I only have a couple of rates and I really need some more people to rate it! Thanks and heres some. Rate mine and Ill rate yours guaranteed! pics! http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=preview&uid=4335

End at last !! We finish our game and you can check it out here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=preview&uid=7149

Thank you very much Ludum Dare and everybody that worked all this days !! Can’t wait to play all of them!!

Merry Christmas !!

Wow.

This last day has been REALLY hard…

There is still a lot of little things I would like to change, and the alternate ending we wanted is not in this version, but at least we did complete a full version in time.
Those little corrections will have to wait though: can’t do any more tonight.

Thanks to everyone who commented, tested, and followed us during the jam.
Thanks to the Ludum Dare team and participants, it was a really great adventure…
Thanks to Motion-Twin for inviting us to its IRL gathering: Deepnight, Warp, Bumdum, and of course Eole

I won’t hesitate to say “I’m in” for the next one!

Here is the link to the latest version of our game:
http://01101101.fr/ld48/demo/

It’s the day after, I am extremely well rested – slept for 11 hours after coding for over 25 hours straight! – and my game is getting some plays. I can’t wait to dig into the other contest entries, there is a ton of them and I hope everyone gets a fair chance despite the participation of certain gaming celebrities and their ravenous, crazy fanbase. But I digress – good job to all of you LD’ers! I had an insane amount of fun and I can’t wait to do it again in April.

Here’s my little post mortem of my entry, The Sheep & The Peach.

What Went Right

I released. I’m amazed and proud of the fact that I was actually able to make and release a game in about 39 awake hours. I don’t really care how well my game does, if nothing else I’m happy that I released.

My intention of creating a depressing little 10 minutes seems to have worked, players care about the characters and the correct emotions are conveyed. It’s hard to make games like that! This is by far my most “artsy” game I’ve ever made, so I wasn’t sure if it would have the intended effect.

I had a plan and I stuck to it. There was very little feature creep, and I cut out planned content early enough that it didn’t cause me problems. I also had to cut out very little as well, and the level I cut out I knew was going to be the most difficult one since it required a lot more 3D art to it.

While I keep saying time and time again that I’m no artist, I’m pretty happy with how the art style actually did turn out. A big shout-out to Halfquake: Amen for a lot of the art inspiration. Not to mention that the mouse-drawn freehand flower I made is probably the best piece of 2D art I’ll ever make in my life.

I playtested as much as I could with as wide an audience as possible. Thanks to the people in IRC who played my game when I had playable versions. I’m also thankful I had an IRL friend test for me, and even better since she’s not at all a “gamer”. She found some obvious design flaws that would cause problems for a non-gamer, that I would never have found or thought of being a gamer myself. Thanks to her I drastically cut down the explorable region to not get players totally lost, and added more refined clipping areas. But on that note…

What Went Wrong

Everyone hates invisible walls, and I unfortunately had to surround my entire game in them. If I had more time and skills I would have used physical barriers, but that just sadly was not possible. For a 48 hour game, I hope too many people don’t find it offensive. On a slightly related note, I had to drastically shrink one area of my game because it was just far larger than needed and players kept getting lost. I planned on it being a lot bigger because…

I added a big section to the game – the “explore” section – with only about 6 hours to spare. Again, my lack of artistic skills made me have to cut it down, making it far less interesting than I had hoped. My plan was to have many points of interest for the player to look at, instead of the 3 plot-specific items that made the final cut.

On Friday night / Saturday morning, I overslept by about 3 hours. I meant to wake up at 10am and didn’t get up until almost 1pm. Granted, I had work on Friday and was already running on about 20 hours being awake. But toward the end I couldn’t help but wish I had those 3 extra hours.

On that note, being at work on Friday and not being able to start until 2 hours in kind of sucked too.

I spent too much time modeling my one and only object. About 45 minutes to create and texture the house, which is literally 2 cubes and 1 extruded face. I’m no artist, but I should have spent more time in the week leading up getting more familiar with Blender. I attempted to but kept having other things get in my way.

I could have playtested it more with more people, and I could have tested things a bit thoroughly towards the end. After release I found a couple of weird, non-critical bugs. Things like objects not being the correct size and the camera snapping to a weird location during a specific condition. Nothing too terribly awful, nothing show-stopping, but still annoying to have in a release.

Finally

Once again, I had a blast, and I’m incredibly proud of being able to release. Won’t you give my game a try?

Jeez, that was close! My game, Lonely God Dude, is now finished!!!

Here is a screenshot of Lonely God Dude a mere eight seconds into the game.

If you would like to give it a shot, hit up this link.

EDIT: Post mortem coming up in the next 24 hours or so.

What went right.

• I finished. That simply made all the effort worth it.
• I’m happy enough with the graphics overall.
• I had fun making and playing it.
• I had healthy food, that made me have good mood.

What went wrong.

• I allocated too little time for level design, and it shows.
• I had to cut some features planed.
• I overslept.
• I procrastinated to much.

Conclusions.

The experience has been great and I’m somewhat proud of the result.

Timelapse

Well after all this I finally found out that I had an hour submission time after the end of the compo and so I thought I missed it and went for the Jam. But all is well. I rolled out my first game and managed to keep my sanity too along with not gaining more than 2 lbs from lots of mountain dew and food  Now just to relax and continue on my other game.

Btw heres my entry as well as a lovely timelapse

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=preview&uid=8075

Well, Divided is finally finished! This was a great experience and for the most part we’re really happy with how this turned out. Of course, there are problems with it, but for three days time and working under pressure it’s not bad at all. We definitely learned a lot from this, and I’m sure we’ll be participating next year.

DOWNLOAD THE GAME: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=rate&uid=8689

What we learned from this:

*Don’t sleep. Pffft, you don’t need it.

*Don’t get distracted.

*Don’t accidentally duplicate the same level and replace it with a level that was supposed to be in the game. (Whoops.)

*Time Management is the key.

What we didn’t learn:

*How to get decent amounts of sleep.

*Eating proper foods.

*How to socialize with the outside world.

Anyways we hope you enjoy our game, and if this does good then in the future we’re looking into remaking this game in flash with more levels and more solid code. I’ll leave you with this:

Enjoy!

-Team Ink

What went right?

• The Flashpunk framework was incredibly easy to use, and had most of the features needed. The few things that it couldn’t do I was able to live without.
• I was able to pump out the few sound effects in sfxr extremely quickly.
• The graphics came together a lot quicker than I thought. I’m not an artist by anyone’s standards, but 8×8 pixel tiles are so amazingly simple to create that I was able to keep churning them out.
• My Trigger class. Although the code was messy, and it really needed to be cleaned up, it was extremely powerful. I was able to create interesting events in XML alone.
• It was a lot of fun. This is the first time that I’ve tried something like this, and the experience was awesome. I usually find it really hard to get motivated, but being surrounded by people doing the same thing is awesome.

What went wrong?

• Simply not enough time to put in the content. After getting the graphics and code finished, I didn’t have enough time to put together a fun game. There were actually a lot of features in the game that I had ready but that I didn’t even get a chance to put into the game. For example, there were obtainable items that could be picked up off the ground.
• There were some bugs that I knew about but did not have time to fix. The major one that everybody who plays the game fully will encounter is that doors appear on the wrong layer when you come at them from the top. To fix this, closed doors need to be two separate images in two separate layers, one underneath the player and one above.
• The code was really messy. It all worked, and there aren’t too many bugs, but I would not like to maintain this code after the event – if I do continue to work on this game, I’ll be cleaning up and redesigning the code to make extending the game easier.
• I ran out of caffeine.

Hello, this is my postmortem for The Necropolis, the first Ludum Dare that I’ve finished not counting the mini Ludum Dare last month. Looking at some of the games here is quite overwhelming since there are a lot of great looking games considering that we only have 48 hours to make them, and I told myself that someday I’ll make great looking games but not this Ludum Dare. This Ludum Dare I’ll have to make do with crappy art, and my current programming skills. This is the result my friends.

The Theme

So in Ludum Dare we start out with a theme first(and build the mechanics from there), as opposed to making the mechanics first before pasting on the theme. The night before the Ludum Dare I looked at the round 4  list of  themes and chose parallel dimensions(since it was on the top of the list) to think about. I thought about gameplay ideas for it just in case it was chosen and then went to sleep. The next day I woke up sat down in front of my laptop, excited like a kid on a Christmas day. The theme I saw on the screen was ‘Alone” and I thought great at first until I noticed the ideas were not coming. I wanted my game’s dynamics to be reflective of the theme but when you think about it(at least from my perspective) the majority of the games out there can justify the theme of being ‘Alone’. It wasn’t that I wasn’t getting ideas,it was that there were too many ideas(about 80% of them I can’t implement..yet). I spent the whole day thinking of a suitable game mechanic that I can implement and that would reflect on the theme of ‘Alone’ as best as it could, and after sleeping on it I came up with one.

The Gameplay

The first game I thought about was ‘The angel of Death’. In the game you are the angel of death sent to kill one of the baddies in the level. The idea was all the baddies in the screen with you will take damage until they die as long as you were there with them. So you had to avoid them while looking for the baddy you were sent to kill. I scrapped the idea because the screen was too large and the hero was limited in movement for a 2d platformer to avoid the baddies.

So I came up with the current game after more thinking. I came up with the idea about a character refusing the idea that monster’s exist. I heard in a university lecture once that ‘your perception is your reality’ so I imagined a character trapped in an underground labyrinth with a lantern. He firmly  believe that he is alone and that the monsters he keeps seeing just beyond his lantern’s light(to limit the vision) is just his imagination. Unfortunately they might not be, and the moment he realizes that he is not alone his mind breaks down and its game over. To do this I thought of putting( inspired by an emotion engineering lecture I attended lately) the following stuff:

Blood trail(not implemented)- the monster leave a trail of blood on the floor which disappears after a few seconds so that the player knows where its been and the direction it is going.

Heart beat(not implemented)- I actually put this in the game but the sound that I got was inaudible(its still in the source folder) so I just removed it. Whenever a monster was near the heartbeat would warn the character.

Compass(not implemented)- for game play reasons purely. The compass would point to the direction of the nearest scroll to help the character.

Light(implemented)- The core mechanic. Any monster revealed by the players light will give him sanity damage.

Scrolls and portals- the goal of the game is to explore and collect this stuff(so its an exploration game).

Lurking Monster(not implemented)- something that wanders the Necropolis randomly.

So yeah I removed a lot of stuff and decided to finish with just the core mechanic. I would like to put them in the game sometime in the future( I’m learning how to program them now) . Looking at it(at least to me) the game play reflects the theme of being ‘Alone”, alone in the screen as much as possible(game wise), and believing that we are alone, and that the monsters we refuse to believe are not really there(philosophical shit to make me sound more intelligent ;p).

What went right

I decided to use Flixel, I’ve been using it for the past months and so far so good. I’ve been learning Unity and almost decided to go with the ‘alone in the island’ game (e.g. put a guy in an island , tada! he’s alone!) just so that I could test the stuff I’ve learned. Good thing I realized immediately that I can’t model stuff yet.

What went wrong

I lost a lot of time trying to implement the pathfinding for the lurker monster before scrapping it and go with the other stuff first. I was supposed to make better art too( better is something better than my art). Forgot to put kittens in my game.

Overall

As always, I’ve enjoyed this Ludum Dare and I can’t wait for the next one. I almost thought of giving up the first day but I trusted myself enough to come up with ideas with just a little help of sleep and a dose of dreaming. Thinking of other stuff to say but I’ve ran out of stuff for now, I’ll probably put up follow ups in my game journal if anyone’s interested. So there, good luck with your games and thanks for another sleepless but excellent weekend!

I’ve successfully completed my Jam entry, Frosthome. Guide the silhouette across platforms to shelter before he freezes to death. This was my first successful Ludum Dare, and my second LD total. I’ve learned a lot about time management and cutting features. Expect a postmortem tomorrow; for now, sleep.

Download it here

It would appear that (despite my taking the extra day) I was still unable to get a game done. I use the term “done” loosely here, since I did technically finish my game. The only problem is that it consists of one good (but short) level, two bad levels, one ending which is just a pop-up text box, and one ending in which a character who has just been introduced proceeds to arbitrarily betray the player. It’s a narrative focused game, and most of the writing is not good at all.

I suppose that my not finishing the game isn’t too bad, though. This is my first game jam, after all, and I’m not necessarily going to get it right on the first try. Also, I’ve this is my first time making a narrative focused game. So in the end I didn’t get it done, but I learned a lot (okay, maybe not a lot. But at least something) and will do better next time

The only good part of the whole game

I finished my game in time for the jam. http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=preview&uid=1044
If you thought that my last compo typing game was bad, this is a morse code game.
I’m an evil game designer… and loving it.

The only button that works is the spacebar.

We’ve just submitted our game!

It was our first unforgettable experience and 3 very difficult days.

But we like the result. Now we can finally relax.

And then.. We can’t wait for the next Jam!:)

Link to Jam Entry

Please rate and tell us what you think.

Thank you!

This was my second LudumDare competition and my first successful one. I tried to put something together for LD21, but ultimately had over-complicated my idea and spent too much time on non-essential things. I took hard lessons away from that experience and tried to apply what I learned to this attempt.  All-in-all, I’m happy with what I was able to create and I’m pleased that I was able to finish in time.

That said, I still ran into stumbling blocks this time around. I figured this time, though, I’d publish my thoughts and maybe someone can learn something from my problems.

About Atlantic Flight One

Atlantic Flight One is a short rogue-like. As the lone survivor of the titular plane crash, you must pilot an inflatable raft towards the coastline. Scattered across islands are food, water, and fresh clothes you’ll need to survive the journey back to the mainland. If you allow exhaustion to settle in, or leave yourself exposed to the elements for too long, hunger and thirst can quickly turn into a life-threatening situation.

You can find my entry here. I invite you to check it out and I would appreciate any and all constructive feedback. And, with that, on with the postmortem.

Title Screen

What went right

Of all the things that went well, knowing the tools I used was probably the most important. I made use of C#/XNA and GIMP. Having written several games with XNA and having years of C# experience definitely paid off and allowed me to recover from what I originally felt was the end of my chances.

I also made sure – after the problems from LD21 – to pick a game that would not require complicated graphics. A rogue-like game allowed for a simple tileset with no animations. I can’t stress how much this allowed me to focus on the more important aspects of my design. And, allowed me to produce something I feel is interesting and, most importantly, fun to play.

Initially, I’d decided upon an all to complex idea, but more on that in the “wrong” section. After abandoning that, I settled on a much simpler idea. This let me recover some of the ground I lost to the first, failed idea and allowed me to end up finishing early and add in some extra features I had not originally planned.

Lastly, this weekend was fairly hectic and I ended up spending the bulk of Saturday afternoon visiting with family for the holidays. Between this, and the time wasted on my initial idea, I only had about 24 of the 48 hours – and I still had to sleep and be a dad for some of those. Carefully watching my time really paid off in allowing me to finish this time around. If I caught myself being distracted by irc chat, or the internet in general, I’d take a 5 minute breather and come back. Also, every few hours I’d make myself get up from the computer, walk around, and just think about the game. Was it going the right direction? Did I need to change anything? Or cut something? Frequently taking hard looks at my progress let me react when I needed to and feel reassured when things were going smoothly. In the end, I think I managed to get 12 to 14 hours of work in on this game. But, having those hours be focused and planned out allowed me to make each of them count.

What went wrong

I should’ve planned better – plain and simple. I did not participate in the Warmup and went into Friday evening without any ideas at all. That forced me to sit around desperately trying to come up with a game design as quickly as I could and led me to settle on a bad idea. By Saturday afternoon, I’d almost completely given up. My idea was too big, required too much in the way of art assets, and wasn’t interesting to me at all.

I spoke with a friend and he said he always felt isolated when he was on a boat in a big body of water. I instantly felt like it had some great potential to both encompass the theme and provide a challenge to players. I threw out everything I’d done up until then and started over (which felt like a really stupid decision, but thankfully paid off). After some messing around in GIMP, I settled on the graphic for the title screen. I loved it, it rekindled my spirits, and, thankfully, I quickly dove back in. Even just an hour or two spent brainstorming ahead of time, though, I feel like would’ve helped me sort out my initial idea and prevented me from having to scramble mid-way through the competition for a new idea.

Logo Concept

When I realized my original idea was too complicated and I’d essentially wasted hours of development time, I was really frustrated. I spent part of Saturday just angry at myself for not planning better, not realizing I’d designed to big (just like the previous LD), and for basically giving up. I should’ve used that energy to focus on coming up with new ideas and solving the problems in front of me, instead of just complaining and “giving up”.

Ultimately, I came up with a design and plan I was able to finish. Ironically, I finished about 2 hours before the deadline. I decided to add a few features to the design – both of which I feel really helped create a more challenging game – but, pushed my development time up to 30 minutes before the deadline. At that point, I had to scramble to get everything packaged up and ready for submission. In playing through the game today, I’ve noticed a few little things that, while not game-breaking, would’ve been very easy to spot and fix (typos, balancing issues). The next time around, I will definitely try to stop feature development sooner so that I have that time to do a little bit of polish on the game before I submit.

Lessons Learned

Plan, plan, plan. Prototype ideas, do the warm-up, and brainstorm ahead of time. You might not end up using any of the ideas you have, but at least you’ll go into the competition with some planning and scope. Even with the risk of my ideas not matching up with the theme of the competition, I think the chances of having a useful idea outweigh wasting precious development time trying to come up with a solid idea. Also, as I mentioned above, letting myself get discouraged hurt. It caused me to waste even more development time. Time, that at the end, I could’ve spent polishing my game instead of submitting it with silly mistakes.

Ultimately, I had a great time participating in this competition and I’m glad I stuck with it until the end. I’m happy with what I was able to create in 48 hours and eager to see what I can create in LD23 next year.

Lone Survivor suffering from a variety of ailments.

About Tritax

I’ve been coding for the past 27 years in a variety of languages – BASIC, C++, Java, and C#. For the past decade, I’ve worked professionally as a .NET developer creating web applications for a variety of industries. More recently, I’ve been more focused on hobby game development – releasing a small game for the Android market in October. I can be found on Twitter and Facebook

Alas WHAT IS THIS DUNGEON DAN YOU SPEAK OF?

well I was off skiing all weekend with no internet so I didn’t get to post about this at all, but HERE IS MY JAM GAME
(naming this post has me already missing all the bad puns and alliterations I usually title my posts all along LD)

DUNGEON DAN

There’s only one level (as explained on the entry page) but I still find it to be a lot of fun personally.

PLAY DUNGEON DAN: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=preview&uid=1548

And if the game seems really familiar that’s because you might have played my LD16 game, TOWER QUEST (http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2009/12/13/tower-quest-almost-done/) which this is basically a revamp of but with less levels.

So yeah! Happy LD everyone!

I’ll write up a Post-mortem later tonight

It was a long three nights, but here we are at last! I’m looking forward to playing all of the games made this past weekend, and I hope you all like ours. Enjoy!
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=preview&uid=8680

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=preview&uid=7131

First Ludum Dare for me, i’ve been meaning to join in but always ended up busy during the weekend it came up…though even this weekend was no exception. (was out of town most of saturday)  Interesting experience though, I don’t think I’ve ever rushed quite this much to write anything….normally at work we’d have at least 72 hours to finish a major project

Overall I was pretty happy with the results, I’ll be honest in saying that the theme was total bunk, it’s too vague of an idea and 99% of the games in the list (mine included) are stretching it about as far as possible to make really anything work on the theme. Would be nice in the future if themes were limited to physical objects or gameplay mechanics.  /minor complaint

What Went Right?

- Time : I picked an idea that I had more than enough time to work on with my additional constraints, it was a little close at the end due to all the things I did wrong… but I didn’t really have to rush to get done (though i did have to cut back on how much artwork i did)

-Choice of api’s: I’m glad I picked SDL to use, as I’m very familiar with it, and sticking with plain old c++/SDL let me take quite a few “shortcuts” I wouldn’t have known in other languages. (bad if this were a real project, but good for saving time)

What Went Wrong?

- sound & art : I’m not COMPLETELY unskilled with sound or art, but it does take me forever. In retrospect I should have just shot for super low res and claimed it “retro” styled instead of using the higher res that I did, which, in not having time, led to a very messy, poorly drawn look

- porting: I didn’t realize that ports were allowed to happen after the deadline, so I wasted a good 4 hours of my 20 actual hours I had to work on my entry trying to get the windows port to compile properly (turned out I needed to upgrade mingw’s toolchain, mine was too out of date for the SDL build i was using)

- tools: I should have choosen tools ahead of time, i didnt even think of sound or music till I was nearly done, and at that point i spent a good hour or two of my precious dev time installing lmms, sfxr, and learning how to use them.

Also, here’s a nice set of videos of gameplay and my dev timelapse.

Here’s my submission.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=rate&uid=4842

What went right:

Figured out how to use Eclipse to hotswap code.
Picked a relatively easy art style.
Completed 1 level.
Made a few pieces of fun music.

What went wrong:

My weekend wasn’t free to compete in LD, wasn’t around for the first day and the second was a slow start.
Although one level was completed, I forgot to add the soap sud mechanic and the dryer cycle, so the instructions in-game didn’t make 100% sense.

Woo! And that was LD22! This was the first time I did the Jam purposefully rather than just using it as a time extension for the contest, and it turned out great. Having an artist to work with was a real privilege.

It’s an iPhone game, so I can’t really upload a binary. What I’m going to do is submit it to Apple later tonight and post a video of the gameplay.

Check out the video! (sorry the first few seconds are messed up). If it’s not clear from the video you control the dinosaur indirectly by sliding the platforms up and down.

As soon as the app is approved by Apple, I’ll put up a link to the app store and so everyone can play and comment on it. I’ll keep the app free for the duration of the judging and feedback time, I might release a post-compo version later.

Anyways! This was a lot of fun and I think this is my most polished LD entry yet.

Link to the Entry Page (I will add the App Store link here when apple approves it)

UPDATE 11:45pm – Submitted to App Store! Will update when available. Email me if you would like to try a build early thru TestFlight.