That was a blast!  This was my first Ludum Dare, but will defiantly not be my last.  Thank you to everyone involved.

My Game

VOXTERIUM

My Plan

Before the competition started, I had designs in mind, wrote some stuff down, and was testing out a million 2D platform game mechanics.  I’ve been doing primarily 3d stuff over the last year, so I began to question why I was entering a realm I wasn’t comfortable with for a 48 hour competition.   At the last minute I decided to switch to a 3D approach.

The whole process was really organic, I let the game design itself.  I didn’t take time to write out a plan or design document.  Design documents are great, and serve their purpose… but they are no fun to play and I can use that time to add cat powered mega bullets.

What went right…

I got the full support of my wonderful and loving family.  Every minute I wanted to work on the game, I had, distraction free.  Can’t express the importance and appreciation of that small fact.

I completed the game.  By using a definition of ‘complete’ that really only applies to games made in 48 hours.  There is a hint of a story.  Win/Loss conditions, mechanics, sound…  The basics are there.

The game is fun.  I enjoy it at least.  Once I turned it in last night and the LD website went kaput, I spent  a while playing it… not play testing it, but playing it.  It was nice.

I believe I did a really good job with my coding time management.  I worked a short time on each mechanic then really took a step back and decided if it “just didn’t feel right”, or flat out just didn’t work.  Rather than beat a dead horse, I was able to drop them and move on to the stuff that did work.  What I was most concerned about, generation of the antagonist and controlling it’s growth actually just worked out with minimal issues.   In the beginning, it reproduced so fast it would kill the framerate after a minute or two playing… I ended up calling that “hardcore” mode, with a warning, but optimizations and balancing added later killed the fun in that

The hardcore mode “bloom attack”.  The visual and sound… It just works for me.

What could have gone a lot better

I resorted to lazy coding a bit too quick.  Played the “public” and “static” cards way too early.  Some last minute bug fixes were a challenge, (and there are still a few minor ones lurking that I believe are tied into the above).

I got in a good chunk of time in to work on balancing and difficulty levels but it wasn’t nearly enough.   A few more hours to work on balancing would have helped a lot.

The “art”, if you can call it that needed some more love.  Some may find the color shifting thing a bit obnoxious… but then again, others will want more.  All the modeling was done in code and consists solely of cubes.  Some more interesting powerup and bullet shapes would have been nice.

Some of the sounds just don’t work for me. Except for the “bloom”… did I mention the bloom?  I like the bloom.

Final Thoughts

The jealous side of me is trying to decide if next time I should go for a web game.  Probably going to lose a lot of plays and votes for being a Windows-only application.  Lose several more for XNA’s outside requirements.  It may not be right, but it is what it is.

In the end though.. I didn’t do it for votes…  I did it for the fun and the experience.   And by those measures, I already won Ludum Dare.

My first submission to Ludum Dare! It’s been fun and I hope you enjoy playing my little game!

The game itself is very simple, take your key from the top of the map to the bottom and placing it into the portal by digging your way downwards, avoid the blocks that can’t be dug (red and orange). Oh and the theme; Alone, well you are alone in the game with only yourself to beat!

Play Right Here

Instructions:

Use the WASD to move your character.

Use the mouse to remove blocks, but you are limited to a range around your character I.E. You can’t dig miles away from your man, so keep him close

This was my first ludum dare entry! It wasn’t actually too much of a wild ride, though– I was taking it pretty easy. More below.

The Game: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=preview&uid=8771

Neutral things:

• Started working on the game at 1pm on Saturday
• Finished work at 10:30pm on Sunday
• 6 code files (Bullet, Enemy, GameLogic, Player, BGScrolling, Animation) – 7 hours 15 minutes
• 12 art assets (two frames each up / down / middle for player, bullet, three frames of asteroid, two background layers) – 3 hours 40 minutes
• 2 sound effects (shot, explosion) – 5 minutes
• Background music – 25 minutes
• Tools used: (Unity, Photoshop, BFXR, Cubase)

• I didn’t make it into the competition. I was relaxed about the timeline, started late, etc. and missed the turn-in time
• Did not get in the level of visual polish that I would have liked. (missing particles on explosions, more frames in animations)

• Completed in 15 working hours
• Finished and submitted the game!
• Game was able to be completed because of proper scoping and planning activities
• I spent probably 3 hours (a fifth of the dev time!) planning — after this I had a really good idea about when I needed to stop working on something and move on
• I thought about my game holistically and thought of the overall completeness and what features were required to get there.
• Diligence pays off! Everywhere where I acted in a precise manner I was successful
• I FINISHED AND SUBMITTED THE GAME!

Strategy for next time:

• More of the same! Plan, scope, then act–
• Practice the things that take the most time or that are the weakest in quality outside of compotime — Practice makes perfect! (or at least better) ;P
• With a faster process I would explore more level-design driven development — maybe even some story

I love jams! They are great!

Happy game making!

Our 13-year-old dog had to be put down today, so my heart isn’t into finishing my LD jam entry.

Entry postmortem tomorrow.

Currently hunting for last minutes changes prior to submitting our Jam entry. Keep yourself occupied with these screen shots until then:

See more

See by yourself!

Ludum Dare #22 – Progress report 4

I AM STRESSED RIGHT NOW.

Play windows

We got a long way, but work/school/other things got in the way a bit. However we will submit what we have made as a tech demo. Basic movement and environment are in the game. The game was going to be story based, but we didn’t have time to actually make the level and implement the story progression (even though it wasn’t that complex).

It was fun though!

Tools used:

• C++
• Clanlib
• Boost serialization
• Visual studio 2010 express
• Photoshop
• GIMP (Photoshop can’t export transparent png’s somehow)
• Pen and paper

Emiel

If the jam lasted one more day!

In the end I spent too much time researching possible engines and didn’t get anything finished. A lot of time was wasted trying to figure out how to make Slick2d work in an applet. But really I didn’t have a game to applet…ize.

Game Name: Kitten Alone

Language: Java

Libraries: LWJGL, Slick2d, MarteEngine

Completion: 10%

I ran out of time leading up to the event to do the kind of self-education that would have made this possible. My current plan is to continue working on the game (and changing the title…) so next event I’ll have a better idea what I’m doing. And if for some reason my Java skills aren’t up to snuff by the next Jam, I may need to make the next entry in Basic. Or ActionScript 2.

After sleeping like a baby, I’m gonna go out and relax today, I’ll upload my timelapse video later (with commentary) and write a postmortem and an article too. Try my game Desperate4luv and rate it please, it’s a dating simulator!  I had to leave a lot of stuff out, but it’s playable.

So after three days of Ludum Dare (2 days of actual work)
We can say we are happy and fullfilled by the experience,

This has been an amazing event, we hope you’ll enjoy our game

OMFG FFS will you LEAVE me ALONE

Rate and comment!

Good luck to all of you and keep up the spirit!

Wow, that was three days of hard work, but the results are pretty awesome, even if we do say so ourselves. I think Gijs’ artwork is top-notch, and I feel that we’ve managed to deliver a polished and fun game. Give it a try, please rate it and let us know what you think!

Submission Page

Alone with... things!

What went badly:

• I didn’t have any basecode and started from scratch. Thus a considerable amount of time was “wasted” on animation, landscape tiling and collision detection coding.
• Any form of storytelling or player guidance fell victim to the time limit
• The LD started at 3am here in Germany. I only got 4 hours sleep prior to the start and got unconcentrated and tired rather quickly.

What went well:

• Coding went smooth like butter. I never really used XNA previously, but working with it is easy as long as you know the coding language well enough.
• I’m not much of an artist, but i’m happy with the art. Nothing fancy, but it works.
• Using bitmaps with 256 indexed colors for levels. You won’t need a level editor this way and adjustments can easily be made. XNA doesn’t support those, but the BMP format for color-indexed bitmaps is VERY easy to load directly from data.
• The game idea turned out to be interesting and fun. Combining a traditional gametype with some unconventional twist in gameplay seems like a good way to go.

Tips and learned lessons:

• Sleep and eat well before and during the competion. You won’t be very creative or focussed when tired.
• Use a coding language and tools you are very familiar with.
• Use base code for animations and stuff. If you don’t have any participate in the warmup to create some base code for such things.
• Priorize planned features and keep the unessential untouched until you are done with the essential ones.
• Look at the themes during theme voting and try to come up with ideas for as many as possible. It helps to bring your creativity up to pace, even if a theme gets voted for which you haven’t got an idea yet.
• A drawing tablet (even a cheap one) helps A LOT with making art, even if you aren’t much of an artist and not good at drawing on paper. Take time to configure it and its buttons well for a smooth workflow prior to the contest.

Timelapse:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=rate&uid=8158

After learning about Ludum Dare–somewhat ironically–48 hours before it began, I decided it was something that I just had to give a shot. It has easily been simultaneously one of the most fun and most stressful programming projects I have taken on in a while.

Before It Began

 I don’t think I had any idea what I was truly getting myself into. I knew it was going to be a challenge. I knew it was going to be hell. But I didn’t quite understand the nature of the beast.

It was at this point, before the compo began, that I made the stupidest mistake of all. I decided to make a game using technologies that I had never even touched.

I had seen a few examples of WebGL online before and was blown away. Full 3D from a browser? This is the future of the internet.

The problem though is that I had never touched WebGL. I had never even successfully dabbled in OpenGL. Every time I tried to find a working tutorial, there was always some bullshit reason that the code would refuse to run. The closest thing I had to any sort of 3D graphics knowledge was the work I had done with Unity3D for college, and a few painfully simple Direct3D projects that really never got out of the “3D tech powering a 2D engine” sort of thing.

Deciding I was going to do this was the programming equivalent to deciding it was a brilliant idea to saw off one of my legs before participating in a race.

The Theme

When the competition began, I–like many others, I’m sure–was completely caught off guard by the theme. Alone. Out of all the themes people could have voted for, Alone came out on top. I wasn’t exactly disappointed, but it was a theme I never expected to be selected. As such, the first two hours or so were spent pacing around the room–it helps me think, honestly–trying to ponder this strange theme.

First my mind went to shadows. Maybe you could be someone who wishes they had friends, and interacted with your shadow to complete puzzles in some sort of platformer? From there, my mind pondered more about the darkness of it all. Everything around you is dark… space? That’s kinda like space. So dark, mysterious, beautiful, empty.

I liked where this was going, but what occurred to me is that games have stolen space’s thunder. It’s still amazing, but there are so many games in space that it feels less like a statement of wondrous emptiness, and more just a thing you do when you can’t think up a legitimate theme for your sequel.

My first mental attempt at adding a feeling of loneliness was somehow make it multiplayer. But that didn’t capture the feeling of being alone; if anything, it was the opposite. No, to be alone meant being cut off from everyone around you, not interacting with them.

That’s about when inspiration hit. If you truly want someone to feel alone, remind them of everyone else who isn’t there. Give them something that they will be drawn to that will remind them that they are hopelessly disconnected.

Forgotten Memories

The idea for my game–the story or plot, if you want to use that term–is that you enter an area of empty nothingness, with the only thing to be seen around you are a small collection of lonely sparks. They are quiet and unresponsive. You can not interact with them; you can only observe them.

Every one of these blips in this empty realm have been left here. Left behind. They are all that remains of those who have visited this place before. Memories, if you will. Nameless, wordless memories of those who are long gone.

But most important of all: Every one of these memories are left behind by actual people. People like you.

None of them have been hand crafted by a developer to represent “pretend” people. When someone visits the realm–when you visit the realm–your actions create a new memory, and when you leave, it is left behind, like a message in a bottle that will never be answered.

This is what it means to be alone.

So… Is This A Game? Or Art?

I still haven’t stopped asking myself that one, honestly.

I was trying to think outside the box. I didn’t want to just make a platformer, RPG, or something predictable. I wanted to make something memorable. Something that was different, inspiring, and unique. I would like to think I succeeded on that part.

The problem though is it’s hard to call this a game in the traditional sense. It’s not like you’re running around with a health bar, save files, a set goal, and a time limit. With so many traditional elements abandoned, can it still be called a game?

The mindset I have been in is that games are “Interactive Experiences.” Forgotten Memories has been designed with that idea in mind. In the end, it strikes me as being an attempt at “Games as Art.” if such creations are games, art, or both, well… I think that’s a debate that reaches far beyond my contribution.

It is pretty though, whatever it is. Yay shiny things!

The Technical Stuff

I should probably mention that depending on what you think about these sort of things, you might want to not read the rest of this journal. Why?

Well, for one, if you truly think this is something beautiful, and thing that knowing how it works would ruin it, the rest of this post is where I take this beautiful thing from you and dissect it, like an immature highschool-er violently stabbing the corpse of a once-beautiful bird, now bloody mess.

Also, it’s a bunch of technical boring shit.

The technologies in play here are WebGL, PHP, MySQL, Javascript, and a bit of Ajax and HTML. The last thing I ever touched anything web related was back in the days where everyone had Midi music playing the background, there were a grand total of maybe 50 gif images on the entire internet, and all sites were always “Under Construction.” Needless to say, a lot of what I did was actually pretty basic stuff, but just combined in a way that looks complicated. (Unless it actually IS complicated and I don’t realize it, in which case I should add that programming in general has been a hobby of mine since about the age of 10 or so.)

WebGL and Javascript make the bulk of the application. It handles accepting mouse and keyboard input, as well as plugging information into formulas to make those strange memory things.

Those, by the way, are known more formally in the math world as “Strange Attractors.” I REALLY wanted to add more variation to them, but not knowing a whole lot about the math behind it, I could only get one formula to work. Thankfully one of the interesting thing about strange attractors is that you can feed them various numbers to get visually different results, so it wasn’t too terrible. Maybe if I expand on the project sometime I’ll work on finding more.

PHP, Ajax, and MySQL handle the sending and receiving of data from people that connect. Yes, the memories ARE legitimately formed based on what people do. Sadly though, because of time restrictions, it’s not based as directly as I had envisioned. I wanted it to be meaningful: people who stay a long time make bigger memories, people who move around a lot make more chaotic ones. But even though I got code in that measures how much you rotate, how much you press buttons on the keyboard, how long you hold those buttons, and how long you stick around, the only data that gets plugged into the formula is how much you rotate the mouse.

Really though, that worked to my advantage, as apparently quite a few people don’t move with the keyboard anyway. Looking at my database shows that a third or so of the people who connect never touch the keyboard, which may be because you can move using the mouse buttons. I didn’t realize that was a feature of the library I was using, so the data-grabbing code doesn’t account for it.

Of course, the code is available at the link above, so if you really want to know the ins and outs, feel free to poke around!

Final Thoughts (And Some Advice)

Don’t ever try learning a new technology or language for one of these things unless absolutely necessary, let alone several. It’s suicide. I may have had success with it this time around, but I owe that in large part to having been exceptionally lucky. This should have never worked. That it does baffles me.

Likewise, prepare for these things. Consider everything that you might do, and have it ready to go. If you think you might use an art tool, download it ahead of time and learn it. If you’re going to make something multiplayer, make sure you have a server ready to go. I lost an hour or two in downloading, installing, and configuring Linux on a virtual box so that I would have somewhere to host this thing.

Finally, do something simple. If there is one thing that I can try to claim was a brilliant idea, it was that what I was trying to do–besides a lack of knowledge of the technologies–was ultimately rather simple. The more features you try to add, the better chance you have of running out of time. Think small, and build from there if you have more time left over.

In closing, I had a lot of fun, but ultimately was disappointed that I didn’t have time to add a kitten to my game.

I made a game for the jam, I cant seem to submit it! its a flash game, swf format, what should I do?

First, link to this game:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=rate&uid=7264

Then, a screen:

This night i went to sleep at 3am, i woke at 5:30 and went to work (i start at 7am), my head hurts a lot and i feel i need more than two hours of sleep tonight. I played my game a couple times again and this is my post mortem:

The Good

A complete game: the game had everything. Start Menu, Game Intro, Actual Game, Game Ending.
Graphics: My Achille’s heel, i don’t know how, i don’t know why, but i found a graphical style and i made a couple simple animations. Achieving this gave me enough satisfaction.
Sound: I’m really happy about the game sounds. Bfxr was a good choice and this music generator completed the work.
My first Ludum Dare: Since I found out about Ludum Dare in 2009, I always wanted to participate in this competition, and this was my first entry. I really enjoyed it!

The Bad

Crap story: The story intro/ending were made in the last 3 hours, i never thought about them till the very last and i wrote some cheap texts.
The game is too short: There’s only one level, it’s kinda boring and it can be finished in less than one minute and a half.
Tools: My Unity3D and C# knowledges are low, i started toying them about a couple month ago. I got struck a lot of time trying to figure out how to progress (eg 2+ hours for jetpack physics).
Bad programming techniques: Using copy-paste between objects and spaghetti antipattern is usually a bad thing, trough i think it may be ok for fast developement. I wrote really few comments on my code, which is always a bad thing.
Timing: I had other things to do in this weekend, I stopped once in a while to eat and I slept enough during the first day. I managed to work 20-22 hours and submit my entry ten minutes before compo end, but probably that’s was only luck. Having added at least one or two level and a boss fight could have improved my game a bit.

And last but not the least, my timelapse:

We have alot of the stuff done. luckily for game maker it has a very easy level design tool. Should be done soon.

again, heres a demo. if anyone cares.

http://www.mediafire.com/?25vgy7dquqy42sx

Weeeee

Yeah, that awful, awful feeling of having eaten bad food hit me on Sunday, and I had to give up. Despite that, I still have a timelapse video of what I did manage to accomplish up here. If you want to play the incredibly crappy techdemo, you can do that here, but be warned: it’s crappy.