Yep finally posted. I used some unliscensed music, but it was already too lowres to include on the wrapup, so I strike out on two counts. Sorry, shoot me.

Also some notes on my game, for next time I decide to participate. Also this comprises what I saw other people doing that I would like to rip:

• Flash, Flash, Flash. I need to learn it and use it, or else not many people will play it (my game). Even though I could theoretically release my entry for iPhone today, the tradeoff for lack of feedback just isn’t worth it
• Trigger Mechanics. My game is effectively a cross between mario and guitar hero for the first three levels, but the player doesn’t have quite enough agency about when the notes trigger. I could fix this by changing the sound triggers from platforms that the player stands on to switches that the player needs to throw. I was really overloading the verb “positioning”.
• Play up the cool part. I didn’t get to the cool part of the game until about 3 hours before the deadline. As such I didnt get to tune it, and it makes it not very cool. My opinion of the cool part is the player ability to reposition the area around the goombas so that you can make a goomba sequencer. It needs more messing with though, because right now the goombas really trigger too much.

Any who, here is the utoob.

Happy x-mas everyone!

Following on from what I made in the compo, I’m going to try and build upon it’s underlying ideas and concepts. Currently, I’m experimenting with moving the core of the game over into a Unity project… slowly getting there

Yep, slowly getting there

Currently on my check-list of things that (I think) would be awesome for the game:

• Multiple “floors”
• More use of lighting
• More interesting turrets
• Better level transitions
• Level editor (A must )
• Treasure

Once I’ve got the basis of it working in Unity, I’ll post a test build of it and some more info about what I’m trying to get out of it

or, A Million Ways to Ruin a Good Idea

nice pants, shorty

Last Things First – The Conclusion

This game (“Lost Races’ Abandoned Artifact Recovery“) failed. It is not fun (actually rather boring). It fits the theme, but not in the way I wanted. It does not transmit the information intended. It is not very funny, either.

In short, the game does not live up to any of the goals set. Let’s go over why.

The Concept

This is the only part of the game I am proud of, even if it is not reflected in the finished product in almost any way. You take the role of an exploring astronaut, scavenging old, abandoned machines and technologies left behind eons ago by advanced races (now extinct). This mechanic alone may have been interesting, but there is another twist: whilst you are busy discovering and cataloging these machines, another technologically-advanced race is monitoring YOUR progress.

I was struck by this model of double-discovery as a good take on the theme, and something that would probably be rather original. The game wouldn’t explicitly tell you that you are being watched, rather it would become clear as you played. (Also, if your actions arouse too much attention, you are destroyed.)

I decided to go with a mechanic that requires the player to upset a random distribution of “glowing stones”. As the player organizes stones around focal points (the artifacts), they are unwittingly making their presence known. I show this by using a minimap in the lower right-hand corner, which actually represents what the aliens see on the planet.

Daniel recommended using negative entropy as a measure of organization (defined here), which worked very well. I built a quick proof-of-concept in MATLAB. It’s like a poor-man’s pattern recognition algorithm, and Flash was able to do it reasonably quickly.

For the same number of points, entropy is reduced as they are clumped up

Another thing that spurred me forward: I don’t know of any other game in which the minimap plays a key part of the mechanic.

The Riddle

This is my fourth Ludum Dare competition. This compo marks one year since I made my first game, for LD16. If so, why, oh why, do my tilemaps look like this:

I know retro is in, but Windows 3.11???

Why? WHY WHY

The Failure

Ultimately, despite the good concept driving it, the game failed to communicate what was necessary.

The scary voices I added were ambiguous to the players. Along with the “alien” writing (Wingdings), they were meant to correspond to the interest level of the aliens, ie. how organized the playing field is. Similarly, the minimap was not recognized for what it was, and I was asked “why doesn’t the player appear on the map?”.

The graphics were very, very ugly (except maybe for the astronaut’s helmet, which I liked).

Evidently, the algorithm failed as well. Depending on the random starting layout, entropy would drop at different rates as clumpiness was achieved. Also, I couldn’t account for different player styles, so maybe clumping differently had an impact on the measurement. In any case, people could play through the game without losing and without knowing about the Overwatch aliens. To these players, it was a boring, repetitive game with no point and no reward.

Random distribution - no alien threat

After player "organizes" the stones near artifacts - high risk

To players who lost, I doubt they understood that if they redistributed stones after discovering an artifact, they could avoid the aliens’ attention.

Ironically, I thought of a great way to improve it, after the competition was over. Instead of piling stones on top of artifacts, the player should uncover them from beneath mounds of stones. This is more intuitive, and might be coupled with a physics element to provide a less “grindy” feel. Unfortunately, I don’t have time to test it out.

Dear Eli: For Next Time

• Try to make a SIMPLE game that does ONE THING and does it WELL.
• Don’t bother with forced artsy concepts that hold up an entire game. Maybe these concepts need to be built, but maybe they don’t need to be in game-format. Maybe it’s the wrong medium. Maybe.
• GOOD GRAPHICS
• If completing the game does not provide satisfaction, there needs to be something more than a title screen that says YOU WON!!! on it.

Hope I do better next time. Thank you for reading and I apologize for making another non-fun game.

By the way: if you have read this far, then YOU WON!!!

Maybe.

I wanted to easily access a list of games that were available to be played on Linux. So I wrote this userscript at the behest of LegacyCrono in #ludumdare.

You need Firefox and Greasemonkey for this.

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/93455

When you visit this page, it will be … better.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-19/?action=misc_links

And you can trust this script doesn’t just vote up my game because I failed to submit one… again :\

I’m pleased to announce that Volatile, my Ludum Dare entry, has been reviewed on the popular Game Maker Blog!

You can find the review of Volatile at this link! It’s quite in depth and certainly accurate.

Thanks Phillip!

So I finally managed to edit up the timelapse video. I wanted to make an audio comment and actually had two tries on that. But as my voice sounds face-punchingly dull and boring, I decided against it, ending up just adding some royalty free music I found by searching the net.

So click here to see my timelapse.

Previously, i posted #1 over here

Iv posted a timelapse, a post mortem, a final submission and i am now finishing the games levels and style as i was aiming to.

Pass 2 level image

Pass 2 level

More information soon

I just received my LD Gift Exchange gift today. It’s a Glasgowbury 2010 music festival programme on a lanyard.

The programme has five parts, for all the different stages at the festival. “Small But Massive Main Stage” in dark red, “G Sessions Stage” in bright red, “Spurs of Rock Stage” in pink, “Eagle’s Rock Stage” in orange, and “G Spot Stage” in yellow. The backsides are all black, with the venue logo and the slogan “Small But Massive” in white. Some of the listed bands include names like “Panama Kings”, “Team Fresh”, “Little Hooks”, and “Henrietta Game”.

The lanyard is 90cm long, black and has the venue logo as well as the words “red square” in white.

The accompanying letter written by gift-giver Grieve has nice lines to write on, and a pink margin line on the left. It also has holes for easy storage in a binder.

I’ve managed to plow through and rate 40 games most of them today. I’ve got a headache of gaming joy now =)

…Time to stop for a bit I think. Atleast until after I have some edibles ;P

My timelapse video for Q-Bers is up. In it you’ll see my kids working on computers too (actually they are playing games).

more goodies

woo thankyou, mystery santa!

This is a message from the ministry of love and sexual affairs.

My first ludum dare, my first post mortem. What an amazing experience this was! I had an absolute blast and can’t wait to do this again, though it might be a while before I’ll be able to find the free time. Also wanted to say that I love all your feedback. Thanks for trying my game and leaving comments.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-19/?action=preview&uid=2925

What went right:

I made a game! – About 10 work hours in, I realized that if it wasn’t for the competition, this was precisely the moment when I’d normally stop on a hobby project and leave it unfinished forever. I am so glad for the external pressure. Thanks, Grandmaster Ludum Dare!

20×20 and the 1 screen game – I am a programmer, no arguing it. This means I’m not an artist. Limiting my assets to teeny pixels really helped keep those limitations from being the focal point of the game. Not to mention I saved sooooo much time by not having to deal with mechanics like paging, scrolling and camera.

Design Up Front – I’d decided that I was going to spend two hours designing on paper before I wrote any code. This was tremendous. I managed to go through several crappy designs

No Level Design – I’m a huge fan of Lost Garden. If you’ve never read it, it’s one of the best design blogs I know of. Anyway, I’ve really been convinced to push for ‘evergreen design’, that is, design that can be played forever, not driven by ‘once through’ content. Besides, I’m not a very good level designer. It was really hard to shut off all the possibilities of level based games from my design thinking, but in the end it was worth it.

Polish Last – I tried really hard to keep myself on task and spend my effort on mechanical completeness more than anything else. Probably 75% of my polish came in the last hour of the competition. I’m pretty sure that if I’d tried to polish each mechanic and feature I’d have never finished at all.

Making lists – Each night I would make lists of all the features I needed to implement next. This really helped me keep priorities focused and not to go down the rabbit hole on anything.

Lucky Tuning – I am so lucky my game is playable. The tuning was all guesswork and I didn’t even get to play it more than 2 minutes before submitting. It’s actually not bad!

Skip Audio – Yes it’s nice, but a playable game seems nicer.

What went wrong:

Time – I had planned to only work about 20 hours in this competition. I have a family and also my sister and brother-in-law were in from out of town, so I was expecting fairly limited constraints. That being said, I had even less time than that. By the end of the first day, my game wasn’t even mechanically complete and I was feeling pretty low. The last day I slept in accidentally and only managed to get 3 hours in between everything that was going on

Last Minute Purpose– Even with my design up front, I still had no idea what the purpose of the game was until the last hour. Discover the green planets is what I came up with. Funny that I didn’t think of a goal related to discovering until the end. I tend to get a bit ‘mechanics focused’ as a designer. This was very risky.

Shops are so complicated – I went through three iterations on the architecture for my in-game store before finally getting it right. It was terrifying and took up at least a third of the total competition. The end result was the ability to arbitrarily upgrade statistics on the player object, but it took way too much time to get there.

Chopping Block – Some things didn’t happen. Pink planets are completely pointless, which is so frustrating because they are huge and at the fringe of the galaxy and you just want them to be awesome.  Lots of stuff just didn’t make it.

Lack of feedback – Every time I watch someone play my game I cringe a little. They understand the game, but there’s just not enough feedback to keep them from making silly mistakes or getting stuck unnecessarily. The vast majority of the feedback that’s there went in during the last 20 minutes of the competition.

Need more Engine – This was my first time ever working with HTML5 and canvas. I spent about 3 days building up some really basic example code for drawing things, handling input and preloading images. Wow I really wish I had spent more time building up a library for this. Particularly for UI elements like text controls, popup windows, etc. I sunk so much time making quick hacky versions of what was essentially library code that could have been spent on the game instead. Next time I’ll be more prepared.

What’s Next:

There’s so much more I could do to make this game awesome. Here are some of my plans:

Better UI – More than anything else, the game just needs better feedback. Tell you when you’re running out of fuel or armor more clearly, show tooltips on all the things in the world, give you enemy stats before you get in a fight, tell you the resources a planet has to offer, better rollover highlighting. Infinite time can go here.

The Money Game – Credits should only drop from enemy ships and never from planets, changing the money game dramatically and giving you more reasons to hunt down enemies and fight.

Resource Distribution - Create variations of the green planets that drop different resources instead of all planets dropping all resources. I want you to have to hunt for the resource you want to get the upgrade you’re targeting

Tuning – The resource tuning is probably a bit high, especially around the edges of the galaxy

Audio – Learn how to do audio in HTML5 and add audio to the game.

I’ve been playing the games like there’s no tommorow since the compo ended and I found some really interesting stuff. Some are better, some are worse, some are prettier and yada yada, but I like to see myself dragged in some of the entries up to the finish! I am a bit dissapointed that so many games still lack sound / music. It’s better with sound thaks to DrPetter’s sfxr, but music is a scarce. Maybe a tool for that one would be useful aswell? Well, I probably won’t have much spare time after christmas, so I’m going back to playing before my brains bleeds out.

Also, [by looking at the games] I suppose that a proper sh*tgame is sometimes better than an unfinished materpiece.

So, Im attempting to do a review of every single game that I possibly can, and Ive dont 39 so far.

You can read them in the mean time, and I will keep this post up to date (as much as I can) and in the end I will list which games are in which post.

1 to 10

11 to 20

21 to 30

31 to 40

I went to go check up on comments for my game, to find that my entry disappeared. Wonderful! Anyone have any ideas on how to fix this?

I started off by doing some python stuff to make directories with links to each game’s page. So after that, I would just have to download stuff, open the zip, and drag it into the folder. It works well enough. Except it’s really boring.

I got around 2/5 of the compo entries done before stopping. You can get the partial (255MB) file here: ludumdare_torrent_partial.zip

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to download this file, complete the archive, and start it up as a torrent. I’ll help seed.

(If you’re crazy/bored enough to do this, leave a message in the comments so we don’t get two people doing the same work at the same time. Wouldn’t want to waste anyone’s time. )

http://sarah.draknek.org/Games/CompactDiscovery/MostRecent/

I will be using this link to host the newest versions of Compact Discovery until the end of the competition judging. After that I’ll be merging the original LD submission with the newer copy.

I’ve been continuing to add new features and secrets to my game after the Jam version. For those of you who are fans, I encourage you to check out the latest version here.