I picked up 3 more games that stand out for me!

And my list of favorite games grows! I have seen about 30 games, picked out 6, around 690 still to go!

Anyways, Copy Killer form PerilousPete is the best game so far, amazing gameplay and usage of the theme!

While preparing for the Ludum Dare, I had to get acquainted with the engine I would use, libGDX, so I made a test game that I also used for a school project and I just put it up for the Android Market! Check it out if you have an Android Phone!

QR Code for the link of my game!

Do you think I should also put my entry of Ludum Dare in the Android Market? Or is it too simple and rough?

Happy rating for you all!

I’ve made a (post-comp) build. It’s at least 50% more fun and 33% less confusing.

There’s combo multipliers and a win condition and also you can burn crew members when your engines slow down.

Also you can now pickup space kittens as you fly past to help you staff your spaceship.

Here is the latest version:
SUPER SMASH LANDER SUICIDE PARTY, BRO? (ENHANCED)

(of course the Ludum Dare 48 hour version is still here:
Ludum Dare #22 Competition Entry)

If you’re reading this, you really should just play through the game yourself, but in case you don’t want to, or can’t (looking at you OSX users, sorry!), here’s a video of me doing a playthrough myself:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6WRB7Vl3dE

With LD22 – my first Ludum Dare – over and me having caught up on sleep, I’ve had some time to reflect on how it’s gone. Personally I consider this weekend both a success and a failure in different ways.

It’s a success in that I have proven to myself that I can create something at least playable within 48 hours – the reason I signed up in the first place. I’ve also managed to learn a new toolset.

It’s a failure in that the design is pretty crude and the end result isn’t nearly as “finished” as I would have liked it to be. This is due to various issues, some of which popped up very late in the compo.

Nonetheless I’ve submitted the last build, for the sake of honesty. This is what I could manage in the time given with the self-imposed restriction of using new tools rather than familiar ones. I’ll get better. I’m still not sure if it’s in a state I should have submitted it in, but it’s a bit late to change my mind now.

(more…)

Here’s my timelapse :

The last geek : Timelapse

I added a bit of gameplay to make it less boring.

Once again, I am willing to rate your games.

But there is a few small caveats:

• I am terrible at 3D games.  They give me vertigo
• I hate platformers.  I hate jumping, I am no good at it.

I can run Windows, Mac, and Linux.  I am partial to story games and sims.

Susan

Here a video Trailer for our entry.

 
Four Friends Trailer
 

Just a quick note for those of you wanting to play/rate my game: I’ve now added http:// links before the URLs in my entry, so you should now be able to launch the Web version and grab the source. Thanks to the people who pointed this out in the comments!

The entry: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=preview&uid=6526

Thats LD 22! I had fun, I hope everyone else did too!

Like everyone else:

Highlights:

Code, I wrote good code, I had very few bugs or issues that I could not fix quickly and with elegence.

Music, I know people who play my game will go “What Music? You have like 4 note looping!” but in comparision to my last LD entry, which had only silence, the melody included is quite good I think

Game idea, My idea was good I feel! The game play support the story which supported the theme. A lowlight was my implemention of that tho

Lowlights:

Gamplay, the game it’s self is not fun, it short and its confusing. An absolute fail there. I focused on the gameplay funtional rather then making a game that people would want to play.

Art, I can’t draw, some day I will accept this, till that day i will continue to try and fail.

You can play Teddies here

Bring on LD23!

well, let’s do this thing then, shall we

i’m using the ld22 postmortem survey for tips on what to actually say here, since it’s my first ever postmortem, so let’s go

right off the bat, we’re faced with physics… there are some significant bugs related to that, i THINK that’s mostly caused by a too high framerate though, over 100-ish you can move so fast you can run through walls, and when you respawn at a checkpoint you might lag out(because it reloads the map as it was when you saved to the point you fall through the ground, i think that’s caused by my using millisecond timing(which can end up being 0) and adding 1 to it because i screwed up the way i used this at first(i was doing position += velocity/dTime instead of velocity * dTime, so i got exceptions when dTime was 0), also you can run up an N-tile high wall if you’re fast enough, because the “escape” direction is always up, instead of “wherever there’s free space”, because i didn’t know how to figure out where that would be

there are also a number of known bugs in the game, mostly related to the fact that the cellular automaton i use does not run off-screen, so it might get into a 3-cycle loop somewhere if you, for example have this section where, H is an electron head, and T is an electron tail, and W is a wire
HT
H
after which the top 2 cells run for another generation, but the bottom cell doesn’t, resulting in this state:
TW
H
which is a 3-cycle loop with these other states:
WH
T
and
HT
W

coming up with the idea wasn’t too hard, i already had the platformer + CA idea in my head, before the compo even started

because a 3-cycle loop basically kills any circuit, because 3-cycle pulses are faster even than the fastest transformer possible in the game can handle, in retrospect i should’ve provided a timeout for cells(a very slow update cycle that runs one line at a time when outside the regular simulation that basically tells all tiles to reset to their defaults

i didn’t REALLY use prototype artwork, however if you watch my timelapse, you’ll see that at the start i wanted to use a more human-like character, which i soon after basic testing discarded because it would take me too much work to animate

i always try to pay attention to details, and in this case, i am glad that seemed to work out okay for me, even if level design may have suffered from it

i did get a chance to create some sound effects and BGM which i think are pretty awesome and fitting for this game *even if the art style doesn’t reflect the mood i was trying to set as well as i might have hoped*

and for me, this weekend was a blast,  i had a lot of fun making the game, and it’s really awesome to watch your own timelapse, and see the game coming together at high speed

i have not watched TV/movies, but i have had youtube on with some of my series, but i kept working on my main screen while the video’s were on my sub screen, so that worked out pretty much okay in my opinion

regarding the theme, it surprises me people had so much trouble with the theme, i quite like it, but only really show how it’s incorporated in the game at the end, and of course, at the very beginning if you know what the name is derived from, i only came up with the name during the beginning of the level design, and i might as well explain what my pre-LD far-fetched idea for the storyline was, might be cool to share

you would start off in an area with an infinite amount of wire blocks of all kinds to use, and  a computerized voice recording would give you an introduction, and tell you that you were on starship YANA, and that you should follow it’s instructions, a little while later, you would exit through a door, and it would basically signify the end of the tutorial area, and lock off in some way, from that point onward you would be severely limited in how many wire blocks you could use, yet you would have to get through a number of puzzles, i had even imagined a kind of layered effect, where you’d have different layers to play in, travelling between layers by doors, and being able to see deeper layers through some kind of parallax effect, and even having wire travel through layers to make even more complex puzzles, in the end you would reach some kind of end room, and perhaps face off against an enemy, the only enemy in the game, and after beating him, in the credits, you would hear the true meaning of the starship’s name
Y ou
A re
N ot
A lone
sadly most of that got scrapped because of level design fails, and it ended up being a rather sandbox-style platformer

my game WOULD run in a browser, and i almost made a version that does run in a browser, kind of, but because i use several external files, this doesn’t really work all too well it would seem, i might try to see if i can have the editor work with files that are in the package itself, and allow the game to work properly in a browser, but as of right now, it doesn’t

like i mentioned earlier i am not satisfied with level design at all… i would’ve wanted this to be way more complex, and way more difficult than it is now, a fair part of this was caused by my screwing up with regards to actually saving my work…

i was pretty satisfied with my working area, dual monitors are always a win, and i tried to keep it kind of clutter-free so i could work properly and comfortably

again as mentioned, some features were left out, either because i had found an alternative, or just because i didn’t think it would be very useful, or that because they might cause a lot of unnecessary extra work, or just because i didn’t like them, another feature i might have wanted to add, but didn’t, was an ikaruga-style shmup-esque defense system, this might have increased the difficulty significantly, but i would’ve had to add pickups as well, but i might in a final release version of this game

i don’t know ANY time management techniques, so i just went and did what i had to do

i spent some time on IRC / msn / tweetdeck, but i’m not sure that’s “real world socialisation”, apart from that, i don’t think i benefited from it

i did drink a lot of coffee / energy drink, and ate mostly kind of junk food, but that didn’t seem to result in decreased desire to just keep working or fatigue
i also drank *a* beer, which had no notable effect AFAIK, i also went outside pretty regularly to smoke and get some fresh air *about 10-15 minutes every 2-3 hours*
i didn’t sleep much either, i started saturday at 6:30 ish, 3:30 hours after the compo started, and in between slept for only 3:30 hours, between 05:15 and 08:30-08:45 on sunday, and then kept working until i uploaded my entry at around 02:30, 30 minutes before the working deadline

i HOPE the time i’ve spent on the help screen/tutorials are enough to make the game playable, without forcing you to go through things that slow down gameplay

because of what happened with level design going badly, i feel the game can be completed too easily, however the glitch with the escape direction can get annoying and make the game more difficult to complete

i spent a good segment of time on code, but i feel most of the code/graphics/audio work were finished, so i’m okay with that

the GUI could have been better, of course, but apart from the block selector’s background being a bit plain, i think it’s pretty much okay

controls should be slightly tuned to be slower, but i am actually happy with it, and i think the fact that you slide very far pretty much matches the player’s graphics

i’m happy with how the sound/audio turned out, and even with the artwork, so i think, apart from level design being slightly lacking, i “finished” my game pretty much,

and i wouldn’t hesitate to join the next LD48 if i get the chance

We finished Sanity last night with literally minutes left on the clock. I’m not sure if it’s shown up on the Ludum Dare website yet but you can play it here: http://sandbox.yoyogames.com/games/191217-sanity

http://www.kongregate.com/games/alec_larsen/i-am-alone

I Am Alone is up on Kongregate. Go play this survival shooter

Whew, my jam entry is complete and uploaded! (I got it in 20 seconds before the time ran out, heh)

My idea for my game was that you are gravity flipping forest creature (which we call the ‘Gravity Cat Thing’, or ‘Mike’), which wants to be alone. Unfortunately, Evil Dr Cuddles wants to give Mike love and attention, so Mike runs and gravity flips away! Gameplay wise, the game was supposed to be a cross between Canabalt and VVVVVV, with bosses thrown in for good measure.

During the first 2 and a half days of the jam, I chugged along with the coding rather slowly (I couldn’t get into those ‘zone’ moments, y’know?), maybe because I was unfamiliar with Flixel as I’d picked it up only a day or two before the start. The game was originally supposed to involve jumping over gaps in the floor, and you were also supposed to be able to run up walls as well. The levels were also randomly generated. But I couldn’t work out how to get the level to constantly generate new content without heavy stuttering every couple of seconds. Generating the content was fine, but Flixel would take a long time putting the content into a tilemap. And to top it off the code was a horrible mess because I was rushing and everything was getting more and more difficult. I did get a boss done though

So then it got to 2:30pm (GMT) on the last day of the jam, with less than 12 hours to go, and I got so frustrated with the whole thing that I decided to start again, but instead of having holes in the floor just have obstacles that are randomly thrown in front of you. After each themed ‘stage’ you’re faced with a boss and then you go to the next one. Once you get through all four you’re thrown back into the first again, and the cycle continues. This time, there character is stationary and objects fly towards you rather than the other way round, which meant the tilemap could just be a static block above and below you. I recycled the old boss and added another boss which was basically a rehash of the first but it shot different bullets (I really didn’t have time to do anything different!).

Here’s a screenshot of the new version, in the forest stage:

As you can see, there’s polishing that needs to be done that I just didn’t have time for. I also need to balance the difficulty (it’s quite hard at the moment), make obstacles easier to see, and also add the other bosses (there were supposed to be four, at the moment there’s two. The other bosses have been drawn, they just need coding). I also want to add a feature that was in the old version where there are rings/hoops scattered about, and if you jump through them you get bonus points. I’ll be making an enhanced post-LD version for sure.

Also a big thanks to Ben for doing an amazing job with the art. There’s still a lot of it that didn’t make it into this version of the game, and I’m really grateful for what he’s done. He also did the music for the game. If you want to hear more of his music, check out his SoundCloud page: http://soundcloud.com/dosage

Oh yeah, and here’s a link to the game:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=rate&uid=4920

I’d really, really appreciate any comments, criticisms, and ideas!

Well, that’s my first ever Ludum Dare over and done with! Cannot describe how much fun I’ve had, it’s definitely cemented my love of game design/development. Will probably enter into as many future LDs and mini-LDs as I can handle without completely failing college, because if anything is good practice for game design, it’s being constrained to 48 hours. You can find my game here.

What went well:

My art assets were pretty much finished by the first hour of the competition, which meant I didn’t have to use placeholders, which I hate with a passion

My level creation code, although messy, is pretty versatile and meant I could make some fairly interesting puzzles, although more on that later

Once I’d finally got my collision detection code working, I had absolutely no problems with it. It was very simple, which meant it was very, very difficult to break

The overall game, I found, was very fun, even if it was rather difficult and short

What didn’t

The collision detection code. Jesus, when it worked it worked beautifully, but before then it was a major headache that cost me somewhere in the area of 5-6 hours. At least now I know how to do it.

The levels were very simplistic, with only 3 unique puzzles spread across 4 (non-tutorial/boss) levels. Even though the puzzles were not necessarily easy, the very, very basic level editor meant that it was hard to visualise more complex puzzles, especially as this is my first puzzle game.

LWJGL is a harsh mistress. I used a .bat stating the location of the native library for my original submission, but after almost a day of tweaking I managed to make it find the library when you run the .jar verbatim.

In my next game, which I’ve already decided on, I will use an xml-or-similar-based level file, to allow for easier scripting of levers and such, and a graphical level editor for easier visualisation.

Well, that’s that. When all’s said and done, my game’s development went rather smoothly, and I hope yours did too. Now go play 800-odd indie games, you’ve deserved them.

Step 1: Create a blank array of cells, each 9*9 tiles. This example uses 5*5 cells.

Step 2: Scatter points around randomly for the player, block, and kiln to spawn. Add an extra ‘dummy’ point for taste. Mark each of the cells these points are in ‘visited’.

Step 3: Draw lines from the player point to the block point, and the block point to the dummy point and kiln point. Mark each of the cells these paths touch as ‘visited’.

Step 4: Carve out the ‘visited’ cells into empty rooms. Note down exits to each room.

Step 5: Check the available exits in each room. Choose one configuration at random from five possible configurations for that exit configuration (75 room types total). Place these rooms into the correct cells.

Step 6: Output all these to a tilemap and you’re done!
(Excuse the tiny image size. One pixel = one tile.)

Due to time constraints, I’ve planned to limit my LD participation time to 4 hours, but eventually I’ve tinkered with the game for roughly 6 hours (not counting the planning phase).

Let’s timelapse, for enjoy!

Even though it was short a didn’t attend to IRC much, I’ve enjoyed this LD and I’d love to try some of the miniLDs in the future!

Animals are sad and alone, hook them up with some friends to create an epic friendship club!

We did not manage to finish our vampire platform game in time for the Jam, but we like the idea and have some nice art assets, so we’ll continue working on it over the holidays.

What went well

• We created a lot of art assets that we really like
• We came up with a cute game idea (vampire boy searching for teddybears in scary vampire castle), despite the challenging theme
• We even created some sound effects, although they are not in the game yet

What did not go so well

• Map creation and tile engine – we initially used Tiled for map editing, but had problems with implementing game physics on the loaded map data  (some of our tiles are large (256*256), while others are smaller, which caused headaches).  Eventually we wrote a tile engine and game physics from scratch, with some map generation code, but by then there was not enough time to finish the game.
• Not enough time to actually get to implementing the game logic..

What we will do differently next time

• Use an existing tile engine, or write basecode for one before the competition starts.  There is enough work in game-specific code, no point in re-writing tile engines for each competition.
• Map creation in Tiled was straightforward, but time-consuming.  We are trying out programmatic map generation from python now.
• Get a simple playable game asap, afterwards add more features and graphics.

Finally, a part of a room in the big scary vampire castle:

If you haven’t yet here is my JAM game for you now consideration
{DUNGEON DAN}

Mandatory Screenshot

What went well:  

• Making the “engine”. Most of it was just remaking my old LD16 but better, so there weren’t very many problems there. But my Makeshift FoV/LoS did cause some problems. I originally was checking if there was a wall to the right of the character, then tiles to the right of the character would be black. The problem here is that if there’s a hallway to the right of you but it ends, you’d still see past that wall at the end of the hallway. So I eventually ended up having to learn how GameMaker’s Collision_Line function works without internet access. Which was actually a ton of fun, and got the job done.
• Art and Music went swimmingly. As usual I managed to produce adequate graphics in a low amount of time, basically going along with my “draw shit and then decide what it does in the game later” strategy. And I spent the last hour of the Jam making the audio for the game. Which turned out really nice too IMHO. I used DrPetter’s {Musagi} for the main theme and {Bfxr} for the three(3) sound effects. I also put the main theme on soundcloud if anyone is interested: http://soundcloud.com/mortar-1/dungeon-dan-main-theme
  

  Making a theme song

• Overall I just had a ton of fun and I’m super happy with the end result

What went not so well:

• TIME TIME TIME, TIME IS OF THE ESSENCE. I was off skiing  friday/saturday/sunday so that forced me into the jam with little time to work on it. Thus I only have one level in the game. But I’m fine with that. It might have been cool to explore the puzzle possibilities better but I’m content with what I got. I also didn’t have time for menus, win screens, help, etc. though the controls are simple enough to not really need instructions.

What went right:

- The Food & Drink:

Prepared enough food for myself for the weekend, made sure the house was stocked up with enough to eat and drink in case I became bored of consuming that. Only drank 4 energy drinks over the weekend, and avoided coffee and alcohol.

- The Idea:

I came up with an idea pretty quickly, and stayed focused on it until I had a working game mechanic. This took a total of 9 hours with 1 good break in the middle.

- The Graphics:

Decided right away that I’d be hand drawing all my graphics. For this I used a graphics tablet, and was the best decision I made yet. Initially planned to make a 3D game, went ahead and made a 2D prototype, but had more than enough time to turn it into a 3D game during the second day and did!

- The Engine:

This is the 3rd LD I’ve used my own engine, I was going to be doing it in C# with a port of my engine initially, but decided against this as I’ve fixed a lot of bugs over the last year and it would be throwing away productivity if I didn’t take advantage of this.

What went wrong:

- The Sound & Music:

Completely uninspired musically and don’t have the greatest library of synths, and not totally familiar with the tools I chose to use. Sound wise I didn’t produce much. The sounds I created were quickly made with Audacity recording with a microphone and filtering.

- The Submission:

Thanks to a recent update I made to my engine to do multithreaded rendering, and only testing on single/dual core machines, I missed a critical bug in my job system which prevented it from working on a machine with more than 2 cores. It’s been fixed now, but it’s something I should have tested before hand.

- The Development “Hardware”:

To make sure the game worked for most others, I developed the game in Windows XP…inside Virtual Box…in OSX. This was a nightmare as the GL window will block Visual Studio when hitting a breakpoint, causing several headaches…not to mention that GL is slow inside a VM (could be considered an advantage performance wise since it’ll run smoothly on almost any machines). Next time I will be using a hard machine, hopefully with Windows 7 installed, and do compatibility testing inside a VM & on other machines.

- The Sleep & Night Before:

The day before LD it was my companies xmas party, which meant I drank a lot, and got very little sleep before LD. This turned out not to be so bad as the adrenaline of LD hit me hard! Saturday night (well…Sunday morning) I scraped 5 hours sleep before the second day. Didn’t sleep Sunday night and continued to work, but got there eventually. Monday was taken off work as a means of catching up on sleep, but sleeping through the Monday messed up the sleep that night, causing me to remain tired on the Tuesday. Could be worse, thought I managed it fine, but not so much as I would have liked.

Before next Ludum Dare:

- Ensure I’m familiar with all my tools.

- Test on several different machines.

- Improve my engine’s content pipeline.

My entry can be found here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=rate&uid=1154

The timelapse video is here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Wm9wcr5JBs