Hello, I would like to participate for the first time, I’ve never released any game and this LD21 could be a great occasion to begin…but : Can I make a game with Adventure Game Studio ? I’ve never seen AGS games in ludum dare, so maybe it’s forbidden for a reason…Could you tell me ?

(I’ll also use Graphics Gale for graphism and Audacity for sounds effects)

Hi.

If you read french, or if you’re fine with google translate, you might be interested.

I’ve started on my blog Oujevipo a Ludum Dare Review Marathon, the objective is to review a maximum of LD#21 games before the end of the voting. Of course, I’m not alone and a lot of nice people are helping me. Thanks to them.

Maybe will you find your game in there, maybe you’ll discover some games you still haven’t played…
it’s here : http://oujevipo.fr/index.php?option=com_tag&task=tag&tag=ld21

I’m in.

I made my very first game on LD21 and was pretty proud of myself, so let’s do it again.
I didn’t try to make any game since then so…maybe there won’t be any progress but whatever.

I’ll probably use Adventure Game Studio with GraphicsGale for the graphics.
If the theme fits, I might use an Andre Michelle’s tool for the audio ( http://lab.andre-michelle.com/ )

Well…I suppose the “Never Alone Hotline” name is gonna stay now. I don’t like it very much but whatever : here comes the title screen!

Ta-Daaa

(Please tell me it looks a bit like a phone…)

Just like the last time, I finished my game 6 hours before the deadline.

Finding the idea took me around 3 hours, the graphics 2-3 hours, same thing for the sounds effects, the rest was for coding and writing dialogs (especially writing the dialogs).

I would like to do a What went wrong, what went right thing, but according to me, everything went right. The game is what I wanted it to be, it’s my second one, and I’m pretty proud of myself.

Don’t know if the game is fun, funny or moody still, but it’s mine, and I love it.

Thank Ludum Dare for making this happen. I would have never thought I could actually make games.

(The game is here : http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=preview&uid=1874)

Hi! And Merry Whatever!

In August we were plenty to cover the LD21 on L’Oujevipo. This time, I’ll try to do it alone.
It means I’ll post a new LD22 review everyday during the rating period (and maybe after). I don’t try to review the best games, but the most interesting to me (i.e the ones which deserve 5 stars in Innovation ^^). So if you want to read about games you missed or maybe about your game, why don’t you take a look ?
So far, I already reviewed Al-one, Craequ, I used to speak to the wall, Älone and Comfort Zone (This game is the GREATEST! You should totally play it!). Many more are to come.

Only problem…The reviews are in french…So maybe you should try Google Translate.

-French reviews

-Poorly translated reviews. (Sorry)

Eventually, feel free to rate and give feedback on my own game : Never Alone Hotline :).

It’s beautiful outside, and I’m gonna spend my whole week end in front of my computer…Rhaaa I hate you Ludum Dare!

Well, I’m entering for the thid time and I’ve never been that anxious. I did very well last time, and I’m afraid I’m not gonna be as good this time, but whatever, I’ll make a game, I swear! Probably another one with a lot of dialogs, not much gameplay and crappy graphics…That’s all that I can do.

Whatever the theme will be, I’ll try to insert the “birthday” theme, because it’s Ludum Dare 10th birthday and well…because one theme is not enough.

I’ll use Adventure Game Studio as usual, with GraphicsGale for the graphics (now I know how to use layers, Wooo! \o/). Don’t know yet for the sound.

Also, I’m french, and I’ll be on irc wia bunch of other french Ludum darers
#ludumdare on irc.philpep.org. Join us!

We got a website too!

Finally, I’ll review Ludum Dare games as usual on my blog : oujevipo.fr

( Go Artificial Life!)

Hi everybody!

I’m giving myself a little break to show what I am working on :

As you can see, there is no tiny world, tiny planets, huge insects…I don’t like to use themes litterally ^^

In France, when you’re surprised to meet someone somewhere you didn’t expect it, it’s common to say something like “le monde est petit!” (“world is tiny!”). I don’t know if this idiom is used in english, but I really hope so, because if it isn’t, my game has nothing else to do with the theme.

So, in this game, you’re Amy, sitting at the bar, and a guy recognize you and start to chat with you. Problem is : You don’t recognize him at all! What an akward situation!

There’s more of course, but I don’t want to spoil everything.

I still have A LOT dialogs to write A LOT animations to design, background to improve and I need to add some sounds…I hope I will finish in time!
The game is inspired by :

-The Garfunkel and Oates’ song : I Don’t Know Who You Are

– The Human Traffic’s bar scene

cheers

I finally found my title! \o/

And obviously, I finally made a title screen!

Yay!

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 22nd, 2012 at 8:23 am and is filed under LD #23. 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.

Ludum Dare Games are tiny and done under constraints.
And you know what else is tiny and done under constraints ? Haikus!

So I started to write haïkus about some games I played and I’m decided to write many more!

Unfortunately, the haikus are in french, because I am french. But if you don’t understand them, you still can click the links and play these awesome games :

Minilization

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=1163

Civilization

Étudié au microscope

Que d’agitation.

Gravity

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=11804

Le doux carillon

Est l’annonce d’une averse

Averse de cadavres.

Memento XII

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=2982

Les années perdues

Dans cette froide cellule

T’en souviendras-tu ?

(there’s more )

Little Knight’s Tiny World

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=4055

Petite planètes

Trop légère gravité

Attention les pieds !

There is a Picture

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=12109

Voici une image

Des astres, des objets

Voici une image.

Atom Planet

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=2081

Le petit prince

Découvre, casse et bricole

C’est un dinosaure.

A Super Mario Summary

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=608

Adieu Champignon

Mario restera petit

Et son monde aussi.

Ant Surf Hero : The surfening

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=3289

A dos de fourmi

Avec ou sans son fusil

On se sent petit

Synthesis

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=5431

Un peu de carbone

Une poignée d’hydrogène…

Zut ! Encore raté !

Real War

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=2280

Le sergent, l’enfant

et Nuprahtor tour à tour

tirent les ficelles.

By the way, I will also write a review about a LD game each day until the end of the ratings on my blog : http://oujevipo.fr

Ok…so I’ve rated 133 games so far, and I reviewed a dozen of them on my blog. Time for a break.

I’m very grateful to all the people who recommended some games on the Ludum Dare frontpage and allowed me to discover some jewels, so I’m gonna do the same.

Of course, a lot of my favourites already got 100+ ratings and it would be stupid to recommend them one more time, so I’ve decided to present 15 games with less than 50 ratings and which deserve to be played. (The order is not important)

Dr. Biology’s Educational Game

Because biology is fun !

Five by Five

A very clever puzzle game

These are your friends

I fell in love with an island !

Minilization

A very deep civilization simulation

Evolve

A grow-like with awesome graphics

Tiny Toy

The weirder it is, the more I like it !

There is a picture

An suprisingly awesome adventure made on RPGMaker

Dwindling Worlds

My brain and my eyes still hurt…

Real War

Not for kids !

Circus Flea

This one made me ROFL

Tiny World Cardgame

A well balanced card game…moreover : it’s cute

Tinyville confidential

What would happen if Facebook games were actually good.

Rambros

Looks like a video game version of The Expendables

It’s a tab

A 16×16 pixels game…playable in a favicon.

Beefwar

Meat+Panzers = Fun (too bad I can’t see any link with the theme)

On a previous post, Madball explained how he rated the games, and that was very interesting, especially because I myself rated games quite differently. So maybe some people will be interested by my own rating grid :

Here are the categories, by order of importance according to me :

Innovation
1 : This game is a total ripoff, I blame you for that (never used)

2 : This game is nothing more than a platformer/shooter ^^

3 : Ok…you got some good ideas.
4 : That is clever !

5 : MIND BLOWN ! (when I give 5 in innovation, I automatically give 5 overall)

Theme

1:No link with the theme
2: Easy use of the theme (only introduced in a single sentence, or in the title for exemple)

3: Fits the theme, but meh…not very cleverly

4: A rather original approach of the theme

5:A unique approach of the theme

Mood

1 : /

2 : I see what you’ve tried to do, but you obviously failed

3 : Meh.

4 : You made me smile/cry/rage…etc

5 : I was so in your game that I forgot I was playing a game

Fun

1 : /

2 : That was soooo boring

3 : I don’t regret the few minutes I spent on this game

4 : I enjoyed playing this game

5 : I’m still playing this game.

Humor

1 : /

2 : /

3 : Ok, you got me, I smiled

4 : My eyes laughed

5 : My body laughed

Graphics

1 : /

2 : Graphics annoyed me

3 : I didn’t notice the graphics, that means they’re good enough.

4 : You put a lot of efforts into your graphics

5 : Graphics fits perfectly with the game, even if it’s only three pixels on a screen

Audio

1 : / (no audio, I don’t rate)

2 : There is some audio, but honestly, it would be better without it

3 : There is audio, and it is not annoying.

4 : Great audio or/and great music

5 : Audio is part of the gameplay

Overall

Most of the time, Overall is the better value between Innovation and Theme, but is could be lowered if something really suck. I would never give 5 overall to someone with 1 or 2 in Theme or Innovation. On the opposite, if you’re a cool guy, overall could be raised by 1, that’s not voluntary, but I know it counts.

Well that’s all folks.

By the way, Have you played my game-with-an-accidental-spelling-mistake-in-the-title ?

I was so excited to see my LD results that I decided to make a chart!

Here it is :

On this chart, you can see the results of my 3 Ludum Dare entries. Left columns are the position, middle columns are the rates and left columns are (position/number of entries) x 100, something like the position the game would have if there were only 100 entries. A good way to see if you improved yourself or not, despite the increasing number of entries.

I think this chart is quite interesting and I suggest you to do the same. Here, I can see I improved A LOT between my first and second LD Game (first and second games ever) bu that my third LD entry wasn’t as good as the previous one. I already knew that but some details are very encouraging.

1 : I significantly improved my graphics, and I’m very proud of that

2 : Even if I lost some ranks in Mood and Humor, this chart shows that I’m still as good at it. By the way, it’s quite surprising that I got on LD23 a better rating and a worse ranking in Humor. Were the LD23 games funnier than LD22 games ?

3 : Innovation is interesting too! I lost A LOT of ranks in Innovation, even if my LD22 and LD23 entries have similar gameplays. But after all, it’s very logic. Never Alone Hotline was quite innovative, Ok, now this is akward wasn’t, because I already made Never Alone Hotline before.

In the end, I’m very happy with this results. It’s more or less what I was expecting with some good surprises (I expected much worse in Fun and graphics)  and a single bad surprise (only 127th in Theme ? Originality doesn’t pay much)

From now, I’m gonna work hard to improve myself for the next LD in august! Can’t wait!

Tags: post-mortem, postmortem

Hi there!

Well…how to put this in words…We’re in!
We’re a team of three french blokes who have once lived together but never worked together. And now, we’re going to make a game for LD #24!

I, Pierrec, am a video game guy (still afraid to write “game developer” ). I’ve made some games for previous LDs like I am Ourobouros (LD21), Never Alone Hotline (LD22) or Ok, Now this is Awkward (LD23), and some other ones for other competitions (Find them HERE)  I also got a blog in which I review some cool experimental/innovative games. Since now, I always worked alone, but I’m willing to try something else, so I grabbed some friends for this Ludum Dare.

Remember this one ? Seems like a billions years ago!

Félix is a librarian. He likes video games but doesn’t play them much cause he’s a Linux user (hin hin hin). He never worked on a video game but he makes cool stop-motions with kids in his library. Here’s one of them :

Où sont passées mes lunettes ? from Médiathèque de Rognac on Vimeo.

You also can watch more of them here. We talked about making a stop-motion game, and got really excited about it. So…whatever the theme is gonne be, that’s what we’re going to make! Of course, Félix will be in charge of the animation.

Jay is an english teacher, but he’s also a graphic designer, a musician, a gif animator, and many other stuff. Everything but game maker…yet!

See this awesome graphic skill ? Well, we won’t use it, because we’re making a stop-motion game! Instead, we hope to use his music skill

(seems like music and video integration doesn’t work here, so, here’s a link
http://soundcloud.com/jay-farkasember/sallys-song-danny-elfman-cover

and maybe his english skill to proof-read our game (because there will probably be lots of dialogs…I love dialogs). Jay *might* won’t help us on this jam because he’ll be busy this week end. If so…we’ll be Team 11 instead, and that’s a lousy name, so I hope he’s gonna find some time!

See his Tumblr, his Soundcloud and his Flickr

To summarize :

Ideas : Pierrec, Félix, Jay
Coding : Pierrec
Graphics : The real world
Animation : Félix
Music : Jay
Dialogs : Pierrec, Félix ?
Proof-read : Jay ?

We’re gonna use Adventure Game Studio to make this game, and probably a lot of other softwares (don’t know which yet)

I hope we’ll manage to make this game, I hope it will be good, but even if it’s not, I’m sure we’ll have some fun!

Let’s jam!

Tags: LD #24

Hi!

We’re Team 111 and as we said before we wanted to make a stop-motion game and…we’re making it!

Here’s Felix working hard

It’s a game about games…a meta-game! Almost everything will be stop-motion animations. It won’t be very “gamish” but we hope it will still be fun to play/watch. As usual in my (Pierrec) games, there will be a lot of dialogs and ramifications…but no pixel ^^

Problem is…The game is goind to be heavy. The picture we use are only 640×400 but there will be like THOUSANDS of them.

So expect a 150, 200MB file…Would you be patient enough to download it ? Do you have a favorite file transfer service ? Would it help with a torrent file ? Any suggestions are welcome.

I tried to make some gifs to show you the animations, but failed. So here are some screenshots :

Where is the “Evolution” Theme ?

Well, this game is about the evolution of a game, of a game night, and will probably use some evolutive musics (Like with the gool old iMuse)

Well…I have to go back to work. See ya!

This is a screenshot

This is it, I rated 100 entries.

Before going on, here’s a list of my 10 favorite (Compo+Jam)

1 – Ages of Irving
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=11045

2 – Deep See Fish Loves You
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=4958

3 – Beetlefields : The Forecast
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=2952

4 – Neural Nodes
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=15598

5 – Revolution
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=12722

6 – Meow for Mutation
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=5431

7 – Lucas’s Quest Backwards
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=11243

8 – Crab
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=16516

9 – Plan M
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=7835

10 – 2-deoxyborose
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=3222

Ours isn’t in the top 10
But you can try it anyway
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=1874

 
Also, most of these games were reviewed in french on http://oujevipo.fr

A game made of stop-motion animations ? That was a “risky” bet!

So…there are only 5 days left to rate the game, maybe it’s time for us to write a small post-mortem [EDIT: not that small eventually] in order to explain how we made the BIGGEST GAME in Ludum Dare history! 1,14GigaBytes! Shi*! That’s more than Minecraft!

Size does matter

By the way, you can play and rate the game here!

Post-mortem below! (because it’s big too)

WHAT WENT RIGHT

Pooling talents (and extra constraint)

Before this LD, I was used to make games, but didn’t know anything about stop-motion animation.

On the other end, Felix was used to make stop-motion animations but didn’t know anything about game making. So, naturally, we thought we should make a stop-motion animated game, whatever the theme, and that’s the main reason we worked together on this LD.

I think that was a pretty good idea cause we both learned some new things, and because the more constraints you have, the more creative you get.

Felix working on the “Agricola’ scene

Getting prepared

Since we had no idea how to make a stop-motion game, we took an afternoon before LD to experiment things and sharpen our tools. That way, we discovered some problems like files incompatibility, scaling, cut out and could avoid them during the competition. Unfortunately, one big problem managed to slip through…What was it ? Suspense! Read further.

Hot Chocolate

Hot Chocolate is part of my own LD ritual. Every Ludum Dare, I wake up at 8, I look at the theme, and then I go out to order a hot chocolate and croissants in my favourite café (in France, the theme is announced at 3-4am so…it seems wiser to have a good sleep and discover it on the morning). I think going out is a good way to find inspiration, even if I can’t scientifically explain it. It always worked for me, and this LD was no exception. Of course, this time, we ordered two hot chocolates.

Fan

Since it’s pretty hot in Marseille, and since we spent two days together in a small flat with the curtains closed and the lights on (for the shootings), buying a fan was a DAMN GOOD idea.

It’s getting hot in here…

Time management

We didn’t use any time-management technique or whatever, but we managed to be extraordinary synchronized. While Felix was building his studio, I was coding the basics, while he was shooting an animation, I was writhing its dialogs. That way, we always could know precisely what was done, what was left and how much time we needed. Eventually, everything was made in time

Funny breaks

We didn’t take many breaks (except for eating and sleeping) but kept finding new ways to make the work funnier : drinking real rum for the Red November animation, inviting some friends fo the tarot animation, finding funny way to destroy the Monopoly…In the end, the game making was fun all along, and I can’t think of any better way to make games.

Cheers!

WHAT WENT WRONG

The theme

When the theme was announced, we were really happy. This theme was the one we were expecting. It was a big relief, and at this moment, we knew theme won’t be a problem for us! How ironic, here are some comments about Coin-Operated Afternoon :

I don’t understand how it correlate with evolution theme

I didn’t really get how it involved evolution

I don’t see the relationship with the theme

I have to say I don’t see the theme clearly either.

And so on…

So, obviously we failed!

We wanted to make a game about evolution of game mechanics through boardgames and to show boardgames evolving through the animations, but it looks we had so much fun making this game that we forgot a bit our initial idee

The flat was a bit messy

Sounds and Music

We never planed to have any sounds in our game, but we planed to have some music. Jay, the third man of the team, which is a great musician, was supposed to be in charge of this aspect. Unfortunately, during this week end Jay

– wasn’t in the same city

– was quite busy

– had no internet connection

– and didn’t even have a windows computer to play what we were making! ^^
So, even if we thought it was still possible to make something with him, it obviously didn’t happen. This is a shame because Coin-Operated Afternoon REALLY NEEDS music, so I hope we’ll make a post-post-compo version to complete the game!

HUGENESS (no shit ?)

Ok, we were aware that making a game in stop-motion will lead to a big .exe file…but 1,14GB ? Seriously ?! Well…it looks like Adventure Game Studio wasn’t made to build stop-motion animated games. The good news is that it allowed us to break a new record! I really think we’re the first ones to reach the 1GB limit in Ludum Dare History ^^ (but I might be wrong)

-Hey I got an idea! What if we turn the game in 8bit colors to lighten it ?
Oops…bad idea

And that’s it

Yeah, that’s it. Except for these “little” problems , Coin-Operated Afternoon went RIGHT! We made the game we wanted to make, we had a very good time, and we’re very proud! So once again, thanks Ludum Dare for making people happy!

Eventually, I got an idea and am working on something.

This going to be dumb. Really dumb. The dumbest game I ever made.

BEWARE!

Since I got some great feedbacks on The Quite Annoying League (Thank you!) I thought some might be interested in a time-lapse and post-mortem. So here they are :

Time Lapse  (integration doesn’t seem to work, click the link) :

(some little part are missing, that’s because I used to stop the recording everytime I went out for a cigarettes, and sometimes I forgot to relaunch it when I came back)

The Quite Annoying League Time Lapse par Oujevipo

Post-Mortem

What went right

The theme

As a lot of people, I was quite sure the theme would be End of the World. So I started to think about some game ideas like 2 or 3 days before the compo, and I came up with many of them. Having a game idea before the compo seemed like a good thing, but deep inside, I knew it was a problem, because 1) I would feel like cheating 2) it wouldn’t be as fun. So, the You Are The Villain ‘s victory was quite a relief!

The train-trip

I spent my three first LDs all alone, I spent the last one with a friend (Jam) and this time, I wanted to do something different, so I went in a LD gathering in Montpellier, 2 hours away from my house. To go there, I had to take the train (yeah, in France, we’ve got trains), and that’s exactly when I got my game idea : a train trip in which people are quite annoying, obviously because that’s what I was living at this very moment. This confirms something : I never ever ever ever got a LD idea in front of my computer, always in a café, a train, or walking in the streets. So…this could be a tip.

The gathering

Working with other people (even if I made the game alone) was very motivating. I was a bit afraid at first, but it turned out to be just great. I met a lot of cool people, I’ve seen them working on their games, some gave me ideas, some lend me some material (microphone…). It was a great experience overall, and very useful too! I never worked that much on a LD : usually, I work something like 30h on my LD games, this time, I worked 42 hours, and wasn’t even sleepy!

Cigarette breaks

My biggest fear was the fact that I wouldn’t be able to smoke in front of my computer as I used to, but it turns out to be great too, because I had to go out to smoke from time to time, and think about the game away from the screen. Once again, that’s when I got the best ideas, and when I decided, for exemple, to restart some things from scratch because it wasn’t that good.

The mini-games concept

My game is in fact made of five mini-games (and some barely interactive cutscene). I think this is a good format for LD games : after 30 hours, I could have submitted my game with 3 mini-games for exemple, or work to add some of them. It’s a very good way to be in times, whatever happens, and I understand why this LD have so much WarioWares minigames in it!

What went wrong

Annoyance

I have a problem with Adventure Game Studio : I can’t find a way to create a skip button to skip many dialogues at the same time. So…replaying the same scenes again and again in the game could be quite annoying. The game being called “The quite annoying league”, people might think it’s meta etc…but in fact, I don’t believe it’s a good thing to annoy the player, even for a laugh, and especially not when he has hundreds of games to rate.

Sounds

The game has sounds, this is good. But I feel like I cheated by using a train sound from Freesound.org (I warned the players/raters about this, but still), it’s not something I made, and this is frustrating. I wanted to record train sounds myself with my mouth, something funny like repeating “bruitdetrainbruitdetrainbruitdetrainbruitdetrain” (which means “train sound” in french, and actually sound quite like a train sound), but I’m too bad at editing audio, and it wasn’t good at all. On the other hand, I’m quite happy with all the other sound effects I made myself.

And that’s all.

Overall, I feel things went mostly right for me.

can’t wait for the next ludum dare

Tags: post-mortem, time lapse