Wow, I’m pooped. XNA was like really weird. Please, enjoy! You might need a decent system to run this. It uses version 2.0 vertex and pixel shaders. Meow =^.^=
Download Windows Binary 6.8MB
Download Source 22.7MB
EDIT: You need the latest DirectX and XNA redistributable installed, even on Vista, or else it will crash! You can get DirectX here and XNA here.
Tags: final
Paramecium is a monocellular love story, in which the protagonist (you) must collect food vacuoles in order to replicate. You play on a team versus an a.i. opponent, and the first to collect enough vacuoles to replicate 25 times wins the round. Some of the game’s parameters are randomized at the start of each round, so it’s quite replayable.
Features artsy graphics, intuitive mouse control, and a looping ambient soundtrack.
Screenshots:
Download Paramecium Game and Source
Tags: alphablending, C++, directx, final, midwinter, monocellular, msvs, paramecium, proceduraltextures
It’s incomplete, but I’m uploading it anyway. It’s playable. Here’s a screenshot.
Please check the README.txt before playing.
Phew. I’m not very happy with my results on this LD48, but at least I uploaded something. Maybe next time I’ll do better…
http://www.divshare.com/download/3138890-95b
I will post a py2exe’d version soon.
Edit:
Windows Version: http://www.divshare.com/download/3139192-073
Edit: Try this one (Windows version) instead, with a README.txt that was missing: http://www.mediafire.com/?c9ma0gsxju4
Tags: final
Here’s my final entry for LudumDare 10:
This was my first LudumDare and I’m disappointed that I did not finish, but on the other hand I guess I’m also kinda surprised I got as far as I did. Most of the game logic and art is finished, but I didn’t have enough time left to add gameplay and polish stuff like a menu and highscore list. It is possible to run the game to see the artwork and play with the logic a bit (see doc/README for details).
My biggest mistake was spending 9 hours on trying to get A* graph search working (especially with about 2 years gone since the last time I touched that kind of stuff). Should have given up on that path and re-designed after 3 hours instead of 9 – then I might have had a playable entry.
I did learn a lot (and I am going to learn a lot in the coming weeks as I work to finish this game and to improve my library to make things easier for next time). It was fun in spite of the setback.
Here’s a screenshot from just before I started packaging it up for release:
Tags: final, incomplete
Space Chaos is a fairly standard space shooter, but with extra explosions, featuring 3 types of enemies and two deadly weapons.
Download – binaries for windows and linux + source.
imba game nice done sam!I’m done. Final post here.
The game’s name is Catalyst, as the game revolves around triggering a nuclear war. There’s not much to it. Its very basic – just a 2-player human vs human mode. Not to mention the fact that the gameplay is very broken – its easy to get into stupid stalemate scenarios and so on and most of the time feels pointless. BUT the nuke explosions are pretty! Wahey!
The chain reaction part of the game is the way that missile attacks trigger off counter-attacks against other nations who then attack other nations etc etc.
Tools used:
Here’s my final screenshot:
And here’s a link to download the game, complete with source:
Tags: final
Executable here and source here… wordpress didn’t like my .zip files. Not very complete, or fun, but you can kill enemies or lose. And you have a chain, which grows longer, and enemies react to it ^_^. Maybe I’ll have something good next time.
Edit: I used SFML, mainly for timing, random numbers and the OpenGL rendering window. All the graphics are drawn with opengl lines.
Tags: final
aka FreeRad
Whew gotta get this in!
3 level rushed release =/ more levels later!
found some free file hosting in the last minute, here’s the file:
http://www.mediafire.com/?20tipylt149
(Thanks Jach for offering ftp space)
more to come later, probably my next free day: Wednesday.
Edit: If the game gives an error message like “This application has failed to start because the application configuration is incorrect. Reinstalling the application may fix this problem.”, you may need to install the Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 redistributable package, which can be downloaded from:
here
Tags: final, screenshot
Unfortunately, I didn’t have as much time as I had hoped today, so I wasn’t able to finish the game. However, it is partly playable, so I’m sending it in anyway.
Link (exe and source): Duck.zip
(The source uses a modified version of TileMap.bmx, which I made last year and published on the Blitz site as a tutorial).
Tags: final
Inspiration for this game was this blog post, which somewhat explains the name.
The idea in the game is that you’re a casual games’ level designer and it’s your job to create levels for the game, in which the players can get the maximum score without really doing anything. Because the truth is that’s what most commercially successful casual games are like. Big rewards with minimum input from the player.
M3_ludumfinal.zip (2.3 Mb) (Windows binaries)
M3_source.zip (0.5 Mb) (Source code)
Drag the pieces around and click start. The colors will be destroyed as they touch each other. Try to go for the big multiple chains.
[space] – swaps between the editor and game.
[m] – toggles sounds.
Read more from game’s “homepage”…
Tags: final
It’s done and you can get it here. It may not work if you don’t have visual studio 2005 installed. If thats the case I’ll try and upload a working one asap.
Tags: final
First Ludum Dare entry! Whew… tiring.
Move using the arrow keys, X drops bombs, Z fires your gun. Avoid the aliens. Killing one will set of a chain reaction of bodily explosions!
Download (Windows only):
http://phuce.com/uploads/moonbase.zip
I wasn’t able to fully finish the game in time. I finally got an idea I liked on Saturday, after scrapping 3 others. Unfortunately, I spent too much time messing with graphics and AI and such and not actual gameplay. Case in point:
That took… a long, long time.
Anyway, at about 2 hours until deadline, I finally got the gameplay implemented, tested it… and it wasn’t fun.
So I bit the bullet and threw all the gameplay out except for these gluttons, which seemed to be the one thing that had potential. I managed to get health and a basic hud in during the last 10 minutes, but didn’t get scoring or menus or anything.
This is actually the first game I’ve ever released, and I’d never used Ruby or Gosu before for development, so I’m pretty happy with how it turned out even so.
Tags: final
The game is finally done, and just in time. I made some basic instructions when starting the game. I am sure everyone can figure out what each crate is and where to land for fuel xD. I dont know if this game will be fitting the theme very well, but I never programed in python and this is my first time using a physics library. Considering everything, I think the game is not bad. Hope whoever plays it has fun.
The game requires python 2.5, pygame, pyopengl, pyode. I will make a binary later on, but for now this is my final entry.
DOWNLOAD THE GAME 700KB
Tags: final
Tried to make a multiplayer matching game, but got hung up pissing with the javascript displaying. It’s a web based game.
Click Here To Play * Firefox Only
*can’t figure out how to add my source here. It’s available at: http://wardtek.ca/files/cascade.tar.gz
Tags: final
My humble entry: Vector Chain Attack! (pygame source 191kb)
I think only pygame is needed to play the game. Will try to make a py2exe executable too. Samiljan made one for me, can be found here (6.9mb).
Move about with ASWD, and shoot with the mouse. Hit the blue chain bits to start a chain reaction, or the red bits to whittle down the chain little by little.
Lots for me to learn this time, as I did not have much experience with Python or pygame before the competition.
I spent quite a few hours making my first music track too, so I hope you enjoy the SNES style music (the full 13 seconds of it!). Had lots of fun making it with DrPetters Musagi tracker. Before you go mad, press M to make it stop.
Tags: final
I know this post is after the deadline, but here’s the Windows version of my game. I hope it’s ok. See my other post for the Python source (the one with the final tag). Decided to post a new one instead of editing the other post to not risk losing any timestamps there…
Well, I ran out of time. =) This is not even the gameplay that I intended and it is not playable (unless you like to lose). I spent too much bloody time on collisions and missile trajectories, etc.. The “daleks” that you see in the screenshot were going to be gun turrets which you use to shoot down incoming missiles. If enough missiles hit the ground, the ground is destroyed and your tower plummets. I had other buildings and a point to the whole thing, but those were plans that had to be thrown out. 😉 I think with another hour to two hours, this could actually be playable, though not polished. My greatest regret is that I did not get a chance to rotate the missiles so that they point in their direction of travel.
Here is the zip. Download and run at your own boredom.
python source (64K) Needs pygame and pyopengl.
Edit: Uploaded new version with a .bat file that uses CRLF terminators.
Edit 2: Uploaded a non-zero length archive (for ‘archival’ purposes now that judging and whatnot is over). Not really sure how that happened in the first place.
Hmnn.. my ftp server is down ): Anyone keep to upload it somewhere for me? jwwhite at gmail dot com.
anyone else able to open it?This is my entry into the Ludum Dare competition for December 16th 2007. It comes with a Windows binary and the source code. It’s not quite a game. It’s more of a game engine or toy. The commands are the cursor keys to move your selector around, and ‘u’ for up, ‘d’ for down, ‘r’ for right, and ‘l’ for left.
The game is a setup as a grid. Each cell can have animals: elephants,dogs, cats, and mice. The idea was to set of chain reactions by placing certain animals or changing which direction an animal was facing. Currently you can only change the direction animals are facing. But the animals do have behaviors that you can exercise. Dogs will chase cats; cats will run if they can. Cats will chase mice. Elephants will stampede if they see a mouse, and charge in any given direction for a short burst. Another idea to add to the game would be to have items perhaps, e.g. peanuts, bones, catnip, and cheese to persuade the creatures to move into some alignment that is favorable.
Graphically, I was trying to go for a hand drawn animation look, with the flicker that inevitably results from little mistakes on the tracing. I think if I had put a kind of sketch-pad/notebook background behind it, and finessed it a little it might have made up for my crude artistic skills. I created each of the prototypical animals using the draw-vector program I made (included with the zip file).
I only managed to get out one level, and there’s no goal. So it’s still at toy status. My excuse was I was fighting with my environment for almost all of Friday just trying to get Windows binaries from CLISP. Once I had my environment working, doing remote development with SLIME had a bad behavior which nearly forced me to go to some other development kit mid Saturday. However, once I fixed my SLIME problem, it was actually pretty fun to write it in Lisp. Oh well, maybe next time I’ll have my environment ready before hand.
Anyway, it was great to try out the competition. It was a lot of fun and I learned a lot.
-Shane Celis
Tags: final
Some people are having trouble running the XNA games some of us built. If an XNA program crashes, it’s probably because you need to install the latest XNA and DirectX redistributable. These are not installed automatically. My game even crashed on an up-to-date install of Vista until I manually installed the latest DirectX.
I have updated my binary to include the DirectX and XNA redistributables.
BTW: To restart a level (if you mess up), stop the ball with the spacebar key, then click on the screen.
So, bugs found in my game so far:
– Something strange happening on some machines – game running slow as heck. Did try running in 800×600 windowed mode, turning blending off and background texture off, still slow. No idea why, as the game doesn’t really do anything special. I can debug this on my wife’s machine if I find the time / inspiration.. Could be related to AMD CPUs, ATI vid cards, or karma. Probably karma.
– EDIT: midi volume is way low on some systems, which is good or bad, and fmod seems to change system midi volume directly. Oops.
– Widescreen (as well as tallscreen) code, which I spent some time with, apparently not working correctly. Should leave black borders, but doesn’t. Duh. Run in windowed mode instead.
To run my game windowed, give it some parameter. Any parameter. -w for example.
For those possibly wanting to compile my game on different platforms, the following external libs are needed:
– GLee (for example from http://www.opengl.org/sdk/)
– SDL
– SDL_image
– FMOD (optional – game can be compiled without audio)
http://users.evtek.fi/~jarikom/ld10_mostentries.zip
EDIT: mirror: http://www.kekbur.se/ld10_mostentries.zip
EDIT: better package (more games): http://www.kekbur.se/ld10_most_games.zip
About 100 megs. Includes all the entries I could download easily, and does NOT include entries that have extra requirements (such as XNA, pygame, etc).
Consider this a kick-start package! It includes directories for all the entries, so make sure you go through all of the entries, not only the ones already included here.
P.s. the package won’t stay there forever.
EDIT: P.p.s: doesn’t include separate source packages either.
(Hm, got bored at work, so an extremely lengthy post-mortem following..)
LudumDare 10 entry “Lunte” by Allefant
I have yet to analyze the over 3GB worth of automatic screen caps, but I think I spent about a third of time each in IRC, coding, or working in Blender. Rather minor amounts of time were devoted to idea research, making sounds in SFXR and making music in LMMS.
In fact, my music is somewhat of cheating, as I used an existing melody, and further, an existing .mid file including 2 additional scores to the melody, cords (or whatever, I’m no musician) and percussion. What I did is just fiddle in LMMS to create and assign instruments.. I gave a high pitched square wave to the main melody, a piano to the cords, and since LMMS decided to simply lump the midi percussion notes into one channel, ignoring the MIDI assignment, some wooden sounding neutral percussion to that. As for in-game sounds, I used SFXR by DrPetter, which simply is incredible – in last LDs I was running an old SimSynth through Wine to get some poor sounds, now (also thanks to mjau) I have a native app with all those randomization features making sound generation much quicker.
Since sound is covered, next to graphics. My tools were Gimp and Blender. But most of the visible graphics are Blender renderings. I do know by now how to set up a simple “armature” to get stuff animated. I still have no idea what the difference between the three windows IPO/Action/NLA is and why some of them are empty some times and sometimes not. And very likely connected to that, I can’t figure out how to give separate animations to separate things (like, doing the feet animation independent of the head animation, in the same armature). With everything downscaled to 640×480 pixels, not many details were necessary anyway though.
One thing which proved somewhat challenging were shadows. I decided I want to have them separate – since two tree sprites next to each other looked somewhat odd otherwise. Suffice to say, I had to resort to Blender’s Python-scripting capabilities to have a script which fiddles with material parameters – for the non-shadow version, disabling the shadow, for the shadow version, setting all materials to “cast-only” and a special “shadow plane” to “only-shadow”. The result is, each of my graphics has two versions, the shadow and the rest.
The biggest challenge however was the explosions. I learned some about particles, soft-body and the deflection setting in Blender. One thing I wasted time on was when I tried to get the explosion to cast a shadow – Blender simply can’t to that (yet?) – particles can receive shadow, but not cast it.
Now, finally, to the code. I ended up not using pygame but my C-disguised-as-Python language and my custom library. Which for someone who wants to compile means, the following dependencies are required:
After that, it should be a matter of compiling all .c files in the “generated” folder and linking to those library. I provided the Makefile I used for cross-compiling the .exe.
The actual code I have written is all in the src directory, little more than 800 lines. I love the Python syntax for that, even though the code is rather hackish and there’s no comments, the forced indentation makes it still easy to follow. There’s nothing really special regarding the gameplay, it’s a rather simple puzzle game, done a 100 times. I made one huge list of all objects (santa, trees, bombs, wood), then pass it to the C qsort function to sort by layer and by y position, then draw it.
The challenging thing was the water/ice/snow layers. The straightforward idea was to first draw water, then where there is ice draw ice tiles, and finally snow tiles. It just would have meant, if there’s a snow tile at x/y, cut that tile out of the snow texture, and place to the screen. However, I wanted to use an alpha mask for the cutting out – but OpenGL 1.0 does not allow specifying a separate alpha channel. Which would have left me with some texture combine extension, or a fragment shader. I read up a bit on fragment shaders, but then finally went for a software solution, re-calculating the water animation with possibly ice and snow in front each time level geometry changes.
One thing I totally neglected was level design. The game I cloned apparently lived from the clever level design, giving you hours of puzzles. In my version, there are no real levels, basically just 13 tutorial/test screens. I guess I could try and find a ROM of the original then rip out the levels. Or try to create some challenging levels myself. In any case, when doing a puzzle game in an LD48, time for level creation must be factored in. It’s hard enough doing platformer levels in short time, but for a puzzle game it’s crucial.
In a way, not having the least bit of originality haunted me throughout the competition. I wish now I had thought more about my initial chain-of-lights on xmas tree idea (all the xmas setting is a remnant of it), then could have spent the time creating explosions and break-able terrain on implementing that idea instead.
Tags: post-mortem
Here is an exe and some dlls for my game if you use windows. You still need the data (graphics and levels) from the other archive though. Just put the contents of the two zip-files into the same directory.
Here’s the zip:
http://d.skalle.googlepages.com/ld10_final_exe.zip
If nobody gets any problems with this zip then I will probably make a new zip with the EXE, the datafiles and the source code together.
Tags: chain reaction, galectric, LD #10 - Chain Reaction - 2007, Windows
Hey, not sure if everyone noticed the edit to my last post, so I’m making a new post…
It appears that I missed a source file (.py) in my original zip, so I’ve updated the zip to include it. If you were having problems running the game in linux or OSX, please re-download and try again
Thanks for your patience.
Tags: oopsies
So just to give a bit of background behind the chemistry of my game, here’s the page I used for research:
http://www.pslc.ws/mactest/radical.htm
Basically, the creation of the material we know as vinyl is done by a chain reaction of monomers into polymers (polymerization) initiated by a free radical initiator.
If you have shockwave then this short video (from the above page) will demonstrate the process effectively:
http://www.pslc.ws/mactest/movies/peprop.htm
Tags: chemistry
One last thing that I forgot to add to the “tools used” list: I used a nifty little program called JSmooth to generate the windows executable to start the JVM. It just acts as a nice wrapper for java programs so that they can be started with a simple exe. I think it also tells you where to download the runtime if it doesn’t detect it. Pretty damn handy really.
X-Out and I were playing lerc’s game and he was having a problem solving one of the levels so I started to post a screenshot of the solution. He solved it before I could post but since I had already started I finished off solutions for all six puzzles.
Solutions are after the jump.
Level 1
Level 2
Level 3
Level 4
Level 5
Level 6
Making a high score list for my game.
High Scores:
1. Hello_Kitty – 2:36
2. lexaloffle – 2:31
3. BenW – 2:08
4. Samiljan – 2:05
5. Endurion – 1:59
6. Deepflame – 1:58
7. SteelGolem – 1:46
8. DrPetter – 1:44
9. sirmalloc – 1:43
10. midwinter – 1:32
Tags: scores
Finally I built a binary of the game with py2exe. I had trouble with pyopengl since it used a .egg file. I dont know how it was fixed, but Samiljan supplied me with a modified source code file for pyopengl and it works now. A few words to py2exe authors: include .egg support.
I was tempted to add game pad support, add sound and tweak the game play more. I dont think thats fair though =p
download – binary executable for windows
download – multi-platform source and art files
For everyone who was having issues with huge sound latencies in Windows, here’s an updated zip that should fix the issue:
The only changes in that zip from the compo version is that I rebuilt the executable without debug info and with optimization (no code changes), removed svn files to make the zip smaller, and replaced the buggy SDL.dll I was using with a good one from libsdl.org.
I’ll probably write a postmortem in a few days.
Like all games, mine gets a patch short after release. 😉
I was informed that level 5 was remarkably easy to solve and indeed it was, you didn’t need most of the level to do anything. Thus I minorly edited the level 5 file and uploaded my entry to my webspace again. However, I left my original version on the webserver as well, in case people want to play it with the possibly easy level 5. (It can still be difficult unless you see the easy way.)
Old-version: http://deepflame.deeplyswitched.com/ld48-10/CoA-Final.zip
Fixed-version: http://deepflame.deeplyswitched.com/ld48-10/CoA-Final-Fixed.zip
Do with it what you want. I hope level 5 is more challenging now.
– Deepflame
Since the music to my game, Space Reactions, has become a little bit popular, I figured I’d tab it out for any fellow guitar players here. I haven’t got a guitar in front of me right now, but I think this is pretty accurate. I’ll update this post if I find anything wrong with it 😉
---------------------------------------------------------
-------12~~~-----5/8\5~~-------12~~~---------------------
------------------------------------------7/9-----5/9----
----14---------7------------14----------9-------7--------
---------------------------------------------------------
-12----------5-----------12----------7--------5----------
Sounds good with some light distortion and little bit of tremolo. Enjoy!
Was experimenting with this, gtk-recordMyDesktop made it trivial to capture a window and even sound, shows me again how little gameplay there is, oh well:
Since Paramecium is a bit abstract, I hope this quick explanation can help you get into the swing of things:
The goal of the game is for one team to collect enough food vacuoles that they have 25 paramecia on their team. After collecting 6 vacuoles, a paramecium will split into 2 paramecia, and each of those will go on and collect food vacuoles and split, etc., until the team size reaches it’s goal.
The computer starts off with between 3 and 8 paramecia, where you start off with only one. This helps keep it challenging and interesting. Instead of just running around and collecting vacuoles, one has to make a strategy in order to replicate faster than the computer. For instance, if you eat an area to exhaustion, you may replicate lots, but those new paramecia won’t have much to eat… so you’re team won’t grow as quickly. You can also use this to your advantage if you follow the other team’s paramecia around… (although I’m in no way trying to promote paramecia competition… make paramecia love, not competition!)
The coloured markers at the top of the screen represent the score. The larger the marker (and more it turns), the more paramecia that team has. Once a team reaches 25 paramecia, a screen will come up to show which team has won (the coloured marker screen), and the game will reset with random parameters after a couple seconds.
… and to those who doubt it can be done, winning is tricky but not impossible:
well, i shoulda wrote this the day after, but whatever.
this was my first actual entry in a competition on the interwebs, ever. HAVE MERCY ON ME! actually i couldn’t really come up with anything decent that didn’t require a physics engine. i didn’t have one ready so i had to make do with what i had. which was nothing. not even kidding. i had jack squat.
actually one of the ideas that came to mind involved a spin on games like bust-a-move and snood and all those. it was a spaceship game where you had to get to the core of a circular space station by knocking off the hull. the hull would be made of different colored hexes or circles and you would shoot colored shots that would connect to it if it was the wrong color, or pop them all and possibly break off sections. i actually wanted to have an asteroid field of random collections of these blocks that you could tractorbeam and catapult at the station. you’d have a weapon you’d have to charge and blast the core with once you had an opening. hmm. that’s still a good idea. i didn’t need a physics engine for that. why didn’t i do that one?
anyways, i pretty much kicked back and took it easy for the entire one. had alot of family trouble keeping me from the project, too. wasn’t a pretty scene there.
so yeah. i’m sure i could have put more effort into the game, but it was a pretty crappy idea and i knew there wasn’t any substance to it. i saw it as one of the Dud entries, just there to fill out the ranks and to get my name out there. also, it was a chance to get some funnies in. i think i aughta score ok for that. got some giggles out of the gf, it did.
wrapping up, i’d say there’s no way i’m gonna beat out some of the other entries. they were looking super good and i knew i didn’t have a chance in hell. i had a blast though! good luck everyone!
The infection risk of the Crabs was depending on the CPU, now it’s constant for every CPU. The Game should now be much easier.
Furthermore the speed of the crabs is no more increased from level to level, because fast crabs are really hard to kill and move. The first level starts with a number of 50, the second with 100 and so on.
I updated the mouse controls and hope it is better now, soon I will include some Options, where the mouse sensitivity can be adjusted.
Please try it again, thanks for reporting the bugs.
Download TheCrawlyCrab_a.zip
Tags: update
Tags: 30min
My birthday is today, this image represents the fun of losing time you had..
Tech notes: This was an image to the 30 min graphics compo. No rules so I used an image I had the rights to. I also had to do R&D to the tool I used (GIMP). Didn’t have the time to buy Photoshop. I think they should award talent with free copies though..
Tags: 30min
Tags: 30min
Tags: 30min
After a long struggle to get it working, I finally have py2exe version of my game. This release also includes a bugfix to my library, which lets the game run on ATI hardware (the texture loader wasn’t enforcing power of two texture sizes).
Sorry it took so long, but I didn’t have much time to devote to LudumDare in the 2 days after the deadline and I had a really hard time getting PyOpenGL to work with py2exe (for details on how to make it work see my journal).
Here are links to the new release files:
GlobCombat 0.1.1 for Windows (6MB)
GlobCombat 0.1.1 for Linux (1.5MB)
Tags: final, incomplete, Windows
If you were having trouble running my final entry please download it again. I accidentally linked to a debug dll in the release version of my game. I have since fixed the problem and it should run on most peoples machines. I have also tested it under parallels with dx support and it runs fine. Finally I have not received any reports of it working under wine. If you manage to get it running under wine please let me know.
People reported being unable to download the file. I don’t know a good host, but I tried hosting it again somewhere else. If anyone would like to post this on a good host, I’d be grateful. This is the Windows version of the game (the source code is fairly small and the other link should work, but it requires Python and Pygame).
http://www.mediafire.com/?c9ma0gsxju4
Hope it works this time.
Another two problems are the lack of README.txt on the Windows version and the fact it’s written in a rush. I’m sorry about that; I was trying to get the game playable as soon as possible and ended up rushing everything. The above link has an improved README.txt and more in this post there is a copy of the “how to play” section of it for those who were already able to download it or are downloading the source.
I apologize for all the trouble.
How to play:
This is a turn-based two-player strategy game. One is the red player and the other is the blue player, identifiable by the color of their units. The objective of the game is to eliminate all the other player’s units.
Each unit has a different attack pattern. Everyone on their attack zones take damage when they attack, and the idea of the game is that an attack on an unit triggers it to attack, possibly creating a chain reaction of attacks (as in the theme).
The game is divided into turns, until all units of one side are destroyed. Each turn is divided into three phases.
At the beginning of the game, there is a special phase called the Setup phase. This is where you’ll put three initial units on the grid. [Each is meant to be able to put their units only in their “zones” (the bottom half and the upper half), but I had to implement playability first and I didn’t have time to make that.] The red does this once, then the blue does this once.
On other turns, this is called the Draw Phase. [Imagine an imaginary deck. ;)] It’s basically the same as the Setup Phase except you draw one random unit from a predetermined deck instead of three preset units.
The second phase is the Move Phase. You are able to move at most three of your units. To move them, just click on them and choose a blue square to go to. Press ‘e’ [or the imaginary “Done” button] to end the phase if you don’t want to use all three moves. Also, moving your mouse above a unit shows you their attack zone, which are the tiles on the grid on which units standing on them are damaged when it attacks. In this phase, you can also change an unit’s facing with no cost. The only thing an unit’s facing affects is the unit’s attack pattern (for example, a spearman can attack 2 squares north, 2 squares east, 2 squares west, 2 squares south depending on its facing). Each player does this once.
The third phase is the Attack Phase. In this phase, each player chooses one unit to attack, and they’ll attack. Their attacks may trigger other attacks, and so on.
[I know the attacks go too fast – sorry about that. And the attack graphics are placeholder graphics, except for the spearman.]
This doesn’t really have anything to do with the competition, but I thought I’d let you guys know. Thanks to Hamumu’s suggestions I made a quick update to my entry M3 – Molesting the Match-3 Market.
The most drastic change is in the way the checking for matches works in the game. Now the game lets everything fall down first and then checks for matches (as suggested by Hamumu). I also changed the colors of the blocks so that the contrasts between them is higher now.
You can download the new version from here: M3_release2.zip (2.3 Mb) (Release 2).
Tags: update
I’ve changed the font-rendering in my game as to avoid GLUT and letting me build a working package you guys can run.
Nothing even remotely related to gameplay has been changed, only font rendering is different.
Here it is: PewPew Laz0r
And here’s an uptaded source version
Still a bug in the controls, I will try to fix it, update soon.
It’s still early, but it’s usable. Get ready for sfxrVst.
Windows (32bit): sfxrVst – pre release 0.2
Any feedback, confirmations that it works with your host would be appreciated.
Notes:
History:
Windows (All notes same Freq): sfxrVst – pre release 0.1
Tags: tools
Well, not much to say about this entry … I used pygame which was a good choice as usual. I broke my level into MVC components, which really didn’t matter much, but it was interesting to do. (I’ve usually done my games as just a single blob.) It didn’t take any more or less time to do, so I guess I might as well do it, since it makes enhancing a game that much easier. (Galcon is just one big blob and it’s somewhat painful to work with sometimes.)
The gameplay was the first okay idea I had. I think half the fun is not playing the game, but messing around with making a million fuses go. Originally I had it so you could set up your fuses and then light them yourself, but the gameplay seemed pretty slow. I made the fuse auto-light to give it a more arcade feel, which I think worked. However, the gameplay isn’t really “great” but I think it’s passable.
I had most of my fun drawing the backgrounds for the game. I figured since the gameplay wasn’t the strong point I’d go for broke on art. However, I’ve been in a bad mood about python+C integration the last few weeks so I didn’t feel like writing a particle engine in C, so my explosions ended up being really sorry. I wish I understood blender so I could render stuff with that, but I don’t use it often enough to retain memory of how to use such a crazy interface.
My sound is usually a pretty strong point. This time it was a bit weak, I just cranked out a chord progression. I had some intentions of adding in a viola track over that, but didn’t feel like it. The sfx were made with SFXr of course. Really cool tool! It saved me the bother of recording my handmade effects, which since I was feeling lazy was good. I prefer to make my own, but it was nice not to have to this time.
Anyway, that’s about it. Hope you had fun with the game.
Tags: post-mortem
ok, so maybe I’m a bit late to the party, but here’s a quick post mortem for my ld10 entry. I had limited internet access for this one, and missed being able to hang out on IRC and see what everyone was up to as things progressed, but it’s been great reading the blog posts retrospectively.
:: Design
The compo started at 4pm Saturday for me (New Zealand). I got home around 6pm, completely not intending to enter, but when I saw the theme was chain reactions I caved. I spent most of Saturday evening thinking about game ideas. The main contenders were:
The last one was by far the easiest to visualise, and to know that somehow it would turn out to be fun without oo much messing around. And when I saw that Dr. Petter didn’t have platformers covered for once, it was a no-brainer. :p
:: Tools
This is my 4th entry, and I’ve used the same tools each time:
sdl, sdl-mixer, bcc55, mspaint, gimp. Also this time, sfxr.
:: Implementation
The first step is always to get a black screen which responds to keypresses. I hate that part. I cheated a little this time, by copying snippets of code out of a past entry (sprout) to get the sdl initialisation and keypress code working. Knowing I did this is a tiny lead weight which my soul will carry forever.
Next up was running around a test map. I love this part. It doesn’t take much to get a guy running around 2d blocky landscape, but it’s instantly satisfying to start leaping around and exploring the limits of the world. I spent a lot of time tweaking the physics until it had a good feel to it.
The whole time I was doing this, I was imagining how the fireworks might work. I knew how the sparklers and rockets would be, and they took very little time to draw and code. The roman candles I wasn’t so sure about, and I ended up spending 5x as much time on them. Writing code and drawing gfx doesn’t seem to be the bottleneck — it’s just deciding exactly how things should look and behave.
I had just moved back from overseas when I did this compo, and in the midst of daylight savings confusion and lack of internet connectivity, thought I was finishing at 3pm instead of 4. I realised my mistake quite close to finishing, and was very happy to have the extra hour. I didn’t leave enough time for the vital task of designing maps, but was still able to try out what I imagined to be the defining moment of the game – being chased down a corridor of exploding crates.
I did the sound in about 5 minutes with sfxr. I would formally like to donate my audio points to Dr. Petter for that one. I just grabbed the first 5 randomised explosion sounds that came out.
:: What Went Right
:: What Went Wrong
:: The Fucha
The problem with making 48h games is that I alway want to spend more time brushing up my entry and re-releasing it. Splode is no exception — I’m thinking to make a nicer 10-level arcadey version with online scores and recording at some stage. I’ll post here when it happens.
Controls should be fixed.
I have added some options:
-choose between window and full screen mode
-choose mouse sensitivity
-choose crab speed
Download: TheCrawlyCrab_b.zip
What Went Right
1. Not giving up
Above all else, the most important thing that went right was the fact that I didn’t give up. After reading the theme I thought about it for a few hours before starting to work, and figured it would end up being a puzzle game (not much unlike a bunch of entries ended up).
However, puzzle games require lots of well-designed levels to be fun, and I was pretty sure that I couldn’t manage that in the time frame. There were several moments during the contest where I was asking myself why am I doing this, this is not going to be fun, but pressed onwards anyway, and the end result (after changing from pure puzzle game to something between a puzzle and a shmup) is pretty neat.
This is also the first time I’ve felt like continuing development on an LD entry right after the contest =).
2. Pseudo-random level generation
At first I had totally random levels, but they were, quite frankly, boring. I ended up writing a bunch of different level-generation algorithms (looped square, circles, grid, spiral), which then were fed some pseudorandom values with increasing number of partycles as the levels progressed. I think the first 25 levels or so are surprisingly good with this design.. after that we’re well into the bullet hell territory, and levels were turning pretty similar.
One thing that happened almost by accident is the fact that different levels require different kinds of gameplay – some are “almost” pure puzzles, some are “almost” pure shootemups, and of course the frantic bullet hell levels later on.
3. Time management
I managed to go to dog school, take the dogs out six times, take a shower, do some christmas shopping, sleep well over 8 hours in the middle, watch a movie, etc. and still submitted the final entry 9 hours before the contest end time.
4. Sfx(r)
One thing I’ve really improved upon in LD entries is the sound effects. Sure, I used the (amazing!) sfxr tool as basis this time, but also recorded (with a crappy webcam mic) and mixed some sounds. I used fractal music generator for the music again, which, while not good, is better than nothing.
5. Graphics
I think the graphics turned out pretty good this time, the little there is.
What Went Wrong
1. Bugs
A few bugs which I could have found (and possibly fixed) during the last 9 hours of the compo were left in. Widescreen monitor support, which I actually spent some time on, is broken. Midi music volume works differently than I expected, ending up changing the system midi volume(!), and third, some PCs, more-or-less-happily including my wife’s, are slow. As in 2fps slow.
I’ve solved the first and have been trying to figure the last for the past week or so. It appears that the rendering drops into software on my wife’s PC for some reason that I haven’t been able to figure out yet.
2. Tons of other stuff to do
Having this kind of contest in the middle of the holiday panic isn’t the best possible time =)
3. Tuning
Another thing where I could have used more time on; more level generation algorithms and/or hand-designed levels, slowing down the “normal” bullets from partycles, different kind of partycles that would lead to different kinds of puzzles.. etc. We’ll see if the game is popular, I might spend some time developing it further.
4. Code re-use, or lack thereof
I realized, while doing this contest entry, that I’ve probably written a bazillion font printers. Thus, I started working on a basecode set which includes most of the stuff I’m doing over and over and over again to be ready for the next LD.
5. Post-LD Exhaustion Syndrome
Returning to work and working on the multi-million line projects which move forward at glacial speeds after making a whole game in a weekend.. well, you probably know how that feels =)
This was my first ludum dare ever so I didn’t really know what to expect of it. Also it’s my second little-time-internet-game-compo ever, the first one the last pyweek. I think it was my 3rd or 4th game I’ver ever made, but I’ve programmed other stuff before so it’s not all new to me. All that considered I do have some things I wished I could have done better..
Bad things (in no particular order):
Some good things:
That’s pretty much it. I really loved doing this, it was great fun and you are all nice people. I will be back next time, hopefully coming up with something better.
Oh, deskphoto! It’s a bit late, but better late than never. (Beware of dust)
Tags: deskphoto, post-mortem
Here is some longoverdue documentation for the Windows version. I only realized yesterday that the README file was not included in the Windows release (and even it was, it would have been unreadable due to different end-of-line conventions between Linux and Windows).
To save everybody from having to download the 6MB package again, I am just posting a separate README.TXT.
Just to highlight it, you can create new globs on the right hand side of the screen by pressing NUMPAD 1 – NUMPAD 4 the elemental type of the summoned glob corresponds to the order of the runes on the control panel, so NUMPAD 1 summons a Water glob, NUMPAD 3 summons a Fire glob. If the game was finished globs would rush at you in pre-configured waves, but I didn’t get that far.
In addition, here is a screenshot showing the relationships between the 4 elements:
Red lines indicate how runes (and once implemented, globs) are activated by different elements. If an Air glob walks onto a Fire rune, a fire reaction will ensue. If an Air rune is triggered by a Water glob and there is a Fire rune in the area of effect of the resulting Air reaction, the Fire rune will be triggered by the Air reaction.
The green arrows shows against which elements globs are resistant. Air cannot harm Earth and vice versa. Water cannot be harmed by Fire, but Fire can be harmed by Water.
A post-compo version of my entry is here.
Changes are:
oops i forgot to put this in.
Graphics:
– Paint.net > you can’t get alpha chan stuff with mspain. also the wand tool and multiple layers are super handy.
Sound:
– sfxr > drpetter’s sound maker i think is pretty much what everyone used, but i only used it for a couple of my wavs.
– wavepad > i really love this program. i did my recording and remixing in this.
Code:
– visual c# 2005 express > does-it-all-for-me coding and debugging tool LAWD i love this thing
Notepad:
– oh wait i didn’t write a readme AAGGGHHHH NO POINTS FOR ME
anyways thats it
Tags: ld10 tools
Like others I forgot about this.
I used Gimp andPython IDLE.
That’s it except for Mozilla for nav/chatting 😉
Have a look at this nice chain reaction at YouTube: TheCrawlyCrab.avi
I guess people are posting tools lists… so I shall join in!
I used MSVC 6 (yes, 6! Not 2006 or whatever), The Gimp, and SFXr. Chatzilla for a whole lot of IRC action. Probably Notepad for the readme. The library I used was PTK for graphics, input, and sound. I made the font with Bitmap Font Builder. I tried to use Musagi to make music, but failed.
And that’s that!
Tools of power:
All in all, a good combo. Next compo I need to get over my angst against python-c integration and go back to SWIG or something (like I used in Galcon to get the swarms and effects)
Tags: tools
Tools I used!
I intend to post a follow up as soon as my family visit settles down a bit. If I could do it differently I’d probably pick a different graphics program that works on Linux As it was I had to transfer graphics from my laptop to my desktop. And, as I mentioned above, I wasn’t happy with Komodo Edit.
Graphics – MS Paint
Sound – SFXR by DrPetter
Music – Reaper mostly, but the music didn’t make it into the game
Coding – Mostly Python IDLE IDE
Libraries – Python and Pygame
it was a fun competition!
Next time I won’t wait until the second day to start, I underestimated how long it would take to implement my game and I ran out of time.
This entry was posted on Monday, December 24th, 2007 at 1:42 pm and is filed under LD #10 - Chain Reaction - 2007. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Didn’t know about this.
GFX – Gimp
Language – Python/Pygame
Sound – Didn’t have anny
Developer – Gedit (I started with DrPython, but quickly got frustrated with it).
Well, not exactly, where do you download py2exe, and how is it run?
Anyways there is aa little story to the game, but, I never released it, also I did make the laser move towards in the last few mins before I uploaded it, but, it was so buggy, I removed it.
The story is as follows:
Youare a cycling maniac, you always knew one day it would get you into trouble, and it did, you got trapped between two pillows (Iwas going to make the pillow further back and stop you moving past it), and a laser was there to, if you hit the laser at a low speed your chain would react to the laser, weakening it, aka, making you lose a life.
If you went quickly past the laser, it would react differently, giving you back your life.
You had to see how long you can last without dieing, it’ll be a challenge with an always moving laser!
And who is shooting the laser at you?
Aliens from outer space. 😀
Also in LD11, I’m planning on using C++ is that recommended?
Now before everyone’s going into hibernation again here’s a small Post Mortem for Chain Reaction.
First i was not sure i was actually going to enter. I’ve partitiated in a few Ludum Dare’s before, but usually only when i could really use the full time. This year round that was not the case. I didn’t even reserve some extra timeout from the family.
Still, once the theme was up i couldn’t help it. I strived for a rather simple game (simple as in simple to make) since any greater planning would go down the drain anyway. I’m rather glad how it worked out. My entry is not particularely innovative but things fell into place pretty nicely.
What went right:
This is actually the most important part for these kind of competitions. If you have a flaw in your gameplay design you still have time to refine it. It’s no use having nice technical gimmicks all around when the gameplay is crap.
If a game is level based it’s one of the rather convenient things to have. Sure, with the given time nothing stops you to hardcode level data or even store it in some text file. Once you have an editor you can churn out levels at an alarming rate. And it’s a nice polish plus for the final version.
Usually one of my bad points. It’s easy to use a microphone and grunt/hiss/snarl some stuff but it also sounds exactly that way. DrPetters tool is a most awesome help as you can experiment and modify in just a few clicks.
What went wrong:
Not thinking too much about what to do i was glancing over the first shots of the other competitors. Lerc’s shot looked very nice and i thought about these circles being bombs. I’m glad that the gameplay came out very different though.
Tags: chain reaction, Detonator, Endurion, LD #10 - Chain Reaction - 2007, post-mortem
yes, its a whiteboard. no, its not especially exciting. but! if it weren’t for LD10 and lerc’s youtube of his room, i never would have realized I NEEDED IT SO BAD IT HURT. so i wound up getting it as a gift from my folks.
this is the result of a chain reaction caused by a simple competition. a chain reaction of LOVE. thank you, everyone in the LD community! happy holidays to all of ya!
Tags: LD #10 - Chain Reaction - 2007, lerc, whiteboard, xmas, xmas07
for anyone who wants to keep tabs on me, stalkers and lurkers included, head over to:
http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/mod/journal/journal.asp?jn=270089
hopefully i’ll be back for more LD madness if there’s a number 11.
I tried writing a post up in this thing but It kept on trying to eat it so I put my post-mortem here
Tags: postmortem
I tried writing a post up in this thing but It kept on trying to eat it so I put my post-mortem here
Tags: postmortem
I had to close proactiveapathy.com. So you’ll probably have trouble downloading my stuff until I find alternate hosting.
Edit: Mirror
This was my fifth Ludum Dare (including 8.5). Before this compo I went through all my previous LD entries and wrote some small post-mortems for them, and looking back, I’ve never been particularly good at handing in finished entries for these compos. I think maybe the first one I entered (7) resulted in the most complete game. That one (which I named Pathmania: Way of the Jelly for some reason, I think it was supposed to be some obscure joke) left a few things to be desired, but it had a title screen, several levels, a random level generator and even a level editor! Shrapnel has one thing it didn’t have, though: Sound =)
Libraries and tools
I used the SDL, SDL_image and SDL_mixer libraries (which in turn uses some libs for decoding png and ogg vorbis), the rest was written from scratch during the compo. All work was done in Linux, using the KDE desktop with 4 virtual desktops. Tools I used was:
Other things:
General
I had those previous half-finished entries I mentioned in mind as I started out, and simplified a few things right away. For example, I’ve traditionally used libpng directly for loading images in stead of simply using SDL_image. There’s a few reasons for this, but most of them have usually been irrelevant for my LD entries anyway, and SDL_image is a lot quicker to use than libpng. You just call one function to load your SDL_Surface from a file and that’s it.
So for this compo, I did what I should’ve done all along and went the quick and simple way, using the SDL, SDL_image and SDL_mixer libs. I think that worked out well, it took almost no time at all to set up the traditional black window with an event loop, and some image loading capabilities for good measure. I added sound later on, which was also very quick and simple. I still made the game in plain C, but I did some header magic to autogenerate loading and unloading code for resources, setting defines and including the header several times in the file that should get the handling code. This way I didn’t have to worry about either spreading things out in several places or making some fancy resource management system, just put the resource IDs and filenames in one place, and the resource is instantly available for use with that ID. I’ve done similar things in some earlier LDs, and while the headers can look a bit hairy it works really well =)
The result: Less fiddling with technical fluff, more time to work on the actual game. This was a very good thing, since I worked horribly slow and inefficiently during the entire compo and could use all the time I got. I also had major trouble getting to sleep during the compo, which didn’t exactly help (that happens sometimes, compo or not .. I’ve tried several variants of sleeping pills before, but none actually work on me for some reason). So, I ended up wasting more hours just lying in bed trying to sleep, during the night, than I spent actually sleeping, which ended up being during the day. Ugh.
I also spent some time porting DrPetter’s sfxr tool to SDL and Linux, since the Windows version had some issues when I ran it in Wine, and I was determined that for this Ludum Dare, I would have sound in my game or die trying. The porting work was done entirely during the compo, so that “wasted” some time too, though I don’t really see that as a waste of time since I ended up using the port to make some really nice sounds that I feel add a lot to the game. Similarly, the time I actually spent sleeping, eating and going outside for some air was time well spent, I doubt locking myself in the room for a 48 hour marathon would’ve resulted in a better game. On the other hand I could’ve really used some of that time to make more and better levels. The short and crappy levels are, I think, Shrapnel’s most major flaw.
What went right
Well, I made a playable game, and I think it’s kinda fun despite its many flaws =)
The food I ate during the compo was great, probably the best I’ve had during a Ludum Dare so far. One of my flatmates made us lots of delicious food =)
I kinda like the graphics, too. It’s not amazing by any means, and the ship designs are perhaps somewhat uninspired standard fare, but at least they’re not plain ugly =). The graphics was made in Gimp with my tablet. Before the compo started I had some serious issues with the tablet in Gimp, so I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to use it. Gimp would freeze, crash, make all tools behave like the “move layer” tool, and generally misbehave in any number of ways. Thankfully these issues magically disappeared the day before the compo started when I compiled GTK and Gimp from source and installed that in stead of using the distro’s packages.
The sound effects are great, which I have DrPetter’s sfxr tool to thank for. The time spent porting it to SDL was time well spent in that regard =)
I also like the music, which I made with pxtone (pxtone works well in Wine as long as you touch .ptcop files before saving them, since only overwrite works). I was equally determined to get some music in the game as I was about the sound in general, but initially I didn’t have any musical inspiration at all. I tried to make some tunes, but everything I did sounded like crap (specially since I don’t really know any musical theory, it can be a bit hit or miss). I was ready to give up and continue making the game — this was during the last hours of the compo, there wasn’t much time left and I really should be spending time on more important things than trying to make music — and even switched over to the code desktop, ready to do some coding again, when the whole tune suddenly popped into my mind out of nowhere. So, I switched back to pxtone and, according to the timelapse images I’ve got of my desktop, the primary and secondary voice was basically complete in literally three minutes for the first half, four more for the second half, note for note what you hear in the final tune apart from some minor tweaks I did later. That includes time for listening to it a bunch. It was so weird! I did spend some more time with it later, added the drums and such (and made the ingame background thing), but the whole thing was done pretty quickly. Most of what you can see of the pxtone window in the timelapse video (below) is actually rejected tunes, listening to it, and doing and undoing small insignificant tweaks =)
What went wrong
I already mentioned a bunch under General, so I’ll skip that here.
By far the two biggest complaints I’ve seen about my game in the comments have been that the game is too short, and that there’s not much connection to the chain reaction theme, and both of those are really at least partly because of the levels, or lack of, and their design. Actually calling it “level design” is a bit of a stretch since I didn’t really put much thought into their design at all, there wasn’t enough time. They were literally thrown together at the last minute. For the next compo I really need to set off some time for level design, or make some game where level design isn’t so important.
There really are chain reactions in the game, I made the game with the idea in mind from the start — when you kill enemies, they send out shots that kill any other enemies they hit (or you!), which again sends shots when they die to kill yet more enemies, and so on — it’s just not very apparent that they’re there since the level design I mentioned doesn’t really take advantage of the fact at all, except perhaps for this one place. So, there’s not often you actually see chain reactions happening unless you’re both lucky and work really hard at making some. Originally I wanted to have a bit more advanced enemy behavior too, with them floating around the screen for a while before going on, going both left and right and upwards in addition to just down, so that you had to choose both where and when to shoot to make the most chain reactions possible. I’m sorry I didn’t get around to that, because I think that that would definitely have been a much better game. However, that would also have required good level design, and even with the current enemies I think that some decent level design, levels to really set up potential chain reactions, could have had an impact.
Also, the scoring system could use some work perhaps, but the effect the chain reactions have on the score isn’t really obvious in any case (see next section). There should have been some visual feedback when combos happen and such, or at least a mention in the readme in the slim chance that someone should happen to read it.
There’s also a few bugs that slipped through. The most apparent one is probably that the last level sometimes ends before you get a chance to kill the last few enemies, so you win the game with enemies still firing shots at you =). Another bug is that the Alt test when pressing Alt-Enter for fullscreen doesn’t actually work, so you go into fullscreen just by pressing Enter without Alt. Maybe that’s a good thing though, since the fullscreen toggle is undocumented and it’s easier for people to accidentally discover it that way =)
Another undocumented feature is the joystick support. I wonder if someone used it?
Last words
Overall, I think I’m going to call the game at least a partial success. I didn’t get done nearly as much as I wanted to or even could have had I been more efficient, and the levels are a huge detractor, but it’s still kinda fun to play, and I like it =)
By the way, it actually is possible to take advantage of the chain reactions for higher scores if you’re just aware of the scoring system =). I think my record is around 11800 or so.
First, you lose one point for every shot you fire, so if you want high scores it’s in your best interest to not just keep firing, but choose somewhat more carefully where and when to fire.. like a bleak shadow of the original intent with the smarter enemies, heh. You only score 1x the points for each enemy you kill yourself, but enemies killed by the death fire of other enemies get a combo multiplier — 2x for the first one, 3x for the next, and so on. Score is also multiplied by the current level number.
Or, if scoring’s not your thing, you can also try to beat the game by not firing a single shot =)
Timelapse
Finally, here’s a timelapse video of my desktop during the compo. I turned off the computer when I went to sleep, since it’s a bit noisy and is in the same room as my bed, so it’s broken into three parts. I use four virtual desktops, you can see which one I’m in in the little indicator at the taskbar if you look closely. During the compo I used the top left mostly for code (kate), top right for graphics (gimp), bottom left for IRC (xchat2) and internet (firefox), and bottom right for sound (sfxr) and music (pxtone) and sfxr porting =) (except for day one, when sfxr porting was done in the top left desktop).
There’s one screenshot for every 30 seconds at 30 fps. I used scrot in a shell script loop to take the screenshots in the background during the compo, and then mencoder to combine them into this video.
Hm, looking at this I seem to be doing a lot more work than I actually did. Like I said, inefficient..
Tags: post-mortem, shrapnel, timelapse, tools
This was my fifth Ludum Dare (including 8.5). Before this compo I went through all my previous LD entries and wrote some small post-mortems for them, and looking back, I’ve never been particularly good at handing in finished entries for these compos. I think maybe the first one I entered (7) resulted in the most complete game. That one (which I named Pathmania: Way of the Jelly for some reason, I think it was supposed to be some obscure joke) left a few things to be desired, but it had a title screen, several levels, a random level generator and even a level editor! Shrapnel has one thing it didn’t have, though: Sound =)
Libraries and tools
I used the SDL, SDL_image and SDL_mixer libraries (which in turn uses some libs for decoding png and ogg vorbis), the rest was written from scratch during the compo. All work was done in Linux, using the KDE desktop with 4 virtual desktops. Tools I used was:
Other things:
General
I had those previous half-finished entries I mentioned in mind as I started out, and simplified a few things right away. For example, I’ve traditionally used libpng directly for loading images in stead of simply using SDL_image. There’s a few reasons for this, but most of them have usually been irrelevant for my LD entries anyway, and SDL_image is a lot quicker to use than libpng. You just call one function to load your SDL_Surface from a file and that’s it.
So for this compo, I did what I should’ve done all along and went the quick and simple way, using the SDL, SDL_image and SDL_mixer libs. I think that worked out well, it took almost no time at all to set up the traditional black window with an event loop, and some image loading capabilities for good measure. I added sound later on, which was also very quick and simple. I still made the game in plain C, but I did some header magic to autogenerate loading and unloading code for resources, setting defines and including the header several times in the file that should get the handling code. This way I didn’t have to worry about either spreading things out in several places or making some fancy resource management system, just put the resource IDs and filenames in one place, and the resource is instantly available for use with that ID. I’ve done similar things in some earlier LDs, and while the headers can look a bit hairy it works really well =)
The result: Less fiddling with technical fluff, more time to work on the actual game. This was a very good thing, since I worked horribly slow and inefficiently during the entire compo and could use all the time I got. I also had major trouble getting to sleep during the compo, which didn’t exactly help (that happens sometimes, compo or not .. I’ve tried several variants of sleeping pills before, but none actually work on me for some reason). So, I ended up wasting more hours just lying in bed trying to sleep, during the night, than I spent actually sleeping, which ended up being during the day. Ugh.
I also spent some time porting DrPetter’s sfxr tool to SDL and Linux, since the Windows version had some issues when I ran it in Wine, and I was determined that for this Ludum Dare, I would have sound in my game or die trying. The porting work was done entirely during the compo, so that “wasted” some time too, though I don’t really see that as a waste of time since I ended up using the port to make some really nice sounds that I feel add a lot to the game. Similarly, the time I actually spent sleeping, eating and going outside for some air was time well spent, I doubt locking myself in the room for a 48 hour marathon would’ve resulted in a better game. On the other hand I could’ve really used some of that time to make more and better levels. The short and crappy levels are, I think, Shrapnel’s most major flaw.
What went right
Well, I made a playable game, and I think it’s kinda fun despite its many flaws =)
The food I ate during the compo was great, probably the best I’ve had during a Ludum Dare so far. One of my flatmates made us lots of delicious food =)
I kinda like the graphics, too. It’s not amazing by any means, and the ship designs are perhaps somewhat uninspired standard fare, but at least they’re not plain ugly =). The graphics was made in Gimp with my tablet. Before the compo started I had some serious issues with the tablet in Gimp, so I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to use it. Gimp would freeze, crash, make all tools behave like the “move layer” tool, and generally misbehave in any number of ways. Thankfully these issues magically disappeared the day before the compo started when I compiled GTK and Gimp from source and installed that in stead of using the distro’s packages.
The sound effects are great, which I have DrPetter’s sfxr tool to thank for. The time spent porting it to SDL was time well spent in that regard =)
I also like the music, which I made with pxtone (pxtone works well in Wine as long as you touch .ptcop files before saving them, since only overwrite works). I was equally determined to get some music in the game as I was about the sound in general, but initially I didn’t have any musical inspiration at all. I tried to make some tunes, but everything I did sounded like crap (specially since I don’t really know any musical theory, it can be a bit hit or miss). I was ready to give up and continue making the game — this was during the last hours of the compo, there wasn’t much time left and I really should be spending time on more important things than trying to make music — and even switched over to the code desktop, ready to do some coding again, when the whole tune suddenly popped into my mind out of nowhere. So, I switched back to pxtone and, according to the timelapse images I’ve got of my desktop, the primary and secondary voice was basically complete in literally three minutes for the first half, four more for the second half, note for note what you hear in the final tune apart from some minor tweaks I did later. That includes time for listening to it a bunch. It was so weird! I did spend some more time with it later, added the drums and such (and made the ingame background thing), but the whole thing was done pretty quickly. Most of what you can see of the pxtone window in the timelapse video (below) is actually rejected tunes, listening to it, and doing and undoing small insignificant tweaks =)
What went wrong
I already mentioned a bunch under General, so I’ll skip that here.
By far the two biggest complaints I’ve seen about my game in the comments have been that the game is too short, and that there’s not much connection to the chain reaction theme, and both of those are really at least partly because of the levels, or lack of, and their design. Actually calling it “level design” is a bit of a stretch since I didn’t really put much thought into their design at all, there wasn’t enough time. They were literally thrown together at the last minute. For the next compo I really need to set off some time for level design, or make some game where level design isn’t so important.
There really are chain reactions in the game, I made the game with the idea in mind from the start — when you kill enemies, they send out shots that kill any other enemies they hit (or you!), which again sends shots when they die to kill yet more enemies, and so on — it’s just not very apparent that they’re there since the level design I mentioned doesn’t really take advantage of the fact at all, except perhaps for this one place. So, there’s not often you actually see chain reactions happening unless you’re both lucky and work really hard at making some. Originally I wanted to have a bit more advanced enemy behavior too, with them floating around the screen for a while before going on, going both left and right and upwards in addition to just down, so that you had to choose both where and when to shoot to make the most chain reactions possible. I’m sorry I didn’t get around to that, because I think that that would definitely have been a much better game. However, that would also have required good level design, and even with the current enemies I think that some decent level design, levels to really set up potential chain reactions, could have had an impact.
Also, the scoring system could use some work perhaps, but the effect the chain reactions have on the score isn’t really obvious in any case (see next section). There should have been some visual feedback when combos happen and such, or at least a mention in the readme in the slim chance that someone should happen to read it.
There’s also a few bugs that slipped through. The most apparent one is probably that the last level sometimes ends before you get a chance to kill the last few enemies, so you win the game with enemies still firing shots at you =). Another bug is that the Alt test when pressing Alt-Enter for fullscreen doesn’t actually work, so you go into fullscreen just by pressing Enter without Alt. Maybe that’s a good thing though, since the fullscreen toggle is undocumented and it’s easier for people to accidentally discover it that way =)
Another undocumented feature is the joystick support. I wonder if someone used it?
Last words
Overall, I think I’m going to call the game at least a partial success. I didn’t get done nearly as much as I wanted to or even could have had I been more efficient, and the levels are a huge detractor, but it’s still kinda fun to play, and I like it =)
By the way, it actually is possible to take advantage of the chain reactions for higher scores if you’re just aware of the scoring system =). I think my record is around 11800 or so.
First, you lose one point for every shot you fire, so if you want high scores it’s in your best interest to not just keep firing, but choose somewhat more carefully where and when to fire.. like a bleak shadow of the original intent with the smarter enemies, heh. You only score 1x the points for each enemy you kill yourself, but enemies killed by the death fire of other enemies get a combo multiplier — 2x for the first one, 3x for the next, and so on. Score is also multiplied by the current level number.
Or, if scoring’s not your thing, you can also try to beat the game by not firing a single shot =)
Timelapse
Finally, here’s a timelapse video of my desktop during the compo. I turned off the computer when I went to sleep, since it’s a bit noisy and is in the same room as my bed, so it’s broken into three parts. I use four virtual desktops, you can see which one I’m in in the little indicator at the taskbar if you look closely. During the compo I used the top left mostly for code (kate), top right for graphics (gimp), bottom left for IRC (xchat2) and internet (firefox), and bottom right for sound (sfxr) and music (pxtone) and sfxr porting =) (except for day one, when sfxr porting was done in the top left desktop).
There’s one screenshot for every 30 seconds at 30 fps. I used scrot in a shell script loop to take the screenshots in the background during the compo, and then mencoder to combine them into this video.
Hm, looking at this I seem to be doing a lot more work than I actually did. Like I said, inefficient..
Tags: post-mortem, shrapnel, timelapse, tools
What went wrong
A lot of these stuff are related to the physics engine and my lack of experience with them.
What went right
Porting
So I decided to try to port the game away from xna, to OpenGL, so that more people can play it. The rendering part went fine. But then the physics lib stabbed me in the back again. It uses the xna lib. So I dug out a version that did not. But I failed again. It turns out that that lib also is xna dependent. So I tried to get the source code and remove all dependencies. But failed to grab the source. Not much energy left to de-xna it.
Tags: heli, HeliChain, physics, post-mortem
What went wrong
A lot of these stuff are related to the physics engine and my lack of experience with them.
What went right
Porting
So I decided to try to port the game away from xna, to OpenGL, so that more people can play it. The rendering part went fine. But then the physics lib stabbed me in the back again. It uses the xna lib. So I dug out a version that did not. But I failed again. It turns out that that lib also is xna dependent. So I tried to get the source code and remove all dependencies. But failed to grab the source. Not much energy left to de-xna it.
Tags: heli, HeliChain, physics, post-mortem
Okay well .. it’s been a bit of work, but I got one together. Unfortunately, youtube wouldn’t take it. I think it had something to do with something to do with something. Which, means I need to upgrade linux to get … blah blah.
On the more interesting side, I wrote a linear video editor for the task in pygame + pug. It only took about 90 minutes to make the editor. The rest of the time was struggling with encoding issues. The editor works pretty good and plays music along with so you can get things synched just right 
The program takes in a list of .png files (movie.txt) and lets you cut out chunks and do other things with ‘em. Here’s the video. It’s got great music – thanks to DrPetter’s brother!!
Tags: timelapse
I made a new level for Mr.Splode — good luck! To play it, copy it over level 4 and then press 4 from the title screen to play the level. I’ve also made it compile under linux .. you can grab the new .c and .h from this zip as well. To compile:
gcc -g mr.c `sdl-config –cflags –libs` -lSDL_mixer -o mr
Someone asked for a pelly. I made one. It’s simple and boring, but I suppose it’ll do if nothing better comes along.
Here’s a psd file with suitable layers for making variations to suit all the themes: pelly_layers.psd
(I’m too lazy to do them now)
Tags: pellies
Someone asked for a pelly. I made one. It’s simple and boring, but I suppose it’ll do if nothing better comes along.
Here’s a psd file with suitable layers for making variations to suit all the themes: pelly_layers.psd
(I’m too lazy to do them now)
Tags: pellies
inspired by PoV’s posting of this:
I created this pelly (admittedly useless as an award):
Tags: pellies
Thanks everyone for coming out and making Ludum Dare 10 a great success. A fitting close the fifth year of of the compo.
If you haven’t seen it yet, the results can be found here. Final entries can be found here.
Now, as much as we’d love everyone to idle with us in #ludumdare until April, we understand this isn’t practical for everyone. So, in addition, we have a mailing list at gamecompo.com.
To subscribe, e-mail: gamecompo-subscribe@sykhronics.com
To unsubscribe, e-mail: gamecompo-unsubscribe@sykhronics.com
And when in doubt, hit up ludumdare.com.
– – –
Now, unlike prior years, we’ve tried to make it clear that the next compo will be in April. Anyone that’s stayed up with our shenanigans will know April is our magic month, the anniversary of the first Ludum Dare compo (the original 24 hour compo in 2002). If there’s one tradition we’ve kept over the years, it’s been holding a compo in April. Be it organized a month in advance, or pulled together last minute.
So the first order of business is to pick a weekend in April to hold the compo. I’m not looking for suggestions per se, but reasons to include or exclude a specific day. Our options include:
Ideally, we like to plan around such things as Game Industry events (GDC, E3, Game Connection, etc), Exam season (we love you students), national holidays, or any such event that either hinders or benefits the majorities chance to participate.
– – –
And in final, if you have any comments, suggestions or feedback for us, please do share them. Ludum Dare is and has always been about the community. Without you all, we’d just be an IRC channel.
Thanks again everyone, and have a great 2008.
Tags: compo, LD #11 - Minimalist - 2008, Planning
Thanks everyone for coming out and making Ludum Dare 10 a great success. A fitting close the fifth year of of the compo.
If you haven’t seen it yet, the results can be found here. Final entries can be found here.
Now, as much as we’d love everyone to idle with us in #ludumdare until April, we understand this isn’t practical for everyone. So, in addition, we have a mailing list at gamecompo.com.
To subscribe, e-mail: gamecompo-subscribe@sykhronics.com
To unsubscribe, e-mail: gamecompo-unsubscribe@sykhronics.com
And when in doubt, hit up ludumdare.com.
– – –
Now, unlike prior years, we’ve tried to make it clear that the next compo will be in April. Anyone that’s stayed up with our shenanigans will know April is our magic month, the anniversary of the first Ludum Dare compo (the original 24 hour compo in 2002). If there’s one tradition we’ve kept over the years, it’s been holding a compo in April. Be it organized a month in advance, or pulled together last minute.
So the first order of business is to pick a weekend in April to hold the compo. I’m not looking for suggestions per se, but reasons to include or exclude a specific day. Our options include:
Ideally, we like to plan around such things as Game Industry events (GDC, E3, Game Connection, etc), Exam season (we love you students), national holidays, or any such event that either hinders or benefits the majorities chance to participate.
– – –
And in final, if you have any comments, suggestions or feedback for us, please do share them. Ludum Dare is and has always been about the community. Without you all, we’d just be an IRC channel.
Thanks again everyone, and have a great 2008.
Tags: compo, LD #11 - Minimalist - 2008, Planning
If there is an LD11.
OK, at the moment I’m learning how to code in C++, is that a recommended language to be used in LD11?
I’ve tried to look at the pros and con’s, and found:
Pros:
Con’s;
At the moment it looks like the pros are greater than the con’s, but, is it a better language overall?
I mean python is written on top of C++, so that means that the person who made Python can’t of been to happy with C++ if he made is own one, either that or he was bored.
If python is written in C++ then That could mean that it is an ”improved” version of C++, leading me to think that that is better.
However, I already know python, so it would be a good learning experience for me to learn C++, and someone gave me a Sams Teach Yourself C++ in 21 Days, so I’m trying to learn that. (Not the average item on a 12 year olds list )
Only 4 people rated my game. Thats unacceptable, I need get rid of XNA. So I’ve thrown all XNA stuff out of it. I needed to poke a bit in the source of the physics lib as well to cleanse out the filth, thankfully that was easy. Now I need to tame the horrible controls (That was my fault, cannot blame XNA for everything), and then pretty it up and I’ll make a release. I plan to port it to linux too, with Mono.
I’m only using Glfw, OpenGL and .Net 2.0 as we speak. For sound it will be OpenAL.
Only 4 people rated my game. Thats unacceptable, I need get rid of XNA. So I’ve thrown all XNA stuff out of it. I needed to poke a bit in the source of the physics lib as well to cleanse out the filth, thankfully that was easy. Now I need to tame the horrible controls (That was my fault, cannot blame XNA for everything), and then pretty it up and I’ll make a release. I plan to port it to linux too, with Mono.
I’m only using Glfw, OpenGL and .Net 2.0 as we speak. For sound it will be OpenAL.
Did not quite make it in 2007, but here’s Partycle Popper 1.5
– Pretty much recoded based on cleaned up basecode which was based on the contest version of the game
– The widescreen bug fixed
– Audio recoded using SDL audio instead of fmod to make porting slightly easier
– Custom mixer for sound fx and midi instruments
– MIDI player (only supports one instrument and note on, but hey, it works)
– Gameplay tuning;
– Player’s bullets and bad pop bullets are faster, normal pop bullets slow enough to dodge around now
– Scoring is slightly tuned
– On player death, the same level is restarted with the same score as when the level started
– Couple new hint lines, and couple informative printouts here and there
Finally I’ve ported it away from XNA to OpenGL, still got the (almost) same lousy controls, for your pleasure. Still needs .Net 2.0 to be installed though, but should be compatible with Mono, and thus playable on Linux. If someone like to try to compile it on Linux, contact me. Some things have been tweaked and added. But the game play is the same. Added ugly clouds for better sense of height movement. Updated the physics lib to the newest version.
Arrows: (over) steer
Z: Claw claw claw!
X: TURRRRRRBO
Space: Reset heli position
R: Reset level
N: Next level
Download now! 441KB Now with dependencies included!
Finally I’ve ported it away from XNA to OpenGL, still got the (almost) same lousy controls, for your pleasure. Still needs .Net 2.0 to be installed though, but should be compatible with Mono, and thus playable on Linux. If someone like to try to compile it on Linux, contact me. Some things have been tweaked and added. But the game play is the same. Added ugly clouds for better sense of height movement. Updated the physics lib to the newest version.
Arrows: (over) steer
Z: Claw claw claw!
X: TURRRRRRBO
Space: Reset heli position
R: Reset level
N: Next level
Download now! 441KB Now with dependencies included!
WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
Game Development!
I’ve written a postmortem for my LD10 entry you can see it on my website here. I’d repost the whole thing here, but I’m lazy.
Today I’m standing in for my RSS feed which seems to have gone haywire. By the look of things it’s still refreshing even though I removed the xml file!? Phil?
Anyway, updated the page with two more projects from 2007. Go see while they’re hot… uh, pretending they’re not already 4-6 months old.
