Just wanted to write a few notes about my submitted entry “Abandoned”, which participated in LD21 (escape).

You can try the game here:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=preview&uid=2393

First of all, it feels really good to have been able to submit the entry within the deadline. I have to say I’m really pleased with the result.
I had a great time coming up with all the weird artwork (which IMHO looks really good considering that I’m not a particularly good designer/illustrator). I really wanted the game to be creepy… which it is

About the controls I think the basic movement is really good, however the attack is a bit tricky (a tip is to collect a lot of green chrystals to speed up the rotation of the eyeball and just use it as a shield). That specific attack is based on an attack from a game for the C64 (I don’t know the name, and haven’t seen it since about 1989, so its probably just a twisted memory).

I really wanted the game to be more of a bullet hell game, but I designed the level in the last 3 hours and was really tired. Just one more hour would have improved the game a huge lot. Tweaking the position of the enemies and the rate which they spawn their particles.

Anyway, it was a great weekend, and now I have a lot of games to browse.
My thanks to the LD-crew (who struggled with the servers) and all developers who kept inspiring through status updates on the blog and in the irc. I’ll see you again!
/Tommy Salomonsson

The Grind was my first entry for Ludum Dare. This is an in-depth breakdown of the development went.

My goal was simply to finish something and I’m happy to say I achieved that goal. I ended up having to cut the vast majority of gameplay features, graphics, and sound (entirely), but the contest was a good exercise in scoping down a project to fit into the time available.

Time breakdown:

• Planning: 1 hour
• Map design/editor: 3 hours
• General coding: 6 hours
• Graphics: 3 hours (including scrapped art)
• Testing and bug fixing: 3 hours
• Real life + sleep: 32 hours

Lessons learned:

A narrow scope leaves time for polishing. I came into the contest with a vague notion of how time-constrained I’d be, but I didn’t truly appreciate the level of urgency until about 3/4 of the way through the contest. At the beginning, I tried to scope my project down to make it achievable, but honestly I brainstormed ideas I had no chance of implementing in time. This led to wasted time working on features that were later cut (e.g. smart phone text, nicer looking wall graphics).

Don’t underestimate time spent on algorithms. I had a rough idea of how to implement simple collision detection/resolution and line of sight detection, but I really underestimated how much time it would take to implement something acceptable. My first few attempts at collision resolution could lead to the player getting “stuck” and it was so frustrating that I had to keep iterating until I found something that “just worked.” On the plus side, I managed to come up with a simple line-of-sight algorithm late at night that works very well (set “debug = true” in the main script file to watch it in action).

Real life matters, but can be inconvenient. I hadn’t planned on spending roughly 11 of my waking hours doing “real life” things, but I think I had a better weekend and enjoyed the contest more because of it. After I submitted my entry, I was glad that I had done something else fun before it was time to go back to work on Monday.

Critique of The Grind:

The Grind is a very shallow game, but it is entertaining to watch the player get hounded by many bosses at once. I enjoyed watching 3 different guys in suits all say “Have some work!” right as I turned a corner.

Obviously, the game could use more polish. There are no menus to speak of and the smart phone isn’t really used very effectively (the original plan was to have various tasks show up on the phone–in the end, it’s just your score). The graphics ended up being a strange mix of 2D overhead (for the walls) and 3/4 (for the characters); this was simply a function of running out of time to make the wall graphics look good from a 3/4 angle. Lastly, the lack of sound and music is regrettable, but these were last on my list of priorities by necessity.

In the end, though, I had a blast and can’t wait to play through the other entries. Thanks to the Ludum Dare community for arranging this event!

Hey everybody. I’ve written up a post-mortem on my game, with thoughts about what the game means, why I made the decisions I did as far as the two-player requirement and some other gameplay mechanics, and the backstory on how the game itself came to be. Check it out at my website.

And, a quick side-note: huge congratulations to everyone who completed and submitted a game this time around! You’re all awesome. I look forward playing as many of the games as I can this week.

Watch the Timelapse video of my LD #21 entry Stromcrow:

I did manage to submit my entry before the competition ended, but as the website was going so absurdly slow at the time, I didn’t write anything about it. Perhaps next time I will attempt post more updates during the competition.

My entry was made in Actionscript3 with the Flashpunk library.
Software used: vim, gimp, lmms, audacity, sfxr.
Timelapse video created with my timelapse script and Kdenlive.

I’m currently attempting to submit my entry for LD21 and thought I’d share some of the steps along the way with screenshots (from timelapse archive, <3 chronolapse).

No better way to start than a title screen:

I then got stuck straight into the concept I had for “escape” – solving puzzles to move up levels of a tower/dungeon to escape rising lava levels, with a snakes and ladders like “fall down 3 levels” mechanic if you got something wrong. First up, an indicator on the screen for your level and the level of the lava!

(more…)

When I started with my first LD, I was at first confused by the somewhat complex voting-system. So I thought I could explain it for anybody who’s interested.

This is what the voting-screen looks like. Here are the details:

1. The list of Developers. The entire list is randomized, to ensure equal visibility. At the beginning only 20 names are visible, but once a certain number of those has been voted on, the list extends, showing the next random batch.

2. Pressing this button will load the entire list. It will still be randomized, though.

3. The amount of votes this developer has gotten.

4. Coolness-rating. Hovering over this spot reveals the coolness-rating of this developer. Coolness is awarded for the percentage of rated games. Should this person rate ALL games, she would get a coolness-rating of 100%. The developer will get a medal displayed on the left, next to the name. Bronze at 25%, Silver at 50%, and gold at 75%.

5. Competition-rating. Games can be rated in the categories Overall, Innovation, Fun, Adherence to Theme, Graphics, Audio, Humor and Community. The Community-rating describes the actions of the developer towards the community, for example by providing blog-posts, timelapse-videos, and other additional pieces of information. Ratings can be 1 to 5 stars, or “n/a”, should you feel you cannot give a proper rating in a certain category.

6. Jam-Rating. The same system as in the competition, only with games that have been entered in the Jam.

7. Text-Comment. An X appears should you have given a comment

I hope this helps

-Matthew

I had a blast making the game for LD48 but wow, was i tired last night.

Anyway here is the game as submitted: http://www.strangechair.se/LD21/

and here is the  Time-lapse.

Now to try out hundreds of new games!

A few thoughts on the pseudo-completion of my game, ‘I THINK IN A MINUTE OR SO I WILL EXPLODE.’

Climban gaems

It was a bit of a mess, all told. I spent almost all the time getting the switching mechanic to work properly. I always forget that swapping two states requires a break, or else it’ll just loop and loop back. Silly little mistakes.

I missed out on the chance to add sound, and decent menus. But the extended submission period did give me a chance to patch some bugs andfix the non-functional difficulty curve.

All in all, I’m happy to have gotten it done, and I hope everyone gives it a go. And I think I have an idea of where I’m going with it if I want to polish it up. Getting it done wasn’t as cathartic as I expected, but I guess it’s because it’s not really done yet.

There’s always more to do.

Please try it out here and let me know what you think.

And there’s another Ludum Dare!

Heh, the site issues were freaking me out a bit. I read that there’d be an extension, but I can get a bit paranoid about making sure I’ve done things correctly, so I kept on trying during the server troubles. Finally went through though.

I had to cut some things I wanted – biggest regrets are not being able to include a final sequence to better justify the health upgrades, and not having better art for the ending – but I’m happy with what I accomplished.

Thanks to the LD team for organizing this great event and working out those server problems, and thanks to all the other participants! =D

PLAY ~ VIEW PAGE

This was an intense couple of days, and felt more like a week had passed. It being my first ludum dare I didn’t know what to expect. I’ve made games before, and I’ve made games with deadlines before, but the ones I’ve finished were not much.

As the time of the theme’s announcement came closer I wasn’t worried too much, I had some vague ideas on some types of games to do. One game could fit several themes. Then the theme was announced: escape! I have to admit that this was one of the themes I overlooked in my mental preparation as I assumed people will want to avoid a pile of room escape games. I didn’t want to do a platformer because I assumed that there will be enough little jumping men and floating platforms from other competitors. So I sat down started pacing around the whole house and tried to think what I’d like to escape from: cities came to mind, then I thought that’s too much of a cliche since the whole world would want the same. Now that’s an Idea.

First let's get them spinning

 First thing’s first in an orbit-based game: get the orbit working. That worked easily enough. Geting them spinning around eachother was trickier though.

Then get them spinning around eachother

The coding went a lot more smoothly than I had anticipated, the only slight issue was in switching orbits where Urth (I’ve been told repeatedly that it looked like a hairy circle in its first incarnation) would randomly teleport around.

Probably my favorite level

By the end of day one I had 6 finished levels and escape mode. There were still no menus, no sounds, no interface of any recognizable sort, and at this point I hadn’t slept for well over 24 hours, not due to a lack of trying though. I’d sit in my bed, lights off and sleep wouldn’t happen. Instead what happened were the storyline overlays. Then sleep happened.

Day two started with implementing some suggestions from preliminary testing, adding the artwork, doing the menus, and generally improving the game play experience.

Music and sounds were a headache. I rarely add sounds to projects, so this was mostly new and uncharted territory. Some fumbling with lmms wasted several hours, so I just went and picked up my dusty old mandolin (no I can’t actually play it other than one song: Planxty Irwin) and banged and pinched on it (the sound effects) until I eventually managed a slow tune (the music). Some tweaking in audacity made it bearable to listen to.

Ready for my world tour, fetch my manager!

With that out of the way I still had some hours to spare. Since I became addicted to the Escape game mode, and would play it repeatedly for minutes on end instead of doing actual work I decided to make a high score table so others can show off their planetary avoidance skills. This only works in the applet though, the compiled versions will save your scores in a text file.

Escape this if you can

To conclude, some advice:

• start simple, but make it expandable
• prioritize
• do not update to a beta release of ubuntu the day before ludum dare
• 48 hours isn’t enough to learn new skills and use them, work with what you know
• do not forget to blink

So, I didn’t submit my game because all that the player can do at the moment is exploring around. I was planning to do some enemies of course, but time (and wrist RSI) punched me in the face.

Chryssalid Escape WIP3

TODAY’S WORK:
————
+ There are now 3 Fog levels, black, fogged, lit. Looked better when I blurred and colorized the fogged images a bit.
+ Scrolling screen around edges. Visibility is increased by the number of rays passing through a tile, meaning I get a sort of peripheral anti-aliasing I guess.
+ Scrolling centers on character moving near edge.
+ Selection box that blinks and follows moving characters.
+ Made some quick button gfx (idle, hover, pressed).
+ Started on bottom GUI. Mouse knows better if it’s on the map or not. GUI is selected tile/unit sensitive.
+ Sloppy gfx for some furniture (4). Noodled on other gfx as well.
+ Separated walk blocking and sight blocking.
+ Default Chryssalids spawn in Alien Containment area.
+ Lowered walls so they don’t exactly obscure the tile behind.

I made a somewhat longer post about the entry on my blog for some more information on the development on

http://redwatergames.blogspot.com/2011/08/collapse-ludum-dare-entry.html

also uploaded a video featuring the leveleditor

and a gameplay video

Enjoy reading/watching/playing and leave some comments

Game made the 48 hour deadline, and is available to play and rate: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=rate&uid=2661

And timelapse is up. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rp7_G-4232A

It was a good weekend. Thanks to everyone on IRC for being very interesting and providing some pleasant distractions, and to my many friends who were supportive and understanding.

Test 123

And is done. Play here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=preview&uid=5234

Wish I had more time, but nevertheless, enjoy!

Let’s give the “too long, didn’t read” version right at the beginning, it’s been a wonderful experience.

With the time difference, I had from Saturday 11am to Monday 11am to complete the game, modulo two kung-fu practice sessions and one band rehearsal, on top of your everyday needs (groceries, wife, food and everything). I could only start to work on the game after lunch and I had no idea at all. The theme “Escape” was too generic for my tastes, but that was maybe the point. There was no way to escape the theme…

At first I was thinking about a physics platformer, where you had to plan your escape: each level had two parts: the “getting-in” where you can look at the level, move things around and plan your run, and the “getting-out” where you get the hell out of the place after stealing whatever was worth at this point. I had played with Box2D and its Java port a couple of years ago, and the perspective of getting all that  to work again was not very enjoyable.

Time was running out already and I had no interesting idea. Well, in that case, the point is to start doing something. So I started the basic structure of a game, a simple framework to have at least something to play with. Then I just started to make a 2D top-view game, just because it came that way. “Escape” was easy to fit on a closed room setting, with classic stealth games as examples.

Well I was getting into the basic level loading of the game and I decided that I wanted to get a nice lighting system for my game, like the ones you have on rogue likes but better, just because I needed the challenge of doing something new with this competition.

And that was a huge mistake. The way I implemented this was buggy at best, and the code is a huge pile of handling special cases, getting around floating point errors and is probably performing very bad in a lot of cases…

But it worked relatively well. Sadly I ended up having a stable engine on Sunday late afternoon, leaving too little time for making a real game. “Never give up, never surrender” as they say. That’s the spirit of the competition. You make choices, some work, some don’t. But you keep on coding.

Making the light/switch system, enemies took me the last part of the day. Midnight, getting tired, and far from having a game. Polish, music and level design would have to wait. I could not sleep, having ideas to improve the poor gameplay of the game as my wife was happily dreaming by my side.

6am, already up, 5 hours to go. Code a few ideas, breakfast and coffee. Coffee. Coffee. It was 9:30. Quick, let’s make some music/sounds. Two sound effects done with the microphone of my laptop, and the music took five minutes to create, with 2 of them to choose the pad in Ableton. Just 8 bars, a very simple chord progression and a very basic drum loop. Add a bit of fading and done. Not enough time to do better.

10am and I had no levels!!! One hour later I had three tutorial levels and four main levels. None of them is very interesting, but it was time to pack. The game was “ready” just on time, but the server had trouble, extra twelve hours to submit? I managed to squeeze my submission a few minutes after the original deadline (well, I also needed to go to work eventually on this Monday). Resisting the temptation to use those extra hours to do better would be a bad idea…

Just checking that the game starts on all platforms and I called it done. 48h is short, but getting something done in that time frame is very challenging but so rewarding. I learned a lot on how to crunch, and how to cope with failure.

See you next time, Ludum Dare!

Anyway, I had some trouble submitting my posts during the outages this weekend, as every single one of you contestants have also experienced. Here is a Saturday update with a production shot of my game, Under a Watchful Eye:

Today [Saturday] I’ve spent several hours testing the mechanics and putting together all the art. I took a digital camera into my back yard and snapped shots of the grass, moss, trees, stone, and one cloud. I cut this cloud out, made the sky color an alpha, and put it on a billboard. Spent far too long coding the movement of the clouds and the way they fade away/are recycled. Ah well, it looks nice at least.

I also created a number of meshes in blender for rock formations and boulders. They are all just extruded cubes that have been displaced using perlin noise, sub-surfed, and UV unwrapped.

Anyway, the enormous glaring eye now twitches and looks in random directions. If you step too far away from it, it will go into alert mode and warn you not to go any further. If you keep going, it will fire at you, killing you unless something is blocking its path.

I got a very late start and I’ve had a very relaxed attitude to boot, so I don’t have NEAR the quality many of you guys churned out! I think it’s cool though. My only goal is to make a game that’s fun to play, no matter how crude it is otherwise. I figure: this is my first ld; I’ve got nobody to impress.

I wanted to post up my tiny little WIP because I’m happy with it and I think it’s fun to play . It’s 1 level. No sound. All programmer art. .

My game is called Escape Velocity (which I thought was perfect until I saw how many others have that name ) and here’s the plot ripped from my readme:

You work for the cheapest interstellar delivery company in the galaxy. Your boss gives you so little fuel for each trip, you’re lucky not to slam into a planet or be lost careening into deep space! You know each delivery could be your last but you have to pay the rent .

You have to use the gravity of stars and planets to slingshot your way to the delivery zone!

Download it here.

In case anyone is using Tile Studio with Flixel, this might be useful. I added an option to always start with a transparent tile at the beginning of the exported tileset: !StartWithEmptyTile, since Flixel insists that the drawable tiles start from a certain index.

For some reason I haven’t been able to log into SourceForge for a while, but there is a new executable here: http://www.wieringsoftware.nl/ld/ts.exe (if you don’t already have Tile Studio, first unpack the zip from http://tilestudio.sf.net and then replace the executable with this one).