This Ludum Dare was a great one, and I have to thank everyone who participated and rated my entry!

This time around I made a First Person Shooter called Complexity.

TIMELAPSE:

Here’s the post-mortem for a summary of how I spent my time!

From Potatos to the final moments, the competition was astounding in every way! And now… the results:

Alright, so apparently my game was… funny. Well the end boss was pretty funny… and it has…

I mean seriously… I didn’t even bother to draw a parachute on the character… so you kinda just… land.

Anyways next best was audio. I did work hard on the music and sound effects, but I don’t really think they were as unique as some of my other sounds. Now “fun” was the thing I was trying to achieve most on this one, just like most of my LD’s. I really tried to make movement and animations as smooth as possible and rewards for hitting the enemies. I realize the game is a little difficult at points… mainly because of spawning issues… but the quick respawns and the fact that advancing in the level is pretty easy make the game easy to enjoy. Skipping overall and going straight to graphics, I think this was another problem I had in my other games. I always use basic shapes for my enemies and levels (which probably won’t change due to the amount of time given) but this time I wanted the enemies to look a little more… animated… than previously. I really tried, but failed to make the game look as good my LD23 entry, Invasion Of The Trivials. I know why I failed to accomplish this: I didn’t have enough time due to places I had to be during the weekend. Regrets aside, I can safely say the results are pretty accurate, except for maybe humor…

Thanks again for everything, you guys rock!

Happy gaming, Ludum Dare! <3

PLAY THE GAME

POST-MORTEM

POTATOOOOOOOOO

Adhesion from team RADMARS here, with extensive battle reports for this fateful compo from all of our trusty team members. We all have grizzled war stories from the development of our entry Tessitron, a 3D, minimal music game – play here! http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=18627 – but first I will entice you with a screen timelapse and the entire (single-track) soundtrack from our entry:

http://adhesion.mu/sic/Adhesion-Tessitron.mp3

And up first we have tokken’s postmortem:

It’s pretty incredible to be a part of a group that meshes so well and yet our ways of thinking contrast yet compliment one another. Although we’re all able to come up with off the wall bizarre ideas, it’s the way we think that’s pretty special. Spacemars is really good with generating nuggets of ideas; I tend to build off and branch from those. Adhesion has great depth as well as the analytical aspects that help ground ideas. Eugene is usually quiet but when he puts something out there it’s generally to lay down something important. Brendon has a great way of conceptualizing play and teasing out interesting mechanics from our vague notions.

This time around, although we weren’t entirely certain how we were going to apply the theme of minimalism, we had some basic constructs we wanted to adhere too. With three games under the Radmars belt we looked at our history and pondered where we were going and where we wanted to go. Two of the Three games had been 2D pixelated sidescrollers, with the third being a 2D pixelated top down adventure game. Although a theme was never intended, one was starting to appear; partially due to ease and speed of development. Between Spacemars and I, we had some fairly substantial 3D chops if we ever wanted to go in that direction.

Previously, Spacemars and I would generally do the brunt of the graphics work which placed much of the development onto Adhesion and Eugene. The secret sauce for Radmars has always been the great music Adhesion produced (also the dark humor imbued in each game). When he’s loaded down with code, music was pushed off to near last minute or at a lessened capacity.

This time around there was a definite consensus amongst the group to embark on a different journey from the previous games. We wanted to utilize our broad skill set without losing any piece that was vital to our current dynamic. We looked at each other and evaluated how to potentially build something that played off our individual strengths while compensating for each’s weaknesses.

Spacemars is a Jack of Most Trades Master of More Than Should Be Possible. He’s foremost a great developer, with serious pixel skills, 3D abilities to rival my own, and an eye for design. He’s also one of the most dedicated on the team and probably dumps the most time into the projects. His major weakness is time; he can’t do it all. Luckily with a team like ours he’s super malleable and is able to pick up any aspect that needs assistance. Certainly the cornerstone of Radmars.

Adhesion is Spacemars’ right hand man. His greatest asset is his mind and depth of thought; he certainly has a head on him that allows for quick concepting and speedy explanations; his dry sense of humor meshes perfectly with the team. Oh, and he’s a bad ass music man.

Brendon certainly has an eye for design and a great ear for music. Maybe his most important asset is the thoughtfulness he brings to our game designing. He has a very analytical thought process that allows him, and by extension us, to break down games and gameplay into more compelling pieces. His ability to find and create mechanics is something that always boggles my mind.

Eugene is a quiet thunder that weighs in on ideas and directions while being a heavy lifter on development. Unfortunately he is also somewhat mysterious, like a ghost that haunts your brains and whispers genius into your ear.

Myself, I have a robust working knowledge of Cinema 4D, texture and matte painting, and am a UI / web designer. My skills in development are limited to some as3 and Unityscript. My biggest flaw was my parsed time allotment.

At this point you may be wondering what all this BS has to do with the actual game, but I assure you this was not just some ego horse shit. Knowing each person and what they bring to the table helped us shape Tessitron…

(more…)

As promised, a timelapse and graphical analysis of my LD48 project, minigames octacade. Let me first explain something about the workflow used here.  I batched several activities in order to save time.  Before even knowing what games I was going to develop, I created 70 random sprites, and 15 tiles and backgrounds.  After that I developed the games one by one.  For each game I selected graphics using a “graphical selector” that shows different combinations of sprites, tiles, and backgrounds.  After the games were finished, I created all sounds for all games, as well as explosions and particle effects, in a single session.

The batch activities are called “general activities” in the graphs below.  Other general activities are programming that is not related to a specific game, deployment (uploading, creating LD entry, creating screenshots), and “other” (not classified).

Some graphics were created during game development as needed, these are classified under the particular game that the graphics were created for.  This accounts for about 1-2 hours of development total.

Some conclusions:  I created too few tiles at the start, given how little time it takes to do it batch-wise.  More colour schemes to choose from would have been useful.  The backgrounds are the most time-consuming, not shown under “backgrounds” are about 30 minutes of creating backgrounds during game-specific development.  A more automated process for making them tileable etc. would have been useful.  Sound also took more time than I expected. I spent a lot of time unsuccessfully mutating sounds in sfxr.  Actually adding the sounds in the code took hardly more than 2 minutes per game. Surprising is that deployment actually took significant time, so this could be further optimised too.

About equal amounts of time were spent on each specific game.  An interesting fact is that the game I spent the least time on (Axis Invaders) was actually the most popular with the reviewers, and the game I spent the most time on (Digger) is my own least favorite. Story of my life… this is what inspired me to do this project in the first place.  In the wild, some of my simplest and even roughest games seem to be appreciated the most.  Once I find out which games people like most, I can concentrate on further polishing these games.

And here is the timelapse which the analysis was performed on:

And, before I forget, you can play the games here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=14520

This was my 4th Ludum Dare, and for it I made a game called Complexity, a first person shooter/platformer in Unity3d! Timelapse:

From the start I knew it would be some sort of first person game. In LD24 I had made a puzzle game, which surprised me. After LD24 I tried working on some more action-based mechanics: I had begun work on a 3rd person shooter adventure game and spaceship simulation game.

So with my newfound curiosity of the action genre I wanted to make a game that would prove my profound knowledge of fun mechanics. Like most of my games, it started looking like this:

After the basic movement was achieved I started thinking of a plot. From the beginning I knew there had to be a bad guy, because without a bad guy there would be no purpose to shooting things up! And with the theme Minimalism, I decided early on that you were trying to stop some sort of bad guy from making things too simple. From there I came up with a weapon to counter his efforts — the complexity gun.

Alright, so now I had a weapon. After working on putting some basic shapes together I started a simple AI script. From this I had my enemy. If there was one thing I learned from LD23 it was that the more the character interacts with the level the better — basically keeping the immersion. So I came up with a second purpose for the complexity gun – what if it could shoot objects and make them more complex too? Then I tied this into a gameplay perspective — doors that could only be opened by making them more complex. With these new mechanics I pieced together a level.

Audio and music are pretty self-explanatory, if you want to see exactly how I spent my time on them check the timelapse above!

After working on more important game mechanics such as health and enemy lasers, it was time to work on the final boss! Obviously you all know what it had to be:

Sorry to whoever worked long and hard on that animation

Anyways to add story to the game I quickly came up with a splash screen and tutorial section and after that it was done!

What went right:

1. Gameplay
2. Mechanics
3. Boss Battle
4. Story
5. Animations
6. Sound

What went wrong:

1. Graphics
2. Textures
3. User Interface
4. Incomplete side-objectives
5. Goal of game

Why don’t you PLAY THE GAME?

Happy Gaming, Ludum Dare! <3

Finally got around to compiling the timelapse for my compo entry Pyramid. Time spent watching the Dreamhack Open Starcraft action not included >_>

The game:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=15943

Here’s the walkthrough (spoilers):

Tools used:
Engine: Unity free
Graphics: Photoshop, Flash, SAI
Animation: Anim2d
Sound: FL Studio + Massive VST + Goldbaby drums

The main goal was to field-test my animation system – animation editor and animation playback libraries for Unity.
The animation editor looks like this:

A lot like Flash with layers and nested animation clips, but with float frame values, “bones”/layer hierarchy, double keyframes for sprite changing.
And here’s the usage in Unity:

Fun thing is that you don’t have to manually import textures/sprites for animation, you just drop them into folder named “Sprites” and the system automatically picks them in editor, makes a library in Unity and stores textures into atlases (for now i’m using TK2d for atlas generation, but later i might remove this dependency).

In runtime there are 2 ways of playback – “rigid” – switches frame immediately, and “interpolated” – with possibility to crossinterpolate multiple animations, and overlay multiple animations. Rigid is faster and more useful for simple things like bullets, ui elements etc. Interpolated mode allows to smoothly switch between animations for characters. With overlayed animations in interpolated mode i could make the character shoot in 4 directions while standing, running or jumping, also landing squish was an overlayed animation too, so you could see the character counteracting the landing impact while continuing to run and shoot. And another fun thing is, it can be called with 1 line of code, like:

if(just_landed) anim_inst.OverlayAnimationReuseLayer("land", "stand", ...);

You can use different shaders and materials in one animation, it will create different meshes during playback, and if you use one material it will use the automatic batching.
Anyway if enough people are interested in this system, i’ll release it later.

I also used my polygon editor with some adjustments:

//that’s how you not use it, since physics only works good with convex polygons

In the last day i was kinda tired and sad, so i decided to screw around with FL Studio for some time, and made a simple electro-screechy thing using 4 Massive channels and funk-drums. I think it gave me motivation to finish at least something playable. It’s the first time i’m doing game music.

Wat left:
- I’ve spent most of the time fixing bugs in animation system, finding a way to correctly sort sprites by depth, learning how to use materials and shaders. In other words i ignored most advices about using only reliable tools that you are familiar with (again).
- I like to do detailed sprites and was anticipating to draw something with shading and stuff.
- The game is too short, with very few game objects and only one level (too little time was spent on actual gameplay, most of it went into technical stuff and debugging).
- There are severe memory leaks (materials and meshes) that i haven’t noticed (due to my poor knowledge of Unity) and that may crash your browser.
- It was too stressful.

Wat right:
- I did fix a lot of bugs in animation system, and made it work.
- I learned how to shader.
- Now i know how not to update procedural meshes and materials.
- I’m still new to Unity, and i’ve learned a lot from this jam.
- I did music.
- I managed to finish something playable, YAY!

Timelapse:
!MINIMAL DISCO WARNING! PROCEED WITH CAUTION!

While Zeik is fiddling with his own timelapse for the code he made for our game “Stargazers”, I was able to throw together mine fairly quickly and have it ready to go! (He’s much more of a perfectionist when it comes to his video. )

Check out our game here:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=10976

“Stargazers” required a lot less intensive art than usual, I think. The constellations were pretty easy to throw together since there were only 10 of them in varying detail, plus even the most detailed ones were extremely geometric and just required small amounts of shape wrangling.

Shamefully, typography took a large chunk of this video. u.u Moreso than I’d like to honestly reveal, since I probably edited that down to a much more inaccurate representation of how much time I spent.

Maybe next time I’ll sacrifice overly customized typography for more detailed worlds. Hope you all enjoy my timelapse~ <3

Also, we apologize for being much slower at rating games than usual this time around! Cake and Zeik are drowning in a sea of school projects and end of semester/quarter assignments. We’re hoping to make a “Best Of” post after going on a rating spree though! (Which should hopefully be after this weekend!)

Managed to get my time-lapse uploaded. I think I might have cranked up the speed a bit too much haha. May cause eye strain.. Also cheesy funk music

Game Page:

www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=rate&uid=22035

I will be writing a full post-mortem doo dah tomorrow, as at the moment it’s rather late (yet again, if you’ve read my previous posts before).

Anyway, after spending too long dilly dallying, I’ve finally rendered out my creation timelapse:

Created using chronolapse and Sony Vegas. Unfortunately, not everything was captured, but anything that wasn’t here was recorded in a lower quality for backup, not that you’re actually interested.

If you’re feeling nice, or if you even like the look of my game, please feel free to vote on it here. I am personally trying to vote on as many as I can but with a-level exams coming up soon it’s kind of a hurry for me :/
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=20850

Hi.

During the LD 48h compo I made a game “Farmer Joe Sheep Farm” http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=9486 I only worked 12h straight from 24h, because on Sunday I had a Math Competition that took all the day.

On Saturday I managed to make everything except sound effects, which I completed on Sunday.

I managed to try out Flash game framework that I have never used Flixel. The framework itself was ok, but it lacked Documentation. As of everything else somehow managed to not make many errors and crashes, except one that took me an hour to solve. It was due to the lack of Documentation, so I had to hack it my way – the dirty way.

I think I did well in the compo, better than all the previous times, because back then there were a lot of distractions, so I did not submit anything. Here is my timelapse. 12h livestream compiled into 10 minutes, with hopefully good music.

Many Ludum Dare participants like to create time-lapse videos that show the actual development of their entries.  I thought that was a cool idea, and decided to use Chronolapse to capture and encode my video.  Chronolapse is stable, has a simple interface, and even has some advanced features like dual monitor support and picture-in-picture.  But the software lacks in one major area: video quality.

While recording, Chronolapse takes periodic frame captures from your screen or webcam.  Then, when you’re done, you can use the tool to compile the image sequence into a video that can be uploaded to YouTube, for example.  Unfortunately, there are no settings to tweak the video output quality, and the quality is pretty bad.

The simplest solution I could find is to download a separate tool called ffmpeg to do the encoding.

Chronolapse

ffmpeg

Here’s how to do it:

1) Use Chronolapse to create a sequence of images in a folder somewhere.
2) Download ffmpeg and extract it.
3) Find the encoder executable ffmpeg.exe in the bin folder.
4) Rename all the images in your time-lapse sequence to a format that ffmpeg can recognize:

• Open the folder with your image sequence in Windows Explorer.  Make sure there are no other files in the folder.
• Single-click on the first file in the sequence to select it.  Note: This step is very important and affects sort order.
• Select all files with Ctrl + A.
• Press F2 and type img, and then press Enter.  The files will be renamed sequentially.

5) Place a copy of ffmpeg.exe in the same folder as your image sequence, or ensure that the executable is in the Windows path.
6) Open a command window where the image sequence is, and enter the command:

ffmpeg -r 20 -i “img (%d).png” -q:v 1 -b:v 1500k timelapse.mp4

7) After processing for some time, you should have a new video file of much higher quality than what Chronolapse produces.  Unless you have the correct codecs installed, this will not play.  If you’re having any problems, try the VLC Media Player.
8) Profit!

To see an example of higher video quality in action, see the time-lapse video link on my entry page.

Have fun!

PLAY THE GAME HERE

Happy Gaming, Ludum Dare!

Finally got this done. 34 hours, and 10 minutes down to 16 minutes. If you want to play it yourself: <click me>

This time, not only did I finish a game but I’ve also made a timelapse! I can finally try to understand why I usually waste so much time. xD

From the start of the compo, I wanted to use the theme within the gameplay. So, after some thinking (and one scrapped idea), I decided to make a game where you would use abilities (jump/run/shoot/etc) to solve puzzles, but you would only be able to use one of those at a time. I also wanted each stage to feature few different objects and require few abillities. A simple use and not that great, but the game was possible.

What went right:

• I quickly decided on a game idea that I knew I would be able to implement
• Most of the possible interactions were implemented without problems
• I used the tilemap editor I created after the previous compo; there’s nothing like using a program made to you (and by you xD)
• I noticed that I wouldn’t be able to come up with good stages and polish the game, so I made sure it was the most polished possible
• The graphics and the music came out pretty nice (imo).

What went wrong:

• Bugs! The pushable box took a long time to work (almost) as I intented
• I spent too much time drawing instead of doing the rest of the game
• The background looks really weird; it could use some better colors
• I decided to make a platformer-puzzle game, and I don’t play those games that much (so, I couldn’t come up with nice level design)
• Let alone nice levels, I just made tutorial levels
• I though the game’s name on the last minute (literally)

I’ll have to try and keep art to a minimum next time. Otherwise, I fear the same thing will happen again.

And here’s my timelapse. =D

If you still haven’t played it, why not play it now? It’s really short!

Wow, Almost forgot to upload my timelapse video.

Only one person has got past level six so far, come on guys…
I didn’t think it was that hard.

My entry.

This is a time-lapse video of my development of Amish Brothers for Ludum Dare 26.  The video footage was taken from my Twitch.tv stream.

Generating a time-lapse video from a Twitch.tv stream is not a trivial task.  I will describe the process that I used to create this video.  This is only a suggested method, and I do not suggest, promote, or advocate any of the software packages described below.  Use all software at your own risk.

First, you will need all of your Twitch.Tv video clips.  These can be downloaded from http://bashtech.net/twitch/download.php .  You will need to connect your twitch.tv account with your username and password.  I believe the authentication is through Twitch.tv, so it should be safe, but don’t hold me to that.  To be on the safe side, make sure your Twitch.Tv password is unique from any other passwords that you use.

Then start pressing the Next button until you get to the videos that you want to use for your time lapse.  If you’re like me, you named these videos something like Ludum Dare.  Now for the monotonous part, start downloading each of the video streams into a folder of your choosing.  These videos will be saved in FLV format.  Unfortunately, this site provides your videos in 30 minute chunks, so there may be numerous video files to download.  If you are clever, you can probably script a process to speed up the download process using a web file grabber like wget or curl.

Download and install the VLC video player from http://www.videolan.org/vlc/ .

VLC can be used to generate snapshots of an FLV video as specified frame intervals using  a command like the one below from a Windows command prompt.

> vlc C:\ludumdare\myvideo.flv --rate=1 --video-filter=scene --vout=dummy --start-time=1 
--stop-time=1800 --scene-format=png --scene-ratio=24 --scene-prefix=snap 
--scene-path=C:\ludumdare\screens vlc://quit

This tells VLC to generate a snapshot every 24 frames for the first 1800 seconds (30 minutes).  This works okay, but the stream has to completely play through the entire 30 minutes to take the snapshots.  Therefore, it will take the total amount of casting time to grab all of the snapshots for the time-lapse video.  This method could take hours for to grab all the snapshots out of the stream videos.

Note: The path to VLC must be in your PATH environment variable.  This can be done in a command prompt using a command such as the one below.  Change the value accordingly for your VLC installation.

set PATH=%PATH%;C:\Program Files (x86)\VideoLAN\VLC

To make this process more efficient, we only want to play the video at the points where we will capture a snapshot.  This can be accomplished by changing the start-time and stop-time values.  When specifying those values, VLC will start generating snapshots at that number of seconds into the clip.  However, there is an apparent bug which makes VLC also generate a snapshot at the beginning of the video as well.

Now to generate all of the snapshots, we will need to execute VLC setting the start-time parameter to the value of the position where the snapshot should be taken.  Repeat this process by incrementing the start-time parameter by the interval between frames in seconds.  I set the stop-time to the start-time + 1, since we only want to capture one frame at that time.  Be careful to make scene-ratio the value of the frames per second for the cast, so that only one snapshot is taken for the one second interval.  In most cases, that value will probably be 24 frames per second for Twitch.tv.

I chose to take one frame every 30 seconds for my Amish Brothers time lapse video.  I scripted this process in Ruby, so that it automatically calls VLC with the correct time parameters.  This made the total time to generate the snapshots for a 30 minute video 60 seconds (2 snapshots generated for each minute of footage at one second each), but maybe a little longer due to some overhead of starting and stopping VLC.

That is good, but I had 37 videos to process, which is still tedious.  With a little more scripting, I was able to loop through all of the FLV files that I had downloaded into my video directory.  After the script is complete, it puts all of the PNG image files in the “screens” directory.  However, there is that bug in VLC that generates an image at the start of the video, so with a simple DOS delete command I removed all of the “*00001.png” files, leaving only the correct snapshots remaining in the directory.

Below is the Ruby code for generating the snapshots with VLC.

USE AT YOUR OWN RISK AND ONLY IF YOU KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING!

iFramesPerSecond = 25
iSecondInterval = 30
iFrameCounter = 1

Dir.foreach('.') do | strFile |
  if (strFile =~ /\.flv/)

    iStartTime = 1
    while (iStartTime < 30 * 60)

      strFrame = "%05d" % iFrameCounter

      strCommand = "vlc #{strFile} --rate=1 --video-filter=scene --start-time=#{iStartTime} 
--stop-time=#{iStartTime + 1} --vout=dummy --aout=dummy --scene-format=png 
--scene-ratio=#{iFramesPerSecond - 1} --scene-prefix=#{strFrame}f 
--scene-path=.\\screens vlc://quit"
      puts "Running #{strCommand}"
      system(strCommand)

      iFrameCounter += 1
      iStartTime += iSecondInterval

    end
   end
 end

Next, I went through my snapshot directory and removed unneeded images, such as when I was eating or away on a bathroom break.

Now I needed to put the snapshots back together in a video file.  Some people have recommended Chronolapse, but I tried it and the video quality was really poor and there were no options to increase the quality.  Therefore, I used VirtualDub (http://virtualdub.org/), which can also make a video out of image files.

The only problem with VirtualDub is that it expects the filenames to be in sequential order (0001.png, 0002.png, 0003.png, etc), and the filenames generated by VLC can only be specified by a prefix, and it gives each file an unchangeable ending, which is based on the frame number.  To resolve this, I wrote another Ruby script which looped through all my snapshot images and renamed them to sequential file names.  I’m not sure if the files are looped through by lexicographical order or timestamp order by default, but it worked so I’m not complaining.

USE AT YOUR OWN RISK AND ONLY IF YOU KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING!

iFile = 1

Dir.foreach('.') do | strFile |

  if (strFile =~ /\.png/)

    strNewName =  "%05d" % iFile
    strNewName += ".png"

    puts "Old: #{strFile} New: #{strNewName}"
    File.rename(strFile, strNewName)

    iFile += 1

  end

end

Now all of my images are in the directory in sequential order by file name.  The images can be imported into VirtualDub by selecting File > Open Video File and selecting the first image.  It will automatically add all of the other images in the directory.  I also added an audio track using some of the music from my game, by selecting Audio > Audio from other file.  It is important to note that VirtualDub will not loop your audio, so I had to manually loop the audio myself by extending the audio track in Audacity.

Finally, I added a credits screen at the end, which seemed to be more trouble than it was worth.  There is no way to slow down or copy frames in Virtual Dub, so I had to make another video file containing my credits, and then used File > Append AVI segment to add it to the end.

Now I just needed to encode the video, but it turned out to be about 5 Gigs in size, which I believe is too big for YouTube.  This was fixed by selecting Video > Compression from the VirtualDub menu.  It gives a few different compression methods.  I didn’t really have a clue as to which one is best, so I just selected Microsoft Video 1.  It reduced the size to around 400 Megs, so it did the job.

Finally, I previewed the video and uploaded to YouTube.  It seemed to a be a lot of trouble just to make a time-lapse video, but this was my method since I didn’t not use a screen capture program and I didn’t want to spend a lot of money on a professional video package.

References:

http://wiki.videolan.org/How_to_create_thumbnails

http://code.google.com/p/chronolapse/

http://support.twitch.tv/discussion/2391/frequently-asked-questions

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2012/09/09/how-to-make-a-good-timelapse/

https://wiki.videolan.org/VLC_command-line_help

When the theme was announced I was actually expecting something like ‘Dreams’ or ‘Ancient Ruins’ to the the winner, but I was susprised by the majority, as usual.. Altrough it took me by surprise (I had Minimalism voted as neutral, havent even considered it), it wasnt a bad theme, unlike past LD’s.. It gave a more broad range of stuff I could do.
Basically, in my head, any game can be minimalistic’d, with the proper approach. Minimalism isnt a restrictive theme at all, au contraire; Its so broad that you can make practically anything, and had it fit the theme somehow.

So, after that my idea was to make an isometric game or a shoot em’ up. I went with the Isometric idea first, and having made only one little isometric game in my whole life, I found it exhausting. Too much little stuff that just dint worked the way I expected, too much code for simple tasks like having to recognize in wich tile im on, etcetera. I ditched iso right away with the promise of coming back to it later on the future, but never again on a LD.

Started with, what I thought it was a shmup, while watching some retro/vintage science fiction posters around the web, and fell in love with some of the styles I found there. I was always a big fan of retro-like stuff, and vintage posters are simply beautiful (when properly done), not to mention most of them are drawn very minimalistically. so the game was started and intended to look like one of those right away. Having the style defined allowed me to start pushing other aspects of the game quickly, like asteroids and props, also creating the gameplay super quickly

While developing the initial aspects of hte game, wich was supossed to be a vertical shmup, I kinda thought of the story behing this little ship I drew.. It looked like a rescue or transport ship more than a fighter/warship.. So maybe we just have to go somewhere or escape from somewhere instead of shooting random hordes of aliens..? And so it happened that I ditched the shmup idea to make a vertical dodge-and-survive kind of game. It lacked most of the elements I would have liked for it to have, but overall, I really liked it, not to mention that the visual outcome was, besides minimalist, very beautiful, even to my likes!

I finished the game within the initial 30 hours of the competition, being the quickest LD for me until now, for wich I am very satisfied, but I lacked the imagination to use the rest of my spare time.. I would have liked to add more stuff to dodge and maybe even stuff like powerups, but I just couldnt think of anything that suits both the theme and the game idea. even until now I found that to be hard work.

Overall, most important things went just fine:

1. I finished the vast majority of the game within 24 hours and all of it within 30hs.
2. I defined a style right into the beggining of the compo, that allowed me to focus on more important things quickly.
3. Having made everything so quickly also left me with plenty of time to develop and poolish different platform ports, especially HTML5 wich is usually a pain to fix, works just as fine as the desktop version with a couple minimal graphical discrepances.
4. Slept more than enough
5. Timelapse didnt failed (phew!)

What went wrong:

1. The game is not as extense as I would like, solely because of my lack of imagination for it, since I had plenty of time to add new stuff.
2. Besides the art style, the game doesnt fit the theme much more.. its a 50/50 thing.
3. No music/sounds.. completely forgot until the last day, and I was like, ‘oh well, who needs that stuff’
4. havent really gone out home in the entire weekend, and I just focused on the game the whole time, in the end I got really stressed. I just wanted to go out and run ~100 miles.
5. havent drew anything on paper before starting, in the end it didnt affected me because I developed the idea right away, but it is the second time in a row I do this, and im scared I wont be so lucky next time.
6. Didnt had a reliable internet connection during the entire compo, that kinda slowed me down a couple times, especially when looking for inspiration or particular images. Not to mention IRC kept on closing unexpectedly and twitter didnt even loaded

Game page:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=2290

(the game works on Windows, HTML5 and Android)

Timelapse video:

As usual this was a super-awesome experience, I havent really worked on any game since last month, and the ammount of inspiration this competition pumps on me is priceless, you are all awesome, and I am looking forward to play ALL of your games asap!!

Thanks Ludum Dare people!! =D

My Entry – The Time Saver

The MinimizeArt entry page is here.
Ludum dare started for me at LD23 – Tiny world. From then until now, I have learned a lot and my games have improved. For one, I was actually proud of what I had made and my game was actually kind of fun. Before I continue, let me show you a timelapse.

Although my game was better this time around, not everything went perfectly.

What didn’t go so well
Messing around – I spent a great deal of time just sitting there, looking at what I had done. I would get something done, and I would just keep looking at it instead of coding.

Important things last – I didn’t do things in the right order, I ran out of time to make more levels (which is mostly the fault of #1). I should have added sound sooner in, made more levels, etc. Then the other stuff would have been a breeze.

What went well
Code – In the past my code was really sloppy. I just did whatever worked. But this time I stopped to think about my code. The end result was much nicer.

Lighting – This was actually the first game I’ve made with lighting, so it’s kind of a good thing.

Game was hard and fun – In the past, my game were about as fun as coding a Graphics driver in Assembly, and they were never hard either. But this time I actually enjoyed playing it.

So that is how my Ludum Dare went.

It’s been two days since I posted the game, so I thought it might be time to write a post-mortem about it.

You can find the game here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=15476

And here is the timelapse:

This was my second Ludum Dare , and my first compo entry (I participated to the 24th, but posted for the Jam).

I was expecting this LD to be awesome, and I was not disappointed. Making a game in 48 hours is definitely awesome.

So, here’s What went right:

• The graphics: I’m usually more of a programmer than an artist, but this time, it’s like the opposite happened: while I was having a lot of programming issues, I managed to finish all the sprites I was planning to do, animate the 3 versions of the player, even make a little introduction, and all of this in -relatively- no time (1 hour for the player, 2 hours for the whole tileset, 1 hour for the intro).
• The level design: In my last LD, I ran out of time and could only make four levels for my game. This time I made 9, which was what was planned. I also wrote a pretty useful level management system which allowed me to directly import Tiled level files (.tmx format). This saved me a lot of time, because Tiled is very efficient and fast, comparated to manually entering CSV values in a file…
• The early programming:  I am starting to get pretty familiar with the tools I used for the development (C++ with Allegro 5). Indeed,  I  wrote the level management system, the basic gameplay mechanics and the renderer by midday.

And here’s What went wrong:

• The time management: I posted my game 5 minutes before the deadline (which was 4 a.m for me @_@). While things were right on the saturday, sunday was a totall mess.
• The music: I’m terribly bad when it comes to music composing, and this time there was no exceptions: I did not even manage to create a correct music for the game (But I did not have a lot of time for this, also).
• The late programming: My code on sunday was the most buggy and unstable thing I had ever made in my entire life. I wasted at least 2 hours trying to fix Segmentation Faults, Level loading problems, collisions problems, etc…
• Dealing with the theme: Minimalism did not really inspire me as a theme. I was tempted to make a game with minimalist graphics, and minimalist sounds, and say “Hey, look ! This game is all about minimalism!”, but after a LOT of brainstorming, I finally came out with this Reducing player’s capabilities every 5 levels thing, and this background story.

Once again, I really enjoyed making this game, and I’m looking forward to participate to the next edition !