Sorry, my original submission had a start up bug that made it crash for everyone.  It was a quick fix and I’ve uploaded the corrected exe.  Try it now

I thought this would be helpful since there is no in-game tutorial and the game may be a bit complex. The compo page for the game is here.

General Tips

The queen will randomly select a trade good to retrieve for the quest. If she asks you to get 5000 gold coins then reload. You will need to visit around 100 islands to finish and you will get bored.  Bananas might also get tedious (around 26 islands) if you are in a hurry to vote.

More after the jump.

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Did anyone happen to download the SWF of my game, Sky Traders of Jupiter? I’ve accidentally overwritten the LD version and don’t have a backup. I downloaded the torrent which includes “most” of the games, but apparently “most” doesn’t include mine.

If I can’t find someone with the LD version, I’ll probably have to take my game down out of fairness, and either just go with whatever votes I’ve received so far, or drop out of the running entirely.

First, thank you to everyone who’s played, voted and provided feedback on Roller-Derby 20XX: Mega Islands of Awesome. You guys are the mega awesome ones!

Some responses to some of the comments:

1. Music: I’m glad everyone likes the soundtrack. As requested by skintkingle I’ve uploaded the MP3s and they are accessible here:  http://www.refrag.com/game-dev/roller-derby-20xx/
2. Title Screen: Glad you liked this Terry. I had so much fun making myself into an NES style titlescreen. I saved extra time on Sunday just for this final touch.
3. Collisions: Feedback around the “fishy” nature of collisions is good feedback to hear and very valid! In reality collisions are working exactly as I coded them. When you intersect an enemy there is a dice roll based on their “aggro-level” (which is randomly generated at spawn). There is a chance they will hit you. If they hit you you will either bump forward, or there is a chance you will fall. But yes I can totally see how this isn’t very intuitive. Surprisingly this dynamic tests better with more casual game players who seem to accept a “fuzzy” logic to collisions. The more experienced gamer seems to expect either binary rules or a way to pre-determine the result to better strategize. (Neato!)

I have some ideas on how to build on this game concept (thanks to your feedback!) and hope to flesh out and expand on this “world” in the near future.

SAVORY SEA HOSS ended up being a complete success for me. I say this for 3 very important reasons.

1) I set out to make a game with an objective that could actually be reached (unlike my LD16 entry), and I wanted to include SFX and MUSIC (unlike my LD16 entry)

2) I wanted to make something visually and mechanically unique

3) I wanted to make something FUN / FUNNY

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After rewriting most of the code and taking out every library, I came to he conclusion that it just wasnt going to work on the web =(.

But luckily the .jar file works on windows and mac so i uploaded that.

Go check it out – Link

Hempuli says …
The gameplay elements are a bit thin, but this is sure a good start! The music is also very good.

Most gameplay elements were created about one hour before the deadline and there was not much time left for playtesting. Keep an eye out for the post-compo version which I am planning to release in a few days.

psnake says …
The graphics and music are good and do their jobs. It’s noticeable that there’s polish to the graphics whichs gives a great and consistent look to the game

I wish the gameplay was on the same level, it has the basic elements, but the random maps, in this case, gets in the way of the player since any strategy he could plan by restarting the level is lost because a new map is generated. In the end, it feels like it’s mere luck to be able to go from island to island.

Thanks for your detailed comment. At first, I thought the randomness was not such a negative factor. But then I played the game again and could see the point you are making. My thought when placing the random islands: Usually with these kind of survivor games once you have build everything or “seen” everything you are not going to play the game ever again, so I wanted some replay value. I realize now that placing the islands this randomly was not a good idea, you still need a lot of luck to beat the game.
I am planning to release a post-compo version in the next few days (or so), where especially this issue will be adressed.

eli says …
wonderful graphics and music. The feeling is extremely lonely and wonderful.

Thanks. I actually was kind of inspired by the music you did for your LD warmup.

philomory says …
I was looking forward to playing this game, but when I run it (on Windows), the text is all missing, as are most of the graphics. All I see are the robot and the items to pick up, no background, and no text, including on the menu. I’ll be coming back to this one to try it again, because it looks interesting.

Hmm, that seems like an odd issue. You need at least OpenGL 1.1 to play the game, but since almost every computer does meet this requirement, I did not mention this explicitely. So, installing the latest graphics driver might help.
But first, check if the file has been downloaded correctly. The file size should be 5.2 MB. (I had a few issues with my webspace hoster the last couple of days, maybe you just downloaded the file at a bad time.)
Also every time you play the game a log file is being generated in the /bin folder called “SurvivalGuide.exe.log”. Usually the content is something like that:

- Note – Timestamp – Start log
- Note – Timestamp – Using hardware surface
- Note – Timestamp – End log

If you have a completely different content, please let me know. I just tested the game on all four Windows PCs (all either Windows XP or 7) at home, but I couldn’t reproduce this error anywhere. If you have redownloaded and tested it again and it’s still not working, could you please give me some detailed specs on the computer you are trying to play the game on.

Just like to thank / apologise to anybody who rates / plays my first Ludum Dare game Coconut Island. I had such grand ideas when the theme was announced but as time wore on I realised I was basically making Chukkie Egg with crabs (instead of chickens).

There are many things wrong with the engine that I didn’t have time to put right, namely the fiasco that is the ladder movement and the fact that it’s possible if timed right to jump off both the crabs and coconuts as if they were a platform.

The whole game and resources took me around 6hrs to put together and I’m still fairly new at this so I’m pretty happy with the way it turned out.

Once again Thanx for playing my game and I promise to play and rate as many others as I can inside the two weeks.

So, with the weekend over and some of my voting out of the way, I figured I should write a bit about how thing went. I had really been rooting for Flood, as I had this neat idea for a puzzle-platformer in which you must raise and lower the water level in order to reach new places and manipulate objects of varying buoyancy. Such an idea probably wouldn’t have panned out in 48 hours, but it didn’t end up mattering, since the theme was islands.

I didn’t actually have any idea for the theme, and was considering skipping this LD until my girlfriend suggested I parody the recent comments of Representative Hank Johnson (D-GA) concerning the island of Guam, specifically the danger that it would “tip over and capsize”. I thought this was a brilliant idea and set to work.

Things that went well:

• I got to use my buoyancy ideas that I had been thinking about for the Flood theme.
• I was able to write a primitive importer to transform an SVG shape into a Chipmunk shape.
• I produced much better programmer art than I ever had for previous games.
• I had sound for the first time.
• I learned a lot.
• I figured out how to successfully package some very awkward dependencies into a distributable ruby application (specifically, getting FFI packaged up correctly was gratifying).

Things that didn’t go so well:

• I had very few ideas for actual gameplay until it was way too late.
• I wasn’t as familiar with my libraries as I thought I was, and introduced lots of subtle bugs that were hard for me to track down.
• I didn’t manage as much programmer art as I would have liked.
• I wasted a lot of time trying to wrangle garageband, which I had never used before, and ultimately had to give up on it.
• There are some very basic bugs that, had I spent time testing at the end, I could easily have fixed.
• Packaging was difficult.

Some more on that last one; I had some problems getting everything packed up, for both windows and mac, but my biggest problem came from a weird issue with bitbucket. They use Amazon S3 as their storage for downloads, and apparently there was some issue there, because when I uploaded new versions with fixes, they didn’t end up distributed correctly (or so I surmise), because some people clicking the download link got the new version, and other people the old one. That’s all fixed now, so if anyone tried earlier and was unable to get the game to run, you might have more success now.

Now to respond to Hempuli’s comment:

F-Secure blocked it as a “suspicious program”. Probably a false positive, but could you ensure this?

This is almost certainly because the windows version is run using allinoneruby.exe, which is a complete ruby distribution packaged into a self-extracting archive. When you run allinoneruby.exe <scriptfile.rb> (which is what Capsize!.bat does), allinoneruby.exe extracts an entire ruby distribution into a temporary folder, uses that to execute the script, and then cleans itself up. It’s almost certainly this behavior that’s triggering warnings. Harmless though this particular program is, a lot of malware makes use of similar mechanisms. It’s not the most elegant distribution method, but it’s simple to set up, reliable, and fast.

You don’t have to take my word for the binary’s safety, though. If you’re concerned, you can download your own copy of the program and replace mine with it. Or, if you have ruby installed on your system (and know how to use it), you can just use that. The code itself (the stuff that I wrote, for the game) is all there is plain text, if you want it.

Anyway, I hope people who try Capsize are at least amused by it, even if it didn’t turn out a terribly good game. I’m looking forward to LD18 already.

I have no idea what you guys use for this, e.g. to have an overlay of the webcam input on the same video.

Any help is appreciated. Thanks!

(I did use the search feature but of course it only listed timelapses and a way to do it in linux)

There’s a couple comments now about virus scanners tripping up on Yargh! for some reason.
I’ve tested it myself on a number of virus scanners without any issue, so I can only suggest to update your definition files and so on, since as far as I’m aware, it’s a false positive.

That said, the only thing I can allude it being to is that I compressed the main exe with UPX.
I’ve used UPX before for entries without an issue, so it could be the latest version I grabbed does something that makes some virus scanners thing it’s a bit iffy. As such, I’ve just uploaded an uncompressed version of the game. And seeing as I know some virus scanners would block access to the whole zip, never mind just the exe, I’ve re-uploaded the entire data set with it.

The new version is available here: http://www.stuckiegamez.co.uk/gamez/ludumdare/ld17/yargh-uncompressed.zip

It’s the same data, and it’s effectively the same compiled exe ( I did just recompile, just in case ) but if you’re wanting to be super extra safe, the engine sources are in my entry for you to grab and compile yourself.

If there are any more problems with this, please let me know!

Apparently there is a bug in my entry for LD17, where only the sky would load, if you encounter this bug, simply reaload the page once and it should work.

Quickly whipped up tiles and got a better image drawing function than I had.

Got tiles rendering, and quite a few things ironed out in the meantime. Still need a set of debris sprites, I might do smoke but I kind of like the circles.. I need to make the tiles better though, and improve the level generation. Water should come soon as well.

I’m looking forward to this getting some atmosphere I’m thinking stormy backgrounds and possibly pirates coming in from the sides of the island too (I’ll need to improve the generation automata 12-fold, i think)

Sprites!

Inthusfar, that’s all the spritework. Heavily Cave story/Oryx/Spelunky inspired. Hopefully I can get the grass, flowers and entities drawing tomorrow, though I still need to do debris sprites and a lot of coursework. We’ll see how it pans out.

So, plenty of people are breaking the rules. Using pre-made content, not releasing sources, doing a team effort.

When LD started, originally, the rules were really loose – not set in stone at all. It was more about the feeling – if you feel like you’re cheating, you’re cheating, that sort of thing. Later, when things progressed, and LD grew bigger, the rules became more defined (and in some cases, unfortunately, slightly conflicting).

The more rules, the less likely it is for people to actually read them. As an example, here you can read the final ruleset of the TMDC contest I organized for about a decade. Lots of rules. Strict rules. Rules that define things exactly. Rules most people didn’t bother reading. Rules someone always complained about.

Which leads to this LD – and folks not releasing sources. The rule is there for several reasons. Primary reason is for people to check what you’ve done, maybe learn something. I don’t know how many people do, but that’s it anyway.

If you fear someone is going to steal the code you made in a rush in a weekend, you’re simply delusional. You’d be surprised how difficult it is to get people to use your GOOD code =)

Free code isn’t free. Just take any random third party library; you’ll find it takes time to figure out what it does, how to use it, and what the limitations are. And this is for code that’s designed to be used by third parties. Code, that’s not designed to be looked at ever again, written by you, in a weekend? Please.

So anyway, I’d propose we design a very small set of simple rules that are easy to understand, and then have a bunch of clarifying rules based on those. For instance:

• 48 hours, clearly defined start and end in a certain timezone
• Solo competition – everything must be done by you.
• All graphics and audio must be done from scratch. Fonts are ok, but only for text.
• All source code and content must be released, along with binaries.
• Pre-existing code is ok, as long as:

1. it’s available for everyone
2. it’s available well in advance (say, 2 weeks?)
3. it doesn’t contain any gameplay code

Now, we could debate forever about just about any rule there:

• Is it fair that the 48 hours fit some timezones better than others?
• Is everything done by you if you record sounds by some other person (with or without them knowing)?
• Is the graphics done by you if you take photos?
• Why can’t we use font ‘A’ character as the spaceship? (seriously, what’s the harm?)
• If you record your synthesizer that you bought with big bucks, is the sound “from scratch”?
• <insert any other edge you might get by buying fancy toys to do content with>
• What, exactly, is gameplay code and what isn’t? Is menu code ok? Is my level-data-specific A* ok? Is state machine code ok?
• etc.

And if we go back to “if it feels like you’re cheating, you are”, well.. different folks’ threshold for feeling guilty about these things are different, and the bigger LD grows, the more varied it becomes.

Someone suggested LD should have different categories for different things, like team efforts etc. I’d say no. If you want to, set up another event – it’s not rocket science! And if you don’t like the rules, nobody is forcing you to enter.. or if they are, please do tell us about it!

For transparency, I’ll mention that I did not do an entry this time. No time, sorry.

I say “preliminary” because it’s possible I’ll do a larger more in depth one later.

In making this game I made two huge oversights:

• I used a 2d hardbody physics engine to make a platformer
• I had a total of maybe 12 hours of usable time including a mad bughunt from 12-3AM and most of my basecode writing.

Nevertheless, I’m not disappointed with what I got out of it. I’m just about to do some spriting and make the game look less like debug-draw mode. (more…)

hey all,

given the 2 comments on my windsurfing sim, I had to add keyboard commands in addition to the gamepad (which is still recommended!). See readme file in the archive.

Now it’s also compatible with the Xbox 360 controller, as well as the previously supported Logitech Dual Action (and probably many other dual joystick controllers. Also the provided lua DLL does not reference the release vc10 anymore – EDIT: the osg DLL still does ! but it’s not too a problem.

- The new file is at  : http://dl.free.fr/qpLMt33Pg (click on “Telecharger ce fichier” i.e. “download this file”)) . Is there a way to edit the compo entry to add this link and the linux version ?

- EDIT: install the VC10 runtime which is included in the archive (vcredist_x86) or get it from Microsoft here.

- go to bin/ and start ld17_arif.exe

I also updated a few lines of code to add water drag force (auto slow), but no change in the game (data, gameplay).

Later I’ll add jump, better left/right sail effect, wake particles, surfer position, balance, falling, and most importantly a better surfing wave !

As before, control the board/sail with the two joysticks, or S, F and the arrows. F6 to restart.

The original entry is at : http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-17/?action=rate&uid=1096

-arif

And I’m all out of games. Anyone got bubblegum?

So, since the compo ended I played and rated 172 games. Basically I started with the web games, then went through people I recognized from one or another site… then I started in on my assigned games, and when I finished those I just kinda kept rating…

If I didn’t rate your game it was because:

Some stuff I want to say:

Don’t play 172 games in 2.5 days. They start to blend together, and there are some which I probably did not give the time they needed in order to be assessed. (Not -YOURS- dear reader, yours was unique and captivated me )

Everybody- Please DO indicate on your title screen how to get to the main menu. And if you include a line that says ‘Press the Any-Key to continue’, please make sure the left arrow works.

(I pick on Flash, because I do Flash.)

I thought the over all quality of the submissions was really high! I enjoyed making my game, I enjoyed playing all yours! I’m looking forward to doing this again in August!

-TF

Evil Lair Command uses HTML5′s canvas and javascript. In theory that means it runs anywhere. I decided to do some more compatibility testing based on what I have readily available to me:

Obviously some of the playability depends on the hardware you’re on. Leave a comment if you want to play “what can this stupid game run on” too.

So, it’s been a couple days since the end of the competition, and I don’t have any posts here, so it certainly seems a good a time as any to change that.  I’ll take this time to describe the grand dreams we had working on Eden Island, as well as answer a few things people have written in their comments.  I’d also like to thank everyone for taking the time to review the game and give some good feedback.

First off, what didn’t make it in.  You got to see the pirates, but what you didn’t get to see was the extremely awesome sea monster which destroys the ship.  The art was done, the ship getting destroyed looked perfect–I just didn’t have time to add the sea monster.  Eventually the sea monster will eat your pirates (and probably monkeys, if the pirates haven’t killed them) if there are too many of them.

The concept of the game was not to be plot based at all–it’s not an evolution from sand to trees to monkeys to pirates to sea monkeys–it’s a combination of everything to create a balanced island.  If you have too many monkeys, you are going to attract pirates (clearly for their luxurious fur); if you have too many pirates, you’re going to attract a sea monster; if you have a sea monster, you’re going to have a destroyed island–back to square 1.  While it is a “god game,” you do not have direct control over anything, really; all you can do is influence what is happening.

There is also going to be a lot more interaction between elements in the coming versions.  For instance, you might notice now that if you have multiple waves of pirates, your monkeys will probably stop throwing coconuts at them.  That means they have run out of them, and they can’t get more.  So the monkey will either have to leave the tree, or a pirate will likely chop it down, since the monkey is no longer trying to kill him.

Rain currently grows your trees, and it will continue to do so.  However, the effect you see now is more for storms; in the later releases, you will start off with light rain, and it will work its way into a storm.  Storms will damage your trees, pirates, and other stuff.

Okay, now for some answers to the comments you have all graciously left us.

First and foremost, several people have stated that the competition must be done solo.  Well, if that were the case, why do the rules make no mention of it?  I started off under the full assumption that it was a solo competition, but when Germille offered his fantastic artistic skills, I closely checked the rules to see if I had to do everything myself.  And guess what?  There is no mention of it being a solo competition in the rules. So, I gladly accepted his services–and clearly the game was better off for that.

Another big point is that it’s not really a game.  Well, it’s not a game yet. Unfortunately I am quite the perfectionist, so I spent far too long getting cool effects in the game than I did developing actual gameplay.  At least I have a lot more planned to go in than what you see now.  Fortunately, I did in 36 hours what I haven’t done on some games in several years.  It was truly an experience.  It was my first Ludum Dare, but it will definitely not be my last.

Okay, now for some specific replies:

smn said it was like a zen garden.  I really like this comparison–it is truly meant to be a world you sculpt and of which you must take careful care.

It inspires jplur to learn flixel: quite a big honor, I believe.  I’m glad my game can inspire anyone to do anything–and learning to make a game in flixel is a noble cause and really quite easy.

increpare: at the moment, you can only have 4 or so plants on screen at a time.  This should mean that you always have monkeys on the ground, otherwise when the pirates come it’d be too easy to just kill them all.  Certainly this will change when there is more interaction between pirates and trees, pirates and monkeys, and monkeys and trees.

zez: about the trees’ bounding boxes: yes, they are quite terrible, and I have redone them significantly in my local copy.  I have also fixed the “drop a monkey on a tree and he starts climbing” bug, as well as the “climb up an invisible trunk” bug.  There are probably also a myriad of others I have fixed, and many more I haven’t noticed.  I definitely welcome all bug reports!

refrag: glad you like it!  I’m honored that it’s your favorite so far.  I think you’ll be really knocked out when the sea monster comes after your pirates, too!  Sorry to hear that you dinged me for not doing it solo, but I was very careful to follow the rules.

xeon06: you’re probably dropping them from too high, so they’re dying on impact.  There’ll be a ‘splat’ sound and graphic for that later…

So, I’m glad if you’ve enjoyed playing, and if you didn’t, I’ll be glad to remedy that!  Let me know what I can do to make it better.

Behold, Bouncecrab, Starfish Island!

The game is sadly quite short, but I’m pleased that I managed to get something I could call a “game” at all  This is my first foray into actual game programming, written entirely from scratch using Standard ML and the Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL).  Special thanks to Tom 7 for his SDLML bindings.

The Windows version seems to have way-too-fast timings, but I’m told it is sort of playable.  Also, the latest release of the Mac version is statically linked against the GnuMP library, so if you had any problems with it before, please try again.

This past weekend was super fun!  Thanks, Ludum Dare, for existing!