Starting April 19, the 5th Hack-a-Jam Game Development Competition will begin!

This competition is held every 2-4 months, and this is the approximate 1-year birthday. Because of this, I am offering a prize to the winning entry. This prize is free advertising (one month), on both of my main websites, which have decent traffic.

What is the Hack-a-Jam?

The Hack-a-Jam is a game development event/competition where you must create a game within a set amount of time. The time given in each competition varies, as it could take two days, four days, or even just 30 minutes. Different from other game jam events, the Hack-a-Jam uses a multiple-award system, meaning there is no “Overall Best Game”. This allows for us to give awards to the best games, and not make a decision between two games which are equally amazing. The theme will be a suggestion voted on from the community through many different voting sessions. Another thing you could do to win certain categories is make things such as dev logs, timelapses, etc. You can them post them or links to them in the Posting section of the Forums.

What are some possible winning categories?

Most Psychedelic Visuals
Most Deaf People After Hearing The Game
Most extra items (dev logs, etc.)
Most Rage-free
Most rage-induced
Most Suggestive Content Without Crossing The Line
Shortest Game
Best themed
Most Things On Screen Without Lag or Crash

What are the rules?

Since we are a laid back community, you could probably get away with most of these rules (except major ones, like turning in your entry a whole 24 hours late…). Here are what I would like the community to follow, however:

1. All game content must be created within the set time. Note: You can use other music, placeholder graphics, etc. as long as you are allowed to!
2. Your game is not required to follow the theme, but would greatly improve your chances of winning. Unless almost every other game is not following the theme, it is almost guaranteed that your game won’t win anything.
3. You must work alone, and you must create everything included in the game.
4. All game creation tools are permitted, such as Unity, GameMaker, Photoshop, Flash, Paint, etc.
5. All external game extensions/DLLs are permitted. If you want to make it multiplayer (if you are using GameMaker), go ahead and use 39dll.

You can visit our website at http://www.hack-a-jam.com/. From there, you will want to head over to the Posting section, and sign up for an account (you can use Google, Facebook, etc.). Good luck to everyone!

It’s already my fifth Ludum Dare and I’m still excited like in the first time

I feel that this Ludum Dare is going to be super awesome with a lot (1000++++) of great new games!

And as always, my weapons:

• Platform – Flash AS3
• Library – FlashPunk
• IDE – FlashDevelop
• Graphics – GraphicsGale and Pixlr
• Sounds – BFXR
• Music – Maybe some random generated music
• Food – Chocolate, A LOT of CHOCOLATE
• Live stream – Open Broadcaster on Twitch
• Encouragement – Friends, my cat and the Beatles

I’m In!

Follow me on twitter for live updates! ( @galman33 )

Starting April 19, the 5th Hack-a-Jam Game Development Competition will begin!

This competition is held every 2-4 months, and this is the approximate 1-year birthday. Because of this, I am offering a prize to the winning entry. This prize is free advertising (one month), on both of my main websites, which have decent traffic.

What is the Hack-a-Jam?

The Hack-a-Jam is a game development event/competition where you must create a game within a set amount of time. The time given in each competition varies, as it could take two days, four days, or even just 30 minutes. Different from other game jam events, the Hack-a-Jam uses a multiple-award system, meaning there is no “Overall Best Game”. This allows for us to give awards to the best games, and not make a decision between two games which are equally amazing. The theme will be a suggestion voted on from the community through many different voting sessions. Another thing you could do to win certain categories is make things such as dev logs, timelapses, etc. You can them post them or links to them in the Posting section of the Forums.

What are some possible winning categories?

Most Psychedelic Visuals
Most Deaf People After Hearing The Game
Most extra items (dev logs, etc.)
Most Rage-free
Most rage-induced
Most Suggestive Content Without Crossing The Line
Shortest Game
Best themed
Most Things On Screen Without Lag or Crash

What are the rules?

Since we are a laid back community, you could probably get away with most of these rules (except major ones, like turning in your entry a whole 24 hours late…). Here are what I would like the community to follow, however:

1. All game content must be created within the set time. Note: You can use other music, placeholder graphics, etc. as long as you are allowed to!
2. Your game is not required to follow the theme, but would greatly improve your chances of winning. Unless almost every other game is not following the theme, it is almost guaranteed that your game won’t win anything.
3. You must work alone, and you must create everything included in the game.
4. All game creation tools are permitted, such as Unity, GameMaker, Photoshop, Flash, Paint, etc.
5. All external game extensions/DLLs are permitted. If you want to make it multiplayer (if you are using GameMaker), go ahead and use 39dll.

You can visit our website at http://www.hack-a-jam.com/. From there, you will want to head over to the Posting section, and sign up for an account (you can use Google, Facebook, etc.). Good luck to everyone!

Play Despair

Remember my little MiniLD#40 game? No? It was that strange game about fighting the news. I read your feedback and comments, and figured I could remake the game into something else. I’ve never made this before, I just tend to archive my projects and move on to the next one, so this was a good opportunity to try something else. In the process, I trained my willingness and discipline, because working on something you thought it was finished, it’s pretty hard. I hope you enjoy the new game and continue to give me feedback!

[You can read a full post-mortem at my blog]

This was my first Ludum Dare and I must say it was an awesome experience. I’ve learned a lot and I’m also pretty amazed by how much I got done in those two days. So here’s the post mortem for my entry.

What went right

Since this was my first LD I didn’t really know what to expect or how much I would be able to get done. So I was amazed that I actually got the core gameplay working given the fact I went for simulation game. I was also surprised at my own coding. Usually I tell people I’m not a very good coder but looking back all I did was coding

first running version

So I’m pretty happy how the game plays. Its fun to watch the citizens walk around and do their thing. The initial brainstorming and mind mapping helped me a lot as well in filtering out game ideas. The minimalistic graphic style turned out well but this may also be due to my previous games and experience with it. Ultimately it allowed my spent as much time coding as possible.

What went wrong

The core game concept was to force the player to suppress their citizens in order to win the game. So even the player has good intentions he will be looked as an evil king in the eyes of his citizens. The problem with this concept is that it was difficult to generate enough feedback to the player so he would understand it. I also stumbled upon how to communicate to the player that he has to force his people back to work in order to win the game. The intro story of the immediate great drought tries to provide some motivation and context but I’m not sure of people even did read all that. I tried to display angry citizens by placing a dark cloud above their heads but something else like them rallying and demonstrating in front of the castle probably would’ve been better.

Another thing was that depending on the camera zoom some things got lost and they player didn’t get what was going on or why things happened a certain way. This brings me to the next issue. The user interface which displays necessary game information but in a unappealing and cryptic way. For example its very easy to lose track of the food count.

I didn’t have time to create a tutorial or some introduction to the gameplay mechanics. I also didn’t have time to properly playtest the game in the end and there are some severe balancing issues.

Conclusion

Feedback is king! Because if the player doesn’t get whats going on the game isn’t going to be much fun, unless of course thats to point of the game. This is a kind of obvious thing but it gets lost so easily in between all those awesome features inside your head. I’ll definitely spend more time on communicating things better to the player in my next Ludum Dare. I’ll also try to do a simpler game so I’ll actually have enough time for that as well. I’m definitely looking forward to it.

If you want to play the game then follow this link.

If you want to check out my development tumblr then follow this link or if you want to see what other games I’ve made then follow this link.

Thank you.

Happy New Year, folks!

I thought it’s time to write a postmortem too. For those who haven’t seen my game yet, you can find it by clicking on one of these conveniently placed handcrafted icons:

And now without further ado, here we go:

Some things went wrong

Yup, I’ll make that the first section. I think the game turned out pretty well all in all, so I’ll let the best come last!

Not everything went right though. First and foremost: It took me hours and hours to get motivated. Motivation is my biggest problem when I work alone. I’m not too good with game design, and often I don’t see if a game can be great before it becomes great – which seldom happens in the first few hours. There are many moments on the first day where I wanted to give up. What helped me was to remember that I’ve felt this way before with other projects and they turned out great! And now I have another one of those.

What didn’t help either is that I have no definitive base code library, I extracted my base code from another project and had to delete stuff that doesn’t fit. And then post it here. It takes time, and I don’t feel too good about it as it goes a bit against the Ludum Dare spirit. I’ll take care of that soon and will have one for the next LD!

Unsurprisingly, the clock wasn’t kind to me. Two of the levels were created in 10 minutes before the deadline. The first level is my “easy” test level, and the fourth level is my “hard” test level. I didn’t even have time to test the two in between. The third level works quite well, the second is awful but at least it’s beatable in about 1 1/2 minutes…

The music doesn’t sound stealthy at all. I am no musician, so this is no surprise. I’m not sure if I want to put enough energy in this to get better just for the LDs, so I guess I’ll just have to deal with that. I should have added an option to turn it off though.

Some things went right

Probably the most important thing: I wrote a to-do list before I started. This is so incredibly helpful and I hope all of you are doing it. For those who are not, here are the benefits of doing it:

• You think about the code design along the way. It’s not as exhausting, restricting and time intensive as doing a full-blown software design and it still gives you a general sense of what you need.
• You can always look how much you still have to do and how you’re doing progress-wise.
• Most importantly: It keeps you from digressing. At least that’s what it does for me – every time I feel like I’m lacking clear directions, I check my to-do list. Works without fail.

I had a level editor at hand. Mind you, it’s nothing fancy – it couldn’t be easier actually:

Yup, it’s just TextPad – with an XML file, shown with a slightly modified version of the Laser Systems font. It’s dead easy to parse. I’ll surly have something fancier in the future when I’m more established with games that actually need an editor, but for now its service was perfect.

It was 10 hours before the deadline. There was no time to be wasted. Yet I was idle browsing the FlashPunk forum without anything specific to look for. And guess what I found: TileLighting [1.0.1], made 6 days before the Ludum Dare. On an impulse, I spent 2 hours to integrate it. Here is the result:

Is there are lesson to be learned from that? I have no idea. All I know is that it made the game SO much better – it basically gave the game one of its major mechanics.

Speaking of major mechanics, I was 8 hours before the deadline and I had to decide which single feature on my huge to do list I wanted to implement – all others were to be discarded. I decided on lock-picking, and it turned out great. After the light became such an essential tool in the game, I decided to link the lock-picking to the lighting level – just how it would be the case in real life: The more light you have, the easier it is to do something hard. This feature received the most praise in the comments which makes me pretty happy!

Another important thing was that I focused on what I can do best: Gameplay. I could’ve spent more time on the graphics, but then it still wouldn’t look good and be much less fun. I think the abstract graphics are working well for the time being.

Another good thing was that I inserted sound effects and music. They might not sound as well as in other games where the developers actually know what they are doing, but it’s still a vast improvement to silence! I think I did both in 1 1/2 hours. With 48 hours in total, there is no excuse not to add them.

Here’s one more on gameplay: Enemies don’t have to be intelligent, they just have to work and be fun. I thought about implementing pathfinding, but took a far easier route in the end and I fare just as well:

• Enemies just patrol a straight line.
• When they hit a wall, they go left or right.
• When they scrape a wall and find an opening, sometimes they enter it.
• An enemy that spots a player goes to where he saw him last, then follows the player’s trail a few seconds:

And yup, that’s it. Just going straight for a point, then following a trail the player leaves. It’s was rather easy to make and is a lot of fun to play against!

I have no idea how much impact the fact that I made a gameplay video had, but I think it was a pretty good idea. It can give people a sense of the game if they don’t have enough time or incentive to play it and it can provide basic instructions for those who don’t like to read and can’t figure it out by just playing. It’s not hard to make, it doesn’t take much time and you can do it after the deadline: You should definitely make one too!

Some things were learned

A few lessons learned/tips:

• Don’t like the theme? Neither did I. Deal with it! You can still make a fun game. It’s not like you have to design your whole game around it. Sure, that would be cool – but having a game that will get 1/5 in the Theme rating is still better than having no game at all because you gave up before you even started.
• Keep calm and carry on: Never give up while there is still time! Maybe the game isn’t great now and you don’t have any idea how to improve it, but if you carry on, inspiration will hit.
• A to-do list helps to keep you on track. It also helps with the design. And tells you were you stand progress-wise. Write one before you start developing.
• Focus on what you do best. For me that’s gameplay, and that’s why my game isn’t as pretty to look at as other games, but it’s a lot of fun.
• Add sound effects and music. Even if you’re not good at it, I guarantee that your game will feel FAR better with them, and with good tools, it won’t take you long to make and insert it either. (In case of doubt, just add an option to turn off the music.)
• Sleep. Yeah, 48 hours isn’t much time, but if you’re fresh you work better. And who knows what kind of ideas you get when you’ll get your subconscious some time to rest?
• Music for Programming is pretty cool. Especially when you’re having a hard time concentrating.

Some features were discarded

Are you interested in what I wanted to implement, but ran out of time to do? Here is a quick breakdown:

Some thanks are offered

Thanks to the Ludum Dare organizers and to the great, great community! You guys have made a wonderful thing here and are doing all of this in your free time and it is so much appreciated! I cannot believe how many games were made, and how many kind comments I got on my game – I’ve seldom experienced such a friendly community. I had a great time and I will definitely participate again!

Do you have any questions I didn’t iterate on? I’ll happily answer them in the comments! And you could leave a little comment if you enjoyed reading this or what you rather wanted to read.

Apropos, one last thing: Thanks a lot for reading this postmortem! It hope you enjoyed it as much as I enjoyed writing it. (And it’s probably pretty obvious, but maybe you want to follow this other conveniently placed link and rate my game? Your feedback means a lot to me!)

Greetings all! A week-and-a-bit after the fact, here’s a mini post-mortem of our LD 25 Jam entry – SUPER Witch Hunter Pro.

level layout sketch compared to final version

General
Overall, the Jam was a fantastic experience for us both. It’s the first time we’ve worked as a team on a finished indie game, and has whet both our appetites for more of the same.  At the very least we’ll be taking SWHP to a further finished version after LD judging is completed.

arting in progress

Hits
Overall, things went quite well.

• Theme
  We made good use of our first hour with a focused discussion about how villains can be interpreted in various media, and the different approaches to playing as one. It wasn’t long before we settled on subject of history judging once righteous/heroic actions as villainous or unseemly. The most compelling villains are often well-intentioned, and history often decides where villainy lies. Our scenario – What if 17^th century European witch burnings were today widely perceived as good and heroic deeds, and how would they have been realized as a series of hit arcade games? We were both inspired by this, and it energized us both from the offset.
• General design & Scope
  Since subject matter and history were quite “heavy” – what with women being burned alive at the stake (and worse) – we decided a simple arcade gameplay treatment would help lighten (or conceal) the tone, as well as forcing us to boil down a complex situation into basic elements. Those elements became Pyre, Wood, Witch and Fire. We looked at Game & Watch titles as an example of the sort of “plate-spinning” gameplay we wanted, though we decided to take it a step further, with many small simple loops operating in a single screen layout. We set ourselves a gameplay goal that wasn’t too ambitious, but suitable for LD. It was important to us that we could realize something relatively final, without too many obviously unfinished elements.
• Teamwork
  We both knew exactly what we were doing as a team, and where our individual strengths and responsibilities were. There was little to no downtime during the Jam due to this. We prioritized tasks that were dependencies for each other, so that there was no waiting for one another.
• Mechanics
  Implementation per design/plan went without too many hitches or serious bugs. The Pyre object acted as a nice anchor for much of our gameplay events, which helped concentrate development efforts.
• Art, 2.5d Approach
  We decided early to go with 2.5d, largely sprite animation due to the short dev time and classic arcade inspired gameplay. A fixed camera allowed us to exploit a lot of time-saving tricks, and provided the game with a strong visual style. This choice allowed us to very quickly test and finalize character, gameplay and level assets.
• Scoring & General Feedback
  Although we certainly could have had more, we were both pleased enough that we managed to address most important game events with visual and aural feedback. A decent variety of text dialogue/copy lent the game some added character. Scoring with combos and a basic rankings system being intact helped us get closer to our arcade game goal. These things went a long way towards making our entry feel complete.
• Sound
  Though not our collective strong suit, it was great we managed to get in as much as we did – ensuring no screen was too aurally empty and key events had sound. As well as boosting the final presentation, ranting about burning heretics  for the VO recording was a great way to release some pressure during rapid development.

final asset art

Misses
We’re planning to add all of these and more in a future (post-LD) version.

• Difficulty curve
  Though we had several avenues for adding a difficulty curve, and it being fairly necessary; we knew we wouldn’t have time to properly adjust or test it, or to make It obvious enough it was in effect. We left it out so that everyone that played the game once would at least be exposed to all it had to offer.
• Victory Conditions
  You can’t technically “win”. Though this is true to the arcade and game & watch references, it’d still have been nice to provided round/levels for a  greater sense of progression and encouragement. As we didn’t include a difficulty curve, however, there was little basis for inserting this (and not enough time).
• Pyre score feedback
  One important feedback layer we didn’t have time for was the score earning display which would appear at the pyre on “Burn Complete”. Unfortunately, though the combo (Serial Burn) bonus multiplier is working in the final game, it’s not really something the player is aware of due to this feedback not being there.
• Gating, Rain, Cauldron Bombs…
  Evolving level design to include dynamic blocking and slowing volumes, rain clouds which slow or reverse fire growth, wood thieves, witches flying overhead with cauldron goop bombs, other stuff to set on fire… all the “next step” ideas that you gotta drop due to time
• More Power-ups!
  To go hand in hand with more hazards, a greater variety of power-ups would have exposed further gameplay depth.
• Piety loss feedback
  Since this is essentially player HP, more obvious feedback is needed – especially when failure was imminent.

it lives

Play the game:

SUPER Witch Hunter Pro – Ludum Dare #25 Entry Page

Song of the Entry (I still have this stuck in my head…)

As happy as we are with the game, I think the biggest positive for us was our proven ability to work well as a team, and under within the time constraint. LD has really empowered us to push harder at making indie development a personal reality. So – thanks LD!

from Ben & Jerry

@JerryVerhoeven | @benjkers

Wow, it took me a week to rate 10% of the games submitted this time.

So, if I continue to at my current rate, I will only be able to play a third of them before judging ends.

Ludum Dare is huge.

LD #25 was significant for me.  Not only did I submit my first entry to the compo, it is the first time that I have created a game and put it up for anyone in the world to play.  The feedback in the comments has been fantastic, and I’m kicking myself for not having participated sooner.

Take a minute and try Goombah! here.

The first thing that came to mind when I saw the theme announcement was to focus on a grand villain – Darth Vader, Genghis Khan, Kane, etc.  The second thing I thought of was stupid and funny.  I went with that.

It’s hard out there for a goomba.  He sits on a little platform, waiting patiently for the plumber to show up, at which time mr. goomba either gets stepped on or walks off a ledge.  I didn’t want to make the game quite that boring, so I took out the ledges and provided an endless stream of jumping men to avoid.  The goomba’s chances of survival are still slim, but at least it is interesting!

What went well

• Kept it simple – I had a simple design that was not too difficult to implement in a few hours.  I considered adding game play features, but focused instead on making everything look nice and by the time I could have come back to changing game play it was time to submit.
• Flashpunk – The only exposure I had to flash development before the compo was running through the flashpunk tutorial.  For me it was a great place to start, and that engine is a snap to use!
• Draw first – I am not what you would call an artistically gifted man.  I spent the first hour or two in GIMP drawing out the sprites for the game, so that I knew they were done and did not have to worry about the art while I was working on the code.  If I had done it the other way around, I’m not sure my placeholder art (colored squares) would have ever been replaced.
• Submit early – I submitted the game early on Sunday because I had other obligations, and at that time only a few dozen games total had been submitted.  I know they don’t count for scoring, but almost 50 people had played my game before the end of the day.  That’s just cool.

What could be better

• Levels – One thing I would have liked would be to add some variety to the game by having different platform configurations to mix up the game play.  The game works, but does get boring pretty quickly.
• Interface – An actual menu, instructions screen, and game over screen would be nice to have in there.  The text elements up top were a last minute addition, and while I think they do the job it could be better.
• Frame based motion – I would much rather have implemented motion based on actual elapsed time, but started the game by implementing motion based on number of frames passed.  Around hour 5 I realized that this could be an issue, but never managed to go back and rework it.  Next time, I’ll start the right way.

Having actually made a game in a weekend, and then having so many people play and comment on that game has been a great experience.  And to everyone who has played and commented on my entry, thank you!

Hello everyone! Here is my first LD game, Mine Sneaker:

 Play Here

Mine Sneaker is a reverse version of classic Minesweeper(and their names almost rhyme!) You act as an imp who moves mines sneakily to trap the cursor, a.k.a. minesweeper. The different colored cursors have different vulnerabilities, so you have to be smart, lucky, and of course villainous to beat them all.

After the theme was announced, several ideas appeared in my mind, and I chose conservatively. It’s an idea I can implement confidently. However until I completed basic AI, I hadn’t been sure whether it’s playable or not. Thank God it works well (enough) finally.

As my first LD and my second game(first one), its workflow is still very armature. I started to create sound effects in the last 2 hours, and made a lot of mistakes while drawing graphics. I learnt many precious experiences, though , in this 48 hours.

-What went right-

• Made a playable game. After all, it’s the meaning of LD.
• Practiced making graphics. My drawing skill is poor, and I eagerly wanna improve it.
• Introduce few bugs. I’m a CS student so that’s what I should do… but in fact I usually write buggy code.
• Chose an interesting, based on theme idea.

-What went wrong-

• Code is messy. It may be inevitable for a short game jam, but I really hope I could have written more structured code.
• Didn’t polish enough. No splash screen or ending.
• Used a strange tool. Making 2D game with Unity is like eating jelly with fork and knife. It works, but strangely.(It’s not really wrong, I think)
• Steep difficult curve. As everyone said, the game is too hard.

Conclusion

LD is just fun. I wanna enter a real world game jam, but there are few jams in my country(I’m a Taiwanese). I really appreciate the work people did to hold LD. And I saw many great ideas from others’ entries. See you in LD26!

Oh one last thing… I’m looking for an opportunity to work with others. If you’re a small team or an artist who needs a Unity programmer(and accept communication via Skype/IM), please consider me.

This is my third Ludum Dare and I think this is the best game I made. It went almost exactly as expected, but of course some thing were not so well.

As with the previous editions, I used Unity as my framework of choice but instead of using RagePixel (2D), I risked to make something in 3D. I think the result is not that bad

What went wrong or so-so

• I could not setup proper screen capture software for my dual screens. My laptop’s display and external monitor use different screen resolutions and the utility (screencapture, OSX) didn’t take both screenshots at the same time. In fact I couldn’t manage to take capture from my secondary (laptop’s) screen with any tool!. A pity because I coded on my laptop screen and managed Unity on the external monitor. So the time-lapse is a bit boring…
• I got distracted with not so important details, as the feet animation and its synchronization. I didn’t know about Unity animation events so I lost a lot of time trying to “manually” sync those feet… When I found about events, I felt both stupid and relieved And that made my day! But that is for the “what went right”.
• As with animations, I over-complicated some things. For example instead of making the player walk for real and dynamically generate the terrain, I faked the movement by displacing the road’s UV map. This lead to problem of buildings and enemies, which had to advance too, independently of the players speed (which changes). So I ended up manually correcting every objects’ speed according to the player’s. It’d had taken less time just to generate the terrain as needed
• I totally forgot about music until the last minute! I wanted to make *anything* using garageband or something easier, but I totally forgot about it and ended up using autotracker….
• No procedural city. I wanted to make a few buildings/houses to randomly place then along the roadside, but I ended up using the same model with random height and colors… Well…
• Enemy waves and increasing difficulty. Although the game is not simply easy, I think it’d be better with increasing difficulty. Right now the enemy’s spawn rate and max units is fixed.
• If an enemy shots, you are hit. I think this is OK for soldiers and tanks, but I wanted the plane only to hit you if you were right in front of it, so you could dodge it when seeing it come from the distance.

Wow, that’s a lot of things that went so-so

HitlerZilla – development screenshot

What went right

• I managed to finish every item put on my “unavoidable TODO list”. This means that although I left some thing behind (like enemy waves) I got a fairly amount of work done.
• My code was not perfect, but good enough to allow me to add tanks and planes without touching the base enemy class, and in the last 2 hours! You can see in the time-lapse that tanks and plane don’t appear until the last hours. I could have added more enemy types (pointy barriers?) without much more work.
• I wasn’t as ambitious as with my last LD (9 mini-games, what was I thinking about????). I got the idea during my morning shower, where I get all my LD ideas , put it simple on paper and started working, getting-shit-done (TM).
• I finally got Unity animation system! I had to fight with a “getting back to origin” problem, but everything solved using an empty GameObject as my animated object parent.
• Animation events. I didn’t know about them! As I said before, I struggled my mind trying to sync my feet animation. With animation events I can say when to start the other feet animation, sounds and object destruction. SO USEFUL!!!

I think that’s all. I hope to get better rating than with my last entry. I’m getting good feedback by the moment, so I hope this to stay the same.

If you have the time, I’d like you to check HitlerZilla and write some comments:

HitlerZilla – Rate, rate, rate!

Thanks, LD community!!!!

Hey guys,

I submitted my game as Compo yesterday and many of the features I originally planned were missing due to bad time management (my first time doing something like this).

So today I managed to spend some time to update the game here and there and decided to just update my submission to a Jam Entry.

There is still a major feature missing: the end of the game.

But here is my game.. Hope you enjoy it somehow/anyhow..

Have fun,
JC

What Went Right

1. Previous knowledge of using Unity3D and its various 3rd party libraries.
2. Able to get plenty of experience from a previous Game-Jam (GitHub Game-Off 2012)
3. Game Idea was not overly ambitious.  I started brainstorming with the potential 12 themes, this helped me pin down certain game mechanics that will work on multiple categories.  I was able to start the project right away.  On the downside, I was still at work when the compo began…got stuck in traffic, then finally got home.
4. Did not encounter major bugs.
5. Planned out the entire technical design before starting, really helped gage my progress.
6. Ready-made palettes for making pixel sprites.  Prior experience helped me make semi-decent art faster.
7. Ready-made food, snacks, beverages, energy drinks.  I literally spent the entire weekend indoors.

What Went Wrong

1. Took too many breaks.  Day-job habbit
2. Did not sleep on the first day.  Even though this made it possible for me to get the game ‘complete’, I consider it a bad thing.
3. My first time trying out the tile system in 2D Toolkit.  I had this grand idea of making a large map for the game…For some reason I was having trouble getting something to work nicely.  Plus, editing the map was a bit difficult for me.  I spent too much time fooling around with this feature.
4. Some game mechanics just didn’t work.  The “guard” is suppose to deflect projectiles but never got to making projectiles.
5. Game pacing and balance.  This is the kind of thing I never get a chance to do every time I make a game for a short time.  It’s a designer experience I need to hone more.
6. No audio.  Always the one thing that I put aside until the last minute.  Also, robots don’t make good music (cgmusic).

Other Notes

• I need to be more active with posting and public stuff.  As you can see, this is my second post for the entirety of LD 25
• Did not have time to add a boss…It is incomplete as you encounter it in the game
• The game originally is suppose to be in a city where you go on a rampage as you grow.  I suck at drawing modern things, so I decided on “heaven”.  Also, since I ran into some technical issues, I had to make the bounds smaller.
• Next time I’ll make sure to add some sort of intro and ending.
• The “guard” mechanic is dumb.  I should have just made it automatic or do something sinister.
• I drank 12 energy drinks for the span of 2 days.
• Listened to: mr-explorer from La-Mulana a lot as a motivation.

You know the idea is golden when there’s no features listed below!

Some Art Assets

Gameover

Victory

My concept was created in half an hour in which I was reminded about all those bad guys always trying to destroy the Earth but always lose the game and end up in jail or something. Not this time, this time you’re the villain is the idea and a game without winning is not fun. So, this time, you, the villain, will blow up the Earth starting with the two cities on your TODO list.

I planned to create a second “how did I do it” but I couldn’t find any useful new facts since the previous.

Obviously the heroes try to interrupt your evil plans but you found a way to lock them in the dockingbay where they try to cut the door. This gives you the time to go destroying the Earth. Sadly your station is not fit for such powerful ray and it starts to collapse.

Command your drones to repair the station as you try to blast Earth back to the medieval.

Tools used: Visual studio 2012 (code/c++), Irrlicht (3d), IrrKlang (Audio), Photoshop (2d), Illustrator (2d), Anvil (Audio), Audacity (Audio)

Download and vote for the game

So after having worked on MiLWaDS for many (As many as 48 even) hours now, I feel like a short post-mortem might be useful.

So MiLWaDS, or as it’s really called; “My Little World Domination Simulator”, don’t ask about the ‘i’ and the ‘a’.
I was in luck about the theme choice because this is a game idea I’ve been wanting to make for a long time, a sort of demake of the world domination part of the RTS Evil Genius. Using the minions you gain through recruiting efforts you’ll slowly but surely complete nefarious acts and villainous deeds on the road to complete global domination.

Decided to again make my game in C++, because I figure that using a tool I’m comfortable with is better than using a simple tool that I’ve never used before. Plus, with building it in C++ I was able to use the Yarn engine I’ve been working on for university projects, which also lead to some interesting features being available that I had absolutely no use for. Full angelscript based script engine support and google breakpad exception handling among them, I did use other parts of it though. And SFML, let’s not forget SFML.

Just like last time I was in my tools are;

• Visual Studio 2010, for writing my C++ code.
• GIMP, for all my art.
• Blender, for 3d-modeling, even though I haven’t really needed them.
• Spotify, because music helps creativity for me.

So some thoughts afterwards;

What went well?

• I love the simple but still stylish color scheme I managed to create early on in the development process, simple dark-grey with cyan borders worked well and gave the game a sort of hollywood-hacking feel.
• Loading the data from basic csv style formats worked much better than I expected it to, at point I was hoping to instead save them with JSON but decided against that to save the time need to implement something like that.

What went less well?

• The agency system ended up having far too many parts that never got used, I delegated too much work to them in the design phase.
• I never got my minions fininshed completely, each minion was supposed to gain in strength when levling up them as well as being able to specialize in different abilities.
• I ended up breaking Kunlaboro (An entity system I’ve been working a bit on) enough that I had to add triply redundant error checking to most messages. Since I was low on time I didn’t really want to try to get a clean clone done of it either.

Play the game here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=10247

Epic Rampage screenshot

Personal Goals

For this solo jam I had basically decided on two goals beforehand which I would work towards in any case.

My first goal was to make game making fun again. Recently I’ve been very busy developing a sequel to this thing, but development has been kinda slow so I’ve been feeling in rut. Entering jams like this one helps to feel that thrill again. There’s just nothing like pumping out a game under pressure to get the blood flowing. (pun intended)

My second goal was to develop my artistic side. As I consider myself primarily a coder, I have noticed my lack of artistic skills often limits me in various ways. I wanted to remedy that, so I practised Aseprite and created some fine pixel art this time.

What Went Wrong

• Sprites: Player character. Way too much time was spent perfecting these sprites. If I had instead spent more time on the code and on different enemies and buildings, the overall game might have been much better. Good thing that time was still useful as I have developed a bit of a feel for process. The player now looks a lot better than he looked at the beginning. (don’t laugh, check the time lapse)
• Balance: This is a game design issue that I still need to grapple. What”s the best approach to designing systems that make sure NPCs behave in fun ways, levels look interesting, and enemies spawn in sensible amounts as the game progresses? I think only experience will solve this one, and maybe more thinking ahead of time.
• Bugs: Some annoying Unity bug I had not encountered before. Somehow importing audio files ceased to work properly, meaning I could no longer mark them as 2d sounds. It is the reason some sound effects are barely audible.

What Went Okay

• Choice of engine: Unity3
  I had anticipated making a game in a style similar to Minecraft or Fex (pixel art on 3d geometry) which would suit Unity, my engine of preference. However, when I got my actual game idea, I dropped that in favor of going all-in 2d. Installing a different DE did not seem like a fun way to waste time, so I decided to keep using Unity. In retrospect it might have been slightly easier to work in a native 2d engine or something like Flash, but once you know the tricks, it’s not all that different or hard to use a 3d engine for pure 2d.

What Went Right

• Infrastructure: Implementing sprite animations was much easier than I thought it would be. As long as you think it out in advance, and don’t need too much optimization, it can be done in a very short time frame.
• Sprites: Lots and lots of enemies. Each of them with his own 16×16 sprites.
• Sprites: Player character. That climbing animation looks good!

Time lapse

Recorded with Chronolapse at 1 frame per minute, over ~35 working hours. processed by VirtualDub and Hybrid.

 Conclusion

This has turned out to be a great little game, with a lot of potential. I can’t wait to develop it further and see what else I can do with it. But first some optimization. Some of that haste-induced code is ugly! Then we’ll start the actual 99% the work on any game, namely of polish… polish… and more polish.

Regardless of reception or overall success of this game, I’ve had a blast participating in this Ludum Dare for the first time. I think this is not the last time you’ll hear of me.

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.

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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.

And here we go, a blog-post about my entry!

Burglary

Explore the premises. Evade the guards. Pick locks.
Steal the treasures! And the escape with them.

Burglary, an action/stealth game about stealing from
the rich and giving to those needing it: Yourself.

Visit the Official Ludum Dare Submission!

Play the game on Kongregate!

View a gameplay video on YouTube:

Used libraries/tools:

• My Base Code
• FlashPunk
• TileLighting
• Punk.Transition
• Sound Effects were made with Bfxr
• Music was made with the lovely autotracker-bu

So I managed to finish my super-simple game about a contract killer in a timely manner.

Here is the link for my entry: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=8403

The game was almost done yesterday, so I had a whole day to just polish it. Aiming really low payed off for me nicely. I just hope it won’t get too bad ratings due to its simplicity.

Unfortunately I still couldn’t make music for the game, I have to practice it before the next compo.

Here are some screenshots:

Title screen

BAM! You’re dead!

Two targets in the city

I see there a lot of games submitted already, I can’t wait to try them out!

And for those of you who are still working hard: Don’t give up! You can do a lot in 2 hours!