Here’s the last push for a bit of attention to my LD submission, if you have a second and haven’t already done so, please check it out and toss me whatever rating you feel it’s worth.

This whole experience has been absolutely fantastic. Thanks and much love to the organizers and participants for making this such a great ride to be on!

There’s a walk-through video, a time-lapse, and a self-hosted project page if you’re interested.

Here I present the “edited and abridged for LD’ers” version of the post-mortem:

What Went Right

1. Leveraging the Power of Unity Prefabs

All of my past projects up to this one had been done almost exclusively in C#, with almost no special use of the Unity environment. They were done that way to help me come to grips with coding in C#.

For this LD, I threw that mentality out the window and crafted nearly everything in scene, using prefabs. What an amazing difference it makes! Defining game objects, exposing the variables on them, and using drag-and-drop to configure game play is really what Unity is all about, and I’m glad I had this LD to finally realize that.

2. Scripting Tight

Sort of a knock-on effect of switching over to prefabs, code bloat was immediately reduced to a negligible amount. With all the variables explicitly used and exposed on the game objects in scene, it was far easier to manage what was going on and limit the overall messiness of the scripting process. That’s not to say there’s no kludgy-hacky nonsense going on, but there’s far less than there was when I was in pure code mode.

3. Winning the Theme Roulette

This time I followed the theme selection very closely. I hadn’t before because I didn’t want to set my sights on any one theme before the final was announced, and avoid any kind of disappointment. This time I didn’t really fixate on a theme, but I had a very strong feeling that ‘It’s Dangerous…’ was going to be chosen. The night before the compo I dreamed a fully-formed concept for a game that used this theme, so you can imagine my relief when it turned out to be the one that made the cut. Lucky advantage.

What Went Wrong

1. Uneven Production Process

When tackling any long-term project, I tend to break things down into manageable chunks and then assign levels of ‘completeness required for play’ to them. This means there’s a round of building, and producing passable assets so that I can start to see if a game is going to be fun or not.

For Ludum Dare, though, it seems that one thing that makes games stand out and get recognized is the end quality levels of art. I’ve always envied these 2D wizards that can crank out beautiful pixels for their projects that really make them shine. So, I told myself I was going to push it to the limit with the 3D assets this time out. The problem was I focused so much on making the 3D nice that I had little time for audio and controls polish.

It’s always a trade off, a fine balance of managing just how much to produce in the time given.

2. Not Enough Kitties

Apparently this is also an important thing to producing a popular entry, and I’ll endeavor to add more cute meme-cats to my future entries.

3. Not Enough Zelda

Looking back at it now, I probably could have taken the time to insert at least a few nods to the venerable Nintendo classic, but I’m still happy with my interpretation of the theme and glad that it left enough leeway for all the other creative entries that weren’t strictly focused on emulating the Tri-force hunter in one way or another.

It’s really important to note that this LD sparked enough of a creative fire under my butt to finally abandon another project that I wasn’t really having much fun with and shift all of my production over to creating an improved version!

Thanks again and congrats to all that participated in this LD, I’m looking forward to seeing you all and more come the next one.
-
Jack

<click here for Dark Acre Jack’s entry>

Hey,

I ported my Jam game over to Android !

However, many users have had crashes, etc… if any devs can give it a run and do an “adb logcat” and post the results here, that would be a huge help!

(The game is also available on iOS, PC, Mac, Linux too, if anyone cares to check it out!)

-Phil

UPDATE: Android build is so broken I took it down.

Well, ok, it’s the updated version of my game, but all the levels in the original version are in there. (apart from the first, but if you need a walkthrough for that…) This is also proof the last level is possible.

Hey there, folks.

Over the past couple of days, I’ve been working on a boilerplate library.

I love FlashPunk, but it doesn’t do everything that I need. I need skeletal animation and more complex collision detection and response than FlashPunk can provide.

Therefore, I’ve taken it upon myself to write a boilerplate library of my own.

It will have skeletal animation, a proper entity hierarchy (FlashPunk has none, Flixel’s is purely organization), separating axis collision response (In addition to hitbox collisions, of course), a gui system, and other things that I will add as I need them.

I’m not 100% sure of the name for the library, but I’m leaning toward “SpudTech” because, well, it sounds funny and I like that in a library name.

That being said, you folks can expect me to use my library in further LD efforts. Probably including this month’s Mini-LD.

Peace, love, and buckets of cheese,

— Mr. Dude

I finally got around to making a little walkthrough of my LD20 entry. So if you had trouble running it or didn’t want to download it, or are just stumped by the staggeringly complexity of the puzzles, then check it out:

Also includes a quick looks at the “Sproxel” voxel editor I used to make the characters and tiles.

Will there be a post-compo version? We’ll see…

Currently working on a graphical retouch of Quaintbrush.

Right now, I have a really rough 2.5D system set up.

how to be a girl, my LD20 jam entry, has been updated. I suppose I could call it ‘how to be a better girl’ now, or something. I dunno.

The game’s jam page is here. Or you can go straight to the updated version here.

After recovering from LD20 I decided to spend this past week adding to how to be a girl in an attempt to make it feel more complete.  So what did I do?

I added endings. Plural. Not that I expect anyone to put up with the game long enough to see them all (there’s three). I think the main thing I took away from the feedback I got, was the game lacked a sense of closure (it really did). I’m not sure if the endings I’ve added quite do the trick. I could probably do better. One of the endings in the game works pretty well for me, the others possibly less so. Who knows, I may come back to the game in a while and fix them up. Maybe not; they’ll quite possibly stay as they are.

I also added a couple more interruptions for a tiny bit more variety. This is a very minor addition since the interruptions are all functionally the same.

Perhaps the biggest addition, at least in terms of the amount of time it took me, is music. I spent most of the past week recording and editing. I’m quite happy with how the soundtrack turned out, so you download it here, or from the game’s website, if you want (you probably won’t like it). The download includes a couple tracks which did not find a place in the game. I would maybe have used them for a couple of the endings, except their length would have caused a fairly large increase to the game’s (file)size.

If anyone’s wondering, the only program I used in creating the music was Audacity, with a few plug-ins. The music is all thumb piano (played by me) and noise. For the most part all of the noises are recorded sounds that I applied various effects to (the only non-recorded noise is the buzzing crescendo shared by the two tracks that are not in the game).

Give it a play, if you wish, and leave some feedback, if you so desire.

updated on May 18th

thanks to Draknek who pointed me to this page which doesn’t require signing in and have more comprehensive stats. i have updated the script and now there is no need to provide a password. page fetching part was rewritten using only built-in ruby methods so mechanize gem isn’t needed as well.

some examples to demonstrate how it works:

get this script on github: https://gist.github.com/975928

enjoy!

With only a week left of voting time, I figured it’s high time I get around to writing a post mortem for my game, Elidia.  Elidia is a game of survival, where your goal is to avoid the enemies for as long as possible.  The theme came into play by certain weapons which help you to destroy the enemies.

Click to rate Elidia

What went right:

• Choosing an extremely simple concept.  In the past, I have bitten off a bit more than I can chew in just 48 hours–I have always made something playable, but it hasn’t been for very long.  Elidia is as complete as my original concept.  Obviously it can use some refinement and expansion, but I am very happy with what I got done.  All-in-all, the whole thing really took me about 16 hours of work.
• Having a game that doesn’t need a story.  I’m a big fan of story-driven games, but they’re almost certainly too much work for a Ludum Dare.  I opted to have a game which didn’t need a story to be played.  That being said, I’d like to think that there is a bit of a story told through the narrative.  Speaking of…
• Using audio.  In the past, I have only really ever used SFXR or BFXR to make sound effects.  I opted for a text-to-speech program this time around, since I thought it would work out better than generic “pew pew” sounds.  I also figured I could work a bit of humor into the speech, since it doesn’t really fit anywhere else.

What went wrong:

• Not adding enough variation.  There is only one type of enemy, but ideally there will be many more–each with something different about them.  I will also add a lot more variation to the audio so it will be less repetitive.
• Figuring out the best graphical style.  I wanted the game to be a lot like Geometry Wars, but didn’t want it to be a copy.  While the game play is actually very different, the style is like a very simple version of Geometry Wars.  I plan on coming up with a style which is unique to Elidia, while still keeping its influences.
• Not changing the size of the bounding boxes.  This is easily the most hated part of Elidia.  Each enemy is a triangle, but the bounding box is a square which encompasses the entire triangle–so you can still die even if you’re pretty far away.  I knew this was an issue, but never got around to resolving it before the competition was over.

In the end, this is my most successful Ludum Dare yet.  I managed to complete the game I set out to in the alotted time, and it seems to be getting good feedback.  Obviously I don’t know how it’s doing vote-wise, but it’s still a big success to me.  If you haven’t played it or rated it yet, what’re you waiting for?!  Good luck to everyone in the competition!  :)

I’m in for the upcoming mini-LD provided I don’t have to roadtrip that week.  I’m waiting to hear back about a possible job opportunity in my area.  If I don’t get the job I’m going to have to drive halfway across the U.S. to stay with relatives.  So as long as I’m in one place, I’d love to participate.  This will be my first Mini-LD and second LD overall.

My tools will (probably) be:

IDE:  FlashDevelop

Codebase:  AS3 + flixel + flixel power tools

Graphics:  Photoshop

Sound:  Sfxr/Bfxr + Audacity

Music:  FLStudio

Tools:  Handheld whiteboard and 8 colored markers; Programming hat of +5 code skill

I have a couple ideas that I hope can fit with the theme.  One is an atmospheric platformer (pretty generic) and the other is an orthagonal (3/4) view puzzle game with a unique means of interaction.  I really hope I get to do the latter.

Excited as always!

Edit: Looks like the 26th is a Thurs.  Since I’ll hopefully be getting a new job I may opt for fri-sat instead. Nvm.  Misread the date.

Hi, I’m proud to introduce you gLapse v0.1, a GUI GNU/Linux tool to make time lapse videos of your Ludum Dare work progress. gLapse allows you to take desktop screenshots at fixed intervals and glue them together in a time lapse video. I developed it because there only were command line tools to make time lapse videos on Linux… until now!

Features

• Take .png screenshots at a custom time interval and with variable quality.
• Make videos from using the saved screenshots with custom FPS.
• Multilanguage: English and Spanish for now (more translations are welcome!).

(more…)

Hello everyone, I’ve been meaning to write this, but with reports and project deadlines bearing down on me I kept putting it off.

This was my first time participating in Ludum Dare, the primary goal I had was to finish, and have a game that was at least partial fun. I finished on time, and I’m overall happy with my entry.

What went right:

- The Teleporter concept, worked overall I would have liked to have more complexity to it, and some sort of combination

- Construct, I was able to get the player movement and Teleporters function working within an hour. As well as having a platform to create level layout on visually.

- The tutorial level, it was the first level I created, and I think it did a good job explaining the concepts.

- Sound Effects, I think they worked good, but with the music in the game you could hardly hear them.

What went wrong:

-The art, (kinda sad seeing as I’m a Fine Art major) When I started with the tutorial level, I was thinking of a high contrast game (mostly Black and White) Then the next level I added more textures and it didn’t look right. It also went wrong with a photographed main character, then a drawn enemy (though in my defense I did add the photographed player at the last minute)

-The music, haha shouldn’t have  even attempted it. I haven’t had much experience with LMMS (or music of any kind). The volume was way to loud, and the music looped wrong, in addition to just being a bad song.

-Construct, (yea it was both good and bad) I had troubles with the Minimap (although they are solved now and I should have been able to figure it out before). There is also a crash that stems from the minimap (I believe).

I’m working on an updated version of the game. I’ve already increased the starting speed of the devices, fixed the minimap. I’d like to add some player animations, powerups, more levels, and I’m going to change the overall look of the game back to a high contrast look. I’d also like to see about adding a scoring system.

You can play the compo version here

Hi All,

It’s been almost two weeks since the competition, and I figured I’ll write a bit about my experience in creating Dragon Island.

What went right:

1. Graphics and tile engine: I am quite happy with how the graphics turned out, given the time limitation. Even more so, I am happy with my trusty tile engine which grows from LD to LD – this time I added “depth” sorting to allow for this “3d” look.
2. Music: I really like how the music turned out to be – after writing it I though it reminds me of a part of “Dune 2″ music, but that was not intentional (although my sub-conscious probably is to blame…).

What went wrong:

1. Gameplay: I am actually disappointed that my gameplay didn’t go as planned. It is full of bugs, and controls are iffy. This seems to be a common problem with my games, but this time it was the worst – I think next time I will need to prototype the game play MUCH MUCH earlier on in the competition, and make it work first. Pretty graphics and nice music doesn’t help when the gameplay is flawed – we are making GAMES here.
2. Time management: I am not sure what happened this time, but I didn’t really manage my time well this time around – I got to the evening of Sunday with very few working elements, and needed to rush everything – usually I’m better at this.
3. Theme: I didn’t like the theme, and I didn’t even know the reference for it (Zelda, and/or the Meme). Well, I work with what I get – but I don’t like the silly themes, so it would seem.

I think that’s about it – thanks every one for a great competition and be sure to play and vote as much as you can (I am very busy these days, I just hope to rate the assigned games at least…). Go play!

Thanks,

Daniel

Play Now Vote

In the Beginning
Going into the competition I didn’t really have any direction. After hearing the theme and looking at the kitten meme and the Zelda text I figured I would start off with an elf kid going into a cave and receiving a kitten rather than a weapon, but other that that I had no idea for gameplay or anything. I knew for tools I would use CoffeeScript and the PixieEngine (I have been creating PixieEngine for exactly these kinds of competitions and wanted to put it to the test). If you’re looking to try out a new development environment for easy publication to the web I recommend checking it out. It’s free! It’s still a bit rough around the edges but with your feedback we can make it better.

It was quick to get the initial level and cave in but I wasn’t sure what direction to take the game. I spent several hours on animating the sprites, drawing the kitten from reference of the meme. Art isn’t my strongest suit but spending time on it gave me time to think and I definitely could feel myself improving. After sleeping on the theme the first night I knew that I didn’t want to just have the cat act as a weapon, because that would be pretty plain and boring. I decided that it would be cool if you had to take the cat around to different dungeons and work together to solve puzzles. I had the idea to make the water impassible for the kitten around this time so that the player and kitten would need to work together to access different areas. I also spent some time getting the mew to sound right in SFXR.

I really wanted to focus on the emotional attachment to the kitten and to make it feel like you were helping each other. It is for this reason that the initial cave the kitten goes into narrows symbolizing a feeling of cramped/claustrophobic danger. This culminates when the kitten becomes trapped in a waterfall and the player is required to submit to entering the water and becoming helpless. Then when the kitten floats back out down the stream the player is given control of the elf character and must rescue the helpless kitten. The relevant psychology is that we develop good feelings towards those who we do favors for (similar to Portal’s Weighted Companion Cube). These locations, actions, and even the sound of the mew, were all designed towards the goal of creating an emotional bond.

The bombs were an ok addition, but didn’t have very much depth. It seemed like near the end of the game (especially at the ending) there was plenty of room to create a wide variety of levels and puzzles, but I had just solidified the core mechanic and core emotional experiences and the clock was still ticking down.

My brother was in town and late Saturday or early Sunday, in the course of viewing the game he came up with the idea for the ending. I spent several hours Sunday grossly copy/pasting and hacking the functionality in. This cost me a bit in terms of level design. An additional cost of adding screens was due to some excessive manual steps (like hand coding doors). In the end there were maybe 1.5 dungeons and 1.5 puzzles, but people really enjoyed the ending so I think it was a decent trade-off. As the level editor and game object tools improve it should become easier to add more levels with fewer manual steps.

All in all it went pretty well. I didn’t stay up too late or stress out much, but the time limitations were significant. Next time I should make a stronger effort to discover a fun core mechanic sooner to leave more time for level design. The risk of this is that I may lock down the mechanic too soon, before it is actually fun, but I think that’s the main conflict throughout game design.

The Good
The pixel editor, level editor, and sound editor integration in PixieEngine really helped me get a playable prototype up quickly. I was able to get a guy on the screen and moving around in minutes.

The API for many of the core components was simple to use. If I wanted to play a sound I would create it in the embedded SFXR, then call it by adding Sound.play("mew") at the appropriate place in the code. Similarly for loading sprites.

The engine Object Query Language was great for hacking together quick functionality engine.find "Player", engine.find "Item", engine.find "Cat" all came in handy.

Experience with CoffeeScript and the PixieEngine system was also a big plus. I knew what the strengths and weaknesses of the system were and was familiar with the workarounds (like using git integration to copy files to get around the missing “Save As” feature).

Publishing to the web was immediate and 100% hassle free because the entire engine is online to begin with. I didn’t have to spend anytime thinking about packaging or distribution.

I actually got to make a serious attempt at sprite animation, and some of the two-frame walk cycles actually look decent. Also the things I was drawing basically looked like the things they were supposed to. Still room to improve immensely but so far a personal best.

The Bad
As a home grown engine there were many parts that were still rough around the edges. The tilemaps and game engine had no built in concept of rooms, persistent entities, and transferring state from one room to another, so I had to just hack it in.

The file management was similarly rough: there was no “Save As” (though there is now because it was my #1 issue)

Our animation/model system isn’t as integrated as the sounds/images/tilemaps so I had to hack together my two-frame walk animations by hand.

Still don’t have an integrated music editor. I was able to do all the art and (most) sound effects from within the editor suite, but had no option for music. I really want to make some sort of online Mario Paint Composer style editor, but realize that it would be a pretty big project in its own right.

The lack of a shared “object toolbox” of all the classes of objects was a pretty big negative. This meant that for each screen I had to recreate the tiles by dragging them in, and manually setting their class and data properties. This especially sucked for doors where I needed to hand type the destinationPosition. The good news is that this is the next feature on our list and once it is fixed things are looking great!

The Best

Because I coded in PixieEngine, everyone is free to view the source, fork the game, make alternate levels, and more. (Though the engine is not quite “easy to use”. Your feedback is greatly appreciated!).

Though I wasn’t able to get in all the levels and puzzles I had hoped for this was still a personal best LD for me. I have had a great experience this LD and am looking forward to the ones to come. Additionally, all the feedback was helpful and it was nice to see that people enjoyed the game. If you haven’t yet, please play through and let me know what you think!

Play Now Vote

What a great couple of weeks it has been! After our complete and utter failure to implement our LD20 Jam game how we wanted to, everything else has just massively made up for it.

First, our LD19 Jam game, The Wager which we released an updated version of just before LD20 got noticed and ‘Freeware Game Pick’ed by IndieGames.com, then we caught praise from Rock Paper Shotgun and Destructoid. Just this week a lovely, long bit on the start of the Gamers With Jobs podcast is the latest thing.

At time of writing, an estimated 2000 people have played our game. That’s hardly setting the world on fire but considering that we were delighted when the count stood at 200, seeing that ten times over is… well, we’ve been grinning a lot. And this, our second game ever.

Over all comments have been very positive from nearly everyone, with some good criticism mixed in which is really helping with the update we’re looking to release as soon as we can. Then it’s onto the next project, in which we hope to resurrect our LD20 attempt in a very-much-changed form.

Most importantly, we may never have gotten around to actually making games instead of talking about it if it hadn’t been for the LD Jam, so I wanted to thank everyone that helped get that portion of the event going. I also want to put in a good word for the Jam, because I still think it tends to get lost behind the bluster of the main competition and I’d love to have the organisers think of some ways to give it a bit more love.

Yo LD’ers, coders and freakers,

Just sharing the news with a shameless plug…

There will be a juicy two-page-spread editorial about the game “Track King” in June’s edition of “Racing Victoria – Inside Racing” (Australian horse racing magazine).

Stoked!

“Track King” is a game that my friend and business partner created, with additional design and content from me, including flash based applications (RaceVision, Silks, DNA lab etc.). He covers the PHP/HTML bases. We’ve put in countless hours of work since TK was launched late 2007.

It’s a multiplayer online stable management game. We won BBG’s “Best Simulation 2009″ award against some pretty tough competition.

www.TrackKing.org

Brass Monkey – Post Mortem
A Treatise on Simian Semantics

What happened…

When I first heard the theme “It’s too dangerous to go alone. Take this!” I sort of shrivelled up and died. I had placed this right at the bottom of my list of preferred themes. It seemed too generic, too clichéd; it simply didn’t grab me.

The irony here being that a tight rigid theme allows more creativity than a vague theme.

I judge a theme by how quickly they evoke images, characters and game play. Many themes like “absorption” and “evolution” gave me instant visions into doors of wondrous possibility, but the final chosen theme gave me nothing – just a mental blank page.

So, being confused by this theme, I desperately wanted to steer clear of anything predictable, and of any concepts already done. (Perhaps I get a point for this… ).

I spent the entire first day thinking, scribbling, walking, and generally procrastinating. I spun yarns in my head about a far future monkey race of beings (a la Planet of the Apes). In this context, the player could then be given an ancient artefact of any design – this idea amused me greatly, and struck me as the crux of “escaping the usual”.

For some reason, a trumpet came to mind.

And of course, what would a monkey know of trumpets? Perhaps it is a hat (which was the original idea, and it is implemented in the game; but it bounces up and down so it’s not really very evident that it’s a hat).

Some idea I had involved Pied-Piper-esque scenarios… a silhouetted monkey dancing across a barren landscape, playing a trumpet, leading a multitude of rat-like post-apocalyptic mutants to their death.

Another idea was a kind of “simple simon” musical challenge, you would have to essentially “jam” with the enemies to defeat them.

After the end of the first 24 hours I was building a civilization in my head. This was fine if I wanted to write a novel, but I was supposed to be making a game.

But I am stickler for cohesion – the back-story of a game is important to me (he says, while typing a blog entry about a monkey playing a psychedelic trumpet).

At the end of the first day I had not written a single line of code.

THIS was a mistake.

Any code, any dirty code, any spaghettified mess of code is required at the end of day 1. Something. Something to get your project moving.

Instead I had done some “asset fishing”; this helps me think, and reflect upon ideas. So I grabbed certain CC/royalty free images that inspired me in some form or another, without really knowing what the final game was going to be.

This sort of random haphazard multi-sensory work flow is fine… unless you’ve only got 48 hours.

I slept on it.

I struggled the next day too, and played with assets – graphics and sound – still without any concrete ideas.

5.00pm on day two, I write my first line of code.

Something came together over those hours. Nothing amazing, but a nice little game that can be expanded upon. The submitted version lacks pace, and “powerups” – easy enough to address.

I’ve always been a great fan of Jeff Minter (a Commodore 64 guru of psychedelic gaming), and I wanted to add some of this flavour to “Brass Monkey”.

A couple of quick words regarding royalty free images… I wasn’t sure of the “legality” of this, it seems the consensus is I am not supposed to use them. I can understand how it’s not really “in the spirit” of the competition.

I remember reading some post where someone offered the general advice: “if it feels like you’re cheating, don’t do it”. I didn’t feel like I was cheating. And the silly thing is, if I were to use a publicly available AS3 library (like “flixel” I think it is) I WOULD feel like I was cheating.

But that’s just me, and it’s a bit silly, and it’s something I shall get over… I need to explore some of these libraries.

I’m from the “olden days” (not TOO old, but technology changes so fast doesn’t it?). Cut my teeth on programming machine language, by “hand” of course, for the 6502 chip on my Vic-20 (no assembler – manual opcode lookup, split addresses into low-byte/high-byte format, poke them into memory, and hope the machine doesn’t crash!). This is in about 1981, I was aged 12. My father is a programmer, so he helped and encouraged.

So, I was around for the excitement of the microcomputer revolution. Progressing from the Vic-20, to the Commodore-64 and then the Amiga (…oh, the Amiga, how I miss thee). So, I’ve always written my own libraries for everything, because computer were much simpler back then.

BUT all that being said…
I highly recommend the LD experience to anyone and everyone!
It IS challenging, but also great fun!
As difficult as I found this one, I still enjoyed the experience!

The one big thing out of the Ludum experience is the COMMUNITY.
It is so inspiring to see the work of others, and read about their experiences and ideas. It’s also amazing to see all the different technologies – for example, I wonder what it would be like to write a game in Python? I’ve no idea… but many out there do.

There is a real sense of comradery and community here!

Cheers,

Hey all,

Thanks everyone for the feedback thus far on my entry, most notably Daniel X. Moore’s comment about not being able to run Unity on Linux. I’ve put together the above walkthrough of the game from start to finish.

So, for anyone having issues running it or beating it, you’ll get the whole experience here and hopefully still be able to contribute a rating!

I’ve also prepared a version of the video without commentary. Thanks again for checking out my stuff, I’ve had a blast playing through everyone else’s!

Hey guys!

I wanted to see what you guys think of a little game I have been working on: Solar Quest!

It’s a little 3D space monopoly game based on the board game of the same name. Get it here!

Windows Installer

Let me know what you think!