Hello everyone! I am here today to share with you a game that was born here, in the Ludum Dare, as a warmup game, and now I completed it as a fully playable game with everything a real game needs; Achievements, story, infinite mode, unlockable weapons, highscores, etcetera, etcetera!

Promotional poster

The original game, formerly ‘Earth Defenders’ was a crappy minigame I made as a warmup for my first Ludum Dare, under an interesting mechanic: A 360º Space invaders twisted clone. at the moment with my little game design skills and motivation it ended up being fun, but not fun nough, and definately not as pleasant!

So, three months ago and three years after that initial minigame I decided to completely remake it from scratch, I dumped every bit of that old minigame and started writing this new, enhanced version of it, with High definition graphics, a touch-screen friendly interface, and cross-platform. The result was Earth Defenders HD, and it is now complete

You can obviously play it on Google Play for free here:

Enjoy it and dont forget to share it with your friends, thanks everyone!

Hey there developers and gamers!

I had a lot of fun with Ludum Dare last weekend.  It’s always a blast to make a game that turns out pretty good!

What went great:
– The theme.
I feel like the theme gave me a lot of room to be creative and come up with something the rest of the developers didn’t.  I love the freedom of that.  Kudos to the Ludum Dare team for making that possible
– Flash.
I know what I’m doing when I’m in Flash.  I spent half my life learning Flash xD
It crashed twice, but thankfully it has autosave, and I didn’t lose too much.  Tip: The debugger decides to crash every few tests…
– Not using a chunk engine.
It’s true.  The original engine I made had the start of a chunk engine.  It didn’t make sense.  It was awful!
– Streaming.
I LOVED streaming, not just because it motivated me, but because I got to meet some really neat people in the chat.  I listed everyone I could remember in the “EXTRA” section of my game menu because it was so fun.
– My idea.
I had a good idea right from the start.  It’s really important to get the basics down in your game before you go and add goats or something.  That’s what I learned from this experience.  As quickly as I could I built a working game with a unique concept and simply gameplay.  Afterwards I added all the less-needed features, like music and a menu…
– Time management.
48 hours to make a game.  It seems impossible, but when you start doing it, it’s surprising how fast you work.  At least for me.  I was able to get done what I had to get done in the time I had to get done doing it (twitter reference).

What went not-so-great:
– The details.
It’s not really expected to have a detailed game during Ludum Dare, but I feel like the features I did have weren’t pushed to the right spot.  The regenerating stamina was too slow, the leveling up was boring, and some other things (like the particle size).  I’m sure it would make the game less glitchy if some of my rendering wasn’t messy too.  Hopefully I’ll get around to fixing it up and making it a finished game!

Overall I think I did a great job, and I had fun!  I like a lot of the games I’m rating too!  Great job everyone else
Here’s my submission: Dragon Boss

Later,
- Zanzlanz

I haven’t been this proud of myself in a long time! I’m so glad to be sharing this with you!

Play it
Also, I didn’t manage to get all three pieces of music in the game (because I’m not a proper programmer), but I promise I’ll upload the soundtrack soon, as I’m proud of it too!

Thank you thank you thank you, for the fantastic experience, third time in a row!

I can’t believe that in the first LD, and the second game I’ve ever written I managed to make it into the top 10 for a category! Not only any category but theme, from the looks of things it is an area that a majority of people work very hard to make a game that fits the theme. I was also please my result of 100th for innovation and for other areas it was what I expected around the 200 mark (there were 400 entries into the jam so they were very average scores) .

Play it here!

I’ve had a fantastic time, learning a new language, object orientation and how to quickly generate an achievable if ambitious goal.  I am very please with the community and the mature approach to constructive criticism.  I’ve had great fun playing, rating and reviewing games (I made sure to comment on each and every rating I made).

I’ve learnt a lot, pleased to have actually taken part at last, even more pleased by my results. I’ll see you all in December!

This is my first ever LudumDare out of 4 when I managed to finish my game in time. No sounds though but everything is working fine and every feature I wanted in the game is implemented. So I consider this a big success!

So what are you waiting for? Go diamond hunting on staticvoidgames.com! Just click ‘Applet’ on the left to play Gems of the Evolving Land in your browser.

Here is the entry page please rate!

This is the stuff! I feel the urge to experiment, to breathe the true spirit of the Ludum Dare, and push myself into a realm I have never before dealt: the isometric map. Spent the hours I had this morning figuring out how to best render an isometric grid, and now…SUCCESS! Step one complete, I shall move on to some placeholder graphics and start the control scheme.

I just finished porting My Ludum Dare #35 (Originality) entry, Eternal Life, to Flash and yesterday I uploaded it to Kongregate…where it already has 329 plays!

What would happen if we could really live forever? Take a look at the answer with Death as your tour guide in this game made for Ludum Dare #35 (Originality) in 48 hours and converted to Flash as an exercise in learning the language.

Play it here!

http://www.kongregate.com/games/SkullSoft/eternal-life

Thanks to ThirdEyeWild for helping me with the Flash version!

OK, so here’s some development shots and various assets for our game, Kumiho

This is my visual reference chart, the visual references that most influenced how the game looks. Ikaruga has a prominent role visually, even though I did play some Jamestown, Touhou 8 and Xenon II to get a feel for things. I used a 21 color palette which grew organically as I added more and more stuff. It’s the strange shape at the bottom left of the timelapse. I also tried to keep with a vertical composition and Korean text, in its (less usual) top to bottom form, was a huge help in establishing the look. Korean and chinese drawings were also a big influence on the style.

I always like to have reference for everything before I start to work. In this case there’s background ideas, spaceship designs, photos of insects and stylized korean drawings.

Here is my timelapse.
I used one main photoshop file to draw new stuff, so that I could see them relative to other assets. Essentially, a mockup/overview of the game.

When something needed animating, I just copied it into a new file and went on from there. Cases in point:

Long explosion. Again, Korean and Japanese art influenced the shape

the flappy wings of the squid boss. I realised, from looking at slow-motion squid videos on youtube, that the movement is essentially a sine wave. Even so, this took about 2 hours

The ship was my first animating challenge for this game. I had chosen an asymmetrical design, so left and right animations would have to be different, and not just a flipped over version.

The tentacles. This took 3 hours. Sine wave movement again, but these were harder. The two right tentacles are flipped versions of the two left ones, with a time delay of 3 frames, so that the movement looks more organic.

Hope this helps,
Christina

Fedor and I made this completely from scratch in three days (with little sleep):

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=13139
We’re proud of it and couldn’t wait to show this off to you guys! Please spread around, rate and comment

I will now attempt the daring feat of sharing what this experience felt for me, so we can all benefit from it as game designers/developers/artists.

Development notes:

It was exhausting and super fun. I particularly enjoyed composing the music, and how we came up with an interesting gameplay mechanic (teleportation).
Coming at it as equals and negotiating ideas did a world of good for our game. Our main inspiration was the Touhou series of games for Fedor (I’d only seen gameplay) and Ikaruga for me (finished the game several times).

I started doing graphics on Saturday morning. I worked on a mockup photoshop file full groups of layers, to which I returned throughout development. For example, when I needed a new enemy, I would fire up the mockup, draw the enemy next to all the other sprites and then paste it into another photoshop file and animate it separately. I would then export as individual .PNGs (Photoshop’s “Render Animation to Video” was very helpful).

Dropbox of course saved our lives, and we communicated through skype’s chat. In fact we haven’t even seen each others’ faces.
I used Photoshop CS5 for all animation and graphics, and Fruity Loops with free soundfonts to write and perform the music.
Fedor used Unity and I don’t know what else ^-^

Post mortem: We gave it our absolute best. A coding set-back made the scrolling clouds unusable, so Fedor had to wing it at the last moment, which left the background a little bleh in my opinion ( I had no time to make changes to the cloud graphics and scrolling). But even so, when at the last minute he managed to fix the clouds so we at least had some, it was very exciting. The level is very very well thought-out and very fun to play. It took Fedor, what, 6 hours? to come up with the patterns that complement the teleport mechanic.  The 3 hours before deadline were, for me, mostly about helping Fedor out with any requests, like changing sprites or giving him a list with all the visual elements he had yet to implement. I made a second enemy ship graphic in 15 minutes, since Fedor made enemies with two different numbers of hit points, and I felt we needed to be able to tell them apart. This was done 2 or 3 hours before deadline, when Fedor was struggling with the stupid clouds. He added the second enemy graphic in the game 1 hour before deadline.

I also wanted finite lives implemented (9 of them, as many as the tails of the Kumiho fox-spirit), shown only everytime you are resurrected from a death, in order to keep the interface as clean as Fedor wanted it. Scoring wouldn’t have hurt either. But we didn’t have time to even negotiate it, because the ideas came too late. Even if they had come early, we wouldn’t have had time. I stayed up Sunday 12am to Tuesday 6am, and it’s the longest I’ve ever been awake.

So, overall, I couldn’t have wished for anything better, I had the fastest and best coder at my disposal, we had a crazy schedule and working hours, and implemented almost everything we set out to implement, and still had time for a little polish.

And with a great success. With 11 finished entries, more than I could hope for. I will pack the games in a package and post a download link around 18.1. The games run on windows, and should also run on linux (some with wine). They mostly make use of python and pygame, so that will probably be a requirement to run the finished bundle.

Thanks for perticipating, finishing an entry or just hanging around. It was great.

From wiki:

I’ve participated in a few ludumdare contests over the years, one with a friend. This friend gave me a call about me helping out with some flash stuff for JunglePeak. I meet up with them and pushed that I’m very interested in making games. I also took a lower price for game development. I did a few things, mainly flash website stuff, for them and it worked great, well, except for me working more than I want, I wanna work with games and have the time off with my family. So I introduced my current day job with this entertainment company hoping I could consult, that resulted in nothing.

A few weeks later Ludumdare 11 took place, one of the highlights of the year, I made Exxon – The oil contaminator a game based upon an idea I’ve pitched for this company. So the Monday after LD11 I sent the game to the entertainment company and a few days later the CEO called me up. He wants me to lead the development for their MMO flash game. Three weeks later the contract is signed and after the summer I’ll start making games for a living, partly thanks to Ludumdare.