OK now it looks like a game. But less than 6 hours are left on the counter to make some levels.

I need the sugar

Now that I’ve slept, I think I’m ready to think about what worked and what didn’t. But You Wake Alone has basically the same gameplay that I imagined in the beginning but had another layer of visual craziness and meaningful text that was a surprise. It even had sound and music, which went a lot faster than I expected!

On a personal level, it was very satisfying. I had a lot of prior obligations (including sleep!) so I figure that I spent 24 hours actually working. That’s basically a week’s worth of work condensed into two days! Getting instant feedback from my coworkers was very motivating, as was the #LD48 Twitter feed. Any time I started flagging I looked at those comments and got pumped up! I also ate better than I thought I might, which helped me maintain concentration until… oh… two hours before the deadline.

What Went Well

Scope
My concept turned out to be almost exactly the right length. I had a couple of features that got cut (an actual win condition and a new type of crowd) but I also managed to get some things in that I hadn’t planned on (sound and music). The only time I felt rushed was Sunday evening when I was trying desperately to get the win condition in the last hour.

Adding story
The original version was totally visual, which was okay since the style turned out to be so striking (maybe not good, but at least interesting). Adding some brief snippets of text really improved the game, though. For one, it was a lot faster to add more textual content than more graphics. It also helped people give their own context to the game, especially the more writerly folks.

Stealing from the past
I made good use of concepts that I’ve become familiar with in my day-job games. For example, the maze generation is a simple implementation of an algorithm that I ran across when working on Tiger Trackers (my current game). The crazy level overlays are based on code that my coworker and I wrote to deal with scaling a Flash movie clip around a non-origin point. By pulling in concepts that I knew inside and out, I was able to spend more time playing with the fun stuff and less time getting the basics working, despite not using an engine.

Simple collision detection
A lot of people had trouble with collision detection. It’s always a hard problem and if you don’t get it exactly right, you get weird edge-case bugs that are hard to replicate and fix. Early on, I decided arbitrarily to work on a grid, which made collision detection super easy. Whenever an actor moves, it checks to see if it’s moving into a new grid. If it is, it checks to see if there’s a wall in the way and stops the movement if necessary. This means that no matter how many pixels an actor jumps, it can NEVER skip over a wall, so major collision glitches can’t happen. I still had some minor problems, especially when I changed the origin on my actors, but they were never game-breakers and they were relatively easy to resolve.

What Went Wrong

Rushing a feature
I knew that adding a win condition was going to be a big deal, but it was such a cool idea that I had to try and cram it in at the last minute. Instead of trying to cram a big feature into the last hour, I should have gone out with a bang and just submitted early to avoid the stress.

Losing the fun
I wasted about two hours on Saturday pushing the zooming aspect further and further into the gameplay. I don’t regret playing around with different concepts (that’s what this is all about, right?) but I shouldn’t have settled on zooming for so long once it became obvious that zooming was less fun than seeing more of the screen.

Crazy input handling
I have no idea what I was thinking when I started writing my keyboard handling code. My recent day-job games have all been mouse controlled, so I just kind of started doing what seemed to make sense when it came to keyboard input this time. Unfortunately, that led to problems and bandaids over those problems and then bandaids on top of those bandaids. In the end, keypresses go into an array and then get removed from arrays and those arrays get converted into horizontal and vertical directions later and blah blah three steps later you’re actually moving. Madness!

Conclusion

Positive outweighs the negative 4-3, so I think I did pretty well. I certainly had a lot of fun and learned a lot!

You can play But You Wake Alone here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=rate&uid=8239. I’d love to get feedback, so please leave comments!

And now off to rate some other games! Leave a comment to bring yours to my attention!

My first time in Ludum Dare went surprisingly well, I still had to skip some major ideas and lots of gameplay, but at least I finished it.

What went right:

• 3D modeling with Blender: I have some months of experience with blender in game development and have been using it before that for experiments and stuff like that… I realle had no problems with that!
• Programming: Actually this game wasn’t very much programming work… the modeling was the really time consuming part.
• Sound and texture creating: Both aren’t really beautiful… But I think they are quit good if you consider the fact that I made them entirely from scratch!
• Overall style of the game: It worked out to be nearly as I wanted it to be.

TL;DR Please don’t hit me! It’s my first finished game!

(Bonus info: I am from Austria, so please don’t hit me for my for my grammar bad and speling, as well )

Well that went well…

Oh, you want me to elaborate?

What went well:

• I had an early playable, and it was just a matter of adding stuff from then on
• I managed to make a 2*5 pixel character spooky.
• My first tileset loader! I will reuse that!
• My first 2D level generator! (Gotta love the sine function!)

This was my first entry, and boy was it a crazy experience. Next time I will definitely create something simpler, and alot less focued on the nice shaders. I did a timelapse for some time, but then I just debunked it because I wasn’t getting much done during “streaming hours.” I have come to learn alot about game design in general, but more importantly what and what not to do during crunch time. Time for analysis!!

The Game Itself:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/50008295/WebPlayer.html

The game itself is pretty basic, a 2d platformer where you maneuver a guy through a set of rooms. Not original in the slightest, but I wasted enough time on crazy ideas. Performance wise it ate up alot of draw calls (I had no time for serious optimization) and the WebPlayer seems a little shaky because of it. I think the graphics are nice and fit quite well. Not really a whole lot of fun, besides walking around you try to push some crates around to solve some sort of puzzle. As for theme, I actually tried to cook up something good. The lighting, sounds, and layout were all part of some creepy-alone atmosphere. Of course, it is a 48 hour game experiment and I couldn’t put as much time as I wanted into it.

The Problems (many)

-Why is my game so damn short?                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     This was simply due to not enough time. The level was made on the spot in Sauerbraten, ( an FPS game). I had to play it safe because I didn’t know, for example, how far the player could jump while creating it within the FPS game. I couldn’t keep exporting, so the level design, in an attempt to be puzzlish, is just downright annoying and sloppy.-

Why are my walls all Glitchy?                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            -Although I came up with a good solution for collisions, I blame it all on sauerbraten. Each material represented a different surface type, and missing a surface in sauerbraten meant glitchy walls. It’s hard to explain, really. The controller is fairly decent, it uses realistic physics and the controls are tight, while mantaining a pseudo-realism feel. But alas, poor level design just ruins it.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 -

Um……Y u give us no controls?                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  Well, I wanted you to feel like you were really alone, with no guidance to help you. Apparently, most people can’t even get past the first room! (why don’t you go challenge yourself now?  )                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 laglaglaglag                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              poor optimization, sorry guys.

What I learned:

DO NOT RELY ON CLEVER LEVEL DESIGN  :  Your level will get nowhere and it will be extremely short much like mine. I cannot stress this enough, I didn’t believe it at first. Also, don’t rely on 3rd party games to do your dirty work.

BE ORIGINAL/SILLY/WEIRD. DONT TAKE YOUR GAME SERIOUS:  Why do I say this? in an attempt to make a serious (hears laughing) story based platformer, I ended up with a barely playable graphics prototype. I would much rather tenderize chicken upside down while tenderizing my shoelace than 30 seconds of pointless rooms.

X FACTOR:  My game lacked this as well. What will make your game stand out? is it original? Clearly, this is what makes the 48 hour game fun to play with the limited time.

GRAPHICS? DEPENDS WHAT YOUR GOING FOR  :  Everyone likes nice graphics, just remember, they eat up alot of time.

——Conclusion——

I really enjoyed the Ludum dare, although I was quite stressed at times. I really need to make my game more user friendly. Even more importantly, next time I will take my time and simplify everything.  I will just get the basis of my entire game as simple as possible, and If I have time, then I’ll add cool features.

TehWut out!

The boss symbolises my internet. The player symbolises... a player.

I’ll have to admit, my first ludum dare was very far from easy. I took hardly any breaks and the rush at the end to fit in the (amazingly detailed) title and end cards and final boss was a bit overwhelming and I finished with one minute to spare. But I’m happy with what I made, and I’m surprised I actually made it this fast, because the last game I made took me 2 months and wasn’t as exciting as I had hoped.

So anyways, I came up with the idea after reading a book called “The Other Hand” in english. The book deals with immigration and discrimination, but since I can’t make a serious game I un-serious-ified it and put it into a character. That character being “El Presidente”. The spaceship idea just came to me, as did the plot twist. Not that the plot twist is serious either.

My decision to make the game have dialog came from the fact that I’ve never gave any of my games dialog before, it has always been tooltips or just UI elements. I don’t know if I did a good job with the dialog. I tried to inject some ironic humor but some people might take it seriously, which just makes it look like a cheesy, broken storyline.

What went right:

• I was familiar with all of the tools that I used. StencylWorks, Fireworks, PXtone; maybe it would have been better if I used another tool ending in “works”.
• The idea I had was clear, that way the game flowed better (than it would have been).
• Feedback and playtesting from friends over an IM service.
• SFXR is amazing. AMAZING. My game sounds great, from my perspective.
• That short music track made the game. It was really boring without it.
• Motivation! I wanted to do my first ludum dare right.

What went wrong:

Oh god, my internet.

Throughout the two days of the competition my router kept breaking for periods of time. This wasn’t directly affecting me, but it made my livestream (that nobody was watching :c ) cut off every hour or so and disconnected me from conversations from my playtesters friends. When it came time to upload my game, the router went down and wouldn’t come back up. I desperately set up 3G tethering, but that (somehow) broke too. The internet came back on 30 minutes after deadline, at which point I was relieved to find out that the submission time had been extended. Thanks, downtime.

My humor. I’m really not sure about my dialog.

Towards the end of day one and at the start of day two I started unintentionally doing other things, I don’t know why. At 12 hours remaining I snapped out of it, though. Thankfully.

Sleep. Just an hour longer… (I did make it for 9 am every day though)
I’ll be in bed the whole way through christmas at this rate.

The fun:

I would say “the whole thing”, but there’s no point in making a list if that’s all you have to say.

Designing the ships was a lot of fun, I really enjoyed myself making them. Same goes for the music; pxtone is a brilliant music editor.
The most fun was had though, programming the game with StencylWorks. It was really fast and I didn’t have to do any extra engine stuff that would have brought friction upon my idea.

The not fun:

Designing Levels, ugh. Next time I design a spaceship game (or if I continue designing this one), I’m going to make programming movements a lot more me-friendly.

—

So, to conclude, I really enjoyed participating in this ludum dare, and will definitely be doing it next time too!

Here’s a link to my game: Splaser Strife – by RHY3756547

(the lens flare on the logo is for sheer crappiness factor, i don’t actually think that looks good!)

It looks a lot better in motion, I swear.

Okay, well. This is awkward. My game was literally on the verge of being done when it broke. Just completely and utterly broke. I spent hoursd trying to find why, but to no avail. So, it appears I did make SOMETHING, since that WAS my goal, but it’s in a barely playable condition. And, fittingly, my game’s title was called Broken. Well, it was fun, I suppose. Here’s what went right and what didn’t.

What went Right

Good theme- I’m really good at atmosphiric-y stuff, so I knew this was the perfect theme. I had a good (but short) plotline and storyboard planned out perfectly. Unfortunately, things sortof went downhil from there.

What went Wrong

Poor Planning- Yeah, I didn’t plan well.  Let’s be honest. I only somewhat knew my tools. And somewhat knowing your tools isn’t going to make you a game. Granted, it will make you a game, but maybe not one you’re proud of.

It’s not a feature, it’s a game breaking bug- Yes, the bugs were definately game breaking for me. Since I only somewhat knew my tools, I couldn’t diagnose what was going wrong and as a result spent many countless hours trying to fix it. (About half the time I was awake.)

Life- The biggest thing that got me was life. Even though I entered in the Jam, everything fell apart on the last day (today.) From finding out my game spazzes out every time you switch scenes, to having to spend 3 hours not diagnosing your game, to even spending 12+ hours trying to diagnose your game, nothing went well. At all.

I hope you all learned a lesson from me. Every wrong thing stemed from poor planning. Nothing went well. If you don’t learn anything, atleast remember this: Planning is EVERYTHING.

That said, I’m already prepping for LD 23. Good job everyone who participated (and those who still are) and holycrapwebroke700.

So I’m rating the games and keeping note of the ones that I think “stand out” from the rest, after all, 750+ is a lot of games…

I’m keeping the list in a post in my blog, click here!

I’ll update at least once a day!

This has been my first Ludum Dare entry (and probably the first game I’ve actually “released” beyond just having the code available).  I decided to make something multiplayer,with the tie to the theme being that it wouldn’t be apparent whether or not anyone else is actually playing, or even that the game is multiplayer at all.  Beyond that I’m a fan of the Box2D physics engine and know it reasonably well now, so I decided to work with that to create an online multiplayer arcadey shooter.

I’ve been interested in making realtime multiplayer games in “html5″ for a while now, and have tried a couple times in the past.  Previously the implementations of websockets and other newer web standards hadn’t been mature enough.  Websockets are now in an RFC (supported in Chrome, not quite in Firefox), there’s some preliminary support for sound effects and there’s support for encoding and decoding of binary data packets.

I have been very much treating this competition as a chance to try out some new technologies as well as trying to produce a working game.  A large part of the first day was taken up setting up a cherrypy/ws4py server which would work with Chrome, most of the rest of the day was spent figuring out javascript websocket handling and binary data decoding.  The actual gameplay elements didn’t take up that much time in total.   By the end of the day I’d got most of what’s ended up as the game done with it being a simple multi-player shooter.

The second day I didn’t have as much time as the first and things seemed to go a bit slower.  A lot of the time was spent on various bug fixes.   I made some graphical improvements like adding the background, added a some sounds (which took a while digging up useful information on the webkit audio api) and added NPC dots.

I think what I’ve ended up with is more of a tech demo for features of HTML5 than an excellent game, though it has some features I like.  There’s a few larger bugs in there which I’ll probably leave in for now.  I don’t think I’ll carry on work with this beyond the competition, though I’ll probably extract some of the code from it into a library that I can use for other games down the line.

‘malone? is submitted here, please rate and drop me some feedback.

I updated Alone In Space to fix two game breaking bugs.

1. Fixed the crash that happened when you pushed Play.

2. Fixed the crash that gave the (Cannot set multisample rendertarget as texture)

Changelog:

- Changed Nebulas to a pre-rendered version was the cause of major lag on some systems (Fixed the crash on Play error)

- Changed the Minimap to no longer draw enemy ships of any kind was the cause of the (Cannot set multisample rendertarget as texture) error

Inside of the download there is Alone.exe (the fixed version) and Alone-org.exe (the original version)

You can download/Rate the game here.

…But I managed to finish it, and seems to play pretty well.

Quite a weekend! I was pleased to get a good night’s sleep last night.

I had fun, was a great experience trying to code a game from scratch in 48 hours. You definitely have to keep your discipline; I worked right up to the deadline, and did an all-nighter the second day. I think I did overscope a little, so had very little time for playtesting or polish. (or being able to improve on my placeholder art!)

My game is a turn-based strategy RPG. Very similar to the “Shining Force” series of games, but there’s no ‘force’; it’s just you, on your own.

Here’s my entry page:

• http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=preview&uid=7345

And here’s a direct link to play the game in your browser:

• http://www.gavpugh.com/ludumdare/ld22/WebPlayer.html

I recorded a timelapse video, kept a journal, and will writeup a postmortem too. I’ll post them all here, once they’re ready.

Cheers!

Here’s the timelapse for my game Sat-E. Note to self: record more than 1 frame per min or you won’t see much at all!

I’ve added my entry to the chrome web store because having it in html5 makes that a hillariously simple task.

Grab it here:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/lmkbojccjjlficidfnpkgehomippmfgi

Rate it here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=rate&uid=5432

This is my second time here, and I really wanted to charge through and release an actual product that actually worked. At the same time, I wanted to show people that having healthy eating and sleeping habits makes a better end-product. Hopefully, everyone enjoys playing my offering; I’ll be releasing a post-LD version once voting is complete.

Here’s my time-lapse:

http://youtu.be/qf5tMLdWytA

None of the music I was working on made it into the game. There wasn’t time to fine-tune a creepy, atmospheric score, and substandard music can kill a game. Feature removed. Instead I spent time on a particle system and a bitmap font so I could put more information on the screen. In the mad dash to make deadline, I forgot to put the little 1/Q, 2/W, 3/E captions above the spell buttons, so people are having trouble figuring out how to fight ;_;

Something really huge I want feedback on is the speed of battles. Some people are reporting “too fast”. But it started out sort-of-turn-based and that was slow and confusing. I think my solution is going to be:

* Add the control text that’s supposed to be above the actionbar

* Slow down the regen rate out of battle

* Add more “stupid-time”. That is, monsters should be disoriented for longer at the start of each battle, and take longer to choose their spells.

* Probably split up spell cooldowns. Right now it’s one recovery rate – cast a big spell, take 30 ticks to recover, cast a small one, take 10 ticks. I’ll change that to individual cooldowns similar to MMO’s. That will also give players a clearer expectation of when their spell will be ready to cast.

* Particle effects for “I’m casting a spell!” and spell nameplates. I feel like having more steps of animation and visual feedback would help prepare players and inform them that yes, indeed, the monster is casting a spell. I think some people just see a bunch of dots fly by and die.

* Internally, split up the battle and map screen. This would have the effect of the map not showing through behind the battle, but then I’d also be able to put a cool backdrop in, and I’d have a lot more latitude to fix controls and graphics that are getting out of hand.

* Look into speed differences between low-end and high-end computers. This should -not- be happening, but since the game has a time element, I may include some more internal time inspection just to make doubly certain fast computers don’t hose the game.

Did I miss anything? Do any of these changes sound like a terrible idea? I want to hear about it.

I’ve played a bunch of the compo entries so far, and I love them to death. Thanks to everyone for making this whole thing possible!

It’s a little easier than surviving Singing Gaga.

In around 32 hours I made 32 sprites, 3 tracks about 45s long, 17 models with UV’s (the pain), and just 350 lines of code.

Pixel McBlocky Face? Is that you?

Even tho it’s crap art its still art! Or so I’m told… Anyway this compo has left me permabrain damaged, and I’m doing a jumping, flying cat-a-copter that smells like burnt tost for LD23. I’ve yet to see a single decent game beside Notch’s BRILLIANT MASTERPIECE game. Well played Notch, well played. If you have a GOOD game that isn’t:

• Unity character collider tipping over boxes,
• Flash crap platformer,
• Anything involving penises,
• Linux only builds,
• Can die in 0.1s from entering,

Well I had a lot of fun with this game and now I can’t wait for the next LD Competition.
So here we go:

The Good:

♦ I managed to build an acceptable metroidvania game (hopefully)  in little time.

♦ I had lots of fun while doing it.

♦ It was great as an exercise and I learned a lot too.

The Bad:

♦ I lost my internet connection on saturday night and could not get it back online till today’s morning. So I had to submit my entry from an internet place and I lost many hours that could have gone into polishing and testing.

♦ The game starts kind of weak.

♦ Some corridors and areas feel kind of empty. (cause I didn’t have time to finish them hehe)

♦ A couple of really annoying bugs that I missed. >:(

♦ Crappy Dialogs and soso timing.

♦ Game progression could have been better.

♦ Soul Pieces ended up being useless cause I didn’t manage to add the alternative ending I wanted nor a counter to check how many you’re missing haha…

Well I better stop criticizing my own game or else nobody will want to play it! XD
Anyways, you can find it here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=rate&uid=8677

T – O – G – E – T – H – E – R      A – L – O – N – E

I thought I would share some thoughts on how my first Ludum Dare compo game came out. It is an object avoidance game with a simple but unique take on the idea of being alone. It also features a song where I sing. If you feel like playing it, the link is here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=preview&uid=7245

Da Big Problems I Faced 

• Deciding on an idea – Even though the theme I thought most about before the announcement was “Alone”, I still had trouble getting started on my game.
• Implementing my ideas – I wound up scrapping my first two ideas (although luckily I could keep some elements and graphics) because they just didn’t seem that fun and also were getting complicated to implement. I need to follow the KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) principles more closely.
• Comfortableness (<—- I don’t like this word) with environment – I like to jump into things and pretend I am pro at them, only to learn….I AM NOT! The confidence is nice until confusing errors crop up! Oh well! For some of the results of this, check out my ugly source code!

Here’s my 48 hour timelapse. Postmortem is coming soon! In the mean time, you can check out and rate my entry: Someone To Love.

Click to enlarge

Yes is my first ludum dare game made in about 12 hours thanks for playing if you are going to:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=preview&uid=7045

and check my timelapse… but the video has some distortion (why youtube? WHY?): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6PFbbDYhb0