AVOIDAL – Post Compo Version!

I’ve made a bunch of improvements to AVOIDAL since the compo and I’d love your feedback!

Play the post compo version of AVOIDAL here

The LD48 official compo version for judging is here now

Changes to the new version:

• Added 1 second of invulnerability if you take damage (this helps a ton!)
• Rebalanced the difficulty curve to make it progress a tad slower
• Mines spawn a tad further in from the edges to help player not get stuck on walls as much
• Reworked How To Play screen to be simpler and clearer
• Changed ‘Energy’ to ‘Health’ in UI
• Fixed some sound volume and playing issues
• Added a nice visual effect of little random twinkling stars in the background

I’m gonna keep listening for feedback and working on this game but I think it is pretty close to me calling it done at this point. Thanks for the great feedback I’ve gotten already to everyone who left me comments on my rating page.

Here’s a video of me playing through my game.

Wow, It seems my game is popular enough to use up all of my website bandwidth.
I will be moving stuff over to another host as soon as it becomes available.
My website has had ten times more the visits in the last two days than in the last year.

OK, here we go.

• Flixel, flashpunk, et cetera… just go for it, you’re making a game. I’m still not a fan, but if it gets you making a game, then you’re playing your part in this competition.
• Speaking of platforms, it helps if you pick something that’s truly cross-platform as not everyone uses Windows (I’m actually going to suggest a figure of 90% who do, which means 10% who don’t, which means 1 in 10 people). There’s Wine, but some things (especially Game Maker) run horribly, and it doesn’t run .NET binaries (and Mono doesn’t have XNA). It’s not against the rules but it’s a pain in the butt.
• Also speaking of platforms, make sure you give an idea of how fast your game is supposed to run. Or something like that. In most cases, your game will run “too slow” on some systems.
• Try to make it get progressively harder if it’s an endless game.
• Don’t use a “lives” system, unless it’s purely for score reasons – I kinda just want to get through everything.
• Don’t spend too long on the graphics. Best just to stick with placeholder art to start with, and then improve it as you go along.
• If you’re going to code an engine which is quite different from the target platform, code it beforehand. This is a tip for myself, who spent roughly 26 hours on getting the emulation working.
• The competition is more serious than the jam. If you’re afraid of criticism, I would suggest the jam. I think. Bleh.

If you want some throttling code, here’s some pseudocode.

CPS is Clocks Per Second.

CPF is Clocks Per Frame. If you have something which returns milliseconds ( 1000 ms == 1 second), and you want 50 fps (== Hz == occurences per second), use CPS/50 == 1000/50 == 20.

next_tick = get_time();

while(doing_your_loop()) {

current_tick = get_time();

if(current_tick < next_tick) {

do_video();

sleep_for_a_short_moment_say_5_ms();

} else {

do_logic();

next_tick += CPF;

if(current_tick – next_tick > CPS/10)

next_tick = current_tick – CPS/10;

}

}

This is essentially what I do in my entry. I thoroughly recommend that you use this. Alex the Allegator 4 uses it, which is an old LD48 (?) not sure what it was entry, but forgets the short sleep so it runs at a nasty framerate on FreeBSD (and I’d assume at least some other OSes, too), and it doesn’t do the lag clipping thingymabob.

It always pays to at least yield to the scheduler every now and then so other stuff can get done, ESPECIALLY if you’re using Java (I did a port of Shawn Hargreaves’ SPEED once and I encountered a problem with the sound being really, REALLY sloppy).

EDIT: Added in the lag clipping. It helps if you get an interrupt storm or something and you lag out for a second or two.

I want to thank everybody who tried out my Ludum Dare #18 entry, Infiltrator. In particular, special thanks to those who took the time to comment and vote on my entry. You can still play/vote for my game right now, just click on the banner!

This was my second Ludum Dare, and despite the warnings from senior Darers plus my own analysis of my previous performance, I ended up making a few old mistakes and plenty of new ones. I’ll cover that in…

ChainedLupine’s post-mortem for Ludum Dare #18: Infiltrator.

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So I thought I’d take a quick look back at my first experience of a Ludum Dare event now that I’ve fully recovered from what the final push did to me! I ended losing about 10 hours of my 48 to my day job: combined with my inexperience in producing something in such a short space of time… well, it was certainly a challenge.

Overall I’m very pleased with how this weekend’s development of “The Robots and I” (link) went: I genuinely feared I would fail to have anything to submit by the deadline, but I managed it. At the same time there are so many little additions/improvements I would have liked to get in there that could have made a difference.

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Greasemonkey, I’ve noticed in the comments you have spoken against using flash libraries such as Flixel and FlashPunk for retro games with pixel art.

I was wondering why and what you would recommend instead (anyone else is welcome to chime in if you have an interest in the subject of course)? I think people like those libraries because they are so damn easy – no dll hell, etc. Is there something better out there?

I was pretty impressed with what notch did with just the standard java in making his pixelly platformer so I’m sort of torn about whether a framework is really necessary or useful.

I created Undermine in 48 hours, and for 24 of those hours I was an hour and a half away from home, attending a wedding.

I really liked the experience Ludum Dare gave me, from the first moments of brainstorming while watching Robocop for the first time to a character with no attacks and enemies with abilities that could be activated by pressing buttons on their various sides… and then on a tangent to messing around with a slide ability (for the hell of it– it was fun!) to popping up under enemies. And then the SPACE INVADER.

Anyway: thinking of an idea, drawing on past concepts (I had a similar concept a long time ago, about a giant boss enemy flying around in the sky while you platform on the ground as it attacks you and you attempt to destroy it using occasional fixed rocket launcher emplacements), making graphics, making music, and making code all in the span of 24-48-ish hours is really amazing!

The limited time meant I knew I’d never have to worry about feature creep (at least not for this… cycle of development life) or ‘what if’ or procrastination because oh look there’s the deadline! Looming!

That said, while I got a lot of focus, I didn’t give up any regular habits: I still went to the wedding, I still had a regular amount of sleep (perhaps not a ‘good’ amount of sleep), and I still ate when I would have.

~

Anyway, I ended up with Undermine, a flash game that I am ultimately very proud of. It’s short and sweet and not without its imperfections but certainly to the point. It definitely isn’t for everyone– but then again, what ever is?

I’ve spent two months on a game, two weeks on a game, and now two days on a game; thanks for existing, Ludum Dare.

Ok, I give up. I tried (again) to do a double timelapse, merging screenshots and webcam pictures into a single, hey-this-is-what-I’m-doing-and-what-I-look-like-while-I-do-it kind of video. But I can’t for the life of me get the timestamps to line up. If it helps, think of this as two timelapses of my writing this game which may or may not have been made at the same time. Anyway, my timelapse for Double Bounce:

I can't figure out how to embed YouTube videos on WordPress, so...

I spent several hours this afternoon trying to put together a trailer, but I can’t seem to get anything out of CamStudio that is A) not terribly encoded and B) readable by iMovie. Any tips?

To sum up LD18:

What did I plan to do:
In a nutshell, I planned to learn some AS3 and make something in FlashPunk to prove myself it’s not that hard, I accomplished this goal, and it was far easier than I thought. I consider using FP on future compos.
Nevertheless, from countless ideas, I picked one. enemies fight each other, but do not attack the player. You need to spawn even more enemies to distract the existing ones. I planned it to be tile-based platformer with a twist, and I suppose I managed to do this.

What went right:
I made my first flash gam Actually it’s crap, but it’s pretty extensible, and I think I’ll tune it up a bit and put it on Kongregate. I always wanted to have my game there

What went wrong:
The game.

Anyways, learning something useful is more fun than doing somthing I already know how to.

As you may recall, last night with three hours to spare, we managed to finish and submit our game Fistful of Beef for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. After a good nights rest, the LÖVE-PARTY has had some time to reflect on the last few days and the work that has been done. As such, we felt it may be fitting for us to round off our participation in this Ludum Dare with a post mortem, and sharing what we’ve learned.

In a previous post, we mentioned that we spent the first 24 hours doing nothing constructive other than putting together our intro screen. There were a few reasons for this:

1. We didn’t have our workflow set up. We hadn’t decided on what frameworks and libraries to use, so for the first 8-10 hours we were trying to use a custom framework that only one person really understood. After deciding that it was rubbish, we switched to yet another -even stranger- framework that I don’t think anyone at all understands. It wasn’t until after 24 hours that we decided to rip all of the complex stuff out and replace it with something with loads of documentation that everyone could grasp in minutes.
2. Our team structure was unclear. Our team was originally far too big. I think that we were originally going to be 7 or 8 people. It’s really, really hard to manage a group like that. Especially when you’re spread out across timezones. It wasn’t until about half of the group had defected that we could really start focusing and getting things done. If your group is larger than 3 or 4 people, I would advice splitting it into two groups instead.
3. Coordination problems. This ties into the above mentioned point, but it can be equally as much of a challenge even in a smaller group. Because we were spread out all over the globe, some people were never around when the “core” of the team were awake. While we were unconventionally organized with proper game design documents (okay, so maybe not proper design docs. But they were better than post-it notes.), it was still hard for everyone to know what had been done and what was going to happen next.

It wasn’t until we had solved all the above problems that we were able to get started, but once we did that, I’m amazed at how efficiently we worked and how everyone stepped up and took care of what needed to be done. The team did great and I would certainly not mind working with them again (albeit in a smaller group). I’m very much looking forward to participating in another Jam, but I hope that in the future there will be a competitive version of it. Making games together is damn fun, but it does feel a little anticlimactic to have worked so hard and then just have your game sit there.

As for the game itself, I’m pretty happy with it. In the best of worlds, I would have liked to have implemented a highscore and prerferably a way to upload that highscore to a central server, but what the hell. It’s a game about beating bulls down to a pulp.

Before signing off, I would just like to thank all the LD:ers for an amazing time. I would also like to thank all the members of the LÖVE-PARTY for their hard work. And finally, to my incredibly supportive girlfriend who kept comparing my cowboy hat to a vagina and my bull to a turd: I will have my revenge…

It's not a vagina nor a turd...

If you want to try the game out, go grab it from the game page!

It seems that the windows version of PySFML was compiled incorrectly or something. By recompiling PySFML from source, I believe that my game should now work fully on windows. If you are able to test, please do, the game’s post is here. Make sure you read all the instructions as the game can be quite confusing otherwise.

If so, I’d love to talk to you! I’m trying to configure the CMake files so that they create the following:
- Linux distributable in tar.gz format
- Win32 distributable .zip format
- Source in tar.gz or .zip format

So far, I can get the Linux-based distributable in tar.gz format, but it is also creating a installer with the .sh extension, and it tries to do the following:

CPack: Create package using TZ
CPack: Install projects
CPack: - Run preinstall target for: gbgames-ld18
CPack: - Install project: gbgames-ld18
CPack: Compress package
CPack Error: Problem with tar_close(): No such file or directory
CPack Error: Problem compressing the directory
CPack Error: Error when generating package: gbgames-ld18
make: *** [package] Error 1


I’m sure it has to do with the fact that I haven’t done much with the CMake files but tell it to use CPack, so it is trying to do default things, but I’m not sure how to configure it for what I want. Anyone willing to help? I’d appreciate it!

It’s been more than a day since the end of my first ever participation in the 48 hour Ludum Dare competition, and it’s time to take a retrospective look at what I did. The goal here is to spot where I made mistakes, where I did well, and what I can do differently in the future.

Let me start off by saying that I’m already very proud of how well I did. This not only is the first ludum dare I’ve done and completed, it’s also the first non-trivial game project I’ve undertaken and completed. That being said, there’s still plenty of room for improvement. Let’s see what happened after the bump…
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Sorted out my OS X port at last! Sadly will only work on OS X 10.6, but that is a limitation of the package system I’m using, not my code. Honest

Alpha Channel

Many thanks to Deps for building the application, since I don’t have access to a Mac (incidentally, his excellent entry is even better than mine!).

A little late uploading but I’ve not made a timelapse with quite so much in it before so that’s why =p

• Play/comment/judge/whatever The Game
• Watch the timelapse
• See all my LD18 posts (with progress builds of the game playable)

It was really fun making games alongside you guys again (even if I do frown a lot in the timelapse lol)

in unrelated news, I’ll be posting an announcement regarding the september mini at the end of the two week judging period, but the date will be the last weekend in September, so keep it free (and find a friend who hasn’t worked on a game before, they may come in handy for my rules )

I’ve updated my submission to include a post-compo edition, with bugfixes and some new features. list at submission page
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-18/?action=rate&uid=1844

First, I thought it might be worth posting all the images I made for the game:

(I’ve hidden one image above the second ship to avoid spoilers)

This LD was pretty much a dream.  I’d already decided I was going to be using watercolours for the graphics (since I’ve been painting with them quite a bit lately), and then on seeing the theme I had an idea for a game that would really benefit visually, and tie into my current reading habits (again, Jeff Vandermeer’s City of Saints and Madmen).  From there the whole thing went incredibly smoothly, with no major roadblocks.

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Sorted out some issues that were breaking the Linux port (CTD and corrupted font). Unfortunately, I had to change the font to achieve this, since a bug in the library I was using to render fonts caused the original font to be displayed completely wrong! I’ve updated the Windows version to use the new font, so every version looks the same.

Linux port

Alpha Channel

OS X port will be with you ASAP, as soon as a friend on a Mac comes online so I can bully them to build the .app file