So I’ve got around to compiling my 2GB of screenshots into a timelapse. You can see a long period at the start when visitors came round and I got absolutely no work done, but things get more and more frantic as the deadline approaches.

It looks like I never slept - but this is because there’s no screenshots from when the computer was off.

http://www.surrealix.com/ludumdare/timelapse.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6fX5zzRf9Q 

Here’s my timelapse video. The picture-in-picture part is not completely in sync with the big video, but it should be somewhat close. I cut out the parts where I was sleeping or otherwise away. Music is Scattered Progression by JDruid.

Here is my time lapse vid. I put the webcam time lapse inside the screen one and synced them up as best as I could, so it looks best in fullscreen mode. You can get the high res version here (~6.5MB)

Here’s a timelapse for my game. Watch me repeatedly fail to draw stuff, write big chunks of code that was later thrown out, and also try to make music that I decided to not put into the game! (The music just didn’t fit at all. I extended it a bit and used it in this video in stead)

Contains spoilers obviously, so play the game before watching =)

Oh, and I noticed the counter shows -1:39:49 at the end of the video. I did go a few minutes overtime (mostly upload issues though, also I started way late so please go easy on that =]), but only by a minute or two. There was a bug in the counter that caused it to count wrong when it went past the deadline. (Also, the time skips when the sleep window pops up as my PC was off then.)

Timelapse!

http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=2WrnjfxFQ64

Strangely enough, very little of the final levels I shipped with are in there. I stopped recording when I rebooted about half and hour before the deadline, so you can’t see me fooling around with sfxr either =(. You can, however, see all the time I wasted on that math problem on Saturday >:).

I’m alive! I expected otherwise! And, as I begin the early stages of my undoubtedly slow recovery, I will first post the timelapse video I recorded:

And, in case that doesn’t work or you want a higher resolution: The original, 720×480 Xvid w/ mp3 audio, 76.21MB

Here’s the timelapse of the development of my entry [youtube.com], Mondrian. It spans pretty much the whole 48 hours, with one shot every 10 mins, (except the blank ones when I was sleeping with the screen on powersave).

For my own future reference:

Screenshots taken with the cronjob:

0,10,20,30,40,50 * * * * import -window root -display :0.0 /home/pansapiens/LD11/screenshots/$(date +%F_%R).png >/dev/null 2>/dev/null

Converted to video with:

$ mogrify -format jpg -scale 840x526 *.png

$ mencoder "mf://*.jpg" -mf fps=4 -o timelapse.avi -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vbitrate=800

Youtube timelapse video

Too fuzzy?? Try the high quality version here. (24 MB)
Music is a game remix of an amiga game, title: Nikamota - [Nicky Boom] Coming of Age(In the Club)

Here’s a time lapse of my desktop as I competed in Ludum Dare 11.

Here’s a youtube link.

I know, the screenshots got cropped. The program I was using to grab them wasn’t grabbing the whole screen. Sorry about that.

And yes, there’s a whole lot of downtime in there. I’m married and I have three kids. My wife made a pithy comment about my participation, which you can see in the video.

You can download a higher-quality version here.

You can find my time lapse video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fpXRHYU-hU.

Here’s a timelapse! If it doesn’t show up, it might still be processing on YouTube.

Music by Nine Inch Nails - Ghosts - Track 34

Introducing ‘Of Robots & Groglots’, which is a cross between an old favorite of mine, Star Fox 64, and the minimal and popular Helicoper Flash game (see link if you want to be prepared for minimalist controls):

The whole game is controlled using only two buttons, of which one is usually permanently down; the microplanets add another touch of minimalism. Downloads:

• Windows version
• Mac version
• Source only version (for Linux)

These links have been updated to point to a version that includes 1) a two-line fix for two levels that were unplayably slow on some systems, and 2) a one-line fix for a bug that could stop your show, depending on your style of playing. Other minor bugs and balancing haven’t been touched. If you want to see the original version, replace ‘opt’ by ‘final’ in the links. Thanks!

Be prepared for:

• No music — no need to stop Winamp
• Gamepad support!
• Needing a minute until you can maneuver as smooth as you want.
• Two interwoven storylines (sort of) and very different levels. If you get stuck, see the Readme file for a cheat so you can inspect them.

Last foodphoto:

The timelapse is available on YouTube. I caught a cold and look pretty exhausted =) - and it’s probably only interesting if you know the game.

Here it is:

http://portal.acad.cai.cam.ac.uk/~mml27/minim.tar.gz

Details to follow shortly.

Posted after close of competition:

Windows port: http://portal.acad.cai.cam.ac.uk/~mml27/minim.zip

Linux par/pp version: http://portal.acad.cai.cam.ac.uk/~mml27/minim-ld11-a-pp.tar.gz

Time-lapse video (2 minutes, 15 Mb). Warning: this video contains bright, rapidly flashing colours.

So what’s it all about?

I decided to interpret minimalism in a minimalist way, namely “minim” (half-note to Americans). You get a load of musical notes moving about the screen like particles and you have to guide them to certain points. You do this by drawing minims with the mouse. The notes then bounce off the minims. You can get more detailed instructions by running the game and waiting at the title screen.

How do I run it?

Linux users: download the tarball above and extract. Run minim.pl. You need SDL, Perl and SDL-Perl (Debian package libsdl-perl).

Windows users: download, extract and run the zip file above. It seems not to support fullscreen mode. The port includes a 1-line fix for a graphics glitch that didn’t show up on my Linux system. Linux users can get updated source here.

Linux users who can’t get a working version of SDL-Perl: download the par/pp version above. Extract and run “minim” (not minim.pl). You still need SDL, but not Perl or SDL-Perl. This version includes the graphical glitch fix mentioned above.

What’s missing in the 48-hour compo entry?

Some of the demo screens are missing animations showing how to draw minims. You can’t load in user-defined levels from an external file. There aren’t as many levels as I would have liked. I intend to add these last few things and post a second version some time in the next week or so.

Why is the game so hard? Why can’t I draw minims?

Drawing minims takes quite a bit of practice. It’s meant to be tricky, especially when you’re running out of time and panicking and can’t draw steadily. It may be helpful to know a bit about how the game judges minims. The most important things are where you start and finish the minim: these points become the ends of its stick. If you fail to draw a minim, you’ll notice a stick with a cross on the end appears nearby. This represents the shape the game expects you to draw. The head of your minim needs to pass through all four quadrants marked out by the cross, without deviating too far from it. Ultimately, this means that you have to start (or finish) your minim at a point on the stick about half-way up the head. One thing I noticed while making levels is that, because you can’t draw mirrored minims, it’s a lot easier to bounce semibreves to the left than to the right. I’ve tested all the levels to make sure they can be completed, but some of them will probably take a few attempts. Keep trying! Or (if you get fed up) cheat by pressing “S” to skip to the next level.

How did you make it?

My development machine is a 3 GHz Pentium 4 with 1.5 Gb RAM, running Debian GNU/Linux (unstable). The game is written in Perl, using SDL Perl (1.20.3) for graphics, sound and input. My text editor is joe; my window manager is FVWM2. For playing the game I used a Wacom Graphire 2 tablet. Sound effects were produced by my voice, recorded and cut in Audacity, but otherwise unmanipulated.

As SDL Perl has no line or circle drawing facilites, I had to implement them myself using a putpixel routine. This was far too slow to be used every frame, so most things are pre-rendered and blitted onto the application surface.

The collision detection routines are not optimised. If you have a large number of semibreves and minims on-screen at once, the game is likely to slow down.

How did you make the Windows port?

Using par/pp. The documentation for how to do this is rather scattered, so here’s a summary.

The problem is that you need versions of Perl, SDL, SDL-Perl, PAR and pp for Windows that will all work together. Perhaps you can build from source, but as I’m not a regular Windows user, I’d rather just download binaries that work.

Perl is distributed freely for Windows by Activestate. I downloaded and installed version 5.8.8.822. 5.10 builds are available, but it’s more difficult to find all the other libraries for it.

Activestate’s Perl includes a utility called ppm for installing Perl packages built on Windows. That can be used to install the remaining packages. SDL-Perl was a little tricky to find. As this page says, you can install the package with the command:

ppm install http://www.broadwell.org/dl/ppm/5.8/win32/SDL_perl.ppd

The package includes the SDL DLLs needed to use SDL from Perl with SDL-Perl.

Now I could run my Perl program on Windows, but I wanted a way to distribute it without requiring the user to install Perl. For that I used PAR and pp. First I installed Activestate’s package of PAR using the graphical ppm utility. Next, following the links on the PAR website to bribes.org, I found a package of pp that I installed with:

ppm install http://www.bribes.org/perl/ppm/PAR-Packer-588_820.ppd

Note that pp packages may be specific to a certain build of Perl.

With everything installed, I could now create a Windows executable of my game:

pp -o minim.exe -gui minim.pl

The -gui switch stops a console window from opening when you launch the executable. The executable still needs the SDL DLLs to run. You can pack them in the executable with pp’s -l option, but I find it easier just to copy all the DLLs into the directory and zip them up for distrubution. On my installation, the DLLs are in C:\perl\site\lib\auto\SDL_perl\ .

Where is your time-lapse video?

Here (2 minutes, 15 Mb). Warning: this video contains bright, rapidly flashing colours. The music is “Corporation” from Makke’s album “It’s Binary, Baby!”. Buy it! It’s really good!

I had a few difficulties with mencoder, so here’s a short description of how I got it to work. For some reason, mencoder crashed on trying to encode the video. Perhaps it didn’t like one of the frames. I got it to build an MJPEG-like video:

mencoder “mf://*.jpg” -mf fps=25 -o output.avi -ovc copy

However, mplayer wouldn’t play that normally. It would write the frames to PNGs, though:

mplayer -vo png output.avi

That gave me a directory of PNGs that it was happy enough to encode normally.

My time lapse sceenshots came to just under 2 minutes (the length of the music), so I thought I’d add a few seconds from my game to the beginning and a still to the end. I used SDL Perl’s save_bmp() grab frames from the game, converted them to PNGs with ImageMagick’s convert (ls | xargs -i convert ‘{}’ ‘{}.png), then resized them (ls | xargs -n 1 mogrify -background black -extent 640×512) and changed them to 8-bit colour (ls | xargs -n 1 mogrify -depth with mogrify. The still at the end I made using GIMP. Renaming them into the right order with rename, I could then join them together with mencoder’s “mf” video source:

mencoder “mf://*.png” -mf fps=25 -o output.avi -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vhq

After that I used -audiofile to add the music (ripped from CD with cdparanoia):

mencoder output.avi -o minim.avi -ovc copy -oac mp3lame -audiofile cdda.wav -lameopts preset=64

so I couldnt think of what else to do with theme, so here is a little puzzle/score/maze-em-up.
[ This here is the download link ]

sorry its not as funny as my other games

and heres a final desk shot, make sure to note the almost finished pack of hobnobs, the hardcore biscuit for hardcore people

Timelapse: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Av6esGTALq4
Source: http://sophiehoulden.com/randomstuff/ludum/minimalist02.fla
Browser Version: http://girlflash.deviantart.com/art/Dot2doT-83299341

Game in under 4 hours. Pretty minimal. Grab the final version here (includes sources). Needs SDL, SDL_mixer, SDL_image and GLee to compile.

Hi all,

I’m not exactly new to LD, but it’s been quite a while. I’m planning to enter LD11, and I have some interesting ideas up my sleeve I’ll be writing all my code completely from scratch, using Win32 -I have a lot of experience doing this though, so I don’t think it’ll be a handicap.

I’ll also be recording a time lapse video of my progress, which might be amusing to watch afterwards - Good luck everyone (you’re going to need it :P)

Okay well .. it’s been a bit of work, but I got one together. Unfortunately, youtube wouldn’t take it. I think it had something to do with something to do with something. Which, means I need to upgrade linux to get … blah blah.

On the more interesting side, I wrote a linear video editor for the task in pygame + pug. It only took about 90 minutes to make the editor. The rest of the time was struggling with encoding issues. The editor works pretty good and plays music along with so you can get things synched just right

The program takes in a list of .png files (movie.txt) and lets you cut out chunks and do other things with ‘em. Here’s the video. It’s got great music - thanks to DrPetter’s brother!!

This was my fifth Ludum Dare (including 8.5). Before this compo I went through all my previous LD entries and wrote some small post-mortems for them, and looking back, I’ve never been particularly good at handing in finished entries for these compos. I think maybe the first one I entered (7) resulted in the most complete game. That one (which I named Pathmania: Way of the Jelly for some reason, I think it was supposed to be some obscure joke) left a few things to be desired, but it had a title screen, several levels, a random level generator and even a level editor! Shrapnel has one thing it didn’t have, though: Sound =)

Libraries and tools

I used the SDL, SDL_image and SDL_mixer libraries (which in turn uses some libs for decoding png and ogg vorbis), the rest was written from scratch during the compo. All work was done in Linux, using the KDE desktop with 4 virtual desktops. Tools I used was:

• kate: Text editor. The split view feature is great!
• gcc: Compiler and cross-compiler.
• gimp: Graphics. I always use several views of the same image when making pixel graphics, this time was no exception — one for 1x, sometimes one for 2x, and one for 8x or 16x. Sometimes I use a mouse, sometimes tablet, this time I mostly used a tablet.
• sfxr: DrPetter’s sound effect generator we all know and love. I used the SDL port which I ported myself during the compo =)
• pxtone: Pixel’s music editor (v 0.8.3.4).

Other things:

• xchat 2 and firefox: Internet distractions =)
• amarok: Music player. Tuned to Nectarine during the compo =)
• scrot: Screenshot utility, to take screenshots for the timelapse video. Worked really well, I didn’t notice it at all.

General

I had those previous half-finished entries I mentioned in mind as I started out, and simplified a few things right away. For example, I’ve traditionally used libpng directly for loading images in stead of simply using SDL_image. There’s a few reasons for this, but most of them have usually been irrelevant for my LD entries anyway, and SDL_image is a lot quicker to use than libpng. You just call one function to load your SDL_Surface from a file and that’s it.

So for this compo, I did what I should’ve done all along and went the quick and simple way, using the SDL, SDL_image and SDL_mixer libs. I think that worked out well, it took almost no time at all to set up the traditional black window with an event loop, and some image loading capabilities for good measure. I added sound later on, which was also very quick and simple. I still made the game in plain C, but I did some header magic to autogenerate loading and unloading code for resources, setting defines and including the header several times in the file that should get the handling code. This way I didn’t have to worry about either spreading things out in several places or making some fancy resource management system, just put the resource IDs and filenames in one place, and the resource is instantly available for use with that ID. I’ve done similar things in some earlier LDs, and while the headers can look a bit hairy it works really well =)

The result: Less fiddling with technical fluff, more time to work on the actual game. This was a very good thing, since I worked horribly slow and inefficiently during the entire compo and could use all the time I got. I also had major trouble getting to sleep during the compo, which didn’t exactly help (that happens sometimes, compo or not .. I’ve tried several variants of sleeping pills before, but none actually work on me for some reason). So, I ended up wasting more hours just lying in bed trying to sleep, during the night, than I spent actually sleeping, which ended up being during the day. Ugh.

I also spent some time porting DrPetter’s sfxr tool to SDL and Linux, since the Windows version had some issues when I ran it in Wine, and I was determined that for this Ludum Dare, I would have sound in my game or die trying. The porting work was done entirely during the compo, so that “wasted” some time too, though I don’t really see that as a waste of time since I ended up using the port to make some really nice sounds that I feel add a lot to the game. Similarly, the time I actually spent sleeping, eating and going outside for some air was time well spent, I doubt locking myself in the room for a 48 hour marathon would’ve resulted in a better game. On the other hand I could’ve really used some of that time to make more and better levels. The short and crappy levels are, I think, Shrapnel’s most major flaw.

What went right

Well, I made a playable game, and I think it’s kinda fun despite its many flaws =)

The food I ate during the compo was great, probably the best I’ve had during a Ludum Dare so far. One of my flatmates made us lots of delicious food =)

I kinda like the graphics, too. It’s not amazing by any means, and the ship designs are perhaps somewhat uninspired standard fare, but at least they’re not plain ugly =). The graphics was made in Gimp with my tablet. Before the compo started I had some serious issues with the tablet in Gimp, so I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to use it. Gimp would freeze, crash, make all tools behave like the “move layer” tool, and generally misbehave in any number of ways. Thankfully these issues magically disappeared the day before the compo started when I compiled GTK and Gimp from source and installed that in stead of using the distro’s packages.

The sound effects are great, which I have DrPetter’s sfxr tool to thank for. The time spent porting it to SDL was time well spent in that regard =)

I also like the music, which I made with pxtone (pxtone works well in Wine as long as you touch .ptcop files before saving them, since only overwrite works). I was equally determined to get some music in the game as I was about the sound in general, but initially I didn’t have any musical inspiration at all. I tried to make some tunes, but everything I did sounded like crap (specially since I don’t really know any musical theory, it can be a bit hit or miss). I was ready to give up and continue making the game — this was during the last hours of the compo, there wasn’t much time left and I really should be spending time on more important things than trying to make music — and even switched over to the code desktop, ready to do some coding again, when the whole tune suddenly popped into my mind out of nowhere. So, I switched back to pxtone and, according to the timelapse images I’ve got of my desktop, the primary and secondary voice was basically complete in literally three minutes for the first half, four more for the second half, note for note what you hear in the final tune apart from some minor tweaks I did later. That includes time for listening to it a bunch. It was so weird! I did spend some more time with it later, added the drums and such (and made the ingame background thing), but the whole thing was done pretty quickly. Most of what you can see of the pxtone window in the timelapse video (below) is actually rejected tunes, listening to it, and doing and undoing small insignificant tweaks =)

What went wrong

I already mentioned a bunch under General, so I’ll skip that here.

By far the two biggest complaints I’ve seen about my game in the comments have been that the game is too short, and that there’s not much connection to the chain reaction theme, and both of those are really at least partly because of the levels, or lack of, and their design. Actually calling it “level design” is a bit of a stretch since I didn’t really put much thought into their design at all, there wasn’t enough time. They were literally thrown together at the last minute. For the next compo I really need to set off some time for level design, or make some game where level design isn’t so important.

There really are chain reactions in the game, I made the game with the idea in mind from the start — when you kill enemies, they send out shots that kill any other enemies they hit (or you!), which again sends shots when they die to kill yet more enemies, and so on — it’s just not very apparent that they’re there since the level design I mentioned doesn’t really take advantage of the fact at all, except perhaps for this one place. So, there’s not often you actually see chain reactions happening unless you’re both lucky and work really hard at making some. Originally I wanted to have a bit more advanced enemy behavior too, with them floating around the screen for a while before going on, going both left and right and upwards in addition to just down, so that you had to choose both where and when to shoot to make the most chain reactions possible. I’m sorry I didn’t get around to that, because I think that that would definitely have been a much better game. However, that would also have required good level design, and even with the current enemies I think that some decent level design, levels to really set up potential chain reactions, could have had an impact.

Also, the scoring system could use some work perhaps, but the effect the chain reactions have on the score isn’t really obvious in any case (see next section). There should have been some visual feedback when combos happen and such, or at least a mention in the readme in the slim chance that someone should happen to read it.

There’s also a few bugs that slipped through. The most apparent one is probably that the last level sometimes ends before you get a chance to kill the last few enemies, so you win the game with enemies still firing shots at you =). Another bug is that the Alt test when pressing Alt-Enter for fullscreen doesn’t actually work, so you go into fullscreen just by pressing Enter without Alt. Maybe that’s a good thing though, since the fullscreen toggle is undocumented and it’s easier for people to accidentally discover it that way =)

Another undocumented feature is the joystick support. I wonder if someone used it?

Last words

Overall, I think I’m going to call the game at least a partial success. I didn’t get done nearly as much as I wanted to or even could have had I been more efficient, and the levels are a huge detractor, but it’s still kinda fun to play, and I like it =)

By the way, it actually is possible to take advantage of the chain reactions for higher scores if you’re just aware of the scoring system =). I think my record is around 11800 or so.

First, you lose one point for every shot you fire, so if you want high scores it’s in your best interest to not just keep firing, but choose somewhat more carefully where and when to fire.. like a bleak shadow of the original intent with the smarter enemies, heh. You only score 1x the points for each enemy you kill yourself, but enemies killed by the death fire of other enemies get a combo multiplier — 2x for the first one, 3x for the next, and so on. Score is also multiplied by the current level number.

Or, if scoring’s not your thing, you can also try to beat the game by not firing a single shot =)

Timelapse

Finally, here’s a timelapse video of my desktop during the compo. I turned off the computer when I went to sleep, since it’s a bit noisy and is in the same room as my bed, so it’s broken into three parts. I use four virtual desktops, you can see which one I’m in in the little indicator at the taskbar if you look closely. During the compo I used the top left mostly for code (kate), top right for graphics (gimp), bottom left for IRC (xchat2) and internet (firefox), and bottom right for sound (sfxr) and music (pxtone) and sfxr porting =) (except for day one, when sfxr porting was done in the top left desktop).

There’s one screenshot for every 30 seconds at 30 fps. I used scrot in a shell script loop to take the screenshots in the background during the compo, and then mencoder to combine them into this video.

Hm, looking at this I seem to be doing a lot more work than I actually did. Like I said, inefficient..

Space Chaos is a fairly standard space shooter, but with extra explosions, featuring 3 types of enemies and two deadly weapons.

Download - binaries for windows and linux + source.

Timelapse