Theme

The theme for Ludum Dare #22 was Alone. I actually had no problem with this theme. A lot of people in the IRC chat hated the theme (a second theme of kittens was adopted unofficially), but Alone was one of the three final themes I upvoted.  I hadn’t spent any time thinking about the theme beforehand (I fully expected that randomly-generated would be the theme).  When the theme was revealed, I sat down for about an hour and the game concept came to me.

My thought process for the theme was that with a theme like Alone, I wanted to tell something of a compelling story. Further, I wanted to make sure that the story wasn’t totally depressing. After all, the theme was Alone, and I knew that people would make a lot of depressing games.  I had previously made a simple board game for teaching the concept of loss to children (a challenge for Ian Schreiber’s Game Design Concepts class a few years ago).  The game was about a group of children growing up and becoming independent, as the mother goes further and further away from their lives. I basically took this same idea and turned it backwards for the game concept. The focus was on the mother this time, and the child was slowly leaving the nest.

For my warmup week game, I made an entirely text-based game about a person grasping with a realization of one’s own madness (or something like that). I spent so much time working on the text system for that game, that I decided I wanted my game to be devoid of any text. I also wanted to keep scripted events to a minimum, just enough to let the player know what was going on at the start and guide the player a little when it wouldn’t make any sense. I wanted the actions the player was doing to tell the story, and I wanted the player to make up the story.  The result was something of a bare game. At times it felt silent (even with the music I included). Other times it felt loud and obvious.  Still, I think it worked, or at least I hope it did.

The Good

• This is the third game I have finished this month. I don’t know what is going on, but I am loving how productive I have been.  Finishing a third game that I really like feels just wonderful.  Further, this is the first full game that I programmed from scratch. There was a lot missing from my weekend warmup game and I don’t think that could be considered a full game. ITDFY is a whole game, and I made it in C++. This is an achievement!
• I have music and sound.  This is the second game I had music at all, and the first with sound effects. The first game I needed music because it was important to the characterization in the game.  In ITDFY, it was optional, but I managed to get it working.
• I told a good story that has an emotional arc. I told it using expression and game mechanics, not exposition or lengthy cutscenes (although I have some scripted scenes in the game).
• I love my little exclamaition point people.  Part of my problem was that I am not much of an artist, so I needed easy-to-draw characters, as well as characters that I could show changing over time.  Exclamaition points could be created programatically, so it was easy to animate them too.
• I felt like I knew what I was doing, for the most part.  I didn’t try to tackle a new language at the last moment.  I didn’t set out to make a game way beyond my ken.
• I got done early.  I was actually finished at about the 40 hour mark. Everything needed was in the game.  The last 8 hours were spent adding in extra things to make the game better.

The Bad

• I’m worried that the game isn’t really much of a game. It’s a maze. It tells a story, but there isn’t really any challenge to the game.  I pushed this off with the idea that the challenge was understanding what to do next.
• The game is a bit punishing. As you walk through the forest, there is a day/night cycle.  At night, the tiles are barely visible, if at all (water and stone a re visible, everything else not at all). This prompted me to add “sparks” to the game, which lit up the forest one level when used.  Sparks are the most game-like mechanic, being that they can be used as a score. The more you have, the better you were at the game. But the sparks don’t really fit the game very well.  The complete darkness was pretty punishing. What I should have done, instead, was reduce the visible squares at night, so you can only see a little bit of the forest depending on the time of day.  This was suggested by a commenter (nate427), and I totally agreed with it.  It would have greatly fit my game’s concept and title.
• I wanted to do more with sparks.  At the end, I was considering making it so that a spark was consumed each night like food, and you could lose the game if you ran out of sparks.  I don’t know how I felt about this, though.  I’d also wanted sparks to be littered about the forest, but I had a really hard time getting them to randomly generate about, so I scrapped the idea.
• I wanted to have obstacles, or at least something that required a bit of thought or skill.  The child was supposed to play a part in this, somehow.  This was a feature scrapped early on in the process, as the system I created really didn’t allow for it.
• The game is shorter than it should have been. It was supposed to have four areas, the last of which empties directly into the child’s house.  I didn’t have time to make two more areas, mostly because adding in those two areas would have changed my tile set around (Tile Studio seems to put the most used tile first).  The child, as it is, does not reach full development (he’s only at stage three growth at the end).  I also feel that players wouldn’t have played the game as it is with two more levels.  The back-tracking would be just silly.
• I’d wanted better movement in the game.  It’s square-by-square at the moment, but I really wanted free movement. I think square-by-square looks bad and feels old and gam(e)y.
• The music isn’t the best. It doesn’t fit the game at all.  I’d wanted to use this music, but Wolfram’s terms meant that I couldn’t myself distribute the file. I ended up using AutoTracker-C, which makes great music for games with technology or action in them, but doesn’t really make good ambient music.  I spent hours tweaking the output in OpenMPT, trying to get it to sound at least decent (I don’t know that I succeeded). I might have been able to track my own piano/pan flute music, but I really didn’t have that much time.

Overall, I enjoyed making this game, and I have some great ideas as to where to take the game from here.

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.

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!

Here have a screenshot:

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.

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.

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!

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

]]> http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2011/08/21/prisoner-submitted/feed/ 0 http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2011/08/21/done-for-now-3/ http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2011/08/21/done-for-now-3/#comments Sun, 21 Aug 2011 18:08:20 +0000 puffi http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/?p=66960 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)

MY ENTRY

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

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

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

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.

Windows
OSX 10.5+ (Intel)
Source