This past weekend I participated in Ludum Dare, a 48-hour game making competition.
This time around, the theme for the competition was “Minimalism”.
My entry, which I’m quite proud of, is called “Motion”.
Motion is a minimalistic arcade game about adaptation, memory, and control.
Will you figure it out?
Click the image above to be taken to the game’s Ludum Dare entry page.
As usual, all feedback is greatly appreciated!
So lately I’ve been in a bit of a rut, I’ve tried to participate in a bunch of game jams and competitions, but haven’t really had the motivation to do so.
After a bit of introspection, I’ve realized that the reason for this is a lack of passion.
At the beginning of 2012, when I first started taking game development seriously, I was passionate about making any game at all, simply because it was a new experience for me. Now that a year has passed and I’ve made several games, I’ve found that I can’t become passionate about just any project, there are some ideas I’ve had for a long time that are really calling out to me.
It is for this reason that I’ve decided to dedicate the rest of the year to the development of one such idea, a virtual pet game/music visualizer called Audiovore. I’m not yet ready to talk about the details of it, as I’m still working them out, but I’m really excited to be working on a larger project; especially one that I first conceived back when I was in high school!
Since I don’t like to do posts without at least one image, here’s a little bit of Audiovore concept art:
Thanks for reading! Leave me a comment so I know that someone actually reads this!
I love game jams.
They’re a great opportunity to flex your creative muscles and make something amazing, in a very short amount of time. They allow small developers like myself to get our games out to a much larger audience than we would normally have access to, and they bring developers together to work toward a common goal.
Here are a couple I’ve participated in recently:
0h Game Jam – November 4th, 2:00 AM to 2:00 AM
“During DST hour shift, we shift clocks backwards, so there’s actually 1 hour between 2:00 am and 2:00 am. This is the best time in the year to make a game! Make a game in zero hours!”
My entry for the 0h game jam is called “NO TIME!” it’s a short, 5 level game that’ll put your reflexes to the test! Can you beat it?
F*** This Jam – November 9th, 6:00 PM to November 17th, 6:00 PM
“F*** This Jam is a jam centered around the theme of making a game in a genre you hate. Through utter ignorance for conventions and hate for the established rules of a genre, beautiful things will happen.”
The genre I decided to tackle for this jam was the family board game. I hate the genre because it typically focuses on luck-based gameplay, rather than skill-based gameplay. With my entry, LUDO-BOTS, I took the tropes of the family board game genre, and turned them on their head! While the game heavily features dice rolls and random card picking, the only way to win is to carefully observe your opponents’ behavior! Download it, print it out, and try it with your family!
Ludum Dare 25 – December 14th, 9:00PM to December 16th, 9:00PM
“Ultimately, our goal with Ludum Dare is to encourage people to sit down and make something. Our hope is that the new structure continues to encourage more and more developers to join us and create a game in a weekend.”
The theme for the last Ludum Dare of 2012 was “You are the Villain”. This theme fit perfectly with an idea I’d had kicking around for a while, a 2D platformer with a one second control lag. Normally with platformers, it’s absolutely taboo to have any delay between when the player presses a button, and when the player character reacts. I wanted to explore what would happen if you introduced a lag, and whether or not it would be possible to make a good platformer this way. Try it out and decide for yourself!
I hope you enjoy them!
I’ll be participating in my first Global Game Jam on January 25th at Quinnipiac University, so expect another game really soon!
Ludum Dare 24 judging ended last weekend so I figured I’d take a minute to talk about the game I made for it, and what the development process was like.
For those who are unacquainted with it, Ludum Dare is an online game making competition in which people around the world try to make the best game they can in 48 hours. A theme is announced at the start of the competition, and developers have to keep it in mind while designing.
The tools I used for Ludum Dare 24 were:
Game Maker 8.1
Inkscape
Voice Memos on iPhone
Audacity
sfxr
This time around, I made a game called Virion. I’m not entirely sure what genre it fits into, but it’s a game in which you control the titular character, a virus particle, who must travel through the body, avoiding white blood cells, to infect a nice healthy cell. The game has 17 levels and an ending. Here’s a breakdown of how the game was developed:
Friday:
The theme for Ludum Dare 24 was announced at 9 PM on Friday while my wife and I were heading home from our favorite restaurant G-Zen. (We decided to go out to eat before the competition started because I tend to forget to eat during Ludum Dare…) Upon hearing that the theme was “Evolution” I really didn’t know what to think. I had no real ideas, and didn’t feel too passionate. 3 hours later I was still in the same boat. I contemplated giving up, but instead decided to make a list of features I wanted my game to have. Here’s some of the big ones:
The last entry on the list got me thinking about what kind of environments in nature evolve based on the actions of a single entity. I immediately thought of our bodies’ immune systems when they realize a virus is attacking. Since I didn’t have any better ideas, I did a little research on viruses and decided to go with it. The original idea was that you would play as a virus particle, attacking the same body over and over again until you destroyed it. The white blood cells in the body would get smarter and smarter based on your previous playthroughs.
The image which inspired the look of the main character: an influenza virion.
So, the first thing I did was design the character and controls. Can’t really design levels until you’ve got the controls completely ironed out! Since the game would take place within a body, I wanted the player to have a kind of slippery, slidey movement. I spent the first night of the dare tuning the player’s movement until it felt just right! I found that adding some rotation to the character made it feel a ton better, and decided to make him blink and pulsate as well. Little details like these seem to make a pretty big impact on players.
The final look of the main character
Saturday:
On the second day of the dare I implemented the title screen, sound effects, background noise and background graphics then began work on the enemies in the game. I brainstormed a few different types, the ones in bold made it into the final version:
I implemented the three enemy types that I thought had the most promise (the ones in bold) and then started trying to create the game’s level. Since the idea was that you would repeatedly invade the same body, there was to be only one long level that you played over and over, with new enemy types appearing in later playthroughs. It took me most of the second day to realize that this idea was really really stupid. Not only would it be incredibly hard to design, it would also be boring for the player! So, toward the end of the second day I began designing the one-screen levels that would be in the final game.
This level shows an interesting effect of the enemies that copy your movements.
My goal with each level was to highlight an interesting feature of the type of enemy that was in it. There were to be 5 levels for each of the 3 enemy types, followed by a final boss room and a room in which you encounter the cell you want to infect.
Sunday:
Since it was now the final day, I entered panic mode and started designing levels as fast as I could. In the end I was only able to design 3 levels for the enemies who mimic your movement, but did succeed in designing 5 for the other 2 enemy types. In a crazy hour full of half-assed code I implemented the game’s ending, then went around sprucing up the rest of the game. I made the background graphics slightly different for each room, and implemented the crazy circle graphics which make up the walls in the game. (The walls were previously just black squares) I also added a secret warp zone, gave all of the levels names, and updated the look of the enemies. In the end I was unable to create a final boss, so I just placed the hardest level in the game right before the last room. And so, just after 9 PM on Sunday, I submitted my game to the Ludum Dare website then promptly fell asleep.
Results:
Skipping forward now to the end of the judging period (a few weeks after the submission deadline) I’d like to talk about the results of the dare! Shockingly, I placed 21st overall out of 1006 compo participants! Here’s a detailed breakdown of my results:
The coolness rating is based on the number of other Ludum Dare games you played, I only had time to play 60 this time around. I was surprised by how high the overall and fun ratings were, since I didn’t feel too passionate about the game when I was making it. I think the number and quality of the levels is what impressed most players. It may also be that since they were able to beat it and see they ending, they got a nice high and rated accordingly. The rest of the ratings fall about where I expected them to. It makes sense that my theme score was the lowest, since I scrapped the part of my game that was overtly about evolution. Overall I’m very happy with the results, and had a great time!
Whenever I come up with a new game idea I like to create a quick prototype of it in Game Maker to see how much potential it has. In creating prototypes I typically come across a number of design problems that I didn’t see when I had the initial idea. It is typically these design problems that will cause me to abandon or continue working on the game.
One prototype that I’ve been playing around with lately is for a game tentatively titled “RGB”. The game is about a pixel in a computer display that has gained sentience and goes around restoring the dead/stuck pixels in the display to life.
The original idea was that it would be a puzzle platformer where you play as a flashing pixel that, upon colliding with other pixels, will cycle them from red to green to blue, and then back to red. The goal of each level is to make all of the pixels the same color.
A screenshot of the first prototype.
Upon finishing this first prototype I found two big problems:
1. It is difficult to precisely hit one pixel when you can move freely.
2. All puzzles I could think of were easy to solve using brute force methods.
So, to solve these problems I decided to give up on making it a platformer, and allowed the player to move up, down, left, and right, snapped to the game’s grid. (Like an old JRPG) This also helps reinforce the idea that the player is a pixel in a display because they cannot move on a sub-pixel level.
The first level of the new prototype – the player is the gold pixel.
The new prototype solves the control issues of the old one, and opens up a lot of new possibilities for puzzles. While it is still difficult to create puzzles for the game that cannot be brute forced, I have created a few, and am confident that I will be able to create many more.
One of the easier puzzles in the new prototype – the player is the gold pixel.
I’ve added a link and some info for my Ludum Dare 23 game Planet ZOOB to the games page, check it out! I’m gonna do a full writeup about the game once I get a working scanner. I want to scan in my design sketches to go with the post.
Also, the site now has a (barely functional) store where you can buy a Pacifist Games logo tee if you for some strange reason want that. I wanted a logo tee for myself, so I figured why not sell them? They’re 100% organic cotton!
That’s it for now, back to work on the mobile version of Planet ZOOB. 
Since I finally have the site up and running smoothly, I thought I’d take a moment to explain the Pacifist Games logo. Back when I started thinking about creating Pacifist Games, in early January, I knew I’d need some kind of logo to represent it. After a little bit of pondering I came up with a list of the three most important features such a logo would have:
1. It would be easily recognizable, at any scale.
2. It would be a simple and colorful vector drawing.
3. It would represent the name and mission of Pacifist Games in a unique way
The first two features are pretty trivial, but the third is where I started to have problems. How can I represent the name and mission of Pacifist Games in a unique way? I began by looking at common symbols for pacifism. The symbol most commonly used to represent pacifism is the peace sign, but to me, the peace sign doesn’t mean much. How do three lines and a circle represent peace? I decided that I would begin to look for better representations of the pacifist ideal, and, if I did end up incorporating a peace sign into the logo, it would be in a subtle way.
After some more thought, I decided that a tree is a much more suitable symbol for pacifism. A tree never consciously causes harm to other living things (as far as we know) and has only beneficial effects on the health of the Earth as a whole. From this conclusion I decided that the Pacifist Games logo would have to prominently feature a tree of some kind.
Combining these two ideas, and keeping in mind the three main features that the logo had to incorporate, I designed a few prototype logos before settling on the current one shown at the top of this page. Now, you may be wondering, how does it incorporate a peace sign? Well, folding the logo in half, as shown below, reveals its true nature:
Hi, and welcome to PacifistGames.com!
I’m Kyle, and this is my personal website!
Here’s a little dialog to introduce you to the site:
What can I expect from Pacifist Games?
If you have a look at the mission statement on the About page:
“Pacifist Games’ mission is to create interesting, thoughtfully designed, and primarily nonviolent video games that treat players ethically.”
What does that even mean?
The Pacifist Games mission statement can be broken into 4 main ideals:
• Interesting – Games that are interesting arouse the players’ curiosity and hold their attention, one might also call them “captivating”.
• Thoughtfully designed – Game design in which all parts of the design have been thoroughly considered.
• Primarily nonviolent – Don’t expect to find the next big war-themed first person shooter on this site. All games released by Pacifist Games will be suitable for general audiences. In-game violence will be used sparingly, and only where it is absolutely necessary to achieve a certain effect.
• Ethical treatment of players – All games under the Pacifist Games label will respect the
players’ time, money, and mental health. Games should be enjoyable, with no adverse
effects on their players’ lives. Basically, I won’t be making Farmville or World of
Warcraft.
So what can I expect from this blog?
The Pacifist Games blog is where I’ll be posting information about the current progress of my games and game ideas as well as talking/ranting about game design and development. Follow Pacifist Games on facebook or twitter to be notified of new blog posts.
Cool, where can I play some games?
All games will be posted on the blog and added to the Games page as they’re completed. At the moment the selection is pretty sparse, but I hope to change that soon. I participated in the Ludum Dare 48 hour game making competition last weekend. If you want to try the game I created for that, go here. Expect a blog post about its design soon
Thanks for checking out my site!
If you have any additional questions, ask them in the comments!