Ludum Dare 32 | Ludum Dare 31 | MiniLd #54 | Ludum Dare 30 |
MiniLD 49 | MiniLD 48 | Ludum Dare 28 |
… This weekend, prepare to be eaten away by our new game jam entry! (not ludum dare related though)
Release should be on Sunday.
And, of course, our team will enter LD31, since it will be our first anniversary! One year ago, we did our first game ever for LD28. Thanks you guys for your great feedback, for playing all those wonderful games, and for making this a place where we can actually make instead of dream-talking!
Well, I made it in time (barely) : here is our MiniLD 54 : A Burrito Too Far.
In this game, you are invited to a party filled with Mexican food (ok, I’m sorry for the racial stereotype, but I found it funny :p )… And what happens when a bunch of people got to go to the toilets at the same time? Well… IT’S A RACE!
So, it’s a multiplayer runner; we got a hard time with this one, and I’ll write a post mortem whenever I have some time, but right now, it’s time to go to work (and I didn’t sleep at all T_T)
I spent the weekend with some friends and they fought each other on Warmageddon… Why don’t you give it a try?
project page
Well, you could since I post almost everyday about our 2 players RTS, but in case you didn’t, look at that colorful gif and if you feel like it, go try and rate it
Booom, waaah, oh no an Imp! Flooosh… No sound on a gif? No problem!
Warmageddon is a simple RTS with two camps: God or the Devil; the way the game was made I expected most of the victory to be on the Devil side (if you are to try the game alone, you are going to play the devil). To get a bit of data back, I implemented some basic google analytics and the results are surprising me :
Yup, God is winning one third of a time, even though he is much less played! That means that there is more people playing it 2 players than I hoped, and I wish to thank you all for that!
Now, why not try it and rate it?
Images that moves!
First of all, I’d like to thank both my teammates on this jam : Lukasz, the “art guy” did wonderful work even though he was busy during the weekend, and Aubry supported me from start to finish with playtest, research, documentation, all the little things that allowed the game to feel more “polished”. The synergy was amazing, this is teamwork at its best; love you guys!
This Ludum Dare was kind of different : after a few success (mostly LD 28 : Rogue Rush and Mini LD 49 : Gaming Cockroach ) we started to be a bit overconfident, and this resulted in a massive downfall for LD 29 : we wanted our game to be smart, witty, good looking, fun, full of content… No need to say that we would need much more than 72 hours to do that and of course, we failed miserably at every single one of those goals. So LD30 was more about actually producing something. When the theme was announced, I quickly started looking for a game design; it usually takes me about 3 hours to define the concept of my game for a jam, but this one took only one :
Programmer art!
Idea 1 was about switching from one world to another one while your actions remained (Somehow like the cute and fun Heart Star); the second was about moving twice the same character in two slightly different levels ( Parallel Worlds does a very good job at it). Still looking for obviously “connected worlds”, Heaven and Hell came to mind, I sketched the idea not to forget it and *boom*, the concept spawned with it.
I was not so sure about the whole tablet oriented and two player thingy : on the one hand, it was original and would change from what you can usually find on a game jam; on the other hand obviously not everybody would be able to play it and that is sad. That said, both Aubry and Lukasz were really interested, so we gave it a go.
Yup, french flag place holder
We quickly choose 8*8 for unit size, so Lukasz would have enough time, and I started prototyping. Because of some lack of skill from my part, some ideas got scrapped at this point : the smarter path-finding system for units was gone and with it some of the spells that depended on it. Overall, everything went smoothly untill we got the first playable prototype by the end of day 2. We had some fun with it and from that point on, we considered the game as shippable. And there came something that we learned in previous game jams : polishing.
Do you know what they told you when you ask “what is your secret for a good game?” to a professional indie developer? Playtest. Playtest it as soon as possible, playtest it as much as possible, playtest it again and, when it’s over, do some playtest. This is obviously harder to do in 72h, you normally don’t have time for that and that’s why we got Aubry on the team : it was his first jam, he has no specialty (he can do a bit of code, a bit of GD, but nothing specific) but he gave his all on finding bugs, playing the game alone over and over, giving me invaluable feedback so I could concentrate on fixing stuff rather than looking for it. During this time Lukasz went berserk : adding animation everywhere, those wonderful attack spells, emotions for God and the Devil… Sadly, that is also where the second batch of cut down happened : some units and spells got scrapped, because we wouldn’t have time to polish them as much as the rest, and it would give an unbalanced feeling to the rest of the game. So we used the good old proverb: less is more.
Playtesting with my mom :3
I finished the game 6 hours before the end of the third day… 6 hours is both a lot and not that much to add something to the game, but I had in mind some of the stuff I learned from previous game jams, and I quote myself here : Don’t suppose everybody thinks like you do. You need to teach players how to play, even if it’s obvious to you. So I started the tutorial. The bitmap font doesn’t look right, my English is broken and it could be a lot clearer, but overall every people who watched it understood the game, and that was the objective.
Of course, with more time, more knowledge or better skills, we could have done a better game, but this is our current best and we are proud of it. We hope you’ll enjoy it, please give it a chance and rate it!
War it is then!
Has it developed self awareness? Well, maybe… But before worrying about whether or not a game jam entry could become the next Skynet, you should try playing it : it’s a fun and colorful RTS in HTML 5 😀
Project page
And tomorrow, I shall write the Post Mortem of this great adventure!
Yup, we did it!
Common and play Warmageddon, the most colorful apocalypse game yet!
Warmageddon is a two players RTS for tablets and smartphone :
And right now, I just need a lot of sleep; but I can’t wait to try all those games 😀
So, we started some playtest of Warmaggeddon, our two players RTS on tablet/mobile, it works fine and I’m amazed by our pixel artist work for this Ludum Dare :3
And still more than 24 hours left 😀
… and there rages the war between God and the Devil!
We are doing a two players tablet game, and it is coming along nicely :3
Cya at release time!
We needed a break from our #LD48 game… So we did another mini #LD48 game… Also, intelligent people should stay away because they could be offended.
This will be our fourth Ludum Dare (mini included) since December 2013 😀
And we just opened our site : http://schizokoa.com/ our blog and all our games are there, come and say hi!
Thanks to r2d2upgrade (play his game guys, it might very well be the best of Mini LD49!) I saw there was a Youtube video of Gaming Cockroach 😀
Those reactions was pretty much exactly what I was looking for with this game :3
Infinite thanks to John Gavin Polson who was nice enough to post about my little Gaming Cockroach on IndieGames.com 😀
The article : http://indiegames.com/2014/02/freeware_pick_play_tetris_as_a.html
Download the game : http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-49/?action=preview&uid=31786
Time to write a post mortem for Gaming Cockroach.
“Non human player” did not click with me. I grew up with the genesis and the super nes, and quite a lot of my favorite games are staring animals or at least anthropomorphic animals: non human player is not a constraint but a given in my mind. I guess I could have done a puzzle game, but the truth is, I don’t think I could pull out a working puzzle game over a weekend… So the last idea was doing a game that was not intended to be played by a human; I thought of different things, like making my cat play with my tablet or doing some video analysis from a webcam (poor man kinect) to make you play with a plush… And it was terrible till I get an idea : I was looking to add an interface outside the game (a cat, a plush, whatever), but it could easily be done inside the game. So I started doing some 3D model of a nes gamepad.
Well, I got lucky with this one: the development went right and I only got a few quacks on the road:
For my third game, I’m quite satisfied with the result, and I can’t wait for the next jam ^_^.
I’d also like to thanks everybody who played it!
Some people insisted the game needed sound. So here it is, Gaming Cockroach last update!
…
By the way, it’s time for me to show what the Konami code does!
Hell yeah, there was a flappy clone game hidden in the game that is in my game! (Much Inception! Very Depth!) To access it: do the konami code (up up down down left right left right B A) on the virtual pad on the Tetris title screen :3
