Finally, here is an updated version of Cavern Defense.
This is mainly a bugfix release and all critical bugs have been fixed, so it is quite playable now and there is now sound under Mac OS X.
I’ve update the menu, the intro and the instruction screen and it should be more clearer how to play the game.
For more information on what has changed take a look at the changelog.txt

Here are the downlod links:
Windows (6,2 MB)
Linux (4,8 MB)
Mac OS X (12 MB; Universal Binary)
Source (132 kB)

If you want to compile the source, you also have to download one the binary releases and combine those two because the resources folder is not included in the source zip file.

I started with the idea of doing a ‘cave flyer, plus something cool’. I figured i would make the cave flyer first and the something cool later.

Play the competition version here and the much easier updated version here.

Using ActionScript

I have only been learning ActionScript for a little while but I’m very happy with it. I quickly got the basics of a cave flyer going, and whenever I got stuck I found plenty of tutorials and discussions online.

I used free tools only (FlashDevelop and Flex 3 SDK) and found them perfectly sufficient.

‘Next Actions’

I think that the best way to write game fast is to act as though your next half-hour might be your last. If you could only add one more feature, what would you add? And how would you get it working as quickly as possible?

When I follow this rule, I get good results. When I don’t follow this rule, I get bad results. So I think it’s a good rule.

Distractions

I did not follow the rule. I wasted my first evening working on a feature that I didn’t need and didn’t finish.

I wanted to make an AI-controlled ship that flew around like the player’s ship, resisting gravity and avoiding obstacles. It would have been super-cool. I coding up a kind of crude AI navigation map, and made a big if-statement AI controller for the spaceship.

I realised quickly that it wasn’t going to work. My if-statement AI couldn’t handle the compexities of gravity, obstacles and thrust. But I was having fun and I didn’t want to stop, so I spent hours tweaking it. I only stopped when I had to go to bed.

The final game didn’t use the AI player. I should have spent all that time making life better for my human players.

Difficulty

The game is much too hard. I knew that it was too hard, and I made it easier, but not enough. I think the best thing I could have done is popped a link to the game in the irc channel – someone would have immediately told me that the difficulty was a problem.

Level Editor

I made a very simple level editor. It allowed me to lay out the terrain on each level with mouse clicks instead of hand-coding coordinates. This was my best idea all weekend – it did not take long to make and it let me create level screens in seconds.

Cutting Features

I wanted to combine my cave flyer with another simple game genre to make it unique. I had plans of making a trading game where you bought and sold goods at different cities (seperated by dangerous tunnels), or perhaps a Legend of Zelda-like game with a large world to explore and items to find.

None of that made it into the release. Partly because I couldn’t decide exactly what I wanted to do, so I delayed the decision.

Last Minute Save

I was running out of time. I had a flying game with multiple screens to explore, but I still had no goal or motivation for the player. I finally started following the ‘next action’ rule and attacking the most important problems first.

1. There was nothing to fight – so I added a simple enemy that hovered and fired at the player.
2. There was no goal – so I made enemies drop ‘metal’, and added a metal counter to the screen.
3. Combat was unsatisfying, so I added some explosion-effects.
4. The player couldn’t respawn, so I implemented respawning.
5. You collected metal but had nothing to do with it.

Number 5 hung around for a long time. Finally, I hacked up a simple upgrade system. I wanted to add icons for the upgrades, but cut it for time. I wanted to add some clever upgrades, but cut it down to what I could do with the code I already had – most of the upgrades simply change variables that were already in the game, like the player ship’s “mass” (resistance to impact force) or its refire rate.

The upgrade system was crude, but it gave the rest of the game a purpose – now the player had a reason to fight enemies and collect their metal.

Colours

I stole an idea from Meritous, where the world gets redder when more enemies are around. I like it.

Conclusion

Next time I’ll try not to get distracted on ‘advanced’ features when there are more immediate features that the game needs.

I will make sure to do a user test on my game, to catch obvious problems like “It’s far, far too hard”.

And if I’m making a “Classic Genre + Something Cool”, I’ll try not to wait too long before I add the “Something Cool”.

Ok, I better get back to rating entries now…

We’re entering uncharted territory here.

Thanks to everyone that contributed to our little demographics survey. We surveyed 100 people, and now have some actual data about your fellow LD folk.

Lets look at some charts.

Students, hobbiests, game jobs, ex mainsteam, full-time indies

This is one we’ve been wondering about for a while. Students covering about 25%, with nearly 30% being those with game jobs or enough entrepreneurial spirit to make their own.

I’m not sure what to take away from the “spare time” stat, other than to think more about my choice of words. For example, does a self employed game maker make games in their spare time anymore? Also, some people do contract game work, so wordings again could be problematic.

Games you've made (and own all right to), the cool things they've done

This data was crammed in to the 1st question. A set of questions on about how stuff you’ve made has done. This makes me realize a good question may have been weather you’ve released a game before (freeware, web, shareware, retail, etc). None the less, we can see nearly 20% of those surveyed have have had some notable successes with things they’ve created.

You and the game making community

This is what was left in the first question. I wasn’t expecting “the book one” to be on top, and only get a single vote (cough…). I know for a fact we’ve had other authors enter before, and I have a book on my shelf with an article written by Geoff (who obviously now didn’t do the survey). None the less, the subject of writing can certainly be expanded on. Articles for Gamasutra, the Escapist, gamedev.net, or other publications are certainly worth wording a question around. Whitepapers and tutorials too.

The last 3 refer to various compo styles, edited on the graph text so not to eat up all the space. The first being your Ludum Dare’s, PyWeek’s, and TIGSourc’esc compos. Glad to see a good turn out for that. The second being attended events like Game Jam’s (TIGJam, TOJam, …). The final being your Independent Games Festivals, Sense of Wonder Nights, GAMMA’s, PAX 10′s, Indiecade’s, and similar exhibitions. In other words, a real venue demoing your game.

Platforms: PC's, Mobile, Consoles

Next the platforms question. Windows rating, we expected something nice and high. It’s also good to have some Mac and Linux numbers too. And whomever it was that added the single vote for non big-3 PC OS, pat yourself on the back for being the only one. Keeping the dream alive.

Web made a good showing. Flash, Unity, and those crazy PHP game makers. Nice.

I did neglect PDA’s, but I’d imagine (hope) most people wanting to mention that put a note down for Mobile. iPhone could probably be given it’s own section next time, since I suspect it’s pushing up most of that mobile score.

Consoles, that’s always good to see. With a pair of 13′s though, I do wonder how many are distinctly A or B, or both. Also there’s the question of homebrew. Being an “indie” event, I’d expect a decent split here.

Classic computers, also keeping the dream alive. From that stat we know we have at least 6 really old people here.

Physical games, I’m glad someone suggested this. I imagine the majority don’t do a lot of board/card game development these days, but physical stuff is great for prototyping ideas.

The survey'ish question

Yes, finally the more traditional survey’esc question. I’m proud to report we have a 10% scandal ratio going on here at Ludum Dare. I’d expect no less.

Thanks again everyone for taking survey. I hope you enjoy these colorful charts.

Cross posted from my main blog at http://www.caseydunham.net

This past weekend I took part in my first Ludum Dare competition, Ludum Dare #15. Ludum Dare is a community driven contest where a single developer has to create a complete game within 48 hours.  I have watched the prior competitions, but have never really had the time with family and school, so I was a bit surprised to find that last weekend was fairly open. So on Friday afternoon I decided I would take part.

Each Ludum Dare has an associated theme that the game must be created around that is decided on by community vote. The theme is only revealed at the start of the competition and for LD #15, the theme was “Caverns”. I immediately had a few ideas but nothing that seemed too out of the ordinary. Upon deciding to enter the contest, I also made up my mind that regardless of what the theme was, my goal was to complete a game, no matter how simple, within that 48 hour deadline.  I did complete a simple game, but as usual with these types of competitions, didn’t quite turn out as I had hoped. This is an effort by me to talk about some of the things that I feel went right in the development of Coffee Caverns and what could have been done better.

The Good

Probably one of the best choices was to use what I was already familiar with, C++ and SDL in a Windows environment. I know that some people like to experiment with new technologies during these competitions, but I decided to not risk it, my goal was to complete a game. Along these same lines I also decided that whatever I did would be small. I have started and never finished numerous game projects in the past much like every other aspiring game developer and I also know that one of the things that separates aspiring game developers from game developers is that game developers finish things. I had a decent idea of the scope of what I would be able to finish and decided to stick with it.

I didn’t start coding or designing anything until the Saturday morning after the competition started. I checked to see what the theme was going to be and than went to sleep. In the morning I ate breakfast and started a bit of mind mapping while having some coffee. I started thinking about caverns and I kept coming back to danger and falling, falling objects like rocks, and than somewhere in the mind map coffee came up so I ended up mixing coffee with falling rocks. Awesome, sounds a bit weird let’s go with it. It came naturally that this would be an arcade style game and once I decided on it I stuck with it. The total design of the game was probably about an hour and that was with sketching a bit of a development plan as well.

I also liked that I was able to get a couple of sound effects in thanks to the wonderful program Sfxr. I am glad that I got the title screen in without too much trouble as well. It only took a little bit of trouble and was I think worth it. Although next time, I am going to check for a specific key press to transition as opposed to any key, it made taking screen shots of it a bit tricky.

The Bad

I think that my biggest mistake was not getting the prototype up and playable as fast as I wanted to. My intention originally was to use primitives for prototyping and later put in the graphics. By the time I had the framework ready I needed a break from coding and decided that I would play around with Paint.NET a bit to see what I could come up with. I should also mention that other than SDL, I was using no prior written code, writing everything from scratch. In no time I had created a couple of graphics that I thought would work, so I figured I would just drop them in. It wasn’t a huge time waster since I was going to do it anyways and in some ways did work out in the end.

The Ugly

Easily the worst part about the game and what I would argue is the game, is the game play itself. The game is no where near as balanced as I would have liked it to have been, the scoring is very simple, and there is very little feedback to the player. I spent most of Sunday doing game play testing and bug fixing. I had the majority of the code written by Saturday night and it was a good thing too as I had a few things come up Sunday that might have kept me from finishing otherwise.

The little things that I didn’t fix that were pointed out to me in comments on my Ludum Dare blog are in retrospect what could have made the game better. The player sprite being about a pixel off during the animation would have taken me all of about three seconds to fix. I also never got the score out of the title bar like it should have been. This would have been another easy fix that would have added to the polish of the game.

The other thing that people complained a lot about was my use of an installer. I had mixed feelings about it but I know and understand the irritation I am sure it caused others as I started reviewing a few of the other entries. At a certain point I was annoyed that I had to unzip things and will next time not bother with the setup and provide a straight running executable.

Summary

Overall the whole competition was very rewarding and I learned quite a bit as well and would recommend everyone who is interested in game development to take part in these competitions as often as they can. I am definitely going to!

…because i’ve done all my voting now.

All 144 entries, 29 of which either :

1. I did not have the required platform. (linux, mac only games)
2. I did not have a good enough graphics card. (games needing 2.0 shaders etc etc)
3. Crashed at startup for reason (2) or other unknown reasons.

The lucky 29 entries that didn’t work got voted only in community, because(obv) I couldn’t play their games.

Ok I’m not gonna write that long name again .

This was my second ludum dare and i again manage it make it . At the first one i did choose a very ambitious project (making a post-apocalyptic rpg with car combat, yes it was really ambitios ). In the end i had to cut lots of stuff to finish it before time ends. This time i was ready for this. I knew what i had to expect. But again some unexpected things happened, but in the end i make a playable game and have fun (maybe not all the time ). So it’s time for a postmortem and i’m going to do this in a very cliché method .

The Good:

- I finished a playable game before time runs out .

- My framework really helped me a lot. I didn’t have any technical problem. And after the compo, making a windows port was really easy. Mac port is coming in a few days too. I don’t have to change a single line of code to make these ports, it’s all because of my shitty framework. It’s badly designed but it does its job well .

- A couple of friend of mine entered to the compo with me. As they say: The more the merrier .

The Bad:

- I couldn’t find a game idea that i was satisfied. Just this problem took my first day.

- While i couldn’t come up with an good idea, my code wasn’t better. I started coding a simple shooter but i don’t know why, i couldn’t code it properly and i write probably the one of the worst codes i have ever written .

- Maybe i finished it before time expired but game still lacks lots of things like there is nothing kills the player. So all those cave critters you killed actually just wanted to hug you .

The Ugly:

- My graphics. That is what ugly is. Man, i started gimp and make those. But just i finished those i look at them and lost all my aspiration. It took lots of time for me to recover that loss.

So thats it. I can only hope that at my third LD i’ll finally come up with a fun to play game .

To see the game i made click here.

I uploaded the game to a friend’s host. I apologize for making you wait this long.

I couldn’t figure it out why it doesn’t work on vista.
I’m using directx 9.0c but i didn’t test it on vista.

I could probably because of the vertex codes without using shaders or because of fullscreen, i don’t know…

I’ll be glad if you send any error messages you’ve got to me  .

Thanks.

I was waiting for a Windows port before doing a postmortem, but I wanted to add a walkthrough for people who don’t want to solve the whole thing.

General hints: There’s three parts: an “orientation” section, followed by a puzzle with three switches (orange pink white), followed by a puzzle with four switches (blue green red yellow). Each of these three parts is separated by a long tunnel, and you never need to backtrack to a previous part. If you think you’re going the wrong way, press Down to turn around. Also, hold Up or Space while walking to speed things up. Because all the steps are reversible, it shouldn’t be possible to get stuck. You might wind up worse off than you started, though.

In the walkthrough below, each line is one room. “Blue 1st right” means turn to face the blue switch, hit it, and then take the first door to the right of the switch. If the line doesn’t have a color, such as “2nd left”, do not turn to face the switch, even if there’s one in the room. Just take the second door to the left of the direction you were facing when you entered. (This is counting closed doors, so if the first door on the left is closed, “2nd left” is the first open door on the left.) Okay?

Part 1:

1st left
Cyan 1st left
Purple 1st left

Part 2:

Orange 1st left
Pink 1st right
White 1st left
Orange 2nd left
White 2nd left
Pink 1st right
White 1st right

Part 3:

1st right
Green 1st right
Red 1st left
Yellow 1st left
Blue 1st right
Yellow 1st right
Green 1st left
Yellow 1st left
Blue 1st right
Yellow 2nd left
1st right

Thanks for playing!

First I’d like to say that I appreciate all the good constructive feedback on Shafted!.  To all those who have commented – thanks!  I have a new version of the game which addresses some of the feedback:

• I’ve now mapped all controls to the keypad which works much better.
• No more mouse required. To start the game, simply press <enter>.
• Press ‘h’ to toggle display of the help text  explaining all the controls.
• I’ve moved the camera a bit to make more of where you’re jumping visible
• Pressing space on sign more than once no longer throws up more text
• The player now turns red when he reaches fatal fall velocity.

Note: This new version is setup to run in windowed mode by default. To run in fullscreen, find ‘command_line.txt’ and remove the ‘-window’ argument.

Download Windows

Download Mac [Coming soon]

I’ve made a couple of post-compo modifications to my entry.

The main one you might be interested to hear about is that solo play is now possible. You can load and save by double-clicking the relevant buttons at the bottom of the editor. I just whipped up nine demo maps, included.

Note that you can’t overwrite a map, so don’t worry about that. Every time you hit save the map gets a unique filename which you can mess with later.

Besides the time considerations I originally didn’t want to include saving at all, because I thought that feature might deemphasise the interaction between players. But since I haven’t gotten much feedback from people who actually have another person to play with I thought I’d open it up a bit.

Another LD ended (my third one) and this time I’m proud of this game. A mix of puzzle and quick-action I hope that it will deliver some good moments to the player.

From the beginning I started with a cumulative design in mind, that is, I started with “the player runs in a grid” and started coding that. Then the next idea was making the player explore a maze, so the maze concept was implemented, but then enemies were needed to give more pace to the game. The maze and enemies combined  well into this puzzle-like + memory + timing mechanics. So all maps were created to take advantage of this moto: “the real challenge of the game is to understand the level and then go to the next” (note that replayability was never a goal of the game). The last design element was growing difficulty, I wanted a serve-all solution so the multiple exits were implemented (an exit that it’s easy to reach means that the next room is easy (when compared to the other choice)).

But this way of designing the game brings its share of problems. First, there’s no defined “finished” game, so you can always add or at least think of other features you can add. Second, and building in the first problem, you may lose some notion of how much time left there is for polishing the game (the menu teaching on how to play the game was only made two hours before the deadline and so the code for that is one BIG hack).

The big thumbs-up for this method is flexibility, if an idea doesn’t work you can throw it way without worries. In contrast, when you design everything and only after you start coding, if some feature doesn’t work as expected you must certainly will have to change (or, in the worst case, also throw way) some features that depended (or interacted) with the lost one.
Another positive point is that you never over-design a game that needs completion in 48h, although you need to reserve a greater chunk of time to polish the game than you would need with the design-everything-first method to avoid the problems mentioned above.

Technologically, everything went smooth for the most part of the game code. SFML is a really good media library that gives you everything you need but doesn’t get in the way you want to design your code. Many people use SDL when using C/C++ but I really recommend using SFML. I picked it up one day before LD15 and still could make a game without almost no worries (great tutorials for each feature and great organization of the library also makes the API reference easy to read).

The problem arose when porting to Windows. SFML uses OpenGL but support for it (in Windows 7) is still in the early stages , so testing the game when its rendering performance dropped considerably was a pain. I just hope that other Windows users don’t have those problems and can experience the game in its fully performance.

About the graphics, although I’m no artist, I always try to make something good looking. But this time I focused much more on game design, making the maps balanced and polished. So the 30 minute art that I did in the first day stucked until the end, but still I think it isn’t that bad though I could have made simple animations if I just had put another hour to it.

In the retrospective, I think that, of the 3 LDs I’ve taken part, this is my best entry so far. The biggest problem was really porting to Windows, so lesson learned, next time code in Windows and Linux comes as a bonus port

Play here

I’ve tinkered around with my Ludum Dare entry a bit more, and am ready to make another release (there may be one or two more after this, but nothing major.) For a while now I’ve been wanting to play with these mechanics, and Ludum Dare was a great opportunity.

New this version:

• sound (or something vaguely resembling it)
• vacuum affects enemy projectiles
• vacuum can be used to destroy enemies with their own projectiles
• 8 levels

There are other things I’m interested in trying, but I will probably not experiment with them in this prototype. These include:

• an alternate weapon mode that adds to walls instead of destroying them
• incorporating indestructible surfaces
• a charge shot with variable blast radius
• ammunition containers that double as shootable explosives
• better ways to handle lava
• stones (Dig Dug!) which are embedded in walls and can be freed to crush enemies, saving ammunition
• ways to limit recoil jumping, so it can be used to hover, but not reach unlimited heights

Timelapse video of “nice cave”

The dual monitor setup made this timelapse a pain in the ass to put together! I hope some of you enjoy it though.

How do I embed youtube into the LD blog?

This is a short behind-the-scenes explanation of why my game, Let’s go cave-burrowing is missing some gameplay

In the beginning I envisioned a game where you threw “grenades” to change the environment, sort of a casual-like game. I didn’t want to have any game-over screens or the like, as this would detract from the core gameplay. One solution to make it more interesting was to add diamonds that threw out more puke-like balls that exploded, though I didn’t had the time to implement it.

All the easy game-play I could add to make it more challenging would remove the fun. For example I thought to add a timer so that you had to complete the level within a certain time, but then the player would not be able to “explore” the level at his/her own pace.

It was only now this morning that I realized that the perfect solution would be to rate the player based on some score of fast-completion and huge explosions, since then it would add a challenge for those who wanted it, but it wouldn’t punish those who didn’t. I guess you can’t win every time

Click to watch a gameplay video.

Beacon is currently at Version 1.10 now, with the following changes:

• Added ambient background track courtesy of Ronan McGrath.

• Spikes no longer kill you when hit from the side.

• Fixed tiling issue with certain tiles next to spikes.

• Many difficulty tweaks made to the later, harder rooms.

You can download the latest from here:

ZIP (3.36 MB)

RAR (3.12 MB)

It was also features on this week’s ByteJacker episode. The LD compo was linked to as well.

http://www.bytejacker.com/episodes/052

I probably should have written this closer to the end of the contest, but I wanted to finish a small puzzle game (The Knight’s Tour) I had started the week before for release. As a result, my recolection of some of this may be a little hazy.

I’ve added a zip containing my project directory to my game’s page… it’s complete except that I had embedded the font ‘Arial’, and you’ll have to add your own copy of arial.ttf to the font’s directory in order to get it to build.
(more…)

I apologize to everyone that wanted to try my game but weren’t able to do it because it was Linux only.

Now I installed a fresh copy of Windows 7 (thanks to university for early access to it and quickly ported the game to Windows. But some problems arose while porting, one being the performance of the game, but that may only be because I have an old laptop and the drivers for Win7 are not good enough (I’ll dive into more detail in the post-mortem that I’ll write after this post).

So if you have issues with performance and have the possibility to test the game in Linux, please try in both.

Again, sorry for the inconvinience, good luck to all other entrants.

link: http://psa-sandbox.googlecode.com/files/Cavern%20Escape.zip

I’ve listened to the comments that the controls in Cavern Copter are not as good as they should be and as a result I’ve uploaded a new version with an alternative control scheme.

• Cavern Copter (new controls) – Windows
• Cavern Copter (new controls) – Mac (Intel)
• Cavern Copter (new controls) – Mac (PPC)

Think of it as Asteroids and you’ll be fine (I hope).

For what it’s worth, the new controls work better for me. I can now rescue all 8 scientists in 112 seconds.

— Rod

Lots of people have been saying my entries not working, so if you tried it and it crashed, go to the page, and replace your exe with the one in the debug .zip, and then post the number in debug.txt, so i can try to track down the cause

Timelapse

Compilation of gameplay videos made during the development.