TO THE ENTRY

A game about smashing bottles to fuel a shapeshifting device. Shifting a little bit is easy, completing shapes is not.

Potion Shift is our third Ludum Dare Jam entry. Instead of trying for complicated mechanics or a complex idea, we built everything around match-three mechanics this time. The goal was to get the polishing part right since we thought that we could use some practice in that area. We had help with music and sounds for the first time which was pretty great.

I can’t wait anymore to try out your games!

– Ekki

We managed to finish our games! If you try it, you will help us a lot!

Just click here to play

This is the first time that I’ve participated in Ludum Dare, and the first time I’ve designed a game for a game jam. The game involves having to move a group of blobs around so that they fit into a particular pattern. We haven’t come up with a title yet but here’s the soundtrack.

The soundtrack is designed to be played with the segments shuffled around as the game goes, and such that the game can crossfade between tracks when changing level sets. To that end, everything’s in the same key and at 80BPM or a multiple thereof.

LD33 was my first time entering Ludum Dare. Here’s a timelapse of my entry, “Lure.Lair.Lunch.” for the compo.

Language: Python
Frameworks: Pyglet, Cocos2D(Python)
Software: Notepad++, GIMP

And here’s the link to the entry page for good measure.

Ok so no one can HACK my puzzle and thing it’s just a bunch of random concepts? I reveal all in my new Blog Post

Armed with this knowledge please vote for my game entry – I will return the favor. And be honest, if you don’t like it you are entitled to your opinion!

Please Vote

Time to say thank you all for ur rating/comment for my first LD !

I learned a lot of this exp with my Snow-koban like game and i hope i do better for the next LD!

Good luck to all ! 😉

PLAY IT HERE !

So first of all, thank you for the huge amount of positive feedback and ratings on Glow Drop so far! I don’t think I have gotten this much rating and appraisal before in a Ludum Dare event! So I’ve been taking in your feedback and lots of people want to see a mobile version, so I am giving into your demands and will release Glow Drop onto Android and Windows Phone 8!

(Sorry iOS users, but I cannot afford to develop and release a game onto the App Store at this time)

However, I think it’s fair in saying that this shouldn’t be a simple release. I feel as though this game could do with a little bit more work to feel more worthy for people to download. So I’ve been taking in some of the feedback from both the Ludum Dare page and so I have a list of things that can be done to polish up the game a bit more:

• Visual Identifiers – Mostly stuff like how the drops react when they are destroyed or what happens when they start overflowing the screen.
• More Special White Drops – The current game has three, and there is plenty of opportunity to expand the possibilities of these drops.
• Improve/Extend Music – I am extremely happy and surprised with the amount of people that liked the soundtrack. I didn’t have much time to properly flesh out the music so I feel I can use some time to either extend it to a longer loop, make it feel less repetitive and/or remix the existing music to a new genre (I was thinking progressive trance but feel free to tell me otherwise).
• Global Leaderboard – While it’s nice enough to keep a saved highscore, it’s much better to also compare it with people around the world. I’m not sure what’s the best option to implement this for me, but it’s worth looking into. I know GameJolt has a leaderboard system in its API but for mobile it’s gonna be different for each platform unless I try a platform-free tool to handle it.

Are there any other things you can suggest? Let me know, also Play and Rate Glow Drop!

Hey everyone ! Here is the post mortem of my game Linked Colours. 

As always, you can click here to play and rate it.

WHAT WENT RIGHT

Idea and development

As last time, I had the idea pretty quickly and stick to it. Thankfully I didn’t encountered big design issues and if I doubted that I would be able to create many levels, random generation came to my rescue, so I didn’t even needed to create levels manually other than the two tutorials.

In addition to Daneel, the framework for CraftStudio I created and which is the base of all of my projects, I was able to borrow quite some code from other projects of mine, so that I could focus on gameplay instead of reinventing the wheel once again. Having so much code already ready is what made me enter the Jam and not the Compo as the previous times in the first place.

But having an extra day prove very useful as even with a simple idea and lots of  ready-code I hadn’t much at the end of the second day in term of gameplay (but visuals where almost final).

Visuals

Let’s say it with some pomposity: linked colours is the best-looking game I have ever created in my entire life, so far ! Look at this beauty ! I am not even an artist, or am I now !?

Well, not quite, but it’s what I am most happy about, the game looks really great, especially compared to my previous games (improvements, yeah !).

Random generation

At the end of the first day, I wanted to add a level editor so that anyone could have created levels. I have one almost working for another game but I ditched the idea even before beginning the second day, where I worked mostly on visuals. Instead I spend some time working on random generation, and it did go surprisingly well.

The generation is pretty simple : on a 5 by 5 grid, it picks a square, then picks a color, then finds another square nearby and sets a color the previous one can connect to. It repeats that until there is no more colorless squares on the grid. Then it picks the squares that are not connected to any one and change their color so that they can connect to a nearby square. Then it finds squares with 3 or more connections (3 is rare, 4 in really unlikely to happen, 5 or more never happens) and sets them as squares with a required number of connections.

And that’s it, and it produce pretty nice levels, with actual mixed difficulty. I just wished I had time to tweak it a little and have some variations in the grid.

(more…)

So that’s the end of day 2 already, here is what I did :

• 9:30 to 10:15 am (45min): background V1 and splash screen.
• 10:30 to 11 am (30min): title scene.
• 11:05 to 11:35 am (30min): work on UI (icons).
• 12:05 to 12:40 (35min): ?
• 5 to 6 pm (1h): end level screen.
• 6:30 to 7:50 pm (1h20): color gradients.
• 9:10 to 10:10 pm (1h): color gradient, background V2
• 10:40 to 12 pm (1h20): various.

Total time: 7h (9h yesterday)

So, today the visuals have been vastly improved and the gameplay has been refined a little, but I still don’t have more content.

That will be for tomorrow, I hope I will be able to have a random level generation.

I planned a level editor but I ditched the idea even before starting the day, maybe for another time…

Play the game in Chrome and tell me what you think !

http://florentpoujol.fr/content/craftstudio/ld30

Bon courage to those who rush to submit in the coming hours, and all others !

( Yesterday’s post)

So that’s the beginning of the second day for me, here is what I did yesterday :

• 7 to 9 am : wake up, think
• 9 to 12 am (2 h 15 min): basic gameplay
• 1:30 to 6 pm (3 h 30 min): more gameplay, level selection
• 7:30 to 12 pm (3 h 10 min): first two tutorials, web player build

I took the not-very-original route again and set out to create a puzzle game where you have to connect all the coloured dots together.

Complication comes when you can’t create connections as easily as you would want.

So far, you can play to the first two tutorials in your browser (use Chrome, CraftStudio’s webplayer loads slowly in Firefox) here : https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/51314747/CraftStudio/Ludum%20Dare%2030/index.html

I said on the game’s page that I planned to work on a level editor today but I will work on every thing else instead !

• Background
• Title screen
• Better UI and graphics
• Last tutorial
• Level !
• Sounds ?

See you tomorow morning !  Bon courage everyone !

What’s up!

First Ludum Dare Jam.

We still got a few more hours left in the jam. That we’re going to use to add more JUICE!

A simple puzzle game where you’re an alien trying to change the brain structure of a human by changing their neuro path ways to TAKE OVER THE WORLD

Coming soon to a web browser near you.

Well, this was my first Ludum Dare, my first game here and here’s my first post-mortem.

I didn’t start early. I saw the theme and went to bed, then let it boil for half a day after I woke up. Had a few ideas in my head, wrote a couple of them down and in the end I decided on an asteroids-based puzzle game where you only have one shot to destroy all the asteroids. Puzzles are designed with screen wrapping in mind and require you to think differently about your environment. Since I was set to hold an introductory game development class a week after Ludum Dare, I decided to try out Scirra’s Construct.

What went well

• Finished on time – I stared late, some 12 hours after the theme was announced and I also had some obligations that took half of my Sunday. Still, I kept my scope small, managed my time well and successfully submited the game on time for compo.
• Slept well – Even though I had lack of time dedicated to Ludum Dare, I decided to have my 8-hour sleep and be productive rather than crunch mindlessly. I’d say this helped me keep my mind clear and finish.
• Got friends into Ludum Dare – When theme voting began, I was pinging my game dev friends to come vote and join LD, even before the jam started. When I got to work, I kept talking about my progress for Ludum Dare and I guess I managed to motivate two of my friends to join in the fun. Knowing that they are also part of LD made this a pretty grand experience. They both managed to finish, more or less, and you can try their games here and here.

What went wrong(ish)

• Used a tool for the first time – Construct is a pretty straightforward to use, through, but it still wasn’t the smartest idea to use it during a game jam for the first time. Took me a few hours to get accustomed to the UI, the way the Event Sheet works and the limitations of the Free version. The latter got me stumped a few times and had me using workarounds (thus the pre-rendered glow, instead of a realtime effect). Construct also started causing problem an hour before the deadline when I tried to import audio. It could have ended tragically…
• I almost lost my project – I made audio with as3fxr and one of the audio files didn’t bode well with Construct, so it hung on import. I waited it out for a while, realized it’s not going anywhere and decided to “End Task”. It asks me to save, I save it to a new file just in case, then it asks me to save again, ok, I saved again. Open up the new project file and what do I see? A construct demo project that I used as a reference when starting out. Fortunately, I was considerate enough to save as a new file, otherwise dissaster would have struck.
  Later I uploaded the project, full of joy that I have done so before the submission hour, and shared the game to my friends. Some time later I’m getting feedback “Hey, mate, this is nice. Would have been great if you had a game over screen, though”. “But I do have a game over screen”, says I to myself. I check the uploaded version and it turns out it’s not the latest one. I assume Dropbox is caching files, try fiddling around, but nothing. Then I get back into Construct to export the project again, only to realize that at one point during the fiasco above it decided to change the export directory to my desktop. There’s still time, so I upload the game and go back to my joyful self.
• Would have liked more time for audio – I only had about one hour for audio, and Construct started bailing on me then. I wish I could have tried out more sounds and perhaps put in some more fitting audio. As it is, it’s a bit rushed and missing a preloader.

Altogether, I really enjoyed doing this and am very satisfied with how my game turned out. And if you still haven’t played it, please try it here