Me and a buddy of mine will be participating in the Jam for the upcoming LD for the first time ever. We’re sure as heck looking forward to it.
We think we’re gonna use XNA or java, not sure which, and my buddy is planning on composing all music and graphics himself. Should be fun. Likely gonna be a 2D style game.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yrLjvmn8lEw
This is a time lapse of me and my friend participating in the jam. We got 4 perspectives, a video of each person as well as their screens. Enjoy!
This will be my 3rd year in a row participating in LD. First year was a jam, second was the compo, and third year I’m doing another Jam. Doing a jam because a buddy of mine wants to participate with me, so I will be handling all the programming and he is going to work on graphical/audio assets.
Course of action planned:
Language – Java
Libraries – Slick2d, LWJGL (because of slick2d), Nifty-Gui, and personal code libraries (basically a template for a java game) for 2D games
Software: Eclipse, Fruity Loops, Audacity, Gimp
Things that went right:
Things that went wrong:
So all in all, I’m pretty happy with the results of my game. I mostly handled the code, and a buddy of mine handled the assets. It has a few bugs in it, for example sometimes (very rarely) you can get cut off from the stairs, which is a problem. Had to work a bit on getting class abilities balanced, they still aren’t perfectly balanced. Being a bandit and spamming increased strength is pretty potent.
I wish I able to get in branching class paths (For example, Warlock X level + bandit X levels = arcane trickster, etc.) and I wanted to add in learning new abilities as you leveled, but the time just didn’t permit it to get in.
If I had to do it all over again, in hindsight i probably should have worried about tweaking combat less and getting more elements in. At the end of the day, though, it turned out really well and is easily my best entry into LD yet! I certainly learned a lot! This was also my first time using Java to make a game and moving out of my comfort zone of using XNA + C#.
Tags: ld25, postmortem
This will be my 4th year participating (annually) in ludum dare. I will be doing a Jam with 1-2 other people, depending on who all is in, which will make it the largest group ive worked with for LD thus far.
Not sure what we will be using, but on the table is C# with XNA, Java with jmonkey, and unity for the overall architecture. Likely using audacity and fruity loops for musical bits, and photoshop/gimp/blender for graphics.
After finishing my 4th LD ever, competing annually, I can honestly say I learned a lot this go around. Previous years, i spent the time building up to it practicing whatever language/framework I planned on using. This year, i decided to try using Unity. I had some vague exposure to unity a handful of times, but nothing this extensive.
I can honestly say, as far as frameworks go, it’s really rather slick. I could definitely see using it in a real project.
At the end of the day, though, I’m honestly not too enthused with the results. I really just couldn’t come up with any good ideas for the theme this year. All previous years, i had so many ideas buzzing around I couldn’t get to all of them, and ended up having to cut things. This year, i got essentially everything in I planned from the get go, with plenty of time left of my hands to mull over extra ideas. All in all, i honestly don’t think the game turned out that fun, either. I honestly felt really restricted by the theme. Oh well, here’s hoping to a better LD next year!
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-28/?action=preview&uid=2978
Tags: jam, LD28, Ludum Dare, postmortem, unity
Two friends and myself will be doing the game jam! We’re going to be using unity, gimp, audacity, and fruity loops.
Play it here: virophage
Summary
All in all, I’m outrageously happy with how this project turned out. The concept and mechanics actually came out really well, and the two other people I worked with knew exactly where to go with their end of the project, as well as working with enough autonomy so as not to hold us up. When the theme was first announced, I was hesitant with it, trying to make sure we steered away from anything to do with water and/or caves or mining. I had a feeling those were going to be the bulk of the things that came to mind when you hear the theme.
Daily recollections
Friday
Initially on Friday we had some good, long discussions on what we could do. Ultimately, we came down to two different ideas, the idea we used (virus attacking the immune system), and one that sounded fun, but probably more work than we had the gumption and time for, a sort of rogue-like Fishing RPG. The details of the second one aren’t terribly important, but suffice it to say that your fishing gear was like items you could find and equip in an RPG, and to catch fish, you had to battle them with your lure. We joked about this concept for probably far longer than I care to think about, given our small time frame.
One of our team members was remote compared to the rest of us (all two), so we used a teamspeak server run by a mutual friend. Suffice to say, I’m actually really happy with how the remote communication worked out in this instance. The person who was remote, MechaToddZilla, is actually the person who I participated in my first ludum dare with, this being my 5th one to date. As an aside, I think I’m getting pretty good at gauging what is and isn’t a possibility to fit into these. As I go along, there’s less and less features that need to be cut, and in this instance, adding of new things that weren’t even planned in the first place. Where as the first LD I participated in, there was probably a good 15-20 features we had to cut out. There was still a few things I had to axe that I had wanted to do because I didn’t think it would be feasible to implement well in the timeframe we have.
After some preparations (and a snacks/drinks run) and initial prototyping, of which, the prototype looks nothing like what we eventually ended up with, both in mechanics and design, and that’s ok, we proceeded to call it a day without any real work other than getting prepared.
Saturday
This is where the bulk of the work happened. I spent most of the day head-down in the code working to bring our creation to life. We ran into several snafu’s with BoxSync working between the three of us, and i don’t know if it was a weird interaction with the newer version of unity, or something up with the latest BoxSync software, but for the entire weekend we couldn’t get it to sync terribly properly. This is both odd and annoying, since I’ve used BoxSync on my last 2 or 3 LD’s I’ve worked on without any issue at all.
Other than the issues we ran into with the other two not being able to really playtest anything most of the day, everything else went quite smoothly. MechaTodd kept adding more and more graphics into the project, and for a while there I thought I wasn’t going to have enough need for most of them in the game at the rate it was progressing vs how quickly I was getting the game implemented. TinariKao added a number of sound effects to the project that he actually made on his own with a microphone and some ingenuity, which, sadly, I wasn’t able to get around to using too terribly many of them. Both from a lack of any real need and due to getting a large portion of the mechanics down.
About halfway through the day, MechaTodd turned his attention to the musical aspect of the game, which I have to say, I think turned out pretty well. I think the small tune on it’s own is fairly evocative of a heartbeat, and complements the game very well. I’ll admit, at this point, I didn’t have the mechanics anywhere near done, and MechaTodd and TinariKao had created a ton of content that I was afraid I wasn’t going to have a chance to use much of. That said, shortly afterwards, things really started coming together within the game. I eventually called it a day with the base mechanics fully intact, but not much actual content to the game other than the white blood cells being a thing.
Sunday
This is where things really started to pull together.
I started this day unsure of the particular direction I needed to go with the game. The mechanics were all intact, but there wasn’t much to DO in the game. So i started designing a handful of bosses. At this point, the game was relatively unbalanced, and became super easy REALLY fast, so i decided to implement some scaling. To this effect, I made every boss and power up grant you 10 “level” and every normal enemy kill 1 “level”, and I started scaling boss health and damage, as well as normal enemy health and spawn rate. I also decided to up the spawn rate of power ups to make level gaining increase exponentially as you go along, thus making the game start off slowly, and ramp up in how hectic it is. It actually worked out fairly well.
With all this in place, I decided to try to give players a bit more direct influence on their attacks. To this ends, i set about trying to give the player the ability to shoot projectiles, that was earned from defeating bosses. At first, I had planned to simply have you fire at the mouse cursor. I had done this in the past in unity, but I remember it being somewhat wonky and difficult to actually implement. After googling it for a bit, and trying out some stuff with getting relative positions to the camera, i realized it wasn’t going too well, and I was spending way to much time on it. That was when I had what I think was a fairly brilliant idea.
I decided to make the firing pattern fire in a predictable 8-directional pattern. This, i felt, actually works out MUCH better than the original plan of simply firing at the cursor, and was significantly easier to implement. It also gave me some extra tweaks to give to the boss rewards.
At this point, I was once again entirely unsure of where to go with the game, but i felt it needed more challenge to it. It was then i decided to add in the super boss, which was a giant combination of every enemy currently in the game. It was actually quite easy to implement, as the mechanics for the game had really fallen into place at this time. I also talked MechaTodd into coming up with boss music for these fights. From here, things really started winding down, and we moved in to balance mode, trying to make the game get tough later on, but not too tough early.
I went through several balancing iterations, some way too easy, some way too hard. I ended the day unsure if it was going to be balanced well enough for the release on monday.
Monday
Going back to my usual day job left me with little time to do much on this project. However, what scant few hours i did have after I got home went straight into playtesting and balance tweaking. I think the results we ended with worked out very well, the game starts simple and ramps up to harder difficulty really starting around level 1000. With that in place, we pulled the trigger, locked in the code, and submitted our entry.
What went right
Overall, the gameplay mechanics really started to fall into place at an early point in the games development, which i was very happy with. Unity, as usual, strikes a good balance between ease of use, portability, and design freedom to allow us to get a good game up and running in a very short window. Teamspeak was also invaluable to our communication, and held up admirably. After our initial design sessions, everyone knew their part, and we set about our tasks, idly chatting between head-down working sessions. This can only be accredited to working with people you really trust to get their part done, and is absolutely essential in such a short timeframe.
What went wrong
Box. Box single-handedly encompassed every single issue we had with this project. We spent at least a total of 3 or 4 hours among each of us just working around issues with box, waiting for syncing, resolving conflicts, wiping out and redownloading the project, etc. We were able to limp along in this aspect and get everything done, but had the process worked seemlessly, we might have had considerably more time to pump into adding things to the game.
Had the rest of the project not been going so well, this very much so could have ended up being a show-stopper when it came to getting our project finished on time. Luckily, everything else ran so spectacularly well.
Conclusion
At the end of the day, I’m very happy with how the project turned out. Despite its simplicity, the game is actually pretty fun, and based on the reviews I’m currently seeing in the comments, people seem to agree. The mechanics, graphics, and sound all mesh so well to create a pretty solid overall experience. As usual, there was more I wished I could have gotten finished, but there’s only so many hours in a Ludum Dare weekend. At least this time i was very good at recognizing my limits, and what would really put us on a time crunch, and was able to effectively mitigate any problems that would have caused. There was still obviously a few concessions made in the sake of time, but not nearly so many as I have done in the past.
Tags: jam, ld29, post-mortem, postmortem
I will be joining in the jam with 1-2 friends (not sure of the count quite yet). We plan on using unity, gimp, audacity, and maybe a couple other miscellaneous tools that slip my mind at the moment!
This will be my 6th or so LD, most of which have been the jam with the same group of people.
This will be my 6th annual ludum dare, and I am most definitely in! Will be using unity for a game engine, and probably photoshop and audacity for the sights and sounds. Probably gonna be on the solo end this year!
http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=2978
Submitted my entry! Submitting so early isn’t usual for me! Glad I got everything I wanted to done! I present to the world “The Star War”
Participating again for my 5th year in a row. Ready for another fun (and probably frustrating!) LD! Will be using unity.
Mechanics are starting to come together pretty well, and adding content is starting to get quicker and easier as everything else comes together!
Also, gots myself some turts!
Whelp, time to get back to work!
Joining for my 7th or 8th year in a row, one in for the competition!
Will be using unity, paint.net, and audacity.
I've noticed a handful of people appear to be "submitting" their game as a blog post.
Had a blast working with a few friends on this one. Overall, game out really good, this is my first time coming back to Ludum Dare since about 2018! Had a great time!
Go check it out.
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/51/a-space-polka-in-ten-parts
Just a small tip for people who might need it: To get your game views and ratings, obviously play and rate games yourself, but more importantly:
I've got a handful of ratings on my games, but no comments; Most people who participate will reciprocate the ratings if you comment on their game! With no comments, we don't know who to go back to in order to return the favor!
My first LD in a couple of years. Worked with a few friends on our entry, had a really good time. We got pretty much everything we wanted to get done.
Check it out!
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/squirrel-puncher
