After a few hours of trying to get an idea I felt satisfied with I started coding a basic screen system hoping to get an idea while working. It worked and off I went. From then on things flowed nicely and I had very few places I got stuck. I didn’t have enough energy to work as long as I had planned on Saturday (~9hours effective work) but I made up for it on Sunday by putting in over 12 hours. I still had to cut a few things I had hoped to include, like a better level and scoring system, but over all I’m happy with my result. It was a great experience and I’m really glad I tried it and managed to finish!

The “effective work” times above were calculated from the number of screen shots generated by my little screen capture program I wrote the day before the compo for making a timelapse. I only had it running while actively working and I turned it off for even small breaks like when trying to figure out what to do next or working out some maths. Screen shots were taken every 12 seconds and with 6429 shots in the folder that amounts to about 21.43 hours of effective work during the 45 hours from when I started to when I submitted.

Here’s the resulting timelapse: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6rGl6lPxSk

[ Go to entry | Watch timelapse ]

My game turned out to be a vaguely steampunk-ish exploration/management game in space.

I can’t believe I finished this! Aside from the lack of sound, the game is more polished than most of my Pyweek entries, and those get 7 days. I was very surprised that I managed to implement everything on my list without cutting features. I’m actually kind of impressed with myself.

Having said that, it’s not a great game. It’s not very fun and it’s not very innovative. If you like exploration in games as much as me, there are some cool moments, but you have to work to get them.

The gameplay complexity is added gradually throughout the game. I think I should have front-loaded it, because I expect that people will quit after 10 minutes without seeing the whole game. People who play for less than an hour probably won’t get the full experience, and I know that’s way too long to expect someone to invest in a LD game, especially when there are hundreds to play! Oh well….

This is now the third game I’ve made that’s basically a rip-off of one-quarter of Starcon 2. One more to go.

What did I learn? I need to learn how to generate sound and music for the next LD. In Pyweek you can use sounds that are freely available. I forgot this wasn’t allowed until the last minute, so I had to disable the music I put in. I may upload a Jam version that includes it. Also, python + pygame is great, but it’s time to learn another language for making games.

Thanks to everyone involved in putting this competition together, and good luck to all the contestants!

Finally got the timelapse of me creating my entry uploaded to Youtube. You can find it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLYye9zr32s

I created it using Chronolapse, set to take a screenshot every 6 seconds. The video was encoded at 30FPS. Given the length of the video, this means that I spent almost exactly 16 hours working on my entry; more than I had hoped for, but a lot less time than I actually ‘needed’. Oh well.

Just a quick reply to the comments on the submission so far: I’m glad you’re enjoying it! I could go and add to it for a Jam version, but I’d rather not. Don’t know why.

Also to commenter Devenger: not sure you mean about getting stuck near the right-most altar. Just go back through the tunnels?

Now for the post-mortmem:
I made one huge mistake right at the start of making the entry, with regards to how the terrain was stored. I stored each screen as a quadtree of blocks. Moving off-screen triggered swapping out the ‘current’ quadtree for the appropriate replacement, and sending the player to the other side of the screen.  What I should have done was store the entire world as one big quadtree, and just had the camera snap to fixed positions – or not. Really, if I could go back and chance one thing it would be this.
See, if I hadn’t done this I could have had my original winning conditions – collecting four ‘orbs’ instead of just seeing the four altars – in and working instantly. As it was, I had to scrap that because of my lack of time. Also, making one continuous world would have allowed me to grant the player special abilities after getting each orb – digging through walls, a jetpack, etc. – something that would have just raised too many problems with the current setup.

Art-wise, I can’t really complain – I was at the limits of my artistic ability as it was. I might have tweaked around with background colours and water tiles if I had the time, but I can’t see myself doing much better.

Sound… the sound effects are fine, I think. SFXr is a fantastic tool. The problem was background music – I have no idea how to create it, and it’s something I need to check up on for next time. I was going to use WolframTones, but that only produces MIDI files ( I can only play WAV ). Oh well.

At the start of the competition I considered how to use the theme best ( you can see this on the timelapse video). I didn’t have a decent game mechanic in mind, and trying to do it through story would have meant spending far too much time creating a GUI that could display the story (text). As it was, I decided to go with atmosphere – and I think I just about pulled it off.

If you haven’t yet done so, please try my submission “Quest for the 4 Altars”, and tell me what you think.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-19/?action=rate&uid=1886

Firstly, here are some links :

My submission

some other posts

Well,

First off – Timelapse. While i tried my hardest to get this to play nice it caused more trouble than it was worth and i was more intent on finishing. So, i only ended up with about one day maybe of timelapse. Ill post it anyway, lots of random rubbish there.

Secondly – What my goals were and what i didn’t achieve, and what i did.

A) Goals.

The original concept – “The Discovery of game development” ie  ; the character is me ( i tend to wear a tie all the time).

The character would go through the phases of game development, seeing each department in this large company and thinking how cool it is, making it to a small apartment with a laptop , and discovering game development for himself.

The second concept – “Discovering you are inside a game” ie ; The current

I changed to this about half way, not really enough time to go with all the mechanics i had planned. I was attempting to mix platformer and point and click adventure, where you explore with look/use and could move things, break things etc. A few minor hurdles got me with the last 5 hours to finish the gameplay side and stop working with all the planned options.

The story as of now :

You are suddenly spawned into an unknown world, a realistic surreal place that your pixel eyes cannot begin to understand. A small mishap perhaps but a broken console in a pool of coffee somehow extrapolated too worlds – colliding what is defined with what is real. Your journey starts here.

The missing elements :

The bugz. They were from the game world, escaped along with you into reality. You must collect them (they are hidden all over) and drop them off in the programming department.

The environment . Alot of the point and click world is missing its interaction. This is just a limitation of time and i plan to implement all the pointy clicky things soon.

The other 6 levels. There were 6 more levels, and a final rooftop (where you fought the boss). These should be easy to add with less pressure and with the working mechanics.

The boss battle. This was something i threw in randomly. When you discovered you were in a game, you met with the evil publisher guy who decided to change everything about you. Your hair your colors everything. In order to regain your originality and to be who you are, you must destroy him. As his health drops pieces of you are dropped to collect. So,  imagine platformery gameplay with projectiles (water cooler dispensed plastic cups) and mostly avoid and attack, no real combat per se.

What went right :

1) Planning something scalable. Going from 12 levels to 6, removing erroneous stuff was easy. I did most of the pruning along the way so i am glad i chose something scalable.

2) Writing alot of the tech specifically for this game. Instead of aiming for super flexible etc i just coded what was needed. I have trouble with this a lot before.

3) More time on code than on art. I finished all of the major mechanics i had planned barring projectiles (i did have a working prototype where he throws a handful of pixels from his pocket)

4) I had a crapton of fun.

What went wrong:

1) Leaving gameplay elements till last, interactivity is super simple to implement  but its lacking because of other things (like text messages etc)

2) Plenty

Thats all i guess. I can only hope to do something better next time but that isn’t to say that i am not happy with my submission

Thanks!

I was excited as always to participate in LD. After 2 years java I switched to Unity3d. But that didn’t prevent me from making the same mistakes as every time. I had an idea and started directly coding. Hey, it’s only 48h. No time to think ;D

As soon as I heard ‘Discovery‘ as theme I had the spaceship in mind. Spaceship -> Planets -> Gravity -> Resources . So that should be the four main points for my game. I wasn’t so sure how to handle. At first I wanted to let the player control the ship all the time but somehow that was no real fun and I couldn’t find a good setup. After 8h work I realized the ‘Keep it simple‘-Rule (that I seem to ignore quite often) so I decided to restart the project! So that you have only different parameters to setup like direction and speed of the ship and fields of gravity of the planets. That worked quite well, although you have to try and error at the beginning after a time you get a feeling on how to change the setup to control the ship. The one major problem is that simulation is much too slow. You see the result of your change much too late! I realized the problem but had no time to make a 1:1-simulator that fit. Too bad.

Nevertheless if you see what I have done in the last two years this is by far my most game like LD-Submission. So what are the next steps?

- Create a Timelapse

- Show a quick time simulation. Somehow this would make the other slow simulation senseless ;D But who cares. So I will include the ‘Evolution’-Theme (beside the ‘Discovery’ and ‘Title includes a Year’) to mutate my game until it is even better.

- Online Highscore

- Level-Editor

- Make it clearer what the goal is! As I showed the game two different people and noone took the time to read the shitty tutorial ;D I think that is common (I wouldn’t do it neither ;D )

Actually I don’t have too much time to make something for the jam! Hmm,…I have 4h! Let’s see if I can do something.

BTW: Here is the link! Play it

So, this looks like the second Ludum Dare where I might not finish anything for.
Certainly not for want of trying this time though; however I never really made it off the starting line!

With about twelve hours left of the Jam, I have two choices:
1) Drop what I’m working on and start afresh – and ignore what I’ve spent all weekend banging my head on the table with.
2) Hope that I can fix it/work around it quickly to carry on with my original plan.

Somehow don’t see (2) working out that well, so giving myself a final five minutes to have one last root through this issue, and going for option (1) .. which means a MUCH simpler game.

Oh and failure is of course, not an option!
I’ll go down kicking and screaming with keyboard in hand, if I have to

First time I’ve seen a timelapse of my own work before… kinda interesting.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLZgdqBpL7U

There was a bug that prevented you from getting past one scene and as a result you couldn’t reach the rest of the game, it’s been fixed now.

After have fought against mencoder’s options (the manual is far too dense, too many options), I finally uploaded it to YouTube. It’s still processing it for now, but should be available soon…

Here’s the video:

Bye ! See you all next time !

Play NOW

Mini bombing game.
Will add scoring later today.

Tested in Firefox & Chrome (absolutely no IE).

Well, thanks to that magic that is called adding in cheats for the purpose of debugging, I completely missed the fact that one area was impossible to get out of without it. Essentially, the area isn’t showing the clues and in order to get to the next you have to find a certain number of clues. I can fix this, right? :/

The game is here. It’s like a retro arcade game with a twisted approach to the theme “discovery”. I spent about 32 hours working on it. I’m so happy that I finally submitted it in time.

good parts:

• game play is implemented as I expected.
• I draw the set of sprites all by myself(I never draw so much before).

missing parts:

• particle effects, score display with every hit.
• more mob types.  It seems that time is never enough in LD.

Also congrats to everybody who submitted their games! We’d be busy rating games for some days.

I’m taking the opportunity to learn some new production methods, and hoping to have my game ready tonight to enter into the jam!

I just realized that the online version is a test verstion…

There’s way to much aborigines ( I was testing the game over sequence ). I was not intending to kill the player at the first error.

I dont know If I can modify my entry or not. If I could I would be happy, but It break the 48h rule…

Here’s the correct version : fodnal 1.1

Please let me know if I can replace my entry with this one ( juste one line was deleted from the original version )

I’ve decided what exactly I’m trying to get across with my game. It’s a metaphor for what I experience when I learn a new skill.

Majority of the code is done, as is most of the character art. Still need background, the remaining character art, and a couple other bits. Will actually likely be done by the end of the jam.

Here’s a screenie of what I’ve got:

It's a metaphor for something else. Art!

So there it was again, LudumDare. I shouldn’t have been working at the same time, as there were lots of distractions, and I should get together with other people again to have more motivation

At first, the theme seemed to me like a revival of ‘Exploration’, LD 16. A peek to wikipedia showed me that ‘Discovery’ can be taken as that, but also as ‘to discover something new, not in the sense of exploring’. So I really tried to do that, not going into the direction of exploring (large areas) at all.

the idea came fast. it’s similar to a minigame that you can find in Pokemon Pearl/Diamond, where I spend hours running around. Then the rest was coding and a lot of drawing.

Coding is luckily not the problem. Ruby is very fast to write, Gosu nice to use, and the rest is up to me. No time -> hardcode. There actually is hardly any code, about 600 lines and that’s it. But the drawings ate up a lot of time. I also didn’t managed to do all the drawings. I wanted to have more, to animate everything slightly, and (of course) I also wanted to colour everything. Especially the win/lose-screens lack text, colour and animation. I probably could have done it with a bit more time

So that was it again! let’s have a nice time judging and playing around!

Yep, I’m getting somewhere now. Dumped the use of real lighting in the wee hours yesterday and instead I opted for distance based hide/show. Less fancy but gives a far more satisfying effect (the white light is torch light by the way and follows the crosshair). The red block underneath the cow is a little spinning thing to attract your attention (especially since the cows are billboards – so this will alert you of the cow even if the cow is at an extreme angle/paper thin)

Also, note the above is placeholder (read: google image) art. I expect an art drop this afternoon from my ‘artist’ (we both jammed the idea but neither of us are artists).

15 hours could be tight, but if I can get shooting in within the next hour I think it could actually get done…

Kind of sad to see two days of work reduced into this flurry of rapid inactivity

I just woke up, man was I tired!!

This was my first Ludum Dare and the first time I’ve started and completed (to my own meager satisfaction anyway) such an ambitious project. Originally I was going to write my own tech in C++ based around libcinder but luckily last weekend I ran a mock trial using Experimental Gameplay Project theme “Drawing” and realized that I would rather spend my time working on a game – not technology. To that end I decided to use Unity, and had spent the last week learning the ins and outs of this extremely impressive technology. Usually I’m not a fan of these out of the box engines, but I have to admit I am very pleased.

I started out strong, the first night I got the basic level generation working, as well as moving around the world. I had assumed that this would be the lions share of the work – how is it that no matter how much time we spend making games, we always underestimate the little things??

I wanted to add combat immediately, but felt that since the theme was “discovery” I should make sure to have all the mechanics involving that aspect of the game first. I quickly got the mini-map and mineral scanner working. The next key was victory conditions, I felt strongly the most important part of the game was making the player decide between self improvement and repairing the ship, so the next step was getting repairing the mothership and modules working.

This came together surprisingly fast, so much so that I took two hours off for a long lunch and re-watch some Rurouni Kenshin – I regret that now.

At this point it was Saturday night, and I felt I could start working on combat and making the game polished and feel like a real 3d rouge-like. I was quickly hit with a series of frustrations, all of which I now attribute to having gone about 30 hours without any sleep and my brain was addled. I passed out at 9 Sunday morning and woke up at 12.

Sunday was a mad scramble, I was constantly switching between MIDI sequencer trying to make sound effects (which never got in ), fixing and hacking a combat system (which I hate now, I really loathe it. I almost wish I didn’t put it in and just let it be pure exploration.) And putting polish elements like the ghost of a story I had imagined.

The title-screen, in case you didn’t realize, was supposed to be this dramatic slow motion re-enactment of the mothership crash landing haha. (Hint: I just put a spring on the ship and camera, randomly generated a map, and then dropped it slowly =p) I wanted to build particle effects, and fires, and have a red warning light … I swear it was all way cooler in my head!!

I wanted to track how many levels deep you went, make about a billion more modules, fix the combat system, make more enemies, make a texture or two =p, sound effects and more music, I also want to build a bunch of different floor and wall tiles to make the worlds feel more organic. Also, I have an idea for randomly generated height maps as planet side, and then you find randomly generated dungeons and then … and then …

.lol. ^^;

In any event, I AM proud, for a first time try I hope to have not made a complete fool of myself, even if I bit off more than I could chew, and even if I didn’t get to where I wanted to be – when do you ever? I look around at some of the other entries and feel a real sense of community, I’ve been making game for a long time in lots of environments, but I have to say that this has been one of the most rewarding experiences.

I know I’ve said this lots of times, in lots of places, but I hope the repetition doesn’t dull it’s intention. Thank you for the opportunity to contribute, and I am humbled and honored to have my game sit along side so many other projects of such creativity and quality.

I worked on my game and did lots of homework instead of Ludum Daring.
Dunno why.

Here’s the pastebin of the thirty pages that I have finished.

http://pastebin.com/z9z6rViX

Some notes:

$p[number] starts Page [number].
]p[number] is a link to Page [number].

Enjoy.

EDIT: