I’m afraid I must shamefully bow out. May a thousand needles pierce my body and my organs liquefy (or something similar – doubtful that will happen, though).

Unfortunately, too many things went wrong from the start. The theme alone (see what I did there?) was enough for a major brainfart, and I lost Friday evening simply thinking about what to do.

I did come up with a design, though… which was then gracefully shredded to pieces and flushed down the toilet (wanted to do a survival/Castaway type game on a desert island). I then moved on to doing a side-scrolling 2d shooter, where overgrown manimals of all kind attacked the player and randomly exploded.

Now, even if the concept isn’t half bad (let’s call it “minimalistic” for the politically-correct folks out there), I kept encountering seemingly simple, yet mind-boggling problems. Admittedly, I haven’t done simple XNA sprite animations in a while, but this weekend made me feel like I should be going back to school (or subliminally learning animation code while sleeping).

So there I am. With 4 hours to go until close, animations that aren’t showing, no music or sound effects, no weapon sprites made yet, some serious lack of sleep, a massive headache and a caffeine overload…

I wish the best of luck to the other participants. I learned so much this weekend, and will be more than prepared to tackle the next Ludum Dare.

Engage~

I have completed and submitted Super Animal Friendship Club:

PLAY ONLINE

Total coding time: 5-6 hours

Enjoy!

now its time pack everything and publish the final version !!!!
good weekend of coding, drawing, coding, testing …

So here’s my entry, Worst Birthday Ever. The zip (link in image above) contains C/C++ sources and win32 binaries. Done in about 4.8 hours.

Bonus feature: launch with a parameter for windowed mode.

Finally!

I finished my game “None Alone”!

Wow, I Worked very hard on it and finally I have a result!

This is my first time on ludum dare so I’ m very proud of myself.

The live stream went pretty good and it was very fun.

Here Is My Entry

Here You Can Watch My Past Live Broadcastings

Here You Can Read My Post Of Day One

It’s done!

I managed to finish everything I said I would add (except for music), so I feel pretty good about calling this complete.

Apparently I can’t submit it though, presumably because I already submitted a warmup. Is it one entry per account? I thought Ludum Dare allowed you to enter as many games as you’d like.

Oh well, here is the link to the final version anyway.

I had entered my game “The Prisoner” for the All Talk mini-LD #27. Although it took some time (an additional 2.5 months — I had to rewrite the engine), I did finally finish my game. The final version can be played here.

Here’s how the new UI looks:

Just a little postmortem on my LD #21 entry, Anthony’s Psyche: Escape.  (This is mostly a cross-post from my blog.)

This was my third Ludum Dare.  In each one, I’ve challenged myself to come up with a different interpretation of the theme than I thought would be typically done.  For the Escape theme, I decided to go with the idea of psychological escape mechanisms, or avoiding painful thoughts and memories.  This turned out to be a rather artsy, narrative-driven playable story of sorts.  This is very different than anything I’ve developed before.

I spent about 27 hours on this entry.  Friday night when the theme was announced, I spent three hours in the typical initial panic of trying to come up with an original interpretation of the theme.  I settled on the psychological escape mechanisms concept, and that it would have something to do with words on the screen representing thought fragments.  I was still unclear about the specifics beyond that.

On Saturday, I spent a couple more hours playing with ideas in my head, and settled on a design.  I then spent about ten hours writing code and debugging.  It took me much longer than I anticipated to get text with variable alpha per character working in Flashpunk. Probably five hours on that alone.  I also spent a few minutes making the “art” for the game (the one stick figure) for a total of 12 hours on Saturday.  By this point I had most of the basic functionality of the game working (moving a box of text around the screen and having the words fill in when over the character).

On Sunday, I spent about an hour getting Reason and my keyboard set up, and coming up with the short music loop and “thought complete” riff.  I then spent several hours trying to come up with a decent story.  I discovered that telling a story through first-person thought fragments is very difficult.  When I started entering the text for the thoughts, it just wasn’t coming together.  I also discovered some bugs in the way Flash renders text, so I spent a couple hours debugging and working around that.  I finally gave up on the story I’d come up with, and about two hours before the deadline, I came up with a very different story that came together pretty quickly.  I also wrote some more code for the title screens, ending screen, etc.  That made a total of about 12 hours for Sunday.

The end result isn’t exactly a “game”, but I’m satisfied with what I came up with because it’s very different for me, and pushed me in a different direction.  I like the overall feeling of the play.  I’m thinking of developing something like this a little further.

Like my previous two LD entries, I created things as stand-in content (the stick figure guy, and especially the very short, repetitive music loop) so I had things to write the code around, but they ended up being the final content because I didn’t have time to do “real” art or music.  The difference this time was that by now I’ve learned that when I create them, that’ll probably be the case.  Ludum Dare is always a great exercise in game development (and a lot of fun) because it forces you to be ruthless in cutting features and calling things “good enough”.

Creating a game is a passionate experience. Doing it in 48 hours is equal parts divinity and torture. As such, a lot goes down during the development process, laughs are had, tears are shed, and ultimately you arrive at the end product – your game.
Well, maybe I’m being overdramatic. But you definitely learn a lot upon completing a development cycle, even one as short as two days. The post-mortem is a great way to share that knowledge, imparting wisdom upon those who seek it. In this I’m going to examine what was successful, what were failures, and what just plain drove me nuts during my development of The Man Who Sold The World.

Play The Game Here

The Good

Level Design Workflow (or “Levels are the meat of the meal“)

I had an excellent workflow for creating levels in TMWSTW. One of my favorite aspect of game design is creating levels, so I made sure that process would be as smooth as possible. This meant creating a method of designing, developing, testing and finaling levels in a minimum of time.

The first thing I did was create the character and camera systems, including physics and collision detection. This allowed me to get right into levels, as I knew how my player acted and moved within the first wee hours of development. The result was over a dozen enormous, hand-crafted levels that made it in-game; not only created, but tweaked and tuned for an ideal gameplay experience.

I had the time to fully explore what I wanted to with my level designs, creating many worlds in different environments, and even get experimental with more abstract locations. The process was effective, informative, mentally invigorating and, most importantly, fun.

Source of Inspiration (or “Why the Repeat Button is Your Friend“)

You’ll notice upon launching TMWSTW that a splash screen reads, “Inspired by David Bowie’s conceptual album and story, ‘The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars’”. That’s there for a reason – it may sound silly, but I listened to David Bowie’s “Greatest Hits” album on repeat for nearly the entire Ludum Dare – having it on repeat allowed those songs to be constantly in my consciousness, influencing my design choices. Having that aural feedback not only encouraged me to keep working, but did wonders for keeping me focused and following a coherent vision for the game.

I did the same thing when I developed Nyan Cat FLY!, listening to the Nyan Cat song during development – I’ve spent over 100 hours of my life listening to that atrocious tune, but it helped the game reach its final state. Nyan Cat FLY!, like the meme itself, is cute. TMWSTW is, like the story it’s inspired by, an epic tale about the decline of humanity.

Plus, Bowie is pretty rocking, and helped me get through the long hours of the night.

Audio Design & Implementation (or “If it’s there, use it!“)

I’m proud of the audio in TMWSTW. I spend a liberal amount of time creating game audio tracks, and like to think I’m getting better at it. I primarily use Sony ACID Music Studio 8, of which I’m lucky enough to have amassed a liberal amount of assets I can use to develop custom music. However, that’s just so much bandwidth-drinking data unless you can get it to actually sound off in-game. Flash is notoriously awful at handling audio effects, and I didn’t want to struggle through creating my own audio manager in AS3.

This is where external classes and APIs come in. Guess what – you’re not the only programmer in the world, and other people have come across the same problems. I wish I’d realized this sooner, especially for audio. Matt Przybylski has creating an amazing tool in the AS3 Sound Manager v1.4, which controls the sound in TMWSTW (and all future AS3 krangGAMES projects). Unfortunately I implemented this system fairly late into development of TMWSTW, and had already lost time trying to foolishly use my own code. Had I gone straight for Sound Manager, I could’ve saved plenty of time and effort. I won’t make that mistake again, and if you ever use audio in AS3, I highly recommend looking into it.

The Bad

Unclear Art Direction (or “Know Your Limit, Play Within It“)

By no means am I an artist. I have a confession to make: while my LD19 entry PRIOR won 8th in graphics and was lauded in being beautifully stylized, the art is only the way it is because at hour 47/48, I realized, “Oh, this game needs some better art than the debug stuff.” I then proceeded to slap a gradient texture on every background I could find.

However, that was not the case in TMWSTW. Forgetting that I’m not an artist, I -wanted- to make custom retro/pixel art for every environment in the game. Ultimately, I lost several hours of work to something I ended up simply not using. The pixel environment art I made was ugly, low-quality, and took far too much time to develop (especially including the process of moving from Photoshop to Flash, then implementing it into the game). I finally abandoned that vain attempt, and moved to Flash-generated stylized art, similar to PRIOR (though, thankfully, with a bit more color. I’m kinda getting sick of black-and-white, and actually spent a few hours on the art this time.)

The moral of the story: Don’t be something your not. If you have to, do it in the easiest way possible.

Misallocation of Time (or “Why Your Brain and Time are NOT Friends“)

In Ludum Dare, time is not just a commodity, but a deceptive bastard of a resource. What I mean is, your psychological interpretation of time is never representative of true amount of time left. Even when you KNOW that you’re running out of time, you can still very easily lose track of it and waste it on badly prioritized endeavours.

If you’ve been reading this post-mortem through, you know how much time I lost working with audio and Photoshop (more on Photoshop in a moment). This happened primarily because I misjudged both the amount of time required on these tasks, and the amount of time remaining. Admittedly I’m vastly unfamiliar with Photoshop and couldn’t make a proper work-time estimate there to save my life, but that’s a poor excuse for losing the number of hours that I did. Estimating time and collecting those estimations into a proper timeline is incredibly difficult, and it’s all too easy to misjudge that and stray too far from the path of your development.

I suppose the best method to avoid this tragedy is to quantify everything you have to do objectively, at the beginning of development. What I’m going to do for the next Dare: create a task list of everything I need to do and estimate the time it’ll take to do it. Then add 15% to those tasks. Then reserve at least six hours for polish and miscellanea, and strip away everything of low-priority that pushes me over the 48-hour timeline. Hopefully, that’ll keep me on time.

Lack of Sleep (or “Quality Is Better Than Quantity“)

Here’s an unsurprising truth: you lose sleep in Ludum Dare. There’s no way around it, making a decent game in 48 hours will suck away time like nobody’s business. Spare time doesn’t come from nowhere, so if you want to make a decent product, you’ve gotta cut something away, and sleep is the most obvious victim.

Don’t get me wrong – there’s nothing wrong with that, at least from the Dare’s perspective. Staying up late can be fun, as any eleven-year-old would attest, and the constant flow of energy and creativity that arises from game development is exceptionally invigorating.

But there’s an fine-yet-extremely-important line between sacrificing sleep and neglecting your needs. Time limit or not, your brain needs sleep, even if only for a few hours. Staying up too late under a naive notion of “If I sleep, I won’t have time finish” is one of the most dangerous things you can possibly do.

Lack of sleep will take its toll, a far worse toll than spending three-hundred minutes unconscious will. Your focus will drift, your quality of work will decline, and your overall product will suffer for your self-negligence. Taking a four-hour powernap and a shower upon waking up will do far more for your product than an extra five hours of half-baked development, followed by more hours of ever-increasing tiredness. At one point I was falling asleep at my computer – it sucked, and my game knew it. So learn from my mistakes. Go take a nap.

Either that, or adopt the Uberman Sleep Schedule.

The Ugly… Sotra

Theme Interpretation (or “Livin’ By Your Own Rules In Someone Else’s House“)

The theme for Ludum Dare 21 was “Escape”. I’ve noticed that people tend to treat the theme differently. Most people take it literally, which is fine, and often produces some pretty excellent gameplay experiences (such as NMcCoy’s excellent “Planetary Mission“, which I recommend trying out). Others view the theme in a different light, more like a guiding star than a criteria point.

This is how I viewed it in TMWSTW. Make no mistake – “Escape” is the dominant theme in my game, and it’s represented metaphorically through the player’s final actions in the game. This is not some kind of excuse for my game design, nor is it an attempt at being a pretentious douche. It is simply my interpretation of the theme, and how I chose to represent it through a video game.

Ludum Dare Compo Rule #3 states “Games must be based on the theme.” Ludum Dare is all about rapid development, and creating a product out of unfiltered passion. Basing the entire development cycle on a theme, like what the Dare has done, is ingenious, and manipulating that theme in your own fashion is an exciting thing. No matter how you interpret the theme, you’re taking a universally acknowledged concept, and making it your own. So do so however you see fit.

F**k Photoshop (or “No, seriously.“)

Please, bear with me for a moment while I depart from a more eloquent dialog and instead relinquish to the world a personal opinion that I hold, in the most base and understandable form possible:

F**k Photoshop.

For real. I love Adobe, I’m a huge fan of Flash (as anyone who knows me can attest), and the entire Creative Suite is a great product. But Photoshop and I have a beef, and I’ve gotta address it. I’ve stated on several occasions that I am NOT an artist, and as such I don’t pretend to have any level of skill in Photoshop, or Illustrator or even creating advanced artistic elements in Flash. But I do know a thing or two about product design, and creating features for users of all skill levels.

In this case, the chip on my shoulder comes from Photoshop’s inability to mass-modify colors on different layers, and then export them. You simply cannot find-and-replace colors on multiple layers (or at least, after a few hours of forum-sifting, I couldn’t find a way). As my player character had many different layers for animation, this was a huge issue. I could simply place a layer mask that changes all layers beneath it, sure, but then you can’t mass export those assets – the layer mask is not included in the export, and only default images get created. Ultimately I made a keyboard macro to duplicate the layer mask, combine it with the layer below, export that layer only, delete the layer, and move the original mask down to the next layer. Lather, rinse, repeat – a major pain.

I lost over four hours to trying to change BLACK and WHITE to ORANGE and BLUE. Four hours. Now, feel free to go off and rant, “You were using a poor method/That’s easy to do if you know how/there’s technical reasons it can’t be done/You’re a PS noob!” or whatever other retorts you may have. My point is, usability design has to take novices into account – a program SHOULD be intuitive enough that users can perform simple tasks. And replacing one color with another should be a simple task, and it is, if you’re only working on a single layer. I’m no slouch when it comes to finding solutions on online forums or hunting for methods of completing tasks, but when it takes you over four hours to jury-rig an impromptu solution to a presumably simple issue, I’m left at the conclusion that Adobe dropped the ball. Photoshop is a great program, but it’s far from perfect.

</rant>

Scope, and Knowing Yourself (or “The Uplifting Conclusion“)

I think I’m masochistic. Maybe that’s more than you wanted to know, but that’s the only explanation for the decisions I make during Ludum Dare. I’m constantly pushing myself beyond my self-determined reach in terms of development. In Ludum Dare 19, I crafted a facility larger than a standard city block and populated it with a complete, twisted back story. In LD20, I created a fully-functional level editor and allowed players to not only take the game into their own hands, but record the fruits of their labor and share them around. And in LD21, I wove a Universe. With David Bowie at my side, I explored love, spirit, daring, and the fate and frailty of humanity.

Those lofty reviews aside, the point is I established the scope of my development as HUGE. I did this intentionally, for a few reasons. One reason is, I simply love creating stuff. “Stuff” is the correct word there: I love creating levels, NPCs, obstacles, stories, music, everything that goes into a game experience. So I set ludicrous goals for myself, and push myself beyond my reach. It’s risky, and it isn’t for everyone, but it’s how I generate the best personal results (usually).

The point I’m trying to make here, is be true to yourself and your habits. Take every bit of advice with a grain of salt, and find your own best practices. Biting off more than I can chew works for me, but it can be catastrophic for others (just as trying to do pixel art nearly did me in, while some people are savants with retro graphics). We’re game designers. Only through creating games can we get better at our craft, and only by being true to ourselves can we really create a game. Anyone can build a game, but to really create an interactive experience, you have to play to your skills, nurture your muse, and be true to yourself. That’s where games come from.

In summary: David Bowie rules. F**k Photoshop. Thanks for reading. <3

<3 Nick Yonge
Founder, Director, MCS-EOOEJ, krangGAMES
www.kranggames.com
nick@kranggames.com
Facebook ~ Twitter

After 10 hours, 53 minutes and 20 seconds of frantic coding due to a very late start, the Sky Fell.

Download the 1.8Mb zip file for Windows.

The servers also fell, and while I got my entry  in successfully last night, I left this final post for today. My entry this time around is the most playable and complete game I’ve developed for LudumDare. I’m very pleased with how it turned out – especially seeing I started very late and didn’t put much time into it. The game looks lovely in motion, and unfortunately the grey screenshots don’t do it justice. Saying that, here’s a grey screenshot :

I’m not entirely satisfied with the game. I had to manually program all of the particle effects, something that my previous games never needed because I had tool-set already developed for that. The graphics turned out OK due to an amazing fluke. I bought a new camera, and played with it all the way to work and back on Saturday. When I started my LudumDare entry, I had a huge stash of photos taken during the competition period – just sitting waiting to be used. With a bit of colour correction they turned out ok, but trying to modify anything made me miss my old Wacom Tablet. Hopefully next LD I’ll be back up and running as an artist.

The game takes some practice, but it is possible to win!  Good luck in your Escape  …

So here’s my game!

You must escape from Ludum Dare by completing microgames, each based on a Ludum Dare’s historical theme! Play Escape from Ludum Dare here!

I got my entry submitted at about 2am BST, which makes a change from the 2-minutes-before that I usually end up doing. So here’s my entry, VOLCANOWNED!:

DOWNLOAD

I was pretty happy with how it turned out. It’s a very simple game but I think I did a decent job with the graphics. Next time I’ll leave that little bit extra time to record some proper sounds and music.

I’m going to put my timelapse together later and write a full post-mortem soon. And oh man I can’t wait to start playing all the other entries – I swear they just get better and better every time!

My game ‘Vault’ went into the submission morass about 45 minutes ago. CLICK HERE!

This is a game about a security system, a series of barriers you gotta hack your way through in grayscale rectangle land.

As is my wont, I spent more time doodling around with superficials (and lazing about) than working on the game proper, so the experience is rough and feels sort of cloudy. It’s consists of an odd game mechanic where optimization is the most interesting thing, yet the only push to optimization that I put in was points and leaderboards for finishing in X moves. Maybe ought to have added a fuel gauge limiting how many moves you can take. The game could use a lot more experimentation, level design and otherwise.

With leaderboards and that unique hamburger something or other, I hope this Flash game will mean something to someone.

(Can’t get embedding to work…)

Here’s the link!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhWYc-e4Zmk

Yep! I finished my new game, The Villainous Villa. It’s about escaping a mansion, or villa if you’d like to call it that. It’s quite villainous.
I’m really happy with the music in this game especially, so I might put that up for download later.

It's a screenshot!

Here’s the entry link: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/
And here’s a link straight to the game: http://ericsmusicandstuff.com/flash/ludumdare21.html

Whoop whoop.

I finished my game! It is called A Familiar Story. A “familiar” is a magic animal companion, such as a witch’s black cat. Familiars are used to boost the magic strength of their companions and have a history of being valuable allies. [VIEW MY ENTRY]

Click this image to play in your web browser!

Follow the adventure and friendship between two lonely young heroes. From humble beginnings, their partnership are all that the world needs to save them from an evil tyrant. Recruit allies and meet people and creatures along the way toward the boss battle.

This was created using art that I’d made previously. I created all the avatar art (cats, dragons and people) using Poser Pro 2010 and DAZ art assets. Most of the backgrounds were created in Vue 8.5 xStream.

I decided that my challenge for this weekend would be to build my first MOBILE game. Using Phonegap and jQuery, I created the entire game in HTML. Using Eclipse to compile a simple .java class, I packaged phonegap and my html sources into a non-signed Android .APK which is designed to be used on phones like the HTC Desire, or any Android 2.2 device with 800×480 resolution. It might also work on tablets and older phones as well. Because it isn’t a signed .APK, it is not yet ready for prime-time (it wouldn’t be allowed to go on the app stores, and you need to enable “debug mode” on your phone and “allow unsigned apps”).

For the Windows .EXE, I used Appcelerator Titanium to create a stub executable which is really just a chromeless web browser (using a variant of xulrunner).

For the web version, all I had to do was upload my HTML sources to my web server. The sound is done with soundManager2, which can use HTML5 audio but generally sticks with more reliable invisible Flash.

Although this is a very simple game right now – just some conversation and one battle – I am very proud of what I accomplished. As a tech demo for a future, more advanced RPG or visual novel, I think this is a great start. Perhaps I will flesh out the adventure, add a few more characters, implement game saves and inventory and a quest manager and craft a more robust RPG game like I’ve always dreamed. Who knows?

In any case, it was really fun working on this. Hope you enjoy it!

So here it is… “Saving his code” 2d mini platform game. I managed to cut my ideas and move on. I had a lot of gameplay features, but it would take a lot of time, that i don’t have right now.

MY ENTRY

It’s complete. I’m not satisfied with the balance or the feel, but Hot Potato is finished and submitted.

Oh. I should rebuild it on my Debian system since other people tend to have problems playing my game when I build a project on my Ubuntu system I might make a Windows port soon, but after 72 hours, I’m beat. I’ll update this post when I get those two things done.

Updated! I created the Windows port, and I rebuilt the game on my Debian system so that a wider variety of Linux-based systems should just work out of the box.

You can download it for:
- GNU/Linux (1.6MB tar.gz)
- Windows (3.12MB .zip)

Asteroid Explorer by McFunkypants

A Molehill tech demo programmed in 48 hours for the LD48 game jam.

Featuring high-poly Flash 3d hardware acceleration, .obj file parsing, heightmap terrain generation, terrain “splatting” multi-texturing, cube-mapped skybox, mp3 engine sound with pitch-shifting, rigid-body car physics simulation, flash sprite 2d overlays, and Molehill (AGAL) vertex and fragment programs.

This game requires Flash 11 or the incubator beta version which can be downloaded here:
http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplatformruntimes_incubator.html

Please visit my blog: www.mcfunkypants.com for more games, music, art and code.

I warmly invite you to follow @McFunkypants on twitter (I *only* tweet about game development)

Play the game here:
http://www.mcfunkypants.com/LD20/

I would LOVE your comments and feedback:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-20/?action=rate&uid=2297

Finished the Dare, just in time I’m really quite proud of myself for this one, not only did I really push my technical skillset (first time integrating a full-on level editor in a game!) but I also kinda pissed away the first 12~ hours Anyway, in the end it turned out pretty well, check it out if you want, hope you enjoy it!

Eunaborb