So I really did manage to submit my game last night. Who would have thought.

Tonight I’ll be doing the porting work, because up to now there is only a OSX build up there. I’ll port to Linux and Windows.

Also further post mortem, timelapse video and the like will follow, so stay tuned. There is still so much work to do to really finalize the submission with all the porting and editing to do. Also there is rating, don’t forge the rating.

But for now I gotta work my daily job as superman. Looking forward to going back to my secret identity of Clark Kent at night and create shibby games.

It’s been a long Ludum Dare. No longer than usual, but still. I submitted my game, Questling, with 4 minutes to go. I then realized there was an additional submittal hour, so I polished and added music. Since then, I’ve kept updating my post release .exe, and I’ve finished my timelapse. I really wish I got more levels into the final version, but I’m very proud of what I have. So, try it out.

Submission – Timelapse

I managed to finish my game. This was a bit of a twist for me, instead of spending way too much time on the code, I spent way to much time on the art content.

In order to do a 3D game, you pretty much have to have animations, unless you’re making a space game, or a racing game. So that meant that I needed to do animated models for my game. I haven’t done much of anything for modeling, animation, or texturing. This meant that the process of creating the art assets took a huge portion of my time. I think they turned out pretty nice though.

You can see the video of them here : http://vimeo.com/23143112

And the finished game can be seen here : http://vimeo.com/23141263

This LD48 took me to my limit, everybody to the limit, I said come on Fhqwhgads!

…ahem…

So yeah my ‘game’ is ‘done’ and ready to be ‘played’. You can check out the official LD entry page HERE and check out my personal site with game info, controls, and downloads HERE.

It’s a 2D beat ‘em up with a twisted theme interpretation. The majority of your entertainment is gonna come from the audio and basic mechanics, as there is not challenge at all… since you CAN’T DIE. Or win. You just go through the rooms and then the game resets after the last room because I didn’t have time to make a ‘win’ screen or whatever. I prefer to play in full-screen… which you can do with F4, or you can manually change the game window size.

GAH I’m tired. Going to sleep now.
I can’t wait to dig into these games!

For some reason the zip file of my windows build kept getting corrupted. After removing the mirror update feature thing from the files on GameJolt, I was able to upload and the problem went away. Since the zip file was normal, I decided to render my time lapse…

After waiting an hour, I quit after 50% of my time lapse was rendered because it was taking sooo blooody long in Windows Live Movie Maker and switched to OS X.

I found out from twistedjoe that I forgot to have two .framework files copy into the package, so I had to rebuild the game to put them in.

The windows build still uses the same code (no cheating!) and the mac build just required some tweaking for timing and file loading. For some reason 3*CLOCKS_PER_SEC on Windows lasts a lot shorter than on OS X, so dividing all times by three for the OS X build makes the extended times disappear.

I was told by PoV that I could upload ports after the compo was done, so I’m guessing that I’m allowed to have the ported code included in the source zip too. Right?

So if you’re running Windows (32 or 64) or OS X (intel only), play my game please?
Organs and Marriage

Download HERE!

You can run Unity webplayer builds directly off DropBox! I did not know this – just discovered it by looking at someone else’s entry (hat tip to Doktor Ace). Useful thing to know about for Unity devs.

I just managed to get Lonely Fortress more-or-less playable by the deadline. No music, and a lot less gameplay than I planned (not even a win screen – it was that tight). But what a great exercise! I love having to do everything yourself.

I think the adrenaline is finally wearing off so I can go to bed. ‘Night.

Allright so here’s the windows build:

It’s pretty much exactly the same, except I had to change the opendir/readdir stuff to FindFirstFile. You can still win it in about 45 seconds…

Hopefully this will let more people check it out.

Tomorrow I’ll look into making a properly packaged mac bundle.

Download link at my entry page.

So, this was the first year I participated in Ludum Dare. I had an idea for a dungeon relay race, where adventurers were passing gear back and forth to beat the clock. Coming from Angband, I was thinking about this in a turn-based, grid kind of way with procedurally-generated levels, etc. I thought I might try to do some graphics though, to make the game more accessible to people. I was kind of nervous about being able to finish in the time, especially since my idea for the game kept expanding outward.

48 hours later, I managed to (barely) finish the game (Quengon: Dungeon Relay), or at least, the parts of it I could get done in 48 hours. Toward the end I started feeling a lot of pressure and disappointment: I had planned to create a bunch of different types of monsters, but ended up only having orange goblins because I didn’t have time to draw more. I had a lot of different items that I wanted to make but failed to, and there were a lot of basic things I should have finished that I didn’t (the most egregious was not rotating weapons depending on what direction the elf attacks from). Leaving the sound effects and music to the last minute meant that the sound effects aren’t great and there is no music. And I failed to create a lot of in-game content to help players understand what’s going on.

That said, I did manage to finish the game (even with a 9 hour break to play a show), and the game seems to work pretty well (I haven’t seen any crashes yet). Given that I came in with very little preparation (a few PCG algorithms taken from Angband and Pygame) and that I don’t have any experience doing programming with SDL/Pygame I was glad that I managed to get something built. Also, I was really worried about the art, but actually I think my pixel art ended up being OK. I’m already thinking about “the next one” and while I don’t think my game will win any awards I think it’s something people will be able to play (assuming I can figure out how to package it for Windows/Mac tomorrow).

In retrospect I would have been better off with out using PCG to generate dungeon levels, since most players don’t see that many anyway. I could have used that time to place items and layouts in a more interesting and narrative way. Tons of little things I have heard over the years (don’t use square tiles, don’t make your tile the base unit, etc) were born out in my experience. I made sure to get 7-8 hours of sleep a night, although again I wish I had carved a few hours out of that.

My biggest regret is not leaving an hour for playtesting at the end. I ended up making the 7 items and 3 power ups in the game a bit too rare, which means that the decision of which items to pass on (or not), which is supposed to be a central piece of the game, kind of gets side-lined. I may try to do a post-LD release where I create a splash, an instructions page, a death screen, fix the sounds and fix the rarities.

Thanks to everyone who helped put this on and participated, especially those hanging out on IRC!

Woo! After busting serious ass, I’ve “finished” and turned in my game! If you want to give it a play, you’ll need python and pygame installed. Here’s a link to the source:

http://brianschulman.me/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/Spark.zip

I’m proud to have finished, even if I missed the compo deadline. There were some issues there, but now I’ll know to prepare better beforehand. Speaking of, I’ve totally got a post-mortem to write up. Long story short, though, I learned a good bit about work in Python and game development in general. This is a huge first for me, and I’m psyched to move on to the next stage! LD 21!!

I’ll get a video of the game up soon, to save people the effort of grabbing Python and pygame. In the meantime, I’m dead tired, totally full on an awesome burrito, and satisfied. Night all!

Well, my game was a complete failure, but I did learn from my mistakes. For one, I should make sure I have at least a little game plan. Second using physics was a huge no-no. It made things far too complicated and screwed up my player controller. Thirdly, I need to make sure I have the time to finish my game – I only got to work for about 18 hours total. I also spent wayyyyy too long in the beginning trying to figure out really dumb things that I had to end up simplifying to move on anyway.

I’ll be looking forward to the next dare! Good luck to everyone.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-20/?action=preview&uid=4178

Old news, but a few hours ago I submitted my entry to the competition.

I’m impressed with myself. I single-handedly made a fully playable game about some kid who single-handedly takes down a robot empire with a little pea shooter. And then I named it SINGLEHANDEDLY.

After looking at the other entries I doubt if it will win anything in any category, and that’s not saying anything bad about my game. It’s an honor to be competing with the kind of talent I’ve seen here. What means the most to me right now is that I made a game from start to finish, a bit rough, but I made it and it’s fully playable and packed with decent features. And on top of all that, it’s a FUN game. No doubt, it’s a little uninspired, a generic “Metroidvania,” but you know what? It’s been too long since I’ve played a game this spiritedly simple.

I hope you all have fun playing this game and I look forward to the feedback I hope to get.

Oh, and I might whip something up for the jam. I dunno.

Here is the download link for Cleansing: http://www.megaupload.com/?d=KZMEJY0E

Done my Game! it’s been a while since I actually uploaded it, but I figured I’d blog about it.

One final Screenshot

go play it now!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-20/?action=rate&uid=1548

warning: pretty darn unpolished. But I like to think it adds a certain charm (no game-over screen is VERY charming)

Wow, great job everyone who submitted Compo entries. I’ve been incredibly impressed by your efforts. My team and I are still cranking on GunHack for the Jam.

We just implemented some nice pixel shaders for lighting, why? was this a good use of time? who knows… but it looks sweet. Also baddies are starting to chase the player around.

First attempt at making a timelapse, quickly glued it together before going to bed this morning. Enjoy

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

As I should have seen coming UDK takes a long time to upload an exe for so I don’t think I made it in time. Lesson learned and I had fun anyways since theres still no working link heres a gameplay vid of my entry “Cleansing”.

-rayn

I managed to finish my game, Elidia, in time for the compo!  The game is rough, but finished.  This is the first time I have managed to actually complete a full game–in Ludum Dare or out!

So what are you waiting for?  Go play and rate!

Everybody loves particles!

Just barely made it into the compo with a playable version!

The gameplay is nothing much – just jump from platform to platform in search of the portal platform that takes you to the next level.  I didn’t have time to implement enemies, more complex level layouts, or any kind of storyline to bind the game to the theme.

Regardless, I’m really happy with what I got done over the weekend – a lovely multipurpose 3D mesh generator,  a very powerful game editing framework, and the bones of a nice game.  I even came up with a passable plot that matches the theme, even if I didn’t have time to implement it.

If you want to download the game or browse the source (it’s Scala) you can find it in my github repository under a GPL license.

Now to catch a few hours of sleep.  Thanks to everyone for a nice Ludum Dare!

Finished the Dare, just in time I’m really quite proud of myself for this one, not only did I really push my technical skillset (first time integrating a full-on level editor in a game!) but I also kinda pissed away the first 12~ hours Anyway, in the end it turned out pretty well, check it out if you want, hope you enjoy it!

Eunaborb