So, I didn’t write about anything in my journal. To be honest I didn’t have time! I was too busy making that damn game! HAHA. But maybe I can write something now. Mainly about what I have learnt in this contest.

Time: Well, I kind of didn’t learn anything here. I like everyone wildly overestimated what i can get done in 48 hours. I spent ~26 hours. But I am always over-estinating time. At work especially where I’m making games daily, I still think – “a week, sure, no problem”… Then I get bitten by time for disrespecting it. I usually double estimates to stop this… )

Instructions/GUI/Intro: Never spend enough time on these and they’re really important. Far too interested in the idea of the game, the mechanic and how it plays. Never on how to teach a player to understand it. The GUI needed an overhaul or actually doing in some cases (falling back to the default Unity stuff).

Planning: I need to plan and timetable stuff out next time. I think I spent 45 minutes modelling a gun, but it’s not visible and should have stuck with something simpler. If I planned everything, allotted time to each part with contingency then maybe the GUI would have been better.

Too big: Next time I’m going to aim for a 12 or 6 hour game. 24+ hours of coding over the weekend on top of all the game coding I do in the week means I didn’t have a proper weekend. I may have gone out for dinner so my wife didn’t kill me for ignoring her that long, but today, on Monday, I’m zonked.

I think that’s it for my thoughts for now. Hope you enjoyed my game…

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=rate&uid=4757

Jasper

So… the day after. I spent some time playing my oh not so great yet almost promising game and found out I made it tooo hard It really needs few fixes and tweaks, especially island generation, I’ve fixed most of the stuff even before submitting, but I forgot about the grass which plays vital role in successfully escaping from the island. So I’m considering doing some kinda “enhanced” edition with some more stuff.

Looking back, the biggest problems were:

not getting motivated enough, didn’t like theme and couldn’t think out anything really good… It was better second day because it seemed that I might have a chance to finish it in some sort of playable version.

having too much ambitions instead of sticking with something much simpler, but which would be more playable.

and doing everything from scratch just with openGL via OpenTK – I lost few hours doing stupid things like something resembling GUI (btw coded so ugly my head hurts even now), on the other hand, I took the whole competion more as experiment (my first Ludum Dare, although I participated in global game jam).

And too bad I just hadn’t time to make some sounds :/ I started to implement them about hour before the submission hour and realized I never worked with openAL and that there’s no way I could even play some simple wav without looking through some tutorial. Too bad, since I’ve bough a microphone to record some screams and other sounds just for the Ludum Dare

Hi,

It’s a day after my first LD.

Unfortunately I didn’t have too much time for coding and game doesn’t looks as good as I want, but the first pancake is always spoiled

I was writing in technologies which I never used before. I’ve chosen flash to be able to create web version of game. To make it simpler I used FlashPunk and Box2D (with box2fp as a wrapper).

I don’t have graphic talents but I was trying to create something better than classic programmer art in GIMP (with Bamboo tablet) and of course Paint

It’s also my first game in which I generated sounds by myself, but when you use Bfxr it can’t be difficult.

In general it’s possible to finish this game. Just remember a few things: sometimes you need to move back, it’s impossible to destroy TVs and grenades doesn’t hurt you.

Yes, I know, my English is terrible so maybe more visual rest of the text could be better.

Photo taken before start:

You can see here my desk, Lech Poznan match, yerba mate, two energy drinks, some other not important stuff and of course pierogi!

History of creating:

Theme announcement – 4AM here:

Start coding after night:

…

real life
…

First prototype:

Graphical corrections:

…

sleeping, bowling and party time %)

…

And final version without any significant progress since last day:

Thanks and congrats to all that participated in this LD.

Maskl

I always wonder who reads these posts, there are so many and they keep coming in so I guess we might as well focus on the games..

However, I do feel that granted the premission I have a few things to write about Ludum Dare  21, My first LD was 20.
Unlike my first LD, this time I only completed nearly 20% of the features.
This Theme was actually one I wanted long before the LD21 and I ended up coming here unprepared to make an exquisite submission.

I spent the entire first day on perfecting the first feature that hardly affects gameplay(random maze) and only using one sample so the player doesn’t benefit from the variety of having a fresh new maze each time we play.

The game I wanted to create, a rougelike inspired shmup,  (Think Metroidvania meats Powder)where you play as a space traveller caught in a massive (not so) abandoned  space station looking for some spare parts to fix his rig and save some bucks.

Requires improvement:

The game was suppose to introduce the story to the player in game amongst other things, like powerups, enemies, bosses and traps, this feature will only be in a future version.

The good:

I learned something I should have known by now.
How to blit fast in AS3 which I never tried before.(I actually used shapes)
This was very refreshing and got me highly excited near the last hours.

What I learned:

I really should focus on making gameplay elements first.
Making and playing with the actual player experience is far more important than the technical aspects, cause if the game ends up not finished, I would like to think that people enjoyed my submission.
Otherwise it would be a technical demo competition and not a game making event correct.

Anyhow I’m sure tomorrow I’ll play all the great games and enjoy and start getting some code ready for the next LD.

Thanks for reading.

Here is a timelapse for my entry

Forgot about that and am too lazy to edit.

What went right:
Music
Gameplay
Graphics
Submission Time
Food
IRC
Almost everything else.

What went wrong

The site server ^_.^ (I’m thankful to PoV and Phil for fixing it, though)
The variable ‘jump = 1′ x_.x

So, there, done.

Here’s the full final version of the timelapse video, along with some gameplay video at the end.

My submission included the Windows version, I’m working on the Mac version now.

Now that I’ve had an evening to gather my thoughts, I wanted to write a bit about the game I built for LD21. I submitted my entry into the Jam so that me and a friend could work together on it. That said, we limited ourselves to 48 hours and followed by the rules of the competition the best we could.

Overall the project went smoothly from start to finish and didn’t encounter any major issues, so I’ll go over some of the things I think went well for our project.

When we first got word of the competition’s theme, we just sat there quietly for about 10 minutes. I pitched the idea “You’re an escaped prisoner or something, piloting a ship down a corridor, where you have to break down these gates and dodge bullets while being chased by a big bad guy. Maybe with giant saw blades or something.” The game was more of a ‘chase’ game than an ‘escape’ game, but escape is a pretty broad term, and we figured we could hit the theme if we provided a little background to the characters prior to going into the gameplay portion of the game.

We used Unity for development. I must admit, while unity is awesome, the best part of it is the rapid prototyping. We took our idea and made a playable game within 3-4 hours of the start of the competition. We identified a lot about what would, and what wouldn’t work about our idea. You can see the prototype HERE.

We ditched the idea of gates, since we liked the idea of constantly accelerating gameplay. Gates required you to be able to shoot, something we got rid of, and also required to slow down, which we felt would probably break the flow of the game. The obstacles in the test version were entertaining enough, so we kept them around. We thought the game was way more interesting when the enemy was on screen rather than off, so we made it so that the enemy couldn’t fall too far behind.

The way I set up the game’s movement (as in the speed the stage scrolls) is kind of interesting. The speed the game was moving at was handled as two values; the target speed (the speed the player should move at) and real speed (the speed the player is really moving at). Getting hit dropped your real speed by a % (in the final version you slow by 10% for bullets, 15% for obstacles), and you recover speed by a set amount per second. That actually let us increase the difficulty by simply adjusting the speed the player moves at, since getting hit while moving faster would penalize you more. The enemy, his speed remains at 98% of your target speed, until he hits the bottom of the screen at which he matches it 100%.

Some really interesting things happened with this set up though that we didn’t originally intend. Getting hit just once didn’t really set you back very much because you recovered the speed you lose almost immediately. Consecutive hits would slow you down more, and more importantly, for much longer, which penalizes you much more. This meant that we didn’t have to make a game where your goal wasn’t to get hit… we could make the goal to try to avoid getting hit multiple times in a short period of time.

I was a little disappointed that actually slowing down was not noticeable. In the final version, even hitting multiple objects in a row, you won’t actually notice a change in speed, even though the scroll speed slowing down is what lets the enemy catch up to you. I think the shaking that occurs when you get hit hides the slowdown, but we needed the shaking to make it obvious that you got hit, since the explosion audio queue also sounds when an obstacle is destroyed by the enemy.

The enemy creeping up on the screen had gameplay implications that we hadn’t really foreseen, but once we saw it we kind of ran with it. I didn’t really notice much until a player mentioned on twitter that he enjoyed the way that the enemy’s position acted as a health bar of sorts. That made my day, and allowed us to make it a bigger part of the game. As you make mistakes, you’re given less room to work with, which makes further mistakes more likely. It reminds me of messing up in a game of Tetris, as the blocks pile up, you now have less time to plan your moves. It’s kind of invigorating, and while it wasn’t originally in intended feature, it was just one of those things that we were like “heey, that’s pretty interesting, lets see if we can make this a more important part of the game.”

It’s kind of amazing just how much a game, even one as small as a weekend competition game like this one can change over the course of development. We kind of had an idea where we wanted to be right from the start, as the prototype we built at the start looks fairly similar to the final product, but the actual gameplay was refined a considerable amount to make an interesting experience.

So yeah, I guess the take-away was that because we had our plan and working game so early, almost the entire 48 hour process was polishing and tweaking to make it more fun.  That’s a really good way to do it I think, it would have been much more stressful if we hadn’t had something running early on.

I want to thank Mike Paulson for helping me out with graphics, his art added a lot to the the game and it would have been a much uglier game if I had to do it all!

I hope you enjoy the game, let me know what you think!  Web/Windows/Mac version are available, as well as a timelapse and source code.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=preview&uid=5375

Tried to make my first game ever with a selfmade engine and in 48h: Escape Velocity is what came out of it.

What went right:
- Base code: Already having drawing code and good collision detection in my engine saved me so much work. I don’t think I’d have anything
- Javascript: Man, I love this language.
- Real life: I managed to find time to BBQ with the family and go to the pub on LD weekend.. Food, Beer and Coding? Awesome.

What went wrong/Lessons learned:
- Physics: I really like physic based games.. but I really suck at coding them.
- Base code: I also tried to integrate the physics in the engine and that was a rather bad idea. I could have saved so much time if I’d just took the straightforward way.. next time: more work on the game, less work on the engine.
- Timelapse: next time I’ll make sure my script does not capture in 100% quality and I have enough disk space. Missing an hour or two in the video.
- Time for polish: There are a few tweaks I wanted to do but did not have the time to (especially how the gravity bullet behaves). Also more levels with greater diversity would have been nice.

Although my game is not that good, I really enjoyed making it and I think I’ll participate again next year (:
Now off to play all these awesome games!

So I finished my game last night! I really struggled with the theme at first – one of those that can be used for a game in so many ways it was hard to pin something original and interesting down. While I’m not convinced I truly achieved that in my concept, this has been by far my best execution on a Ludum Dare to date. I actually had a little time to polish! But no DISCO

Click to go to the game page

So, pretty happy. I also took a timelapse with Chronolapse that I stuck up on YouTube if anyone’s interested:

Timelapse

I just finished up my jam entry, Frickin’ Laser Beams, you can check it out here:

http://www.uncade.com/prototypes/frickin-laser-beams/

Overall I’m really happy with how this turned out. It’s a platformer where you have to run to the energy shields to avoid being killed by the ever present danger of laser beams. I might decide to keep working on this as a full game, not sure yet. I added music for the first time to my entry, totally worth it It also ended up looking a lot like minesweeper, which was unintended, but kinda cool now that I look at it.

<Salzkorn> how's your game goin
<Salzkorn> finished in time?
<asiekierka> almost
<asiekierka> but crash bugs were fixable post-mortem
<asiekierka> i fixed all but one until i said "fuck it"
<Salzkorn> call it feature
<asiekierka> the game stops sending data to you every 5 minutes (in multiplayer)
<asiekierka> because you're a piece of shit so everyone tries to escape from YOU and not the infinite map they're supposed to escape from
<asiekierka> THERE WE GO!

Dear judges, keep that in mind while playing my game. Thanks.

*Phew* Ludum Dare is so damn crazy. I think this Ludum Dare I didn’t make enough progress on the first day. The game turned out pretty nicely, although it’s probably not as original as I wanted it to be. One of the core mechanics I had planned for my game was having the wolves be able to chase the player around, so you could lure the out of the way instead of fighting them, while running the risk of getting trapped. It also could have used more original obstacles, with more gameplay depth than “go to A to get the key then go to B to open the door”. Kind of like the fighting. It also needed more levels. In fact, when I first submitted it, before knowing that there had been a 12-hour extension to the dead-line, the game only had a test room. Afterwards I realized that I still had time, so I was able to make a real level, test it properly, and even add sounds! It’s only a few, though. And there’s still no music. Another issue is that I didn’t make any decorative props, like I planned originally. This might sound superfluous, but scenery is actually very important in any game with big areas (mazes and exploration games), especially when you’re using walls that all look the same.

Escape from the Wolf Castle

Studies show than posts with chinchillas have a 20% bigger chance to attract attention from the common page-scroller

On the bright side, I think the game turned out fun. I made a checkpoint movement mechanic that I had never done before, I was able to make some nice animations for my rabbit, and I even made a turn-based combat system that players are able to learn on their first try, all under 48 hours! And I even crunched some home-made sound effects in there, too! It was the first time I made sound effects, and I have to say it was surprisingly easy. I have next to no experience with sound effects, but with a microphone and some free software, I was able to much together something. I realize now that it’s a HUGE difference in quality, from having no sound effects to having some basic crappy ones. It’s also very quick and easy to make.

I hope you all enjoy playing the game as much as I enjoyed playing it! Eventually I’ll want to develop this some more to make it more complete, but for now I’ll listen to my victory song (Frog’s Theme from Chrono Trigger. It’s a very encouraging song) and relax after my exhausting 60 hours of making a game. Thanks for reading!

Timelapse

This is the timelapse of my attempt at Ludum dare. If you watch closely, you can see that i make 3 games. Two extra because of technical problems

Here’s the link to my final LD entry: SurfN-2-Sur5

Vote link

Some helpful tips to get started:

• When starting out you’re falling from the sky, wait until you hit the water to turn.
• In order to have a successful landing you need to be facing in the direction you’re moving.
• Write down your longest time/distance and try to beat it (if you’re into that).

Controls:
Arrow keys Move
Space or Enter restarts

I made the game in PixieEngine, the tools are getting better and these games keep getting easier and easier to make.

I finished the background music earlier using Aviary this afternoon and I think it’s pretty rad. Aviary was tough to get the hang of and was rough with importing loops into the larger song arranger, but once I got the basics down it was just a matter of toughing it out.

Here’s the link to the audio:
https://rookery.s3.amazonaws.com:443/9491000/9491020_96a4.mp3

I was pretty proud of drawing the little pixel surfer guy. Originally I wanted him to have twice as many rotations as well as subtle animations, but you know combinatorics…

I made desktop wallpapers out of all 510 compo games submitted (as of when I ran the script a few minutes ago) for Ludum Dare #21!

Ludum Dare is getting popular! It's getting hard make out the games in these wallpapers!

Here’s a zip file containing the wallpapers in various sizes and the Python script that generates them (requires PIL).

DOWNLOAD

I’ll be back in around 11 hours to add the jam games!

Update: The list of all games has been split into multiple pages, so the script no longer works.

While youtube continues to refuse my ogg video timelapse all I can say it was done in time, 7 seconds prior to the 48hour deadline and about 15 seconds before I fell asleep for the next 14 hours…

Some bugs remain but its playable, and the name is the result of me beign too tired to remember the awesome one I had worked out earlier and the typo ‘p’ the result of caffeine at 2:50AM.

If you run windows, audio will omst likely not work, if you use linux x86_64 it may work but I recommend compiling….

Check it out here if you are brave enough: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=preview&uid=4203

Developped with the nonstop briti-nyan, nyan-cat and other nyan variants to ensure maximum code nyan-a-bility.

I didn’t make the deadline, but I’m still working on the game I started. Here’s a quick screenshot.
I’ll try to finish it before the Jam deadline, but I doubt it

Waking up at 1:30 PM in the day today with aching fingers, I felt happy.

The game is actually pretty fun to play, and not too badly balanced. There are three zones of different colors, and each zone get’s a bit harder. The enemies get a little too fast and jumpy after a while though.

I don’t regret using Flashpunk this time, it really makes everything so much easier than using just as3 like last time. I spent many hours on a stupid bug though, and realised Flashpunk tilemaps do not actually clear tiles when you call clearTile() on them if the clear tile (index 0) is transparent. That was annoying and made me loose a lot of time.

I think the leaderboard can add a lot to the game. Sadly Playtomic has disabled it’s leaderboards due to some problems, but it should be working soon again.

I didn’t really make any graphics at all, but focused on gameplay instead. I think that was a good idea, but the game could really use some better graphics. The music and sound effects could be better too, but they do the job.

A breakdown of the time spent in different applications (tracked with ProcrastiTracker):

• Flashdevelop 13h
• Chrome 6h
• Flashplayer 4h
• XChat 2h
• Photoshop 2h
• Cubase 1h

Entry page: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=rate&uid=2311

(journal – entry)

Here’s the timelapse!