I’m making good progress on an improved version of my game: thinking of lots of new gameplay elements and drawing lots more Zelda enemies.

Here’s a screenshot showing some of the new things I’ve added:

Entry page here

This was my first Ludum Dare – I went into it feeling completely unprepared, and finished the compo with a game I’m pretty happy with. I’m going to attempt to describe how that happened.

What Went Right

• The Toolchain. I made a rather risky move going into this LD. I decided to use a game engine I’d never tried (Flixel) in a language I haven’t used in years (ActionScript 3) in an IDE that doesn’t run on my OS (FlashDevelop) Crazy, right? Actually, I don’t think it could have gone better. Flixel’s handling of basic motion and collisions is far more intuitive than any physics engine I’ve tried, and the engine as a whole seems perfectly tailored to quickly prototyping games. Due to some of the awesome features in Flixel, I ended up using Photoshop as my map editor, which worked quite well, and is something I’ll be thinking about doing more of in the future.
• The code. The one piece of advice I got before Ludum Dare was to not get caught up in the code. That’s a problem I’ve had in the past (I’ve got a number of game prototypes that are more engine than game, nearly all of the utilities I’ve released have about 3x the functionality that can be shown in their UIs) but with the looming 48 hour deadline, I was able to ignore best practices and just get sh*t done. There’s dead code, unused variables, methods copied from class to class, and not a comment in the entire program. But it works, and ultimately that’s all that matters.
• Music & Sounds. The audio ended up being much less of a hassle than I’d initially thought it would be. For the music, I used Garage Band on iPad which has a feature called “Smart Instruments” – I gave it a couple chords, and it gave me back a groovy baseline. I spent about as much time making the music as I did trying to get the .mp3 to loop properly. For most of the sound effects I just decided to record them myself. I grabbed my iPhone, went in to the quietest room of the house and made zombie noises for a few minutes. It was fun, actually.

What Went Wrong

• The Theme. At least initially, I had no idea what to do with this theme. I didn’t want to wind up with the same idea as everyone else, so the obvious ideas of a zeldaish game or something where you only win if you’re holding the MacGuffin were out. I spent probably 4 hours tearing my hair out and contemplating leaving the competition before scrawling down “you start in a portal like chamber where you don’t get the macguffin, then you fight zombies or something”
• The Graphics. Unlike the code, where I only did what I needed, as I needed it, when it came to the graphics – I didn’t really have a plan. I started the graphics before starting the code, which was a mistake – but the bigger mistake was starting the graphics before I’d nailed down what the game was going to be. I wasted a lot of time on graphics I didn’t end up needing, or which just didn’t look right (all the walk cycles) I’m relatively happy with where the graphics ended up, but it took too long to get there.
• Planning. I didn’t really know what my game was going to be until after I was 3/4 of the way finished, so I didn’t even have a todo list until the last 12 hours. I’m pretty good at flying by the seat of my pants, but I think a little pre-planning would have helped. You know, trying to set a couple milestones, researching the engine I was using a little more, that kind of thing.

And if you read all that, here’s your reward! I’ve uploaded a Timelapse of the development of Super Shotgun Deathrace which you probably shouldn’t watch until after you’ve played the game

Hectic week, but finally had the chance to toss my timelapse together.

Click to play!

Enjoy and critique!

Well, let me tell you my foray into game building this time was an interesting one. My goal was to create a dramatic movie experience using just audio and music.

While everyone else in the competition was busy playing with game ideas or throwing together some code for their game infrastructure or perhaps even creating a level editor, I was just trying to fight back writer’s block. I had about 15 pages of narration to write (and that was after cutting the initial scale of my game in half) and initially I had allocated about 6 hours to do it. I was planning on being done by the time I went to bed that night, but when I was too tired to work any longer, I had only a third of the story written!

In the end it took me about 12 hours and it was still unfortunately a pretty rough draft but I had to go with it. The end of the narration definitely suffered compared to the beginning when I was able to add so many extra details, but that’s life in a 48 hour competition. At this point it was 1pm on Sat. and all I had to show for it was a stack of papers.

Luckily I was prepared for the recording session. I had done a test the day before and knew exactly what I wanted to do even though I had never narrated before. Of course, the fact that I didn’t have time to even rehearse the material meant the narrations didn’t come out as well as they could of. And of course it’s harder to narrate than you may think. Sure a paragraph or two is simple, but when you are reading page after page, the mistakes add up and so you end up doing everything several times and then have to go back through all that later and sort out what is good and what is not. There is just a ton of painstaking processing involved with audio.

In order to get the best possible sound, I shut down my pc and got rid of every possible sound in the room. I recorded the audio using logic pro with my mac mini. I recorded through the preamp of my Mackie mixer and through a comp54 compressor (which is an amazing reproduction of a neve compressor). I used a Shure sm7b microphone which was the one that Michael Jackson actually used to record Thriller. It works as well for voice as it does for music. So I was pretty confident that technically the narration would come out well and it did.

So I finished the recording and then that evening (maybe 4pm) I exported everything to my pc and put the chapters together using Cubase 6. Cubase is by far my favorite daw; it really is the best there is if you are using midi and virtual instruments and don’t want to feel limited with what you can do. I had originally planned on scoring the narrations using my prophet 08 analog synth, but I realized there just wasn’t going to be time to do all the tweaking necessary to get the sounds I wanted (I did use it for that intro sound though), so I fell back to using Omnisphere, which is a software synth in a class by itself. I had never scored a narration before (a lot of firsts here). I tried several different techniques during the process of creating the 12 different scores (which is a heck of a lot of music to try to create in such a short time). I think from the first one I did to the last one I definitely improved quite a bit. I hate the first one (chapter 1) and plan on redoing it for the iphone version. My favorite is the helicopter flight score. Well, that and maybe the score of the hive with all of the gross creature sounds. I found my process was getting much more elaborate during these last few scores. I spent the rest of the night working on the scores, maybe to 3am.

Next morning I was on schedule but immediately things went horribly wrong. I had used Unity in the last LD to make a nice little 3d game, but man when I tried to use it for the simple purposes of this game, I was just fighting it the whole time. All I wanted to do was a simple fade, but I was jumping hoop after hoop and things weren’t coming together. It was noon and I had nothing, so I switched immediately over to flashpunk which I had used to make a game last year. Thank god I did. I didn’t even have flashdevelop on my computer, so I had to download it all and follow the flashpunk instructions to get it all working, but that only took about 10 minutes. Almost immediately things were working and I was coding the game. The actual code was about as simple as could be, so I won’t spend much time talking about it.

The final big hurdle I hit when I was all done and testing was that I found that flashpunk (probably flash actually) was very picky about the sample rates of my mp3 files. In order to upload the game to Kongregate I had to get the game under 10MB so I had to make the sounds mono and as low a sample rate as possible. I had done all the final wav files at 96k and I was having a heck of a time getting wavelab to convert the 96k wavs to small mp3 files that flash would actually accept.

I finally ended up creating the mp3 files in Cubase actually, which I think gave me a higher quality sound in the end. I went with mono, 32kb, 11khz and I liked the quality of the output, but ran into a huge problem. It was really affecting the volume levels of the different tracks. I had the music much quieter than the narration and in some cases the output mp3 had actually silenced the music. So at the last minute I had to go through my projects and adjust the volume levels, bringing up the volume of the scores so you could actually hear them in the mp3.

That’s it. Overall, to be honest, I’m just amazed I was able to complete it. There were several times when things weren’t going right that I considered just giving up. But I think I continued because with this project I choose to do the things that I enjoy the most, writing and making music, and so that’s why I was able to persevere. I know a game like this is sure to be rated poorly, I knew that going in and accepted it from the start. Even if my voice was like Orson Welles and my prose like Hemingway I wouldn’t have a chance. And yet I really think there is a niche for this kind of game. Sure it falls more under interactive fiction than game (it is less interactive than dragon’s lair even), but there’s almost limitless potential for the number of epic stories I can tell. I almost see it as a way to bring game-players back into fiction.

If you feel like listening to a good story, check it out. It is a dark, apocalyptic science fiction / survival horror thriller that will depend completely on your imagination. I’m working on a mobile version now that will have some beautiful artwork and a bunch of other features as well (not to mention a re-write or two). I should warn you that there is a ton of profanity so I would say if you don’t like listening to audio books or if strong language or gross imagery disturbs you, then stay very clear of this one.

Change of Heart
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-20/?action=rate&uid=258

LD20 marked my first successful LD submission. Since then, I’ve been looking at the feedback I’ve been getting.

…And the Ludum Dare community is by a long shot the most supportive community I have ever seen! Why is this? Is it because when you’ve spent 48 hours grinding out a game, you feel the pain of your fellow participants?

Not that I’m complaining or anything

But seriously, guys, no matter what game I look at, the comments are full feedback and positive remarks on the games.

Give yourselves a pat on the back.

D'Awww!

Oh, and in completely irrelevant news, I made a timelapse of my game, “A Portrait of my Curious World” is up. Check the video:

Here

Or if you’re feeling really adventurous *cough cough*, you can find the game:

Here

May the force be with you.

This post-mortem presented to you as a series of random observations and comments.

My original idea for the game came as a sort of pacifist Zelda. It would be just like the Legend of Zelda game, except you’d never get any of the weapons.

I wasn’t trying to be funny at first. With this post, however, I realized that there was a potential for humor in the plot, and went with it.

Honestly, this wasn't intentionally funny. I just needed an excuse to not give the player the super-weapon yet.

I can’t really point out something that went wrong this time. I suppose I wasted too much time and didn’t get around to implementing a boss fight, so there’s that.

I started seeing someone between the last LD and this one, so I got to dedicate the game to her. That was cool.

The reason for the super-weapon:

SPOILERS BELOW

I wanted to give players a chance to destroy the puzzles and annoyances from previous rooms, a sort of vicarious revenge upon the game. Also, a lot of the people will stop playing the game for a bit so that they can say to me. “MOTHERFUCKIN’ RAINBOW CANNON” or something along those lines.

SPOILERS END

Autotracker-C is AMAZING. USE IT!

Taking part in the community is so beneficial! Getting feedback is helpful, and giving helpful feedback leads to all sorts of warm fuzzies.

My puzzles are so unchallenging! I have no idea how to balance them, since being the one who designed them gives me a bit of an advantage.

Hi,

I heard some reviewers mention, there is a bug in my game Red that freezes the game after the objective is complete.

Please check the game if you have a sec and see if it freezer during the second level.

If the bug does happen, please comment and include the version of flash you have.

You can check here which version you have. Thanks

ER

Due to several people suggesting it, I made a post-compo version of Take This Penguin that doesn’t start at the title screen each time you die. Link is on the entry page for it. Hope you enjoy it!

Entry Page

Hi, my name is David and i am looking for people interested to be in a small dev team. I am a good programmer in AS3, but i suck at making chiptunes even though i play guitar and know how music works and such. I also am TERRIBLE at spriting/graphic design. So in this dev team of mine would be:

Me: Lead Programmer
?: Chiptune/music developer
?: 8-bit/what ever matches the game artist

if you think you qualify and you are interested feel free to comment or find me on twitter (dsv101). Thanks,

dsv101

Doh! I thoughtlessly picked one of the stock Unity skydomes, forgetting that this is ART and should therefore be made by ME. Oops.

So “Lonely Fortress” has accordingly been moved to the Jam. Apologies and thanks to all of you who took the time to rate it.

On the plus side, since it’s no longer being judged, I’m uploading a new version with a quick and dirty fix for the bug where you could get stuck with your head inside a block. And I plan to continue developing it into a full game. Gotta keep busy until LD21 rolls around!

DOWNLOAD HERE!

What’s new in this update?

Well, there’s an AWFUL LOT. Thanks to all the people who played, this update is for YOU!

• The entire escape sequence has been fixed to be tons better. Sound isn’t as awful and the enemies still spawn.
• The in-game timer works now, so you can actually do competitive runs through.
• Added a whole hidden new area and fixed one of the hidden guns.
• Tweaked the final boss fight. More fun.
• Fixed a minor thing with the whole map.
• There’s a hidden boss in the hidden area. You can only get to this boss if you haven’t got the spreadshot yet.
• Tweaked difficulty levels to be a more steady challenge and made easy mode not as easy.
• Even a bit more than I’ve listed here. Have fun!

Well, I finally made some progress in finishing up all my main chores for the competition.

That being the port to windows and finally uploading my timelapse video. Check out the game page for the windows version and the timelapse.

Oh and as I heard there were some problems with the windows version, please let me know if you also encounter any problems running my game, so I can try to fix it somehow.

It wasn’t pretty, but I managed to shoehorn my 2D game engine on top of Unity3D.

The process was ugly, but the result is better than I could have hoped – the game looks and runs almost exactly the same as the Windows version (bugs and all – I didn’t make any changes). Unlike other web platforms I’ve tried that have framerate issues (I’m looking at you, Flash), it runs butter-smooth.

So, Mac users and those averse to downloading .zip files can now give Ascent of Kings a try.

I compiled a spreadsheet of all the games that can be played from the web for easy voting access.

Web Playable Games

Also, because I’m a fan of data, I was wondering if anyone would be interested in a technology and platform survey to gather stats on what tools, frameworks, and distribution channels LD participants are using. If there’s enough interest we can work together to get a survey up (and if something like this already exists, that’s even better!).

I have started to clean up the code of “Bloboy’s Journey”.
What more, the sprites will be improved.

Check out the work of Medea, the GSM Productions graphist!

This sprite sheet has become

(GSM Productions is a young Belgian game development team composed of Grungi Ankhfire, Medea and myself.)

Ok so after tinkering around a bit I finally managed to upload my game at http://www.scs.ryerson.ca/~aalksne/icarusGame/run-applet.php

It may have some trouble running on IE; I haven’t been able to find a clear way around that yet other than to use Chrome or Safari instead but hopefully it won’t cause too much trouble for everyone.

I have polished the game since ‘finishing’ it back on monday and although it’s really basic and my first completed game I am really proud with how it turned out. What I’m most excited about is that now I have a framework created that will allow me to dedicate more time to the actual ‘game’ portion and less so on the ‘figuring out how to add a model without it breaking the scene’ portion for next competition. Can’t wait for LD 21!!

Time for a quick postmortem of my entry, “An Old Man And His Quest”:

What Went Right

• Initial concept: although I’m not a big fan of this theme, my wife helped me with a basic idea so I could jump right into working on the game
• Getting scripting working: this really helped me get the game working as I intended, and really made it easy to add powers and cutscenes to the game… I’m probably going to merge that component I did in the compo onto the framework for the next time.
• Graphics: by going 3d and using some pixel art skills I picked up on the latest compos, I could do something that didn’t look completely terrible.
• Music: Again, WolframTones served me well for 48 hour game music…
• Cutscenes: I love doing cutscenes, specially in this kind of limited environment… Having to think on ways to twist my meager artistic skills and limited tech is very entertaining for me
• Mixing the “game” stuff and the “menu” stuff in a single framework… All becomes more interesting, and it’s less work to make behave properly, especially with the scripting engine

What went wrong

• Time managment: Again, I failed miserably in estimating development time, most of it by not considering the rest of the things that went wrong
• Going 3d: I almost always think about going 3d and don’t do it because it’s normally harder (even 2.5D like in this game)… This ended up being no exception, and I had loads of problems getting the initial setup working correctly… It also led to some driver-related problems and things like that, that made me loose loads of time… :\ The end result is a mixed blessing: it looks better, but it took longer…
• Bugs: Ran into some bugs after the deadline, which meant the game seems more buggy to everyone than it seems to me… :\ Fixed most post-compo, but that’s too late…
• No time for level design: In all compos, I promise myself I’ll code something simple and let 4 or 5 hours at the end for pure level design, game balancing, tuning and polish… and I always fail at this… This time was no exception… I had 5 levels thought of, only had time to make 4 (and the last one was terribly unbalanced)
• Using Photoshop as level design tool: what seemed like a nice idea ended up being more complicated than it should, which kind of defeated the purpose… next time I think I’ll be back to ASCII text files… or a good tile editor, if I can find one that suits my needs (haven’t found any so far, all demand too much work getting to work properly or require me to write a weird importer)

The game has circa 3000 lines of C++ code and 1100 lines of Lua code, and the framework about 17000.

Tools used:

Code: Visual Studio 2005
APIs: DirectX 9 (Feb), FMod, Win32, Lua
Graphics: Photoshop CS4
Sound: WolframTones (very awesome, only had 20 mins or so to play with it), Midi Converter Free (online free midi to mp3 converter), Sfxr
Blogging: Internet Explorer
Listening music: Winamp

On an end note, I’ll probably grab the 3d tiling stuff and scripting binds and merge it with the rest of my LD framework, for future use… I still want a competition where I can actually spend time working on the game, instead of the technology!

Thanks everybody that participated for an exciting weekend!

Hey I’m going to talk a bit about PSYCHOSOCK now!

It took me a couple of hours to develop the concept for PSYCHOSOCK. The original concept was thought up whilst brainstorming with my wife about the theme, she suggested a man trying to escape from a hospital and some item he need so he could escape, a sock for example. I then ran with this and decided to turn the item into a secondary playable character, making things somewhat more interesting. I also decided that to fit more closely with the theme, the character of the sock would be the player’s only means of offense, making it essential he take it with him and use it to deal with danger.

What went well:

I started mostly by experimenting with the visual style. I wanted something rather distinctive, different from my usual pixel art style, but also quick to produce to stay within the time constraints. I settled on a colourful, bold, childlike art style- which I feel helps the game stand out. The style itself was rather fun to work with as it meant I never got bogged down in character details and could make art assets at high speed.

From that I started to work on the basic gameplay concepts, considering things such as nonlinearity, an expansive map the player can explore, stealth systems and multiple approaches. I decided to go with none of these aside from a basic stealth system- to have done so would make it far too ambitious a concept to knock out in 48 hours. I settled on a linear basic stealth adventure, with a couple of environmental puzzles, and a basic enemy to be defeated or avoided. The character of the sock was always fairly clear in my mind- it’s a homicidal item of clothing. I originally thought of many puzzle concepts for the sock such as slipping through air vents and laser fences, but decided this was too complex and allowed him to strangle people, pick up items and flick switches; which still allowed for some basic puzzles.

Level design was a big step forward for me in this project, the rapid development process left no room for error, and I tracked every room, item and door object numerically on paper so I could immediately see how everything linked together. This was vital as it saved me a lot of headaches and backtracking by knowing exactly where each room transition object should point to, and how it was numbered. I also numbered all of the rooms, and using a few basic templates I was able to quickly design and populate the levels of the game. Going forward I will undoubtedly use this system of mapping on paper with room transitions and naming codes to keep track of my level design.

Soundwise I spent about an hour composing the two tunes in the game, just some simple chiptunes made using SFXR and LMMS. I made all the effect in SFXR in about 10 minutes, and added a little voice acting to the guards with my Rock Band microphone. The sound was a lot of fun to make and thought a lot of people neglect sound in these projects, I feel it can really enhance the atmosphere and feel of such a small project. The way it can be so rapidly generated using tools such as these really helped.

What could have been done better:

The final stage was rather rushed as I was running out of time, leading to it being very corridor based and a bit sparse. The final art assets I created for it are also noticeably rushed, as sadly I didn’t have time to make them look better.

Due to the time constraints I was unable to make much of the narrative either. My original idea was to have the player initially escape with their sock, then between each level I would have a scene where they talk and I could flesh out the characters and setting more. As it turned out I had barely enough time for the narrative that is in as it is, having to really speed draw the background for the opening and closing scenes. Perhaps I’ll revisit it and provide an updated version with the full scenes as originally intended.

The explanation of the controls was intended to be non-intrusive. I felt text prompts would break with the visual style of the game, so I put all the controls aside from movement in thought bubbles above the character’s head. This worked fairly well as a hint system, but the control for strangling guards (mashing X) did not come across clearly, leading to some people repeatedly being caught after failing to strangle them. This is unfortunate, and I have since put notes on the game page to help with this issue. Overall I feel animating these would have helped but as with most other things I simply did not have the time.

Lastly, though I think I managed to handle all the showstopping glitches, there are some left in the game. Testing is one of the most time consuming parts of any project, so I had to really cut it to a minimum. Notably one of the guards is stuck inside a locker and can’t move, and if you are caught whilst strangling a guard, the strangulation sound effect will loop endlessly until you kill somebody. On the plus side this does mean you get some further exposure to my wonderful imitation of asphyxiation.

Overall:

I’m really pleased with the way this project went. I feel I made a pretty good game and learned a lot about how to develop more efficiently, as well as getting to experiment with mechanics and styles I hadn’t tried before, as well as being able to release a game at the end of it. Perhaps if I’d have stayed in and not got drunk on Sunday evening it’d be a little more polished, but really I’m happy with how the whole thing played out.

Please give it a try and let me know what you think of it: PSYCHOSOCK

Check it out here!

Thanks to all the positive feedback from everyone who played p.i.g!
I’ve used a lot of suggestions to improve the game.

The enhanced version includes:

-original music from the composer for ‘endeavor’
-3 new unlockable levels with a new mechanic
-level select screen to replay levels
-enhance portal funneling feature to make portalling easier
-bugfixes!

Go play it, and have fun!

Contest Link
Web Player Link

Intro:

Air Pirates was developed in a very fluid way, meaning the game I was planning and the game I ended up with varied greatly over the course of development. Many of the game’s features were thrown in at the last minute and not properly tested. However the core components of the game I wrote at the start of the contest were flexible enough to accommodate these wild design changes.

What went Right:

Used a known technology

– I decided to use Unity v2.6 because I been using it for over a year. I knew the names of the native classes and functions that I needed, and how they work. I tried Unity 3 at a friend’s house and I found the slight difference in interface jarring.

Code for reuse

– Many of the classes I wrote in this contest pull double duty, or more. The AirPlane class for example was used for the player, airship, and friendly/ hostile fighters. The texture and performance difference between these objects were implemented via public variables changed in the editor.

Just because I can doesn’t mean I should

– Unity has a terrific feature set including physics, shaders, and animation blending. But to take advantage of these features I would have to sink a great deal of time building 3d assets for them. Instead I went with 2d Sprites attached to a square polygon which always faces the camera.

Using Airplanes

– Airplanes look cool and don’t require animation for their idle, moving and attacking states.

Low rez pixel art

– My art pipe line for the airplanes went as follows: Make a hand drawn sketch on graph paper. Scan sketch and resize it to 128×128. Trace sketch on new layer. Bucket fill with solid colors. Add shade and highlight with color offset. Using a pencil sketch caused me to worry less about exact pixel placement. Using fewer colors gives the game a clean retro look while allowing for palette swaps.

Knowing when to cut my losses

– As you will read in the “What went wrong” section not all the features I wanted made it into the final product. At 6 hours to dead line I decide I should stop messing around with the cool stuff and make a game out of this. Had I continued to dick around I would have release a really cool tech demo instead of a game.

Want went Wrong:

Was too ambitious with original concept

– I have wanted to make a game involving epic battle between airships and airship launched prop fighters for a while. Needless to say the game did not end up like this and I wasted a good amount of time laying the foundation for features that would not be implemented.

Not enough time spent brain storming

– I was writing code less than an hour after the theme was announced. I did not spend much time figuring out what the finished product should look like. I knew I wanted to do something with airplanes and interchangeable weapons pods, and assumed I would figure the rest out as I went along.

Didn’t do long term tests

– I tested my code frequently, but most tests were a few seconds long to make sure the latest feature worked. As such a game breaking bug with the enemy respawn system slipped though. If I had played the game for over a minute I probably would have spotted and fixed this bug.

Didn’t sleep enough before the contest

– The contest started at 7pm on Friday for me. I tried to take a nap after work, but was too excited about the upcoming contest to get any rest. My first night of coding suffered from this.

Didn’t think of the end user experience

– I got too caught up in how much fun I was having implementing the features that I didn’t take into consideration how the game would feel as a whole.

Conclusions:

Using the Unity engine to implement a simple sprite based game saved me a lot of time. Its editor, GUI , and particle features allowed me to make a much more complex game than I would have been able to make from scratch in the time provided. I regret the lack of planning and testing that resulted in the bugs in the final version.