All that I can say now that I’m done is, it was awesome!  Despite a roadblock at the beginning (laptop charger decided to die on me), I’m happy with my game. This was my First Ludum Dare and I had a great time making my game.

My game’s called Fierce Undead, it’s more or less an open-world game where you have to survive in a zombie infested city until rescue arrives for your escape.

I also created a timelapse video of the development of my game.

Hey guys, I finished my LD and successfully submitted last night Very happy with how this one turned out. It’s kind of a stealth submission as I had initially said “I’m In”. Followed by no other communication. I didn’t tweet or update blogs or anything this time, just got my head down and finished it!

The main thing I was trying to do was capture an atmosphere and keep the production quality as high as I could within the 48 hours. I think I managed to get just the atmosphere I was looking for so I’m really pleased with how it turned out! As it’s Unity you can play it online with a high score board on Kongregate here!

Congratulations to everyone else who made it into the compo, I look forward to playing all your games in the coming weeks!

(Link to LD Entry)

*wants

Please take a look at the about page, and feel free to use the site as your Ludum Dare game host if you are fine with the conditions and Pirateware Licence.

Visit www.ghbrvlowabrvfladberogvlwrvfwlo.com!

PS. there’s an upload size limit that grows, let me know if you need more space!

Original post

Hello everyone,
This was supposed to be my first ludum dare,  but despite still missing 7 hours at end of competition, it’s 8:51 am and I have to work.

You’ve missing a boring game with awful graphics, its name was “Esc-Ape” and this should not be against rules competition.

Escape key was used for jump…I was really proud of text on video “Press ESC for PLAY” and “Press ESC for JUMP”

Yes, the smiling block at left corner is the ape!
Bye.

Being 3.44am here, the upload of the timelapse finished (Click on the image above)

[Game link]

I see you on the next LD!

This is my entry for Ludumdare21.

It is a Unity game so it works in BROWSER! TEST IT NOW. And give your feedback

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1497567/LD/LD21.html

NOTICE! I will make an updated version of this game during next weeks, with the ability to record scores and extended game elements.

Health decided that last night was mostly a bust

With work today, I’ve only got a few hours this morning and tonight, to get it finished and slightly worrying I’ve yet to actually get anything game like in there.

So not really good going :-/

However I’m actually fairly happy with what I’ve developed, so if nothing else it will come back for the next Ludum or mini or maybe just worked on regardless and I still hope to submit something even if just one puzzle room.

Skel and Dollface are both in now, so just to get Dollface to tell you whats going on and then implement the first puzzle game, its designed and tbh probably far too easy. But without much time to tune it, i’m just hoping to have at least something game-like.

At the very least, its very pretty for a few days work and tbh shows that even indie titles using cheap off the shelf art, can look pretty good even for the art-talentless like me

Yes yes yes! I have a game that is actually finished and finishable I am trying to relate it to not being drunk the entire weekend, but it’s probably just a coincidence.

So where’s my checklist…
1. Prepare a framework for rapid level creation – check! – Entire first day I designated to creating a framework so that I could create levels like mad on Sunday. I managed to do it, and level creation was done 90% using GraphicsGale. All the gags are animated frame-by-frame, and items are loaded from a color-keyed map.

Example of gag animation

Example of item map:

2. Create levels like mad – yup! – I was making levels the entire Sunday, I wanted to have 16, then 8, but I end up with 6. Good enough! Anyways my plan was to have a ready game on the first day, so that i will just do as many levels as possible.

3. Have witty puzzles – dud! – Well… my brain wasn’t really prepared for that, and I can truly say that I blessed McPixel with a secret mission to facepalm the player to death.

4. Cool website – weee! – HTML 3.0 + CSS is just awesome!

Try it! and let me know what do you think!

My game’s all done and submitted now. Although I didn’t get to do everything I wanted to, I’m fairly happy with the result.

If you’re interested you can play it here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=preview&uid=4425

I made it in on time, without the upload issues, and actually had a decently sophisticated engine by the end of things! Yet another awesome LD experience.

Final Escape Timelapse

Some though, post-mortem:

Have more of my engine assembled beforehand – avoid wasting TONS of time on collision and movement stuff, and also avoid the spaghetti code I ended up writing.

Place a premium on powerful/accessible level creation – I meant to implement external storage, for maps/screens, but I didn’t quite get there.

Make sure to get the core mechanics assembled/playable from the earliest, as opposed to working mostly on tech until… say, mid-day Saturday.

Oh man, I’m so happy! Might have something to do with being overtired (I’ve only gotten one nap in this weekend… definitely not ideal), but Ludum Dare has been a thrill. I was worried I wouldn’t be able to submit it in time until I saw the twitter notice. phew.

What my game lacks in level design and art, it hopefully gains in… oh, I dunno :p It’s certainly not perfect, but I love it!

Check it out here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=rate&uid=2040

*collapse*

Still very much in dev, but here’s some screen dumps of my game ‘Escape the flood’

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=preview&uid=5896

Twitter: digital_glue

I didn’t do much posting during development due to the site being mostly down and/or begging us not to use it. So, where do I start? “Escape” was not the theme I would’ve liked. When it was announced at 9pm my local time, I attempted to just get started because I had a bunch of boilerplate code to write. During my typing I thought of what I could possibly do with the theme. Prior to the competition I had made a promise to myself that I would make something arcadey and simple. The reason for this, I think was obvious: arcade games, once you have the basic mechanics down, you’re pretty much done.

After some deep thought over writing main(), creating a window and handling events, I arrived at a simple notion of “The escape of the Esc key”. You’d have to maneuver your Esc key (handling kind of like a top down vehicle) through a keyboard being typed on by an AI. Fortunately, you’d know what sentence the AI was typing, so you could anticipate the pattern. After some initial tests, this proved to be neither fun, challenging or interesting. Real sentences use far too little of the keyboard to make it a good obstacle test, and just random patterns screw up the notion of anticipation.

The blue background for some reason reminded me of Nyan Cat, and as a joke to myself I drew the some of the elements of the original video. Such as the background sprites and the Nyan Cat’s head. I made a little Escape key body for it, thinking maybe I could make this into the character sprite for the above mention game. The scale was completely off, but I didn’t care because it was meant to be temporary graphics and a joke to myself. I went to bed thinking “Well, I’ll sleep on it and probably will have a real idea in the morning.”. Well, not so much. I woke up the next morning and still had no idea whatsoever. After some contemplation I decided since the base code I was working from is actually a stripped down version of my side scroller game from years back, I’d make a side scroller. I set about making that a reality:

In this rather rushed concept you were a convict (in a prison orange jumpsuit, as illustrated by the fact you were solid orange)..who was…escaping. There’s was nothing really interesting about the design, and that was my problem. Had I seen it to its end, it would just be another kind of generic platformer. I had no hook to make it interesting. I had Elevator Action without the elevators. Also, no action. Add to that indecision, the fact I had to tackle a bunch of new, weird physics bugs that cropped up and I started to despair.

I thought back to the Nyan Cat I drew and oddly enough went back and attempted to flesh that design out better. Gone was the idea of evading an onscreen keyboard, replaced with a dirt simple typing speed test. It was a complete 180 degree turn around in the gameplay and genre I was originally trying for, but with 24 hours left and sleep between here and submission time, I had no choice. I had to make something, and something very very small. So I began hacking together code as fast as I could and, long story short, made a respectable little typing game despite its flaws.

Now typing games aren’t my cup of tea, and I’m pretty sure they’re not anyone else’s either. I went looking back through Ludum Dare archives and I could find only one other previous example of one. I expect that it won’t get much in the way of votes, but that’s not what I’m in it for. I was in it to prove to myself I could make a game in a weekend. In it, not for the glory, but for the satisfaction. And if anyone says anything positive, well that’s gravy really.

The whole ordeal can be seen in my timelapse

Check out my entry here: link

I don’t seem to have access to a submission form, what’s the process for submission?

My entry features a girl called Ball, a ball.
If you didn’t know that, check out my entry “Poor Ball”.

Here is my timelapse:

Uploaded my final mac/windows builds to my server at 6:55 and 6:57, spent the last two hours trying to get the LD site to load, making blog/twitter type posts and building a Linux version. In the end I named it “You Don’t Fit”.

And… success, I think! The game is small and I have no idea what will happen in voting, but my goal with LD was just to prove to myself I could make a game with the 48-hour constraint (even my simple game projects tend to take months and spiral out of control) and I met my own little personal goals. There are some things I might have done different with a longer timeframe– I think the puzzles could have been deeper than they are (although it does have a facility for user levels!) and I had some ideas about sound and graphics that I didn’t have time to explore. But: I met the deadline, and the game feels “complete” to me, it has non-placeholder (if simple) sound and graphics and it’s possible to win. So, woo.

- My blog post about the game

- My entry on ludumdare.com

Thanks everyone for the support and the platform, and now it’s time to go try to play everyone else’s games

So, I managed to get my game in on time. I’m so burnt out from the past two days! The game puts you in the role of someone caught in an unfortunate situation that I’m sure we’ve all experienced from time to time: A large double-irised disembodied floating eyeball creature has trapped the player in its circle of protection, and you need to escape before it bisects you with a laser. It actually loves you, it really does, almost as much as it hates anyone outside of its circle.

Under a Watchful Eye is by no means complete. I planned on building more escape routes, for instance. Right now there is only one way out of the circle that the eye has you running. I’ve already added a few more here… just check my site for updates. If I have any post-compo editions, I’ll post them here once the voting is over.

So, I’m pretty stoked about what I’ve managed to get done this weekend, not just in the ‘oh wow, I got so much done’ sense (although that’s definitely a part of it), but also (and really, mostly) in terms of how people will play the game and their reactions.

For my game is a bit of an experiment.

I’ve been wanting to play with social gaming for a while, but to specifically look at how we might make social gaming more meaningful, and use it to create real shared experiences rather than virtual shared cows.

So this weekend, I decided to go social. To specifically use the Facebook API to create a co-operative gaming experience between each player and their circle of friends, that would result in a different experience depending on how the group played.

I’m not sure if I’ve been successful at this (and in some areas I’ve definitely misstepped, taking time from tweaking gameplay to adding these social aspects, or levels which are probably the wrong difficulty), and so I’m really hoping to get some feedback on the social aspects of the experience, and how they played out.

So yeah, if you’ve got a bit of time, please have a look at ‘Escape from Flatland’. You may want to get a few of your facebook friends to play it as well to get the full impact. Either way, I’d love to hear what you think.

Thanks everyone for you patience. It looks like we finally have the performance problems solved. Way to help us break-in the new host!

I think we are ready to run a Ludum Dare now! (Oops!)

As you can imagine, Phil and I had an INSANE couple days pounding the website in to submission. Here’s a re-telling of what happened.

(more…)

I decided to go with a design school which I’m not very familiar; experience based. I’m used to noodling around with squares until something fun happens, so this time I really wanted to focus on how it would feel to be in an airship being pursued by.. something. wind rushing through your hair..

In retrospect, a 48 hour comp might not be the best place to attempt an ‘experience’ game since they’re really rather ethereal. It either clicks or it doesnt, and I think I got enough of what I wanted in there to be happy- but it was also very close to being a disaster.

excuse the rambling, it’s 5am here.. night all!

edit: oh, game link:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=preview&uid=5541