Finally I am getting around to writing a postmortem for “Into the Dark for You”.  ITDFY can be obtained here. It is recommended that you play it, if you can, before reading too far as I’m just about to ruin the whole game for you.

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Although I finished this yesterday at the deadline, I’m posting it now because the site isn’t (as) super laggy.

Proudly presenting Volcanox:

About

Volcanox is platformer that takes place on a distant planet, coded entirely in my own programming language. Our hero is stranded alone with a volcano in his path, and he must find a way out! There’s only one level and enemy, but it’s a fairly long level and the enemies are annoyingly hard. So plenty of replay value. There is an end for those brave enough to get there. It also times you, so you can share results with your friends.

I put up a small homepage for the game as well, so it’s not lost in this blog.

Install directions

Windows:

Extract and run the executable: volcanox.zip

Other Platforms:

Install the LÖVE game engine as directed on their site. Download the .love file, and open it with the game engine.

Source

The source is hosted on GitHub.

Issues

After speaking to some Windows players (after the deadline) I’ve found out that some of them have a problem with moving, where one direction is faster than the other. I also have heard of an issue where the sound effects break after playing initially. I was unable to reproduce any of these problems on my development machine (linux) so my apologies to those who encounter these problems during their playthrough.

My first crack at the LD48 and I have….Dead Party!

Dead Party was originally going to be a dungeon crawler, where you play the sole survivor of a raid gone wrong, but during playtesting I found that NPCs that followed you did so in an amusing manner, and I though “I should make a game around that” so I did. And there’s lots of cats.

I describe it as “Ico meets Diablo meets SmashTV” but with none of the quality.

Play it here!

quick post mortem

what went right

• I knew the game library, and I had made games with the language before

During the warmup weekend I had tried to learn more about Love2D, and while I managed to make half of a game it didn’t sit well with me. A friend of mine suggested I stuck with what I knew, which was AS3 and Flixel. It turned out to be right, I spent nearly the entire period making stuff rather than trying to wrangle technical issues or learn a new library. I also used Flixel Power Tools, which made several things, including bullet managment and aiming, exceptionally easy. Flixel is great at taking care of a lot of game related things, and the Power Tools made things even easier. I’m used to code structure more than I am with other scripting langauges, so I could structure (or not structure) things to work.

• I knew what to cut and when

Originally the game was going to be and RPG, complete with an overworld and a dungeon level, plus a battle system. Then that just went to an overworld system. I was also going to have multiple weapons, plus melee weapons, each with different characteristics. Needless to say, it didn’t turn out that way. I had to cut 2 levels and a few more features near the end too.

• The Level Editor!

Probably the biggest help is the DAME level editor. Normally I would have to hand-code where certain things are, or have to create my own level editor, or make my own CSV for things. This time I was able to build and design levels with ease and get them into the game quickly. Granted the workflow process was really weird (I’ll get to that later) but I was able to make non-super-ugly maps quickly.

• Got some sleep

After 3am I hit a brick wall when it comes to productivity, and continuing on doesn’t make sense. A friend of mine said that I wouldn’t win if I slept, but I beg to differ. The last 5 hours were the worst, and I began to make simple mistakes while fatiuged, had those happened earlier on it would have made the rest of the dev process much harder.

• never give up, never surrender!

With 24 hours to go I was still working on the dungeon crawler, but I felt really crappy about it since I felt it wasn’t a very good game. All I had was a level loading at that point and it was just shooting enemies. And then I thought “It may be crap, but I basically made a Smash TV clone in under 24 hours, so be a little proud”

WHAT WENT WRONG

• Making levels

Oh God. I mentioned this in an earlier blog post, but to make a level and put it into the game, I had to do a 7-8 step process. I had to make a new .dam file for each level, re-import all the sprites and tiles, draw the map, rename the groups, export it, fix certain .as files, and make a whole new playstate for the level. If I had made a saner structure and had just 1 playstate for all the levels, I could have simplified things and made more levels. I was mainly interested in making things work, rather than make things easy, and in the end it was probably 5x more work to import the levels the way I went about it. It also meant that I had to cut off features at a point, because i would have to add them all to the seperate playstate files and test them induvidually. Real smart, me.

• The theme

I had trouble with the theme, since I could only think of sad things, and I was so concerned with starting I didn’t really take time to consider another idea, just “start coding right now OMG” and, maybe if I went with something else, I could have skipped a lot of headache and felt better about going with the stated theme.

Well, that’s it for now. I’m really tired so, I’ll probably go to bed *before* 3am. ha!

I submitted my first ever Ludum Dare entry: Into the Dark for You!  I’m really glad that I decided to do one this time. It was a great experience, knowing what I can do in just two days

Here have a screenshot:

Whew! Participating in the Jam was a lot of fun but really tiring. We managed to finish our game Claustrophobia with just a few hours to spare.  Check it out here!:  http://sandbox.yoyogames.com/games/184445-claustrophobia

My game for this compo was Black Hole, a game where the objective is to escape both the horde of Drones who cornered you, and the black hole which they cornered you against.

Fortunately for you, a long-dead alien race left a platform here, which feeds off of the emissions of the black hole and broadcasts energy to all nearby ships. You have moved in close to this platform and the black hole itself, and thus avoided the gigantic Drone Mothership which was chasing you. However, the smaller Drone forces can and did pursue you, so now you must hold out against them to recharge your Jump Engines, allowing you to jump to beyond lightspeed and escape to your home.

The coding process was quite frantic. I had to write the entire game engine, and at one point ended up re-writing and re-integrating the entire collision engine, as I had failed to discover that my method of detecting overlapping rectangles was not accurate if they were rotated. Fortunately, I’m quite skilled with circle based collision, and it only took about 20 minutes to switch and integrate.

Another thing to note: I was high on Oxycodone and other painkillers the entire time, having gotten my wisdom teeth removed on Thursday. This caused many dumb mistakes, the majority being simple math related. I persevered through it though, and ended up coming out with what I think is a fun game!

Plans for the future: to continue to develop this game. I want to add more enemies, powerups, and new game modes.

Timelapse Part One is here.

Timelapse Part Two is here.

I’ll be writing a Post Mortem at some point… Thanks for the fun times all! Cheers!

Edit: 1814 lines of code, for those of you who care.

This Ludum Dare was a bit hard, I got a zero originality idea and that demotivated me over the process, so I tried to finish it quickly but almost without love.

The game name is Vampire Runner, like Canabalt, you control a guy who runs forever and runs faster and faster but instead jumping to avoid obstacles, in you have to activate your super skill to move through obstacles. The main objective remains the same.

Here are some images:

Running happy while there are no walls near

Using his move through wall skill near a wall

Lost all the skill energy while moving through a wall.

Despite I put almost no love to the game (well, I did for the graphics) the game is funny, so give it a try and I hope you like it.

P.S.: I will add the timelapse when I finish processing it.

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!

This was my first time doing anything like this, and I’m actually pretty happy with the output.

There are a few minor bugs, but nothing killer (I think/hope)

I decided to go for a more story-based game than I have before. The gameplay could be better, but I will continue to work on it after Ludum Dare.

I also eventually try to port it to other platforms, namely Linux.

Check it out: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=preview&uid=5267

Red buttons and red doors

I finally got around fixing some major bugs that were discovered when I was about ready to submit the game (most of which were Windows related…).

While the game is nothing to write home about I reached my goal and finished a “game” in time from scratch (with almost 8 hours remaining on the clock) so I’m rather happy.
Had great time and will definitely enter again, most likely with more ambitious game designs =).

Cant wait to try out all the great looking games!

Oh and the game can be fetched from: here
(windows and Linux version available)

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

Bunker 69

And with only five minutes left, it’s over

Sadly, it’s hard to call it a finished game. However, I’m exhausted after coding the whole night, so I don’t think Jam would help much. Sorry if the game is horribly raw, or should it happen to be boring — I did what I could for the first time. I’ll try to be as active as I can in rating your games after I get some sleep.

Congratulations to everyone who finished on clock

I am pleased to present the final version of AVOIDAL. It has gone through heavy changes since my last post-compo post.

I’ve been working very hard on it since Ludum Dare concluded and have put about 30 more hours of work into it (or about 50 or so total on this game so far.) I wanted to be able to get this finished in time to submit to August’s Experimental Gameplay Project since I was aware of their theme of “Zero Buttons” while I worked on this and I was able to do it!

Big thanks to Sparky who has given me a TON of invaluable feedback and ideas while tweaking this final version.

The menu should read v1.0.7 or greater in the top-left or your cache is old.

RECENT VERSION HISTORY

v1.0.7 – Posted 8/30/2010

• Made HUD a little less cluttered

v1.0.6 – Posted 8/30/2010

• Combo introduced and capped to x5 multiplier
• Mines now can start moving around at higher levels
• New “Mine Streak” bonus awards at 10,25,50,75,100,150,200
• New menu layout
• Tracks local highscore, highest streak and difficulty for local replayabilty and challenge
• More sounds added for new notices and awards

v1.0.5 – Posted 8/30/10

• New visual effect and sound effect for when a spike hits a mine (to differentiate and add variety from when a seeker hits a mine)
• Smoother angled robot effect when mouse moves left and right
• Smoke toned down to be less distracting
• Mine lifespan increased at beginning to 6 seconds instead of 4
• Added a 10 frame damage image to the robot torso to also help show player health
• Adjusted game to run at 60FPS instead of 30FPS
• Smoke now appears behind player sprite
• Fixed score bug

v1.0.4 – Updated 8/29/10

• More changes to difficulty curve based on feedback
• Added Animation on How To Play screen to easily explain game mechanics instead of having as much text to read

A bit late to post this, but I thought the submission entry would show up on the blog.

So yea, the game is finished and submitted. You can play it here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-18/?action=rate&uid=2311

Enjoy!

Timelapse: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIOyWFkWTdw

Okay well its not quite complete, the waves of enemies could do with some more work but I have my mum coming up from London to visit me in 30 mins so im gonna call it quits here.

So, finally it has a name, I have called it “48 Hours Later” Its not technically true as I have only had 40 hours to do it, but oh well!

Overall im pretty happy with my first Ludum Dare entry, im very tired right now and have a banging headache, but thats all part of the fun right?

So onto the game. First some shots:

Okay so if you have been following waaaay back my original intention was to make a game with the same sort of art style as World of Goo but with the game mechanics of Boom Stick. I think I have stayed pretty true to that original idea.

Basically you fight against waves of enemies that float across the screen. There are currently only 10 waves, I would have liked more and with more variety but oh well

The theme of the competition was “Enemies as Weapons”. I have incorporated that theme by having the enemies drop giblets when they die. You then have a certain amount of time to pick up those giblets and fire them back at the enemies. Enemies as weapons!

So as a disclaimer: im sure the game has many bugs and things, I have run out of time to do much in the way of testing and optimising. If you find any bugs however drop a comment I would love to hear about them as I plan to release this to a few flash portals, so would like to get those bugs fixed

Anyways enough jibber jabber. A few more shots then the game is below:

You have to play the game on my site, I cant get flash to work here
http://mikecann.co.uk/ludum-dare/ludum-dare-hour-40-complete/

Oh also, if you cant run flash I plan on making a Youtube video in the next day or so to go along with my timelapse of development!

Tools Used:
Adobe Photoshop CS5
Adobe Flash Builder 4
Adobe Flash CS5
SFXR
Chronolapse

So I finally finished my game, Attack of the Canvey Island Monster, which is now all sumbitted and tested, so hopefully nobody will have issues with it.

Enjoy

Title screen for my game

Oh and I by no means believe in all the cryptozoology stuff, just felt like a nice way to use the theme

This was my second go at entering Ludum Dare, and I’m happy that I’m 2/2 in terms of finishing games (4/4 if you include the GGJ )

Oh yeah and it was made in Game Maker, as I’m not a coder, so nobody be mean cos I don’t have the awesome coding skills that all you other guys and girls have

Now I’m off to sleep as I have to get up for work in three hours

I submitted my game, although not completely finished, but I lost sight of my goal. So I’ll recap and try to figure out where it went wrong. I also have a timelapse in the making, so I’ll post that next week as well. Good luck to everyone that still working hard on their submissions.

Cavern Tycoon Final Screenshot

Check it out here or at its page on my site here.

Let me know if there’s any problems not known, or just send an email if you like the idea. Thanks so much guys. I’ll write a proper postmortem later. But this has been an amazing experience.

for windows.

*cough cough* erm…done…*cough*

Windows
OSX 10.5+ (Intel)
Source