This LD (like LD20) I decided to make an adventure sort of game. Not an arcade game like I usually make, but something that involves a big space to move around in.

Needless to say, I failed both times. The first time because I tried to write an efficient tile map renderer from scratch, and the second because I got caught up in making my chunked, randomly-generated map work while avoiding floating-point inaccuracies.

A randomly-generated house. I spent way too long on this.

So, after a particularly nasty bug involving the doors and still not having collision, I decided to scrap that project about 6 hours before the deadline and make a different one.

This new project, Asteroids: Alone Edition is what happens when you take the theme too literally and apply it to an old game. Simply put, it’s asteroids minus the asteroids. Well, except the main menu, where the AI plays.

I finished it up in about four or five hours, and submitted early.
…Success?

(Most of that time was spent tweaking the AI. Make sure not to ignore it when you play my game!)

Play my entry, Asteroids: Alone Edition.

Or play the original, unfinished project, Return to Solitude (Controls: WASD, hold shift to run.)

!! VICTOLY !!

I personally consider it a victory to have completed a game at all for my first Ludum Dare, much less one that’s actually kind of charming. So without further ado, let’s have ourselves a post-mortem!

(-o^_^)-o PLAY AND RATE THE HUG MONSTER HERE o-(^_^o-)

The Good

The Concept:  Thankfully the idea for this game came quickly, but it was not the first idea I had.  I threw out two other concepts before settling on the Hug Monster.

The first idea was a game where you’re a zombie who just wants to make friends because he’s lonely, but invariably when he makes a new friend he eats them.  While I liked the idea for its humor value, I wasn’t convinced that the gameplay would be much fun… or rather that I wasn’t sure I had the time to make it fun.

The second idea was one in which you play a shoplifter who tries to steal as much as he can from a store while avoiding the watchful eyes of the clerks.  While it fit the theme, I didn’t really have any great ideas on how to turn it into a fun game.

That’s when the Hug Monster came running through my head.  I figured that most people would choose to make their games about avoiding the state of being alone, so I would flip this on its head and make the game about becoming alone to seek safety.  I find the particular emoticon that the hug monster is made of to be really cute and compelling, and I liked the thought of it wiggling its arms as it chases you around.  I thought that if I stuck with the ideation that I might come up with a better concept, but an hour and a half had passed already and this game concept seemed just viable enough to have a shot.  This turned out to be a great plan.  The idea was solid and the execution was just as cute as I’d hoped it would be.

Unity3D:  I’ve been a fan of the Unity tool for almost a year now, and this game proved that it is sufficiently versatile to handle both 3D games as well as 2D games on a short timeframe.  I still believe that Unity, being a 3D engine is primarily best at rendering 3D.  There are certain idioms and assumptions that Unity uses which make perfect sense in a 3D world, but which sometimes get in the way when you’re thinking in 2D space.  That said, Unity does offer you the ability to “break out into the 3rd dimension” if you want to with ease.   Top it off with a nice, sane language like C# and you have a real winner of a tool.

The Art Style : I’m not saying it’s perfect.  There’s a lot I want to clean up in the graphics for Hug Monster, and it’s certainly not on the level of some of the incredibly beautiful entries I’ve seen from others such as morganquirk, but it works to reinforce the lighthearted feel I was going for when I concepted the idea.  I don’t think a “realistic” or even a “cartoonish”  Hug Monster would have nearly the same charm, and a protagonist with any detail might take away from the real star of the show, the monster itself!

Wingdings : No kidding, the Wingdings font saved the day here.  The character’s standing pose is actually an 8px sized rendering of the skull and crossbones icon with no aliasing.  Now that I’ve told you this, you can probably see it if you look at the main character hard enough.  Of course, at the 8px scale, it looks more like a daring little guy… one who is very easy to animate, as it turns out!

ALL OF YOU GUYS : I don’t want to sound cliche, or like the end credits screen of an old Nintendo game, but the Ludum Dare blog itself was a huge inspiration and a motivating force to help keep me focused.  Just knowing that there were dozens of other people doing this at the same time helped keep my head in the game, and if I had a moment to breathe I could look at the progress other people were making as well.  I even played a demo or two along the way.  Additionally, posting my own progress got me some nice feedback from the community regarding what I could do to improve the game.  I wish I’d had more of this actually!

The Ending Rocks : Even though the ending took about 3 hours to make, with all the precise fiddling I did to make everything timed just right, I think it’s worthwhile.  I would love to add more movie sequences at various mid points in the game as I expand it over time.

The Bad

Sound Design was a big time suck :  I have no experience designing sound.  None.  Why I thought it would be a great idea to hang out on a sound generator website and try to make sfx and music for this game I have no clue.  I’m sure I wasted at least 3 hours playing with sound effects that didn’t really work, and that I didn’t even quite know how to form into what I wanted in the first place.  I could have used that time to better balance my level design, or give people clues about the properties of the game world (for instance, make some levels where Hug Monster plows through blocks early, just to show you that it can, before you find a level in which it actually needs to happen.

Level Design was a big time suck :  And I still didn’t fully express all the ideas I wanted to.  I was hoping to have more novel behaviors for switches, such as opening pitfalls or dumping rocks down to block passages.  I was also hoping to have more environmental hazards, such as falling Wingdings, and possibly motorized platforms.  Even what I have really isn’t perfect.  When the game started coming together I knew it was begging to be a puzzle solver, but the problem with this is that the puzzles need to be challenging and at the same time actually solvable… and with the Hug Monster’s AI being a bit on the dumb side, that wasn’t so easy to accomodate.

Hug Monster’s AI : It’s not that the AI is really “bad” but it’s very simple, and I feel its lack of smarts is somewhat of a hinderance to game and level design.

Unity3D : Or rather, the physics engine in particular.  It wasn’t all bad by any means (after all, it’s prominently listed as one of the good things) but I found that while it bought me a lot of time for other things in not having to roll my own full physics engine, I still lost some time fiddling with Unity’s built-in physics which can seem somewhat opaque.  I’m sure this will come more naturally in time.

I’m sure there’s more to be said about the game’s good and bad points, but right now I’m just spent.  I think I’ll go rate some more of you guys’ work!

No, really — that’s the premise of my jam entry, “Alone in the Rain”.

The world is ending. Destruction is raining down upon the world. It will all be over in four days. We all saw it coming — nobody is really all that surprised.

What is surprising is the manner in which the destruction is raining down: refrigerators? From the sky!?

There is an underground shelter that people are gathering at. Families and friends are attempting to reunite there in order to spend the final days of the Earth together.

Nobody wants to be behind. Nobody wants to be left alone..

Alone in the Rain was written in 72 hours, from scratch, in C++, using the lovely Allegro game library and the powerful Chipmunk physics library. The game has been (painstakingly) ported from OS X to Windows and Linux (don’t hold those four (4!) hours against me). cfxr was used to produce the delicious 8-bit sound effects. GIMP was used to create all of the graphics. This game features my first attempt at a human sprite and walking animation — huzzah!

There are five areas in total. The game is surprisingly challenging and unmerciful, although (in this author’s opinion) quite fun to play and experiment with. I am absolutely thrilled with the final result, and cannot wait to see what fun games everyone else has come up with!

Download Alone in the Rain

It took a few tries in Motion to upload to YouTube properly, but without further ado, here’s my timelapse for the creation of The Travel Section, with a postmortem after the link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhNemclQU7s

So, what went right:

• Sticking to UIKit was a great idea, as it let me visually design my interface and make sure it was going to come out right on the first try.
• SpriteSomething on iPad was super-useful for making pixel art.

And of course, what went wrong:

• I totally misused UIStoryboard in my first pass of the app. If I had done just a touch more reading before I started, I wouldn’t have lost five or so hours near the end of the compo.
• CoreAnimation isn’t for games. I had four or five hours to make my minigames near the end, and if I had stuck to basic NSTimer and manual animation at the start, I probably could have done three or four of them in the time it took me to do just one on the second try.

So, that was my Ludum Dare 22! It was a tough experience, taught me a lot, and was quite a bit of fun. Hope you enjoy the game, if you happen to put it on your iPhone/iPod!

A post mortem for Luto Hominus.

(more…)

17,530 Screen shots and 48 hours compressed into this 6 minute long video. Its also got a rocking soundtrack. I can’t wait till thenext Ludum Dare!

My Game: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=preview&uid=8475

As you can see the title: “My first game” and i am not just saying about the competition but in general, this is the first complete game that I created, I have tried to make a game but then I think of a new idea and then i no longer complete the old game.
The game has tiles and lighting, That’s something I’ve never used and i use it for the first time! so this is like a step forward on my programming knowledge in games!

Check the entry of my game if you want to play it: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=preview&uid=7045

So, I took a day off from work to finish the game for the Ludum Dare jam! I got a lot done, and you can try the game now, but there’s a lot missing.

But, there is a title screen…

And music, and a clock, and you can lose the game.

But you can’t win.

And likely, neither can we, with an unfinished game in the competition.  Oh well. Hopefully we can finish it up over the next week or two and give it a proper release, because the game has a lot of potential.

I spent most of my time today working on the scripted sequences for the tutorial and winning and losing the game, but those turned out to take a lot longer than I’d hoped. I cut my losses pretty late, barely adding a placeholder lose condition but no tutorial and no win condition.

I’m still waiting for all the adrenaline to wash out of my bloodstream. That was a bit too stressful at the end.

Not sure if it was a good idea to submit the game in its current state, but I guess it can’t hurt. Letting people try it out is a good thing, as it’s not like anyone will want to steal it the way it is now. Just hope not too many people see it until we have time to make a finished version. It’s just a draft!

Yeah. Kinda disappointed.

But no, I don’t regret it. This was a great experience overall. The fun parts (that is, most of it) were really fun, and I was really amazed at how much we were able to get done. And I look forward to finishing the game. I just hope I still have enough energy for the rest of the week. I don’t want to burn out now.

Well, thanks for following us on this little journey. The best is yet to come!

I’ve written a post-mortem for my entry, Separation Anxiety.

It’s very long and contains spoilers for my game, so I’ve hosted it on my own website instead of simply writing it here.

You can find it here. I hope you enjoy!

It’s done!! If you are running Linux, go ahead and play. As for the other platforms..

Two and a half hours after the jam has ended, and I’m still trying to get my game working on the three Big Ones. Ungh — it’s painful. I’m using C++ with Allegro and Chipmunk.

Linux: Done. Not too bad. I didn’t have a statically linked copy of Allegro, so I’m including the Allegro shared lib, hackishly setting  LD_LIBRARY_PATH, and relying on users to run a “run_game.sh” script that sets the env var and runs the game. Does anyone know how to nicely distribute a game that relies on a shared lib?

OS X: More or less done. Figuring out how to package things into a .app was painful. THEN figuring out how to put the .app inside of a .dmg was even more “fun” (thanks though, guys). The other fun news is that Allegro relies on QuickDraw, an older OS X API for doing software rendering. It was deprecated (but functional) in Snow Leopard, but trying to run it on a Lion machine reveals that support was dropped entirely. So, on Lion machines, the game will toss a bus error when run in fullscreen. *grumblegrumble* Fine then. Since I can’t even catch the failure gracefully, Mac users will have to settle for a windowed version.

Windows: About to start on it, but I suspect it will be more of the same awful. I didn’t see any nice binaries for Chipmunk lying around, so I suspect I’ll need to compile that myself using some arcane MinGW IDE like Dev-C++ or Code::Blocks.

Next year I’m either going to use Java, or invest some time making a set of scripts to automate at least some of these cross-platform chores.

Another Ludum Dare has come and gone and now that the high is over, it’s time to brag about the things I got right and lament about the perils of doing things wrong.

First, the right:

To start, I’ve had a streak recently of using words within established genres.  The last LD I submitted had you turn objects into words to fix the scene and advance to the next part of the game.

With “The Unfortunate State of Being Alone” I wanted to be able to tell more of a story than the last time I used words.  I was also influenced by the poem “Lost Generation” by Jonathan Reed [Poem].  It is a poem that has a different meaning it does when read forward than it does when read backward.

So, with that, I set out to write a poem that dealt with loneliness, but could also read as the dying words of someone who believes we die alone.. and the dying words of someone who believes that you are never alone, even in death.

everyone dies alone
i cannot believe that
when your lips touch mine
i can be with you forever
i tell you knowing that
i want to live without you by my side
i’ve never felt that
all these years meant something
and with my last breath i know
it was foolish to presume that
i will not die alone

i will not die alone
it was foolish to presume that
and with my last breath i know
all these years meant something
i’ve never felt that
i want to live without you by my side
i tell you  knowing that
i can be with your forever
when your lips touch mine
i cannot believe that
everyone dies alone

So, with that finished, it was time to write up some puzzles around specific words in each line.

I picked a word from each line that would be the easiest to write some back story around.  And then I would associate each story with some item you would interact with in that particular room.  Each story would have a theme and use specific words to hint at what the missing word from the line is.

Now, the bad:

So, as with all Ludum Dare, once I had done all the above work.. I had to start cutting out superfluous parts.  I had wanted to do a bit more with this poem.  The game, as it is right now, doesn’t take advantage of the fact that the poem is read the same forward and backward.

The original thought was to give you the option of the gold key or the red key first.  Depending on which key you chose, it would change which direction the poem was completed, which would change the ending.

Also, how to solve the puzzle changed shortly after I completed the first puzzles of Ashley’s room.  So, the red puzzle is .. very difficult because it lacks the story-based clues like the other rooms have.  Also, because these puzzles were rushed, they are not as fantastic as I would like them to be.  In a perfect world, there would have been more objects in the room and more puzzles within each room (you can see a bit of this with the hidden safe and the service elevator).

That’s all for now!

Hi all It’s been a craaaazy 72 hours, and here’s what we came up with:

Ludum Dare #22 – Lonely Planet – Full gameplay video

And here’s the level editor I developed during the game:

Ludum Dare #22 – Lonely Planet – Level editor

I’m too tired to write anything meaningful related to the development process, but I just wanted to mention that this has been developed from scratch on top of cairo and GTK, in ooc – a language that I have designed and implemented mostly myself in the past 2 years. This was a nice occasion to put it into practice!

I’ll glady comment more on it if there’s interest, just leave a comment if you want to

Lots of thanks to Einat Schlagmann and Sylvain Wenger for the art, you’ve been awesome! (especially LAST MINUTE KITTEN UPDATE) Looking forward to the next LD!

All the code and art is available at https://github.com/nddrylliog/alone Have fun!

This is an effort of about 40+ hours total(I had party to go too and Mirage and I work at the same place so we had work as well).

We got MisitfChris to make sounds and Music but we could not get them in. But we will be making an update if that’s allowed.

We had to cut back and a lot of assets went without use.

The game ends pretty quickly but I think we got the point across.

Things that went right:

- Programming using Love2D was fun!

- Consistent Art Style

- Cooperation(Google+ Hangout was extremely helpful! The ability to look at each others screen on the fly helped.)

-Awesome Music (Look forward for the update.)

-Playing with the yarn ball is fun!

Things that went wrong:

-We lost our $6000 dollar Cheetos budget!

-We had to cut our game practically in half because of time constraints.

This was our first time participating and we had a blast! We are in for the next one!

Go play it and tell us what you think!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=preview&uid=8306

The smoke has finally cleared, and by the end of 3 intense days we have a total of 891 entries (stats)! Holy cow!

For the next 3 weeks, we’d like to invite all participants back here to the website, and ask you play and rate the games. Visit the Rate Games page for a list of 20 randomly assigned games, just for you.

Left side numbers are Compo, Right side are Jam, number in brackets is how many ratings

The random list will grow over time if you need more, and you’re free to pick and choose what games you play. If we can get everyone to play at least their assigned 20 entries, that will give us a good baseline set of stats overall. And if you can play more, that would help a lot!

With Christmas next weekend, it’s understandable that people will be busy. I will be sending a reminder out to the mailing in about 2 weeks, so if you’re not already on it you should sign up. Then be sure to stop by January 10th for the results.

Ludum Dare 23 – April 2012 – ** 10 Year Anniversary! **

It’s pretty crazy when you think about it, but the next Ludum Dare event coming up in April will be our 10 year anniversary. Yes, we’ve been doing these silly events for 10 years now! Wow! Be sure to stop by in April for the big one! Lets break 1000!

Ludum Dare at the Game Developers Conference

Phil and I are regular attendees at the Game Developers Conference, so if you too are attending, stay tuned. Last year we did a meetup as well as an afternoon Game Jam at NoiseBridge. It was a lot of fun hanging out with with everybody. We don’t have our plans figured out for next year yet, but stay tuned!

You are all awesome

Thanks everyone for coming out and making this another record breaking Ludum Dare.

Additional Links

To tidy up the front page, here are some posts worth looking at.

• Post Mortem Survey by Breakdance McFunkyPants
• “The downloads of many LD games suck”, Packaging Tips, with Sos

PLAY THE FINAL VERSION

So I managed to finish a game. Not in 48 hours as intended but 72 Well, I thought that might be the case.  So I didn’t worry too much when I lost a lot of time doing the cute little character.

Can you find the kitty?

EIGHT HUNDRED NINETY GAMES

LOOK AT THEM

so many!

DOWNLOAD

WALLPAPERS

Well we managed to get something playable but leaving submission till the last minute leaves you with rage at the submission system.

I’m not entirely sure what went wrong with the system but It would log me out whenever I clicked on the Create an Entry it would sign me out, and then it would tell me i needed to be signed in.

Anyway here is a link to the current version of the game if anyone is willing to play it application. I will release the final version of the game with source in a couple of days when all of the bugs are sorted out and some content is made.

Windows Executable

Well, we finished! It was a blast. Don’t have a whole lot of time at the moment, but we will def have time lapse vidoes up soon.
Good luck to everyone who entered!

What is better almost as good as making a game all by yourself, from scratch, in 48 hours? Why, receiving feedback on your creation!

So I took the time to rate a bunch of games. I tried my best to offer meaningful comments and suggestions to all the games that the “rate” button put in front of me

Here are some of the best games that I played tonight:

Courage Quest – A very well polished game, a platformer with multiple mechanically varied quests. Nice animations, graphics and sounds.

The End – A neat game with solid controls and a very spooky and well executed mood.

Alone in all Elona – While this game is not very polished at all, it deserves a mention because of its unique and very fun mechanical premise. I liked playing with it, and would play more if the author takes the time to cut the rough edges from the game.

SleepWalker – This game’s text is simply hilarious.

Void – A very, very beautiful game. Just note that the signs don’t kill you, they indicate the end of the stage

See you tomorrow with more game highlights!

We made it to the end together, my disgusting friend.

That Ludum Dare high really wears off during the final few hours…

Awesome LD, even if I wasn’t a fan of the theme. Even though testing out a new library usually ends in disaster during an LD I had a pretty easy time of it with Flixel. Feeling good, big scope, lost a lot of time to real life things, and still pulled something out that I’m proud of.

I’ll toss a post-mortem and timelapse up here tomorrow. I don’t know how you folks manage to think clearly enough at the end of the competition to do any sort of critical reflection.

A hearty congrats to everyone else who, like me, unexpectedly added 24 hours to their LD.

Play Me