Spent the first ~20 hours of my first LD without a good idea, but I’m on-pace for day 2!

This is as pretty as it's getting. :/

It’s a two-player one-keyboard puzzle game, and it looks like I’ll be spending day 2 making puzzles/audio.

You might have to adjust for your time zone. Mine should actually start at 8pm

Of course, none of this is going to work out.

Hello, everyone!

This is my first LD and I figured, since I was planning on using some of my personal code library for whatever I end up doing (Unless it turns out that I’m doing something completely different) that I would make it available and perhaps put up some other information.

First, the personal code library: Mapping Utilities. This is a small library that contains a set of classes to quickly define rectangular arrays of various sorts, including a mapping to a hex map (Including directionality options). I’m not certain about how efficient the code is, but I’ve been using it for some time. Feel free to make use of it

Second, I’m already planning on going through some cross platform fun by using Java and especially libGDX (LWJGL style) with a focus on making a game that I’ll be able to play (And enjoy) on my adroid phone. For the most part I’ll be doing my development in the NetBeans IDE switching to Eclipse if/when I get to the point where I want to test it on my phone.

“Oh, really?” my friends would say. “You wanna join Ludum Dare 23 jam? Aren’t you too young for real compo?”
Yep, I propably am. And? It start in 10 hours, I’m gonna make a game or just try to make it – keep it simple.

This will be my first attempt to…finish…anything really! But I love the crunch so we’ll see how it goes.

I’m going to be using Unity Game Engine, Photoshop and Blender for visuals, and Pro Tools and Audacity for the audio. I don’t plan on using any existing code, just drawing from what little knowledge I have and leaning strongly on the Google crutch.

I will also likely use a very basic sprite/texture animation script, which I will probably modify. You can find it here: http://pastebin.com/8gPqFU3D

I will try to make most of the sounds but I will inevitably end up using http://www.sounddogs.com/ and perhaps http://www.bfxr.net/

I’m going to do my best to update with video (using Camstudio & Windows Movie Maker), as well as art concepts, etc as I go.

Anyway, cheers and good luck to all the other #LD23 entrants!

~Mitch

ps. Does anyone know how to change the profile pic for WP? I can’t seem to figure that one out…

So yeah, I’m planning to enter LD23, although we’ll see how far I actually get.

Going to be using Unity with Boo, and possibly any useful libraries that I find along the way. Graphics will be a mixture of Blender and Paint.net Sound will either be me shouting down a microphone or sfxr.

I may or may not also use a little personal library I’ve written, for editing, saving and loading into game a 3D tileset based level. At some point it might be nice to make this a tool others can use, but right now it is undocumented, under-commented and almost completely free of sanitization, so you can break it very easily, so I suggest that nobody as much touches it. In keeping with the rules however, here is an unordered collection of Boo classes.

I’ve only got one Unity game under my belt so far, and tat was hardly stellar, so wish me luck!

I’m in! Let’s make something quick and fun, and polish if there’s time.

Tools you say? How about Stencyl? Ah, you like that? Okay, let’s throw PyxelEdit in there too. Still with me? Well, if I get something playable, then I’ll throw in some Bfxr work with your paid donation. And what’s this Otomata thing I’ve been hearing about?

Hello! I am static_boy123 and I just wanted to share my experience in my first LD, and first game, with others:

I found out about this competition last year when Notch(The maker of Minecraft) entered Prelude of the Chambered, I immediately said to myself,  ”I will do this next year.” So now I did it, I entered in my first, but not last, Ludum Dare.

I was watching tv one night when something popped into my mind, the Ludum Dare. I checked the website to see when it was, two hours. I ran to my computer and started memorizing my basic -5 file- library inside and out, after an hour I was able to repeat most of it from memory and the rest, thankfully, wasn’t needed. So I waited the longest hour of my life hoping the theme would be kittens.

Once the competition finally started I cursed everyone who voted anti-kitten, opened up handy dandy Visual Studio, and got to work. I typed out what I remembered of my library only two classes, but I was able to make a bunch of edits to one to make a new class. I had lots of trouble starting and coming up with ideas for what to do, but I did the basic things, like changing the screen size and creating the controls for moving.

After an hour of sitting and thinking I had an idea, a game that is more based on story than game play, but still has game play. I sat down and started, I added in textures, added a way to shoot, and realized just how inexperienced I am when it comes to game making.

Coding was crazy, I had tons of road blocks; bugs, bugs, and more bugs. I had to go into untraveled land to create the game, and I also spent plenty of time in well worn territory. Overall my game was very fun and frustrating to make, but it was well worth it.

Now a list of what was good and what wasn’t:

Good Things:

• It was fun
• I learned a lot
• I coded in XNA which I am very comfortable in
• Everybody was very supportive of my first game
• I am happy with my work
• My coding works
• Others enjoyed my game
• The ultra great graphics game “Real Life” didn’t distract me that much

The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door…

Play It | Rate It

Origin

When I heard Alone was chosen as the theme, a set of bizarre ideas immediately appeared in my mind. I really wanted to explore about the feeling of being alone, about the psychological effect of it. Also, I had read The Knock recently so I wanted to explore more about that subject.

Development

The tools I used included:

• Adobe Photoshop
• Adobe Lightroom
• Adobe Flash
• Flashdevelop / ActionScript 3
• as3sfxr »
• Aviary »
• A standard Digital Camera
• Some burned papers
• A friend (lol)

The art is rather simple, I took some photos of my house and I asked a friend to model for me. We did some shots of him walking, but because I lack equipment (tripod, marks, etc) the result looks a little bad. I did my best to correct the photos in Photoshop. The room is a part of my house, that isn’t even a room, but I couldn’t take a picture of a real room because the camera angle was too short. I applied Exposure and Posterize to all the images.

The programming was done entirely in ActionScript 3, using some features of my own library, but the vast majority was to be made from scratch. I used Flashdevelop because I’m really fast with it… Just press Ctrl+Shift+1 and it’s like magic!

What now?

I think I’ll work more time on this game. I’ll add more puzzles, make an easy mode, add language support, and maybe more rooms to explore, or explore more about the story. For example, what happened upstairs?

This was my second time on Ludum Dare, and I think it was a really good experience. I don’t think there’s something that went wrong, maybe next time I’ll add more features to my framework, like effects, sound support and embedding support; but at the end I managed to do what I intended to do.

What went right.

• I finished. That simply made all the effort worth it.
• I’m happy enough with the graphics overall.
• I had fun making and playing it.
• I had healthy food, that made me have good mood.

What went wrong.

• I allocated too little time for level design, and it shows.
• I had to cut some features planed.
• I overslept.
• I procrastinated to much.

Conclusions.

The experience has been great and I’m somewhat proud of the result.

Timelapse

Ok so I crashed for some sleep after submitting my compo entry and I figure now is the best time to do  a postmortem.

In traditional game projects people usually go off on vacation or put off post mortems long enough to forget about the details

The ‘Game’

Forever Alone Kitten

Play / Rate it here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=rate&uid=3624

 Made with: Unity3d / Photoshop / BFXR / Maya

Points of frustration

1. Indecision about Dialogue/Story, after the theme was announced I was at a loss for what to do. So I went through the motions of creating the game engine shell while being nagged by this. I originally wanted to make a shmup, but tried to do something moody to fit with the ‘Alone’ theme and sort of flailed around for several hours trying to define it.
2. I’m still new at learning unity and wanted my entry to be made with it, so consulting the documentation repeatedly or trying to figure out proper script code to control material properties or other things slowed me down bit.
3. No time for visual polish/build a proper environment. At the end I lied to myself and said its supposed to look bleak and empty anyways.
4. No game restart. I realized early that worrying about adding/testing restart functionality would have slowed me down considerably, so I abandoned it even though there is some fragments of it in the game.
5. Based on the player input, its possible to not see all the game narration paths, so if someone plays it only once, there is stuff I put time into that they may not see and the length or mood impact can vary. The lack of #4 (restart), or communicating that there is ‘another path’ in the game content is also problematic. This is why I don’t like permanent branching games as a game player, and prefer ‘networked world’/sandbox games because all content is explorable at anytime or multiple times. I’m not convinced story heavy games really hold up to replayability since they all seem to suck at this issue (you played this before, but this menu option here will show you something different, a hint like that would be kind of spoilerish or break immersion).

Things I was happy with

1. I learned a lot. I’m a ‘learn by doing’ type of person, so forcing myself to deliver something in 48hrs made from scratch in the time limit = learn + do fast. I used version control even for this short-term project so i could document its construction in the commit messages and  would stop worrying about ‘accidents’ where i would lose work or mangle things so badly and could rollback.
2. Some people commented on liking the mood in the game, which is what I decided to focus most on. Someone despaired that when they played there seemed to be no “happy ending”. My goal of toying with the player’s emotion = ‘mission accomplished!’
3. I came up with a neat little forcefield behavior around character that affects the things that swarm and come for you, the enemies still face+approach you, but when the shield is up it holds them back and they get pushed around fairly smoothly when you forcibly move into them. I’ll have to re-use that for another project….
4. Although the code is absolute spaghetti, there is alot of it with some lengthy comments sprinkled in it so I could remember what I was doing along the way, so its not a complete throw-away game shell for something in the future. For the curious: Link to source/assets/unity project are here:  http://db.tt/eJOJT6Dx

In reference to point #4 above, I call my rapid code prototyping style ‘Freestyle Spaghetti / Chaos Coding’. People that care about ‘coding style’ or ‘designing clean systems’ will be outright offended by what they see here haha

The basic rules of ‘Freestyle Spaghetti / Chaos Coding for rapid prototypes+game jams:

1. Extra Comments, you need them. You need more comments than you think you do. I write comments as a way of ‘talking out loud’ about what i’m doing. It makes things more clear, and when I come back to the code later, I can more easily remember where I left off.
2. Extra Verbose variable/object names. you want every variable name to make it painly obvious as to what its scope and contents are. Between #1 + # 2, I rarely ever need to step through code using a debugger because I can work out what is going on following these 2  rules.
3. New ideas may often come to you while writing code for other things, jumping to act on that new idea is okay, as long as everything still runs you’re cool. Unfinished things = comment verbosely what is going on. Before you jump to the new thing, always write a note in code about what you were just doing+need to do next there, then jump to the new thing while the idea is fresh to you.
4. Everything can look to a base (GameBase.cs) to figure out what is going on (access a global value state) to gate/ungate a script that doesnt work or isnt complete.
5. Take the path of least resistance in implementation. Data driven? Code Driven? Do I need a tool? Do I need a file format? Could you just hack it in code and be done with it?
6. The person playing your game doesn’t see your code when they play it. Stop worrying about what your code looks like and focus on the results that people will play. You can pretty up your code and ‘refactor it’ later if you need to build on it.

Things that took more time than I expected:

1. Audio – I spent a lot of time with bfxr trying to get sounds out of it that matched the mood I wanted (trying to get a sad kitten+spooky type sounds out of a synth). There’s a lot of extra sounds in the source that I didnt use which fit the mood target but i didn’t get to implement due to the time limit+needing more supporting graphics+code to go with them.
2. Art/Tweaks – I went crazy with the particles. I liked the square/fine grain look of the particles so i kept the particles untextured to save time. I fussed with the colors of everything several times to keep it the right ‘mood’ as well as all the other particle effect sliders. I lost time modeling a few other things that didnt make it into the game and realized that there wasn’t going to be enough time to texture+rig+animate them so I trashed that given the time pressure.
3. Dialogue/Narration – changed multiple times after playtesting through it over and over and over…. Having a premade system to handle complex dialogue/interaction would have been much better. hacking something from scratch+testing it with time pressure was painful.
4. Setting up+modifying my game in unity. To save time I did some things in the unity editor instead of explicit code, which i’m still getting the hang of. The editor workflow method has little quirks like nuking connections or values on scripts if you change the variable name in the class to something new ended up biting me several times, breaking the game. Trying to find a balance of initializing/setting script values hardcoded or in the editor view on an instance of something with a given script slowed me down and I should have more clearly defined this.

Things to do next time:

1. Setup and do a timelapse next time. In retrospect i’m even more sad I didnt do this. Ideally I would do record this for 3 screens since I work across 2 screens on my mac (playtest+code+ photoshop on cintiq), + geo modeling pc.
2. Do something that doesn’t waste so much time with unique dialogue flow with one-off internal triggers/unlocks that the player might not ever trigger.
3. Continue to write code fast+freely for the sake of progress, and don’t be so worried about what people think of your code that you hacked together over the weekend. (I write much better code for normal games I swear! )
4. Build out a more of traditional game to play?
5. Worry less about story/playtesting dialogue flow. Focusing the first half of the compo time on this was good/bad since it ate up a ton of time – it was uncharted territory for me in terms of content+code implementation.
6. Better schedule my time and set time limits on doing a feature/asset.
7. Start visual polish phase and test deployment earlier so there is less of a frantic rush at the end.

I have successfully finished my very first LD game, The Last Man on Earth.

You play as the last survivor of an alien invasion, your goal is to avenge your species by clearing out an alien spaceship.
It is a pretty hard game, but please don’t get mad at me – I had no time to balance the gameplay.
The game has two endings… and a kitten.

It has been great fun, I would love to participate in the future, too.

Screenshots:

Tools:

• Visual Studio 2010
• XNA Game Studio 4.0
• Paint.NET
• Inkscape
• Bfxr

Download: http://attilahorvath.me/TheLastManOnEarth.zip
Source: http://attilahorvath.me/TheLastManOnEarth-source.zip
Game Page: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=preview&uid=8403

I have finished it ON TIME!

WOW! I did it!

Here is my entry:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=rate&uid=7418

These are the changes since the last report:

• Player graphics and sounds
• Fix Floor borders.
• Arrow graphics and sounds.
• Arrow shooter graphics and sounds.
• Barrel sounds.
• Save point sounds and graphics.
• Exit point sounds and graphics.
• Burning Effect.
• Title screen.
• Ending screen.

Pasta today, the cupboards are empty, all that I could find was milk, spaghetti, flour and cheese, oh well.

I also have a lack of ideas, that sucks too. I’ve finished all the mechanics and music scares me.

I think i have finished with almost all the gameplay elements. Now I’m planning the rest of the graphics and starting with the sounds.  So now the status is:

• Player –  Gameplay done – Graphics pending - Sounds pending.
• Columns - done!
• Floor - pending. (fix border tiles)
• Barrel – done! - Sounds pending.
• Spikes Hole – done!
• Spikes Hole filling with Barrels – done! – Effect pending. 
• Lava Hole – done!
• Arrow Shooters – Gameplay done! - Graphics pending. Sounds pending.
• Arrows – Gameplay done! - Graphics pending. 
• Boulder Dropper – Canceled.
• Boulder – Canceled.
• Save Points – done! - Graphics pending. Sounds pending.
• Exit Point – done! – Graphics pending. Sounds pending.
• Menu - pending.
• Intro screen – pending.
• Game Over screen – pending.
• Ending Screen – pending.

I have put the Alpha1 for testing purposes here:

Timelapse for day 1. Time for sleep now. A day of music and polish tomorrow. It’s nearly done!

I guess the first bad impresion about the theme was unfounded. After some thinking I found a feasible idea. I think the coding is going smoothly, even after some struggles with the typical problems of coding in C. The art is coming in nicely as well. Here is the first screenshot.

My first LD is LD #22

Just to really get started on how confusing this is to begin even before a competition I’d have to say geesh. Now that that is out of the way there are about 5 hours left before the theme is announced. I’m really hoping for “dreams”, but can deal with quite a few of the themes especially “falling”, “random generation”, “underground”, “teleport”. The one that I think is just plain no fun is kittens. Sorry just hate that as a theme. Looking forward to making one an easter egg. I am also hoping to keep the style very rougelike sans ASCII +1 graphical. We’ll see.

So I am thinking flash AS3 as the development platform and black and white silhouette as the atmosphere.

5 hours till theme announcement and beginning of code writting

Hey!

I submitted my warm-up game “Bouncy Bouncy“. And it looks like I’m ready to go.

Also mi updated setup is that:

Compiler: GCC and mingw (for cross-compiling)

Library: SDL and my framework (GameLib)

Graphics: GIMP

Sound: Audacity and Sfxr/Bfxr

Timelapse: Glapse

Hardware: Gigabyte M912

And well; the required ”desk” shot:

I supose that makes me a couch-gamedev