Hello Ludum Dare friends, I am writing a book on game jams.  As part of the research I wanted to ask you if you had any anecdotes or advice you’d like to share for achieving game jam success!  In particular, funny stuff is what I’d like to hear most. =)  One liners, haiku, yoda-like wisdom… you name it. Update: I’m loving all the haiku (5-7-5 syllable poems) please submit more!

McFunkypants
blog: www.mcfunkypants.com
twitter: @McFunkypants
google+: http://gplus.to/gamedev

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.

Since LD19, a unity game competition turned up on Kongregate so since then I’ve been iterating on my game Spacebrick! It’s much improved from the ludum dare version and hopefully I’ll be able to hit the $1 october challenge target too.

Play on kongregate.

This would also be one reason I missed out on Mini-LD 24, but congratulations to everyone who completed a game for it!

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.

Hey Jammers,

Looking for some more indie game jamming goodness?
I’ve compiled a massive list of upcoming game jams.

Check it out:
http://www.mcfunkypants.com/2010/game-jams-aplenty/

There’s something there for everyone.  Have fun!

Cancer Wars v0.1 – The Movie of the Game

Cancer Wars v0.1

2D Cure-Em-Up – Battle for inner space against slimy green nasties to cure cute patients using Nano Technology circa 2099.

Built using the Unity game engine, free to play online at http://CancerWarsGame.org.

A bit late for the last LD challege, and following the trend of DonationWare with 50% going to charty and 50% going to further development!

I don’t think it will be the next minecraft but fingers crossed…

Please try it and let me know what you think… and remeber to donate to charity!

More about the build process on my blog here

Kind Regards
Al
Arowx.com

Woo hoo!  I had my first sale today!!!

Stacker - Bumps on a Log

The game is edging closer to completion. I’d now say that the game itself is done, bar any tuning of the difficulty and the controls. There are still things to do, such as giving it a visible score and giving it a persistent score, but other than that it works reasonably well.

If you want to give it a whirl then you can download it by scanning the QR code from your Android phone. Note that it needs Android 2.1 or better.

I’d be happy with any feedback that you want to give me, so if you would like to leave some then please do so on this site, or here.

October Challenge, complete!

Hey, Ludum Dare — my October Challenge entry, Distant Star, is finally out! It’s an old-school 4x space game, something like a mash-up between Master of Orion and pre-expansion Sword of the Stars, re-designed from scratch for the iPad. Give it a try!

Distant Star for iPad, on the Apple App Store.

On a slightly more sober (hic) note: if you play the game I’d really, really appreciate it if you left a review in iTunes.

Sorry for this double post, but I thought some people might be interested in this (who am I lying to?) My Ludum Dare 16 entry, called Apocalypse Adventure, did quite well, probably not because of the quality but instead because of the sheer size – 12 different areas and lots of stuff to find. I kinda aimed for that – the game engine is utterly simplistic but it’s compensated by other things. Didn’t work, though, the game was way too confusing and hard, what with lacking a save feature. However, I’m now kinda working on a ‘sequel’, or a game with a similar premise, and I thought it’d be cool to record nice videos of the original to show a bit what’s there. So here they are, dunno if anyone’s interested:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

So, I didn’t take part to this october challenge because I didn’t get my own paypal up in time, and also because Multimedia Fusion’s porting capabilities are really limited and I really wanted to make a flash game. Anyway, a couple days before the challenge ended, I ported an old game of mine called Bulletsss to flash and submitted it to Kongregate to see just how teensy amounts of money one gets if he doesn’t include any exclusivity requests/advertisement APIs with it.

To be honest, I assumed myself that it wouldn’t make any money at all, what with there not being any advertisements to get revenue from. However, as I submitted the game, I noticed that my earlier flash game, Doooors (which was made on my earlier LD entry!), had made some 50 $, of which I got about 12 $. Not much, but it gave me hope that I could perhaps pass the required bottom limit of the challenge, albeit ‘unofficially’.

No luck with that, though. As we speak, Bulletsss has been out there for about a week and the full revenue has been about 0,60 $. Haha, next time I’ll look at Flash games license instead!

If you’re interested (and want to increase my revenue, MWA HA HA HA) go check the game out!
HEREHEREHERRRE

In some respects this is a major milestone, in that I’ve added the robots back in. They don’t fire yet, but perhaps it’s just as well as it’s quite difficult to hit them. I can see that I’m going to have to tune the game a lot to make it playable on a phone.

Android download available here, or by scanning the QR code (below).

As far as game design and visible progress goes, things have been moving slowly the last few days, but here’s another update – and an in-game screenshot!

I’ve been working a bit on the sound engine, but mostly cleaning things up and fixing some minor cleanup exit bugs. However, I figured it was time for a screenshot, so I threw in a screenshot feature.

Full story.

So now I’m going to be spending the next week launching this game for open beta and getting feedback from users.

You can see my launch annoucement. I sent that out to my mailing list.

Anyway, here’s to hoping it all goes well! I’m also looking for artists / musicians to help with polish, so feel free to check that out.

-Phil

After announcing Astriarch – Ruler of the Stars as public beta a few weeks ago, I’ve finally passed the $1 in ad revenue mark!

Thanks for holding the October Challenge Ludum Dare, helped give me motivation to finish this off in a hurry!

So wow, what a month! Thanks to everyone that stepped up to my crazy challenge. The list of 24 finished games can be seen here, many of which have already made their first sale!! Awesome! You rock, all of you!

Now (like me), if you poorly scheduled your time and scope, or just had too many things come up, I hope you still made the most of it. Despite not finishing, I have a working (though crude) level editor, and a well thought out plan for what comes next. I’m sure many of you are even further along than that. Perhaps you decided to hold the game back due to quality concerns?

For all of you, I’ve opened up a participants list.

Everyone that didn’t finish their game, please go and add an entry to the Incomplete Games list. Talk about the game, add pictures, and links to any postmortem or further development places (your blog, a website, etc). I’m sure many of us are thinking about personally extending this in to a “November” or “December” challenge. Here’s a great chance to say “I was here, and now I’m there”.

Plus, I’m sure we all want to know how many people actually attempted it.

And when you do finish, let us know! As always, the blog is open to everyone to keep us informed of the latest news on the games you made. Don’t be shy! If you win the IGF or get a slot at PAX, SOWN, or any other gaming exhibit, we’d love to hear about it! Heck, we want to brag about it too.

Will this become an annual event?

Lets put it this way: We know a good idea when we see one.

What’s next?

Coming up this month is MiniLD #22. Stay tuned for details on that.

Then coming up December 17-20th weekend is Ludum Dare 19! This will be another Compo+Jam event, so see the rules. You can suggest themes on the wiki. I’ll get the clock going soon.

Finally, if you’re planning to attend the Game Developers Conference in San Fransisco next year (Feb-March), or simply are a resident, stay tuned! We’ll be posting the details on our 2011 Ludum Dare meetup soon! Phil and I will be there, and many other awesome people.

Again, thanks everyone for making this special October event such a success.

Okay, so I did not quite get where I wanted to this October, but it would have been a challenge even if my freetime would have been higher.  Work related stuff ended up taking a lot of my time, for almost 10 days in a row I was unable to make much progress at all, then work started slowing down, but I had an opportunity for a programming test; which ultimately failed as I found out last night.

These are not excuses, as much as the truth of why I didn’t get where I wanted.  I am actually quite far behind schedule now, although I am still holding high hopes that I can sell a copy by December 31st.  I see more and more people are starting to become interested, as I released a video of the game in replay mode last week, and have had a few instant messages with congratulations and stuff.

Overall I still feel positive about the project, and even after a few weeks of “here and there” development I think things are coming together nicely.  I still need to edit the physics of the car/world, and need work on the user interface of the game.  One small piece of the gameplay portion exists before I start adding all the dressing and polish that will turn it from a ‘game’ into something playable.

Tonight I added a config file, so the player can change settings and they will remain stored for the next time they play.  As soon as I finish writing this I will start working on resources for the car, so that tires can be depleted, fuel runs out over time and brakes heat up, performing worse under heavy use, although quickly cooling back off.  Once I get that working I will need to add some more things to the track editor, and start making some tracks and content…  We will see.

In other news I added music, for now it is just temporary although I am going to be getting in contact with a musician sometime (I hope).

Have a good time, and congratulations to all those in the community that finished their games in October!!!

I’m disappointed that I didn’t get my game anywhere near done by the end of last month. I wrote an October Challenge post-mortem in which I tried to assess where I went wrong, in case you’re interested.

I would like to say “Thank you!” to PoV for giving me a good way to hunker down and try to focus on the attempt. Before October, I was spending some time wondering how long I should work on the commercial version of Stop That Hero!, not wanting to take too long for fear of running out of savings, and not wanting to take too little time for fear of putting out an unsellable game. With PoV’s deadline, I had a good compromise.

PoV, thank you! I have a good start to my project, a better idea of how to manage it, and a greater awareness of my strengths and weaknesses as a game developer. I’ll be continuing, and I plan on finishing and selling this game before the end of the year.

Tonight I got a little bit done. I wont be using my previous idea, but I can incorporate it and get a feel for my current dev tool (Game Maker).
Pictures whenever I can make graphics.

I sadly couldn’t finish the game in time, I couldn’t fix the sound.

I’m still going to work on space waves, It could be quite a fun game if its properly done. I wish I’d known a bit more about OF with the iPhone before I started.

Anyway congrats everybody for making some really good games, they all look great fun! I need to try them all out!

I had a lot of fun doing this,  it was something I’d want to do again.

P.S can’t wait for the mini LD this month!

-bear