Viewable here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKdPC42_F3Q

I scribbled together a compo postmortem late last night (as I seem to do now). Woke up this morning, edited it a bunch, then decided to submit it to Gamasutra blogs… in the off chance that it might get featured.

Hooray for off chances.

http://www.gamasutra.com/

If you don’t see me watching you from the Featured Blogs section of the site, then hit this link for the article.

http://www.gamasutra.com/…/Ludum_Dare_15_Was_Hugeer.php

Pretty cool.

I’m really pleased with how this one turned out (and kind of amazed at how much I managed to get done over the course of two days!).  It’s weird how my motivation went in completely the opposite direction to the last one.  In that one I started off really excited only to hit a wall on Sunday afternoon, while on this one I started really down (the theme’s caverns?  Really?), only for my enthusiasm to ramp up more and more as my game progressed.  It took me ages to get to sleep last night, I was so wired from it all.

I’ll start with the bad, because it’s only little things:

• Stupid jumping bug.  Platformers really need to have solid collision detection, and mine kind of fell down (ha ha!) there.  It’s no good if you’re jumping up to a ledge only to fall through it into the lava below.  It only took 5 minutes to fix when I came back to it this evening though.  The perils of writing a game in only 2 days…
• The music.  I’m not sure it really fits the rest of the game.  I was going for an underground, subterranean theme, but I think it’s just a bit too sinister.  I should have tried to do something more upbeat.
• The theme.  Given all the existing games already set in caverns, I can’t help feeling I would have made a weirder, more interesting game if one of the other themes had won out.  Still, given how Caverns of Light turned out, I’m not too fussed…

The good:

• The graphics.  Doing everything in Inkscape really turned out well, and other than a few slight glitches where certain tiles get drawn over others, I think it looks really polished.
• The ‘connect the lamps to lightboxes’ mechanic.  Particularly the moment when you activate a lightbox and the sky gets lighter as it plays the ‘light-up’ sound.  That’s a great moment.  And I think the mechanic has a lot of potential.  If I’d had more time I would have definitely made the level bigger and more complex.
• Doing the level editor first.  Getting this out the way before I did anything else really made things easier for me than if I’d done it the other way round.  Once it was up and running all I had to do was implement the game logic for navigating round the level.  Incidentally, I didn’t use up anything like the maximum space in the level (the full size of the level is 1024 x 768 tiles, which is pretty huge), so there’s scope for other people to make better ones…
• Building a complete (if a bit slight) platformer in 2 days!  I’m still grinning about this…

Now for the timelapses.  I’ve actually got 2, because I did the music and sound fx on a different computer (my laptop’s not set up for making music), and I didn’t bother joining them together.  First, the main one:

Ludum Dare 15 Timelapse 1

And the music one (this takes place between 10:30 and 12:00 on the Sunday):

Ludum Dare 15 Timelapse 2

I think that the stuff that happened behind the scenes this time were rather interesting, so I decided to write a post-mortem.

The compo began at 6:00 AM our Finnish time, and when I woke up at 11:00 AM, I instantly began to work on my (first) entry. I had had 2 ideas from which to choose from, but the theme wasnt’ really fit for either of them. Anyway, I decided to force the theme a bit and insert my frog-with-a-sticky-tongue-idea to the game. I also realized that I want to do a time lapse, so I downloaded Chronolapse and set it running.

The first few hours I spent by playing around with the physics and testing different tongue methods. A silly bug that was “hard” to notice took a bit of time, but not too much. It was harder than expected to get the frog look right, and I tried several foot and ‘arm’ sizes, ending up with quite big legs and no arms. The silly eyes were a part of the design right from the beginning. I went for a long walk with our dog Turre, took about 2 hours. And ate pizza. Smoked Salmon Pizza. yum.

After that I started pondering about the method for creating the background and walls. It was clear that I’d need several different sorts of angled walls, to make the physics interesting. After some (lots of) pondering, I ended up with using a list with the wall-creation commands, so that I could easily change the layout. After even more pondering I decided to load the background ‘art’ externally, which was the easiest but also a bit stupid way to do it. I had to code a separate editor for the levels (may sound normal, but is actually quite rare in MMF2). I wasn’t exceptionally happy with the simple look of the game, but the engine seemed to work fine.

At this point I started doing other things for a while, such as posting the food picture and reading some MSPaint Adventures. Not much has to be said about that. After getting back to work I decided to start adding other features, such as ‘enemies’ (spikes), and insects that you could eat. I really liked the effect I got to the insect-eating. but overall the score system made out of that was a bit random, considering the actual game was turning more into a puzzle (how to swing that tongue next?.exe).

When I had the basic engine ready, score system running and the game overall working, I started adding new levels. I had spent about 8 hours with the game, and started wondering why it has taken such a short time.

I didn’t feel overall that happy with the game, it was a bit too simple and random for my taste. Also, after seeing screenshots from games like Dock’s entry, I started worrying that the game wasn’t good enough. Anyway, I decided to finish the game I had started. Somewhere around 00:00 I had all the levels ready, and made a very silly ending screen. Fixing the last bugs and such took an hour more, but after that and after submitting the game, I wasn’t really happy with the game; all the others seemed much more interesting. Also, I realized that there was something wrong with MEncoder and my timelapse didn’t work! ;_; Anyway, went to sleep.

(You can find the Cavefrog download link from the bottom of this post!)

The Next Morning – The next game

I woke up at 11:00 AM, and started quite much instantly to ponder about the compo. I had had this over-ambitious idea of a settler having a mining site and exploring the underground caverns, actually even before Spelunky. Anyway, at 13 o’clock I went for a walk, during that I thought of the possibilities I have, and also my own capabilities. Seems like I was in a good mood for thinking, because after some dozens of minutes I had the main idea and item base of my ‘other’ entry ready. A rather sudden rainstorm interrupted my walk a bit, and I got really wet. It was kinda fun, actually.

I calculated that I had around 9 hours to work on the game that day, so I decided to be quick and controlled with the creation (oh yeah, that’s easy to be said). The 5 hours I worked before leaving for piano lessons were quite hectic, and I also forgot to timelapse the creation (;_;), so there isn’t much to say about that. The game progressed surprisingly well, and what’s even more unexpected, no game-breaking bugs showed up! There were some annoying phases though, getting the underground world to be created and then adding the enemies there – I had at first set the enemies appear before the actual caverns, which led to some hilarious scenes. I had chosen the graphical theme mostly because it was the fastest one to do, but also a bit because I like Atari 2600 and C64.

After returning from the lessons at half past 7 PM, I had still lots to do: adding 2 new enemy types, having treasures appear underground and creating the glitchy loose blocks, along with actually making the game over/winning screens. Somewhere during this phase I suddenly realized that I could make the game require more tactical thinking by adding the rising lava (yes, there’s rising lava!) to the end. That’d make the player hurry a bit, and possibly have to think a bit about the route back onto the surface. I was continuously unhappy with the enemies gathering into huge piles in some small gaps, and trying to punch you from too far away. I didn’t manage to get all of this away, but probably most of it. I’m still kinda unhappy with how the projectiles work though.

I went over the time I had planned by 1½ hours, but that time was really needed for adding sound effects and squashing bugs. When I finally sighed after working for 11 hours on the game, I was really happy with the result. Though I had a schoolday tomorrow, so I had to send the entry without checking if it’s actually beatable. I feared a bit that the lava’d rise too quickly for the players. Luckily my fears weren’t needed; though I’ve yet to see someone apart from myself who can beat the game.

I will probably make a Deluxe version out of this sometime later, and I must say that I enjoyed this ludumdare very much! Especially when I finally found the IRC channel. I’ll sure e participating next time, whenever that is. I can imagine items like stun gun, umbrella and electronic drill. Perhaps even a jetpack!

Pros & cons on the creation and game overall:

+ I think the graphics fit the style rather well. I like the look of the player itself, and also the grin on the face of the health meter.

+The game isn’t too easy. Granted, some of this is caused by bugs, but I like how you have to think a bit how to move while descending deeper.

+The game is surprisingly bug-free. There are some bigger and some smaller nitpicks, but overall I wonder how there weren’t any worse bugs around.

- The bugs that are around are quite annoying. The most notable glitch is the one that happens when you jump on the corner of a loose block: You slide horizontally and technically fall through the block. This bug is even more annoying because I can’t understand what causes it.

- The game became a tad too confusing. I think my choices of buttons are somewhat logical, but I can see that especially the ladder will take some time to get working correctly.

-The dynamite is unuseful. No-one wants to explode huge areas, not in this game, because they block easily your path further/back.

-The game became a little too much like Spelunky. I don’t know if I should be happy or sad when people say that the game is a Spelunky ‘demake’ or something like that, because the base idea is a lot older. However, I think I unconsciously took some design choices that make the game resemble Spelunky, starting from the outlook of the player!

Overall, I really enjoyed this compo! Thanks guys and gals! Sorry for the lengthy post-mortem.
Download Cavefrog through this link!

Hey everyone,

We got talking in IRC about demographics, and decided we should try collecting some. So hit this link for our shiny Ludum Dare poll.

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=0XGGBruHxeEbdl24Y5zi0Q_3d_3d

It’s a single page with 3 questions. Click all checkboxes that apply and then click done.

I’ll post some results later in the week(s?).

Thanks!

Like many, I did a timelapse this weekend! I did a webcam capture as well, for the first time. It was funny seeing snapshots of my pain and/or elation at different points throughout the weekend. Here it is:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLDeczIW2JI

I realized the instructions for my entry were a little sparse.

There are two levels with a boss eat the end of each. The game is completable and has a proper ending sequence.

In level one you should avoid shooting the barrels exept it is the less painful alternative (like being hit by the green beams).

In level two radiation is your friend..

Hey guys,

I had a few people leave comments about my entry noting that it wasn’t quite working for some people. I sent it around to a bunch of friends to playtest and it seemed to go okay for them…sooo, if you’ve run into problems with my entry or would like to see if it works, please download it! If you do run into any issues, please give me some details – the program generates a log file in the Release directory which should spit out any fatal errors. (also if you’re running it through wine or something, that would be good to know!)

It’s not the best piece of gaming in the world – I just want other people to be able to legitimately criticize it.

http://www.cs.stevens.edu/~pmainwar/ld15.zip

Thanks!

The dust has barely settled, but I’m throwing up a post mortem anyway…

Moons of Subterrane was interesting in that for the most part, nothing went wrong.
I had been feeling a bit ill and stuff, so didn’t do the full 48hr run, I perhaps did 24hrs instead…
So in keeping with my previous post-mortems, the good, bad and ugly -

The Good:
As said, nothing really went wrong during the work I did.
Adding things was really easy due to the way I had set it up – albeit slightly convoluted in that maps and enemies/stations are in different files.
The system kinda worked like a database to that effect… where each room was designed in a text editor and given a room number, and the map just referenced the room numbers. All data was loaded in on level load ( which can cause a pause or two )
Enemy spawners and flight paths were relatively easy to add as well.
Seeing as I did miniLD11 with Little Quirks ( which I’ve still been working on ) I was a lot more confident with the engine and how things worked, or should work, which was probably how I managed so well this time

The Bad:
Again, I didn’t really factor much time in for sounds.. and a ZX Spectrum could beat the sounds I did!
Testing was quite tricky as well, as the levels can be quite involving.
Also, no animations… so everything’s a static sprite – doesn’t look quite so good as it could’ve been but then, I’m no artist!

The Ugly:
The submission phase… heh… I buggered this up spectacularly and only just realised after I got a comment stating it was far too fast.
The game was coded primarily on a Linux box, and I had a Windows laptop setup to do win32 builds on. I tested and built the correct binary, but somehow transferred an older binary to my Linux box when packing things up. Same thing happened with the Dingoo and Wiz builds ( they should work but just not have input, instead they crash due to other factors which I fixed this morning. )
Now, I have updated my entry with a fixed exe to download.. but this is tricky though as my original submission does have a broken exe – HOWEVER, and here’s the fun bit.. I included full source in that package and if you were to compile an exe from that source, you’d get the correct working version!
Also, I did put up various versions on my site, as I had some other people who were testing my game throughout the duration on Windows for me.
You can find them all here:
http://www.stuckiegamez.co.uk/gamez/ludumdare/ld15/

(The submitted package is: MoonsOfSubterrane-LD15.7z and the Win32 fix is: SGZ2D.exe)
You’ll see that the exe in hour 44 does infact work at the correct pace ( without sound.. though the sound is so dire and you’ll be probably turning it off anyway ), and you can check the source in the submitted package: specifically line 132 onwards (the updateInterfaces function) in Source/code/engine/CInterpret.cpp – there lies the nasty hacky SDL specific framelimit code – which obviously isn’t active in the submitted exe.

Also… KATE on Linux seems to do stuff to the files it edits, as on Windows they seem to have extra blank lines between every normal line.. hmm..

So yea, although nothing technically went wrong during the competition, and I was surprised at that, I managed to bugger up the submission in spectacular style, instead! Woo!

Well I never made it to submission, but I’m really glad I entered as it’s possibly opened up a major door for me…

It’s very close to what I had in mind for my first chapter of Amnesia Stories, the ‘prequels’ to Amnesia (see my blog), a game I may never get round to making. In fact, the boy looks like a young Yuuki, the main character, and so this may well become the first chapter of said prequels. I think I’ve got something a little special, atmosphere-wise, and it’s a great template for the guaging exactly how long it would take to put a scenario together for AS.

So if you’re interested in 2D survival horror, keep an eye on my blog in the coming months, as there may be goodness contained therein.

Thanks for having me, Ludum Dare!

As promised here are the linux and mac os ports:
Mac OS X (11,2 MB)
Linux (4 MB)

And here is the windows port (again, for the purpose to have all files in one post):
Windows (5,4 MB)

Linux notes:
- You need libSDL, libSDL_image, libSDL_mixer, libSDL_ttf and libSDL_gfx installed on your system to run the game.

Mac OS X notes:
- For some strange reason (specific FreePascal/SDL_mixer/Mac OS X – bug) there is no sound on Mac OS X.
- Be sure to copy the application from the image file to a directory with write permissions because the game creates a log file.

And if you don’t want to read my journal online, I put together a PDF and added a short post mortem:
Click here (3 MB)

Click here to see Cavern Defense Timelapse
(I realized I hadn’t chronolapse running all time during the LD, so my timelapse is rather short.)

It’s important to note that my entry was not done in four hours.  This weekend ended up very different from what I thought it was going to be, but I was so far behind my schedule that I didn’t feel I had time to make a journal entry to clarify this.  I worked through the night instead of going to sleep prior to my first prior engagement, so that was an extra 8 working hours.  The other of my prior engagements fell through, supplying me with an extra 6 working hours or so.  So in reality, I had about 18 hours to work on it.

If it looks like it only took 4 hours, that’s because the majority of my time was spent fixing very early bugs rather than adding new content. So, sorry for the mostly-empty game :/

AND to clarify yet further: I didn’t design any levels for this game.  The levels are procedurally generated.  I tried two schemes for this: one based on recursively taking edges in a graph and complex-ifying them (which never worked to my satisfaction), and another (much simpler) one based on random attachment, with a few extra edges thrown in to allow cycles to form in the graph.  After generating the graph out of edges and vertices, I “rasterized” it into blocks to make collision detection easier.

I realized moments ago why my final submission wasn’t the fixed one.

I had forgotten that Code::Blocks keeps its binaries in a separate path.

That happened with my upload of the fixed version, so I swapped things around real quick.

Now I’ve uploaded last nights fixes! X-D

Even though I didn’t manage to finish my entry, I still did a timelapse. Because timelapses are cool.

I did a timelapse movie during this competition too.

Mr Monocle timelapse

Put together a timelapse for this weekend; the picture-in-picture is me, waving my arms in time to the beat of stupendous bugs.

I’ve uploaded a fixed version of my game.

Late last night, but still well before the deadline, I fixed several bugs, including the segfault.

I also added a few more enemies, and they now respawn when you kill all of them.

This was completed about two hours before the deadline, but I forgot to update the package on my computer last night.

I’ve been told that it’s okay to upload this, since it was done bofre the deadline, so long as I also offer the unfixed version.

—Mr. Dude

Here is my timelapse.

And here is a distribution chart of programs I used to create Cave Diver.

The chart was created by sampling which window had focus when the screenshot for timelapse was taken.

33 hours, one picture per minute:

Timelapse for my unfinished (but submitted) entry Lost Whelps.  YouTube detected DragonForce and AudioSwap is bugged right now so no audio on that one.  Click the Vimeo link if you want music, both are in HD.

Lost Whelps – LD48 #15 Timelapse from Christopher Zamanillo on Vimeo.