Just a few days till Ludum Dare! Oh.. I’m so excited! Okay so let’s do the I’m in thingy.

Language: Still using Game Maker

Art: MS Paint, because I’m to lazy to learn any other art tool.

Music: Autotracker-bu and bfxr

That was easy. I just can’t wait to start jamming, and play all your awesome games! Good luck!

PS: Yes, every character you see in the pic is made for a (mini) Ludum Dare Compo.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 21st, 2012 at 2:45 am and is filed under LD #24. 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.

The chain reaction of being curious in the night about 1000 abandoned evolving kittens that have to survive in a castle with a lot of tunnels, that is being created and destroyd, which makes it a ruin, placed in the deep space in a parallel world where they are trapped in the beginnen of time, but they have each other as a companion and are breaking all the rules as a colony, like going outside while it says they shouldn’t go outside, because if they do it will be the end of the world.

Juice it or Lose it! – a talk by Martin Jonasson & Petri Purho

A game is so much more than just gameplay. In this video Martin and Petri explain how making your game ‘juicy’ can make the game a lot more fun to play. I can recommend this video to everyone here, so make sure you watch it!

Link

How I fell in LÖVE

Not so long ago the only thing I used was Game Maker. I liked it, it did the job. But I felt I needed to continue with something else. An actual programming language. At that time I used ActionScript 3 at school, but let’s just say my school isn’t all too great. I tried improving my AS3 with videos and tutorials. But a lot of stuff just didn’t seem to make sense to me. So then I decided to try Java, then C#, JavaScript as well. And every time the same problems. It takes so much code for a simple image to appear on the screen. Or to make even the basis of a game code. The loading, updating and drawing. So I tried and gave up at everything. Maybe too soon, but I didn’t feel improving. So I told the IRC chat about how I felt like the worst programmer in the world. And then someone suggested LÖVE. So I gave it a try. And I fell in LÖVE.

A few videos were necessary before continuing on my own. These past months were a great adventure of coding. I’ve learned so much in that time. Things like tile-based levels. Or pendulum physics. And there is still so much to learn. But why LÖVE? What was it that made me understand this framework so much easier than others? Let me show you:

The left code is AS3 and the right side is LÖVE. And for a beginning programmer the left side looks a lot more confusing than the right side. So many words, and so many questions: Private, void, extends, addEventListener, e:Event? A lot problems I hadt with AS3 was “What does all that stuff mean?!”, while at the same time I tried to program a game.

Now the great thing about LÖVE for me is that it skips that stuff. It allows me to focus on programming game mechanics and not having trouble with the tricky code stuff. Here’s the thing: In my time using AS3 I needed to Google my compile error all the time to understand what was going on. With LÖVE I have done that maybe once or twice. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that it’s bad. I understand that it ensures for clean code to make the software run faster (I think), and I will eventually get back to it.

So if you’re like me and have trouble finding a language that fits for you, please give LÖVE a try, it has a great (and a little dirty) community, and it’s so easy to understand.

http://www.love2d.org/

http://nova-fusion.com/2011/06/14/a-guide-to-getting-started-with-love2d/

Thanks for reading!

Not sure what he says, but I think he won.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 14th, 2013 at 5:02 am and is filed under LD #28. 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.

Play the game!

Post mortem

The idea

Coming up with an idea must be my least favorite part. You’re smashing your head on the table, trying to come up with something, while instead you want to start working on your game. In general I always try to be innovative in some way. All kinds of ideas came in my mind: You only get one bullet, you only get one try, you only get one.. thing. It all seemed so obvious, too straight forward. Finding something innovative is getting harder every time. When the camera idea crossed my mind, I took it as too hard to make. All these moviescenes I need to make. All the entities move around and you need to film them correctly. Coming up with the idea alone took me 3 hours. After another 15 minutes of not coming up with an idea, I decided to risk it, and go with the camera idea. And I’m really happy that I did.

What didn’t make it into the game?

I had the idea of using a microphone. You had to avoid getting this microphone on the screen. But idea came a bit late in development, and the code was messy already. Letting the microphone move around fluently would be hell, and I like how the player has no indicator of where to place his camera and is left alone with what he thinks is good. Originally there was also going to be this guy:

A director in the chair, shouting commands. I removed him mainly because of how he looked. All humans were in the limited pixelart style, and then you have this guy. I also thought it was nice for the player to look ahead and prepare for the next task.

What would you change/add if you had redone it?

The concept of being a cameraman, which I have never seen used before, could be done all kinds of ways. My game is putting the camera on the right spot every x seconds. But a more fluent game with this concept could also be fun. The camera could have had more functions. Focus for example. I will be playing around with the cameraman  concept, and see if I can make a fun, full length game.

For this version, I think I would’ve done the camera detection different. Or make it more specific in some way. I can understand people getting angry to the game, because they thought they filmed it correctly. This happens when they didn’t zoom in close enough, or they actors weren’t centered. Typing the numbers of these detection rectangles was the most boring and annoying part of the making of my game.

What have I learned?

That I shouldn’t take an idea as too hard straight away. By simplifying some parts of the ideas you can actually turn it into a really fun game! Besides that, I have learned that I can’t think ahead. The code is really, really messy. So that’s a thing I should work on. There are probably some more things that I’ve learned, that I either forgot or can’t come up with right now.

So what now?

As I said, I will most likely be planning on making a full version. But for now I hope that all you guys enjoy my game!

I recently opened my website: http://sheepolution.com/

I also have a Twitter account: https://twitter.com/Sheepolution

And here is the link to my game: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-28/?action=preview&uid=5959

Thanks for reading, I’ll be playing and rating some games now. I’m really curious to what you guys have made!

Cheers!

How did I do?

 Overall

 Innovation

#5 Fun

#9 Theme

#14 Humor

#41 Mood

#89 Graphics

#561 Audio

Overall #1

Woooooaaaaaaahh!

Ever since I joined Ludum Dare it was my goal to achieve this, but I never thought I would get it this soon. I still have my moments where I realize that I actually won. Like.. Gold Overall.. what. I’m not sure what else to say than a big THANK YOU!

Innovation #2

I was hoping on a medal for Innovation, and I’m really happy with silver! If I’m not dissapointed that I didn’t got gold you ask? Not after playing #1. That is simply brilliant. Silver? Fucking awesome!

Fun #5

Glad to see this! Not only innovative but fun as well, cool I managed to do that. In the top 5 for 3 categories, awesome!

Theme #9

In the comments I noticed some people thinking it was a good take on the theme, and others said they didn’t feel like it was related to the theme at all. So I’m glad to see I still got to #9!

Humor #14

People like my humor. I like that.

Mood #41

Uhm.. I’m too confused about this category for me to celebrate my position. But yay, I guess.

Graphics #89

I think the style really fit the game. Looks like other people agree! Yay!

Audio #561

Not surprising. There was an obvious lack of audio.

____________________________________________________________________

I will say it once more: I am working on a post-compo version of the game. I have a friend who is an awesome artist, he will do the art for the whole game.

If you want to get updates on the development of the game, you can follow me on Twitter:   @Sheepolution

And here’s a progress pic of the scene creator, that will be used to make scenes, but can also be unlocked in the game so that you can use it to make and share your own levels!

See you in April!

Time for someone else to take the throne, or will I be able to defend it?

Tools

Language/Framework/Engine: LÖVE

Text-editor: Sublime Text

Art: Aseprite

Music: PixiTracker

Good luck everyone!

I recommend playing the game before reading this:

Play the game

Information

• Start: 11:30 AM (5:30 AM EST)
• End: 3 AM (9 PM EST)
• Time spend sleeping: 11 hours
• Software used: Sublime Text, LÖVE, Aseprite, Pixitracker, bfxr

The idea

I had to think for a long time before finally coming up with an idea. But then it suddenly popped into my mind. I thought back to a flower parade float. You can take a look at it here on Youtube. When I was standing in the audience looking at it, I felt fear. They made the mood so strong, that I feared for them being captured. I took that as inspiration and started making my game.

The good

• Art

It was the first time I used Aseprite for Ludum Dare, and it is such a great tool. It does exactly what I want. So making the art, although it’s not the best, went alright.

• The idea

I personally think I succeeded again in coming up with an innovative, and fun concept. The idea had room for potential that I could come up with while making the game.

• Programming

I don’t think there was any bug that cost me more than 15 minutes of my time. Although the source code is one big mess, I managed to find my way through it. Luckily you only have to look at it for 2 days straight.

The bad

• Gameplay

You could hug your daughter, and feed the baby, that was it. I needed a reason for you to walk from left to right and back. But with everything I could come up with, I had this argument for myself: “Then why wouldn’t the daughter stand on the right side?”. I solved it by adding the lights coming from the floor, which you weren’t allowed to be seen by (although this is actually not in the game, people still think it’s dangerous so they sort of added that feature by themselves). The ‘getting food’ was a perfect solution. You take the risk of the guy coming while you’re taking food, you need to let your daughter hold the baby, you need to feed your daughter. It added a lot of gameplay. So even though it sounds as if that all went right, it was something I had a lot of trouble with making the game.

• Balancing

Never had I so much trouble with balancing a game. It kept being too hard, I kept lowering the speed of how fast the baby or daughter cries, and upped the time of how fast the man comes to inspect. In the end I think I made it too easy, but that might be because I made the game. Most still seem to have trouble finishing the game their first or second try. Balancing cost me quite some time, and it’s the reason why the intro and menu are so shitty.

• Audio

I can’t make music or sound effects, and I felt that 8-bit sounds wouldn’t do its justice. In the end my brother told me to do a heartbeat, which worked out pretty nicely. It reminded me Eniko’s game from previous Ludum Dare, No way out. I felt like stealing it even though I didn’t took it from there. But if a single feature of another game makes your game at its best, then why not use it? In the end I think the audio gives some nice mood.

The ugly

• The baby

If you’ve played the game, you might have seen what can happen to the baby. Now you might think: Sheepolution, what were you thinking in your sick mind while you decided to put that in your game? Well, I got it from the movie The Pianist. In the movie a woman cries. A man explain she’s crying because the police was searching their house when they baby started crying, she suffocated the baby, but it was too late, they were already caught. I thought this would fit perfectly in my game. I hoped it would make people skip a heartbeat when they suddenly see the option in the menu. The scene of the movie can be found here: At 0:45:40

I hope you enjoy(ed) playing In Hiding. I think it’s a kind of game I won’t be making again soon.

Cheers!

Does it look familiar? This time you’re not the camera man, but the director!

I decided to make it so that you first choose what the actors need to do, and then they do it, after which you need to make the next choice.

Yay curtains! Also, I need your help. I’m not sure whether to use Theatre or Theater! You can vote on the poll here:

http://strawpoll.me/3141688/r

Play it here!