This has been a good experience, which I will sure repeat again in the future.

At the end, I have only spend about 12 hours into developing the game, as I was sick and was sleeping almost all the time.

I hope you like the concept behind the game and I look forward to the next Ludum Dare!

Hey All!  I wanted to do a quick postmortem on the game we submitted to the Jam, Reveal.

What went right

A solid  artistic vision.  Most of the artistic vision for this game came from @pixelbutterfly,  who also did the art.  At the core of the game, it’s about uncertainty in a world where the media tells you who to be and how to look.  But as you scratch deeper below that, and peel away the superficial layers, the world only gets uglier.  Finally, as my own little nihilistic touch, you realize that the escape you sought from your uncertainty wasn’t exactly as you had planned it. (more…)

This was my 2nd Ludum Dare (you can play my LD #20 game here) I was a bit un-prepared this time, since I only found out that I would have the weekend free about 45 minutes before Ludum Dare started. Talk about timing!

Once again I chose to use the Flixel engine. It’s a powerful and simple little engine, and developing in Flash means just about everyone will be capable of playing my game with no trouble. For my IDE, I used Flash Develop running in Windows 7, running in a Parallels VM on my Mac. I don’t recall exactly why, but that’s what I did last time so I stuck with it. Once again, sounds were recorded on my iPhone and edited in Audacity (cfxr doesn’t work on OS X Lion. I might need to fork it and fix that…) Also, I recorded a time-lapse of the whole thing using ScreenNinja, a Mac app I developed for exactly this purpose. One minor hiccup: I didn’t have Photoshop installed on the machine I was using, so I grabbed Pixelmator from the App Store. It’s a nice little photoshop replacement app suitable for most tasks, but unfortunately making pixel sprites isn’t one of those things, and I think that may have cost me some time.

The main frustration I had with my previous Ludum Dare game was that it was very short, so this time I knew I wanted to have some sort of endless map (plus, I think it fits with the theme) – so that’s where I started. Progressive level generation is tricky to get right, and looping though a single map just isn’t the same thing. What I ended up doing was designing a number of levels (at first 3, in the final entry I believe there are 11), each only slightly larger than a single screen, and as you approach the edge of one level, the game randomly picks another level and inserts it on the screen. Because the ‘levels’ are tile maps, and each is loaded from a .png file, I was able to design levels in Pixelmator and easily see how each level would look next to all the others, and make sure the edges lined up right.

Once I got that working I quickly threw together some basic player and enemy logic (it’s fun seeing the henchmen jump off cliffs, lemmings style), then it was just a matter of throwing things together and seeing what was fun. In action movies, the gun is a versatile tool. Along with killing the bad guy, guns can also be used to open doors, disable equipment, activate buttons or traps at a distance, or anything else an escaping hero might need to do. So I thought a game based around a sort of chase sequence might be fun. One of the things I programmed and didn’t end up using was for the wall mounted turrets to fire missiles that would destroy the ground under you. It looked really cool, but unfortunately the player could get stuck in the craters, so I had to take it out (although it’s still in the source code if you’d like to see how I did it)

Bugs. Hopefully there are no major bugs in my game, but there’s always a few weird ones. Occasionally the henchmen just won’t jump off the edge of a cliff, and I can’t figure out why. I’m pretty sure 30 lines of AI code isn’t enough to gain sentience, right? Also, sometimes the door spawner will spawn a henchman 32 pixels lower than it’s suposed to (and he ends up stuck in the ground below) But, since neither of these were game breaking bugs, I said screw it and worked on new features instead.

And finally, I tried to add a little humor and competition to the game in the final few hours with the game over screen. Much like in Super Shotgun Deathrace, the final text is assembled from many different pieces so it’s different each time. After showing a near final prototype to a few friends online as well as the IRC, it was suggested that I should have some stats besides distance displayed at the end of the game. So, I added the damage values and a henchmen killed counter. Took all of about 10 minutes to do, and I think it significantly improves the game, so thanks everyone who suggested that.

Oh. One more thing. Play (also, please vote and comment on) my game here, then you can click here and watch the timelapse

Well.. It did went as I was hoping. However I’ve submitted it.

On the bright side my idea for the game engine worked quite well. However I did spend a lot of time on the mechanics (or rather lost it, for example for stuff to move properly around took me like 6 hours) and actually almost finished it. And of course barely any graphics and no sound at all. Levels are also only two. Maybe I’ll try to finish the game just to see if it will turn something interesting.

After the submission found a major controls problem, do not use trackpads for development !

Here is a link to my entry:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?uid=5130

Whew! Participating in the Jam was a lot of fun but really tiring. We managed to finish our game Claustrophobia with just a few hours to spare.  Check it out here!:  http://sandbox.yoyogames.com/games/184445-claustrophobia

So enough time has passed since finishing that I can look back objectively over Stratus, found here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=preview&uid=5541

The game I initially envisaged is *roughly* what got made, but I had all sorts of ambitious ideas about minigames and complex interactions with the objects on board.. frankly the initial design was laughably ambitious, but hey I’ve never tried to make a game this quick . But I kept the scope as far as the airship design is concerned, and poured a lot of effort into the design and execution of the ship. For me, the key thing for this game was the experience and atmosphere, and anything else came second- so I pressed ahead with the art and particle effects, and ditched some of the ambitious interaction mechanics.

what went right:

- the atmosphere I was trying to create, I think for the most part came together.. I really wanted you to feel the wind in your hair, high above the ground in a flying machine.

- the shooting sequence, while brief, I find enjoyable. I can play it a few times and be happy, so maybe I could have made it longer.. I really love making low-fi particle effects so the explosions were fun to make

what went wrong:

- probably having slightly too wide a scope for the concept left me really stuck for time to code the actual game and mechanics. I had to cut a bunch of ideas to finish the game which is always a shame

- sound, about the only sound effect I’m reasonably happy with is the wind, which was done by modulating the frequency of some pink noise. I really really wanted to devote some proper time to creating nice sound effects because they add so much to the atmosphere of the game, but unfortunately apart from the wind it’s all sfxr (I still love sfxr.. but all games sound the same when they use it. and you can have really blocky graphics but if the sound gets a little extra love, it can really add to the experience)

-testing: I didn’t get anyone to test my game, because I left it so late to get the mechanics in place. So, if there are some major bugs lurking then that’s why!

overall, I hugely enjoyed the weekend, even the massive stress on sunday This was my first compo, and I would definitely come back again. It’s a great community here!

cheers,

-RichMakeGame

Hi all !

Uchuu Sentaï Pastagaga’s first game is submitted. Named Pastagus Fantasy, we hope you will enjoy it !

Please give it a try

See you soon for a post mortem, at least one update of the game, and for another jam !

May the Sentaï Force always be with you!!

Finally, after several hours of troubleshooting some audio issues on Windows I finally managed to squeeze a build that works. So yeah, we were done at around 44 hour mark, but I ended up using 14 hours for fixing issues that rised during porting and making the release packages.

Go check it out!

Now it’s back to the daily grind for me, hopefully I find time to do a linux port, write a post mortem and compile my time-lapse. Thanks to Hasis for joining the ride, it was a nice experience and showed me that yes, I can squeeze a cross-platform game engine and a game out of me in less than a week.

- eimink

My game is Bob’s Escape. It took ~30 hours to create everything. I hope you like it. Support me by going to the COMPETITION PAGE and voting! =3

Just doing the guns’ animations, while listening to ‘Wild West Hero’ by ELO, classic.

Here you are. Just over a minute of goodness. I spent about 14 hours working on it.

The music is from Conker’s Bad Fur Day.

Well, I have to say that compared to my last Ludum Dare, this experience was COMPLETELY different. The first difference that comes to mind is how I didn’t waste all of my time trying to create a physics/movement engine. That thing sucked up, probably, about 80% of my time and I certainly wouldn’t call it “complete” even now. Also, it was more laid back since I only got around 14 hours to work on the game, as opposed to the 24 – 30 that I had last time.

What Went Well:

• I, once again, was focused the entire time. I was so focussed, in fact, that I forgot to finish off a delicious beverage (although don’t worry – I drank it now).
• My game concept was simple enough to leave me a whole day to work on assets & the front end.
• Audio. It existed this time. I think it sounds pretty nice for, like, 30 seconds on a loop.
• I had lots of screenshots & some demos to share before the compo ended (although I don’t think I packaged the demos correctly, and the LD site was down)

What Didn’t Go So Well:

• Uploading. I wasn’t good at it. I gotta remember to include sndfile.framework & to add other frameworks to the “Copy Frameworks” step in Xcode. I actually lost $5 here because I bet my brother that I uploaded something correctly and it didn’t work.
• I didn’t test all the “pipelines” involved in my game; 1 hour before the contest ended, I realized that I didn’t know how to get audio into my game. I figured it out though.
• All my ideas at the start were basically the same; I was only considering ideas where you (singular) were trying to escape from something, which isn’t really thinking outside of the box. I was actually really displeased with all of my ideas, and wasn’t having much fun developing them until I thought of the evacuation idea.

Overall, I am once again pleased with the product that I produced, and think that it is a pretty big step above my last entry, and am looking forwards to December. I might keep working on my entry (after the ratings though; programmers = good playtesters) since I can think of a few ways to spice it up.

(If you are some sort of STRANGE ALIEN and have yet to play my game, it’s over here)

48 hours of development compressed into 2.5 minutes! (edited out the boring sleep segments too)

Mountain Break
 

Yay! I uploaded my game to Kongregate today hoping to get some more publicity.

Try it out!

As I failed to post a single blog entry whilst I was actually making my game I thought I’d instead lump it all into some horrendous mega-post after the event.  Only the brave should read on.

So my game, Escaping the Rat Race…, is all about how working for the man sucks and how we all would like to quit and make a shed load of cash doing something infinitely cooler, like developing our own indie games (if we haven’t done already!).  That’s the escape, the escape of being your own boss.  I have to say I made this game from the perspective of someone who’s never done it, I’m sure it’s not all wonderful and rosy, but the feeling of getting up in the morning and knowing you’re going to work on something you personally care about and have a massive stake in is frankly intoxicating.

In with that context in mind that you should play the game.  Some of the design and content decisions I made were extremely specific, including making some elements of the game frustrating and annoying because I thought it best represented my message.  Please don’t hate me for them, and, in hindsight, maybe you should turn down the sound in the rat race section…  There are a couple of annoying bugs with some of the variables and the rats tail is still hilariously disembodied but I probably wouldn’t change a great deal about the game apart from a little spit and polish here and there, including spending more time on the frankly very crude graphics.

This is the first game I have made in a long time, probably something ridiculous like over 10 years.  I used to make little games on Klik and Play in my mid-teens and then I didn’t even think about making any for ages.  It’s only recently I’ve decided I do really like games and want to have a hand in making them.  Alas I’m not a programmer, or an artist, or anything particularly useful for making games (I’m a mechanical engineer in another life) so it’s always been that nagging hobby I’ve never indulged again until now.  Therefore I ‘cheated’ and used Scirra Construct Classic which was only mildly frustrated in places.  Ludum Dare has been such an awe inspiring and encouraging event for me and I cannot fathom the quality of some entries.

I realise I’m probably rambling by now so I’ll finish off – it didn’t turn out to be that epic a post after all.  Please let me know what you think of my little entry, I’d be intrigued.

Finished uploading my timelapse. 8 hours in 8 minutes (:

How the heck are the pygame users among us planning to port your game to all platforms?

I’ve been trying with py2exe and py2app and having absolutely no luck; I’ve been seeing crashes everywhere. Any tips?

Hehe. The luxury of 24 extra hours. What to do with them but gloat that you actually managed to finish everything and to have time to spare.

At any rate, we (Joszs, Ever121 and myself) have just finished our Jam entry. The game, called Left – for what better name than a non descript name? – is an action/agility flyer based around a small craft in a large facility. Loads of explosions and gunfire, as one might imagine.

Go have a look!

I have some minor things to fix, but I’d be just as happy to leave it in its current state.

We’re all pretty surprised at how fluent everything went. The amount of technical hickups was remarkable (one might say miraculously) low, we all shared a similar vision and we were all deeply impressed by eachothers work.

Loved the experience.

I’ve got two comments so far, both mentioning the complete lack of a difficulty curve (it just gets difficult too quickly).

I’ll agree with them. I’ve only beaten it once. Unfortunately, I ran out of time before completing any levels other than the first one, which wasn’t anything but a tutorial. As such, I copy/pasted a bunch of obstacles and placed them at semi-regular intervals throughout the level and called it a day. Too bad. The game supports loading multiple levels and I was planning on having a nice difficulty ramp across them. The first level was originally supposed to be the tutorial and like one more trap.

One commenter (Notch) said it feels like trial and error, which is actually partially what I was going for. I remember the game n+ where you just try each level over and over until you’ve mastered all the traps and the like, and I kind of wanted that feel. Part of what I was missing, I think, is the everything-on-the-screen you get from sideways 2D. The perspective the camera has and the amount of playing field you can see makes it very difficult to see far enough ahead of you to make any sort of difference. Basically the only option is to die and restart several times so that you know where everything is beforehand. And get a bit lucky.

Last minute I added in a bullet-time ability that really helps a lot, but having made it a limited timer (1 second of bullet time, takes 2 seconds to charge) means you don’t really get it enough. In retrospect, I think it would have been cool to subtract money from your character as you use it, thereby giving you as much as you want bit still adding in the pressure of not using it too much.

The biggest problem though I think is just the curve. Level 1 should be a piece of cake, and there should be around 10 very short levels. That way when you restart you’re not forced to redo the whole thing. That or checkpoints, maybe.

I still think the game is a great idea and I’d love to see it on iPhone some time in the future. Just needs a bit of tweaking.