http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=rate&uid=8347

Here are some thought on my first Ludum Dare:

The Good

• Timing – never really felt that I was running out of time, or that I’m going to finish too soon. I felt I was about ready when there was 2 hours or so left.
• Learning – I was familiar with the tools already, but I have never made a card game before, and I tried out a couple of new techniques, which taught me a few valuable lessons
• I was really inspired by the community – the progress reports, IRC and live feeds (Notch seems to have some mad programming skillz/routine)
• File size - Web versions .unity3d file ended up just over 1MB, which is nice (Windows standalone is over 7MB zipped)

The Bad

• Sounds. Not very good with them, and spend very little time on them, but at least I have them
• Screen resolution isn’t very ideal (though shouldn’t be a problem on Windows standalone version)
• The game rules are a bit obscure, I’m afraid too many players will lose intrest before ‘getting’ the game

The Ugly

• Code – not enough routine or planning so ended up doing many things poorly or inconsistently
• Poorly optimized, realized at the last minute that I have a ridiculous amount of draw calls and did some hasty optimizations to bring them down from ~250 to around 35, which is kind of ok, but I know I can do better
• Graphics – I’m really not an artist, and as a result most of the graphics suck, though I am pleased with couple of the characters
• The info screen is a bit messy, I have no idea if it’s of any help to anyone

Conclusions

• A little bit of planning goes a long way
• I was pretty close to the sweet spot between trying to do too much/difficult/new things and doing too easy/familiar. Maybe I should’ve tried something a bit more ambitious, but just slightly so
• Maybe next time I pay a little more attention to accessibility and try to stay away from obscure/unfamiliar/abstract game mechanics
• I liked the end result, and will make another iteration of the game soon with better graphics and improved gameplay
• That was fun! Will definitely participate again!

Solitaire of Solitude development screenshot

I’d appreciate it a lot if you could give my game a try and give me some feedback about it.

- Nightmares of a Wizard -

Christopher Yayahkeekoot - @TheYayahkeekoot - Art and Design

Initially, we had our everything figured out. Going smoothly, we started on our various jobs but within the first 4 hours, our sound guy quit so we had to repost and restart. This was a major setback because we knew we needed sound for this game to go as we wanted. I remembered our friend Jacob Lake (aka ClankyTheGorn) did some awesome ambience so we skype called him and asked him what he thought… we were in luck as he was all for it… After that I found producing sprites wasn’t as hard as I had thought as long as I didn’t try to hard, letting my inner feeling take over.  This helped me a lot I think, more so than sleep food or even the bathroom (ok, mabe the bathroom helped more).

Things that went well:
-The title menu and HUD
Having finished most of the sprites, I decided to rework the title menu so that it fit the feeling more, I added a fade around the edges and a blood glob that looked more like red wax seal, in the corner which probably made all the difference.
- The Voice Acting
We found that by the time we had it finished, it required voice acting to put the cherry on the cake. This wasn’t so much hard as it was  repetitive.. the mic we used wasn’t of the best quality as it lived on Gabriel’s floor. Instead, we worked with it so that it produced something that, though quiet, had no background noise or sharpness. Finally, using audacity, Gabriel amplified it so you could hear it over the background music.
- The Damage system and spells
We knew exactly what we were going to so that helped alot of the spriting side… Having the image in my head I went to work on the fireball… Saturation up, glo up, make a tear shape and paint it orange… done, next the Ice blast spell… Simple ball of blue, add glow… add lgow…add glow (etc x20) and voila! The acid and lightning sprites produced by gabe forplaceholders but were so good we just kept them.
- The theme and storyline
Here, we developed it as we went although we had a good overall story planned. We didnt want to try to develop a story without first knowing the theme so we decided to wait until it started before developing. Fast, effective and easy to implement, our story was also very manipulative.

Things that went… meh:
-The Wall sprites and floor sprites
I did these fast and they were the first thing to do… Not making a Spritemap was the worst idea ever and I may just go back and fix that in a hotpatch in the near future (it’s just a lot of effort on my part) so … yeeaaah
- The Level Select Buttons
These were mass produced by me in 5 minutes, I wish I had spent more time making them fit into the background, possibly having them be constellations or something, though it is not necessary at all
- The Achievements
also made these extremely fast but they came out a little better than the level select buttons. I wished I had made them a little lager and more intricate but whatever, I enjoyed them anyway.

Things that went wrong:
- The wall sprites
ugh… I did them to fast and I wish I had made a sprite-map as  I stated before. These were everywhere and made things look amateur and messy and so I give my apologies in that respect.
- The original Gargoyles
We needed a static enemy that didn’t move but still attacked the player.. In a castle what is there to shoot you? Gargoyles! The original grgoyles were hideous, tiny and just overall bad. So I redid them and they look a lot better when I spent more than three minutes on them…
- My body
After the first 23 hours my body decided to just stop working… off to bed for a half an hour and then Gabriels mother woke us up so back to work… It was good though, then 20 hours later my body was just screaming at me to stop… nope, i stated, not happening… it happened. About 6 hours later got up again and blasted off the rest of the game. Slept very little last night as I am not screwed in the inner clockworks. :/ it’ll fix itself eventually, till then I’ll work on the game more!

-Wishes
I had hoped to have some interactive rooms, such as levers/buttons/gates that opened stuff to give it a more moody setting as, currently, it is a dungeon crawler with waves of enemies and a boss… fun but repetitive

–( Overall )–
Our product, Nightmares of a Wizard, overall excelled our first standards and hopes. The appearance of the game could have gotten a little more working on but we were stressed for time and it was “good enough” for me. The coding was beautiful

PS: I really loved messing with people

[-]==+——————————————————————————+==[-]

Gabriel Silvarredonda  - @gabotun - Programming and Design

What went right?
--Programming went very smoothly, I figured I would have more bugs then I really did, and I only
ever got stuck with a couple of strange changes I must have made by accident and did not notice.
--I really have to give credit to Chris for all the spriting here, he worked fast and efficiently
and we got all the stuff we needed by the deadline, my 1920x1280 desktop is still full from the
70+ sprites he made in 72 hours!
--The mood ended up working very well, we feel the tone of the story flows and the cutscenes
allow it to really be what it is.
--Jacob really pulled through for us as well, we originally had other ideas for music, but
after some problems with that Chris and I asked him for the best songs he could come up with and
the end result was spectacular. Stick around for the credits to hear my favorite of his pieces!

What went wrong?
--Making this as a dungeon crawler style was a good idea, I had originally hoped to implement
more boss battles however, but time began to run short near the end so we ended with simply
polishing the 9 levels we got done.
--We had some awesome voice acting for the different achivements, but in the end only had
time to polish and implement the main story voice overs, which was dissapointing.

In conclusion, NoaW was a lot of fun to make and I am very glad the theme wasn't kittens! xD
----ACHIEVEMENT GET: [Y U NO KITTEN!?]---- 

PS: I know this is a Repost but I wanted to make it was seen, it got bumped off rather
quickly last time it was posted but now that everything has slowed down, I'm reposting
for the lulz   

Made a gameplay video of my entry, The Sheep & The Peach. Warning: totally spoils the game if you haven’t played it yet!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24PBXF5Yo7w

I posted this on my personal blog as well, but thought it was appropriate to post here as well, since it directly relates to my Ludum Dare 22 entry.

Ludum Dare Entry: Play/Rate The Wizard Apprentice

Ludum Dare was really an eye opening experience for me.  I had a ton of fun and I’m getting an amazing amount of feedback from the indie gamedev community, which is fantastic!  Thank you all so much for running the competition, for participating, and for the honest feedback.  I intend to compete again, not for prizes but for the love of game development and to give back to the community!

I think as a result of the experience, I’m going to continue developing “The Wizard Apprentice” prototype into a more feature-full game.  I may even write the 2nd chapter in our curious little wizard’s adventure for the next Ludum Dare…  I love doing the level and puzzle design and dropping the assets in and playing with them is really a blast!  I’m not going to abandon my HexDev project, but it’s moving to the back burner for a while.

I decided that I’m going to run with the concept and fix a lot of things, keeping some of the puzzles the same, rewriting some, and adding a lot more content.  I’m probably going to rename the game, because the name is too generic and I literally decided on the name in the last 10 minutes of the competition while I was submitting my entry.

I’ve done a couple of things so far, worth mentioning, so here’s a glimpse:

• I’m revamping the way my modeling in Blender was done, so I have cleaner transitions and better control over connections like the stairwell.
• Opened up the room depth, taking full advantage of the “octagonal space” on each floor.
• Stairwells no longer require a turn halfway through (I’m not sure if this will make it harder or easier, but so far I like the new style better)
• Adding Toon-Style shading where appropriate
• Fixed some camera angle issues to give better depth perspective.  (may tweak this some more)

As a result of the feedback I’ve received so far (and the lack of time I had for implementing it to begin with, the following fixes are on my list already):

• Fix First Person Camera control to face the direction the avatar is upon entering.
• Fix the mouse cursor by locking it in place and adding a crosshair type GUI element while channeling “C”
• Add Textures to the walls to give it visual flare.
• Add Music, Sound.
• Improve “hidden” objects like keys in cabinets, so picking them up doesn’t go unnoticed.
• Adding more floors, more puzzles, more secrets, more ghosts, possibly a kitten (?)

Lots more to come!  Stay tuned!

If you’re interested in following the progression of this game in the future, you may want to subscribe to my blog, where I will probably be posting some Alpha builds continuously as things get updated.

Thanks!

-Josh

I’m in ur base, rating ur gamez!

This is the third in a series of posts that I have begun Monday. Every night, I try to rate as many games as I can, leaving each game a constructive message. I pick 5 of the games I played that night, and highlight them on a post. This has been loads of fun, and I have already found quite a few surprises. Although I’m not sure I can go through all 1000 games before the end of the voting period is done. So feel free to ask me to rate your game in the comments!

My picks for today are:

AB-Alone — Thanks Sonnybone for suggesting this game to me. This is an adventure/puzzle game with a very good difficulty balance. You will die a few times trying to figure out what to do, but you won’t feel hopelessly lost. There is some nice humor in the game, and the puzzle is nice too. The graphics are a bit weird, but all in all, a game worth playing.

Robotic Friend — A nice platformer — it has some rough spots in the beginning, like a badly placed intro screen, and no command sheet, but the map is extense without feeling too big, and the author made some nice decisions regarding the effect of water in the player.

Alone – WITS — The game is still quite rough, but it deserves praise for the unique gameplay and controls. The goal is to keep the “enemy” alone by moving the dots that you control away from it. With a bit of graphical and sound tweaking, it could be a game worthy of Orisinal.

Alone in the Rain — The most hilarious game I have played in LD so far. Better played when drunk. I won’t spoil the surprise for you. Just click play. Don’t read comments. Don’t watch screenshots. Just play this already!

Lloyd’s Tale — A platformer with challenging, but not frustrating, levels. The controls are very responsive, there is a variety of obstacles, and the authors even hid an Easter egg in the game (not kittens, unfortunately). Quite fun, worth a play.

If you want to check my previous picks:
Rate ALL the things! Part 2
Rate ALL the things!

See you tomorrow!

Ok, so this was my first Ludum Dare and it will not be my last!

I enjoyed myself sooo much last weekend, even if i didnt get everything I wanted done.

Things that went right:

- Was very happy with the overall look of my game (2.5D type of style)

- Small story elements and the pixel graphics I did

Things that went wrong:

- Music *facepalm* I am no good with music. I’m so tone deaf when it comes to music that i probably cant even play the triangle.

- Collisions weren’t correct, which caused problems with doors and lasers.

- Didn’t focus enough on the levels (its a short game).

Cant wait for the next one as I’m teaming with so many ideas now that I have seen everyone elses work.

Dos personas son compatibles en esta categoría si ambos tienen los mismos niveles de optimismo en general o la felicidad. Si una persona es siempre ver el lado negativo de la vida, la persona que encuentra la esperanza en todo lo que puede sentirse estancado. Sin embargo, lo contrario podría ser cierto si los dos individuos honrar a los de otras cualidades, como el pesimista se siente mejor porque de puntos de vista del optimista, y el optimista es más arraigado a la realidad de estar con el pesimista.. Artículo recomendado por Carteles

to any LD love users, here’s a little python script to help with packaging up your games for distribution. it can run on any platform, and it creates a .love file and zips with executables for windows and mac. all you need is the script; it downloads the love binaries and libraries for you. i might add linux support later but packaging for that is a bit tricky and i’ll need to come up with a linux system to test on. it requires python 2.6 or greater. let me know if you find any bugs.

script is here

run with -h for help. here’s a usage example:
python lovedist.py -d felinus/game -n felinus -b com.maxcrane.felinus -N felinus0

i added a mac version of my game FELINUS using this. i also wrote a little strategy guide for anyone who was having trouble figuring it out. find these at the link below. i’m going to write a postmortem for the game soon.

entry is here

I refuse to call it a postmortem for the end of the dare is not the end of the game , Due to how much i like the idea and the game-play i will continue Chronoflux. now to get down to the meat of the post.

What went right:

-Sound creation was a breeze with sfxr and Greasemonkey’s Autotracker-bu it took all of 5 seconds to add some sound to the game;

-Art creation though its not a work of art by any stretch I made art that make your eyes bleed and it take too much time.

-Infinite Coffee who needs sleep anyway

-Made a map editor as clunky and painful as my (sort of unreleased) map editor it is much better then if i tried hard coding it

What went wrong:

-Lack of outside testers caused me issues such as the slowdown on level two (caused by poor collision detection) and the difficulty of some puzzles(end of level 2 for example)

-Lack of sleep to be honest i slept a total of 2 hours during the dare, as much time as i gained not sleeping i lost much more from being tired… i may have started mumbling to myself and rocking back and forth one hour… but thats besides the point…

-Infinite coffee without it i would have passed out, it would have been for the better

-Lack of time i lost many hours from my madness cause by lack of sleep so i lost time to add features such as past npcs, animations and a proper tutorial.

All and all if you get anything from this. code +fuel = game. sleep = fuel. coffee != fuel

by the way you should play my game

It’s not really a post mortem, well it sort of is, but not for the game I made this Ludum Dare. That’ll come in  a while after I sort out my thoughts on it. I might do a technical post mortem first.

Anyway

It’s about my previous ld game(again, sort of), which has been my first proper contact with game-making after a long long time. As if I put it (making games) on a shelf and forgot about it for many years and let it collect dust and cobwebs. It’s something I can do that makes me happy regardless of the end result. It’s something I can do that takes nothing and time and makes something, and at the end of the day I can sit back and look at something which wasn’t there before.

And you guys are to blame for me finding it on that shelf.

People liked this game of mine for some reason(the ones that understood it) and some made a point to tell me in IRC they remembered and liked if from all the way back then which blew me out of the water. Days later I still can’t believe that happened. So now that said game is on the android market and the ubuntu software center and desura and such I feel that I should give something back to the people who inspired me to keep going.

So what I’ll do is post a bunch of desura keys for that game of mine every day till Chritmas.

Let’s start with 2 for now and see where that takes us:

R42VR-VIU5B-ZBR2T-EL8BD-RIZIK

PUOJQ-X0BD5-I2QG2-E26MQ-KZCQC

Para evitar problemas, asegúrese de que cualquier vacío de la piscina tiene una cesta de la hoja en línea, o eliminar manualmente las hojas de la piscina con una embolsadora de red o de la hoja que se conecta a una manguera de jardín antes de aspirar a la piscina, entonces usted está aspirando sólo la suciedad. También, asegúrese de que todas las cestas de filtro en la piscina están en buena forma y no tiene fisuras. Esto incluye la bomba, el skimmer y las cestas de la hoja en línea. Artículo recomendado por Cubiertas de Piscinas

I came into this Ludum Dare with one clear objective; to develop a game using HTML5 to evaluate the Impact Game Engine (it passed with flying colors, tho I’m still hoping that someone ports Flixel to JavaScript). Besides that, I had no further plans, so when I saw the theme, I was a bit troubled, how can I make a game about being Alone?

So I decided to think about job occupations that lead you to loneliness, and while I went through the list the weirdest one was “Lighthouse Keeper”. So I scoured the web searching for a Lighthouse with a cool name, but I found none that I liked, so I decided to create a fictional one, that somehow made this idea pop into my mind:

Yes my notepad is rainbow colored

“You are the Lighthouse Keeper at Styx River, your job is to persecute souls trying to escape hell, it can get lonely, but jumping on ghosts sure is fun and it’s pretty comfy.”

For some reason, I saw the tarot card “The Tower” and I felt that it was fitting, so I dropped the idea of being the Keeper, and the player became the Lighthouse itself. For the mechanics I concieved Space Invaders meets Hop & Bop platformers. Sounded pretty easy at first, but the execution proved difficult and it does need a lot of playtesting to get right.

What went right:

a.- The Music: As usual I took a public domain music score (Danse macabre, Op. 40, by French composer Camille Saint-Saëns.), recorded some sound effects (cards shuffling and hitting the table), and a public domain fireplace sample that I looped. I was very pleased with the final product, I think it properly represents the core concepts: We are all alone and the same in death (Danse Macabre), We all share the same destiny(Tarot), and the fires of hell that served as setting. Once again I used Audacity, Aria Maestosa and GXSCC.

b.- The Framework: Impact Game Engine was pretty intuitive to use and extend, even for a first time user, I only missed per pixel collision.

c.- The Concept: The idea is great, I’ll keep working on it.

d.- The Art: I loved the Art. I drew on paper, then took a picture with my webcam and painted in Photoshop, it went smooth as silk but…

What went wrong:

a.- The Art: Spent too much time on Art creation. Last time I think that no one realized that my Art style was Atari-like on purpose (I even implemented a Pixel Bender shader to simulate screen ghosting after the screen flashes), so this time I decided to go for a painterly style, that also happened to be more labor intensive. In the end I could have used a couple more hours on coding.

b.- The IDE: I was too stressed out to properly install and configure Eclipse, I was stuck with Komodo Edit.

c.- Server Stuff: Spent too much time trying to configure PHP on my laptop to run some tools.

d.- Platform: HTML5 audio support is not there *yet*, had to implement a quick hack with SoundManager 2.

e.- Language: I had no prior game dev experience with JavaScript, I was left wondering how to implement a global variable registry. Also, I got to find an IDE with proper code completion, Komodo did not autocomplete variables I had declared on the same *.js file.

f.- Execution: The concept was hard to execute successfully, I should have playtested more, and also I should have investigated prior implementations. Now I have homework: Why does Mario bounce off enemies the way he does?

Phares, Jam Entry

When I first submitted my project, it depended on the VS2010 Runtime Environment. I then re-submitted it using a static compilation (before the deadline), but that caused it to crash on many PCs. So, I am reverting it to the old version that required the VS2010 Runtime Environment so more people can actually play it. I hope this is OK.

My entry for LD22 (ISOLATED ASSAULT) was somewhat of a wave survival game, getting harder with each death, until you reach the goal, the escape chopper.

I had a lot of fun, and, after being my first time, I will most definitely do this again.

Here’s the “Proper” Post-Mortem:

How I Spent My Time

Timelapse here if you want to take a look.

Basically I came up with an idea while I was making the game. I had already pretty decided it would be first person. And also I had pretty much decided the enemies would be cubes. (Just to make it easier on myself)

I didn’t particularly like the theme, alone, but it was better than kittens.

Mainly I worked on getting the character movement to be as smooth as possible, that’s where most people messed up, to make the game fun and re-playable. I tried to make the sword animations as hectic as possible, just to make it look a little more stylish. I made the wall and floor textures 8 bit and repeatable. I made the music overdone, with a lot of instruments (using garageband) and very complicated. I did this because I remembered all those 2d games with catchy music but terrible graphics.

I implemented the theme by having enemies appear if you put on sunglasses, but disappear if you take them off. The catch was that in the sunlight, without sunglasses, you burned. So you had to find shaded “safe” areas to take off your sunglasses and regenerate health, while the enemies disappeared.

The sound effects were done in CFXR (I especially like the enemy death noises). The language I used was Javascript. The game engine was Unity Indie. The 3d modeling software was Blender. This cannot get any simpler.

I chose these programs because, well, they were free, and also because they’re proper towards making an indie game.

What I Learned

• The smoother the gameplay and character movement, the better
• Sound is a very important part of game development
• Don’t over-complicate things, keep your main code in as few scripts as possible
• Particle effects make the game seem more complete

What Went Right

• The music was mostly catchy and was repeatable
• The gameplay was smooth and the sword attacks blended together well
• The implementation to the theme (being alone, only when your glasses are on)
• The sound design was okay, especially with the enemy deaths

What Went Wrong

• There should have been more enemies
• The enemies should have been easier to fight
• There should have been more things blocking your path
• There should have been better GUI controls and being able to change the mouse sensitivity
• The level design should have been worked on better
• The game should have been longer

All in all, I think I did an okay job, maybe not the best, but it was fun enough to please my friends, and good considering the amount of time I had. (Less then 48 hours, more like 30, I had to go to some places)

Try it out here.

OMG!

There is a problem with the youtube upload page because if you have Chrome or Firefox you got to upload your video here: https://upload.youtube.com/my_videos_upload write https not http.

I hope this has been helpful for some people!

Here is my timelapse if you want to see it:

Ludum dare 22 timelapse – The End

If you want to play the game here is my entry:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=preview&uid=7045

This was my first Ludum Dare. Really this is my first time ever making a game in such time constraints. Our game is OUTPOST_NULL. It was created by a team of two, Delko and VonZippenstein, for the jam.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=preview&uid=7436

What went right: We planned this game around the theme and focused on making it atmospheric. The sound effects came out pretty good and the 3D art looks amazing. The collisions, computer text effect, and the doors are all perfectly functional. The 2D to 3D stage editor turned out great.

What went wrong: We knew that 3D in this time limit was risky but did it anyway. I spent the first two days working on the collisions and the moon surface and star effects, but in the end only used the moon as an ending screen and the collisions didn’t work right with the new 3D models. Really all the work was finished on the last day. The models took 2 days to create and when they were finished is when actually creating the game could begin. I got the models Sunday night, stayed up all night making a map editor, and didn’t sleep until it was submitted 9pm Monday. Due to the time constraints not all of models, stages, and gameplay could been added and there was no time for play testing.

Even with everything we had to cut I still think it turned out pretty decent.

OUTPOST_NULL TIMELAPSE

This is the first Ludum Dare or any other game development competition I have ever participated and I really enjoyed it a lot, for sure I’ll come back for some more LD. I’m very happy with my game and I’m very glad to show it to you, void:

Positive:

As soon as I read the theme of the competition I was able to quickly think about my game idea. Obviously it got a little mutated while I was creating it but it just got better.

I made no mistake at using Love2D engine as my platform to make the game, its a very intuitive and easy to use tool for make games, everything just feels and looks nice in this platform.

I kept my sleeping and eating habits, and never felt out of energy or extremely tired (stressed on the other hand…).

One of the biggest reasons which I think made me able to finish the game was that I choose a very simple graphic style, at first I was using only colored shapes and at the end I just left non colored shapes, which I think looks nice. I’m not good with graphics so I think it was a good decision.

Negative:

Even though Love2D is a great platform it just provide you with tools to draw, handle inputs and play audio, maybe some other nice features but it doesnt provide you with EVERYTHING you’ll need to create a game (In fact I like this about this engine because you have to actually code your game).  The problem is that I spent quite big time just making the physics, loading and drawing a tilemap and other very simple stuff that other engines makes with a few lines of code. If I use Love2D again I’ll make a toolchain to have all this basic things ready before the competition.

One of my mistakes was that I didn’t play test enough my game before the time ran up, this lead to a maybe a little to hard game (which is not impossible to beat). I was aiming for a challenging game for sure but not this kind of (enjoyable) hell.

Time lapse:

I was not able to capture all the time, I completely forgot about the time lapse the first few hours of the contest but here is almost all the 48 hours:

Time lapse

How to beat the last level:

A lot of friends are asking me if its possible to beat the last level on my Ludum Dare 22 game entry -Void-. This is the proof that not only is possible but is not that hard… I know is a little hard but you should learn to enjoy the pain :

How to beat the last level

Espectadores en el clima frío los eventos tienen más de un problema de los atletas. Cruz condados carreras de esquí se han disputado a temperaturas cercanas al menos a 30 grados F sin problemas para los atletas – no así para los funcionarios de carrera y los espectadores. Artículo recomendado por Roja Directa

After searching the #ld48 tag for actual links to LD22 games and reading a tweet about this problem I decided to suggest (courtesy @noragames):

#ldentry

Twitterers, be so kind to use this hashtag for posting your links to your LD entry. Additionally using #ld48 in the same tweet is a great idea! Both makes finding links to LD22 games (they’re 891, remember) much easier.