Well this was unexpected

This is my first completed Ludum Dare jam and this time I did the incredible choice of teaming up with some friends.

Me and Samuel (Blixt Gordon here on Ludum Dare)worked tirelessly on the game for the first two days on the game Surf Ace. I have heard that finishing a Ludum Dare

game was something really hard and that we should keep the ideas streamlined and simple. F**k that we thought lets to a game where

you can not only surf and flip (which to be honest, would have been awesome!) but also catch fish on a spear and then ride it.

“Oh brains you are fantastic creatures” – Me

I had my hesitations about the completion of this game up until the last day when one of our friends came to record the hilarious sound effects and another friend

helped out on the fiddle to create the track for the game. This all took place in the last 5 hours so you can understand my concern.

The last hours was by far the best part of the development when we had the game ready and just played around with the details.

That is, right until we figured out there is no tutorial to our game and the controls are unique to our game so it was a must.

As you probably have figured out by now it went splendid, we got a good game out of it and most important. We had an awesome time making it!

If you have read until now, here is a potato for the long post (had a lot to say I guess).

Sincerly mrhill

link:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=15148

If you don’t play the game yet, please, play it before read this post-mortem. It only takes 2 minutes.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-28/?action=preview&uid=28794

Brainstorming (Saturday 8:00  – 11:00 GMT +1)

We met at 8:00 and started to generate ideas. We rejected some of those ideas because they were unviable, boring, or absurd.

We decided to use the point’n’click game mechanic. The main character awakes bewildered and locked in a room. He only gets one object at a time and he can interact with the scenery objects to escape from there.

Finally, we decided that the main character will never survive and his life will always end by a shoot. Nevertheless, in the end we gave more variety to the game and we decided to add different deaths. With this, the user gets addicted to the game, trying to save Wilhelm from his fatal destiny, making a 2 minute game so much longer.

Pre-production (Saturday 11:00 – 15:00 GMT +1)

Once we chose the mechanic and the details of the gameplay we started to develop the idea and we planed it in different tasks.

• Marina & Juanlu (designers) split their work in stage and main character. They used Spine (Esoteric Software) to make all the animations.
• Chema & Carlos (programmers) worked with LibGDX (Java/LWJGL). Chema worked in front-end (graphics and cool things) and Carlos worked in back-end (state machine and controllers)
• Ricardo started to work in music and sfx.

Production & Testing (Saturday 15:00 – Tuesday 3:00 GMT +1)

At this stage we developed all the stuff that we decided before. But we had to make some changes due to the short time.

In the beginning all the deaths had its own animation, but this was unviable, because of that we decided that only the original death (The shoot one) would have animation. The final solution was that the light turned off, the character died and then the light turned on again; showing to the player the corpse of Wilhelm. This is why we decided that the main character use the Wilhelm scream, and gave that name to the main character.

We decided that all the action and reaction would have their sound effect to represent the unseen deaths. The ambient sound was wind, rain, thunders and our lovely neighbour dog. In addition we recorded some nonsense speaking lines.

During the develop of Wilhelm’s Escape:

• A Spanish Omelette died.
• A few campero sandwiches were devoured (an spanish sandwich)
• Poor quality chinese food.
• 5 litres of coffee
• 1.6 litres of energy drink
• 2 litres of beer
• Snacks
• 1 kg of pasta
• A couple of pizzas
• A lot of hours of music
• No dog was harmed.

Hey all! I’ve been enjoying a lot of games from this Ludum Dare, and I hope you all have to. I participated myself in the jam, collaborating with another indie game dev known as Code_Assassin. However, through details I’ll explain below, we didn’t finish. While we did submit an entry, it wasn’t a finished game like we hoped, and after a day of thought, we requested the entry to be taken down, and the game removed from Newgrounds.

The idea

Our game originally started off with a premise of finding a mob boss out of a group of people, the levels and the clues would be random each time, but you only had one chance at killing the boss. We agreed on using Flixel as our framework due to its ease of use, my experience from using it in last year’s Ludum Dare and CA’s experience with Actionscript3, and that we could upload it to the web. We got a Git repository set up and we were hyped up and ready to go!

(more…)

It’s the first time I participate on a real Ludum Dare, last year I entered the charity mini jam but nothing else, so it’s the first time for me judging and I’m REALLY ENJOYING IT 😀 I’ve found some amazing entries so far like that you should check out:

♣Channel by BradleySmith: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-28/?action=preview&uid=14944

♣The Last Rock by Ozeotropo: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-28/?action=preview&uid=19200

♣Process Journey by Lissar: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-28/?action=preview&uid=27179

♣Just One More Turn by Ithildin: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-28/?action=preview&uid=15664

♣Out by SuperPokeunicorn: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-28/?action=preview&uid=9858

I’m having an awesome time judging so leave the link to your entry on a comment and I’ll rate and comment your game 😉 Rate mine HERE! 

Thanks ^^ 

♠Play It Here ;D ♣

♠Rate and View Jam Entry \o/♣

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After a few hours of doubting whether if I would participate or not (I had a huge Christmas party on Sunday and HELL NOTHING would stop me from going XD)  I decided that I would give it a try to my own 24 hours game jam, so I began creating some magic! XD

You Only Got One…What Should I do with That ¿? 

You only got one? One bullet, one life, one minute…there are many ways to understand this concept and I wanted to have a take on it in a kind of  different way. I started to think in which occasions we really only got one and after some minutes of forcing a bit of hardcore mental processing, I thought of Decisions! Either they’re large or simple, once you have chosen and performed it you can’t go back. Even the smaller decisions in life like choosing to wake up when the alarm rings or having five minutes more of sleep, can make the difference in the way our future develops. Having this on mind I began with the concept behind She, a game in which every decision counts.

Building a 20’s Silent Film themed entry

My tools: Game Maker Studio, Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator and Audition CS6.

I got the inspiration for the aesthetics  from the old silent films from the last century, I loved the style of the dialogue cards and the influence of art nouveau in every aspect of them. Of course since I had only one day for everything I combined it with a simple vectorized cute style. The final result grew on me and I love how it all came along! ^^

I spent the first 6 hours designing the characters, drawing and painting along with the backgrounds, scenery special effects..etc. My heart was racing and a shoot of adrenaline fuelled me during the whole process XD I even dropped a cup of hot cocoa over my keyboard and damn how I regret that now Whatever….When it comes to programming it was pretty simple I must admit that the part I liked the most was designing the enemy waves for chapter 2. If you’ve already played the game you must have noticed that the second part contains most of the action and fun. The literary aspect was really important since it was the core of the whole game. I spent about half ‘n hour writing the suicide letter. I took a look at many sad suicide letters from real life for inspiration, that was a really intense and aerie experience that in a strange way I enjoyed. I wanted the card to be as realistic as possible.

For the audio and music I opted for the always successful 8bit! In my entries I always do every single asset from scratch with exception of the music. Other than a few I created, most of the tracks and effects come from my royalty free library. That’s why I don’t participate in the real deal! I hope one day I can produce my own SFXs. The main theme is an 8bited version of Music For The Funeral of Queen Mary  and obviously I got the inspiration from one of my favourite movies…A Clockwork Orange!

#LD48 Conclusion…

I really enjoyed this Ludum Dare, I learnt a lot and achieved all my goals. I’m really happy with my entry it came along exactly how I had imagined it, and I think that’s part of what makes Ludum Dare an unique experience…..no sleeping and extreme efforts are worthy when you finally upload your game, see the comments and a sudden rush of self-confidence and feeling of success fills you from head to toes! 😀

Please play my game and replay to see all the endings and drive trough the different roads, snooze and don’t snooze, it’s interesting how the decisions affect the result and difficulty of the game. Enjoy and thanks!! 😀 

So here comes another Ludum Dare for my team and I; and you know what? We’re in.

My History with Ludum Dare
LD 22: Didn’t complete a game but turned it in anyways.
LD 23: Hard to track down bug killed the game 8-hours before the end of the jam.
LD 24: Did as much as LD 22.
LD 25: Finally finished a game first time. Both in the LD and ever.
LD 26: Finished second game ever and by myself in the 2-day time squeeze.
LD 27: Was really sick the whole compo. Didn’t finish (because I slept too much), but made the most complex game mechanics I’ve ever made.

On this seventh edition of the Ludum Dare, I look forward to not being sick and having a chance to really give some of the new stuff, I made since the last Ludum Dare, a good test run. My goal this time around, opposed to my output of the last Ludum Dare, is the limit the mechanics and their complexity. See what can produced under a constrained system. So here’s to hoping I make something neat! *cross fingers*

What I’m using!
Programming Language(s): Monkey
Editor(s): JungleIDE, Notepad++
Graphic: Graphics Gale, Photoshop
Sound Effects and Music: bfxr, Soundation, FL Studio, or public domain music/sounds
Library/Framework: XAddon (my lib/framework), FontMachine, Monkey-JSON