Hey, this post is going to go on the notgames blog! Cool, huh?

On Valentine’s Day, indie game developers axcho and knivel released a little game called The Love Letter. It’s a free, five-minute experience, a slice of life as the most popular boy in school. But things aren’t so easy at the top, especially when you find a mysterious love letter in your locker and you have to read the whole thing during passing period without any of your so-called friends catching you.

“It’s hard for me to say where The Love Letter fits in the spectrum of game to notgame. The purpose is to get across a particular five-minute experience, not to make it about a challenging game with a lot of replay value,” says axcho, who wrote the code for the game.

While there are no points, achievements or levels to be found in The Love Letter, it is possible to win or lose. Getting caught by another student while reading your love letter results in a cute but painful shaming in front of your peers, and a quick trip back to the title screen to try again. If you do get to the end of the letter without anyone seeing you, you are rewarded with an awkward but adorable encounter with your secret admirer, and a satisfying “the end” that makes it clear you’ve met the game’s expectations.

Still, there is a balance to be struck. You could call it a casual stealth game with only one level, but that would be missing the point.

The Love Letter was originally a 72-hour creation for the Ludum Dare 22 game jam, where hundreds of participants all over the world spent a weekend making games inspired by the theme of “alone”. The game’s author knivel says that the brief development time encouraged him to try making a short, scripted experience that really explores the competition theme rather than simply trying to make a fun game that people would want to play over and over again. It lasts for five minutes because that’s as long as it needs to be. It’s not particularly deep or profound, but it stands on its own for five minutes, without all the gameplay fluff that would be needed to sustain a longer playing time.

As one player mentioned on the notgames forum,

“What made this for me was the fact that the game didn’t try to ‘challenge’ me with levels, achievements, or points. It could have been more ‘fun’ and earn more flash portal money if you went that route. I can imagine myself adding more challenging level design and mechanics to this until the game ends up as this soulless fun machine.

But you sir, made this with the notgames mindset and left me with something pure and sincere. Thanks for that.”

We’ve all seen shallow themes stretched out to hours of gameplay, whether in killing monsters or clicking cows. But while some developers choose to reach for lofty heights with themes that deserve such extended introspection, others like axcho and knivel simply take something sweet and fresh and give it all the time it deserves. Five minutes.

This quote says it best:

“If Dear Esther is the main course, The Love Letter is my dessert.”

You can read more about The Love Letter’s development on axcho’s blog.

(-o^_^)-o HUG MONSTER is evolving! o-(^_^o-)
Play the post-compo version at www.hug-monster.com!

My compo entry for LD#22 was a little game called Hug Monster, and it was seven levels of ASCII art fun. A reasonable number of people played it, and their comments were a mix of happy praise and criticism. I am really happy that I received both, and have taken to heart the feedback. Therefore, over the past few weeks, I’ve done a number of thing with the game.

• The player’s momentum and inertia is toned down, and his top speed a bit slower.
• Many of the bugs related to jumping (particularly double jumping) are squashed
• More cutscenes! It’s not just the title and ending that have little movies now.
• More levels! And in fact, some of the levels from the compo build that were rather weak have been tossed out.
• Local storage – The game remembers how far you got and lets you start from where you left off
• More focus on puzzle solving
• Even more ways to trick the Hug Monster into helping you escape a level
• Hug Monster shouldn’t get stuck in certain walls any longer

And I’m not done yet! I still have plenty of ideas for levels, puzzles, and even plan on adding music to the final build eventually.

I want to thank everyone who took the time to play the compo game and leave feedback, as you have all helped to make Hug Monster (-o^_^)-o a very happy creature, and a ridiculously fun game.

This is a really long post about my compo entry for Ludum Dare 22 and something I learned about how I should make games…

Enjoy. xD

(more…)

We did it!

The Love Letter is all polished up for Valentine’s Day! You can play it here:

http://axcho.com/theloveletter/

Happy Valentine’s Day everybody! <3 We hope you love the game!

Spread the love! Don’t spend this holiday ALONE…

Ha, see what I did there? :3

We’ve put the final touches on The Love Letter and sent out an email to a bunch of friends for private beta testing!

Get ready for The Love Letter on February 14th, Valentine’s Day! We’re looking forward to it…

After really enjoying the prototype I produced for Ludum Dare 22, I  decided to continue develop on the idea.  After another month of development, I’m happy to announce that I’ve officially released v1.0 of Atlantic Flight One on Kongregate.  You can find it here.  I would appreciate any thoughts and/or criticisms.  Thanks!

It’s changed its mechanics a bit, though the core gameplay is still there.   The original LD22 entry can be found here and a post-mortem can be read here.

Ludum Dare 22:

While Isolated Assault was huge success in my eyes considering it was my first Ludum Dare game, and by the scores it received, I’m struggling to come up with a Post-Compo version. You see, I’m just not feeling the motivation to work on it. Every time I sit down, I just feel, “Wow, this is old.” It’s like one of those projects I just gave up because I had no motivation for it.

That’s how it went with Dunnet (My most worked on game), and with my First Person Shooter (My first professional game), and with all those projects I started but never got around to.

Currently my Unity Project Folder looks like this:

Where “Abandoned” have been worked on for a while. I could always go back to the “Abandoned,” but I haven’t, and why should I?

My Problem:

I need a due date on projects.

Some people can never get work done knowing there’s time management involved. For me, it’s the other way. Knowing that there’s no time to procrastinate, and that there’s a reward for finished, I can get a lot of good things done.

I also have problems focusing on one idea and getting it implemented quickly. All of focused ideas I have are too complicated even for top-notch game companies.

Therefore, Ludum Dare was perfect for me–it gave a theme for the game and a deadline. I now know my best work will probably come from future LDs.

Will there ever be an Isolated Assault 2?

Not now. And probably not from me. Anyone familiar with Unity (That means you, reader!) can take my Isolated Assault Source files, and add some new levels, as long as I receive credit.

I have no motivation whatsoever to make an Isolated Assault 2. All my ideas were expressed in the first one. You are a guy. That fights cubes. That wears glasses. The only thing added to this game would be gloss.

Will you participate in LD 23?

Of course! Ludum Dare is the best way to manage time and get good games squeezed out!

Will you stop asking yourself random questions?

Never!!!!

Now I ask you, do I stick with deadlines for making games, or do I learn to get around them?

Do I use Ludum Dare to create all my of my work?

For some reason, I need some sort of reward/time limit for everything I make, because that’s just how I work.

Either way, I’ll obviously still be doing LDs, and I can’t wait for LD23!

I last mentioned that The Love Letter will be released after judging ends…

And yes, judging has ended (and we got voted the best in Theme for the jam, thank you!) and The Love Letter is not released. But our original pronouncement still stands – the game has a release date, and that release date will take place *after* – and not before – judging ends.

And it’s the perfect release date.

What else could it be but… Valentine’s Day! February 14th!

We’re so close. We were working all weekend, and we’ve got all the major features in – at this point, we’re just iterating on polish and playtesting feedback. I’m excited!

Source code is looking good too. I’ve factored out two new Flixel plugins from the code for this project, and I can hardly wait to get them on GitHub. FlxScript and FlxTilemapPlus, coming up!

Release for the full game code will probably be a week or two after the game release, just to give us a bit of a head start on the inevitable flood of copies and clones that will soon follow…

It’s been around a month now, but now I want to take Enola to a new level, and make a full game out of the concept. The game I made for the 48 hour competition was purely an exploration game, but for the full game I want to implement other stuff, including puzzles and death traps. I’m crowdfunding the making of that game, so if you want to help, you can visit the campaign page at www.indiegogo.com/Enola and donate. Also, please share the link with everyone you know.

I actually added new stuff to the game I made for ludum dare, so you see what other mechanics I want to implement in the full game. It has a puzzle, a trap, and 2 endings, including the “good” ending. Since the contest was over a month ago, and I made this as a way to present a small prototype, I did use a couple of premade models for this build. For this same reason, I’m not switching the download link on the contest entry page (I will simply post a link on that page to this blog post).

A lot of people found Enola a very mysterious and even somewhat unnerving/scary game. The full version would be a “horror/adventure” game, but not the kind of horror found in games with monsters, zombies, and such, but rather horror related to the human nature. Enola will focus on a different kind of horror.

My game for the SOPAjam (also my first entry ever) is finished! I finished it yesterday, but I didn’t have enough time to post anything about it until now.

It ended up looking kinda ugly, having a couple of annoying glitches and it wasn’t even close to what I attempted to make, but I have never made a game in under 24 hours before (including school, sleep and other stuff), so I am very satisfied with the finished product. I learnt a lot very fast and I had a lot of fun.

Not the prettiest thing in the world, but it is something

Download for Windows and Mac on my website!

PS: My game isn’t showing up under the all games category for some reason, but it is clearly uploaded (http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/sopajam/?action=preview&uid=10299). Am I doing something wrong or is it supposed to be like that?

Im entering MiniLD31  I will be Using Game Maker 8.0 Pro

So I’ve heard of this “Ludum Dare Gamejam-Competition” and I thought I’d enter my own jam.

To create Game-Jam of course only the classic ingredients of Grapes, Apricots, Mango and Elderberries would do (I know, I’m a comic genius).

Here is the fruit. I had to fall back on elderberry-preserve, as they are ridiculously hard to come by.

Turns out cutting grapes is totally fun, and not at all tedious or complicated.

It also turns out that Elderberries have a very strong color that overpowers everything else. Or it’s the food-coloring I added. Not quite sure.

And here it is! Finished Game-Jam!

Quite tasty. And extremely sweet.

-Matthew

Today’s screenshot looks a lot like yesterday’s.  :)

Squiggly thing == Internet

I still have a few things to do after work before I finish.

We were very happy to win the 2nd prize in the Jam with our game Together Alone. Although this was our first LD, Gijs and I have worked on creative projects together for a long time, including games, and it’s gratifying to see that people appreciate our imaginings.

As we’re planning to do more games together, we’ve decided on a name for our two-man team and created a website: Qwok Games. Qwok was a minor character in our old comics (see the site if you’re interested), and we both liked him so much we’ve adopted him as our mascot.

Together with a few other LD22 participants (including Midas and Follow) we were asked by JayIsGames.com if they could host us. We were happy to say yes, and worked hard to provide an even more polished version. It is now up on the site, along with a very positive review. Woohoo!

My SOPAjam entry Congress Chainsaw Massacre is ready!

Play on my website!
Play on Newgrounds!
Play on Kongregate! (with high scores!)

Hey everybody, Dan from Lantana Games here, and this is my first LD48 entry for the SOPA Jam, entitled ftp://Breach. It’s a hacking-based text adventure which takes place in an unfortunate dystopian future where the net is completely text-based.

The game isn’t done yet however all the core mechanics I wanted in are in. Going to different IPs, jumping to nodes, hacking servers, trace countdowns, pinging the server to buy yourself more time, etc. I even added in lives because it was getting a bit too unfair to keep dying while trying to write “ping” as quickly as possible.

Feel free to test it out, only available for Windows right now as my Flash exporter seems to be busted. :/
http://www.lantanagames.com/breach/ftpbreach.zip

SOPA and PIPA see online communities as the childish clubs of pirates and script kiddies. I indulge their delusions in Netbaby, my first game jam entry!

Download for Windows and OS X at http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/sopajam/?action=preview&uid=10237

My SOPA themed DX:HR hacking / Uplink LAN hybrid is finished! You can find it here http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/sopajam/?action=preview&uid=3939

Hope you enjoy it!

So yeah, it’s done. Play it here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/sopajam/?action=preview&uid=5267

Remember: SOPA is no one’s friend!

For anybody who was aware of me in the last LD48, I have made a stop SOPA game! It should be way more playable then my LD48 game.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/sopajam/?action=preview&uid=8522  Enjoy!