Happy new year to all of you!

I think my thoughts are sufficiently settled for me to write a blog post about how things went.

How things went: Things went well! I’m just about past the amazement that I actually managed to complete a game in 48 hours, and not only that, some people seemed to find it fun. It’s the first time I’ve went into an LD while in any fit state to do so. (LD#18 was 5 hours of focused work on a so-so concept, followed by me falling ill for nearly a week with something that had been creeping up on me for days.) I’m just lucky that my mistakes were partially countered by my good fortune.

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Hi all,

I am like everybody there trying to do my best to rate all the games I can. However, due to personal constraints I fiund it really hard.

The fact that I use a linux netbook at home allows me to rate the following kinds of games : linux based, flash based, wine compatible.

The problem is that there’s no way to know if a game fits these categories before going to the game’s page. I have to click on a page, scroll down ( thanks to my netbook super high resolution ) and discover if I can actually play the game.

I know, I know I could wait to go back to my office and launch all your wonderful submissions on my 90″ 3D extraLED screen on my wonderful Windows 7 mega pro 256 bits edition . But I am on holidays !! So I must wait next week to take time to do so.

Now, now, the idea I had is to be able to browse the game by label or tag. So I could know if the game works on linux, flash, mac osX, win7, unity, etc…

So I could focus on trying the games faster than light ! Well I would have to scroll down of course, but this would be really much better .

Okay, that was the idea. Please feel free to destroy it as much as you like or consider it is my 50 cents to the next ludum dare rating system…

2.0 ? Noooo, much better

Ya sneaky ludumrats, mate Bear made us a torrent HAR HAR ya wimpy coderers.

Nah be ya good lads and man the har har harpoons!

THAR SHE BLOWS!

All yer gams be thar me lads!

Hey everyone, hope Xmas and New Years is going well. I’ve got a great idea for a future challenge if you want something to during the January blues. OK here goes, how about we do a weekend challenge where the theme is ‘Finish Each Others Games’. The basic idea is that you take an existing game, it can be incomplete or complete, retrieve the source code and add your own elements/levels/art to it. The aim is to improve the game in any way you see fit. The end result should be a mass completion of unfinished games and vast improvement on already finished ones.

RULES

• You need to declare the source code you’re working from before starting so we can see the difference in the initial and finished games
• You can use your own source code from a past game if you want
• Team entries are allowed
• Many different participant/teams can work off one source code if they want
• Once finished at the end of the week we will vote for the best game.

A week late, but after a break here it is, a post-mortem and a more coherent version of my game.

Click here for the new and moderately improved version of HOMMage

My main goal for this competition was to develop social game within the 48 hours, or at least something that had the hooks for a social game.

When discovery came up as the theme I figured I’d rip off Heroes of Might and Magic, that way I wouldn’t have to focus too much time over the weekend on design, and could make this game, mostly a technological challenge…. Should be easy enough to get all these features done then eh?

Woohoo, all the design is done for me! Cake walk, right?

What I ended up with at the end of the competition was a nice start of stitched-together half-finished features. If you squint really hard, you can see the start of a HOMM style game, and I couldn’t been happier with the result. I wanted a nice little tech/scope challenge and to develop something that could transition into being a social game, this LD scratched both of those itches.

Hey, I still think it's pretty.

Positives

Goals, Planning And Scope

I had a clear vision of what I wanted for this LD, a HOMM style social game (ugh).

So I may have overshot a bit in my scope, but it broke down into simple milestones. Be able to navigate a hero around a hex map, unit management, combat other heroes, end condition for the game.

Having the design already done made the informal milestones a lot easier to place over the 48 hours. The last few game jams I’ve participated in I’ve tried to play around with exploratory gameplay and found it was even harder to wrap the jams up in time. In a lot of timelapses, and post-mortems I’m seeing a lot of the great games generally end up being the developer’s second attempt that weekend (It’s a Fricking Cave, Quarters). How do you know when to cut and run, when the funs not there, and wont be?

Timelapse

First time I’ve done a timelapse, and man was it fun. Nothing more motivating to actually get something finished for the competition then investing in recording the whole thing. Awesome fun to watch it and show it off to friends afterwards. It also goes a long way to keep you honest, you end up spending a lot less time slacking when you’ve got a camera focused on you.

The catlapse really tied it all together

Regardless of how useful or entertaining it was for anyone else, I loved it!

Choice in Tools

This is the first jam I’ve done that I’ve had experience with all of the libraries and tools I’d be using going into it. I find it so hard to apply Box2D, Flynt, or any of those fun libraries in my day to day that I figured a game jam is a great time to give this stuff a test run. And I mean it usually works okay for evaluating an engine.

On paper 48 hours is a lot of time, Ill get up to speed on whatever lib in 3 hours and It’ll be smooth sailing, this has never been my experience.

Tweenmax was a god send, simple tweens really easily took the place of more time consuming little effects (combat screen).

Community

Oddly enough I was pretty excited about my food photos, even if they were pretty mundane.

Loved reading LD posts during a competition, so many new types of technology to try out. It’s a Frickin Cave(totally have a crush on this game) makes me really want to take a look at MMF.

In previous LD’s I’ve picked up and used Musagi and SFXR, so I’m pumped to see what technologies I end up taking away from this LD

The only downside to the whole community bit was that I was so swamped with my scope that I didn’t have a chance to take a look at the IRC channel or to jump onto Mumble, hoping to do that next time around.

Negatives

Unintuitive Gameplay / Ease of Play

Biggest problem with HOMMage. If you haven’t played Heroes of Might and Magic, you’re completely lost. If you have played HOMM you’re only mostly lost

This really stuck out like a sore thumb, a lot of the comments I’ve gotten on the game have done a lot to echo it.  I wasn’t unaware, I realized how rough around the edges the game was, and provided a narrated play through. Ick.

Reflecting, I’m not sure if there was much I could do within the 48 hours to really lead the player along any easier, other than a detailed tutorial… I feel like this genre of game is so focused on user interface interactions that the amount of consideration it’d take to make this a pick up and play game for a casual user could not be accomplished in 48 hours.

At the very least I get to come away from this thinking a lot harder at the concept stage about how the user will interact with my systems.

Planning and Scope

I don’t know how I held any illusions that I would get this done:

“This game will be built with AS3 using PHP to make database calls.

• Finding the time to design and develop the DB structure and getting it working properly with AS3.
• Is my little tower enough of a web server to handle multiple games?
• Working with hexes and simple pathfinding.
• Simple AI in place of human players.

Initially the whole game will be single player with AI, I’m hoping thats not as far as it gets but well see how I can manage my time.”

!!!

Honestly? Anyway, even paring this down to the smallest scope that constituted as a game, it still would have been painful to polish it, let alone find time to put sound into it. Huge flop here in terms of making a game for the competition,  the sting is mildly dulled since I at least met most of my initial goals and motivations.

Art

I wanted to use my tablet for everything. Wasting time on the HUD by sketching it out on the tablet was a huge time suck. I figured even if the result was so-so, it’d give the game a little character. But no, no I was way off.

Even though the rest of the art wasn’t terribly gorgeous, I had a blast doing it, huge time suck though.

Castle Greyskull was totally worth it.

Interface Design

All things interface really kicked my butt here. “How should clicks act if the currently selected hex is ____ and the user clicks ____” trying to figure out a lot of the interactions and then implementing them consumed a ton of time that could have been spent polishing gameplay, or spent trying to make the game more intuitive.

Fun

After reflecting a bit, this stab at a HOMM style game just isn’t fun. Even the post competition version, is still just a neat tech piece and not really something people would want to play.

This really got me thinking about “fun”, and where it comes from in the HOMM series, and even in other strategy games.

Thinking about HOMM and other strategy games, you could say fun comes from the progression, building up a units, becoming a force within the system of game mechanics. Theres a lot of minutia there in making that an enjoyable experience, carefully balanced units, carefully balanced progression of AI opponents, and a lot of pretty window dressing.

Any fun strategy games I’ve seen as a result of game jams do well to avoid the majority of the genres trappings. Something simple like, setting up a simple top down map, and simple units with flocking behavior. Only allowing the user to point to where the flock should go. Or letting a user choose his units before the game starts, and once engaged the units will automatically interact with their environment.

With some time to reflect on it, I feel if you really take a hard look at the strategy genre, you can boil the core “fun” of a strategy game down to “conflict between units”. With the focus I spent in pretty much every other aspect, it seems like I may have totally missed the mark on this one.

Bottom Line

Even ripping a game off HOMM’s design, there are so many bits of interface minutia to consider that there was no way to deliver an intuitive quick to play game within the 48 hours, but the trip getting there was a blast.

Post Competition Build

Loved the comments I was getting, gave me enough motivation to bring the concept a little further along. Pretty strapped for time over the holidays but I came up with this build.

Added features:

• Fog of war.
• Working combat, more information.
• Working unit purchasing.
• Tons of small bug fixes.

I figured this would be about where I should have ended up for the competition. It does well enough to showcase most of the main elements of HOMMage.

Time consuming things I wish I could have added:

• Racial abilities.
• Abilities for the special characters of each race.
• Hero abilities.
• Enemy AI.
• Castle garrison combat.
• Title screen + tutorial.
• Items on the world map.
• Multiple heroes and castles.

You guys can play it here.

And just tacking this on here since it’ll be my last LD19 post. Big thanks to the organizers, you guys do an awesome job every LD of putting this together, the rating system for games is just awesome now. And a big shout out to the community, I’ve learned tons and garnered tons of neat things from posts here and there

I like to make platformers now and then. One thing I’ve noticed, though, is that they require a great deal of artwork. Developing Evening, I spent a solid three or four hours on just the artwork for the terrain and three or four more for sprites of the girl.

That’s time not spent on gameplay, time not spent on levels, time not spent on making it fun to play.

That’s just not good when you’re working in a 48h/72h time limit.

I’m thinking that from here I’ll probably be making less animation-intensive things. Not necessarily art-light games, but games with a lower art-to-content ratio.

Shumps come to mind, as do (very simple) strategy games. As well as puzzle games. But not platformers and certainly not fighting games.

Just some thoughts I had.

Peace

— Mr. Dude

I just found out how to add blog posts…bit late I know but I may as well.

So I’ve updated the collision detection mechanic in Wysp, it’s a little less bouncy now. I’m also in the process of designing more maps and thinking of new ways for players to use the phase mechanic and maybe moving platforms too!

I highly doubt these features will be implemented before judging ends though but I’d like to see this game through to completion.

I failed to finish anything at all worthwhile for Ludum Dare this time, but I did finish a game. I wanted to avoid making a game about the act of exploration because there’s already a million billion games about that, so instead I tried to focus on the fear of being discovered – the act of hiding, of obfuscating the truth from an investigating agent. The game I planned to make was like a cross between Pong and Battleships where both players tried to keep track of the ball’s location while hiding it from their opponent, but the short deadline, procrastination, and my poor technical abilities meant that I only ended up with a barely modified remake of Pong. It seems kinda ridiculous compared to some of the stuff you guys have been posting, but I’m pretty happy to have finished something more ambitious than a Wario Ware game.

Presenting: Turn-Based Pong. May or may not be more ambitious than a Wario Ware game.

Has someone downloaded all the games yet and ready to host a torrent of them? That would save a lot of time from a lot of people..

I’ve done it a few times, but I don’t have the time now.

When I decided to enter this LD, my rationale was thus: My weekend is free, I’ve always enjoyed the products of LD, and I’ve only ever created a “finished” game once. My end goal wasn’t to create a polished, high-quality game, but to just finish something. Something, hopefully, that could be considered a game.

I think I succeeded, and perhaps, on the way, actually made something fun too.

If you haven’t yet, play and rate here.

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I want to share some tought about my entry for LD19 : Land Of Fodnal

What went wrong

Scrolling constraints

I tried to implement a scrolling system where you have to select a unit to center the scroll zone. No other way to scroll map, so you have to build units to visit, and also you have to keep your units alive if you want to go back. Incidentally, if you loose one of your unit, your link to your main base is cut and you have to choose between explore back or go forth with what you have.

In theory it was ok, but in pratice the main system really look like a bug or some very bad control choice. Most of the player were trying to find key shorcuts or mouse control to scroll around, and I was not able to write a hint to describe a control you actually dont have… Ingame help is my biggest flaw, so maybe other gamedesigner could  have done much better with this.

Ingame Help

All is said, I knew I will mess up this part and I did.I hope  that many LD experiences will help me to correct my way of creating games.

Stress

The last 8 hours was a nightmare. The final 15 minutes ( didnt know about the 1 extra hour for submit ) I found a crash on the gameover sequence ! I added tons of aborigines on the map, to trigger gameover faster and have some tests. As soon as I fixed it, I uploaded my entry… with the test settings…

Really sad to see how 48h of work can be wasted for 5 minutes of overstressed debugging…

Interface

Creating game from scratch is fun. But spending hours for creating a button Class and aligning text really made me feel like I’m loosing my time. Maybe I will declare some interface libs in the next LD to stay more focus on the game creation part.

Writing post, read other people posts.

I intended to post step by step part of the game and I was totally unable to do it. Stress was eating me so much that I could not give enough attention to the LD blog, or even test the game of my friends that were working just next of my desk… Now I will catch up by testing the more game that I can ^_^

What went right

Minesweeper

Working on a minesweeper games is really entertaining .  I’m actually not a very good player at the classic game, but last year I played to the fantastic Onslaught of the Electrics Zombies and I had very good time with it. I was amazed on how the minesweeper gameplay could ignite some kind of exploration will. I also had good experience with Mamono Sweeper and Mine Tower. That’s why I tought that Minesweeper mechanic could be a good idea for the LD Discovery.

Sounds

Having to create sounds  was really exciting. In my everyday work I make webgame without sound because most of the users turn it off or even complain about it. Adding some sounds ( even just a bit ) in my LD game really feel like I’m creating a complete videogame. I was thinking it will cost me a lot of time, but it was easy and fast thanks to Sfxr. I also had a look to musagi but I was not able to make a good music ( need more pratice )

Play Tiny Hawk on Kongregate

This has been out for a little while now, but turns out I never announced the release here.

I made a game for Ludum Dare #11 by the name of Tiny Hawk. It placed #5 in the overall category, and I got a lot of good feedback on it. It was featured on some indie game blogs too. So yeah, it was a mild success, but I was pretty happy with it.

Fast forward to September 2010, when PoV announced the October Challenge. I decided I would try my hand at making a Flash game and getting it licensed through Flash Game License. At first I thought I would make a 1:1 port of the original LD entry version of Tiny Hawk, but ended up making a bunch of changes to the gameplay and making 32 all new levels. I do think it maintains the core of the original, but improves upon it. I was able to get a sponsorship deal from GameBods.com and the game’s also done decently well on Kongregate. I recently sold a non-exclusive license to Armor Games, where the game has been pretty popular. The game has been played over 300,000 times on different sites. The feedback has been a bit mixed, but some people like the game a lot, so I’m pretty happy about that.

This was the first time I joined a Ludum Dare competition. I thought I wouldn’t be able to finish in time, but somehow I made it. “Fate of Mankind” was the result of 32 hours of work. And now I’ll tell you about the ups and downs of the development.

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What went right

Pixels! I love pixels, I first started to animate the characters in flash, but somehow the animations went berserk and I decided to go with pixels instead. They turned out nice. I imported pngs and animated them in flash.

Tiled. An open source tile editor I’ve used before. Implementation if the fileformat went smoothly and the editor is pretty easy to handle although it has it’s quirks. If you download Tiles you can modify the game by opening data/map_0.tmx (make sure to set Tiled to save xml files and not binary).

Mapsize. I made a map that is 100 x 100 tiles. I was afraid that it would slow the game down but I think it has not. the size did make the theme more applyable.

Flash Develop. My choice of IDE for coding flash applications/games. It aids you oodles in code-generation, hints and snippets.

What went wrong

Discovery theme. I planned for key/lock gameplay but only managed secrets and crate-opening as discovery-elements. Although there is one weapon pickup.

Music. I don’t know how so it’s usually left out in my games.

Other notes

I forgot to add the 3rd party librarys in my source-dist. But fear not here they are.

Play & rate my game here: Dr Discovery

Ok, finally I released the timelapse video for 2011 – Last Ride of the Discovery. I used windows video maker after trying lightworks which I could not make to load my videos!? So no cool overlays Maybe next time!

Here is the timelapse and don’t forget to have a look at the game itselfs.

Merry XMas everyone!!

PS: 248 Games is really lots of work! I’m voting like crazy and only got about 40 games (yet)! Ok still some time left!

Updated my game a bit. I added a pause function – press P – also made some tweaks to the scoring, so you don’t get a score boost when falling from the top and you get less points when sliding.
All scores were deleted as it would be a bit unfair. So get playing and get on the table while it’s empty!

ALSO NEW MUSIC. Yes, you don’t get your ears raped by my attempts – well half. The drum loop is made by me, and the epicness you can hear on multipliers x5 and x10 is made by ganon95. Big thanks to him! I hope I can get a drum loop which fits the song a bit better soon :p

So what’s still to do is the “Respawn and fall in front of a platform” problem. Lets see what I can do there.
Also someone suggested, your multiplier keeps increasing if you are on x10. Any comments on that? Good/Bad?

GO PLAY THE GAME!

As always, the most up to date info can be found on my webpage http://www.blacktriangles.com

I haven’t had a whole lot of time, but trying to continue incremental progress on “Mothership”, I’ve been working on creating more interesting spaces. I’ve removed combat and minerals for the time being. Neither of these are playable (unless you really want them) since I’ve stripped them of game play elements. Right now I’m focused on the areas.

First I built a new “digger-bot” algorithm that works in 3 dimensions. By tweaking some of the variables it creates these trippy space islands which are kind of neat. They aren’t fun to run around in just yet, but I think it shows some promise.

I’ve also been playing around with a more traditional “rogue-like approach” which is to build interconnected rooms.

It’s funny that these take a lot more effort to build, and I’m not convinced they’re a whole lot better in terms of either gameplay or visuals. I think the digger-bot was and is a better choice but I am not going to abandon the room-bot until I make a playable space.

I know it’s not a lot, I apologize. I should have more time coming up soon to make bigger progress.

Whew! Lots of good stuff here. Somehow I doubt I’m making it to my goal of 200, but I can aim for 150! I’m done for today because my brother needs the bandwidth for TF2.

Also, I find it highly amusing that the 32nd game I played was develop32′s.

In case you missed it, Phil organized a low-key gift exchange between members of the Ludum Dare community. About 20 of us signed up, Phil put all our names in to a “virtual hat”, and forwarded a contact to each of us.

To keep it interesting, everyone was assigned someone in a different country — that way, we could send locally relevant gifts to each other. So yes, somewhere out there, a very Canadian bundle should be arriving soon.

Me, I was awakened today to the sound of the door ringing. As it turns out, the mail man arrived super-early with a package for me — a HUGE laptop sized box, covered in Deutsche Post markings!

What mysteries lie inside DAS BOXEN?

Lets explore the contents of this uber gift. (more…)