When I saw the theme list on the final day of voting, I was rooting for one of the stealthy themes. They didn’t make it, but escape allowed me to work this idea I had for the past week into a game. I wanted to try and create a top-down game with true line of sight. The end result is Abstraball, a game with true line of sight, so I guess I succeeded with that. But it could’ve been so much better if I changed some things at the start.

Day 1

I did my usual routine for making an XNA game. Create a simple screen system, a world class, entities, and fix up drawing things. This time around I wanted to use polygons instead of using the spritebatch, and I wanted to make variable sized geometry rather than tiles. So I worked on that. The camera would be orthographic instead of perspective, and not being limited to square tiles would mean I could make simple big geometry for large portions, and resort to more complex (read: diagonal walls!) shapes when I wanted fancy things. After doing that, I worked on the shadow effect. First I made the area next to and behind you black. Then I added the effect on geometry. And that’s when I should’ve made a different decision. An orthographic view with ‘shadows’ like that is practically the same as a perspective view with pillars reaching to infinity, but without the texture support, and the without ability to easily prioritize what should be drawn. At first I didn’t realize that, but now I do, and I definitely would’ve done it differently if I had known at that point.

Anyway, I continued with that, thinking I could make it look better later on. I started working on the map. I had the ability to make any shape I want, to make any complex level I wanted. But I had no level editor, and placing things by hand was a pain. So I resorted to creating a bitmap, and importing/parsing that. So at this point I had fancy, unstructured polygons shaped as square tiles, without the benefits of a tile grid. That was mistake #2. I should’ve made it tiled, then I could index things more easily and efficiently, and also easily make a bit more diversity with other shaped walls. But I didn’t. Pathing the world was tiled, but they didn’t support each other. I also had to make some optimizations so unnecessary geometry wouldn’t be added.

Day 2

At this point I started to realize the mistakes I made during day 1. I lost some motivation, but kept on going anyway. I worked on the AI, and after a few hours I got a nice and robust AI system that got the job done very nicely. But again, I had optimization issues because of the way I built the world. So I had to cut on a few things to make it playable. Pathfinding was just bad, and occasionally it would take a second to calculate a path. Line of sight calculations were bad as well, and many other things were bad too. But I worked around most of them. Next to those things, I added the footstep sounds, and the positioning for it. So by now I sort of had a playable game. I named it abstraball because I knew I couldn’t fix the graphics, so maybe coining it as an abstract game would help.

With about 8 hours left I started talking to a friend. He playtested my game and gave a bunch of tips for features and gameplay changes. I added difficulty modes, tweaked the AI, added a compass, the energy bar, fixed a few glitches, added the plague bearer mode, and did some other minor things. He wants to be credited for being awesome, which he is, so his name is savooipeerd. With about 4 hours left I added a few final touches. I composed the music with iNudge in about 10 minutes, added keyboard configuration options, and started to playtest some more for balancing changes. I fixed a few annoyances, and with an hour or so left I was done.

Final thoughts

While I’m not that happy with my game (it could’ve been much better), I still greatly enjoyed creating and playing it. I feel my previous (and first) entry of LD20 is a lot better overall, but during the creation of this game I learned a lot of new things and tricks, which I am sure to use next time. I’m going to stay away from the spritebatch completely now, as I now have a relatively good understanding on how to work with primitives. For the next time I’m going to roll out my own engine/framework/toolset/whatever to prevent having to search for and redo basic things, and to do it right. The current code is such a mess, it’s just plain terrible. I broke so many best practices because of laziness, and while it’s part of LD, it still feels terrible for doing so.

In any case, I really enjoyed this LD and I’ll participate next time as well! I’m also going to attempt to do the october challenge as a motivator and deadline to finally do something with a project I’ve been working on and off for over the past year.

I just saw my game in the first picture of the LD article from Rock, Paper, Shotgun.

That I approve ^^

Also: ‘Dodge – DYLC’ ad in the indie(magazine); at http://indiefunction.com/issue11.php

So lets look at my batch of twenty entries to be judged. Ten decently cool and playable games, two that require me to download something in order to play, one that opens successfully then closes leaving a notepad file saying something like congratulations, one that works on google chrome but jams up on basically every other web browser, and one that only runs on a mac, and a few more that straight up don’t work.

I was going to be a cool guy and play games in order assigned to gain the monster cool points. But making me work harder to play your game is not going to cut it. Any additional work past downloading is getting me to skip over your game, period. I am tired of it.

My first post-mortem for my first finished game for my first LD (entry here). Those are all stand-alone firsts. I have never actually finished a game to a point where I post the .exe for others to play. It’s just never good enough for me (we’ve all heard that one before). Anyway, post-mortem:

Idea

Not much to say here really. My first thought was — who wants to escape the most? Well, trapped souls from the depths of hell, obviously. In retrospect, that being my first answer says something about me. I also knew I’m not doing a platformer. From then on, I just kept adding random ideas/features with a promise to not go back and redo stuff.

I think the idea/concept turned out fine (or at least we’ll see after ratings ^_^). I didn’t expect to come up with any groundbreaking ideas and I didn’t have all day to think of one either. I saw a few people bail out and rewrite their code, so I’m happy I managed to stick with mine. I also saw too many people going “need more levels”, “need more level ideas”, “I only have 524 levels, help!” One of the reasons why I did not go the platformer route.

Schedule

Day 1
10am (5h in) — wake-up
10am-5pm — code
5pm-6pm — break
6pm-8pm — code
8pm-9pm — blog post
9pm-1am — Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood

Day 2
10am — wake-up
10am-3pm — code
3pm-330pm — break
3:30pm-4:30pm — code
4:30pm-7pm — beach
7pm–12:30pm — code furiously
1am-1:30am — blog post, submit

That’s a total of 9h+11h=20h out of 48h. Sure, I could have spent more time coding. But if my overnight Uni reach-the-deadline coding sessions have taught me anything, it’s that I don’t like them.

Gameplay

I think I oversaturated the game with features, especially since they all are accessible at once (if not usable). I didn’t think it was possible to have too many features for a 48h game, but there you have it. I have a nice tutorial screen to introduce everything though:

Only now do I realize this, but there are 600 games and finishing every game is near impossible. You have to keep it simple, stupid! Who has the time to read all that verbal diarrhea? I foyu skip the “help” button, you have no idea what you are doing. That said, there is nothing bad with complexity, in fact many games are known and praised for it. But you have to take it step by step. Introduce gameplay elements as the player progresses and plays, not throw everything at them at once. I think this may have be my biggest design flaw (besides lack of music). But then again, an in-game interactive tutorial in 48h? Moving on…

“Art”

Let my art speak for itself! (more likely growl out “kiiill meee”) Here’s the entire sprite-sheet:

I’m not an artist, I’m a programmer. All my units are either static of flying, so my “move” animation is 1 frame One thing I did wrong is make all the terrain colors too dark. Units and props stand out OK, but the terrain itself has too little contrast, and it really shows in screenshots. My Holy Light could have been more impressive too. I wanted a magnificent beam of shiny and awesome, but all I got is this lousy flashlight.

Audio

I’ve done very little with sound and games, so this wasn’t my strong side. I did decide to try out sfxr, which was a super-easy and quick way to produce relatively awesome sound effects. Ended up with 8 different sound effects. Obviously, I have no music and I couldn’t make any myself anyway. I’ve played around with Fruity Loops or whatnot in my day, and concluded I have no musical hearing. Not that my music teacher hadn’t made that perfectly clear back in grade 3.

Dirty code

Spaghetti code! Argh, my eyes! Not a single useful comment, dirty inefficient hacks, integers instead of constants or enums, … That’s K.I.S.S. and time limit for you! *shudders* I don’t think I could go on working with this code much longer. Then again, I’ve seen much worse too.

What I do appreciate in my coding style is the object-oriented design. Even with the number of classes spanning into second dozen, I didn’t get any game-breaking bugs that were more than careless copy-pasting.

In conclusion

Can’t say anything went terribly wrong. I probably would not have done much better with any other themes anyway. I could have spent more time coding/drawing, but then I would just exhaust myself beyond “fun”. I’m proud of myself for sticking with this till the end, even if my first thought was “Escape? What bollocks!”.

I love C#, XNA, and ReSharper and the speed at which I can chunk out code/features. I also know how many raters I’m losing by not having a “Web” play link. It would’ve been better if I had a Flash or Unity or something entry. But then I would have had to learn it first

Ludum Dare has been great so far, I love the community activity, and I can’t wait for the super-secret-October-make-a-buck type challenge.

Just barely made it. The best part is how I forgot a screenshot, and almost missed the deadline.

I made it in about two hours, so it is pretty decent considering it’s coming from me. The linux port is giving me a small difficulty, but I’ll try to have it uploaded within the next couple of hours. I wanted to make this post after the port was complete, but oh well.

Technically, you could say this is my first completed game. =)
The code is a bit mangled, but meh, I was rushing.

2 hours of non-stop soda and facepalms. Worth it.

Hopefully my game isn’t so crappy as to be rated the worst game ever created, but at least I submitted something. If you wanna check it out, here you go!

I have to give my thanks to BlackBird for the idea. I’d also like to thank N0_Named_Guy for a bit of help with the linux port. It’s just about done thanks to him.

All in all, this was a great LD, and I’m seeing a lot of amazing entries. Good job everyone. Keep up the good work!

48 hours of fiddling with GLUT and GLEW while building my new workstation.  In fact, I just finished setting up sound on my workstation this morning!  And I just got the details worked out for building a couple binaries.  You can now download a 32-bit Windows binary and an x86-64 Linux binary here.

For anything else, you’re welcome to grab the source and try building it.  Heck, feel free to contact me if you are trying to build it for anything else.  Whether or not you encounter any problems, I’d like to know!

HOORAY for Ludum Dare!  I’ve been watching my friends do Ludum Dare compos for several years now, but as a dude with a family it’s been hard to commit to spending 48 hours of weekend time on a game.  But last Friday, after putting the kids to bed, I sat at my PC, bored, and thought “Hmm… Escape, huh?”

Before I knew it, I’d started sketching out some ideas and downloading Flixel.  I knew right away that I should definitely NOT attempt a game that took 48 hours of time to complete, because there was no way I’d actually be able to spend 48 hours working.  I quickly latched onto the basic idea that rather than the player himself escaping, the objective would be to help some other things on the screen escape… by hurling them through the exits.

Check out and rate the finished game! It’s only 8 levels – try to beat my time

My buddies skelethulu and ExciteMike pointed me to excellent resources like Tiled and BFXR as the weekend went on, and I was able to spend a good 12 hours or so between Friday night, Saturday night, and naptime on Saturday and Sunday.  I actually “finished” the game mid-afternoon on Sunday, then ended up adding Mochi leaderboards and a couple of extra levels before submitting since I had to wait for my LD-n00b WP registration to go through anyway.

What Went Right:

• I chose the correct scope!  I’m super-happy that I kept my goals modest and was able to do something that, though it’s not sprawling or super-ambitious, is still a “finished” game, and in only 12 or so hours. I think I made some wise (though painful) priority choices along the way.
• FLIXEL is fantastic.  I went in knowing nothing about it, but with the help of a few great tutorials out there, I quickly had basic platforming, pickups, dino-hurling etc. I was pretty astonished at how fast the basics came together in Flixel.
• Tiled is also fantastic.  With a few hints from skelethulu, I was able to have my levels completely data-driven, loading TMX files from Tiled for the map itself as well as all the game objects, triggers to show and hide text, etc. Making new levels was so trivial and fun with Tiled!
• The pixel art ain’t bad! I did it all by hand in Paint.NET and I think it fits together for a nice consistent look. Sadly I think this is about my limit pixel-art-wise, though.
• It really amuses me that I didn’t implement player death. If you fall out of the level, you are just unable to help those poor dinos any more, which means you’d better reset the level! Meanwhile the timer up there just keeps running…

Unfortunately I only just joined up after the competition finished. But I’m very eager to participate in the next Ludum Dare
So watch this space.

Timelapse video

Ludum Dare 21 – Coin Runner – Timelapse

Here are updated versions of the wallpapers I made earlier, now including the jam games!

This is getting ridiculous!

DOWNLOAD

First time writing a post mortem. Woohoo.
Before we start, have some pigs.
Times are noted from the start of LD. That means 0:00 would be 4am in my timezone, and 24:00 is 4am the next day.

~ PHASE 1 – THE IDEA ~
I woke up at 5:00 – 2 hours later than planned. What I thought to do is to look up the theme, then take a walk, play some games, relax a bit while thinking of ideas.
Sadly I had to go at 5:15 so everything was in a massive hurry. I managed to get my idea at 5:30 during a car drive – I arrived at 5:35, and finished the sketch at 5:45. So while I was not relaxed at all, I was able to come up with a nice idea.
What went right: Got my idea quickly…
What went wrong: …while being stressed as hell

~ PHASE 2 – THE CODE ~
5:50. I jumped on the closest PC, got Dropbox and grabbed all my stuff. I jumped instantly into it. It all went very well, though I encountered some really wierd glitches. (I should have saved them to showcase them here. Just imagine the ball goes apeshit and that’s about it)
The biggest timewaster happened to me at about 15:00. This is when I started to work on the lava.
Originally, I wanted to make the Lava Minecraft style, expanding block by block, getting quicker with every km (sidenote: km should actually be screens. Every screen is 1 km) you pass.

Dramatization. A death by lava is not that painful. After all, it's pretty quick and your brain is fried pretty early.

Sadly, for some reason, the collision code decided to be evil. The first time the lava source was created, every single tile would think it collides with something, even when it doesn’t – resulting in no spread at all.
The second time the source is created every tile would think it does not collide, resulting in lava flodding into the walls, and massive lag since it wouldn’t check if there is lava already.
At 19:00 I decided to screw it. I made an enourmous picture of lava, almost increasing the filesize 3-fold. It’s an ugly workaround, but it works.
Finally, I have finished the basic gameplay one minute before german midnight – 19:59.
What went right: Most stuff was pretty easy to code…
What went wrong: …and then there was lava

~ PHASE 3a: IMPROVING ~
The next morning, 27:00… switching on my computer. Checking the code.
What happened was the same thing that happened the last two times I participated at the LD:
“*stare* what the fuck did I write? I should use comments next time.”
First thing I did was implement scoring. For that I just counted how many screens you went right, how many you went down, and -pow- done. Then there were two nightmares at once.

~ PHASE 4: MUSIC ~
After the crimes against humanity which I call music in my previous two entires (#19, #20) it was easy to understand I tried my best. Sadly, I had to leave Ubuntu for it and boot into NightmareOS. You might know it under the name of “Windows Vista”. First thing I noticed is that the internet connection didn’t work again. My WLAN stick only works in one of ten cases when starting Vista, needing about 1 hour of fixing every time I want to play something on Steam. I didn’t have the time, so I just started pxtone and planned to save it on my disk instead of Dropboxm then copy it over.
Now, I was in pxtone and started throwing some note bars here and there. The result should never be mentioned again.
I spent half an hour just doing random stuff until I hit the effect window and heard a sound. THE sound. It was exactly the sound I wanted to do in sfxr later. Then then idea hit me like a train. After (ab)using pxtone to make my sounds, I left Windows behind, went into Ubuntu Studio where I used Hydrogen to make two drum loops, one fading in when you get closer to the lava. Huge success!
What went right: Everything!
What went wrong: Nothing! (except having to boot into Windows)

~ PHASE 3b: IMPROVING ~
Back into Ubuntu, I smacked the sound files into my project. It sounded wonderful.Next thing to do was more obstacles, as it was pretty repetitive. After looking at my code for obstacle generation, I knew this would be hell. Thus, I made a level editor. It is included in my source archive, already compiled, in the subfolder “editor”. It’s a bit hard to use though, as the black walls are hardcoded and there are no buttons. D/Right resets everything, S/Down removes blue walls under your cursor and A/Left will put the code into your clipboard to paste it into the game code.

Dramatization. The game is not as friendly as this screenshot suggests. It will eat you alive.

The last things I did was adding online highscore, adding a texture to the lava and a bit of a backdrop. Then I submitted that thing. Done!
What went right: Level Editor! Online Highscores! Had tons of time left after all that was done…
What went wrong: …but wasted it playing Hatsune Miku Project DIVA on my PSP. derp.

~ PHASE 5: POST-COMPO ~
I was flattered by the feedback. “Oooh this is a nice game! Sounds, music and everything!” – “Amazing, just amazing.” – “The most fun LD game I’ve tried so far.” First thing I did that morning was celebrate that occasion. By playing some more PSP. Then I went back to coding.
After the compo, it didn’t change much things. I added a glow to the lava, a preloader, and fixed a GFX glitch with the motion blur. Then I submitted the game to Newgrounds, where it had a “GREAT” entry rank and has a current score of 3.33. Weee!

And that concludes my tale of my third Ludum Dare, and I hope I will get even better by next time!
Although honestly, you know what makes everything better? Bacon. (I bet you thought I was going to say “taco”.)

This post has just been made better with bacon.

Thank you for reading!

Here are a few minutes of gameplay of my compo game “elastic prison”. I think the compo went quite well for me. Considering this is my first time here and that I haven’t really finished a game in a loong time.

Go to the entry page to download it.
I’ll post my time-lapse later today. And maybe a complete playthrough sometime this week, because I like the ending.

ELL DEE TWENTY ONE LET ME HEAR YOU SAY UWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

This was my first LD proper since LD15 (which had a baker’s dozen entries (144)).  I love love love Ludum Dare as an event (it feels like THE WHOLE WORLD is building and learning and having fun together), and I’m pleasantly shocked to see 4x as many submissions just two years since my last one.  I promise to not let two years pass again my next one! I’ve always been building small games, but my spare time for a FULL WEEKEND of something has been so limited that it’s been challenging to get my Compo Wind back.  BUT HERE I AM!  Despite having a new baby in the house (my second kid), I was able to carve enough of a weekend away that I got a completed game done ON TIME WOOOOOOOYAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHhhhwwwmmm.

I had an absolute blast building this little thing (here’s a link to rate it, bros!)

So v1 of my game was done at like 6pm EST on Sunday, 4 hours before the deadline, and I was shocked.  I actually got to submit before the site exploded!  Here’s my somewhat standard Post-Mortem-formatted Thingie!

What Went Right

• FLIXELLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL is always fantastic to use.  I was there when @adamatomic put out the first release, and I’ve kept up with it since the beginning.  The version I use now is an ever so slightly modified version of 2.4.3 as well as the FlxBitmapFont add-on.  I had just used Flixel for something quick a few months ago when I quit my job at EA, and although I now use Push Button Engine on a daily basis for my Make Money Doing Things part of the day, I had to go back to my old friend.
• MUSIC / GARAGEBAND YEAH!  Part of my responsibilities at my new job include composing music, and it’s been great to keep that part of my life alive (a long, long time ago, I started college as a classical saxophone major).  I use logic for work, but I don’t have that at home so I booted up another tool that I’ve loved since v1.  I have a simple MIDI keyboard hooked up that I’ve used for years, and man nothing relaxes me more than getting to lay down some melodies.  I wanted the music in this game to be kind of sad, and kind of melancholy like the ticking of a clock (there’s a line in the dialogue that says “You’re only getting older.” and I really wanted to have that feeling of climbing some monotonous, mechanical wasteland).
• Tiled: simply the best map editor around.  For making maps in flixel I’ve used DAME in the past, and FLAN before it (I own a FLAN license!), but I really love the file-format for Tiled.  Even if as an editor it’s not as good as DAME for sidescrollers, I have to use it on a daily basis for building isometric maps (again at the Make Money Place) and I’ve grown super-used to it.  If you want to figure out how to load a Tiled map in flixel, there’s a really good example out there.
• I liked the story of the game, and I liked the setting, mood, and dialogue.  However…

Hey there guys! I am just offering help to package games on Linux. I know some people are having issues on compiling and distributing their binaries for Linux, so if you are in that group, leave a comment =)

So far, I’ve ported this game:
The Power of Escape – Rate Link

I hope I can help some of you!

Hi all,

My entry

I just realized that the characters in my game are not centered when playing the game in a notebook with integrated GPU. The issue was that textures dimensions are not power of 2.

Here you can see the main character looks small and “uncentered”

I changed the texures dimension in this new version. So if you experiment the graphic issue please try the new version. I didn’t add anything just change the texture dimensions

Fixed version

The fix

Please don’t consider this for the compo, of course.

Best luck

JF

Seriously, my top tips? Nothing about sleep, organising your time or what to eat. I’m not going to talk about thinking out your idea before going into it headlong. I have two tips that will help IMMENSELY :

- KNOW your software, now is not the time to try out a new IDE or use a language you don’t know very well, and make sure you can and HAVE compiled stuff with this software that WORKS. Trying to understand the quirks of VS2010 isn’t what you want to be spending time on.

- KISS : Keep It Simple Stupid. And I don’t just mean the concept. In general in OOP it’s a good idea to make classes for each concept, but here you need speed. Just make a BIG mainloop with ALL your code in it, and make classes for the few things that REALLY need them. Remember, simple doesn’t mean elegant. Simple means an O(n²) algorithm is better than an O(n) if it means you get the job DONE.

To be honest, the game I put out has the gameplay I originally imagined when I started pondering the theme. So in that respect, I succeeded in building the idea that I wanted. But I didn’t respect the two previous points, so my game is SEVERELY lacking in aesthetics, and features.

I usually code in Linux, with gedit or Eclipse, in C++, and I’ve done some SFML stuff. And since I was making my game in SFML/C++ I didn’t think coding on a Windows machine with VS2010 would hurt. Turns out it does. First, SFML hasn’t been compiled for VS2010 yet, so you have to build it from source WITH VS2010. But that means knowing how VS2010 works IN THE FIRST PLACE. I could have done it, given the time to consult a few forums and manuals, but time wasn’t available.

Another mistake I made was that I made classes for everything, the was a state manager, an assets manager, a game loop manager, a class for monsters, a class for turrets and a class for the world, a class for tiles that compose the world, and I think that’s it.

Now given more time, this is a great idea : OOP allows for amazing flexibilty and extensibility if you structure your code nicely.  My original design would have allowed easy creation of new monster types, turret types and tiles. It would allow quick and easy mainenance of code, and since only the asset manager had access to SFML, it would be a cakewalk to port to a different graphics engine.

While all these features are nice, it quickly devolved into spaghetti code as I tried to beat the clock with an ever more complex code, sleep deprivation and panic started to settle in by the next day and I no longer understood my own code, and even switching to my trusty linux netbook that I’ve been using to learn coding for the past year didn’t help. My code was a beautifully designed mess.

I eventually bailed and posted an “I’m Out” blog, sat down and gave up.

But then I came to, realised that I COULD do this, and with less than 20 hours to spare, sat down and did it right.

The new code is a messily designed beauty, there’s a huge, unwieldy main loop with monster spawning, monster update calling, turret spawning turret update calling, points counting, credits counting, event handling all bundled up in a big mess. There is a class for monsters and a class for the turrets, and they contail their own rendering code. I do everything WHERE I NEED IT.

But the end result was that I made a game in 14 hours whereas I totally failed to do anything in the 20 or so before.

I’m going to learn VS2010 now, it seems to me like an interesting IDE, and there’s some stuff I’d like to use, and I’d like to develop for WIndows, but I’m going to do it now that I’m out of a time-limited mess. Expect my next LD to have a lot more content, and work better on Windows (My Windows build still fails on some machines, and I have no idea why, if you have SFML1.6 for Windows, please help me compile a version that will work for everyone : http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=preview&uid=1561 )

I keep seeing posts or chat entries that say things like “I used the extended submission time (12 hours) to add XYZ to my game”.

Is that valid? I know the competition is a bit laid back, so I’m not too worried about it, but does this bother anybody else?

I’m kind of kicking myself, because I purposely stopped a couple hours before submission time to make sure I had everything deployed correctly, which meant that I had to stop myself from fixing a few bugs, one of which occasionally freezes my game. If I had also used the extended submission time, I’d be a lot more confident that everything in my game worked. But I didn’t want to abuse the extended submission time.

Oh well, I guess I’m just ranting and wondering if anybody else feels the same way. I still had fun, so I’m not getting too worked up over it, but it does seem a bit unfair. Oh well!

Phew, now that this crazy 48+something marathon is over, I finally got the time to think about it without having to worry about the deadline.

It’s time to ramble! ^^

(more…)

You can find a decent post mortem for my game here.