Due to being away and stuff I was highly limited in my actual working time. I only found out the theme 7 hours after it had been annouced, and didn’t have time to work on it. BUT I STILL MADE AN AWESOME GAME!!

PLUS GOATS!!

Click to play!

It has goats!

My only regret is not including enough exclamation marks in the title.

The basic premise is to rebound lasers from other ships in order to get massive combos

Cool things about this game:

• I used as3sfxr and generated the sound in-game for the first time.
• I used box2d for the reflection angles, making this the first game I’ve used box2d in.
• This is the first game I’ve used a restricted colour palette for, and the graphics went well.
• Didn’t use any silly flash engines like flash punk because I’m cool like that.
• GOATS

Hey you!!! Yeah you!! Click in me to vote and give a feedback about my game, and also win one billion dollars, and don’t need to use viagra in your life, and make love with Kim Kardashian, and learn how to dance Hammer Time as Neo learn photoshop.

Or click here to go to the game first.

————————————-

Greetings, my friends. Wallace again to post my relatory about my LD game… but this time I don’t have f#ck|ng nothing to show.

Not really NOTHING, but this sunday I was called to work, soo that’s explain the title. Usually sundays is very quiet in the work, but not this one, I’d leave my job at midnight. I almost don’t send the game and I’m very pissed off about it… but i make some graphics, sended the game, and I believe it’s ok for now.

The first think I have to show is about how shiny and happy people plays the game:

Whoo hoo! Ok, enought talk, let me show some…

GRAPHICS

As my first experience in pixel art, I used the Paint.NET app for drawing (very recomended for people who has great abilities to draw… but don’t). With this tool, i maded the first earth of my game – it’s a city scenario:

And I made this little guy here => to make the people walk “around” the earth. In that case, this strange island.

For now, I’ll rest a little and then work in this game a little more. The objective is make the game beautiful and running in mobile phones.

I’ll finish to compose the song as well, and made anothers. I have a story to put in the game too, and a very funny one (with the goat as a leeder).

You can play the game clicking here, or vote in my game here. Your vote is very important to me. Seriously.

Hope everybody have fun in this Ludum Dare as I have. See ya.

Here’s my submission – Dracula’s Treasure, I hope you guys enjoy it! I started off this jam with an idea for a “Dracula Dating Sim” which would place Dracula in high school, where he would try to win the heart of some incredibly stereotypical high school girl by dressing as an incredibly stereotypical high school boy. All in all, I don’t think I knew enough about dating sims, dialog trees, or high school to get it playable. Here’s a peek at what I had gotten done by Saturday morning:

So on Saturday afternoon I set out on making a new game based loosely on Flicky and City Connection where you play as Dracula trying to protect your valuables from impending eviction:

Anyway, I wanted to do something a little different – and even though this is closer to my M.O., I tried a lot of new things and learned quite a bit.

Great LD! The theme was great (even though I’m not advanced enough to tackle some of the better ideas I had for it) and the company was great!

this post is a direct mirror from my blog, I’ll be doing this a lot so as to not waste too much time (yours and mine)

Hoo Wow, This One’s Tricky!

I’m still brainstorming 2.5hrs after the theme announcement. This is a tough one!

I have a nine page bullet list of ideas, but choosing is a little harder than it was last time because:

• My favourite ideas are likely the favourites of many other people
• My least favourite ideas mostly fall under the following categories:
  • nice concept, but where’s the game?
  • how does that differ from the hero version?
  • nice game, but where’s the concept

Normally at this point I’d start work on coding up the basic framework and getting the generic skeleton going, but since I’m not sure which game I’m going with I still don’t know whether AS3/FlashPunk or Java/LibGDX are going to be more appropriate.

I’m leaning toward FlashPunk again simply because more is covered by the library, but that would instantly limit my chances of doing anything simulation-based as the VM (as far as I know) is not as well suited. Distribution is significantly easier though.

Another caveat if I choose Java/LibGDX is that less people will play the game unless it’s embeddable in the browser – outside of Processing I’ve never attempted this, which could either be deceptively simple or a waste of a few good hours.

More coffee, and standing in the sun before I choose.

I give myself one hour to choose, and a further hour to get whichever dev environment I go for setup and ready to go. If the setup is not yet done by that point I shall switch to a simpler environment.

I’m going to give it a shot. The bad news is that I lose 7 hours tomorrow but i think I should be able to recover. Worst case scenario is that I submit it to the Jam.

Language: AS3
Engine: Flashpunk
Sound Effects: *Shrug*
Graphics: Paint.net
Music: *Shrug*

Wanted to participate in LD-s for quite a bit, but never had time. Or motivation. Or skills. Still lacking in all of the departments, but lets see how it goes this time.

Setup:

• Flash + Starling + Nape (not sure yet)
• Idea/Flash Builder or FDT
• Adobe Cloud Tools
• Renoise or FL Studio, not sure yet

Optional dungeon setup photo:

Ok, getting ready for a beauty nap.

Hello. I’ll be entering LD25.

Tools and stuff I’ll be using:
> FlashDevelop
> Flashpunk
> Tiled
> GraphicsGale, GIMP
> bxfr
> goldwave
> Musagi or cgMusic

This is some base code I’ll be starting with. It’s mostly just for loading maps from Tiled.
Download

You can’t quite see it in a static image… but the slime is moving… xD

I’ve made something not totally useless, and thought that some of you might like it… xD

As the title said, it’s an “animation player” (that runs over Flash). What it really does is to allow you to import a charset from your computer, create an animation and play it. And that’s it. =X

Since I’ve been using flixel (and like to draw with GIMP), this application make sense for me. I can use it to import a charset and test if the animation is looking all right. Before creating it, I’d create a State, add a Sprite and then animate it… but since I’d have to compile it, it’s a little time consuming… Now I can only re-import the image and see how the animation is.

I know that there are tools that already do that, but… don’t know. xD I just wanted to try and do something like that. xD

I made a post on my blog (here) with it. Alternatively, you can’t use it directly here.

Looking for a Console for your Flash game? I’m currently developing Consolator, a simple library which attachs a console to your project, ready to use and fully customizable.

You can use it to debug your variables, or change your game while playing. You can easily call the methods of the objects you bind.

Some features:

• Categories of messages, you can hide what you don’t want to see.
• Bind any class and you can automatically access its public methods.
• Visual auto-completion with a popup, just like an IDE would.
• Easy integration: just addChild(new Consolator());
• Fully customizable: change color, background, position, size, etc.
• Remember the last commands used so you don’t have to write them again.

Your ideas are welcome at consolator.uservoice.com

So, I’m in! I just wanted to make sure I can accomplish this crazy idea of mine.

Since I’m not going to make a game, I’m going to create an enjoyable multiplayer experience, without goals. It’s an IRC client for #ludumdare.

The image you see above is the first screenshot taken on the #ludumdare chatroom. Those are all real people who were at the chatroom at that time. And that’s me saying something just to take a screenshot.

Some features this “client” (will) have:

• Server-less. I don’t use an external server to store anything, all the information comes directly from the IRC server. And maybe I will use some information from the ludumdare.com page itself (a blink-blink if you got 100% coolness in the last compo… How is that not cool?)
• Unique characters. The character is selected according to your nickname, so if you log in today or tomorrow, you will have the same character (as long as you use the same nickname).
• IRC interface. Yeah, you will be able to actually log in with your username and chat.
• Quick Commands. Simply click on an avatar, and from the menu choose /kick, /msg, etc.
• Move around. When logged in, you will be able to move around your avatar. The others will stay in place. This will not be a concurrent multiplayer application.
• Art. I will use the noncommercial assets from Oryx (I think that’s ok with the rules), and make some background art for the game, but since I’m not an artist, artists are welcome to help me in this part.

That’s all I have in mind for the MiniLD. I’m using my framework, which you can get here, but as with most amateurs frameworks, it is not complete / documented / and is subject to change in the short term. Use at your own risk.

If you have an idea/suggestion, please leave a comment below!

PLAY :: RATE :: TIMELAPSE

You need to socially evolve to get the girl you want. To have money, a car, popularity, etc. That’s what I tried to tell in my last game.

 Warning: This is intented to be a parody game, so please don’t take any advice in the game into the real life

In this post-mortem, I’ll try to explain what things of the development process made me mad, what made me sad, and what made me glad.

It’s not a fun game!

At least for the last 30 minutes, the game wasn’t fun. That was driving me nuts through all the development process. I was thinking “I need to make this game fun, but how?”. Finally at the last moment I decided to make the “power-ups” come from the right side on a random basis. Before that, they were static.

This wasn’t my original idea

Indeed it wasn’t. I wanted to make a more strategic game, in which you had to train yourself to get more girls, and eventually you could get Lucy, the girl you always wanted. Of course, that was out of the scope because of the short time. 

I only had 24 hours

I woke up at around 8pm (yeah, I know), looked up the theme, and tried to think something cool. Obviously, nothing cool came about, or only ideas related to genetic algorithms, which I didn’t have the time to implement. At the end, I could have made a better and more balanced game with those extra 24 hours.

I’m (still) not good at pixel art

Not a bit. I lost too much time drawing and redrawing the characters and the background, and even though didn’t come with something cool. This is definitely something I need to improve for the next projects.

I had many versions before the “final” art

I couldn’t use my framework

My framework was on process on refactor when I learned that LD was the next day. So for obvious reasons, I couldn’t use it, and had to stick with plain Actionscript.

The Resource Maker saved lot of time

Indeed it did! If you haven’t checked out, my Resource Maker can process a folder and generate a Resources.as file which contains embeds for the assets found in that folder. I made a simple *.bat with a call to Resource Maker, hooked it on the pre-compile process, and I didn’t have to write a single embed line

I was well organized

There is something I’m more and more aware of: TODO list are a win. After I had some idea of what I wanted to do, I wrote a TODO list on a text file with what I needed to make in order to complete the game. Next, I had to stick to the plan, adding and removing things as necessary. After 12 hours, I was already implementing sounds and music, since the core game was already finished (although it was still boring).

 No interruptions

I wasn’t interrupted at all (except for going to sleep, going to the toilet and sleeping). That was a good thing since I was fully concentrated on the development.

Good prior sleep

Since I woke up at 8pm Saturday, I already had a full sleep. So all I needed was sleep only 4 hours during the development.

Good post-render effects

I followed this tutorial to make my fancy post-render effect. It took me around 3 hours to implement it, and it was well worth it

A quick comparison between normal mode and “fancy” mode

Easy music maker

Since I’m not a musician, this tool helped me a lot for the music. What I needed to do was to generate good sounding music, and put them together in a sound file.

Walkthrough

Finally, the post mortem!

This was my third Ludum Dare and I think it was the best one!

Let’s start at the night of the theme announcement,  I was really excited for this Ludum Dare (as always) and I decided that I should go sleep early (23:00).  I went to sleep and for some reasons I woke up at 3:50 AM just ten minutes before the theme announcement. I saw that the theme was finally evolution  (All of this while I’m in bed ), I tried to get back to sleep but I wasn’t able to, so I already started to plan my game!

From my twitter feed

My idea was to make a game where you are a life form which evolve by adding new cells to it. Each cell will cost a different amount of DNA which you collect by killing other life forms and will have a different ability like power, defense, speed etc.

When I woke up I started my live stream and created a new project in FlashDevelop. The first thing that I did was to write my idea down.

ideas.txt

Later, I started the programming and added the basic life form entity and cells.

The first life form

Than, I programmed the life form editor/store.

The editor

Later on, I added some parallax scrolling background and some DNA.

DNA and parallax scrolling background

And I completed the GUI.

GUI

Finally I added some nice random generated life forms.

Random generated life forms

Overall

This was my best Ludum Dare ever! It was the first time which I used the whole 48 hours till the end, The game came out perfectly as I wanted it to be and the live stream was super fun! (Thanks for everyone who watched it )

The Good

The gameplay is really fun, I really like the graphics and the music and the most important part, I had a lot of fun!

The Bad

I really worked until the last minutes and it was dangerous, some instructions are missing and sometimes enemies spawn right on you and instant kills you.

Life Forms

And once again, I made a game in 48 hours for Ludum Dare!

You can rate and play my game right here

My Ludum Dare Jam entry is Those Stupid Aliens. It’s a top-down space shooter.

The player is firing from a capital ship at the bottom of the screen. It has just gone through a battle, defeating the enemy battleship, stranding hundreds of aliens. As a result of the battle, it only has enough shields to withstand five hits. Your technicians are routing power and fixing subsystems, but they are tired. When you defeat a wave of enemies, it builds up the morale of the crew and they repair one point worth of shield. And that brings us to Those Stupid Aliens, and your job, as one of the last remaining gunners.

Using the mouse to guide the targeting reticule, and the left mouse button to fire, your goal is to shoot the alien ships that appear. They will show up in groups and express different characteristics based on the makeup of their internal properties. As the game goes on, the successful aliens will have their internal properties inserted into the gene pool, and the next waves will be created from this information. Eventually, you should see ‘smarter’ aliens which are more difficult to defeat.

What Went Right

Platform/Language/Library

I used Flash/Flex/AS3 with FlashPunk and the FlashDevelop IDE. I’ve been using them for over a year with a few different unfinished, but ‘demo-able’ projects so I was confident in my ability to use it for Ludum Dare and be able to complete something in 48 hours. I will definitely use FlashPunk in December’s competition and likely beyond.

Project Scope

My last successful entry was in LD48_15. The biggest thing I took away from that was the scope. I was essentially trying to implement a clone of a game I loved to play as a kid. Therefore, I already knew the features that needed to be implemented and tempered my desire to feature creep. For this competition, I tried to make sure that I limited what I intended to implement to make sure the project didn’t get out from under me. I came up with an idea that didn’t require level design or a sheet full of tiles. That certainly saved a lot of time and work. I kept the original , knowing that I wouldn’t have time to implement them all anyway.

Controls

I knew I didn’t want the player to have to use the keyboard much–or at all, if possible. Therefore I just implemented mouse movement and single click firing. No other buttons on the screen. If I had to, I was ready to implement a “Shift-Click” for a secondary action, but I never really let one enter the scope. The idea behind keeping the controls simple was that if I made something worthy, I could easily port it to a mobile touch device.

Sound and Graphics

On Sunday morning, updated my placeholder capital ship (which I’m still not really happy with), added sound effects and the explosion particle generator. Once I did this, it’s like the ‘game’ part of the game jumped out at me, even though the gameplay didn’t change. It really gained an old arcade feel and I think was a psychological milestone.

What Went Wrong

Allocated Time

I spend too much time doing other things this weekend. Mostly it was stuff with my family, but an hour here and there adds up. When the 48 hours were up, I was not done, and had to fall back on the Jam. Though I must say that this project moved along much better than any previous LD attempt in the past three years.

Alien Movement

For the bullet, I took the target location (the mouse click) and projected out the location that it crosses the top of the screen. Each frame it would move towards that location. For the alien movement, I tried to do something similar using the direction of travel (a normalized point relative to the original location) and the current location to create the target on the edge of the screen. That target would be recalculated whenever the alien changed direction based on it’s internal properties. It worked ok, but later I realized I only needed keep adjusting the target point to something beyond the max speed every turn. A simple multiplication instead of trying to figure out the math behind the projection and deal with different quadrants.

Feedback

One thing I didn’t get a chance to implement, or even figure out a decent signal for it, was feedback on the evolution of the aliens. I wanted to give some sort of indication that the evolution was happening or that there were successful aliens in the current wave. I never really came up with a good idea, so I never implemented it. I think some sort of feedback would have been great as it would help give the player a sense of change, rather than just witnessing wave after wave and having to notice changes all on their own.

Neutral

Music

I made the music using the online instrument Circuli. It’s a neat thing to play with, but I don’t think what I used fits the game all that well. I purchased the iPhone app, so I’ll probably mess around with it again, but I probably won’t be using it in the post-compo version.

Background Hum

I have a background engine hum during play mode instead of music. I don’t know how annoying it might seem for other people. I debated switching it to music, but the intro music didn’t fit and I didn’t have time to create anything. Since it’s constant, I don’t think it would work out with music at the same time. If the ship moved, then it could potentially only make sound at that point, but it doesn’t, so I think I have to decide which way to move forward with it.

Method of Evolution

I think the idea behind the aliens becoming smarter is good. It’s a survival of the fittest process, with every trait possibly live from the beginning. Every time you play, a new initial gene pool is created from randomized DNA. This makes it impossible to set a difficulty. You may get an initial gene pool that consists of aliens that are slow moving, large, and don’t fire very often. Or you may get  small, fast moving sprinklers. I sort of faked some progressive difficulty it raising the number of aliens in the wave. I’m not against that idea, but I wanted it to be gradual.

Aliens Future

One of the first things I’d like to do is change the alien graphics. I think I want to use bitmaps, but I also kinda like the vector look. (I’m actually cheating, the vector graphics are really bitmap placeholders.) At first, my intention was to use the look and the colors as purely cosmetic traits, but I to like the idea that they represent something internal. It would be a way to solve part of the problem of feedback that I mentioned earlier.

I also need to redo the evolution component. I never implemented mutations, which would serve to introduce traits that did not exist in the initial gene pool, and reintroduce phased out traits that might have better success in a different combination. I’d like to come up with a way that makes it possible to use the traits to have a couple difficulty modes without relying on wave size. The way I do it now is closer to a true evolution using survival of the fittest (which fits the theme) rather than a carefully planned difficulty progression (which some entries passed off as evolution). Somewhere in the middle is the solution.

Right now the enemies hover near edges, which makes sense since they are introduced there and often don’t have traits that move them away. I need to get them out of the edges without making them predictable at the start of the wave or do something that obviously goes against their internal traits.

Conclusion

I think I’m fairly happy with this project. I ended up with a game that feels like a game. Many times I’ve ended up at the halfway point and I don’t know what I’m doing or how I’m going to make it fun. I managed this time to come up with what I feel is interesting and has promise to be expanded to keep attention longer than a few minutes.

I definitely did better than I thought I would with the theme. I had originally been a big proponent of Evolution a few years ago, but cooled on it when I realized that it would take a long time to get a good algorithm set up. I’ve been thinking of this kind of stuff for over a decade. I used to sit in biology and other classes and diagram out some sandbox DNA projects that I never did implement. I’m surprised at what I have done in the weekend time frame, so I might go back and visit those old notes sometime, now that I’ve had a little taste of it here.

For the past few years I’ve been pretty disappointed in my LD participation over the past couple years. I mostly didn’t finish and gave up. Sometimes it was because I didn’t feel I had come up with a good enough idea on the theme, or ran into problems and didn’t have the heart to finish, or had too many other activities that I couldn’t avoid.  After my experience with LD24, I’m really looking forward to December.

Last week end was my first participation to the ludum dare. I’ve been considering to participate for a few years now but I had never had the ‘nerve’ to take the last step. So here am I, and honestly I had a very good time! Let’s immediately skip to…

What went right :

- fortunately, I had already participated in game jams so I avoided the common mistake of seeing too big (though barely I must admit)
- I’ve made my mind on what the game would be 9 hours after the start of the competition (including 7 hours of sleep ^^) and honestly it could have been worse. Though some mechanics evolved during my implementation, I managed to stick to the original idea.
- I’ve used VERY FAMILIAR tools. I’ve been working with Flash for years now and I mainly used a small open source blitting library I’ve create with my partner at Alkemi several years ago. I know the thing inside out unlike larger frameworks like Flixel or Flash Punk. I’ve almost tried to make the game with Unity with which I’m very familiar too, but I’m REALLY glad I didn’t in the end. I love this tool but it’s definitely not as fast to use as Flash and it wasn’t required for my idea…
- I’ve managed to keep my tablet out of the way! I knew if I started to draw things with a tablet I would spend too much time on graphics and not enough on development so I kind of forced myself to do it 100% with simple vector graphics (and a WHOLE LOT of filters). I’m kind of proud that the whole game weighs less than 30Ko without sounds and less than 80 with them ^^
- The actual level design occured only 10 hours before the end of the competition but it went relatively well. Even if it did not turned out always as I expected, it gave something with some potential if not enormous interest.
- I’ve managed to keep the pressure off and work I’d say… 20-24hours during the week-end with wide variations in concentration and involvement and a few starcraft2 games in between

What went wrong :

- I just didn’t like the theme… I prefer less open themes, less generic. Personnal taste that’s all, but it kind of bothered me for the whole first day.
- I ended up doing a ‘microbiological’ game like the project I’ve been working on at alkemi for the last year and a half. That’s my entire fault but I had no other idea than that (well no feasible idea at least). I kind of turned it into something interesting for me by tring to explore an art direction I had discarded for our game…
- I ended up doing if not a shooter, a shooting game which is what I have the most experience with. I would have liked to try something a bit more different than my usual, tread on new paths even if it meant to risk failure. I’ll try harder next time!
- Game mechanics didn’t turned out exactly as I planned. Well that’s almost always the case, whether you have written them down or not (personnaly I don’t believe in game design documents, I believe in experimentation and prototyping). Still, I like when things turned out as I imagined them and I still clearly need experience to run an accurate simulation in my head ^^
- I’ve done a few sound fxs with SFXR (an excellent tool I’ve discovered this week end…) but I could have, should have added a lot more ambiant sounds. I just didn’t have the juice left to do so…
- I’ve missed most of the SC2 MLG live streaming

I’ll definitely try this again!

I submitted my game.  The scope was too large to make in the time limit, so I had to leave out a lot. It still turned out pretty good, I guess.
Visit the game page here.

Man, I hate/love Ludum Dare at a time. But I finished in time, so I deserve a restful sleep until the next LD48.

The entry page: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=14867

The game online here.

The source code at GitHub and the 1.0.0 release.

Bona nit i bona sort / Good nigth and good luck.

Just submitted my game with about an hour to spare. Managed to stick some simple analytics grabbing people’s scores and posting them to a DB so I can see just how unbalanced and easy my game is

It was pretty cool for my first ever LD, definitely will do another one some time. My only gripe was that I had ideas for several of the themes but not Evolution and couldn’t think of anything for hours (but that’s my fault anyway hehe).

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=14880

p.s. I also completed the kitten challenge

I was stuck with the game mechanics, so I continued with the game interface. Added a intro screen, the main screen menu and a HUD while playing the board game.

(No food images, sorry.)

Test it online here.

Source code hosted at GitHub.

I started very late… And had less than 24 hours to make something. My framework was not working, I got no idea of what to do, and I was working alone (no team motivation). Anyway, I decided to go with a simple idea, but somehow got stuck with making fancy effects to hide my inability to draw.

After a half-day of game development, a pause for game status and get some sleep.

The game is a strange strategy board game resembling Go (not too much). I need to test the game mechanics and improve the rules, though the engine is 50%. No AI, no menu interface, no scores… yet.

Test it online here.

Source code hosted at GitHub.

P.S.: Sorry for the silly name of the game.
Ànims a tots! Cheer up to all!