I have a confession to make.  I am platformer/3D incompetent.

If it involves jumping, I suck at it.  If it involves moving around in 3d space, I get lost.

About 50% of the games on my initial list were platformers.  I was very sad.

I’ve gotten through my initial list. (YAY!)  I would like to test some non-platformers.  If you have created a game that is not 3D and involves NO jumping, I will gladly test it.

I can test Windows Start 7 on Netbook, Windows Vista on Desktop, Mac OS 10.5, and an old netbook running eeebuntu.

I will not install things.  I cannot open rar files.

Susan

tl;dr I will test your 2d non-jumping game if you leave a comment

Here is the Timelapse for my Jam entry, for Ludum Dare 21, BEF.

I was using Chronolapse 1.0.7 on a two monitor setup, but some entire sections of the capture were just blanks, which was annoying as I did some serious modelling the first day, troops, tanks, aircraft and a ship (only the ship and french trooper appear).

This is a good example of how not to do a LD, don’t just model everything first at least model and develope or better still build the mechanics then bring in better models.

Play the game.

The ongoing discussion on irc/twitter/this blog about how the theme ‘escape’ enabled almost every game idea to fit somehow made me pondering, if there is some link to this big amount of new participants in LD21. So my theory goes like that:

• the theme was very open, so newcomers could submit almost every kind of game
• this encouraged a lot more people to try and made something very simple and stuck some sort of escape to it
• would the elected topic have been something like self-replication or recursion, the amount of submitted games would have been less

Especially the themes stated above probably would have needed a deeper insight to programming techniques and game design principles which could have put a lot of people off. Any opinion to this theory?

To fire the discussion, I can even give a counter-argument:

• There were so many new people attracted before the final voting ended (by notch, etc), that they had a significant influence on theme voting.

So I haven’t had a chance to do a postmortem yet (it’s coming, promise!), so I decided to quickly put together a commentary video for my game, Escape from Flatland.

Hi!, this is the first time I do this and I’m not so good in English but I’ll try:

For those of you who don’t know which game is it, it’s right here.  The game has a very simple concept (platform running), before the competition I was thinking about what would I make if the escape theme were selected then the runner was one of the first ideas but not the concept, I just thought about something I could draw (simple stuff) and could complete in 48 hours.

The reason to select XNA as the main tool for creating it was that I already worked with it before and I heard about the competition two days before it started then… no time to learn new languages or tools, anyway I learned very interesting stuff about Inkscape and Gimp, such as the cool texture effect I used to make the graphics.

Things that gone well (in my opinion):

- The most important, I could finish a game, don’t know if it’s fun or not but I was happy I could finished it.

- Learned new stuff about graphics, sounds and found some bugs in the libraries I used for animation and camera (which I coded before and shared in assembla .

- The time was managed relatively fine, except for the level design.

- A new concept was created, simple and under pressure, which means (not really) maybe with more time I could get something better.

Things that gone wrong (again, in my opinion):

- Level design was the biggest mistake. I should be using a tool to create the level, I have been thinking about polishing the level creator I started years ago and I haven’t completed it yet. I think this is one of the most important points and stuff to learn about.

- Coins placement, due to the short time (taking into consideration I started trying to code the level late) I wrote a very simple and naive algorithm, didn’t like it so much but at least it worked.

- Due to the lack of experience making sounds the music was not so good, it made me think I should have a library of sounds made previously when I have time to learn about it.

Things I learned (which is the topic I like the most):

First of all I think we (programmers) should be wise when we decide which tool will we use to do something. In my case I used XNA because of the previous experience I had and lack of time to learn something new. But… (as the LD recommendations said) it would be better to use some tool which could be deployed web, such as Flash or HTML5, I would say Unity but I think maybe sometimes is boring if you have to wait too long to load the game but… anyway it’s good too.

It’s important to take time to think about the game, I mean, the designing part. It is true that 48 hours are too short and we have to code as soon as possible and draw and bla bla bla, but… if we make good plans, there will be good results and not only good results but “not wasting time” (coding things again and again or starting an idea from the beginning in the middle of the compo is not good).

Finally, it’s really nice to get others comments about your work, to see what the rest of the people made and what the thought when they created their games and when they tried yours and criticize it I think it should help us to be better programmers, designers, etc, etc.

Here, a screenshot of my game:

 I hope this can be helpful for somebody and you enjoy the competition .

PS: I will try next LD with flash or something like that.

In case you haven’t played it (you probably haven’t, with 599 entries) this was mine http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=preview&uid=418

This is going to be a very brief post mortem; almost as brief as the game. Making a game with a baby, and a job, is no easy task. Nuria must hate me, for having put so little of the weekend into actually creating my entry.
So Thursday and Friday, I tried to come up with simple but interesting ideas for all of the possible themes. I never thought of anything for evolution, adaptation, or genetics. Good thing those weren’t the theme!
Friday night the theme is announced, and I already have a good idea what I want to do, so I start drawing a tileset. It’s very simple. A brick wall, and some border pieces for the top. I play around with that in Ogmo, get it displaying in the game. Then I spend about an hour trying to animate a guy walking. Eventually I get frustrated, give up, and draw a blockhead. Then I go to sleep.
In the morning, I have to go to work. I don’t get more time to work on the game until six in the evening, and I have an eight-month old to deal with. I make an enemy, whose just a red version of the player, and I give him a fine mustachio. I also write a quick hack to make it easier for the player to move into single-tile passages. You probably don’t notice it while playing, but it took navigating the game world from ‘frustrating’ to ‘intuitive’. By time I go to bed, the enemy can tell if it sees the player and even patrol in paths.
I get up at about ten am and make breakfast for my wife and I, and then I take the trash to the dump, and then around noon I can get back to work. I figure out how I’m going to handle multiple levels, and get a couple working. I add locked doors and the gold keys. I add the text popups. Then I add spike traps, something that wasn’t in the original design at all. They take about ten minutes to make and become an integral part of the game. It’s now about four pm, and the ludumdare website is slow as I’ve ever seen it. Plus, there’s a giant thunderstorm outside and my power has already flickered once. And PoV hasn’t yet announced his plan to extend submissions, or I hadn’t seen it, so I packaged up what I had and submitted it while I still could.

What went right:
Using flashpunk. This is my first AS3 game ever, and I’m amazed by how much I accomplished by using Flashpunk. I decided on my tools early, and spent the week before ludumdare learning about actionscript3, and flashpunk, and the Ogmo tilemap editor. This preparation, and the simplicity of working in the language, really paid off when real life got in the way.
Planning for possible themes in advance. When the theme was announced, I didn’t have to brainstorm; I could just get right to work.
Keeping the scope small. Because of my inexperience with flash, I was able to keep myself from expanding the game into some huge monstrosity; I only knew how to do simple things in the language, so I had to keep the game simple. Flashpunk helped as wall, because while it’s a powerful piece of software it also encourages you to do things in a simple manner. Don’t setup a system of collision response callbacks, just call collide(…) in the object’s update function and do something if it’s colliding; simple things like that.

What went wrong:
I knew in advance I wanted to go with small, pixelated graphics, so why didn’t I practice with the medium before hand? If I had, maybe it wouldn’t be called Blockhead Can’t Escape, but instead Pixel Dude Can’t Escape.
Second-guessing the time limit. I was afraid I wouldn’t get to submit at all, so I submitted too soon. I could have used that time to create many more levels. The website worked fine all night, and I never lost power for more than five minutes at a stretch, it would have been fine.. but, once I submitted, I lost all drive to work on the game. I could have polished and re-submitted before ten, but, I didn’t.
I should have gotten Saturday off. I never plan for these things far enough in advance.

I’d like to expand the game; or rather, rebuild it; with more levels, a unifying theme, and better graphics. The feedback I’ve gotten has been positive, but for one thing – it’s way too short! – so people seem to like it. Maybe I’ll do that, but for now, that’s all I have to say about Blockhead Can’t Escape.

Hello

So last weekend, my goals basically were, in order of importance:
1. Finish a game
2. Make it fairly polished

For the most part, I think I did well. To be fair, they are pretty low goals (note that ‘make a good game’ is not listed), but I am happy. Here are some thoughts on how things went.
You can play the game here.

What went right:

Choosing to participate:

I don’t think I could have done this last year, or even a couple of months ago… and I was quite certain I couldn’t now, either. I glad I decided to recklessly go for it anyway! I’ve wanted to have a go ever since hearing of the event during the ‘islands’ theme. This whole this is a great learning experience for me… it’s good to take chances, sometimes!

Using unity:

I was a bit worried about using unity for a 2D game, seeing as it’s designed for 3D but I’m glad I went with it, it’s just so easy and quick to use. The controls were done really quickly, leaving a lot of time for making levels and fiddling with graphics(which probably took the most time for me, as It’s not a point I usually get to).

Levels were easy to make:

Top down view, and no fiddly graphics to deal with, just boxes. It’s good to be able to just move things around easily, without messing up the whole look. It isn’t the prettiest, but I think too much content to be made would have just taken way too long, and it wouldn’t have been very motivating either, had things gone wrong(which they definitely would have!).

What went wrong:

I am bad at music:

I have not made any sort of music or sound before, and I have no idea where to start learning. I was planning on using GarageBand on my ipad for music, but stupidly I had not tested it beforehand. I thought there was an export to email option(and this is what google tells me too, what?) but I could not find it for the life of me… Trying to sync up with my ipad has caused troubles before, so that’s not something I wanted to deal with during the time frame of the contest.

Using it definitely would not have made a difference anyway; I am still bad. I just plain need a lot more practice with this kind of stuff. I am still happy with what I managed to achieve, however. Most things I make are just silent, and I am glad this one is not!

Controls:

This I think was the main criticism I received, and I can definitely see why. I used the drag rigidbody unity asset to make the dragging movement, and didn’t change it much at all. It certainly sped up the process, but I really should have spent more time fine tuning it to make it feel better, or even writing a new script based of it.

Didn’t really think about plot/graphics until the last minute:

There’s not really much more to it then that. I would have liked to have had story be more integral to the gameplay. As it is, it’s basically just something that’s tacked on, and I’m not really happy with that.

Anyway, In general I’m happy with what I’ve managed, but I’ve still got a lot to learn.

Thanks everyone for playing my game, and leaving comments! It means a lot to me, you guys are really helpful. I look forward to future games/jams/whatevers

This will rub some people the wrong way, but sorry, I have to let it out.

I’ve been rating some entries and I’m very disappointed of probably most of them. I understand the time limit won’t allow for masterpieces, and I’m not expecting any, but come on, I mean, there should be some sort of standard.

Unfinished games and half-assed attempts, I mean, why submit those? People even cynically admitting they didn’t even try hard enough to make it better, that they gave up midways, but what the heck! They submitted it anyways!

The problem with those is that they distract from the good games from people who busted their asses off to make something decent, but now many won’t see them because they will be burnt off after checking out hundreds of unfinished entries of people who didn’t put their hearts into it.

I know this is open to novice developers and Notches alike, and I think it’s great that you have the balls to release something crappy, because sometimes people who never finish anything is because they are scared to realize they aren’t that good. But, hey, at least have a standard for yourself. If it isn’t even playable, why bother? Learn the lesson and join the next competition. You are on the right path, but it takes time to get there, keep it up, soldier.

I’ll probably rate selectively from now on, because, honestly, I can’t rate all 599 games, I’ll be lucky if I can rate half of that, but I won’t waste my time on people who didn’t finish and half-assed it but still submitted it just to have a shot in the dark.

Decency, people!! Don’t take this rant the wrong way, I’m trying to encourage some quality. We don’t expect master pieces, but we expect something finished and hopefully enjoyable. Thanks for reading. :3

Just a little postmortem on my LD #21 entry, Anthony’s Psyche: Escape.  (This is mostly a cross-post from my blog.)

This was my third Ludum Dare.  In each one, I’ve challenged myself to come up with a different interpretation of the theme than I thought would be typically done.  For the Escape theme, I decided to go with the idea of psychological escape mechanisms, or avoiding painful thoughts and memories.  This turned out to be a rather artsy, narrative-driven playable story of sorts.  This is very different than anything I’ve developed before.

I spent about 27 hours on this entry.  Friday night when the theme was announced, I spent three hours in the typical initial panic of trying to come up with an original interpretation of the theme.  I settled on the psychological escape mechanisms concept, and that it would have something to do with words on the screen representing thought fragments.  I was still unclear about the specifics beyond that.

On Saturday, I spent a couple more hours playing with ideas in my head, and settled on a design.  I then spent about ten hours writing code and debugging.  It took me much longer than I anticipated to get text with variable alpha per character working in Flashpunk. Probably five hours on that alone.  I also spent a few minutes making the “art” for the game (the one stick figure) for a total of 12 hours on Saturday.  By this point I had most of the basic functionality of the game working (moving a box of text around the screen and having the words fill in when over the character).

On Sunday, I spent about an hour getting Reason and my keyboard set up, and coming up with the short music loop and “thought complete” riff.  I then spent several hours trying to come up with a decent story.  I discovered that telling a story through first-person thought fragments is very difficult.  When I started entering the text for the thoughts, it just wasn’t coming together.  I also discovered some bugs in the way Flash renders text, so I spent a couple hours debugging and working around that.  I finally gave up on the story I’d come up with, and about two hours before the deadline, I came up with a very different story that came together pretty quickly.  I also wrote some more code for the title screens, ending screen, etc.  That made a total of about 12 hours for Sunday.

The end result isn’t exactly a “game”, but I’m satisfied with what I came up with because it’s very different for me, and pushed me in a different direction.  I like the overall feeling of the play.  I’m thinking of developing something like this a little further.

Like my previous two LD entries, I created things as stand-in content (the stick figure guy, and especially the very short, repetitive music loop) so I had things to write the code around, but they ended up being the final content because I didn’t have time to do “real” art or music.  The difference this time was that by now I’ve learned that when I create them, that’ll probably be the case.  Ludum Dare is always a great exercise in game development (and a lot of fun) because it forces you to be ruthless in cutting features and calling things “good enough”.

I dare you to disagree:

by Ian Brock

Click to go to entry page

Ludum Dare 21 marked Incredible Ape’s second Dare and fourth ever game jam.  We had a great time and are quite proud of our little game called / ESCAPE \ (which will be henceforth referred to as Escape in this post).  If you haven’t played it, you should check it out right now!  You can also watch a timelapse of Josh’s screen during the development process.

The following is an (extremely long) account of and reflection upon the successes and failures that Josh and I experienced during the making of Escape.

What Went Right

Falling in love with the idea

There’s a lot of pressure when you’re trying to crank an entire game out in less than 72 hours.  Knowing when to call something “good enough” and move on is crucial to a successful jam (ie finishing your damn game), but the brainstorming phase is one thing that should not be rushed through.  When we began brainstorming on Friday night, it was already decided that no actual programming or artwork would be made until the next day.  This decision made it easy to bring up and ultimately throw out lots of bad ideas because we weren’t feeling rushed, and there wasn’t the pressure to just go with an okay idea simply to start working on something.  Instead of considering and analyzing the merits and practicality of every idea we had, if a concept wasn’t immediately exciting, we simply moved on.  We did this until the idea of a one button wall jumping game was brought up, and it instantly sparked excitement in the both of us.  We quickly boiled the gameplay down to its purest form and, despite what had been previously decided, started working right away.  We were too excited to wait!

Everyone loves platforming!

Playing to our strengths

Successful teams know what they do well, and they also know what they suck at.  For Ludum Dare 20, Josh and I were using Unity for the first time and both of us were in unfamiliar territory.  We came up with a pretty neat idea but everything took longer than it should have and at the end of the 72 hours we had only finished two simple prototype levels.  For this jam, we stuck to our guns.  Josh is good at Flixel and I’m good at 2d sprite art so that’s what we went with.  We also brought in our friend Guerin McMurry (aka spamtron) to do the music and gave him utmost freedom to do what he does best.  Unsurprisingly, the end result was a much more complete, polished and satisfying game than when we tried something completely new.

Focusing on controls first

Since we decided to make an action game, we knew the most important thing to get right was the feel of the controls.  Good action games make the player feel skilled and powerful and nothing ruins that more than sloppy, laggy, confusing, or otherwise poor controls.

An example of poor controls

The jumping mechanic was the very first thing Josh prototyped (with beautiful programmer art) and it proved that our idea would be fun.  Originally, I had been skeptical whether we needed to give the player control over their jump height, but Josh insisted and after playing his prototype, I completely agreed.  I had first imagined the game relying purely on the timing of your jumps (trying to keep it simple), but Josh’s controls were so intuitive and responsive that they won me over.  A big inspiration came from the tight, fast, acrobatic jumping in Super Meat Boy and Escape’s controls were basically designed to feel just like that.  With the controls proven early on in the development process, we knew that even if we didn’t have time to add all the cool visual stuff we wanted, the game would still be fun.

Random generation

Designing good levels by hand for an action game takes a long time, and 72 hours is anything but.  Early on, Josh and I both knew that the only way too make something small that could keep a player entertained for more than a minute or so would be randomly generated levels, an idea we first realized when we made PewPewPewPewPewPewPewPewPew for the Global Game Jam earlier this year.  Of course, randomness can introduce complexities as well so you have to keep the variables to a minimum.  There are several elements to a level in Escape and two of them never change: the walls are always the same distance apart and the laser accelerates at the same rate every time.  The only things that are variable are the min and max distances between shockers, their probability of spawning, and their size.  With just those few variables, we were able to generate dynamic, challenging and fun levels that test a player’s skill and don’t feel cheap or impossible (most of the time).  Josh also adjusted the variables based on height so that the game’s difficulty ramped up gradually, creating accessibility for new players and reward for those who play long enough to really hone their wall-jumping skills.

Playtesting, playtesting, playtesting

If you watched Josh program Escape, you probably noticed that a large percentage of the time was spent playing the game during its various stages of development.  He would test the game after each and every change, no matter how small, and it was this mentality of playtesting, playtesting, playtesting that I think contributed the game’s overall quality.  However, I wished we could have gotten more fresh eyes and hands on Escape during development as by the end of the jam both Josh and I were extremely adept at the game’s mechanic and it was a bit too challenging for new players.  When we realized this (at the last minute, of course), we reduced the difficulty, but by too much, and the late-game challenge disappeared, so we had to scramble to re-balance the game with seconds on the clock.  This bring me to . . .

. . . What Went Wrong

Too addicting

I fucking love wall-jumping

Let’s get the least humble and admittedly bullshit reason out of the way first.  As I said before, playtesting, and playtesting often, was a key component to the game being fun, and there’s certainly nothing wrong with making a game you genuinely love to play (I mean that’s why we do this, right?).  With that being said however, we often spent too much time just playing Escape when we should have been implementing new features, fixing bugs, or making assets.  What can I say?  The game is really fun and addicting as hell (IMO).  At least the fun we had kept us motivated throughout the process.

Blocking issues

Confession time.  Unlike my friend Josh, I don’t have professional experience in my field and I’m not used to working in groups.  That’s no excuse to ignore your partner’s requests though.  It’s not as if I was doing it on purpose, but I’m generally not very ordered or organized when it comes to working on stuff.  I tend to just go where my attention is drawn and I also tend to start tweaking assets that are already in the game when I should be making new ones.  That’s just my perfectionist nature I suppose, but at times it was a significant hindrance to Josh’s productivity.  As the artist, I don’t usually rely on Josh to get my work done but he often relies on me to be able to progress.  If I had realized this earlier, we could have had the game at a more finished state earlier and we could have avoided some unneeded tensions.

Too damn hot

Yup, I’m blaming mother nature, or maybe I’m blaming anthropomorphic global warming.  In any case, this summer has been particularly hot and no more so than now.  Unfortunately, our apartment was without air conditioning so we had to sweat it out.  The heat made us lethargic and relatively unproductive during the day, with night time bringing some relief but not much.  On the second night we worked outside for a bit but Josh’s laptop quickly ran out of juice and so it was back to the oven that we call an apartment.  I suppose we could have gone to a coffee shop or Fred Meyers or something, but that probably would have been too distracting to be worth the AC.  I’d rather be hot with a finished game be than cool without one.

What summer feels like to Portlanders

Forgot to eat/drink

Not only were our bodies secreting moisture at an incredible rate, but Josh and I weren’t even re-hydrating most of the time.  This was not a conscious decision of course, just an unfortunate side effect of being completely wrapped up in a project with a looming deadline.  I think I ate just one small meal on Monday.  I’m sure these factors decreased our productivity, so next time we’ll definitely plan breaks and meal times in advance so as not to forget.

In Conclusion

Despite all that went awry, this Ludum Dare has been our most successful game jam ever and I think Escape is certainly the most fun out of all the games Incredible Ape has made thus far.  We can’t wait to do it again in four months time!  I hope you enjoyed our game, I hope you enjoyed this lengthy postmortem, and I hope you enjoyed Ludum Dare 21 as much as we did.  Until next time!

Go to entry page

I feel guilty making such a hard torturous game. It wasn’t supposed to be this way, so maybe I’m slowly becoming an evil game designer. Mwahahahahaha. Forcing people to type at lightning speeds is downright cruel, I should’ve at least eased them into it better. Oh well, I better be less evil next time.

As in the comment on the game page, the instability was caused by my french windows 7 copy that interprets a floating point of having a , (comma) and not a . (decimal point) which of course is the opposite for english windows. The result of feeding in the incorrect decimal separator is a memory access violation (or similar on different OSes)… Download links are below, it is quite unfinished but its there at last and I cannot say how much of a headache this was to fix.

Again, my sincerest gratitude to those that tried to run this so far. The linux build is still dodgy, so I recommend using WINE despite the sound issue remaining for the time being.

Page comment:

GREAT NEWS:
—————————————————–
THE BUGS RELATING TO WIN32 RELEASES HAVE BEEN SOLVED. LINK:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4853895/LD21/LD21_CyperSpace__Win32_R3_EN.zip

The bug related to foreign builds of Windows 7 (french) that interpreted floating point values as having a , not a . and this resulted in a crash in English windows as the reverse was true. This is SOLVED! (unless you have french windows)

The linux version (experimental) with some new dependency scripts can be found here:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4853895/LD21/LD21_CyperSpace_Linux_DIY_R3.tar.gz

This is a DIY release, compile it youself from the scripts please (sudo bash the dependency .sh files and then DO NOT sudo the compile script unless you want to either run some chowns or sudo ./LD21s later)

I again, apologize for the fiasco and will be writing to a few people as to why foreign versions of windows interpret floating point values differently to avoid this for all people (need to feed back to a german friend whose game only works on german windows. I now know why).

Again, my sincerest apologies for the delay.

YRGBO is a “weird” puzzle-adventure game. Since it couldn’t be long, it had to be tough! And it is. I gave the past Ludum Dare a shot but I quit after the first 24 hours as the game I was working on didn’t turn out as I expected. This time I could finish, and I’m happy for that. I also think the game’s good, not that it will appeal to most people, but that was never really my intention.

THE GOOD
- I finished! (For the jam, although I wanted to submit it for the main competition).
- I ended making a good game (not exactly how I wanted it, but I’m still proud of it).
- I got into the zone (Never really got tired, I lost track of time).
- I got “the hang” of it (I knew what was worth adding and leaving out).
- I handled sleep deprivation nicely (I’m a heavy sleeper, so skipping sleep was never an option, but I could get away with very little of it).
- I got a nice idea early.
- I didn’t quit! (the idea crossed my mind a couple of times) instead, I cut off features and adjusted the project to the time I had left.
- I felt good, period. I forgot all my problems while working on this. I was tired but very happy and excited.

THE BAD
- I couldn’t finish on 24 hours, had to use the jam deadline and work for some extra 24 hours.
- I didn’t have the time to test my game, it had bugs that made it almost impossible to be finished. Had to fix them up.
- I should’ve planned more before starting coding, could’ve saved some time.
- No time to exercise and I ate lots of crap, well, not lots, but I ate them, which is bad!
- This isn’t exactly bad, but I tried to make a kind of game I had never done before. In these kind of compos you should probably stick to what you master, it’s no time to experiment.

THE UGLY
- I felt weird when the compo was over, my time awareness was messed up, I have trouble getting up early now.
- I felt really tired the day after. It’s weird that my legs were so sore.
- At some point I started to feel really stressed out, you know, that pain in the chest. Pressure + lack of sleep. I’m ok now.

CONCLUSION
This was a great experience! I hope I can repeat it the next time. This was my second “short” game development competition, I had been involved in compos that gave you weeks or even months to make your game, but this is a whole different thing! I’ll finish in 48 hours next time! ’till then

Thank’s to PixieEngine’s one-click export feature I was able to publish SurfN-2-Sur5 to the Chrome Web store in minutes, just needed to upload the zip file and add screenshots. It’s as easy as filling in the LD competition entry page.

Chrome Web Store – SurfN-2-Sur5

Currently the version in the store is exactly the same as the LD competition version, but in time it will improve.

I am the creator of PixieEngine, so I may be biased in favor of it, but I thought that it’s worth sharing. And while we’re on the topic, I also love that when I’m building my game in PixieEngine it’s already on the web, so there’s no extra packaging or upload step required, just click “Publish” and everyone has access to the latest version.

Did I mention that it is free? And that it runs on OSX, Windows and Linux? And that you can always export/download your game at any time? But wait! There’s more…! Actually, that’s most of it.

So please, check out PixieEngine for all your game development needs and give feedback with any questions or concerns. You can even start by messing around with the SurfN-2-Sur5 source, though the code quality isn’t super high since it was made for the competition.

I got bored, so I put together a nice Python 2 script to output all the entries in a easily parseable JSON file. Here’s the dump: http://pastebin.com/r2XW8RQi

Source coming along, as soon it is ready for release…

Hey … I just put up a post on my blog with the lessons learned from this past weekend about optimizing WordPress. If you’re at all into WordPress, or just want to know more about what I did to the site over the last few days, check it out.

Thanks again to everyone for making this competition awesome!!!!!!!!! Totally worth it to see 599 games get made in just one weekend

-Phil

Now I have had a swamp of build issues with this and such and such not running on yadida. This seems to be due to the variable way in which various windows builds interpret floating point values – they either want them as ’0.3′ or 0,3′

I CANNOT BUILD A WIN32 RELEASE SPECIFICALLY FOR YOU.

The builds WORK on windows 7 X64 (on two seperate machines albeit no sound), and the linux build WORKS on Ubuntu x64 with common sdl and opengl packages installed. Period. I understand Linux x64 is not popular and in that instance I am going to get a WINE version rolled out.

For those that have invested in FPC please do compile – the library code is very rushed and this is to be forseen as I’ve had a hell time getting thigs working. I am currently trawling through code on a windows 7 netbook trying to find what is affecting th windows users while also installing a 32 bit linux machine to run a test compile and dependency list.

I am sorry for those unable to rate so far, however this issue will be resolved soon and many resolutions in library craft have been pulled from this LD as was the case for the last LD also.

Thank you dually for your patience.

Mindbane was my entry for the 48 hour competition. If you haven’t, check it out and rate it here: PLAY MINDBANE!

The development of this game was a mess, to say the least. To begin with, I had to work on the saturday, so actually I lost ten of the 48 hours doing absolutely nothing. Well, nothing is quite inaccurate, because I was trying to have ideas for the entry. But my brain at 4AM is barely working correctly, so I couldn’t think of anything.

(more…)

So LD21 was my first ever Dare and some things went okay and some didn’t. I definitely learnt a lot from it, and I’m keen to keep making games and work on my entry. I thought I’d do a brief little writeup.

Blatant self-promotion link: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=rate&uid=5119

The game

The Daring Do! title screen

I’m pretty pleased with the game I produced: “Daring Do!”. It’s a sidescrolling running platformer where you play an intrepid archeologist. Each level is short and follows the same formula: grab the glowing golden idol and get the heck out of the temple before the whole thing caves in or you get crushed by the giant boulder coming after you. Avoid pits and arrows along the way. I wanted to keep levels short so it kept you wanting to play; that just one more level feeling. I’d like to add an ‘infinite mode’ in a future update, though. I’m also planning to add many, many more of the normal-style levels, as well as a lot more trap types: crumbly blocks, falling debris that you have to dodge, spike traps,and perhaps even some bad guys and collectables. I would’ve liked to get more of these in during the compo, but just ran out of time. Also, more work is needed on sound and sprites.

Daring Do! gameplay - pick up the glowy idol and prepare to run!

The Bad

The main thing that went wrong was that I didn’t spend enough time on day one thinking up a concrete idea. I got a rough topic in my head of a Breakout bat escaping from a game of Breakout, and rushed off and started making it. I built a simple little Breakout clone really quickly, and then spent a fair amount of the rest of the day trying to script together some kind of in-game cut scene explaining your escape. At this point, I realised I’d spent far too long on an ‘intro’ without having any idea at all about what the core gameplay would be after your escape. I became somewhat disillusioned with the idea and stopped working.

My first game idea, a breakout clone where you actually break out.

I woke up late on the Sunday with the intention of giving up, but I felt that I’d be very disappointed in myself if I did so. I chatted with a friend about what to do (thanks @triard!), and a new idea was born, that which turned into Daring Do! This one I felt I could run with: a simple gameplay mechanic that can be easily extended by the addition of more traps, levels, etc.

Daring Do! gameplay - outrun the boulder, avoid the arrows, jump the pits!

The Good

I’ve only recently gotten into Flash development, but I absolutely love working with FlashDevelop. I use a Mac as my main machine, so I had to run FD in a Windows virtual machine which was pretty slow – this infuriated me on numerous occasions as I sat there wanting to code but having to wait for my computer to catch up with me. For future LDs, I’ll have to run Windows natively somewhere, as the VM was almost unworkable. I wish there was a Mac version of FlashDevelop.

Flixel is also brilliant, although I was kind of learning as I went along so got a bit hung up on things that should’ve been easy but I didn’t know how to do yet. I’d like to spend some time with FlashPunk, too, to see how they compare. Writing my game in Flash made it super easy to test, to send to friends for comments, and to upload for other LD48ers to play.

As for my other tools, I used DAME for map editing, which worked pretty well, bfxr (fantastic tool!) for sound effects (although I somehow forgot to give my main character footsteps!) and had a brief attempt at creating some terrible music with FamiTracker.

Next time

I’d certainly be up for taking part on Ludum Dare again – the feeling of satisfaction having built something in such a short space of time is brilliant, and I love the community feel of the event. I’m so glad I didn’t give up after day 1! Next time, I’d spend longer ensuring I had a great gameplay idea before starting. Gameplay, gameplay, gameplay, that’s what it’s all about. In fact, I’d probably recommend trying to spend some time during the final round of voting thinking up some ideas for each of the top-voted themes from previous rounds, just in case they come up. Having a solid idea from the start would allow me a full two days to make my game – next time, I’d plan for day 1 on the engine and gameplay, and day 2 on content and tweaks. As I had to cram all of that into one day this time round, the content was a little light.

At the moment, I’m really enjoying looking through everybody else’s entries. There are some truly, truly brilliant games in there – not are they fun to play, but it’s nice to be able to find out how things were implemented. It’s a great way to learn.

I’d really appreciate it if you’d take the time to check out my game and rate it and / or leave a comment.