Since most things that went wrong happened in the first 6 hours, I’m going to start with what went wrong.

What went wrong:

I didn’t really love the theme. Not because I couldn’t come up with anything, but because it was so obvious what to make: An atmospheric metroidvania/ zelda clone. The problem was that that sums up pretty much 50% of all the games I have ever made, including the game I made for the last Ludum Dare, and I was hoping that the theme would force me to make something different.

So now I had to do that myself, and that wasn’t easy. Most ideas I had required too much animation talent to tell the story. I’ve played around in unity to come up with ideas for a 3D game, played games to come up with ideas. It didn’t help. 6 hours into the competition I decided that there was nothing left to do but make an atmospheric zelda clone, and I made some music and tiles to capture the right mood.

 Music

What went right?

Then I decided that I really didn’t want to make another zelda clone. So I went through all the gamegenres to find a genre that I didn’t make any game in yet and I got excited when I realised I had never made a turn based stratigy game before. I knew from the start that I wouldn’t be able to make that within the 48 hours, so I decided to simplify it. It was going to be turn based, but I was making a puzzle game instead. I also still wanted to keep the atmosphere I created before. A concept was born. I was going to make a puzzle game with exploration elements.

After that it was programming with the usual problems, making programmer art, realising some of the programmer art was going to be final, level design, adding extra’s, adding endings, hiding a kitten somewhere etc. The game was finished 10 minutes before the (first) deadline.

Lessons learned:

When stuck: Don’t think, just make! Ideas will come later.

When stuck and tired: sleep.

The game:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=rate&uid=5496

My comp entry went in last night: Adrift

 
So I guess it’s time to write a little about how it went.

The not so good:
- I was coding in Java using the LibGDX framework, which worked really well. Unfortunately there are parts of libGDX with little documentation, so I was frequently ducking into the source to try and work out how to get it to do what I wanted.

- I had plans for a much more elaborate game with more graphics, more levels etc but as is the case with this, ran out of time. I think I spent too much time on the menus and other screens whereas the game should probably have come first.

- Why can I never get up when my alarm goes off?

The better:
– Sound effects were much easier to add than I had expected. Setting and remembering volume was a bit fiddly though, and making the sound I wanted in sfxr was time consuming although quite good fun.

– I actually finished a game! Usually I get caught up in trying to optimise everything as I go along, but for this I was forced to just get on with making the game. This does of course mean performance is hit slightly. I was only getting about 20 to 30 FPS on my old laptop, but more modern machines should cope better.

– I stole a second monitor from my sister after about 12 hours. Wow did it make everything easier. But now I have to give it back.

– libGDX meant I could get a dekstop and applet version of my game made easily at the same time. I also have an Android version, but I have no idea how/if the controls work, what the performance is like, or what it looks like. I also have no way of testing it, so decided not to release the .apk file.
(I did have it running in android-x86 in a virtual machine, but that was really slow).

Now to sort out my sleep patterns and retrain my fingers not to press Ctrl+s all the time.

Hi everyone!

This was my first Ludum Dare entry
I had a lot of fun doing this game, and I’m pretty happy with the result.

In this game you must distinguish all your bad feelings, in particular the feeling of being alone.
You do this by shooting your bad feelings while completing the lane within the time limit!

Please check it out and try to beat the game! I tried to make it challenging

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=preview&uid=4140

Post Mortem to come later on!

Idan.

Yep! Finished my entry last night.

It’s very short, but I thought it was pretty cool. Good production quality. I spent most of the time on the art and physics, I did it all from scratch.

Written in C++ using SFML2.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=rate&uid=6035

Check it out, play it please, let me know what you think

Hello everyone,

I was able to finish my game for the Ludum Dare 22 with Love2D engine and I want to share my work with you.

Void - "The void is hopeless" 



http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=preview&uid=7125

This is my first time participating in this competition and I'm quite happy with the results,

 I'll be posting soon my timelapse video and a description about what went wrong and what went good.

PD: I'll give you a cookie if you manage to beat the game

I posted an extended version of my game. It only adds a difficulty setting, because most people found it too hard Yes, it IS actually very hard. But I wanted to make something more challenging and intense this time: it serves the ambient a lot to emphasize emotions (being chased and put on edge).

What went right:

• the animations: painting a dog walking was quite an amazing challenge to me, especially as Photoshop lacks good animation tools (unlike GraphicsGale). But I’m very proud of the result
• the particles: it was really quick to add fx in the game, I used a previous lib I made for the LD20,
• the gameplay: there is pro/cons about that, but compared to the previous versions I add during the weekend, the result works fine (not great but hey)

What went wrong:

• the difficulty: insanely high and lacks a good progression, fixed in extended version
• the music: when I added the “being chased” gameplay, the calm and moody music became awkward; it was not fitting at all anymore… But I kept it.
• the SFX: I like DrPepper’s SFXR a lot, but it tends to be repetitive after 4 LD entries… I definitely have to dig the Sfx question before next LD!
• the final sequence! I spent like 2-3 hours on it, and the high difficulty made it hard to actually see T_T

Back into things this morning. Day will be broken up by other responsibilities, but hope to wrap up all the loose ends. Here is some gameplay footage for now. Includes the music we wrote and recorded just for this entry. Sorry for the low quality capture.

Gameplay Footage

To continue with tradition, I made a game for this Ludum Dare named Leave me Alone!! (sadly, it seems like there are 3 or more games named that way).

I had little time to spend making the game so I targeted a simple game with almost no graphics nor sounds but fun.

The story behind the game is, you have to isolate a particle from other particles to keep the world safe, if they make contact then the world explodes in a mega hyper super duper explosion (use your imagination).

Here is a screenshot:

And here is a gameplay video.

Play it, rate it and love it.

I didn’t http:// before adding the play link to my game, so the link didn’t show up at all! it’s fixed now. I would have spotted it earlier but ‘the pages are cached’

http://software.o-o.ro/ld22/index.html

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

Sorry about that to anybody who tried and failed to play

First two hours is missing but I was only looking at irc to make myself feel better that I wasn’t the only one struggling with the theme.

That is all…

Bye bye

Man-o-man my first entry in LD and it was one hell of a ride.
I did the most I could do in between the interruptions and think it came out pretty good.
Talking with friends gave me really cool idea’s for the game (exploding kittens).
I had a lot of fun creating the music, the graphics and recording the sound effects,
which I’ve never done all that much for a game before.

Check my platformer out over at My Entry

What went right
Creating the content, which I didn’t expect at all!
I didn’t know about music/SFX content generators but now I do thanks to a friend (Frib)
who has competed in LD before. I also expected a lot more stress
from LD, but it was more fun than stressful!
Also implementing a lot of ideas like bouncy balls and spikes went better than expected.

What went wrong
Physics and collision, it just works so borky (omg, I googled it, it’s a real word).
It has something to do with rounding integers from rectangles and I just made a really
dirty fix around it. I also wanted to make more levels but I had other things to do this
weekend and that really limited me from creating more content.

Lessons learned
Maybe use a physics engine, or some sort of small physics engine for tiled games
I could create before entering? Also, I learned that I’m half decent, well better than expected anyway, at creating music and sound effects!
It was really fun to do and I can see myself doing that again for other games.
I think the next game I’ll make for LD is gonna be a bit more basic though,
I don’t wanna waste so much time on physics anymore.

Conclusion
Ludum Dare is a real lot of fun and I should get my other
game developing friends involved into this fun competition.
Which I will, next Ludum Dare. We’ll probably enter a Jam
(and maybe a little game for the Compo? ).

Btw 3 a.m. as a deadline is the best.

Overall I’m very happy with my game. Not because it’s the best game ever, but because I finished it and it’s playable. I even managed to cram in a bonus if you keep playing.

My original idea was a sort of rouge like where you moved between connected battle areas trying to kill everyone in the world. I was going to have rooms connected with single directional paths so I could add some puzzle element. The world would have had a set number of bad guys in the world + a set number of allies.

When you leveled, one of your allies would turn against you (you are trying to destroy the world so you can be alone.) and you would have a 1-on-1 fight with them. If you won, you got their power.

I spent a few hours on the game design. Then almost 7 hours trying to make the game over world in pure html/css/javascript. Unfortunatlly I kept running into issues and I didn’t have anything to show for it!

So 3pm Saturday I took my girl friend to work and sat in Starbucks (where she works) until 11:30pm working on the game. I decided to throw out the over view stuff and switch to ImpactJS for my game engine. I made a ToDo list that just focuced on making an old school RPG battle screen with the player on the left and the bad guys on the right.

The menu was hard coded, no matter what you picked, the player would attack. The bad guys could not attack you back. And the selector icon would jump around the screen. But it looked like a game.

My next focus was on letting the bad guys attack back and trying to make the menu system pull from a move list. The idea was that as you played new special abilities would be unlocked. With the global move list, the bad guys now could attack back. I gave everyone a strength property that is random and renamed attack to “Punch”. Now there was some variety between game plays.

You would die, a lot. But I always intended for you to have help from allies (that you would later kill.) I came to a turning point in the game design. I didn’t have enough time to create the over world (because I had to throw the old one out.) or add allies.

I let my girlfrind play test it and asked her which way I should go. She voted for allies, the game was just too hard without them.

I added text to show health, and removed the still non-working inventory option. I added two special moves, a kick that was just a plus to punch, and a round house kick that was an instant kill. I added in special points so you could go a kick 3 times, or one round house kick each game.

I had to redesign the main game loop so all allies would attack, then all bad guys. I also made it so bad guys will always attack allies before they attack you. Since my first ally is ice man, I added the Ice Beam special attack. Ice man always uses the Ice beam, bad guys still always punch.

I added winning and loosing screens and improved the background image. I ended up with 5 different backgrounds. Three of the stone dungions that are just colored differently, an ice room and a fire room.

The game was basically working. Everyone could attack and die. The player could win and loose. And randomly the game would lock up and throw a bunch of errors and crash.

I was quickly running out of time. So I decided to ignore the bug because it didn’t happen very often, and improve the bad guys. The new images where made and my cat was turned into a cat/xmas tree because, uh … because I said so, that’s why. (and cats are freakin hard!) With some play testing I reduced the number of allies down to one at a time (picked randomly) and changed the number of bad guys to be random between 2 and 4.

I made a quick title screen and threw up some story text. And the game was done!

Almost. I had two hours left. So I dove into the code to find that pesky crashing bug. When the bad guys had finished their turn, if there was only a single bad guy left on the screen, he could take a second turn without checking if the person he was attacking was still alive. If he attacked someone that was killed, the game would crash. Bug fixed.

I made last minute balance changes, and added in a played counter. I still had the Ice Blast and Fire Blast attacks in the game, but no way for the user to every get them. So I descided to use the play counter. If you play enough games, the powers will unlock and you will get more than one ally at once.

It’s been a long 48hrs. I’m glad it’s over, but I had a blast doing it. I’m hoping for some good feedback, if people generally like it, I might go back and try to add some of the dropped features after the judging.

Thanks for reading!

This Ludum Dare went much better than the last. I finished this year with hours to spare, last year, I was very close to the deadline. I think it was because I was more experienced this time. Now about this Ludum Dare:

The Good Bits:

• The idea worked well
• No major blocking bugs
• Random level generation saved me a lot of time
• The orange graphics for obstacles. This was inspired by mirrors edge and I think the bright colour in my otherwise quite dark, grey game really worked.
• Visual Studio 11. Once I got it fixed, it was a dream to work with. The intellisense is so much better now. Besides that I’ve always liked how Visual Studio has worked, it’s clean and very usable.
• SFML. As before I used SFML for my game. This means, theoretically, it will also compile under Linux and OS X. Alongside that it made development easy and handled much of the boilerplate code for me.

• No soundtrack, I’m not good with music
• Albeit random generation saved me time it makes it very hard to control the difficult. So much so that currently, I believe there are still certain times when a move is impossible.
• Mixed graphical style. About half way through day 1 I completely redid the graphics however some things from the old style remain. Things such as the scaled low resolution graphics and also the basic stick-figure player sprite.

• Chronolapse, or more specifically mencoder. Turns out mencoder doesn’t like 2560×1024 graphics. I ended up spending about an hour on the first day finding this out just so I could post the timelapse.
• Getting addicted to your own game. I ended up playing my game more on the second day than developing it. Although I didn’t have anything major to have there were things I could have added.

Kinda didn’t expect to finish, but got a good bit done, fixed a few annoying bugs with the engine and added a feature or two. Feel kinda bad because I went into this as a Jam with NeonLare and he was really hoping to get something done. I think we both have a habit of thinking a bit too large. Also didn’t help that I had other things to do this weekend and pretty much all my work was done from a hard wooden chair with my computer set up on a dinner table… next to a TV with annoying Christmas specials playing all day. Anyways… enough with the bad

Still had a lot of fun with this. Finally got a chance to actually use my character controller which seems to be working pretty well. Forgot about a few handy function I’d added to the engine until later, and unfortunately wasted my time with some other ways of trying to accomplish the same things. I still seem to have some bugs with my boolean logic (specifically with short-circuiting… I think that’s the term anywys), and ended up laying my code out differently to avoid using the operators. Most of the code functioned pretty well though.

Some sort of tribute to Zelda

The world-building could have gone a lot faster if I’d actually had my cogblock system and scene editor working how I wanted. I unfortunately wasted a good bit of time arguing about textures. The first batch we were going to use had a filter applied to them, which didn’t really fit the retro style. Ended up using them without the filters applied, and it looked pretty good. NeonLare sent me a number of different textures to use, though, and the way I was putting the level geometry together wasn’t allowing me to apply the individual textures easily. Again, if I’d had cogblocks working correctly, I probably could have just handed the whole level building portion over to him.

The heroine of our game here, Zoe, was based off a sketch by a friend of NeonLare. She’s a bit miscolored here because of how the face texture was applied. It’s basically multiplying her base skin color over the whole mesh. Ran into some issues with animation, mostly on account of the way the new version of Blender stores actions. Didn’t realize it was tossing out our animations if we hadn’t marked a fake user. NeonLare was… just a little pissed about that after losing probably over a dozen full animations.

He's ready to totally ruin your day

Though we had a lot more planned… skeletons were pretty much the last thing that got added in here. Ironically… they’re able to attack and kill the player.. but the player wasn’t able to attack back yet. She COULD swing her sword at least. I’d be working on this today seeing if I could wrap things up, but it’s Monday and that means back to work.

All in all had fun with this, and essentially have an engine going now that I can hand over to NeonLare and let him go crazy with. Good job to all those that you know… actually finished stuff (inlcuding NeonLare’s side entry!) and see you again next time!

Hey, heres the timelapse for my game. I’ll probably write a postmortem later today or maybe tomorrow.

==What went right==

-I really liked my idea (a boy that wants to stay alone playing his video game while everyone tries to disturb him)

-I managed to finish my first 3D playable game using an engine I’d never used (Unity)

-Made the art with my own voxel tool (Paint3D) and it looks kinda cool and old-school. And it took very little time!

-I learned *a lot* (specially Unity and 3D game making)

-Had a good time on a rainy weekend

==What went wrong==

-Lots of other games with the same name (700 games is way more than I expected), at least I haven’t seen one with the same idea yet.

-RIGGING – lost 3 out of about 13h trying to rig a character voxelled on Paint3D. This is not something you “learn” over an afternoon. Had to give up on animations.

-As always I decide to use something I’d never used before and got only about 13h working on my game. It’s good to learn something new but I reeeeally need to change this on the next compo

-The game isn’t 10% of what I intended it to be – it should’ve been funny with several “enemies” with different behaviours (mom, dog, little sister, neighbours, guitar player, aliens), dialogs, music and realistic recorded can-hit sounds. Right now it’s just a barely playable one enemy shoot-em-up.

My buddy’s now creating the levels and the engine is done. a few tweaks will be needed but that’ll be after the levels are made. i can’t wait to play this, and i can’t wait for you to ever
ollz

This is our latest build:

http://www.monkeydev.com/unity/ld22/index.html

Many of our features are still unimplemented. It is time to focus on making this a game.

Well, halfway through Monday and I’m still awake. That has to be some sort of accomplishment, right?

Anyway, I’m really proud of my first ever entry to Ludum Dare. It turned out 95% from what I had in mind. I had actually thought about the tunnel racer idea and setting a week prior already, and figured it’s something that scopes well into a 48h limit. And then the theme – although pretty bland, I could fit it right into my story…

Post mortem specifically:

Good Bits

• I used my very familiar tools for art and development. So mostly things went very smoothly with only one or two re-dos or revisions on assets.
• I used some of the XNA 4.0 features which I’ve never touched before, like the default XML pipeline. It worked out brilliantly and I didn’t need to write an editor or content combiners.
• Having had the setting (mood, visual style etc) in my head for a week prior meant no time spent on paper or concept prototyping.
• In-person meet up and dev sessions with the rest of the Cape Town dev community proved to be a lot of fun.