I have never participated in a Mini LD and wanted to give it a try, besides the theme seemed quite intriguing. Instead of the whole weekend, I have dedicated just around 6 hours to this Mini LD. I have completed all three of my personal goals: make a game in haXe, create sound effects from recordings and complete the prototype.

The game has 4 stages and is controlled just by the SPACEBAR.
I have thoroughly enjoyed making monster sounds

Looking forward for other entries!

I really should stop coming onto the site to have a quick look… Everyone else’s games look awesome, while mine is looking… not so awesome…
Anyway, first solo Ludum Dare of any kind. I’m normally just the visuals guy in the Jams, so I’m sticking to Game Maker for the actually game-y code-y stuff. I know a bit, and I’m hoping it’ll be enough to pull some sort of a game together.

Here’s a screenshot, about 16 hours in…

A bit late announcement, but I am in. I am using Haxe, GIMP, Audacity and Flixel.

Here’s a simple one-button game I have got so far:

Two stages now, another two might come tomorrow.

It was a very fun and productive day!

Play The Game Here! (May take some time to load)

It’s  a game.

You, platforms, someone, bats and lives!

So good morning everyone!

I just started to work on my game 2 hours ago.

I got the main idea of the game.

I really need some graphics…

Thanks all who voted and competed along with me! It was fun and exciting to finally join Ludum Dare, and I can’t wait to join again for the 10 year anniversary!

Once again, I’m going to honest (and critical) and try to make this mega-post interesting!

PLAY THE GAME HERE

My goals for Ludum Dare 22

• Before the competition started, I had some goals in mind that I wanted to make.

1. I wanted to make sure “Fun” was the best category, so that people could replay the game, and have a good time playing.
2. I wanted the gameplay to be smooth and the animations smoother.
3. I wanted to beat Notch in at least one category (knowing how hard that would be).

What software I used

• Unity 3d Game Engine
• Blender 3D Modeling Software
• Pixlr Photo Editor
• Cfxr Sound Generator
• Unitron Script Editor
• Garageband Music Creator
• Text Edit Text Editor

How I made the game

• I quickly had come up with an idea for each of the most likely themes before LD22 started. My theme for “Alone” was a game where you would be sometimes alone, and then all of a sudden, you would be crowded with people.
• After the theme was announced, I decided that the game would be first person (the easiest of all the persons) and that you would have to fight your way through endless hordes of cubes (the easiest of default shapes). You could only see the cubes when your glasses were on, but if you weren’t in a shaded zone when your glasses were on, you’d start burning. This was a way to keep the player moving, and a way to make them constantly nervous.
• I worked on the player controls and LockCursor, etc. But the gameplay does not complete a game. I needed an enemy. One that would appear only if your glasses were on.
• I whipped up a cube model and texture and soon came up with this:

• Whoo Hoo! Now I have a cube!
• Next I worked on making the cube look at the player, and then having it disappear when the players “glasses” (A semi-transparent plane) were off.
• By now my Unity Scene looked like this:

• Soon I got Health implemented, and then it started to look like a Test level.
• I kept at it, knowing it would soon look like a game.
• The cube could soon move towards the player, and deal damage at close range.
• The first “Shaded Zone” was created, (using a Trigger) and the player would not take damage while inside it.
• I worked on making the zone a little prettier, and expanding the floor plane. I added a skybox, and changed the ambient light to near black.

• All along I had been slightly working on a music track, but now I decided I needed to finish it.

• The level was extended, the cube had a spawn code and could replicate itself, and the textures for walls and the floor was created in Pixlr.
• I created a variety of sound effects in CFXR like jumping and enemy death noises (my favorite).
• I worked on making an in-game tutorial, by timing when the music starts with the same time that it tells you that there is no one there.
• The menu was easy, all I had to do was come up with a name and choose the font, and soon my game looked legit. (Sorry for the lack of photos here)
• I asked my friend if he could play a test version on his computer (a windows) and I’m glad he did. The font I chose was bugging out on his computer, so I changed it to something else, and it worked fine.
• Now I knew my game was compatible on Windows AND Mac

• I created another music track for the menu, a helicopter to go to as the goal, and a stats screen so you could try to beat your own score.

Rating Other People’s Work

• I specifically rated the games that had the fewest ratings and tried to give most of them a fair, solid score.
• Mostly I gave 3.0s when I thought something was average.
• For a few people that put little effort into it, I had to give some 1.0s.
• I was sad that Notch had not really implemented the theme and pretty much made a different version of Minecraft. (Most likely this was just because he wanted to, or he felt like it.)

How people rated my game

• I can thank my friends, family, and Ludum Dare community for playing the game and enjoying it, especially DontBeNoobish‘s Gameplay Footage:

• I was proud with how my game turned out compared to most of the other entries.
• People mostly liked the audio and innovation of the game, but there were a few things I could’ve made better (More enemies, options, etc)

The Results!

• Coolness – 52% Bronze medal | At first I thought that the bronze medal meant third place, but then I realized Coolness didn’t have the same rating system. Oh well, it was still good to see that my playing of all those low effort games went to good use!
• # 40 Community – 3.55 | Wow! Community? I didn’t realize I was that popular! I guess this rating makes sense because of all the excited posts I made with links to this game. I did a LOT outside of the game (Time-lapse, post mortem, gameplay video, tips)
• # 108 Innovation – 3.20 | Good, people liked my idea of the sunglasses and whatnot!
• # 113 Mood – 3.20 | I think the music accomplished the overall feel of the game.
• # 118 Audio – 3.00 | Once again, the music, but also the enemy death noises made this count.
• # 113 Theme – 3.33 | Well, you are sometimes alone…
• # 202 Humor – 2.29 | I wasn’t even going for this (other than the ReadMe) so I have no clue how it ended up higher than overall.
• # 323 Graphics – 2.67 | Although mine was one of the few 3D first person games, I guess people didn’t really like the low effort GUI and enemy textures.
• # 435 Overall – 2.50 | Oh no! Overall score seemed like an important one…
• # 487 Fun – 2.06 | Really? This was the category I was focusing on, but yet it got a 2.06! Yes, I guess I did better than almost half of everyone else, and I’m not complaining, but this ended up at the bottom of the list, when I had worked for it to be the top.

Comparison To Notch

• My goal was to beat Notch in at least one category, and it turns out that was too easy:

• I ended up beating Notch in 7 different categories!
• A comment on the community rating: Last LD, Notch won third place (if I recall correctly) in the community category, but now he received a #49! And I received a #40! So after all the years Notch has spent on Ludum Dare and Minecraft, and the entire fan-base he collected from the Top Computer Game Of 2011, I was able to receive a better score than him from 3 weeks of posting on Ludum Dare!

I send out a huge thank you to all who rated my game (yes, even those of you that got me that horrible “Fun” score) and hope to join again for LD 23! Please remember Rob Productions again for next Ludum Dare, and you can expect a post-compo version coming in time!

Links:

TIPS ON MAKING A UNITY GAME

POST MORTEM

TIMELAPSE

THE GAME AGAIN

For those that get stuck, can’t play the game, or just don’t have the patience to experiment… I’ve created a game guide / mini walkthrough for my Ludum Dare 22 game, Ab-Alone.

You can check it out and rate the game HERE.

I’m also working on compiling a list of some of my favorite LD22 games for a future post.

First of all, the game:

Desert Adventure (with Kittens)

This game is a text adventure where you control a player waking up in a hostile environment.

What went horribly wrong:

• Theme, I had like 0 idea what to do with Alone (but I can only blame myself, that’s one of the few themes I voted for in the final round).
• I procrastinated way too much while pretending to be looking for an idea.
• I had other things to do that weekend, which I did during the last 5 hours of LD.
• I’ve had to rush making one third of the game’s content in one hour.

What went right:

• Using jQueryMobile for the first time.
• Choosing a text-adventure (time was short, 12h were already gone, so not having to create assets except using jQuery’s ThemeRoller for text/bg colors was great).
• Adding Kittens!
• Choosing a web-deployable framework (makes packaging 100x easier).

Although I wasn’t inspired as much as during previous LDs, I’m happy with what I came up with and I hope the final product will satisfy you, the players !

Volcanox was a lot of fun for me. Although a programmer, game development is not something I normally do. Additionally, it was also a test of the programming language MoonScript. I wanted to see if I could write a game in my own programming language.

The results, I thought, were pretty good. By the end of the competition I had something playable. I even had time to write music and insert sound effects.

If you haven’t played the game yet, you can do so here!

The Process

For this project I started with plain LÖVE. I figured I could get a foundation together. Even before the theme was announced I was pretty certain of making a platformer. It’s something I’ve never done before but I implementation ideas in my head. The first night was all writing collision detection code and movement. This was the one thing I was certain about writing, so I plowed through it. I even had time to write a map loader

I implemented an algorithm called Uniform Hash Grid, which let me subdivide my collidable objects to reduce the number of checks per frame. This worked very well, I was able to create a huge map with no impact to runtime performance. (It had a little load time though, which I think I could improve if I had more time.)

My map loader just loaded a bitmap where pixels represented collidable tiles. I did this to avoid having to use any real map editor tool. In my code I assigned colors from the map image to be actual tile sprites. This was my first map:

From there I just added gravity, and assigned a jump button and I had a working platformer.

I spent some time fooling around with ideas. I wrote a basic particle system which I later used for all the shooting effects.

The next day, after waking up I decided to tackle something I thought would be very hard, drawing sprites. I put together a simple (and awful) animated player sprite:

After that though I kind of lost sight of what I wanted to create. I had a working system, but I didn’t know what kind of game to create. I  got lazy and went out to a coffee shop with friends. I think this was unavoidable because I needed time to think. After that I decided I would have shooting and enemies so I started coding bullets. I added minor things and created a tile set. Things were looking okay but I still didn’t have a game mechanic.

On the last day the name Volcanox finally came to me. I coded up until 1 hour before the deadline adding simple game features like title screen, and winning and losing conditions. I added one enemy and wrote the AI. I had no experience writing something like that so it came out very unnatural. I decided that because the game was so simple, I would make the enemy spawning very aggressive. This actually made the game (annoyingly) hard. I expanded the map to make it huge and have lots of enemy spawners.

Here’s the final map: (yes that’s a volcano)

The last hour I rebooted into OSX and recorded some music on my keyboard, and quickly got some sound effects out of bfxr. I submitted my game at exactly 6pm.

The final submission’s sourcode is on GitHub.

Review of MoonScript

Part of this project for me was testing how well MoonScript would work for game development. MoonScript is a language that compiles into Lua. It’s a slimmed down syntax that adds a lot of sugar. Things like classes, list comprehensions, and a lot of other useful stuff. It works great with LOVE.

I wrote 1534 lines of MoonScript, and it compiled into 2880 lines of Lua. Pretty cool!

I heavily used the class system, and the inheritance it provides. It allowed me to quickly scaffold objects in my game. I think if I were writing Lua, a lot of time would be spent designing my object interaction. In that regard, MoonScript was an excellent tool to use.

I strongly recommend it for game development.

What went right

• Using MoonScript
• Using a bitmap and gimp as my map editor
• My tools all worked well together

What went wrong

• Didn’t test on windows, got report of people having issues after submission
• Didn’t know what I wanted to make in the middle of the comp
• Didn’t have any foundation code, had to focus more on getting code to do basic stuff instead of adding game features and polish.

Once again, If you haven’t played the game yet  you can do so here!

Greeble is an HTML5 game where you are the captain of a crashed spaceship. You are ALONE but need some help to survive. Collect the cryo-keys to activate the stasis pods in order to free your friends.

What went right?
Was very familiar with my tools, both engine, language and art creation pipeline. The amazing JAWSJS game engine was a breeze to work with. Had a very easy time making the art, since my level editor was just photoshop. Enjoyed screenshotsaturday, twitter and google+ as a means to stay motivated. I did well in the time-management arena, and planned ahead of time. I used placeholder art during programming and coded everything first in an ugly room with rectangles for characters. Only after the first day (when all coding was done) did I dive into the art, so I had tons of time to make it real puuurdy. I spent 75% of the time on the art and was feature-complete the coding by noon on Saturday. Total time spent on the game: 14 hours.

What went wrong?
Ran out of time before I could add sound effects. No user instructions or intro. No GUI. Had to cut features and simplify to finish on time. Got a bit stressed about it on the last day, racing to finish. Drawing the level took more time than I predicted. Overall, had TONS of fun regardless.

About the game:
Features pixel-perfect, non-grid platforming, bounce-pads, transparent glass tubes, a fun retro “scan line” effect, silly AI followers and A KITTEN. Your objective is to navigate to the exit where you will be rewarded with a trampoline party!

→→→→ CLICK HERE TO PLAY! ←←←←

Use the ARROW KEYS to move around. Try to find a way to revive all your friends (including the hidden secret kitten, which signifies my enthusiastic participation in the “kitten challenge”) so you can all bounce on the trampoline at the end.

I had so much fun making this game. I even had time to hang out with friends, go for a hike, and decorate my house for the holidays! There is a lot of room for improvement but overall I’m really happy with the final product. Created using ippa lix’s wonderful jawsjs game engine.

The word “greeble” comes from the original Star Wars ILM special effects artists who used the term to describe generic “tech” bits and pieces that adorn sci-fi hulls. There are thousands of greebles in this game’s level art.

How it was made: I drew two “techno” textures as the base texture for all the world platforms (one brown and one silver). These patterns were covered in “greebles” (panels, buttons, wires, lines, etc.) In photoshop, I made opacity maps for each and turned everything transparent. Then, I drew the game map itself by drawing black and white pixels on the alpha (opacity) channel so that certain parts of these materials would become opaque. An effect filter that added a little emboss to the edges completed the look.

In the game engine, the entire world map is one gigantic .PNG image, which is layered on top of two parallax-scrolling background tiles (set to move slower than the foreground). The retro “scanlines” effect is merely another overlay image that sits on top of everything.

This is the entire map image I drew, as used in the game (click to zoom in):

… and this is the scanlines overlay I created:

Making “Greeble” was very inspiring. I now have an HTML5 platformer game engine that allows me to create freeform worlds in photoshop. No tiles or level data files required!

→→→→ CLICK HERE TO PLAY! ←←←←

Ludum Dare is so much FUN. It is amazing what you can accomplish in a speed-coding weekend.

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

Proudly presenting Volcanox:

About

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

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

Install directions

Windows:

Extract and run the executable: volcanox.zip

Other Platforms:

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

Source

The source is hosted on GitHub.

Issues

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

Moving Day is finished! Play it!

Features include:

• infinite running… to the LEFT!
• pixel-perfect footsteps! (such a waste of time ^-^)
• gliding physics
• a token kitten
• You can win! (temporary ‘feature’)

This was my first Ludum Dare and I will probably be back for more! I really appreciate the motivation provided by the community and time limit.  I did record a timelapse, but I’m undecided if I will post it. I’m not sure if there would be much interest in watching a noob such as I.

Things I learned in the last 48hrs:

• How to animate a run sequence
• Flash + FlashDevelop + Flixel is a very pleasant and forgiving coding environment.
• premature gameplay tweaking is about as evil as premature optimization.

Hopefully someone will enjoy Moving Day, now I’m off to play some of the other entries!

I didn’t get to spend as much time as I would have liked on my entry.

Its got bugs and a ton of stuff didnt make it into the 48hr limit, but the time pressure was an amazing push to get something done.

I’ll continue working on it for the next day to the point im happy with it, I forced myself to submit something even though I might be alittle emberassed by it, because I said I was going to do something from scratch in 48 hours.

Participating in LD 22 is an amazing learning experience. I made my entry with unity, which i’ve been learning seriously for about a month now.

I also bit off more than I could chew by going outside my comfort zone and trying to code some complex dialogue flow to create a ‘mood’ which is something i’ve never tried before. that part alone took way more time than it should have.

I have successfully finished my very first LD game, The Last Man on Earth.

You play as the last survivor of an alien invasion, your goal is to avenge your species by clearing out an alien spaceship.
It is a pretty hard game, but please don’t get mad at me – I had no time to balance the gameplay.
The game has two endings… and a kitten.

It has been great fun, I would love to participate in the future, too.

Screenshots:

Tools:

• Visual Studio 2010
• XNA Game Studio 4.0
• Paint.NET
• Inkscape
• Bfxr

Download: http://attilahorvath.me/TheLastManOnEarth.zip
Source: http://attilahorvath.me/TheLastManOnEarth-source.zip
Game Page: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=preview&uid=8403

I don’t believe it! I really finished the game and this time seems fun to play

However, I didn’t have time to add music and sound effects. Maybe I’ll add them in a post-compo version…

Screenshot of the finished game!

The entry (source and web version) is here. Now I go to sleep

Sell it to the butcher at the store…

VOXTERIUM

Now to play some games!

Well, time to get it all packaged.  Been a wild ride, but I feel I’m at a point where I can call it done and be happy.

Unless there’s time to add just one… more… thing….

Now to package everything up, compile my timelapese, post a gameplay video…. and

crash….

hard…

I have completed and submitted Super Animal Friendship Club:

PLAY ONLINE

Total coding time: 5-6 hours

Enjoy!

Things were really coming together rond abouts midnight last night.  Today, I’m making progress, but I’m starting to get sloppy.

Got the difficulties balanced a bit, now I win amost instantly on easy…

and die almost instantly on hardcore… that’s balance…