SUMMARY

AVOIDAL page here on Ludum Dare (for rating and comments!)

Gameplay Trailer (watch me score 1.5 million points!)

Watch my TIMELAPSE

Play the LD48 Official Compo Version of AVOIDAL

Play the Post Compo Version

I had a lot of fun this Ludum Dare! After missing the past few it was good to participate again for sure. I’ve never done one of these post mortem entries but I enjoy reading the other ones people post so I thought I’d take a crack at it.

POST MORTEM

You can read my detailed post mortem below:

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Only 10 hours left, let’s show some gameplay, while we refine it.

My gameplay video on youtube.

Not that anyone watches these, but here goes

I missed the deadline for the main compo, but I can still submit my game to the Ludum Dare Jam. The deadline is 24 hours after the end of the compo, so I have until 9PM tonight to finish this game.

After a good night’s rest, I woke up with bug fixes. Seriously, I was lying in bed, slowly waking up, and I thought, “Oh, yeah, I implemented cooldown for the entities after they attack, but I forgot to ensure that cooldown ends.” I fixed a crash bug which also prevents the creatures from trying to leave the world map. And I improved the exploration mode of the AI so that the entities should no longer wiggle or fidget. They pick a direction and go until they reach it. I found that the reason why the hero was getting stuck in place. It was due to the fact that I was checking if he had reached a very exact location, and with his speed, he sometimes overshoots it. When he tries to go back to it, he overshoots again, forever. I enlarged the collision detection box to compensate.

When I finished Iteration 4, I found out that accidentally implemented some stories from Iteration which deal with entities attacking each other. I’ve simplified combat so if entities are not in cooldown and are touching, they’re attacking. That implementation left Iteration 5 fairly moot. In fact, I decided to skip the remaining story in Iteration 5 which dealt with some nuanced AI that I’m not even going to look at, so I’m on to Iteration 6. You can see the backlog of skipped story cards under the Iteration card.

I’m pretty excited. It’s only 10AM, and I’m on the last two iterations. Iteration 7 is basically sound effects and packaging the game up, and frankly (and sadly), sound is optional at this point. B-)

hey guys just saying remember to vote!
my game http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-18/?action=rate&uid=2197

vote and play other peoples games!

I admit it – I already had a game idea coming into this compo, and then I took the theme and merged the two.
Here’s a retrospective post on how that happened…

A bit ago I read an article somewhere (possibly on the excellent www.designer-notes.com) mentioning that Civilization’s combat is actually it’s weakest point.
There’s not much strategy in the actual fighting – it’s mostly making sure you have a ton of decent troops in the area.
This set me thinking – how could you make the combat in (the excellent!) Civ 4 more strategic? Could you add flanking into something like Civ? I thought if they got that working for Civ 5 it would be totally awesome.

Then came Ludum Dare 18, with the theme “Enemies as Weapons”.
Bugger. All my thoughts of doing an abstract arty game with no baddies, no guns, and no nothing went out the window.
Probably for the best – I’m no artist.
How about a platformer where the baddies have guns, and you don’t – you have to move to the baddy and then can use their gun? For extra depth, maybe you have to get behind them before you can grab them & their weapon?

Could be good. But I’m already making one action game… I want to make something different. Something more like….. Civ? Bing! The two thoughts came together in a crazed shotgun marriage fuelled by ginger tea:

Civ with flanking, where you grab baddies from behind, and then can use their guns

You can see that my final game differs from this in places… but that was basically how I started.

My ludum dare Jam entry is called U.F.O. where you play with a UFO which have an absorbing rays which absorb any enemy and make it a part of it so it can use the enemies powers against other coming enemies

Hope to finish it soon
ScreenShot:

My game is almost finished, now that I’m working on a restful night of sleep. It’s got a heavy emphasis on the fact that it’s moddable, and as a result the actual game isn’t terribly long. I expect to get my entry up and available within the next couple hours.

Special thanks goes to LandsharkMeww for helping test the game and taking a look at its data files a bit and giving me a second opinion.

I’ve participated in a lot of game jams and spend many weekends not sleeping and rushing to get my prototype done. My Ludum Dare experience was completely different.

I started late Saturday and met up with a few friends who was working on their own entry. We had some coffee and started brainstorming. I had already realized that I didn’t have the whole weekend to work on my entry and I had also realized that I usually work together with people doing sound and graphics. This time I had to do it all in less time. This affected my brainstorming process and I came up with some very simple ideas. The one I stuck with was: Avoid homing enemies and make them crash into each other.

Concept draft

I’m a programmer, but I probably ended up spending more time doing sound and graphics. However, at the end of my Saturday I had a playable game. A simple game, but very playable compared to other entries. I showed a lot people the game and got some feedback. I’ve tried to sum it up:

• What do I do?
• It’s too hard in the beginning (very classic when you’re the only one who have played it)
• I don’t feel in control of what’s happening. It seems too random

I used the last day to perfect my intro screen with some better instructions and balance the beginning of the game so the player can learn the basics without panicking!  I spend a lot of time on the “straight targeting” robots (the red bullet like ones) to make it visible that they are targeting you. In the beginning they where big walking robots, but I made them into bullet like robots that pointed in the direction they were moving.

Cause the game mechanics felt kind of almost done and polished (for a 48 hour game) I started improving the visuals with shaking camera, particles, combos and pretty explosions.  I love particles and explosions!

The original concept in my head was about a horde of robots that was crazy in love with this cute little monster and wanted to hug it (which obviously meant hugging it to death), but I couldn’t really express that in the art and sound due to lack of skill so I ended up with the robots just trying to kill the cute monster. However, I kept the title  ”Robots <3 Monster”

Introscreen

Ingame screenshot

Ingame screenshot with combo

The final game can be found here:Robots <3 Monster entry

The OSX and *NIX ports of The Lair of Fungal Wonder are up now (and amazingly required no edits to get them to compile on the other platforms – that must be the smoothest porting of a game I’ve made to date).

I’ve also uploaded my timelapse, so you can see me making the game.  The only slight hiccup is I made the music and SFX on my other computer, so during that part you’ll have to make do with watching the screensaver.  Also I didn’t think to point the webcam at my paper while I was doing the watercolours, so for that part all you see is me hunched over, occasionally looking up with a paint brush in my mouth.

I’ll do a post-mortem later.

I’m going to call it good for this LD. At this point, I’ve got a long way to go before I’ve got a complete game. I don’t want to turn in what I’ve got, as it’s rather buggy, so there’s nothing from me.

It’s not for nothing, though. I discovered that 3D game dev is very troublesome on a netbook. OGRE3D is a monster to install, Irrlicht’s forced real-time clock caused big frame rate issues, and Panda3D just didn’t have the muscle I needed. I may get back to it once I’ve got a Real Computer, but it’s well beyond what this netbook can do.

I also discovered that Flash/AS3 is wonderful. Its learning curve is fairly shallow, and it’s still fairly powerful. I plan to use it in future LD’s and in my own projects.

I think I’ve finally learned my lesson when it comes to changing ideas half-way through a compo. I really created a problem for myself doing that. I’ll try harder to not do that from here on.

That said, good job to those who finished. I envy you right now.

Click for the full page of notes

Phew, finished my game last night at very much the last moment.  Above is the page of scribbled notes accumulated over the 48 hours – a mixture of design ideas and remembering how geometry works.

Post mortem style words after the ‘more’ link.

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Hi,

Since the competition is over (good luck jam people!) I thought I’d share some of the lessons I learned during the 48h in the making of HOME.

What went right:

1. I got a complete, working game. As someone who started many projects, but finished very few, this is the best thing about LD for me – I actually FORCE my self to finish this, and it rocks! It happened in LD17 as well, but this time was as good!

2. I think the style and general feel of the game is quite good, and as I intended. Everything runs fast and smooth, and has this vectorized look, which I like. Although I implemented this using sprites, it look quite crisp IMHO.

3. Music turned out to be atmospheric as I wanted it, maybe a bit boring, but it’s background anyway…

4. The code (available, of course) is surprisingly neat – it only started getting messy towards the end.

What went wrong:

1. Gameplay – I think the whole tractor beam mechanism is not fun enough, and not really necessary for finishing the game (although it helps) – this is both due to the physics code which should have been tweaked more, and possibly the general game idea.

2. The game is WAY too short, it’s not that easy (sometimes it is, depends on random values) but you can finish it in under 30 seconds if you’re lucky. not good.

3. No sounds effects! This is actually a technical issue, something weird with how clanlib handles sounds – I got the music to work after a LONG time, but sound effects were very problematic. ANYWAY – you can’t hear anything in space.

4. I wasted a lot of time of getting rigid body collisions (spheres, actually) which I didn’t use – it’s a shame really..

That’s it, I think.

You are welcome to play my game and of course, VOTE!

Can’t wait for the next LD!

Daniel

I just uploaded a Time lapse of the making of my entry, Illusion.

Enjoy. =]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTa6tyEp_mI

My entry is found here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-18/?action=rate&uid=1066

Here’s my timelapse, for my entry “Fratricide”:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNui4u02JK0

I’ll have a postmortem and some general thoughts sometime in the next day or two…

In the meantime, I might make a quick game for the jam too… just got an idea and I have some assets I could reuse.

Trust your Enemy

…train them and then use them!

Lets get into some details…

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I decided to record a gameplay video of my game Defend Your Glacier.

I was going to record clips and edit them together but for some reason my video editors can’t read the AVIs put out by my screen recorder. =< Also forgot to record from speakers and recorded from my microphone instead. ;-; But anywho, the video's here.

Should skip near the end, as it starts out slow. =P

Defend Your Glacier Entry Page

Some of you were having problems figuring how to play my game because of the complexity and the lack of tutorial, so here’s a two parted video of me playing it:

Part 1

Part 2

Anyone know how to do a youtube embedding? (i promise to be a nice boy and put it after the more tag!

About time, too!

clicky

Hope you like my music choice