It looks like my bolstered confidence from this jam was indeed justified. I have submitted to 4 LDs including this one, but for this LD, I set a new personal best in every single category in which I got a rating (except Coolness). Not all of those new records are by a significant amount, though; the reason I’m so happy is not because of the improvements in my strongest categories, but the improvements in my weakest categories- the quality of my work is more consistent across categories without having lost any of my strengths. I still have to refine my methods a good deal, but the changes in my work habits I resolved to make for this LD paid off. This is my first solid evidence that I’m actually getting better at this.

So, why’d I do how I did in each category, and how do I improve?

#76. Innovation – 3.67 (previous best: 3.64, LD21)
I usually do well here, but I was still surprised at my performance this time, because I deliberately constrained my brainstorming.  As I mentioned in my “I’m In” post, I wrote “NO GAME GENRE REFERENCES ALLOWED” in large letters across the top of my brainstorming sheet.  However, I also made sure not to accept an idea unless it was low-scope enough to actually pull off well (I was SERIOUSLY tempted to go with a cooler but much higher-scope idea).  As a result, I adopted a rather generic arcade-style gameplay structure to maintain that low scope, but the primary gameplay mechanic isn’t quite like any game I know of, since it wasn’t designed with any existing game or genre in mind.  While almost certainly something new, it’s still nothing hugely out of the ordinary.  If I want to improve, I’ll have to find ideas in that small overlap between “low-scope” and “attention-grabbingly unique”- quite a difficult task.

#94. Theme – 3.83 (previous best: 3.80, LD21)
I’m also a bit surprised about how this was my highest-rated category. I thought it was a pretty standard implementation of the theme… perhaps people liked how I offered a sympathetic portrayal of the “villain”, but that was just in text outside of the game proper.  Improving here’s not my highest priority, but as long as I don’t keep my idea too much of  stretch from the theme, hopefully it’ll improve hand-in-hand with Innovation.

#174. Fun – 3.25 (previous best: 3.05, LD23)
This is always my highest priority, but also hard to complete satisfactorily within 48 hours. As per my game-design training, the gameplay has a solid “core” (the challenge of picking up humans without dropping them). However, I was aware going in that I would get a few marks down for some gameplay flaws that could easily be fixed given more time (i.e. humans staying out of reach, weird chain-of-humans physics). I intentionally saved these kinds of tweaks for later. In the past, I’ve fixed an emergent flaw as soon as I detected it, but this caused me to neglect other aspects of gameplay, as well as almost all of the graphics and audio, preventing me from working on a more “complete” experience.

#181. Overall – 3.33 (previous best: 3.00, LD23)
I like how this was my biggest non-audiovisual improvement. I think it reflects the fact that this is a more “complete” product than my past entries, as I mentioned previously.  This was the first time I feel like I properly scoped for 48 hours. I do still need to improve on “completeness”, though, and I think that’s the primary way I’ll be able to improve my Overall rating. The graphics and audio, while present to the degree they “need” to be, were still noticeably bare-minimum, and the gameplay still needs some more polish (see “Fun”).

#206. Audio – 2.92 (previous best: 2.18, LD23)
My most-improved category for obvious reasons (for the first time, I have music). I suspect this was brought down by a noob mistake I made and didn’t find out about until well into the rating period: after each round, the game started playing a new instance of the background music from the beginning, but kept playing the previous instance of the music at the same time. I’m going to be a bit more rigorous with my audio testing in the future to make sure nothing like this happens again.

#272. Graphics – 3.17 (previous best: 2.69, LD24)
I’m surprised that my programmer-art got me above the 3.00 threshold. I guess I just have to keep making sure that I don’t include any assets well beyond my drawing capabilities- though I was kind of proud of the way I disguised the collision boxes with the design of the mothership. I think, if I am to improve here, I have to go for a consistent, stylized aesthetic (ideally minimalistic), and find the time to do non-essential things like illustrated instructions, non-default UI graphics, background imagery, and “juicy” visual effects.

#1048. Coolness – 22% (current best: 32%, LD23)
As usual, I struggled to find time to rate other participants’ games, between holiday plans (including a trip to New York for New Year’s Eve), commitments with friends (as students at different colleges, winter break is the only chance we really have to catch up with each other), and various obligations.  I’m graduating in May- hopefully, come LD27, I’ll have more free time.

Humor – N/A (current best: 3.25, LD21)
I included a little humorous story on the game’s ratings page, but I didn’t really intend the game to be all that humorous… just cute/lighthearted fun.

Mood – N/A (current best: 2.53, LD23)
I know I find mood hard to rate for most games (and usually abstain), and I’m betting most other voters do too. Like I said, I was going for a cute/lighthearted aesthetic, but I’m not sure it’s really stylized enough to constitute a “mood”… I guess the voters agreed. Plus, I think some voters use the Mood category only for melancholy or artsy aesthetics… those are the only ones I find easy to rate myself.

Things have been going surprisingly well!

You can still tell I’m not an artist, but I’ve got the bare-minimum art done (I’d like some clouds, hills, or something else to fill that empty space in the background if there’s time), and the humans behave much more (though still not entirely) according to the laws of physics.  I’m satisfied with all the mechanics, so that just leaves sound/music (and writing instructions- I saved that for last in case there’s any last-minute mechanical changes) and I’m home free!  I might actually have time to add extra polish!  Probably not goats, though, but that’s okay.  Maybe for a post-compo version.

I don’t want to jinx anything, but I think this has been my best LD performance yet.  This is already leagues better polish-wise than I managed with my LD 24 entry (which I took an extra 24 hours to do), I’m going to have art, sound, and MUSIC (a first for me), and I didn’t overscope!  I’m very happy with how this has been coming out.

To the finish line!

I’m always so jealous of the people who know how to art.

Everyone else’s games look so much prettier than mine right now, but then again, that’s because I’ve spent my entire time so far working on mechanics- some of you all might have done art first or interspersed it with mechanics.  I try to reassure myself that I’ve therefore spent more time on gameplay than most other people (and thus my game probably plays better), but is that true?  My logs say I’ve done 5 hours, 17 minutes of actual work.  While that’s a little over half as long as I predicted I’d take to get to this point, the time doesn’t add up.  Almost 28 hours of LD have elapsed so far- subtract 4 for planning, 9 for sleeping, 2 for meals and the like- that’s still about 7 hours, 43 minutes that have vanished into the mystery zone.

Where did all that time go?  I know I get distracted a lot, but I’ve been fairly focused so far- I’d attribute no more than, say, 2 hours to distractions.  Am I really underestimating by that much?

No matter.  Time to get back to work.  I’ve stopped a few mechanics early because, while I’d have a hell of a time trying to narratively justify the physics at this point, it’s already fun/challenging.  I figure polish first, make sense later.  I’m going to do a bit of menus, then go straight to the art, then sound and music. After I’ve done all that, I’ll come back and add in whatever I originally planned that I still have time for (like the people you abduct not being able to pass through the ground once they’re attached to your ship).

Oh, and I think I figured out how to work goats in if I have time.

Hey everyone!  I’m back for my 6th attempted (and hopefully 4th completed) Ludum Dare!  Although I’ve completed a few games in the past, I still really have to work on my polish and work ethic- I haven’t been too good at either of those things in past LDs, and it shows.  After the disaster that was last time, I am now committed to learning from my mistakes and Doing Things Completely Differently.  Here’s how I’m changing up my process from last time:

• Having my tools set in stone before the compo.  In the past, I’ve been tempted to use an engine I was less familiar with or write more code from scratch because it better suits the idea- this time, I established what I’m going to be using well in advance of the theme announcement – all tools that I’m familiar with and will allow me to prototype quickly.  I’ll be working in Flixel, with Photoshop CS3 for art, Bfxr and Audacity for sound, and GarageBand for music.  These will restrict the kinds of games I can make, but the assurance that I won’t overscope on the core mechanic alone is worth it.
• Focusing less on an innovative high concept and more on polish.  Of course, I always want my gameplay to be innovative, but my ideas are usually a bit too “let’s put a big ol’ gigantic TWIST on the theme”, forcing me into oddball gameplay structures that don’t lend themselves well to the tools I use.  This time, I’m focusing on wowing people less with the elevator pitch (I’m doing a game about alien abduction- not too unusual) and more with the actual experience.
• Not making a platformer.  I tend to think too much within preexisting genre conventions.  This time, I wrote at the top of my brainstorming sheet “NO GAME GENRE REFERENCES ALLOWED”.  I thought purely in terms of what kind of villain the player might play, and what primary “verb” the villain will be doing.  I think that it’s paid off – the idea I’ve settled on would probably be best described as an “action game”, which is pretty damn nonspecific (at least compared to things like “shooter”, “beat’em up”, or “platformer”).  This allows me to branch out a bit in terms of game design, and think less inside the box.
• Planning, planning, planning. I’ll be writing out every little thing I plan to implement, how I plan on implementing it, and how long I plan on taking to implement it (within a fixed time budget of 13 “on-the-clock” hours, not counting meals, sleeping, and such), so I don’t get carried away with designing while I code.  It’s a distraction, and keeping all the info I need in my head has severely slowed me down by forcing me to constantly remind myself what I’m doing.  Of course, if playtesting reveals something interesting (or uninteresting), I’ll change the design accordingly, but I’m not going to improvise while I’m typing out the code.
• Tossing away my nitpicks and worrying about them later.  So the collision’s a little off.  So the spawn rate of enemy X is a little high.  Who cares?  I’ve got an entire game to finish!  Instead of trying to fix these little things, I’ll put them in a list to fix if I have more time, and move on to more important things, like interesting mechanics, art, and sound.
• Reserving time to make music.  I don’t care if all I’ve got in the game after Day 1 is Hello World, I will put some music in this game if it kills me.  I have yet to have a game with polished gameplay, art, sound effects, AND music – something that really feels complete instead of just thrown together.  I plan on changing that this weekend.
• Stretch goal – Progress shots!  I have yet to supply in-progress shots of my game, because I’m too busy rushing to make something barely playable.  I want to participate more in the community, and I want to feel less pressured about the amount of time I have.

Well, I’ve spent long enough writing this (that’s another thing I need to learn not to be so perfectionistic about)- time to get to work!

Screenshot (no, really):

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Bluh. I submitted my game to the Jam, but I’m not sure I can say I “finished” it. It’s a very rudimentary packaging of what I was able to program within the time limit, but it’s not really a coherent “game” without a lot of explanation. Also, I accomplished absolutely none of the goals I outlined in my “I’m in!” post; as usual, I simply didn’t have time. This is my third completed and fifth attempted LD; I should be doing better than this by now!

So, what went wrong? I picked a terrible idea. I don’t think it’s a terrible idea for a game when actually executed to spec, but it IS a terrible idea for a Ludum Dare entry. The kicker is that the primary mistakes I made, I already knew were mistakes. I knew working with a language that was not my primary programming language would slow me down; I knew making a platforming engine from scratch would decimate my scope. The problem was that making an ASCII platformer was critical to my idea at the start – I wanted to impress people by having the link you click on transform into the game, using the Ludum Dare page itself as a play surface and playing off that fact as part of the story.  That required me to jump through all these hoops that slowed me down, and I had rejected all my other ideas because they were either unoriginal or had a very low chance of being fun.

Thankfully, even though I was well aware of many of my mistakes, I did learn some new things from it that’ll help me be more confident and, hopefully, get much more accomplished the next time around:

• Technological experimentation in a time-constrained game jam is not a good idea.  I’ve read so many things about how the spirit of Ludum Dare is about going out of your comfort zone to create something unique; something you wouldn’t have made or perhaps even thought of otherwise.  That’s all well and good, and I love that aspect of LD, but I feel like that statement has some serious caveats.  Most of the experimentation I’ve done has involved structuring my games in uncommon ways that are not well-supported by existing engines.  The less you can rely on existing infrastructures and codebases to form the backbone of your game, the less you can get accomplished in all the other areas of game design, and the more potential there is for things going very wrong.  I spent about 50% of my time writing an ASCII platforming engine from scratch, and 50% of the remainder working on a Javascript exploit that was basically rejected by the submission form (in order for the game to be played on its own ratings page)- leaving very little time for art, level design, or anything approaching a coherent user experience.  Even though programming was the first game-related discipline I learned and one of my strengths, I think next time, I’m going to scrap any idea where the primary “wow” factor is supposed to be a technological aspect, in favor of experimental gameplay or storytelling methods that are easy to program.
• Innovation doesn’t have to be in how you interpret the theme.  When brainstorming, I didn’t even stop to consider any ideas where the player character or enemies were the ones doing the evolving, or where the evolution was literal/biological in any way.  As per the aforementioned spirit of Ludum Dare, this was in order to ensure my game was unique- but I think it ended up working against me.  A lot of other people try to think like that, and in the case of this theme (or any theme based on a verb), there’s only so many other things that can evolve.  Sure enough, one of the eariler games submitted to the Compo stated in its description that, like in my own idea, the graphics were the thing that evolved.  In addition, I realized that I was sort of fighting against the theme rather than working with it.  I was categorically rejecting all the ideas that would’ve come naturally because they came naturally.  I still like that common “scrap your first idea because everyone’s going to do that” piece of advice, but in trying to innovate upon what aspect of the game evolves or how it evolves, I lost sight of the fact that there are other ways to innovate.  I have a feeling I would’ve done better had I just done a standard “characters get upgrades as you progress through the game” bit, but done so with unusual characters, in an unusual scenario or genre, or given it a unique stylization or sense of humor.
• I should be doing FAR more detailed planning on paper.  I spent an embarassingly high amount of time looking at the top item on my to-do list (stuff as broad as, say, “enemies” or “collision detection”), wondering how to execute that particular aspect of the game, then getting distracted, forgetting the plan, and having to think it up all over again.  Here’s another thing I plan on doing next time: during the first 4 hours, I will do no programming, art, or anything else related to the production of the game.  I will simply figure out what idea I’ll be doing, then plan out the whole thing on paper, complete with time estimates and, where I’m not sure about execution, broad-level pseudocode.  I will budget for 13 hours of pure work-time.  In 48 hours, I usually sleep for 18, and since the planning would take 4, that’s about 26 hours of free time.  I cut those 26 hours in half because, having previous experience with self-estimates, I know that they tend to be pretty accurate (possibly even self-fulfilling, due to Parkinson’s law), but that I spend about half my time doing things “off the clock”- that is, real-life stuff that gets in the way: eating, bathroom breaks, distractions/breaks from work, phone calls, other unavoidable social situations, etc.  I say 4 hours for planning because settling on an idea usually takes me 1 hour (I was a bit intimidated when the keynote described it as “the first minute” of the LD experience- it took me a whole 3.5 hours to find an idea I liked this time, due to the flaw in my plan outlined by the previous bullet point), and the remaining 3 hours should be enough to make a very thorough plan that outlines the entire design (both on the user end and the programming end) in one fell swoop, so I can eliminate critical thinking almost entirely from the programming process (I work, like, 10x faster and more distraction-free when I don’t have to think all that much about it).
• EDIT: I need to stop being such a perfectionist.  Reading Sos’s excellent post-mortem reminded me about this one.  I caught myself several times hacking away at bits of code because they didn’t work in some obscure edge case, or testing, altering the gravitational acceleration by miniscule amounts, and re-testing because the game might’ve been a bit too easy or a bit too hard without those adjustments.  I know from experience that I have a very hard time letting go of little nitpicks like that, but I need to learn to move on and come back to it if I have time (even though, deep down, I know I won’t).  In my most recent (non-LD) project with a deadline, on my to-do list, I kept a list labeled “nitpicks” of all the things that bugged me about the game that I thought would harm the user experience.  When I was done with the rest, I went back and fixed maybe two of them before I had to submit, but it was all the better because I didn’t focus on those right away.  I guess I should start doing that in LD too.  After all, why spend half an hour on fixing minor bugs in the controls when you could do it implementing something more important, like sound?

I guess I’ll end this very long-winded post by saying that, while this Ludum Dare was less pleasant to me than usual because of all my failures, I’m still glad to have done it because of how much it has galvanized me to do the next one so radically differently that I might actually accomplish some polish that time.

Congratulations to the Evolution theme, which has FINALLY been chosen!  It’s a bit tricky to find a non-obvious idea for this one, but at least it’s not too similar to previous LDs!  I’ve got a few ideas brewin’, but naturally, I’m afraid a bunch of other people will have thought of the same things.  I suppose with thousands of games out there, it’s hard to have something COMPLETELY unique- execution is important, too!  However, I am trying to shy away from what I bet is the most obvious idea: a game where the player character or enemies get upgrades or change form (à la Altered Beast) over time.

My tools:

• Haxe with Physaxe or AS3 with Flixel, depending on the idea
• DAME for tilemap editing, should I need it
• Photoshop CS3 for whatever I can pass off as art
• GarageBand (or Famitracker if I’m feeling generous with my time budget) for music
• bfxr for sound

Also, remember last Ludum Dare, when I was one of several people who did a postmortem survey and promised to release statistics with the results?  Well, unfortunately, due to some stuff that happened to everyone in the class I was doing the survey for, I didn’t get to do a real analysis of the results.  When this compo’s over, I’ll take a crack at the analysis and post what I come up with!

I guess I should have goals, too, so here are some goals I’m coming up with off the top of my head:

• Spend less than half my time programming.  That way, I can spend more time working on the ever-elusive polish: level design, art, music, sound effects, and so on.
• Actually have music.  I have not yet released an LD game with music; I’ve always run out of time before I could compose some.
• Not get distracted so much.  I am my own worst enemy in these sorts of things; my mind gets carried away all the time.  Part of the reason I do Ludum Dare so much is to train myself to focus, and I plan on continuing that here.
• Oh, and KITTENS!  I will work cats into this somehow if it kills me.  There’s too many kitten-haters out there.

Good luck to everyone, and remember to have fun!

Hi there!

• Did you participate in Ludum Dare 23?
• Do you want to help forward the cause of SCIENCE?
• Are you at least 18 years old?

If so, you may be interested in taking my survey!

https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/CXBYMDB

I am an MIT undergrad interested in studying game jams for a course on video game research. I’m studying Ludum Dare to see the relationship between how people go about making their games during the Compo or Jam to how well they did (and how well they believe they did). The survey’s not long at all; you should be able to complete it in less than 10 minutes.  Any and all responses will be greatly appreciated!

Thanks,

Michael Ahearn

That’s it. I give up.

Since I had prior commitments on Saturday, I planned on making my entry for the Jam during the remaining 48 hours. The idea was to make a game that has NO graphics, forcing the user to navigate by sound alone. That was all going fine, and I was well on my way to a finished game, until 15 minutes before the deadline, I discovered a bug that renders the game unplayable. The way I tested it, I enabled one sound at a time and tested them individually. But, when it came time to put them all together, the way I coded it makes the whole shebang sound EXTREMELY choppy, making it impossible for the player to know what’s going on. I think I know a fix, but it’s gonna take more time than I have left. I guess I’ll keep on plugging and put out a non-jam version when I can.

Anxious to finish an actually polished game for once, I’m definitely entering the October Challenge.  My target platform is Kongregate, for two reasons. The first: I’m working in Unity this time, and since I lack a business, my own website, or any mobile device worth playing games on, Kong’s definitely the easiest way to get exposure.  The second: Having hosted things there before, I’ve seen how much a game makes in ad revenue, so the $1 itself looks like it’ll be a simple task.

My personal goal is to make a game that gets more players than the few hundred you get within the first 24 hours of posting any game on a web portal, and actually keeps a few of them coming back.  Basically, I’d like a jumping-off point to start a reputation.  Maybe, if all goes well, I can use the revenue to buy some decent hosting/domain registration and finally put up a website for my development projects.

The project I’ll be working on for the Challenge is a game I’ve been making on and off since the summer.  The theme is disorientation.  To this end, it’s an abstract first person shooter set in a 3D maze in zero gravity.  The most important part, however, is what happens when you manage to shoot an enemy.  Basically, this is an entire game’s worth of Touch Fuzzy, Get Dizzy.  I’d like to have several different effects that could be randomly activated in order to give the game a more chaotic feel- think Treadmillasaurus Rex. The range of screen effects I can use is rather limited, considering most of them are exclusive to Unity Pro, but I think I’ve got some good, feasible ideas.

This is what the game looks like so far:

It’s not much to look at right now, (and yes, that’s a Mandrill Maze shout-out lining the walls), but it’s functional. It randomly generates a maze of any size made out of cubic rooms, you can fly through it, you can shoot at things, things can shoot at you (the only enemies so far are those red squares on some of the walls- at the bottom is a bullet barely missing me), and you can reach a goal.  Now that I’ve done the basics of the game, I’m ready to test the visual effects that will form the main draw of the game.  Maybe I’ll do some basic lighting while I’m at it; it looks kinda dark at the moment. >_>  For the art, I’m thinking of doing something in the style of M.C. Escher, as that’d add a lot to the theme of disorientation (although I know it won’t be the first Escher-inspired video game).

I think the biggest design challenge for me will be balancing the difficulty.  I’ve noticed that, in games that gradually increase the difficulty of the game by adding speed, enemies, or chaos (like the aforementioned Treadmillasaurus Rex), if the difficulty ramps up too quickly, the player gets frustrated and leaves.  If the difficulty ramps up too slowly, the player gets bored and leaves.  If a game is balanced between the two, by the time the player gets overwhelmed, they’re hooked and will want to see if they can beat their previous level of endurance. I’ll probably have different difficulty levels to make this job easier, but it helps to be thinking about this.  I’ll not only have to balance the intensity of the visual effects for this purpose, but the frequency/strength of the enemies.  If either obstacle overpowers the other, the player becomes more focused on that one, which takes away from the chaos.

The working title is “Get Lost!”. Whaddya think?

Gah.  I spent about 48 hours on this last weekend, but the collision (which SHOULD have been simple) took me so long to debug (and there are still plenty of bugs) that I didn’t get any time to include actual horror… or gameplay, for that matter.  I’ll put up what Flash-work I got so far, but I’m done hacking this thing together.  See it here if you’re interested.

I was actually going for what McFunkypants jokingly referred to a few posts down- the horror of drowning.  That is, I noticed that sequences in many games when the player character can only be underwater for a certain period of time get really tense when the countdown clock is approaching 0 (as in Sonic 2, for example), so I wanted to capitalize on that and add some scary enemies, sounds, and music (I got one enemy done, but none of the sound/music, and I was SO looking forward to that).  Hold the arrow keys to swim slowly, and tap the spacebar to paddle once (tap repeatedly of effectively swim faster). The blue bar is the drowning meter, and the red is health.  I’m hoping the rest is self-explanatory.

The plan was to have the player swimming from surface to surface in order to breathe, as the paths between the surface areas got more difficult to navigate and infested with creepy stuff.  I only got to finishing one path, though, and a little stub branching off of it.

At least there’s the October Challenge… I’m looking forward to actually polishing a project for once.

I’m in!

After a fairly successful run in this past Ludum Dare (#38 humor, #39 theme, #57 innovation), I’m giving the MiniLD a go.  My goal this time is to finish the mechanics with enough time to spare to actually put in graphics and sound. I guess the theme is perfect for that- while I know I’m going to have a tough time with horror, if you don’t have graphics or sound, you don’t have horror.  It essentially forces my hand in the direction I want to go!  I have less of a coherent idea this time than last LD, though… I guess it’s time to do some research.

where doing it man

where MAKING THIS HAPEN

Hello, Ludum Dare!  I’m a first-timer who really should’ve lurked moar before jumping into the competition, but since all the cool kids are posting here and declaring what tools they’re using, I figure it’d be prudent to do the same:

Code: AS3 (with Flash CS3) or JavaScript (with Unity3D – free version), depending on the theme ‘n such

Visuals: Photoshop CS3 and Flash CS3

Sound effects: Bfxr looks cool.  Maybe Famitracker if I decide to go 8-bit (don’t have/know how to use Flixel, though)

Music: GarageBand, Audacity, and/or Famitracker

Here’s hoping I make it to the finish line in one piece!