So the results are in! So awesome to see the final scores and see what games got in overall, and see where everyone else’s results are on the rankings. Since this is my third successful Ludum Dare, I thought I’d try a little comparing to see how much I did better (or worse) at this point. Then for future Ludum Dare entries I can then add in those results and probably build a chart to see my progress.

The Results

Ludum Dare 27 (Ten Seconds) – 10 Second Paper Flight

Ludum Dare 29 (Beneath the Surface) – Under Maintenance

Ludum Dare 31 (Entire Game on One Screen) – Glow Drop

My Comments

So while the ranking don’t appear to have changed, the average score for most categories has improved. The only category to have gone down considerably over the three LDs was Humor, although in fairness since my game wasn’t intended to have humour so I could’ve omitted the category. I’m also one of the people that got 100% coolness which is an awesome surprise, it means I’m (technically) listed on the results page. At the moment I’m balancing University work and turning Glow Drop into an Android and Windows Phone release as Glow Drop DX. So hopefully you might see more from me in the future?

Thanks for Ludum Dare!

Well, after some tuning and graphics updates, I decided to submit Tiny Haunt, my LD29 entry, to IndieCade.  While the LD feedback was vastly positive, there was one common complaint: the game wasn’t hard enough.  I intended the game to be fairly sandboxy, and to that end, fairly easy if you choose.  However, I ran out of time to implement the mechanics that made it more than that.  In the IndieCade build each of the four levels has its own optional challenge, which might be defeating enemies within a certain amount of time, or using only one ability.  I’m happy with the progress I’ve made so far, but there is still so much to do!  A big part of the future experience will be enhanced interactions with enemies and more objects put at your disposal.  On top of that I have plans to add an exploration element that allows you to uncover the long lost secrets of your castle.  Exciting times ahead!

Here’s a preview of the IndieCade build.  If you’re interested in the game, don’t hesitate to follow me on Twitter (@rojomojogogo), or add Tiny Haunt to your watch list on IndieDB.

	Coolness	59%
#72	Mood	3.85
#251	Audio	3.27
#295	Graphics	3.60
#443	Theme	3.39
#680	Overall	3.06
#782	Humor	2.13
#996	Fun	2.47
#1038	Innovation	2.38

72 in mood! Oh, my GOD! Thanks a lot people, I love you all! Even though my goal for each LD is to get better than last LD had failed this time if one judges by overall (last LD I scored 6 more than this one) I still think I succeeded, I never’ve been in top 100 in any category, so this is big deal for me! This LD was a lot of fun and now I am waiting for August even more! (You see, I have a birthday on 26th of August!)

Now, let’s look at graph, they’re so popular these days!

As you can see, I gradually getting better in most categories. The Big problems I can see is Fun and Theme (Though I guess, I can call it fixed because of this LD). I don’t really care about humor, as I never intended to make a humorous game.

Well, thanks for reading this unformated, random text. And I’ll see you all next Ludum Dare!
– RedPanda

I’m so happy because of the released ratings that I created a graph in LÖVE about my progresses during my LDs.

You can download the file here, if you are interested in.

I made a video as well, it shows my absolute first impressions. Check this out! I’m kind of pleased anyway, and even though I expected a little bit more, it was still far my most successfull Ludum Dare event!

I hope everyone else feels the same way.

– Katamori

Post Jam version of our entry is up! We fixed some bugs, added the plot, improved graphics and added even more selfmade sounds You can check it right here

Right, I should probably have written and posted this much earlier. But my life doesn’t always give me enough time for these things…

Regardless, prepare your eyes for the wonder that is;

Not Your Average Mining Emulator*

* Gameplay may actually be average

N.A.M.E.

This would be my fifth finished game, but also the seventh Ludum Dare I’ve tried to join in on. And I’ve got to say that this was not one of the themes I was hoping for myself, but I still did what I usually do; Sit down for a few hours just after the theme’s released (3am here in Sweden) and sketch up a few game ideas. And then I can take those ideas and polish them after sleeping on it for a few hours.

The ideas I managed to sketch down for this LD were of a Diablo UI inspired rougelike, a submarine hunting game that also spun off as a wreck hunting game idea, an idea for a submarine shoot’em’up, and finally something of a clone of the old game Motherlode and Clonk. In the end I decided to go for the final idea, as that was the one I felt held the most promise with the lowest amount of graphical work (my weakest point).

So, with that in mind.

What went right?

• Had already prepared a simple framework that worked well for a 2D sidescrolling digging game, helped cut down some on the development time. Inputs and things prepared in advance is really nice, since otherwise such things would eat development time.
• Streamed everything, every second I was at the computer. This really helps with the focus, and I even managed to keep enough attention on the chat to be able to answer some questions that arose from viewers.
• My art ability seems to have improved slightly since I started Ludum Dare, so the first sprites I did for trees and ores came out looking really well.
• My thoughts on UI design turned out perfectly fine too, I’ve noticed that many people’ve commented on how nice and smooth the in-house UI looks.
• A crafting system turned out easier than expected, so I was able to throw it together and put in two recipes in only about one and a half hour.

What went less right?

• Didn’t think to grab an existing physics engine like Box2D, so lost a huge amount of time writing physics and debugging them. There’s actually a collision bug that slipped through when I was working on ladder support, since I moved some code about and accidentally removed the part of code preventing you from jumping when you have a wall above your head. I really need to cure my NIH syndrome I guess, but it’s just so much fun to recreate the wheel.
• Didn’t feel I had enough time to really work towards sound or music in the game, so it’s a very silent game. This is something I really suck at doing, so I guess I won’t be releasing any games that take in high scores on Audio any time soon.
• Still can’t draw a player character in any way, so the player stayed as a cube saying ‘IDLE’ until the last couple of hours. And even then I only really managed a simple stick man.
• I failed to put together an inventory system like what I originally thought of making, so lost several hours of development rewriting that. In the end I figured that only having a single object on the player was acceptable, and spent more time getting the house to be able to store things.
• Because the inventory system failed to be finished I had lots of code that was supposed to be used with in-game tools that you couldn’t craft or carry.
• Didn’t have ingredients for proper food laying about, so ended up with simpler food and that just doesn’t feel as good. No food photos from me this time.

Other thoughts.

• Another entry made from scratch in C++ using SFML, this is starting to look like a theme for my entries I think. Maybe I should sit down far in advance of the next one and create a larger base framework so I could use that instead, based on SDL maybe?
• This Ludum Dare I decided to try a simpler game without using my home-grown entity component system Kunlaboro, so this game is more of a statemachine based game. And while it feels really good to go back to my roots for a simple game, I can’t help but feel that I could’ve gotten so much more done if I’d used Kunlaboro for it…
• I should try to move game logic away from base C++ code and towards scripts, maybe using Lua or Angelscript. This needs for me to have more time before the start of the compo so I can properly prepare the framework though.

To finish, thank you to all the people watching me work. And those of you that commented on the entry, both during the stream and during judging, every bit of criticism helps.

I’ll be seeing about maybe cleaning this up later on and releasing a post-compo version, though I don’t know how much of the original code would be left afterwards. It started off so nice and neat, but now the codebase if just a horrible bunch of duct tape fixes.

Here is a short post-mortem of my third Ludum Dare Entry (Jam): Below Earth.

In it you play an adventurer (bomb throwing maniac) that is exploring an underground cave only to find a rather hostile environment.

This time I also tried out some new tools like IntelliJ (IDE) and Aseprite (Pixelart) and I have to say I like them.

The somewhat good things:

• Brainstormed the idea long enough and then sticked with it.
• Prototyped graphics really quickly.
• The game is actually fun to play.
• I successfully drew my own pixelart with aseprite.
• I didn’t neglect my personal duties during the weekend.

Don’t mess with the local wild life.

The rather bad things:

• I originally intended to procedurally generate levels, but then I realized, that I have absolutely no experience with procedural level generation. I ended up with uninteresting and lazy “random” levels. So I later created a level parser to read text-files and made some quick levels, but I also left some of the generated levels in it.
• It’s too hard. I slowly start to see a pattern with my Ludum Dare games. I always balance it in a way, so that I still have a challenge, but that might not be an acceptable difficulty for others. Having difficult levels itself isn’t the problem, but having a too steep difficulty curve is a problem. I should learn to slowly(!) ramp up the difficulty of the game. Giving the game to playtesters often and early can really help with this.
• Hiding content in later levels. Because of it’s difficulty, some players never got to see every enemy that the game has to offer. This might be something not true for game-design in general, but it holds true for Ludum Dare, where most people probably don’t have the time to try and master your game. This means all the main game features should be available within the “easy” levels, and only combine them and challenge the player after those levels.
• This is another entry without music. Music is important for a game, but before I hastily make some annoying 10 second loop I rather leave the game without music. This might be a personal goal for my next LD to focus on music and create some for my game. I just have to find a program I can make some with and learn to use it….
• I created pixelart. It’s not good, but it’s better than anything I’ve created yet. Still it took far longer than it should have.
• No Web version. I really tried to get that GWT build to work, but there are so many things that go wrong when they somehow possibly can…

Time spent (aka everybody loves statistics)

During the whole weekend (Saturday to Monday because it’s a Jam Entry) I recorded my development time with toggl.com, which is really useful for such things. I ended up spending more time on graphics than I thought I would. Programming seems to be so big, because I was always testing my game inbetween bigger changes and played it over and over again. I also spent a whole hour setting up the project because I was using Libgdx without eclipse. 😉

That’s how I spent my weekend.

Conclusion

Every Ludum Dare helps me in some way to become a better developer and even a better person. 😀

I found some new nice tools with which I will continue to work.

I also should try to make my future games not too difficult for the average player.

I already started and will continue to develop a post-compo version of this game, because this is one of my first games where I feel like polishing it is worthwile.

If you want to play or rate or try out the post-compo version, you can do this here.

Get ready to jump on ice as long as you can to survive in this first update !

This post compo game contains the following improvements :

– Controls : camera improvements and strafing available

– Gameplay : some ice will gradually spawn and surface to let you survive longer

– Graphics : add anti-aliasing & bloom effect !

       (on the surface, beneath the surface, these monsters will follow you…)

Play the compo & post compo here !

(Disclaimer: I didn’t do this video, it is done by Ganil Ganilder)

Well, it was a nice first Ludum dare, and my first published game in quite a long time; I’m the type of person who begins many projects, but “takes a lot of time to finish them”… So the two-day deadline was very positive for me. I had first thought of using pixel graphics, but the theme (and the fact that I’m not that good at pixel graphics) made me think of a more vectorial and music oriented game.

Play the game *here*

(more…)

That’s how one slays worms

(sorry about grammar and over-complicated English)

You can play the game here

It was my first LD and, in fact, my first game. Actually I’ve been playing with Unity quite a long time, and wanted to make some simple game, but somehow I always tend to end up with some abstract and complex idea which is not-so-easy to implement, and do nothing.

So my main goal was to actually finish my entry. And that’s the main thing that went right I made it! The main thing that went wrong though is that I wasted too much time.

Idea and general

Underground worms was literally the first thought that came to my mind (and just to mention: I never played death/megaworm).  So I started to make a worm immediately. And all that “worm” part of idea went OK I think.

But when it came to the “player” part I just got stuck. I had some ideas including bombs, some distracting items, using of environment(e.g. some safe stone islands) but didn’t manage to have a clear enough picture of how it should work.

So just to start I made throwing rocks mechanic. I actually made aiming with mouse first =/ and then changed it to  keyboard aiming. The main reason was that I wanted character to throw only ahead, so you have to face a worm  before throwing, but for some reason it felt awkward to me with mouse. Anyway aiming doesn’t make much sense since you don’t have enough time to aim and in general shouldn’t even try.

Really sad thing is that such simple idea as to make more weapons came to me too late. I decided to make some melee and shotgun but only managed to add some halberd-like weapon which actually made it more easy and fun. But it seems that a lot of people just didn’t see it so if you’re one of them please just skip to the 4th level and try it! (you can skip level after dying!)

(some response to comments)
Many told me that “it should give some indication where the worm is going to break the surface”, but it doesn’t make much sense given the way the worm moves. The worm tries to reach you so it’ll break the surface exactly where you stand UNLESS you’re moving, then it would surface at some distance from you and more horizontally. And of course you cannot see the worm beneath the surface, because YOU CANNOT SEE WHAT’S BENEATH THE SURFACE, that’s the very idea.

Audio

Since I received a lot of positive feedback about music here is the link to it, just in case.

“Soundtrack” was made relatively fast, I was playing with synths recently and had most of  them already set-up, and music itself… well, it’s so simple and straightforward if you ask me. It sounds EPIC though In the middle of the work I thought that it would be great to make a feel of total wormapocalypse, to match the music fully, e.g. add some burning and falling buildings and some people to save but I would definitely need at least an artist to do this.

Alas, I didn’t have any time to make proper sounds.

Graphics

There is not much graphics, but graphics took much time. Character took I beileve 2-3 hours overall. I made him twice actually, and have been tweaking come colors and animations every now and then. Worm took over an hour. At least I’m happy with graphics.

Time management

Time management in general is what I’m bad at.
Fist day was productive I think. I made most of the graphics and most worm-related things. But somehow I totally wasted second day. I got stuck with gameplay. After making some gameplay I’ve been spending too much time playing game instead of making it So I ended up with the game being far away from finished at the end of day 2 and decided to use 3rd day. Nonetheless there was a lot to do, and all “levels”, sounds and other finalizations were made in last few hours of Jam. I managed to made it just in time of deadline, and it was 5 a.m. for me… such crazy!

Main things learnt

KEEP WORKING! If you’re stuck, switch to other things you’ll have to make, or just try to implement it as simple as you can, but keep working.

Anyway I’m glad that I made it! And I had fun playing your games, can’t wait for another LD!