I’m planning to do an experiment to determine some things about the effectiveness of putting one’s work into various places in a game, and I need the source code of a few games in order to do it. Specifically, I’m looking for games which can run on Windows (or in a browser) and are intuitive to play; it should take no more than 5 minutes for someone to enjoy the game. I will be making minor modifications to the code of the game, and major modifications to the assets in the game and distributing modified versions.

If you’re interested (or, at least, don’t object to my use of your game), please post a link to your game in the comments & any attribution you’d like if I do use your game.

(I will, of course, share the results of this experiment with the community, since they are probably interested)

I have finally finished my timelapse. My screen recorder crashed during the compo and I had to download all 23 parts of my stream, join them together, speed it up and add music. After over 3 hours of rendering I can finally present my timelapse:

I made the game Space Rescue Mission. I am pretty happy with how everything turned out, except that my game was very buggy. This was my first Ludum Dare  and I should have managed my time a lot better. Anyway, looking forward to the next compo!

For those that get stuck, can’t play the game, or just don’t have the patience to experiment… I’ve created a game guide / mini walkthrough for my Ludum Dare 22 game, Ab-Alone.

You can check it out and rate the game HERE.

I’m also working on compiling a list of some of my favorite LD22 games for a future post.

Well, not really, I’m definitely not going to play all of them. But let’s see if I can get to one hundred before voting time ends.

I generally try to play (and rate) games that don’t have that many reviews, and lately I’ve only rated games that have less ratings than mine (currently 6), as I kind of feel bad for people how put a lot of effort into their games but only get like 3 or 4 people to try their games out (I wouldn’t mind more people playing my game either, wink wink).

Here’s a shout-out to a  couple of great games that don’t currently seem to be getting the attention they deserve:

• Super Square Zombie Killer by citizen_erased
• The ghost who wants to be alone by Fenyx
• One Final Trek by vandriver

Usted puede comprar una caldera nueva en una variedad de formas, con cada tipo que tiene un precio diferente, a veces incluso de manera drástica. Muchas grandes empresas ofrecen la caldera y el sistema se instala con todos un precio establecido (aunque es aconsejable comprobar cuidadosamente todo lo que esto abarca – a veces cargos inesperados pueden surgir que no están cubiertos). Esto es a menudo la opción más cara, con una falta de control dan al cliente en la instalación de la caldera, pero la tranquilidad de una gran empresa de instalarlo con la promesa de todo lo establecido. Artículo recomendado por Instalacion de Calderas

MINICRAFT FOR LUDLUM DARE WINNER 2011!!!

The first time I heard about Ludum Dare was a few days before LD22, and I took my decision to participate only a few hours before it started. So I had absolutely no preparation, and I’m quite proud I actually finished something. Also I’m glad my girlfriend let me spoil so much week-end time Here’s the result, an HTML5/Javascript/canvas game:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=rate&uid=8588.

Looks like postmortems are popular here so let’s jump in.

Good stuff

• This wasn’t my first accelerated game dev thing, I took part in the Global Game Jam in Paris last January (link) and learned a lot from people there. This surely helped me to plan and get things done without lacks of sleep and horrible headaches.
• I wasn’t sure if I would go for a Flash game or an HTML5 one; finally I went for the second option even if it’s far more limited. I’m glad I did because what I’ve learned could prove valuable to me later on. This wasn’t my first HTML5 experiment either (first one here), so I managed to get a good basis at the end of day 1: basically a moving character and fleeing enemies.
• I also managed to get enough time out of day 2 for polishing, notably the gameplay. This way the game won’t finish if you don’t play (as it did at a point… maybe that would have fit the theme… somehow.. the game playing alone…) -but it will resist you for a minute.
• My first idea was that the kitty would evolve somehow (turning into err… well, play the game and you’ll see, let’s not spoil), and that the environment would become more and more colorful while you progress. But I figured out soon enough I had no time for this. Instead, my game is just a very simple run, but finishes with a little joke. So I had to sacrifice a bit of my original idea, but it turned it into something that still makes sense (a bit).
• I can play a 15-seconds song on a crappy flute, what a musician!

Bad stuff

• I wasn’t really happy with the theme, actually “kitten” sounded real fun to me. A great opportunity for disrupted cuteness and mass murder. So as a fallback I did a game about a kitty that is alone, but meh. There’s hundreds of entries like this, of course, I should have anticipated that. So next time I’ll try spending more time on finding something that really plays around the theme, like this entry by Ludexor Studios. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying this was a bad theme, just that it didn’t inspire me that much.
• Maintaining decent performance was an issue too. I was testing on two browsers (Firefox and Chrome), and they had trouble drawing all my sprites. I had the idea from the beginning that the kitty would be surrounded by a glowing light, so I took advantage of this to render only the visible stuff, and clear things around with a few black stripes. It did the trick, and the game’s running at 60FPS on Firefox, and around 45-50FPS in Chrome. But still, I had to restrict the number of enemies and I wish I’ve had a bit more time to optimize all this. I’m sure there’s some Javascript library around that does sprite blitting in a much more efficient way that I did (please comment if you know any).
• The biggest mistake was with sounds. I could play music easily with the HTML5 brand new audio tag, but it would loop only on one browser and not on the other, so I had to drop looping background music. And the SFXs I wanted to add a few hours before the deadline became real hell. The browser support for the HTML5 way of playing sounds is really poor, sometimes they’ll play, sometimes they won’t, sometimes they’ll stop my music, sometimes they’ll scratch… Really, proper sound playback for games is not there yet, or maybe I did it wrong and didn’t find the simple way that works, but next time I’ll probably rely on some good, working library, that I’ll test beforehand.
• This would have helped if I’ve had some good Javascript libs for vector math, collision handling and sprite animation. I had to do some tedious coding instead of creating actual gameplay.
• I had no time to check if Internet Explorer would run my game. Turns out it doesn’t, but IE9 is supposed to handle HTML5, so I’ll try to fix this in a near future (EDIT: done). Also, I discovered at the last minute that zooming on the webpage would crash the game with Chrome, maybe I’ll find a fix some day (EDIT: no problem with a recent version of Chrome, so nevermind).

Conclusion

Democracy hates kittens, but game competitions are great. Thanks to the admins for organizing such a great event, and cya!

Hi there,

first of all, congratulations for all contestants, you made a good job . Now, our post-mortem/discussion/reflexion about our game.

Well, this is my first LD and I want to thank @ReikVal, my friend, game designer and co-developer of our first game. It is not perfect, actually it is full of bugs, inconsistencies and poor gameplay. But, it’s not bad after all .

We learnt a lot in this contest, we learnt how to develop a game from scratch, designing the game, creating a micro-engine and developing game features. While we were developing we found a lot of problems.

First, we start developing our engine without any experience. We lost a lot of time doing this task and we don’t invest enough time on game development. But, if we are positive, we developed a cool engine with the following features:

• Loading textures using a TextureManager improving our memory management.
• Handling mouse input using GLUT with a InputManager class.
• Using a SceneManager we can switch between two different contexts, using a nice interface for our Scenes.
• Cool Sprite class for handling sprites animations.
• A TileMap class for loading the map
• Three useful GUI classes for Buttons, Selectors and TextInputs.

Finally I am getting around to writing a postmortem for “Into the Dark for You”.  ITDFY can be obtained here. It is recommended that you play it, if you can, before reading too far as I’m just about to ruin the whole game for you.

(more…)

This was my very first Ludem Dare and also my very first original game!

Read my detailed postmortem to see how a novice approaches game development for the first time. I’d love to get real feedback and advice from some of you more experienced developers. Thank you Ludem Dare for pushing me to finally do something I’ve wanted to do for a very long time.

Flod, my LD 22 entry’s protagonist wishes you all some relaxed and peaceful days:

Happy Holidays

Phil’s made a nice gameplay walkthrough video for our game Braille:

Due to the fantastic packaging advice post now stickied to the page, I created a web applet wrapper for my game so that it could be played in browser, for those who don’t want downloads cluttering up their desktop.

I tested it in Chrome and in Firefox, please let me know if another browser is having trouble.

It is a little buggy because it is just a wrapper and is still trying to process the executable code, had I had this in mind from the start I could have segmented it better.  Something to keep in mind for the next one.

“Lost in the Woods” entry page.

Here’s a video of the game being played through for anyone who can run it.(The version being shown has been polished up in a few places. It’s at about the 72 hour mark).

It’s kind of obvious I borked up on the theme. I had a very different (kind of tragic) ending planned at the start… but then I discovered the awesomeness of the high-five and EVERYONE agreed that that could be the only way to finish the game. I feel like I failed, and I’m certain the ratings will reflect that, but at the same time I can’t bring myself to wish it had turned out any other way.

Here is the page where you can rate it: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=rate&uid=3041

And here is the updated version: SUPER SMASH LANDER SUICIDE PARTY, BRO? (ENHANCED)

La Biblioteca Móvil Digital es operado por OverDrive – un líder de servicio completo distribuidor digital de libros electrónicos, audiolibros, música y video. Fundada en 1986, la compañía tiene su sede en Cleveland, OH. El proyecto está destinado a promover libros electrónicos descargables y audiolibros de la biblioteca a los miembros de la comunidad. Se erige en una persona las bibliotecas públicas en apoyo de sus servicios de descarga. Artículo recomendado por Comprar Ebook

Hi I thought I’d post a quick message to say I have repackaged my game “Fernands War” for Mac now as well as PC (it’s a java .jar file), you can see it here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=preview&uid=5349

I didn’t change any of the code btw, just added the mac dll’s to the jar package so I think this is within the rules. Hope you like it!

gratuitous kitten shot (in the face)

elo..

this is my 1st post mortem so i dont really know what to put or start with..

i DO know that i really enjoyed talking to like minded people for once and being part of the great community

what went right:

i was quite happy with the overall gfx side of everything.. ideally i would of tried to get some more effects etc in there but time and all.. i was pleased with the droning BGM aswell… just borderline annoying as to still in your head hehe

what went wrong:

i spent far too much time trying to get the sound working better as the game should rely heavily on this part but i just couldnt seem to get certain sound libs to perform glitch free and had to spend some time trying to learn others quickly and in the end i just decided on a simpler approach.

ideally i wanted to have the pitch/pan and gain to reflect how far and which direction to sonar bounced off a wall etc but it was forever crackling and not working properlly (it probably down to me not understanding to libs fully)

what i learned:

i had a good few i deas for the theme but quickly realized they would have taken alot longer than i had so had to scrap them and think of a simpler but diff concept. i realized im not that bad of a programmer and if pushed can produce things quick enough gfx/sound especially (not in a big headed way just in that normally i constantly put myself down and never think im decent at anything..anyhoot ;p )

like i said previously i enjoyed it thoroughly (and still am with the community side) and i do like rating games altho i do think it would be better possibly if each entrant was given 20 random(least ranked) entries to rank (not knowing whos game you were ranking) to stop people going straight for their favs ?! maybe after the 20 random then it would open up and let you rank further entries ?

ahh i duno heh

well anyhoot thanks to every1 who puts on this comp and to all the ppl ive met since ..until next time my like minded  loons

biNAry_giRL

p.s heres mine if u dare murhahaha

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=rate&uid=8824

Last weekend was Ludum Dare 22: Alone, obviously why else would hundreds of people gather to make no less than 891 games not including those that were not submitted?  I took part of this awesome gathering for the second time, with Ludum Dare 21: Escape being the first.  During that entry I had the following postmortem of which after reading I realize I didn’t put in all the things that went wrong.  I feel to that list should have been “pick a smaller idea”, although I suppose that previous idea was very flexible in size.

What went right:

I had the weekend to myself, with no interruptions or responsibilities.

I picked a framework I was familiar with, and had tools to do what I needed.

I followed the theme well with a simple idea of taking a team sport, and playing alone vs the other team.

I spent little time debugging issues, crashing, etc.

I added sound effects and music early on.

What went wrong:

The idea was far too big for a weekend project, too many little rules.

The idea never turned into a game really, despite a win/lose condition; It was too hard, or too repetitive if the player managed to learn the patterns.

Some art; the player/ai characters, was completely temporary and never replaced with something better.

I spent far too much time programming.  My framework needs to allow me to manage/do less, if it is to be useful in LD.

What was learned:

I need to spend more time on art/music and content.  To help with this I am rewriting/adding to my framework so that it will manage more things for me.  Instead of loading a sound, and remembering to unload it, I should just be able to PlaySound(“Yada.wav”).  It would go a long way in reducing the time I spent programming, or at least the time spent programming “needless” things.  An idea for a 48 hour game must be small.  I went into this compo knowing I needed to aim to be complete with my game by the end of day 1, yet the idea I chose was far too big for that.

I am waiting for the next LD, where I hope I can shine through and get this done right.

Play and Rate: 10 Yards Alone

Blurry, stupidly sped up, and crazy alt tabbing so you can’t see anything. Enjoy.

LD22 Timelapse

The entry. http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=preview&uid=110

Pekuja manufactured the code, Arne created the splendid art, and I made the music.

We didn’t get as far as we’d have liked. All of us fell a little short of where we wanted to be. The game was made in C# with Unity.

Pekuja did great in getting things done, even when having to deal with quite a few technical concerns. Also, Arne. His artwork surpasses an amazing amount of completed games on the web. These two are some of the best team members I’ll ever have had the pleasure of working with.

Everything from the background tiles to the moon are beautiful.

From what Pekuja said, it sounded like he was unhappy with his choice of Unity. It seems that all the bells and whistles just kind of got in the way.

All in all, I learned a few things from this LudumDare. I’ll try to keep the list short.

1. Time is limited, so make use of what you have. Don’t mull around thinking, just start doing. If you want to just think on it the first day, that’s fine, but don’t let it hold you back from getting things done.
2. Working in a team is awesome. It allows you to focus on just the task at hand. Working with great teammates to make a game is an experience every game dev should be able to have.
3. Don’t wait for inspiration. Make it yourself.
4. Use tools you’re familiar with. It’s just not fun to spend all your time learning a new API, or bug-fixing weird corner cases. Once again, “Time is limited, so make use of what you have.” I used a new vst when working, and ended up wasting a lot of time fixing a problem where some of the sounds were desynchronized on the final audio render. Learn from my example!
5. Don’t get stressed out. It’s just a compo. It’s not the end of the world if you don’t finish on time. Just do your best! A lot of people take their projects further even after LD is said and done. (That’s what we’re trying to do.)
6. Most importantly, have fun doing it. Accelerated game development compos are an awesome way to teach yourself tons of things at an incredible rate. All the minor things you get caught up in during normal development get thrown out the window, otherwise you run out of time. You learn where all the little pieces fit together to make a complete game, where most time gets spent in the development process, and most importantly, you get better at it. Sometimes you need impractical experience to learn how to be practical. Compared to LD’s time restrictions, ordinary development afterwards looks easy.

I guess one of the biggest points I’m trying to make, is that if you spend time and effort on something you love, you’ll have fun and become better at it. LudumDare lets you create something that you can love, and call your own.

Also, bragging rights.