After finishing my game “Follow” (and then fixing a few bugs after release <.<), I put together this timelapse.

Warning – I recorded my voice for the beginning of it. =P

Somehow I missed the badge… so here it is now:

find the kitteh!

Tags: kittendare

Brain finally returning to normal. That was an interesting weekend. I kept track of my hours in notepad – turns out I worked about 39 of the possible 48 hours. And I started about an hour and a half late. That was a week’s work in two days!

So my game is ExtraVertical (http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=rate&uid=7598). I wanted to do something different, as I suspected there would be countless platformer and ‘explore the dark caves/tunnel’ games. So I decided to make a skiing game, with an 80’s flair. My game also doesn’t really have a proper scoring mechanic or goal – it’s more a short exploration into my interpretation of the theme.

ExtraVertical - The play on words that no one will get

What Went Well:

-I had the complete concept in my head from the beginning. I knew exactly how I wanted it to play out, from beginning to end. This has been a problem in the past, as I’ve had half baked ideas that I thought would be fun, but after early implementation, discovered that the mechanic doesn’t fully hold water and needs a lot of rethinking to make it work.

-The graphics. I’ve not done a game with pixel art before, and there’s only a bit in this game, but the feel of it worked out better than expected, and using a small color palette for all the colors gave it somewhat of a consistent feeling.

-The Slick2D game library, which I had never even heard of before this competition actually worked out quite well with only minor issues. Once I had everything setup to build and deploy (more on that later), no major issues were encountered.

What Went Wrong:

-This was my first Ludum Dare. And despite reading how strongly people recommended familiarizing yourself with your tools and getting your workflow from compilation to deployment nailed ahead of time, I totally under-prepared. I had not really used Java in about 5 years. I had never even heard of this Slick2D game library I used, nevermind used it. I hadn’t used either of the paint programs I worked with (Paint.NET, and then after finding no palette support, switching to GIMP, which is quite frustrating in its own right). I hadn’t used GarageBand. Or deployed with Java Web Start.

I did try to prepare though. In the few days leading up to the competition I attempted to get some test code to deploy with Java Web Start, but was totally unsuccessful and left clueless as to how to fix it. So, sitting down at my computer an hour and a half after the competition started, I was left to try and figure it out. It took me about 4 hours to finally get it to deploy from the web. Turns out you need to SIGN THE F*CKING JAR FILES. Sorry for that.

-While the interpretation of the theme made sense in my head, it didn’t translate into a very understandable mechanic in the game. I’ll try to explain: you’re an extroverted ‘hotshot’ who needs the admiration and attention of others to be happy. Without it, you feel desperately alone and unwanted. Unfortunately, in the game, this theme isn’t obvious, and makes the game’s ‘scoring’ and end-game mechanic confusing. I don’t think people get the title either…

-And as always, the game could have benefited from more gameplay polish and content. But everyone can say that I’m sure.

That’s it! Cheers to everyone who participated, it was one of the most intense, stressful and fun experiences I’ve had and will definitely not be my last contribution. Looking forward to playing everyone’s games!

The game is done, or to be more honest the submission has been complete for a while now, and I’m currently working on the post compo version and I’m thinking of uploading it to kongregate or some other flash hosting service. If you wanna help, have a play or two and give me a list of improvements that I can add to the final game.

Play it here

Here is my timelapse of creating Moving Day. ( play it!)

Perhaps I should call it a noob-lapse as I stumbled through learning Flixel for the first day and only really got into the zone half way through. Post-mortem coming soon!

Tags: timelapse

I finished my first complete game ever in this Ludum Dare!

Screenshot dump!

I’m afraid I had more fun developing it than anybody will get by playing it (it’s sad but realistic). If you to give it a try I’ll leave some links:

• Play/Rate the game here (link).
• Game source code in Mercurial repository (link).
• Development blog in Posterous (link) (I didn’t want to saturate Ludum Dare’s blog posting there, but now I realize that was a mistake).
• Timelapse of the entire process (link).
• Some Link I found on Internet (this pun cost me the 10 game-developer followers I had in Twitter)
  

Just in case anyone makes a kitten compilation of LD 22 (wink, wink) I leave mine here to make free use of it (it is really ugly and small though).

Tags: final, java, timelapse

I’ve posted a postmortem over at my website, and a walkthrough of me playing the game (with commentary) on YouTube.

Tags: post-mortem, postmortem, walkthrough

I just uploaded my timelapse video.
Don’t forget to play the game first.

Tags: timelapse

This is my post-mortem for my compo game Just Like The Others. I think my game turned out pretty good and I am definitely happy with my game.

What went well:

-Making the art, I am not an artist so I think it’s pretty good.

-Getting other people to playtest, this helped me establish a good learning curve for my game.

-Fixing the bugs, no time did I spent longer than 30 minutes fixing one.

What didn’t go well:

-When I had my initial idea, a turn-based RPG, a instantly started building it, but I was not sure if it was going to be fun and it turned out it was not. That is why there is now this game.

-Making the player look more interesting, I think he looks a bit boring.

Before I sum up the experience, I need to mention that I discovered that there is a huge memory leak in love for setFont(), which wasn’t an issue on my dev computer for whatever reason. So I went back and patched that in my game, no other changes made. Alright.

So this was my first time participating in the competition, which is because this is the first time I feel like I’m qualified to make a game, which is because I now work in the industry. Do I really know more than I did before? Maybe a bit. But whatever, I took part in this one, and it was fun.

I’m not an artist or a musician so those bits of my game are complete crap. Oh well. I didn’t know anything about the tools I used, so I probably made some huge mistakes (excluding the memory leak). Too bad. What is fantastic is the fact that in just two days, I started with nothing and ended up with a pretty cool game. Sure its not going to blow anyone away, but it exists, and I made it. So there.

Play my game. In SPAAAAAACCCEEE!

It’s haer.

What went right:

– The Food & Drink:

Prepared enough food for myself for the weekend, made sure the house was stocked up with enough to eat and drink in case I became bored of consuming that. Only drank 4 energy drinks over the weekend, and avoided coffee and alcohol.

– The Idea:

I came up with an idea pretty quickly, and stayed focused on it until I had a working game mechanic. This took a total of 9 hours with 1 good break in the middle.

– The Graphics:

Decided right away that I’d be hand drawing all my graphics. For this I used a graphics tablet, and was the best decision I made yet. Initially planned to make a 3D game, went ahead and made a 2D prototype, but had more than enough time to turn it into a 3D game during the second day and did!

– The Engine:

This is the 3rd LD I’ve used my own engine, I was going to be doing it in C# with a port of my engine initially, but decided against this as I’ve fixed a lot of bugs over the last year and it would be throwing away productivity if I didn’t take advantage of this.

What went wrong:

– The Sound & Music:

Completely uninspired musically and don’t have the greatest library of synths, and not totally familiar with the tools I chose to use. Sound wise I didn’t produce much. The sounds I created were quickly made with Audacity recording with a microphone and filtering.

– The Submission:

Thanks to a recent update I made to my engine to do multithreaded rendering, and only testing on single/dual core machines, I missed a critical bug in my job system which prevented it from working on a machine with more than 2 cores. It’s been fixed now, but it’s something I should have tested before hand.

– The Development “Hardware”:

To make sure the game worked for most others, I developed the game in Windows XP…inside Virtual Box…in OSX. This was a nightmare as the GL window will block Visual Studio when hitting a breakpoint, causing several headaches…not to mention that GL is slow inside a VM (could be considered an advantage performance wise since it’ll run smoothly on almost any machines). Next time I will be using a hard machine, hopefully with Windows 7 installed, and do compatibility testing inside a VM & on other machines.

– The Sleep & Night Before:

The day before LD it was my companies xmas party, which meant I drank a lot, and got very little sleep before LD. This turned out not to be so bad as the adrenaline of LD hit me hard! Saturday night (well…Sunday morning) I scraped 5 hours sleep before the second day. Didn’t sleep Sunday night and continued to work, but got there eventually. Monday was taken off work as a means of catching up on sleep, but sleeping through the Monday messed up the sleep that night, causing me to remain tired on the Tuesday. Could be worse, thought I managed it fine, but not so much as I would have liked.

Before next Ludum Dare:

– Ensure I’m familiar with all my tools.

– Test on several different machines.

– Improve my engine’s content pipeline.

My entry can be found here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=rate&uid=1154

The timelapse video is here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Wm9wcr5JBs

We did not manage to finish our vampire platform game in time for the Jam, but we like the idea and have some nice art assets, so we’ll continue working on it over the holidays.

What went well

• We created a lot of art assets that we really like
• We came up with a cute game idea (vampire boy searching for teddybears in scary vampire castle), despite the challenging theme
• We even created some sound effects, although they are not in the game yet

What did not go so well

• Map creation and tile engine – we initially used Tiled for map editing, but had problems with implementing game physics on the loaded map data  (some of our tiles are large (256*256), while others are smaller, which caused headaches).  Eventually we wrote a tile engine and game physics from scratch, with some map generation code, but by then there was not enough time to finish the game.
• Not enough time to actually get to implementing the game logic..

What we will do differently next time

• Use an existing tile engine, or write basecode for one before the competition starts.  There is enough work in game-specific code, no point in re-writing tile engines for each competition.
• Map creation in Tiled was straightforward, but time-consuming.  We are trying out programmatic map generation from python now.
• Get a simple playable game asap, afterwards add more features and graphics.

Finally, a part of a room in the big scary vampire castle:

Tags: postmortem, pygame, python

Due to time constraints, I’ve planned to limit my LD participation time to 4 hours, but eventually I’ve tinkered with the game for roughly 6 hours (not counting the planning phase).

Let’s timelapse, for enjoy!

Even though it was short a didn’t attend to IRC much, I’ve enjoyed this LD and I’d love to try some of the miniLDs in the future!

Animals are sad and alone, hook them up with some friends to create an epic friendship club!

Tags: postmortem, timelapse

Well, that’s my first ever Ludum Dare over and done with! Cannot describe how much fun I’ve had, it’s definitely cemented my love of game design/development. Will probably enter into as many future LDs and mini-LDs as I can handle without completely failing college, because if anything is good practice for game design, it’s being constrained to 48 hours. You can find my game here.

What went well:

My art assets were pretty much finished by the first hour of the competition, which meant I didn’t have to use placeholders, which I hate with a passion

My level creation code, although messy, is pretty versatile and meant I could make some fairly interesting puzzles, although more on that later

Once I’d finally got my collision detection code working, I had absolutely no problems with it. It was very simple, which meant it was very, very difficult to break

The overall game, I found, was very fun, even if it was rather difficult and short

What didn’t

The collision detection code. Jesus, when it worked it worked beautifully, but before then it was a major headache that cost me somewhere in the area of 5-6 hours. At least now I know how to do it.

The levels were very simplistic, with only 3 unique puzzles spread across 4 (non-tutorial/boss) levels. Even though the puzzles were not necessarily easy, the very, very basic level editor meant that it was hard to visualise more complex puzzles, especially as this is my first puzzle game.

LWJGL is a harsh mistress. I used a .bat stating the location of the native library for my original submission, but after almost a day of tweaking I managed to make it find the library when you run the .jar verbatim.

In my next game, which I’ve already decided on, I will use an xml-or-similar-based level file, to allow for easier scripting of levers and such, and a graphical level editor for easier visualisation.

Well, that’s that. When all’s said and done, my game’s development went rather smoothly, and I hope yours did too. Now go play 800-odd indie games, you’ve deserved them.

Greeble is an HTML5 game where you are the captain of a crashed spaceship. You are ALONE but need some help to survive. Collect the cryo-keys to activate the stasis pods in order to free your friends.

What went right?
Was very familiar with my tools, both engine, language and art creation pipeline. The amazing JAWSJS game engine was a breeze to work with. Had a very easy time making the art, since my level editor was just photoshop. Enjoyed screenshotsaturday, twitter and google+ as a means to stay motivated. I did well in the time-management arena, and planned ahead of time. I used placeholder art during programming and coded everything first in an ugly room with rectangles for characters. Only after the first day (when all coding was done) did I dive into the art, so I had tons of time to make it real puuurdy. I spent 75% of the time on the art and was feature-complete the coding by noon on Saturday. Total time spent on the game: 14 hours.

What went wrong?
Ran out of time before I could add sound effects. No user instructions or intro. No GUI. Had to cut features and simplify to finish on time. Got a bit stressed about it on the last day, racing to finish. Drawing the level took more time than I predicted. Overall, had TONS of fun regardless.

About the game:
Features pixel-perfect, non-grid platforming, bounce-pads, transparent glass tubes, a fun retro “scan line” effect, silly AI followers and A KITTEN. Your objective is to navigate to the exit where you will be rewarded with a trampoline party!

→→→→ CLICK HERE TO PLAY! ←←←←

Use the ARROW KEYS to move around. Try to find a way to revive all your friends (including the hidden secret kitten, which signifies my enthusiastic participation in the “kitten challenge”) so you can all bounce on the trampoline at the end.

I had so much fun making this game. I even had time to hang out with friends, go for a hike, and decorate my house for the holidays! There is a lot of room for improvement but overall I’m really happy with the final product. Created using ippa lix’s wonderful jawsjs game engine.

The word “greeble” comes from the original Star Wars ILM special effects artists who used the term to describe generic “tech” bits and pieces that adorn sci-fi hulls. There are thousands of greebles in this game’s level art.

How it was made: I drew two “techno” textures as the base texture for all the world platforms (one brown and one silver). These patterns were covered in “greebles” (panels, buttons, wires, lines, etc.) In photoshop, I made opacity maps for each and turned everything transparent. Then, I drew the game map itself by drawing black and white pixels on the alpha (opacity) channel so that certain parts of these materials would become opaque. An effect filter that added a little emboss to the edges completed the look.

In the game engine, the entire world map is one gigantic .PNG image, which is layered on top of two parallax-scrolling background tiles (set to move slower than the foreground). The retro “scanlines” effect is merely another overlay image that sits on top of everything.

This is the entire map image I drew, as used in the game (click to zoom in):

… and this is the scanlines overlay I created:

Making “Greeble” was very inspiring. I now have an HTML5 platformer game engine that allows me to create freeform worlds in photoshop. No tiles or level data files required!

→→→→ CLICK HERE TO PLAY! ←←←←

Ludum Dare is so much FUN. It is amazing what you can accomplish in a speed-coding weekend.

Tags: html5, postmortem, screenshot, video

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 20th, 2011 at 10:11 am and is filed under LD #22. 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.

http://www.kongregate.com/games/alec_larsen/i-am-alone

I Am Alone is up on Kongregate. Go play this survival shooter

We finished Sanity last night with literally minutes left on the clock. I’m not sure if it’s shown up on the Ludum Dare website yet but you can play it here: http://sandbox.yoyogames.com/games/191217-sanity

Ok, I guess everyone here packaged and submitted the game already, but as I was trying some of them out, I thought that it’s a good thing to post some advice on how to make your game work out of the box, thus getting more views and plays. Consider repackaging the game if some of the below points apply to yours!

How to have your game working out the box:

• First of all
  • Listen to suggestions, people will surely feedback if the game is not working for some reason! Check comments, come to IRC and ask if the game runs fine.
  • Make a gameplay video and include it in your game links! Even if someone is unable to play, he can give you some ratings (e.g. Graphics and Audio)!
• Downloadable games
  • Subdirectory - Include a directory with your game files in the downloadable archive, it makes unpackaging way easier!
  • Decrease size – make sure you remove all redundant files form the archive!
  • File name – avoid using file names such as ld.zip, ld22.zip, alone.zip etc.
• Java
  • Make a web applet! Link to Daze’s web applet snippet
  • Or, use Java Web Start
• AS3/Flash/HAXE/Stencyl
  • Include classid parameter when embedding!
  • Add a preloader if your game is over 1MB!
• Love2D
  • Create Love executable!
  • Keep the original .love for Linux and Mac users!
• Python
  • Use Py2exe!
  • Keep the source inside too!
• C#/XNA/Mono
  • Provide links to framework you used in the game description!
  • Framework links: XNA 2.0, XNA 3.1, XNA 4.0, .NET 2.0, .NET 3.5, .NET 4.0
• JavaScript/HTML5/WebGL
  • Make sure your game works in different browsers! At least Firefox and Chrome!
• C/C++/Native
  • Make sure you included all the dlls and that these are right version!
  • Add links to redistributables: VS 2005, VS 2008, VS 2010
  • Use static linking if possible!
• Ruby
  • Use OCRA to package your game into executable!
• Game maker
  • Submit the game to Yoyogames sandbox! It will allow people to play it online.
• Linux
  • Use ldd to pick and package correct libraries with your game!
• Mac users
  • Use WineBottler to play most of the windows entries!
• Read DO’s and DON’Ts list by Mathias Zarzecki!
• “[…] Damn. I spent ages searching for such a place. Ah well. I’ll do it next time.” SUPERBAD!
  • Do it now! That’s what this guide is for!

If you run across anything annoying regarding packaging, or have a piece of valuable advice, write it in the comments, and I will snip it to the list!

well, let’s do this thing then, shall we 😀

i’m using the ld22 postmortem survey for tips on what to actually say here, since it’s my first ever postmortem, so let’s go

right off the bat, we’re faced with physics… there are some significant bugs related to that, i THINK that’s mostly caused by a too high framerate though, over 100-ish you can move so fast you can run through walls, and when you respawn at a checkpoint you might lag out(because it reloads the map as it was when you saved to the point you fall through the ground, i think that’s caused by my using millisecond timing(which can end up being 0) and adding 1 to it because i screwed up the way i used this at first(i was doing position += velocity/dTime instead of velocity * dTime, so i got exceptions when dTime was 0), also you can run up an N-tile high wall if you’re fast enough, because the “escape” direction is always up, instead of “wherever there’s free space”, because i didn’t know how to figure out where that would be

there are also a number of known bugs in the game, mostly related to the fact that the cellular automaton i use does not run off-screen, so it might get into a 3-cycle loop somewhere if you, for example have this section where, H is an electron head, and T is an electron tail, and W is a wire
HT
H
after which the top 2 cells run for another generation, but the bottom cell doesn’t, resulting in this state:
TW
H
which is a 3-cycle loop with these other states:
WH
T
and
HT
W

coming up with the idea wasn’t too hard, i already had the platformer + CA idea in my head, before the compo even started

because a 3-cycle loop basically kills any circuit, because 3-cycle pulses are faster even than the fastest transformer possible in the game can handle, in retrospect i should’ve provided a timeout for cells(a very slow update cycle that runs one line at a time when outside the regular simulation that basically tells all tiles to reset to their defaults

i didn’t REALLY use prototype artwork, however if you watch my timelapse, you’ll see that at the start i wanted to use a more human-like character, which i soon after basic testing discarded because it would take me too much work to animate

i always try to pay attention to details, and in this case, i am glad that seemed to work out okay for me, even if level design may have suffered from it

i did get a chance to create some sound effects and BGM which i think are pretty awesome and fitting for this game *even if the art style doesn’t reflect the mood i was trying to set as well as i might have hoped*

and for me, this weekend was a blast,  i had a lot of fun making the game, and it’s really awesome to watch your own timelapse, and see the game coming together at high speed

i have not watched TV/movies, but i have had youtube on with some of my series, but i kept working on my main screen while the video’s were on my sub screen, so that worked out pretty much okay in my opinion

regarding the theme, it surprises me people had so much trouble with the theme, i quite like it, but only really show how it’s incorporated in the game at the end, and of course, at the very beginning if you know what the name is derived from, i only came up with the name during the beginning of the level design, and i might as well explain what my pre-LD far-fetched idea for the storyline was, might be cool to share

you would start off in an area with an infinite amount of wire blocks of all kinds to use, and  a computerized voice recording would give you an introduction, and tell you that you were on starship YANA, and that you should follow it’s instructions, a little while later, you would exit through a door, and it would basically signify the end of the tutorial area, and lock off in some way, from that point onward you would be severely limited in how many wire blocks you could use, yet you would have to get through a number of puzzles, i had even imagined a kind of layered effect, where you’d have different layers to play in, travelling between layers by doors, and being able to see deeper layers through some kind of parallax effect, and even having wire travel through layers to make even more complex puzzles, in the end you would reach some kind of end room, and perhaps face off against an enemy, the only enemy in the game, and after beating him, in the credits, you would hear the true meaning of the starship’s name
Y ou
A re
N ot
A lone
sadly most of that got scrapped because of level design fails, and it ended up being a rather sandbox-style platformer

my game WOULD run in a browser, and i almost made a version that does run in a browser, kind of, but because i use several external files, this doesn’t really work all too well it would seem, i might try to see if i can have the editor work with files that are in the package itself, and allow the game to work properly in a browser, but as of right now, it doesn’t

like i mentioned earlier i am not satisfied with level design at all… i would’ve wanted this to be way more complex, and way more difficult than it is now, a fair part of this was caused by my screwing up with regards to actually saving my work…

i was pretty satisfied with my working area, dual monitors are always a win, and i tried to keep it kind of clutter-free so i could work properly and comfortably

again as mentioned, some features were left out, either because i had found an alternative, or just because i didn’t think it would be very useful, or that because they might cause a lot of unnecessary extra work, or just because i didn’t like them, another feature i might have wanted to add, but didn’t, was an ikaruga-style shmup-esque defense system, this might have increased the difficulty significantly, but i would’ve had to add pickups as well, but i might in a final release version of this game 😉

i don’t know ANY time management techniques, so i just went and did what i had to do

i spent some time on IRC / msn / tweetdeck, but i’m not sure that’s “real world socialisation”, apart from that, i don’t think i benefited from it

i did drink a lot of coffee / energy drink, and ate mostly kind of junk food, but that didn’t seem to result in decreased desire to just keep working or fatigue
i also drank *a* beer, which had no notable effect AFAIK, i also went outside pretty regularly to smoke and get some fresh air *about 10-15 minutes every 2-3 hours*
i didn’t sleep much either, i started saturday at 6:30 ish, 3:30 hours after the compo started, and in between slept for only 3:30 hours, between 05:15 and 08:30-08:45 on sunday, and then kept working until i uploaded my entry at around 02:30, 30 minutes before the working deadline

i HOPE the time i’ve spent on the help screen/tutorials are enough to make the game playable, without forcing you to go through things that slow down gameplay

because of what happened with level design going badly, i feel the game can be completed too easily, however the glitch with the escape direction can get annoying and make the game more difficult to complete

i spent a good segment of time on code, but i feel most of the code/graphics/audio work were finished, so i’m okay with that

the GUI could have been better, of course, but apart from the block selector’s background being a bit plain, i think it’s pretty much okay

controls should be slightly tuned to be slower, but i am actually happy with it, and i think the fact that you slide very far pretty much matches the player’s graphics

i’m happy with how the sound/audio turned out, and even with the artwork, so i think, apart from level design being slightly lacking, i “finished” my game pretty much,

and i wouldn’t hesitate to join the next LD48 if i get the chance

Thats LD 22! I had fun, I hope everyone else did too!

Like everyone else:

Highlights:

Code, I wrote good code, I had very few bugs or issues that I could not fix quickly and with elegence.

Music, I know people who play my game will go “What Music? You have like 4 note looping!” but in comparision to my last LD entry, which had only silence, the melody included is quite good I think

Game idea, My idea was good I feel! The game play support the story which supported the theme. A lowlight was my implemention of that tho

Lowlights:

Gamplay, the game it’s self is not fun, it short and its confusing. An absolute fail there. I focused on the gameplay funtional rather then making a game that people would want to play.

Art, I can’t draw, some day I will accept this, till that day i will continue to try and fail.

You can play Teddies here

Bring on LD23!

Just a quick note for those of you wanting to play/rate my game: I’ve now added http:// links before the URLs in my entry, so you should now be able to launch the Web version and grab the source. Thanks to the people who pointed this out in the comments!

The entry: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=preview&uid=6526

Here a video Trailer for our entry.

 
Four Friends Trailer
 

Once again, I am willing to rate your games.

But there is a few small caveats:

• I am terrible at 3D games.  They give me vertigo
• I hate platformers.  I hate jumping, I am no good at it.

I can run Windows, Mac, and Linux.  I am partial to story games and sims.

Susan

Here’s my timelapse :

The last geek : Timelapse

I added a bit of gameplay to make it less boring.

With LD22 – my first Ludum Dare – over and me having caught up on sleep, I’ve had some time to reflect on how it’s gone. Personally I consider this weekend both a success and a failure in different ways.

It’s a success in that I have proven to myself that I can create something at least playable within 48 hours – the reason I signed up in the first place. I’ve also managed to learn a new toolset.

It’s a failure in that the design is pretty crude and the end result isn’t nearly as “finished” as I would have liked it to be. This is due to various issues, some of which popped up very late in the compo.

Nonetheless I’ve submitted the last build, for the sake of honesty. This is what I could manage in the time given with the self-imposed restriction of using new tools rather than familiar ones. I’ll get better. I’m still not sure if it’s in a state I should have submitted it in, but it’s a bit late to change my mind now.

What went right

Not Alone

I spent the weekend with a couple of friends who were also doing LD. This gave me a good deal of motivation to not slack (too much) and made the breaks a lot more pleasant. It also meant that when it came to having food, one of us could make something for all three, saving the other two some time. Even when working solo, I’d greatly recommend being in a group.

Distraction management

As an extension of the above, I managed to mostly stick to the project with little distraction, even though I had the internet and some games right in front of me, and even though I am normally The Procrastinator.

Learning a new toolset

I decided earlier in the week that I’d try doing the game in Game Maker, to see what the toolset is like, and the art in Bottleship, to try its suitability for repeated rapid art production. Both of these I now have a reasonable grip on, and both of these are fairly nice to work with within their limitations.

What went wrong

Learning a new toolset

I kept accidentally overwriting existing sprites in Bottleship when I tried to do animations or derivative tiles. This cost me a bit of time redoing assets I’d done before. I found out that the Mac version of Game Maker has some significant pitfalls; not only is it still v7 which is now approaching five years old, I’ve also to this point been unable to get the Publish-to-Web function to work. Additionally I used the free version of GM, which meant I had to make some compromises on tech (no alpha transparency, in particular).

Solution: do more research into the new toolset next time or use one I’m familiar with.

Non-programming skills still a bit crap

The design I came up with is quite crude. If I’d had enough time to implement more enemy behaviours, it might have turned out more interesting. I’m planning to continue working on Headphones On and see if it turns out reasonably fun. Also, my pixel art is a bit rough and due to my nonfamiliarity with making music I was having trouble getting anything at all down on that front.

Solution: practice more.

Lack of inspiration techniques

This is part of the cause for the crude design mentioned above. “Alone” is not exactly an easy theme to work with I thought, but the fact that I have no methodical approach to finding inspiration didn’t help.

Solution: No idea. Any suggestions welcome.

Late-dev issues

I ran into several problems very late in development; we’re talking an hour before submission time. For one thing suddenly a crash bug popped up relating to key events, so I rewrote my entire input system in script rather than using GMs event system. This then resulted in having to rewrite collision detection, which resulted in having to re-test the level. This kept me busy for just more than an hour.

When it came to submission, I found that the Publish-to-Web function on GM/Mac seems to be broken, so I had to run to the website and buy the Pro version just to be able to make any build to submit.

Solution: Not much to be done about late-dev bugs. I was building and playtesting a lot and genuinely don’t know where that crash bug came from. The publishing issue I could have figured out if I’d researched GM4Mac more thoroughly, rather than just reading up on how it works.

In summary, while I’ve pretty much achieved the goals I set for myself for this LD, I’m not really satisfied with the product thereof. The main problems I was having were down to not having researched potential issues with the new toolset enough before the compo; the others are mostly things I expect will get better with practice. Very much looking forward to trying more jams and LDs in the future

Tags: postmortem

If you’re reading this, you really should just play through the game yourself, but in case you don’t want to, or can’t (looking at you OSX users, sorry!), here’s a video of me doing a playthrough myself:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6WRB7Vl3dE

Tags: playthrough

I’ve made a (post-comp) build. It’s at least 50% more fun and 33% less confusing.

There’s combo multipliers and a win condition and also you can burn crew members when your engines slow down.

Also you can now pickup space kittens as you fly past to help you staff your spaceship.

Here is the latest version:
SUPER SMASH LANDER SUICIDE PARTY, BRO? (ENHANCED)

(of course the Ludum Dare 48 hour version is still here:
Ludum Dare #22 Competition Entry)

Hi! I want to learn procedural level generation and some simple pathfinding( for making objects wander randomly for example). I would like to ask a favor for those people here to suggest me games(from this Ludum Dare or others) so that I could study the code for doing this things. I’d also like to learn how to make cut scenes so add these games too. Thanks a lot!

I picked up 3 more games that stand out for me!

And my list of favorite games grows! I have seen about 30 games, picked out 6, around 690 still to go!

Anyways, Copy Killer form PerilousPete is the best game so far, amazing gameplay and usage of the theme!

While preparing for the Ludum Dare, I had to get acquainted with the engine I would use, libGDX, so I made a test game that I also used for a school project and I just put it up for the Android Market! Check it out if you have an Android Phone!

QR Code for the link of my game!

Do you think I should also put my entry of Ludum Dare in the Android Market? Or is it too simple and rough?

Happy rating for you all!

Lesson learned: don’t leave the core gameplay and puzzle initiation algorithm for last. Argh.

The game was supposed to play a little bit like Pipe Dreams. You’re the last engineer on an otherwise vacant starship, the ship’s AI is taking care of navigation and weapons, and you need to make sure the shields, weapons, and life support stay powered under enemy fire. The board starts with a reactor on one side, the ship’s systems on the other, and a bunch of power routing tiles in between. You reconfigure the grid by rotating tiles to provide power to the systems that need it.

What went well

For the first time ever, the graphics came together really well. They were a little time-consuming to make in Inkscape because in between sessions, I forget everything I know about it. I was happy to finally have a game with a consistent graphic style that wasn’t offensive or straight outta MS Paint.

I got the tiles clicking and rotating pretty easily. That was a great confidence booster early on. The background game simulator that powered the ship’s systems and dealt damage to its shields over time went together really well, too. Adding scripted events is as simple as adding a hash with an ‘enabled’ flag, an interval in milliseconds, and a fire() method that performs the game state update and requeues itself.

The Android WordPress app was lovely when the LD site wasn’t under load. Rather than fiddling with screen shots and files and the web UI, I could pull out my phone, snap a pic, and post. Awesome.

What didn’t go well

Eating, sleeping, staying focused, and holiday things that will now turn into last-minute nightmares. And then there’s the technical bits:

Given how hard it is to programmatically find a smart route through the tiles between each of the three ship systems and the reactor, I’m now thinking that the Tetris-like pick-n-place behavior may make more sense than starting with a filled grid. I thought the filled grid would be more interesting, but crawling the tiles to find each system’s connected power grid is tricky. Two systems can’t use the same tile. So who gets to use it? The first grid that’s fully explored? That was my first strategy, and it lets one well-connected system take over the board. Maybe the systems have to explore the grid in parallel, each acquiring one tile at a time before the first can acquire another.

I was really looking forward to completing my first LD. I figured I could cram a bit into the submission hour, even. And then it was too late. I had a bunch of nice-looking tiles that rotated when you clicked them, and I couldn’t figure out why they couldn’t see their neighbors. Heartbreak and disappointment.

Since this is also a sort of prototype for a part of a larger game, the plan is to see it through to some kind of playable state. The holidays may torpedo that plan.

——

CraftyJS bugs I have yet to report:

• Tint component draws tints under my canvas sprites. Not sure why, but that isn’t useful to me.
• Tween component overshoots values; tweening my tiles through 90 degrees of rotation went 5-15 degrees too far.
• Initializing component properties to new objects at the time of declaration (instead of inside the init() constructor method) shares them between all instances of that component. Not good, may not be fixable.
• FPS seems to be fixed at 50fps. Should be adjustable in Crafty.init().
• Typeahead find bug is back? Keypresses bubble up out of Crafty and trigger the browser’s typeahead find.

Well I learned a lot from this.  First of all, the controls are much less self explanatory to the people playing it then the people programming it.  And also you should probably have it switch to the first weapon automatically, cause nobody’s gonna figure it out that they have to press the switch weapons key to get it.  Sorry to everyone who downloaded it and couldn’t play, that was my bad.

Hello everyone!

A little post to explain how I create levels in Run Away.

All the system is based on pixels.

First I got my set, here is my Hell set.

Then I create on my paint editor a new image where 1 pixel is one tile in the game (classic).

To choose which tile to use, I work on the Red color, Grass will be 0, Water will be 100 …

Then I add foes, bonus, checkpoints  and tuto points with Green color

And to conclude, the Blue allows me to select a specific one. For exemple I can chose the foeI want to spawn.

Here are my maps

For the last one, that’s what we have in game:

In the game, the loading is really static, I could have added information on the Alpha of the first pixel to store data on the level for exemple the set (if it’s forest or lava) and the id (to know the order).

My local values for each colors.

int GrassRed = 0;
int WaterRed = 100;
int PanelRed = 130;
int EndRed = 150;
int SpikeRed = 160;
int BossWallRed = 170;
int DefaultRed = 255;

int SpawnGreen = 100;
int CheckPointGreen = 200;
int FoeGreen = 150;
int BonusGreen = 160;
int TextGreen = 170;
int ShadowGreen = 180;

int FishBlue = 100;
int BirdBlue = 101;
int SawBlue = 102;
int HalfSawBlue = 103;
int HalfSawLeftBlue = 104;
int BirdNoCollideLeftBlue = 105;
int BirdNoCollideRightBlue = 106;
int SawNoCollideTopBlue = 107;
int BossBlue = 120;
int BossDamageBlue = 121;

//int SpawnSideRightBlue = 255;
int SpawnSideLeftBlue = 254;
int SpikeRightBlue = 254;
int SpikeBottomBlue = 253;
int SpikeLeftBlue = 252;

Thanks for reading, if you want some other little post on how my game works, please comment

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=preview&uid=7984

My first time trying LD and it was a great learning experience as well as being fun and creative! It was kinda cool to just sporadically start programming random things with no base code (although the source code is a minefield of awfulness) and getting to draw whatever I really felt like – setting it as a dream gave me some artistic license with things, for example you don’t usually get whales in space (or oceans in space for that matter).

What went well

• The theme. It made me think about games slightly differently, I usually like platformer-type action or puzzle games, but I had the opertunity to think of something a little different.
• I got the art done as I went along, started off with the character and some stars, then as I got ideas I just scribbled out some more (with a basic idea of where I was headed)
• The code was not very nice but got the job done, was very fast to come up with on the spot. The paper concept for the player was a half-way snake type thing, instead of cells in a ‘rope’ rotating they stayed axis aligned, giving the paper vibe (along with the art).
• I like the way it feels, weird and dreamlike. I always think of dreams as a lonely place – people will be often be in dreams, but they aren’t really there.
• It looks a little sad from the outside, which matches the ‘alone’ theme, but my view of the end is more cheerful – but I’ll leave the whole thing open to interpretation.
• I didn’t give any instruction as to what the player is supposed to do, because they can do whatever they want. There is a purpose and end to the game, but I think games are about an individuals’ experience, and I thought it was cool to just let people float around in my little dream world and just check it out, move things around, do whatever they want.
• Working over a 48 hour period wasn’t as bad as I thought, next time however, I will be more prepared and bring something a little more solid to the party.

• SOUNDS! Total lack of them. My main regret. I didn’t really know how to load and use sounds, didn’t know of any libraries or how to use OpenAL and didn’t really have the time to learn so much as I went along. Probably gonna look at SDL for the future.
• Images, as I had zero base code to start with I forgot (after not programming for PC in a while) I didn’t have any image loading libraries, so I found a nice lightweight lib called SOIL, which was really simple and worked perfectly.
• It wasn’t exactly polished to a high standard. The code was inefficient (and sloppy), there was no reset and no title (although a title probably wasn’t necessary).
• The code should compile on Linux and Mac, but I don’t have a Linux install and didn’t have the time to get it running on my Mac.

Tags: postmortem

Yay, Dread Maze is fun. Happy days. Mostly writing this so I have at least one journal entry. 😛

Isn’t it sad that the amazing winner of the BEST COMMUNITY award last time wouldn’t have any entries at all? :’-( At least I made a game. It was my dad’s birthday and I am home for the holidays, so that I found any time at all is pretty surprising.

(This post mortem can also be found on our own blog!)

SOLILOQY – my LD compo game – you can play it and rate it!

Ludum Dare 22 was somehow pretty exhausting for me, and kind of depressing. I don’t exactly know why, but I think that multiple factors brought in.

The weekend before the compo I made a “warm-up game”, even though I planned to do it long before PoV announced this kind of thing. I just wanted to make a game in 48 hours in order to help a friend (a 3D artist), who needed a programmer for his university project. The programming part wasn’t wasting, but the fact that the game didn’t get finished at this weekend (mostly because of my friend :P) left feelings of “incompleteness” inside me, which I hate.

Another thing: I didn’t like the theme “Alone”, and I still don’t think it was the best or even a good theme of the ones in the final voting round. But, as I always have to live up to my own standards I wanted to follow the theme AND make a good game. And this often leads to a status-quo – as long as I don’t have the right ideas I won’t start, and as long as I don’t start I won’t have the right ideas. Or something like that. My mind was blocked and I did other things, like playing Skyrim and chatting on IRC (not in #ludumdare, though, that place was CROWDED). Later, I started Unity3D and tried to play out another idea I had days before, about some time manipulation gameplay. It wasn’t feasible to do it in Unity3D, but due to the fact I did something concrete (game with 3D environment and FPS controls) I could develop another idea in my brain, which became the concept of the final SOLILOQUY.

I still think the best part of my game is this name! I thought of it before I thought of the gameplay (but it didn’t give me any directions,), and I liked it so much, I wanted to use it in any case. I’m quite happy nobody else named his/her game the same, too.

Even though I have some experience by participating at Ludum Dare before, I still don’t really know how to cut back optimally. The concept of SOLILOQUY demands levels, and levels demand content and art and story and design and choosing colours and making 3D models … but I knew this would be hard for me, as it was when I made my Ludum Dare 20 game, “TRI“. So I decided to do NO textures this time, and it didn’t hurt much (on the game’s side), but the benefits weren’t that great either. I mainly put the levels together in Unity3D instead of 3dsmax (in contrast to TRI), but this didn’t help me much, either. Altogether I have six levels now, where I really wanted ten, but at least seven.
The levels don’t look that bad (abstract style for the win), even though I chose the colours quite randomly. On the other side, what I don’t like much, the levels are all tutorial missions only. You just jump around in the first two, learn using your souls in the levels after that, press some buttons and work together with yourself. After this, the real levels should come, but I didn’t have time to do any more content.

I finished the last level three hours before the deadline, and I couldn’t do any more creative stuff. I especially failed in doing sounds or anything like music, unfortunately. I thought about using inudge.net again, but it would sound like my other two Ludum Dare games, so I dropped that idea. At least this frustration encourages me to actually learn how to make simple songs with real tools. (Wish me luck.)
The reason why I couldn’t do more creative work: This time, Unity3D was my enemy. Sometimes I really had to fight the engine, mostly when it came to the text you see in the game (story & hints) – Unity’s GUI system still is awkward to look at, and it has bad effects on the performance. So I used someone’s code which displays bitmap fonts via SpriteManager (the original one), but it didn’t work out of the box with all my bitmap font generator tools (I decided to use “TWL Theme editor”). After those problems were resolved, at the very end of the process, suddenly my white text became gray in the webplayer version. Argh! I needed nearly an hour to find out why that happened – a plane with alpha (the dark overlay) had the same distance to the camera as the text, and somehow the editor sorted it differently than the webplayer. Whyever that is.

After the mixed (or even bad) feelings I had about my own game, I’m really relieved that people actually liked it! The current feedback is mainly positive, and some things that were criticized are fixed in a post-compo version (on Kongregate, for more attention)! Other things, like the jumping height / range being too crass, are somewhat subjective and unfortunately can’t be changed without rearranging some of the levels.
Of course, many people complain about the brain-hurting aspect of the game (gameplay and visuals alike), but that was expected. I could have done the double-soul mechanic with just a picture-in-picture style or something like that, but then the game would lose its uniqueness pretty fast IMHO. Also, as soon as dogbomb does his “I play your game drunk!” video, the whole game visuals will make much more sense, haha.

BTW, if you have a look at the source you will need Unity3D. The indie version should suffice for just reading the C# files and so on, but you need Unity Pro (or its 30 day test version) in order to actually start the game, because I used Render To Texture. Sorry!

Thanks for reading this wall of text, and don’t forget to PLAY THE DARN THING!

Tags: post-mortem, postmortem, puzzle game, Rat King, unity3d

It’s been a solid couple of days now so it’s time to give my game (The Animals are Deadly) a sober second thought.

Good Things:

• I did things I for the most part knew how to do. Not as much guess and hope it works coding this Ludum Dare.
• This lead to some serious art time which hopefully shows.
• For the amount of time I put into sounds and music it turned out pretty rad. I’m usually pretty bad at that.
• I slept and ate like a normal person all weekend. Felt wonderful.
• Kicking birds away is fun.
• The HUD looked sick, but I’m pretty biased towards big stupid HUDs.

Bad things:

• It’s pretty hard to tell what the Van does. (It scares the birds away; can be used to stay safe for awhile or keep birds from following behind you)
• The map is WAY to big with WAY too many things I must have been subconsciously overcompensating for something.

All in all it was a good run this Ludum Dare and I’m pretty happy with the results.

You can play the game here.

Here goes a postmortem for my first LD game, Lighthouse Keeper. I started working on the game on Saturday afternoon and finished almost on the deadline.

This was a great experience even if my game didn’t turn out great

What went right:

• Managed to submit a game, even if it’s horrible, buggy and way too hard.
• The art is ok in general terms (for programmer art!), atleast better than stuff I’ve done before.
• Using stuff I’ve worked with previously: C++, SDL, OpenGL.
• Simplifying my original idea so I could finish in time.

What went wrong:

• The game ended up being too hard. Should probably tune the wolves and player attack damage and/or add more lives to the player. Actually you started with 5 hearts but decided to drop to 3 just before submitting the game.
• You can walk on water! Didn’t have enough time and decided to work on other stuff instead of adding collision detection for staying on the island.
• I spent too much time trying to figure out isometric tiles when I could have just render a rotated quad for the island (pretty much did this to save time).
• The code is horrible, there’s repeated stuff and it’s messy. This is because I just started coding right away with no planning or thinking before.

Tags: postmortem

I had a lot of issues since the end of the 48h challenge and the game wouldn’t work correctly for obscure reasons. But now it does.

You can play it here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=preview&uid=6638 (I strongly recommend Firefox to play it best online)

Gameplay video!

Tags: LD22, video

Volcanox was a lot of fun for me. Although a programmer, game development is not something I normally do. Additionally, it was also a test of the programming language MoonScript. I wanted to see if I could write a game in my own programming language.

The results, I thought, were pretty good. By the end of the competition I had something playable. I even had time to write music and insert sound effects.

If you haven’t played the game yet, you can do so here!

The Process

For this project I started with plain LÖVE. I figured I could get a foundation together. Even before the theme was announced I was pretty certain of making a platformer. It’s something I’ve never done before but I implementation ideas in my head. The first night was all writing collision detection code and movement. This was the one thing I was certain about writing, so I plowed through it. I even had time to write a map loader

I implemented an algorithm called Uniform Hash Grid, which let me subdivide my collidable objects to reduce the number of checks per frame. This worked very well, I was able to create a huge map with no impact to runtime performance. (It had a little load time though, which I think I could improve if I had more time.)

My map loader just loaded a bitmap where pixels represented collidable tiles. I did this to avoid having to use any real map editor tool. In my code I assigned colors from the map image to be actual tile sprites. This was my first map:

From there I just added gravity, and assigned a jump button and I had a working platformer.

I spent some time fooling around with ideas. I wrote a basic particle system which I later used for all the shooting effects.

The next day, after waking up I decided to tackle something I thought would be very hard, drawing sprites. I put together a simple (and awful) animated player sprite:

After that though I kind of lost sight of what I wanted to create. I had a working system, but I didn’t know what kind of game to create. I  got lazy and went out to a coffee shop with friends. I think this was unavoidable because I needed time to think. After that I decided I would have shooting and enemies so I started coding bullets. I added minor things and created a tile set. Things were looking okay but I still didn’t have a game mechanic.

On the last day the name Volcanox finally came to me. I coded up until 1 hour before the deadline adding simple game features like title screen, and winning and losing conditions. I added one enemy and wrote the AI. I had no experience writing something like that so it came out very unnatural. I decided that because the game was so simple, I would make the enemy spawning very aggressive. This actually made the game (annoyingly) hard. I expanded the map to make it huge and have lots of enemy spawners.

Here’s the final map: (yes that’s a volcano)

The last hour I rebooted into OSX and recorded some music on my keyboard, and quickly got some sound effects out of bfxr. I submitted my game at exactly 6pm.

The final submission’s source code is on GitHub.

Review of MoonScript

Part of this project for me was testing how well MoonScript would work for game development. MoonScript is a language that compiles into Lua. It’s a slimmed down syntax that adds a lot of sugar. Things like classes, list comprehensions, and a lot of other useful stuff. It works great with LOVE.

I wrote 1534 lines of MoonScript, and it compiled into 2880 lines of Lua. Pretty cool!

I heavily used the class system, and the inheritance it provides. It allowed me to quickly scaffold objects in my game. I think if I were writing Lua, a lot of time would be spent designing my object interaction. In that regard, MoonScript was an excellent tool to use.

I strongly recommend it for game development.

What went right

• Using MoonScript
• Using a bitmap and gimp as my map editor
• My tools all worked well together

What went wrong

• Didn’t test on windows, got report of people having issues after submission
• Didn’t know what I wanted to make in the middle of the comp
• Didn’t have any foundation code, had to focus more on getting code to do basic stuff instead of adding game features and polish.

Once again, If you haven’t played the game yet  you can do so here!

Tags: lua, post-mortem, postmortem, screenshot, tools

Here’s the first in my (maybe) three part series of postmortems for my game ZERO2. Of course, I’d recommend checking the game out first before reading so here’s the link:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=preview&uid=5821#LD48

GOALS

This is my second time participating in Ludum Dare, so coming into it I was hoping not only to simply make a game, but to outdo my previous effort. My LD21 game (NO ESCAPE [pictured below]) was fairly well received for its graphics and audio but (as many commentors noted) suffered from three main flaws:

1. ‘Not A Game’

Well, that’s a little harsh, but in some ways maybe true. I hadn’t even attempted to program anything for years going into LD21, so I decided on a concept that would require the bare minimum of coding. The result ended up feeling more like an interactive movie than a proper game, with little variation between playthroughs, and no real challenge or obstacles.

2. ’40 MB WTF?!?!’

While I was working on it the last thing on my mind was how big the .swf was going to be. Turns out it was really big – 40 MB big, which in the world of Flash games is humongous. This led to a painfully slow preloading screen. This wouldn’t be so bad if it wasn’t for this next point…

3. ‘Press Space Bar for a Minute Then it’s Over?!?’

Yup, despite all that loading time you were getting only about a minute of gameplay. And while I generally go for quality over quantity, I think it’s safe to say my game simply didn’t have enough content.

'NO ESCAPE' - My entry for LD21

SUCCESS

So, with these goals in mind, how do I think I did with my LD22 entry?

1. ‘It’s A Game This Time I Swear!’

This time I based my gameplay on the point-and-click adventure style popularized by games like Myst in the early 90’s. Although this type of game still has moments that feel a bit like ‘interactive movies’, it still definitely feels like a game. You solve (admittedly simple) puzzles, collect equipment, and have to find your way to the end. The great thing for me, is that this type of game is relatively easy to code – and I was sort of thrilled that everything worked as expected almost right off the bat.

2. ‘3 MB OHH YEAAAAHHHH’

I was SO concerned about the file size of the final .swf that I took every imaginable step to keep it down. All of the image files are as compressed as I could get them without showing too many artifacts. I also really restrained myself in terms of adding animated sequences to the game, and when I did add them I tried to be very conservative with the frame count.

3. ‘It Takes Slightly Longer Than a Minute to Beat!’

Ok, it’s still a short game, but I really busted my ass to create as many environments as I could so that the experience would have some ‘girth’ to it. I think these types of games are successful when you can really drag the player into the game world so they can feel that sense of exploration and being lost in an unknown environment. While I think this game could certainly be much longer, I think it’s long enough to get the player ‘involved’ with the world and the story.

FAILURE

While overall I think I would describe the game as a success, there are certainly ways it could be better:

1. Too Easy

Right now the game is quite simple – almost all the puzzles are solved in the same way: you need some object to proceed, find said object, proceed. I wish I could have programmed some more complicated stuff in (for example I had an idea for a ‘circuit breaker’ style minigame to get one of the elevators running) but every additional layer of complexity would have severely increased the time spent coding.

2. The Sound of Silence

While I’d like to think the environments convey a potent atmosphere with the visuals alone, the truth is that sound probably would have made the experience twice as good. In fact, I was thinking about sounds all the way through the development process – unfortunately, I just ran out of time!

3. Too Short / Not Enough Replay Value

Ok, after patting myself on the back for making it longer than my LD21 game, I still think I could do better. Part of that could be achieved through replay value. And while replay value for puzzle/adventure games is always hard to achieve, I had a pretty good idea to implement an ‘Investigation Rating’ at the end of the game so that players would potentially want to go through it again and try to examine everything in the game for a 100% rating. You know, basically achievement hunting! Of course, I’d need to add a lot more stuff to investigate…

CONCLUSION

Despite these ‘failures’ I still feel pretty good about my game, as I think overall I was able to achieve my goal of outdoing my LD21 in almost every way. The other good news is that I feel I’m in a pretty good position to expand upon and improve the game without needing to completely redo it. Whether I choose to do that or not…well, we’ll see.

I haven’t said too much about the graphics since I’ve decided to save that for another post. If you’re curious about my process though stay tuned for my next postmortem, in which I’ll do a step-by-step breakdown of the creation of a single scene.

So time for post-mortem is here…

This time I’ve managed to create fullscale and mostly playable game (probably best I’ve done in 4 competions I’ve attended in last two years) which is even quite fun to play, so I’m pretty happy with myself, even if I had to move to the jam and use another 12 or so hours to finish it.

It’s an oldschool style FPV dungeon crawler with a goal to find your zombie kittens and be finally alone with them (and a big bag of brains), but rotten undead pirates ninja looted your kittens and you have to take them back. I even had time to do some leveling with three skills (ninja, pirate and undead) and tune up the game (not completely happy with it, it tends to be too easy later on, but since playthrough takes about half of hour I just had no time to do more testing.)

What went well:

Using Unity (well mostly) instead of coding everything from scratch… after several months of using Unity fulltime I’m quite skilled with it and this time most of the things I hate about Unity wasn’t issue, since I was doing PC / Web build. And web build is one of the things I like on unity (even if there’s no linux player). (BTW web version of TDMR is just about 700 kbytes, while pc has 20  megs :/)

Drawing 2D “art” : I’ve spent just maybe two hours drawing all textures and sprites and skins for characters using tablet, Paint.Net and not giving a damn about how hurtful it will be for eyes of some more sensitive people I could have done something much better if I wanted… but it would took me at least day. And this way I can boast about having “style” 😀

Decision to use pirate/ninja/undead – not exactly sure how I came to this connection (I think it’s from some picture I’ve once seen, who’s the bigger boss, pirate, ninja or zombie?), but i’ve mixed it together and in the end I have a lot of enemy types… easily made by combining three (well, four if you count ghost) base types- and I used it as a base for RPG system too.

Adding sounds: with about hour to spare for submission I took my mike and audacity and made some sounds and “voiceovers”, quickly patched it to the code and I’m quite happy with the result. Just too bad I hadn’t time to sing some songs as background music (brains brains brains brains braaaaains, brains brains brains!)

Keeping number of game elements in check I made most of the things I wanted to have in the game with the exception of brain-o-matics for buying brains.

What went mostly ok:

Most of the coding in unity, although I’ve spent some time trying to debug few stupid bugs I made (and debugging is sadly one of the beefs I have with Unity – it works much better on WIN editor, but I’m so used to total instability on MAC and “printf” debugging that instead of firing up monodev debugger and hoping for best I’ve spent a lot of time by putting numerous Debug.Logs everywhere. Resulting code isn’t even that ugly as usually is in my speed hacks… although I still hardcoded a lot of things without using some better design – if I ever try to use TDMR as a base for some more serious dungeon, I’ll have to refactor at least half of it.

Level design Originally I wanted to have few more levels (but smaller), but in the end it’s just one and I’m quite happy with it, it reminds me good old times with Beholder and Dungeon master, so it’s definitely ok from my point of view I’ve originally considered doing rogue like randomly generated levels, but it’s probably good I hadn’t even attempted it.

Playtesting and tuning up RPG system – At one point I realized that I’m playing for fun, not for testing, which really gave my morale big push. Also my GF used as playtester liked it (she’s as crazy about old RPG’s as I am), so although it could use some more tuning with difficulty and some parameters, it’s ok.

Sleeping enough I’m getting too old for non stop crushes and since I’ve ended one of the worst periods in my 10 year carrier as gamedev just before the start of the LD, I decided to take it easy. But in the end I had to move to Jam and use another 12 or so hours to finish it. I think I’ve spent about 30-40 hours total working on the TDMR.

What went bad:

Theme I was really unhappy with the theme (once again)… I’ve spent some time racking my brains for ideas about using alone for something original AND fun to play, or something interesting to flex my code skills on… then I gave up. Since I’ve always wanted to make some oldschool FPS RPG (and never found enough time), I’ve decided to make it and force it somehow on the Alone theme… (from what I’ve seen from other submbissions, I wasn’t the only one using this approach – some entries don’t even try to use alone in any way).

Idea about using animated chars instead static sprites – near the end of the day one I had a stupid idea – why use simple static sprites if I’m using Unity? So I ventured to recreate my first characted (pirate ninja skeleton), put it on simple 2d mesh… then skin it and rig it to the bones. I’ve wasted a LOT of time on this, result is ugly (kinda hard with the texture I’ve started to do good mesh and skin it so it can move without serious distortion taking place), but I should have expected that – I have all the theoretical knowledge about this stuff, I wrote it from programmers point of view, but… using 3ds max for anything else then checking on some artists work, creating super simple meshes and importing/exporting here and there, is something I just don’t have much experiences… Well, I now have some, but it took me too much time, especially considering results. But at least I’ve learned / practiced something new.

(First sprite I’ve made before switching to animated chars… it’s static, but it looks better :/)

So… I’m mostly happy with my entry (and hope someone will play it :), about the only thing I’m sad is that I hadn’t time to implement save and load… never wanted to do it, other then maybe checkpoints on the level start, but since I had just one… Problem is that doing serialization in Unity for proper save / load is not that easy and it takes some time to do properly… time I knew I won’t have.

Anyway, I’m glad I had time to participate in LD and looking forward for another one (and Global Game Jam next month). Although it can be brutal… it’s fun (especially when compared to “normal” crunches on commercial stuff).

PS: going to rate some games before I start working on another game (I have three months to finish one commercial design), so if you’ve made something else then platformer (I seriously hate those), drop me a link

My entry page

Playable version (unity web player)

Link to my blog

Hi All !

I just received my Ludum Dare Christmas gift ! The sender is Polm23 who doesn’t know what to send me so He looked at my LD21 submission which is Pastagus Fantasy. A crazy shoot’em up that is a tribute to Parodius and other amazing shmups. So He decided to offer me Gokujo Parodius on Super Famicom ! He also adds a weekly manga pre-publication magazine and some flyers of the mythic retro game shop the well named Super Potato.

His gift is just AWESOME ! Obviously like a lot of people here I’m a retro gamer and so a fan of Parodius games and I love receiving Japanese stuffs ! Fortunately I didn’t have this one and can’t wait any more to play it !

So once again a big thanks to Polm23 ! You are the best ! And here is a photo of what was inside the package.

Merry Christmas Everyone !

Tags: christmas, gift, parodius, pastagus, shmup

Well we didn’t make the deadline for the Jam, but we’re committed to finishing the project regardless. We just rushed into this thing too quickly and got in over our heads. The physics for our original idea were too complicated and everything just fell in. Here’s our latest mockup, programming starts tomorrow. If you’re interested in following our progress, check out @undergroundpixl on Twitter. We mainly focus on iOS development, but plan on participating in Ludum Dare Jams into the foreseeable future!

Play the game HERE.

Timelapse video:

I’ll make it short and to the point:

RIGHT

– I finished on time

– Interface

– Idea

– Art

WRONG

– I had to leave many stuff out

– No time to make music

– No time to polish

– Some problems with the software (The Games Factory NGE) (Game was supposed to be displayed scaled 2x, not in a small window. Didn’t know it wasn’t possible until I was done).

MISC.

I don’t think the game reflects what I intended, as the content is very limited but it may give imaginative people an idea of what I had in mind. I’ll surely keep working on this to make a proper game that’s more enjoyable.

Tags: post-mortem, postmortem, timelapse

So first of all, thanks LudumDare, because of you I had awesome weekend. It was my first gamedev experience and it was amazing.
My game is Glow. You can download/rate it here.

I’ve tried to do my best on theme/mood. And I think I succeeded in it.
What went right: code, sound, idea, storyline
What went neither right nor wrong: art, level design
What went wrong: packaging. I though it would be easier :/
See you next LD.

Here is a full playthrough video of Aurea Oceanus!

Sharks at 00:49 and 04:01 😀

Play it here!

Not much to say here

What went right:

Simple gameplay idea
Using tools i’m familiar with
Livestreaming, there was only a few people, but they were a great motivation and stress relief

What went wrong:
Making a level editor, should have added a few more features like painting an area and auto-save
Enemies programming, should have optimized this

Timelapse:

Download and rate here:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=rate&uid=2958

Tags: 7Soul, easter-egg, kitten-challenge, postmortem, timelapse

Hello there!
I’d love to get some honest feedback on my game. Ratings, comments and constructive criticism are very much appreciated!

Download, rate and comment it here!

Thanks a lot!

Alone with… things!

Here’s my timelapse, complete with faffing around in Unity like a noob:

I wrote some thoughts about my weekend on my blog, but generally: very happy with how I managed to get to grips with Unity, and very much looking forward to using it again in future. As for the game… I hope people see where I was going with it, even if it is a little unfriendly to the player! But overall another great Ludum Dare weekend (that’s 5 now :O).

Edit: Oh yeah, the game page is over here! http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=rate&uid=1626

Tags: timelapse, unity

As you may know (or not), I used TimeSnapper for timelapsing. However, for some reason, all these screenies cannot be used in my video editing software, because of some “missing file” issues when I select all of these. :/
Well, now at least I know that I should test my software even better. :U

Also, I was thinking if I should continue developing my game. The truth is, I want to abandon TGF2 in favor of C++. You know what that means for my game.
Well, I still have time to think about it. Not that I have a deadline now anyway 😛

And again, entry: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=preview&uid=3133 (for those who are curious what I am talking about)

Another day, another timelapse.

Unity3D, Maya, Paint.NET and FL Studio.

play it here

Another LD48 over, and I got some sleep in a warm cozy bed. Which is nice, especially because at the location where I was programming the game, the heating didn’t work o.O

So let’s do a final post for this LD: I was watching many Parodius videos on youtube a few weeks ago, simply because I like the music. Also:

Gradius (original)

Parody + Gradius = Parodius (awesome game)

Ludum Dare + Parodius = Ludum Darodius 😉

What went well:

Graphics: I managed to make lots of animations in GraphicsGale (awesome program), and even though I was like laughing all the time because they looked so funny very close, I don’t regret spending so much time on them 😉

Gameplay: I wanted to make a helicopter game for a long time, and I did!

Alternative challenge: Haha, did I really have a cat in there :)?

What didn’t went well:

Theme: When the theme was announced, I made a draft. And didn’t like it. At all. Made me want to give up, because I like funny games. Kept drafting, but no. And that part alone took  4-5 hours already :/. So I scrapped it all, and scrolled through the posts on this site to get an idea. Until someone had a post with that skunk and the cat of the looney tunes, and then it made *ping* (thanks for that!). ‘Leave me alone’ rather than ‘alone’ alone. Plus, the kitten challenge kept me going

Sleep: Unbelievable, I felt like cr*p after the first night. Getting old :D? At that time I was staring at the code, unable to do anything. So I kept animating and drawing more and more sprites + making concepts for new ones.

And that’s the ranting for this time. Always a nice experience to code and code and code and code 😀

Screenshot for those who don’t make it to the boss (would be sad if you didn’t see the animation ^^). Side scrolling penises!??!? :D:D. They were supposed to look like the mountains from Super Mario

Happy voting!

First of all, the game:

Desert Adventure (with Kittens)

This game is a text adventure where you control a player waking up in a hostile environment.

What went horribly wrong:

• Theme, I had like 0 idea what to do with Alone (but I can only blame myself, that’s one of the few themes I voted for in the final round).
• I procrastinated way too much while pretending to be looking for an idea.
• I had other things to do that weekend, which I did during the last 5 hours of LD.
• I’ve had to rush making one third of the game’s content in one hour.

What went right:

• Using jQueryMobile for the first time.
• Choosing a text-adventure (time was short, 12h were already gone, so not having to create assets except using jQuery’s ThemeRoller for text/bg colors was great).
• Adding Kittens!
• Choosing a web-deployable framework (makes packaging 100x easier).

Although I wasn’t inspired as much as during previous LDs, I’m happy with what I came up with and I hope the final product will satisfy you, the players !

Tags: kitten-challenge, postmortem, screenshot

Covers about 20 hours of actual work, most of which spent with a warm cat on my lap.

Post-mortem coming soon!!

Edit: thanks Galman for helping with the embed!

Tags: cat, ghost town, kitty on my lap, time lapse, timelapse

I wrote up a postmortem for this game here: http://blog.wolfire.com/2011/12/Ludum-Dare-22-Alone

After reading one of the posts on the Ludum Dare main page about creating a video of your game. I decided that it would be a great opportunity to demonstrate the game being played by myself. I hope other game developers do this with their games. It’ll give me the chance to view and understand games from the developers perspectives and perhaps get to rate games that I couldn’t otherwise play if they are windows only ( as I am on OS X)

I hope you enjoy.

We finished our game! Whee! Download the windows package here.

Here’s a screenshot:

Even though it does say “Game Test”, this is the final version. If you’re running on Linux and want an executable, drop a comment on the game page and I’ll submit one. The game runs fine under wine too, I got it to run under wine on my mac and Linux laptop.

Well this was fun!!

My game is kinda lame and it need some more work. For example it needs more than one enemy ;), more levels and a background.. I was suppose to enter the compo but I ran out of time, so I aimed for the jam.

FAIL:

• It started with the theme. I had some ideas but they were way to big for this.
• libGDX is a good library.. But I used it in the wrong way to start with, so 4h++ work were throw away..
• The boss was made when it was 30 mins to go, art + code. It should be a cat but I can not make good pixelart. Not with 30 mins to go! Haha..
• Spent to much time on details. The collision detection is horrible, it works but…. and other stuff that I am ashamed of…

• I submitted something !! Yes I am really happy for that even if it is lame 😉
• Well it is not so much art but I think I can do some good pixelart. If I have time for it.
• I ate pretty good and drank lots of water/juice
• Took breaks and even went to a Christmas dinner with good friends.

Peace

Tags: LSM, postmortem

– Nightmares of a Wizard –

Christopher Yayahkeekoot – @TheYayahkeekoot – Art and Design

Initially, we had our everything figured out. Going smoothly, we started on our various jobs but within the first 4 hours, our sound guy quit so we had to repost and restart. This was a major setback because we knew we needed sound for this game to go as we wanted. I remembered our friend Jacob Lake (aka ClankyTheGorn) did some awesome ambience so we skype called him and asked him what he thought… we were in luck as he was all for it… After that I found producing sprites wasn’t as hard as I had thought as long as I didn’t try to hard, letting my inner feeling take over.  This helped me a lot I think, more so than sleep food or even the bathroom (ok, mabe the bathroom helped more).

Things that went well:
-The title menu and HUD
Having finished most of the sprites, I decided to rework the title menu so that it fit the feeling more, I added a fade around the edges and a blood glob that looked more like red wax seal, in the corner which probably made all the difference.
– The Voice Acting
We found that by the time we had it finished, it required voice acting to put the cherry on the cake. This wasn’t so much hard as it was  repetitive.. the mic we used wasn’t of the best quality as it lived on Gabriel’s floor. Instead, we worked with it so that it produced something that, though quiet, had no background noise or sharpness. Finally, using audacity, Gabriel amplified it so you could hear it over the background music.
– The Damage system and spells
We knew exactly what we were going to so that helped alot of the spriting side… Having the image in my head I went to work on the fireball… Saturation up, glo up, make a tear shape and paint it orange… done, next the Ice blast spell… Simple ball of blue, add glow… add lgow…add glow (etc x20) and voila! The acid and lightning sprites produced by gabe forplaceholders but were so good we just kept them.
– The theme and storyline
Here, we developed it as we went although we had a good overall story planned. We didnt want to try to develop a story without first knowing the theme so we decided to wait until it started before developing. Fast, effective and easy to implement, our story was also very manipulative.

Things that went… meh:
-The Wall sprites and floor sprites
I did these fast and they were the first thing to do… Not making a Spritemap was the worst idea ever and I may just go back and fix that in a hotpatch in the near future (it’s just a lot of effort on my part) so … yeeaaah
– The Level Select Buttons
These were mass produced by me in 5 minutes, I wish I had spent more time making them fit into the background, possibly having them be constellations or something, though it is not necessary at all
– The Achievements
also made these extremely fast but they came out a little better than the level select buttons. I wished I had made them a little lager and more intricate but whatever, I enjoyed them anyway.

Things that went wrong:
– The wall sprites
ugh… I did them to fast and I wish I had made a sprite-map as  I stated before. These were everywhere and made things look amateur and messy and so I give my apologies in that respect.
– The original Gargoyles
We needed a static enemy that didn’t move but still attacked the player.. In a castle what is there to shoot you? Gargoyles! The original grgoyles were hideous, tiny and just overall bad. So I redid them and they look a lot better when I spent more than three minutes on them…
– My body
After the first 23 hours my body decided to just stop working… off to bed for a half an hour and then Gabriels mother woke us up so back to work… It was good though, then 20 hours later my body was just screaming at me to stop… nope, i stated, not happening… it happened. About 6 hours later got up again and blasted off the rest of the game. Slept very little last night as I am not screwed in the inner clockworks. :/ it’ll fix itself eventually, till then I’ll work on the game more!

-Wishes
I had hoped to have some interactive rooms, such as levers/buttons/gates that opened stuff to give it a more moody setting as, currently, it is a dungeon crawler with waves of enemies and a boss… fun but repetitive 😛

–( Overall )–
Our product, Nightmares of a Wizard, overall excelled our first standards and hopes. The appearance of the game could have gotten a little more working on but we were stressed for time and it was “good enough” for me. The coding was beautiful

PS: I really loved messing with people

[-]==+——————————————————————————+==[-]

Gabriel Silvarredonda  – @gabotun – Programming and Design

What went right?
 --Programming went very smoothly, I figured I would have more bugs then I really did, and I only
 ever got stuck with a couple of strange changes I must have made by accident and did not notice.
 --I really have to give credit to Chris for all the spriting here, he worked fast and efficiently
 and we got all the stuff we needed by the deadline, my 1920x1280 desktop is still full from the
 70+ sprites he made in 72 hours!
 --The mood ended up working very well, we feel the tone of the story flows and the cutscenes
 allow it to really be what it is.
 --Jacob really pulled through for us as well, we originally had other ideas for music, but
 after some problems with that Chris and I asked him for the best songs he could come up with and
 the end result was spectacular. Stick around for the credits to hear my favorite of his pieces!
 
 What went wrong?
 --Making this as a dungeon crawler style was a good idea, I had originally hoped to implement
 more boss battles however, but time began to run short near the end so we ended with simply
 polishing the 9 levels we got done.
 --We had some awesome voice acting for the different achivements, but in the end only had
 time to polish and implement the main story voice overs, which was dissapointing.
 
 In conclusion, NoaW was a lot of fun to make and I am very glad the theme wasn't kittens! xD
 ----ACHIEVEMENT GET: [Y U NO KITTEN!?]---- 

*phew* Finally back on Solid ground after flying half across the world from Europe to Asia…

So, I made a very very rough game, or more of a game mechanic prototype and it shows:

But it also is my first game. Regardless of the downfalls of not reaching my -too high aspirations- I learned a lot from this little challenge, had fun and I am definetly looking forward for the next Ludum Dare event.

The first thing I confirmed to my self was the fact that, 3D asset creation is a bitch when it comes to UV mapping. That perhaps took way too much of my time, simply trying to create UV  surfaces to which I could map tilable textures, on the assets I created for the game. I also seemed to fidget too much on this part, when In fact I should have first done the layout of the map using primitive shapes, and place all the objects onto the scene before working on the assets them selves. Perhaps the worst part was: I was completely aware this would take time from my experience with working with 3D models from before, but ignored my own instincts and warning sas I was working on the game.

Another thing that probably was also a big downfall and a big sink of time, that caused me nearly to reach madness was getting the doors to animate properly: At first I used Unity3Ds transform function in the scripting to try to make a smooth rotation, but I quickly found out that it simply adds to the rotation, instead of making an implicity turn.

After battling with it for over 8 hours straight (I nearly gave up and was going to call quits try to make a function that toggles it open and close), I found a very, very simple solution: That was simply to make an animation and command it to be executed it. Even with this it took a while to figure out why the door wasnt staying open, and constantly looping the animation, before I figured out that there is the Clamp-Forever. After I completed this, I did do the correct thing, and started to work on the game mechanic: But once I did complete the basic inventory system, and the interaction system, 38 hours in, I started my biggest mistake with fidgeting with the UV mapping and trying to work in textures, instead of working on the Map it self, when I had all the systems in I could work with.

I might have as well used blocks placed everywhere to make very simple puzzle.

So in summary, my mistakes were the following:

• I was not completely familiar with Unity 3D… Well it wasnt really a mistake, but I could have done my warmup with a bit more seriousness, and atleast check out how to make stuff interaction, Sure I found out how to make a flickering light within 15 minutes, but the fact that I had to bruteforce my way in with trying to make a door, thats something Basic I probably should have investigate on first.
• Take “alone” as an inspiration for an artistic puzzle game, instead of thinking up something much more simple
• Fidget too much on assets creation instead of the map, trying to get some textures aligned, and trying to do my UV mapping within 48 hours. Perhaps Next time I should just do simple minecraft style textures instead.
• Try to optimize my models, which probably caused lots of problems with the shaders in unity 3D (not sure if this was a mistake, but I saw alot of odd shader issues that are present in the final prototype release)
• My timelapse software could have been researched on more. my default webcam software and fraps simply couldnt do the job: Fraps apparently stopped 5 hours in to the timelapse, while my webcam software only kept a buffer of the previous 30 seconds… Any suggestions what I could use in the next LD?
• Perhaps make something more usual instead of trying something new: My first idea was an creepy abandoned house: Which could have been easier to make, instead of a abandoned gas station in the middle of nowhere, I had to then remove the abandoned, because after doing further research I found out I had shot my self in the foot: This was that you had to find a screwdriver, near a vandalized phonebox to open a Barricade infront of the gas stations door, and then try to do stuff in theree.
• Didnt get to work in the nemesis which would have been a planar 2D black shape with red eyes in the darkness: this would have been athing that would be getting closer and closer, unless the player got indoors and hid them selves.

Now so what went right:

• Game Mechanics: I am rather suprised I managed to get this far: I figured this out rather well and created scripts that would make the creation of puzzles relatively simple and easy to implement
• Gettings the Lighting, and Environment set up: I learned how to create a very nice looking cubemap without much issue, as well as flickering lights
• Sleep: I got enough of it, 4 hours a night is actually a fairly good timeframe, along with a few hours of naps here and there: I was never excessively tired, until the very end.
• I actually got the idea for the game down within 1 hour of the competition starting, regardless of its complexitivity,

Anyway, I am looking forward for the next LD, When I have time later this week, Ill probably check out the works done by everyone else in the compo

Still working on my game! Heres a preview of the art now that I got some extra time to work on it:
BEFORE:
AFTER:

Added some more lush colors and removed some of the noise. The tiles are somewhat less tile-ey too, but still keeping that noisy artifact charm. Somewhat prettier, no? More readable too. I guess it does reduce the noisy style a little, but its a trade-off I am pretty okay with for now.

Im really pumped about my game guys. Pretty goddamn pumped! Its gonna be sweet! And it already is kinda, except its riddled with bugs!
If you havent yet, check out the Ludum Dare compo version of my game HERE.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 20th, 2011 at 8:24 pm and is filed under LD #22. 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.

So, after I had some time to relax from the latest great Ludum Dare #22 I have the power to do my first postmortem! Yay!

Overall

I actually managed to finish a real game in less than 48 hours! Something that I never done before!

I got the idea of the game very easily: ALONE = Lonely People = People who want to meet other people = We have a game!

The idea was that there are lonely people who don’t want to be alone anymore and you have to help them meet each other.

1. Getting the platformer basics to work And the people AI

This part was pretty easy:

• I used flan to create a simple map.
• I programmed a simple algorithm which took an exported flan map and added blocks to the screen according to the exported flan map.
• I programmed a simple people AI which made them walk to the left until they hit a wall and then go to the right and so on…

2. Making the simple tools

At first I had some problems with the tools so I made two types of blocks: airBlock and dirtBlock.

• When the player clicks a dirtBlock and the tool which is selected on the inventory is item “0 – Hammer” the dirtBlock should turn into an airBlock.
• When the player clicks an airBlock and the tool which is selected on the inventory is item “1 – Dirt” the airBlock should turn into a dirtBlock.

3. Making the trampoline and the game over screen

• Added a trampoline which you can place on the map and when a people overlaps it the people is launched into the air.
• Added a game over screen which is activated when someone falls out of the screen.
• Added a little fade in fade out between levels.

4. Making a lot of new levels

Making a lot of levels with some help of my friend idea.

5. Day 2 – Making all the menus and implement Kongregate API

Making the menus was very fun and fast!

I am pretty familiar with the Kongregate API so it was also pretty easy to me to implement it on the game!

== At This Point I Finished The Game ==

To summarize

I was well prepared to the competition and it helped me a lot. I know flixel and Flash Develop very good and it was fun to make a game with them.

In addition, I made a game in the Mini-LD and the Warmup so I was even more ready to the compo.

I had some great times on my first LD, I am looking for next LD and I am very proud of myself that I managed to build such a game (I’m fourteen years old).

You Can View And Rate My Game Right Here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=rate&uid=5971

So, I was very exited to be able to do this year’s LD, this has been my second one. Last time I did it with a freind, our entry was Dwarflings. This year, I decided to try LD48, but unfortunatley due to something that popped up last-minute (literally) I had to move it to the Jam. I had a few frustrations jumping right into Flixel 2.5, which I had no idea would be so different, but they were resolved fairly easily.

(Here is my entry if you’d like to see it and rate it. (hinthint))

What went right:

• Sprites – I’m quite impressed with what I was able to do this time compared to what I did in LD21. My walkcycles still need work, but they’re better. Also, I’m no longer getting artist’s block when drawing characters. I drew Stan pretty quickly, much to my surprise.
• Programming – I think I did pretty well here, just needed a refresher here and there, kept the Flixel reference handy for getting used to 2.5, I’m thinking of writing a tutorial on my code, as it’s good, and Siefer Tim’s excellent platformer tutorial is long outdated.
• Time – Considering I took way too many breaks and started the compo at 2:00 PM ET on Saturday, I still finished, and almost had it done in time for the compo.
• “Feel,” moving – I think I nailed this. Since the game takes place on the moon, I needed to make you feel like walking on the moon, which resulted in great, realistic, high jumps, slow walking, sliding, etc… I’m really happy with how this turned out

What didn’t go so peachy:

• Bugs – As I learned Flixel 2.43, I was caught off-guard by how many changes there were in 2.5, and this resulted in many aggravating bugs that resulted from using old/depricated methods, and fixing these took a good 4 hours out of my time.
• Distractions – Minecraft, TF2, Patriots games, I didn’t really do well dividing my time between game-making and game-playing/watching. ‘Course, I was never good at that.
• Putting things off that I shouldn’t have – I put off the menu and SFX until the last minute, and I didn’t have time to get the SFX in, and the menu just barely scraped on. I had to cull an attract mode I wanted it to have due to time. Had I done this, I think it would have made my entry that much better.
• Guns and Bullets – As you can see, Stan has a gun. But of course, he can’t use it. This was the plan, to add it in and add enemies that shoot, but I didn’t have the time to add a shooting enemy, and therefore didn’t bother with the bullets

• Level design – The level feels too short, and there’s a lot of wasted space and useless jumping.
• Tilemap – I think I overdid the craters on this, it feels like there are too many.

They’ve been setting up SSL on the domain for the past few days, and it appears my subdomain broke, so my game can’t be downloaded at the moment. Sorry for the inconvenience, trying to get it working as soon as I can.

This LD I decided to throw myself into a completely new engine and way of making games and challenged myself to make a Flash game and learn Stencyl in 48 hours. Something about a definite and worthwhile deadline and the community spirit really creates a sense of urgency and also a source of motivation which definitely helped since I’m lazy and have a short attention span. I don’t really know how to do these things… Sorry!

What went well?

Well, things started out okay because I was just fucking around in MS Paint, and experimenting with the black and white setting. The Cultist scene was one of the first I drew and I was pretty happy with it. I spent a lot (probably too much) time on scenes at the start but those ones turned out really nice.  Even though I’m a bad guitar player and literally recorded the sound in one take, I think it turned out nicely.

What didn’t go so well?

Pretty much everything else. I’m pretty slow with coming up with good ideas, so a lot of the scenes in Survive The Desert feel forced and dumb. Making the game itself at first started off pretty well, but I ran into so many problems and didn’t know how to fix them that I wasted a lot of time doing really tedious code to make things work (there are 30 different objects just to handle the transitions to each different scene, and each scene has its own text box object). Because of this though, I sort of created something awkwardly long and with a seemingly strange sense of time and distance and although the desert is fairly populated there’s still a lot of space and I kind of think I managed to get a little of the theme in there. It’s growing on me. I hated it at first.

My artwork started getting really sloppy towards the end too, and I wish I’d had enough time to put in as much detail as I did in those early scenes. Also something simple like making the compass more apparent to the player, I didn’t get enough time to do.

What would you do if you had more time?

Originally I had intended to put in a hydration level which would decrease as you ventured across the desert. I also had ideas for different items you could start with which would allow for different ways to play the game. I really wanted to put an item called Danger Skull in there which when used would fill the screen and then a voice would say ‘There is danger here’ and that’s all it would do. I wanted to put in all these useless items that you could find in this large desert. I wanted more character interactivity too, but I was clutching at straws for ideas towards the end anyway so I don’t know how that would have turned out.

How would you rate your weekend as a whole?

Pretty highly I guess. I’m glad I did it, it’s always interesting to see how your mind works when a deadline is approaching. I kind of thrive under that pressure and that’s pretty much why I was able to finish this game.  I did only get like 4 hours sleep the whole weekend though, and didn’t really eat anything on Sunday which was kind of bad. But it’s done, and I’m glad I did it.

I’m sorry this post-mortem is pretty boring, you can try out my game Survive The Desert by clicking here.

I wrote a post-mortem for the last Ludum Dare on my blog.

Last week-end, December 17th to 19th, it was time for another Ludum Dare.

I took part in that Ludum Dare, just as my colleagues did, with our in-house game engine, the RedBox Engine.

TDWIWEEHF

The game I worked on is called 2011 : TDWIWEEHF. That title was not initially gibberish, but the line of thought I had with that original title was discarded once I realized I could not convey what I wanted to in the time I had. The game’s source is available at its bitbucket site, but not everything is made easy to build right now. I was mainly making use of BoxFactory for development. If you want to make it work, you will need to copy the libraries folder from the RedBoxApp starter project and call libbuildtool on that.

[…]

Continue reading on my blog at:
http://samuel.dionne-riel.com/blog/2011/12/20/TDWIWEEHF-ld22-postmortem.html

By the way, I don’t know if it’s frowned upon to post like that from another blog. If it is, contact me and I’ll work things out properly. Thanks.

After sleeping 12 hours and looking at the feedback that I got so far I think its time to write my Postmortem.

If you haven’t played it yet, go check it out . and have a look at the screenshot:

What went Wrong?
1. Lack of Sleep Management
I came from a very busy week finishing of a project on Friday and having to deal with the press, I was in a very rushed state. And also pretty tired and went to bed 30 minutes before the theme was announced. I slept for a long time and when i read the theme I was very demotivated and started to laze around not really knowing what to do. I slept for an hour or so in the afternoon aswell and played some soul calibour.

2. Fiddling around with the details
I spent a ridiculous amount of time adjusting the details of the landscape and the texturing, the trees and such. I think in the end this is what makes the athmosphere unique but i got a little obsessed with it and spend a lot of time on placing audio sources on the shore for example.
Also the textures of the landscape changed alot unitl i was happy with hte result.

3. Lack of Gameplay Instructions
Although I had lots of ideas of how to implement I got caught up in the art and didn’t start coding any real gameplay until sunday it would have been wise to do that earlier as It would have been easier for people to play the game if it would have been clear for them what to do. But then I wasn’t really sure about what to implement. so really it was a lack of clarity.

4. Lack of a Plan
I didin’t have a real plan I just started doing something and the game is what evolved out of a whole bundle of ideas. Even though I’m quite happy with the result a proper plan would have enabled me to really sit down and do some focused progress. instead I walked a more playful path adding stuff here and there. this made the process into a very joyful experience but a proper plan would have enabled me to finish more features in the weekend.

5. Lack of involvement with the community
Although I posted some progress reports, I would have liked to get involved with people a lot more. The Chat is just to fast for my liking and also on the central page the messages kept coming up in quite a rapid rate. It would have been nice to get some playtesting done before submission because that would have made the lack of instructions a lot clearer.

1. Starting with the music
I had noc idea what to do so, I just sat down on the piano and played while recording the midi. After 16 bars I stopped as i felt that I had jsut improvised a great harmonic progression I then took this progression adjusted it here and there and built the track from in about 30 to 45 minutes. Hearing the music I felt very inspired and basicaly built the whole game around it, always going back to it once i felt stuck.

2. Going for the Mood
Reading the theme and that there was a mood category this time, it immediately rang something within me and i set forth to take this as my main goal to built an athmosphere, a space of feeling.
I think that is what makes my game unique and where it really paid of to spend all that time on the art and sound, as people just love the athmosphere.

3. Proper Preparation
I took part in the warmup weekend which further enhanced my knowledge of Unity regarding game related functionality, as I have been using Unity in a non game related context.
also making myself familiar with modelling and texturing, proved to be very valuable. Sticking to the known toolset I never got stuck on anything which made the whole experience much more relaxed and enjoyable. I think Unity really showed its value as a development tool as I would never have been able to code something like that from scratch.

4. Getting involved in the Community
I posted progress reports involving screenshots and got some positive feedback which really boosted my motivation. That was good but It could have been more as indicated above.

5. Strong Visuals
I felt it was really important to have a strong artistic delivery as thats what people recognize first and which makes the game stand out among all the other entries. For me that meant having a well balanced color palette aswell as a general feeling for the forms and textures that make the game quite unique and also coherent.

All in all I’m really happy with the game, although it’s not really finished I have something that I want to keep working on and turn into a proper game.  Anyonone would be willing to pay for this?

So I finally settled down from LD22 and got time to render out the footage I took while making Isolated Assault, my entry. Some screenshots:

I had fun, but lost some sleep.

Anyways here’s the time-lapse video (The first and third music tracks are ones I created for another game, the second I created for this one. Process for the second one’s creation is shown in the video. Oh and I do tend to watch Notch’s live stream and play other people’s submissions from time to time.)

Isolated Assault – Ludum Dare 22 Timelapse

Resolution is a little large, you may want to go full-screen to see what applications I’m using.

This was my very first Ludum Dare entry, and I had a lot of fun with it

It actually got me motivated to make a game from start to finish, even if the game wasn’t so great. That said there are some things that I learned from doing this that everyone might benefit from.

When we were all sitting there voting on the final bunch of entries, the three best ideas that entered my head were for Forgotten Places, Kittens, and Consequences. I had a solid idea for Alone, but when the theme was actually announced I really fumbled it a bit. The final idea to come to mind had nothing to do with gameplay at all, it was a story idea. You’re a kid with your dog, your dog gets stuck, and you have to try to get the dog out. The twist was that you couldn’t do it the way you’d expect. Either you or the dog died, and you (the player) had to make that decision, and I’m certainly not going to make you feel good about either of them

Things that went well:

• Livestreaming. I really only had a max of 6 viewers at a time, and all of them were friends that I know in real life, but having someone there watching you is an amazing motivational tool. Want to go to 4chan real quick? Better be content you don’t mind everyone seeing. It also opens up a channel for some good ideas to get pelted at you when you get stuck.
• Art. Considering what usually gets saved and called art, I believe that the majority of the game art ended up pretty good. It’s a bit tile-ey but someone told me that it was a bad idea to spend the whole weekend drawing art, so I tried to get done with the art as quick as I could.
• Story. It’s an implied story, since there’s no text or dialogue (Unless you count the endings). I really wanted the player to enjoy the dogs presence and make the dog seem like a standard idiot dog, the kind that just roams around sniffing and being generally useless. And then once the player really likes the dog, take it away from them, and present them with a possible way to save the dog. I think it worked pretty well, and when I get comments like “You monster!” I know that they felt the emotions I wanted them to feel when playing the game.
• Sounds. Everything that seems like it should make sound does, and there’s also the little happy dog yap at the end as it runs off with the bone. I like it
• Multiple Endings. Games that have alternate endings always seem to require an extra bit of thought into how you go about completing it, and with a game like this i feel having the two endings was a really nice touch.

Things that could have gone better:

• Level Design. The level was really just slapped together as I added more and more to the little debug area that I started with. It certainly could have been more interesting, with things like traps, and enemies, or at least some form of challenge.
• Gameplay. The game isn’t fun, at it’s core it’s a button stomping game. This is really because all I had focused on is the feeling of being separated and alone.
• Music. I have never made an original tune before in my life, the music in this game is pretty bad, which is why I added in the mute button.
• Programming. The game is a horrible mess inside. At first I wasn’t really going to have that many objects so just placing the objects directly in code seemed like a good idea at the time, but as I got farther I realized I had like 150 lines of just adding new objects into the level. I haven’t used the DAME exporter for anything more than a CSV editor with a  GUI for a long time, so I could have taken the opportunity to get used to the exporter again.

The game itself wasn’t very fun, because the idea that I had in my head was for a story driven game, not so much a cool gameplay concept. I was short-sighted when I was making the actual game and just wanted the specific scenes that are present in the game, and wasn’t really taking much consideration as to how to hold the players attention.

Really it seems like the worst part of the game is… the game. As I was finishing up I began to realize that my game wasn’t a game as much as it was a mindless button stomping adventure, and by then it was far too late to go back and really change it. If (lol when) I do another Ludum Dare, I intend to put more thought into how to make the game fun before I work a story. It’s supposed to be a game after all, and there’s no point playing a dull game.

Ludum Dare 22 marks my fifth entry into the 48 hour game design competition of the GODS. My most critically successful competition thus far … was my first. Way back with LD 16 and the “EXPLORATION” theme, I created a Wall-e meets Fallout sidescrolling adventure that didn’t even have 75% of my planned features. Maybe it was because there were only 121 entries that time, but my game somehow ranked 8th in graphics and 20th overall. I was pleased with the warm reception, but I knew I could do better.

Fast forward to NOW… with Ludum Dare 22 and over 800 entries… wow. There are some AMAZING games floating around out there, and I can’t wait to dive in and try them out.

So what happened during this LD? The most important thing that happened is… I LOST MY MIND. I have never really been able to take a game from idea to completion in 48 hours. It haunts me. Even when I scaled back my idea for the “ISLANDS” theme with Savory Sea Hoss, I still ended up with a game that just felt incomplete. I decided that I would do whatever it took to release a ‘finished’ game this time, and it nearly killed me. I didn’t sleep during LD22.

Did it work? Sort of. I ended up with a much more ‘complete’ game, but I felt horrible throughout the entire competition. I flooded my body with worthless snacks and energy drinks to stay awake, and I made some stupid errors that wouldn’t have existed with a WELL RESTED perk.

I was desperately hoping that the theme would include an actual GAME MECHANIC and not a setting or ‘idea’ theme like before. I wanted RANDOM GENERATION, as that’s one area that I don’t have much experience in. I wanted to learn how to do that. I certainly could’ve incorporated that into the “ALONE” theme, but I ultimately decided against it.

WHAT IS AB-ALONE
Ab-Alone is a hybrid adventure/survival/crafting/puzzle game that combines BEING ALONE with BEING IN A STRANGE/NEW PLACE.

From the official page:
“An alien creature crash lands on an unknown planet and ends up on a remote island. With no way to repair the spacecraft and no way to call for help, the stranded alien is forced to survive while attempting to find a way home. The small island is covered with sand, grass, rocks, and trees… but no other life forms can be found. A startling discovery reveals that there may be more to this world than originally thought…”

FORMING THE IDEA
The “ALONE” theme immediately made me think of a deserted island. I knew right away that there would probably be MANY, MANY games based on this basic idea, but I decided to go ahead with the brainstorming phase. I knew that the core of my game would be based around being trapped on an island, and the overall goal would be to escape. I decided very early on that I would take the theme literally. I didn’t want there to be any other characters in the story, and I wanted to create a sense of desperation by making the player as clueless as possible without creating a complete TRIAL AND ERROR experience. That’s when I decided that the main character should not only be alone… but alone on an unknown planet. Instead of a space marine with guns and gadgets… it’s an alien with NOTHING. The player is just as clueless as the alien, as there is no tutorial or extensive explanations/labels. This is a design decision that I made early on, and I stuck through with it even after realizing that it had the potential to create an incredibly frustrating game.

WHAT WENT RIGHT
• A Beginning / Middle / End – I wanted the game to start and end with a story sequence to frame the action. I did it, and I’m happy with how it turned out.
• SOUND – Thanks to the beauty of SFXR, I was able to create a large amount of custom sounds in a very short time. I even had time to make two songs that really add to the feel of the game. The ‘main theme’ that plays during gameplay is a mixture of island ambience and breezy melodies that work with one another without feeling too repetitive.
• Pretty Lights – I wanted a day/night system. I also wanted the ability to make a fire. I knew that this would require lighting, so I spent a large portion of my Saturday designing the day cycle/fire lighting. This eventually led me to experiment with particle creation for the fire. I decided against the particle fire, but I kept working with the particles for other effects.
• HUD Creation – I knew that I had to come up with an inventory/crafting HUD system that wasn’t too invasive. I didn’t want there to be any sort of PAUSE or pop up menu, so I decided to design a HUD along the bottom of the game window. The HUD can be switched between an INVENTORY and a CRAFT view. It isn’t the most intuitive or beautiful system, but it does what I wanted it to do, and that’s a victory in my book.
• Crafting/Building – I wasn’t convinced at first, but I really dig the ability to craft ‘structures’ and such. It isn’t much, but I think that it really adds a nice touch to the game.
• Water / Waves / Tide – I knew that I wouldn’t be able to create a fully-functional tide system in this amount of time. I designed the island as if it only had one beach… with the rest of the coasts being covered in rocks. The beach features a wave that carries in new collectibles every morning. I originally toyed with the idea of a moving sun that creates a reflection in the water but I stopped being stupid and immediately stopped thinking about it.

WHAT WENT WRONG
• Sprite / Color Cohesion – I never really stayed true with any specific art style or color palette, and I deeply regret it. The shades of yellow and green that I used to form the island tiles are just plain UGLY. There are some sprites, like the crashed space craft, that are very well done. Then there are others, like the rocks and trees, that just look out of place in comparison.
• Forgotten Features – I wanted too much. I wanted more items, more crafting combinations, more food, more EVERYTHING. I have a very small collection of items that can be found/crafted, but there just wasn’t enough time to do more. I have an entire document drawn up that shows fish, a fishing pole, and a way to grill fish over a fire. None of this was included in the final game.
  Bad art – Some stuff is just badly/sloppily drawn. The rocks are ugly. The dried leaves look like bananas. The seashell look like a jelly fish. The axe, which is made out of a seashell tied to a rock and a stick… looks like a jelly fish tied to a rock and a stick. ETC. Not too thrilled with a lot of the aesthetics this time around.
• Controls – I’m not too happy with the way the character moves, and some of the ways that you have to interract with the cursor are confusing/nonsensical. I just didn’t have enough time to iron out these details to perfect the interface.
• Delivery – I was so tired after not sleeping that I completely bombed the LD 22 entry page process. I posted a link to my game site without making the page public. I could see the page, but nobody else could. I lost several plays because people couldn’t get to my game. With over 800 entries, I may NEVER get those plays back, and that sucks.

CONCLUSION
In the end, I feel as though this is my greatest LD triumph. It may not be reflected in the voting, but I think that this is the best ‘overall’ game I have made since I started these crazy things. I took an idea that has been played to death (crafting / survival) in recent years, but I was able to put a new spin on it. The game includes a bit of humor, which is always good, IMO. It’s very hard for me to be SUPER SERIOUS in life, and this should be reflected in the games that I make.

I’m working on a guide/walkthrough for the game… as I’m sure that there will be questions. The game is meant to be a bit of a puzzle, so you won’t be able to plow through it without some experimentation and careful studying of the slight clues.

SO WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR? GO PLAY AB-ALONE!

Ludum Dare Entry Page
Direct Download (Windows)
Direct Download Mirror (Windows)
Official Game Page (under construction)

Here is a timelapse of the first day.  The second day I was on my Mac and didn’t have the timelapse software.

Timelapse

There are some cool shots of me programming the mini game.  Also lots of me trying out various sprite editors.  Never found one I liked.

If you like dating sims with weird stories, come rate my game:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=rate&uid=5150

Susan

Edit – I can’t figure out how to embed my video.
Edit 2 – Thanks Andrew!

So it looks like my web hosting is having issues right now. I’m not entirely sure but it may be that I’ve spiked up to about 6Gb of bandwidth a day for the last few days. So if you get a broken link in the download then maybe check back in a day or so when hopefully I’ve had a word and figured out what’s wrong.

That was hard! It was a trainwreck of failures.

• First, i had about 143.472 image files captured. That looked a bit worrisome.
• The images were having serial numbers in the ld22-frameXXXXX.png format. However, as mentioned, there were more than 99.999 images, so half of them were using an extra digit and, thus, not sorted correctly.
• So i had to write a script to fix that.
• Then there were a lot of gaps. I’m using the screencapture Mac OS X command-line program to take the shots, but if the screen has blanked out, nothing is saved.
• So i had to write a script to fix that by using a filler image for that.
• Then i had to wait for almost a half-day for them to be converted to a (huge) .mpg file with ffmpeg.
• And after that, iMovie (the editor i usually use and so far has worked well) decided that it won’t support .mpg files.
• So i had to wait for a few extra hours for the huge .mpg file to be converted to a huge .mp4 file that iMovie can open.
• iMovie, however, saw through my scheme and decided that, no, it won’t open the file. It didn’t even tell me why – it just acted as if i decided at the last moment to cancel the import process.
• So i had to search for another editor. While doing that i noticed that all open source video editor for Mac OS X are either abandoned old editors from the PowerPC era that Mac OS X Lion doesn’t support anymore, or experimental ports of mostly Linux-based tools that may work if you are lucky enough and willing to compile from source.
• Fortunately, i also noticed that Blender, the 3D tool i use, has a video editing mode. Wtf, how i missed that for so long (ok, i had heard of it, but i thought it was some sort of simple annotations or whatever…).
• So i spent an hour learning how to do video editing with Blender.
• And finally made the video as i wanted it. That is, i added an intro image and removed the big delays while i was sleeping.
• Then i had to wait for another half-day (or so) for Blender to export a huge .mp4 file. I hoped it wouldn’t be huge, but it actually was about 2.2GB :-/
• So i decided to do the conversion properly with ffmpeg to H.264 and MP4 myself. And these formats were mandatory since i wanted to have (a bit of) control over the video quality and YouTube doesn’t seem to mess with the video encoding with these formats.
• Unfortunately the ffmpeg version i had wasn’t compiled with libx264 support. So no H.264 encoding for me.
• So i tried to use a version from Linux using VirtualBox since Debian would probably have it an apt-get install away and i was so tired of all of this.
• After another hour configuring repositories (because, apparently, Debian didn’t have it an apt-get install away due to licensing issues…) i managed to have a x264-capable ffmpeg converting the file.
• Only it was way too slow. Like, 1fps slow. Making that video would take more than the game itself.
• So Debian idea scrapped, let’s go back on Mac OS X. And compile our ffmpeg with x264.
• And thus i downloaded code for libx264 (i already had compiled ffmpeg previously), yasm (that libx264 needs) and a couple of others.
• I spent a couple of hours just trying to get ffmpeg compiled. Incompatibilities between (default) flags, the installed version of gcc, features, etc and almost no mention of it on the web. Bleh. But i finally managed to do it.
• And so, yet more hours of waiting to get ffmpeg convert the 2.2GB video to something i can upload…
• That would be a 415MB video.
• So, i left it uploading and went to sleep fully tired… and finally:

After watching it, i also figured out what exactly was missing from the game:

What was missing from She Loves You

Next time i’m going to fix that 😛

Tags: timelapse

If you haven’t already played my game, go for it, it’s a text adventure called “Desert Adventure” !

Here’s the timelapse of its creation:

Below is the timelapse vid for my LD22 entry: The Lonely Arena.

If you haven’t played/rated it yet, please do so here.

Tags: timelapse

So, I’ve taken part in my first Ludum Dare. It was also the first project I’ve actually finishd in Unity, the first project finished in over a year and I must say: it feels good to have made something. Here’s how it went (in my opinion):

What went well?

Keeping my ideas managable. I initially kept the interactions to the bare minimum needed to achieve what I wanted, then I added extras (such as averting the eyes from those who look at you) later. Even with these “extras” I still managed to get all the basic interactions working on the first day, leaving the second for sound design, level layout, figuring out how to enter LD and a bit of polishing/tweaking.

I also did fairly well at saying “good enough” with each aspect as it was made. Usually I spend hours on the most minor of details, which obviously wouldn’t have worked here, and I managed to not obsess over any particular aspect too much.

Sound. Maybe I’m biased, but I think the sound works pretty well. It’s very minimalistic like the rest of the game, but I think that actually works in its favour.

What didn’t go well?

I spent far too long just trying to make a very simple piece of music. It turns out that I didn’t really know what I was doing with FL Studio and my idea of just picking it up as went along wasn’t all that great. Audacity, which I’ve actually used a little bit before, was a life saver allowing me to do simple editing of the sounds that I couldn’t figure out how to do in FL.

There are still a few bugs, though most of them are quite amusing and don’t happen if you play “properly” so I didn’t really make any effort to fix them.

Not knowing how to use dropbox to share webplayer files (that took me a while to work out).

Lots of other things like “is the lighting quite right?”, “Should I have used more sound effects?”, “Is the pit of fire really necessary?” I don’t know how much difference these would have made though.

My indecision towards the end over what I should work on led me to faff around a bit and ultimately do none of the potential improvements (though this may have been a blessing in disguise since building and submitting took me longer than expected).

What I’ve learned?

I can make games in short periods of time

Indecision can kill a lot of time (isn’t that obvious?).

Knowing how to play one instrument to some degree and another to almost no degree does not mean I can use music creation software with ease, there’s actually a bit of learning for me to have there.

Little bits about finishing a game, sharing it online and the problems that don’t appear in the Unity editor.

All in all I’m happy with my entry, I’ve gotten a little feedback so far (mostly positive) and it seems the main thing I need to work on is probably my visual presentation. Hopefully I’ll get some more feedback soon… And if the themes stay this interesting I’d definitely like to compete again.

EXTRA: Here‘s what Procrastitracker thinks I did that weekend (minus 1hr 30mins I worked past midnight. I’m not sure if it’s very accurate).

Okay, so it’s time for a post mortem of Someone To Love! There’s also a timelapse, if you didn’t see it. Let’s dive right in – what went right and wrong, and what lessons are to be learned from my experiences during this Ludum Dare!

What went right.

• Graphics. I mean, I usually think very little about my art skills, but this time I feel that my approach was perfect (for me, at least). I’ll admit that simplicity wasn’t something I thought of at first, but at some dead end while coding, I figured I could as well create the graphics. I used a total number of 6 colors, the main being white, with cat being 10×10 pixels and human 10×24 pixels. Then I used FlxG.camera.color to change color tint of the scene, depending on the distance between player and the human. I usually tend to overdo things, so this simple solution (achieved after many hours of experimenting with other options) is brilliant according to my standards. Like the last time, at the beginnig I used placeholder graphics, which is always a great idea and I recommend it to everyone.
• Music. Wolfram Tones. That’s it. Go, check it out if you don’t know this. I’m actually really interested if it’s possible to use this generated content in a commercial game – anybody got any info on this? I mean, I understand the technology is copyrighted, but I don’t think that this also aplies to generated music (I mean, Wolfram doesn’t have rights to every CA there is, does it?).
• Flixel. I have issues with this piece, so read on below. Here I can write that Flixel is a great framework, especially if this is your first contact with AS3, and especially if this is your first contact with game programming framework. Automaticly done collisions, very simple map loading, many options, Flixel Power Tools for GREAT effects and much, much more.
• Mood. I like the overall design of the game, the colors and cat monologues, and the direction it was heading when it was time to finish. I like that there are endings, and that there’s a few of them (last time I didn’t have time to make an ending for my game). It’s definitely not flawless, though – read on, below.

What went wrong.

• Over-coding stuff. I didn’t have any idea regarding the theme, so I started programming some kind of platformer. I wasted a lot of time on nice effects when player leaves world bounds, only to design level in such a way that it’s impossible. I prepared my object model to be very flexible, but in the end it was a waste of time, because I didn’t need this flexibility.
• Flixel. Yeah, when you’re used to programming, doing it with Flixel may be pretty crazy non-intuitive. I mean, collisions are done automagically for you! I know this speeds up the developing process, but this wasn’t something I expected, and made me scratch my head a couple of times (what if I wanted to do something non-standard? – at the end, I stuck to the simple things). I think Flixel’s general design is best if you know what kind of game are you making, and the physics at least resemble something common, like platformer, shot’em up, top-down movement, etc. If you need something else, you CAN program collisions yourself, but this wasn’t clear for me at a first glance – however, this might be due to my idea of learning the framework on-the-fly, during LD event.
• DAME. Well, I definitely want to use it in the future – it’s just that using it during this LD’s was way too much for me to learn. In the end, I did my level design in paint.
• Design. I should’ve cut the platformer elements to the minimum, so that finishing the game would take more like 3-5, not 15 minutes. If someone wanted to see all five endings, he would need to waste way too much time, going again and again through the same story. Yep, didn’t think about that. The worst part is that the level is completely static – so if someone wants to try bringing more fish to the human, or find the special item, he always needs to go up the platforms, using the same path. This is much more boring when trying to see other endings.
• No balancing. That’s mostly why it’s so unnecessarily long. I should know better – I played my game a few times. Now I’ve got some ideas how to make it better: have randomized parts of the story, change level design every time a fish is brought to the human, or at least make time between events much shorter. Also, replaying the game could be much easier, as everyone who will play it more than once, do it only to see other endings.
• I’m not even gonna write about eating, drinking too much coffee and bad time management. It was bad.

Things to consider.

• Are you doing art/ story game? Make it SHORT. As in “5 minutes short”. If you have more than one ending, or some additional things for player to uncover, it can be even shorter, because it can easily be played many times.
• Is ANY KIND of gameplay good for your idea? Do you need that platformer-style gameplay, with enemies, bullets and things to do, if you’re creating a STORY game, or maybe “some kind of interaction” would be enough? Don’t overdo things!
• Is learning stuff during LD event good for you? If you love it, like me – here’s a suggestion. Pick the stuff you want to learn – do some research before LD and check if the amount of stuff to learn suits you. It’s BAD to waste TOO MUCH time on learning, when you’re supposed to create a game.
• Very low-res pixel-art is GOOD. Easier to create, but still recognizable. Manipulating color from inside the code can give great effects. Learn some simple graphical tricks to make your game even more appealing!
• If you’re programming in AS3, learn to incorporate TweenLite/TweenMax into your framework. It’s GOOD.
• MUSIC changes the mood of your game astonishingly. Use anything you can use – be it Wolfram Tones or any other generator, or whatever. For instance, I’m quite sure that without that ambient music, my game would be much, much worse.

Okay, that’s all folks. Big thanks to everyone who motivated me during my development, I’ve had a GREAT time and YES, I WILL PARTICIPATE AGAIN, and again, and again… forever! Last time was Flashpunk, this time – Flixel, so next time… don’t know yet!

Tags: post-mortem

I had a friend call me today and ask why he was receiving an error while trying to play my game – Atlantic Flight One.

Terrible, terrible, terrible error message. :(

I immediately realized that I’d built my game without changing the target profile in the XNA settings from “HiDef” (the default) to “Reach”.  This means that the game suddenly demands a much more powerful video card than it even comes close to needing. Overlooking something this simple means I’ve potentially risked limiting the number of people that can run (and vote) my game.

Lesson learned …

Always review your project settings.

If only I would’ve taken 5 seconds to double check these settings when I started the project …

I hope everyone gets a chance to get out my entry.  I really enjoyed the competition and am already looking forward to April 2012.  Hopefully, no one runs into this problem with my entry.

So here we are. Ludum Dare 22 is over.

I didn’t finish.

I’m going to try to stay positive.

What Went Well

I was reasonably familiar with the processes behind making the art; I have made pixel art before, even though it’s not usually my style.

I had a pretty solid idea, as well.

What Didn’t Go Well

I was too ambitious for the time. I didn’t have basecode. I chose something that required too much art. I changed platforms halfway through. I did a lot of things wrong, okay?

Seriously, though, most of what could have gone wrong went wrong. I don’t want to talk about it in detail.

What I’ve Learned

So… here’s the part that isn’t so negative.

I’ve learned that my ideas are often too ambitious for my time and resources. I try to do two weeks’ work in a weekend and I suffer for it.

I’ve learned that I need to choose whether I want to make lots of art or write my own basecode. I can’t do both, which is what I tried to do. I’m going to make that choice from now on, at least in Ludum Dare.

I’ve learned to prepare. I had the warmup weekend, but I didn’t do it the way I should have. I could’ve avoided these mistakes.

I’ve learned that I should be ready to surrender an idea if it isn’t working out. The main reason that I didn’t finish was that I wouldn’t give up my original idea (even when I said that I would) and wound up losing hope at around 8h before the jam deadline, getting distracted, and not finishing.

I’ve learned that I need to stick to a d*mn platform. I failed partly because I derped and decided to switch to a completely different platform. I switched to C++ and SDL, which was a big part of why I failed.

I’ve learned that I don’t enjoy these big projects that much. When the deadline came, I looked at what I had, flopped back into my bed and thought “Thank Sekhmet that’s over with, now I can let that thing go!” I didn’t want to continue with the game that I was working on, and I still don’t.

Where to Go From here

I’m going to move away from these huge projects. It’s really killing me to work on these things and not get anywhere.

I’m considering moving to app development. I can develop a simple game in less than a month, be finished with it, and move on. With publishers like the Chrome App Store and eventually Android and iOS, I stand to make a little bit of money from my work instead of laboring for years on one big thing and not getting anywhere.

Hopefully, developing smaller games will be more fun for me.

People in IRC can expect me to ask them to playtest some of these games, certainly. It’ll be great fun, I think.

Peace, love, and nowhere to go but up,

– Henry

This is the title screen from our game, Shaped.

It’s been a few days since the Jam ended for our team (Send More People) and I thought I’d throw in a few thoughts on the Ludum Dare Jam experience. These are in no way organized or comprehensive – just a few thoughts that came to mind.

I was surprised how much fun it was
Maybe I shouldn’t have been. I had expected the main fun of Ludum Dare to be hanging out with my partner Eric as we worked on a project. Eric is a rad guy and generally everything is fun around him, but truth be told I was nervous that any game we would make would feel stinted and unfinished, and that this would diminish the pleasure of our developing. Part of the reason for this was our prior experience. Eric and I have been working on a single, very ambitious project for months. Drift is an endeavor with many highs but also a lot of lows, particularly because we keep altering the concept. We are ambitious people and have big goals. So, before this project I wouldn’t have thought that we could finish a title together so quickly. Now I know that we are totally capable of it, and the project was more fun because of it.

Sometimes time crunch can be a good thing.
As I said, we’re ambitious and our projects have a tendency to expand, expand, expand. One benefit of doing a project over a weekend is that we were forced to stay focused and on task. The game we made was largely the game we planned on, and any additions to the project occurred as a natural development of features we were working on. We made decisions and were pretty much forced to stick with them. This was actually liberating, in a sense, since we weren’t constantly rehashing the same topic.

Good lord, I love 2D!
Our other game project is 3D. Shaped is 2d! It’s a simpler design, but we were able to get a much more refined look out of it. Again, simpler is often better. Drift could be interesting but unpolished. Shaped, by comparison, seems smooth even without a whole bunch of refinement. That’s not skill, its just the benefit of the medium and the simplicity of the art style.

Friends made it work
Eric and I were essentially attached at the hip for 48 hours over the course of Ludum Dare. That might have been a terror if we didn’t get along so well, but the reality is that I was enjoying myself every minute of the experience. Getting along well with your partner(s), having fun, seems to be a really important part of the coding experience. We actually made the game-developing process fun, laughing and joking throughout the day even while we were setting our minds to work on challenging puzzles. It smoothed over the points where we disagreed on where the project should go, and made the successes where we agreed on a concept feel shared. I was very doubtful when Eric suggested a seek-pellet… I thought it would be making the game too easy… but it turns out that it was a central component of the feel of the game. I trusted Eric even when I disagreed with him, and that allowed the game game to be much better.

So! Probably nothing mind bending here. like who you work with and simple is ok seem to be the major lessons I’ve walked away with. It may not be much, but it certainly made the development of Shaped into a satisfying and meaningful experience.

Well, if you spent the last few years being slapped around a table all day, you’d be grumpy too! This ball just wants to be alone on his blocky islands.

Entry is here.

(And yes, the .eel files are plain text source files, so that’s the full, hackable game source right there. The language is a bit like Lua with a C-like syntax.)

Well, the other balls don’t really do anything, as I didn’t get around to implement any AI. And I didn’t get around to do any music either. And, it might have been a good idea to “tilt” the terrain of the higher level maps towards the viewer, or just select a few good areas from the Perlin terrain, as it gets a bit tricky when you can’t see what you’re doing.

What went wrong

Decided to go for isometric 3D, so I had to code the engine for that, along with some physics. Not strictly a bad idea, but it was actually my first attempt at that particular kind of engine, so getting it to work correctly while not melting the CPU might have cost a few hours extra. And, I still got the depth sorting wrong in some cases…

Also got this crazy idea of coding a tiny MIDI sequencer, instead of just typing music in as ChipSound script, but the net result of that was just a wasted hour or so, as I didn’t have enough time to do any music anyway.

The biggest problem, however, was that I just caught a cold with fever, and couldn’t cope with the kind of tempo and short naps I planned for. All in all, I put in 27 hours of effective work time. Could have used 5-10 more hours – and they would have been there, even in the 48 h compo, had I been in proper shape.

What went right

Initially, all I had was this vague idea that the game would be about someone or something that wanted to be left alone. I decided right away that I’d go for isometric 3D and focus on low level game mechanics, so I drew a block in GIMP and coded away.

I realized I wouldn’t have time to do a proper character with walk cycles and stuff with the tools and (lack of) skill at hand, so I considered giving the rubber pig starring in my Fixed Rate Pig SDL example a call – but then remembered I need to work alone, and drew a shiny steel ball in GIMP instead.

Going with a steel ball actually turned out to be a brilliant move, as it became instantly obvious that the game mechanics would focus on bouncy physics, which can be a fair bit of fun in it’s own right, without any “artificial” game rules. In fact, there’s only one rule: A ball that touches the lava dies.

And of course, I did finish in time to submit for the Jam, so failing the main event wasn’t a complete disaster. (Actually did try to submit in time, but it just wouldn’t work – and probably for the better, as that version was pretty useless anyway.)

Lessons learned

No real surprises here, but well worth pointing out:

1. Coding a custom engine for a time limited event like this is a gamble, unless you really know what you’re doing. Each kind of engine has it’s own set of problems, and unless you’ve written one of that particular kind before, a few hours will likely be lost understanding and solving problems that are brand new to you. That can be fun and challenging, but the gamble is real: If you fail, you’ll still be struggling with the engine by the time of the submission deadline.
2. Make sure you have a functional, complete and efficient toolchain that you’re up to speed with, for anything you want to use in the game! I could have leveraged ZeeSpace and ChipSound better, but I don’t yet have a functional authoring tool for the former, and I don’t have a proper music setup. I’ve been having the same problem with Kobo II, and the LD #22 just made it more obvious that I need to fix this ASAP.

Conclusion

One would think that after a full weekend of being ill while working frantically, especially after previously having worked for weeks in a similar manner to get the Kobo II tech preview out, one would just want a long vacation – but I’m more excited than ever to get back to work! I’ll probably start by adding some more gameplay elements to Kobo II for a Christmas Special Tech Preview 2, and then I actually will take a break – by hacking a sequencer/editor for ChipSound…! 😀

UPDATE: Timelapse video uploaded!

David

…also filter by platform 😛

So, i quickly lost track of what i’ve played and it seemed a bit hard to find games that run in my platform (Mac OS X). To fix that i decided to code a solution: Ludrator!

This is just a simple html page that puts a sidebar with all the LD48/Jam games with a nice checkbox near them. Also adds WIN, MAC, LIN and WEB “tags” for each one (based on a small heuristic that seems to work) with checkboxes at the top to filter-by-os.

The checkbox for each game is supposed to be used to mark the games you’ve played/rated. Its state is saved using HTML5 localStorage so you can close the browser/computer and later come back to it and it’ll still be there.

How Ludrator looks like.

You can find Ludrator here: http://runtimelegend.com/pages/badsector/gimme/ludrator/.

There is both a zip version and an online version. Unless you have reasons, prefer the former since the latter will be slow and the former contains the Python script used to make the sidebar (so you can hack it for a new LD or whatever).

Tags: ludrator, rating, ratings

Now that i have corrected my Loading texture / security (due to server bad config)  issue, i’m happy to see what i have done in 48 h , with flixel + flare3D

What i learned ? :
Smoothing a mesh for a “cubic” environment is not a good idea.
But i’m sure that using flixel as “background” for small little 3D games in flash can be an easy solution.
Now i can clean my code to release it .

Hope you like my game,whas very happy to participate to #LD …

You can Play
or rate it

http://www.gliiz.com/565-cardiac-and-fireproof-kitten-alone-in-alps-after-a-plane-crash.html

Created using a script that took screen captures every 30 seconds, and then stitched together using ffmpeg at 15 frames per-second. (That means, what, 7.5 minutes/second?)

My Ludum Dare entry is, a Untiy3D based arcadey space shooter. It is either my first or second game, I have another Unity 3d project I’ve worked on, on and off, for the past few months. That’s a somewhat less interesting and complete game than my LD entry, and has less content as well, so I’m willing to call It’s Space my first game. I’m honestly still reeling from how much I got done and how well it turned out, and my mind is spinning with ways to expand it.

What went well:

The art: I used tools I’m quite familiar with, Wings3d and Photoshop, and I’d already experimented with getting assets from them into Unity3D before the competition, so everything went smoothly there. Some of the models I made turned out to be surprisingly effective, and for the most part they seem to evoke the right reactions in players that I’ve been able to observe.

Unity3D: I’d spent the week leading up to the Dare trying to come up with things that’d be useful for games and learning how to make them work in Unity, such as being able to click on objects and whatnot. As a result I didn’t find myself hitting many walls where I just didn’t know how to use the engine, and was able to spend most of the time making things instead of figuring out how to make things.

Coding: This is probably going to be damning myself with faint praise, but I was very pleased with how much I was about to write code to be reusable and flexible, which saved me having to write lots of duplicated behaviors for new objects and enemies. As a result I think I would have been able to add more enemies into the game in the final hours, had other things not intervened.

Preparation: I food in advance so i wouldn’t have to stop to cook but would still be well fed. That worked out great, and if I did another Dare I’d do that again.

What went wrong:

The art: Though I’m pleased with a lot of the art, the most important visual in the game, the player’s ship, turns out to be a formless grey rectangle from the camera’s position. It looks more interesting from other angles, I swear!

I’ve already started work on a replacement ship that should look more interesting.

The theme: I don’t think I engaged the theme very well. I had some ideas for a slightly more thoughtful take on the theme, but couldn’t think of any real gameplay to go with them. In the end I essentially said “Screw it, I like spaceship games, I’ll make a lonely spaceship game!”. That said, I did want to make the game about exploring a grand and empty ruined civilization, and I think that would work with the theme fine. I intend to expand on what traces of that there already are as I work on the game in the future.

The code: There are some boneheaded things in the code right now that stemmed from me doing things wrong and not bothering to fix them, such as player’s velocity not being independent of player’s rotation. Motion was to be, and should be, more Newtonian than it is, but alas.

The pain: Several hours before the deadline I went to pour hot water into a mug as part of the construction of a hot drink designed to keep me going for the home stretch. Being at that time somewhat impaired in my motor function due to lack of sleep, I proceeded to pour just-shy-of-boiling hot water over my hand as well as into the mug. At that point coding ceased early and I submitted what I had at the time. I consider this to be my biggest mistake of the Dare.

Minor burns aside(they’ve already healed) I found the Dare extremely enjoyable and rewarding. I’d do it again, and I hope to turn my entry into something greater over the coming weeks. Thank you all for this exciting event, and I look forward to playing as many games as I can stand as I work through my ratings responsibility.

You can find ALONE with K.I.T.T.I. here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=rate&uid=7263

What went wrong?

There was an unexpected family emergency that took up the better part of 10 hours. The emergency was unavoidable, and unforeseen. It was unfortunate, but I absolutely do not regret missing the 10 hours.

That said, 10 hours is a lot of time in a 48 hour competition. After sleeping for about 10 total hours and the family emergency, I was left with about 28 hours of total work time. Not bad, but it was not evenly distributed, requiring some energy drinks and long periods without sleep. If I had had the 10 hours, about 4 of it would have been for sleeping on Saturday night, and the rest would have been time spent on polish.

My first time sync when working on the project was going with the sprite.js library — it’s an amazing library, but I hit a wall when I realized the support for Tiled, which I was banking on, was not really all that complete. I was going to use melonJS from the outset, but then a couple of days before the competition, I decided sprite.js would offer a better experience. I had tested it out before the competition, and thought I could get everything to work based off of one of the libraries examples, but you know how that goes.

I ended up switching everything over to melonJS, which has faculties for reading Tiled maps directly. In the end, I think this was beneficial to the overall project, but it did eat up time. If I had just used melonJS from the beginning (like I had originally planned), I would have had at least another 3 hours of work time.

My second time sync was maps. I initially built a small test map, and iterated features over that map. The test map was an excellent strategy I think, but coming off of that I jumped into a really large map — bigger than I needed by several factors. I wasted a lot of time just trying to fill it in and make it playable. I eventually shrunk the map down, but I spent an awful lot of time with a map that I ended up throwing away.

I think if I would have just did a little more level design up front on a piece of paper, I could have avoided this time sync, and probably got several more hours to work on polish and other levels.

More experience with the Tiled editor would have helped to, but it’s pretty easy to pick up.

What went right?

Tools! I knew my tool chain fairly well — I’m certainly middle of the road competency wise, but I have been using gimp, vim,  and javascript/html/css for quite a while and was at least comfortable with how they worked. I think this saved me a lot of heart ache.

The things I didn’t know well were sprite.js, melonJS, sfxr, Tiled and the music generating python script that GreaseMonkey posted about: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2011/12/13/if-you-find-it-hard-to-make-music-read-this/

However, I did practice using these tools before the competition, so I was comfortable using them, and they didn’t offer any surprises, or set backs (other than plain inexperience).

melonJS was fantastic to work with, and really easy to pick up with the great examples on their website.

Tiled is an amazing editor — combined with melonJS I think it really saved the project after the 10 hours I spent away from the competition.

And, of course sfxr really added a little something to the game. I’m no sound engineer, but having absolutely no sounds in a game is almost as maddening as eating at a restaurant without background music. sfxr is amazing. On top of that, it’s really easy to use!

And the Autotracker-Bu script from GreaseMonkey gave me something I thought I wouldn’t have. Perhaps the music isn’t perfect for the game, but it does add something.

Summary?

My experience? Positive. I’ll definitely be doing this again. Next time I’m going to hopefully avoid emergencies, pass on the energy drinks, get some nice evenly distributed sleep, and know exactly what my libraries/frameworks are capable of going into the competition.

Happy Hacking, and I’ll see you all in April! (and possibly before that for the MiniLD’s!!)

Tags: LD22, post-mortem, postmortem

I am happy to announce that Lonely Planet is now available on Windows, OSX and Linux!

Windows | OS/X | Linux | Source

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=preview&uid=4598

We put a lot of love into this game, and we are confident you will like it Please test it and rate it if you can!

Love, the Lonely Planet team <3

Greetings all.  This is a postmortem for my first LD entry, the game I Should Go Back.

Linky:   http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=preview&uid=842

It’s a really weird puzzle/adventure game where you make a choice to not die at the time you were supposed to.  Why?  Beat the game to find out. (Hint: It has to do with the theme.)

THE GOOD

Graphics – I was able to make simplistic, retro-style graphics without spending too much time or generating much stress.  I might not have been pushing any artistic boundaries, but everything flowed together pretty well visually, and I ended up making more art than I thought I would.  I especially like the main character sprite.

Music – Again, this was something that I spent very little time on, but which gave me a pretty large payoff.   I was simply able to record myself improvising on my parents’ piano.  I do not expect my game to do well in any category, for reasons I will get to in a second, but if it had one area where it had a chance of success, it would probably be audio.

Everything worked – I was scared to make an adventure/puzzle game, especially since all my projects before now had been platformers, but everything came together into a functional game with a high amount of content and five different endings.

I volunteered at a homeless shelter during the 48 hours of the competition – That’s pretty cool, right?

THE BAD

The Puzzles – Unfortunately, the main core of this game, which was ten distinct number puzzles, was wildly inconsistent in its difficulty.  I knew I wanted ten puzzles because of how well it fit with using the numbers 0 to 9, but I simply could not come up with enough good ones.  Some are too easy, some are too difficult, and some are simply uninteresting.  The high difficulty of the puzzles combined with the long introduction cutscenes makes the game very inaccessible, which is exactly the opposite of what I want for a game to be noticed and played by many people.

The Plot/Mood – I set out trying to make a really deep, interesting game that explored the notion of loneliness and how far people are willing to go to avoid it.  Unfortunately, everything seems really deep when you are sleep-deprived, and looking back I can see the game for what it really is:  ARTFAG.  The game just seems kinda weird, preachy, and very, very serious.  In addition, the jokes that made me crack up as I was implementing them now simply seem out of touch with the serious mood of the game.

THE UGLY

Fun – The game is just not fun at all.  I took mostly uninteresting puzzles, combined them with a forgettable plot and forgettable characters, and had very little area to explore.  Only a very small portion of the game is spent actually solving puzzles (compared to talking and watching cutscenes), and that should just not be the case for such a short game.

And finally, most importantly:  THIS WAS A BLAST.  I am DEFINITELY participating in the next competition, and maybe bringing some friends along as well (people to keep me grounded and tell me my ideas are stupid, or else I’ll end up with another game like this).  Thanks for reading and best of luck in the voting period!

As with all crazy ideas that people don’t think will work, mine actually did. I chose to learn Java over the weekend while creating my game, in Java. I learnt a tiny bit of command line output (no input) over the week and set up a compile batch script. I’ve looked into Java development in Eclipse previously, but gave up due to the complexity of the interface. Instead I made my own development environment.

As for snacks, day 1 I lived off of a small roll, 2 cans of coke and some M&Ms that where picked up later in the day. I drank plenty of water and was sitting in front of a nice fan (Summer in Australia…). I worked from 10AM start time to about 8PM solid, trying to get the base of my game up and running. Lots of googling and viewing of public source code helped me to build my game. It was then time for a dinner break so I grabbed some Cheese Lowers pizza. After eating I went straight back into code in an attempt to get the basics for my game out of the way before midnight. I hit the sack after that, but being restless and eager to continue work I drew up all my cut scenes meaning I went to sleep at about 2AM.

Woke up at about 8AM, showered, grabbed a snack and relaxed for a bit. I was back into my game with image editing. Since I had hand drawn the cut scenes I tried to vectorize them. I wasn’t going along very fast so I swapped to Paint.Net and used some of their tools to make the cut scenes look a bit better, but still hand drawn like. After finishing the cut scenes I implemented them into the code and started doing a level system. After finishing the level system I had a few bugs that would pop up every now and then, but I couldn’t see where in the code they were coming from. I threw in a 5 line bug fix that checks for it and now it’s all fin and dandy. Finished work around 5PM when I stopped for a lunch break, uploaded it and wandered around, trying to stay off of my PC for as long as possible.

All that time I was live streaming and streaming radio, whenever someone popped into my live stream chat I tried to say hello. I’m currently in the process of compiling my time lapse. I’ve been replying to everyone who has commented on my entry, and from doing that I have another game idea which is currently in development as work is so slow. Planning on turning one of my parked domains into a temporary game site, implementing a nice high score system and adding some sounds to it (after judging closes of course). I may even redo the artwork!

~Mitchell

My Entry: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=rate&uid=2884

Live Stream: http://www.twitch.tv/bob_george33

P.S. 300 people have visited and loaded my completed game 😀 I’m happy cause that’s more people who have played a game by me than ever before!

TL;DR Version:

Didn’t know Java before, know Java now.
Sleep deprived.
Ate nothing, but kept fluids up.
Streamed Radio, drew cut scenes.
Plan on making changes later, as well as a new game before Christmas.
Live streamed whole thing.
Time Lapse Coming.

Im just wondering if we Can use Game Maker to make a Game In 48 Hours as it is easy to use

First up, here’s the voting link:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=rate&uid=7360

Here’s the Game Maker sandbox link, if you prefer:
http://sandbox.yoyogames.com/games/191280-a-manor-of-speaking

I don’t have a video because none of my machines are capable of recording and playing with a good framerate at the same time. If someone could make one for me I would be forever grateful. Apologies.

The first thing you see of the main character.

Post Mortem

First, the theme, ‘Alone’. It sucked. There, I said it. When I saw it I thought “Great, there’s something that half of the games out there have.” I didn’t really think much of it at that point. So without much inspiration I decided to make a game that had side-scrolling. Maybe a platformer. But everyone makes platformers, so I can’t do that. alright, how about a fighting-slash-exploration game from a side-on perspective? Yeah, let’s roll with that.

So I started with a brainstorm. I went from ‘Alone’ to ‘Escape’ to ‘Horror’ to ‘Death’  and then realised I didn’t want a Horror. Scrap that. ‘Alone’ to ‘Seperated’ to ‘Lost’ to ‘Unknown Place’ seemed to work better, and I then started to think “Well, where’s this Unknown Place?” A few things ran through my mind but I liked the idea of a mansion. Then I thought of Castlevania and Alone In The Dark. Castlevania seemed like my inspiration for the enemies (or maybe Luigi’s Mansion :P) and Alone In The Dark for the gameplay.

I liked the idea of a night-time setting. Most Horror things happen at or near night-time. Then I thought of Knights. Then I thought of a name for two characters: Knite and Dae. Then I remembered the film ‘Knight and Day’ and scrapped it.

Sprites. The first thing I went for was something small – that’s my specialty. Small sprites, no bigger than 16×16 or thereabouts. So I went for something bigger: 48×20-something. I liked the Knight idea, so I went with a Templar (Assassin’s Creed had a part in that choice). I drew a Templar Knight; you can see him at the end of the game.

Then I realised that I had to animate him. Nope. It had taken me an hour to draw this guy well and wasn’t going to waste more time animating him. Back to the drawing board – rather, my Pictures/Pixelart/ folder. I liked the little blue caveman alien guy I had drawn and decided to copy him. I couldn’t use him since that was against the rules.

So I drew a little blue man. That was my character. How strange. Anyway, now I had something to make a platformer with (didn’t I NOT want to make a platformer? Oh well) Movement/Jumping engine came easily since I had already written many of them, trying out slightly different methods of execution in code. So now I had a great Platformer engine with collisions and such.

Next Stop: Enemies. What do you find in a scary mansion? Ghosts. What else? Possessed Suits of Armour. Oh, hey! I can use my Templar design for the armours! So I drew a suit of armour with a red cross on it. I liked it. Then I drew a ghost, which was easy. My ghost was a mix of a Boo and a Pacman Ghost. I liked it.

Then, still in MSPaint, I decided to draw a chest. I did. It looked good. Then I realised that there are enemies called Mimics that commonly take the shape of a chest and eat unwary dungeon explorers. So I copy-modified the chest to have teeth. I was starting to like my characters at this point. All except the blue man. He needed to be a normal man. A few skintoned-pixels later he was a little boy, not unlike the one from Up (Pixar film).

Then I got stuck into coding. Hours pass and I’m still trying to think of a good story. I love my stories, see, and didn’t want to have something like an arcade game. It would be harder, sure, but I just made the choice without thinking. I then remembered that I had to go to work, so I scrambled into my clothes and left. Worked. Came home, went straight to be since it was already midnight. End Day 1. Hours used: 5

Next day I got up with a page of notes I had jotted down during the night. I had fresh ideas and was raring to go. It was about 9am when I started and I had to get a LOT done in ~24 hours. I got straight to work coding all the bits and pieces that needed doing. Fixing up my platforming collisions, making enemies walk/float properly, keys, doors, levers, pressure plates. were all done before dinner. I had regular breaks too, since I knew what had to be done and didn’t think it would take until tomorrow morning to do them.

Code was mostly done. Sprites too. Then I realised I had gameplay, mechanics, enemies and loot, but no story or tutorial. Oh bugger. The tutorial code took a while to get right but only had to be written once. No bugs. Excellent.

The story, however, was half-assed. I didn’t have an ending or any levels except for my two or three debugging/test rooms. And I needed environments as well.

This was when I realised that I would be up most of the night and into the morning.

I made a post on here and then got to work drawing. I drew a table, chairs, banners, pictures, a bookcase, windows, everything I could think of that belonged in a mansion. Then I switched to level design. It got boring real quick, and I managed to make a single wallpaper tile I had drawn earlier fit into each room as I didn’t have time to make anything else.

Then I discovered I had forgotten the ending, again. I needed something quickly and it had to be half-assed but not look it. Items. I could make the whole thing into a quest for items. But what item? Next to me on my desk was a candy cane. Perfect! A knight that likes candy canes. Corny, strange, different and it would work. So that went in quickly with a slight change to the chest code.

So my sprites and tiles were done, my enemies and gameplay was done, my story worked (barely) and I had everything ready for a test run. I did one, found some bugs, squished them and THEN made a post about audio. A google search later revealed a beat-mixer by Aviary and I went with that. Ooh, a randomise function! Low piano notes, slow beat, randomise times a million. Hey! This one sounds good, and it loops well. Download.

Now to SFXR. Lot’s of randomising in there too. Now I have everything. Time for a test run – about 1 or 2am at this point. I’m going to get it in time!

Heh, nope. Computer decided to take FOR EVER to compile the code with this new-fangled audio thing. I left it and went and got a drink and cleared my work area.

3 am. Computer doesn’t like the audio and the game together but they work separately. OK, that’s all right. I can work this. I added one-liners to each thing that needed a sound effect then commented them all out. Fixed a few little things, removed the audio from my assets list and saved. Test game!

Nope. I’mma crash on you!

Computer restarts. Oh god. Well at least I saved, right? …

Back up and running, I load the game and all is well. Phew. Test game, reveal bugs, fix bugs. Add audio, compile, wait an hour. I had a kinda daze-like nap here, because the game seemed to be suddenly making music. Oh good.

It’s 4am by this point. The sun is rising. Good god, I haven’t stayed up this late in a while. Okay, testing. All is well in the first half of the game, must be OK in the rest. Take some pictures, zip up the game and the source and upload it.

Submission time. I felt proud that I had finished with about 5 hours to spare. Time for bed. I turned off the PC and did so.

Three hours later, my Dad comes and wakes me up:
“What time did you go to bed?”
“Uh, around 5 um, thirty?”
“So you’ve had three hours sleep.”
I look at the clock. 9:30.
“Yeah…”

I got up, checked the site and was able to catch the end of the 48 hours. Woooooo!!! I made it!
“We’ve extended the submission time to 2 hours. :D”
Well, ok I suppose.

[THIS POST IS GETTING QUITE LONG, SO I’LL CUT TO THE CHASE]

Found out too late that my game was broken: one of the levels that had a candy cane in it (a quest item) didn’t link back to a room properly. A one-way street basically. So I set to work documenting how to get the candy cane and get back, since I had an extra key in the game. But no, it didn’t work. Now it’s well after the submission time, and the game is still broken. I check LudumDare’s twitter, send a message about after-submission bugfixes and then end up submitting the fixed game for the Jam instead. It still fits under the Compo’s rules, except for the time limit.

So all in all, I’m happy about my game, ecstatic that this is my first go and I did it, but sad that it couldn’t be submitted for the Compo.

Thanks for reading this massive wall of text. Have a good one.

… and here’s those links again:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=rate&uid=7360

http://sandbox.yoyogames.com/games/191280-a-manor-of-speaking

Name: Basic Game Designer

Description: make uber simplistic games

Version: Very early version of what came to be the Non-Existant Ultimate Game Maker Deluxe

Download: Basic Game Designer

I Just Created a New website for My Applications Visit It here

https://sites.google.com/site/shubgames/home

I added a small gameplay video of my game.. Enjoy!

Little Blue Box on YouTube

I made a video of SOLILOQUY, especially for Linux users which can’t use the Unity3D webplayer plugin.

Tags: gameplay video, Soliloquy, unity3d, video, walkthrough

It was my first Ludum Dare Jam, and here is my post-mortem.

I made a game “Tiny planet”.

What went right:

1.  I`m familiar with coding. In fact, “Tiny planet” is a sequel to “Tiny world”, which used the same engine.
2. No time issues. I have no difficulties organising my work, and all shedules were completed. Testing also was quick, due to minimalism of my game.
3. Graphics. All graphics were easy to make: I already had stickman, kitten and powerups are small, other things were built in editor itself. Even the fact i`m bad at drawing didn`t bother me.

What went wrong:

1. Music. I`m bad at composing, more than that, i never used music in games before. I barely made the background music, but i couldn`t make sound effects. Gonna do warmup next time.
2. Difficulty. At first I thought like “What a nice quick game I make!”, but then I realised it`s hard for other people. I had to add a bunch of hints to make it possible.

What I learned:

1. Making music for games.
2. Harder isn`t always better.
3. Too little gravity is bad. At first i had usual 9.8 gravity, but i had to change it to 49.
4. Basic embedding swf files in html.

Hi guys this was my first LD and it was awesome, i will be back for more!

Here is my time lapse video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EsAElyrM-bU

It also was my first time using AS3 and Flixel so i learn a lot. I will try to be more prepare for the next one.

If you want to check my game it is here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=preview&uid=7587

Have fun rating games!!