Hey everyone ! Here is the post mortem of my Jam game GSOD: Grave Screen Of Death.

Click here to play and rate ! Thanks !

What went right

Theme

Many hated the theme, rating about it being only a technical limitation. But that’s kind of the point of a theme. And I think this one is not more or less limiting than “10 seconds” or “minimalism” for instance.  It’s just that it really said (maybe more than the other theme) “Do whatever the heck you want, but maybe on one screen (please ?)”.

Anyway, this flexible theme gave me the perfect occasion to make a top-down shooter, which I never had the chance to do before. Plus, I had the idea pretty quickly and was able to stick to it, so that’s at least nice for that.

Graphics

This is the first game for which I use model animations and fake shadows. It was actually fun to tweak the animations and the general look even if it’s still very much programmer’s art.

Overall, I think the game looks pretty nice to me. But yes I more and more really want to team up with an actual artist !

Webplayer

As explained last time, web games are really convenient for people to play. It’s even more convenient now since you can embed web games directly in your entry page on the LD’s website.

Except for a bug that was quickly fixed by CraftStudio’s creator, everything ran without a inch ! The webplayer was even improved these past weeks and run equally good in Chrome or in Firefox.

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Annnnd release time !

That’s the end of this Ludum Dare for me, it’s 10:40 pm here and “real life” calls me back !

But I had a blast these past 72 hours while crafting a game I am pretty proud of :

It’s a simple top-down shooter (in one screen, obviously). Your goal is to “collect” crosses by killing the enemies and managing for them not to destroy the existing crosses with their explosions.

Play it right in the submission page :

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=14207

Proper post-mortem tomorrow, probably.

Bon courage for those still working, and good luck for the other !

I am looking forward to play all your games !

Florent

As planned yesterday, today has been mostly dedicated to art and (very quickly) sounds. And code, as always !

We now have a proper -yet simple- and almost fun top-down shooter.

And as you can see, I haven’t been idle (see yesterday’s screenshot) and had quite a lot of fun !

You can play the game here : http://florentpoujol.fr/content/craftstudio/ld31/index.html

But beware ! The red blobs explode if they come too close ! Controls : WASD / Hold Left Mouse Button.

For those interested, the sources are on GitHub : https://github.com/florentpoujol/HotMine-LD31

I am off to bed now, see you tomorrow for the submission and the post-mortem !

Good luck and have fun !

Florent

Hey everyone !

I am back this time with my favourite tools CraftStudio, Daneel –a framework of my own-, Paint.net, SFRX and probably some others.

After a little over 10 hours, I have an embryo of a top-down shooter. Our most cubic miner Steve can shoot creepers in the face with a double barrelled shotgun !

And that’s pretty much it for now.

Still, you can play it over at florentpoujol.fr/content/craftstudio/ld31/index.html .

WASD / Left Mouse / Escape to spawn a creeper (they don’t explode properly due to a webplayer-specific bug but I am too tired to fix it now).

Tomorrow will mostly be dedicated to art and sound.

And I still haven’t decided how (and if) am I gonna respect the theme on this once.

Good luck to all and so see you tomorrow !

Florent

Hey everyone ! Here is the post mortem of my game Linked Colours. 

As always, you can click here to play and rate it.

WHAT WENT RIGHT

Idea and development

As last time, I had the idea pretty quickly and stick to it. Thankfully I didn’t encountered big design issues and if I doubted that I would be able to create many levels, random generation came to my rescue, so I didn’t even needed to create levels manually other than the two tutorials.

In addition to Daneel, the framework for CraftStudio I created and which is the base of all of my projects, I was able to borrow quite some code from other projects of mine, so that I could focus on gameplay instead of reinventing the wheel once again. Having so much code already ready is what made me enter the Jam and not the Compo as the previous times in the first place.

But having an extra day prove very useful as even with a simple idea and lots of  ready-code I hadn’t much at the end of the second day in term of gameplay (but visuals where almost final).

Visuals

Let’s say it with some pomposity: linked colours is the best-looking game I have ever created in my entire life, so far ! Look at this beauty ! I am not even an artist, or am I now !?

Well, not quite, but it’s what I am most happy about, the game looks really great, especially compared to my previous games (improvements, yeah !).

Random generation

At the end of the first day, I wanted to add a level editor so that anyone could have created levels. I have one almost working for another game but I ditched the idea even before beginning the second day, where I worked mostly on visuals. Instead I spend some time working on random generation, and it did go surprisingly well.

The generation is pretty simple : on a 5 by 5 grid, it picks a square, then picks a color, then finds another square nearby and sets a color the previous one can connect to. It repeats that until there is no more colorless squares on the grid. Then it picks the squares that are not connected to any one and change their color so that they can connect to a nearby square. Then it finds squares with 3 or more connections (3 is rare, 4 in really unlikely to happen, 5 or more never happens) and sets them as squares with a required number of connections.

And that’s it, and it produce pretty nice levels, with actual mixed difficulty. I just wished I had time to tweak it a little and have some variations in the grid.

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So that’s the end of day 2 already, here is what I did :

• 9:30 to 10:15 am (45min): background V1 and splash screen.
• 10:30 to 11 am (30min): title scene.
• 11:05 to 11:35 am (30min): work on UI (icons).
• 12:05 to 12:40 (35min): ?
• 5 to 6 pm (1h): end level screen.
• 6:30 to 7:50 pm (1h20): color gradients.
• 9:10 to 10:10 pm (1h): color gradient, background V2
• 10:40 to 12 pm (1h20): various.

Total time: 7h (9h yesterday)

So, today the visuals have been vastly improved and the gameplay has been refined a little, but I still don’t have more content.

That will be for tomorrow, I hope I will be able to have a random level generation.

I planned a level editor but I ditched the idea even before starting the day, maybe for another time…

Play the game in Chrome and tell me what you think !

http://florentpoujol.fr/content/craftstudio/ld30

Bon courage to those who rush to submit in the coming hours, and all others !

( Yesterday’s post)

So that’s the beginning of the second day for me, here is what I did yesterday :

• 7 to 9 am : wake up, think
• 9 to 12 am (2 h 15 min): basic gameplay
• 1:30 to 6 pm (3 h 30 min): more gameplay, level selection
• 7:30 to 12 pm (3 h 10 min): first two tutorials, web player build

I took the not-very-original route again and set out to create a puzzle game where you have to connect all the coloured dots together.

Complication comes when you can’t create connections as easily as you would want.

So far, you can play to the first two tutorials in your browser (use Chrome, CraftStudio’s webplayer loads slowly in Firefox) here : https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/51314747/CraftStudio/Ludum%20Dare%2030/index.html

I said on the game’s page that I planned to work on a level editor today but I will work on every thing else instead !

• Background
• Title screen
• Better UI and graphics
• Last tutorial
• Level !
• Sounds ?

See you tomorow morning !  Bon courage everyone !

Hey !

Remember me ? Probably not, it’s only my second Ludum Dare and third game. The first one was Breeding Cubes for LD24, and the second one was HeartZ made with 3 others during the GlobalGameJam 2013.

This time I choose to reproduce Harvest: Massive Encounter, an already minimalist tower defense game that I enjoyed a lot. I wanted to built a resource management game for a while already, so this LD’s theme was the perfect occasion. Its certainly minimalistic on the inspiration side, but I really wanted to built this one and that was all the motivation I needed.

I tried to reproduce most of the mechanics : rock harvesting, energy production, energy propagation along the nodes (the feature that makes the game very cool and interesting to me) and building construction and functioning using energy.

It’s clearly unfinished and unbalanced, but it’s playable.
Move with arrows, place buildings with the mouse – click on them on the left then on the map (discard with right mouse).

Note that you can not reload the game, you need to exit it and launch it again to reset the level, sorry about that.

Still, I am pretty happy with it. I only worked like 25h on it and lost about 5h trying to fix bugs directly due to my inexperience with the the software and game dev in general.
The good thing is that I feel like I have leveled-up !

It is made entirely with CraftStudio that you can still try for free for a couple of days.
Depending on your OS, you may need XNA or Mono or -I am not sure what- to play.
You can try the web built, but it does not work for me (stays stuck during initializing scripts).

Go Play It

Thanks and GG everyone !

Hi everyone

That LD24 was my first LD, and also my first attempt at making a game. It didn’t go that bad since I successfully shipped an entry, a platformer named Breeding Cubes (spoiler : it involve cube reproduction !).

You can play it on my website (need the Unity3D WebPlayer plugin, but you already have it don’t you ?), download the source and rate it.

Theme

I headed for a straightforward interpretation of the theme. Your character has some abilities. You can evolve your playable character (new abilities or better ones) by finding another non playable character and breed with him (her). The new character resulting of this union possess the best abilities of its parents and can now overcome obstacles and progress through the level.

TimeLine

• Compo began Saturday at 3am.
• Woke up at 7am and started brainstorming on the theme while breakfasting
• The first day I worked 11h and implemented most of the features
• I slept from midnight to 8am on Sunday
• The second day I worked only 9.5h including 4 on level building and finally submitted my entry around midnight
• Compo ended Monday at 3am

How did it goes

Since I had no prior experience, I didn’t even really knew where to begin. And even if I did play around Unity before, it took me ages to implement basic stuffs. But in the ends, I successfully implemented almost everything I had planned without coming across major issues.

In total I worked only 20,5 hours on the game. That tells two things :

Unity is really a great tool to work with in very short period of time. I can’t wait to have experience to work faster and see what I can come up with in similar timeframe.

I had to take frequent and sometime extensive breaks. The second day, I was actually bored and tired of working, so I had to take a huge break from 11am to 3.30pm. But I did nod while watching an interview of Edmond McMillen, so it wasn’t a “lost” time on a gamedev perspective.

Also this LD confirmed me that I don’t like neither deadline nor crunch times. Am I fit for this insdustry ? Hopefully I am not working in it yet, I still have time to figure it out and adapt. Also I enjoyed the design, level design and level building phase much more that the coding phase.

Good job everyone who submitted something playable, I will try to play and rate fair as much entries as possible. I am also looking forward to hear from you about my game in the comments.

(If you want to play a great jam entry, let me suggest you “Porté par le vent” it’s really awesome !)

So I’m in for my first LD, which will also be my first game ever.

I will mostly use Unity3D with a bunch of great plugins as GameDraw and iTween as well as Sublime Text 2. I may use Paint.net too, but you can expect graphics full of primitives forms and plain colors.

Good luck and have fun !

Florent