Man, it’s been a while. Been caught up with school, so i couldn’t attend the last few LDs
That said, I have had the time to work on my skills a little, and have been working on a game in AS3, with the help of good (not so) ‘ol FlashPunk.
If any of you remember LD#18, i entered a game called “AfterDark” (you can find it HERE). Well, the entire game has been re-written in ActionScript since then, and this is the result:

Slight graphics upgrade since last time...

Also got a new name, and a new logo!

The game is still in sponsorship stage, but if you want, you can give it a go on FGL (you will require a developer/sponsor account) HERE

As of now, my schedule is looking pretty good. So, unless the theme is awful or pointless, I’ll probably be participating. I might work up a multiplayer web-based game using PHP and MySQL, much like the ones on my website. I could throw some JavaScript at it and make it all AJAX-y. Alternaly, I could develop something in Flash, an actual real-time game. I could do something in Inform 6, which I know, or Inform 7, which I’m learning. I could even write something in ChoiceScript…or if I really wanted to go all-out, DirectX. I guess we’ll see!

My LD#18 game, HackBotz, was the first game I did using Flash.  I felt like it was a pretty good concept, and so when the October challenge came along I was motivated to polish it up a bit, add some levels, and release it into the wild.   A couple of months on Flashgamelicense.com and a few sponsorship offers later, I managed to get a non-exclusive with addictinggames.com which was pretty cool.  It was a good learning experience, and I owe it all to the Ludum Dare compo.  You can play the game here.

All those months ago I created a litlle game called Alien Super Mega Blaster as part of LD18 – Enemies as Weapons.

Early today it passed the final peer review and is now available for purchase on the Xbox Live Indie Games channel here:

http://marketplace.xbox.com/en-US/Product/Alien-Super-Mega-Blaster/66acd000-77fe-1000-9115-d802585507aa

All the proceeds I receive from the game will be donated to Action Duchenne, a charity established to find a cure or more effective medicines to treat Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy.

In the months between the compo and yesterday I’ve added sound and music, new alien types and over 100 hand crafted levels of blasting fun.

If there anything the Ludum Dare community can do to increase awareness of the game and help find a cure it will be very much appreciated.

Some details on the game:

“Alien Super Mega Blaster is a classic space invaders game with a twist available for the Xbox 360.

Kill the aliens and avoid the fallout.  Maximize your score with mega cascading death to the alien scrum. 

Over 100 hand crafted levels of blasting fun… how far can you go?

All proceeds from this game will be donated to Action Duchenne.”

You can find out more about the game here: http://asmb.codheadz.com
You can purchase the game here: http://marketplace.xbox.com/en-US/Product/Alien-Super-Mega-Blaster/66acd000-77fe-1000-9115-d802585507aa
You can find out more about Action Duchenne here: http://www.actionduchenne.org
You can find out more about Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duchenne_muscular_dystrophy

Thanks for any support you can give.

Jon

Explosive Love

I’ve been working on my Ludum Dare 18 game Robots <3 Monster which is now called Explosive Love and was released for ipod/iphone yesterday! You can see a trailer here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y464HJvnk5s&feature=player_embedded and view the appstore page here: http://itunes.apple.com/dk/app/explosive-love/id405025826?mt=8#

However, some people have reported crashed and I’d really want to know which devices/firmwares that have a problem so that I can release a fix. If you want to help, but can’t afford 0.99$ I do have some promocodes.

The Itunes description:

As an attractive monster, you suddenly find yourself surrounded by robots, all madly in love with you. Sadly the feeling is not mutual. Avoid the clingy robots by predicting their movements and luring them into fatal collisions. Collect points and survive as the difficulty ramps up, all to beat the highscore!

An addictive action arcade game filled with love and explosions.

AVOIDAL (my August 2010 Ludum Dare entry) and October Challenge entry has found a home!

I’m excited to report I finalized on a primary sponsorship deal with Tom Fulp of Newgrounds last week and have finished all the integration and testing work required. That work included getting to create 23 fun medals (achievements) for players to win when the game is played over on the Newgrounds site with a player account. The game will launch over there next week on November 3rd. I’ve also managed to sell a few non-exclusive licenses including one to Big Fish Games. The primary sponsorship was found via posting to Flash Game License. I spent a good bit of time in October working on, play testing, and polishing the original competition version into the final version.

The highscores have been reset so get in there and play!

But better late than never. It starts a few hours into my development as I was using fraps to capture the start, which failed badly. Without any further ado, I present my timelapse.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNbIu-Tmsf0

I’ve posted a postmortem of Dodger, my Ludum Dare 18 entry on my blog.

Now, there obviously isn’t a prize and the whole rating thing is pretty meaningless, but this sorta bothers me. None of the comments fit that kind of rating, and if you have some complaint to merit such a rating, I think voicing them in the comments would be the nice thing to do… (I’m more than willing to take negative feedback, but a universally negative rating tells me nothing useful).

After getting slammed with a couple of troll rating votes (people who rated an entry with 1s across the board, while all other votes had decent ratings), I was curious about how much this was happening overall in the voting.

I ran some numbers, and put a report here: http://spampudding.com/troll.txt

The format is username and how many troll rating lines they received (1 or 2), followed by their average ratings in each category, followed by what their average ratings would have been without the troll votes.

These five entries were hit the hardest, each losing a quarter of a point or more in at least one category due to troll votes: http://spampudding.com/trolltop.txt

Assuming all votes were logged, I’m wondering if maybe the admins could go through the database and see if it was the same couple people making these votes.

The single best indicator of what your overall score will be, is how fun your game is. Innovation, theme, and graphics all are noticeably correlated with the overall score (though a few outliers managed to get a good overall score without meeting the theme). Audio has a slight correlation. Games with good humor tend to have a high overall score, but games with little humor don’t necessarily have a low overall rating.

 
Next I have a few observations on the ranges of values in various categories.

Innovation: Very few games scored below 2 in innovation. It’s clear that innovation is being done.

Theme: Most of the entries made a good attempt at the theme, but a few seemed to ignore it.

Audio: Not many entries scored well in audio, and some put little or no audio in their game. Does this mean participants don’t have very good audio skills, or just that audio was somewhat neglected in the competition?

Humor: Very few games rated above a 3 in humor. Only handful of games both tried to be funny and succeeded.

I wrote a little script to scrape all the ratings for all games and put them in a comma separated value file.  You can open this in any spreadsheet app (Excel, OpenOffice Calc, etc.).  It’s here, if anyone’s interested:

http://www.spampudding.com/ratings.csv

While 50th overall is definitely a step up from last LD, 16th for audio (for the first game I’ve ever used sound effects in) and equal 6th for innovation (4.04 average!) are amazing results and it’s definitely a victory by my standards. Thanks to everyone who voted!

This has been a great LD for more than the scores, of course. While I have to say there were a number of games that felt too similar, there were also a good number that stood out, and the standard of presentation as a whole was fantastic. The feedback and support from the community throughout has been incredibly encouraging and uplifting, and while the previous LD was a good learning experience this has blown it away.

Work on an improved AS3/Flixel version of Sonic Boom is well underway and hopefully others are developing their games further too – I look forward to seeing them.

Ludum Dare 18 judging has finally ended, and here are your results.

Top 20 Competition Games

You can check out the top 20 competition games here (including ties):

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-18/?action=top

Winners are decided by the Overall category. To see the complete list, hit the “Show All Entries” link at the bottom.

Categorical Top 5′s

Here at Ludum Dare, being the best game isn’t the only way to win. Games are rated in 7 additional categories, with a special “Coolness” category highlighting people that went above and beyond to be sure you got a vote.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-18/

*NOTE*: You can click on the titles of the categories for Top 20 style lists per category.

Ludum Dare 18 Jam Games, Compo Games, oh my!

Ludum Dare 18 was our first trial run of the new combined Competition and Jam event. So in addition to the 172 entries created by individuals for competition, there are 41 more games created teams or individuals that decided to take an extra day to polish their game. Be sure to check those out here:

ALL JAM GAMES (41) <--

[ ALL COMPO GAMES (172) | ALL GAMES (213) ]

Overall, the response to the Competition and Jam has been extremely positive. But now that the Ludum Dare 18 has come to a close, we’d like to hear your thoughts.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2010/08/25/did-you-like-the-jam/

* * *

And THAT was Ludum Dare 18

What an incredible event! Thanks everyone for making Ludum Dare 18 such a big deal.

When the smoke cleared, we had a total 213 games across both the Competition and Jam! This is our current “high score”, 10 entries ahead of Ludum Dare 17 in April (203).

During the final theme voting round, we collected nearly 500 votes in a single day! If we’re to take that as the number of participants, that means Ludum Dare 18 had an over 40% completed game rate! Wow!

Theme voting results can be found here.

Press Coverage (Viral Timelapse Videos)

As for other happenings, Ludum Dare made an impressive showing in the gaming press, especially the timelapse video from one Notch. Kotaku, Engadget, Digg; You name it, they covered it. 200,000 Youtube views later…

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2010/08/25/ludum-dare-18-press-coverage/

In addition, IndieGames.com and Bytejacker are back with a quick look at many games from the competition. Go see if you were one of them.

Ludum Dare 18 Meetups

Even though the Ludum Dare competition is a solo event, that doesn’t mean you have to work alone. Here’s a look at some of the gatherings that took place Ludum Dare 18 weekend.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2010/08/17/ludum-dare-jam-live-at-cb2-bistro/
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2010/08/21/ludumzilla-at-cb2-indies/
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2010/08/22/new-england-meetup-video/

If I missed any posts, let me know and I’ll update this list.

Other Ludum Dare 18 related links

- Number of competition entries in the final minutes
- Watch the Keynote, hosted by Mike Kasprzak (PoV)
- View the Theme Voting Results
- The “ALL GAMES” wallpaper by ExciteMike

Interesting Tags: montage, motivation, foodphoto, deskphoto, timelapse

* * *

Ludum Dare 19 coming December 2010

Our Winter event, Ludum Dare 19 will be in December. Date to be finalized as it gets closer.

If you haven’t already, you can sign up for the mailing list, and we’ll keep you informed. Also, you can follow Ludum Dare on Twitter.

Mini-LD #21 “Greatest Fear” this month!

Can’t get enough Ludum Dare? Later this month, tune in for another MiniLD hosted by SophieH (GirlFlash). Details about the upcoming mini can be found here.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2010/09/04/announcing-mini-ludum-dare-21/

Unfamiliar with the Mini-LD? Mini-LD’s are smaller competitions hosted by Ludum Dare veterans. They’re held monthly in the off months between our major competitions. Tune in to the website every month for details on the latest Mini-LD competition. Curious who’s up next? You can check out the host list on the wiki.

Ludum Dare Games at Toronto Exhibit

I was asked by a friend for a list of “art games” from Ludum Dare events (current and past). I gave him a few off the top of my head, but LD is so big now, I could use everyone’s help making a list of Ludum Dare “art games”. For details and to give me your suggestions, see this post.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2010/09/06/ld-art-games-at-exhibit/

Feel free to nominate games you made.

Suggestions

If you have any suggestions for us (website, observations, etc), we continue to collect them in the comments here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2009/08/30/suggestion-post/

Thanks everyone for coming out and making Ludum Dare 18 such an incredible success. We’ll see you again in December!

- Mike Kasprzak (PoV)

Heya, just posted my game on GameJolt!
here’s the link:

http://gamejolt.com/open-source/games/arcade/afterdark/3418/

It’s the post-compo edition.

On another note, good luck to everyone with the results!

Looking for more compo fun?

Here’s a really cool contest: You have seven days out of the month of September to build a game that is “NEVERENDING”. Can you build a game that is infinitely playable, and always crowd pleasing? For more info, check out The Experimental Gameplay Project

If you are a demoscener or love javascript html5 canvas stuff, there’s a nifty “elite” coder style compo called JS1k, where you have 1024 bytes total for your game. Entries are due in one week. Some of the demos totally blew me away – there’s even a Zelda clone!

Finally, if you are a serious contender and can afford the $100 entrance fee, you can compete for $100,000 in the Indie Game Challenge.

I’m always on the lookout for new fun compos, so if you know of any more, please post a comment and let me know. Thanks LDers!

So yeah, I finished a post-compo version of my jam thing. I’m quite happy with it, but beware, it’s really REALLY hard.

BWOOP
download

== CONTROLS == (These are explained in-game, too)
Arrow keys = move
S = jump and confirm
D = pick up and throw
D + Down = put down
D + up = throw upwards
R = restart
Esc = Quit
Note that the speed of thrown objects changes depending on your own momentum while throwing. That is, throwing stuff while walking makes them fly farther.

I’ve been tinkering with my LD 18 game over the past week and a half. The main things I’ve added are online leaderboards, background graphics and better in game help.

It seemed like the main problems with my game were confusion over how to play, very bare gameplay unrelated to the ‘story’ mentioned in the readme and misunderstandings over the goals. There are now several pages of in game help explaining the mechanics, with pictures, that will hopefully clear up how the vacuum mechanic works. I’ve added some nice tile mapped backgrounds and an intro ‘cutscene’ which should indicate that you have to defend the area beyond the left of the screen. Finally, it’s basically a score based endurance game so the leaderboard should emphasise that part of it.

Astrovax also turned out quite addictive, hopefully the leaderboard will make it more so. >:D

The new version can be found at astrovax.moop.org.uk.

Wrote a blog post making excuses as to why I didn’t finish my Ludum Dare entry here:

http://hobbygamedev.blogspot.com/2010/08/ludum-dare-18-and-pyweek-11.html

tl;dr version:
“Turns out having a toddler and an infant to take care of is pretty time consuming.”

Why yes, I am shameless enough to blame it on my kids. Mostly only had code, but I did take this picture of our brainstorming session:

Maybe next time. Great job everybody!

I’m going to work on a iPad/iPhone version of my Ludum Dare entry and had a friend help with some art brainstorming. Here are a few drafts. What do you think?

Current look: (Entry page: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-18/?action=preview&uid=2612 )

New drafts:

Main character: The idea is to drag the monster around by moving the eye.

Updated versions of the two robots already in the game

New robot concepts: Big slow robot that can take a few hits. Slow hovering robot that shoots with smaller robots. Some powerup!