So, My first attempt at Game programming coincided with Ludum Dare #22….Which also coincided with me moving back home from university for Christmas….overall -> massive challenge

My breakdown of events:

1. I haven’t produced anything worth submitting – only got much of the backbone finished
2. I have learnt a lot about the workings of C++ and the SDL library
3. I managed to produced my very first makefile to automate building and debugging
4. I have a basis for a game I have wanted to make for a while
5. I might still have some time to finish in time for the Jam Deadline

Well, for me the first day of development is over. It is already 22:15 – time to play Chrono Cross, yeah!

Good luck to other participants!

Hello!!

Finally is all right to start the competition, all is ready!!

My desktop is ready to work:

You may notice that my desktop is well tidy and have a pretty visual!!

Well, good luck for all!! And much more luck for me!!!

Cool Text seems to be a very good (and LD48 valid?) content generation site. It has some nice free fonts and an advanced button/logo generator.

Some of you may remember a post I made at the close of LD21. In it I declared my intention to carry on with the game I started during the contest and to use its tech to create an online map editor tool that can be used to build maps for 2D tile based game engines. Well, the game hasn’t seen much attention but I haven’t been completely idle. The map editor is now complete enough to be useful, and a beta version is available online at http://www.callidusrex.com/mapper. I hope some of you find this tool handy, its in active development and comments/feedback/noise are more than welcome! I will be using this tool during my participation in LD22.

Hello!

This is my first LD so I want to get things cleared up.

Can I use fonts in my game or do I have to make my own? If so How?

Anyways this is what I will be using For this LD

Unity for the game engine

Visual c# express for code

Paint.Net and Inkscape for 2D sprites and textures

Blender for animation and modelling

Bfxr for sound effects

Music, havent decided probably no music as I have no musical talent

Oh and I currently have a game on RocketHub(international kickstarter), You should check it out: http://rkthb.co/4587

VERY, VERY IMPORTANT SIDE NOTE:

I have to do a full citation!
Please send me an e-mail to richard.blechinger@hotmail.com, include your FULL NAME, OR your FIRST NAME and the FIRST LETTER of your LAST NAME, i.e “Johnny M.”, if you want to be kept anonymous.

That’s it. Now you can read the rest of the article.

You have 2 weeks.

Post anything you know about “indie”, answers to common questions, opinions, and more, I can convert any data.

• Do you think you could live off your hobby?
  Your definition of “indie” vs. “AAA”,
  Post-Mortems,
  Success (or terrible failure),
  Which language you use,
  Which IDE you prefer,
  Indie-Magazines,
  Articles,
  Games (Windows, or Flash/HTML5/Java),
  Examples of random code snippets (Commented if possible, please)
  ANYTHING.

It doesn’t have to be all too technical, because my classmates aren’t exactly computing geniuses. (Some random commented code snippets are okay, though. Just for showing them what’s going on behind the scenes)

Also, if I meet any of you on IRC while I’m slacking, I may ask stuff :p

There you go, bombard me, LD-Community!

Thanks everyone for your generous contributions! It’s awesome seeing the community come together to help keep this site afloat! The FUNdraiser is now over, so may your year be filled with many 48-hour game jams!

The donation system is still available if you really want to contribute more. At this point our hosting should be covered for over a year, so contributions above and beyond will be used at the organizers discretion. (I’ve been thinking about buying a pair of giraffes …) But really, we’ll probably keep a hefty buffer in case our hosting costs go up again After the optimization we did to the site, though, I’m hoping our costs will stay under control.

I just want to say a thanks again, this has been an awesome year for Ludum Dare and I can’t wait to see what happens in 2012!

-Phil
P.S. a special thanks to PoV (Mike Kasprzak) for setting up the donation system! It worked great!

Alright! Thanks everyone again for all your feedback.

After much deliberation, we’ve decided to start taking donations again. If it turns out that isn’t enough, we will investigate some of the other options. I’d especially like to thank everyone that contacted me directly about outright hosting, boxes, sponsorships, etc. We may still need you, but for the sake of the community, we’ve decided to try donations first.

To find out how we’re doing, or to make a contribution, visit the following page:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/donations/

It’s important to us that Ludum Dare stay free for all. We don’t want anyone to feel obligated to contribute. But if you’d like to help us out though, it would be much appreciated.

We have control over our VPS, so we can raise and lower our plans as we need to. We’re currently on a $90 plan. There was some unexpected heavy Reddit traffic the other day, and with the October Challenge about to kick off, we’ll be keeping a close eye on this to optimize our costs.

Thanks again everyone. And now it’s time for me to go kick-off the October Challenge.

Got the back to school blues? The end of summer blahs? The “LD21 was so much fun, when’s the next?” daydreams?  Just looking for some gamedev fun in September? Your wish has been granted! Prepare to jam your face off the weekend of September 17th:

- increpare’s miniLD (Ludum Dare)
- Orca Jam (in Victoria Canada)
- GPCv8 (Game Prototype Challenge)
- Mysticism Pageant (Super Friendship Club)
- Story Game (Experimental Gameplay Project)
- Glorious Trainwrecks (Klik of the Month Klub: only 2 hours long!)
- Pyweek #13 (Python Game Programming Challenge)

Some of these jams are ongoing all that week or even over the entire month.  If you are super mega hardcore, maybe you can make one game that fits all the themes and submit it to multiple game jams! Anyone up for the challenge?

So, I didn’t write about anything in my journal. To be honest I didn’t have time! I was too busy making that damn game! HAHA. But maybe I can write something now. Mainly about what I have learnt in this contest.

Time: Well, I kind of didn’t learn anything here. I like everyone wildly overestimated what i can get done in 48 hours. I spent ~26 hours. But I am always over-estinating time. At work especially where I’m making games daily, I still think – “a week, sure, no problem”… Then I get bitten by time for disrespecting it. I usually double estimates to stop this… )

Instructions/GUI/Intro: Never spend enough time on these and they’re really important. Far too interested in the idea of the game, the mechanic and how it plays. Never on how to teach a player to understand it. The GUI needed an overhaul or actually doing in some cases (falling back to the default Unity stuff).

Planning: I need to plan and timetable stuff out next time. I think I spent 45 minutes modelling a gun, but it’s not visible and should have stuck with something simpler. If I planned everything, allotted time to each part with contingency then maybe the GUI would have been better.

Too big: Next time I’m going to aim for a 12 or 6 hour game. 24+ hours of coding over the weekend on top of all the game coding I do in the week means I didn’t have a proper weekend. I may have gone out for dinner so my wife didn’t kill me for ignoring her that long, but today, on Monday, I’m zonked.

I think that’s it for my thoughts for now. Hope you enjoyed my game…

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=rate&uid=4757

Jasper

Right! So I’ve made a timelapse during this whole thing! It’s split into two parts:

Part 1: Singleplayer. Uploaded during the compo and posted on IRC.
Part 2: Multiplayer. Uploaded a moment ago.

The two songs used in them represent the two anime soundtracks that helped me keep motivated throughout the compo. (Haha)

Computers used:

Battleship Asus: Android tablet running Ubuntu 11.04. (AH THE DETERMINATION)

Battleship PC: A quad-core PC with 4GB of RAM, used towards the end of timelapse part 2.

Apps used: gedit, terminal, javac, zip, mtpaint, nano, wc -l, etc.

Timelapses:

Timelapse part 1

Timelapse part 2

Well this is where I work.

I normally would not be using the crappy laptop to power the TV/media screen – but I had to do something since my 8800 has fried and I’ve already lost “so much” screen real estate already…  I know, third world problems.  Anyways.

The much required white board, and a bookshelf of reference material just in case it gets dangerous.

Hey, just scrolled through a dozen pages of posts, collecting people on Twitter like Pokémon, and I noticed that a few had entered the entire Twitter URL into the field on their Ludum Dare profiles.

You only have to put your Twitter name in the field, with or without the @.

Not a huge deal, but makes it easier for folks keen to Follow you up

With LD21 rapidly approaching, I wanted to do a Post-Post-Mortem of my LD20 entry, since in addition to improving the game to make it ready for wide release, I’ve been working on a sequel for the last 4 months. Links for those who don’t want to read:

Diamond Hollow on Kongregate (380,000+ plays): Diamond Hollow
Diamond Hollow II: Coming soon…

So let’s get to it!

In the beginning (approximate 7pm PST on the opening day of LD20), there were a couple of block games. These block games were well intentioned, but I could tell they weren’t going in the direction I wanted them to, so I quickly tossed them in the trash (the last one actually went into a filing folder somewhere to deal with at a later date).

My goal was to make something that players would find fun. Being the superficial dev I am, I quickly took to the past winners pages, and found that players like platformers. Great! So I immediately switched focus from block/puzzle game to platformer. I decided to go with a tower climbing theme, and this was born:

It was very generic; it was very simple. Now that I had the basics down in a way that I thought I could turn into something fun, I began drafting out what features I wanted in the game. Among these were:

• Randomly generated infinitely high level
• Quick paced movement and jumping
• Gun shooting with the mouse
• Enemies to kill
• Something to collect
• Upgrades to spend your collections on

It was looking good! It was at this point I needed to choose a theme. While it was a tower climbing game, I wanted to do something not tower related. My first thoughts were climbing a castle (but that would have just been a tower so I threw that out), and climbing up through the branches of two large trees on either side of you. However, my powers of art are extremely limited, so while I would have enjoyed a tree climbing theme, it would have looked pretty terrible and have taken too much time. However, dirt was something I knew I could do easily (fill brown, add noise filter, DONE) in photoshop, and the first thing that popped into my mind was a cave. So quickly I hopped to photoshop, and the pictures above immediately grew into:

Awesome! But then I hit the “collect” point. What can you collect in a cave? Rocks? Bats? Diamonds! It wasn’t the most elegant solution, but with the clock ticking, I hopped on it, and it wasn’t long until I had cute little diamonds sitting to collect. At this point I also added my first enemy, the slime:

Things were looking great now! I could jump up a cave, collect diamonds, and avoid cute little slimes that liked to wander back and forth (why? because they are slimes of course). However, in order to hook players I needed upgrades. Many people find upgrades cheap and hate them, but they are like crack in the world of casual flash gaming (and I, like many others, feel drawn to upgrade anything and everything). However, in preparing how I wanted to do upgrades, I started thinking of other aspects of games that hook me. The main one that came to me was Achievements. Achievements usually mean nothing, but they can make a game much more fun by giving you goals, and goals in games are always great.  For example, killing goblins for hours can be boring, but when you’re doing it for a quest or achievement, you feel driven to do it, and you feel like it means something. If I’m going to have you climbing an endless cave, I might as well reward you as much as I can.

So I took to photoshop, and in a surprisingly short amount of time (according to my timelapse), I had a protype mostly complete:

This is what pushed me over and kicked my motivation into overdrive. As soon as I had this working I blogged it. There was just something about it that made me want to play the game myself, and it sounded like others liked it too.

I continued to work to polish the game, add a few more enemies (plants that shoot at you), and get the game in a generally fun state. However, sunday morning at about 4am I ran into a hurdle. I had never actually used FLStudio before, and after downloading the demo, I found I probably should have practiced. I started putting random beats together, and would constantly start new projects because every song I tried to make was like terrible terrible noise. I googled some tutorials, but found nothing all that great. After looking around for something to save me, I found some videos showing how to put together simple beats and use instruments. I put together a basic background beat, threw in an obnoxious sounding tune on top of it, and called it good (it still kills my ears when I hear it though). When trying to save it, I realized it would be good if I could save the actual project, so I attempted to buy the full version to save my “creation”. Unfortunately, it didn’t seem to like my credit card. I tried again. And again. Strange. The funny thing is, when I attempted to go for breakfast, my card was also declined. It wasn’t until Monday night that I learned that me trying to buy a strange program (FLStudio) on a strange website at a strange hour in the morning (5am) flagged the fraud check on my card, and they disabled it thinking I had it stolen. In the end it is for the best that I no longer have anything more of an mp3 for the “music” I made that morning.

After a nice 8 hours of sleep, adding sound effects went much easier thanks to as3sfxr. I got through that, balanced the game a bit, and ended up with pretty much a final product.

The last thing I needed was a name. I asked a couple of friends what they would call a game about collecting diamonds in a cave, and I got some absolutely terrible suggestions (that I’m happy I didn’t go with, because some were names of other games about caves they had played at one point but forget). Eventually, after using thesaurus.com for a bit, I settled on a simple “Diamond Hollow”. It wasn’t exciting, daring, or clever, but it got the job done.

And with that… It was complete! And before the deadline, even! Overly excited, I submitted it and took a sigh of relief.

The next day I woke up refreshed, pulled up the game and started to play. Immediately I realized my error. The game was not balanced at all. Knockback was frustrating, the game was hard in general, and some of the achievements were way overtuned. Fortunately, while it was too late to change for the contest, there was still a life that Diamond Hollow could take after the competition.

Wasting no time I immediately got to fixing things. The first thing was the music. It had to go. Without the restrictions of having to make it myself, I turned to music licensed under the creative commons, and found something upbeat and catchy. An instant huge improvement. I then started rebalancing things which turned out to be a much bigger feat than expected. Changing achievements to require less skill is easy, but when you make gameplay changes that affect how easy the game is overall, all of a sudden your rebalanced achievements need re-rebalancing. It was a headache, but it got done. I then adding more polish to the game, fixing things like spawning, diamond locations, just to make the game feel less “thrown together”.

My goto place for flash games is Kongregate, so that is where I settled on for a home for Diamond Hollow. I wasn’t expecting much, as this game was made in a very short amount of time (well under 48 hours, even if you count the improvements I made). I was thinking it would get a low to mediocre response, and it was going to be something I would just watch and see how it progressed so that I could learn from it, and use player feedback as a way to improve my game development skills for future projects. But it turned out very different.

As soon as I posted it, it got an “okay” rating, but I began getting tons of feedback. While I had intended to use the feedback for future improvement in general, it all felt like improvements that the game should have had in the first place. I began compiling the feedback, coming up with concrete things to change to address the issues, and got to work. Every couple days I would work on implementing the latest round of feedback, release a new version, and announce the changes. It turns out that players like it when a developer listens and implements their feedback, and the effect was incredible. My “meh” rating went up by quite a bit until it was a “pretty good” rating. My plays started growing quickly, I got featured on the front page, and soon enough I obtained badges for my game. At the time of writing, the game has over 380,000 plays on kongregate. This was really exciting!

Then the feedback changed into bigger things. People wanted to explore. People wanted bosses. People wanted an “ending”. At this point I had to start rethinking my actions. There were a lot of things I would have liked to put into Diamond Hollow if I had the time during the competition, and there were a lot of features that players think would improve the game a ton. However, these would require major rewrites of all the code, at which point I might as well just start over from scratch. And that is where Diamond Hollow II was born.

Like with Diamond Hollow, I began by drafting out the features I wanted. Given I had no time constraint, I was able to include a lot of things, but I also had to limit myself. Did I want to get myself into an overbudgeted project that I would never finish? That was something I wanted to avoid at all costs. Among the list of features, I had the following:

• An ending
• Multiple guns
• Bosses
• More achievements
• A story mode
• Particles
• Varied graphical environments
• More enemies

With these goals down, I got to work. Rewriting the engine from scratch, I was able to greatly optimize it, allowing me to implement all the features I wanted, without it being slower than the original. However, I hit some major snags along the way in the form of content. Creating levels was taking quite a long time and it was starting to make me rethink having a story mode with hand crafted levels. Perhaps I could randomly generate the levels? Would players know the difference? In the end I stuck with it, and eventually managed to carve out the shell of a story mode. Then I began to fill it with enemies (new and old), and tons of improvements including new graphics, powerups, more upgrades, story text, and bosses.

So I thought I wouldn’t join LD #21. I already spent too much time working on my own game, and overall, I was too la—

And then I saw her face! (hint: click on it)

YAY, SUZUMIYA HARUHI

Right. So after seeing that, I decided to join this little Ludum Dare thingy. Sadly, I think there are a few copyright rules in so I won’t actually be able to USE Haruhi… Or will I?

We’ll see!

What libraries will I use? Uhh, I’m not sure, probably something obscure again… We’ll see, we’ll see, we’ll definitely see.

I’ll follow up with code/library declarations in a few days.

… and I’m definitely in. I’ll be writing another HTML and Javascript thingy and I’ll use the gameloop I build for the last one, thats all. I’ll strip this “library” out of the things for the last game and publish it as soon as I get there

So, as you might guess, based on this post existing, I am going to try my hand at this whole Ludum Dare thing, finally. I’ve been watching from the sidelines for a little while, and I can’t any longer. I must participate! I am hereby officially declaring my intent to participate in the LD21 competition.

It looks like I need to declare upfront my personal code “libraries.” Calling them libraries seems a bit presumptuous, actually. It’s a few little pieces of code (rendering functions, top-level skeleton functions, a couple of pixel manipulation functions, mostly stuff to speed up use of SDL, all in C++), but I suppose all together I can call them the cheese_framework library. That name isn’t taken, I hope. Google actually found something (on Google Code), but it looks like it was deleted. So, cheese_framework, then. Do I need to post this stuff on here or something? I totally can, but I would have to put it all together or something and stick it up. Let me know!

Actually, here is an open source roguelike I whipped up for the 7DRL 2011. You can totally see my masterwork in there. Anyway, still let me know if anyone wants to see more of it.

If you’re still reading, my name is Kevin Wells, and I have a little indie game development company known as Cheese and Bacon Games. Maybe I should have led with that.

I’ve managed to participate and complete LD#20 Maybe this time I will get a better result.

As before I will be working in Java using my PAJ Framework, which I have been able to upgrade a bit

My dream is to port my framework to JavaScript and be able to make a web based game for some LD in the future

***Submissions are now closed!***

McFunkypants and I are making a compilation of videos of people saying I’m in for the upcoming ludum dare! Record yourself and spread the fun!  The deadline has been extended due to popular demand. The deadline for submissions is now TUESDAY at midnight.

Try to keep it to around five seconds using this script:
“I’m [nickname] on Ludum Dare and I’M IN! I make games using _____”
(and feel free to add anything else for fun: creativity is welcome – nay, encouraged!)

Record your video here: I’m in upload thingie!
(No webcam? Upload an .avi somewhere and post the link in the comments)