Just a quick word to announce that I’ve repacked my stealth game Evasion in a single jar file, so it should load without any problems on any computer with a recent version of Java!

And while trying to understand why my timelapse was not interesting at all, I found this little “disco” version of the game (I used this to debug the lighting algorithm, but the results are pretty nice):

And I have to say, rating is a long journey, but it’s worth the time. Thank again to everybody for making this ludum dare experience a blast.

With the help of d_m, I managed to get an ncurses-backed Linux port of my LD21 compo entry to run.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=preview&uid=89

Requires python 2.6+ with the builtin curses module.

Note that it’s sized for an enormous terminal window; it’ll abort with a semi-helpful message if yours isn’t big enough.

Let’s make a big list of events like Ludum Dare – game compos, 48 hour compos, cool events, whatever. We all know Ludum Dare is awesome, so events like it must be awesome too!

Some events I’m aware of:

• http://pyweek.org/ : Pyweek. Inspired by Ludum Dare! (Yay!) A week long contest to make a game, but only in Python. Which is kind of a shame if you don’t use Python, but Python is a great language so you should definitely learn it. Has an event coming up in the next week or two.
• http://www.superfriendshipclub.com/ : Holds month long game “pageants” every two months.
• http://gameprototypechallenge.com/ : Week long contest to prototype a game.
• http://experimentalgameplay.com/ : Month long competition based on a theme.

I bought two new screens, next LD will be twice as fun as the last one !

Yay! 1920x1080 FTW!

And I know, I should buy a real keyboard before LD22 !

Escausage Timelapse

Well this was a very successful LD for me, I think mainly because I just started making something without some grand and bloated plan. I’m slowly working on the post compo version, and your comments have been super helpful in planning that.

PS here is the entry page: Escausage

I just felt like posting it:

So far the games I’ve played have been AMAZING!  But there’s one thing I miss…

Now that things have returned to normal, it sure would be nice to have the sidebar back.

Perhaps it could be turned into static html that only gets updated once an hour?

More importantly, the new improved sidebar needs one extra feature:

I’ve been busy trying to incorporate all of your excellent feedback into a more fun game. My game, Escape Velocity, features a ship that has to tango with realistic gravity (scale notwithstanding) in order to accomplish its missions.

My latest attempt, which I’m calling v1.2, has the following added features over the compo version:

• Multiple ships (extra lives)
• Menu screen & multiple (easier) difficulties
• Added direction indicator for delivery zone.
• Added out-of-fuel indicator and reminder that F5 resets.
• Narrowed the rectangle your ship can move in before the screen scrolls (so you can better see what’s ahead).
• Added animation to target zone.

Before I discovered Ludum Dare, I was a programmer and a game enthusiast. Even though games were why I started programming, I would hesitate to use the term game programmer for myself because I’d never finished any games. I would make a lot of tech demos and the like: programs I’d made just for myself but abandoned well before they had any purpose outside of my own amusement. I think on some level, I never really thought one person could finish anything really cool that others could enjoy. At least, not without having tons of experience, time, industry connections, etc.

To say that this experience has been inspirational would be a huge understatement. This has been super-mega-awesome-bordering-on-religious-awakening-great. Ludum Dare 21 has been my own personal right-of-passage. I embarked on a great journey, saw a vision of Princess Peach eating Toad and returned to my community as a Game Developer.

Of course, we’ll ignore for now that there’s not much to my game. I want to keep up this can-do attitude and keep pushing my game further forward. That means I’ll need more honest feedback and constructive criticism. So if you haven’t played my game, please hook a brother up. If you have, please see if you like it more. After all, you haven’t played this game yet . Naturally, the compo version is still there too, in all it’s ugly glory with all it’s original assets.

Heres the updated ver, with better graphics and less bugs.

Please try it out:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/34397004/RelicRunV1%2C1.exe

I think everyone can relate to this? Honestly, I’m surprised I managed to “finish” a game with the amount of distractions I got. I’ve never finished anything… If Ludum Dare teaches something, then finishing is what it teaches best. It’s like you get an instant feedback of your performance in 2 days. By the time your brain wakes up with “Huh? What? Featu-u-u-res!” it’s already over. I think that this is a very useful experience for any starting indies and a good reminder for the veterans.

Too busy to actually download and play the game? Well now thanks to Superstickman42 you can simply watch an LP of the entire game! In some ways this is better than the actual game seeing as the video has added Megaman music!

I’m Sorry I’ll Play That Again: Your Pals Have Escaped

Post mortem for Towering Inferno, also cross-posted from my dev tumblr:

Things that went right:

• The Pomodoro technique kept me focued for the first day. It breaks work down into 25 minute chunks, with 5 minutes of break inbetween. In my todo list I kept track of how many pomodoros I had spent on each task, so I could see when I was getting sidetracked. For instance I could have spent more time on the procedural level generation mechanics, but could see the pomodoros adding up, so decided to move on.
• Git and github. I haven’t used Git in anger before and quite like the workflow, but by hosting for free on github I could quickly push updates to a friend who would playtest them for me. This was two or three keypresses in bash, but if I had to package and email off builds it would have taken much longer.
• Playtesting. The game was essentially finished by 5pm, but I spent a lot of time balancing and playtesting the game, along with a friend mentioned above. He helped me fix many bugs and gave input on the difficulty and balance of the game. It’s inifinitely better because of his input. Thanks Steve!
• Libtcod. This was the first roguelike engine I tried. I had others lined up, but this fitted the bill perfectly. It did not require much code to hook up, and handled all the annoying bits of game development: graphics, input, etc. Its BSP library was very useful for the procedural generation of levels, and even provided a good random number generator.

Things that went wrong:

• Difficulty. The procedural generation is very basic, which makes some levels much harder or impossible compared to others. The only sop to this is that fire is not allowed to start in the exit room or the room connected to it. This removes some of the frustrations but it’s still there. I needed more time to come up with a scheme that generates fire in challenging but not frustrating places.
• Choosing an engine. I was originally going to use Unity, and had spent a few days prior to the event learning the ins and outs. However on the morning I decided on a roguelike game, which by its 2D nature is not very well suited to Unity. It took me more than the first morning to investigate, choose and then learn a dedicated roguelike engine. Libtcod was very good as I mentioned above, but I could have got a lot more done if I had got up to speed before the weekend.
• Presentation. Everything about the game is functional – the color of the fire, the ascii art representing the tools, etc. It is not that attractive to look at. In particular it’s not easy to create enticing screenshots, which may hurt the click-through rate on the ludum dare site.

I uploaded a Timelapse of the Chambered to YouTube!
I recorded this at one pic every four seconds, and it ended up being about 14 minutes at 60 fps, so this video is skipping quite a few frames.

So when’s the next LD? I miss it already.

I finally “finished”  Spiders v. Aliens, at least for now. The new version adds narrative text, an opening cutscene, and some simple music, as well as various bug fixes and whatnot:

Play the updated version at Kongregate, or check out the original LD72 entry.

I think I read somewhere on the site that the gentlemen who run Ludum Dare now have monthly server costs in excess of $200.00.

Shouldn’t there be some kind of donation system so we can contribute to the site?

I know I would be willing to contribute some of my money to keep this fine site up and running.

Hopefully this donation system comes up soon before the site goes into its inevitable hibernation between contests.

What do you guys think? Would you donate? (a star means heck yeah I would donate to the cause!)

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=preview&uid=258

Some people think my game is unbeatable, but it is actually not that bad once you know what to do. It is definitely easier than about half of the arcade games in the 80s which is what I tried to model it after.

There is one bug that causes real problems, but the workaround is you just have to wait at least eight seconds before dropping a boulder. I don’t think there are any other bugs that are really an issue to beating it.

Here is the video walkthrough. This one shows the “eliminate the obstacles” strategy. This is not the quickest way to win, but it is one of the easiest ways to win for sure. I died three times trying to make this video btw.

Video Walkthrough for Scratchy Get Out!

After having improved the level generator a lot, I think it’s the right time to write a post mortem of my game.

What went right:

• Game idea: At first I was disappointed with the theme, because I had some nice ideas for self-replication and genetics. But with the morning shower there came several interesting ideas. First idea was some sort of swarm attracting rescue game (still self-replication minded), second was a rpg in which you try to escape your chosen role (e.g. only get xp for things you are bad at) and the third idea was the actual one. I chose the later because it was the easiest to implement.
• Tools: After warming up with python and pygame in the Mini-LD shortly before LD21 I felt very secure with the programming. Gimp, bfxr and Musagi also worked great.
• Time management: Almost all the time I felt just a little bit ahead of my schedule which really is a great feeling (should once happen in my everyday job)

What went wrong:

• Final improvements: I head some plans to further improve the game: better soundtrack, improved graphics, more player control over level generation. I even had the time, but as my wife and child came back home on Sunday my time for game development suddenly vanished (that’s not as bad as it sounds )
• Windows executable: Meh, stupid py2exe. Just didn’t want to automtically bind the sound libraries. Actually that’s just a small issue, cause it wasn’t necessary to have this executable at Sunday night, but I was so eager to release it in time.
• Randomized levels: I made a rather late decision to do randomized levels instead of pre-designed with raising difficulty. I am quite happy that I chose the randomized approach but my algorithm was to stupid to have real control over the difficulty (explanation here). I fixed it for now, which I want to illustrate with two screenshots.

Developer's "see all" mode: On the left the old generator on insane. Number of cages and cacti walls are quite random. On the right the improved version. Fixed number of cages and walls with random distribution.

Will there be a post-compo version? Definitely, there already is (not yet online) and I am planning to do further improvements based on the feedback so far. Ideas include:

• Different play modes (e.g. visible cages with other constraints than now)
• Kind of  dungeon crawler with inventory and classes
• Integrate the dungeon crawler to a bigger scale exploration game (to prevent stupid descend dungeon levels)

Final words: If you haven’t already:

Go Play

This was my first Ludum Dare and it totally rocked.  I am a great fan of creativity under a deadline events.  I’ve participated in NaNoWriMo (Novel Writing), 24 Hour Comic, and NaNoRenMo (Visual Novels).

The Good:

Remembering to keep things simple.  The original story I came up with was much more complicated and involved things like timers and explosives.  I broke it down to the simplest elements.

I made my own event system. OK.  This is not that great an achievement, but I am happy with how well it worked.

The Bad:

End Graphics (The Lack of) I ran out of steam with the artwork and didn’t make any. The game didn’t feel complete without them.

Awkward interface.  Adding the mini map helped a bit, but it was hard to place yourself in the location.

Passage of Time not Apparent. Many people didn’t notice that the raccoon was slower than the cat.

What I learned:

You are much tougher on your game than other people are.  There is no need to point out all your mistakes to the people playing your game.

Play my game!

Susan

I wander does anybody uses something like STM in games?

I did try something like it in the last LD – my game used what I would call a lightweight STM. Meaning that had two threads of execution – a reader thread (which is actually performing the painting, based on a given game state) and a writer thread (which actually moves the game state ahead, the update loop).

The writer threads starts a “transaction” and it is working with its private copy of the value. When commits, the value becomes visible to the reader/painter thread.

The main advantage of the approach is that we can use easy multi-threading (even utilize multiple cores) with clear separation between who makes updates and who makes the drawing on screen. The only negative I see is that we cannot use directly the values provided by the language but instead should wrap every peace of data in another layer/abstraction.

Any thoughts?

Hello everyone, a brand new version of Claustrophobia is now up on my site! It improves on the collision detection and music, as well as a bunch of other bug fixes and small improvements.

Check it out here:  http://shard123games.weebly.com/ludum-dare.html