There’s a new featured article on Gamasutra and Game Career Guide about game making festivals and competitions. You can find the article here:

http://gamecareerguide.com/features/784/features/784/winning_a_guide_to_finding_game_.php

On page 2 there’s a small plug for Ludum Dare and RetroRemakes, which is pretty cool if I do say so.

I decided to steal an idea from the 7DRL people for the October mini LD: while I will announce the rules sometime on October 2, the contest starts whenever you want in October. Just post a message right before you start and than post your game at most 48 hours after that.

I participated in the last Klik of the Month Klub over at Glorious Trainwrecks, too.

For those who might not be familiar with GT, here’s the spiel from the front page:

Glorious Trainwrecks is about bringing back the spirit of postcardware, circa 1993. It’s about throwing a bunch of random crap into your game and keeping whatever sticks. About bringing back a time when you didn’t care so much about “production values”, as much as ripping sound samples from your favourite television shows to use in your game, or animating pictures of yourself making goofy faces on your webcam. Where every ridiculous idea you had, you would just sit down and code. When you would make up a “company name” to legitimize dorking around on the computer with your friends.

It is not about unfinished, unplayable games. If any part of a glorious trainwreck is terrible, it is terrible in a way that is AWESOME.

Klik of the Month (FAQ) happens on the third Saturday of every month, and it’s about coming up with whatever you can come up with in two hours. Usually using Klik & Play (a horrible Win3.1-era game authoring tool), and usually by gleefully abusing stock sounds and graphics. Personally I find it a fantastic challenge to turn out something interesting (although that’s certainly not mandatory) in such a short space of time with such a limited, primitive tool. Hope to see some more LD people there next time it rolls around.

This time around for KotMK#27 I wanted to try doing some pretty bullet patterns in KnP, so I made a horizontal SHMUP. I wasn’t sure if it would work, seeing as how KnP suffers once you hit the limit of 255 sprites, but it came out pretty decent. Check out KILL GOD.

Fellow Ludumer Hempuli missed out on KotMK#27 due to timezones so we decided to have an encore mini-klikkening. I was pretty tired and just wanted to see how far I could get with adding features to a little Dwarf Fortress fangame inside two hours (again, the object limit of 255 being a huge problem). Yesterday I added a bunch more features. It’s hard to stop adding shit, in fact. I can sort of see how someone could do it full-time  with the kind of love Toady does. Check out Lonely Hermit Dorf.

In general I’ve been on a bit of a KnP bent lately. If this stuff interests you, I also recently released two KnP RPGs:  MOTORCYCLE COCK and Mathora VI.

I participated in yesterday’s Glorious Trainwreck. My self-imposed theme? RAIN.

Play it! (Windows)

Ludum Dare #15 is over, and I already wrote that the results are in. Aside from placing well in Community, which shows how much I love participating in LD48, I also saw my overall ranking come in at around the 40 percentile. I was ranked #63, which sounds good, but there were a number of ties for previous rankings. Out of 144 entries, Mineral Miner was 87th. It’s much better than coming in almost dead last in the previous Ludum Dare (and not completely last only by virtue of two other entries not getting rated at all), but I’ve done better.

Let’s look back on this project and see what happened. First, let’s go over a summary of the game. Mineral Miner turned out to be a puzzle game in which you drive around a cavern in a tank, getting out to collect minerals. You can only collect one mineral at a time, so you need to drop off collected minerals in your tank to collect more. If you are near a monster lair and not inside the safety of your tank, a monster will come out and chase you. If a monster catches you, you lose. If you collect all the minerals, you can leave the level and win.

What Went Right:

• Rapid Prototyping on Paper I took a free, online game design course at GameDesignConcepts.wordpress.com, and I was able to put use those skills to great effect. During the competition, I posted about my prototypes. With only 48 hours, it can feel painfully slow, but I iterated through the design, adding a new mechanic, trying it out, and deciding whether to keep or remove it, and then repeating until I had something I thought might be fun. Painfully slow? It took me almost no time at all. In previous LD48s, I’ve been known to add mechanics at the last minute in an attempt to make a game out of the code I was writing. This time, I knew exactly what mechanics I needed, and there were no real surprises here. The finished game ended up playing exactly how I hoped it would.
• Quick ‘n Dirty Graphics I’m not terribly familiar with art tools, such as The Gimp, and so every LD48 I find myself looking up how to use it to create what ends up being ugly art for my games anyway. I decided that this time, I wouldn’t try to make anything fancy. If I have any images that need text, I will use the basic text tool instead of the script-fu that creates cool looking logos if you tweak parameters just right. The tank? A square with a dot to let you know which way is the front. The driver? A yellow circle. Hey, it worked for Pac-man. I was able to focus more of my time on making the game because I wasn’t frustrating myself with trying to create halfway decent artwork.

  

  

• I Made Sound Effects This is my fifth Ludum Dare, and only the second time that a game I made had sound effects. Because I had a game that pretty much worked the way I expected it to, I had time for some polish. I made a list of sound effects I thought I would need, used sfxr to create the beeps and boops, and wrote the code to tie it all together. Adding sound really makes a big difference to a game, and I was glad that I could do so for this one.
• Faster Build Times and Lighter Distributables Because I had been doing some work on my Vampire Game, work that involves using TDD from the first line of code, I also did some work on my build scripts. Going from a 10 minute build time with a distributable that is already 10+MB due to including source libraries to a build that finishes in seconds and is less than 2MB is amazing for productivity, especially as it comes down to the final hour of the competition. Everything happened so much faster, keeping me focused on game development instead of getting distracted as I waited for a build to finish. Now, it isn’t as if my builds always took 10 minutes, but going from checked out source code to a complete build would. Once the libraries were built with my old system, compiling and linking would still take some time, much longer than the time it took with my new build scripts. Plus, one of the complaints I would get from previous competitions is that my game package was so large, so that’s one complaint I did not see this time around. B-)
• Simple AI Goes a Long Way I remember taking a few minutes to think about how I wanted the monsters to interact with the level. Should they obey the walls and other obstacles, like the player has to? If so, that would take a bit of AI programming. I don’t have much experience with AI, and I didn’t want to take the time to learn it for this LD48, so what did I do? I made the monster head towards the player every step, ignoring the environment. I could explain it away. It’s a monster. Maybe it climbs walls like crazy? The big surprise was how well it looked. Besides making it move towards the player, I also made the monster randomly move horizontally or vertically to do so. Combined with the sound effect when it comes out of its lair, the twitchy looking monster moving really fast at the player actually feels scary.

What Went Wrong:

• Distractions I have two cats, and both of them have been featured in previous LD48s, so I won’t focus on their antics too much. My home office wasn’t in a usable state, so I was out in the kitchen or living room. The cats love distracting me from productivity, and LD#15 was no exception. The one thing I did my hardest to control was external obligations. Anytime someone wanted to make plans with me for the weekend of LD48, I would politely tell them that I was busy. And it worked! I was able to focus almost entirely on eating, sleeping, and LD48ing…except for the Chicago Fire game.

  

  I won tickets to the Fire vs D.C. United game, which happened to be the same weekend. They were really good tickets, too, and so I made an exception. In practical terms, I lost a good chunk of Saturday. I was able to get the game finished, but having an extra hour or two would have been good for tightening up the graphics and audio. On top of knowing that, the Fire lost, so it wasn’t even as fun a game to watch from the 2nd row as it could have been.

• The Sound Effects Were Very Rough By far the biggest complaint from people playing my game is that the audio hurts. I was able to get audio in within the last hour of the competition, but I didn’t have time to adjust it. I knew that some of the sound effects were loud and obnoxious, especially the one that plays when you bump into walls, but I couldn’t dedicate the time to tweaking it. The deadline was looming, and I still had a few more programming tasks to complete.
• There’s Only One Level Right before the end, I realized that I did not have a victory condition. I had programmed a way to lose if a monster caught you and also if you tried to leave the level without collecting all of the minerals, but someone will eventually collect all of them. What then? Ideally, I would have added code to load the next level, created that level, and kept going. In fact, Level 2 is in the distributed game, although it is a copy of Level 1 and there is no code that knows about it. I was thinking about taking Level 1 and breaking it up into at least three levels, with each level introducing new puzzles and getting progressively more difficult. Three doesn’t sound much better than one, but it would have made a big difference. The player would have felt that progress was being made, and the later levels could introduce the trickier ways to deal with monster lairs.
• Level Loading Bug I could not figure it out in time for the deadline, and I still haven’t looked at it since, but every so often, the level loading code would choke on the data, bringing the game to a halt. Sometimes shutting down the game and rerunning it would work. The data came from a text file, and my code is supposed to load a single character at a time, mapping the value to a tile. Sometimes, however, it would choke because a single character variable would have a value that is two characters long. For a time, I was dedicated to fixing it, but with only 48 hours, a good chunk of which I couldn’t make use of, I decided that since it wasn’t a show-stopper, I would keep going. I really wish I could have figured out why that bug was there. Besides ruining the perceived integrity of the game, I know at least one person didn’t review it due to this crash.
• Making a Puzzle Game I didn’t set out to make a puzzle game. I didn’t want to worry about creating a lot of content. One level might not be such a problem if the level was varied and fresh each time you played. I could have created a procedural level generator, but I never built one before. I didn’t want to spend time learning how to do so, nor did I want to spend the time tweaking the algorithm to make nicer levels even if I did end up accomplishing it. Out of all of the ideas I came up with, the game I liked the most ended up being a puzzle game, which unfortunately meant I was either going to spend a lot of time making clever levels or finish a game with hardly any levels. It ended up being the latter.

What I Learned:

• Rapid Paper Prototypes Work My game design skills are sorely lacking, but I’ve been able to practice what I learned in the game design concepts course, and it really paid off with Mineral Miner. I’m not claiming that it’s a fantastic game, but it did rank #45 in the Fun category, putting it in the top 50%, and #27 in the Innovation category, which puts it in the top quarter! It feels good to know that the game design I prototyped early on before writing a single line of code came together, and the comments for my entry showed that people saw a lot of potential in my game. Everything I wanted to put into the game, I learned from minutes of drawing on paper and messing around with tokens. I didn’t need to have a game engine coded up to explore, discard, and introduce mechanics, which means I saved a lot of time that would otherwise have been wasted on code that would get thrown away and changed needlessly.
• Quick ‘n Dirty Graphics and Audio Can’t Be Permanent My art and audio work was minimal and saved me a lot of time, allowing me to work quickly at getting the game play up and running. Unfortunately, my overall rating got hurt here. I was near the bottom in the Graphics category at #104 and surprisingly a little better in the Audio category at #77. I was hoping for time near the end to replace crude art and sounds with better ones, but it didn’t happen. On that note, even if it did happen, it wouldn’t be more than marginally better since I don’t have the practice and skill with my art tools. One suggestion was to use images of my prototype work, and I agree, the drawings look much nicer.
• My Pacing Still Needs Work I felt much more confident about my entry this time around, but I still found myself finishing the game at the last minute. There’s very little time for polish when the complete game forms only an hour before the deadline! It’s especially a concern since I decided to go with quick and low-quality art in order to get the game running as quickly as possible. I probably could have set mini-deadlines for myself. 48 hours sounds like an incredibly compressed period of time to make a game, and it is, but it’s still enough time to flounder. Early on, I have two whole days to worry about everything. In the last 5 hours, I’m in crunch mode. I could stand to manage my time and prioritize my tasks much better.

If I could do LD#15 over again, I would try to manage my time better. I could have had the prototype work done much earlier on, leaving me with more time to do the actual programming and arting. I might have been able to get more levels and variety in if I didn’t waste 5 or 10 or 20 minutes at a time wondering what to do. Still, even though Mineral Miner wasn’t a winner of Ludum Dare, I felt it was a success. I designed early on paper instead of designing with hard-to-change code, and I was able to focus on making the game I felt had a chance of being fun. People said they enjoyed the game and wished there were more levels. It was a complete game, meaning that aside from the level loading bug I mentioned above, everything that happens in the game happens because I designed it that way. In 48 hours, a complete game that provided some entertainment for others is a good accomplishment.

I’ve released a post compo version of Cave Ninja. Nothing exciting, it just fixes two bugs:
1. Win check for last level corrected.
2. Divide by zero error fixed that occurred for certain OpenGL implementations.

To be honest, for most people there’s no reason to update. But for those that got the divide by zero (might also seem like it just shutdown at once), it might be worth it.

Windows binary (should run fine in Wine).

Wikiventure went far better than I was expecting. Mainly because I wasn’t expecting anything remotely interesting. I’m still working on it, in fact, adding new things – just today I added user-input via a text-box and tags which react to that input, and score and cash variables that can be checked and modified. I’m really enjoying it, and plan to add a basic battle system like in proper game books.

What went well

• The basic game, taking pages from the wiki and letting you travel between them, was very quick and easy to set-up. Then it was just a case of feature-creep for the rest of the weekend, which was perfect for me!
• People took an interest and wrote some content for me!

What went badly

• Spent rather a long time at the start battling with C++ libraries before moving to PHP. Though that did help me come-up with an idea.
• Also spent rather a long time at the end trying to fix an infinite loop, but managed to do so before the deadline, so no real bad points.

What I would do differently

• Plan-out code structure before writing it. I spent quite a while on the Sunday rewriting all the tag-parsers to remove a lot of repeated code. There’s still a lot now.
• Put time into writing content! I only actually created two areas, as a test right at the start before I’d added any tags, and then I kind-of expected people to write my content for me. Which some people did, but it was horribly lazy of me.

Things I’d like to add

• Cookies or some other way of keeping things persistent between sessions. Could tie it to user-accounts on my site.
• Combat system, mentioned already.
• More levels of persistence than ‘IFVISITED’ and ‘IFNVISITED’, so that the player wouldn’t necessarily have to follow the same set of actions multiple times.
• Any other stuff I happen to think-up.
• Content!1!1!!1!!!

So yeah, it went pretty well. I’ll keep working on it and maybe it’ll become something really interesting.

It’s been a few weeks (!), but I feel like I’ve been sitting on this retrospective for so long I may as well post the thing. LD #15 had a fantastic theme, Caverns, and I got a kick out of participating. As usual.

Shelter From the Rain

Looking back at my past LD and MiniLD entries, I really feel like I’m improving. My games for LD15 and MiniLD12 just feel more polished, somehow — a feel which makes me inordinately happy. I did something a little different with Shelter From the Rain; I knew I didn’t have a very strong gameplay idea, and that my mechanic (running around picking things up) had more holes in it than a ten-gallon coffee strainer. So I got the basic game together, then spent most of my time working on little polish-type features. Things like my (relatively) slick menus, configurable options, and online high scores — not to mention some, for me, pretty good atmospheric audio. In my previous entries I’ve always tried to focus on improving my skills in a particular area; this compo was no different.

If I were to go back and re-do Shelter From the Rain, I’d break it up into a series of ‘quests’ — tasking the player with going out and collecting, say, 10 cans of beans. I’d also add more hazards to both the above- and below-ground: fallout, soldiers, survivalists. In short, I wish I’d made the basic game more complex. I also feel like the visual style was crazy-disjoint, something I’d love to improve. “What are these black geary things?!” you cried. What, indeed.

Wikirunner

Oh man. I’m so pleased with this one. If I’d realized it would receive any publicity at all (ohmygod, indiegames.com. I feel legit) I’d have spent way more time working on it this weekend — as it is, the game is basically the product of some hasty Saturday morning programming, and a little polishing on Sunday night. It’s rough, and ugly — but, I like to think, actually Fun.

This is promising. I’m working on a post-compo now, to fix some of the glaring usability bugs people have been reporting and clean up the AI a little. Breath, held.

I cleaned up my entry a bit, added some sound, changes the rules and added 100% less crashing.

Oh, and I changed the name to “The Hardest Text Game In The World”.  If you’ve played it, you know why.

Can you score 100 points?

Grab it here (for Win).  I did a sort of post-mortem here.

http://pekuja.com/ludumdare/143/globehopper-post-compo-release/

Now with 70% less disorientation!

I just finished porting sfxr to Haxe, but as a library instead of an app. Instead of generating a WAV file in sfxr and storing it in your SWF, you can now generate it while your program is loading, or the moment you need it. Why? To save space in the final SWF and to provide more flexibility, like being able to vary a sound a little depending on something in the game.

http://www.wieringsoftware.nl/ld/sfxrhx/

There are several ways to use it:
- you can start with making a sound in sfxr and save it as a .sfs file and use the load() function
- generate random sounds in your program and simply save the random seeds of the ones you like, use create(), randomize() and mutate()
- if you need to fine-tune a sound, you can also edit the individual parameters in your program
- use generate() to create the wave file in memory
- finally, use play() at any time to play it

Six degrees of separation. With a shotgun.

I finally packaged stuff properly for Linux,  and made the Windows port. Grab them here.

Notes:

• It does crash at exit. Will fix later.
• You can get stuck at the top of the screen. I’m sorry but couldn’t find a way around.
• Sound can get irritating, be sure to lower your volume first.

Otherwise, I’m quite happy with it. Awesome theme idea, GirlFlash!

Here is the included readme:

(more…)

ExciteMike’s right, an actual post would make commenting easier!

Wiki Warrior is a generic top-down shooter with elements pulled from random Featured Articles on Wikipedia. The enemies in-game are generated from the article’s links, and the background is pulled from the article, too; in the case where an image couldn’t be found associated with the article, a random image in the Cityscapes category at the WikiMedia Commons is used instead (I happen to think that, for the most part, random city panoramas make for okay background images in this context). (more…)

Compo troll of the year: http://www.youtube.com/… – REMOVED
Mirror: http://v.youku.com/…
Transcript: http://etherpad.com/indiebaycriticism
Soundboard: http://www.swfcabin.com/open/1253602778
Samples: http://blogs.microsoft.com/ichiro/ibaysamples.zip

Remix (Video): http://v.youku.com/… – NEW
Remix 2 (MP3): Offended

Oh hey!  If I make a blog post, then people will actually have a place to comment on the game!

Latest upload of Blow Up Wikipedia is here.

PLAY ONLINE

This is a post-compo version where the game is more like what I actually meant to make.  The original and post-compo versions are marked as such on the game’s page.

It’s like some weird mashup of a broken typing tutor and Space Phallus (NSFW!  Play it at home!).  Only mine has no genitalia.  Well, depending on which Wikipedia articles it uses.

I did make some updates to Xue after the compo, which I spun into my “game of the week” for this past week.

I’m not really super pleased with the result (in the end, I think the game still has too much “oooo… parallax” and not enough “wow, that was fun!”), but I also don’t have a clear direction that I’d want to push the idea in at this point, so I’m letting it stand as is for now. Maybe someday when / if I get a better sense of exactly what I want people to do in those caverns I’ll spin off a different game based on the entry.

Anyway, heres an updated screenshot (once LD was over, I immediately and shamelessly plugged in some graphics from LostGarden.com):

It’s playable online here: http://www.thewasabiproject.com/flash-games/play/play-xue/

As Kobel suggested in the comments on the entry, I did use a color matrix to tweak the background layers (actually, the original entry did that too, but it only darkened them, so it wasn’t much of an interesting effect). There are a few different “atmospheres” that the game uses for the caves, each of which fiddle with the colors of the background layers in different ways.

Gameplay-wise, I added some fireball spewing monsters, along with items that restore fuel. I also fiddled with the controls for the player’s ship (and actually I’m still fiddling with them, even with the game already released online), and adjusted the way the crystals spawn.

The map is also completely enclosed now, so there shouldn’t be any more invisible walls, and there’s no longer a way to fly off into space off the top of the map. Technically the map generation got tweaked a bit too, but nothing terribly interesting (the maps start out at half size and get scaled up, which both speeds up the generation a bit and cuts down on some annoying small-scale features).

I’m always happy to get feedback (though on this one, like I said, I’m not sure if I’ll stick my fingers into it again for a while unless a really compelling new direction for it comes up).

I also realized when I was getting ready to write this post that I never posted the updated version of my LD14 entry — so I hope nobody will mind if I tack it on here!

That entry was Crushing Pressure, and it turned into this little Flash game:

You can give it a whirl here, if you like: http://www.thewasabiproject.com/flash-games/play/play-crushing-pressure/

The original entry for LD14 had the same basic goal (rescue the little people while avoiding the walls), but it didn’t have any other obstacles to avoid (the updated version adds the DoomCubes and WhizBlades). The released version also added music, and little extras like an honest-to-goodness score counter and some quick transitions between levels. It’s still a pretty simple game, but there are a few minutes worth of gameplay hiding in there, I think.

Thanks for the feedback everyone left on both the original entries!

Well, I placed 91st overall… Woohoo, eh? I expected to at least place somewhere in audio… Anyways, time for a postmortem of what went well and what didn’t.

Good:

I created a roadmap of what I *wanted* to do, that was realistic for the given time

I rapidly got the framework running

I got the basic generation of the caves going in the first night, albeit, I had to tweak it the next day.

I was satisfied with the music, considering it was done in the last 10 minutes of the competition. ;P

Bad:

The song should have been MUCH longer

The AI never did get worked on at all. That was to be the main playing point – the enemy would chase the player through the maze and create a sense of urgency. I can still see the original vision for this in my head, a suspenseful somewhat scary chase in a cave

I had VERY LITTLE time commited. Of course, something major had to go on that weekend. My sister and nephew moved down from Duluth, MN that weekend back to our house, so I had to help with that and put up with a 2.5 year old running around, when I wasn’t used to that. Otherwise, I may have gotten my top priority at the end, AI, implemented.

Movement speed was very slow in the game.

The cave did not look natural at all. It looked like a maze (Was made of rectangular prisms…)

The cave was very rarely continuous (Players HAD to use the wall-glitch)

The Goal was unclear in my description.

Textures wound up ugly

Some people had issues with framerate and the like. I’m sorry, but I couldn’t account for that.

I could go on and on, but those are the major issues. Next time, I’ll have a whole, undisturbed weekend to work.

Ludum Dare 15 voting has finally ended, and the results are now available.

Top 10

For the press, we have a special link just for you. If you want to know who “won” Ludum Dare 15, go here for the top 10 games (expandable to the full 144).

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

“Winners” are decided by the Overall category. To our surprise, we had two ties in the top 10. Neat!

Categorical Top 5′s

For us LD folk, the full categorical breakdown of winners.

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

*NOTE*: Click on the titles of the categories for Top 10 style lists per category.

Ludum Dare 15 as Screen Shots

And since it looks cool, the full list of 144 entries, as screenshots.

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

Next Time

Our next major competition (Ludum Dare 16) will be in December. The exact date we’ll know as the month approaches. To keep informed of the latest news, you can sign up for our mailing list here:

http://www.gamecompo.com/mailing-list/

You can also follow us on Twitter:

http://twitter.com/ludumdare

Or alternatively, you can watch user news‘s RSS feed.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/author/news/feed/

Can’t get enough? Then stop by next month for MiniLD #13 hosted by nilsf.

Suggestions

If you have any suggestions for the compo, we’re collecting 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 such a huge success.

- Mike Kasprzak (PoV)

I made some changes based on the feedbacks !

• fixed animation, to animate only when the char was in movement
• add some instrunctions of how to fire
• increase the distance of the border of the screen to avoid zombie-suprises
• changed the torch throw to allow multiple torches
• fixed level 3 and add a level 4
• criated a windows exe
• fixed some screen flickering
• reduce the maximum speed of the zombies
• generated some random textures for the ground

thanks all for the feedbacks !! this helped a lot to enhance the Java engine that Im building.

glaucon and the cave  v2

thats 48 hours folks!

to submit your game go to:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-12/

and to view all entries check:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-12/?action=preview

you guys clearly took the theme and ran with it, very far indeed it seems! I have to say you guys once again impressed me. I cant wait to check out what everyone has done

if you havent finished yet dont sweat it, its only a miniLD after all and I’m not going to hurt you if you want to take an extra hour or so to clear out any bugs and the like

also, voting for August’s LD ends in 3 hours so if you have time to spare you dont have long left to vote.