Here is a gameplay video (*spoilers*):

If you want to try it out yourself, there is a fancy new windows build courtesy of Wallacoloo that you can try out:

LINK

Please give it a try, and don’t forget to leave a comment if you have a moment!

I kind of like how this game concept turned out, so perhaps I will try developing it post competition into something more substantial.  For now though, it is time to sleep!

Slimes! Just look at 'em all, slimin' around!

This was my first Ludum Dare, and in fact, my first coding jam of any sort. It was grueling, painful, and ultimately quite satisfying. I learned a lot, and hopefully I can share some of that knowledge for anyone attempting to do this sort of thing in the future.

Oh, and before I go any further, I would love it if you played a little bit of my game. I’m quite proud of it, and I’d love to hear your feedback

What was Awesome

Having a (rough) plan!

I went into this with a very broad idea I was excited about (controlling multiple tiny creatures at once). Armed with this constraint, I went into my image editor, created a blank 8×8 texture, and noodled around until I came up with the basic slime sprite. This then spawned further ideas about what to do with these tiny creatures, because after all, why do slimes exist other than to split up into smaller slimes? A half hour later I had two different sizes of slimes with a couple frames of animation for both. This leads to my next point…

Prototyping with real art

I love these little guys.

Having good, familiar tools

Ludum Dare is NOT the time to dive into a language you’ve never written in before, to use a shiny new unfamiliar library or piece of middleware, or to implement a cutting edge rendering algorithm you read about in a siggraph paper. I do believe it can be done, I’ve seen a few good submissions by people trying out a language for the first time, but you will run into stumbling blocks frequently. These will sap your time and your sanity, as you waste hours googling vague error messages and posting frantically to messageboards at 3 in the morning. I stuck to a toolsuite I knew well, and even still ran into issues and bugs that took far longer to resolve than I’d have liked.

SFXR!

Working with discrete units

As many systems as possible in my game use integer based units. Everything runs at a fixed timestep (there is no deltatime passed into the Tick() functions, and really no concept of elapsed time used anywhere outside of the physics system), actor locations are stored as integer vectors, etc. I found that this kept complexity to a minimum, and made tweaking animation timings, actor placing, and other things a lot easier. This strategy won’t work for most games, but for an 8-bitty 2D game, it’s a real timesaver.

Having awesome friends…

… and making myself accountable to them. I told a bunch of people about my Ludum Dare intentions, to the point where I couldn’t really back down without disappointing people that I respect. While I was in the thick of the competition, I set up a livestream, and a few of them were always watching. It was an awesome feeling to be cheered on while I was working, I honestly don’t think I could have done this without their encouragement.

“Just get it done” mentality

What Sucked

“Just get it done” mentality

Yeah. What was awesome at the start of the project grew into a monolithic block of gnarly, twisted code. Iterating went from a quick line change here and there, to a long slog through pages of code, searching for functions I’d forgotten the names of, and classes that may or may not even exist anymore. The worst example of this backfiring was my “actor factory” code, which of course started as a simple switch() statement, and ended up as a series of gigantic switch() statements full of redundant and copy-pasted code. This is where using an old library of code would have been very handy, as this is something I’ve done “correctly” before, but couldn’t be arsed to do in the short time allotted for the competition.

One of many awful switch statements. It goes on and on like this.

Adding content

I vastly underestimated the importance of having good tools for getting new content into my game. My levels were stored as huge grids of text in one of my classes, and I did my editing within Visual Studio’s text editor. Painful, and not great for iteration. Adding a new entity was a multistep process involving creating a new class, editing three different switch statements (ugh), dragging its frames of animation into the project, adding those frames to a giant list of textures, remembering what index in the list those frames were at (UGH), and other minutiae that quickly added up. By the end of the second day, I had fewer levels and entity types than I had planned on, and just didn’t have the energy to add any more. If I were to do this all over again, I would have allotted a bit of time at the start of the second day to cleaning up this mess and streamlining the whole process.

State of the art level editor. Thinking about licensing the tech to Epic for UDK4.

Using a physics solver for character control

Don’t get me wrong. Box2d / Farseer is fantastic for what it is meant for. But what it is meant for is NOT making a character smoothly and reliably run across your level, with finely tuned jump heights and air control, and keyed translation amounts tied to your animations. I spent probably five hours trying to get it to feel decent. I could not even tell you what I did to get it to where it is now. It’s STILL not where I’d like it to be. Plus, the damn slimes have a tendency to get stuck on geometry, to fall through the world, and generally misbehave. Unfortunately I just don’t have experience in writing anything like this, and having a big ole’ pile of slimes naturally fall all over each other was something I didn’t think I could get without a pretty good physics sim running it. I definitely need to find a better way to do character control if I’m going to keep working on this game.

My (awful hack of a) debug physics visualizer

Phew!

I don’t know if or when I’ll do this again. All told I spent about 30 hours working, wrote a little over 4200 lines of code, created 54 sprites and 11 sound effects, and shipped 7 levels of gameplay. It was incredibly draining, and I still feel like I’m recovering from it. That said, I came out of this with a renewed vigor for game development, and a great amount of appreciation for everyone who undertakes this challenge.

If you like my project or just want to chat, shoot me an email at jvsola@gmail.com. I’d love to hear your thoughts!

Hi,

There is nothing like LD to clear up misconceptions and bring you up to speed:)
Since the a few LDs ago, seeing some brilliant games made in Flixel I’ve always wondered what are the advantages of using a Library like that?
(Please be patient, I was quite a noob at game making for the web, let alone a 48h competition)
After all, it seems that all the tools that are available in AS3 API, are sufficient to create great games quickly.
After this LD I finally understand, even though I do not use that library because I enjoy learning to make stuff myself, I now know why it is so great and helps a ton.

Here are some reason you would want to use Flixel instead of writing more code yourself:

1. You can talk to people about something in Flixel, there is a community.
   Having conversations is beneficial to learning for beginners and advance users.
2. You get every tool neatly organized and handily available during the competition when you really need.
   Doing well in the competition may require preparations and knowing Flixel well covers that.
   If you write the code, you still may need to organize it properly.
   You may have a ton of code but is it handily available?
3. The tools are tested for bugs and they do what is expected.
   If you write it yourself, you still need to test for bugs and even if you do, one person testing in 48 hours or a few weeks does not match with ? thousands that are constantly testing it during the whole year.
   Having bug tested code saves you unwanted surprises.
4. You get really high performance, this is something I did not know. These tools are tweaked for high peformance.
   I made a huge maze for the competition and I know Flixel handles tile based maps, however I did not know it does it really fast and takes advantage of the best ways this can be accomplished in AS3.
   I actually learned and used Bliting in AS3 for the first time this LD which was really exciting to me.
   Flixel would have done that for me and I wouldn’t even need to know it is doing it. The same principle is true about other tools. Flixel offers an answer to the need for speed. This is very important for games where low frame rate ruins the experience.
5. Bottom line: If you understand how Flixel works, you can focus much more on the game instead of writing the “low lvl” functionality.
   Sure writing an engine is a wonderful learning experience but when you compete to make games, you can use this precious time to work on other aspects of the game itself.

So basically I’m not planning to use it but by I highly recommend it for most AS3 based game projects.:)
Now I finally know why. If you have any comments on the advantages of using Flixel please share.

No more art to do ; _ ;

With all the art done, we turned our attention to the team’s logo while the programmers keep churning out code.

We are near completion of what we can do with our 72 + 4 hour time limit.

Setbacks in the second day kept us from having the game done within the original schedule but we are really proud of our overall progress.

Some stuff won’t make it to our submission build, but we’re keen on finishing this amazing project.

You can check out our Day 2 recap at http://makeaga.me. We won’t be doing a Day 3 post or Post Mortem for a couple of days.

WATCH OUT, IT’S A CODERS’ BLOCK!

With all the server problems, I wound up using twitter (for pretty much the first time) instead of posting journal entries here. I did take timelapse screenshots. I just need to figure out how to turn them into a movie.

Anyway, let’s see:

What went right:

• Flixel  turned out to be a great choice. The debug layer (available by pressing the backquote key) was slick, and every time I went looking for how to do something, it turned out flixel had a simple way to do it built in.
• DAME completely rocks. It’s a lot more than just a tile editor. I was able to set up initial states for each sprite (dead vs live aliens, powered vs unpowered machines) and even set up relationships (this lock powers these portals, and this portal leads to that one).
• Pomodoro technique (when I remembered to use it) helped me be a lot more self-aware. The break time would come up, and I’d realize I’d drifted into a low priority activity like polishing graphics instead of sticking with the core work to be done.
• Having a walkthrough. Maybe that’s the wrong word, but once I mapped out the basic solution to the game, it was easy to see what items and features needed to be in each room so that by the time the player makes it around to the other side of the ship, he knows everything he needs to know to solve the puzzle (ie, how do you actually reach the door that you can see from the first room?). I actually mapped this down to narration that was supposed to appear in each room, for a “learn as you go” experience. Even without the text on screen, I think there’s a pretty clear logical progression to the encounters.
• Font-based graphics. Except for the ghost and the background tiles, pretty much all the graphics came from standard fonts. (Webdings for the spiders and aliens, Consolas for the player and most of the other things) Even the hero’s ship outside is made from various symbols.
• The “grab/drag” mechanic. I really like how this turned out. I’ve been playing a lot of Arimaa lately, and I had a hunch the push/pull mechanic would work well in a video game. Once that was working, lots of other neat effects just sort of happened: things like slinging spiders around, carrying items through portals, and letting the ghost drag objects through walls.

What went wrong:

• Learning curve: most of the time I lost had to do with not knowing enough about flixel. Most of what I wanted was easy to find, but one or two small gaps lead to massive disasters. In particular, my dragging and portal code both tried to move sprites around by setting their x and y values. This appears to work, but causes all sorts of trouble with collision detection. All I needed to do was also set last.x and last.y but that small oversight had me pulling my hair out for hours, because I thought the problem was with my game objects. I think the fix here basically just boils down to experience.
• Polishing Early. I spent WAY too much time on the graphics for this game. It was originally going to be straight ANSI art (Kingdom of Kroz style) but I got carried away, and pretty soon I had gradients and two layers of shadows and way more detail than I needed. I should have limited myself to solid colored rectangles until I had the basic gameplay working.
• Not having a walkthrough up front. In Arimaa, you capture pieces by dragging them into traps, and I was going to use that idea, too. I also planned to use expand on the push/pull concept with machines that moved whole rows or columns of boxes. So I drew graphics and wrote at least some code for all that, when it turned out I didn’t really need those things (mostly because I hit on the idea of using the spiders as a weapon instead of as an enemy). There’s also a fully working implementation of on/off switches that I wound up not using. So lots of waste in this area. The walkthrough really clarified things for me, but I didn’t do it until the second day. Next time, it’ll be first thing on my list.
• Too many contraptions. I really thought I was aiming small, but… portals, dragging, machines with various states, keys and locks, combat and health, and an NPC that passes through some walls but not others… That’s quite a large scope for such a short game. I’m actually pretty proud of all the neat gizmos in the game, but in terms of a 48-hour contest, the cost was too high.  Toward the end, it was too late to design a new puzzle, so I was locked in to finishing the implementation for all the machines instead of adding the narration, which would have wrapped everything up into a nice coherent story. Here again, the walkthrough would have helped, and perhaps even an iterative walkthrough: start with nothing but the hero and an exit, make sure it works, then design and implement one obstacle at a time. At least that way the game would always be playable start-to-finish and I’d have more flexibility in choosing what to add next. Basically, I should have adopted a more agile development process.

Anyway. I’m exhausted. Gonna go for a swim here and get some sleep so I can start checking out all these other games tomorrow!

phew, this was tough!! I’m way too tired to write a post mortem right now, I wanted to enter the main compo, I couldn’t make it, but I submitted it to the Jam.

3 days of non-stop work. I need a rest. I put a lot of heart into this game, I hope somebody can play it and appreciate it

cheers!

EDIT: Timelapse video is up :3

YRGBO Timelapse

It was supposed to be Flash, goddamit. But the Greek… he owns a Mac with Gamemaker. And he cannot code a single line.

The Greek listened to Enrique Iglesias Escape Album the whole weekend. He should go see a shrink or something.

Right now, the Greek is sleeping. He told me to promote his game. Right. He deserves to have nightmares. He made his game for OS/X! But we love the Greek and maybe we will port his game to Flash, make some original artwork and polish the gameplay.

Enrique Iglesias on a game? Only the Greek can come up with something like this. He wrote some description before passing out:

In 2001 people in the United States were terrified. Something terrible had happened. Something that frightened even the bravest ones. Enrique Iglesias released a new album in English: Escape.

There was more. Enrique decided to make surprise appearences around the States. In shopping malls. It was said that listening to his new songs would blow your mind. Literally.

In the game you are a shopping mall security guard. You should protect visitors from him. You should find Enrique Iglesias among the visitors and click on him. Then, people could escape from Enrique.

But fail and people would listen to him.

More info: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=rate&uid=5634

Download (OS/X): http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2051675/EnriqueEscape.zip

EXTRAS

Who is Enrique Iglesias?: http://bit.ly/WhoIsEnrique

Listen to Escape album: http://tny.gs/EnriqueEscape

That’s right, I finally uploaded the game, with 2 minutes to spare! And after trying about 5 time times, I managed to complete it (I guess a one-level game’s gotta be hard, huh?) with a score of 2605, try beat it

-Will be adding a scoreboard within the next few days

The comments section on my submission page (for Goat Milk) is broken! HALP!

Hi,

This is my first time in Ludum Dare, I don’t know if you already saw it but anyway I would like to get comments from you if it’s possible .

This is my entry for the competition: http://is.gd/qrkSjE .

Maybe it’s a bit annoying that you have to download the game instead of playing online but I worked in XNA, next time I’ll try to do it easier and use Flash.

Here is a screenshot of the game, as you can see it’s very simple, a platform runner. You are the rounded piece of candy and the goal is to escape from the walrus. I hope you enjoy it.

Caramelo screenshot

I put it off long enough! Here’s my timelapse video of me creating Glissaria:

Timelapse

I have to say, reliving an entire weekend of your life in 6 minutes is kind of fun.

You can rate and play Glissaria here:

Glissaria

I found out today that the last level was impossible in the game I submitted last night. This was due to some last minute changes that I thought were too small to merit testing.

Oh well! It is at least good to know that players made it that far in!

I fixed that level; CLICK HERE FOR THE UPDATED VERSION.
Or CLICK HERE FOR THE SUBMISSION PAGE – the update is linked on there as well.

The leaderboards are growing, and I am both sad and happy to say I’ve been dethroned on all levels – except of course that last level on which hamburger holds the first and only score.

Hi everyone!

First of all, I’d like to say that I’m really happy with finishing my game. Unfortunately, due to the site’s issues, I couldn’t log my progress. I guess this isn’t just a postmortem but rather also an “I’m in” post.

So far, this is the third game I made for LD. I made a game for some miniLD or another (I don’t remember which), and another for LD20. However, I wouldn’t count either game as a “full” game (for some definition of full corresponding to the 48 hour time limit). The miniLD entry was a game where you shot enemies that came at you (sort of like asteroids but with people) but had no video feed; instead you had the audio of creepy footsteps, gunfire, and screams. While it didn’t turn out bad, it wasn’t quite complete because it had no graphics. As for the LD20 entry, I made an (almost) exact clone of part of the original Legend of Zelda game. So finished or not, it wasn’t really my game. That’s why I’m extra-proud of finishing this time.

Before I analyze what happened, go play my game
Here is the entry page:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=preview&uid=3743
and if you won’t vote anyway, here is the game:
http://mr.galacticgaming.net/Real%20Live%20Avatars%20Inc/Game.html

(more…)

Well, I finished my first jam game (Escape Velocity). I’m pretty damn happy with it too! My goal was not to make things “simple stupid,” but stupid simple. It worked like a charm . It’s funny because the gameplay is by-far the most fun of anything I’ve made – all from trying not to work too hard. Weird, huh?

Anywho, there’s only two levels and no score but I’m already addicted to my little game. Then again, I’m very, very biased . I would’ve liked to take more time on the music, and at least have an indicator for your ship’s delivery destination.

I wanted to have a small map popup before each level so you wouldn’t die right away but c’est la vie. I also realize, just now, that extra lives would be a good idea :/. Funny how that slipped my mind *shrugs*.

Also, I haven’t actually beat it yet but I’m pretty sure it’s doable (I haven’t had much time). I do know that the first level is doable, even with less fuel than I give you.

Why are you reading this? PLAY MY GAME!

Howdy I finally finishing building the windows release of Zeta Prime you can try it out here
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=preview&uid=2879

Enjoy!

Wow it’s done kind of BEF

Not sure if it’s a fun game but mechanically it ‘works’.

Quick Postmortem:

(more…)

Thought since others are doing these after-submission look-backs I would too!

What went wrong:
>The physics from the start were a shambles, collision detecting is a very awful thing to deal with when you don’t have some solid code for it, and mine wasnt! All through the game I continuously made changes to the physics.
>I didn’t brainstorm… Being my first game to complete, I had the idea for a game where you smash into atoms, then just dove into doing the physics, graphics etc, and didn’t brainstorm any features, so I ended up making them as I went along.
>Coded in GameMaker, not the best idea if you want a retail quality game, or a game thats cross-platform… So I started learning Flash(FlashPunk) straight after my entry…

The main point i’m disappointed is not following the storyline, I basically said at the beginning “Go smash into atoms” then didn’t elaborate too much.

You can play it here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=preview&uid=5696

Some screenies:

My entry: http://code.kevinworkman.com/EscapeFromMonsterCity/index.html
Timelapse: http://code.kevinworkman.com/EscapeFromMonsterCity/timelapse.html

I only worked for about 12 hours, so instead of making a video, I took screenshots as the program changed. You can check them out if you feel like it!

This was my first Ludum Dare, and I’m pretty pleased with how everything turned out, especially considering that I had never used Processing prior to the contest- learning it was half the fun!

I stuck with the bare minimum considering the time constraints, but I’m surprised to see how many other entries were pretty similar. I guess that’s the nature of working around a theme, but I think next time I’ll work at coming up with something a little more different.

There is one bug left in the final version that causes the program to freeze occasionally- this is due to logic I attempted to write to prevent monsters from spawning inside buildings, which doesn’t work anyway. Lesson learned, next time I’ll stick with something that definitely works instead of trying to implement algorithms I know might break things.

Also, I didn’t have time to implement a goal, or score, or an ending, which I think hurts replayability. I did manage to throw in a title and game over screen, which goes a long way to making the game feel more legitimate.

However, I think I came pretty close to my original goal of capturing a creepy mood, so I’m happy with the outcome. I wanted to create a spooky feeling as the player rounds a building and almost runs into a monster, and I think I came pretty close to that. Yay!

I’m also satisfied that I met the theme, which is extra awesome because I wasn’t really thrilled when it was revealed (I was hoping for evolution or adaptation). The main focus of the game is to escape the city, with the added terrifying mini-games of escaping monsters that wake up. Yay again!

All in all, I had a bunch of fun, and I love the Ludum Dare community. Awesome job to everybody who managed to put together something in 48 (or 72) hours! You guys are all rock stars.

Had a blast. Got a lot done. Gameplay really needs some adjustment and balance but I ‘realised my vision’ and I’m pleased with that. Hopefully this game will actually run on someone’s machine, unlike my last entry.

Game Video:

Timelapse, for whoever it is that watches these things (fairly sure I’m the only one):

I had to sacrifice any community effort to get this in…  It’s 3AM and I’ve just finished!

A ZX Spectrum RPG

Here is the link: the link