I released a new version of my post compo! Here is a list of what has changed since release:
+ Added Music and Sound
* Changed player image
+ Added Easy, Medium, and INSANE difficulty (hard is what it was during the compo)

Click here for the entry page.

I also posted a video featuring the changes (note that the actual game looks much better) below. Oh and don’t forget to watch my timelapse.

And here is a GIF preview:

I made a playthrough video of my game “llab“ almost 2 weeks ago, but forgot to post about it here until now.

Click here to jump to YouTube, or view right here:

Did a quicky continuous 10 seconds clip for the compilation project… should probably have done some editing/snippets of interaction, but this will do.

Intrigued? Play my game!

Also see my Pre/Post Mortem for more details.

PLAY :: RATE :: TIMELAPSE :: WALKTHROUGH

Minimalism exposes the essence of a subject, through eliminating all non-essential forms…

Reading some of the comments on Less is More? it seems that some levels can be difficult, so I made I walkthrough video.

My entry: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=15195

www.twitch.tv/jellycakes1

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Index of games 1|2|3|4

The last part is released, it’s a bit shorter than the others but still full of good games! That’s all for this LD! Thank you for participating and my apologies if somehow your game got left out (I hope I got everybody).

(more…)

www.twitch.tv/jellycakes1

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

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=232

What went right

• Finished something playable, check!
• Aim of making prototype I can later improve and release as a good game, check!
• Minimalistic, check!
• Idea came to me pretty quick, Google helped to find lot of inspiration that I remembered
• Made a game close analogues of which I don’t recall, check!
• Had loads of ideas and FUN, check!

What went wrong

• Photoshop after reinstall of drivers hangs because of color modes or something, did not check that before compo, obvious pitfall, ended up using Paint7 which sucked, then Pixlr, then Paint .Net
• Did not use Flash stuff for UI using bitmap icons instead, bad result and eats more time as its not WYSIWYG enough
• Did not slept enough, slept 18 hours in 3 days which is BAD, as now start of working week is ruined
• As usual ,went for quite experimental game which is impossible to polish in 48 hours to have good game play
• First day went so good that I was too calm on second day thinking all is good, while it was not -_-

Lessons for next time

• Learn to use AudioTool or something similar with license allowed for LD
• Check all the tools, even ones that worked yesterday
• Find ways to work in more stable and motivated way, aka more sleep, less slacking around even if I think that I am doing good
• Start making levels as early as possible, doing it too late, as usual

Here’s the game: http://smilingrob.com/ld26/

And the competition link: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=20689

The Good

* The biggest thing I learned was that it’s ok to sleep, eat well (no red-bull or candy), and do some normal things during the 48 hours.

* I think the audio came out good.  And the song I made was surprising because it was the first thing I played on the keyboard.  When I dropped it into the game the mood changed and made it seem like an art experiment more than a game.  So I was really pleased with that.

* The arrow puzzle controls are really satisfying.  Jumping is frustrating sometimes.  And typing letters would be better if I had time to highlight the individual letters.

* Analytics are built in, I’m tracking how far people get, and their score when they win.

* I finished something, and put it on my website.

The Bad:

* Another major thing I learned was the value spending time on just designing something on paper.  I was really stuck for an idea after the theme was announced, and I just ended up choosing a lame mechanic because I didn’t have time to think of some good one.  If I do this again, I’ll try to think of a cool mechanic first and then apply the theme to that mechanic.

* I’m disappointed that I didn’t spend an hour modeling some quick things to drop on the path besides blocks.   I wanted to have junk flying by to make things seem faster, and have stars moving over your head.  But I got stuck on a few bugs and ended up only having time to make it work.

* Aaron and Alex’s role aren’t really visualized as well as I wanted.  I set the audio to pan Aaron on the left and Alex on the right.  Good guys classically come in from the left.  Alex’s voice was much louder in my mic, so I had to boost Aaron’s character and I boosted him a bit too high.

* The capsule looks lame and beginner to anyone that’s used Unity.  I can model much better things in 3D, but I ended up just modeling some cubes.  So much for practicing UV mapping in Blender last week.

They say your prize is your game.  And I’m very happy to have made something to put in my portfolio.  Even if it’s not great, it’s way better than an empty portfolio and the excuse that most of my work is backend, behind a firewall, and an NDA.

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

— ede_ (@ede_) April 28, 2013

Hey guys, here is my halfway-ish video update on my progress so far. Now the crunch shall begin!

So, I set this video to upload yesterday, and today I wake up to see that it’s finished.

Day one timelapse

Now for the second day, and my second breakfast for this weekend.

Starting April 19, the 5th Hack-a-Jam Game Development Competition will begin!

This competition is held every 2-4 months, and this is the approximate 1-year birthday. Because of this, I am offering a prize to the winning entry. This prize is free advertising (one month), on both of my main websites, which have decent traffic.

What is the Hack-a-Jam?

The Hack-a-Jam is a game development event/competition where you must create a game within a set amount of time. The time given in each competition varies, as it could take two days, four days, or even just 30 minutes. Different from other game jam events, the Hack-a-Jam uses a multiple-award system, meaning there is no “Overall Best Game”. This allows for us to give awards to the best games, and not make a decision between two games which are equally amazing. The theme will be a suggestion voted on from the community through many different voting sessions. Another thing you could do to win certain categories is make things such as dev logs, timelapses, etc. You can them post them or links to them in the Posting section of the Forums.

What are some possible winning categories?

Most Psychedelic Visuals
Most Deaf People After Hearing The Game
Most extra items (dev logs, etc.)
Most Rage-free
Most rage-induced
Most Suggestive Content Without Crossing The Line
Shortest Game
Best themed
Most Things On Screen Without Lag or Crash

What are the rules?

Since we are a laid back community, you could probably get away with most of these rules (except major ones, like turning in your entry a whole 24 hours late…). Here are what I would like the community to follow, however:

1. All game content must be created within the set time. Note: You can use other music, placeholder graphics, etc. as long as you are allowed to!
2. Your game is not required to follow the theme, but would greatly improve your chances of winning. Unless almost every other game is not following the theme, it is almost guaranteed that your game won’t win anything.
3. You must work alone, and you must create everything included in the game.
4. All game creation tools are permitted, such as Unity, GameMaker, Photoshop, Flash, Paint, etc.
5. All external game extensions/DLLs are permitted. If you want to make it multiplayer (if you are using GameMaker), go ahead and use 39dll.

You can visit our website at http://www.hack-a-jam.com/. From there, you will want to head over to the Posting section, and sign up for an account (you can use Google, Facebook, etc.). Good luck to everyone!

hello! I was wandering, can i use the Cyengine 3 in ludum dare? and what would i do about the source code? give them the project file?

We were interviewed on fight4game during Ludum Dare 25, and the footage has finally been edited and released: I’m afraid it’s all in French, but you get a decent look at the room were were in

I can’t seem to embed youtube videos, so here is a direct link.

I want to point out for those who do speak French that I was exhausted (this was taken Saturday morning: remember that in France we start at 3am) and that French isn’t my mother-tongue – sure, I repeat myself a lot, but considering the circumstances I think it went pretty well

This was my first Ludum Dare and I must say it was an awesome experience. I’ve learned a lot and I’m also pretty amazed by how much I got done in those two days. So here’s the post mortem for my entry.

What went right

Since this was my first LD I didn’t really know what to expect or how much I would be able to get done. So I was amazed that I actually got the core gameplay working given the fact I went for simulation game. I was also surprised at my own coding. Usually I tell people I’m not a very good coder but looking back all I did was coding

first running version

So I’m pretty happy how the game plays. Its fun to watch the citizens walk around and do their thing. The initial brainstorming and mind mapping helped me a lot as well in filtering out game ideas. The minimalistic graphic style turned out well but this may also be due to my previous games and experience with it. Ultimately it allowed my spent as much time coding as possible.

What went wrong

The core game concept was to force the player to suppress their citizens in order to win the game. So even the player has good intentions he will be looked as an evil king in the eyes of his citizens. The problem with this concept is that it was difficult to generate enough feedback to the player so he would understand it. I also stumbled upon how to communicate to the player that he has to force his people back to work in order to win the game. The intro story of the immediate great drought tries to provide some motivation and context but I’m not sure of people even did read all that. I tried to display angry citizens by placing a dark cloud above their heads but something else like them rallying and demonstrating in front of the castle probably would’ve been better.

Another thing was that depending on the camera zoom some things got lost and they player didn’t get what was going on or why things happened a certain way. This brings me to the next issue. The user interface which displays necessary game information but in a unappealing and cryptic way. For example its very easy to lose track of the food count.

I didn’t have time to create a tutorial or some introduction to the gameplay mechanics. I also didn’t have time to properly playtest the game in the end and there are some severe balancing issues.

Conclusion

Feedback is king! Because if the player doesn’t get whats going on the game isn’t going to be much fun, unless of course thats to point of the game. This is a kind of obvious thing but it gets lost so easily in between all those awesome features inside your head. I’ll definitely spend more time on communicating things better to the player in my next Ludum Dare. I’ll also try to do a simpler game so I’ll actually have enough time for that as well. I’m definitely looking forward to it.

If you want to play the game then follow this link.

If you want to check out my development tumblr then follow this link or if you want to see what other games I’ve made then follow this link.

Thank you.

This is the postmortem for my game Trina of the Depths  ( play it! ).

::: Development Notes :::
I worked alone on this one, because I couldn’t find a coder to partner with.
It’s the first game I ever made myself. I’m an illustrator by trade, and have never been (and probably will never be) a hardcore coder.
It was very hard work, since Saturday morning through Monday evening, I slept about 10 hours total.

I used Construct 2, FL studio,  Photoshop and Flash.

About the theme: I couldn’t top my last LD submission, which was about an evil dungeon lord trying to destroy a hero, using traps. So I thought I’d go with my second idea, controlling an evil octopus. So this whole RPG/metroidvania idea developed in my head, about Trina, daughter of the evil Sea King and the secret of her birthright. And it really worked for me, to the point that I’m going to make it an actual game.

Gameplay Video:

:::How I spent the time:::

I really wanted a control scheme that captured the feel of an octopus slicing through water. Therefore I spent some 8 hours developing the control scheme.
Trina, the heroine, is controlled via cursor keys, in a unique way. Pressing a direction doesn’t move Trina, instead it charges her corresponding vector, horizontal, vertical or both. Movement occurs after the release of the cursor key(s), and the muscle meter on the bottom left is accordingly drained by the effort.

Since Trina seemed to be falling too fast (she is in the sea, and this just wouldn’t do), I also implemented some resistance to gravity, not in the form of passive Lift, but in the form of a last strain of her muscles/parachute action. For 30msecs after finishing her ‘jump’, trina will try to stay afloat, giving the muscle meter time to recharge.

This simulates a movement that requires judgement and thinking-ahead, like an octopus might plan. After you’ve made your mind about your target, you jump towards it.  The result is a very exact, very elegant control scheme, that most players so far hated?? Wait, what? More on that later.

When I was satisfied with the control scheme, I added an enemy, a cute fish, which naturally hurts (and annoys) evil Trina. I struggled with its behavior, AI and patrolling patterns, and in the end managed to only get one to spawn…

Graphics came on the end of Day 2. I animated Trina’s animations in Flash (just penciling) and inked/colored each frame in photoshop.

Music-writing sessions were interspersed throughout Days 2 and 3, to ensure maximum inspiration, and time to go back and re-do things. I ended up with three themes, a main tune, an encounter scherzo and a battle theme , using old soundfonts and a sampled gameboy Bass sound.

Day 3 was about damage control (since I hadn’t succeeded in properly implementing enemies) and level design. I also made rapidly prototyped level blocks. For this I took one giant background and start painting directly on it, taking care that assets do not overlap, so I can lasso them and export them later. This way I work super-fast without overthinking everything, I have a good idea of what my assets will look like when overlaid on the game background, and I don’t have to worry about layers and CPU performance at all. It’s the technique I’ve used since my first LD#23 and I wholly recommend it.

Here’s a screenshot of my almost final assets file:

And what my final stage looks like:

:::What went right:::

• my first ever solo game!
• the control scheme: having extensively playtested the game, I find that Trina moves in a much more refined, much more interesting way than if I had used plain 8 direction movement or mouseclick-to-move. After getting the first power-up, Trina controls like a charm, cutting through water like the evil princess she is.
• animation/character design. It’s as fluid as I envisioned. Like all animators, I was mimicking an octopus in the mirror the whole time.
• the music: I thoroughly enjoyed taking a soundfont of women singing “ooohs” and another of women singing “aaahs” and writing parts for them to sing, so that they sound like one chorus that sings both. I loved the battle theme, which I injected a sample of a rhino snorting into. I think it makes the mood more intense.
• the backstory and foundations for expanding this into a proper game. I couldn’t help daydreaming and scribbling notes about how I want the game to be, after LD is over

:::What went wrong:::

• the control scheme! From what I see in my comments section, many people don’t get it at all, can’t maneuver, and/or believe gravity to be too harsh. In my opinion, it may actually be too lenient; it’s a platformer, and you can (with some effort) ‘fly’ to wherever you want to. How is this harsh? Ok, it’s not Owlboy, but it’s not supposed to be. That having been said, I’ve been convinced that up-front giving Trina the powerup that nobody bothers to get  will do its part in coaxing new players into playing, and is a good game design move.
• coding. I’m not a coder, and even though the Construct 2 forums are full of good FAQ and solutions (thank you, community!) , I seriously messed up the code that spawns new enemies, and even though I finally managed to pinpoint the cause, this left my game with only one enemy
• time: because of my coding set-backs, I didn’t implement the larger level I had in mind, the metroidvania “get the item and go back to unlock a new area” portion of the game, and the boss battle. I decided to make it as fun to play as possible with the assets at my disposal.
• backstory/dialogues. It’s not apparent why Trina is a villain. She hates all people (fish) in this part of the world, where she was brought unwillingly, and will scheme and plot against Good King Triton. All this is lost, since I didn’t want to cheapen the mood by inserting plain text using a plain font (Construct 2 doesn’t support embedding, and using webfonts was a big risk)

And that was my entry. I hope you enjoyed it