Ludum Dare 22 Post Mortem
December 2011 – Game: Fernands War.

Pre-compo prep.
Last year I found out about the Ludum dare competition and was really interested in doing something, unfortunately I didn’t have the weekend totally free to commit to making any real attempt, but I managed to crank out a tiny little endless runner in a couple of hours and catch some of the live recordings (Notch’s one mainly). It was interesting to see the fruits of every-one’s labours, and the community spirit here is really inspiring.
So as I hadn’t managed to make a decent attempt last time, I had planned to jump in properly for LD22. In preparation I had made all the necessary requests for that 48 hour period to be free and started thinking about the tools I would use to make the game.

Physmo is a 2 man team, I do the art and design and @physmotone is the chap with the coding skillz. We had talked a bit about entering the jam as a team but were struggling to both get the time off we needed so I planned to enter solo. This meant coding the game myself; I am a programmer but I’m certainly no game programmer so I realised this would be tough. I’m sure Tony would be shocked by all the fundamental coding mistakes I made while making my entry, stuff he has the experience now to avoid, but I learned a lot doing this, especially about the architecture of making a game, the game states, resource management etc – all that tricky stuff we can take for granted sometimes.

In the week before the theme was announced, I decided I would choose Java as the language, and Slick2D as the graphics library for drawing the sprites (It also does a great job of loading graphics, sound and level data.) I’m not a java programmer but it seemed close enough to C++ to be easy to pick up, but mainly I wanted something that would be multi platform with the vague possibility of embedding in a web page (this didn’t happen). I didn’t know what kind of game I’d be making but assumed it might need level data, and I had heard of a map editor that was supported by Slick2D called Tiled, so I downloaded that and made sure I knew the basics of how it worked. In the prep week I didn’t find as much time as I would have liked to do actual prep but I did get a few hours to find some java tutorials and create a small test application that demonstrated loading and displaying sprites, loading and playing sounds and reading a Tiled level. I didn’t want to waste much of the 48 hours being stuck on some trivial problem like not being able to draw a font to the screen so I investigated the font libraries too (Angel code fonts I think it was). I had the small test app running, the final thing on my list of prep was to actually package the program to be runnable on other computers.
This was a couple of days before the announcement and I could not for the life of me package this thing properly. Eclipse is the IDE I was using and it’s pretty complicated if you don’t know it, and I had no idea about how to create Jar packages (which is what I needed to make the thing runnable). I tried every combination of including the platform specific .dll files, the library .jars for Slick2D and LWJGL, and did a lot of googling for the problem. Fortunately (?) many novices seem to have a problem with this step, and in the end I reluctantly tried using another app to package all of the files up into a fat jar, which worked. i say reluctantly because even though it worked in the end, I still don’t have a good understanding why it didn’t work and why it does now, but hey, it works! This was a real problem just before the compo started though. If I couldn’t find out how to package the game, there would be no point in working on a game. I would heartily recommend anyone taking part in a time limiting game creation competition to build a full app end-to-end before they take part.

The graphic and audio tools were to be Photoshop, SFXR (of course) for sound effects and Audacity in case I needed any sound effect editing. In the end I did install audacity in the final hour to tweak the ship thruster sound effect but that’s all.

Announcement
I’m in the UK, so the announcement came at 2am our time. The plan was to stay up for the announcement, have a think about it and then get some sleep.
The theme is announced. “Alone”. I stare at the screen for a few minutes. My first thought is, “Well at least I won’t have to code any enemy AI”.
At Physmo we have a folder full of crazy game Ideas and prototypes, but we have never really considered a thrust style game. I used to like thrust style games though, and I though it would be within my skill range to make a good attempt at one. Quite soon after the announcement I had come up with some ideas for a decent plot – I wanted to have some narrative in the game that would be explained as you play and I really wanted to have a good twist in there too. I had my general story Idea and style of game I wanted, I could now sleep (and secretly hope to come up with good ideas in my dreams).

Oh, this post mortem is going to be a total spoiler for the game, so please play it first if you intend to… I’ll give you a couple of minutes, just watch out for the spinning sawblades, the collision on them is a bit saucy.

For the plot of the game, I wanted the player to have unwittingly done something really terrible. This idea made it into the final game but was very scaled back. The initial idea was that you would be flying a ship around a room with some kind of reactor in the middle, there would be a cage full of energy capsules milling around that you would have to pick up and drop into the reactor. At some point you would realise that this is not the true reality of the situation, the reactor is actually a horrible mind controlling alien, the energy capsules are really other human members of your crew and the alien has tricked you into feeding your crew to it.
This was the plan until the end of day one, I didn’t think I would have time to code the mechanics for all this, the switching level graphics, picking up and dropping the crew etc, so at the start of day 2 I decided to change it slightly so that you were a security guard of a mining colony, who was going mad. It seems like at first you are being attacked by aliens, but as you progress through the game you can read log files that gradually explain that the aliens are really just the colonists, and by the end of the game you will be alone, having killed them all. It’s nice to end on a cheery, up-beat note.

It was time to start programming. But first I went to my trusty Photoshop and drew some sprites: A yellow ship, some bullets, some white splodges to use as particles and a simple tiling foreground and background tile sprite. The spaceship made it into the final cut of the game with no modifications as I quite liked it. NOW it was time to start programming! First I needed some classes to represent the ship, bullets and enemies. That’s what the game needed, they are an integral part of the game. You can’t have a game without them. That’s why, like an idiot, I spent the first couple of hours making some pretty particle effects.
Ok, Basic particle engine created, I now really HAD to start creating the game objects. I found a nice tutorial about creating game entities, and then creating generic behaviours that could be inserted into them, this seemed like a cool Idea and one I had never tried before so I gave it a shot (I’ll try to link to these tutorials and things at the end of the post). After stealing the code to create the framework of the entities, behaviours and renderers, I derived my own object classes for them, starting with the players ship movement code. This was easy as I had used some basic maths like this a lot in some processing toys I made a while ago. It’s useful to know so I’ll write it out here:
Horizontal Thrust = sin(ship angle of rotation) * force;
Vertical Thrust = cos(ship angle of rotation) * force;
So everytime the thrust button is pressed, I add these values onto the ships velocity on the x and y axis. Every time through the game loop, I add the velocity vector to the ships position, and that moves the ship. And at the same time I dampen the ship’s velocity by multiplying it by a number slightly less than 1.0 (0.98 or something). That reduces the ships motion over time and eventually makes it stop in a pleasing way.

Ok, next big problem. In my processing (processing is a simple java-like programming language) experience, the main loop is locked to a certain frame rate, but in the Slick2D framework it isn’t. This means the loop runs as fast as it possible can – maybe hundreds of times a second – but it will vary from computer to computer and will vary depending on how much is being drawn on the screen too. To handle this, the update loops are passed in a variable that represents the number of clock ticks that occurred since the last update, and using this I could feed it into all the motion equations. Essentially, every calculation that results in something moving on screen needs to be scaled down by the number of clock ticks, so that the movement is nice and constant. I forgot to do this to the scrolling routine though so sometimes the scrolling can be a bit slow if your machine is struggling. That’s a bug but would be easy to fix.

I now had a ship swishing around the screen nicely, with lovely particles firing out of it’s bum (and me making “woosh” sounds) so I flew it around the screen for half an hour thinking how awesome I was to have achieved such a thing. Next I needed some background to be drawn. The Slick2D libraries can load and display level data from Tiled map files, although they couldn’t handle (as far as I could tell) drawing level sprites scaled up, but it was quite easy to parse through the loaded level file, find what tile is at what location and draw it scaled up myself. I got this running surprisingly quickly (well it wasn’t very complicated) and then added some scrolling offset code, and voila! I had a ship flying around a scrolling level. Flying right through the walls though. Next step was to detect collision on the walls, so I wrote a routine that given a point in the game world, would find the foreground level sprite, and check if the pixel was filled or not. It worked and that is the basis of all the collision in the game. To collide the ship off walls, I check around 10 points in a circle around the ship to see if they are touching a solid part of the background. If they are, i calculate the vector from that point back to the centre of the ship and add that to the ships velocity, I was amazed that this works but it resulted in some pretty solid feeling collision (I was worried that the collision would be awful in this game) so maybe this is what real collision is based on.
I created some simple behaviours for the player bullets that I reused for enemy bullets (The entity system worked well here) then I added some basic enemy types. I regret not having the time to make the enemies do more, but in the end I just had static enemies that varied in the speed that they fired bullets at you and the number of shots it would take to kill them.
I added a lot to the game in the last half day, as the main mechanics were there. Different sprites for the enemies, more particle effects and the log file objects that can be picked up. Some trivial looking things took more time than expected, for instance displaying the log file text on screen and making the rest of the game pause while it was displayed. At this point I realised I would have to start thinking about game states, so I changed the main class to be a state based game state using the Slick2D libraries and created another state for the main menu screen, then worked on getting this to transition back and forward and make sure that the player could die and the game would switch back to the main menu. This is something I wish I’d thought about a lot more at the start as game states are a tricky thing to to if you aren’t used to it.

Panic was setting in in the last few hours of the 48, there was a lot to be tidied up. The collision between bullets, player ship and enemies was quite off so I modified the renderers to display the collision box and that helped me track down and fix the issues there. One big problem that I regret not fixing is that the hit-boxes for the circular saw blades is a square, not a circle and this makes for some really unfair deaths in the game. I realised I had no time left to fix this so I modified the level to move the saws and give the player more room to move around them, still it’s disappointing to get unfairly killed by them.

The game was looking quite finished, all the log files were placed and the end could be reached, but it was quite hard, so at the last minute I made the players health slowly regenerate over time. In the last half hour I feverishly added a lot of minor details: The player health bar, more particle effects for killing enemies, more sound effects and a dodgy system for playing the ships thrust sound. Panicking further, I played through the game one more time and hit the build button to build the final Jar file, and opened slick jar (i think) to package it up into a runnable jar file. With minutes to spare I clicked the Jar file and it seemed to work, phew! Opened my web browser, and went to www.ludumdare.com …… wait a … WTF .. oh MAN! Why is the site not working! Through lack of sleep and burnout I thought all was lost, I refreshed the site and still nothing. Thinking that all was lost, I gingerly climbed onto the window ledge, and, oh wait, the site loaded! Wheee! Well, at least, I saw a message from the site saying they would accept entries for an hour or two after the closing time. I eventually uploaded the game and could relax, but those last few minutes leading up to the deadline were some tense minutes let me tell you.

In closing this rather rambling post, I did enjoy the experience. I think I made a decent, complete game that I hope you enjoy playing – it’s quite short. I’ve learned a lot about what should be prioritised next time, and I feel like I was part of something big and crazy

Please try it, it’s called “Fernands War” http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=preview&uid=5349

We have a full game called Mos Speedrun too, for iPhone and Mac/Pc, you might like it.

Thanks!

Nick

@physmo

http://www.physmo.com

Due to the fantastic packaging advice post now stickied to the page, I created a web applet wrapper for my game so that it could be played in browser, for those who don’t want downloads cluttering up their desktop.

I tested it in Chrome and in Firefox, please let me know if another browser is having trouble.

It is a little buggy because it is just a wrapper and is still trying to process the executable code, had I had this in mind from the start I could have segmented it better.  Something to keep in mind for the next one.

“Lost in the Woods” entry page.

I finished my first complete game ever in this Ludum Dare!

Screenshot dump!

I’m afraid I had more fun developing it than anybody will get by playing it (it’s sad but realistic). If you to give it a try I’ll leave some links:

• Play/Rate the game here (link).
• Game source code in Mercurial repository (link).
• Development blog in Posterous (link) (I didn’t want to saturate Ludum Dare’s blog posting there, but now I realize that was a mistake).
• Timelapse of the entire process (link).
• Some Link I found on Internet (this pun cost me the 10 game-developer followers I had in Twitter)
  

Just in case anyone makes a kitten compilation of LD 22 (wink, wink) I leave mine here to make free use of it (it is really ugly and small though).

If you were trying to play my game in the past few days and were met with “Could not find main class alonegame.AloneGame”, please upgrade Java to version 7.

Everybody loves a good timelapse, so here’s the timelapse (24x) of my entry in LD22 H.O.P.E

The source and level files are included, so feel free to hack up some more inventive levels

This was my first entry, but definitely not my last! Good luck everyone!

I managed to complete the Ludum Dare! Amazing!

Maze Explorers!

I didn´t quite know what to expect when I decided to join this LD, two weeks ago. I had never made a game from start to finish. But the time limit pressure, and watching other people do the same thing as me gave me a lot of motivation.

Also, I learned a LOT. In my job I have to make java programs to solve optimization problems, and they never involve things such as states, interfaces, resource management, etc. If nothing else, Ludum dare was worth it just for the learning experience alone.

That said, I´m actually rather proud of the game I´ve submitted. Granted, there are a lot of planned things that are missing (just note the huge blank space in the bottom of the playing area). But it went much much farther that I would have guessed. It has half-decent old school graphics! It is multi-platform! It has levels! And I can even add more levels easily in the future.

So, to celebrate, here is the obligatory time lapse. Sorry for the lack of sound!

A shout to MME, who did the dare in parallel with me. We shared a lot of ideas, questions and lols in these 48 hours.

And make sure you find the secret kitten in the game!

Ok, I have managed to complete the Kitten Challenge! Good luck trying to find it in my game :3. It is there, I promise! Dont give up!

Now three more hours before submitting… I wish I could have finished the transitions, but I think that will not happen this time. I will probably spend this time improving the character sprites and maybe adding a few extra levels.

Nyan! Nyan!

So I´m trying to pretty up my game, but I can´t get Slick2D to render fronts using the UnicodeFont class. (So I can´t use some of the fancier functions from that class)

using the Graphics Class, I manage to:

g.Drawstring(¨foo¨,x,y);

But when I do:

UnicodeFont font = new Unicodefont(new Font(fontname, Font.Plain,20);
font.draw(x,y,¨foo);

Nothing happens.

I have tried to add a font effect to UnicodeFont, but it is still not displaying

Halp, please?

EDIT: Thanks for all the help! It turns out that I have to font.loadGlyphs() at every render cycle to get my font to display.

After a short night of sleep, time to write some levels to my game. I´m a little afraid that I may have made the game too hard, and that only luck will carry you through without dying at least once.

But if I think again, not that this is a bad thing, is it?

Or maybe it is the day two blues of not believing in your own creation…

Well, time for coffee and graph paper.

My game after 24hrs!

After 24hs, I managed to mostly complete my game engine. There are a few features missing, but I got all the mechanisms that I need to make my game:

• Controls are all in.
• Victory and Defeat conditions are in.
• Level Selection and Unlocking are in.
• Reading levels from text files is in.
• Placeholder graphics and animations are in.

This means that tomorrow I can mostly concentrate on adding levels to make the game fun/challenging, and adding bells and whistles like images and sounds. I feel hopeful that, for someone who has never made a video game before, I will not embarrass myself

My code, on the other had, is a complete mess. Hardcoded stuff all around, hacks to make the player and the world talk to each other. Very few comments. Objects and world tiles mashed together. Ugh Ugh. I must say that these first 24hrs of LD were great for me to learn some lessons in programming.

Anyway, here is the game. There is no content, but you can get a feel of how it works. You are an explorer, who has to find your way out of mazes. You can do it by yourself, or help people stuck in the maze. Some of them will give you powers, but they will also get in your way, and eat your food. Sometimes it is better to go alone…

Maze Explorers!

PS: If anyone could give me some hints of what exactly I should put in my manifest to make java skip all (or some) of those nasty warnings, I would be very very happy

So i decided to enter this LD – finishing is another matter though since i was never good with deadlines . But there is always the Jam i suppose…

Anyway!

I decided to use the code i wrote these days for viewing/walking around maps made with my 3d world editor in Java and LWJGL. So, as advised by the sages in #ludumdare, i declare here that i will use this codebase. I’m not sure what i’m supposed to do about the 3d world editor, so although i got told that its ok i decided to make an emergency release since the latest one doesn’t include the lightmapper or entity support. Unfortunately i don’t have a Windows or Linux box available at the moment so i can only provide Mac OS X binaries. In any case, in the file below you’ll find my “ld22-devkit”:

http://runtimelegend.com/tools/world/extra/ld22-devkit.zip (4MB)

The devkit contains:

• Runtime World 1.0 alpha 2.99, special ld22 build (this is a full build, including the docs, example textures, world files, etc)
• Runtime World Walker for Java/LWJGL (which is now mutated beyond a simple walker and is a -awful- codebase for making 3D games with RTW files)
• Example code in RWW (Walker.java) for picking up coins and stuff.
• Prelightmapped rtw file, model, etc for the code above
• LWJGL binaries for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X (so that the example can be tried right out of the box) and scripts to launch the “game” from Windows, Linux or Mac OS X with proper parameters, etc

Even if you don’t use my codebase you might find the last one useful if you plan to distribute your LWJGL game and have no idea how to do that . If you just want to try the example/test “game”, you can find it here (this is what i’m going to use as a base anyway):

http://runtimelegend.com/tools/world/extra/ld22-jwalker.zip (1.8MB)

And you can watch a video of it here. If you use Runtime World you’ll probably want to use your own entities – for these, modify the entities.lil file from the scripts subfolder. The format is register-user-entity <name> <group> <size> (size can be actually two or three arguments for width/depth and height or width, height, depth).

My personal set of tools, etc is:

• OS: Mac OS X Lion (iMac)
• Language: Java
• Libraries: LWJGL, own codebase (mentioned above)
• IDE: Eclipse (with some MacVim for non-Java editing)
• Graphics: Pixelmator, Blender, Runtime World (mentioned above)
• Sound: ….eh, what ?
• Video Capture: custom BASH script to make screen captures
• Video Tools: ffmpeg, iMovie
• Other Stuff: Colloquy for IRC, Cyberduck for FTP, Slayradio for background noise

Just releasing a quick library I plan to use in Ludum Dare, consisting of a maze generator and an implementation of A* in java.

https://github.com/xSmallDeadGuyx/SimpleAStar

Hey!

Found out about this new Ludum Dare yesterday and for some reason thought it would be a good idea. Now I’m beginning to realise how badly prepared I am, but what’s the worst that can happen?

Language: Java
Framework: LibGDX
I’ll worry about everything else if/when I get there.

Good luck everyone.

So I’m entering Ludum Dare 22. So’s my brother and friend. The plan is to live stream our desktops (or the primary screen of them at least) , take a photo every 5 seconds for a time lapse, and record the information we place on out whiteboards. And here’s where I’m insane, I’m coding in a language I only decided to start learning today: Java. In about half an hour I set up a development environment, scripts to compile and run and a base program to do my logic loop (which I won’t be using come this weekend).
My set up is as follows:

• Intel Core i7 950
• 10GB DDR3 RAM
• 2 x 22″ 1080p LED Monitors
• 1 x 19″ 1440×900 LCD Screen in Portrait.
• Windows 7 Ultimate x64

And here’s a pretty picture of it all.

Languages:

• Java (Main Client)
• PHP (High Scores or anything web based I want to implement)
• Game Maker (Fall back if Java ends up being insanely hard)

Programs:

• Paint.Net (Pixel Art and Touch Ups)
• Fireworks/Photoshop (Vectorising Drawn Art)
• Notepad ++ (Programming)
• Open Office (Documentation)
• Game Maker (Fall Back Programming)
• VirtuaWin (Desktop Management, 3 Screens isn’t enough)
• pixie (Colour Selection)

Plan is to use mainly black and white, and maybe a red or two for colours.  I’m going to be drawing and scanning my menu systems in, and then vectorising them. As for game ideas, I have a few, some that I won’t be able to do easily due to the lack of knowledge of Java, and some that would look epic and take virtually no time. Worst comes to worst I’ll make a text based adventure game and make a single nice piece of art for it.

~Mitch

I will not be making a 3D game this time around. I simply don’t have the time to learn the basics while doing the compo, so I’ll just be making another 2D game. By basics, I mean all the 3D math and stuff needed.

That doesn’t necessarily mean I won’t use jMonkeyEngine for 2D though. Its integration with external libraries on the scene graph is phenomenal and I’d like to find a way to utilize, say, Bullet nodes/controllers in a 2D environment. Plus, I find wrangling with LibGDX to be un-fun and rewriting boilerplate code for Slick again is not in my sights. I spent way too much time on simple crap like entity management on the Discovery game from LD19.

I’m guessing using jMonkeyEngine for 2D stuff the hacky way would be switching the camera to Orthographic view and just using objects with lots of volume in the Z axis, since I am terrible with physics.

In addition, there are a few new tools I may use:

• Tile Studio
• The Games Factory/Multimedia Fusion (total last resort, if I’m just not feeling up to speed)
• PXTone definitely, though I mentioned FamiTracker earlier I absolutely loath tracker interfaces and PXTone is like a really, really simple FL Studio to me.

There was some talk between my friends and I about doing the Jam instead, but one of them may be having travel conflicts that’ll prevent them from participating. Oh well. Dare it is.

I’m in, checklist:

Take saturday off work: [ CHECK ]
Warmup with theme SURGURY: [ MOVED ] //have planned for this week
Foods & drinks: [ CHECK ]
Motivation: [ CHECK ]
Health status: current: [ OK ] | predicted: [ UNCLEAR ]

Weapons:
Java, Gimp, Audacity & Microphone

This is my second LD, but I hope to finish it this time (last time I failed because of bad planning and code breaking )

I’m down for some Ludum dare fun times.  This will be my first attempt and hopefully my first success.  I will be using java and be voting for evolution.  I think it is time.

My choices:

• unfinished visual novel engine (android) – I believe I misplaced the source
• unfinished bullet hell engine (android) – Needs everything except the actual bullet engine
• LD21 entry: Urth - Needs about 2 tons of polish
• MiniLD29 entry: Redeye - Needs about 20 tons of polish
• Something completely new – no

Urth had a little head start on the android market, so I’ve fixed it by strapping beta to the end. How does that fix it you ask? Well it doesn’t really fix it actually, but I’m October challenging with the non-beta (gamma? ), which I intend to have for non-mobile platforms as well.

I am currently teaching myself java coding, (believe it or not I’m in Elementary School) so I would be pleased to know any tips. In fact, I recently commented on Notch’s PoC about using one image for multiple GUI’s. That would be an answer I really want.

After finishing my game I noticed that I had plenty of spare hours left so I decided to add a scoreboard. Unfortunately that meant communicating with a web server, which to my knowledge meant I had to sign the thing.

Signing applets involves some console work, but most importantly it involves an annoying popup asking people to let the thing run. In my mind that’s nearly as bad as a installer and I didn’t want anything of the sort, besides I tried that on a previous project (which come to think of it was also a 48 hour game) and that resulted in people not playing it a all.

From some android work I’ve done I remembered I can call links to pages even if the app has no permissions(the browser handles the links), and I wasn’t too surprised when I found out that an unsigned applet can do the same.

Basically what I did was call

link(“http://example.com/scores.php?name=Andrew&score=asdfg”);

(processing function, no Idea if it’s the same in reglar java) where ‘asdfg’ was an encrypted version of the score.  This coupled with making each score unique prevented floods on the scoreboard.

The function spawns a popup window, and I’ve noticed that even if chrome blocks it, it still preloads the score page causing the score to go through. This may or may not be a security issue.

If anyone knows a better, or just different way to have an applet share its internal data I’d love to hear it.

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