If we could get the standard deviation value for each of the scores we received. Maybe even the skew.

That’s all

Last week I got a bit busy, and had to cut back on the game reviews, but now I’m back, with a vengeance!

Baby Farm — Have you ever asked yourself how is babby formed? You NEED to play this game, or your LD23 experience won’t be complete. Being drunk is highly recommended.

Dangerons Baby World — Another baby game. This time a runner. The controls are really awkward and the game is hard to play, but it is worth a mention because it really nails the feel of the theme.

Save the World — If you are rating any games AT ALL, you have probably seen by now dozens of variations on “ship defending a small planet in the middle of the screen” game. Well, this one manages to turn the idea on its head: every time you shoot, your planet moves in the opposite direction! Worth a try.

Away from home — A platformer/puzzle/building game, with multiple, quite distinct game modes. The graphics are quite simple, but the game has a depth that attracted me a lot.

Mineral Cities — A very minimalistic strategy game, you have to construct different buildings in the right places and balances to maximize your point output. But the way the rules work in this game makes it for a very interesting challenge, if you try for the high score.

The Earth is Dying — The game is still rather incomplete, but the idea is quite unique and worth a mention. The earth is dying, and the goal of the game is to colonize nearby planets and send as many people to these planets as possible, before our planet dies.

Colours in the Void — Frustratingly difficult, but very innovative shooter: you shoot by making connections between you and obstacles in the scenario. The graphics and gameplay are well tied together, and the game feels quite polished.

And with 102 games, I bow out of the review race for this LD This
Sunday I will make a last stretch, by picking games from other people’s review lists. If you want to plug your game in the comments, go right ahead too!

First, Thank you! <3<3<3 I love these posts! With 1400 games, it is very nice to get some pointers from other people about what games I should try, because I would never be able to go through them all!

Second, would you mind adding the "review" tag to your post? it is in the bottom right of the "edit/create a post" interface (a box called tags). Adding the tag will make it easier for someone to see all the "game review" posts in a single search.

Cheers, and keep up the good fight!

As in the last compo, everyday I’m writing a post with impressions of the games that attracted me most among those I played that day. With more than 1400 games available, I hope that these posts can call to attention some gems that may go unnoticed otherwise . If you want to see my previous posts, just check my journal for the “love” series.

So, among the games I played today, I found many “cute” ones to share:

Tiny Contamination — A “dodge the enemies” kind of game where your cute amoeba has to take the right cells and flee from the wrong one. I really like that the number of lives the player has is integrated into the sprite. A strange bug might make you die suddenly.

A bathtub story — You are a cute monster inside a tiny bathtub, fighting against all the other bathtub toys. Very cute game, until you realize that EVERYTHING in that damn bathtub is deadly, and trying to kill your guts!

Pixel’s World — your first impression might be “ugh these sprites”. Then you see everything that is going on in the background, and realize the look is quite intentional, and work very well that way. A very fun platformer.

Toad Warrior — Hmmmm, a naked dude riding a giant frog may not be everyone’s definition of cute. Hell, it might be no one’s definition of cute! But the art in this game is pretty neat, and the dude looks so happy in his toad! The game is a platformer puzzle with a unique control. A bit rough in the game play, but rather fun.

Gravity Force 3 — Well, this game has nothing of cute in it. But is one of those crazily fun games that you keep playing and playing just because they’re so addictive, even if there are other games to rate

See you again soon!

5th day rating 10+alpha games per day, here are the highlights for today’s review session. Two games are very well fleshed out, and five of them, while lacking a bit in polish, make up for it with some very interesting ideas. If you don’t know what game to play next, check these suggestions:

Tiny World Cardgame — Card games are something we don’t often see in LD, which makes this game already worthy a look. It also features an awesome and very professional looking tutorial, and the ability to assemble your own deck. The rules for the card game itself are pretty simple, but allow for a lot of variation.

The Pioneer — Easily my favorite game for the night. This is just a simple 2D platformer, but the levels are randomly generated from a seed entered at the start of the game. The difficulty progression seems very good, and the art is quite consistent through all the different assets of the game. A generally very well polished little pear.

Scavenger — A very simple and unpolished first time entry in the LD, but which contains the secrets to the ant nirvana. Can you unveil the path to this hilariously unintended bug?

Tini World God — In this game you play with a star system simulator. Create a star, put some planets in orbit of it, and try to create life with them. Or just use your godly powers to blow up the planets into pieces! Needs a few tweaks here and there,
but quite a nice game.

Save your planet — Another “first time in ludum dare” game which performs well. A “defense” shooter, where you have to defend your planet from a variety of incoming enemies. The pacing and controls for the first few levels are quite fun, but the game does not ramp up the difficulty, so it gets a bit boring after 6 or 7 levels. Still, worth a try.

Atomic Galaxy Factory — An action puzzle game where you have to balance the construction of energy generators with the construction of walls to block such generators. Not only the game play and balance are rather nice, but the dressing of the game (you start at the quark level and goes up the universal ladder as you upgrade your pieces) is very enticing. You keep looking for finding out what the next upgrade level will be.

Tiny World Peace — This game is quite unpolished, but its premise is so unique that it is still worth a try. Three planets are at war, throwing bullets and missiles at one another – you control a moving shield, and you have to protect the THREE planets from each other, trying to keep the peace.

That is it for today! See you again soon, and feel free to plug your game in the comments

Weekend! Time to play a lot of games Besides the normal 10, I also played some extra games from people that commented in my game or posts, and there are some very very neat games I want to talk about in this post!

BTW, I have been trying to rate always 5 high coolness games, and 5 low ratings games — but it is coming to a point that most of the games with 0 comments are incomplete games/tech models. Maybe I will drop the “lowest rates” games altogether from my next run…

Anyway, to the games:

Wild West World — Today I played a bunch of games that interpreted “tiny world” as a circular playing area – this is a dizzy dizzy platform shooter where you are a sheriff that needs to clean town. Beware not to shoot civilians! The game can use a bit more polish, but it is quite a lot of fun.

The good ship Higgs Boson — heh, if you don’t pay too close attention to the name, this is an awesome puzzle game. You control a default platforming hero, but you also control the gravity that he is into. So during the game you can make any of the four directions to be “down”. There is a lot of untapped potential in this idea.

Curse of Grimwood — An action adventure game that is really really pretty. The bad path finding of your companions may make you mad from time to time (Damn, guys, try to get one at a time through that gap!), but the game is still quite fun.

Boxed — This game is quite unfinished, but it uses a mechanic that is unique enough to warrant mention — you play inside two boxes, and you can transfer from one box-area to the other. In each box area, the other box exists – and depending on what you do to the box, that box area is modified when you get there. Some amazing puzzles can come out of this.

1 Seed — In this game you have to terraform the entire star system, by bringing seeds from lush planets to barren ones. Trees grow procedurally, gravitational physics are in place, and the game in general has a large, innovative score.

D.A.H. — Yay! Another “Kill everything and don’t think much about it” kind of game. You are a dinosaur in a planet, tasked to destroy cities and eat people. Each person you eat, you get bigger and bigger, until you are bigger than the planet itself. Very very fun.

Spaceship Planet Merge — another innovative game, your goal is to make your planet collide with other planets in the same star system. The game is still quite simple and easy, but this idea has a lot of promise in it. Also, the music is good and the sprites are cute.

Have a nice weekend everyone, I hope you like these games!

So you posted on someone’s else blog. How do you know if they replied to your post or not?

Very simple: use the search feature! In the control panel, go to “comments” and type your own username in the search box, and it will list all the comments that you made, plus comments from other people mentioning you. Then you can quickly go to posts that you’ve commented to check for replies.

This may be obvious for some people, but I didn’t know about it the first time around on LD22, and could never really keep track of replies to my comments in other people’s blogs.

As an extra, if you search for your username on the “posts” section, you can find out if people are talking about you/reviewing your game. Try it out too!

Thanks everyone who took the time to look at my game! Today, besides my 10 daily rates, I also decided to return the love and rate/comment the games of those who rated mine or commented on my posts. Here are the highlights – the games that I enjoyed most. Give them a try, and I hope you like them too!

$ales — This game show how to turn a boring entry into a nice entry with a single stroke: the audio. The narration is very funny! The game is a “trading simulator”, you go around a map, trying to buy low and sell high to achieve a monetary goal.

Nematode — A very unique game: a kind of reverse snake. There are worms walking around in the game map, and you drop colored foods in front of them. If you can make a snake the right color by giving it foods in the right order, you gain points. I really liked the idea. Although the game is a bit too hard at the moment, it is worth a try.

Zunzanda — an extremely polished, challengin, fun game. You have a small island that you have to defend against monsters that are trying to eat it. The graphics, sounds and narration are well put together and give the game a very memorable face. I can easily see this making top charts in this LD, given its degree of polish.

Burning Platform — a perfect android/mobile game. Simple, you start it up, and can get right into it. Addictive, with the “beat your previous score” factor. It is a balancing game, where the goal is to keep your “friends” in the platform by balancing it with your phone’s accelerometer. It is a bit too hard at the moment, I hope the post-compo version works a bit on the difficulty curve.

Mozi Life — another unique game, this is a series of mini games that show the life cycle of a mosquito. Each of the minigames are quite simple, but they are tied together in a nice way. Would look great in an encyclopedia.

Audioland — more a toy than a game, it is world of sand meets music generator. Great and unique idea, I could see this being used to generate musics for future ludum dares

See you tomorrow!

Today I played a few more of the games with low ratings, and did find some undiscovered gems!

* In Delusion — a very freaky adventure game. Not exactly my cup of tea, but those who like story-heavy games and gaming-as-art will certainly enjoy it.

* Simini — This is a city simulator game with a BIG twist: the entire screen is like less than 64×64 pixels. SO CUTE! I wish I could put this game on my phone, or something like that. The game play is quite relaxing too, even if rather simple.

*
Shrinkage — A quite fun shooter, if rather easy. Has some good polish.

See you all tomorrow

Is it me, or a LOT of people are not linking to the source code in their games? At least half of the games I rated today did not include source. That is not cool.

Another Ludum Dare done, and it is time to play, play, play games!

Since I have a much higher workload now than I had last time, I will have to control my time rating games. So the plan is to play 5 games from the “least rated” list, 5 from the “default” list, and then a couple from my “this looks interesting/someone asked me to rate this game” list every night. Every rating WILL get a comment, so if you want some comments on your game, I’d be happy to give it a fair shake!

To start things off, these are the games that I played yesterday and really left a good impression on me:

Pow! Pow! Pow! — As the name suggests, this is a very cute came. The authors really put a lot of effort in the design, and the game is visually very remarkable. The game (a platformer) is a bit on the hard side, though.

Tiny Religion — A game with an interface that is quite unique nowadays — verb name command line! This alone would merit a mention, but the game is also cute, and has an interesting premise. It does require a windows install, though.

Tiny Castle — Mindless fun! A giant boy with a giant-er sword storms through tiny pixelated villages, causing mayhem and destruction! Great game to kick back and relax.

Tiny Girl — An addictive shoot them up – rensponse is really quick, enemies come from everywhere, and the movement of the background makes the game very dynamic: action seems to be going really fast! (when I do a shooter I will certainly steal this idea.

Hope you like these games like I did, and see you again tomorrow!

At the end of LD22, I was quite proud of myself. I had made a game, for the first time, and exceeded all my expectations. I had to deal with a library that I learned about just a couple of days before, almost no preparation, and lots of weird problems packaging the software. So it came naturally to me that this time out I would take all the lessons of LD22, build on top of them, and make an awesome game. Oh, how wrong I was!

Damn this game.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. I went into great lengths to prepare myself for this LD. I participated in the warm up, and build myself a neat little shooter for the 10 hours that I allowed myself to spend in the warm up. Then I bought all kinds of food that I could or could not need, since food was another thing that I felt was lacking in my first LD. Since the theme would be revealed 10AM my time, I slept early, and planned to go to a restaurant near my home to think about the theme away from the computer.

At least food was not a problem this time!

All was working well so far. “Tiny World” was not my favorite in the list of themes, but I did not dislike it. The inspiration came when, at the restaurant, the expresso machine broke. I immediately remembered all those children stories about small gnomes fixing househood items, hidden from the adults. Specially, I was thinking about the recent Ghibli movie, Arrietty, which I liked a lot. So the idea started to form on my head. A family of tiny creatures, trying to live unnoticed in a human’s house.

I spent about 20 minutes thinking about a princess-maker style management game, where you managed a family of “borrowers”, sent them on missions to explore, or expand, or other things, and tried to keep your profile low. But then I thought that a management game was not a good call for LD — management games are not everyone’s couple of tea, and they can be quite hard to balance. I decided to change the focus a bit, in order to make something more likeable, and I came with the idea of controlling a single of these creatures, in an action/stealth game.

Maybe that was my mistake, maybe I should have gone with the management game I wanted to make… anyways.

The idea for the game was this — a creature living underground, had to forage the above world for items, food, treasures. All while avoiding the humans and other hazards in the big world above, and using the spoils to improve their own tiny world. It was still a good idea on paper. But when I started laying out the plan for the game engine, I panicked. I realized that I needed creatures of widely different sizes, on a complex world, and I had no idea of how to handle collision. In my previous game, collision was a non-issue, and I was getting scared that I would spend a LOT of time trying to learn how to make a quad tree or something like that. It did not make any sense, I was just panicking, and in panicking I lost a lot of time.

Eventually I decided to re-implement a tile based engine just like in my previous game, with three different sizes of sprites: 1, 9 and 25 tiled units. I implemented a simple and dirty routine for square collision detection on those sizes. Then I started to work on some early lose conditions, on the idea that I needed to have a prototype with a win/lose condition as soon as possible. So I implemented foraging for food, dying of starvation, and the cat predator.

But by then, it had already been over 30 hours, and I had very little time to do much else.

In the end, my game idea about living among humans and exploring, fixing their stuff, and building your base while remaining undetected became a silly game about stealing food from cats to give to your fat queen . The game didn’t even have any humans.

So much planning, so little to show for it...

Other than the end result, not all was lost, though. The preparation certainly paid off: I did not have any problems regarding my programming environment (no mysterious bugs) or the living environment. Submitting, publishing, time-lapsing all worked without a hitch. I got a lot of practice with the Gimp, and learned to use some tools in different ways. I also learned how to create and add music to the game without requiring a lot of composition knowledge. Autotracker is a wonderful little tool that I learned about too late into the compo, but will certainly be a center piece for future dares. In fact, I might go as far as create a bunch of random tunes to just listen to them while playing DF or something like that. Also, I managed to insert a lot of little neat widgets into the game that made me a bit proud of myself, such as a generic handler for mobs using inheritance, a text message listener that shapes the message to an arbitrary window, dealing with real time, a pause screen, etc. Too bad that these neat tricks can’t replace an actual game :-/

Well, there is always next time! I still feel pumped for programming, so maybe I can get some more game making experience before LD24.

TL;DR:

I finished my game, but it fell way short of my expectations, couldn’t implement critical features.

The Good
* My preparation was top notch: I wanted for nothing, biological or technical
* I managed to solve many technical problems I had in my LD22 game, such as music and message box formatting.
The Bad
* I panicked early in the dare because of lack of familiarity with game programming, lost a lot of time.
* I misjudged the time I needed, critical features and playtesting were missing from the game.
Lessons Learned
* If I like a niche theme or a game style, I should just go for it. With 1000 participants, LD is not a popularity contest.
* Working with multiple small levels uses the time better than working with one complex level.
* Autotracker rocks.

Also the obligatory links:
* Game Page
* Time Lapse

Here it is!

And here is the time lapse too!

Having skipped last night to put more hours into this game, I’m ultra tired. I should post a more complete post-mortem tonight or tomorrow. That said, I can already say that while this game is better than my previous submission, I’m far from satisfied with it.

As in the last year, I will invest a lot of time this week and the next one into rating, commenting and posting about as many games as I can. Of course, with more than a thousand participants, even if I invest as much time as I invested last time, I will still miss a LOT of people. So, please, feel free to plug your game in the comments

Cheers, and congratulations to all who submitted their games.

10 hours to go, and I generally finished the interface, including a nice message parser, an inventory screen, pause and about screens, and winning and losing screens.

The game screen, with placeholder art.

I have almost all the minimum features that I wanted, and at least all the features required for the game to be completeable. So I guess I will take a quick break, and add some content.

I’m pretty sure I won’t be able to add all the sounds, music and art I wanted to, but I’ll see how much I can get done. If I’m lucky, I might even sneak in one more feature or two.

10 hours to go, fight, fight!

Oh, you can play the game here (java web applet) or here (downloadable jar).

With just 16 more hours to go, the game is finally progressing at a nice rate. If I was this productive in the beginning of the dare, I would have a very very cool game by now.

Anyway, I worked on object factories, which will allow me to place many objects with small variations anywhere I like, which will allow me to make my level. No level editor, but I will probably only add one level anyway. I have worked on 5 total food sources, their sprites and behaviors. I added 4 of then in this snapshot, the last is a secret for the final version of the game . I also added a nice sleeping animation for the cat.

Don't wake up the kitten! (you can hover near him when he sleeps)

BTW, sometimes the cat does not enter/stays in the fighting animation when he gets the ant/faerie. I have no idea why this happens, but I won’t spend much time debugging it just yet.

Here is the fat jar, for the brave!

In the last 4 hours, I managed to accomplish quite a few things:

• Added a “pounce” behavior to the cat. The pussy can kill you now, beware!
• Smoothed the Cat’s movement a bit*
• Added a Sound handler and a few sounds

Since my previous LD game had no sound, I can now say that this game is already 1000 better than the previous one (ha ha ha). Well, things are coming along, now I just need to add food variation, the human, generic objects, game data, and we should be good to go. (Well, then I have to add a game level as well — oh my!)

Anyway, here is the jar, in the same place as it has always been.

* PS: For some reason, when the cat is running, it shows two sprites in consecutive positions….. does anyone know how to get rid of this “ghost” sprite?

I tried to sleep for at least 6 hours, but didn’t manage at all. After tossing a bit at bed (maybe all the caffeine?) I decided to wake up early(er) and come back for the dare.

Yesterday was a bit disappointing. I got a bit done regarding mechanics, but I’m still waaaay waaay behind what I hoped to be at this point in time. Anyway, after breakfast I sat up and wrote down my tasklist for these 24 hours:

- Write Cat Pounce Behavior
- Smooth out Mob animation
- Prepare a simple sound engine, to avoid sound bombs
- Make the “foodsource” object generic, to prepare for multiple food sources
- write a message center for the game
- write the Human mob (variation of cat)
- Allow player to dig tunnels/make new stairs
- New Content (Map, new sprites, prettify)
- Extras (if there is time) – Children, Underground base building.

As I write this down, the only thing that dawned on my mind is – No way that I’m going to make all of this in 24 hours

But let’s see how far I can go!

Good luck everyone.

In the past hours I solved a bug with a super sensitive input, and worked on adding NPCs that can potentially try to follow you. The result is a cat (or is it a gecco? my drawing sucks), that will move between some points in his schedule, stop and rest from time to time. Don’t get too close to the kitten And if you value your ears, don’t EVER let the kitten catch you! (I will fix that tomorrow).

Run for your life!

Although outwardly it may look like little has changed, the kitten has been programmed in such a way that adding new NPCs now is relatively simple. While these are not ALL the features that I wanted in my game, there is enough backdrop to allow me to actually start adding some content. After 18 hours, I’m much behind from last LD, but at least I’m doing some progress.

Time to catch a few ZZZzzs, and see you tomorrow!

(Prototype here, same place as before, actually)

13 hours into the dare, it took me WAY too long to post the first prototype

What happened is: I wanted to improve on my LD22 game, so I started to think too much about how to implement a non-tiled top down navigation engine. Result: I panicked a little and lost a lot of time. After a while, I realized that the extra features that I want to add in this game are already a ton of extra work, and trying new data structures now would be waaay more than I could bite. KISS.

Anyway, here is the first prototype! You can move around, you can do a few things, and, most importantly, you can DIE.

First snapshot of my LD23 game. Don't let the queen starve!

You can control your ant-like-winged-faerie with the arrow keys, and press “space” to interact with the environment. Right now you can only interact with the ladder, the anthill, the fruity bush and the queen. You can also pause pressing ESC.

Here is a fat jar for you.

Now for dinner, and then to add a moving enemy!

Tiny World was not the kind of theme that I was expecting… but that is cool, because I get to exercise my creative juices.

So I went for breakfast in a nearby restaurant to think about the theme, and this is what I came up with:

You are an ant-like intelligent creature, living under humans. Living off humans. Your goal is to sustain your queen/nest without getting the humans too mad about you.

The game will be a top down action game where you must acquire food, avoid detection, and expand your nest. I still have to decide a lot of things, like the exact scope of the game, but I should be able to start coding soon. Planned features include schedules for the humans, and the ability to escalate up/down the “threat level” (how actively the humans will try to get rid of your colony, based on how blatantly you have been stealing food from them).

Whee!