For my entry the level was stored in RAM as an array of characters, and each character held 8 blocks, which means that each block only took 1-bit (on or off). So theoretically a level 1000 x 1000 would take 125 kilobytes, a 10,000 x 10,000 level would take 12.5 megabytes in RAM.

Ofcourse, saved as a text file that’s easy to edit in notepad, the same file would take over 8 times as much space.

This is my first time entering LD _properly_. I didn’t have much time due to real life getting in the way [/symapthyvote] but that’s what the Jam is for, I know.

I’m fairly happy with how much I’ve managed to do in such little time, but I’m not proud of the end result as a concept as a ‘game’ however.

I’m still not a professional Game Dev yet, but I’m definitely going to get there one way or another, and this competition was a great experience…and sleep depervation.

I’m fed up with staring at code at the moment, and I have no artistic abilities, so that’s why I’m stopping here. Personally, I think I’ve done enough even for a simple entry.

Oh, and I advise you don’t look at the code, I can’t promise the stability of your mental state.

I wasn’t gonna take part to begin with, but I’m glad I did. Like I mentioned, it was a nice experience, and it also actually got me off my butt to make a game.

Good luck to the other LDers!

P.S You can view my entry Here.

Time lapse up on You Tube with music!

Susan

I have finished my jam entry, and titled it

I’m quite happy with this, my first ludum dare game, my first decent game, and my second game in total. I have achieved what I set out to do, which is not something that usually happens.

Click image to play!

This event was great fun, I’m glad I decided to give it a go. And now, it’s time for me to play some of the other entries

Well here is my timelapse for this LD.  This time I got a good chunk of uninterrupted work in on Saturday (about 18 hours) .  All total I estimate that I spent around 27 hours on LD this weekend. Woot!

Well… The title is based on the inspiration for the story (Well… Apparently. I haven’t watched it).

It really doesn’t need much explaining.

And I don’t have a timelapse or story or anything, I just worked on it, learned some new things, found that I do REALLY bad under pressure, but anyway, here it is: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=rate&uid=4220

Beetle escape

This morning I looked on the ludum dare website and I saw, that i had only a few hours left to make a game. I wanted to enter this competition, so I decided to work hard and here it is!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=preview&uid=5946

Enjoy!

I knew that if I wanted to sell the ‘story’ of my game NO ESCAPE, I was going to need a strong atmosphere. I’m guessing not many game devs consider After Effects an essential tool for their process, but because I do motion graphics work for a living, I knew that AE could give me solid results quickly. So, here’s a quick breakdown of the my layering/compositing process:

Layer 1: Background 1

Initially my background only had one layer, but the result looked fairly flat, so I decided to break the background elements into two layers, which allowed me to get a better parallax scrolling effect.

Layer 2: Background 2

The ‘main’ background. The buildings were modeled and rendered in Cinema 4D. I used the Environment tool to add a layer of fog, which is why elements that are farther away are more faded.

Layer 3: Foreground

Also created in Cinema 4D. I rendered everything out using an orthographic projection, which is why the foreground looks flat even through it was modeled in 3D.

Layer 4: Rain

The rain was added in After Effects with a very useful third party plug-in called Particular. I created one single rain drop and set up a particle system to do the rest. If there’s anything I’ve learned from rainymood.com, it’s that rain makes everything better!

Layer 5: Smoke

The smoke was rendered in Cinema 4D using its PyroCluster shader, which creates pretty convincing little smoke puffs fairly easily.

Layer 6: Water Overflow

This is a small detail, but one of my favorite things in the whole game. After I was more or less done with coding, I knew I wanted to add a few more details including this little water overflow coming off of the billboard. I set up another particular system in After Effects, this time using the built in CC Particle World and this was the result.

Layer 7: Lightning!

The last thing I added was a few lightning strikes, which I thought came out pretty cool. Created in After Effects using the built in Advanced Lightning effect. I timed the strikes so that they would come a few seconds before the thunder claps in the audio track, and positioned them to where the player would likely be at that point.

So there you go – a HUGE downside to doing things this way is that having this video background increased the size of the .swf dramatically. If I was a more competent programmer I would have tried to create these effects dynamically, but alas. Hope this was somewhat interesting, feel free to ask any questions about Cinema 4D or After Effects if you’re interested.

Here’s a link to my entry:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=preview&uid=5821

This was my first time i entered Ludum Dare.

I only had 12 in total to work on my project.  But somehow i got something working.  I decided to create a game where you have to escape the cops on the freeway.  I tried to make it not to complicated,  so i could finish it in the limited time i had.  I started by creating some of the base code and the graphics for the game.

The base code was nothing more than an applet with double buffering,  a thread with frame limiter to progress the logic,  a key-listner for user input and a loader class to easily load resources into the game. I lost almost a hour figuring out why my applet didn’t draw a thing.  It was a stupid mistake.  I called thread.run  (which doesn’t start a new thread)  instead of thread.start  (which does start a new thread).

The graphics took me most of the day.  I spend around 3 hours drawing the cars and the road,  and another half hour for the lights sprites.  Regionally i wanted to add different road tiles,  so the road wouldn’t be boringly repeating itself,  but there was not enough time.  After this the Saturday was finished for me. I didn’t even had a single car driving yet.

Sunday i started on the main code,  unsure if i had enough time left.  First i got the player car driving,  which was actually quite easy.  After that i worked on the other cars.  After an hour or 2 i got a “working” game.  But it was still quite boring,  because you could drive through everything.  So Time for collision detecting.

After the collision detection and writing code for the sprites.  I had to create the title and game over screen.  Which got finished just in time.  After this i had to go away for a while so i shut down my computer.

After starting my computer back up…  disaster strikes.  All my images where gone…  I think eclipse throw them away,  but i’m not sure about that.  I tried a recovery tool,  but no luck there. Luckily i had posted an screenshot on twitter from where i could recover a lot of the graphics.  It took me a pressures hour to restore the damage.

I still had to code the police cars but the clock was running out.  So i hadn’t much time to tweak the behavior.  Especially the detection if it can go left or right is a bit broken,  so it can happen that police cars overlap each other a bit,  or drive full speed into an other car.

I haven’t had any time to include sounds,  so the game is a bit silent.  On the other hand it saved me some time programming a mute button.

Lessons learned:

• Try to make more time free,  12 hours is really tight.
• BACKUP!!! It could save me an hour.
• Basic code,  so i can start on the game code directly.
• Graphics are hard and cost a lot of time

You can find the game (including the source) here.

Well, that was manic. I had family stuff to do this weekend, but I didn’t wanna miss LD, so I’ve cobbled together what turned out to be pretty much the tutorial level of what I originally had in mind…

So here’s what I learned:

Don’t try to Ludum Dare on a weekend when you have other commitments

Yeah, we finally have a completed game for our first LD jam!

This has been a lot of fun – Now I am courious what you guys did with the theme!

Happy testing!

I was relieved to get everything in Escape the Fate working in due time. However, some problems arose after entering.

One tester quickly reported the game crashes for him on startup. I spent a while Googling about py2exe’s quirks and isolated the cause to the font. Had to include that in the download (it’s a free font, don’t worry) and force users to install it before playing.

Later on, people complained the game was confusing with its two different types of falling. Instead of throwing the player straight into the action, I added an intro level which limits the interaction to a minimal amount of tiles. It’s amazing how the mechanics of falling suddenly became self-explanatory. This was on the extended time, so with the slight addition, the game still qualified for the compo.

Just a moment ago, I was giving tips to a player who seemed a bit lost. I wondered why, he hadn’t even gotten to the tricky part yet. Apparently, the game was too big for his laptop screen, and parts of it were cut off so that the level was unplayable. Yesterday I realized this might happen, but I kind of forgot about it when I was busy fixing collisions. That goes under bugfixes, so it won’t get me disqualified from the compo either, especially when I posted it as an alternative download. I should know since I’ve answered several questions about an update’s validity on #ludumdare.

Speaking about IRC, my username is different between the site and the channel. I’m also known as Jiggawatt; I simply failed to predict I’d be using the IRC channel much, so I registered here with something else than my standard issue IRC nick.

For those who actually got the game working and even understood what’s going on, the feedback’s been positive. So go try it.

I showed my game to a friend on facebook and decided to make some changes and enter it into the Jam.  Enjoy, even though the FPS still sucks when there are lots of blocks

Didn’t finish. I’m just too tired right now, and it’s nowhere near done. Thats what you get for slacking off I guess…

Things that went well:
* Forming idea’s

Things that didn’t go well:
* Always putting my idea’s in and wasting time instead of working on the core game
* Internet on computer
* Notch livestream

Overall a great experience. I feel ready for december. I’ll try not to get distracted as easily.

share: http://uploading.com/files/c6859f6b/WhaleEscape.zip/
movement = arrowkeys
rest = R
if Stamina = 0, you need 20 rests. (should have lowered, didn’t… méh)

Turn based gameplay, but with buttonbashing, feels reamtime-ish

TimeLapse day 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZ8XI1YOXMY

TimeLapse day 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjmUgS86rW8

The compo is over, my game is finished and the rating starts. For anyone trying out my game (if you haven’t yet: HERE), I will explain some strategies to survive, just in case you have trouble with it. Additionally, as I tried to get some advice from my wife for setting up the level generator yesterday evening she wasn’t really enthusiastic, to say the least. So for anyone more interested in the tech behind I will explain, why the level generator currently doesn’t work that good for providing difficulty.

The game mechanic basically works with to values that decrease as long as you are digging tunnels (and even when passing existing ones). The first value is food/hunger. You can find three different kind of food which will give you 5 to 15 points back. Food, if there is any, is only revealed if you enter a cage. By that, it is often necessary to leave the direct path and search adjacent rooms if you are low on food. This strategy also has a second benefit related to the second value, hope.

Hope is generated by spotting new cages around you. So progressing the level is the key to prevent death by starvation.  The hope mechanics leads to another point. Often it is better to move to the center of the level because chances for revealing cages is better in free field than at the level borders. This seems contradictory to the aim of getting to the upmost row or the rightmost column which are the only places to escape the level later on. Remeber that you can see 2 spaces horizontally and vertically and one space diagonally (not if you are digging). So if you already are two rows below the top border and there is no cage above, you won’t find any if you dig that direction.

The cacti walls are revealed by digging, so sometimes a tunnel can give further information for planning your path. This only applies if you have enough food/hope left.

To summarize the strategies:

• try to reach upmost row or rightmost column of the cages but pass the center of the level
• don’t dig to places where there can be no cage (2 spaces between player and border)
• don’t hesitate to search rooms for food
• progress to keep your hope filled

Headed to the center and didn't took the direct path to replenish food and hope. Else I would have died short before exit (Difficulty: Hard).

With that you should be able to beat all difficulties after some tryouts. At this point the random generator sets in. The design I used is rather insecure in providing the difficulty level. Instead of spreading a fixed amount of cages for each difficulty, I implemented to check a percentage to set a cage for every field of the grid (e.g. 33:67 that there is a cage on a field in normal mode). Instead of filling one third of the level with cages, this leads to very unsteady number of cages. By that, an “insane” level could have more cages than an “easy” one. Same applies to walls. By that the difficulty selector is a rather vague adjuster. But nevertheless you will notice the difference if you give it some tries (one playthrough is quick; around 15 seconds). So go and play. Good luck.

TL;DR:

Just a game design related teaser for the post mortem coming soon.

My game for this compo was Black Hole, a game where the objective is to escape both the horde of Drones who cornered you, and the black hole which they cornered you against.

Fortunately for you, a long-dead alien race left a platform here, which feeds off of the emissions of the black hole and broadcasts energy to all nearby ships. You have moved in close to this platform and the black hole itself, and thus avoided the gigantic Drone Mothership which was chasing you. However, the smaller Drone forces can and did pursue you, so now you must hold out against them to recharge your Jump Engines, allowing you to jump to beyond lightspeed and escape to your home.

The coding process was quite frantic. I had to write the entire game engine, and at one point ended up re-writing and re-integrating the entire collision engine, as I had failed to discover that my method of detecting overlapping rectangles was not accurate if they were rotated. Fortunately, I’m quite skilled with circle based collision, and it only took about 20 minutes to switch and integrate.

Another thing to note: I was high on Oxycodone and other painkillers the entire time, having gotten my wisdom teeth removed on Thursday. This caused many dumb mistakes, the majority being simple math related. I persevered through it though, and ended up coming out with what I think is a fun game!

Plans for the future: to continue to develop this game. I want to add more enemies, powerups, and new game modes.

Timelapse Part One is here.

Timelapse Part Two is here.

I’ll be writing a Post Mortem at some point… Thanks for the fun times all! Cheers!

Edit: 1814 lines of code, for those of you who care.

It’s finally crunch time for the LD Jam and here I am chatting it up for the rest of my team because

A) my job is pretty easy by comparison
and
B) variations on a theme make my job really easy by comparison

that said, have some more sound clips!

http://snd.sc/pBHV54

The menu for our game

Almost finished!

We’ve got the mechanics working and now we just need to utilize said mechanics in some sweet levels.

What we have so far:

• Running
• Wallrunning
• Walljumping
• Sawblades
• Sliding
• Ramps
• Crushers
• Flying enemys
• Glass which breaks
• Particles
• Checkpoints
• Health
• Slowmo/bullettime
• AI
• Background tiles
• HUD effects

Standing in the gunfire of some drones, surrounded by sawblades.

You control with the arrow keys, Z and X. You jump higher the faster you run, if jump while running towards a wall you will run up it, and if you press up while wallrunning you will jump off the wall.

If you press Z you will turn on slowmo/quicktime which drains the yellow meter in the lower-left. It will make you run faster, make bullets show trails, and makes it easier to avoid stuff.

link to game: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=rate&uid=4909

Basically what the title says

time laps now online

day 1
day 2

first youtube vids ever enjoy!