It seems to be traditional to, in your postmortem, say what went right and wrong. So here goes.

Good stuff

• I managed to adhere to my schedule almost perfectly. I’ve had enough practice with timed contests by this point to know exactly how much I can accomplish in a certain amount of time, which is a huge boon.
• With two hours left, I decided to include a boss, because I felt the game ‘didn’t feel right’ otherwise. As much as a recipe for disaster as that sounds, I pulled it off, and debugged the last boss bug with only minutes to spare. Like a boss.
• Python was an incredible language for gamedev, even though I had only recently learned pygame. I was much more productive than in (say) Actionscript.
• I feel my graphics have much improved since my LD19 entry.

• Get an ergonomic keyboard!
• Care more about graphics. They really are important. Particularly, after you’ve finished with implementation, graphics are arguably the most important thing to work on.
• Porting is hard. It’s such an advantage to choose a language you don’t have to port.

Two big problems with the entry, and one thing that’s separate. I’m going to work on graphics and buying a nice keyboard (that second one is pretty easy to work on ) and I plan to really knock LD22 out of the park!

48 more entries viewed tonight, trying to do 2 pages a night

Play them on Kongregate.com

The idea is to progress these games polish them and improve them over time.

So don’t just leave your LD game on the shelf go back to it improve it, enhance it and get it out there where people can see, play and enjoy it!

What Went Right or The Awesome Things

The schedule I laid out for myself worked very well. Before starting I decided to set very general time slots for when I would work on what. These were split into two segments: first 24 hours and (you guessed it) second 24 hours. Knowing that gameplay and mechanics are the glue that hold most games together (there is the rare game where this is not the case) I decided I would reserve the first 24 hours to having a completely playable, beginning to end prototype of my design minus art, music, story and sound (those 4 things were to be worked on in the last 24 hours. The question needs to be asked, if I thought gameplay was so important, why did I set so little time aside for it? The answer is because it was my first Ludum Dare. I didn’t know how much time it would take me to upload everything, how much time it would take me to randomly scribble on my computer until I  got something that could maybe somehow pass off as art, nor how many takes I would need to record on my cello to get serviceable sound. So yes, my schedule wasn’t perfect, I did end up with some free time on the last day, but the point is that my game was complete. It wasn’t a great game, but it did what it set out to do perfectly, be a simple story based puzzler.

The music was something I was surprisingly capable of doing well. I had the idea set in my mind from the very beginning that I would do all of the sound for the game on my cello, because I thought it would sound cool, and because I thought it would save time and allow me to focus more on the other aspects of my game. The thing was, I hadn’t played my cello for a good 2 and a half years, having given it up partway through my eleventh grade of highschool. Luckily my 7-8 years of training flooded back to me and I did a job that I’m proud of, even though I couldn’t get the looping to work perfectly.

The sound efects were something I struggled a lot with at first, after recording all of the music I decided to test sound effects by randomly playing them over the looping music tracks. This sounded absolutely HORRIBLE, like stab-myself-in-the-ear-with-my-cello-bow bad. At first I thought it was because the sound effects were note-based as was the music, and the dissonance was causing it to sound terrible. So I decided to try an experiment, I went online and watched a bunch of videos of classic games known for having great music (Super Mario Bros., Legend of Zelda and Sonic the Hedgehog are the three most recognizable ones I watched) and found that there sound effects weren’t much different from mine in that they were off-key, out of time and just generally clashing very much with the music. But they sounded good. But then I turned off the monitor and re-watched (listened?) the videos. And they sounded terrible. So, I concluded, that when  you know that a sound effect is coming, when you know what it will sound like and what causes it, the brain is capable of filtering it onto a different track then the music, making them separate entities. Basically, you are capable of listening to the tune uninterrupted in your head, even though what is really coming out of the speakers is a cacophony of unspeakable ugliness. So I kept my sound effect as they were.

The mechanics and gameplay worked well, and in my opinion, were fun to use. I don’t really have much to say about this, as the best way to find out about them is to play the game yourself

Obligatory picture placed here to keep reader attention.

What Went Wrong or The Things That Sucked

The level design was hindered by the coding. This was my biggest failing and the one that could have most easily been avoided. Before the competition I was set on the theme of Self-Replication and a Legend of Zelda-like game where your character only lived for thirty seconds and then respawned, leaving the world as it was when he died, needing you to go back over and over again to set up the world to be conquered in thirty seconds or less (or whatever amount of time). When the theme of Escape was announced I was thoroughly unprepared. I had, gone through the list of themes and made ideas for each of them, but the theme of Escape was one of the few (along with Espionage, Castles and others) that didn’t have any idea to its name. So I tried to adapt my Self-Replication idea to the Escape theme and started coding a whatever you would call a Legend of Zelda style game. By the time I wizened up and decided to go with my final idea, so much base code was written that I wouldn’t have time to rewrite that I was severely limited in mechanics I could add to my puzzler. The “engine” I had created did not allow for dynamic npc objects, something that could have been implemented into my level design had I had more foresight.

The art sucked, and it sucked bad. I am not an artist, I have tried to teach myself, to practice and to improve. However, I have not (though I’m not giving up (: ). I knew my art would be bad coming in, but I thought with enough time I could slowly make something that looked good. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to, I ended up drawing base shaped and using all kind of effects on them so that they looked like they were well drawn (but in an abstract style). Luckily, however, I came to the realization that I would have to except defeat very early, allowing me to at least make the concession of only including two-frame animations, in order to lower the work required.

As beautiful as the the stars at night.

The typo. I wrote wan’t instead of want. That is all.

Last... typo... you... will... be... destroyed.

In the end, I found this Ludum Dare to be a great experience that came out of the blue (noticed it mentioned on the Minecraft site when I was downloading the game) and was a fun learning experience that I got to share with 599 other people. I’d like to thank all of the organizers of the Ludum Dare for offering this experience to people. See you next time!

Got the back to school blues? The end of summer blahs? The “LD21 was so much fun, when’s the next?” daydreams?  Just looking for some gamedev fun in September? Your wish has been granted! Prepare to jam your face off the weekend of September 17th:

- increpare’s miniLD (Ludum Dare)
- Orca Jam (in Victoria Canada)
- GPCv8 (Game Prototype Challenge)
- Mysticism Pageant (Super Friendship Club)
- Story Game (Experimental Gameplay Project)
- Glorious Trainwrecks (Klik of the Month Klub: only 2 hours long!)
- Pyweek #13 (Python Game Programming Challenge)

Some of these jams are ongoing all that week or even over the entire month.  If you are super mega hardcore, maybe you can make one game that fits all the themes and submit it to multiple game jams! Anyone up for the challenge?

Hi there. Here’s the games downloader I’ve mentioned in an earlier post and on IRC:

https://gist.github.com/1178530

Check line 76 of the source code. There you can change the platform you want.
Note that this script won’t download files hosted on file sharing sites (mediafire, megaupload, …).

Also, feel free to patch it, use it and abuse it… (Ok, not too much abuse or else the LD site pays it )…

Have fun

This is kind of a port-mortem of EscApe (there’s another game with same name, it’s not about that one ) but I’m going to focus certain design choices I did in the 3 hours I created it.

Massive spoilers below, so if you intend to play my EscApe, go do it now!

“Your game is just a crummy monkey in a badly drawn cage”, you say? Perhaps, but there’s still more to it than meets they eye. Continue reading!

I’ve found two other games that are exactly the same as EscApe, except that they look and play quite differently. There’s The Power of Escape by BurnZeZ and BATHOS by johanp. I’ll use them to point out some differences in game design, which might sound like I’m trying to bash the other games, but that’s not my intention. Read it as constructive criticism.

The basic concept [of all 3] is of course to present the player with a room, which is impossible to escape using methods normally available in computer games. Not until the player starts thinking outside the box (or tries to quit the game, as we’ll see later), and takes what’s printed on her keyboard literally, she will escape the challenge. If executed correctly, this puzzle actually takes place in your room, rather on the computer screen.

Now, what did I try to do with this? My goal was to give as many hints as possible, without actually revealing the solution. I wanted the player after figuring it out to think “omg, why didn’t I think of that from the beginning?”.

Starting at the title, there’s a big green hint all over the screen. But I tried to draw your focus away from it, by making the game about an ape. You see, the title only says “escape” with “ape” highlighted.. or does it? To put even more emphasis on this I added the text “Can you help the ape escape?”. There’s actually one more thing, which I didn’t think of until later, that APE is written in a slightly stronger color than ESC, but I think the difference could have been even bigger.

Still at the title menu, at the bottom it just says ENTER (the compo version had more text, but I thought it was distracting so I changed it). This is also a hint, actually. You see, I don’t give any exact instructions on how to play the game – I will return to why shortly – you have to figure it out yourself. As I mentioned the solution is to read the Esc-key literally, and for this to work, all keys have to work in the same way. You enter the game by pressing the enter key. Simple enough.

Lack of instructions, yes? The reason is of course, that only thing worse than giving no instructions at all, would be to give partial or faulty instructions (without telling the player that they are faulty). So either you tell players what all keys do, which would spoil the puzzle, or you say nothing at all.

(BATHOS – not made by me)

As you can see BATHOS looks nothing like my game, it has much better graphics (and sound) and I thought it was incredibly funny as well. But the other Johan seems to have done the opposite in just about every choice I’ve described so far. In fact, it even seems like he knowingly tries to lead players in the wrong direction  By giving instructions, there’s nothing in the game – or deducted from experience of playing 100s of other computer games earlier – saying that there’s another unmentioned key that is crucial to winning. Further, if Z means “jump” and X means “pickup”, then Q might as well mean “escape”? IMHO it’s a little like playing Super Mario Bros and having to figure out that you have to press the reset button on your console to press to find the princess. Though BATHOS has a lot more comments and ratings than EscApe, so maybe this is what people wants

Back to our poor, caged simian. My idea here was to print out the key you pressed in clear text, so you would get the connection between its literal meaning and what goes on on screen. Initially I was going to make it more passive, so that pressing left would only make the monkey look left for example, but I ran out of time sooner than expected. People ought to figure out soon enough that moving around in the cage won’t help you, so I’m not sure it made any difference. Hopefully after coming to that conclusion, all the previously mentioned hints have trained the player enough to start pressing other keys to see if anything happens.

Due to this lack of time, there is a crucial part of the game missing; There should be more keys with functions in the game to lead the player from using the direction keys to thinking “aha! I need to press Esc to escape”. Not only would this help bridge the logical gap, but also add a little bit more fun to the game. These were some I thought of:

• Space – Launches the cage into space or something. Maybe the monkey just thinks about space. However, it is a very important key, as it’s likely one of the first ones the player tries pressing (partially because of its size and location and partially because of its use in other games).
• Shift – The ape shifts its weight around.
• Home – Text: “You can’t go home”
• Enter – Text: “You’re already inside”
• Dash (well, it’s technically a minus sign, but they look similar enough) – Quick sprint in either direction.
• End – Popup saying “Are you sure you want to end the game?” with possible quit.
• Backspace – Printed as “Back (from) space” and returns to the jungle. Maybe too far fetched.

So why am I ranting about all this? Because gradually training the player to adapt to your game’s rules and mechanics is how you write modern games. No game designer ships their game with a printed manual these days, and if they do, nobody is going to read it Another central concept of modern game design is to make player feel like they’re doing exactly what they want to, while they’re doing exactly what you want them to. This makes the player feel incredibly awesome and is a lot more rewarding that simply following a heavily scripted story. Ok, so EscApe isn’t Half-Life 2 (Valve are good at this), but maybe it’s a little bit more to it than you initially thought?

I wonder what would happen if the next LD theme was “space”…

My Entry into Ludum Dare #21 was Untitled, a Abstract (non-Objective) platformer game.

Before I go into what went Wrong and Right, I just wanted to mention my workflow, and how many hours I had to work. My college classes started up the week prior to Ludum Dare #21, so I knew going in that I didn’t want to pull any All Nighters. I think that the only thing All Nighters do anyways is make your decisions bad ones. So Friday night I waited around for the theme to be announced, then once it was I just about dropped out, Escape was not a theme I wanted, and not one that an idea came to me right away for. Before I dropped out though I decided to write down a few ideas, and see if any inspired me, and what do you know, one did. I got started that night, and knocked out the player controls, as well as level generation (for the most part) before going to bed. Over the next two days I refined what I had, and added to it. I had to force myself to not over complicate the game, else it wouldn’t be finished. In any case, it was finished, and I am happy with the way it came out. I view Ludum Dare as a chance to prototype a game, that I may not otherwise make. So rather than trying to make a finish game in 48 hours, I aim to make a decent prototype of a game I’d like to make.

What went wrong (because I’m a Pessimist):

> Music, I really can’t find a way to like, or even work with LMMS. Its outside of my range of talent. I have found a few tools from reading others Postmortem Posts that I can work with, and that I will be using next time. But for LD21 I decided to leave out the earplug inducing garbage I made in LMMS.

> Some (many?) people didn’t understand where the theme came in, to quote a reply I wrote to one commenter: ” The “escape” theme is more conceptual, and I don’t expect it to click for everyone. Basically I took the though of playing a Abstract Painting, and the fact that Abstract paintings are designed in a way that continually draw you back in, and meshed the two together. There are many different times and experiences when I have seen people stare at an abstract piece, attempting to come to a conclusion, when the piece more than likely has no logical conclusion, abstract art just is. So maybe they were playing some kind of game instead?”

> The Controls, I don’t know why I went with push button controls for changing your color, it was a bad decision. Many people have brought up the controls being an issue, and that they would have liked to have a visual representation of the keys used. While I’ll agree that is one solution that would work, I knew from the start that I didn’t want to have a GUI mucking up the visuals. That’s the reason the scoreboard was at the bottom, and your time isn’t shown.

What went right:

> I felt that the scoreboard was very effective, it fit in with the game I was trying to make,  and I’m not aware of anyone not understanding what was the score, and what was filler text.

> The GIMP once again worked out great for me. I have never had a problem using GIMP, and have been using it on a daily basis for five years now (processing digital photography). I think I’m just used to were stuff is and how to work in GIMP now. I actually prefer GIMP over Photoshop now, from when I have had to use Photoshop for a class it has  been painful and I find myself constantly hitting the wrong keys.

> Construct Classic since Ludum Dare #20 (the first LD I participated in) I have worked to farther my understanding of Construct. In LD#20 I wasn’t really happy with Construct, I failed to understand how certain functions worked, and thus had bugs and problems with my entry. This time Construct worked really great, I really like that I can drop in the resources and have a game quickly. I also like that I still have almost full control of how objects behave, and what functions I need or don’t need.

> sfxr worked great as always, I was able to generate some fitting sound effects for my game quickly.

> Overall game play and look I though worked really well, sure it needs refinement in some areas, such as the scoring, and the controls. But I believe it is fun to play.

Whats coming next:

I really like the idea of the game, and what it could be. So I am going to continue working on the game, adding and revising features.

> The controls were first on my list, I have changed the controls to use the Mouse, you Left click on the colored object you want to pass through, and right click to unselect colors (makes them all solid). The new controls are tons better, and have made playing the game faster and in my opinion more fun.

> Scoring, I liked the idea of the scoring in the game, but it fail short in a few places. The first was the difference between scores, there was a really small difference (100 to 200). I have since revised the scoring to add in a Multiplier, collection 5 of colored pickup with give you a bonus. I then added additional bonus multiplied that you could get, such as getting to the bottom of the map within 20 seconds, or changing colors less than five times. Overall the scoring is working alot better now, you can score anywhere from 400 to 5000 points. Best of all there is somewhat of a balance between pickup hunting, and racing to the bottom.

> Music, I have actually been working on music most of today. I used Otomata to create a number of songs that are different but all fitting for the music that I wanted. I wanted a kind of ambient music that was just there. Ototmata allowed me to generate music that fit my needs.

> I’m adding more modes/difficulties/colors that will be configurable, as well as changing the look a bit.

> Online High scores table, I’ll be adding a rather robust Online Highscore board, that you will be able to sort by name, score, date, time, pickups collected, clicks (color changes), and a few other details.

> More help, for the Ludum Dare entry I kept the How to Play information in game really general, and it wasn’t particularly helpful. Now when you first load into the level the game starts paused, and shows more information that goes into a bit more detail.

Testing

I’m not sure when I will have a download out for the new version, it will be when I’m happy with it, and I have the features I want in. I have setup a page on Indie DB that I will be posting additional development details on.

So first and foremost, I have to make an apology. I wanted to spam the LD community with tons of blog posts during game development, but I wasn’t able to. Why not? Well… (apart from the website crashing and all that… )

Python, it turns out, is an amazing language to code games in. The greatest part for me is that the iteration process from code to test to code is incredibly quick, and error fixing is a breeze. Contrast with languages like Javascript where you often have to spend comparatively more time tracking down bugs and correcting for silly errors you made (like accidentally adding an integer to a string instead of another integer).

What this means is that I was flying through code. I think that in the first 6 hours after I woke up I had written about 500 lines of code, which is an astonishing rate for me. But then I stared to notice that my wrist was starting to hurt. I kept going, figuring that it was probably nothing, but then at about 2pm I realized I needed to stop coding because my wrist was killing me.

For the first time, I had reached my limits. I had never written so much code in such a short amount of time.

This was actually really terrifying for me, and I had a ton of thoughts fly through my head. I was worried that I wasn’t going to be able to finish my LD game because my wrist was going to slow me down immensely. I was worried I was going to develop RSI or carpal tunnel. I was just generally freaking out since nothing like that had happened before.

So I took a break. I went to eat lunch. Then I went and picked up a guitar and played the song you hear in the background. Then I realized my wrists still hurt, so I worked on graphics for a few hours. Then I did some google searching to see what people do in problems like these. Turns out that these kinds of problems are why people invented those weird looking ergonomic keyboards, and I conveniently had one lying around, so I used it.

That keyboard was the saving grace of the project. It is much less intensive on the wrists for some reason I can’t quite figure out – your wrists don’t move around as much for some reason. Without the keyboard, I probably would have gotten stuck halfway through, which would have been really depressing!

On the other hand, I did lose about ten hours of time that I could have really used to improve my game further. It’s a shame that it happened, but I’ve learned from it, and it’s also a mistake I won’t make again.

So, tl;dr: If you’re a coder, I highly recommend getting a split keyboard to code with, especially during competitions. Save your wrists from pain!

Finally, if you want to see what I suffered through pain to bring you, check it out: Escape Artist

I guess I’ll write a little bit here about how my game turned out. Here is a screenshot as a reference.

Entry: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=rate&uid=4628

This was my first Ludum Dare and I’m glad I participated. My game was originally intended to be a reverse tower defense game but it didn’t really work out exactly like I would have liked it to. I wanted it to be a frantic run through a bunch of randomly put together rooms with a bunch of towers shooting at you. I had that working about 24 hours in, but I came to the realization that it wasn’t fun at all. I contemplated quitting at that point because I was frustrated and a little angry that my game wasn’t fun. I ended up salvaging my game by reducing the number of followers the character has and trying to make the player be strategic with the way he navigates through the rooms in order to protect his followers. I’ll be honest that my game still wasn’t very fun, but I’m glad that I stuck it out and finished.

What went right:

• I finished!
• I liked the follower mechanic.
• I think my in-air spinning knife animation was pretty awesome.
• I tried something different. (As opposed to the type of game I would normally make)

What went wrong:

• Music. I have no musical talent at all, but sometimes I manage to get lucky and make a good track. I tried, but I failed.
• Game wasn’t fun.
• Lots of the code was poorly written.

Takeaways

• Awesome knife animation…
• Various future game ideas
• Motivation
• Experience

I really enjoyed participating and I definitely plan on participating in future Ludum Dares. The community here is awesome and I am very thankful for the people who work hard to organize this and keep everything running smoothly. You are doing an awesome job!

I was talking with my friend earlier today and I was wondering what is the most important thing to focus on a game (after functionality): is it graphics? Innovation? Audio? Something else entirely?

So I wrote a quick script to show the correlations between all of our statistics and overall. The script is here.

The correlations are (lower is more correlated):

{'Humor': 179, 'Innovation': 66, 'Community': 158, 'Theme': 107, 'Graphics': 73, 'Fun': 23, 'Audio': 251}

Fun is obvious. If a game isn’t fun, then it’s not going to be good overall. But fun is also pretty vague and hard to define – it doesn’t give much more information than ‘overall’.

Innovation and graphics come after – these are things that are more understandable. So, conclusions: work really hard to come up with clever ideas, and spend a lot of time on the graphics.

Pretty sad to see audio come in dead last, since that’s something I worked hard on

I like making charts, it’s a… thing. So I took some time to see how coolness is spread out over people, and how many ratings each person received. I might make updated versions on the one week mark and when it’s all over. Also I might make something regarding ratings received/coolness, but for now I got my fix. These values are from sometime today.

CLICK TO SEE

Postmortem time!
This was my first LD and i have to say that i really enjoyed it, with all the blog post, chat and Streaming i didn’t feel alone last weekend. Thanks for that.  long post ->

(more…)

Hooray! 25 percent coolness! It’s definitely been an entertaining week.

Thanks to everybody for making such impressive games- you’re all rockstars.

I’ve added an updated version of my entry, fixing some of the problems with the competition version. Please don’t vote based on this version.

These are some of the changes:

• Added minimap
• Grid on the floor
• Rotate avatar towards enemy on collision
• Change movement speed
• No more horizontal scrolling in sequence list
• Added an easier introduction level
• Added loading bar

Play the updated game here:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=preview&uid=3796

It’s already been a week since I submitted my first entry into LD. Been reviewing quite a few games and am impressed with the sheer amount and diversity (and similarity ) found in the competition. Truly an inspiring place to learn from others.

My game “Still Dreaming” has been reviewed by lots of people. I’m overwhelmed by the amazing feedback I’ve received. Thanks everyone for playing & enjoying the game. Main point of criticism has been it’s shortness which I completely understand. I’d love to keep this game growing over time and add more puzzles as they come to me.

I spent some time today tidying up a few things in “Still Dreaming”. Mainly there were a few visual aspects I wasn’t completely happy with.

Screenshot above is from the “improved” level 2. Check out the enhanced version here: Still Dreaming – Enhanced

Cheers,
Bach

My puny game is not, by any means interesting in terms in gameplay. Main character only walks to the left or right direction, and he does not even jump once. But, it has nice art style, and somewhat interesting, although short story.

That’s because I’ve decided to use and exploit my main skill – drawing. And focus on story and idea. Because my programming skills are rather shabby and rusty, even though I have some, but they clearly not as good, as some of you guys have. I can’t say I was working really hard in this 48 hours, in the first day I have created simple graphics, and for second I’ve made simple and cheap animations and wrote a simple code.

Idea of a game looks kind of like russian matreshka doll, you keep escaping from different places. I have added places that I could remembered as often used in sci-fi and adventure literature.

I should say, this was fun, since it felt really good when I finished it and submitted. It’s great to be part of such a nice event as Ludum Dare, and I want to thank everyone who participated, and especially people who made it possible. Thanks, guys.

Hi.

If you read french, or if you’re fine with google translate, you might be interested.

I’ve started on my blog Oujevipo a Ludum Dare Review Marathon, the objective is to review a maximum of LD#21 games before the end of the voting. Of course, I’m not alone and a lot of nice people are helping me. Thanks to them.

Maybe will you find your game in there, maybe you’ll discover some games you still haven’t played…
it’s here : http://oujevipo.fr/index.php?option=com_tag&task=tag&tag=ld21

Now that the euphoria of not sleeping and game-developing has settled down, let’s take a look at what went right and what went wrong during the development of Metal Sphere Solid.

Well actually, everything went pretty alright. There isn’t much that went “completely wrong”. Ah well, I’ll talk about it anyway.

What went (somewhat) wrong

The theme – Because “escape” is such a non-theme. You can put virtually everything in it. In that regard it is even worse than “it’s dangerous to go alone.”

The color-scheme – The main charater needs to contrast with the environment he’s in too create tension. If the main character just blends in, he’s not in jeopardy, he’s at home. So I was a little miffed when I figured out with 12 hours to go that the environment was mostly blue, and I didn’t want to create a red ball again.

I went for a glowy green (which I nailed this time), which nicely contrast with the level. The color-combination is still a bit weird.

What went right

Tile-based level – Having everything in clean tiles made putting this together much easier. This further creates a nice little gag when you leave the tile-set at the end.

Timelapse – I love timelapses. Everything seems ultra-efficient.

The Story – This is the largest amount of story I ever put in a game. Until now I’ve worked under the premise that good games-design has to be the basis, while story is optional. That still holds true, but now I see how an engaging story can pull you into the game.

The end – I love it. Too bad I couldn’t extend it a bit. First you see your friends, an assortment of balls similar to you, but with different colors, core-structures and sizes. You free them, they say a random, possibly funny line, and roll to freedom. You join them, and while joining them leave the rigid, tile-based confines of the main level and enter a free terrain.

I need to expand upon the “friendly ball”-theme more. It’s fun.

The ball-design – Compared to one of my previous games, Unstoppaball, the ball-design is much better. The glowing core is warmer, the outging light shows the strength of the character, and the brightness contrasts nicely witht he relatively dark surrounding.

The Soundtrack – I experimented with my guitar until I found something that was both interesting and fitting to the gameplay. So far it is only good, but nothing special. Also, the loop is off by half-a-second. Need to remember that next time.

What I would have liked to add/improve

Better character-fragments – So far the “remains” of the hero or the enemies are just four to five relatively uniform fragments. With more time I could have created something more complex and organic.

Better score – The score that is now measured is the time you spend being seen. The highscore-list is reversed, which means that people with the least amounts go on top places. This is far from optimal, as there is a “finite” highscore, and after attaining it doesn’t create an incentive to keep playing.

More complex enemies – The original plan of having patrolling enemies fell through due to time-contraints, but I still managed to make something interesting with only stationary guards.

Conclusion

Well, pretty much every aspect came out positive – The game is emotionally engaging, throwing enemies in spikes is fun, the sneaking mechanic is relatively rare, so far I’ve gotten a pretty good amount of votes, critiques are positive, and a good number of people have played it.

Also, I got a review. Which is always nice.

I call this a success. Now let’s see how you will judge this .

Play here | Entry-page

-Matthew

I’ve released an update to my Ludum Dare game Captive. It fixes the peskiest bugs, adds a bit of polish, and a tiny bit of new content. Of course, the original compo release is still available as well.

Here’s the changelog for this most recent version:

-Added a few tiles to some rooms to make them slightly less dull.
-Fixed a music bug with the red terminal (for real this time)
-Added a secret 4th Boomka game you can unlock after beating the red terminal.
-Added a “portal” object to a single room. It’s related to the secret.
-Made it so that checkpoints remember what key cards and doors are open when you save (as well as other variables, such as the music playing). This prevents you from grabbing a keycard, getting killed, but keeping the keycard after respawning.
-Added sounds for the fireballs. -Randomized the fireball-pipe’s first alarm a tiny bit.
-Fireballs now destroy when they fall off the edge of the screen.
-Made it so that using a terminal will reset the “used” status of checkpoints, so you can save again if you’ve just played a Boomka game.
-Removed a couple of very frustrating spikes.
-Moved around and added a couple of turrets, as well as some fireball-pipes.

Play it HERE!