It’s haer.

Before I sum up the experience, I need to mention that I discovered that there is a huge memory leak in love for setFont(), which wasn’t an issue on my dev computer for whatever reason. So I went back and patched that in my game, no other changes made. Alright.

So this was my first time participating in the competition, which is because this is the first time I feel like I’m qualified to make a game, which is because I now work in the industry. Do I really know more than I did before? Maybe a bit. But whatever, I took part in this one, and it was fun.

I’m not an artist or a musician so those bits of my game are complete crap. Oh well. I didn’t know anything about the tools I used, so I probably made some huge mistakes (excluding the memory leak). Too bad. What is fantastic is the fact that in just two days, I started with nothing and ended up with a pretty cool game. Sure its not going to blow anyone away, but it exists, and I made it. So there.

Play my game. In SPAAAAAACCCEEE!

This is my post-mortem for my compo game Just Like The Others. I think my game turned out pretty good and I am definitely happy with my game.

What went well:

-Making the art, I am not an artist so I think it’s pretty good.

-Getting other people to playtest, this helped me establish a good learning curve for my game.

-Fixing the bugs, no time did I spent longer than 30 minutes fixing one.

What didn’t go well:

-When I had my initial idea, a turn-based RPG, a instantly started building it, but I was not sure if it was going to be fun and it turned out it was not. That is why there is now this game.

-Making the player look more interesting, I think he looks a bit boring.

I just uploaded my timelapse video.
Don’t forget to play the game first.

So I thoguht I’d explain the somewhat complicated voting-process again, for everyone who’s new.

This is the voting-screen. Here are the details

1. The list of Developers. The entire list is randomized, to ensure equal visibility. At the beginning only 20 names are visible, but once a certain number of those has been voted on, the list extends, showing the next random batch.

2. The amount of votes this developer has gotten.

3. Pressing this button will load the entire list. It will still be randomized, though.

4. Coolness-rating. Hovering over this spot reveals the coolness-rating of this developer. Coolness is awarded for the percentage of rated games. Should this person rate ALL games, she would get a coolness-rating of 100%. The developer will get a medal displayed on the left, next to the name. Bronze at 25%, Silver at 50%, and gold at 75%.

5. Competition-rating. Games can be rated in the categories Overall, Innovation, Fun, Adherence to Theme, Graphics, Audio, Humor, Mood and Community. The Community-rating describes the actions of the developer towards the community, for example by providing blog-posts, timelapse-videos, and other additional pieces of information. Ratings can be 1 to 5 stars, or “n/a”, should you feel you cannot give a proper rating in a certain category.

6. Jam-Rating. The same system as in the competition applies, only with games that have been entered in the Jam.

7. Text-Comment. An X appears should you have given a comment (which is broken, I guess, as it always shows a X when you have voted. Or it does something else that eludes me)

I hope this helps

-Matthew

I’ve posted a postmortem over at my website, and a walkthrough of me playing the game (with commentary) on YouTube.

I finished my first complete game ever in this Ludum Dare!

Screenshot dump!

I’m afraid I had more fun developing it than anybody will get by playing it (it’s sad but realistic). If you to give it a try I’ll leave some links:

• Play/Rate the game here (link).
• Game source code in Mercurial repository (link).
• Development blog in Posterous (link) (I didn’t want to saturate Ludum Dare’s blog posting there, but now I realize that was a mistake).
• Timelapse of the entire process (link).
• Some Link I found on Internet (this pun cost me the 10 game-developer followers I had in Twitter)
  

Just in case anyone makes a kitten compilation of LD 22 (wink, wink) I leave mine here to make free use of it (it is really ugly and small though).

Here is my timelapse of creating Moving Day. ( play it!)

Perhaps I should call it a noob-lapse as I stumbled through learning Flixel for the first day and only really got into the zone half way through. Post-mortem coming soon!

The game is done, or to be more honest the submission has been complete for a while now, and I’m currently working on the post compo version and I’m thinking of uploading it to kongregate or some other flash hosting service. If you wanna help, have a play or two and give me a list of improvements that I can add to the final game.

Play it here

Brain finally returning to normal. That was an interesting weekend. I kept track of my hours in notepad – turns out I worked about 39 of the possible 48 hours. And I started about an hour and a half late. That was a week’s work in two days!

So my game is ExtraVertical (http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=rate&uid=7598). I wanted to do something different, as I suspected there would be countless platformer and ‘explore the dark caves/tunnel’ games. So I decided to make a skiing game, with an 80′s flair. My game also doesn’t really have a proper scoring mechanic or goal – it’s more a short exploration into my interpretation of the theme.

ExtraVertical - The play on words that no one will get

What Went Well:

-I had the complete concept in my head from the beginning. I knew exactly how I wanted it to play out, from beginning to end. This has been a problem in the past, as I’ve had half baked ideas that I thought would be fun, but after early implementation, discovered that the mechanic doesn’t fully hold water and needs a lot of rethinking to make it work.

-The graphics. I’ve not done a game with pixel art before, and there’s only a bit in this game, but the feel of it worked out better than expected, and using a small color palette for all the colors gave it somewhat of a consistent feeling.

-The Slick2D game library, which I had never even heard of before this competition actually worked out quite well with only minor issues. Once I had everything setup to build and deploy (more on that later), no major issues were encountered.

What Went Wrong:

-This was my first Ludum Dare. And despite reading how strongly people recommended familiarizing yourself with your tools and getting your workflow from compilation to deployment nailed ahead of time, I totally under-prepared. I had not really used Java in about 5 years. I had never even heard of this Slick2D game library I used, nevermind used it. I hadn’t used either of the paint programs I worked with (Paint.NET, and then after finding no palette support, switching to GIMP, which is quite frustrating in its own right). I hadn’t used GarageBand. Or deployed with Java Web Start.

I did try to prepare though. In the few days leading up to the competition I attempted to get some test code to deploy with Java Web Start, but was totally unsuccessful and left clueless as to how to fix it. So, sitting down at my computer an hour and a half after the competition started, I was left to try and figure it out. It took me about 4 hours to finally get it to deploy from the web. Turns out you need to SIGN THE F*CKING JAR FILES. Sorry for that.

-While the interpretation of the theme made sense in my head, it didn’t translate into a very understandable mechanic in the game. I’ll try to explain: you’re an extroverted ‘hotshot’ who needs the admiration and attention of others to be happy. Without it, you feel desperately alone and unwanted. Unfortunately, in the game, this theme isn’t obvious, and makes the game’s ‘scoring’ and end-game mechanic confusing. I don’t think people get the title either…

-And as always, the game could have benefited from more gameplay polish and content. But everyone can say that I’m sure.

That’s it! Cheers to everyone who participated, it was one of the most intense, stressful and fun experiences I’ve had and will definitely not be my last contribution. Looking forward to playing everyone’s games!

Somehow I missed the badge… so here it is now:

find the kitteh!

After finishing my game “Follow” (and then fixing a few bugs after release <.<), I put together this timelapse.

Warning – I recorded my voice for the beginning of it. =P

We did it! Team Flare submitted 1 hour before deadline!!

For all besides of myself it was their for first Ludum Dare. Andreas catched a flew yesterdays and stayed awake all night with me to finish things up! Chapeau Andreas that was tough! Thanks to Ralf, Monica (gfx), Miriam and Hanne (sfx) for their great work! A detailed post mortem will follow soon!

Please play and vote here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=preview&uid=4216

Im going to bed.

Chaoslab – Quick ludum photo blog of making of – The Lonely Alien.

Ludum Dare #22 - The Lonely Alien

The Album contains a few shots of the making – The Lonely Alien.

• Game Map.
• Art Asset’s
• Design Document’s
• The Lonely Alien.
• Me after the 72 hour game jam.

Hope you had as much fun as I did if not more!

[ Play the game ]

I’d call this one a success!

Good:

• Game is finished, with a lot of content (for me): five playable characters, three spells, three bosses with different behaviors, an upgrade system!
• I was dedicated. I slept about 3 hours per night and spent almost every waking hour on the game.
• Game runs (relatively) smoothly. Given how little I optimized, and how many graphical tricks I used, I think 20-30fps is pretty good.
• I’m getting the hang of Javascript.
• HTML5 canvas turned out to have a lot of relevant useful features
• Really pleased with how the boss of level 4 turned out (and I got in a Wayne’s World reference)
• Really pleased with how the rotating gameplay area turned out
• Happy with the graphics, sound, and character design for the most part
• Deploying to web turned out to be pretty easy. I’m very happy to have my first web-based LD game

Bad:

• I get so engaged with my game during the competition that I have trouble joining the community. I’ll have to make up for it now that it’s over.
• Navigating an isometric layout is a tricky problem
• Had to leave out in-game instructions
• I wish I had more engaging gameplay, but it’s fine for what it is
• Had to leave out storyline (which is fine because it was too depressing)
• Sprites are cut way down from my original idea, surprising no one
• Had to develop in Firefox because of how Chrome handles trusted domains on local filesystems

If you were trying to play my game in the past few days and were met with “Could not find main class alonegame.AloneGame”, please upgrade Java to version 7.

What went right:

Pretty happy with everything, planned it out,worked fast and smart, had enough time for everything but 1 or 2 minor things

What went wrong:

Using polycode and finding out it’s lua bindings had all sorts of issues

And then trying to build polycode from source myself and wasting an entire day on that

(Did I do this right? Hello??)

I just finished my first Ludum Dare, and it was a success! Admittedly I didn’t finish in time for the compo and my game’s still not totally done, but I’m still proud of what I did.

The Game

The gameplay of Busy King is something like Pacman, but a bit more strategic (for example, you can hide in other rooms, and you should probably avoid the wizard.) You play as a king who needs some alone time to get some work done, but his subjects keep seeking him out to ask him stuff. The only way to get rid of them is to bring them back to the room they came from.

If anyone is wondering what the characters are supposed to be: the pages (red) belong in the dining room, the advisors (green) belong in council chamber, the knights (blue) belong in the armory, and the wizard (purple) belongs in his tower. I would have added more characters (including kittens!) if I had more time.

The bad

Too many other things to do! All Saturday night was spent on a bus, and almost all Sunday was spent with my relatives. So it was not a good weekend for Ludum Dare – but I was able to get the game playable on Monday. There are still some weird bugs though (I like the one where a subject suddenly is able to walk through walls and escapes the castle.)

I also wish I had done the instructions differently. I wanted to be in the cool club and use integrated instructions but it didn’t work well, and I was out of time at that point. Since the instructions are simple, a single splash screen might have been better.

The good

The game turned out fun! The concept evolved over time: at first I was thinking of a time management game where you had to assign your subjects different jobs in order to get them out of your way (which would probably not be practical for Ludum Dare), but after discussing the idea with friends I ended up with this. (By the way, the king idea came from watching Merlin just before starting…)

I’m happy with the graphics too, and I think that using a scroll for the meter was a good idea.

I’m looking forward to the next Ludum Dare, when I can hopefully devote more of my weekend to it! In the meantime, I probably try to finish Busy King, especially if people think it’s fun.

Play and rate here

What was changed:

Nothing.

Except music doesn’t stops after your first move (you can disable music from menu – Escape, M).

Link: http://db.tt/lJQCjhry

My entry: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=preview&uid=8581

Windows users with Java installed can also play Java version (just click on the “Linux” or “OS/X” link, save and run with double click) . Actually, this Java port is recommended for all, because original dotNet version sometimes crashes at start.

For those who hate my game for its difficulty:

I’ve prepared version with reduced difficulty.

Changes:

- energy doesn’t decreases while walking

- drill discharges more slowly

- quakes are not so frequent and powerful

- aliens won’t hit so hard

- scream hits you only when walking, not while drilling

Link to download easy version: http://db.tt/lFszdbli