition to controlling the player character on screen. What a mess. I ended up adding WASD to control the player in addition to arrow keys.
• Unity lighting: I wanted to use baked lights to indicate blue and red zones on the play field. However, lights also needed to illuminate the player as it moved around the play field. I tried using light probes but couldn’t get it to work. So, I ended up using about 12 real time point lights. That didn’t help performance. In the post compo version I finally settled with using one directional light and color grading.
• Could have done more: even with trimming the tree and family affairs, there was still time to maybe add some more stuff.

Results

First off, thank you to everyone who played and rated my game. Much appreciated!

My entry ended up somewhere in the middle of the pack. Which I’m pretty happy with actually.

I’m not surprised by the relatively low score for innovation: in the end this is just snake with a gun strapped on. I did not take any risks, something that will be a goal for me in April.

Apart from the scores what really helps are the comments some of you left about the game: what you liked and didn’t and suggestions for improvements. These really help make a better game. So thank you to all who left feedback.

Final thoughts

I can’t begin to describe how much fun participating was. Next time I’ll definitely make sure to freeze all family related activities during the time of the Compo. See you in April!

You can play the game here

First game jam ever and I think I can be very proud of the results! After all this is the biggest online game jam and it is worldwide. Thank you to everyone who rated Wild Growth! During the future months I will polish my game and add some more content to it and you will be able to find it on the Google Play Store (but that will be a future post).

So here are my ratings and for everyone who wants to give it a try, go HERE

What time is it? It’s postmortem time!
Last LD I set myself the goal of focusing on more complex mechanics and level design, that might wait for LD35 :’D

= What went right =

• Audio: Really proud of how the audio fit the style of the game. Again, credit goes to the great Ted Wennerström.
• Programming: Programming went rather smoothly, I’m pretty happy of the way the game is built, it allowed a lot of changes in the same canvas.
• Style: Regarding the style of the game, we stuck to the original idea and players seemed to like it (pairs with Audio)
• Juiciness: The constant screen wobble was an experiment, but the feedbacks were pretty easy to make and pretty efficient

= What went (entirely or slightly) wrong =

• Balance and Design: Oh did I screw up that part. A majority of players made me notice how the game should be more penalizing. I first thought of letting mistakes pass in case people were not good at this kind of game and the Accuracy rating was just a treaky way to reward the accurate player, but it runed out pretty bad. Secondly, the game was way too fast since the beginning but while playtesting got me used to the speed and I realised too late that indeed it was way too difficult.
• Ideas: We knew in the very beginning what the style of the game would be but had no idea on the precise mechanics so we groped until we stuck to the arrow mechanics.
• Theme: The tied themes were pretty confusing at first, moreover we started the design around Growing but ended up using the Two Button Controls because I couldn’t get the Growing mechanics to be fun to play.

The final ratings:

Kicking it with the Audio score. Did better with Theme than I thought. Fun and Mood were the main focus I guess, and I’m actually a little surprised about the Fun score considering the huge penalty flaw of the game.

Thanks everyone for playing Dizzy Dazzle, cheers!

Tselmek out!

Tags: jam, ld34, postmortem

I made a simple tool to visualize your ludum dare ratings.

You simply give it your username, and it will download data about all games(including MiniLDs) that you participated in. You can view the data in charts like the one above, arranged by your score(the value between 1-5), your rank, and your percentile.

It is currently only available for windows.

I wrote code to collect more data than is displayed, like coolness and game names As I dislike UI work. If anybody wants to improve what I’ve done comment here and I can send you the source code, the project is made in c# using winforms.

Download the program here:  https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bz81CN4S2N0qNXJMU3RrekFTZ2M/view?usp=sharing

The end of another LD and the start of a new year of game jamming. I wasn’t completely pleased with my entry, however I was proud that I finished a game, considering the circumstances. Long story short, I attempted to make a voxel game with lwjgl from scratch; bad move. I swapped to making a HTML5 canvas game halfway through. Someone on the IRC sent me a beautiful image of a man attempting to jump off a train and onto the platform. Well, I can now sympathise with that man. It was a wonderful experience. I’m glad to have taken part, here is my timelapse:

Thank you for reading, and happy New Year

Well, I think I did good for my first Ludum Dare.

Here are my scores:

#218 Theme 4.03

#219 Graphics 3.63

#427 Audio 2.74

#481 Overall 3.23

#484 Fun 3.15

#489 Humor 2.35

#569 Mood 2.84

#644 Innovation 2.87

So lets start off with the things that went right…

THE GOOD:

• My art was really good for my first time.
• My game fit the theme with no violations.
• Overall it got a pretty good rating and I thought it was good.

THE BAD:

• It was hard, like really hard. I think that was because there was no way to break the obstacles falling on you and the way I set up the obstacle generation was too random. I will make it so you can break obstacles next update, which should be soon.
• The background music was really repetitive. Using an 8 second chiptune on a loop can get annoying after a while, I also made no way to mute it.

If you have not played my game yet check it out!

http://dmiller.itch.io/super-wall-jump

It’s now 2016. So how is the turnout of my visual novel, Beyond Happily Ever After?

The theme and mood criteria were the highest-ranked, as usual. This means I’m gradually improving my craft as a visual novel creator, always sticking true to the theme and setting up the mood nicely.

In terms of the improved mood rating, I’ve done that by picking the most appropriate royalty-free background music I could find. Plus, the color scheme of the UI has something to do with the theme: green is synonymous to growth, my chosen theme.

And to those who commented that my story needs some more tweaking, yes, I do have plans to tweak the story for an eventual compilation of the visual novels I’ve made for LD and Global Game Jam so far. I just need to approach fellow visual novel developers for that plan.

Anyway, that’s all for this post. Look forward to Global Game Jam 2016!

Beyond Happily Ever After (LD 34): http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=41001

Landscaped Confinement (LD 31): http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=41001

e|merge (LD 30): http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=41001

—

Cross-post: http://jollysword.livejournal.com/149862.html

After the nice reviews we received from you, we followed your suggestions and improved the Deep Hunt, our procedural game with echo-based orientation:
– Improved art
– New tutorial
– Better A.I.
– Scaling difficulty
and more

You can try the new version on your browser: Deep Hunt

“Invade the human organism and become an immortal virus evolving during your exploration, but be careful, the antibodies will try to fool your sonar sense to catch you!”

Hi all!

I made a game using Haxe and HaxeFlixel. I used the “two buttons” theme, play the game here:

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=60100

This was my first Ludum Dare and my first game jam as well (I’ve been developing games for about 6 months). I had a lot of fun! I am really proud of being able to finish on time. Thanks a lot to everybody who participates in LD. Reading games’ source code, and seeing all the art of previous LD jams has taught me a lot!

Anyway, here’s my post-mortem:

Software Used

Haxe and Haxeflixel
Intellij IDEA + haxe plugin for development
Photoshop PyxelEdit and Tiled for graphics
Cubase + Komplete for music

What went wrong

Main theme disconnect and mood/humor issues

I found it really hard to connect initial intro story to the game itself. The plot was sad (end of humanity), but the gameplay side of the game, specially the hero running animation were more on the fun side. I had the same issue with music. The music I made was good for the initial title screens and intro, but it didn’t fit with the game itself. This forced me to ditch the main theme music which I spent on hours and throw in something quickly in 20 minutes.

Doing “mood” music composing practice sessions will help get rid of the issue.

It took me forever to get the initial art right

I wasn’t able to come up with good art on the first day. Everything I’d make I would hate, colors were completely wrong. I really fought through it until I came up with something decent. If I had to say what was the turning point on graphics, I’d say it was using references, specially for color. I found a couple of examples I liked (which I wish I had to share, same goes for the first day art), and used the color palette in PyxelEdit. Also it really got easier once I got the main background done. After that, I had a couple of really productive hours making objects for the game.

If I used references from the beginning, I could’ve spent more time designing levels.

Not enough time to play test game difficulty

On the last couple of hours I rushed game level design and I ended up with a last level that was way too hard. I know these games are supposed to be hard, but it’s just too damn hard lol! I made the last part of the game intentionally hard, so it’s really my fault. I’ll aim for easier levels on my next compo.

Also, my game is made for long play sessions. Most people who play LD games are other developers who are in a rush to try other games. So next time, I should design a game that doesn’t last more than 5-10 minutes. That way people will have the satisfaction of finishing the game, which will help increase the fun score.

What went right

 I was ready 

I didn’t have any project setup problems. I got everything up and running super fast. Haxe and haxeflixel are great!

I kept it simple

I had a number of ideas for the compo. I almost chose a much more complicated idea. Sticking to a simple idea was a great choice that allowed me to spend time on what’s the hardest for me: art.

I wasn’t distracted

Life happens to everybody, and I was lucky enough I give a lot of time to the game, and had pretty much no distractions at all.

Overall it was a great experience. Next time I’ll make sure I track my progress. Now that I am finished, I wish I had builds foe the game at different times of the compo, same thing goes for the art.

My Twitter: https://twitter.com/alvaromartinl

Tags: 2D, compo, haXe, HaXeFlixel, ld34 post mortem, pyxeledit

All the links you need here: http://davideafiandra.itch.io/linedash

Now have a gif of the game!

1. Don’t panic – With literally five hours to go, I could of spent time wallowing in my own sadness and thinking about how poor time management I had. I didn’t. Just work through your regrets, and soon you’ll be making something you’re proud of.
2. Caffeine – I drank an entire caffeinated beverage within 2 minutes before I started, and it gave me a huge boost of energy without it. I also played some fast beated music to keep myself moving and working forwards instead of looking back.
3. Easy Theme Integration – the easiest way to put the theme into your game is to cook it into the engine, that way players will always experience, and you build your game around it. For the theme “2 Button Control,” it was especially easy to do.
4. Simple Engine – I spent about half an hour on the engine for The Journey East. I just picked a gameplay style I was comfortable with, an made a simplified version of it. Because of this, I made a platformer system that could be controlled with 2 buttons.
5. Rapid design – don’t spend a lot of time on planning what you want to make, just work on making and adjusting it. The only design outline I gave myself was 4 types of worlds that I could use – forest, desert, water, and sky. I ended up scrapping water because it didn’t work well, which leads me into the next point.
6. If it’s broke, scrap it – Time is of the essence. So, if you’re spending more than 10 minutes trying to get something trivial to work, do something different.
7. Keep playing around – When I first added the snake enemy, I just thought I’d use it a few times. The more I playtested the game, the more fun the snake was as an enemy. So, I gave it two variants – red snake which lunges at you, and blue snake that adjusts its speed constantly.
8. Evolutionary level design – For level design, I’d place down some stuff in random spots and then build off that. Very rarely would I have a design in mind beforehand,  usually the designs were just refined and then refined further. After I created all the levels, I created details to instersperse – trees, bushes, the sun and moon, and stars.
9. Efficient Playtesting – I would play through each level twice each, to ensure that I could figure out how difficult each stage actually was. Then I’d tweak the stages accordingly. I set up a keyboard shortcut to automatically take me to the last stage created, which helped a lot.
10. Time Management – I gave myself good general deadlines – “Finish this world within an hour. Use the last hour for sound and playtesting.” I made sure the deadlines were flexible enough that I could work on things a little extra if they needed more help. At the same time, I made sure the deadlines would keep things rigid and planned out, as not to run out of time.

You can check out the Kickstarter for the game here, there is a demo included on the page (which is my LD entry).

14 weeks, 1 day until Ludum Dare 35. Ok. No need to panic yet.

A bit about myself – Henrik “Tivec” Bergvin is my name, currently living in Norway where I work with security in an airport administration. I’m of the ’82 vintage, living with my girlfriend and 3 dogs. I love programming and gaming, so Ludum Dare should be right up my alley. I haven’t participated before, so this is my first competition – thus why I start out early. The goal is to spend as much time as possible working on refining my skills so that I am ready for the weekend.

I’ll try to post about my progress every so often – once per week is the goal. Stay tuned for more!

Dog tax: My Australian Shepherd Scott

Tags: LD35

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=1407

Just published a post on my blog analysing the results I got for my entry Rolla Grolla Arena which you can view here.

Didn’t get in the top 100, not even the top 500, but my overall score got better from the last time, my game had almost 200 votes, and I have 100% in coolness, so it wasn’t all that bad. Besides, seeing what I was up against, no wonder why I have such low score.

Anyway, I’m happy to be part of this event, and next time, I’ll try to make a more beautiful game

You can play my game here:

Ortogonalis

Thank’s for playing my game, voting, and leaving your feedback.

Peace 😉

So i made a game this ludum dare (wow, what a suprise)
Here are my results

I am really happy with my results as this is my first ever ludum dare. Looking forward to #35!!

Play the game here http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=64769
Thanks everyone

Stricken Chicken was my second Ludum dare and my two partners first. We did pretty well and we managed to make something which, despite all the bugs, is original and cool. Or at least that’s how I feel about it.

What Went Well

We managed to work non-stop for the first 24 hours. Sitting in my basement programming, creating art, and having a good laugh every time we came up with a new game concept was a cool experience. We were all productive, each doing important jobs, and still enjoying ourselves. We were never particularly stressed, and whenever someone got something done, we would gather around and check out what they had accomplished.

As for the actual game, we made something silly and fun at the same time. I was impressed at how naturally my teammates were able to combine humor and  gameplay elements into one. The levels weren’t very repetitive, which I thought would actually be an issue while developing the game, but it turned out that since we had a lot of enemy types to work with, and only a total of seven levels, we managed to come up with new and interesting ways to deal with an enemy each level.

What We Could Improve

Unfortunately after the first day of development, my teammates had to go home. Which left the rest of the development up to me. Fortunatley we got all the programming done and the first four levels, so they weren’t missing too much. So the second day I was pretty busy with other commitments, but was able to make two more levels. All that was left was the boss battle, which I made after school the last day of development. And then i realised… HOLY CRAP, WE STILL DON’T HAVE A MAIN MENU OR A GAME OVER SCREEN! Fortunately we still had 4 hours of development left, so our artist came over and we quickly whipped up some screens. So now you know why the menu screens and stuff are so ugly and have horrible grammar. don’t blame the artist, its our timing. It’s too bad because that’s probably why the graphics score did so poorly, but he really did a good job.

Any one who has played stricken chicken will right away notice the resolution issues. Fortunately going full screen fixes those. Also, hitboxes are horrible! the game is still very playable however, the only time you’ll ever notice it is when you’re one level above a mama chicken and she’ll still manage to hit you. And finally the last level (“boss battle”) is somewhat unfair, the secret is to disregard every other enemy and just shoot the crap out of the boss, it’s actually quite easy if you do that.

In The End

despite the occasional hitbox glitch or whatever, we made a decent game, and the results make me feel good about myself as a game developer. They’re not the best but it shows that even at 15 I have a pretty decent grasp at what makes a good game and a bad one. I’m sure with more polish, and a bit more thought into this game, this could be a really great game (possibly). Maybe next time I’ll try at do a bit more reviews of other games to bump up the coolness, I was just busy with school, and I’ll be sure to remember to manage time even more effectively.

Thanks for reading and for playing Stricken Chicken!

Play Stricken Chicken Here On Newgrounds!

Hey guys! I had a great Ludum Dare, and I hope you did too. I reached my goal of placing on the top 25 in audio, so I’m really proud of myself right now. I want to share some a new track I have been working on. A lot of what I do in this song, I learned from Ludum Dare.

Monster

My newest track, Monster, started off as a test for a couple of chords, nothing big. It was all going great, it sounded good, so I decided I should expand this beyond just a test. I started working on the chorus, not expecting to do anything out of the ordinary. I actually created a rough-draft for the chorus that was decent, but then I stumbled across the most amazing, hardcore bass growl every created!!! I had experimented with bass growls in the past, and some were good, but never have I heard anything as insane and brutal as this bass growl! It sounds as if a monster is yelling at you though heavily modulated, already monster-like, bass growls (That’s where the name comes from). What I did to create this bass growl, was I created a very stupid audio clip of me saying random words, then vo-coded them using a pre-existing bass growl I had already created. After modulating the vocal clips, and vo-coding it through the bass growl, it created a mega growl! This growl is unlike anything I’ve every heard before.  Check it out for yourself here.

I hope you enjoy!

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