About Orni

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U no take Loot! Ludum Dare 33	Dungeon Deadline Ludum Dare 27	Super 1-Bit Space Arena Ludum Dare 26	Dinosaur Survival Bash!! Ludum Dare 24
Asylum Ludum Dare 23

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Check out some of my favorites so far – I wasn’t able to play & rate many games up until now, but I’m planning to do so next week.

The Red Planet by Zccc

Fantastic aesthetic! Reminded me of Doom and the story telling was nicely implemented

Grave by uheartbeast

This one has both – great gameplay and great looks!
Possibly the best 2D animation I’ve seen so far

Seperated by rxi

Amazing mood that’s supported by equally amazing pixel art

The Bear Hunter by Devark

A great short experience that tells a gloomy story

Sewer Monster City by bitslap

Great classic game idea fully polished. Enjoy.

and maybe check out my game too:

Ludum Dare was a blast once again and I’v already played so many great games!
So here’s a short post mortem writeup of my crazy game dev experience this time around:

Play it!

Since I’m in Germany the contest started at 3 am. for me, so I just stayed awake for the theme release, immediately got the idea for the game and went to sleep for a few short hours.

Waking up I rushed into developing the basic game features (movement & collision) and made some sprites. Great!

However, once I started working on game-specific mechanics I kind of feared my game would be too ambitious (I was both proven right and wrong later on).
At the end of day one I had the enemy spawn system and hero attacks working, as well as most of the graphical work done.

Day 1 went pretty nicely altogether, although I didn’t even start making the particle system or the traps – at least one of which I had on my todo list for day1.

Waking up I organized everything I had to do … and almost gave up the whole thing. It was simply too much work for me to handle in one day – but I stuck with it and continued working in some form of delirious meditation. At around 2 pm. I realized that I managed to get a lot done … and not have eaten anything the whole day.

After coming back from raiding the fridge I felt pretty down and had not a lot of fun working on the game any longer, so I made a title screen instead. At around 8 pm. I finished everything but sound & music. Music generators like autotracker-c are really amazing for exactly these situations I must say.

I wanted to do a lot of additional stuff for the game and there’s quite a lot of polishing left to do – but I was simply burned out. I couldn’t even test the game by playing through it, so I sent it to my girlfriend and once she reported back to have beaten the game I kind of collapsed and simply submitted what I had.

Now, a couple of days later, I really wish I would have taken longer pauses so I would have enjoyed the whole thing more. I might have continued working until the 3 am. deadline that way.

While I’m quite happy with my work, I also know that I reached my limits somewhat.
Maybe I’ll make a post-compo version, but don’t hold your breath.

so right now I’m grabbing a beer (or equivalent) and play a few nice games you guys made!

ezgif.com-gif-maker

titlecard

Play it!

You’re a dragon minding your own business when nasty
heroes enter your dungeon to steal your treasure!
Protect your hard earned gold with fiery breath,
devious traps and summoned goblin hordes in 6 levels of fun!
Share your highscore to let the world know that
you’re the dragon with the biggest treasure far and wide!

title screen

(title screen for my game: U no take Loot!“

I’m about 80% done now.

10h to go, I can do this!

There’s still a huge amount of work to do, but I’m certainly more than halfway done!

I need to finally get the remaining necessary game mechanics in order and start building a couple of actual levels for gameplay testing.

I’m so excited for the “polishing” phase! I have big plans for particle effects and more level objects so they look nice.
This is fun!

progress3

I’m finally participating in another Ludum Dare … it’s been a long time.

Same Tools as every time: FlashDevelop + Flashpunk

I immediately got a nice idea for a game and while I’m not going to reveal it just now, here’s a screenshot of the very first running build of my game … all the running around and collision stuff is working nicely.

The countdown is ticking, so make sure to check out the great games you missed so far!

Here are my personal favorites of this LD:

Proletarian Ninja X – deepnight

Chicks And Dungeons – Kotstulle

Moonlight Running – ncannasse

Capitall – the.vaber

Also, make sure to check out my entry 😀

Dungeon Deadline – Orni

Play it!

First things first: I’m happy about how the game turned out – it’s the first time for me that I finished a Ludum Dare game as I initially designed it, without cutting any features.

I worked with my girlfriend on ‘Dungeon Deadline’ and she helped me a lot coming up with the idea and refining the gameplay elements, while she designed all levels beautifully as well.
As you probably can immediately tell, I’m using Oryx famous ‘LoFi Fantasy’ set – the same set that many other games use (for example ‘Realm of the Mad God’ & ‘Legends of Yore’) so this part was settled. For the audio I asked Landon Podbielski for help and he composed a wonderful tune for it.

I’m very grateful to those two guys, since all that you see and hear in my game was made by them.
(besides the impromptu sound effects and some minor graphics that I did)
So my job was coding and actually developing that whole thing – and it took some very long hours to do so. however – since I’m by now basically fluent in the Flashpunk engine I was coding at an amazing speed and was surprised of myself for a few times – loved it.

Despite being a overall very positive experience I also had some minor downsides:
The code looks like hell … I’m always starting out neat and organized and end up hacking stuff together in a way that should give any compiler a heart attack. It’s still memory-leak proof and more or less reasonably performance optimized though.
Some of the features are a bit buggy, or at least under-developed – one of them being the warrior attack. It’s a bit unbalanced and simply not very well done – but I kept putting it off and ended up having to keep it like it is now. Please try out the other two classes to play the game in a balanced way.

After reading the comments that I got by now I’m happy to report that people generally like my game – some seem to like it quite a lot

Several people suggested that the time limitation hinders the potential of the game – since they want to explore the dungeons in a more traditional RPG way. While I certainly understand that feeling – this is simply an other type of game and the theme of this Ludum Dare is ’10 seconds’ after all. However – I might develop this further and ditch the time limitation to include up/down stairs and a shopping – which should make this a much more classical dungeon crawler. We’ll see.

I also have to thank the whole Ludum Dare community – all of you are awesome!
It’s amazing that so many games got made and I’m going to take my time playing as many as I can over the next days.

Have Fun!

My girlfriend (tnk) who also worked on this entry as a level designer made this awesome gif of our game:

Play ‘Dungeon Deadline’ !

It’s done!

Our game ‘Dungeon Deadline’ is finally finished:

screen_2

screen_3

Play it now!

Unbenannt

I’ve actually started making my entry and got the player movement and world generation done.

As you can see I’m using the awesome LoFi Fantasy graphics by Oryx (thanks again for permission to use them!) – please also note that I’m taking part in the Jam category for the first time, so using already pre-made graphics is a revelation for me 😀

I won’t reveal what the “10 second theme twist” is – at least for now, but I’m pretty sure my game is going to be unique.

Later today my girlfriend will join me and we’ll continue working together on this (which I’m really looking forward to)

stay tuned – and keep up the amazing work

So I just woke up (it’s 4:30 am in Germany) and immediately started coming up with game concepts with my girlfriend.

We’re going to take part in this LD together!
This is a first for both of us, since I didn’t participate in the jam category up until now and she didn’t participated in LD at all.

We were able to decide on a fun (and hopefully unique) concept in a very short time and I’m going to spend the next one or two hours coding together the basic engine stuff, sleep a bit, and continue working on it tomorrow

(by the way – we’re going to use flashpunk, take a look at the tools I used last LD – I’m going to use them again)

If you’re anything like me you really want to know how the voting turned out. I know it’s all rather irrelevant – but be honest, would you take part without the voting/rating/top-games stuff?
I know I wouldn’t 😀

Competing with others is a great source of motivation and therefore surely an important aspect of Ludum Dare

So – bear with me as you count down the last hours and make sure to check out all the roundup posts available, like both of mine for example:

Roundup part 1

Roundup part 2

Here are some other great little games I’ve stumbled upon.
The Ludum Dare Voting ends soon! Make sure to check these games out!

Random Legend Adventure by Captain_Genial

100% Safe Download by 3.14

Four Scepters by Benjamin

F*** This Job by Casino Jack

Life! by cwilloughby

and again, make sure to check out my game as well 😀

Super 1-Bit Space Arena by Orni

Play ‘Super 1-Bit Space Arena’

So, here’s my post mortem I wanted to write for quite some time now.
LD#26 was my third time participating and it was the first time everything worked more or less as I planned to.

I started by thinking something up that would fit the theme and chose to interpret it in a visual way, in terms of color depth, so it ended up being a 1-bit game – the most minimalistic color depth. Since this isn’t limiting genre wise I had to decide that next. Although I’d really liked to make a RPG but that’s something I simply can’t do within 48 hours (yet). The only other genres I have experience making games of are platformers and generic action games – so I decided to choose one of those. For some reason unknown to me (it might be because I was re-watching Star Trek Enterprise and Firefly at the time) I wanted to put my game into space, which fits action more than platformer – and what’s more fun than an arena shooter? yes, nothing, so this was settled then 😀

What went right!

I love Flashpunk!
By now my workflow is tuned almost to perfection – I can make art, code and implement content at a fast pace for/with it. I already decided to use something else next time – but for this time it simply felt like the obvious right choice – and it was.
1-Bit graphics rock!
It’s both very hard and very easy to work with very minimal graphical possibilities – like in this case, only two colors – since the art can be produced very fast and efficiently, yet it’s hard to get those few pixels right. However, by now I’m not too shabby as a pixel artist so this was a lot of fun for me and suited my skillset
time management is key!
I made a lot of breaks and was able to get everything done nonetheless. the biggest reason being that my workflow didn’t let me down and I didn’t stumbled over significant hurdles along the way
I’ve implemented everything I planned!
yes – this is a first for me. The game you can play is exactly what I imagined when I started making it (except for 2 gameplay thingies I’ll explain later). Having a to-do list and getting everything done in time is such a great feeling

What didn’t!

Although I’m quite pleased with the audio of my game – it’s far from great. I’d really like to get a less repetitive, more funky music track but simply wasn’t able to achieve that. mainly because I suck at music. I’ve known for a long time that the first person I’d hire for a dev team of my own would be a music guy.
Sound effect variations are incredibly awesome – yet I didn’t implement them. As many comments pointed out the weapon fire sounds are very repetitive and although this leads to a nice retro feel – it also doesn’t sound that great after a while. One of the things I learned this LD is to always produce slightly mutated sound effect variations and play them randomly.
I’m not happy with the AI – but I implementing some nice A* pathfinding seemed unnecessary at first – yet as my game progressed it became clear it would improve it a lot. So I started hacking it together but couldn’t get it to work without screwing up my time schedule – so I dropped it
I should have introduced the different monsters step by step instead more or less all of them at once (although there’s some nifty background algorithm going on determining the quantity and quality of monsters to spawn), but didn’t think of it until it was to late to implement
my original idea was to get exp points for “killing” monsters to level up the currently used weapon (in terms of knockback and frequency) but I somehow changed that plan – that’s the reason why you already start with those 3 weapons. I should have stuck to that plan – since I feel it would have improved my game (never ever cut a feature if you’re not completely sure it would make the game worse or would cost too much resources)

So – what now?

I don’t know.
Maybe I’ll eventually make a post-compo version but chances are I won’t. However, I had a lot of fun and am proud of my game and it’s a delight to see what you guys have come up with and play your games. being part of LD is a wonderful experience, every time

I’ve rated 50 games now – so it’s time for a first round-up!

these are my favourites of the games I’ve played so far:
(click on each games title to get to the game)