So, I had some hard time preventing my LD20 (the previous one ) game from spreading around the internet like mad, so i thought about sitelocking it this time. So I did, and during the short period when it was on Kongregate, someone already put it on his site. I wouldn’t mind, but since I decided to take it down from Kong and continue development, I didn’t want it to spread over the internet beforehand.

And to my astonishment, the simple sitelock worked and the game didn’t launch So I immediately got this idea in my hand: if I can rule out playing that game, I can pull off a prank So, I changed the sitelock to play the special ending right away if the sitelock test fails

Uhm…. I guess you would need to see the special ending to get the joke So I’m gonna shamelessly plug my entry into this post

tl;dr – Someone stole my game – it was sitelocked – changed sitelock to a pranky one – win – ps, play my game

For my third LD I knew from the beginning that I would have less than one full day to complete the game. Knowing that, I first planned not to join, but when I saw the theme I thought that I should at least be able to do something small.

Again my weapon of choice was AS3 and low res pixel graphics. This time I tried out FlashPunk (thanks to Sos’s framework posted earlier) and even if I used very little FP code I was quite happy with my choice.

All together it turned out more or less like I imagined it to be. If you haven’t played it I strongly suggest you do so before reading any further as the game is quite spolier fragile. Feel free to try the game here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=rate&uid=608

What went wrong
- story
I wanted to really put the player into the action and let the player imagine what had happened before for herself. This had could been done a lot better and I’m not happy with the intro and outro texts at all. They worked, but nothing more. I think better texts could have emphasized the point of the game and the players’ reactions even more.

- framework code
I hadn’t used FP before so when I found out that Sos had posted a quick and dirty platformer framework I decided to use it right away. The framework was good for most parts (thanks Sos!) but there where some minor glitches that stopped me from adding some of the polish I wanted in the end. Since there is so little platforming actually in the game I might have been better off writing it from scratch.

- not much
I tried to think of a third thing that didn’t work out but failed. I didn’t eat very much, but that was expected. Next time I really should take more breaks and eat better – pomodoro style!

Base functionality complete! Time for graphics!

What went right
- scope
Knowing that I wouldn’t be able to pull any all nighters I decided to try something very special and short instead of generic and large. Usually I want to make levels after level, but this time I was smart enough to realize my weaknesses and use them as strengths.

- graphics
While I usually dabble with pixel graphics, I wanted to try a new style this time. Normally I’m very much about child-like proportions, big eyes, and black outlines. In BATHOS I aimed for a realistic style in order to make it feel more real. Wether I actually achieved the latter or not, I’m very happy with the looks of the game and it is something that I will surely use again.

- framework code
Although there were some minor kinks in the framework I used on top of FlashPunk it allowed me to dive straight into the game mechanics. This saved me a lot of time and I think it was the first time in many years that I didn’t write any engine code for a game. Big thanks to Sos and Chevy!

- the name
Reading the initial response I am very happy with positive comments, something which I am very grateful for. There are of course people who don’t like the game and/or hate the ending, which it why I named it BATHOS ( = anti-climax ).

Final look of the first room.

On a final note, let me recommend WolframTones for quick music. It requires some clicking to get the desired result, but it beats composing for a musical newbie like me.

And that’s it! I’m really loking forward to try the entries of this LD, a lot of great looking entries. Extra kudos to Phil and PoV for putting in the extra time and effort to keep the site running – thanks a million!

So, this was my first Ludum Dare, so when all is said and done, I’m happy that I submitted something that was essentially complete. Not to mention, I had an absolute blast participating!

Language and Tools
Before starting I was debating between multiple options for which language I wanted to use. I considered both C++, the language I’m most familiar with, and Java/WebGL, since it’s fresh in my mind from projects I’ve done at work. I ended up using AS3 with the FlashPunk library, and I couldn’t be happier with my decision.  Throughout the weekend, I did not at any point feel that the technology I was working with was a barrier. I was able to quickly get what I wanted into the game. The most time I spent debugging actually ended up being FlashDevelop itself – I was using version 4.0 Beta, which had a bug with auto-completion. Thankfully, I quickly found the patch to fix it.

I also used OGMO for building levels. I do wish that I had taken some time to learn it a bit before starting, as my Friday night was mostly spent learning it.

Theme
I went into “hour zero” with no idea what I wanted to make. I actually purposely did not come up with anything, because I didn’t want to go with one theme, then have my old idea stuck in my head. So, once the theme was announced, some intense brainstorming took place. I felt pressed for time, so came up with a partial idea – escaping from a “pleasurable” place. I don’t think I got the idea across in the end too well, but I tried taking the theme on two levels, the player must “escape reality” in order to “escape the resort”. Thus, the main mechanic was to avoid dying of boredom. You “survive” by watching TV and eating exciting foods. Feeling pressed for time, I took this snippet of an idea and ran with it.

Level Design
Now I personally think that I had a strong game mechanic, but I think I fell a bit flat in terms of how I put the pieces together. The game is a platformer, and when it came to building the different rooms, my creative juices really were not flowing. The result: a short game that feels pretty linear. Part of this was due to the fact that I wanted it to feel a bit more “realistic,” and not a random labyrinth of tiles. I would guess that most people building platformers levels struggle with this.

Art
You may tell me differently, but I think my art came out well. I don’t consider myself an artist, but I’m definitely more confident in my “programmer art” skills after this weekend. I sort of arbitrarily decided to make my tile size 16×16 – this ended up making it easier to create new art, but was a bit too small. The final game is actually scaled to 200%. I do think the final look is cool. Again, the “realism” thing hurt me with art. I wanted rooms to look unique – in the end, I probably could have created a longer game, if I had settled for having redundant rooms.

Sound
I used sfxr and musagi for sound and music. I hadn’t touched either before this weekend. I ended up with both simple sounds a short music loop. I’ve gotten good feedback about the music, and the song has been stuck in my head for three days now, so I guess that means success!

Things I Wanted To Add

• Intro Tutorial 
• More Rooms and Keys
• Puzzle Elements
• Different Particle Effects to Signify Boring-ness
• A More Creepy Ambiance
• Paintings as Checkpoints
• A More Rewarding Ending

Conclusion
Overall, the competition went smoothly and I’m glad that all the pieces fit together in the end. My goal for the next LD (which I’m definitely doing)  is to come up with an idea that is not so dependent on art and level design. I worked as long as I could, as hard as I could (about 6 hours of sleep each night), and just barely finished, with no time to polish. Again, I had so much fun, and am simply in love with this community! See you all next time!

This is my second Ludum Dare entry, my first being in LD20. For this one, I really wanted to try making a multiplayer game, as I it seemed like an interesting thing to do in 48 hours. My concept was a roguelike game where the player was part of an adventuring party who must escape from a dungeon after things go wrong. Because I figured many people would end up playing the game solo, I also wanted the ability for players to carve messages into the floor (an idea straight out of Nethack, I’ll admit). I was thinking that maybe people would carve hints or some such.

What Went Right

The Graphics/Audio/Networking Library
I was using a modified version of my base code from the last Ludum Dare, with a networking component I grabbed from another one of my projects and added to my base code. It generally worked really well, with few notable problems. I worked out most of the kinks last time (mostly related to applet startup/shutdown). I did have to fix a single performance issue with the renderer, though.

Server Performance
My main game server is running on a small virtual server, and I was worried that it would run out of CPU if more than a few people connected. But so far, it has handled the load very well. There also have been no problems with bandwidth on the server side.

Backend/Threading/etc.
I went with a weird architecture that had a separate thread for each zone (which was a bit pointless in retrospect as my server only really has one core). Still, I’m happy that it works without crashing excessively. Even with a few players connected CPU utilization is low on the server. Also, I was a bit concerned that the communication between the threads could lead to some kind of deadlock, but that doesn’t seem to happen, which is good.

Pathfinding
I wanted to give the player character the ability to path around obstacles, which would make the game more user-friendly. To do this, I made a simple implementation of the A* pathfinding algorithm. Because the pathfinding was server side, I was worried that it would overload the small server. But it actually works pretty well with no noticeable stutters. There is the slight issue that you can order it to path to places where the entire path isn’t on screen, though. Using this trick a player can find paths to anywhere onscreen, even if the actual path runs all over the level.

What Went Wrong

Responsiveness
As any good UI designer will tell you, a good GUI must be very responsive, aka it must respond immediately to user actions. To ensure this, most multiplayer games use client side prediction to create the illusion that the game responds instantly to player actions. However, to simplify things, Lost in the Depths uses a “dumb client” model where all game logic is processed on the server side, and the client serves as a sort of glorified renderer. As a result, any action requires at least double the ping time to the server before the user sees any response. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that the server only runs 4 logic ticks per second, so the request must wait for the server to get to the next tick before it processes it. Finally, there is an error in my code that delays all actions by an additional 1 tick (250ms), which does not help either.

Testing
My design for this game was somewhat complex, probably too complex. I did not have enough time to completely test and balance all the components, and as a result there are several balance issues. Plate armor is grossly underpowered, and robes are probably overpowered, just to name a few. Another issue came up on the last day when I was about to test multiplayer. The problem, of course, was that there was only one of me so I couldn’t fully test actual multiplayer, in an allegedly multiplayer game. As a result, the multiplayer game itself isn’t very well balanced.

Level Design
I’m fairly happy with most of the level design, except for Level 2, the Labyrinth. It is supposed to be a bit of a confusing maze, but the result is way too confusing, and there are too few monsters, making it boring to play. This is exacerbated by the lack of an auto-map, leaving players wandering.

Artwork
In my LD20 entry, a lot of the main graphics were made in Blender, and were of robots, which are a lot easier to draw then people. In this game, I relied more heavily on hand-drawn graphics, and unfortunately, I’m not very good at drawing. It also didn’t help that I ended up making most of the graphics last, and at 3 in the morning.

GUI
Some parts of the game require text input, and my plan was to use the Swing part of Java to get this input. The problem was my graphics library was based on AWT and wasn’t designed to work with other GUI components. This wasn’t a showstopper, but it did take a few hours of tweaking to get this right.

Overall, it was an interesting experiment, but I’m not that happy with how it turned out. Working on a complex entry like this was fun even if the result is a bit sluggish. If I were to do it over again I would simplify the game a bit and focus more on tweaking the network performance to make the game more responsive.

This man is not George Takei (although I do see the resemblance)

He’s still a cool guy though.

A game about being trapped by menacing, science-y boxes.

And escaping their cold, firm grip.

With the power of your electromagnetic bracelet! ( or at least that’s what I’m going with )

What I learned from this here Ludum Dare:

- Eating is nice, don’t forgot to do it.

- When you do remember, read the cooking instructions

- Try writing a song or using music software before winging it in a competition

- I sure do make a lot of top down games

- Nobody seems to think my spaceman looks like who he is

Final Thoughts:

- I should make something not top down

- puzzles are usually harder to solve than to design

- stat tracking is super fun and super easy to put into a game

Let me know if you can beat my stats, I’m sure it’s possible. (<– not sarcasm )

I added a link to the Gameplay video to the Submission page.

You can download, play, and rate the game:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=rate&uid=3966

You can watch the video here:

http://www.xfire.com/video/4c77ef/

Its always fun participating in Ludum Dare, my goal was to make a nice game demo, and not necessarily a full game. I accomplished what I wanted to in 48 hours, and have started refining areas of the game now.

The first thing I did was ditch the old controls that are present in the Compo version, in the compo version you moved with A and D but to change colors you used 1-4 and to deselect you used Q. Not very intuitive or easy, when I first watch the gameplay video was when it really hit me how slow it was to hit the number. I knew adding a GUI would be one solution, it was an idea when I first started, but I don’t care for GUI’s because they are either starkly obvious, or they blend in really well with the background. My solution then was to change the controls over to use the mouse, You now have to point and click on the color you want to make transparent, right clicking clears your selects (makes them all solid) you still move the same way. So far it has proven to be a much faster way to play the game.

The next thing that I have started on is the score, I want to make your chooses effect score more, and reflect a bigger difference. I plan to add an online highscore table, but for now I’m tweaking the scoring system a bit.

I’m not sure when I will have a post-compo version out, but it is coming. This weekend I will write up a Post Mortem, that will go more into what went right and wrong for me.

Hey the real good news this weekend was that I took late friday night off from the compo and managed to score a $99 HP TouchPad. Woot!

Welcome to the hotel TouchPad,
Where you can check out any time you like,
But you can never leave.

Alright so i had a ball this Ludum Dare, really glad i entered anyway, rather then writing a huge essay i will just write a few short(ish) points:

What i did right:

• Stuck to my guns! i had an idea and even though i found it very challenging to implement the basic game mechanics i feel a great sense of achievement as a result.
• Slept at least 8 hours each night and ate a reasonably healthy diet.
• Pulled myself together on day two despite feeling quite restless and distracted.

What i would change next time:

• The idea i picked and the way i implemented it ended requiring a lot of instructions for not that deep game play, looking back on it now i feel i need to adjust my designs to allow for  ease of learning, stick to mechanics which are self explanatory or familiar.
• I made the fairly bad mistake of choosing to do ‘quick and dirty’ code ignoring years of good practice with dynamic systems, even though i thought these would save me time i believe they ended up costing me extra in the end and potentially limiting the players experience as a result.

So whats next?

To me Super Kommandant Extreme is an unfinished game with which i can do a lot more then i am presently so once i have settled down i will begin working on a post-dare version with the following features:

• Many varied enemy types!
• Day time, allowing the player to control the ins and outs of prison life!
• Expand and customise your prison!
• New victory condition : Become a General! every German officers dream!
• Host functions, Embezzle funds and get investigated by the Gestapo!
• Manage your daily budget and save up for that extra watch tower you have always wanted!
• Re-done Graphics, sounds and sooooo much better AI!
• Better lighting efficiency so we can put even more light sources in game!
• Customize guard behavior, patrols and more!
• Deal with Sabotage attempts as well as escapes!
• Many more!

When the LD48 v.21 competition started I was on the Loas border taking a short break with my girlfriend. I contemplated going home to Chiang Mai but insisted to myself that cutting my holiday short would probably mean that I was inevitably going to get killed and I’d spend the next six months trying to Escape the wrath of my better half. So, I figured I’d leave it and enter next time. Usually when I want to do something, nothing much stops me.

I traveled from Chiang Khong on the border down to Chiang Mai, Thailand. A journey that took about 7 hours (4 of which I was chatting to a nice Swedish guy with a questionable hair piece) Anyway, I arrived back in Chiang Mai, got a taxi home and sat chatting to my work mate. The competition was well underway, so I didn’t think about it too much. I went over to my computer to see if anyone else had submitted games and couldn’t believe, there was a rook of entries already and I saw the keyword… That was it, 14 hours to go on the board… I need to make something.

I needed an idea so I threw a couple around… “You need to escape from the government”, “You are a rioter, and need to escape from the police”, “You are dead and need to escape the afterlife”… you know, the non-sense ideas (Maybe the last one isn’t so non-sense) ^_^

A few weeks ago, the same friend bought an xbox, the first game he bought for it was “From Dust”, a game I’d found through @photonstorm via twitter and keenly showed my friend. (I’m still yet to play it, although I have seen the gameplay). When thinking about escape games, it jumped into my mind and even though it was demanding to write a prototype of such a game in Flash, I had a full 14 hours…

The result is here: http://bit.ly/pCvKDo

OK… The rights and the wrongs.

RIGHTS

• It’s visually quite impressive for Flash
• I got more that a single level in
• Its nice to play with as a sandbox
• The characters have different walk speeds and recovery rates
• The game is quite small due to some procedurally generated environments using fractals
• Environments look organic
• The point and click mechanism is nice for a 3D game in Flash

WRONGS

• The game is unbalanced for the requirements of this competition
• I’m getting feedback that the controls are quite difficult
• I’m getting feedback that the CPU usage on some machines is high
• The camera is not bound and can pass through the terrain
• Level design is generally poor
• Game mechanics are lacking
• UI is poor, because my FlashBuilder trial ran out and I would usually have used that

All in all, I’m happy…because I was able to build a working game in 26 hours (remember the 12 hour extension? Yes, I needed it all- no sleep for 35+ hours)!! I had super fun with the hallucinating finish where pixels were moving and I was thinking…”Hang on, I didn’t code that in??”)- I loved the spirit of the competition.

WHAT I’LL DO DIFFERENT

Yes, I have the bug so hopefully LD22 will see an entrr from me next time and I’ll be prepared… In fact, that’s my main tactic, organization. Get my workflow for all game elements ready and use the full term. I think I’ll probably prepare a screen cast since I saw some of Notches screencast and it’s probably good to read back to see if there are any constructive comments within the flame flood. Anyway, thank you LD for a fun time and see you at LD22.

Peace

Woo, my first Ludum Dare was a blast

I really feel like I learned a lot about getting something designed and finished in a short time.  I wasted waay too much time coming up with awesome ideas and class designs, and I spent a lot of time on stuff like thread safety and timer rollovers, since my day job is writing real time embedded software that doesn’t do a whole lot, but what it does has to be done completely perfectly under all circumstances.  I think next time around I’ll be in the right mindset to just hammer out something functional as quickly as possible, so I have more time to focus on putting in more fun

(pro tip: It turns out that the Battletoads speeder bike level isn’t fun or difficult if there are no jumps involved)

As I’m going through everyone’s post mortem, I click on the links to their entry pages to play and rate their games. But the page it takes me to doesn’t have the rating form. It does allow me to leave a comment, and it shows my dashboard bar at the top, so it knows I’m logged in, but the rating form is just missing. I have to manually go to the “all entries” page, search the name, then navigate to the entry page that way, and the rating form shows up. Is anybody else having trouble with this, or am I doing something wrong?

We did it!  Three days, one game.  Hooray!  There were some scary last minute bits due to out of date drivers on a testing machine, but everything came together and Run Run Robot got released.  You can check out our game here or read on for my clumsy summary of the development process.

The Process:

We used LÖVE as our game engine and wrote our game logic in Lua.  I did a lot of art and direction, but the vast majority of code was pumped out by the heroic and capable Brian and Eric.  Art was done in the copy of Photoshop Elements that came with my Wacom.

We used Mercurial and the excellent Bitbucket for our version control.  I’ve previously only used Mercurial for individual projects, but I have to say that having multiple people work on the same project on this time scale meant a lot of merges.  I hope I was doing something wrong, because I don’t want Mercurial to be that hard.

Day 0:

The topic was announced at 7PM our time, so our first day of work was just discussion, design, concept art, sleep.  Designing and talking over IM was a pain in the ass.  We’ll try to meet in person next time, or at least have a shared whiteboard and voice chat online somewhere.

Day 1:

Brian wrote animation loading code, made a random level/enemy spitter-outer and handled our basic collision code in top notch time while Eric wrote most of our weapon/shooting code and added the boss.  I painted all of the level graphics and player animations.  Lame croppings of the original concept art were used for the initial boss and enemy graphics.  Our animation loading code uses individual PNGs instead of strips, which seemed totally worth the performance hit.

Day 2:

Powerups, health, tons of discussion and tweaking to make the game as fun and playable as we could manage while still keeping it a little too hard.  I drew the boss animations and finished up the win/lose screens.  I’m pretty new to 2D animation in general, but this watercolory style of animation was especially new to me.  I enjoyed it.

Eric also took it upon himself to sneak a Jedi mode into the game, which was way too cool to hide behind the Konami code as originally intended .  The only way to kill the boss is to reflect his own shots back at him with a light saber.  I suck at it.

Day 3:

It was Monday!  We had to go to work .  During our lunch breaks and after work we fixed a couple crucial bugs, added more instructions and added a life bar to the boss so the player can know just how close he is to winning.  We also made Jedi mode easier to get to as a rather good last minute decision.

Submission time was mostly composed of Eric screaming at me to redraw the victory screen for Jedi mode to have a light saber in it and me insisting that we just didn’t have the time.  ”WHY DID YOU HAVE TO DRAW HIM IN THAT POSE??!” he shouted, fists clenched to heaven.  The cries shall haunt me forever.

The victory screen really does look like he should be holding a light saber.  Sigh.

You can view Run Run Robot’s Ludum Dare page here.

Hi all. My name is Aaron and I am thinking of entering the next Ludum Dare compo, and this would be for me to get better at that language. I am just stuck on one problem. Which language is that gonna be?

I have heard from multiple people that C# is good and Java is easy to learn. I know both of these fairly. But I want to continue learning this language so I come here to find out what language is best to use in game programming. I know there are some professional’s here and know what a good language is for games, and all I am is a noob. So, if you wouldn’t mind, could you please comment on what a good game programming language is.

Thanks a bunch,
Aaron

Hey all!

I can’t figure out a way to search the games by the technologies used to create them, and I’d love to see what else other people have created using the same languages as me.

It’s really inspiring to see the awesome things people can do, so if you used Java or Processing, I’d be really happy to take a look at your game!

Edit- Here’s a link to my game, available as an applet, web start, runnable jar, and OS-specific executables: Escape from Monster City

'I was a teenage Hipster!' - Post Mortem

So this was my second LD – I’ve been obsessed with making games for a long time now (fair to say I’m very likely in similar company ) and this was the perfect way to continue to learn more about the process. Like many recent newcomers I found out about this whole thing through Notch (thanks!)

What went right:

• choosing python – wow I am blown away by just how fun it can be to code in this language; it’s very intuitive so even though I’ve only been using it for a couple weeks it felt very comfortable to get into.
• pygame – makes simple game development a joy
• putting a more wacky spin on the game – my last entry was very simple in terms of story and I didn’t want to repeat that. This time I put alot more time into the writing, fleshing out the setting and plot without coming across as overly verbose, tightening the dialogue, etc. I had alot of fun coming up with the various snide/cynical quotes uttered by Trevor at the beginning of each level and upon picking up special items.

• py2exe – first off I wanna say I still really appreciate that this module exists, without it I’d have no real chance of sharing my game with anyone not running python. But it does seem to possess a few bugs or atleast quirks that you have to be aware off in order to get it to work correctly in conjunction with pygame. It’ll do things like not bundle certain DLLs required by your application which you have to do manually. Normally this would be no problem but the added time pressure of LD makes it all the more challenging.
• time-management – my initial vision for the game was ambitious (atleast for my skill level haha) and while I did end up finished about 95% of the features I wanted to include, I missed the 48-hour deadline in the process and had to submit under the jam. What’s frustrating is that if I had just been more disciplined with my approach I’d have stood a good chance of making the first deadline.
• too much caffeine – ‘oh there’s two hours left till deadline and I haven’t slept for twenty hours and have already consumed enough tea for a week? Haha that’s not important give me another cup wait why can’t I feel my face?’

Anyway I’m looking forward to LD22, if anyone knows of a good language/platform for quick and easy deployment to the web I’d love it if you would share your knowledge , I’m leaning towards flash but am confused by all these frameworks like Flixel, FlashPunk, etc. and which is best for what. Thanks for reading!

Balance is a difficult thing to achieve in a video game, especially in one that lacks any beta testing. My games for the Ludum Dare thus far have turned out to be unfairly difficult to the point of being unbeatable. My game for the LD20 actually had no win scenario because of a bug. My new game, Under a Watchful Eye, is so incredibly difficult that only a handful of people were able to make it out alive.

In this game, you are the captive of a giant floating eyeball that is patrolling a mountainous region. You cannot leave its immediate vicinity without it firing a laser at you. In order to escape, you need to use the terrain and rocks as cover while making a mad dash for it. At this point, the eye will rise into the sky and begin hunting you. The player then needs to reach a control point in the middle of the map to deactivate the eye’s hostile mode and survive.

The problem is, there was only one real escape route in the whole level, and even then, one needed to think just like me in order to make it through. Some people would run into this route backwards, unable to see the obstacles ahead. Others were unwilling to get hit by the laser at all (you can survive the laser for a few seconds before dying). Most just couldn’t find the exit, dying in a hopeless rush and giving up.

I spent Friday on the concept, Saturday on the basic code and art, and Sunday on refining the code and AI. I should have put some time into the actual level! I’ve leared a great deal from this past weekend’s competition. It was an exhilarating experience and I loved every minute of it! Next time, I’ll be sure to complete the whole game before devoting so much time to art.

I’ll be working on a post-compo version of my game to have a little something for my resume. I wish to break into the game industry, but it’s tough being a solo act! I’ll be incorporating some of the things I learned this weekend into my main project Against the Wall, which is itself a giant learning/portfolio project. I’ll see you at the next LD!

Well we did it.  We survived our first Ludum Dare and came out feeling like we accomplished our goal.  So now we are going to go over the experience.

Idea

When the comp / jam started, we took immediately to talking through any idea that we could come up with.  We went from being stuck in a house, to being stuck in a prison and even a few others.  As Friday night dragged on, we went back and forth several time without settling on a game idea.  Sleep, we decided, would help us think.

On Saturday morning, the idea started.  It was very simple at first.  You are in a tunnel and trying to escape.  What you were trying to escape was irrelevant at that moment.  We had a direction.  Immediately the coding began.  At first is was a cube and there was a square corridor.  The movement was the first thing to be put into the game.  The thought was that using physics and gravity, we could come up with an interesting game.  It might not be very deep, but we were hoping it would be fun.

What Went Wrong

Several things went wrong during the weekend.  Things from choosing the right idea, time taken by family, the day job taking time and a lack of play testing.

From the beginning, we wanted to do something unique and original.  We wanted something that stood out from other games for being unique.  In the end, we should have focused on making a fun game.

Family things got in the way pretty quickly.  Most of our time on Saturday was taken on a trip to my Mom’s house.  It happens, but better planning on our end could have helped us to minimize the impact.

On Monday, I had to get back to the day job.  This takes a lot of my time and energy dealing with the everyday IT stuff.

The family and job stuff really came back to hurt us.  There were several game features that we really wanted to do, but we ran out of time to get it done.

The final thing that went way wrong; We did not have anyone play test our game.  This could have helped us refine the controls a little more and ensure that the game idea was fun for other people.

What Went Right

We did a really good job of sticking with a simple game idea that would be easy to finish in the allotted time.  Having been in 3 previous 24 hr game jams, we were fortunate enough to have seen this first hand.

We managed scope creep very well.  There were several planned game features and graphical enhancements for our game.  The smart decision on our end was to get the game play working and then go back and add polish.  Had it not been for this, we could have easily became bogged down in trying to overload the game features.

The art turned out very well.  The models were mostly low poly with the details handled by the textures.  The textures themselves were part of a pack that we had purchased from Dex-soft.  They were purchased early this year in anticipation for a sci-fi game that we had in mind.

The sound and music selections worked well with the art and overall style of the game.  We used sfxr to generate the sounds for the game.   The sounds were randomly generated until it sounded right.  The music came from several music packs that we bought from Artieria.  Again these were bought in anticipation for another game.

Overall

It was a great experience and just getting a game done is more than enough reward.  I’m hoping that at least a few people enjoy the game, but even if you don’t be sure to give us some constructive feedback.  We might choose to continue working on the game idea … only time will tell.

[ Abigail's Descent | timelapse (youtube) ]

I admit I don’t really “get” the whole timelapse thing – it’s too fast to see anything that interesting. I had my webcam this time (although it stopped working on Sunday) since I was going to be LDing in a variety of cool locations (you’ll have to watch the video to find out where!). I put a big countdown clock on there too, sacrificing a good 30% of my screen real estate for the sake of this video. I still don’t think it’s that interesting!

Anyway, if anyone has any tips for making a better timelapse video, lay them on me!

I’ve finally managed to crunch 95 GB of images into a time-lapse for my game, Facilitated Escape. You can view at the link below:

Ludum Dare 21 Time-lapse

I have 200 downloads but no one commented on my game. Is it really bad or is something wrong with the comments:)

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=preview&uid=5426