In response to this challenge to Christmas-ify your game, I decided to add some Christmas things to my entry, Duckling.

The ground is covered in snow, the mother duck has a Santa hat and the ducklings have elf hats (including the player), the egg you respawn out of is gift wrapped, and there are other modifications as well. You can play it here.

Now you can admire the Christmas atmosphere as the poor duckling is repeatedly impaled on spikes.

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas to all!

Just in time for the holiday I was able to change my game A Long Walk Home to be all Holiday Themed. I actually really really like the way the snow falls on the level. I thought about making all the blocks ice blocks, but that would be a little too much of a change from the original code base.

Christmas Time!

Enjoy you holiday!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=preview&uid=8475

Ah, finally got this out of the way. Was dragging my heels on this post-mortem as I didn’t feel like I had made any significant mistakes this time around, so there wasn’t a ton to reflect on. However, I haven’t had a ton of comments on my entry. So hey, if you’re in the festive spirit, give the gift of criticism!

In between zooming around from NS to NB this past weekend, I knocked out a Ludum Dare game. Neat little randomly generated retro style platformer. Posting this both on the Ludum Dare site and my own blog. So LDer’s enjoy an expository preamble!

Click to play

Preamble

So if you’re unfamiliar with Ludum Dare it’s an online, solo game development competition. They release a theme and you have to develop a game using that theme in a forty-eight hour timeframe.  A large list of themes is created and after a few rounds of voting , the list is culled to a dozen or so final themes to vote on. After the final round of voting is complete, the theme is released and a sleepless, hectic weekend begins. I was rooting for “Randomly Generated” to be selected as the theme and was already salivating at the prospect of making a roguelike.

Over the last few years the only games that really stick out to me as being actually fun and life destroyingly addictive were the new wave of roguelikes. Spelunky, Transcendence, and The Binding of Isaac have taken a mostly inaccessible genre and made it almost casual. If a player can get over how masochistic these games are, it really scratches their drive for mastery. There is nothing that can foster that “Just one more turn…” effect better than these games. But I digress, this is a subject worth a post all on its own.

Spelunky was a harsh mistress

The weekend of this Ludum Dare coincided with a friend’s Christmas party I few hours away. I didn’t want to lose six hours driving back and forth so I opted for twelve hours by train. After packing everything for the trip I settled in and waited for the theme reveal. “Alone” ended up hedging out Randomly-Generated by a few votes.  Even though I was bummed over my pet theme losing, I figured I could still work Randomly-Generated into my concept. What I roughed out, was that you were a monster created by the government, you wanted to escape their pursuit and be left alone. I pegged the gameplay as a platformer with randomly generated level sections. I wasn’t sure about combat and mechanics but I was hoping it’d grow organically throughout the competition. My main goal was to produce something playable that had some random level generation in it.

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Merry Christmas – Happy Holidays! Just for fun, here is the snowy SANTA version of my LD22 game, Greeble. Can you revive all your Santa Claus clones? Can you find the Christmas Kitty? It was made in HTML5 and runs at 60fps in all recently updated browsers. Enjoy! Hope your holidays are filled with friends, family and fun!

http://www.mcfunkypants.com/LD22/xmas/

My christmas version (as of bach’s challenge) of the game LEFTalone is available here!

I’m back with another round of really interesting entries from you!

A Weekend Alone – by NoLan Labs

Did you enjoy your experience making a game for LudumDare?  Do you want to do it again?  Now you can!  Play this LudumDare simulator to balance your need to eat, sleep, and use the toilet and hope you can crank out a finished game for the jam (easy) or the compo (hard).  Easily the most “meta” game I’ve played since Game Dev Story.

Frostbite – by saint11

This game is a really tight package with great pixel art, smooth controls, well-considered level design, and light challenge.  I very much enjoyed the fireside mechanic where you cure your hypothermia and simultaneously stop hallucinating while watching the flames.  An excellent entry and a must-play.

Everyone seems to be giving their Ludum Dare games a more Christmasy feel, and while it might be hard for me to say this unusually warm weather has me convinced the holiday truly is right around the corner, there’s a bandwagon, and I’m sure as hell going to jump on it.

Thus, I present to you Forgotten Memories: Limited Xmas Edition!

Do fractals more festive than these even exist? If they do, I haven’t seen them. There’s so much red and green up in this that it will melt your face off with Christmas spirit.

I seem to recall some sort of agreement to only spend five minutes on this upgrade, and adding “snow” would go over that. Sorry, but not every Christmas is a winter wonderland. Sometimes you look up at the sky, and it’s all cloudy, and you’re all “oh boy oh boy oh boy”, but then it doesn’t stay just quite cold enough, so you end up with some sort of slush that looks all sorts of ugly and threatens to kill you if you dare try to get on the roads before having dinner with the family, which I imagine is what having in-laws is like.

I wouldn’t know though. I’m all alone.

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

EDIT: Oh right. You know what helps? Actually linking the thing.

http://www.ludexor.net/xmas.php

I made a xmas theme too for my LD48 entry game.
Check it out: floriaen.fr/thefall

I accepted the christmas-ify your game challenge.
Changes:

• Holiday Graphics
• Christmas Particle Explosions
• Snow in lieu of stars

Enjoy!
download
 

What went right

• Images, graphic design.
• Focus on game (no distractions)
• Layout of game
• Knew how to use tools (C++ SDL)
• Game Story/Planning
• Timelapse/Livestream

What went wrong

• Not fully compatible with all platforms (Mac, Linux)
• Character movement could of been better
• Lava should have done more damage
• Could have had more levels
• Lots of DLLs and other included files
• Walls should have acted differently (instead of spawning at start of room)

What I will do better next time

• Try a different programming language that is more universal, easier to use
• Have less DLLS
• Graphics could be slightly better
• Player movement could be better

Overall, it was a great experience to be part of Ludum Dare 22.

Timelapse here: http://youtu.be/qUCHPi0LrXw

Get it here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=preview&uid=6571

I have decided to accept bach’s Christmas challenge, so I have edited the sprites/backgrounds of my game to look more like Christmas. I also changed the game’s story.

Play it here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=preview&uid=6571

Hey, y’all!

Go and check it out! Here’s the original entry.

Also, here’s my Christmas card to you!

Thanks again for joining in LD22!!! Have a great holiday!

-Phil

I accepted bach’s challenge and made a christmas version of my game. Enjoy!

I made a post-mortem for my game, “Ghost Town”.

You can click this link with your pointing device to see it!!

Re-posted from my blog: http://www.kennygoff.com/post/postmortem-alone-in-a-crowd-ludum-dare-22

Last weekend’s Ludum Dare was, in my mind, the best thus far. For over a year now, I have been trying to get the game development club at my college (SGDC, Stevens Game Development Club) to get together and participate in a Ludum Dare. Well, last weekend it happened! Thanks to a new dedicated room on campus for the club, and me bringing it up at every meeting for a month and spamming our email list with reminders, we had 3 people come by to work on games, and a few other’s come by to hang out and brainstorm. Unfortunately, I was the only one to finish, although one guy made a game on his TI calculator that was pretty cool (he didn’t submit though). Not only that, but I believe this is the best game I’ve made so far in a Ludum Dare, and my time was best spent during the weekend.

The Weekend

When the night first started and the theme, Alone, was announced, I couldn’t think of anything good. I thought of a lonely kitten platformer, but I hated that idea, and wanted to avoid doing a platformer (my fallback game type). I wanted to do something different this time. However, after talking with the guys who were at the SGDC room with me, a few ideas flew around. One being a game where you repulse people, and you have to corner them and make them your friend. Another, where you are trying to be alone, and you have to escape the people following you (basically the opposite of the previous idea). And a few other small ideas came to mind but I liked none of them. It was only about an hour and a half into the competition, and not late at night, so I figured I’ll start programming a simple platformer and make a kitten sprite so I have something to branch off of the next morning. After that it was about 12:00pm EST, and 45 hours remaining. I decided to take the night to sleep it over, as I typically have a better idea in the morning.

I woke up the next morning with a spark that I did not have the night before. It seemed like a more generalized version of the repulsion/attraction ideas. Basically, the game would be top down, with the screen being one room, and the player had to travel through to other rooms, and in each room was a different situation. Each situation would deal with emotions, and specifically for the theme; loneliness, love, togetherness, loss, and some others. I had been playing a lot of Edmund McMillen’s The Binding of Isaac, so I thought of the rooms in the same style as they were in Isaac. One basic rectangular room taking up the screen, with the possibility of one door on any given wall. The difference was, you could not go back through a room you came through.

Once I though of this I immediately got hit with all the different types of rooms I could do. Death, crowds, repulsive to others, getting a girlfriend, and losing a girlfriend were some of the first to cross my mind. I went to go scrap my old platformer and start fresh with this game. I decided to keep everything as different colored squares. This was not placeholder graphics though. I wanted everything to be representational and simple, in order to allow the player to image it all, and put him or herself in the game. Also I’m not that good at drawing top down characters, but I’ll stick with the simplicity angle as the main factor in the decision. The most complex thing in the game was the kitten, who was a small square with big pointy ears and a tail. As I started to put this together I also thought of naming each room something unique and displaying the name of the room on the bottom of the screen (which ended up being the most fun part of coming up with new room … and was totally taken from Terry Cavanagh’s VVVVVV).

I had to take a break during the day because I had a final exam and my roommate and I took a trip to New York City for a couple hours. Once I got back there was just over 24 hours remaining. That was enough time to put together a few rooms, clean up bugs, and submit on time. I ended up with 10 different types of rooms, which are randomly generated when you enter a new room.

What Went Right

1. This was the first Ludum Dare where I prioritized gameplay over art, and made sure to get everything that was needed for the game to be fun before even thinking about art.
2. Chose an idea that was easy to implement and rooms took a very short amount of time to create.
3. Talking to people and going out was an important part in my design process, and the game wouldn’t be where it is without that. I got some good ideas for rooms from my friends in SGDC and my roommate came up with a few good ones, including one of my favorites “Size Does Matter”, where a bigger blue square steals your girlfriend from you.

What Went Wrong

1. Gameplay relied on a lot of content. Although the rooms were easy to implement, I still needed a lot of rooms to make the game fun, and at 10 room types, I think I was short a few.
2. No Sounds… again. I didn’t have time to work on sounds or music, and a simple ominous tune would have sufficed for background music.
3. “The Answer” was kind of controversial, and people seemed to take it to an extreme. That room was a room you could not leave, and had a noose in the center, and when you touched it the game ended with a screen that said “Death: Forever Alone.” This was one of my earlier ideas, and I obviously didn’t think how people would take it. I was not at all trying to imply that I support suicide. It was merely a realistic look at the path some people take when faced with deep depression. I actually planned to add an exit if you didn’t touch the noose after a few seconds and other ways to end the game, including two tombstones if you have a partner, in a room called “Old Age” or something. I simply ran out of time and didn’t have time to implement the different death cases for each setup possible (alone, with girlfriend, with cat).

Looking To The Future

Overall, I think that this was a great Ludum Dare and my best and most unique LD game yet. I want to make a fully realized version of Alone In A Crowd, with a lot of rooms, marriage, divorce, more loss, friends, kids, afterlife, and basically anything in life that could effect a person. I already have 20 or more ideas for rooms, and any time I think about or talk about the game I come up with a new one. The full version of Alone In A Crowd won’t be something I’ll be done with soon. Rather, I’ll be adding to the current version over time, until I feel like I have enough content to release it. I’ll be sticking with doing it in AS3 with flixel, because I think it will be a good online game, and am also considering doing a mobile version, since it is very easy to implement on any platform (and my next few games in mind are going to be mobile and I’ll be in the groove).

I look forward to the future of Alone In A Crowd and the next Ludum Dare, which is the 23rd LD and the 10th Anniversary for Ludum Dare.

As posted on my blog at: http://bombpersons.wordpress.com/2011/12/24/loyds-tale-ludum-dare-was-fun/

So I entered the Ludum Jam last weekend with my housemates. We went in completely unprepared with no libraries at all. We made everything from scratch in those 3 days, including a tile engine, all the art, the level loader T_T. We didn’t get too much sleep  haha. You can play our game here. We named our games character Loyd Hasketh as its the first thing a random name generator pumped out. So our game is called Loyds Tale.

Our game idea was that you played a pirate, rabbit .. thing you finds himself ship wrecked on desert island with a mysterious bed in the middle of it. When you wake up from your slumber, the whole island had lifted out of the ocean and turned into a huge tower. You then have to make your way down the tower in a typical platforming fashion.

We made sure to have no other humanoid enemies, in order to reinforce the “Alone” theme. We did add some birds in there to give it some difficulty however.

We used Tiled as our map editor. It’s free, has a nice and easy to load XML map format, and is pretty flexible to use. We did have to resort to some pretty strange ways of inserting entities into the map, but it still worked.

Post Mortem

Day 1

On the first day we focused on getting the tile engine finished. I worked on the map loading whilst the others sorted out the actual drawing of the tiles. At this point our motivation was pretty high, as the code was still reasonable clean. We also wrote a simple entity system to go alongside the map, and created some sprite for the tiles and character.

Day 2

We fleshed out the entity system and the collision for the player (understanding that this is always a big problem in creating platformers we worked on this a lot). I worked on creating some hazards for the player, like spikes and breakable blocks. As the day went on we got less and less motivated. The code was getting messy as we had to hack things in to make them work, it was dawning on us how terrible our game was T_T.

Day 3

Sill demoralized from day 2, we worked on adding more hazards and designing the level. One of our team members had to leave about half way through the day to go home, so it ended up with just two of us adding the finishing touches. I spent most of the day creating the level. As we finally finished the game and submitted it, we could relax. It wasn’t long after that we realized that the game we created wasn’t *that* bad. You know it was passable considering that we created it from scratch in 3 days.

The Good

1. We got on with it, and finished it within a reasonable amount of time. We didn’t spend to long thinking of the idea and concept.
2. Using Tiled was a brilliant idea, it saved us a lot of time. We wouldn’t have even considered writing a platformer without it.
3. XNA was great. We all knew XNA very well as we all have a lot of experience using it. I would have preferred to use something more portable however =(
4. This is amazing. Bfxr is an improved version of Sfxr which is simply amazing for creating simple sound effects. My friend at university swears by it.

The Bad

1. We weren’t prepared. We really should have written a library to help us create a game in the weeks before the competition. It would have saved us a lot of time and kept our code more tidy. It wasn’t really feasible to do this time because we had a lot of assignments in the weeks leading up to the ludum dare.
2. Next time we do the ludum dare, we will definitely try to steer clear of platformers. They are a lot of work to program the back end to (collision mostly), and it is difficult to create unique gameplay using them (our game is pretty generic haha). We would definitely want to do something different in April.
3. We shouldn’t have resorted to messy code so early. We should have set most of the framework and ideas from the start rather than making them up as we went along. This resulted in horrible code that was painful to debug and lot’s of code repetition.

Other thoughts

Next time we might want to be more active in the community as the we are making the game. Like participating in the IRC channels or creating a timelapse video. Perhaps we will do one of those nextime =)

I did a timelapse/commentary thing:

Actual thing here.

Super busy trying to win this, but still rating like mad when I can. Seriously, would a 3-month rating period really be all that bad? I don’t think so.

Happy ho-ho days! Hope you get to stuff all the stockings your heart desires

I just uploaded my game “None Alone – Xmas Edition”!

The same as the original game but now with Xmas graphics and snow flakes! Yay!

Rate And Play ”None Alone” And “None Alone - Xmas Edition” Here 

I know the theme was ‘Alone’ but there should be a rule not to use it in the title of the game

Here is the postmortem for our LD22 jam entry : Gemclusion.  This was our second Ludum Dare (this first being LD21), and learning from our experiences from the last one we decided from the beginning to make sure to keep the game simple (K.I.S.S.).

Warmup

This time around we benefited greatly from an accidental warmup contest: Game Prototype Challenge.  It’s another for fun game dev contest, but it’s on a smaller scale than LD (29 entries in the last one).  During the GPC contest, we made a point to keep it simple and have fun with the contest.  This is an important thing to remember when doing these contests.  Too often we get caught up in the malaise of trying to make the ultimate game and forget about having fun.  It was after the GPC contest that we happened to remember that the next LD was starting soon.  Once we realized that LD was coming, we started getting ourselves ready.  The next week or so was spent relaxing and waiting for the Theme.

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