Had a heap of fun.. I’m really amazed by all of great games that have been a result of this LD.

screenshoot of AchooBoxes

timelapse video

( of the bug fixed jam version) : gameplay video

download link (osx version) http://www.player2.mobi/LD19_PLATFORM_FIXED.zip

Aaaaaaand, here it is. Not as interesting as I would have hoped. But w/e.

LD48 DiSub

Looking forward to playing everyone’s game, already seen some really interesting projects.

A lot of people have done proc generators, I guess it makes sense. With such little time it’s a great way to extend your world. Gotta say though, as good as the proc is, I’m really loving the level design in some of these games. You should all check out http://bit.ly/gyyhsz. A classic indie game with a bit of a metroid undertone, all wrapped up in some top Notch (*cough*) level design. Not just saying that cuz I know him irl.

Plus go ahead and vote on mine: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-19/?action=rate&uid=3202

Make sure to leave plenty of comments, I plan to continue developing this game so absolutely EVERY type of feedback is welcome. Tell me what you had for dinner and I’ll find out what people who eat that like in video games.

Going to try to play everyone’s game within the time limit, but there is a good chance that I may miss a few. So please link me your game in the comments and there is a 100% chance I’ll play it, vote on it and give it some of my humble feedback. Promote yourself!

LD19 was a blast! I got a decent gameplay prototype complete, and I’m really excited to take it further. I thought I’d share some my some concept sketches and what I learned from the process.

My initial concept for the game:

I knew I wanted to make a platformer/metroidvania style game and I thought the mechanic of having to carry a fragile item around for a while could add interesting gameplay challenges. So I started on some basic concept sketches for my main character, enemies, and an opening level scene:

From there I dove right into Game maker, working on getting basic platformer functionality. I made sprites for all of the enemies and player right away, though not fully animated, instead of using placeholder graphics. This allowed me to get the right collision boxes and movement speeds set up right away, and when I went back to animate I knew approximately how detailed I needed to make the animations. I could get away with only 1 additional frame for the slug creature since it almost looked ok with only 1 frame.

placeholder tiles = bad

I should have taken the time to make a decent tileset early on, since I knew that time was short and that any art asset I made would most likely get used in the final game, however most of development was done using simple gray boxes. I had to scramble to make a decent looking tileset in the last hour, and I wasn’t able to create many levels, and the one I did make was just thrown together pretty randomly. I should have made a workable tileset initially, and used the playtesting during development to home in on a decent level design.

I spent a fair amount of the development time working on refining the animations, damage, and stun/bounce. I’m really glad I was able to get the separate animation state for picking up the vial completed, at least it hints at the “discovery” theme. I’m most happy with the way the visuals turned out, and when I get a little more experienced with programming I’ll be able to add some better gameplay. I achieved my goal of making a playable game for the competition, even if it is lacking a plot, or any real ending.

Give it a try and let me know what you think!

First of all, here’s my timelapse:

Science Tycoon Timelapse

My game is a bit jiggered at the moment, but I think it was a valiant effort, with many cool by-products such as the Ludum Dare User Powered Scientist Name Generator! LDUPSNG! As well as I discovered that it’s probably not a great idea to aim as high as I did. Also, I found out that it’s not a good idea to stay up late the night before Ludum Dare watching Star Wars. Where was I? Anyhow, this was a great experience and you all rock. Peace!

I’ve bumped up the version on the play page to force everyone to re-download the game. If you played one of the beta versions and tried to play the final version, you might have had the issue of it not downloading the updated jars. This should fix that.

Go play it now if you were trying to before!

It was fun to participate on this compo, and I’m happy I could finish it on time

My first idea was to make a simple platformer, but with the theme being discovery I couldn’t resist to make a roguelike. And btw it was the first time I made a roguelike, so I didn’t know where I was getting into…

One of the hardest parts was to create the battle system, and to get all the math right, like exp and hit chance calculation… it was a pain to get it right.

Luckly I kept things simple. No items or equips, and all stats are based on player level and by buying stats, wich was also pretty simple to make.
I’ve chosen to work with Construct (a game maker by Scirra), even though I was using it for only 4 days, I was quite familiar with it, because its so simple to use. A part of the game creation process was to get to know the tool better, and this will help me on future projects.

Creating the map was kinda hard, because Construct was lagging every time I selected a bunch of object or when there were already too many tiles on the map.

Debugging was impossible near the end. The built-in debugger couldn’t handle over 5000 objects without the FPS dropping to 4. The game itself was at 35fps for most of the time, at least on my computer.

And yes, I made some mistakes
- Playing TF2 for more than an hour
- Wasting to much time to get the shadow system the way I wanted (I started using 8×8 shadow tiles, but I switched to 4×4, wich took some time, but at the end I switched back to 8×8 to improve performance)
- I think Construct has a built-in save system, but I made a custom one myself, maybe it could have been easier to have used the built-in one

But
- Making really simple cute little pixel art graphics saved quite some time
- Giving a shit to music also saved time (at a price I guess)
- Slept only 6 hours a night

And that equals game :]

Cya next compo

This certainly was a fun experience, and I’ll definitely be back again. Until then, I need a drink.

From Nothing is a minimalist game with a simple goal: The world begins in darkness but is revealed as the player navigates through it, and collects shiny things…

I can see myself revisiting this, developing the mechanic, polishing, and optimizing the code.

I began this game in an odd way, due to the time constraint no doubt. I started doodling with the character design as I brainstormed possible directions to go. Realizing I had spent way too much time fiddling with the little details of the player character (If I adjust the alpha by just 0.02…) I moved on to the controls, still without a clear direction in mind.

I wanted the controls to be simple to reflect the rest of the game, and be easy to pick up. Again, I spent way too much time fiddling with the little numbers in order to get the right feeling, but I think it was worth it.

This is where I feel I went wrong, designing the character and controls before having a clear idea of the gameplay, so I buckled up and focused on the word… discovery. I decided I wanted the world to start from nothing and be revealed slowly. To do this I designed a quasi-destructible terrain engine, covered my world with it, and optimized it as much as I could in the time I had.

Now I had the player, the controls, and the idea. Implemented. But I didn’t have a game. And I had just slept for 12 hours. Great. So with a few hours before the deadline, I tied up the loose ends with what felt right. And so we have From Nothing.

Hiya guys! Here is a time lapse video from working on Doom Cauldron during the past 48 hours. I used Chronolapse — thank you for recommending it.

You can go directly to the YouTube page instead: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3H9lBz3pYs

Unfortunately I couldn’t get my super wacky Ludum Dare game done in time. However I’ll try and get it done tomorrow for the Compo. I think maybe it was a bit too ambitious to be made in 2 days (I mean, it was basically a big, expansive Metroidvania. Not really the best design for a game being made in so little time.) Oh well. Anyway, here’s a screenshot in the meantime.

I just need to say: Ludum Dare was quite incredible; and even my game characters themselves agree.

Although I didn’t finish what I wanted, i feel very accomplished. I started with absolutely  no base code; this whole game, images, sounds, concept, etc was made from scratch after the contest started. I did more than I expected but less than I hoped for. =p

Thanks to everyone who participated and organized this. Cheers

Oh, and if you want to see these cheery guys tear you apart in my game: download

(Warning!!!!! It is very tough! Didn’t have time to play test xD)

I forgot about timezones and flipped out.  Looks like I missed the deadline just barely, and here I was fiddling around with the music and the icon for the game.

Anyways, here’s my final product.

When I thought of the theme, “discovery,” I thought of a realization that changes how you live.  In this case, it was a long-distance relationship.  Long-distance relationships have been on my mind lately.

Finshed the compo! My head is pounding and all the lights are blurring together, but it was worth it. Ludum Dare was tough, but awesome! I produced a full product in under two days, something I wouldn’t have thought I was able to do beforehand! I’m quite satisfied with the work I managed to do, if you want to give it a look, here it is:

PRIOR

You know nothing.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-19/?action=preview&uid=2994

Anyway, that’s that. As for the theme, my initial idea was along the lines of “exploration and discovering new worlds!” but I felt like doing something a little more off-beat. So I ended up creating PRIOR, as it is now.

When the game starts “you know nothing”, and it’s up to you to figure out what the hell’s going on – hence the theme of discovery!

There is a set storyline to this game and a history to all the notes and events that occur in the game, but mostly you have to piece it together for yourself and build your own interpretation of what’s up.

As far as gameplay is concerned, it’s more or less a simple 2D platformer, where you move with WASD. Eventually you gain new abilities to help traverse the world, including a fairly unique “zero-gee” mechanic.

There are three different endings, each of which contribute in their own way to the overall story. You can’t figure out what’s happened without seeing all three endings, and even then it’s up to you to piece the puzzle together

If any of you are interested, I’d love to hear your interpretations of the story! If you can take the time to write up a short synopsis of what you think PRIOR is all about, please email it to me at nick@nyonge.ca.

Thanks for reading this – now I’m going to view a couple submissions, then go pass out for a little while.

-Nick

I was freaking out, because I had a really big bug to squish right at the 3 hours left mark. It took me over an hour to fix it, then I rushed really quickly to finish the game world and license the source code.

But here at last, it is finished! Have a take at it! And here’s a timelapse video.

I picked a random electronic/dance song from the audioswap thing without previewing, and it hasn’t finished swapping, so if it doesn’t match at all, oh well…

LD19 is over. Time to sleep…
I submitted my game, although there isn’t really any gameplay to it.
Play Here
I will sort out the timelapse video tomorrow.

Man my weekend got all messed up… Not only did I not complete the project I got so busy today with other things that I missed the deadline for entering at all… Maybe I will submit something to the Jam. Sorry everyone for not having anything more to add.

After a final rush to put together something I could submit, I can finally relax ! Pfiuuu….

It was my first LD48, and I must admit that I loved it ! Really ! I had never attended to such events, but now I’ll try to participate in most of them. It’s incredibly faster to make a game during LD than it is when you have the opportunity to do something else…

So, a big thank you to LD !

Next time, I’ll try not to lose too much time chatting on the IRC channel !

That wass stressful o.o

I finished the game with 6 minutes left. By the time i had it compiled, Zip’d, uploaded, screenshot’d there was only 1min 40sec left!! That was close ._.”

Check out Mini Ghost Hunter!

Made in Flashpunk.

Ludum Dare Page
Timelapse : Trip (n.)

Finished my game for Ludum Dare 19: Discovery.  Would’ve posted my development stuff during LD but didn’t really have time so I’ll do it now.

I was originally going to do a parkour-ish platformer that depends on ability unlocks, but while I was making an “energy bottle thing” it ended up looking like a bottle of meds.  So the original storyline of “random square jumps around really fast” got changed to “random square jumps around really slow and happens to be senile/old/drug-abusing.”

To propel the storyline, I decided to use hallucinations, giving it a more upfront, connected feel.  There are three characters that make up the hallucinations: a psychologist that tries to “fix” him, a friend (his conscience) that helps take down his conscience mindset in order to rebuild it later, and an enemy (his subconscience) that tries to reinforce his mental stability, preventing him from helping himself out of it.  The images and their quotes match this description to a degree (although I won’t tell which is which; take a guess if you’d like).

Several times during development my cat would reach under my door with it’s paw and mess with the springy thing on my door and I let it out and that cat was distracting and awesome yeah.

Good first Ludum Dare overall, going to play these games now.

Done finally done!

In hindsight, I guess my feature list was pretty ridiculous. Seriously… a social game?… bah…

On the bright side in the last hour before submissions I was able to pare things down a bit, and get all of the semi-working features tied together.

Learned tons this LD, the timelapse was a great motivator / distraction.

Post-mortem and timelapse with some sweet cat-stop motion going on in the background, coming soon!

Oh and one last food photo

Took a quick break to knead the dough for this Monkeybread