For this Mini LD, I thought I would do something I have never done before, and use Flash. I only have a few weeks experience with Flash, which most would say is not enough to just dive and and roll with. While this may be the case for most, I have made more with less before.

So, my game, right. Since the theme for this Mini LD is the destruction of earth, I immediately thought of space for some reason… Although the story isn’t exactly clear for this game yet, you have been chosen to be the hero responsible for saving planet earth. In order to save the planet, you have to travel around a spaceship and collect cores. Hence, Save The Cores.
I was only able to put in about two hours today, but I should be working most of tomorrow.
I have semi-smooth x-y movement working, haven’t gotten collision up yet, but I have a good prototype for collection of cores.
Next would be collisions, then story, then fleshing out the level a bit, maybe some music in there somewhere, I hope this turns out well!

Game as it is now.
Now to get some sleep. (T_T)

The technology behind

This Ludum Dare I only could spend one day for making a game and I wanted to try out a new technology (HaxePunk). Usually that’s not a good idea for a time restricted jam, especially with restricting oneself even further.

Working with a new language and library worked surprisingly well. Tuning down the scope of my game probably helped, but Haxe seems to be quite a convenient language to work with. The HaxePunk library was a great addition to have quick results, as most of the basic engine stuff necessary for my game was already in there.

For creating some ambient background sound for my game I had a nice idea: As it is finally spring now in Germany, I wanted to record some spring sounds, like birds. I did this with my phone, which worked pretty well. Unfortunately transferring the file into Audacity did something very strange to the sound and it was too late to figure out how to solve it. That is the reasons the bird sounds seem more like from a jungle than a mid-European garden.

What’s that game about

As mentioned, I didn’t have the full 48 hours, so I had to come up with something really simple. The basic idea has some resemblance to my LD23 game Bottlecolonies, but this time with free placement and only two different colors. This makes the gameplay probably a little boring quite soon.

Can you spot the similar concept?

The idea is, that with each new planted flower, the existing ones will grow through different stages. If there are negative influences around (potatoes, mushrooms, different kind of plant) and surpass the positive ones (same kind of plants) the plant will decay. Additionally, a feature implemented quite late, the mushrooms will spread for a while. So goal and strategy of the game is to place the same kind of plants close to each other, block spreading of mushrooms and avoid the negative stuff around your seedlings. The rhythm as how the two different plants are seeded is quite simple. Each three plants it will change. You will win the game if there are enough grown plants and will lose if there are too many decayed ones.

What went right

• Getting the idea (I already had this idea in my mind for OneGameAMonth for the theme “spring” and it also fits the LD theme)
• Fast progress with a new tech (I’m surprised by myself how well I got into HaxePunk)
• Making a Flash game (a lot more plays than usually with a Windows standalone)
• Finish in time (was a long evening, but I did cut the features early enough)

What went wrong

• Making the background sounds (as mentioned above, and took me some time to mix the few recorded sounds to not be to repetitive)
• Player feedback in the game (A lot of people mentioned it: an indicator for the placing position and some feedback what will seed next would be great; I agree)

So all in all I’m quite happy with my entry.

Go play and rate

Well, it’s better late than never.  My first Ludum Dare entry, Minima, was developed in C# and SDL.NET and only ran in Windows.  As I started rating other people’s games, I realized that I was much more likely to play a game if there was a web version.  I’m guessing this is true with other judges as well.

So, I spent several evenings learning FlashDevelop, ActionScript, and Flixel, and ported my game.  I’m quite proud of myself, not just for learning a new platform and finishing the port so quickly, but that it’s so close to the original.

Windows version

Web version

So, if you haven’t played Minima yet because you’re not a Windows user or simply don’t like downloading executables, please give it a try now!

Vote here

My game is a minimalistic puzzle game where we tell a history of a little boy called Ted, trying to make a better world around him with the imagination.

We receive in our page great reviews, and the most good thing is the surprise of the game be so polished. It’s because we fix in the idea that the game have to be something minimalistic at all, not only in the graphics, but also in the gameplay, and even in the story.

(more…)

So my first joke when I learned the theme was “My games are already minimalist.”

I was collaborating with Anand so I could have more elaborate art than I could have made on my own, and the first thought when you think of a “minimalist game” would be red wedges shooting white circles or something.

So on Friday we considered a few directions to take the idea that would address the theme, especially ones that would allow minimalist and non-minimalist elements to co-mingle.

1) A non-minimalist character exploring a minimalist world.
2) Perhaps everything is coloured rectangles until you get close to it or shine a light on it or something.
3) A strategy game that you can switch between two different modes, one with character stats and firing ranges and things, one where they are white and black pieces that move by square.
4) A strategy game of minimalists vs. non-minimalists

We started going with 4, then started thinking a Tower Defense would be easiest to finish in a weekend, ( compared to a more symmetrical strategy game, where I would need to program the A.I. ) and somehow while drawing the sketches for it, we came up with the unique aiming mechanism, which you can see here:

Note also that the towers were initially vertical boxes. The lines were meant to show where the rear towers had a clear line-of-sight, but looking at it, we thought, what if that’s how you aimed, not with a single tower, but with a pair of towers? So we seized on that as a mechanism that made the game a little more innovative than just yet another TD game, and set to work.

I programmed it in Flashpunk, because I had used it before. Anand and I hadn’t collaborated before, so I wanted to keep the number of new things under control. I looked up a lot of things on Flash Game Dojo while the Flashpunk.net site is down.

So here’s the result.

After playtesting, maybe the game is a little too simplistic, which has made it tough to balance, in terms of if you make the creeps too tough, they overwhelm you no matter what you do, and if you make them too easy, you would have to go out of your way to lose. We have a couple ideas on what would add some depth to it, but by the time we thought of them, it was too late to implement them.

Intro

IceBreaker is a minimalist free-pause RTS-ish thing (probably better described as an FTL-like, though bearing little similarity) set in a Cyberspace similar to the one portrayed in William Gibson’s Neuromancer (a book which changed my adolescent life and is at least partially responsible for my getting into programming).

I didn’t get much (okay, any) journal-writing done during the weekend, though there’s a vague run-down of events in the project’s github page.

So consider this (rather large) postmortem post-hoc overcompensation. (and apologies in advance for the spam)

Blender was extremely helpful for rapidly producing the future-retro look very quickly, even the sprites were tiny renderings with wireframes

You can’t quite tell, but it’s a stripped-down RTS:

• no resources or buildings (instead you have gestation periods for replication)
• since you can’t build unit factories, you instead have to replicate (and be vulnerable), but if you’re standing still you will heal
• there /are/ classes, but they are restricted to *strength* (hit amount) and *vitality* (health)
• it’s meant to be broken down into very short levels, generally with you collecting/destroying something which is being protected.

Statistics

• Four litres of coffee consumed
• A whole forest of tobacco
• 3,617 lines of code
  • That’s 60 A4 pages if printed out
  • According to Wolfram Alpha that’s:
    • about 17.8 metres ( 58 ft ) tall
    • 6.6 storeys high
    • and about half the diameter of the Hindenberg
  • Very sore wrists (hush, you!)
• somewhere between 3 and 6 hours of sleep

What went wrong

1. strong underlying system
   • unlike my last two LudumDare attempts, I knew what I wanted to do very quickly, I wrote about three pages of ideas and then stopped when I realised I’d already made my mind up to do the first one.
     However I didn’t flesh out the details as much as usual and so started building the basic framework while pondering, knowing I could change the details later on.  This resulted in a lot of code ( ~60ft worth! ) that, whilst extremely useful was probably not necessary to get the basics of the game done.
     I remain convinced that it was doable within the alotted time period (the post compo version is only an extra 4 hours work, with the last 3 mostly being unnecesary tweaking)
2. not enough testing of environment
   • I did more preparation than previously, but I wasted time on a few things which could have been sorted out before the compo:
     • setting up the live stream stole about 1-2 hours, admittedly I was feeling a bit braindead/overwhelmed/uninspired so this was a better utilisation of time than say, nothing.  But this should have “Just Worked”
     • Final builds (I’ll get to that)
3. using an unfamiliar framework and language (again)
   • In my first LD, I used AS3/FlashPunk which I’d picked up a couple of hours before the compo.  In the second, I used Java/LibGDX and didn’t complete – whilst I had familiarity with Java I was very very new to LibGDX and as a result spent wayy too much time googling.  This time was a fair bit better (Haxe is quite similar to Java/AS3) but I still had little to now experience with either it, or HaxePunk
   • HaxePunk is quite nice, but unfortunately not quite “there” yet for me, I wrote a disproportionately large amount of patches to the library in order to get basic features to work normally.  This stole quite a bit of time, but it was far too late in the project to change ships.  I look forward to using it more though.
4. refactoring at the halfway point
   • despite having most of the system quite well designed in my head, I had to stop and write a vast swathe of code on day 2, partially to undo the odd choices of my sleep-deprived self the night before
5. sleep (braindead 6+6 hours)
   • I should have done it sooner, and more.  I’m quite good without sleep, but I ran rampant on the code-base when I  started getting exhausted.  Much time was spent rectifying this spaghetti.  I’m not sure how long I actually slept (somewhere between 4 and 6 hours), but I easily lost 12 hours to silly choices and then the bleary-headedness upon waking.
     

     an early screenshot complete with pointless UI and ugly tiles

6. didn’t demonstrate theme clearly enough (despite following it)
   • I had basic gameplay down very early in the project this time, but the sleep-spaghetti resulted in about 10-12 hours of programming which left me (effectively) where I started
7. planning
   • I actually planned quite well in a lot of ways, but some very fundamental (and rudimentary) aspects were overlooked initially, resulting in much confusion and wasted time
8. submission process panic!
   • I tested my environment this time to avoid this exact thing.  However I discovered (at submission time) that whilst my project ran perfectly in the Flash standalone player, it would silently fail completely in-browser.  It turns out all I had to do was add “-web” to the build command, but it took me far too long to discover this!
9. no end-game detection or automatic level progression
   • despite “shipping” with a few levels, the submission process issues resulted in my missing the 20 minutes that I needed to finalise this important factor of a “short-level based game” and the gameplay suffers for it.

What went right

1. strong underlying system
   1. Yes, it’s a dirty trick having this in both sections.  But I maintain that the approach was a good one, early efforts resulted in the tutorial system being a mere 45 minutes to implement, and most new features were added extremely quickly
   2. I used JSON for most of the configuration of the game, allowing rapid prototyping of enemy AI, character attributes, menus and the tutorial system)
2. using Haxe and SublimeText 2
   1. This was a pretty awesome combination, I look forward to being able to justify the $70 license for SublimeText2 (this was my first real experience with it, and it was wonderful).  I have been using (shudder) Eclipse for a while despite my lack of appreciation for IDEs in general so it was nice to have a “real” development environment again.  However I’ve gotten rather dependent on Eclipse’s easy mass-refactoring, and you can really tell (names of things changed through the course of the project and thus there are some things named Agents which are actually Actors and so forth)
3. the game idea
   1. I think this concept is pretty sound, and I enjoyed playtesting it.  Definitely building some more levels and a little more “Juice” and thrusting it in the face of anyone who walks by
4. music and art
   1. There were a few times when my brain completely went on strike, so it was good to change gears and work in Blender or Renoise to build some of the feel, having these elements in game was also fantastic for morale.
   2. The music was made in about 5-15 minutes for each of the two tracks
   3. Art was quite quick too, despite a few false starts
5. tutorial system
   1. I’m really happy with the tutorial system, which could also double as a mission introduction system.  It hooks into game events and each dialog of the tutorial can have a number of events required before it appears, or disappears making it very easy to make a clear (and importantly, responsive) tutorial.

The in-game tutorial system is quite smart, if a little overenthusiastic

Last words

Thanks to everyone for an awesome experience yet again!

Project source (github) | Project page | Live stream (twitch)

I strongly encourage you to try out the Jam/Post-compo version after you’ve rated, as it’ll be a lot more clear what I was trying to achieve

Hey! This is my first LD entry: Pete Hated Circles

As you can see, it was inspired by art of Piet Mondrian.
Made in 12 hours in ActionScript 3 (you’ll need Flash to play). Has some bugs, but hey..

And now a relevant picture for your pleasure:

when I was a kid this sort of image was like crack. it’s so laughable now. stupid kid.

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--- I - C - E ---- B - R - E - A - K - E - R --- 
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(When I get up I’ll do a post-sleep post-pre-mortem-post-mortem, some of this will just be taking some of the prolix and manic text out of my submission page – yay sleep dep!)

That was a lot of fun! (but it’s not over yet..)  I somehow wrote just shy of 3,000 lines of code in 48hrs.  It’s almost certainly 90% ugly horribleness, and I’m not a fan of LOC as a metric of productivity – but it still feels pretty cool.  (If I printed it all out it would take about 46 A4 pages).

Unfortunately, quantity of code does not equal a finished game.  About halfway in (after some sleep) I lost a lot of time to vascilating between confusion at the code I’d added before passing out (that guy was craaaazy) and feeling generally dumb.  But eventually I got it nailed down and was grateful to discover that, whilst I had lost track of what I was doing – the more responsibly-minded part of me had sent me down a tunnel with no wrong turns.  Not to say I didn’t bump my head a few times, slip over in miscellany or mistaken inanimate objects for long-lost lovers..

 What went wrong / right

that one’s for the morrow I think, sorry – they’re my favourite part too.

Tools Used

• Music made in Renoise
• Sound effects in Renoise + Audacity (and Bfxr at the last minute)
• Graphics in ASEPrite, Blender and the system default editor
• IDE/Editor almost entirely SublimeText2 (unregistered)
  • I feel terrible about that, as I finally see how cool it is
• Coded in Haxe with HaxePunk
• I also (eventually) streamed my progress at Twitch.tv

It may not be much right now, but I think after I’ve checked the rules I may enter the Jam so I can see it closer to a working game.

I’ll be uploading post-compo editions to the entry’s page as I go (in about 8 hours or so)

NOTES

(this is just copied over from the submission page to reduce clutter, tl;dr: rambling…)

circa T+05 mins
began writing submission
circa T+20 mins
I’m having a few unanticipated issues with publishing; the .swf
seems to work fine in the standalone Flash player, but not
even remotely in a browser.
I’ve got 20 minutes or so of submission hour to work it out, but
here’s the swf for the time being (same link under “Windows” unfortunately)
circa T+56 mins
Okay, got it to publish. Seems to have odd framerate issues.
Will use my last 3 mins to see if I can suss it out.

So I didn’t even know I was going to be able to participate in this Ludum Dare because of other things going on, but I knew I’d be travelling all day on Sunday and I happened to get an idea for a very small game on Saturday night.

My entry was created over the course of 8 hours and involved traveling through four states, on three different types of trains and one bus!

I am so glad the theme was one which supported a heavily constrained timeline.

Use the left and right arrow keys to avoid the blocks!

You can play Squeezed Out in your web browser and it has online leaderboards if you’re into competition with other players.

Here is the link to the compo entry page for feedback or voting.

I just finished and submitted my game. I’m pretty happy with how it turned out.
Play the game here.

My long silence is broken! I have finished Red Swarm, my game for hypothetically the minimalist theme. Maybe. Not sure what went wrong there.

(no potato D:)

Go play it!

Combining both the familiar appearance of the common potato with the radical contrast of sheer empty space my work explores the rift that exists in our post agrarian society.

The gestalt appearance of this tuberous crop, familiar to many as a common food can serve as a metaphor for the existential struggle of existing in a post industrial society.

The apparent contradiction of audio poetry references the numinous ‘eyes’ that cover the surface of the food, transposing eyes and ears to provoke introspection.

Please play and rate.

My rogelikelike is coming together somewhat, got a few different enemy types in now. I can’t deny the theme is really helping with that. I haven’t drawn a single walk-cycle and for that I am truly grateful. Also starting to wind my twisted narrative theme into it. SPIRITS.

To do: bit more interface, weapons, couple more enemies, sound/music, bit of polish if time!

Atrakt 4096 alpha – Progress update before the last run (~32h)
Significant additions to the gameplay, i’m getting more and more confident – my stuff is getting playable already. The game needs sounds, level complete screen, AI tweaking, pathfinding and score system. I’ll try to add at least sound and an additional level or two more in the remaining couple of hours. Check the progress here.

Things I achieved on day one:

• Wasting the entire day on broken pathfinding code I realised I wouldn’t really need to use

Things left to do:

• All the rest of the game code
• All the graphics
• All the sound

Panic mode: yes.

Potato inclusion: unlikely. :C

…there’s always plan B if I really can’t finish what I’m working on in time.

So this is my very first Ludum Dare, and I’ve teamed up with PixelBear, who is doing the programming. Of course, once the theme was announced I was a little worried, since I am primarily an artist. After the worried cries of “aghhh squares!!” on Twitter we finally thought about the theme for a bit and decided to go in a different direction. We took the idea of mini-games, and portions of games that are fun in what might be an otherwise tedious environment. We wanted to reduce the experience down to the basic things that satisfy players. So we decided on: stats going up, beating the shit out of things until they explode, and customising your character via attaching severed body parts to yourself.

Hopefully it will actually be fun!

I’ve settled on making some sort of abstract roguelike-like. Here we see the player, an enemy, and the exit to the level below.

Movement and progression through levels is in, and not a lot else. Hopefully a resistance to adding graphic detail thanks to the theme will give me a better chance at making something of the rest of the game. And also the Dreamhack Open has finished now, that’s going to help…

I’ve been quiet so far because I allready had the bad experience in the passed 24th LD to state something at the beginning and then fail…(this may happen again who knows:D) ..anyway this time i think I’ll manage to create something playable in the compo timeframe. That’s because I stepped on a hard ground extending my Attract 4kb engine. It’s true that the 4kb restriction kept my enthusiasm on developping that engine (its hardly acceptable as game) and that’s my main connection to the theme Minimalism – I’m forcing myself to keep the game in the same simple manner, while adding new features and functionalities.. What’s been done so far: a title page and some ui, created a base for the enemy and some specific abilities for the units, like EMP shockwave :p.. I’ll update my progress here.

It’s been over twelve hours and I’ve only now finally managed to get a working A* pathfinding thing in Flixel.

…I do not have high hopes.

You can shoot, and that’s about it. The tutorial text goes away after 20 sec.

I also have all my enemy graphics drawn and stats set out on my notepad. Will make those happen tomorrow