New Ludum Dare game: Kharon's Twilight

 Hi, folks - I took part in Ludum Dare 50 a little bit ago, and I was able to complete a whole game in 48 hours. The theme was "Delaying the Inevitable," so I made a game where you're eventually overrun by a bunch of mammoths.

The game plays like a deckbuilding boardgame, although it's single-player. There are a bunch of special "power moves" that you can purchase, and you get to use a few of those (randomly selected) each turn, along with some basic moves.

The game did OK in the competition. It was hampered a little bit by speed issues (it's a browser game and I may have gotten too ambitious as to what the browser and my graphics library could handle).

To see the competition page (with more description of the game) see here: Ludum Dare Site

To play the game, check out http://planktongames.com/ld50

My Plankton Games site may go down for a bit over the next few days because I'm changing hosting, but it should be back up within a week or so.

Fun with Commie Mutant Horses

 I took part in the 49th Ludum Dare Compo this past weekend and made a computer game from scratch in 48 hours. Really, in about 46 hours, because I had D&D just before it was due. I'm pretty proud of the game this time. The theme was "Unstable," and I went with freeing horses from their bans (unstabling them) using radioactive canisters that exploded (also unstable) set against a Cold War backdrop (also unstable).

See the game here.

See my contest entry (and future ratings) here.

I always enjoy these competitions. Gets the juices flowing in a big way.

97 Klotho

I finished up a recent game design with some testing over the holidays. I got it worked up for The Game Crafter's Roll-And-Write contest. Not sure I'll do well there - I think people were looking for simpler games - but I really enjoy it. My son said it was his favorite of the ones I've made.

97 Klotho website

Ludum Dare #41: Mortal Keybat

I didn't post about this back when I wrote it, but I did an entry for Ludum Dare #41. The theme was "Combine Two Incompatible Genres," so I did a Karate Champ style fighting game with a typing tutor. I did pretty well in some categories of the judging, and it was a fun time.

The game page is here, with a link to the playable game.
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/mortal-keybat

Results over Four Ludum Dare competitions

I just got the ratings for my Ludum Dare competition game, Domain, written from scratch in 48 hours last month. They were good - this is the second-best finish for me in the ratings, I think. I was curious how I compared, so I did some graphs with my four entries over the past few years. The competition is rated in eight categories, with "Overall" being the most important. My four games were as follows:

• Teeming (LD 23) 
• Evo (LD 24)
• Composition with Red, Yellow, and Blue (LD 26)
• Domain (LD 37)

Here are the results for those four games, first by percentile (vs. other games in the competition), then by overall rating (1-5 stars). In each graph, the categories are sorted by my average performance for all four games.

Apparently, Audio and Graphics are my weakest categories, which isn't that surprising. Theme and Innovation seem to be my strong suits. Teeming (blue line, my first entry) was clearly my worst showing in nearly all categories, and Evo (red line) my best (by percentiles), but Domain (purple line, most recent entry) actually was rated higher in terms of stars. I wonder if the judging has gotten easier over time? Or the games better? Hard to say. Anyway, I seem to be improving as I do these, which is cool. I'm hardly going to sprout an artistic sense in my late 40's, but it's fun to do these, and I still get some props for innovative, so that's OK by me. 

Ludum Dare 37 - Domain

I competed in Ludum Dare #37 in December, where you create a game from scratch in 48 hours. This was a rough one - it came right at the end of the semester, which is tricky, and it was also happening right after my wife had surgery, so I was focused on her needs first. The theme was one I'd voted against - "One Room." Many creators just ignored the theme, or made whatever game they wanted as long as it nominally fit in one space. Only a few really integrated it. That made for a lot of similar games, all limited in scope. So, not the greatest competition topic, I think.

I had a hard time figuring out a concept, but I ended up making a game which was a tank game, but in a weird world where you're trapped in a room and just shoot the walls, not at other tanks. I thought it came out OK, although I didn't have much time for polish. I did it using Unity, which I've been experimenting with for a few years, as opposed to CraftyJS, which I used for my previous three games. I turned it in a few hours early, actually, so it's not as polished as I could have gotten if I'd ignored the rest of my life, but that wasn't in the cards.

The game, called Domain, is playable on the web here. Let me know what you think. I did OK on the ratings - made the top 100 games, sitting at about the 90th percentile of the 901 games submitted for the single-author competition. My competition page (with rankings) is here.

Ludum Dare 26 Results

Here are my results from the Ludum Dare competition this time around.  Not as good as the last time, but better than my first entry.  My audio didn't work on Firefox for the first period of the judging, so that may have hurt me a little bit (probably not much, since Chrome is more common for LD users and only about half the ratings came in while it was broken).

Some of the games in this competition were really great, and it seemed like fewer of them were terrible than in earlier sessions.  The theme was a challenge; obviously, if you're going for minimalism, it's hard to shine in some areas (particularly sound and graphics, but also depth and complexity of gameplay).  Art's not what I'm good at anyway (see above), so Minimalism should maybe have helped me out :-).

Ludum Dare 26 entry

Here's my entry from Ludum Dare 26.  The theme was Minimalism.  I went with a game set in a Piet Mondrian painting that only has one control.  The Ludum Dare page is here.  A direct link is here.  I was pretty happy with it; I spent a little too much time on the dialogue opening (also minimalist, I thought).  I got some really nice comments, too.  Let me know what you think!

Transatlantic Yoggity

Yoggity is off on its way to Bochum, Germany for the Hippodice competition.  The game cost me $20; shipping was $30, and the entry fee was 10 Euros ($15 after Paypal fees).  Entering these contests isn't cheap, even though it sort of seems like it is when you get started. Of course, the Hippodice fee is very reasonable for the hassle they go through hosting the contest, and the rest is just my costs.

Regardless, I'm happy to do it; Hippodice gives useful feedback, which I haven't found to be the case for many of the contests I've entered, and I really like the way they have the contest set up.  Looking over Yoggity again, I was very grateful for Jason Greeno's terrific artwork - I think the game is great, too, but his art and design really makes it much more fun.

Probably won't hear anything until next year - but I'm glad to have the opportunity.

Yoggity makes the cut at Hippodice 2012-13!

I just found out yesterday that the folks at Hippodice have requested Yoggity for their second round.  That means I have to get a physical copy to Germany, which is a challenge, but it should be fun to see what they say.  They got 150+ entries; I'm not sure how many made this cut, but I assume it's no more than 50 or so, maybe 20-30, because they have to play them all.  Pretty neat.

Hippodice entered!

I've entered two games in the Hippodice competition this fall - Horde and Yoggity.  We'll see how I do - I've made the second round once but never their top 10.  I gather it's very competitive.

A user named Yort over at BGDF looked at my stuff and commented that it might be more polished than they were looking for.  I got that impression when they looked at Diggity a couple years ago - one of the reviewers said, essentially, "why are we looking at this?  we're only supposed to look at prototypes."  Of course, it was a game prototype at the time, just printed up nicely via TheGameCrafter, and well within the Hippodice rules which indicate less than 100 total copies.

We'll see how I do - these competitions are always a little unpredictable, but I really respect Hippodice for its organization and standards.

Ludum Dare 24 results

Voting results are in from the 24th Ludum Dare competition.  The theme was Evolution, and I made a puzzle game in which little critters gain traits.  I've got it hosted here at PlanktonGames.com; the competition page with all the comments and feedack is here at LudumDare.

How did I do?  Pretty well, I think; much better than last time.  Here are the numeric ratings and rankings:

	Coolness	100%
#40	Innovation	3.83
#44	Overall	3.75
#55	Fun	3.58
#89	Humor	3.15
#145	Mood	3.11
#216	Graphics	3.34
#242	Audio	2.77
#294	Theme	3.10

The #44 overall is really neat; there were 1006 entries, and I have a lot of top 100 or top 50 ratings in various categories.  I'm not sure why I'm so much worse with the theme, since I actually thought my adherence to the theme was better this time than last, where it was my highest ranking (#71).

Anyway, a good experience, and very encouraging results.  I think I'll try to develop the game further and get it up on Kongregate or somewhere.

Ludum Dare 24

I took part in the 24th Ludum Dare competition last weekend and produced a computer game in 48 hours (well, more like 15 hours - I had to sleep, eat, celebrate my birthday, and perform in two improv comedy shows at the Idiot Box).  The theme (revealed Friday night at 9pm) was Evolution.

I've now rated around 40 of the other games, and there's a huge variety of ideas, themes, game styles, and choices, and also skill levels at putting games together.  I've gotten some nice comments from mine; like a lot of my stuff, art isn't the strong part (especially with only 48 hours to work), but the gameplay is pretty fun.  Give it a try if you like; it's at:

http://planktongames.com/ld24

The Ludum Dare page for my game is here.

BGDF Contest for August - Grow Up!

I'm waiting for the results of this month's BGDF Game Design Showdown, with the theme of Grow Up!  I haven't entered much in recent months; the restrictions and themes haven't really fit my interests for a while, and I've been working on my novel and other projects.  But this month, the restriction was to include a theme of growth over time and to include game pieces which grew in function as the game progressed, which was interesting to me.

These restrictions were actually pretty tough for me, and although I think I met the requirements in a technical sense, I didn't do so in a particularly inspired way. Reading through the entries, I see that other folks had some trouble with this too.  I'll be curious to see how it comes out.

I made a prototype of my game and tried it out with friends and family; seems to work pretty well, and I was able to tweak and balance it some after testing.  I was inspired enough by this to go ask on DeviantArt for somebody to make some art up for the game.  After re-theming the game towards space/sci fi, I offered up $100 for images for the various buildings and cards I need.  I've got some leads; I hope they pan out.  I hope to work it up on TheGameCrafter.com in not too long, and if more testing is promising, maybe I'll enter it in Hippodice this fall.

May GDS at BGDF

Looking like an interesting roundup at the monthly Game Design Showdown at the Board Game Designer's Forum.  People took the "spring" thing in a lot of different ways, mostly literal (a spring-loaded piece of equipment).  We'll see how I do on Sunday...

Ludum Dare results

So, here are my results from the judging for the Ludum Dare competition for my game, Teeming.

The rankings (at left) I think are out of 1,111, so I was top half in all categories, top 1/3 in many of them.  

#71	Theme	3.82
#220	Innovation	3.38
#265	Overall	3.25
#325	Fun	3.00
#394	Graphics	2.95
#410	Mood	2.71
#453	Humor	2.18
#455	Audio	2.43

Coolness 100%

The worst one for me was Audio, and that makes sense - the game has only simple sound effects and no music track. Mood is supposed to be how immersive your game was, but I'm not sure people all used the same standards there. Likewise for Humor, which is hard to gauge.  I'm happy to be up there in the Overall and Innovation categories, and apparently I hit the theme (Tiny World) pretty well.  Graphics will likely always be a problem for me, lacking as I am as an artist.

The last item, Coolness, refers to how many games I rated - I rated (or tried to rate) over 100 games, so I get that one by default (or by dint of hard ratings work). A rank list another guy made shows that I did the 104th most ratings (the average participant made 35 or so).

I'll need to look at the rankings in more detail if they publish more of them.  I don't know how they handle it, but if it's just raw numbers, I'd guess that there are some games near the top of these categories that have relatively few rankings.  Maybe that's not an issue with so many people rating so many games, but you never know.  It would be cool to do a graph of rank vs. ratings received, although there are other factors in play determining how many ratings you get on your game (e.g. you get rated more often if you rate more yourself).

A fun experience; I'm happy with how I did, but I think I could do better. I'll definitely try again next time.

Two cool things

Two things coming up in the next 6 hours -

1. The judging for the 23rd Ludum Dare competition will close. Mine (Teeming) was one of 1402 entries (1,111 in the solo 48-hour competition) with the theme of Tiny World (I went with microorganisms in a petri dish). I've never done this before, so I don't know exactly what to expect, but I did judge 102 other entries over the past 3 weeks, so I've probably seen a representative sample. I hope I make the top 50%, but we'll see. There are some really good ones out there. There were a couple that I saw that were obviously way better than mine, but they were in the Jam segment (72 hours, multiple people designing, relaxed rules on preexisting content)
2. My entry for the BGDF monthly Game Design Showdown should go live. This month had a couple of cool restrictions - one was that you had to use asking permission (from Mother May I - Mother's Day plus May), and the other was that you had to use springs in some way. We'll see how many entries there are and how I do - I feel pretty good about my entry this month, but that has historically not been any kind of indicator as to how I do (maybe even negatively correlated).

Game on...

Teeming - Ludum Dare Entry

I figured I'd try my hand at the Ludum Dare game competition, which I learned about earlier this year. The goal is to produce an entire game from scratch, in 48 hours, solo. I think I did pretty well for a first try; give it a try if you'd like.  The theme for this time was "Tiny World," which led me to make a game about life in a petri dish.  It's been interesting looking at the other entries (all 1111 of them) and seeing what people did.  Huge variety in interpretations, game formats, and programming ability.

Link to the game: http://planktongames.com/teeming

Ludum Dare page for my entry (I think): http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=10977

Thanks to my Mom for putting up with me coding for most of a weekend while I visit her in New Mexico. 

Oceans Elevens

I'm guest-hosting the monthly Game Design Showdown over at Board Game Designers Forum. I required an ocean theme ('cause I'm a marine geologist) and a voting mechanic ('cause it's November). Eight good entries already, and there might be more before the day is through. I miss not entering, but it's fun seeing what people come up with. I was a little worried that I wouldn't attract any entries, but that's not been the case.

Warped pictures

I took some pictures of one of my current projects, Warped, which I entered in TheGameCrafter's vehicle design contest and which I've now sent off to Hippodice's design contest.  I'll see what Hippodice says - I should know within a month or so if it makes it to the playtest round. 

It looks cool, although I don't think I'd ever actually play it on a table with holes in it - too many pieces to fall through.  Pretty neat how much stuff you can get for under $20 - that's a lot of parts.