Although… I have realised that I’m probably putting too much detail into this

Now that I have gotten some sleep I just wanted to say thanks to everyone. This was my first LD48 and it was fun.

I learned a lot in the last two days.  The hardest part for me was not adding more features.  I had to take out some “Fun” elements of my game but I wanted something that worked above all.

One other note my submission has a WINDOWS Link but the link should work on Linux, Windows and Mac since its java.

Good:

Jmonkey was easy to use.

Hydrogen Drum Machine was cool.

Gimp rocked.

Blender 2.5X was awesome

Bad:

Loading Images in Jmonkey have a weird Flip By default. So I had to make my Letters Backwards.

Blender exporter to Ogre xml puts a capital “F” on False so the xml parser cries.

-Greg

Yay! XD

My entry, Fred the Astro-Miner is here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?uid=4920

You play as an astronaut who’s stuck in the middle of an asteroid, being chased by the giant alien that lives in the centre. You need to run away as fast as possible while trying to mine as much metal as you can!

I was quite busy this weekend, so I’m really happy with what I was able to get done in the time! The game is extremely short, as I intended for there to be more levels (there’s only one, and each level is split up into twelve small stages). There’s also a couple of bugs. I’ll probably keep working on the game though, especially if it gets some positive comments, introducing better graphics and more block types for more interesting, puzzle style gameplay.

Enjoy! =)

P.S. I’ll get a Windows executable up soon! At the moment it’s Linux only

…if i’m ashamed to call what I made a game?

It does for me . My only objective was to finish within the deadline and I managed that, even if there’s no art and the game on runs on one platform right now.

Looking forward to the next time I enter, I learnt a lot both about programming and game making in general, and about things particularly relating to speed development.

Angus

Began the Jam rather late, but decided to give it a shot any way.

Work schedule:
1/2 hour brainstorm during family dinner
1 hour paper prototyping in train
8 1/2 hours of development
(Would have been 3, without the extension which saved me)

10 hours in total

Play the result here.

Thanks to the 12 hours spare I could finished my game properly(almost). You can check my entry HERE. I’ve added sounds and background sounds(the clock..) and added some courses to the map. Now it looks fine, but now it’s for windows users only.. this was my second game in c++ so I have no idea how to port it to linux and to mac, the game is in allegro so it suppose to be possible. Can anyone explain how I port it to other platforms? I’ve added a source to the entry so maybe someone can do it for me please? thanks. and some photos:

I gave up at about 2 am last night, after spending way too long trying to get Flixel to do what I wanted it to. Also I ran into a bug in the haXe compiler which made generated as3 code impossible to compile. If I had known about the extra time, I would probably have been able to make something. I might still do something for the jam using some existing code from an old LD or so.

When I showed McFunkyPants’ Keynote to my 16-year-old daughter, she said, “That is one wise baby.”

And over the course of the weekend, she kept asking me, “Are you doing what the wise baby said?”

And I would say, “Yes, of course.”

But I didn’t. I made a NOOB MISTAKE and got over-ambitious with my game design. I wanted to make a platformer with conversations at various places because I had a story to tell. But I decided that my platformer level would be larger than the screen, smooth-scrolling, and 256×256 tiles in size.

And I felt that I needed an editor in order to make my (one) level. I spent most of Saturday trying to beat it into submission, and when my wife told me Sunday that she needed to go out for most of the day to get the kids ready for school, I knew I wasn’t going to finish.

After an hour or two of working on the editor, I should have ditched it, reduced the map size to 64×64, and edited it by hand. If I’d done so, I’d have finished something; as it is I have a half-finished editor, a nice conversation system…and no game.

Ah, well. There’s always LD22.

Hey there, here is the Timelapse for my entry “cosmoZ”.

cosmoZ making of

Test the game here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=preview&uid=3553

Well, I got somewhere! I had set out some personal goals this time to see how far I could get.

Here is the submission link.

a) Get the mechanics I wanted to make in
b) Get the levels buildable with my editor + Tiled so content is quicker
c) Finish at least 5 tutorial levels (which I did, all tutorials, merged one into the other leaving 4).
d) Don’t rush.

I got 4/4 for my personal goals, and I have something playable that I can expand on which is pretty much what I wanted.

What went wrong

1) Don’t rush. This was intentional, and I slept normally, didn’t spend all the time I could have so probably only about half the total time was spent.

This means its not a game, just a tutorial but since those were my goals, I am still happy with the outcome.

2) Trying to make a grappling hook that you can control

I lost a lot of time working on this rope thing that was pretty damn awesome (i love box2d) but it wasnt stable enough to use for now.

3) Only getting a concept/story idea late on saturday afternoon. Unhelpful. The rest of the time was spent working on all sorts of prototyped mechanics and stuff that i was hoping to use.

What went right

1) Mechanics and gameplay went first, then allowing me to edit them from the editor, then polish and art and such.

The editors kinda work like this :
Build the layout in tiled. Create triggers and object layers for whatever you need.

Once you have that, the level will load it for you, you can use the in game editor to edit the scene. Adding sprites, collisions, triggers and more.

Once you have that, you can edit the properties needed to connect the gameplay to the sprite objects. Like that glass1 will destroy the sprite tagged with glass1 in the editor.

What is next

Hopefully I will be able to make a few of them in time for the jam to show of the actual concept. Otherwise, I will just make some levels over the next few days and hopefully do a post release.

This is our first Ludum Jam project and we’re close to a finish. The level editor is working, There are just a couple of screens that need to be changed/created and the of-course lots of levels to make. We’ve got just under 12 hours to go and we’ll make it time easily!

Just 3 minutes before deadline!

For more information about the game, visit the entry.

I still could do the game better, anyway. Escape pod’s graphics are… Well, they could be better. Also the game is too short IMO. However, I’m fine with what I made. Well, it’s still my first LD.

I’ve just uploaded my final version of my game for this competition, well done to everyone.. It’s been great to see such a good spirit and it’s been good to be part of it for my first time here.

http://www.digital-glue.com/competitions/ld21/

Enjoy ^_^

This has been a hectic weekend. I’ve honestly never concentrated so much on an LD entry before.

Here are some of the good points about my entry:
The physics works perfectly – you can kick around the corpses of dead enemies, and the jumping is quite smooth. You can even bunny hop! This is all thanks to BEPU physics which is a darn good API. The character controller I’m using from it is experimental, but seems to work very well.
Gameplay has at least some depth. You have to escape from the lava as it rises, and that is confounded by the exit being locked (you have to find the blue key to escape).
The level is reasonably large. I was able to speed-run it in about 100 seconds. Some players have reported running out of time which makes me grin.
You can fall in the lava and die prematurely, which adds a tiny extra bit of depth i think.

Now the problems:

Only one type of enemy – I had hoped to implement a couple more. I wanted to have a sniper and give him a laser sight so you could see where he was aiming, and I wanted a lava monster who would wake up and throw lava bombs at you.
No pick-ups other than the keys. I had wanted health and weapons.
No unique weapons – the code supports this but I ran out of time, so I upgraded the default to be fully automatic.
The level wasn’t as finely crafted as I had hoped. I had intended to have a total of 4 keys, the red key just being a “tutorial” on the controls (that’s why its so obviously through the only unlocked door).
The big one… I messed up the graphics on the level geometry. The billboards were just fine, but the level geometry was rendered wrong. I tried to share vertices and thus texcoords between each block, but that proved futile. What I should have done was have one batch for each pair of parrallel surfaces – since my blocks are all axis aligned this would have made sense. Then, I would have been able to light them and have more carefully plotted texture coordinates.
I wish I had time to add more levels – the game code supports it, I just didn’t get the time to build them.

One thing is for certain though – from now on, I’m going to do 3D entries. So, when the next LD takes place, I’ll be using the same tech I’m using now.

Hi.

Two days ago a guy at wonderfl.net mentioned LD challenge, and here I am, registered and submitted my 1st compo entry:

You have only 5 levels to beat, so it should not take you too much time to check out

This entry was inspired by awesome PSTW Action RPG, and the reason why I managed to complete it was that it’s way closer to things that got me into flash than stuff I actually do with flash now. I hope you will enjoy playing just as much as I had, making it.

Disregard this post, it’s not just a compile issue, I have no idea what’s wrong.

Let me know if the game doesn’t run on your machine…

I compiled it on one Windows machine, but it’s not running on two other machines, if someone knows how compile a C++/SFML project to run on all Windows machines I’d be really grateful!

A MacOSX Compile would be nice too if anyone can do that?

Grab the source here :

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=preview&uid=1561

my entry: Forever Running

This morning I finished my LD entry. It’s the second time I participated, so I somehow knew what to expect. Here are my experiences:

What went well

• personal basecode: At first I wanted to use an existing framework, but then I realized that I would learn more if I write one myself. It has very limited functionality but I know every single line of code. This helped a lot to speed things up.
• preparation: Before the competition started I had ideas for the top 4 themes (self replication, dreams, escape, adaption). Even though I prefered self replication, I could start coding early. Beside that I tweaked my sleep schedule, so I was awake soon after the competition started (4am).
• visuals: I’m not a great artist, but I’m happy with what I produced. It’s so much better than what I used to do four months ago. (Yes, I’m a bit proud of it)
• goals: I aimed low. It’s not a very original game idea but I was pretty sure I could do it in the given time. I was right.
• release often: I released two indev versions of the game.
• code first: At the end of the first day, I finished all core game mechanics so I could spent the entire second day on content.

What I should do better

• sound: I was unable to produce music or sound good enough to include in the game. I certainly need a) more practice and/or b) better tools
• got up too early: The competition starts 4am here. I got up at 4am and started coding. Soon I realized that I was too tired to produce quality code. After sleeping 3 more hours, things got better instantly.
• focus: After I finished the game mechanics I somehow lost the focus. I thought about other game elements to add, watched some TV, tried to create some music. This way I lost some hours. I went to bed early to clear my mind and was full of energy for the second day.
• timelapse: I tried to create a timelapse with CamStudio, but somehow all files are corrupted I need to find another tool.

All in all I had a very productive weekend, learned a lot, spent time with an awesome community and had a lot of fun. Now I’m going to play all the games you made

Thanks for this fantastic event!

Here’s a link to the submission page!

It’s the morning after (technically it’s the same morning, but my feeble little mind can’t handle that) and I managed to get my submission in with 40 minutes until the official deadline to go. Ignoring any sort of evaluation of what I did right or wrong and how good my game is, I’m feeling a huge sense of accomplishment just from getting something done within the timeframe set for me.

How it all went down

So I started the competition 7 hours after the theme was revealed and had no idea what I was going to do with it. I’d been playing around with some platformer mechanics the night before and sort of had a handle on how something like that should work, so I decided to make it a platformer. Even though I really didn’t know which direction I was going in, I decided that there needed to be something to escape from and, because I’m super original, that ended up being a rising water-level. So I made some little square sprites and tiles and coded some basic platformer mechanics. This is what it looked like at that point:

Now, the aim of the game was to escape the water for long enough to reach the exit, or at least not drown before you got to the exit. The issue I’d come across with that was that once you were in the water you couldn’t get out, which meant that as soon as the water caught up you were swimming and that (with the level design ideas I had in mind) this wasn’t going to be very fun. You’d just end up coasting along, lazily avoiding a platform or two, then reach the exit. The platformer mechanics were also awful. The character would often get caught in the side of platforms or just not jump at all when he was supposed to. I gave up on work for the day and left any improvements for Day 2.

So along came the second day. My issues consisted of bad platformer mechanics and a boring main mechanic. I decided that, to completely avoid these problems instead of solving them, I would change the aim of the game.

I completely embraced the idea of floating along on the surface of the water and made this the entire point of the game. You wouldn’t be able to jump anymore, so the platformer mechanics went out of the window, and you would instead wait for a moment until you were picked up by the water. At this point you’d avoid some more closely-packed obstacles on your way to the exit. The water would move faster, so that it was a challenge to avoid the platforms and to catch up with it if you were pushed underwater. I hastily coded this up (or at least a horribly buggy version) and put together some quick graphics (literally, five minutes worth) and ended up with something a bit like this:

The character was now “Stubbs”, a little block of something like sponge (or something else that floats until it’s filled with water) with stubby little legs that meant he couldn’t jump. This was much more interesting to play and I was actually pretty happy with it. At this point I was starting to feel the deadline looming over me and got pretty worried about how I was going to make this interesting to play. I decided that, instead of making a lot of varied and handcoded levels, I was going to do some lazy procedural generation. In other words, I created some level sections, then made the game stitch them together in some random order. This worked pretty well and if I’d had more level sections I’m sure it would have been pretty interesting.

As time was short, I hastily created some (annoying) music and got to fixing the bugs. Oh, the bugs.

I spent at least 3 hours trying to get the levels to load, then the levels to display properly, then the levels to scroll, then the levels to not scroll when the player was at the bottom or top, then the water to scroll, then have it not scroll, etc. etc. etc. I ended up completely scrapping the code for scrolling and rewriting it just so that I could get my head around what I was doing. Eventually it worked. I packaged everything up and submitted it all. I was finally done.

What I should have done

I should have planned it out a little bit better. I really had no idea what I was doing other than that I wanted it to be a platformer. This really came back to bite me when I changed my idea on the second day and practically had to recode half of the game. Planning would have meant that I could have spent the first day coding everything and the second day bug-fixing and making the assets. As it was, the assets were an afterthought and bug-fixing was something I had to do as I was coding (which lasted until the final hour), otherwise I wouldn’t have had time.

I should have documented more of my code. I tried to document some of it, but I got lazy or I thought, “I’ll just get this mechanic quickly coded and test it out”. I’d then find a bug which would distract me from my initial code and by the time I came back to it it looked incomprehensible and I ended up leaving it as it was instead of spending a good while deciphering it. If I’d documented, half of my bug-fixing issues would have been a lot simpler because I’d not have had to go through, line-by-line, figuring out what everything meant. Heck, I probably wasted more time scrolling through classes looking for a particular piece of code, that would have been obvious had I documented it, than I would have in just adding a few comments here and there.

I should have just gotten to work instead of procrastinating. I’m actually not sure I want to beat myself up over this, because I’m amazed that I got the game finished at all. That said, if I had spent more time coding and less time watching TV or talking to people, it would have been a lot less of a rush when it got towards the deadline.

What I’d do if I spent more time on this

• More levels
• More varied tilesets
• Main character animations
• Tweak the speeds of the main character and the water so that it’s not as punishing
• Spend more time on the level design so that I’m sure it’s possible to get through them all
• Sound effects more movement, drowning, underwater effects on the music, maybe?
• A proper title screen as well as proper win/lose screens with art and not just text
• Better music. I think the music I have at the moment is too slow compared to the speed of the water

This Ludum Dare was a bit hard, I got a zero originality idea and that demotivated me over the process, so I tried to finish it quickly but almost without love.

The game name is Vampire Runner, like Canabalt, you control a guy who runs forever and runs faster and faster but instead jumping to avoid obstacles, in you have to activate your super skill to move through obstacles. The main objective remains the same.

Here are some images:

Running happy while there are no walls near

Using his move through wall skill near a wall

Lost all the skill energy while moving through a wall.

Despite I put almost no love to the game (well, I did for the graphics) the game is funny, so give it a try and I hope you like it.

P.S.: I will add the timelapse when I finish processing it.

My screenshot capture program decided to scramble 90% of the images it took, so my timelapse is rather jumpy and fairly short. Just like my game.

I started mid-afternoon, and stopped only briefly for dinner. Even though I was badly stretched for time, you can see how much I wasted by playing other peoples entries and reading blog posts when the site wasn’t down.

Watch in your browser (firefox/opera). Or download the file.

Don’t forget that The Sky Is Falling and you should escape by downloading my game. It’s more fun than watching this timelapse, I promise.