Ludum Dare

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Snakes and Letters Ludum Dare 37	Helisculptor Ludum Dare 36	Wings for Ska Li Ludum Dare 35	Carrion Forge: Fusion Gunship Ludum Dare 34
Polar Bearer MiniLD #63	Hindenboxer Ludum Dare 33	Bubble Becky Ludum Dare 32	CentiSoccer MiniLD #58
Skreen Ludum Dare 31	Sheepwalkers MiniLD #55	Intergalactic Express Ludum Dare 30	Juno's Garden Ludum Dare 29
Don't forget your old shipmate Ludum Dare 28	The theft of the magic potato Ludum Dare 27	SDFJKL Ludum Dare 26	Ninox the Nightbringer Ludum Dare 25

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Awarded by Jupiter_Hadley
on February 13, 2016

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We already participated 8 times in the Ludum Dare jam, but this was the first time we had a dedicated pixel artist, Daniel! Also this was the first time we made a platformer.

Enjoying a late breakfast in our garden, we discussed many ideas. In the end, we stuck (pun intended :P) with our idea of using bubble gum as our ‘unconventional weapon’. During the process of making the game the following back story crystallized:

Due to an unfortunate typo, Gum has been outlawed in an alternate 90s-past. Young Superhero Becky rises to challenge the robotic law enforcement.

You can play our game here

What went smooth

The graphics are much better than in our last games, thanks to Daniel, who worked on them the whole weekend. 😉 This meant that Anneroos now had a lot of time to help Jelle with the coding.
Distribution of tasks was very easy: Daniel – graphics, Anneroos – coding & sound effects, Jelle – coding and music.
First time using Git (instead of Dropbox), so we all could test our own changes, without the risk of breaking stuff for the others.
It is playable! And it has an end, and a story (for us at least, probably not so clear for the players 😉 )
The first time we made a platformer, and using Tiled went quite smooth.
Crispy pixels 😀 (Daniel is very happy)
We were relaxed! Except for perhaps the last 4 hours. 😉 We took time to dine with friends and juggle in the garden.

What went not so smooth

Making the background music loop nicely.
Level design/playtesting: it turned out that the 4 levels were quite hard for people that didn’t playtest the whole weekend. Next time we should put more effort into developing (shorter?) levels with clearer instructions.
The bubbles were finished quite late, so the velocities and effects were not finetuned as they should have.
The end boss. There was very little time to program the end boss, and it turned out to be quite difficult as well.
Many sound effects were recorded last minute; we forgot to make a sound effect for jumping.

Conclusion

We had fun, and the game is more polished than any of our other games. Of course, there is still a lot of polishing and level design that can be done for a postcompo version, and some bugs to be removed (in particular the infamous infinite-bubble-spawn-bug). We were very happy to hear that some people actually played until the end and beat the boss!

Enjoy playing our game, and good luck with the hard levels

Slaughtering my way through the theme suggestions, I got to wonder how some of those ended up in the list. In my opinion, a good theme has the following characteristics:

1. Immediately inspire
Good example: “Castle”. Building a castle, attacking/defending a castle, exploring a castle are all possibilities in terms of gameplay. It encourages medieval artwork, but leaves room for deviation.

2. Leave room for creativity, don’t be too specific.
Good example: “Futuristic”. Spacefaring, Post-Apocalyptic, Utopian are all possibilities.

3. Narrow down the endless possibilities. This is why having a theme for the contest is good, and it makes each contest unique.
Good example: “Power in numbers”. Although this leaves the setting completely free, it more-or-less forces us to create a game with lots of agents/particles/entities that somehow influence the game. A game that follows the theme will probably be recognized as belonging to this contest.

Do you agree/disagree with this? How do you rate themes?

Below are 50 particularly ~~annoying~~ peculiar suggestions in random order. If you suggested one of these, please let us know what went through your head when you made the suggestion. Did you honestly believe the theme had a chance of winning? (Some of the themes are bad in a funny way, I almost good-voted “Funny Hats” and “Maximum Yak Attack”)

Quack!
Suddenly Weather
Christmas Trees
Zenith
Anorexia
News
Looking For Missing Head
Pompeya
Indigestion
Game Development
Remember The Fallen
New Way
Hydrocarbon
Meow
Voxel (for most participants, 3D is not feasible)
Nanomaterials
Martha Lost
Counter-clockwise
Internet behind The Scene
Big Dick Problems
Home Automation
No Mouse Or Arrow Keys
Candy
Hungry Angry
Unconventional Resolutions
Funny Hats
Miscommunication
Contents On A Found USB Drive
Make The Player Miserable
Balanced Diet
Underrepresented Crimes
Achievement
Soap
Fast Lane
Bread
Maximum Yak Attack
Frogs
Smelly
Third Party
Music And Me
Grunt Work
Different Time Period
Ultra Low Resolution
Privacy
Rhyming
Cookies
Flaws
Quotes
Short Wired
Potatoes

Pointed at LudumDare by Frozen Fractal in the week before the Jam, my girlfriend and I decided to give it a shot.

Concept

I was absolutely convinced the theme would be “End of the World”, but it turned out differently. It took us about 4 hours to come up with an idea that would be simple enough to implement. A trainride forced us to think about it a bit longer than we would otherwise have. The player walks around on a grid, of which certain parts are occluded based on the player walking over “switch”-tiles. Stepping on a “spike”-tile restarts the level, so these have to be avoided, which can be hard in the dark. The goal is to black out the entire level (cover the land in darkness, following the theme). You can check out and download our game here!

Screenshot of Ninox the Nightbringer

Process

I really liked Python after some recent experience with it, and although Java and C are in general my stronger suits, I expected Python with Pygame to work better for this game (I had created a simple brickles game two days earlier to practice). My girlfriend did all the rest, i.e. graphics (in Inkscape), sounds, music (in LMMS and Audacity) and most of the level design (in Notepad). We took it easy: baking cookies, eating all of them, taking a walk, sleeping enough and finishing on Sunday. Despite this, we finished the game surprisingly fast, having a working game on Saturday evening. Sunday was mainly leveldesign and the imho boring polishing (graphics, “repetitive walking”, fullscreen-mode, intro and outro and of course testing). Half my Sunday was eaten by a futile attempt to create an executable from the Python code on Ubuntu.

The Good

We had fun, and thought the concept was original. Dropping the initial ‘pedophile searching his dungeon for a little girl’ made the game acceptable for my girlfriend’s mother, too. We divided the work well and finished the game on time, with an intro and ending. The number of levels was okay (though some of them should have been left out). Both of us learned some (more) Python. Drawing the graphics was great fun, and since they ended up so small, here’s a bigger version of our owl “Grog”:

The Bad

The biggest problem was deployment. I had no experience with putting stuff online, and the game required Python and Pygame to be installed, which most people don’ t have. Some programs exist to create a Windows executable, but it took us two weeks (combined >20 hours, ridiculous) to make PyInstaller work. The main problems were reluctancy to work from Windows, font, missing .dll files (for audio) which we manually included in the end. Maybe next time I’ll try Javascript. Anyway, we have an EXECUTABLE! 😀

Next time we could be a bit more ambitious. We were planning on adding more game elements (doors, walking goats), but with a working game, our motivation (aka pressure) wasn’t as strong as when we started. Also, see the previous paragraph.