I’ve quickly hacked in a Fireworks show at the end of my game as my nod to the New Year’s Eve celebrations.

Trust me, it looks better in motion

[GAME LINK]

Finally got my timelapse up for Voxterium

Found out I’m not good with video editing software.  Just another thing I’ve learned from this compo…

I would like to start a list of Entires into the Comp/Jam that use the XNA framework:

I have only checked the first fifty odd on of my list, please add a link to your submission to the comments and I’ll update this list daily!

Update: This list now has 62 entries, is mostly complete and has been sorted to allow easier navigation.

I have created this list in the hope that we XNA developers will be able to sample each others games and provide much needed and valuable feedback to each other.

Phil’s made a nice gameplay walkthrough video for our game Braille:

Here is our double timelapse for Braille:

That was a blast!  This was my first Ludum Dare, but will defiantly not be my last.  Thank you to everyone involved.

My Game

VOXTERIUM

My Plan

Before the competition started, I had designs in mind, wrote some stuff down, and was testing out a million 2D platform game mechanics.  I’ve been doing primarily 3d stuff over the last year, so I began to question why I was entering a realm I wasn’t comfortable with for a 48 hour competition.   At the last minute I decided to switch to a 3D approach.

The whole process was really organic, I let the game design itself.  I didn’t take time to write out a plan or design document.  Design documents are great, and serve their purpose… but they are no fun to play and I can use that time to add cat powered mega bullets.

What went right…

I got the full support of my wonderful and loving family.  Every minute I wanted to work on the game, I had, distraction free.  Can’t express the importance and appreciation of that small fact.

I completed the game.  By using a definition of ‘complete’ that really only applies to games made in 48 hours.  There is a hint of a story.  Win/Loss conditions, mechanics, sound…  The basics are there.

The game is fun.  I enjoy it at least.  Once I turned it in last night and the LD website went kaput, I spent  a while playing it… not play testing it, but playing it.  It was nice.

I believe I did a really good job with my coding time management.  I worked a short time on each mechanic then really took a step back and decided if it “just didn’t feel right”, or flat out just didn’t work.  Rather than beat a dead horse, I was able to drop them and move on to the stuff that did work.  What I was most concerned about, generation of the antagonist and controlling it’s growth actually just worked out with minimal issues.   In the beginning, it reproduced so fast it would kill the framerate after a minute or two playing… I ended up calling that “hardcore” mode, with a warning, but optimizations and balancing added later killed the fun in that

The hardcore mode “bloom attack”.  The visual and sound… It just works for me.

What could have gone a lot better

I resorted to lazy coding a bit too quick.  Played the “public” and “static” cards way too early.  Some last minute bug fixes were a challenge, (and there are still a few minor ones lurking that I believe are tied into the above).

I got in a good chunk of time in to work on balancing and difficulty levels but it wasn’t nearly enough.   A few more hours to work on balancing would have helped a lot.

The “art”, if you can call it that needed some more love.  Some may find the color shifting thing a bit obnoxious… but then again, others will want more.  All the modeling was done in code and consists solely of cubes.  Some more interesting powerup and bullet shapes would have been nice.

Some of the sounds just don’t work for me. Except for the “bloom”… did I mention the bloom?  I like the bloom.

Final Thoughts

The jealous side of me is trying to decide if next time I should go for a web game.  Probably going to lose a lot of plays and votes for being a Windows-only application.  Lose several more for XNA’s outside requirements.  It may not be right, but it is what it is.

In the end though.. I didn’t do it for votes…  I did it for the fun and the experience.   And by those measures, I already won Ludum Dare.

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

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…

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…

I call it Hardcore mode… but I think it may be a little to difficult…

(The skull boxes kill you, by the way…)

26 ours in and I’m ahead of schedule.

Meant to spend sunday working on music, sound, menus and what not… but got a big chunk taken out of that today.

Have lots of balancing to do…  Right now, it’s kind of boring just shooting the crap out of a big green blob…

At least now it tries to kill you..

and kittens…

Where is all this time going?

Collisions, shooting and what not are now working…

It can get quite hectic for it’s simplicity… just what I was going for.

My progress so far:

There’s a level with solid tiles and tiles you walk through.  Enemies use basic pathing to find you.  The player has a weapon, which fires bullets.  The sprites onscreen are sorted by depth, so they don’t have that nasty sorting hting where you;re in front of someone and on their face.  But I disgress.

Tomorrow: bullets kill things.  Enemies are spawned.  More weapons.  An artist friend is stopping by to help finish the music my brother made and to do art.

Sunday: I expect the basic game works by then.  More weapons, finishing art, testing.  Probably score stuff, menu and title, maybe more enemy types.

Monday: Testing, testing, testing!  Then testing of the distribution to the only other Windows machine in the house, which went badly last LD.  Sorry I use XNA, all.

Got the basic game structure up and running, input, gamestates,  basic camera and skybox.

Made the last minute decision to go 3D….   Sounded like a better idea at the time than it probably will in 44.5 hours…

Kitch's Game

Now ladies and gents, pleeeeeease be nice.

<rant>

This is my baby. My cumulative game developing experience distilled into one sugary goodness. My 1/8 complete Mona Lisa(M?). I’ve developed more than a few finished games, and abandoned WAY more games than I care to think about. This .dll contains solutions to problems that haunted me for literal weeks.

And now I share them with you. All I ask is that if you do use it, PLEASE TELL ME WHERE I CAN IMPROVE IT. Like I said, this is nowhere near finished. In fact, it will most likely change by the time Ludum Dare gets here! In fact I can guarantee it will, I still need to add in my flexible animated texture stuff…

</rant>

What it does:

-Circle and Convex Polygon Collision

-Rotations

-Complex transformations

-Pathfinding

-Common texture stuff (animation, atlases, particle engines, etc.)

Have questions? Ask. It is very well commented, and has all the appropriate XML documentation for Visual Studio.

Happy Game Dev!

EDIT: The link was incorrect, but has now been fixed.

I’m going to have an… interesting LD this time around.  First of all, this will be my second LD compo and my first LD48, as I did the Jam last time.  Additionally, I have finals the two days leading up to the compo weekend, so I will have literally seven hours between taking my semester finals and starting a 48-hour game.  But hey, it’ll probably be all right.

Language: C# using XNA

Platform: Windows (I use XP still, btw)

I plan to make the sound effects myself with a mic and sound editor, so my game will either have bad sound effects or literal onomatopoeia ones like “bang”.

My first post-mortem for my first finished game for my first LD (entry here). Those are all stand-alone firsts. I have never actually finished a game to a point where I post the .exe for others to play. It’s just never good enough for me (we’ve all heard that one before). Anyway, post-mortem:

Idea

Not much to say here really. My first thought was — who wants to escape the most? Well, trapped souls from the depths of hell, obviously. In retrospect, that being my first answer says something about me. I also knew I’m not doing a platformer. From then on, I just kept adding random ideas/features with a promise to not go back and redo stuff.

I think the idea/concept turned out fine (or at least we’ll see after ratings ^_^). I didn’t expect to come up with any groundbreaking ideas and I didn’t have all day to think of one either. I saw a few people bail out and rewrite their code, so I’m happy I managed to stick with mine. I also saw too many people going “need more levels”, “need more level ideas”, “I only have 524 levels, help!” One of the reasons why I did not go the platformer route.

Schedule

Day 1
10am (5h in) — wake-up
10am-5pm — code
5pm-6pm — break
6pm-8pm — code
8pm-9pm — blog post
9pm-1am — Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood

Day 2
10am — wake-up
10am-3pm — code
3pm-330pm — break
3:30pm-4:30pm — code
4:30pm-7pm — beach
7pm–12:30pm — code furiously
1am-1:30am — blog post, submit

That’s a total of 9h+11h=20h out of 48h. Sure, I could have spent more time coding. But if my overnight Uni reach-the-deadline coding sessions have taught me anything, it’s that I don’t like them.

Gameplay

I think I oversaturated the game with features, especially since they all are accessible at once (if not usable). I didn’t think it was possible to have too many features for a 48h game, but there you have it. I have a nice tutorial screen to introduce everything though:

Only now do I realize this, but there are 600 games and finishing every game is near impossible. You have to keep it simple, stupid! Who has the time to read all that verbal diarrhea? I foyu skip the “help” button, you have no idea what you are doing. That said, there is nothing bad with complexity, in fact many games are known and praised for it. But you have to take it step by step. Introduce gameplay elements as the player progresses and plays, not throw everything at them at once. I think this may have be my biggest design flaw (besides lack of music). But then again, an in-game interactive tutorial in 48h? Moving on…

“Art”

Let my art speak for itself! (more likely growl out “kiiill meee”) Here’s the entire sprite-sheet:

I’m not an artist, I’m a programmer. All my units are either static of flying, so my “move” animation is 1 frame One thing I did wrong is make all the terrain colors too dark. Units and props stand out OK, but the terrain itself has too little contrast, and it really shows in screenshots. My Holy Light could have been more impressive too. I wanted a magnificent beam of shiny and awesome, but all I got is this lousy flashlight.

Audio

I’ve done very little with sound and games, so this wasn’t my strong side. I did decide to try out sfxr, which was a super-easy and quick way to produce relatively awesome sound effects. Ended up with 8 different sound effects. Obviously, I have no music and I couldn’t make any myself anyway. I’ve played around with Fruity Loops or whatnot in my day, and concluded I have no musical hearing. Not that my music teacher hadn’t made that perfectly clear back in grade 3.

Dirty code

Spaghetti code! Argh, my eyes! Not a single useful comment, dirty inefficient hacks, integers instead of constants or enums, … That’s K.I.S.S. and time limit for you! *shudders* I don’t think I could go on working with this code much longer. Then again, I’ve seen much worse too.

What I do appreciate in my coding style is the object-oriented design. Even with the number of classes spanning into second dozen, I didn’t get any game-breaking bugs that were more than careless copy-pasting.

In conclusion

Can’t say anything went terribly wrong. I probably would not have done much better with any other themes anyway. I could have spent more time coding/drawing, but then I would just exhaust myself beyond “fun”. I’m proud of myself for sticking with this till the end, even if my first thought was “Escape? What bollocks!”.

I love C#, XNA, and ReSharper and the speed at which I can chunk out code/features. I also know how many raters I’m losing by not having a “Web” play link. It would’ve been better if I had a Flash or Unity or something entry. But then I would have had to learn it first

Ludum Dare has been great so far, I love the community activity, and I can’t wait for the super-secret-October-make-a-buck type challenge.

My game for this compo was Black Hole, a game where the objective is to escape both the horde of Drones who cornered you, and the black hole which they cornered you against.

Fortunately for you, a long-dead alien race left a platform here, which feeds off of the emissions of the black hole and broadcasts energy to all nearby ships. You have moved in close to this platform and the black hole itself, and thus avoided the gigantic Drone Mothership which was chasing you. However, the smaller Drone forces can and did pursue you, so now you must hold out against them to recharge your Jump Engines, allowing you to jump to beyond lightspeed and escape to your home.

The coding process was quite frantic. I had to write the entire game engine, and at one point ended up re-writing and re-integrating the entire collision engine, as I had failed to discover that my method of detecting overlapping rectangles was not accurate if they were rotated. Fortunately, I’m quite skilled with circle based collision, and it only took about 20 minutes to switch and integrate.

Another thing to note: I was high on Oxycodone and other painkillers the entire time, having gotten my wisdom teeth removed on Thursday. This caused many dumb mistakes, the majority being simple math related. I persevered through it though, and ended up coming out with what I think is a fun game!

Plans for the future: to continue to develop this game. I want to add more enemies, powerups, and new game modes.

Timelapse Part One is here.

Timelapse Part Two is here.

I’ll be writing a Post Mortem at some point… Thanks for the fun times all! Cheers!

Edit: 1814 lines of code, for those of you who care.

I have spent a little short of 20 hours on active development. This is roughly two fifths and not quite the 48 hours. Then again I haven’t broken my 1am-10am sleep routine and did take a break or two (or more).

Since my first post, I have been partly polishing the existing features, partly struggling to add new ones. New large ones include a few more objects, a minimap, lighting, sounds, and tutorial and menu screens. In the end, I rather go for a finished, brief game, than a feature complete, but too rough-around-the-edges game. Then again, I went for a “sandboxy” gameplay, so you cannot really tell something is missing until you try it first. Here’s a screeny:

You can download it here (Requires XNA and .NET):

http://blog.capdb.net/SoulHellscape2.zip (my LD48 entry)

P.S. sfxr is awesome, I did not expect to have any sounds in the game, given very little prior experience with sound effect creation and total lack of musical hearing.