I’m currently in the process of producing a makefile to compile my (future) game. However, In my interest to target as many people as possible I would link to know the following:

1. What OS are you using? (Windows / Linux – Include which version if you so desire but it is not necessary)
2. Are you using 32Bit or 64Bit? (This is the biggy)

Participants of Ludum Dare 22 were asked to fill out a survey on their experience. A whopping 747 people filled out the survey.

Thanks for taking the time to fill it out!

I love this enthusiastic and supportive community.

Here are the results (click to zoom).

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This is my postmortem for my Ludum Dare 22 entry, Sat-E. You can find the timelapse over here.

The Good

Motivation

I was really motivated for this dare and it showed in the game and outside it. It’s super hard to make a game in only 48 hours but this time it went pretty well. My previous attempts went okay, but there were always something lacking. This time the game feels a little bit more finished so I’m going in the right direction.

After the game the programming motivation continued and with it I’ve been improving my small fast prototyping framework I use when making games. I got a lot of ideas on improvements during the weekend so that’s great.

The feedback

I was moderately happy with how the game turned out, it didn’t contain everything I had envisioned after all, but I got a ton of positive feedback anyway which is wonderful! It seems like some thinks that my game is good and there’s nothing better for your game making confidence than a bunch of flattering words. I’m even considering developing the game more, maybe spending a couple of days here and there on it during a couple of months when I have the time?

I learned a lot!

The best way to learn something is just to do and it’s still true. I’ve found a bunch of ways to improve and shorten my code, I’ve made an “infinite” space constructed by individual chunks and that game physics != real physics. Awesome.

Game design is a pretty fascinating creature. Sometimes you give it your best but the resulting game isn’t funny, other times you think your game is shit but then you get comments on your “amazing” game! This time I was certain the game was crap, a neat idea wrapped behind a boring gameplay but turns out it maybe wasn’t that boring after all?

I got this comment:

“Also the fact that when that happened the game didn’t simply reset, I lost my money but not my items,
literally stopped me from rage quitting. Bravo”

My thougts? Wait that’s a bug! Hmm…

My girlfriend

Of course as I live together with someone it’s quite hard to devote an entire weekend, plus the extra time before and after, with my computer. Veronica handled it wonderfully well and she was very supportive which means a lot to me and it helped a ton.

The Bad

The music

There’s no music but I had grand plans for making music for the first time ever! It failed hard though. Which brings me to the next point…

Not familiar with the tools

I used my own framework for the game, which is fine, but my last game with it was in May 2011! Which is a looong time ago. I was a bit (a lot) out of practice with this whole pixel arts thing. And of course I had never used LMMS to make music and that didn’t happen. I was short of time and it was too big of a deal to start it with the last minute.

Not enough time

Even though I had the whole weekend planned for the dare and I skipped practice on Sunday I was still short on time. I’m not really sure why though. I made a pretty simple game, not a lot of art and I generated sound with bfxr which took no time at all… The reasons really must be:

1. Not enough practice.
2. Unfamiliarity with the tools. Correlates closely to #1.
3. I’m bad and LD is hard.

When I see all these amazing games I’m reminded on how much better other game makers are. I need more practice and I need to make more games. I should enter the next dare, enter the experimental gameplay project and just make more games.

And let’s face it: Making a game in 48 hours is frickin hard.

The Ugly

The art

Oh god… I suck at making art. Let’s just leave it at that.

The code

There’s a lot of bad and wrong in there, it works but it’s not pretty. In fact, it’s ugly.

The gameplay

This is a tricky one. I thought about placing this in the bad section as I didn’t find the game very pleasing at all. The beginning was too slow, the ending too long and there wasn’t enough incentive to continue flying through endless space I thought. But I got a lot of positive comments and reactions which is wonderful! I don’t fully understand why yet so I’m tagging the gameplay as ugly. After all the gameplay wasn’t like in my dream…

Ending thoughts

Before entering the competition I’m always nervous but high spirited. That feeling is always crushed during the weekend and when I finally get the game done and uploaded I think it’s the worst game ever. Luckily I’m greeted with positive feedback and that was the case this time again. Maybe they are okay, not super of course, but simply okay.

This time the dare came at a time where I felt I haven’t done anything meaningful for a long time, it’s just school, little programming and no game making. Now after my spirits are high and I can face a new year with many more games to come!

Until next time, cheers!

Hi everyone,

This was my first Ludum Dare entry.
It was a lot of fun doing it!

What was important for me was to learn some tools that I haven’t used yet,
and to make a complete game that is playable and hopefully fun.
My graphic skills are very limited, so I decided to go on pretty abstract graphics and use a lot of particle systems for effects.

I used the starling framework for AS3, and its particle systems engine for the effects.
These were the new tools I enjoyed learning and using. I think in these kind of 48-hour effort you can really get a good experience with a library or technology,
and I’m sure it will help me in future games.

I started the contest with about 1-2 hours of thinking and pretty much knew what I would do.
Then I started programming the mechanics. I intended to finish them, and when I’m happy with how things were to move on to graphics, music & sound.
However, after about 6-7 hours of working, and having slept not that much the night before, I was too tired to continue with solving some bugs (even though they weren’t many),
and felt I’m pretty closed on the mechanics and that they are working. Even though I didn’t have any level designed yet except for the simple first one.
So I moved on to deal with the effects and music. I ended up the day very late, but with most of the graphics done and with a simple music which I felt decent with
and hoped to improve it if time permits.

I think that was my first mistake, at this point, I should have built levels and tested the game play some more, since the following day I made some drastic gameplay changes without having
enough time to balance them. What I decided on the second day was that the ship didn’t move in an astroids-like manner physics, and couldn’t rotate while moving. This turned out to be crucial
for the gameplay, since it forced the player to plan his path wisely, so that shooting didn’t cause him to turn specifically. However, I still kept the ship accelerating a bit, so that moving
in long straight lines was better than moving in short more frequent straight lines.

This made the game fun in the difficulty level and playability, but very unintuitive and strange for most players.
I didn’t have much time to thing about this, and left it as is. But I believe what was important to do at this stage was either change the ship metaphore to fit the new mechanics
(maybe a soldier walking, pulling his gun only when he stops, and then rotating turns the gun, or something the like) or forfeit the nice game play I had and move back to astroids-like movement
to keep the intuitivness of the game intact.

Anyway, I think I learned a lot from this experience.
I find it very interesting to think about how players will react to the mechanics.

I think if at some point on the early second day I would have gotten some people to play the game and tell me what they think,
this would have pointed out the mechanics problem earlier and allowed me enough time to fix it.
Once you decide the mechanics are done and start working franticly on the other details, it’s hard to take a step back and think if any major thing needs changing.

I ended up the second day with the level design and balancing of the times. I was happy with that.
I took the time to make sure the game is possible to solve and that I managed to solve it.
Many people thought the times were too tight, so maybe I was too harsh with that.
I might have deducted 10% of difficulty out of each level just for fairness and the possibility to appeal to players that are less good at the game than I was,
after playing quite a lot for testing I might say.

And one last lesson – it’s very hard to call it a night on the first day when you feel you didn’t accomplish enough to finish it.
I couldn’t do it. I kept on going until I was happy and that was what forced me to do music and graphics instead of the core mechanics issues & bugs.
I think at this point, I should have gotten some sleep, and started fresh on day 2.
It’s hard starting day 2 since it’s the last day and you want to be closed on a lot of things to feel less pressure, but at the end it was a bad decision,
since I was much less effective without the sleep I needed.

I would be happy to hear your thoughts about my conclusions and the game itself!

Here’s the game: Feeling Alone

Thanks,
Idan

So it looks like drawing the characters to a surface, then blitting that to the screen on every draw would be the way to go for sprite fonts in GameMaker.

This is the story of what happens when I do just that on my Final Score screen.
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After a healthy break over the weekend, it is time to rate a few more games. This time I’m highlighting games with low number of votes, but bring something interesting to the table. Go rate them!

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Alone .. Developer — I’m glad someone had this idea and actually went through and made it happen! This is a game about controlling a lone programmer as he tries to make a game in 48 hours. Sounds familiar? You have to manage his food/stamina/productivity levels through a wholly unhealthy sleep cycle. The bad endings are hilariously extreme. Unfortunately, the game does not have a good ending.

Diggy Dig — This is a very cute game about a naked dwarf miner. You dig away the dirt with your mouse, and try to grab the treasure. Beware not to paint yourself into a corner! I like games with novel mechanics like this one. But you also can’t win this one yet. Also: kitten power!

Alone with Zzzobmies! — This was the first LD22 game that made me actually scared! Great mood, even though problems with collision detection make the game a bit frustrating. Kill those creepy zombies with bricks! Oh, and this game DOES have an ending.

Squido does not like being alone — An addictive arcade, you have to control squido as he tries to make friends… unfortunately, sharks and zoidberg will kill your friends all the time, and you have to make MORE friends. Maybe a bit on the tragic side, but a very fun game — how many squid friends can you keep at the same time?

Alone in the Clouds — A very beautiful puzzle platform. You have to go to the end of the stage by managing your limited “superjumps”. In normal mode you can recharge your superjumps infinitely. In hardcore you can’t, and things get really difficult. Beautiful background and transitions + robot in a balloon. There is an ending, and a side door near the end that I didn’t manage to open.

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Rating and commenting on every game is hard work. My hats off to those who have already rated more than 30% of the games! At my current rate, I don’t think I can make the 25% treshold, but I hope the devs enjoy my commentaries to their games. If you liked this review, make sure to check my journal for a few more.

Happy new year everyone!

For my Ludum Dare entry Lonely miner I implemented water simulation.

You can see it in action here:

My entry

First you need to know how to use box2d or some other fast physic library that can handle circles. Particle simulator would be best but integrating that to game would take some precious time that I didn’t have. So I created a pool and obstacles and hefty amount of small slippery balls with pretty high density. You don’t want any friction, damping and only small amount of restitution.  Radius of one ball is about 0.25m when my full screen size is 48m x 32m.

So this is how things look with debug renderer on this stage.

 

Simulating lots of dynamic bodies that clamp often to one place is really heavy weight operation. This need to be taken consideration. For this reason I used really inaccurate physic settings. I stepped world with only one velocity and position substeps. Also I fixed physic steps to 30/s.(After competition I noticed 20 would be enough) Always when dealing with fixed time step you want to interpolate or extrapolate position when physic are not stepped but rendering is. I choosed extrapolationing. This is simple to pull of.

RenderPos = PhysicalPos + Velocity * TimeAccumulator

Rendering is the part that trick players to believe that water is not just a bunch of tiny balls. My method was to render water drops as metaballs with radius twice the physical size of the object. Fastest way to make metaball was just sprite that is opaque at middle and fully transparent at edges with smooth circular gradient. I mixed some noise and color there to get better look. Water rendering need two pass. First water is rendered to small off-screen buffer and after that it is rendered as full-screen quad to screen with alpha test discarding too transparent pixels. This will give water hard edges, continuous body and vivid look. To get water drips non circular look just never clear the off-screen buffer completely but leave 75% of alpha channel left but discard alpha if its small enough. Every water drip have unique rotation to give little variety for look. I just ignored body rotation because I don’t want to reveal the circular origin of the water drips.

For final touches I added velocity based color change. This will give nice waves if something collides with water. Its’s also important to render water after ground to get best look. Because water was little too chunky I just colored it to green and called it slime. Lighting and shadow give nice feeling too because water is box2d based and I have implemented open source box2dlights library, integration just worked out of the box. http://code.google.com/p/box2dlights/

 

Performance is a problem after 500 water drips on desktop and 250 on android but this amount is just as much I need.

Since the weekend forced me to take a break on my review series, I have decided to take this chance to sit back and think about how the LD22 weekend worked out for me.

Maze Explorers was not the first time that I tried to make a computer game, but it was the first time I managed to ¨complete¨ my effort. I can thank the 48 hour deadline for that. I feel that after completing this LD, something clicked on me, and game making is not something as mysterious and arcane as I thought it was. I hope this means I can turn my ideas into real games more often in the future.

Now for the obligatory ¨what worked¨ and ¨what did not work¨ lists:

What Worked

• Having friends test my prototypes mid game: I had some very awesome friends test my prototypes as I submitted them, and provide me feedback. Some of the most important suggestions included: A highscore feature, zooming in the game area when the light radius was limited, and making sure my tiles were colorblind friendly (<3 colorblind friends).
• Having a Ludum Dare ¨partner¨: In terms of motivation, I was lucky to have entered the LD with a friend of mine. We were constantly IM´ing each other, talking about bugs and landmarks, and just ranting. It gave me a sense of duty — he was putting effort on it, so I´d better put some effort too! I´m sure I would have procrastinated a LOT if not for him.
• Deciding my theme/game design quickly: After the theme was announced, I sat on my sofa and did not leave until I had the complete game on my head. I found a kinda interesting, not too ambitious idea. Years of programming/Dungeon Mastering helped me keep the scope of my game reined in. I managed to complete about 90% of the planned features for my game, and even to sneak a few more in. Even when it looked like a stupid idea, I stuck to my guns and kept going on.
• Familiarity with the Language/Environment: I have been working with Java and Eclipse for a few years (although only in the realm of scientific computing), and even though I did learn a new thing or two, this familiarity helped a lot.

Thanks for reading so far! I hid the kitten easter egg pretty well, so here is a hint: there is one control key in the game that apparently is not useful for anything. You need that key to find the easter egg!

What did not work

• Unfamiliarity with Game Programming: This goes without saying, but I spent too much time figuring out things like “which class I should store my resources in”, “where to call transitions”, “how to properly program my tile engine”, etc. I was reinventing the wheel way too many times.
• Unfamiliarity with the game library: Related to the previous one, even though slick2D is a pretty simple and straightforward library, I think I spend the majority of my time peering through its class documentation. Finding out how to change the size/color of a font was a pain. Luckly, this means that next LD I should have more time to spend on the game itself.
• Making Levels: A large part of the theme tie-in in my game depended on level design. Levels should have at least two solutions — an “alone” solution and a “with company” solution. Unfortunately this means that designing levels took quite a while for me, and I only managed to complete 5 levels before the deadline. Fortunately, having the player try for the best score increased playability a bit beyond just beating the 5 levels.
• Sound: Sound and Music were always my weak point. I know nothing about sound terminology and technical aspects, and I wouldn’t even know where to begin to try and make some music for my game. sfxr helped me a bit with the sound effects, but I ended up botching the synth voice effects: its volume is too low, and either you can’t hear them, or the stepping sound effect gets too annoyingly high. I need to practice this a bit before the next LD. Suggestions for programs to make music out of thin air appreciated.
• Environment: My environment was far from optimal. I didn’t get enough good food, and ended up eating too much junk food (I had enough water, though). Also, even though I divided my 4 virtual desktops well (net/docs/programming/resource-terminals), a second display was sorely missed.

What now? There are many things that I didn’t manage to finish in my game: Transitions, a few more levels, music, something to fill the bottom of the screen, background screens. There are also some things that the reviewers (thanks!) asked for: better sounds, not getting stuck with a companion on your back (thinking about it, we don’t really need this for the game to be hard).

I might make a post-compo version with the above, for the sake of completeness. On the other hand, I might keep the game as is, for archiving sake, and move on with trying to make some new games to get more practice with the gaming library and with game coding in general.

Thanks for reading, and make sure to try out Maze Explorers and tell me what you think about it

Cheers,

Desde 1975 la enseñanza único ha sido una condición previa indispensable una medida de la complejidad de la universidad rosters.These seguir siendo orientado a ayudar a educar a los estudiantes, además de instrucciones debajo de discapacidad, así como sobre problems.Classes emocional permanecer en adolescentes a menudo menos de grosor y para que todos y cada uno estudiante universitario puede experimentar como rodar sin contar al frente de un tratamiento por debajo de su educador como profesores possible. Artículo recomendado por Empresas de Limpieza Madrid

Eran las prácticas dudosas comprometido a News of the World causados ​​por la concentración de la propiedad de los medios de comunicación? Er, no. De hecho, la teoría de funcionamiento de por qué estos trucos sucios se emplea es que la competencia en el mercado de la prensa del Reino Unido es tan feroz y despiadado por lo que los documentos que recurrir a cualquier cosa para obtener la ventaja sobre sus rivales – incluso en la misma cuadra. Artículo recomendado por Descargar Messenger

During this Ludum Dare, I learned a lot about many different aspects of game development, and about myself. I didn’t enter the competition to win, nor did I ever think I might. My reason for entering was more of a personal challenge, and I managed to achieve my goal. That alone taught me a lot about my personal strengths and weaknesses, which I’ll be working on in the future. As a student working toward achieving an animation degree, I realized that beautification near the beginning of a production is vastly unimportant (to say the least) when compared to creating and shaping a great gameplay experience. While I don’t think my game is a jewel in any way, I appreciate the fact that I had the ability to go back and change things that I at first thought were going to be fun and appealing. These things turned out to be boring, and removing them seemed to make the game feel much more fun and playable. I believe this is an invaluable lesson to learn, for any game developer, and I’m glad I had the opportunity to learn it in this way.

For those wondering, my game can be found here:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=preview&uid=8692

I managed to get it working on Windows, Mac, and in-browser.

Here’s are some screenshots:

Let me know what you think!

So finally, after a week of trying to use multitouch (I thought it would be much easier!), I have the Andriod version for you to try. The only differences with the PC version are touch controls (during the compo we used this instead), a logo, some more boxes laying around and subtle changes you won’t notice.

What went right?

• Blender, Python and Inkscape, our favourite tools, are awesome. Once you know how to use them, you do work much faster than with other equivalent tools. Frequently we used Blender’s Python console or did scripts of around 5 lines which did a lot of repetitive tasks for us.
• Gamekit is an awesome game engine which allowed us to use .blend files as-is without any conversion. It’s like Blender Game Engine but with a free non-viral license and it uses Lua  instead of Python (and no “logic bricks” needed, it was a pain to debug this BGE demo). We use the C++ API directly with some Python bindings I’ve been doing in the past months, which allowed me to hack any part of the engine if needed. Since the source is available I could compete in the compo (if I was going solo). I’ve published all the code although it’s not needed for the jam.
• We started a project which we’ll further develop into a full, fun and challenging game for iOS, Android and PC. We have other projects but this one will have a shorter development time.

 Get APK here or Windows/Linux version here.

What Went Right:

1) Small and Simple: Simplicity and a small scope is absolutely vital for a small, two-person indie team like ours. Shaped was created for a Ludum Dare game jam, which meant we had to take the game from concept to publishing in 48 hours (it is normally 72 hours, but we could not work on Monday). This small timeframe forced us to keep the game super tiny, meaning one environment, and über simple, meaning just a few mechanics. When the creative juices are flowing, its easy to get swept away in the tide and end up with a game concept far too ambitious to finish yet too beloved to compromise. This has happened to me with more game ideas than I would like to admit. Luckily, our short deadline forced us to reject ideas, no matter how great, if they would add more than 30 minutes to our production time. While Shaped is a short game, it is a complete one. Completion, we’ve found, is crucial for morale. If you are a small team like ours, I cannot recommend simplicity and limited scope highly enough.

 

2) Good Team Dynamic: Derek’s already said much the same in his post mortem, but it remains true nevertheless. Having people with whom you can be productive and simultaneously have a good time with is key. Not only does it keep the energy and optimism up, but it creates an comfortable atmosphere where all ideas and feelings can be expressed and considered. Most of my ideas are utterly bad, but Derek will always genuinely consider them as if they were great ones. Perhaps more importantly, he will give me honest criticisms which I can take without clamming up and getting defensive. What it boils down to is respect and the right attitude. With Shaped, we kept the environment fun and supportive and that really contributed to swift decision-making, quality work, and a fun development process.

 

3) Unity3D: Having never taken a computer science course in my life, I find it somewhat strange that I ended up as the programmer. What I have taught myself over the past few years,  I largely credit to Unity3D and its superb community. The visual nature of the engine allows for non-code-savvy teammates to understand and contribute to the process without having to look at a line of code. This also helps self-taught programmers like myself to understand what, in general, my code is doing. The way in which variables are displayed and the ability to adjust them during gameplay helped us both hone and test player and NPC behaviors until they felt just right. Lastly, the ease with which we could import assets from one another and get them up and running was incredibly valuable given our brief timeline. Other than a brief moment of glitch-induced panic due to hosting our Unity project files on Dropbox, the entire process of building with Unity was streamlined and fast. It is for these reasons and many others that we will be sticking with Unity for the foreseeable future.

 

4) Give Yourself Audience: This one may sound weird but filming our process really helped us to not only feel like “real” game developers but it also made the process more fun in general. Even if it is a Youtube video that nobody but you will ever watch, positioning yourself as if there was an audience really helps you to stay on task. Instead of treating the game development process as something that maybe comes after a few episodes of your favorite TV show, filming it gave us an audience (however imaginary) that we had to answer to and work for. I guess it’s where the adage, “Fake it till you make it” comes in. You and your team may not be Valve yet but if you treat the game development process as if you were that awesome, you probably stand a greater chance of finishing your game than if you think you and your game idea is unimportant and unnoticed. For Shaped, Derek and I did a Justin.tv/Twitch.tv live stream as well as a time-lapse using Gawker and it kept us honest. It also made the process more far enjoyable. Why? I will not speak for Derek, but for me it was vanity. There is something rewarding about being on screen and feeling like you are important and, hell, if you can harness some of that vanity to make your game development process more enjoyable, do it. Whatever keeps the ball rolling. If you do not like being on camera, write blog posts and tweets. You may find more people are following the development process than you think.

 

What Went Wrong:

Derek and I had such a positive experience with Shaped that it is a little hard to find things we did wrong. Perhaps we just didn’t have enough time to make significant blunders, or maybe I am still just riding the high. The few I could think of are below.

 

1) The Cold: Stay warm, your code-per-minute rate and immune system will thank you.

 

2) Not understanding 3D programs very well: I think if Derek and I had more of a grasp of 3D programs like Blender, 3DSMax, or Maya, we would have had accurate colliders for the more difficult shapes instead of primitive colliders that come with Unity. Getting knocked down a level in Shaped by an invisible sphere collider far outside the edge of an NPC’s visible edge is frustrating and, in the end, inexcusable.

 

3) Space-Heaters Don’t Burn Down Villages…Actually, they could so please follow the directions: Did I mention that weekend was as cold as the windswept plains of northern Skyrim? Well it was, and you know how the Frost spell slows you down as well as causes damage? Well, the cold room was like that on my hands and joints as I tried to code. I felt like Tin-man without his oil-can.

 

All in all, our experience creating Shaped for Ludum Dare 22 was a superb experience and has really inspired us both to pursue game development as a living. Stay tuned for more games from Send More People! Good luck with your games!!!

Cremas para la celulitis no son naturales. También contienen sustancias químicas como la aminofilina, que estimula la producción de enzimas que ayudan a des-consolidar los depósitos de grasa, por debajo de la piel, por lo que son absorbidos en la sangre. El producto químico más potente ayuda a fortalecer los músculos y suaviza la apariencia de la piel. Artículo recomendado por Fitness

For my entry I made a little point-and-click adventure game without the clicking.  If you haven’t already, you can play it here.

What went right:

Music – going into this I was fairly certain that I would be using some sort of chiptunes generator, but when the theme “Alone” was announced I figured there was no way I would get a chiptunes to work with the mood of being alone. I had given up on music within the first hour of production, but at the end of Saturday I got a little tune in my head, nothing fancy but it just might work. Sunday morning I got out a guitar and found a microphone and started recording just to see if I could make something. What I ended up with may not be fancy, but I like it and I think it is definitely better than silence. Though, since I went with live music I don’t think I should have used sfxr to generate sound effects, I think they kind of clash.

“Just do it” Attitude – When the theme was announced, I was at a loss for ideas. Fearing I would just give up if I didn’t do something, I started drawing a little sprite protagonist. After seeing him walk around I thought “he needs to be crushed by a tree.” The act of starting something allowed other ideas to flow and created a game for me, all I had to do was finish it.

What went wrong:

“Just do it” Attitude – By just starting right away without a plan, towards the end I had to start hacking things together in order to make them fit. Not having a plan before hand meant that I didn’t realize just how many assets I had to draw (as you will see, I’m terrible at drawing assets). And the code it cobbled together and held there with duct tape. I found myself writing the same thing over and over because the base class wasn’t created properly because I didn’t really know what it was going to be used for. Had I started with a decent plan I might have saved enough time to put in a small tutorial.

Theme – I was all prepared to create a tile based platformer and was hoping the theme would present a neat mechanic that could be used in the game. But when “Alone” was announced, all that went out the window. I was at a complete loss for ideas and nearly gave up right there. I actually wrote down several ideas for the themes from round five, but “Alone” was one of two that I couldn’t come up with a decent idea for. In the end, all I had was the vague idea “environment for the enemy” and I tried to make the best out of it.

Lack of instructions – If you watch the timelapse you may be able to see that there was an “Instructions” field in the main menu all the way up until about an hour before the end of the contest. I had intended to include just one screen explaining what type of game this is, what types of interactions the player has with the world, what clickable objects look like, and a hint to where to find the kitten. In retrospect, this really shouldn’t have been cut because without prior knowledge it isn’t obvious at all what the player can and can’t do.

Lessons Learned:

Take time to make a plan – I think next time I will dedicate the first hour to planning out what I’m going to do

Have completed basecode – There were still many things missing from my base code, like collision detection and a way to do fade outs. I didn’t want to look up anything while in the contest as it would waste time, so I made due with what I knew how to do at the moment (and that is why screen transitions are screen wipes).

Be strict about friends/family not bothering me – In the middle of Sunday I was called away by my family by what I expected to only be an hour which turned into five. Whenever I look at this game now I think what I could have done with those five hours.

 

All in all I learned a lot from the LD22 weekend and look forward to participating again. And please, if you haven’t, could you play and rate my game.

You can find my entry here.

Loner Jetman

I have to admit that I wanted to shoehorn one of my existing ideas into the theme, and by pure chance a Solar Jetman-style game was a perfect fit.  I’ve always loved that game for the NES and think it deserves a remake.  I wanted to create it in Unity since I’ve been working with Unity for a while now and love it, and wanted some practice trying new things without worrying about consequences.

The bad

I was unfortunately really tired coming into this competition, having just begun a well-needed vacation, so in total I probably only spent about 10 hours on this game.  As such it’s lacking in polish, has some annoying physics glitches and doesn’t have any real threat to the player.  I needed to hand-hold the player via GUI messages since I didn’t take the time to make things more discoverable.

I would love to release a more polished version of this game but realistically I will be too busy working on my other Unity projects.

The good

Surprisingly, the main mechanic is (in my opinion) fun, and reminiscent of the original Solar Jetman.  I can only imagine how much longer it must have taken Rare to get even basic physics working without the benefit of a modern game engine.  I am personally a fan of mechanics that involve a struggle toward a reward with steady progress along the way which doesn’t get undone.  I like games that start out as hard as they’re going to be, and get easier and easier as you progress toward the goal, whittling away at obstacles.

In the short amount of time that I worked on this game, I learned a lot more about Unity since I wasn’t afraid to try new features to get the job done, without getting stuck in “analysis paralysis”, questioning whether or not I was approaching things the best way.

Having a forum for people to comment/critique the game really gives me motivation to do better for the next Ludum Dare.  It’s one thing to know what I did wrong; it’s another thing to see this reflected in player feedback.

What went right:

• Finding an idea: I woke up early (LD started at 3 a.m. for me) and just looked at the final theme voting results. Then I pondered about possible games while staying in bed, which proved to work quite good.
• Programming: Even with a bug that took me 1,5 hrs to solve I was quite happy with my programming.

What went wrong:

• Time: With my wife and child being around and some not LD realated evening activities, time management became a problem. I had to cut almost all features I planned and keep very simple with the graphic and leave the music out.
• Motivation: Due to the ideas I had at start and the time restrictions I got more and more frustrated running out of time and realising not to make the polished game I would have liked to. So I had some moments where I thought about quitting the compo but am quite glad afterwards I haven’t done so.

Related to the last point, here is a comparison between what came out and what I planned:

So what did I learn?

It’s worth continueing even when you want to give up.

Play and Rate!

So I made an ego-adventure-story-cat-experiment called 5 DAYS. Allow me to recap.

 

What went right

Graphics

Creating graphical assets is a time-consuming task, so I immediately dropped it and only concentrated on stuff I could efficiently produce. The current style is a nice trade-off between detail and costs.

Level-Design

I started this thing from the ground up on tiles, which allowed me to make changes and updates right till the end. Having everything based on clean tiles also meant I could easily add objects, like the lamps, which effortlessly clamped into the architecture.

Intro

I /love/ the intro. This is the closest I have ever come to a cut-scene, and even now it’s completly gameplay, not a video.

The original idea had everyone dying in a scripted explosion, while the player could do nothing (but walk around). Having the player actually kill the reamaining crew (be it by accident, admittedly), would only further compel her to save the cat.

The cat

Your only companion is a cubic cat (no time to model, as mentioned above), which is aptly named Boxy. You have to feed for it to survive, but doing so will deplete your own ressources.

Title-Cards

The game starts with a cold open right in the action. The title is only seen after the first room, and then perfectly sets up the story.

My original title was ALONE. After the player would have watched his friends die / kill them, she would be ALONE. But because the name would probably be overused, I changed it to 11 DAYS. Eleven turned out to be too long, so I shortened it to 5.

I love how the title 5 DAYS becomes a chapter-card, turning into 4 DAYS, and so on. I contemplated putting the title at the end (Hot Fuzz/The Dark Knight-style), but only few people would see it then. I guess this doesn’t work in games.

The only downside of this title is that I already made a game called 5 Days in Charleroi. I was already trying furiously too get the gameplay to work, so this didn’t even occur to me . Oh well.

Timelapse

The video went alright. If you comapre it to my previous ones, you’ll notice I frown a lot in this one.

Music

Instead of composing my own background-music I was forced to try out Wolframtunes, where I found some interesting ambient-tunes. I was able to reverse-engineer those, and created a fitting soundloop in comparatively little time.

Also notice how the sounds picks up after the title, further signalling that the game has “begun”. Nice effect.

 

What went wrong

Initial idea

This was actually my first idea, but I classified it as “way too ambitious”. I had some others, but none of them impressed me as “stuck with a cat on mars”. So I begrudginly started, planning to either switch to a new project a few hours in, or use what I would have built in that time to make a smaller version.

I had a crisis after 8 hours, when I decided this was too big, and tried out other ideas. „Lone asteroid in space“ I actually started, when I realized switching to that would be even more work. It was quite a dilemma. I (not crying, completely manly) went back with further resolve to finish this project (in a manly way), and soldiered on.

After 32 hours everything then came together and started working, which lifted my spirits, and caused the classical game-design-high.

Gameplay

I noticed near the end that I unable to create the payoff every time. If the cat dies very early, the player will have a lot of food, thus eliminating the conflict and creating a boring game/ending. Typing this I realize I could’ve built it so that the reserves will adjust. ARGH THIS WOULD’VE BEEN PERFECT

Then there is the thing that re-playing it offers little incentive, as the gameplay already was rather un-action-y, expecially should the player die. Even a nightly checkpoint wouldn’t have worked, as resetting the player each death would reail-road them to the „desired“ ending, which is strictly against my principles.

There things stem from the initial idea, and show how much I tried to fix this issue but ultimately failed (see timelapse).

No pointer/cursor/crosshair

Here’s an important thing: We are a lot better at playing games than the average player, especially at playing our own games. It didn’t even occur to me add some sort of crosshair/targeting-thingie, as my aim was always spot on. This stuff you only realize after one day not playing it.

 

All in all

Although this had a very bumpy ride, I believe it was a succesful experiment. Those who actually manage to get through to the end all agree, calling it „amazing“, „brilliant“, and me a „meany“. On Kongregate this is already my second most-played game, Ludum-Dare-ratings are doing well, and I even got a review.

 

Play here | Entry-page

-Matthew

Hey there, I’m hoping the makers of the Ludum Dare Website are reading this, if not and you happen to know them, please send them this way

As I mentioned earlier, I haven’t been able to make last Ludum Dare, unfortunately. I do, however, like to look at the games.

At this point, it’s a little awkward. While I can understand, for caching/speed issues, that the game list pages are fixed, it’s somewhat unfortunate the game pages itself don’t come with any navigation.

What I would like is 3 seperate buttons or links: A forward and a back button, so one can speed through the different games a little more quickly, and a Random button which will present the user with a random game. I don’t even really care whether Jam games are standard included or not, but it would become so much easier to run around different games, trying to find the hidden gems before jurying is done.

For your Consideration,

Arie ‘Gemberkoekje’ Hofland.

In the original version of my game I locked the window size to 1280×960, which turned out as a bad thing to do. Some people were complaining that the edges of the screen were cut off. To solve this problem I have now implemented an options-menu that allows you to switch between window sizes. You can also press F5 to toggle. While I was at it, I also made a proper windowed-mode and fixed some minor bugs. I don’t know how the game looks on widescreen now – if there are any problems, please report!
If you have experienced low framerates, you can now press F10 to deactivate the dynamic vignetting effect and replace it with a single sprite. This damages the look and mood very badly – use it only if the game runs really slow! (press F11 to see the fps)

You can get the updated version here (Windows): dywa_elfrth_1.1.exe
New source is also available: dywa014.gm6
And please don’t forget to rate: Submission Page

In other news: A friend of mine made a YTPMV (youtube poop music video) using the soundtrack of my game. It’s really awesome so… go ahead and watch it!