As I said, this year was the first time that I decided to participate in the compo. 48 hours: a game, with all the code, art and music by myself and donated to the public. Yesterday, the voting period ended, and I admit that I was expecting a much lower score on the criteria that interested me.

Scale: 1 to 5

Despite bugs and problems in the early days of the compo, the worst days for that to happen, the game had a relatively good reception.

Mood / Theme:

I learned that gritty atmosphere can even be attained with a naïve aesthetic seen in voxels without generating a negative reaction; nonlinear writing however confused several users, but many got by far uncomfortable sensations, which it was my goal; The proof of concept where the player is a psychopath, but without clarifying who is truly the monster or victim, was extremely well received and many believe that I should expand the concept to a full game; something that interests me the most.

The main reason to the average score is mainly the story was lost; which I owe to the lack of more time to be polish it, it just wasn’t well delivered. My mistake was to deepen the unessential story.

Graphics:

Many pondered the visual style and the work of shaders. Especially the technical work; as in the case, I used a single texture that was a RGB palette rendered into tiny PNG. The shader used to divide the screen into a pixelated grid; was also highly welcomed. As well the use of chromatic aberration and noise, to emulate a feeling of loss of sense of reality was highly appreciated.

Several mentioned that the artistic aspect was lost mostly to the shader pixelating the game world. An error on my part was too not adding more variety in vegetation for the courtyard.

 Audio:

I’m a terrible musician, but I have less musical talent than a fish. I admit it’s not my forte, and I expected that low score. However, most criticism was the lack of variety in the music, which I will consider for the next competition. My mistake was also unable to provide sound effects, but I did not have time to create sounds like crying or injuries of the victim.

Innovation:

The main reason for the low score is the same as I expected, given the clone of the game of cat and mouse that I implemented. Although I wanted to do a much more complex game of stealth, with executions and elements alike, creating the AI ​​for the game, consumed me a good couple of hours I could not use for anything else.

However, many admitted that expanding the concept to more elements of gameplay would be welcoming, something that attracts me to do if I expand this concept to a big game.

Overall:

With all the aforementioned elements, the graphics and gameplay limited factor, affecting a higher score. Things to keep in mind the next time. The good thing is that this AI can be used in any other project, which will give me another occasion greater creative freedom and attention to the gameplay.

Humor / Fun:

The game at no time sought to be hilarious and fun. On the contrary, looking for something to bother and generate similar experiences. You’re a murderer at the end of the day, without precisely defined emotions, the mood was reached, and my objective accomplished. The fun score, shows me clearly that the elements of cat and mouse, are already very common for this kind of games, and that the opportunity for the victim to defend itself undoubtedly was tempting and would have scored me several more points, but time was lacking.

Conclusion:

In TL;DR. I learned a lot, I did an AI using Environment Query Systems, a system damage and a lot of feedback to the idea of a game like I aforementioned before: it is indeed good, and maybe if things improve: I’ll expand the AI, improve the art, make a new aesthetic and above all things, not limit it to one house and do it as a full game

My entry for the 48 hour compo Ludum Dare was Pedestrian Slaughterer, a game where you shall do your very best to slaughter as many pedestrians as you can because you’re a monster, however if you run out of bloodlust you lose! To your advantage you have a hovercraft to more easily slaughter more pedestrians quickly, however be aware if you hit something to hard you will fall off and lose!

What Went Well

• Graphics: I am actually quite happy about the 3D models of my game. I really enjoyed working in blender, however I don’t have much experience with it and this was my very first 3D game that I actually completed. Which I am very happy about. The outline effect gave a cartoon-ish look, which I find very cool.
• Using db4free.net: I had a suggestion to add a score board in my first game and I used that advice, luckily I have used this free database service before and it is really easy to setup, it is not very reliable but for something like Ludum Dare I don’t really care about consistency or security (let’s be honest, who’d actually care about creating a dedicated server for a small game like this?).
• Ragdolls: I successfully added ragdolls to my game which is awesome, I mean they are probably the best thing ever.
• The idea: The theme was probably the best one so far for me and I am really happy with the idea I came up with. I love ragdolls and I wanted to do a 3D game for a change instead of “another one of those 2D platformers”.
• Sound effects: I had very little time left for music and SFX, so I just ended up doing some random sounds with my voice and audacity which I find added a lot to the style of the game.

What Did Not Go Well

• Time Management: As usual I am not very good at prioritizing fundamental game components from small details making it hard to throw in everything I want to make a “decent” game. I’d like to get better at it, but I guess practice is one of the best ways.
• Lose and win conditions: Originally I planned to just let the player try to kill as many pedestrians as they could and the only way to loose would be to crash into some house or mountain but I figured it could easily be exploited and people could just go really slow and practically avoid losing whatsoever.
• Control issues: I had some complains from my friends that the hovercraft was hard to control, and the only excuse I have is that I didn’t have time to do any play testing really. I really wanted to implement drifting so that you could “drift” around houses and have much better control.

Thanks for reading my post and have a lovely day because you are awesome!

Play You Are The Slime!

This is my second Ludum Dare and I’ve never wrote a postmortem so forgive me if there is a format i’m overlooking. Between work and the rest of life I decided to dive in and take part in the jam. The theme “You Are The Monster” inspired me to work on an idea I’ve had floating around (and apparently many before me have had as well) to make a game where you play as the low-level fodder mob, The Slime. Far too long have slimes been abused and their peaceful forest homes encroached upon by adventurers on a journey to greater treasure.

What Worked Out:

Originally your slime grew and absorbed people and rats just by moving over them. When I changed this to having to mash the space bar in order to absorb an enemy I think this added a lot of needed interactively and gave me a better understanding of the monumental task a slime must go through to take on larger powerful prey. Finding the right rate for the growing and shrinking mechanic was easy enough to program. The far more difficult and time consuming task I was able to overcome was making the objects interact and look right with the slime. I really enjoyed how the arrows, humans, and skeletons slowly rotate in the slime and can move just enough to escape with difficulty. I think I did okay in the time I had with additional details such as the archers gathering arrows and the humans bleeding out when their flesh had dissolved.

What Didn’t Work:

Most of my poor time management went to programming small details I could of overlooked for the jam. It would of been far better for my project if I would of put more effort into the art and sound. I had imagined much more of a slope in the game play and difficulty. I ended up cutting out the rats and other creatures which you would hypothetically take on first.  The rate of absorption when attacking the archers is far too slow and becomes tedious.

If I Continue:

I have a couple of more serious long running projects I try to not lose focus on (again) so i’m hesitant to start another side project. I’d like to add in more creatures, enemies, power ups, and general immersive flavor to the world. As well as redo the map, most of the artwork, and all of the sound. The controls and the rates of absorbing need adjustments. Additionally I’d want to fix the difficulty curve to go a little more in the way of Katamari, starting small and slowly growing large till you battle tougher enemies and devour a town.

What I’ve Learned From Jams:

I’m really bad at finishing projects. It really helped me having constraints and a deadline. What this jam has reminded me is the benefits and difficulties of working within a time constraint. In my personal projects I constantly find myself removing entire systems and rebuilding them . Nothing is ever good enough and i’ll stay stuck in a loop of “improvement”. The time constraint is also a difficulty as I didn’t have time to polish the aspects that would have increased engagement and I was forced to cut things I wanted to include, like animals. This makes me have sympathy for AAA developers who have to deal with budgets, time constraints, and knowing their failures will cost people their livelihoods.

Overall this Ludum Dare was a ton of fun and i’m finding awesome games. Good job everyone!

– Andrew, @SecularBaron, My Games

Cross posted from my blog at NewbQuest.com

I did my first game jam this weekend! I participated in the jam portion of Ludum Dare 32 and made a little game called Skull Bomb (play it here). The theme was “An Unconventional Weapon” and after it was announced I brainstormed a bit before settling on ‘blowing yourself up’ as my interpretation of the theme. I didn’t want to have my player character blowing up other humans so I decided to make the game about a world taken over by evil robots. This also worked in my favor that I didn’t have to program any sort of realistic AI.

I’ve been really wanting to do a Ludum Dare since I learned about it but being a dad, having a job, etc always seem to stand in the way of coming up with 48 uninterrupted hours on the jam weekends. This time I decided to not let that stop me and jammed in the hours after my kids bedtime, for a total of maybe 16 or so hours over the 72 hour jam period. I’m really glad I did!
What went well:

I made a game! Not waiting for the perfect moment and the planets to align allowed me to actually make something.

I scoped correctly. I picked a topic I was able to finish in the time I had without crazy crunching.

Used Unity 5. That went well, Unity ran smoothly, few crashes and weird bugs. I think it crashed once.

Using Unity’s Navigation for AI. Setting up the enemy units as Navmesh Agents worked great. I made an array of destinations and selected randomly from that to get enemies moving around un-predictably. Easy and effective.

Simple Sound Design. I added some spooky synth drones that I made with Logic X’s built in Sculpture synthesizer. Sculpture is a physical modeling synth and I love the timbres you can get out of it, I thought they set a good, ominous and abstract tone for the game.

Narrative via Voice Over. This was probably the best received aspect of the project. I wrote a simple voiceover script describing a dystopian sci fi world overrun by machines and laid out the players mission. I had my girlfriend read this and did a bit of editing and mixing in Logic. Details I was happy with that people commented on as well were the cut-up phone maze style strings of numbers that added to the overall dehumanizing atmosphere. Using a voice over was cheap and easy (maybe 2 hours work to write, edit, mix and implement) and added a whole narrative layer to the game that I thought was very effective. Because it ran in the background at startup it allowed the player to experience the narrative without having to wait, read or otherwise be delayed from experiencing the game play. Several people commenting on the game remarked on how well the voice over worked so that was definitely a high point.

New Genre/Mechanic. I’ve never tried to make a stealth / sneaking style game and was quite happy with that aspect of it. I definitely learned a lot and enjoyed working with the form in a short format. This is perhaps my favorite aspect of jamming, the chance to try out different genres or ideas in a short form, low stakes way and get feedback.

Art Style. The art style that I chose was simple, minimal and achievable. I was happy with the result and felt like it worked well with the theme. I got a few nice comments on it so I consider that a success, especially since I consider myself a non-artist. I also got pretty close to my initial ‘vision’ visually.

Getting Feedback / Iterating. By posting the build a few hours before the deadline I got some very useful, maybe critical feedback about playability, controls and clarity. This included a lack of clarity on where to go which I tried to address and not locking the mouse cursor which lead to issues in browser based play. Catching these early was good. I’ll definitely aim to do this in the future, getting those little bits of feedback before finalizing was great.

What went poorly:

Level Design. Several people commented that they wandered around, didn’t know where to go, couldn’t find the goal. The way I laid out the level had no clear (or unclear) path through it, it was just a big box. After getting that feedback I added a moment in the beginning where the player falls from high up and gets a chance to see the black box that represents the server. In hindsight I really gave the player almost no clues as to where to go. I even was considering initially having the monolith change it’s location each time player spawned to add replayability and difficulty. I realize now that that would have been a mistake.

Difficulty. The difficulty was very inconsistent. Sometimes the enemies randomly left big clear paths, sometimes they created impossible, inescapable situations. With more time or better planning I would have set up some more carefully planned routes for the AI to patrol that interlocked, created gaps etc. As Twitter friend @ChrisLaPollo points out though that these are the types of things that you learn in making a jam game and can polish up after.

Browser Support. Annoyingly Google Chrome dropped support for NPAPI plugins right before the jam breaking support for Unity Web Player. The game played fine in other browsers but this was just kinda annoying.

Control Tuning / Playtesting. Several players complained that the movement speed was a little slow. I actually bumped it up a bit but probably could have taken it up a little higher. More playtesting earlier probably would have helped this but given that I was jamming on my own in my apartment I didn’t have local playtesters available. In the future I’d like to try and jam with a team and / or at a space with other people. I think this would have helped a lot to catch this and some other issues before posting.

Play the game here, or watch a video below:

This is my first time Ludum Dare-ing. I have been putting off doing it because I never have un-interrupted time on weekends but this weekend I decided to go for it anyway. This game was made in the hours after my kids went to bed and any other little bits of time I could get together over the weekend, maybe 16 hours or so in total. I hit on the mechanic and theme I wanted to do pretty quickly on Friday night: my interpretation of an unconventional weapon was a suicide bombers bomb.  Because I knew I wouldn’t have time to do sophisticated AI I decided to make the enemies robots which would make their slightly stupid behavior thematically appropriate. The AI could be improved a bit but for now it mostly works. The theme also supported my primitive art style which is made using basic primitives within the Unity editor.  The main mechanic is avoiding coming into contact with the red awareness zones of the enemies while trying to get to the end of the level and blow up the enemy server. I leaned heavily on stuff Unity does easily out of the box for this, in this case Navigation. The flying and hovering enemy types each have nav mesh agent components attached and a script randomly assigns waypoints from an array. This causes them to path through the level randomly and adds some un-predictability. I also added some searchlight gun tower type enemies inside the ‘city block’ formations since running through them, where the hovering enemies couldn’t go, seemed to be a dominant strategy.

I created the audio using Logic which is mainly sounds made with Logic’s built in Sculpture synthesizer. I stuck to ominous drone sounds mostly. I wrote a minute long text which adds some additional context and had my girlfriend read it on mic, which I then processed and cut up a bit. I think it adds a lot to the vibe of the game and provides some useful expository narrative framework.

All in all I had a ton of fun doing this! I’m going to aim to continue to jam, even when limited for time, and try to block out a full weekend to get together with a team and attempt something more ambitious.

Here’s my entry: SKULL BOMB.

If you liked the game or just want to say hi I’m @mattmirrorfish on Twitter. Thanks for reading!

EDIT:

I got some great notes from people playing and rating my game which allowed me to make a few small tweaks, hopefully for the better before the cutoff. I found players didn’t know where to go so I made the final objective more visible, and had the players drop in from high up so they get an initial birds eye view of the level. I also moved an enemy that was sort of spawn camping the player in a really unfair way

Also, lot’s of people liked the voice over! I must say having a little bit of recorded audio in your game like that to add some story is a pretty cheap and easy way to add some production value. That is definitely the thing I spent the least time on (maybe 2 hours out of 16 to script, record, mix, edit and implement) but has gotten the most positive feedback. Definitely food for thought! Thanks very much to all the people giving comments on my game (and on everyone elses!)  It feels great to be a part of a community of game creators like this.

Play the game here – comments and ratings appreciated!

This was a firstie in many ways. It was my first ludum dare, my first game jam, my first finished game, and the first game I ever created without the intention to recreate/immitate an existing game mechanic. About a year ago, I would never have expected to even participate in a game jam like Ludum Dare anytime soon, and here I am with a (more or less) finished entry.

The original idea was to create two worlds, nature and human civilization, coexisting in a subtle balance that could be disturbed by gathering too much natural resources (trees/plants/animals) and other things. I planned to do this visually as well but that turned out to be pretty time consuming, and knowing the mechanics I wanted to implement, I decided to finish these instead. I also wanted to add disasters but I couldn’t add them for the lack of time. The game’s design was inspired by dwarf fortress.

I worked so quickly as I’ve never did before. I cut out a lot of features for the sake of getting some gameplay finished. The menu and credits were extremely rushed and created during the  last hour or two. It turned out to be a very interesting game that can be extended for more in-depth gameplay. Possibly you cannot even win it…

It also has been quite a learning experience. I’ve learned some lessons in AI creation making the commands for the workers. A lot of fun I had making these small sprites (I really loved doing them) and got in touch with a new approach and method to make games. I’ve worked with alot of static variables to design the map and map objects and applied some of my knowledge in memory effective 2D rendering. It was an interesting jam to say the least.

I am looking forward to play all other Ludum Dare entries to check out what others have made during 48 hours. And of course, this will not  be the last time I participate in a game jam too!

Now that my first Ludum Dare entry has recieved some feedback, I thought I should do a post mortem post. 😀
It’s here to try if you wish: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-28/?action=preview&uid=28661

MY EXPECTATIONS:
Well this was my first LD so they were basically null. Haha. Seriously, I didn’t even think I would finish a playable prototype.
My original goal was just to try and finish something, other than that, no real goal as far as rankings go.

DURING THE COMPO:
I’m not going to lie, I made some rookie mistakes.
Well first of all, I have the advantage that the compo started at 1 P.M for me, so that was a nice time in the middle of the day for me.
The rookie mistake was that I was incredibly hung over. Haha.
Rookie mistake number 2, I invited friends over to get drunk on the second night. (Although I ended up letting them game and drink while I programmed and desgined levels. 😛 )

The largest problem I ran into, and what some people picked up on in the feedback, is that I had no way to produce sound.
I had no software for it, so I did dedicate a few hours to searching the internet for free one’s and trialling them, but nothing that was what I wanted. (I just want GarageBand to be honest )
So in the end due to time constraints and the lack of software, I opted out of adding sounds.

AFTER THE COMPO:
Wow!
So much positive feedback.
Seriously, I was absolutely blown away by all the nice comments about how funny it is etc.  I didn’t expect anything like it.
Next LD (Which I am 100% participating in.) I need to add sounds. That is my number one goal.
I would also like to figure out how to do animations. I feel like they add a lot of polish to a game.

CONCLUSION:
Thank you everyone who played my game and to the entire LD community to being incredibly nice and helpful through the entire process!
Bring on the next one! Woo!
Now, a message from Yogo bear!

Final game looks like this:

It is an asymmetrical 2 player (one with a mouse and keyboard, the other with an Xbox 360 gamepad) 3D fire sim toy thing. You only get one match’s life (if you’re player 1). Water and fire interact in the usual way. Strike the match on the rough rock to start. Points are awarded for tree/ house voxels burnt to the ground. There’s no sound.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/32538545/LudumDareFire/WebBuilt/WebBuilt.unity3d

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/32538545/LudumDareFire/LinuxBuild.zip

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/32538545/LudumDareFire/WinBuild.zip

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/32538545/LudumDareFire/FireLudumDareSource.zip

This was my second ever game jam and I learned lots from this project – obviously fire simulation, but also the particulars of Unity’s particle systems and I’m sure lots of other things I can’t remember now.

Obvious bugs include the match floating up at certain times, due to unity’s physics collider. The match probably shouldn’t float on the water either…

I started lots of things that didn’t go into the final game – independent voxel fire grids that could interact, procedural generation of terrain. I guess the maths was a bit too difficult after nearly 28 hours of programming for my brain! I really shouldn’t have eaten so much sugar. Maybe next game jam I’ll remember!

I’ve finally decided to collect my thoughts about the game I made for the Ludum Dare 27 Compo: This Game Will Self Destruct in 10 Seconds.

The day before the competition started, I was incredibly ill and pretty much certain I wouldn’t be able to do anything. When I woke up the morning of, I was still sick, but I decided to participate anyways. So for the next eight hours I sat on my couch with my trusty laptop and learned the syntax of ActionScript3, how to use Flixel, the and basics of music theory and foley sound effect making, none of which I had any experience with before. By the end of those eight hours, I was feeling pretty good, and had learned basically as much as I needed to know.

When the competition first was about to start and I saw the theme candidates, I was desperately hoping for “Death is Useful”. I didn’t know what I would do with it, but it sounded like something I could get behind and make some puzzle game with a neat mechanic, or maybe an action game with special techniques. I most certainly did NOT want “10 seconds” to win.

And then it did. And I was sad, because I thought I was going to have to do some lame minigame style game that would bring nothing new to the table. But within about a half-hour, I had the trolly and brilliant idea that spawned TGWSDI10S. I was playing Skyrim to try to spawn creative thoughts (The best way to spawn creative thoughts), when the game crashed. This wasn’t exactly unexpected, and I’m used to it by now because I have about 70 mods installed that don’t mesh perfectly with eachother. But it got my thinking: “What if a game actually INTENTIONALLY crashed?” And so spawned the idea. I would make a game that crashes after 10 seconds.

Now, originally, I was just going to make it a completely generic game that you can’t beat because it crashes after 10 seconds. It was just going to be a joke game to troll people. But I quickly scratched that idea as not great, and decided that I would make the game save your progress every time it crashed, so that you could continue the story if you hit refresh.

So I started work on making the platforming engine, and very early on decided to make you be able to move super fast. At first this was just to make debugging the map easier, but it felt very much right to be able to move that fast in a game that ends so fast. So from there came the major design choice that every aspect of the game was based on: This game needs to be fast. When I got the combat working, I made it insanely fast. I added a very slight delay to the damage so that the timing is just awkward enough to make the game very difficult without making it impossible to time. I then made it so that once you punch, you can’t punch again for 1.5 seconds. I feel that this makes the combat very stressful because if you miss, you’re basically screwed. So button-mashing is about as effective as trying to kill your enemies Mario-style. Next I worked on the enemy AI and made the enemies follow a simple but very fast-paced movement pattern. Basically, they run towards you, attempt to punch you, and if they miss, run away until the can punch you again, at which point they run back towards you. From the very first time I succeeded in killing an enemy, I felt giddy with excitement and couldn’t stop giggling at how great the combat felt.

From there I implemented the saving, the timer, and some other minor mechanics to flesh out the gameplay before I delved into level design. I added some small tutorial texts and followed the course of my dominant design choice by making the text stunted and feel like it’s supposed to be read really quickly, like in FEZ. I carefully looked over every piece of text I added and removed every unnecessary syllable.

I finally got to level design at the very end of the first day. I was planning on making it a very short game that ended in the generic “Your princess is in another castle!”, but I decided to keep adding levels until I ran out of ideas to make them feel variated enough from eachother. I ended with three, and decided to change the ending to slightly less used used satirical joke (Play to find out what it is 😉 ). I made every level just in text form editing the tile array directly and then testing it out in game, and it worked well enough. I got the levels done fairly quickly.

I went to sleep after finishing the levels and woke up with the idea to add the ray-traced shadows. The fact that you could see the enemies through walls ruined the suspense a bit. After fighting the evil forces of frame-rate drops for a few hours, I ended up with a result that worked, but was a bit ugly and I wasn’t entirely happy with.

After doing that, I realized belatedly that I had no sounds or music whatsoever, and the competition was going to end in less than 4 hours. I hurriedly put together some foley sound effects and then jumped into FL Studio to try to make an 8 bit theme that felt fast-paced.

That failed miserably.

I wasted an hour and a half trying to make the 8 bit theme sound good before I switched off to working with a drum loop and within half an hour it sounded pretty dang good, in my egotistical opinion. I added the beam last based on a dream I had whilst sleeping the night previous, and got that as well as the church organ piece (Just major 3rds and a Dracula-esque down-step) in about twenty minutes. Last thing I needed to was set up the HTML page and embed the flash element within. Two problems were realized at this stage when I had only 45 or so minutes ’till deadline: I completely forgot how HTML works, and I had no website to host it on.

The first problem was quickly solved through the might of Google, and I made a simple HTML page that embedded the .swf in record time. The second problem was a bit more of a challenge, but I called up a friend and he was nice enough to give me access to his ftp server for his website (It’s a fantastic website, check it out: jimmymack.org/world.html), and I solved issue number two in time to meet the deadline. Looking up at the clock I realized that I had made the deadline with less than 5 minutes left.

And so, after the stress that had enveloped me for the past two days, I did the only thing a man can do when faced with so much relief.

No, you pervert, not that.

I ate a bunch of fudgesicles. Seven of them, to be precise.

And that’s the story of This Game Will Self Destruct in 10 Seconds. Big thanks to Skyrim for the idea and Jimmy for allowing my game to be uploaded to his site. I’m gonna go take a shower.

This time we were not able to finish the game, but we do learn some important lessons :

1. make agreements with the team, believe on me : personal events during the ludum dare can ruin your tighty schedule, so before start make sure everybody involved is in the same pace, and with the calendar free.

2. practice the basics of the technology some days before, even knowing Unity3D, as it’s not my daily basis tool some basic activities took more than expected.

3. react fast, as we had some changes in the people involved in the project, instead of creating useless code while waiting for the artist, I should change the game plan and go with something that could be done with my own artistic resources.

4. share results on facebook is not that hard check on this https://developers.facebook.com/docs/guides/games/getting-started/

5. define as a team what will be the folder names for the game assets in unity, so when the export package all over the place madness start, you don’t loose precious time reorganizing files, materials all over the project.

6. don’t make reusable code for ludumdare make straight forward code, and then after the ludum dare, find some time to refactor and reuse wherever you like.

cheers.