It’s about that time where I reply to some of the comments

Perrin says …
For a 2 hour game it’s a pretty good effort, could desperately use some in-level checkpoints.

That’s a good suggestion, but I think I prefer it to remain challenging

Neilo says …
Good effort for 2 hours, however it’s pretty damned frustrating!

Yep, I didn’t have much time to sanity check it before I decided to submit – I cut it really bloody close!

Almost says …
My biggest complaint is that multiple hats do not stack like a tower.
Also, distance jumping off the edge of a platform is hard sometimes.

Hahaha! That’s an ace idea.. But I fear it would have gotten unwieldy(or slow ) so I decided to allow you to wear the hat after you got them all, so you knew when the exit was open if you couldn’t see the exit itself.

EDIT: Thanks for your help, Pov!

I tried to update my LD submission to fix a graphical bug. Unfortunately, while the “edit your entry” screen appears fine, pressing “submit” causes the game title, description, and links to vanish. The screenshots, for some reason, survive.

My page is at http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-17/?uid=1441 if there is anything there to interest you; the game itself is available from http://www.mediafire.com/file/5izfj2ymddr/Jump Pirate_final.exe

The problem is, due to the lack of links it is not recognised as a valid entry. Consequently all my entrant privileges (e.g. voting on other entries) have been suspended. Help!

Finally got Allegro 4.4 compiling on my Linux machine! New download at my entry page.

Sophie Houlden says …
overall I liked the game, even though I suck at it.

however whilst bug fixes are usually more or less ok if you have crashing issues or the game wont run for some people, when you get to the point where you are tweaking AI and other stuff after the deadline I think its going a bit too far. its supposed to be 48 hours and not 73

I’d keep a link to the updated version in your description but have the main links that go to the original version

Tenoch says …
Sorry, but the rules clearly state that source must be provided. This and after deadline “big” modifications force me to give minimal grade on Overall…

It’s too bad that people can’t take 5 minutes to read a page…

From reading the rules previously, I’d thought I’d read that source was optional. (I was mistaken) I thought that minor tweaks could be made.
I’m now uploading the version that was submitted at the deadline without any of the following bugfixes or tweaks. (All of which fixed graphics misdisplaying, fixing the AI not functioning as expected due to errors because of sleepiness when initially creating it and lack of time to test it, fixing the disable sound option, and tweaking the price of a single item that was being abused by my playtesters for an easy victory)
Despite the seemingly gigantic differences between the deadline AI and the most recent AI, the difference is no more than the modification of a few variables and the changing no more than four or five lines of code.
If you think my actions were acceptable, please download the fixed version. If you want the vanilla with all bugs, glitches, malfunctions, and incompatibilities present, feel free to punch it.

For now that’s my High Score on my favorite game so far… This one got me hooked up for hours!

Now i’m preparing a small protection so I can get out of the computer and have dinner…

I wished I could save/pause though =(

This was my first ever Ludum Dare, and it was even more awesome that I had ever expected.  I had a blast with the Global Game Jam a few months back, and that made me even more tempted to test my abilities amongst the best game makers in the world for Ludum Dare 17.  After 48 hours of intensity, here is my result:

I also did one of them fancy time lapses that you can check out on the youtubes. And check out the actual submission page for the game and play it!  It’s pretty rough right now, but I really want to continue to work on it and refine it into a bigger project afterwards.  So a big thanks to Ludum Dare for giving me a huge creative energy boost!

-Love,
Kyle

YARGH! Post Mortem

I enjoyed that, that was a fun weekend
Course not everything went to plan, but a number of things did, and after having had a few nights sleep, I can reflect over things with a clearer mind.
So click the link below for more details!

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Okay the title sucks but I invented it as I was drawing it for the main screen. Since it was an image I was too lazy to change it later.

The game was made with ruby 1.9 (very cool language) and gosu (very cool hardware accelerated library). I personnaly think it is a much better alternative to python/pygame mostly because its faster (forget about doing side scrollers with only pygame).

So, first LD for me (but who cares). I decided not to make an engine from scratch to be faster, so I used mine. I needed to make some improvements , like for example , the introduction of water.

But it took much more time than I tought. And the final result is far from being polished. I think a game like this requires too much polishing because there is some kind of physics , AI and a gameplay to balance.
My next game will be something more predictable. I plan to make an adaptation of a board game. It will be turn based and won’t need drawing skills of death to do something okay.

About the gameplay of the game :

The idea was to make something between “evo the quest for earth” and “super mario” but more nervous, a la “sonic”.

For the aquatic part , you’ll have noticed that the bite attack is pretty useless , because you can’t hit without being hit. In evo your caracter can attack farther than the size of its body. I could have changed it but that would have been too strange that your enemies have a much shorter attack range. And the idea was to make the aquatic part depends of what you do on land. So I introduced the bonus (things you can throw at your enemies while in water). They encourage exploration.
But you can attack the jellyfishes.

The land crushing attack is not working so well because enemies often have the time to attack you before being crushed. You really need to land straight on them , in spite of my effort to increase the size of your hitbox when you are crushing something.

The game seems to be very hard , but it’s on purpose : Without the fast brown fishes , you wouldn’t have to be creative and find a way to progress. This makes the game less linear.
The most obvious way to beat the fishes is collecting items.
You can also jump on them by doing an exploit that consists of taking speed by going down then moving up and jumping out of the water , as they are down (see the videos).
You can stick very close to the spikes so they die trying to get you , like in this picture :

Theses “features” were not really done on purpose , but they add something to the game.

REMINDER – Level 2 walktrougth : http://www.youtube.com/user/Ickylevel#p/a/u/2/vI5h5vlD0KE

Maybe I’m just being anal here, but the rules of the competition clearly state that

1. All content must be created during the compo
2. Source code must be provided

There are still occasional entries with images obviously taken directly from the web.

And in many entries, the source is forgotten (ignored?). Some even claim proudly that their game is closed soure…

I know it’s an honor system, and it is very unlikely that people will actually check your source for copy pasted code. But how long can it take to zip your project folder and upload it along? You can even just put it in a single archive with the compiled game if you can’t be arsed to make two different zips.

Now it’s too bad because the game are good. But how should these be judged? They should theoretically be disqualified. Should they receive N/A, or minimal grade on Overall?

I’m pretty sure most people didn’t pay attention to that aspect, but somehow it’s bugging me. Has an admin advice on the conduct to take?

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-17/?action=rate&uid=2096

Banana Joe is a simple platform made in flash cs3 and paint.net

Do you like Pirates ? Pay attention to crabs and bats.. the are nasty!

Another great weekend. Ludum Dare is such a special event. You go into it knowing it’s going to be a boatload of work. You know you’re going to lose sleep and probably not eat very healthy. But all the pain and suffering is over in 48hrs and all you’re left with is a game you made yourself.

Play > Ludum Dare Build
Watch > Time-Lapse Video of Development
Link > Ludum Dare #17 Vote Page

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TAB: Island Rescue (LD17)
By: Fydo

I dunno if anyone cares, but for the guitar enthusiasts in the compo, you might enjoy a tab of the song I made for Island Rescue.


/ = Slide
~ = Vibrato

Here is the promised gameplay video: Click here

I also added builds for Linux and Mac OS X. The Mac OS X build is a bit slow at the moment, there are some issues with the texture loader which I need to rewrite for Mac OS X in the near future.
Anyway, the links are on my entry page: Click here

Thanks to everyone who played and commented on my game.

I enjoyed the compo thoroughly, and I was so happy with my entry that I’ll sure keep working on it! I’ll probably add more enemies, cannon types and such stuff, along with online highscores. You can see some of the new enemies in that screenshot – the Poison Bomber, and the Balloon Bombs.

So, a small collection of post-compo stuff here, timelapse, post mortem + bugfixes.

My timelapse is up at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJ2UFsvPK4k if anyone’s interested. Looking back I spent a *lot* of time creating levels, but I kind of knew that already. It’s kind of fun to see them grow, though with the benefit of hindsight, taking more screenshots, and producing a ‘highlight reel’ after the event would lead to a more satisfying video.

What went right:

Had a clear design idea. I was lucky enough to start Saturday with a very clear idea of the game I wanted to achieve. It was (overly) ambitously large, and relied on being able to do a large amount of decent level design in a short space of time, but having such a clear vision of what I wanted kept me on task, and prevented me from wasting much time simply trying things out.

In-engine editing. I’ve been converted to the idea of doing level design in game ever since playing around with Cube god knows how long ago. So early on I wrote a system to support editing of levels without leaving the game (I didn’t even have an edit mode to flick into, editing happened literally at the same time as playing). There’s simple no way I’d have been able to design as many screens as I did if I’d had to keep flicking between level editor and game (or, worse, text editor and game).

Simple mechanics that interacted nicely. The 3 core mechanics (springy things, ice, and rocks) were chosen mostly on a “what can I implement quickly” basis, but I was very happy with how well they ended up slotting together.

What went wrong:

Too damn big. Whilst having a clear idea was great the specific idea I had committed me to making waaay more content than was comfortable within the timescale. There are 40 screens in the final game, and nearly as many puzzles, and this is *after* I’d scaled back my original vision significantly. I took a huge chunk of total time, probably approaching 8 hours on pure level design. I ended up having to cut other things I wanted to put in (extra animation, localised fauna etc.) as a result. Having said all that it was really cool to realize something on that scale.

My music is dull, repetitive and quickly annoying. Just a combination of of it being a generally a weak area for me, and having very little time to burn on it (1hr fairly late into Sunday, when I was completely knackered). I came very close to not bothering including music at all though, so I guess overall I’m glad I managed to put something in. More practice required before next time though.

Less testing time than it could have done with. There ended up being some significant and unpleasant glitches (infinite-loops, an inescapable area etc.) that I just didn’t have enough time left to find. Ties pretty heavily into the “too damn big” point, with that much content there’s going to be problem areas, and it’s going to take hours to find them.

Not taking Monday off work. Simple, but regrettable, trying to do a full days work after a 36hr game development marathon was not fun!.

So, all in all, I shot pretty high, way too high in fact, so it feels pretty great that I managed to realize my original idea fairly convincingly.

The glitches + bugs have been annoying me a lot, so I’ve been working on a fixed up version, available to play at http://jwhiting.nfshost.com/ld/17/islands_better.html. So far it has fixes for all the specific glitches people have reported (thanks for the info!), as well as a few I found myself. Also I’ve put in code so that if anyone does run into an icky infinite loop situation it should at least recover from it fairly gracefully. I also plan to add some sort of progress saving system, so that it doesn’t have to be completed in one session.

Anyway, that post was pretty epic all told, congratulations if you made it to the end

Now I’ve just got a lot of games to play

I already posted a mini-postmortem in my submission screen, but here’s my expanded version.

First up, I want to give a big shout out to everybody who contributed to Ludum Dare, and to those who made this entire site and contest a reality.  It’s great to see so many people active a community focused on game development.  While this was my first Ludum Dare 48, I’ve participated in community-driven game competitions before and it’s always been a blast.  LD48 was no exception.

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“A delayed game is eventually good, a bad game is bad forever.”

Well not exactly my case but it’s better to commit and release than to never do so.  So without further ado, here’s my first game I’m releasing to the public.  Cargo Island Drop!

Why so late?

I entered the competition late and I was unable to actually work on the game Saturday.  I had planned on working in the evening but became ill after having the Crab Pad Thai at a friends birthday dinner.  I made a post on Sunday, two hours before the deadline, that I didn’t make it but I wasn’t going to give up so here I am.    I had some extra time today so I spent some making up the lost time from Saturday.  I did it for myself, I did it for those who believed in me but I also did it just to show the Ludum Dare community that you guys are awesome!  Next time I’ll do better planning.  Until then, here you all go!

Misc info:  Cargo Island Drop was built in Unity.  Modeling done in Blender.  Texture work done in Pixelmator.  The music was stock music but seeing as I didn’t have time to make any and it isn’t an official entry into the competition I decided to leave it.  Everything else was done by me, even the art!  First time I UV unwrapped anything that complex!

Web Version:  Cargo Island Drop Web (Unity Plugin)

Windows Version: Cargo Island Drop Windows

Mac Version: Cargo Island Drop Mac

Edit: DOH!  Forgot to include a link to the source:  Source

Please, if you use the source for anything please just drop me a message, I would love to know if it was useful for anyone!  Thanks!

Feel free to leave me any feedback!

Hey there,
I’m the author of Beebop The Island Hopper and this is my first Ludum Dare. Previously I’ve made a few entries for The Experimental Gameplay Project which is a monthly contest of creating a themed experimental game in one week but the challenge of making a game in only two days, and the pretty cool community, compelled me to join in this time.

The game itself is very simple: your only task is to press a button at the right time and advance to the next island but a press at the wrong time will push you back to the previous one. Although simple it was a surprisingly good concept and it did stole a few minutes of my time. The graphics turned out okay (thank god) but the sound is pretty damn awful.

The pressure with such a short deadline is no joke and although I didn’t have a lot of hours to spend, I totaled around 8 hours, I really did spend them effectively.

It was really fun and I learned a ton about programming, myself and getting things done. I will definitely try to participate the next time and then I’ll be more active on irc and to post at least once in the middle of the making.

Now all I need to do is to vote.

Cheers

I have noticed in the voting list that there are strange bronze and silver medals next to peoples names. May i ask what they are?

This Ludum Dare was far more frustrating than the previous one.

My game idea was somewhat more ambitious than SEEK*TOR, but what really killed my progress was trying to use flixel for something it’s not suited for. I spent most of Friday and Saturday trying to bend and hammer flixel into doing what I wanted it to. I managed to code some work-arounds, but I felt like I was doing twice as much work as I should have been.

The game I wanted to make had you swimming around a world as an aspidochelone, or asp-turtle. You would start out small and eat fish and other sea creatures, slowly growing bigger. There would be ships and sea monsters floating around, which you could ram to make them drop their stuff if you were big enough. Once you got big enough, you could start picking up rocks to build an island on your back. With an island, you could pick up people and have them build a village on your back to help you out. There would be different resources that would encourage your villagers to specialize and give you different bonuses, like faster movement, stronger weapons, faster growth, etc.

The two features that I really had trouble doing in flixel were scaling and rotation (specifically, collision detection while scaled and rotated). Given that I had a turtle swimming around in a top-down view, growing as the game progressed, this made things pretty difficult. Also, I kept needing groups of things to move and rotate together, which FlxGroup isn’t quite set up to do. (FlxGroup is very good for pooling objects so you can re-use them. It’s not so good for moving multiple objects as a big chunk.) A minor annoyance that I kept encountering was the fact that it’s difficult to create an object that’s only for display and doesn’t have all the physics-y stuff attached.

With about 18 hours left, I finally decided to toss out flixel and write my own engine from scratch. That consumed the rest of Saturday and a big chunk of Sunday. Getting movement to work was no problem. Switching over didn’t take me too long either, since I tried to match flixel’s organization as I coded my engine. The real headache was getting collision detection and handling to work. I have variously had islands shoot off behind the turtle when touched, trap the turtle and prevent further movement, and stick to the turtle like glue.

So, I didn’t manage to finish my game. On the other hand, I now have a half-way decent first version of my very own game engine!