Don’t forget, MINI LD on this weekend! : D

Did you know that today(13 September) is a programmers’ day?
It’s the 256(=2^8) day of the year!!
So if you are a programmer then:
Happy Programmers’ Day 2011!!!

Tags: Programmers' Day

Finally the results of Ludum Dare 21, and not bad for my first real ludum dare compo 😀 17th on community and score for the rest of my game that isnt bad. Winners are great games, and overal second did use haXe 😀

Howdy! I’ve made a small update spurred on by the success of Stratus in the graphics category, and 9th place overall (very happy right now, thanks to all who voted on my entry!) I can’t wait for the next Dare :]

Stratus Link

first of all, i thought I would still be able to edit my entry to add an ‘after compo update’ separate download, but the edit button appears to have vanished now the results are out :S. So I’ve edited the original zip- since the voting is over and the changes don’t affect the actual game, I hope it won’t be controversial.

here’s what’s changed:
– added some contact details to the beginning of the game
– added arrow key support and changed input to use keyboard codes, so the equivalent of wasd should work on non-qwerty keyboards (sorry it took so long to add this non-qwerty guys)

Thanks!

In the interest of full disclosure, I’ll state up front that the main reason for this post is because someone told me I couldn’t get trophies if I hadn’t written a blog post. I have no idea if we’re too late for any awarding, but what the hell.

I haven’t really felt the need to talk about my game, EscapeOut, because it wasn’t a particularly interesting process. Relying on a 20-min show-off video by Photon Storm about how to make a brick breaker in 20mins, I stumbled my way through Flixel and came up with something that put a little spin on the core concept. The theme of LD21 was Escape, so how else does one apply that to a brick breaker? Easy: something on the screen has got to try to get the hell out of dodge. From there it was a simple leap in logic to the eventual core mechanic. I won’t say what that is because I don’t like to spoil the game. In fact, I really liked setting friends down in front of EscapeOut with no instructions to see if they can figure it out. The game has no instructions for a very intentional reason.

Judging by the comments on EscapeOut, forcing players to discover the game’s mechanic paid off. I’ve been a very bad LD participant: haven’t blogged, haven’t played many of the entries, haven’t used the IRC channel except for a couple technical questions. Mostly this has been due to time; I only managed to spend half of the 48 hour timeframe coding, due to oversleeping and family obligations. So, I was quite surprised to log on today and see the comments and ratings left for EscapeOut. A few people really seemed to like it, more than I ever could have imagined. Even more shocking, the game was rated #54 in humour. Seriously, a game with no instructions, no words other than “YOU HAVE DIED” and “YOU ESCAPED”, no characters, no narrative, and even no sound effects or music, ranked within the top 10% of humourous games in the entire Ludum Dare 21!

I guess this really goes to show that an intriguing mechanic can turn a relatively bland experience into an interesting one, even if only for a few minutes.

Tags: as3, breakout, brick breaker, EscapeOut, flash, Flixel, photonstorm, post-mortem

Hello World,  my name is David or if some of you know (i dont think anyone knows) my nickname for every game I play is Davidobot. SO I joined just after the Ld #21 finished so I’m realy looking forward to the mini LD on the 17th. I will be posting all my game on this post so watch it closely. BUT my submisions to the LD’s will be on a different post… That is all I have to say right now…

Ludum Dare 21 is finished and rating time too and we have the rating results.

Vampire Runner was #290, not so good as other of our previous Ludum Dare games, but on the other hand there was a lot of games in this one, almost three times the games of the previous Ludum Dares.

Here are the scores Vampire Runner got in this Ludum Dare:

 Position	Category	Score
 
 #87		Community	3.22
 #144		Coolness	4%
 #159		Fun		2.94
 #168		Humor		2.18
 #290		Overall		2.75
 #305		Graphics	2.50
 #339		Audio		1.29
 #345		Innovation	2.38
 #450		Theme		2.00
 

Now, I want to share a small post mortem of the game and explain why I feel the score is what I expected.

What went wrong

• As the game started like some kind of Canabalt clone, because my lack of imagination, I was a bit unmotivated so Saturday progress was really slow and unproductive.
• I feel I lost too much time making the vampire animations and forgot about the environment assets.
• The game lack of audio and that goes against the Ludum Dare score.
• I forgot to reflect inside the game the connection with Ludum Dare’s theme.
• Missing on-line high scores: it shouldn’t be so hard to add it as I have Face Hunt (and other games) experience but I was a bit lazy and didn’t. One reason to have this one is to make the game more competitive and also to know who is playing the game.

What went right

• On Sunday, I almost restarted the way I was making the game and focused on making it really small and fun. It kinda worked.
• Making the game available on a lot of platforms: Linux, Mac, Windows and Android.

Conclusion

I totally agree with the score of the game because I started with no motivation and for that reason I didn’t tried so hard, obviously that goes against making a good game. Here is a list of why I agree or not with each score.

• Community: I shared a lot of stuff: source code, timelapse, made it work on multiple platforms. I believe that counts as community rating, so 3.22 is right for me.
• Fun: Game IS fun (at least I feel that and some other people does), so 2.94 is right for me (maybe a bit more).
• Humor: Game has a bit of humor when the vampire explodes, and maybe the vampire graphics are funny too, but only that, so 2.18 is right for me (even more than I expected).
• Graphics: Only the vampire animation is something worth to value here, the background and obstacles are not so cool, so 2.50 is around what I expected.
• Audio: Game has no audio, I am not agree with the score of 1.29.
• Innovation: Game is almost a clone of Canabalt with some modifications, it has a bit of innovation but not too much, so I agree with a score of 2.38.
• Theme: If you read the game description, it says what was the intention of the theme connection but as I failed to reflect that inside the game I believe 2.00 is right for me.

Thats all, hope you like it.

(note: this entry is almost a copy/paste of this entry from our blog)

Tags: LD21, postmortem, vampirerunner

The Challenge:
I have a 365 day runway (until 9 Sep 2012) to earn £20k (about $32k) from games development.

The earnings value is based on a UK minimum wage calculation of about £6 per hour 9-5 job, and factoring in that I will have to pay money to make them, buying in music ect, and overheads for payment providers?

Resources:
Me, Unity, PC, Mac, iPod, Android.

Currently I manage to produce game ‘Prototypes’ like these http://www.kongregate.com/accounts/Arowx/favorites

Hurdles:
Art, 3D Animation, Procrastination, Funds, Motivation, Experience, Marketing

Forfeit:
If I have not hit or exceeded this target by the deadline and proved I can make a living from games I have to dust off my CV and get a job!

So what advice would you give or better still how do you do it?

#93 Audio 3.08
#207 Community 2.67
#276 Graphics 2.62
#280 Theme 2.85
#375 Overall 2.46
#379 Innovation 2.23
#399 Fun 2.08
#418 Coolness 0%
#466 Humor 1.00

Well… Let’s start with the bad stuff… Humor. I… didn’t have much, as you can see… Coolness. I am not very good at rating games, or playing them, when I have other things to occupy myself. I probably easily could have gotten a better score if I was actually interested. Fun. In this case, it was the large amount of fake difficulty in the hidden enemies, as well as the rather unorthodox control scheme. Innovation. Not much here, either. I completely agree with my low points.

Overall hits a little low, and it was even worse than my last entry in LD19 (2.46 vs. 2.82) -_-; It wasn’t a particularly good game, and I probably will only touch it to steal different things from it, just like I did from my last LD game.

Now let’s hit with the higher points. Theme. It fit the theme, but you weren’t really given backstory, and it didn’t really try to go anywhere special, so maybe a little higher than expected? Graphics. Honestly, there was little I did to do good graphics. It was a particle snow effect, some filtering, and some nice little tidbits like bullet cartridges, impact points, and the such. I didn’t even do any character sprites, let alone finish them. Community. Like the Coolness score above, this one didn’t really strike me as important. I simply posted my intent, midway point, and game. Audio. Well, actually, this one was pretty good. The soundtrack, though quickly made in Autotracker-C and edited to fit, worked rather well with the mood. I made sound effects to go with pretty much every action (except enemy movement for some reason, though I did for bullet cartridges), sometimes having to combine different sounds to get the effect I wanted (for example the gun-fire and the reload). It was easily my best attribute, and though it didn’t score top 25, I’m proud of the score I did get.

All in all, this was a rather mediocre game, and the players agreed. Though it had good points, it also had some low points. I’m not necessarily happy with my overall score, though I am happy with my Audio score, and content with my game as a whole.

Well, I finally got a look at my results for Unrest:

For a game that was mainly based around concept, and my first entry, I can’t imagine a better result. I managed to get in the top 25 on both theme and innovation, which I think classes a game based on idea more than anything else as a success. I even managed to get a 1 for audio without having any in the game XD.

So yeah, really chuffed with that as an end result. Hopefully next LD I can make something with a bit more gameplay.

I unfortunately didn’t get very high with coolness – I ended up testing most of the Linux entries, and a fair few of the web-based ones, but never got around to testing the Windows ones, so my apologies there.

Overall, I’ve had fun, and look forward to the next one, I’ll definitely plan to compete again.

Tags: results, unrest

Seeing as this is my first blog post I’ll include a preface about my first LD48 experience!:

I’ve been waiting to do a Ludum Dare event until I had 1) Spare time, and 2) Recent experience with a game programming language/library. The second point is important because I do programming entirely as a side hobby. I haven’t had much experience with the art in the past 4 years. I’ve taken swings at SDL, LWJGL, and Allegro before… but this time I had been learning to use Flixel.

Cut to the night of the competition–I was checking my email in bed on my netbook and decided to check on the LD website and HOLY LUDUM they’re having a competition right now! Man, this is cool stuff… what would I do for the “escape” theme if I were participating? Actually, what can I do? Well basing it on Flixel what if I made the main character an extension of the FlxTileMap class instead of the FlxSprite class? Hey this is an exciting idea… let’s actually do it! So I opened up FlashDevelop and started typing away in bed. I ended up coding the whole thing on a netbook. The graphics I did on my old old desktop simply because I wanted higher resolution and I already had Paint.net installed on it. It was crashing on me but… I frantically got my desktop stable again and pressed on. In the end I learned a lot more about Flixel and even came up with something good enough to submit! My only regret was not having enough time to squash bugs.

My game Globular Prisonbreak

So on with the blog entry thing. Results!

Here we go in reverse order:

Humor: No ratings at all? I must be super un-funny. I wasn’t really going for funny but the game itself is a bit corny. I expected a low rating for humor but got none at all. *shrug*

Community: I could probably benefit from posting once in awhile. I didn’t post before the competition because I didn’t register until a few hours into it. Plus there was no planning whatsoever. I didn’t make a post during the competition because I couldn’t figure out how to even navigate the LD website (and it was down mostly). I’d like to put a lot more effort into community stuff next time…

Fun: Well this was sort of expected. But I am surprised it got this low relative to my other scores. I knew it would be low because my game is confusing and buggy, and those make games very un-fun. On the other hand it’s fun in a innovative/schmup/puzzler sort of way. I guess my gameplay is also quite nitch and suffers from being something I want to make and not what others want to play. But I don’t think that’s not a bad thing.

Overall: Okay. Not much to say. Overall is sort of each individual’s weighted average. johnfn pointed out that Overall is closely linked to fun, so this score makes sense.

Audio: It’s nice to get a score in audio since the last time I touched game audio at all was with Modplug back around 2001. I only included a Level Complete Jingle for my game. I tried to have various pitch sound effects for when blobs hit you but my attempts didn’t sound right and I was wasting time. I’ll take a swing at sfxr now that I know it exists (thanks community!). I’d like to try including music when I’m comfortable believing that I can make something that actually sounds like music.

Theme: I was hoping to do a liiitle better here. Simply because my game was about escaping a prison, and each level involved you escaping off the top of the screen. I even included the line “Escaped!” as a possible level-win message. Plus I used the word “Prisonbreak” (not a “real word”, this is intentional) in the title, which I thought was a little more creative than games that simply used “Escape” in their titles. But I’m not complaining here so much as nit picking.

Graphics: A pleasant surprise to score this high on graphics. I did throw out my first colorful floor tiles in preference of a simple brick pattern after my roommate complained that they looked like shit. I guess it paid off.

Coolness: Ah yeah! My game is so cool! Oh right, this is about how many games I played. I made a point to avoid the overly-popular games during the voting. I played a mix of what looked interesting and those straight from the rate games page. My favorites were:

I pity the fool who can’t beat Dystopian Future Underground City and Snake Plissken: Surfin’ U.S.A.

Innovation: I’ve been disappointed at myself that I couldn’t polish my game more or weed out bugs before submitting it. I was thinking, “well, at least I might score okay in ‘innovation'”. Turns out I did pretty darn well, and I’m really happy about it! I think most of us wouldn’t work on a game at all if we didn’t think it was innovative in some way. Why make something if it already exists? This i’s especially important to me because I spend a lot more time thinking about game ideas than actually making them (I don’t program for a living). Plus this is the first time I’ve made something public. So I couldn’t be happier with this result. I even made the Top 25 Categories page!

Future Plans

While I think my game does have potential, I don’t have plans to develop it much further. I think it would have to be reworked from the ground up. I would up the tile size to 16×16 and try to make gameplay smoother. My original plan didn’t have movement locked into a grid, and I’d still like to try it without the grid (which would need other changes for balance). Balancing could already use some work to improve the strategy aspect… things like reducing the color count to 4 in the earlier levels or changing the floor tile algorithm for better color clumping. (Without clumping there is no point to the bullet-adopts-the-color-of-the-floor-tile mechanic.) Ultimately I think my time is better spent on a randomly-generated platformer I’ve been tinkering with for some time already. I might start another separate short-term project or just wait until the next LD48. But until my “fun” rating becomes decent, I think I have to focus my time on real life concerns.

Tags: compo, Flixel, innovation, j_peeba, LD #21, NMcCoy, post-mortem, postmortem, ratking, results, tenpn, vandriver

I wasn’t able to finish anything for LD21, in the end I started all over for the jam, but didn’t get that finished either. Last week I spent some more time on it and now it is finally ready: Asteroid Escape.

In this game, you are exploring caves in an asteroid when suddenly lava starts to rise, which you have to escape.

In total I spent about 34 hours on this, but spread out over several days. I used haXe and my own base code and Random Art Evolver. There are 7 levels.

• Play: http://www.wieringsoftware.nl/flash/asteroid-escape/ (Flash)

October is going to some sort of special challenge month, so let’s celebrate Ludum Dare Halloween a bit early.

The theme is HORROR. Not “interpret the word however you want”, but “try to make something that will genuinely creep people out/horrify them”.

Technically 17th-18th, but this isn’t strict. Start whenever you want, and finish 48 hours later, or take a little longer if you want (Submissions officially close on the 25th, say). Work alone or in a group, use preexisting media/code if you want, or whatever.

[ SUBMIT HERE | View all ]

And, have fun!

I’m planning to enter my second Mini Ludum dare, and I’d like to see what I can get done!

Wish me luck!

Woah, that was a really quick move, I never expected this.

Well, I’m considering this mini competition as a start off – this will be my first submission ever.

Wish me luck 😀

Tags: miniLD #29

How not?

This weekend is packed so I have really no chance of making anything. Oh well, when is the next Ludum Dare or MiniLD?

So I’m busy this weekend, but I figured I’d have time for a simple (but EVIL) game.

• The game selects 20 files from your computer at random
• to win, you must delete them all
• you don’t know what each file is until AFTER you’ve deleted it.
• files 10 and 20 are folders, deleting them deletes everything in them
• there is no undo

this text is a link to the game, you’d be wise to never, ever, click on it. (it’s windows only)

I made this account so me and my friend(s) could maybe compete in next years Ludum Dare Jam, and I just read that there is a mini LD on the 17th. All I know how to do is make crappy games with Multimedia Fusion 2, I was planning on learning more/switching to Python+PyGame by the time of LD next year.

So should we try to make a game for the Mini LD?

Tags: 2, crappy, fusion, gah, games, ld, mini, MMF2, multimedia, try

So Ludum Darererers, who/what the devil are you?

Teen grub attenting a state educational facility? Corporate drone? Overworked techie? Full time indie progamming magician? It’d be fun to see who has energy and weekends to spend on one of the most splendid hobbies in the world.

9 to 5 IT programming guy myself, still struggling to comprehend (but having total max respect for you!) how anyone who is able to pull a LD comp entry off within the deadlines.