With annotations!

Edit: I’ll try to do a post mortem later, I’m thinking tomorrow though

O, Irony! I spent all weekend making a spiffy level editor and didn’t have time to make an actual level. However, afterwards I did manage to put a decent level together without any changes or bugs.

If you want to try it out, replace level.xml in my entry with this one:

level.zip (Biglevel)

There’s still nothing to collect or do, but it’s a nice challenge to see if you can make it to the chamber on the bottom right. And plus it looks way cooler than the testlevel that was included. This took about 90 minutes to make — less time than I spent trying to make new art this morning (that didn’t work and so the time was wasted). Sigh.

Remember, this level was made post contest, so don’t consider it in your judging (though you may consider levels that you make yourself, because the editor is part of the game, heheh). I don’t think it’s an issue though, there really isn’t any gameplay.

I tried to make the timelapse app better this time, but only managed to rewrite the features I had last time – ah well. Next time it will be better, really!
If nothing else, the current framework can be extended, whereas the previous one was rather very hacky.

Here’s my timelapse video:

Brinie is now a java applet available on the web.

The url is: http://www.brinie.org

It looks like it works in firefox and chrome, but came up kinda weird on IE8 with Windows 7 RC.

Anyway, enjoy!

Go ahead . I think that the flixel community would be a great place to recruit for more LD’ers.

http://flixel.org/forums/index.php?topic=276.0

I had some reports that the ZIP file for Broken Cave Robot was corrupt… but I also had plenty of people download it just fine.

I reuploaded the thing anyway, just to be safe. So if you tried once and it was corrupted, it should be fixed now.

1 shot every 15 seconds, encoded at 24fps. In HD!

I am told that animations do not display in local play of download version. Is very bad, but easy fix. I am changing file system settings to local for this build, and now it is working. If you have downloaded candle.rar, please to download new version.

… If I could re-submit my entry.

My caverns are full of watching eyes and strange creatures, and the moment you leave the light, the darkness (or what it contains) swallows you up. It worked really well, but in my excitement, I decided to make the last 3 rooms of the game far more difficult than the rest. I wanted to make finishing the game more rewarding for people, because I worked really hard on the ending! But all I ended up doing was causing some players to quit just before they get to the best part of the whole experience.

Anyways, in some of the rooms there are red crystals. Unlike the blue ones, the light they give off surges, so their luminescent range of safety is growing and shrinking, so you have to time your movements between them. In the very last area of the game, there is one such setup:

I have to get to that upper red crystal to continue on.

This part of this room literally took me several hours of tweaking to get it just right, the amount of time that I would usually take to entirely finish two or three of any of the other room in the game. The problem presented is that the red crystals are glowing opposite of each other, meaning when the lower one is illuminated (as in the screenshot), the upper is dark. When the upper one illuminates, the darker one will fade away. Because of the nature of this last room (which I won’t spoil), it is extremely tempting for the player to want to just jump off that platform to the upper crystal when it illuminates. But that’s not the case, and if it is possible, it’s very difficult to pull off consistently if you fail and have to re-attempt it.

What you’re supposed to do is illustrated in the following screenshot:

You will die if you try to jump from the platform through the area marked by the red "X".

And you have to do this while the bottom crystal is still illuminated. Once you are up by the blue crystal, you are safe from dying, and have to wait there until the upper red crystal illuminates. Then, you can make the following jump across to it without falling into the darkness.

That first little landing is just in range of the blue crystal.

The problem here is, as you can see, the game is very dark. I didn’t want the game to have clear “boundaries” of where you could and could not move, or for anything to be precise. Which is why, in fact, that all the lights have a slightly extended “grey area” where you are safe but out of their visible range. I wanted the player to play by instinct, to move to wherever they thought would be the safest, to huddle in the faintest light when there was nowhere safe to go. Unfortunately, this particular design is too precise, and forces the player to think technically about what they’re doing, and not instinctively, which is what my base design was with the game. There are a couple other parts that I could get picky about as well and refine, but this part was the worst of them, and at the most crucial of times.

It was an unwise decision made in the heat of battle, and will be fixed up in the after-compo version of the game. But if I could do it all over, I would definitely fix this, because I already know that this part will (and has!) prevented several players from experiencing the game’s ending which I worked so hard on.

Alas! Everything else went exceedingly better than I thought it would (I wasn’t even confident I’d come up with an idea, never mind finish one!) so I definitely can’t complain. Let this serve as a guide to those of you who have not yet played my game, and may get stuck at the following part, because it’s worth it to continue on.

Normally I make an effort at including at least a couple of journal entries, but I didn’t write anything at all this time.  By about hour 30 an entry was looking very unlikely, so I didn’t bother.

Inspiration struck in the last 10 hours though.  I made a puzzle game with crude graphics, little polish, but a reasonable number of levels.

Play it here if you are interested:

http://disruption.ca/cave/cave.html

I’ve got a couple more level ideas, and some tweaks in mind.  I’ll probably upload a post-compo version in a few days.  Happy rating everyone.

I should have just submitted Spelunky

So close and yet so far. Two hours short of really putting in an entry. Second Ludum Dare first failure.

In SGDSGU you are a telekinetic kid escaped from a covert government facility. Once they became aware of your escape, they sent out zombies to do away with you. As far as controls go, just click the fully formed stalactites at the top. Puncture zombie heads and try to stay alive!

(You can download what would have been the final here (play it in the stand alone flash player instead of the browser).

Currently missing:

- Win condition.

- Sounds.

- Stalagmites to block the zombies.

- More user feed back (hover mouse over stalagmites causes a glow).

- Gore effects.

- Optimization

I’m still running on the high of getting the game done on time, figure I may as well decompress with a mini post-mortem.

What Went Right

Concept

Settled on a pretty simple concept.

Art

The animation and character creation went extremely smoothly in flash.  I like how everything turned out visually. Flint also eased the burden art wise with some neat dynamic deaths for the zombies.

Programming

Flint was pretty easy to get up and running, the examples that came along with it could not make it any easier to use.

The game programmatically was not all too complicated, so most of that went pretty smoothly as well.

What Went Wrong

Concept

I wasn’t too big on the caverns theme as it left so many options open (?). Yes too many options, through together a bunch of concepts. They were pretty easy to narrow down, most of them included tilesets, yet, since I’ve never drawn tilesets from scratch I was pretty apprehensive about going that route.  I did a lot of humming and hawing as Flixel looked like the perfect little engine for this competition. Easy to generate some random caverns toss a ninja rope in there, and bam you’re done. In the end my fear of pixel art was enough to keep me away.

Art

I hate flash registration points.

I need to have a timer going while I’m working on the art, I put way too much time into making the art bits, when a good chunk of it didn’t get used. I know placeholder art, generally becomes the final art. So I try to get it done all in one go. Having the same problem last compo, I think I’ll have to go about it differently next time around.

Programming

Wasted a little bit of time getting up to speed on Flint. I have to stop using Ludum Dares as a way to try new things. I need to start dealing with the learning curves before the competition.

Placed my registration points way too willy nilly,  wasted way too much time programmatically shifting bitmapdata and registration points around.

Sleep

Squandered a bunch of time sleeping, got a decent 20 hours of sleep in.

–

I got most of what I wanted accomplished. I wish I would have had more time to play around with Flint to create some neat gore effects but oh well. Despite all the extra time I sunk into the artwork, it was a good experience, it was good to spend some quality time with my tablet.

Congrats to all you guys the majority of the games this time around look really phenomenal.

It’s amazing, after a relaxing swim and glass of wine, I came back to the computer and quickly fixed a few bugs that were really annoying me about the last version.

Here’s the change list:

- Net now kills any Grags on it, when set to capture mode.

- Pouper now grows out from its center, not oddly to its right.

- Now you have to get pretty much all of Brinie in the net to capture her. Winning when just getting her partway in the net makes it a little too easy I think.

Here is the new version for windows, mac and linux:

http://www.divshare.com/download/8334544-ac5

By the way, this is one program that will chew up as much cpu as you got. an overclocked i7 would be great if you want to see 1000s of Grags moving around at 30 frames per second. Will only use one core though. My dual core machine can get maxed to 50% with one core in full use while playing.

Have fun, or at least, enjoy the sand box of dead.

Had I known that I was going to end up with such an uninteresting game, I wouldn’t have bothered, but since I already did, here’s the timelapse video. At least it’s a short one.

31 hours in 5 minutes ^__^.

Here is my timelapse video for Cave Miner:

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

You can play the game here: http://www.wieringsoftware.nl/ld/CaveMiner/

You can watch 36 hours of my game development on Angry Caverns compressed into 3 minutes here in my timelapse video on YouTube.

It was my first year doing a timelapse and I think I’m hooked.  So much fun to see the creative process!

Time to sleep soon too…

Well, couldn’t get a demo working in time.  This is my second LD and my first fail.  I’ll try to take away some of the sting by detailing what went wrong!

I wanted a procedurally generated cavern that you could climb using a grappling hook.  I wanted the grappling hook to be modeled as realistically as possible, so it would react like real rope and not stretch much, wrap around corners, etc.  Turns out this is a pretty tough thing to do

I used the Bullet physics library because I’ve messed with it before, and also because I saw a demo for Softbody Rope which seemed exactly what I needed.  Unfortunately, like EVERYTHING in that library, the rope was very sparsely documented.  It took me almost 10 hours to get it working.  This was something I hoped to get done in an hour or so.

Finally, at the end of my first day I got the rope behaving somewhat how I wanted.  Good enough to proceed at least, so the second day I focused on cavern generation.  I wanted to be able to create interesting geometry out of a huge block, so I decided to implement the “marching tetrahedrons” algorithm for turning a volumetric dataset into polygons.  This took longer than anticipated due to a silly small mistake that was hard to track down.  It didn’t help that I was already bummed about losing so much time due to the rope issue

So after finally getting the rope working and a basic cavern generated, I tried to add the cavern mesh to Bullet and get some collisions going.  Unfortunately this is when the deadline snuck up on me, and despite coding furiously I couldn’t finish in time.  I do think I’ll continue with this concept until I get something playable.

Despite the fail, I had a great time as usual.  I’m happy about finally implementing the marching tetrahedron algorithm, as I have a few project ideas that will definitely benefit from it.  And as much as I want to hate on Bullet right now, it is a fun library to play with.  Just not the most fun when there is no documentation and precious little time to comb through source files trying to figure out how something works.

I’ll end with some random shots of things going wrong

Wow!  At current count, we have a whopping 144 entries!  To start voting on entries, go here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-15/

For the rest of the world, hit this link to see the list of all the entries.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-15/?action=preview

If you made an entry, but for whatever reason weren’t able to submit at the deadline (upload problems, used the old submission method), let us know (via IRC, or respond to this post).

Voting will last for 2 weeks.

Remember, this time you’re being rated on how many entries you voted for.  Users that play and rate 25%+ of the entries will see a bronze icon beside their name, 50%+ a silver, and 75%+ a gold.  There will be a final list showing the best voters, along with the rest of the results.

Windows Ports

Hurry up and get your Windows ports in! The longer you wait, the less time people have to play and vote for your entries. For more details on porting, see this post.

Also, some people need help porting their Python+PyGame games to Windows+Py2EXE. If you can help out, see the comments here. If you need a place to upload the ports, ask a moderator in IRC for the FTP info.

Timelapse Videos

Be sure to tag your posts with the tag timelapse. It’ll make it easier for others to find your videos, and for me to collect them all.

Suggestions

If you have any suggestions regarding the compo (things to change, little things to make things nicer, etc), post them in the comments here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2009/08/30/suggestion-post/

Thanks everyone for coming out and making Ludum Dare 15 our biggest and best compo yet! Now go vote!

- Mike Kasprzak (PoV)