My previous host was having problems with downloads. Now I uploaded it to gamejolt and it should be working fine. If you couldn´t play it yet, do it and vote

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-17/?action=rate&uid=1901

Also, thanks for all the comments. They have encouraged me to do a polished version of the game. I think that it is funny and addictive enough so I´m making a flash version. I think I will need help with the graphics though.

All the problems with the game are due to the lack of polishing. It is very hard for some and very easy for others

@ skintkingle: It was hard for me to figure why it was funny I´m not an English native speaker.

@ shockedfrog: Sorry about that. It is my first ludum dare so I wasn´t familiar with the rules. I made all the sound but I didn´t know about the music. It´s only fair to have a 1 in audio.

Well i’ve been stupidly busy at work at the moment so I haven’t really had any time to evaluate how it went properly, so here it is:

Things that went well:

• Graphics – I was overall rather happy with the art in the end, it’s really my first time doing my own art at all (short of modelling some stuff from TRON for fun) and I was surprised at how motivated I was to just continue doing it, i’m usually so terrible with drawing and so on that I tend to rely on others for this sort of thing but with super low-res pixel art it’s so confining it’s hard to get it wrong if you don’t mind stuff looking a bit silly.
• Controls – I don’t want to take credit for Unity’s physics or anything, but this was the first time i’ve done 2D platforming mechanics in Unity and was pretty happy with the result, jumping is a bit weird as I was trying to achieve jump height relative to the amount of time the button is pressed down but apart from that it came off well enough, if a bit heavy feeling.
• Getting it done – I was waylaid by a series of small jobs I had to do around the flat and helping people out with various computer problems, so most of all i’m just happy it was a somewhat complete product.

Things that went badly:

• Sound – Pretty obvious one given that there wasn’t any, I tried to record some basic stuff on my guitar but I couldn’t record it cleanly enough and trying to learn Musagi in the 3 hours I had to do sound proved way too much. I didn’t know about sfxr either so I gave up on sound effects altogether. Next time i’ll be much more ready for this sort of thing and if the theme fits i’ll probably be doing some form of rythm based game.
• Length – Again another pretty obvious problem with it, there’s literally 30 seconds of gameplay tops, primarily due to me building the level with about 5 minutes left and I wanted to make sure it looked right. I didn’t realise you could submit 15-20 minutes late otherwise I probably would’ve had 3-4 levels of significant but repetitive length.
• Dead bodies – Yeah those floating things are meant to be dead bodies, I have no idea how i’m meant to do those properly given the limited amount of pixels but they’re remarkably abstract.

I’m sure there’s other things that went wrong and right with it but those are the main things that come to mind.

Going forward i’m not sure if i’ll continue with it as a game, it’s a rather boring concept and i’m not a huge fan of the cliché’d super hard indie platformer genre, but if people actually want more levels i’m more than happy to implement some of the extra art I did and put together some interesting levels. The theme was fun but I couldn’t really think of anything that interesting to do other than the play on words in the title, but if anyone comes up with any interesting mechanics related to buoyancy and general island jumping I could easily get motivated again.

With regards to the whole debate about Unity/Game Maker/etc i’m a bit on the fence, I’ve done a lot of C++ with SDL/GL/D3D projects in the past and it’s such a laborious, un-fun experience I don’t really have a lot of inclination to take part in a strict competition like that. That said I think each game should be evaluated based on the amount of work gone into it, if you’re using a pre-made engine there should either be significantly more content, or some form of mechanic that would be too time consuming if you had to do the base engine for it too. Then again with that attitude you could end up with people forcing themselves to do contrived game concepts over simplistic but brilliant ideas just to keep up with the joneses. I guess the whole Tech category thing could work but then again that could result in LD being a glorified tech demo event, although it is balanced with the other categories (this was my first LD so i’m unsure as to why it was added then removed previously).

I’ll either be taking place in the Mini-LD this month or in the EGP for this month (High Velocity theme sounds pretty fun to play about with). It’s really fun taking part in these contests and getting feedback, it’s really nice to have people take the time to look at your stuff and give constructive feedback, I tend to be hyper-critical of myself so when people have fun with anything I make it’s a pleasant surprise. I’m working through the list myself and it’s pretty incredible to see how some people interpret the theme and how some people can achieve so much in so little time.

I’m open to collaboration on interesting game concepts (especially if they’re in Unity) so if anyone is serious about a particularly interesting concept or prototype and is capable of finishing products to completion with a high degree of polish i’m more than interested in helping (although with full time work I don’t have a huge amount of time). On another note my company (www.rubixstudios.co.uk) may be looking for a freelance chiptune composer for an upcoming iPhone project so if anyone wants to throw their hat into that ring, PM me here or email me at billy (at) rubixstudios.co.uk.

Lots of love,

Billy ‘brian’ Fletcher.

I want to give Perrin an award for his game, but I can’t because he doesn’t have any journal posts.

I want to give people awards for their games, but I can’t because they don’t have any journal posts.

floatation.webs.com

Go there to download the latest post-compo version. It’s currently only on Windows, but a friend is compiling it on Mac and Linux, too.

fydo says …

Very pretty! I liked the music too.

I must admit, it is difficult to tell how much of this is your hard work, and how much of it is just Unity. Especially since you’ve admitted to being lazy, in your timelapse post.

Not to worry, I’ve given you the benefit of the doubt.

(emphasis added by me)

It’s a very interesting question. And I’m not sure how to answer it.

I think the most honest answer would be that Unity 3D did all of it. Simply because if I had not used Unity I would very likely made a different game and this game wouldn’t exist at all therefore Unity is responsible for 100% of the game!

Click ‘read more’ if that answer doesn’t satisfy you.

(more…)

Hello,

First of all, thank you all for your nice comments.

This is the postmortem of my entry for LD17: Clean the Island!!

My plan:

• Submit my first game to LD
• Learn PlayBasic: I was looking for a language that allows me to code 2D games. I chose PlayBasic because I read it has sliding collision and pixel perfect collision built-in.
• Compose and play a great song for the game
• Have fun

(more…)

Endurion says …
Absolutely unplayable slow. Maybe 1 frame per 10 seconds. What weird stuff have you going on there?

Well, rendering about 500 sprites per frame without checking if the sprite needs to be drawn. I noticed a slowdown on the Mac version, but in my opinion it was still playable.
Anyways, it’s fixed now… or at least I hope so. I just updated the links.

While mazes are the challenge and game of The Forgotten Isles, Ludum Dare is about more. Specifically, the judging of Ludum Dare. With 204 entries, time alloted to play each game is only a few minutes. I want to make sure all the other players can experience as much of The Forgotten Isles as possible.

Below I’ve posted the four maps so you don’t spend your whole time frustrated and lost. You should at least try the game, so you get a proper idea of the difficulty, but use the maps below so you can unravel the whole story.

Island 1
Island 2
Island 3
Island 4

The responses to Forgotten Isles on the Ludum Dare site kept mentioning that that the music was missing. At first I just accepted this as a cross-platform issue, or maybe someone didn’t have their volume up (the music is pretty soft). After a few more of these comments it occurred to me that I probably left it muted.

Like during Waddlefield development, I disable the music so that it doesn’t play EVERY time I’m trying to test. Cute tunes are fun, for the first few repetitions, but then not so much after a dozen or two repetitions. So, bug fix for Version 3! The music has been unmuted!

The other tweak is that I’ve adjusted the camera’s position and rotation so that the character’s movement is relative to the camera position. before, the camera was at a 30-35 degree angle, and movement was less intuitive as it is now. While this added confusion to navigating the maze, the purpose wasn’t to make it more difficult.

You can download or play Version 3 now. Version 2 and 1 are still available for download and online play.

Now, responses to some comments:

AClockWorkLemon says …

great game, however i found this extremely easy due to the fact that on the 2nd island, my ‘memories’ glitched up and got stuck at 45.

Yes! A version 1 bug. If you lose, and start again, the timer doesn’t re-activate. This is fixed in version 2.

Jonny D says …

…I didn’t hear audio though…

Audio is now fixed!

Almost says …

…Some more variety in the type of objects within the maze would help to reduce the feel of wandering in a maze and more so wandering an island. (trees, not just bushes)

Yes, Original plan called for many more types of terrain, but maze design and implementation took up a lot of my time.

pekuja says …

…I do think if you work on this further, you should add something more than just the maze. Mazes can be a bit boring unless there’s a lot of different things to see.

I was thinking there could be some “guards” which you have to avoid, or even some platformer elements for jumping perhaps.

That's my game

Welp, guess I should talk about this.

(more…)

Here’s a timelapse link for my LD17 entry.  Sorry no music on it.

GALAPAGOS TIMELAPSE

What went wrong? What worked? Full post-mortem writeup after the bump… including a SNEAK PEEK screenshot of the progress on the game!

(more…)

Because of complaints about the difficulty I added 2 easier levels at the beginning to serve as a learning phase. Since it’s not in the spirit of LD I haven’t changed much the rest, but now biting push your enemies away.

I was feeling like crap so I figured I’d do a Ludum Dare game to cheer me up. The theme turned out to be crap so I decided to just make a stupid game instead of a good one. I hated working on it and just wanted it to end the whole time, and was totally ignoring it for part of the day. That seems to have helped me avoid getting too focused and prioritize my TODO list so ironically the game turned out okay.

I did get something out of it. I learned how to prioritize features and that it’s really better to do something you want to do as soon as possible instead of waiting for the right time, even if it’s shoddy, because the longer you’re exposed to it the more improvements you can make. But that doesn’t really help because I still felt like crap working on the game, and I still feel like crap whenever I do anything positive, and the ego trip from reading the comments on it doesn’t make up for it in the end.

P.S. On a lighter note, the game was inspired by a Radiolab episode that discussed how fighter pilots performing high G-force maneuvers sometimes lose consciousness and have dreams and out of body experiences. I read that hallucinations can also happen due to sensory deprivation in high altitude flight. Of course, my game isn’t even close to the actual experience, but I thought it was an interesting idea.

Play Nuclear Test

Let me introduce myself to all of you… I’m Roan Contreras (or toadfrogs who entered LD17 with Flag Island), a Game Programmer from the Philippines… I’m also a Game Maker user for 2 years and I’m learning of Actionscript 3 so I can do flash games…

Now, I want to tell of all you that I’m really sorry of breaking one rule of not doing the game solo… I’m not really that good on doing sounds and music (though I can still do it but I’m still terrible). I didn’t took all the sounds, I told the persons to make some for me… Don’t tell me that I’m blind ok? because I really read the rules, but because of rushing… I had no choice but to break one single rule… Its my first time entering a LD contest with a hundreds of game programmers here…

Anyway, nice to meet you all…