I created a pre-packaged version of batcave for macos here.

Just a single zip file with batcave.app inside.

On windows and linux, you’ll still need to download the love2d framework separately.  My windows/linux machine decided to stop booting, I suspect that it’s jealous of the other woman (macbook pro) and is trying to get revenge.

Timelapse

So the Dare is over!

(It’s been over for a while, aye, but I was kinda dazed, and I started playing other people’s games for a while to restore myself.)

I think that this is where I mention the major problems that I had. But I really feel like I lucked out this time, because the creation went off without major hitches, and I even managed to adhere to a schedule (!!!)

Still, some notes:

• I’m still not exactly sure what kind of starter code we’re allowed to have. My starting code put me at about the same level as Flixel (but without map support), but that still disadvantages us to people who use things like game maker and get stuff like map support and room support built in. I don’t think I had all of that until halfway in!
• This was the best I’ve done with abstraction, I think (at least up until the last few hours where I was just cramming in fixes). It really paid off, too – the latter half of development was relatively breezy.
• I was insanely productive. This kind of game usually would take me around 2 weeks to make.

I’ll stop patting myself on the back now:

• My biggest problem by far was the lack of a good map editor. If you look at the timelapse, you might notice that it took me something ridiculous like an hour or so to develop a single map. Going back to make changes (of which I had to do several times) took a while too. Editing the raw data in Flash was atrocious because Flash just dies with that much text – I eventually switched to FlashDevelop, which is lightning fast. The good news out of all of this is that I have finally discovered how to solve this problem, and with it, another problem that I’ve wondered about for ages. Essentially, the tile editor must handle ALL of the output. My current setup was just outputing the raw map data, which I had to put into a class and hook up with exits to other rooms (which later led to nasty bugs). Editing maps and writing code should be completely separate activities. I really wish I could have made a more expansive world, and perhaps played around with the alternate world idea a little more. Ah well. I’ll be taking a few days to make my tile editor better (again)
• I never made a sprite for the main character and eventually just had a stupid smiling pixel. I need to learn how to do art better. I did some tilesetting a few months ago, but I never made characters. This needs to change.
• I didn’t have any animated things. I wanted to make the flowers move around, for instance, but I was preoccupied with other things, and worse, I wasn’t sure I knew how. Now, come to think about it, it’s not that hard, but it requires some more abstraction (yay!)
• The worst bugs in the game were related to collision detection and map transitions, two things that I should have (and could have) done before the Dare. Next time!

All in all, LD was a good experience. Makes me wish I could work at that efficiency all the time…

That was fun. And stressing.

I didn’t get my entry finished to the state I had hoped but submitted it anyway within the final minutes, since I think the visual puzzle aspect is interesting enough to play with.
click to view: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-19/?action=rate&uid=3278

Right away I seriously underestimated the time constraints, I started working on my entry Saturday afternoon (about 18 hours in?). I had a rough idea of what I wanted to create but I hadn’t done any work identifying individual systems I’d have to script or how it would all work together.

I basically jumped right in and started sorting out how I was going to create the visual effect that I was after, sort of a reverse camera-mapping effect but with geometry instead of texture mapping.  I needed to take a plane which had been cut into fragments of various sizes and translate the fragments outward towards the camera at random lengths, but while scaling the fragments in size so that when the viewer looks from the camera’s position they see the plane as if it were solid.   I had made failed attempts at this effect in the past so I had some existing knowledge about what was involved, but the difficulty in this was making it work for a specific viewpoint. A few hours were spent of trial-and-error, all sorts of debugging lines being drawn between points in space so that I could compare results and figure out what I needed.  It turned out to be simpler than what I thought when approaching it, but it still was straining on my poor and forgotten math knowledge. There very well could be an even easier elegant way out there involving matrix transformations and stuff.

I soon noticed that using a “raw” X Y mouselook for the player camera was too harsh, it seemed to reduce the impact and readability of the visual effect, so I began looking into lerping the camera. It helps a lot, and as a bonus makes input with a laptop track pad work great.

Soon after getting that working I descended blindly into an unexpected Quaternion hell where I also attempted to blend the player camera towards the “key” camera rotation when the Player was very near the correct position and rotation, as a way to assist in snapping to the perspective that solves a wall. I spent too much time on it and didn’t get it working right in the end, all I know is Quaternions have 4 dimensions and are inside The Matrix, instead I just opted to count a wall as solved when within X amount of the key position and rotation.  This leads to some problems where the Player never sees the wall fragments fully give the illusion of forming the wall, instead there are small gaps.  Thinking about it now however, I could probably just take control of the Player’s camera during the solved method and blend it to the correct view, creating a transition that feels smooth and provides feedback that the Player has just solved a puzzle, rather than immediately popping in the new room (as it does currently) which is jarring.

The next problem to tackle was creating a system to handle randomly placing the “key viewpoint” for each of the 4 walls, and handling the creation and removal of rooms.  By this point I had started working again Sunday morning and since I’d not planned out any order, my scripting began turning into spaghetti-mess with all sorts of back and forth checks, I was basically improvising everything as I went along.  There are some issues with the random placement at times, sometimes the fragments “spill over” behind the key viewpoint which means they won’t be in view for the player, so the player will see missing fragments (holes) in the wall when solving.

Next was the addition of enemies, the intent was to have enemies gradually spawning in from beyond the current room, slowly encroaching on the Player’s position in a way which would cause the Player’s tension to rise as they searched for a key to the next room.  Finding a key viewpoint would cause all enemies inside the current room to be destroyed, and the idea is that the speed and number of enemies would slowly increase the further along the Player progressed. Destroyed enemies would build up some sort of panic device which when activated, destroys all enemies in a radius around the Player, but potentially has some negative effects (maybe a temporary boost to the number of enemies spawning and a re-shuffle of the current wall solutions).

I didn’t get to that point, as the enemies were being added with about 2 or 3 hours remaining, and I spent the last moments generating some materials and colors to help give the entry a weird and potentially unique look.

Some of my disappointments with this entry are not putting in a placeholder title screen/state right from the start, along with a game over state, all future experiments will have that framework in place, as easy it may be to do, when you’re under pressure of a deadline it is very easy to disregard simple things that could assist in making your entry appear a bit more coherent. I also really wanted to get audio in, as it would have added a lot to the experience, looking back, I probably should have set aside the enemy stuff in favor of adding audio as the enemies are not very incorporated into the entry.

well, that’s about it, if you’re reading this I hope you found my entry somewhat interesting, I look forward to playing through the other entries and the future Ludum Dare compos to come!  I think I’ve learned a lot from doing this

I finally finished a time lapse video for my game The Last Moments. It looks like I was developing the game almost all the time but really I was doing a lot of other things on my second screen.

The Ludum Dare website doesn’t give you a great way to get notified of comments on your game. So I hacked together a bookmarklet to generate that RSS feed.

I’m having trouble keeping WordPress from mangling things, so go over here to get it.

Only really been at this since about 4:30pm GMT ( it’s just past 7:10pm GMT now ) but I’m making some quite good head way already!

It’s a simple game now.. coloured “germs” get pushed onto a dish. You need to group them together to clear them, before they start to rot. You then need to manage those buggers to stop them infecting the rest of them!
Some germs are better than others, of course! ( and worth more points to clear! )

Ironically, it’s been a game idea I’ve had for a while, just never got round to doing.. though the link to the theme is a bit iffy ( discovering which germs are better to keep on the dish longer than others.. *cough* ) but it’s better than sobbing in the corner.. again..

And yes, they look like Splodge with no .. err.. feet, I suppose.. bit pressed for time art wise now

Obligatory screenshot:

Might actually get a game submitted after all!

Yep, it’s now playable complete with some great retro noises courtesy of DrPetter’s sfxr. Got a few powerups (and powerdowns) in, with only a few left to implement (and a few more textures to draw)

It has been an odd LD mainly because of the flip from “no chance of getting done” to “actually this is doable”. Marathon code session this afternoon certainly helped I suppose!

So, the real fun is just about to start. I was so busy the weekend, that I haven’t even tried any of the in-production games.

Anyways, I managed to finish in time, 2 (sweaty) minutes before the deadline (as usual). My entry has ‘the alternative theme approach’, well, see for yourselves. I’ll love seeing 200+ entries, let’s hit 300 next time! It’s bee hard as hell to hit a Coolness medal this LD, but as I said, the fun is just starting and I’m looking forward to playing as much as my PC can handle.

PS. I’m too dlrrpy too uplooaaAAAAaaaaa… the tiemlaaaAAaa……..zZZZZzzzzZZZZzzz…..

My video doesn’t appear here :/ here’s the link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QcJVGEE-qBo

Here it is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkvtMDfrlUc (available in 720p)

I didn’t get screenshots of the last ~3 hours of tweaking, adding artsy fartsy text to the backgrounds and packaging, sorry!

(Is there anything special I have to do to link it to my entry, or is this it?)

A while after making the first bugfix for my entry, Case Closed, I found another, loosely related bug that caused the game to skip the ending entirely. That’s fixed now, too.

I’ve finally caught up with the sleeps, so thought I’d post a summary filling in the missing time, when I was busy crunching the last 10 hours and unable to post. To summarise the progress, and to try and make up for the fact that I couldn’t do a video timelapse, here are playable snapshot web builds showing my progress throughout the 48 hours. I only managed a mere 26 hours to dedicate to LD, due to other commitments but I had a blast! My work pattern can be shown in the following gif I just put together. ^^

Click on a thumbnail below to play a Unity web build of the development snapshot at the time:

Hope you like. Drop me a comment on my entry page.

Chapter I. Enthusiasm

First day. I’m full of enthusiasm.

Yeah. Discovery! Cool theme!

But, wait. I don’t want to create another Knytt Stories. Yes. I will make something really unusual! For example game about self-discovery when hero will goes through seven rounds of hell and he will found his love and then…oh, wait! I have only two days…

Chapter II. Stagnation

Wait, wait! Six hours! Damn six hours. And nothing. Stop. I must draw concept. Something unusual. Nobody must have it.

This is really unusual maze isn’t it!?

No. Of course. (more…)

Planet thing is done. Or not done, it’s actually so incomplete that it doesn’t even have a name. But you can download it and “discover” new planets. It’s kind of amusing and the results are sometimes pretty good (but often terrible).

I might try to turn this into a real game or sfxr-for-landscapes tool or something.  And send me the names of any cool landscapes you discover via twitter (@joeld42) or email.

It’s been fun!

Link to the program (please comment if you try it, even though it’s not elegible for voting).

There are now little cute boop effects when you click on blocks. Also, using blocks in combinations makes them become grey.  If you solve combinations fast enough, you can recover greyed out blocks. (Grey blocks can’t be moved)

Todo:

-Implement high-score board

-Make menu graphics better

-Ambient BGM?

Known bugs:

-None at the moment

So, it didn’t go as planned. What Ludum Dare goes as planned, anyway?

Primary problem this time around actually wasn’t time for a change. My basecode was incomplete by the time the competition started, and it stayed incomplete throughout the 48 hours. Halfway through the compo, I realized that I couldn’t even delete my entities from the game world! I almost started working without the entity system from then on, but luckily I was able to hack in a quick fix to the ES code. This constant incompleteness multiplied the time wasted on basic stuff and made is so I couldn’t finish.

What would I do next time? Have working basecode, or none at all. Either would have made me better-prepared for this LD.

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Now I’m trying to make the game what it was supposed to be.

First order of business: get rid of the magic numbers. I have quite a few of these floating around, and I want them exterminated. I might leave 32 around though, just because it’s so obvious. (Tile size.)

Then: Change renderable stuff so that it uses one scene graph each. At the moment I have three entities synchronizing their motions for the player, and this is NOT a good thing. Also, enemies would be much more dynamic after this change.

After that: make the level generation generate maps that actually make sense for where I’m taking this. This includes a safe “start room”, undiggable metal walls, and more clear “rooms”. Then I’ll work on all the other stuff.

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This game has actually been on my mind for months now, and it’s nice to get a forced start on it. Lots of refactoring to be done before I’m happy with it though.

Oh, I don’t think I mentioned this: online cooperative multiplayer is a future possibility, mostly because I’m using entity systems and I don’t think it would be that hard to synchronize state.

(My LD entry is here, for future reference.)

I just finished my game for the competition and was about to submit it with 3 hours left on the clock when the power went out. In my entire city. For around 12 hours. I’m not even going to enter my game in the jam, that’s just not right(you can even check my game’s “last modified date”). Great so when does LD20 start… never-mind, decided to enter it in the jam.

First thing : ZOMG I have wrote the worst code ever …

Two screenshots here :

You are the Red player and you start the game on a planet. Your enemy is Blue. You both can expand to neutral planets, accumulate more units with yours mother ships, fight for the possession of a planet, and kill each other =]

You also can make your own custom maps.

Since the last post I have deleted :

1. solar systems idea
2. zoom in / zoom out
3. camera movement

Todo

1. (ingame ?) Gameplay explanation / How to play
2. ships attributes depending on the planet
3. Some levels
4. tutorial (maybe)
5. check the Windows version

Timelapse as mentioned here is really short and pretty lame :  but i tried Its got some javascript, some c++ and some photoshop and sfxr.

This seems to come up in IRC every so often, so I thought I’d open up a discussion. This will not affect the current Ludum Dare event, but may affect future ones.

We have 9 categories that every participant is rated in. 7 of them are about the game itself, 1 of them is about how active/interesting you are here on the site (Community), and the final is how well you help out by judging the games submitted (Coolness). I think most of the categories we have are good, but agree there might be some room for some improvement.

Here are a list of the current categories, with descriptions as pulled from the rules page:

• Innovation – The unexpected. Things in a unique combination, or something so different it’s notable.
• Fun – How much you enjoyed playing a game. Did you look up at the clock, and found it was 5 hours later?
• Theme – How well an entry suits the theme. Do they perhaps do something creative or unexpected with the theme?
• Graphics – How good the game looks, or how effective the visual style is. Nice artwork, excellent generated or geometric graphics, charming programmer art, etc.
• Audio – How good the game sounds, or how effective the sound design is. A catchy soundtrack, suitable sound effects given the look, voice overs, etc.
• Humor – How amusing a game is. Humorous dialog, funny sounds, or is it so bad it’s good?
• Overall – Your overall opinion of the game, in every aspect important to you.
• Community – Journals, photos, timelapse video. Everything you do above and beyond just making the game.
• Coolness – Awarded and scored based on the number of games you vote for.

The comment that spurred this thread was the question “Why is Humor rewarded, but why not story and writing?“. To be honest, I didn’t have a good answer for that. One thing I’d like to do is keep us at exactly 9 categories, so that means perhaps reworking a category.

A good suggestion that was thrown out was change Humor to “Mood“. I like that as a catch-all for story and writing, but I don’t think it really does a good job in implying Humor. So my compromise idea is to suggest calling the category “Humor or Mood“. Picking the right word is tricky, since what we want is something that 70% of the people will implicitly understand, and for the rest there’s the descriptions in the rules. Feel free to tear apart or support my suggestion in the comments.

So if we’re discussing the future of Humor, we should really talk about Innovation.

Innovation is a loaded buzzword that seems to really lack serious meaning these days. After all, if a game is truly innovative, why can it be described as bluntly as “platform with guns”? I do think we need a category to really point out the games that stand out as distinctly different and refreshing though, so lets play with words. My initial thought was renaming it to “Innovation and Identity“, to imply it’s a category for what’s interesting and unique about a game … Then I realized, why not just call it “Uniqueness“? What doesn’t Uniqueness cover that Innovation does? Where does it fall short (and is it necessarily shorter than innovation)?

Those are the 2 main categories that I think could use some further thought and discussion. The only other thing that comes to mind is Audio. I like this category, and I plan to keep it, name and all. But we don’t seem to have a clear answer for games that have no sound. Should you score 1, 3, Zero, or not vote? What if there’s a glitch and sound doesn’t work for you (hopefully a rare case)?

So that’s the topic. Please, share your thoughts in the comments.