So, my first Ludum Dare went pretty well. I obeyed all the rules, I got my game (Let Me Save You! Your Faithful Companion, Windows, Mac and now Linux available) done on time and finished and working for almost everyone so far. It didn’t look/sound/play too badly and had a decent play time. It even had fanservice :3 I think that a major part of why I was able to succeed with this is because I knew my limitations and my strengths – my day job is to make comics, so a visual novel type thing would turn out fairly good.

Of course, the only problem is innovation – I knew from the beginning I was doing a tried and tested and derivative thing (even my own husband only scored me 1 star for that, the bastard, I SAW YOU RATE ME), but that in itself meant that everyone can pick up my game and know straight away how to play it and just enjoy it for the art/music/writing. Ultimately, a game is supposed to be fun to play through to the end (and maybe again, if you want the other endings), that’s why I keep going back to RPGs, platformers, etc when I buy games.

I did turn into a total bitch though, like PMS on crack turned up to gas mark 11. I was sooo stressed and angry at the cat, my husband, the weather, the neighbours, the tv – for annoying me, or slowing me down, or taking my time away from the game. Must remember to stay faaaaar away from everyone when it’s so time-reliant XD

If I enter LD again, I may well stick to RPG/Visual Novel/point & click things as they are very much story/art driven, but I’ll try to do something slightly more deviant… (not that way, you filthmongers). I’d like to be able to make a flash/web version as more people will play it. I know that there are some interesting features I would like to explore, and I’m confident that I can take on any theme with good writing / characters / events. I think I was wise to spend the first day doing all of my writing and coding, then the second doing the pretty stuff (because even if it’s rushed art/music, the game itself will run and work – and that is the difference that means you can submit something on time).

And maybe to go along with the T&A (as that’s popular it seems), MOAR PONIES / HAWT GUYS / KITTIES.

Peace and love, everyone. I’m really enjoying all your games so far, I intend to play and rate EACH AND EVERY ONE DAMNIT XD

I have uploaded a bug fixes version of my game, in addition to the original one. Play it.

As I said in my entry, it was posted after the deadline so it’s not intended for evaluation purpose. But if you just want to play and have fun without fearing any bugs that will crash the game, try it :p

If you click rate entries you get a limited list:

Then you have to click “show all entries” waaaay down in the lower left to see all the game.

What is this first list? And why doesn’t it just show all the games?

A quick postmortem of my LD20 experience…

Woke up read winning entry and then turned over to dream a game, got up a bit later with a fully formed game design buzzing in my head!

First play with Unitys Terrain tools had an island rising from the sea, but made the first mistake of using Unity textures to paint the island and skybox!

But a static view of an island with nice water and skybox does not make a game. Dropped in the FPS controller and he presto running around on the island.

(2 hours)

Oops the player can’t climb steep slopes, spend time trying to make the slopes shallower and test/repeat…

Some time later.. ! Change settings for max slope in controller!

(1 hour)

Towers: using default cubes and physics build a tower! Find a cool diamond material (oops!) and prefab it.

Position towers…

(3 hours)

Build weapon and plinth in blender…. drop into Unity.

(1.5 hours)

Picking up and Throwing the weapon to destroy the towers…

(4.5 hours)

Boomerang weapon return after throw.

(1.5 hours)

Day one over…

Day Two…

Played around with the graphic effects to give the impression of fatigue and near collapse for player.

Getting the towers to fight back fireballs were needed.

Spent a good deal of time tweaking the basic gameplay and had a lull, this seams to be a recurring problem in LD’s by day two I’m tired and tend to make less progress.

Got back too it and pulled together an intro scene and then released it as a Jam…

I should have avoided using Unity textures and prefabs (palm trees) to make a true LD entry!

Definitly should have done a warm up game/project to get the feel of starting from scratch again!

No Music/Sfx – Need to work on music/sfx creation from scratch!
No Player death/health
No Win State
No Levels
No Variety

Had great fun and I think ‘From the wreck of HMS Lightning’ is very atmospheric but lacking in depth!

I added an alternative ending to the game… Good luck
Play Enhanced version to find it : http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-20/?action=rate&uid=2982
Thank you everybody for your very very nice & supporting comments! I’m Appy you liked this entry!

Well, I didn’t finish my game, but I managed to record a timelapse of me not finishing my game using Chronolapse. Unfortunately, I simply ran out of time.

Ludum Dare 20 – Timelapse – (Unfinished) It’s dangerous to be lonely, take these every hour.

I decided to take the ”It’s dangerous to go alone! Take this.” theme and make a game that was about a depressed main character that was prescribed pills by his doctor, and you had limited time before your anxiety kicked again and you started hearing voices. I started development with FlashPunk and FlashDevelop. Unfortunately, I couldn’t finish the entry in time, because I still barely had an engine by the end of it. The idea had long way to go. But I have art assets that I could see myself reusing on a later date.

Music is “Surfing on a Sine Wave” by FearofDark (Copyright © 2011 Stephen Hemstritch-Johnston, and released under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA licence.)

THE GOOD:

A lot of things went very, very right in this competition.

• The theme. I loved the theme, tbh. It was wide enough to give flexibility, but still had some coherence. I really enjoyed the theme, a lot more than anything else like “girl games” or “absorb.”
• Graphics. By choosing to stick to the NES palette and limit myself to 4 colors – including transparency – for everything, I really was able to keep a consistent graphical style and I pulled it off so well, that I found it more visually appealing than games with literally 256 million colors.
• Sound. I was actually able to mix my own sound for the first time, thanks to a program I recently came across (sfxr bro, sup) and this did nothing but further complement the graphical style and general play of the game.
• Gameplay, definitely. This went so well I could cry with joy. I’ve never had a game turn out this solid in a while- and it’s got everything – no, MORE than what I had intended initially. It was just going to be one final boss then bam, that’s it. Instead it’s got two mini-bosses and a final boss with an epic escape bit (if you play the game on hard like you should). I never thought I could do a fully playable Metroidvania in 48 hours. The first game I ever made (full length, that is. shitty pong clones don’t count) was a lot like this, years ago, and it took me at least a year to complete. I just topped it in 2 days.

• Time. I didn’t treat it as 2 days of dev time, I treated it as 48 hours of dev time. That really helped me pack in everything I needed to. I didn’t have to keep ideas small-scale, I firmly said “I’m making a badass Metroidvania,” and had enough time to do it.

THE BAD:

Sadly, not everything was as planned.

• The length. I wanted the minimum play time for my game to be at least half an hour. I can run through and beat it in five minutes or less. Of course, it’s hard to get that out of 48 hours, but hell. I tried. XD
• The music. There was none. And there should’ve been.
• The theme. Well, mostly my fault. I loved the theme, but I suck at story telling in-game, especially when I wind up shoehorning it in. Now it’s hard to tell what the theme was for the game, and I could’ve pulled that off a lot better.  That’s my one thing.

Now, for non-competition purposes, I do plan on releasing a few updates to this game. Mostly fixes and a little new content, so those of you who really enjoyed it can squeeze a little more out of it. The engine was so solid I’d hate to let it die with the competition.

So I finally figured out how to put videos in these posts. Enjoy.

Go play.

Now that everything is over and done with, I thought I’d write a post mortem about what worked, what didn’t work, how I can improve for the future. Since this was my first time entering, I ran into a lot of small things that hindered my progress that could definitely be streamlined the next time around. However, I’m pretty satisfied with how things turned out, and I hope to enter again in the future.

What Went Well

Title Screen

The Language
Using AS3 backed by the Flixel library for the competition was an amazing choice. Because a lot of the basics were done for me, I was able to focus on writing an actual game, and not an engine followed by a game, during the competition.

The Graphics
Normally I’m hugely blocked by the art for games. It takes me a long time to make art, and it normally sucks. This time the art was very simple, so it didn’t take long to do, and I’m surprised with how it turned out (it’s from from GOOD, but it didn’t turn out terrible).

The Menu
Making the upgrades menu was probably one of the most fun parts of the competition. I’m a web designer at heart, so being able to design a menu like this was a lot of fun. It also happened very fast, and I’m very happy with how it turned out.

The Idea
The idea has been done many times before, taking elements from pretty typical games (tower climbing game, mouse aiming shooter, collect and upgrade). However, I feel the ideas fit together pretty well, and it turned out to be something that was kind of fun to test, at least. I’m also glad that I was able to pick something that was relatively simple so that it could be finished on time.

Upgrade Menu

What didn’t go so well

The Preparation
This was the thing that bit me the most. I wasn’t entirely sure how I should prepare, what I should prepare, or where I should prepare it (since this is my first time entering). The biggest one was music, I didn’t have a program to make music downloaded, nor did I have any experience (more on this below). But also, about 2 minutes after the competition started I decided I wanted a timelapse of my screen. I simply downloaded chronolapse and started it without much thought. That could definitely have been improved.

The Sound And Music
As mentioned before I didn’t have anything to make music with when I started. I had declared some tools that I had heard of or at least touched in the past, but I should have taken time before the start to get to know them. Thankfully sfxr was incredibly simple to use, so that didn’t present an issue. But Musagi turned out to require way too much musical knowledge, a few other music tools I looked at weren’t really helpful in making music, and what I settled on (FL Studio) also gave me tons of problems. I had to spend an hour just reading tutorials to be able to make something, and when I did make something, it turned out absolutely terrible (I need to remember to replace my music before submitting to Kongregate). While even if I had prepared the music would still be terrible, I could have saved a couple hours trying to learn the tools.

Extensions to the Library
While Flixel was a great choice, normally I have a few extensions to the framework that I use in projects. I misinterpreted the rules (not part of the official library so I can’t use it since I didn’t write it during the competition), but it sounds like I could have (and should have) used those extensions. Also, I think there are some great extensions I could write to flixel that would have not only improved my game (more classes around dealing with menu buttons and such), but also could have given me new features (I really wanted cool particle effects, but using only Flixel’s functions would have taken too long and been too limiting). Having a particle library on top of Flixel is something I definitely will be using in the future for quick particle effects without wasting a ton of time.

The Distractions

Just look at all those diamonds!

I spent a lot of time on facebook, instant messenger, and IRC talking to people. Probably not the best choice given the time restraints. This is something where it’s unclear whether it helped or hindered me though. On one hand it took precious time away, but on the other hand it kept me sane and gave me a break from the programming.

Overall

Overall it was an enjoyable experience, even if I was very tired and worn down by the end (and didn’t have time to put in everything I would have liked). Working under pressure turned out to be a great motivator.

If you haven’t already, you can play and rate Diamond Hollow (or grab the source) at:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-20/?action=preview&uid=4155

If you’d like to see the timelapse of my main monitor during the 48 hours, check out:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydpMKrwKrUY

Since my last post was so darn pessimistic with all those hardware malfunctions and what-not, I thought I would write a happier post about what I did well in Das Sad!

Wee Scope

First thing was that I managed to keep a small scope this time, hooray! If I didn’t have all those hardware failures I would have had oodles of time to make more audio, build some actual escalation, make a tutorial, and balance the whole thing out a little more. Next LD, providing absence of aforementioned issues and a similar scope, I should be able to make a exceptionally radical game for you guys.

2D Arrays are Exclamatory Adjective!

For this here game I taught myself how to use 2D arrays, super handy for grid-based movement  and collision. This here is the tutorial I used:

http://flashdevz.wordpress.com/2008/08/27/as3-pathfinding-part-1-understanding-2d-arrays/

I ultimately used the grid system that came out of the array as a basis for… well just about everything else.  As you can see in the picture right over <—– positions where a dude was were marked with a 1. All I had to do for collision then was check if the position in the array I was moving to was a 1 or 0, if 0 reset my current position to 0 and the new position to 1.

If any of you have more foresight than me and say “But what if you move two side-by-side and the poor first guy sees the position is blocked even though it is about to be clear? What then?!?!” Well, I certainly stumbled into that problem and came out a better man.

What I did for that little issue was if a piece was moving to an occupied position, it would store that position in a Global variable. Then, whenever another piece moved it would check if the position it was moving from was equal to the Global var. If so, tell the other fella to go ahead and move, the way is clear.

Paths Everywhere

Next thing I did that I thought was pretty neato was the enemy pathing, all of which was based of the grid that came out of my 2D Array. It was rather simply really, I would initialize an enemy with an array of point values represented spots on the grid (as seen —–>). Then, from spawning the enemy simply moves from its spawn location towards the first point and as it exceeds it, increases a currentTurn variable. Then it will look for the next position at the currentTurn value index of the array filled with destination points.

The red path was drawn with basically the same approach, only with a few more conditions in there. At enemy spawn the path would set up one-by-one at a delay of what I believe was 0.05 seconds? Sounds familiar enough. Going one grid space each time, it would check if the current destination point was at the same Y location, if so it knew it was moving moving horizontally and would place the horizontal piece. Same thing for vertical, only replace “Y” with “X”. When it was spot on the destination point, it would check if the next point where above, below, left, or right of it and place the respective corner there to. Neat right? At least I thought so.

The Rest

That’s pretty much all the stuff that I thought was interesting enough to talk about unless asked or coerced. All-in-all I’m happy with how Das Sad turned out despite all the issues, probably going to try and take it a little further down the road.  Well, not take it down the road, but down the road do more with it. Oh, by the way, in case you were curious about the name: Well I was testing it  I lined up the A,S,D keys as SAD and I thought DAMN! I’m gonna call it Sad, then I noticed that backwards it said Das, and I thought JACKPOT! So Das Sad was born, as little sense as it makes.

I would also like to attribute much of my happiness to a wide variety of software and libraries that did not fail on me and was also free! FlashDevelop is a great IDE if you wanna make some flash games and don’t wanna pay Adobe. FlashPunk is a totally cyber-awesome AS3 library if you just don’t want to work too hard. SFXR, I believe I have Ludum Dare to thank for this handy little sound effect creation device. Also, Audacity, for being free and helping me convert .wav to .mp3! Oh, and graphics were done in Photoshop, not free therefore not as cool.

That was a pretty long post on what you probably already know. Oh well, I shan’t un-write what has been written.

So, that’s it, this frantic weekend is over, and live from a train, I’m going to give you some thoughts about how the making of my entry went.

What went right :

• The coding itself. Once again, I used python, and everything went smoothly. Not having to spend time working around language limitations was a huge advantage, and helped me stay focused on getting things working.
• Using a new engine (Panda3D). Prior to LD20, I had never used Panda3D for more than just fooling around and display a couple of objects. But once again (as with pygame last time), the Ludum Dare constraints helped me to just take the plunge and get to grip with the engine. This learning aspect is probably the best thing about LD compos from my point of view.
• Time management. I’m really, really happy with how that turned out. I managed to get almost everything I had envisionned done, and even had time to record two tracks for use in-game. I had a good night sleep, and managed to spend some time with my girlfriend. And that’s with the first 8 hours or so of the compo lost to night and a japanese exam. So all in all it went well.

What went wrong :

• The packaging… Once more, I found out that packaging wasn’t as straightforward as I had hoped. Though a helpful comment prior to the weekend had made me research packaging means beforehand, I still find that packages don’t work as expected. For example, the easy windows installer present you with a “run the game” option that just doesn’t work. It’s a bit frustrating, really… For the record I may try a web-based game next time, Flash maybe (that is, if I can lake myself a nice dev environment on Linux… any tips ?)
• Making the game fail beautifully. Even though almost all of the planned features made it into the final release, I failed miserably to include any kind of checks to see if, for examples, shaders were available on the user’s GPU.
• Sticking to the theme. The problem was two-fold. First, I wasn’t inspired much by it. And second, I had a game idea of which OUT OF HERE is  a prototype in my head for a couple of week. The first reason then quickly became a justification to just go with that idea and simply try to somehow shoehorn the theme into the game. But well, at least I know have a prototype I can build upon. The code is really short, so tidying up shouldn’t be too much of a problem.

That’s it. Once again, Ludum Dare has been a blast (which means I’ll definitely be there next time around), and a tremendous opportunity to learn and, basically,  just go and make a game. All in all I’m quite happy with the end result, and while it’s not breaking any new ground, it gave me confidence that the much broader idea I have should be, basically a fun game.

Thanks to everyone for all the motivational/informative blog posts and project updates, I’m looking forward to continuing rating games until time runs out ! Here’s mine if you want to do the same. Cheers !

1. The tools – I recently got back into 2D game development after focusing on 3D for a very long time.  I had used AS3 and Flashpunk for a couple of prototypes, but I was still worried about getting stuck on some functionality the engine might not allow me to do easily.  Thankfully, I was way off.  I don’t think I hit one technical hurdle the whole weekend. In fact, FlashPunk saved me more work than I thought when I realized it had functionality for moving and swept collisions, something I thought I was going to have to implement myself.  I told Chevy Ray on Facebook that I owed him a beer, I will probably be using FlashPunk for several more projects.  GraphicsGale, which I used for the first time for this project, was also the other reason things went so smoothly.  Being able to author, animate, and export assets in spritesheets quickly from one program was incredibly helpful.  And of course, Ogmo Editor and SFXR were really good timesavers.  The reason I am so happy about this positive is that this was the biggest negative for me the first time around.  I was using my own still-in-development engine and working in 3D, so I spent most of the time dealing with plumbing and getting Maya (although I use Blender now) to do what I wanted level-wise rather than writing the game itself.
2. The art – This was something else I was worried about that happened to work out in the end.  I don’t consider myself a good artist, but I’ve been working really hard for the last year to improve through a lot of study and practice.  Most of that was on paper and pencil though and I hadn’t done pixel art, much less animating it, in a very long time.  Given that, I was happy with the end result and hope it’s at least a step up from programmer art.  Also, like I said above, GraphicsGale got out of the way for most part (although I dont like how it deals with alpha) and sped up my workflow.
3. No stress - This may seem like a weird one but I only mention it because the first time around I found myself getting stuck on dumb stuff because I insisted on using my own incomplete tools.  This led to a lot of stress and almost no time to participate in the blog posting/reading and IRC part of Ludum Dare which I think is very important to the experience.  Due to the feeling of getting stuff done and not getting stumped on anything, I didn’t feel bad about taking time to read and participate in the IRC channel and the blog.  I was still pressed for time obviously, but was still able to keep up and even play with a couple of the games.  This led to a much more enjoyable experience overall, the way LD is meant to be done in my opinion.

WHAT WENT WRONG

1. The theme – I did make my peace with what I’m about to say, but I put it in the negative because it did cost me time.  I feel that over time Ludum Dare has attracted more and more people, which is good, but along with that comes a lot of newer game developers that tend to shy away from the more narrow and challenging themes.  This has led to a lot of generic themes getting voted on and winning most of the time (“Enemies as weapons” was the only recent exception) which I think affects things negatively for two reasons.  First, the personal reason that probably others share: I tend to come up with better ideas faster with a good thematic constraint.  Themes like this one are very vague and apply to almost any game, so it’s very difficult to come up with a game from the set of every game imaginable.  I ended up wasting 3 or so hours because I couldn’t come up with an idea I was happy with and I do think that I settled because I didn’t want to devote any more time to brainstorming.  The second reason, which sounds superficial but it’s still important, is that the games don’t tie together very well at the end.  The theme isn’t obvious when you play all of the games like it is with themes like “Advancing Wall of Doom”.  Regardless, I don’t think I will ragequit Ludum Dares because of generic themes.  The experience of getting a game done in 48 hours and participating in the community far outweighs bad themes.
2. Cutting features – This happens to everybody obviously due to the time constraint, but I think my game would have been more interesting with varied zombie types as I originally described it.  I would have also prefered more weapons to get done from my list, but I’m surprised I got through as many as I did.  There was also a few larger art assets I wanted to work on to vary the environment but I decided to improve a couple that were in there already instead with the little time I had at the end.  I also didn’t have time for music, but I predicted that in my intent-to-join blog post.  Regardless, I’m still bummed about that because I think music is very important to most games.  The bright side of this is that I have a pretty clear set of things to add or change if I work on the game post-compo, which I probably will at some point this year.

Overall, this LD was a far more positive experience.  I can’t wait for the next one!

So, we barely managed to finish the game on time (I strongly encourage you to give it a try). I would like to share what I can gather from our participation.

The experience

There’s really nothing like it. Period.  It was fun, it was challenging, it was stressing yet exciting. Sometimes I kinda felt like we were on a time-critical mission to save the world.
It’s THAT epic.

If any of you registered into LD and in the end didn’t feel like entering (either the Jam or the Compo) I strongly suggest you to give it a second thought next time.

It was really cool to work together as a team with my friends. Things like this make you really realize what teamwork is all about. Sure, we won’t get the fame nor the recognition of the Compo dudes but believe me, it’s awesome.

Lesson Learned

Ok, it would be a lie if I say that everything was rainbows and cotton-candy-flavored clouds. We spent a lot of hours (more than half a day, actually) struggling to get things done with the framework we chose (Java + libgdx). None of us had a clue on how to use the library (we bravely chose it because we wanted something multiplatform and powerful enough to make good games with it). We gave up on that because we found no way to make the things we wanted to and it was overly too complex (OGL for a tile-based game seems like an overkill to me) for our purposes. We switched in the end to C++ and Allegro (since we already knew how to use it) although we knew that it would mean making a lot of things from scratch that most libraries already have in their core (Animation support, dynamic resource loading,  collisions, physics, etc).

So, first leasson; Know the tools you are using.  I know it was a foolish move to choose something no one of the team was familiar with… but we dared to try, at least. I’m sure libgdx is really powerful, but probably maybe way too much for what we needed.

Second, try to keep your code tidy, but don’t over-do it. I think I spent a helling lot of time commenting classes and creating methods that probably we didn’t even use (mostly “setters” and “getters” for all or most of the exposable properties of each class).  Some of them came in handy, but others are probably there, unused.

Third: Try to keep it simply, don’t start with things like “the game will have 100 levels and a neural-network-based AI for each one of the 50 bosses”. Don’t aim too low either (e.g: “the game will be a single screen with a static ball on the screen and you earn score by staring at it”). We set our goals in a realistic way (but given our impasse with the lib we chose we had to make some adjustments).

Fourth: Don’t make final adjustments if they can impact the game. In the final hours we decided to limit the reach of the Hook weapon because it was traveling endlessly until hitting something. Now the game is deployed, we can see that if you are given the hook in the third stage you are totally screwed up. The limit we set for it make it impossible to reach what you need to advance . FAIL.

We think it would be interesting to complete the game,  add the whole selection of items we had in mind (one or two more than the ones that made it into the game) and add a nice background story (in fact, the game was supposed to be about a kitty fighting fields and fields of domo-kuns (just because “in soviet russia, kittens chase domo-kuns” ) we even made the domo-kun sprites. We also want to rewrite all the parts of the code that we pretty much stuffed inside wherever they fitted (In the beginning  I attempted to make everything perfect and tidy…  Don’t ask if we still had that coding style by monday…)

We are also interested on making a codebase for future LD.  I’ll be sharing the Map Editor I made so stay tuned. Now I need to sleep…. like.. for 2 days in a row.

P.S: Thanks for everyone involved on this event. I loved being part of it. I’m looking forward to participating again.

The Making of The Heart Is Safe

Tools used:

flashDevelop – $0

flashpunk – $0

MSpaint – $0

pxtone – $0

sfxr – $0

beer – $12

Total cost – a bit of my health

picture > words

Scanlines and diamonds and hearts, oh my!

T.H.I.S. was mostly a stream of conscious accident than anything.  In it’s first day of life it played more like a game of kleptomania. In fact it still does. So this is really a game about kleptomania. Which really says a lot about everyone who plays it.

The main thing I did differently in the making of this game was the lack of any to-do list until the second day. This created a fear that I wasn’t on schedule. Most people say that a to-do list is a way of tracking what you need to do. In this case it was more a way of tracking how much I had gotten done, because after writing it, I took a nap. I don’t necessarily condone this, but it worked in this case.

“I wouldn’t not be lying if I didn’t say that I wouldn’t hate seeing a sequel” -Farfin

Having tools like flashDevelop and flashpunk are really what made this project possible, so I feel I need to put that out there. I went into this project only wanting to use free software.

For sound effects I used sfxr, as most do, but for music I used pxtone. The music wouldn’t have existed without it, and I recommend it as highly as I would recommend sfxr. But if you disagree I would love to hear what you use. The music itself took about 20 minutes to write plus about 10 minutes of polish, but made a world of difference.

I think it’s worth noting that any amount of documentation before the game was built, or during, would have resulted in a much different game. I was confident going in with what I wanted the feeling of the game to be and went with it.

If I could go back and do something differently it would be the theme setting up a music playlist before hand so I would spend less precious time dj-ing.

blah blah blah shut up and let me play

Since I ran into so many hardware issues this Ludum Dare, I thought I might take the time to go over them. Sort of a cathartic, stress clearing exercise I suppose.

1. Slept a full 8 hours the first night and was excited to get going the next day, everything was going just swell until viruses struck! Not sure what it was, but it was blocking access to everything “cmd.exe is a virus” it said, “tskmgr.exe is a virus” it whined. I tried fixing it through Safe Mode, but all I did was make it worse, much worse. After I was through with it the computer wouldn’t even start properly… nice.
2. Decided to waste my time formatting the computer, I forgot that my desktop PC is retarded. Once it was formatted I was unable to get the internet working again to download the various drivers/software I needed. I know, internet is easy, but my computer is just weird that way, I have no idea why it wouldn’t work. It found my network, said I had a great connection, but refused me service.
3. Gave up and switched to my laptop, and guess what? Virus! I have no idea how, after working for a while I was looking up what a certain error code meant and BAM! Needless to say I was a little frustrated… so I may have thrown my laptop and I think it is fair to say that my neighbours have a less than respectable opinion of me after that. Reset my laptop to about a month ago, so I was ready to go.

I would say that I lost about an hour of my game (luckily I backed up frequently) and about 8 or so hours between my crashes, attempted fixes, fiddling, and formatting.

Lessons Learned? Back up frequently because you never know what’s gonna happen and check for viruses on a regular basis cuz’ Jesus that was unexpected.

Note: My friend wants me to reenact the throwing of the laptop and post it, so if I feel like humiliating myself tomorrow I’ll get right on that.

I made a time lapse of my work. It’s not as good as it could be, because there’s one screenshot for every minute, so the framerate isn’t very good. Oh well.

Wow!

Another record setting event. By the deadline, we had 352 entries (289 Compo, 63 Jam). Pat yourselves on the back everyone, you just participated in something incredible. It blows my mind how much Ludum Dare continues to grow every time we run one. Thank you everyone for being so awesome!

If you had any problems, leave me a comment and I’ll take care of it in the morning (I too am exhausted, hehe). If you need to make any minor cosmetic changes to you page, use this link right here.

Thanks everyone for participating in Ludum Dare 20!

Be sure you come back and rate some games!

I finished a prototype of one of the ideas I had in mind, the name is Codename: Taken.

In a quick description, the objective is to to survive from red flying robots (mushrooms) attacks but you can’t defend by yourself, so the creator of the game (me) gives you a green flying robot to defend you from the enemies.

Here is a video of the game play:

Ludum Dare 20 – Codename: Taken – Gameplay

note: dunno how to embed youtube videos.

I made a time lapse of the game development too:

Ludum Dare 20 – Codename: Taken – Time lapse

Sadly I couldn’t complete it in time as a game, some core features like dying so game can finish, couldn’t be added in time. However, I wanted to complete a bit more the game so I worked today in adding some stuff to enter the Ludum Dare Jam as well.

Here are the links for the game:

• Java Webstart for the main contest version
• Java Webstart for the Jam version
• Android apk for the Jam version (yeah, it works on Android)
• Source code

Hope you like it.

Here’s a video of my desktop through almost 72 hours of development of Hot Potato compressed into less than 2.5 minutes: