So… about one month and a half after the end of LD26, I have started working on a post-compo version of my game. I finished a first version of my post-compo, but I can’t find the “edit my entry” button.

So, is it possible to edit entry pages after the compo is finished to add information about a post-compo version? Am I missing something really obvious here?

Thanks!

Just throwing a question for everyone out there. I have my own answer, but I was wondering if it is the right one afterall.

How do you rate mood? Can you give some examples of high mood and low mood games?

Cheers!

I have finally uploaded a time lapse video for my LD26 entry, “The Fair King”. Feel free to watch it here!

Clear the stage by dividing the colors by as close as 50% as possible

For me, Ludum Dare is a chance for me to try something that is out of my usual reality. Game making, art creating, very short deadlines. In keeping with this spirit, I decided that I should move myself outside of my comfort zone, and try a brand new game engine, and a brand new platform. I decided to use libGDX for the first time, and make a game aimed towards the Android platform.

I know that it is not best practice to try out new libraries in the 48 hours alloted by LD, but I wanted this to be a learning experience, so I went ahead with it anyway. Here is the usual “what went well” and “what went poorly” breakdown:

What went well:

• Think 5 ideas, pick the 6th: My game idea became simpler each iteration, until I had an idea simple enough that I could implement in a day.
• Porting to android: LibGDX made porting to android really simple, and it motivates you having your game on a mobile platform
• Image levels: Levels in my game can be stored as images. I used Isopix to work on puzzle levels while I was in the train.
• Version management with Git: I had to rollback the game a few times when I tried to add some functionalities, and Git made it really simple.

What went poorly:

• LibGDX is quirky: You have to use power of 2 textures for portability, the font class is a mess, and different drawing models use y-positive or y-negative axis.
• I’m tired of autotracker: but I haven’t yet learned to properly use any sequencing software for linux. I want to fix this by next LD.
• No playtesting: means that I missed some pretty obvious interface mistakes. For example, I should throw away invalid moves, instead of showing an obvious “lose” screen for these, also it is not obvious where you should begin the line from.

It was fun, and I’m happy with the result. Please give me your opinions here.

Finally! I have posted my game

I’m kinda sleepwalking and can’t think straight… but I *think* everything is all right. I’ve spend the last 6 or so hours polishing and adding levels. There were still a few things I wanted to add to the game, but it is mostly completed as I imagined.

Making mobile games is kinda fun! libGdx has some very strange bugs and pitfalls, but I will let that for the postMortem.

As for now – I will go get some sleep, and you will go play my game

Finally got all the essential functionalities in, and my game is basically playable!

Clear the stage by dividing the colors by as close as 50% as possible

There are 14 levels — on each level you need to draw a line that divides each non-black/white color into exactly half (you can miss by 5% and still clear the stage). At this moment, you can play all the stages.

Now it is time for me to add more polish:
* Music and sound effects
* A level selection screen
* An “about” screen
* Some more cleaning up and improving of the game screen

Please do try and let me know if you have any feedback! These last 12 hours are the best time to fix problems on the game that I can’t find by myself!

Linux/Win/Mac Version: http://claus.castelodelego.org/games/ld26/FairKing.jar
Android Version: http://claus.castelodelego.org/games/ld26/FairKing.apk
Source: https://github.com/caranha/ludum26

Thanks!

(EDIT: some people on Macs have had problem to make it run. If you can give me some info, that would be wonderful)

After 13 hours, I polished the code of my game a lot, changing the “game” class so that multiple level files can be loaded, multiple colors can be used to compare the “sharing” level, and so that flood fill can be done asynchronously. It is still a bit ugly, but at least now the game is quite responsible on android too.

The Fair King – Title Screen

Now I need to get some sleep. There is still a lot of stuff on the pipeline though: Scoring a level, moving from one level to the next, and lots of bells and whistles like winning and losing animations, fades-in and out, music, sound effects etc.

Levels and Polish will make or break this game, which makes me kinda scared about the reaction. Let’s see how it goes tomorrow!

You can play the current version here:
Desktop (windows, Linux, Mac)
Android

After thinking a bit more about ideas for the Theme, I decided to go with a very simple gameplay mechanic:

You are a fair king, who decided to divide the land between two warring lords. You drag your mouse (or your finger) to draw a line on the land. The goal of the game is to, simply, try to divide the valuable land as closely between the two lords as possible.

This might look trivial, and maybe it is, but now I have plenty of time for polish, music, and a number of levels. If I have the time, I might add an extra mechanic or two to the game.

You can try it here:
Java (all platforms) – Android (a bit slow)

And the code is here:
Git Repository

That is a hard theme… but using the good, old “think of 5 ideas, throw them away, and pick the 6th”, I think I got something.

I have this notion that “theme” is something your game should move around, not just the window dressing. Using “minimalist art and sound” is something that went out of the window right away.

So what can we do? Minimalistic gameplay… another quick idea is a “1 button game”. That might be fun, but I decided to think about things a little bit more.

How about a game where “minimalism” is the goal? A game where “less is more”? (Strip poker? Lol, kidding) – Hmmm, I work a lot with “minimization functions”. Not the same thing as minimalism, but close.

Most “puzzle” games are about putting pieces together to form a system. How about the opposite? A puzzle game where you have a very complex system, and you need to take as many pieces from it as possible, while still allowing it to work.

Now we got something! Of course, creating rules for such a different puzzle game might be a bit complicated. I will give myself one hour to think about it, and if it doesn’t work, I might just go with a 1-button action game anyway.

Cheers!

Thinking about the theme

Time for my 5th LD!

This time I’m going back to my origins, and trying to use a library I’ve never really touched before: LibGDX!

I was planning to delay my “I’m in” post until after I had some time to play around with the library, but work got in the way… I’ve managed at least to complete a very simple tutorial, and make sure I could deploy a Desktop and an Android version, so no worries, you WILL be able to play whatever mediocre thing I end up making

Here is the toolchain:

IDE: ADT-Eclipse pack;
Code: LibGDX, versioning with git
Graphics: GIMP, inkscape + {sprite generator, sprite maker, isoPix} (android Apps)
Sounds: bfxr, autotracker, and possibly MuseScore

A word on the android apps: I will have to spend 4 hours on a train, and did some searching on the Playstore for sequencing and drawing apps. I couldn’t find any decent sequencing program, but the three apps mentioned above are quite decent. “Sprite Generator” generates random sprites that could be used as base, or as enemies in a simple shooter. Sprite makes allows the drawing of a simple array of images, and isoPix is a pretty decent image editor. None of these replaces GIMP+Inkscape (maybe Sprite generator does), but they are good in a pinch if you are away from your desktop for an extended period of time.

GLHF everyone!

Hello LD’ers!

So. Ludum Dare this weekend.

And my girlfriend decides to debut her new band on Sunday. On a town two hours away by train!

So I’m looking at a 4 hour downtime in the commute… In order to not waste this time completely, I was thinking that maybe I could work on the art of my game while on the train.

So any suggestions for a pixel art or sprite editor that works well on an Android Tablet?

(Any other suggestions on LD-related things I could do while stuck on a train for 4 hours welcome!)

Thanks!

Voting is over, Results are out, and it is time for some introspection. LD25 was a really, really good LD for me, so take a sit and let me tell you all about it… whether you want it or not! Mwahah!

Play Namcap!

Results

After two pretty terrible LDs I knew, when I put the keyboard down, that this time it had been different. I had a pretty decent idea from the get go. And even if I had troubles with parts of the execution, I was able to sneak in a lot more polish than in previous LDs. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Here are the scores (LD22 positions are multiplied from 891 to 1400 entries).

I’m pretty happy about theme. This high score means that I was able to pass the image of my game to the players. There were quite a few “reverse-x” games in this LD — but the thing about reverse-games is that, for you to feel like the villain of the original game, the reverse game must be as close to the original as possible. This was one of my design guidelines – score, gameplay, graphics, whenever I was able, I tried to mimic the original Pacman.

Graphics and Audio are as expected. Not super high, but higher than my previous entries. I feel more confident with my toolchain, and I’m happy with the result. It is worth noting that although Audio was my lowest score, it was not my lowest placement. This shows how audio making is one of the largest barriers in this competition.

I was expecting Fun to be a bit lower, since many people complained about the controls, and the AI frankly sucked. But I guess when people “like” the game, all the scores go a bit higher together. That also goes for humor – I have no idea why I got a 3.14 score, since I did not include anything humorous in my game.

I would love if anyone who voted in my game could comment on the “mood” score. I usually rate mood based on the “consistent feel” of the game (which mine wasn’t quite there), and the “not done by my nephew” factor (does not feel TOO amateurish – decent opening, transitions, desktop behavior, etc).

Post Mortem

Set-up

LD23 and LD24 were two failures for me. In both cases I had quite pretentious ideas that didn’t live to their full potential. So even before the theme was decided I decided that I would go with a simple action game, probably a shooter. As the LD approached, the idea of making a QiX game was growing in me.

When the theme was announced, I quickly decided to make a “reverse-classical-game”, and sat down to think which classical games would be a)realistic to make and b)fun to play. Pacman and QiX were at the top of my shortlist. In the end, I decided to go with Pacman because since QiX is a really old game, I was afraid many people wouldn’t “get” it.

Making the game

This is the fourth time that I make a game using the JAVA + SLICK2D combo. Even though I hadn’t programmed in a while, I was still familiar enough with the basic API, which helped. I’m starting to feel some limitations on the SLICK2D library though. If I did this for a living, I would probably start to look for a new library about now, but I want to get a bit better at short game jams before worrying about that. I would probably get more bang for my book by learning how to properly compose simple songs, or getting a more consistent graphics style.

Development was pretty straight. I managed to add some bells and whistles such as transitions, pauses, high scores, etc. I wasted a LOT of time on the Pacman AI. My BASIC idea about how the Pacman AI should work was wrong, and instead of realizing that I should redo it from scratch, I tried many different small adjustments to it. All in all I lost a lot of time here that could have been spent on other things.

Another thing that was bad in the development is that I couldn’t get people to playtest my entry. Playtest is SUPER important. Many of the comments from the reviewers mentioned that it was hard keeping track of which ghost was selected with which number. Many simple solutions were suggested. This is the kind of stuff that a little play testing by someone other than me would have caught quite quickly.

Positives and Negatives

The good:

• I was familiar with Slick2d, and that made a lot of stuff faster. Even if I didn’t know how to do something, I knew where to look.
• I started using Inkscape a lot, which is good for non-pixel drawing (such as the game board).
• “If it is not moving on the screen, it can be drawn on the background”
• I started to get used to mixing sound effects in BFXR, for some cooler results than using single samples.
• Simple fade-out transition: draw a blank square on the screen and mess with transparency
• The simpler your game idea is, the more time you have to refine it!

The bad:

• I should have written cleaner code. My code was so messy that it was hard to add simple things such as a difficulty progression based on changing pacman’s speed/power length.
• I’m starting to get tired of autotracker’s music. People who have never heard it like it, but it gets old really fast.
• Using Angelfont in a Linux environment is really hard – I will have to find some other library to use/package fonts in my game.
• It seems that java applets are unreliable in Ubuntu. I can’t even play my old java applet entries anymore in any of my ubuntu boxes .
• Not getting anyone to playtest my game was REALLY bad.
• I lost a lot of time banging my head against pacman’s AI, when I should have done something simpler (Greedy search?).

Timelapse

This time I added the title music of my game to the time lapse! It is so much better than a silent timelapse!

Namcap Timelapse!

Curse of Goats

Finally, a little bit of a rant. I think the goat thing went overboard this LD. I saw too many games where goats were pushed in, without thought. I think this is because the optional theme was put in the announcements this time (unlike kittens in LD22, which was mostly a thing spread through word of blogpost). Since it shared the same space as the official theme, many people might have thought it was also obligatory or something. While I love silliness a lot more than the average people, forced jokes get bad real quick. I suggest that the joke theme is not supported officially in LD26.

Anyway, see you all in LD23!

80 games rated!

This time, I want to highlight some really unique games that I have played so far. These games go the extra mile to be a little bit different, bringing something new to the LD environment. Watch and learn!

• Super Escape – by Saspiron



This game can best be described as a “Turn based platformer”. You control a character with your mouse, as he walks and jumps through very fast traps. Thing is: if you don’t move your mouse, the traps won’t move either! Great concept, some nasty bugs.

• Red Legion – by DeathBySnail



Normally I don’t like “story” games, but this one is great. Not only it has an interesting, funny story, but it also managed to include a typing based fighting mechanics that is actually relevant to the storytelling.

• Burglary – by Tobias Wehrum



Burglary is a sneaking-and-lighting game with two interesting twists: You control the light level, and a very interesting unlocking minigame. The difficulty of the unlocking game is based on the current light level, so you have to balance how much you see the world, how easy the lock-unlock is, and how easy it is for your enemies to notice you.

• Ante-christmas – by nSun



This game does a great job at replicating those old liquid display “game and watch” series. Not only on the graphics, but also on the play style, and the overall feel. If you are older than 20, prepare to be awash by the nostalgia.

• Space Greed – by lotusgame



A multiplayer game with two games in one: The game is a top down shoot them up, but you also get to build your own base, which will be the game stage for other players. The idea is quite fun, but balance isn’t quite there yet: It is pretty hard to get money to build up your own base – so it gets old rather fast.

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Hope you liked the reviews. I will take an extended break for the new Years, and I will be back to rate more games after the 5th! I hope I can break the 100 barrier!

In the meanwhile, please read my previous review posts:

• Review List 1: Good use of the Theme
• Review List 2: Awesome Graphics
• Review List 3: Fun games

And if you could also rate my own game, that would be great:

Another 20 games rated, bringing the total to 60 so far To celebrate this and the holidays, I’m making a list of the 5 most fun games I’ve played so far.

These are games that, for one reason or another, make you stick to them even after you played enough to be able to rate it. I was no longer playing just to review and rate the game, I was playing them because they were damn well FUN, and I hope you enjoy them too!

Here they go:

• Stop him now – by TijmenTio


This is a reverse shooter game, where you select an enemy on the screen to control, and try to hit the good guy. The movements of the good guy are quite well done — he will more than once foil your tries at killing him. This challenge makes the game loads of fun, as you try different strategies with the different powered birds that show up.

• The princess is Mine – by Emveyh


In this game, you control three villains that have to prevent good guys from reaching the princess. The controls are simple, and make the game highly dynamic, as you scramble to position your three servants. Power ups will appear at the corners of the board – can you spare one of your minions to go pick them up? And then your minions get hurt, and you have to move them away from the front lines while they heal – there is a lot of Micro to be done in this game!

• Midboss – by Eniko


A very well done roguelike. You control an imp that can possess defeated enemies. It is possible to learn their skills, and you get to use their attributes for a while. The game is very difficult, as expected from a roguelike, and yet there is that feeling that victory is just around the corner if you play more carefully next time. The complexities of controlling different enemies are really interesting as well.

• Dr. Vile and the greater good – by green pixel


This game is not only fun to play, it is very fun to watch as well, with its cute graphics and story. You are the under-appreciated evil genius, Dr. Vile, on a quest to gather materials to your evil gun. The game plays as a top down beat them up game. It is reasonably difficult, with a small but welcome component of knowing when to “aggro” your enemies.

• Kill all earthlings – by savethejets1

KaE is a reverse space invaders. You control when the invaders shoot, and if they advance/retreat in their way down. This game has very cool visuals, including lots of “pew pew pew”s (a weakness of mine), and plenty of particle effects. It is also fast paced, and gives you a great feeling of “zerging” the defenders through sheer force of numbers. It is a bit on the easy side when you get the hang of it, but you will still have a lot of fun.

If you liked this selection, make sure to also check my other game reviews:

• Review List 1: Good use of the Theme
• Review List 2: Awesome Graphics
And check my own game too, if you have the time

After so much villainy last weekend, I need to redeem myself, by rating games and talking about them here!

This time, I decided to highlight the 5 most gorgeous games that I’ve played out of the 40 or so that I have rated so far. These games will make your eyes hungry Go play them!

Without further ado:

• Memex;
  

  Cake and Code keep their tradition of producing stunningly beautiful game. A lot of care is taken in the design of the visual and auditive elements of their games, and it shows.

• The Other Side;
  

  Vrld’s game consists of three “reverse arcade”: space invaders, pacman and canabalt. He manages to create a consistent and attractive visual identity for the three very different games. I don’t quite agree with his gameplay choices, but there is no denying the graphic quality.

• Twisted Neighbourhood
  

  Klakwa built a very different “game”. A tornado simulator, you control a tornado and has to destroy the neighborhood. The movement of the tornado, and of the trees and houses as you get stronger and stronger, is really awe-inspiring.

• Tyranoforce
  

  Tyranoforce, by blob, is a reverse shoot them up. The game lacks a lot of “quality-of-life” things, such as music and resetting. But the spritework is phenomenal! It is retro, while having its own personality. And the dinosaur in the controls is awesome.

• The Hill
  

  Strkl made, literally, a work of art. Some gameplay was sacrificed to deliver a very touching story, using this wonderful artwork. Although I love the ludus, I think this approach worked very well here. The faces of the sprites are very expressive, and tell the entire story without the need of text.

Thanks for reading! If you liked these reviews, make sure to read my previous one. Also, feel free to plug your games in the comments!

I got luck and had a nasty flu this week. This made me be stuck at home for a whole day – and this time was well put into rating games

When I first heard the theme, I thought about a few ways that the theme could be approached: simple villain dressing, reverse-games, or villainous game design. I should have kept my trap shut. In just playing a few dozen games, I saw some very interesting approaches to the theme.

Today I want to highlight some games with such interesting approaches. Go play them!

• Evil Wall, by Zaszx

This was the first time Zaszx joined the LD. It shows – the graphics of his game are really simplistic, and the game is lacking a lot of polish. That said, he had a genial idea for the gameplay: You play as a ghost that can turn into walls. There are “good guys” in the game area, and a “bad guy” is trying to kill them. The bad guy is evil and slow, he cannot catch the good guys. There is where you come in – your character can materialize and become a wall, blocking the path of the good guys so that the bad guy can catch them.

What is so fantastic about this idea, is that this game makes you FEEL evil based on game mechanics alone. You could stay put. You could not interfere. But you do, you stand in front of the good guys who are trying to flee from the bloodthirsty evil guys. You FEEL evil while playing this game, in spite of the bad graphics and no sound.

• Meteors: Look at them go, by Fonserbc

This is another very different game. You observe the earth as it succumbs to a deadly asteroid shower. You can click on the asteroids and move them around a bit, to mess with the earth’s defense, but in the end your actions don’t affect the end result too much. This is one of the main faults of the game, which otherwise is quite fun and creative.

• Cure 48 – By Sonnybone

In this game you play as the hero… until you find out that you’re not. I won’t say much as to not spoil the game, but it is really worth your time. If nothing else because of the gorgeous musical score and the very polished feel given by Sonnybone.

• Ludum Dare Musical – By ILO

another unique take on the theme. In this game you are literally the villain — of a musical! The game simulates a school play, where your character has the role of the villain. The partner, controlled by the CPU, will sing a verse, and you have to pick a matching verse, taking into account the rhyme and the contents of the verse, as to fit your villainous persona. Very original.

• The Villain Complex – Maxim Schoemaker

This game’s take on the theme is interesting, but it is not what hooked it to me. It was the very original idea of letting you design the weapons available in the game. This game is a shooting platformer, and between each level, you can change the weapon’s range, strength, fire rate and many other properties at will. The enemies will be equipped with a random selection of the weapons that you create, which makes an interesting dilemma: make strong weapons, and your enemies will eat you alive. Make weak weapons, and you can’t properly use them against your opponents.

Hope you enjoy these suggestions, and please play my game as well! Feel free to plug your game in the comments, I will give it a fair shake

5 hours before the deadline, but I have to work tomorrow, and I didn’t get any sleep yet (5AM now). *Sigh*

Well, the game is mechanically done, and I think I did a nice job graphically as well. I added some music to the opening and closing screens. It is autotracker music, but much, much better than nothing. The opening screen has a small animation, I hope you like it!

There is a bunch of stuff that I wanted to make in this game, but didn’t had the time to. A better coder than me could probably have done these on time too. But so far, I’m happy with my entry.

Now it is time to sleep a little, and get ready for the rating marathon! Whee!

Go play my game

Game at 38hs. 10 to go!

After 38hs, I have something actually resembling a game. Wakka Wakka Wakka sounds are in! Even though the AI is pretty dumb, the game provides a decent challenge. If you could try it and let me know what you think regarding difficulty levels and controls, I would be eternally grateful! Also tell me what you think of the sounds!

• Fat Jar (ALL PLATFORMS)
• Applet (Not working for some reason)

Now where do we go from here? First I need to fix the shitty (literally!) intro screen, and also add a high score screen (including music for both – the game screen sounds fine as is). After that, some way to ramp up the difficulty (speed up pacman, increase power pellet time, different maps?). If there is enough time after that, I will try to fix the Java applet, that somehow stopped working after I added sounds to the game . IF, very IF there is still any time left, I will try to put into the AI. But that is not likely.

So, I’ve spend almost 6 hours today trying to get the pathfinding working for my PACMAN game, fighting lots of strange code bugs (and one eclipse bug). Then, when I get everything right, I realize that the way I was approaching the problem was fundamentally wrong!

See, I was picking one of the closest pellets, and trying to find a path around the monsters to it. If there was a monster between Pac and the pellet, this algorithm won’t find another closer pellet in the other direction!

In short, whenever pacman sees a monster between him and the pellet he wants, he freezes.

The solution is to instead implement a BFS, returning when I find the first pellet available (should have seen that all along ). But since I’ve spent SO much time tweaking the AI already, I will put this on the backburner, and work a bit on the sound effects (Wakka wakka wakka!), and the graphics. After I’m done with a somewhat more polished look to my game, I will concentrate on the AI again.

Here are the links, if you want to play with dumb pacman:

• Java Applet
• Fat Jar

Nothing much to say besides that. I had two ways to access a tile in my game: by tile pos, and by world pos…. got both mixed >.<

Now I have a much more “pacman-y” look, power pellets, victory and losing conditions!

Links to play:

• Web Applet
• Fat Jar (use this if the applet does not work (ubuntu?)

25 hours into the dare, this is what I have achieved. The game now has a definitely “Pacman-y” look to it, with the new maze tiles. I’ve improved the ghosts’ look a little too. The main difference this time is the power pellet. Pacman can now kill your ghosts, who will become confused and erratic during the duration of the power pellet. The map in this prototype is a test map that should allow you to see the different options (victory, losing, having your ghosts eaten by pacman, etc).

You select ghosts using 1-4, and you move with ASDW or the arrow keys. If anyone could provide feedback regarding the responsiveness of the controls, it would be much appreciated!

Now to dive into some basic AI for Pacman and the ghosts!