Hmmm – Google Search ‘Robotater’ .  I guess this is appreciation of sorts, though it would be better if the people yanking the source and plugging it on their websites for ad revenue would at least buy the full version of the game creator so the ad didn’t show.

Ganking

If you’re going to rip stuff- at least pay for the full version of the software.

And finally, Erase walkthrough : the second part.

Good game !

Well, some of you may have noticed (but probably didn’t) that in the last days I disappeared.

That’s because I failed at LD 26 and I was ashamed of coming back here after failing.

Why I failed at LD 26? Well:

1. I got sick. Nothing serious but I was definetely not in the mood to make games.
2. Motivation. I started to make my game. Then I saw what other people were making. Then I saw how my game was a crap and lost my motivation.
3. Theme. No, I will not complain about the theme itself, but I was prepared for other kind of theme. My tools were way overkill and non apropriated for the kind of game I was aiming to make. For example: I was using Box2d in a game were nothing moves!

I think 1 was the main reason.

Well, I learned a lot actually. After 5 hours of work (that was hour 12 of LD) I thought I was done. I couldn’t think in nothing I could add or polish. And I think that’s bad, because the game wasn’t “fun”. Well, after 5 hours of work I was already burning in fever too.

Well, wish me better luck next LD.

This. Is. Amazing.

We didn’t expect this. Gods Will Be Watching was our little minimalistic puzzle game for Ludum Dare 26, and we were happy with it, but, seeing it appearing it all over the internet, and receiving more than 10.000 plays per day was totally unexpected.

We are overwhelmed. Took us several days to recover from the 72 hours effort and being able to face all of the blog posts, tweets, mails, gameplays at youtube… we need to thank so many people!!!!

Here’s a selection of GWBW‘s unbelievable (at least for us) journey on the press:

Gods Will Be Watching Is The Saddest Survival Sim (Rock Paper Shotgun)

A Survival Sim That (Mostly) Takes Place On A Single Screen (Kotaku)

Gods Will Be Watching is a bleak, beautiful free survival sim (Eurogamer.net)

In spanish:

Gods Will Be Watching causa sensación (Hobby Consolas)

La supervivencia minimalista de Gods Will Be Watching (El Píxel Ilustre)

Gods Will Be Watching, un simulador de supervivencia minimalista (Eurogamer.es)

Seeing people playing the game on youtube was something magical:

This mashup video with John Carpenter’s The Thing really moved us :’)

Also the game got featured on Game Jolt!!

Will Gods Be Watching?

We hope so! Since the game got a great acceptance both by press and public, and a lot of people told us they want more, we’d love to expand Sgt Burden’s and his crew universe. A lot of ideas came to us during this week on how to develop the game concept further without losing his essence, and we are thrilled with what we have to offer in the future, so stay tunned!

Twitter: @Deconstructeam !

I wanted to wait some time before making this post. Mostly to get some feedback from players and also to take more time to look back at that week-end.

What I prepared

First, this wasn’t my first game jam but it was my first Ludum Dare et my first solo jam. I’m a programmer and I suck at pretty much everything else (including level design). I mostly make HTML5 games and I’m used to build my games from nothing. So I don’t use mapping tools nor I use canvas libraries.

So before the weekend, I wanted to make my own warmup and check out some tools. I took a look at Construct 2 following the two first tutorials. I found it nice and quite useful for prototyping. One reason I tried it was Rytlock’s Critter Rampage made by ArenaNet as a side retro game to one of their in game event in Guild Wars 2. It’s made with Construct 2 so I saw what could be made with it. Though, the free version seems to be way too much limited to make a complex game.

I also took a look at Tiled. I’ve tried this tool before but never used it for games I’ve made because i didn’t like working with XML. This time I asked myself if there was a way to make a JSON exporter until I found out that this feature was there out of the box. That was a good point.

Finally, I brainstormed a bit on what game to do. I wanted to make a stickman fight game, so either a beat’em all, a platformer or a vs fighting game. The main problem was I wanted a stickman engine to render it in real time and not use sprites. A bit too big for a 48h game with my experience. So i thought about a platformer with stickman sprites.

How went the weekend

For the weekend, I wanted to be up for most time. I know sleep is important so I planed good nights of sleep and even cleaned my appartement and prepared better food/drinks than usual. Being in CEST timezone, LD started at 4:00 am. I woke up at 4:30 after a good 9 hours sleep. At first I wasn’t inspired by the theme. But then I remembered my platformer idea and went for a simpler form : take a square. How to move it ? Make it roll. Not quite efficient, circles are better at that. Oh, why the square wouldn’t be jealous of the circles and make it beat them all ? That’s how went my brainstorming phase.

With that idea, I first wanted to see how it would look and if it was any good so I went for a prototype with Construct 2. I made the sprites with GraphicsGale (first time with it) and then imported them. The prototype was ready in 30 minutes and it was looking good. Great occasion to post it already as my entry. As there was a low number of entries, it had a guaranted visibility. Thanks to it I had some early feedback so I knew the idea was good enough.

Then went some long hours on reaching the prototype status with everything coded by myself. Took me most of saturday. I used Tiled to make a test level and see how i could use all the parameters present in the JSON object. That was quick and it took me no time to get the level displayed.

After a not so long night of sleep, sunday brought all the game mechanics implementations, some bug fixing (not much done finally) and all the polishing. The final version was uploaded nearly 30 minutes before the end of the 48 hours. By the way, I didn’t know about the 1 extra hour for submission so I really thought i had to be all set at the end of the 48 hours. Now I know for next Ludum Dare.

And there it is, ^2 is published, with it’s bunch of bugs but I quite enjoy what I’ve made.

The good points

Now, the good parts of the week-end.

First I learned well about tools. It made me want to use more Construct 2 or any other game building tool to prototype games. It’s really efficient with only basic knowledge of the tool. And now i think I’ll mostly use Tiled for mapping when the map type allows it. I might check out other mapping tools but I quite like this one. Also I made my first decent sprites and animations (though it was only b&w and basic shapes) and made me discover the tools to make then.

I had the healthiest weekend for a long time. I’ve been doing much more for me than I usually do so I didn’t have to think about it during the jam. It has also been a great time. I didn’t paticipate over IRC but it was nice to read the discusions there and how everyone was progressing.

As for code learning, I’ve found new ways to implement efficiently animations and game state management. Something profitable for my next games.

Finally, as for the game itself, I want to really finish it by fixing the collision bugs, add sfx and music and add some levels. After that, I even have ideas for at least two sequels. I think I’ll try to allocate myself some time to make them. It might even make me start learning about 3D.

The bad points

But not everything was perfect. Some things I could improve.

First, I should have taken more active pauses. I think I spent something like 35 hours in front of my computer during the LD. I’d say at least for 10 to 15 hour I wasn’t focused on making the game. In these 15 hours, some were dedicated to playing games, reading IRC or else. And I’d say at least 5 hours were dedicated to nothing. Really. Just not knowing what to do. I think in these times I should have just left for a walk or a nap or anything else not taking place in front of the computer.

The second bad point was bug fixing. I postponed it too much. In fact, I made a first rough version which was designed for a specific type of tiles (I didn’t have any roof at first for exemple, so I didn’t bother to make collisions for them). I kept telling myself to fix those bugs but I ended up doing this between midnight and 4:00 am in the night between sunday and monday. I finished by having something but not any better than what I already had so I chose to keep what I had. But now from user feedback, I see a lot of people are facing those bugs and end up in impossible scenarios as then don’t know what to do to get out of the bug. So from now on I’ll add “fix it early” as high priority on my todo-lists.

Last, I’m a bad level designer. One recurrent comment in player feedback is how the level is difficult (starting with the first jump and the first ennemy). I know I tend to be nasty with players when it comes to level design so I’ll try to make it smoother for next games.

And I think that’s all.

To conclude

Overall, it was a great week-end and I’m very happy with what I ended up doing. That’s one more game developped . I’ve been wanting to participate in LD for some editions now, maybe 2 years. But every time I had something else scheduled on the LD week-ends. I’ll try to keep free spots for the next ones.

I’ve also made a walkthrough video of ^2. As many player can’t go through first ennemy or get stuck in the first trap, I thought it could help to see how the level can be achieved or at least how the game looks like.

TL;DR

First LD but not first game jam. I’ve been enjoying this week-end and I’m happy with what I did. I learned to use new tools (Construct 2, Tiled, GraphicsGale) and I now know the benefits of prototyping with a tool making it simple (Construct 2). I was organized enough but should have made more real pauses (not being in front of my computer while take them). I should fix bugs way earlier, postponing it ended up in a buggy game. And don’t be too nasty when level designing.

Entry page : http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=21322

Game link (web) : http://maxgun.fr/ld26/

Source on github : https://github.com/MaxguN/ld26-square

We finished on time!! UNBELIEVABLE!! For the first time on our ludum dare history, here we are, publishing a game 1 hours before the deadline. Also, we are very satisfied with the results, the “Minimalism” condition really helped us to get the project on time. Gods Will Be Watching is a minimalistic survival/adventure game with multiple ways of completing it and failing. We hope you enjoy playing

Click here to play/view my ENTRY

What do “Reich 18″ means? Well, it’s from a minimalist music masterpiece:  “Music for 18 musicians” (1974) by Steve Reich cf. http://youtu.be/zLckHHc25ww  There are only 4 musicians on the game screen because the screen is small; … I’m wondering if controlling 18 buttons/musicians  could be possible! So you have to press the right key (X,C,V or B) when the range of notes is full; 5 bonus points if the maestro is vertically above.

It’s not the greatest gameplay (it’s pretty boring after 1minute…) but I think the feeling is similar to the old 1980s game & watch.

Hi there again!

Today we finished the assets and the most important parts of gameplay implementation, there’s one little thing that I liked to make, but ah well, things weren’t working out very nice, and since I managed to do the main thing that I wanted to implement, I think that’s ok for now…

So, first things first!

We have a logo! YEAH!

Logo of the RED game

I really liked this logo, I think we managed to get something quite stylish, game related and minimalist, this one was made by me with the help of Hexels! An awesome software for drawing stuff with hexels, many thanks to @saint11 from miniboss for showing me this jewel!
Btw, for those who didn’t read the past WIP, RED stands for Red Eyes in the Dark!

About that thing that I managed to implement, here’s a look at it

Predictive movement

Already know what it was?
Yup, I implemented a little system to make the AI predict the players movement before it called up the pathfinding algorithm, because it wasn’t very useful before, it was almost impossible for it to catch the player when it was just following its current position, so, to make the experience meaningful this was a must do!
In the case above, I just moved the player to the left and the AI aimed correctly according to the player’s linear velocity, but it also takes angular velocity into account when needed!

Next up are more aesthetic than functional things we made today, the first one we did was actually having the idea to take inspiration in minimalism quotes to inspire the level design of the stages, which we plan to make ten at most, maybe 9 and a final boss, maybe…

Da flavour

We really liked this font, for some reason it creates a dark atmosphere around it, we liked the idea of it being kind of typewritten, it’s like the kid (read the past WIP for story stuff) was making annotations of its experiences, really awesome!
We also finished the final UI of the gameplay scenarios, here it is

RED’s UI

It will be possible to have more than one enemy at the same time, and they may have different sizes and speeds, it will be a really fun game to play and the challenge level is quite awesome!
The three blue bars up top are the battery level of you flashlight, they will go down fast, so you have to make it past the creatures fast, or else the lights go up and then the red eyes creatures will be unstoppable.
The little beam of light on the top right corner is the exit, the player’s objective is to get to it! I think we will have to make it more viewable, I think it is quite dark as it is now, more stuff for the last day!

For the last day we will be finally getting the sound stuff and effectively design the levels and stuff, I wish we had done a bit more today, but the event slowed us down a bit, as our workplace was used for the speedpaint session of our artist, Joao, that made this quite impressive piece there

SpeedPaint made by the artist of the RED game

Still unfinished as he told me to say here!

And here are we again, at our little booth, this time the whole crew getting in the frame!

RED game devs

From right to left: Joao, Pablo, Tiago (me =D)

Thanks a lot for your attention! Final updates and game ready tomorrow! Have a good Ludum Dare!

It was an awesome weekend. Didn’t have the full 48 hours but I was able to finish my super minimalist game. Click here play it and vote please )

My entry is complete! Minimally.

Match Set Game

Check it out!

This is my second finished Ludum Dare game and it went way better than the last one Here is the link: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=6391

Done! dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/25835344/PPe… #ld48 #html5 #game #tamagotchi

— ede_ (@ede_) April 28, 2013

PPet: 90% done. #LD48 vine.co/v/bxvBHM9g0TZ

— ede_ (@ede_) April 28, 2013

The basic stuff is done, its playable and finally starts to feel like a game Now I’m going to work more on the game rules and add music and sounds.

I’m making so much progress it’s CRAZY.

More on my blog, nothing playable yet.

http://bastiandantilus.com/2013/04/msg/

Hi there,

This is the first Ludum Dare that me and my team are participating, it’s been quite a ride, literally, we started the day traveling to another city in another state where we would be present at a games and anime event, so, obviously, we started thinking in the idea of the game in the middle of the road! YAY!

As we’ve made lots of platformers in the pasts GGJ, we were looking for to make some top-down-ish game, soooo…

Our game will be called RED, which stands for Red Eyes in the Dark! (and we thought about it right before lunch, minimalism in the title, way to go!)

It is a game about a kid who is in his house alone and there’s a power outage in it, leaving him in the dark and only with a flashlight to guide his way to the outdoor moonlight.
The thing is, when he is in the dark, he starts to see glowing red eyes coming at him! OH NO!
However, when he aims at them with his flashlight, he is able to slow them down, giving him time to avoid them and make it safe to the light.

As if there wasn’t trouble enough already, it turned out that his batteries are drying out and his has little time to reach the light before they run out.

I am doing the game design and programming, Joao is making the assets and Pablo is having its way with the level designs.

We have some prototypes that somewhat work already, here are some pics of them:

RED ScreenShot

In this first screen we see the player moving and the red eye creature following him, the flashlight is not hitting the creature, so it is at full speed!

RED ScreenShot

In this second one you can see that the creature is illuminated by the flashlight, so its eyes close and it gets slower.

This jam is being quite the ride so far, we plan to get more assets done and stuff before tomorrow, where we will be in the event again and things get a little bit noisy there (btw, oh yeah, we are making the game while in the event, live! No stream though, what a shame… but here is a pic of us there, with the Ben Powell keynote in the background, so people will know what the hell we are doing there).

Our booth at Saga

Thanks for reading until here! More updates tomorrow! Have a good Ludum Dare!

Not sure if it’s going to be something.
I did not prepare at all compared to the previous contests.
I’ll copy one of the following repositories as basecode:

Html5, Javascript: github-repo
C SDL: github-repo
Rust SDL or OpenGLES: github-repo

Obviously I will throw away the existing games and only use the technology utils part of the code.

If I feel like it I might use SFML and C++ without any basecode except from my eternally unstable monster of a serialization library.

Other Tools like always:
Gfx: gimp, inkscape
Editor: gedit or Eclipse (might try emacs for Rust)
Sfx: that flash tool everybody uses, autotracker.py
Timelapse: neosam’s scripts, his ld-profile

Set sail for fail!

This is… LD #7 for me, I think. I’ll likely be doing it with Jonnopon and a co-worker whom I managed to convert to the cause, but we’ll see.

Syntactic Sugar Studio (my studio) has been pretty busy with a major commission, so this weekend may end up being too busy for us. Again, we’ll see, but we’re planning on doing our best!

Tools:

• WebStorm
• Notepad++
• NodeJS
• Paint.NET
• FL Studio 10
• Bfxr

Languages:

• HTML/HTML5
• JavaScript
• SASS
• XML
• JSON

That’s right, HTML5 devs up in here! Good luck to you all!

P.S.

Motherload clone, anyone? ;D

Hi guys! This will be my first real Ludum Dare, because I couldn’t participate in the previous one.

These are my tools:

Code: Game Maker Studio with the HTML5 module

I’m still polishing my javascript abilities so I’ll use Game Maker to be able to focus a lot more in the design and gameplay of the game

Art: Inkscape or Adobe Illustrator

I’m NOT good with pixel art but I can make some decent simple art with vectors. FAKE it till you make it!

Music: If I have time I’ll make some sounds and music with Reaper, if not, I’ll use some from opengameart.

I love you all!

Hello, Ludumaries!

Those of you who use GameMaker Studio may be interested in a new book that was just published today by Packt Publishing. I provided technical review for the manuscript of HTML5 Game Development with GameMaker, and it will be useful for the beginner and intermediate GameMaker developer.

Much of the book is applicable for general GameMaker development, not specific to the HTML5 build target.  If you pick up a copy, please drop me a note and let me know what you thought.  While I’m not the author, I’m still interested in your feedback.