There were a number of bad bugs in my official entry.

I’ve put up a fixed version here. Hopefully no more flying out of the walls!

Mini post-mortem:

My entry, Comfort Zone, didn’t go quite as smoothly as last time. I’m please with the result, but it still has some annoying bugs – I’m going to try to fix the most egregious ones today and post a link to a fix version.

The puzzle mechanics are cool, but I honestly still don’t know how to solve the later levels without trying random things yet. I think the mechanics are a little too complex to make for great puzzles (or else they just take a lot of learning to get used to). I mean, the basic mechanic is trivial, but the ways you can manipulate it get pretty complex.

Good bit: It was getting late in the game (2 hours before deadline I think), and I wanted several hours for polish (finishing sfx, title screen, etc…). But I still wanted one more level. I played around for nearly half an hour trying to come up with something interesting, and kept having to dumb it down in an attempt to find a solution. I was about ready to give up, because my latest iteration was seemingly also unsolvable. Then I did something weird navigating around the items on the board that I hadn’t foreseen, and suddenly the solution came into view, and I was like “Oh, cool!” Whew, close one.

I knew going in that it was a bad idea to battle with Unity’s physics system. And it turned out to be. My mechanics require subverting the physics in many places (since it’s sort of tile-based), and as a result I have a number of bugs (for instance, where the player can glitch out of the walls). Lesson learned, I should have done the collisions/physics manually, since all I need is basic box collision and springs.

I’ll be using Unity, Photoshop, maybe bxfr.

Check out my post-mortem for Foreshift here:

Foreshift: Ludum Dare #35 post-mortem

I talk mainly about how I made the art and sound for the game.

Also, uploaded a bug fix for the multiple-spawning balls. Boy, it was so tempting to want to make a few subtle changes for the overly-difficult level 6, but I didn’t feel that would be in the spirit of the compo!

You can play it online in an html5 compatible browser here:

http://icefallgames.com/Games/ForeShift/

(so far tested with Chrome on Windows.  IE 11 worked, but with no audio).

ForeShift is a puzzle platformer. Explore a mystical and peaceful forest environment while manipulating the environment…

Unity project:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B7AkuhunCLJTUGIzOXQyeXhubU0

I wish I’d had time to add a few more levels, but the basic mechanics are well put in place at least. If only I hadn’t wasted all of Friday night and early Saturday morning!

I’m in (for the compo). It’s been a while since I’ve successfully completed a ludum dare, so hopefully things will work out this time around.

I’ll be using Unity 5, photoshop for art, and probably Sony Vegas for any sfx editing.

This will be my second ludum dare (I’ve entered two, but bailed on one of them). Last time I finished in the top 5%. My goal this time is to be in the top 1%.

I’ll be using Unity this time (instead of XNA), mainly because of the multi-platform support. I’ve already used it for one other game jam (gamedev.net’s Week Of Awesome II), and that worked out great.

Given the short time frame of ludum dare, I will likely end up doing a 2d game, so I should probably get familiar with Unity’s 2d tools.

This will be my 2nd Ludum Dare

I’ll be using my sample project from this article as a code base:

http://www.gamedev.net/page/resources/_/technical/game-programming/case-study-bomberman-mechanics-in-an-entity-component-system-r3159

It’s an entity-component framework I developed.

This will be my second Ludum Dare. As before, I’ll be using XNA and FarseerPhysics, along with a subset of my own entity-component framework located here.

I wish I was familiar with a framework that would let me make this a browser game, but unfortunately I never got around to that. So XNA it will be again.

I’ve been pretty busy (Today I just released my first Xbox game: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qiKqb13Pmd4 ), but hopefully I’ll find the time this weekend to put in a good effort.

For any of you that have played my game Quantum Entanglement, there are some fixes for bugs in the levels which allowed for easier solutions than I had intended.

The full windows installer has the fixes here, and for those with the zip version, the replacement files for the levels are located here (just copy over the old versions).

I think it turned out pretty well for my first LD. It would have been nice to have a little additional time to think through my levels a little more, and also improve the music. But I was able to put in a good amount of polish, so that was nice. I wrote a little post-mortem here.

The entry is here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=11319

I’m still a little worried my quantum entanglement mechanics aren’t sufficiently interesting, but it seems to be getting better and better the more I “explore” my world. I’d like to spend the remaining hours tomorrow on polish, but I feel I still have some discovery to do about what interesting puzzles can arise in this world where orientation and position are linked…

This is my first Ludum Dare. I’ll be using XNA and FarseerPhysics, along with a subset of my own entity-component framework located here.

I wanted this to be playable in a browser, so I looked into also having a Silverlight version using the SilverSprite library, but that is looking less and less likely. So it will likely just be a Windows executable.