Inspired by bullet hell games, sandbox games, and pac-man, we introduce to you: SHAPEMAN!  This is our first time collaborating on a software project and the first time submitting a LD Jam.  I think we came up with a fun and challenging game. We have some regrets, but I think we learned a lot for LD#36!

Shapes attack you if you are a different shape…

You can eat similar shapes, but they run away if you…

Beat the stage by eating enough shapes before you are attacked too many times!

Try it out here!
WARNING: There is an audio bug in the original submission, so you may want to reduce the volume.  Bug is fixed if you download from Github.

Let us know what you think!  Comments and github issues are welcomed!

I’m in!

After some time I decided to join LD once again~! You can know me from 29, 30 or 32 Ludum Dare, where I submitted Treasure Seeker, Untangle and… a “post mortem of failure” – simple post describing why I failed on 32nd Ludum Dare.
So my LD score is right now 2 successes, 1 failure. and 2 skipped jams. Hope on Monday my score will be: 3.1.2

About me
All-time dreamer, and trekker. I traveled length and breadth of almost all polish mountain ranges. In my daily life I’m .NET software developer working with enterprise times web application. In those few bits of time when I’m not dream, trek or work I create games and write on my blog about more interesting software problems I faced.
You can find my latest projects on my github profile.

My tools
Once again I’ll abandon my favorite c++ try to make something in phaser.js.

Planning: Pen&Paper – you can look for my crapy diagrams this time, too!
Text-editor of choice: Notepad ++.
Art: MS Paint and GIMP.
Sound: Audacity with my guitar!
Source version control system: Git hosted via github.

Good luck, Friends!

I fortunately found some extra time on monday to compensate for the fact that i couldn’t work on it at all on saturday. I was able to finish the feature i wanted the most, the ‘guitar hero’ like ‘fight’ with the hunters.

So even this version is not really part of the competition, i am very happy that i managed to implement the whole thing in less than 2 days.

It definately could need some polishing, but maybe next time i will get to that. (who am i kidding, hehe)

So hello world, i hereby present to you:

Run Fonster, Run!

Help Forest Monster (called Fonster by his friends) to get past the hunters.

Now i can’t wait to see what small and big gems, or just interesting and funny concepts others have implemented,

goeth forth and playeth

The last two times the 48h time restriction was whittled down by social responsibilities to 12 and 6h, but this weekend should be free and i am ready to go!

Language: JS, nothing else can be played by EVERYBODY which is an important point IMHO

Library: Phaser as my favourite JS lib (can’t wait for version 3 with multiple cameras)

IDE: As always the fantastic PHPStorm (i tried many, but forget free, you get what you pay for, and this one is really well priced)

Tools: The usual suspects of some node tools for packaging, Sass and so on. Also i am going to use jroblaks  Yo generator for phaser

Sound: Hoping to improve on that section with the help of my own voicebox, Audacity and Bfxr / Sfxr

Music is as always the big unknown, never managed to include it, but i read here about someone using wolfram generator and i will give this one a try.

So, good luck to you all,

goeth forth and codeth.

I just barely made it in with a shell of the game I had planned, that’s how it always work though, right?

I didn’t have a chance to get around to sound, but the sprites were all made with Gimp and Inkscape. The game is an HTML5 game made with the help of the awesome Phaser.js.

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-32/?action=preview&uid=15070

I thought I would write a bit about how this game, as I didn’t really write much since the first day. I found the theme really difficult, as to me, it meant no sidescrollers, platformers, 3d games, or erm, anything much. I was kinda thinking of cheating with a platformer where you could see every room and they shrunk when you completed them, or maybe having the same room where spikes would appear in different places, like the movie the cube.

It was fairly late in the day by the time I had decided on an Idea, about 3pm. I thought it would be funny if you were a bug on a windscreen trying to survive while being driven round by a mad driver. I thought the spider could eat the other bugs on there.

The art seemed to go really well, and I plugged away in Illustrator for only about 2 hours to get it done. The cityscape horizon came from a tutorial I was reading, which I think is cool. I was a bit nervous that people wouldn’t want to play a spider, so I made it really cute. Animation would have been cool, but I know from experience that it takes a lot more effort. Most of my resources can be handled by just shaking them around or messing with the scale. I love altering the rotation of objects, and was really happy to be able to do that in my ide. I think the art style is really cartoony, but also consistent. I don’t really do palettes, so it has that kind of kid-painting “SKY IS BLUE, TREE IS GREEN” feel..

I was very lucky to use the http://mightyeditor.mightyfingers.com/ phaser.js ide, which was because I saw this tutorial where a guy made a game in about half an hour. I had a few teething issues with getting game physics to work, but by the end of the first day, I had a car and all my resources on it, and they were edible.

Day 2 started with me trying to get some music together. I downloaded a mod tracker, followed a tutorial on mod tracking for it, messed around for a while, then wrote a peppy number. Unfortunately, I had started it as an unusual mod format (ultra tracker?), rather than .mod, so I couldn’t use phaser to play it consistently. In the end, I converted it to wav, then converted that to mp3 and ogg. It got very frustrating to listen to over the three days..

Mid-day 2 build:

http://stevydoos.com/car1/

I was having major issues getting random objects in groups, which was annoying, since I wanted to randomly select an item from the list and put it on my screen. I guess this one issue took about 4 hours of experimentation to get around. I also had some CORS issues with audio (browser couldn’t find the files), and had to export the game to get it to work. Most of the evening was spent moving the trees realistically alongside the car, and I didn’t really bother

However, I did have most of my code working by the end of 48 hours.. This made it “a game”, but barely. The hit detection code I had copied from the tutorial was designed to work when you pushed against something and only in certain directions. So if you’re not moving, you cant eat insects and they push you.. I also accidentally deleted my spider so I had to last minute put all the parameters in again. I decided to submit my entry to the 48 hour competition anyway.

48 hour build:

http://stevydoos.com/car2/

Screenshot-wise, the game was ready.. But I hated playing it and something needed to be done.

The spider is YOU!

The next day, I had to go to work, but when I came back, I looked at the feedback on it, and it said all the things I hadn’t had time to do. I decided to go through one by one.. The hit detection was easy to sort. I separated the background into different objects with a semi-transparent screen layer and a wheel and a lady behind that, and made the steering wheel rotate based on the speed of the car. I made the difficulty (max random velocity change) increase over time, and I added a high score. This made the game purpose more about personal goals, rather than anything rigid. I recorded the sound effects using this tool called RecForge on my tablet and voice effects. Although I still had a few issues with sound on the ide, I added them later. Some people might not like the sound style, but apparently my sister nearly wet herself when it said “oh noes”.

I resubmitted later that night for the Jam. The feedback has been very good, but I’m a little nervous that people have been playing the wrong version, as most people think it was far too easy. That said, I don’t think they should have been able to survive more than 300 seconds if they had played the right version.

What went right:

• Mission successful! Got my level 1 cloud ide merit badge. Released a game in 48 hours.
• It runs everywhere.. IE, Firefox, Chrome, my phone, my tablet. I developed for keys, but it might have been better as point and click.
• I want to make another game. Major success here!

What went wrong:

• Last minute phaser learning was touchy. It’s always a risk learning new tech for a game jam, but it’s also excellent motivation.
• Thinking of something for the theme. I’ve seen a lot of clever ideas because of it though.

Blatant plug to play/rate my game. I think I have enough votes to be honest, but if you want a go, play the JAM version, as I’m not in the 48 hour compo.

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=19350

The favourite game I rated so far is probably Kaiser. I loved a lot of games, but my gaming skills are a bit weak.. I played dock and cover for about an hour?

We are a rock band from Mexico. We made a web videogame to enter the JAM of the 31 edition of the Ludum Dare. We used Kaiser, a song from Human Stalings, our first EP as the main drive of the game. The game makes a connection between the dissent at the way things are supposed to be in life and the way things are supposed to be in the game. All this occurs through the experience of a runaway bride, which makes sense for the song.

We only had three days to produce the game, so we decided to make a game with arcade like mechanics, with certain difficulty that offered players a real challenge, while also providing a serious twist on the common themes and graphic styles of arcade like games.

The theme of this Ludum Dare was “Entire game on one screen”, so we made a game where everything except the player can leave the screen. In that way, we also made the player a heroine struggling to survive, instead of the traditional hero guy who powers over every obstacle to achieve his goals; that way the desperation to survive completes the idea of the player struggling against the rules of the game. The game offers an exit to this survival experience: if the player is skilled enough, he can destroy the screen, and do away with the game.

You can play it here.

Screenshots:

If you like our music, you can find more songs and information here.

Thanks for playing : )

Hey folks,

I’m very tired right now, but this time, I didn’t give up early.
I used the phaser.js framework for the first time, which was critical… Nevertheless I’m fairly happy with the outcome. I learned a lot and can’t wait to make some more games in the future. Maybe some more update posts next time. Had lots of other stuff to do during this weekend.

Link to submit

Happy playing and rating

Litte screenshot from my game

Hi, I’m in. Probably using something like Phaser.js for a change of pace. Failing that, pure Javascript with jQuery and HTML as a dumb web game. Let’s see what happens!

Not so much a post mortem about the game, but about my goals: Same as last time (LD#27) i wanted to use this oportunity to learn, to get to know PHPStorm and to make my first Phaser.js game using TypeScript.

Well, i have to admit, i am very happy with the outcome. Not that my game Beneath the surface with Sir Walter Wuffington is so great and enjoyable that i am utterly sattisfied with it as a game per se, but i achieved my goal of finishing my first Phaser.js game and i got know PHPStorm a bit. On the TypeScript side i have to admit that i had a hard time to adapt the way i code JS to the TS style and paradigms, but these things can’t be achieved over night so to speak.

THE GOOD

Which JS Gameengine to use? After wrestling with my bare hands (i.e. without any game engine) last time around, i decided that it is time to try one of those nice geme engieenes everybody was talking about. After doing some research Phaser.js caught my eye for being relatively new (i.e. supposedly not filled with obsolete clutter and paradigms), which seemed to have a relatively active community and responsive developers (rich hangs around a lot over at the html5gamedev forums) and mobile performance is one of their main focal points. Now, after implementing my first game with it, i am a convert. Try it out for yourself, there are tons of examples and tutorials, and on top of all that it has TypeScript bindings too

Is TypeScript really that much better than CoffeScript or just plain JS? No idea! Looks good though. I have to admit that even with all my motivation, i simply lacked the time to really make use of TS’s advantages. I managed to write my game in TS (well, TS compliant) but it is basically plain JS with a coating of TS to make it compile. After all the time i spent setting up the whole TS / PHPStorm / Phaser.js shebang, there was not that much time left to worry about elegant coding, sth. that i normally value very highly (although i am more an average programmer solutions that are generally more interesting and than elegant).

I found my new personal favourite IDE: for everyone out there pondering the question of which IDE to use for all their JS / PHP / HTML5 coding, i can give you a warm recommendation: PHPStorm (or WebStorm if you don’t need the PHP part, PHPStorm is WebStorm + PHP) After using Texteditors, KDevelop, Eclipse, Aptana for over a decade for all my WebDevelopment, i have found my new IDE of choice. The code completion, existing templates (jQuery, Drupal, WordPress, …) JS Debugging, the ease with which it integrates with other libraries absolutely convinced me, after being disapointed with the slow improvements and overal buggyness of Aptana.

THE IMPROVABLE

Expectations: As i mentioned before, due to the time constraint and my high expectations i had to the game itself, it is not as good as it could have been, but that was to be expected. As i spent probably two thirds of my time figuring out how to do stuff in Phaser.js, TS and PHPStorm, there was not that much time i could invest into the actual game making. I am still pretty content with the result, this time i even have some sounds (two to be exact, but it is a start). If i continue at this pace and stay with the current toolchain, i might produce sth. halfway decent around LD#31

I was still expecting too much from my game i guess, as i wanted to learn all that stuff but at the same time couldn’t bring myself to tone down my ideas for the game, as it would have felt even emptier / more boring than without the second view. It might be worth to scrap that second part and add some juicyness instead, but who knows, next time around i’ll probably have enough time for both as i will be more proficient in using my current toolchain.

THE BEATUIFUL

As always it was amazing to see how much can be achieved in such a short time. For myself i am happy about the work / learning i did in just 48h, and it is always stunning to see what other ppl can come up with in just 48h / 72h.

The fact that there are others like me out there that just love making games, creating stuff, seeing their ideas come to life and being (more or less 😉 ) enjoyed by others warms my heart.

I can’t wait till next time, till then
goeth forth and codeth

p.s: But please, don’t let my ramblings keep you from trying my game :

Beneath the surface with Sir Walter Wuffington

I managed to get some time to add some upgrades to the game this weekend.

The difficulty was slightly balanced by adding a drill, to which the pipes need to be connected.

A level map was added.

Also after level 10 you unlock the police station which reduces the unrest by 25% with every policeman you buy.

Future updates will include

* Politician support which freezes all unrest for 30 seconds (unlockable from level 20).
* Small Bonus levels in between the planets that unlock equipment upgrades, better drills, less poluting pipes, wildcard pipes.

* Sound

* Small graphic changes.

Please be sure to rate and also any feedback is greatly appreciated.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=34443

Thank you,

Adrian.