Tag: Ludum Dare

Ludum Dare #24 rankings

Voting is over. Rankings are up.

I wasn’t expecting great things for Karyote, and I got about what I expected.

Karyote Ratings:

Ranking/1406 Category Score (out of 5)
Coolness 100%
#253 Theme 3.20
#301 Audio 2.60
#335 Mood 2.70
#449 Humor 1.86
#459 Overall 2.82
#489 Fun 2.58
#492 Innovation 2.58
#628 Graphics 2.22

Comparing to my LD23 game, I ended up doing about as well as last time. I’m a little surprised, because I really didn’t think this game was as good at deadline, and I struggled during most of the compo, both to come up with ideas for the game, and to implement most of my experimental ideas, and I probably put in 10 fewer hours over the weekend on this one.

Category LD23 LD24
Coolness 56% 100%
Overall 2.76 2.82
Innovation 3.41 2.58
Fun 2.62 2.58
Theme 3.34 3.2
Graphics 2.75 2.22
Audio 2.07 2.60
Humor 2.07 1.86
Mood 2.68 2.70

Really, both games are fairly similar if you compare them — they both are about microorganisms. I guess microorganisms are easy to do games about when you don’t have any good ideas ;-) I hope I have a game idea for LD25 that doesn’t have anything to do with microorganisms!

Now that I’ve worked out a lot of the kinks in my post-compo version, I think Karyote is a lot better than it was at deadline, and I wonder how the enhanced builds I’ve been working on over the last two weeks would have rated. I’m two major features away from calling it complete now, and I am hoping it won’t take me much longer than the next two weeks to finish it up.

LD48 #24 picks

There were 1406 games submitted for Ludum Dare 24. I probably won’t get to play more than a tiny fraction of that number before the judging is over.

As a judge, I believe my goal should be to play every game, but given the time window and the number of entries, that’s not very likely to happen. So sadly, I end up picking games somewhat arbitrarliy from among the entrants, usually based on the thumbnail screen shot and/or title being interesting.

One strange thing I’ve noticed about LD’s website is that when browsing through all 1406 entries, I will notice that the ordering seems to be random. I expect this is to shuffle the games up so people will have a better chance of playing games that otherwise would be buried at the bottom of the list. But a side effect of this is that no matter how many times I page through all roughly 50 pages of games, I invariably miss many — it seems the shuffle re-randomizes while I’m paging through, and I end up seeing some games twice and therefore obviously must be seeing some games zero times. This is kindof annoying and I wish I could get all 1406 games on one page somehow.

I’ve just taken a walk through the submissions and grabbed the title and URL of the pages of the entries that looked like they might be interesting. This is a completely arbitrary process and I spend maybe 2 seconds looking at each game before deciding whether to pick it up and play with it, or skip it and move on. So don’t feel slighted if I missed yours — if it was any good, most likely I’ll discover it anyway after the judging is over.

I don’t want to skew the judging by recommending games, but for non-LD participants who can’t judge, there’s no harm in sharing a list of links to games I think look like they might be cool. In all likelihood, probably a lot of these are terrible. I haven’t played them yet and this should not be considered a recommendation or endorsement; it is merely a list. (more…)

Karyote (Enhanced)

I’ve patched a few bugs and added some enhancements to Karyote, and plan to make several more changes in the next few days as I’m able. There’s a post about it on my Ludum Dare journal.

I thought I’d write up a little postmortem of the enhancement here:

After struggling with the idea and trying to come up with what the game should be all weekend, and being disappointed with what I was able to deliver by the compo deadline, it’s really interesting to me that I’m actually starting to like this game now that I’ve fixed the first two high priority issues.

What I take from that is that I am better at critiquing and improving something that exists than I am at coming up with something new. That’s consistent with how I know myself, too. What’s interesting to me about this is that I somehow am able to switch from being a “whole cloth designer” coming up with a new game design to a “critic” and when I’m in critic mode, I know just what the game needs, while when I’m trying to develop the design that “designer” mode me came up with, I get frustrated and hate what I’m making. Maybe it’s not so weird, though — it could be all I really needed was to play it enough to figure out what it needed.

Comments I’ve received on my game have been generally positive, as well, which surprises me. I wonder whether commenters/raters apply a sliding scale of expectations when it comes to providing feedback. I mean, it’s one thing to compliment someone on an effort that was good relative to their current ability and constraints. It’s another to say that a game stands up relative to other entries, or even among all games of all time. I think it’s safe to assume that the comments I’ve gotten aren’t expecting LD games to be among the all time greats, and that people are generally inclined to deliver positive feedback and encourage the developer, rather than slam it.

I tend to judge myself more along the “all time” basis, though, which is harsher but also a higher standard to aspire to, and pushes me to do better. So it’s surprising to me when people say they enjoyed something I made when I don’t think holds a candle to Pac Man. But it is really nice to know that people have tried my game and that some of them have even enjoyed it. Getting comments, good or bad, is extremely positive for me. Just having the knowledge that people tried it out makes me feel like it was worthwhile to make it.

 

LD48 24: Evolution. Karyote alpha

It’s not much at all yet, but I have an alpha build of my entry for Ludum Dare 24: Evolution up and running in HTML5.

Karyote

It’s not really playable yet, at the moment I’m just working out some motion and object prototypes. Graphics are all placeholders. You’re always in the center. Move with the arrow keys. Left/Right turns, Up moves forward.

Somehow, I’m doing another game with a microorganism theme. LD#23 was Bactarium, LD#24 will be called Karyote. You control a single celled organism that mutates as you play.

I still need to figure out what exactly you’re doing in the game, but I have some ideas that I haven’t implemented yet, so I’m a little further along than it looks as far as the concept goes. I’m designing as I go, mainly this is design by fiddling around. That’s a dangerous way to go on any project, but when I don’t have much of an idea to begin with, I find it’s one of the most reliable ways of getting me going. Hopefully I’ve learned enough lessons from previous projects to avoid messing up the code architecture, so debugging and feature changes don’t turn into a nightmare toward deadline.

Ludum Dare 24 This Weekend

It wasn’t that long ago (late April, in fact) that I participated in my first Ludum Dare. I really enjoyed that experience, and am really looking forward to Ludum Dare 24 this weekend. I’ll be hanging out this weekend at our Cleveland Game Developers LD48 site, generously hosted at the Shaker Launch House space.

I plan to work solo, and entering my game into the compo, again, but one of these times I’d really like to get into a team and work on something as a group. For the weekend, I’ll be blogging on my page on the LD site, so be sure to check there and see how I’m doing.

I’m trying to think about my goals for the last LD48, and how I’ve grown since then and what my new goals should be.

LD 23 goals:

  1. Finish a solo project in 48 hours. Achievement unlocked!

LD 24 goals:

  1. Blog my progress as I go, self-documenting the development process. Last time I blogged a little bit, this time I want to take that further.
  2. Post playable builds as I go, not just at the very end. Last time I saw other people doing this, and I felt envious as they got feedback from people playing sneak-preview releases of their projects. I was super impressed that they managed to release something playable so quickly, but I have some ideas about how to accomplish that.
  3. Produce builds for Windows, OSX, and HTML5 to reach a wider audience. Last time, I was still using Game Maker 8.1 Professional for my project, which limited me to Windows. This time I’ll be using GM:Studio. This will be my first project targeting multiple platforms, so kindof a new thing.
  4. Use fellow CleGameDevs people for feedback and encouragement. We used IRC for this, and had our first night at a common space, which was good. I just want to do this more.
  5. Play and rate more entries. Last time I did play a lot of games during the rating period, and played even more after the rankings were posted.

Incorporating music into my game will probably remain a future goal, for now. I’ve experimented a little with FamiTracker, and may attempt to produce a little music for my game, but I still think becoming a chiptune artist is a far-away goal. I think music is a really important element of videogame design, but it’s probably better to have no music at all, rather than bad music. There are certain game themes which lend themselves to silence, so I can possibly use that, or I can make a game that has an overwhelming amount of sound effects in it, like my last LD48 entry. Or maybe I’ll get lucky and one of our musically talented CleGameDevs people will throw me some resources, and I’ll make it a Jam entry instead of a Compo entry.

Tonight and tomorrow I plan to go over my preparation checklist and make sure I am ready. Gotta make sure all my software is up to date and working properly.

Ludum Dare 23 Rankings are in

Here’s how Bactarium ranked in the Ludum Dare 23 Compo:

Ranking/1072 Category Score (out of 5)
Coolness 56%
#204 Innovation 3.41
#259 Theme 3.34
#431 Mood 2.68
#511 Graphics 2.75
#520 Humor 2.07
#545 Fun 2.62
#562 Overall 2.76
#587 Audio 2.07

Not *too* bad for my first LD48 entry, though certainly much room for improvement. Considering how happy I was to have been able to complete the game within 48hrs, I’m pretty happy with how it was received. It definitely wasn’t a great game, but it’s not bad, and has potential.

I’ve been working on a rewrite in Game Maker Studio which I hope will address some of the shortcomings that I didn’t have time to address in the compo.

Ludum Dare 23 postmortem 3

(Part 1 | Part 2)

Making Enemies

Saturday I developed Enemy AI and Food. The first Enemy was actually done Friday, simply a renamed, re-colored (red) variant of Player with a collision event to handle contact with the Player, and the control scheme modified to have the Enemy bacteria follow the nearest Player bacterium, not the mouse.

What resulted from this was actually surprising: (more…)

Ludum Dare 23 postmortem 2

(Read Part 1)

Once I decided that my idea to create a game based on bacteria was both interesting and within my capability, I needed to figure out if it would be technically feasible. I knew that I would be working in Game Maker, because I know it the best and can get results quickly with it.

Choose Your Weapons

I toyed with the idea of (more…)