I started a little bit late due to eating food and stuff. But I’ve made some progress! The idea is a top-down shotgun rpg. What does that mean? An dungeon crawler type thing, only you have a shotgun… I have tiles up, player moving/collision.

Here’s the first screenshot! (temporary programmer art)

And I’m streaming on Justin.tv! http://justin.tv/danlthemanl

I’m still wandering without a really precise idea of the gameplay. So here is the first (and only) room. Your world.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 21st, 2012 at 1:42 am and is filed under LD #23. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

For my first time, I think it’s looking cool (for now), I have started a game project called “A Tiny World Hero”, it would be a mini-linear history about a Tiny Hero, in a Tiny world, defeating a big monster (maybe, a dragon?), it will be very simple but I think that can be funny to play.

So, for the first 2 hours I have done the player set up and some tileset for the terrain and for a castle.

Here is a screenshot of how it’s looking in 2 hours.

[IMG]http://i.imgur.com/AyGhA.png[/IMG]

So, right now I will go to sleep 5 hours, and then I will work hard tomorrow (today).

Thanks for this great event,
– Mid.

Got home at 6 and went right into it, I decided to keep working rather than post anything.

This’ll be my 4th LD, I was here for 19, 20 and 22… I don’t remember why I didn’t do 21.

Nevertheless my tools are as follows:

– Unity 3D (As always, but actually going to make a 3D game this time.)

– Photoshop

– sfxr

– Fruity Loops Lite (I seriously doubt I’ll be able to get anything decent out of it… as per the usual)

– Sigur Ros Discography (cuz that’s how I works yo)

Best of luck to all of you, and remember “It’s not the destination, but the journey that matters.” does not apply in this situation… at all…

What I See

So I went out for a walk to get some inspiration and as you might guess there isn’t a lot of inspiration things happening a mid sized town at 12 AM. Just as I was returning from my walk with the disappointment of having no brilliant ideas I break a branch underneath my foot. BINGO! A Giant Sim! Sim’s are great for these types of events due to their open ended design, as soon as I finish the basic mechanics I can keep on adding additional feature until the time limit is up without making anything seem tacked on. The game’s main mechanic will be called force. The player will have a force meter which determines how much force he does each action with so “Throwing” something with 0 force will cause the player to drop it doing no harm to it, while using 5 force would cause the player to hurl it with great strength causing lots of a harm to it. Obviously throwing a human would be a very bad (but fun) thing.

The problem is that I have obsolutly no experience with 3D stuff, some I’m just going to use a bunch of blocks to represent things esque Minecraft.

Have started on mine and am keeping track of progress here:   http://lupfantomo.tumblr.com/

Basically you play as a bacteria on a slide to become the fittest and move on to the next slide.  No photos yet, hope to have some soon.

I had several lame ideas come to me and was stuck so I went to the gym.  Sure enough I came up with something I’d enjoy working on and fits with the theme to some extent.

Basically it’s a Freelancer type game set in an open space of tiny planets.

• Each tiny planet has a dock coming out of it (which will rotate, naturally) that you can dock at and get missions, trade, upgrade your ship, etc.
• You have to watch where you fire your weapons or you can accidentally (or not?) attack a planet and make its people aggressive towards you, perhaps also causing them to send their ships at you.
• You can get trading missions from planets or wait for some planet to hail you to ask for assistance.
• Random encounters with enemy fleets.
• Some areas of the open space will be guarded by tougher baddies that you’ll need upgrades against.
• Bunch of other tiny (lulz) ideas that I won’t bother listing.

This would normally be an ambitious jam project for me but I’m using the theme as an excuse to use very small and low detail art (while still maintaining some style of course).  More time for coding all this crazy crap.

I’ll post updates like I usually do, but for now here’s an earlier hipstergram picture of my fuel:

Current windows build (as of 1:43 AM saturday morning)
Current mac build (as of 1:43 AM saturday morning)
Current source code (continuously up to date)

Current build is not interactive, it will display and animate the first of the three images above. I don’t actually know what my game mechanic is yet. I thought I knew when I started, now I don’t.

Currently concerned that this may wind up being a paint program and not a game. Maybe that’s okay.

What you are looking at is this running full-screen in your GPU.

Hello all,

I hope everyone is doing well. I just thought I’d check in and let the community know what I’m up to. I’m sure everyone is hard at work so I’ll be brief.

Since this is my first LD, I figured that I should try and keep my game as simple as possible. So for the past 2.5 hours I’ve been brainstorming trying to come up with something that goes along with the theme of “Tiny World”. I was having grand ideas about a “zelda-like” game where you are trying to protect a small object that was found from being stolen and it turns out that it was indeed a…you guessed it…tiny world. The player, upon finding this out, would be pulled into the world and get to explore it and fight all kinds of monsters, and dive down dungeons, and save not only the tiny world but their own as well.

Sounds a bit complicated? Yeah that is what I thought. So I scratched that (still a neat idea that I may revisit in the future). The last thing I want to do for my first LD is to get in waaaaaaaaaaay over my head and have nothing to show in 2 days. So I started to think small (excuse the pun). The one thing I liked about my previous idea was the basic premise behind it: protecting a tiny world. So what I’ve settled on is a little “god-like” game that involves you trying to protect your own tiny world from the dangers and chaos of space. I’m trying to keep it simple and manageable, but most of all fun.

I’m going to start work on a mock up and a starting prototype to see if I can get the basic gameplay down and see if it will be worth making. So far I’m thinking it’ll be fun, but we’ll see.

Have fun everyone and happy coding!

Jack

Last time I entered LD I think my timelapse showed about 6hrs of me staring at IRC and the ‘Random Game Name Generator’ trying to think up what to make. This time I decided I was going to make a space game with planets and spaceships no matter what the theme was, luckily the theme was one that fit!

I’ve added a grass planet (made using Diggory Blake’s awesome skysphere generator) with atmosphere and wrote some scripts to handle spaceship controls, fuel consumption and gravity. I still have no idea what my gameplay will be like, but I imagine it’ll be some kind of limited-resource space exploration survival game thing

A bit late with the intent to enter, I know. It seems like an interesting theme though. I’m going to be doing this using Quest, I think. And I will likely be working with a friend of mine on this, so I guess we’ll be submitting under the jam rules.

Tags: declaration of intent, interactive fiction, quest, text adventure, tiny world

Just got back in from a tiring shift behind the bar

Tiny world? Not exactly sure what this theme entails, will think more after I grab some sleep.

Then I’ll have only a few hours to throw together a framework for this before shooting off again to work for 6pm until about 5am
I’ll then have 24 more hours to hopefully get something half decent that people will enjoy…

this is going to be a challenge indeed.

It took me about 2 hours of brainstorming to come up with an idea. I drew up a concept on the white board and started making some art for my game. The game is called Tiny Defender. Your a science pod who’s been shrunk to microscopic size and injected into the foot of human. Your job is to destroy viruses in the body, there will be several stages in each area (foot, leg, chest, arm, head). The last stage of each area will have a miniboss. Once you’ve destroyed all the minibosses you’ll gain access to the head, where the final showdown will take place! Stay tuned for more updates!

-KunoNoOni

Hey guys, this is my first time getting directly involved with Ludum Dare after seeing how awesome it is. I had an idea for a game since last year that ties in with the theme of “Tiny World”, basically it is based on the concept of matter versus antimatter, The “world” of the game is being torn apart by matter / antimatter collisions and your job is to pair (hence the title) up pieces of matter and gain points. The catch is once you click on a piece of matter to start pairing, it becomes activated and once it is activated, colliding with an antimatter piece ends with you losing a life. This is the basic idea of the game, might throw some other stuff in their as well.

So at this point I’ve gotten a very solid idea of what I’m going to do, and a bit of how I’m going to make it look. I’m working on setting up the structure of the code but at the same time starting to get a bit of stuff to play with working, and it all seems to be going along swimmingly.

I have a plane that spins and it’s in a sky-blue square that’s almost a sky. Soon I’ll have planets and will have the plane controllable by the player!

Please do note the tilted plane in the middle of the image. Not the command prompt.

I’ve got a good idea what I’m making now. It took some debate and throwing out a lot of ideas before I came up with one I felt was feasible and worth doing.

So I’m in the middle of building out my classes and some of my art. I think it’s interesting but still perfectly doable within the timeframe I have.

Also, obligatory workstation shot.

Here’s an idea: something kinda like a god game… but in reverse!

You are a small populace on a tiny island assigned with a god that has randomly assigned attributes (likes / dislikes) and your goal is to make your god as happy as possible! however you don’t actually know right from the start what your god wants, so you have to experiment….

also, kinda mock-up:

So the theme is Tiny World?  Yay!  That was my top choice!  So, as I mentioned in my previous post, I’m working with Python and Pygame again, and this time throwing in a little curses emulation library called Pygcurse.  I’m not feeling very well today, so I’ve decided to try to keep this LD pretty low on the ambitiousness scale – wanna be able to finish and still be able to go to work on Monday feeling fairly rested.  To that end, I’m making a text game!  Well… there may be some graphics, perhaps… if so, it’ll be late in development that they get added in.  The game will be something of a spiritual successor to one of the very first games I ever played – and one that was very influential in my decision to become a programmer:  Hamurabi!

So yes like Hamurabi, but in SPAAAAAAAACE!~ You are the new ruler of a tiny space colony (TINY WORLD!~) orbiting the Earth in L2.  Your primary task is prioritizing the colony’s resources between construction (making the colony bigger), infrastructure (increasing livability), and saving for the future/emergencies – much like in Hamurabi.  There are new ideas mixed in too, though – interactions with the Earth and other colonies (trade, politics, war,…?) (I could make it an MMO, lawl), and probably a bit of city-building mechanics added in.  I’ll have to kinda judge as I go how much complexity I’ll be able to add.

Good luck all!  See you in the Tinyverse!

Tags: babylon, gundam, hamurabi, ld23, pycurse, pygame, python, space, sumer, tiny world

So far, I’ve got nothing..

That is all.

Those circles are planets

I didn’t like the chosen theme at first, but I think I’ve warmed to it a little.

My idea is this: A small creature from a small planet wants to explore space (that smallest circle is his). it will be a kind of “Avoid-em-up”. The screen you see is where you choose a planet to travel to.

All I have is that screen and basic movement and asteroid spawning.

Here is the working title screen for my game! Of course, I won’t reveal too much of the plot as I go, but I started with something basic as I don’t have very much time to work tonight.

Cheers!

Can’t wait to see what everyone has in the morning!

~MVette

Tags: day 1, MVette, Temporal Hysteria, tiny world

Journal

Well, I’m 3 hours in and I think I’m doing pretty well. I’m taking off some time to write this journal and let ideas percolate for a while.

It glows like a jewel.

I found a game concept pretty quickly. It’s not the most original or awe inspiring, but it seems fun to make. You’re the president of a space contracting company and it’s your job to create mining lanes to new worlds back to Earth. Of course, you must deal with space pirates and asteroids damaging the cargo ships, so not only do you build mining stations, you also build defense stations to protect your interests.

(concept)

You start by harvesting the moon (destroying it) and as your company grows and grows, the worlds look smaller and smaller. You end up crushing planets hundreds of times the size of Earth, a tiny, tiny world.

I don’t know what the end goal is, but whatever.

Watch me on Justin.tv!

It’s still early here, but I think I might have to be done for the night. It took me way longer that it should have to figure out this tiny bit of code. So tired…

But, I think I have a good idea to start on first thing in the morning:

In my game tiny people will parachute into the screen riding on dandelion spores. You create gusts of wind with your mouse to help guide them to… um… safety? Well, I still have some parts to figure out, but I think I can make it work.

This LD is going GREAT! The last few game making jams I participated in taught me a lot. I’m not revealing all the details just yet, but my game is called My Kid Dropped The Planet and is about what can happen when you combine a minature world with a roomful of bored kids. 😀

I also had an idea for a rescue team going into a wizard’s laboratory and freeing the results of his shrinking experiments. But I like this idea better.

Can’t wait to see what everyone else comes up with!!

UPDATE

Woo hoo!

Intro done, tutorial done, 3 levels done, sound fx done!

I’ll tell you what its about now: Your mom the evil sceintist captured Whoville…but she had to leave it alone with her kids. Now they’re playing ball with it! You are the guiding hand of Fate, controlling where the kids shoot the ball. Will you be Good..or Evil? There’s two ways to play every level–2 tutorial levels and 3 real levels so far!

Between my husband, my four year old and the dogs I won’t actually 48 hours, so I’m so pleased that I made so much progress in the first evening. Tomorrow I’ll add some graphics and the whole thing will make much more sense visually. Stay tuned.

(this is my first Ludum Dare, I was a professional designer who worked as part of big teams and I only started making my own solo games a couple of months ago)

Mickey

https://twitter.com/#!/14legs

Just started coding my first ludum dare ever. I’m not sure I’ll have the time to complete anything, as I’ll probably won’t be able to do much for most of sunday but I think It’ll be fun either way

Here’s a shot of the humble beginnings of my attempt. All my OpenGL programs start with a teapot

Time to go to sleep in order to start working on the actual game as soon as possible.

I’ve just woke up at 6am my clock (which is 11PM in EasternUS or 12PM in S.Korea) …

Tiny worlds … which is a nice theme !

A bacterial infection came into your body, and the small world inside him[“your body”] needs to fight with this ….

Background will be :human tissues,blood, any internal organ zoomed to see the  microscopic life inside it …

I’ll be doing a RealTimeStrategy with small, selectable,commandable,movable,… “dots” with color reflecting thier internal status …

I’ll be using :FreeBasic32/asm (for win32 and if I have time I’ll make sure to make the linux binary too)

Sounds : Win32 MIDI

Images : gnu GIMP, M$ Paint, Paint.NET

Good luck to all others … See you on 23/24 april !

I have decided to do a live stream of my LD23 while I am working on it .It will be variable as I have said before I don’t have too much time to be working on the game.

http://www.justin.tv/darxval

So the first three hours went past and I don’t have anything concrete yet. My first idea was to have two huge sumowrestler dudes trying to kick and punch each other off a small planet. But I don’t think it would have been a very fun mechanic, it would have needed to be a two player game or have some decent opponent AI. So I scrapped that idea.

Now I’m thinking about making a Match 3 -type of game where you are trying to create space for people on a tiny planet. I think I’ll go with this, should be simple enough for me to make. And i really just want to start doing something before it is too late. So time to start coding furiously.

it’s 6am and I need to get a nap until 8:00. I have a hard day ahead

I can build 3D pathes now on my “tiny world” and I can rotate the current platform into view. Math done, tonight comes the fun.

OK! I drank the first beer. The plan has been made. I’ll take a 2 hour nap after this 24 hours up time with physical activities. I’m tired…

The thing is a score attack game. Aliens try to blow up your tiny world. It is a little planet which you have to defend. There are evil space ships and mother ships with deadly bombs everywhere around you. You will have a hard time! 😉

Technical details are planned, algorithms are done except 1 that I have never did before. This will be challengeing to code becouse of the complexity level of the screen. So I take 2 hours nap then I walk my dog and say hello in my pub, drink coffee there and come back and I’ll be awake until all the coding is done. I plan graphics, sfx and balancing for tomorrow…

I’ll release everything that has been made as I go. Stay tuned!

Tags: 2600, atari, coffee, dog, nap, plan, stella, vcs

The Tiny World theme is very fitting.  I just finished two full days of emergency auto repair where we were confounded at every turn by extremely confined spaces housing massive things.  It’s done and we appear to have been successful, but I’m sore, sun-burned, and extremely tired.

Now for the relaxing bit, make a game in a couple of days, give or take.  The best I can do tonight is work up some ideas, maybe scribble in my notepad a little bit, and then go to bed and let the more functional part of my mind churn out something that hopefully won’t look like a turd.

Good night you princes of aether, you kings of code, good night and sweet dreams! (Insert gender appropriate language as needed.)

Here’s my first video update on my entry for LD23.

Hello all!

We are in and developing! Good luck to all! We shall be posting to our development blog at the following!

http://cheesescapeadventures.blogspot.com/

See you all there,

– The Dragon

So, first time using SDL_image… and first LD using SDL.

So, here’s the progress and whatnot…

• Makefile is set up. Only other source file in the dir is main.c. This should eventually be split up.
• Images load nicely, and everything is converted to the same 32bpp pixel format.
• I have started a skeleton for a general object structure, though I might take a “several type XYZ arrays” approach (hoping for some decent SIMD optimisation, har har, but the opportunity should be there at least).
• In terms of .png files, I have that border image, ONE player sprite, and a few bullets.

So I made a title screen. I should probably get started on the actual gameplay now.

Gonna cook up somehing about An alien girl and her pet pocket planet.

I think I’m getting close.

First demo, with simple movement and stuff.
Not much else to show at this point. I want to make a game where you race around the equator of tiny planetoids, pretty much inspired by Chevy’s keynote.

…But I’m too dumb to look at anything else than the camera.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 21st, 2012 at 2:23 am and is filed under LD #23. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

A NEW HOPE:

So, we started of with an OK idea that was more blunder than anything useful. I thought it’d be better to make something a little more literal… Above is a sneak preview of whatever you’re imagination can cook up… which is what we are producing.

Spriting – Http://www.twitch.tv/Yahyahkeekoot

Programming – Http://www.twitch.tv/SteveUbach

This theme is a rather vague one…  I don’t like vague, nor do I like that Disney song.  I plan to combine both concepts.  How?  With genocide and really big feet!  No details yet… except for genocide and big feet… as I am almost done planning and making the base framework for the game.

Stay tuned for more madness with Kontrol Ke’al, right after these annoying songs:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmBgJuS62Fc

So here is the problem. I’m a visual thinker, and I am a terrible pixel artist.

After many hours of slaving over a hot mouse, and chunking away here is what I have.

Should be enough of the key assets to start coding it up soon!

BOOOOOOSHAKKA!!!

After thinking about the theme for a while here’s what I’ve come up with so far:

You’re the manager of Ludum Dare world, your goal is to get 1000 inhabitants within 10 years. You start with a small round planet and add buildings to it to attract game developers.

There are two resources:

• Money is generated by donations you get on each of the 25 Ludum Dare events (don’t forget 0 and 11.5) and is used to build new buildings
• Energy is made by generators (built for money) and required to power computers, which attract developers.

I like the general idea, but so far there’s no real challenge, is there? You should probably have to keep the developers happy lest they leave, so what does a happy developer need? Or do you have any other ideas?

So long,

Mr. Wonko

Coming up with an idea ended up being much more difficult that I had initially anticipated, but I’ve settled on a path that I believe embraces an interpretation of “Tiny World”, be it either a physically “Tiny World” or a  microcosm. I’ve also made headway on the game itself, as per the below screenshot I’ve made a thing:

Lost are we?

Yup. I’m absolutely CRUSHED.

But I realized that I have WAY too much going on this weekend, as well as a few projects for school that won’t finish themselves. Next Dare is this Summer. I’ll have time then.

Oh well… And I didn’t even have enough to be able to give a decent “Here’s what I had so far”

I WILL, however, try to pick at this project and see if I can get something at least playable finished for the Jam?

Got a start on my first Ludum Dare game; Necro Gaia. You play as a small planet and you can drag & drop different tiny planets to help protect your “Gaia”. There are plenty of astroids, shooting stars, and space debris that will cause you troubles. As of now it’s sort of a mash-up of different games I’ve done in the past, but the twist is still in the works

There are plenty of changes that are going to occur, but the basic outline is there This is really fun!

-Johnny B.

Why what a cute little theme!

Very little time this weekend but I’m going to try to make a game called maybe “Our Tiny World,” about the tiny world of our lives, and our struggles to maybe expand the borders a little bit.

Tags: concept

Okay, I think this time I got a fairly realistic idea relatively early (3h in). Last time I spend almost a full day, so that makes me happy.
It’s gonna be about small things that stick together and spin (hopefully that’s cryptic enough). After posting this I will immediately begin coding.

What I will use: Java with Libgdx, Ableton Live (music+sound), and Photoshop.

hf gl to everyone

For this “Tiny World” theme I’ve decided to take the challenge from a literal perspective. This game is played at a resolution of currently 62×78, with the potential to go slightly higher but hopefully not by much. Gameplay is a mix of Sim and Strategy. Right now you click on a forest or mountain to gather Wood or Stone respectively, and then you build things: Roads, Houses, Power Lines, or Skyscrapers is the current crop of structures. Right now everything is controlled with the keyboard but first thing tomorrow I’ll be shifting over to mouse control as placing Roads currently is a pain in the butt.

I’m not entirely sure where the gameplay’s going to end up. After all, this is Ludum Dare, so I’m building from an iterative angle. Hopefully by the end I’ll have a nice little time-killer built.

Check this link to see me working !
http://www.livestream.com/fangh

Tiny World.  Seriously people?

Anyhow.  Decided to go 2D this round.  Gots a basic tile engine up and running, plus a few sprites.  After the theme police raided my last entry, I thought my first goal should be to create a tiny world.

I know.. I know… It’s more of a small world… not really a tiny one. I’ll work on that… I promise.

and

It is not a platformer.  I repeat.  It is not a platformer.

After already trying to draw a game that required a large amount of graphical detail to be able to work, I as always had to stop as I am simply not a artist.. Either way I’ve come up with another Idea that I am fairly happy with..

Space strategy game.. That is all 😉

Exported first set of biome graphics so I can start sticking bitmaps together in code and see if I’m on to something visually.

Also planned out elements that might appear within the world, although tentatively creeped in a load of features that will be totally dependant on graphics, and my ability to draw those graphics.

Time to start coding me thinks.

(click for not suckish)

My graphics so far. Meh

I kind of regret not doing this in 3d but there is no way I would have been able to pull it off at all. Egh. At least I should be able to make it fun in 2D.

I added a few tiny in-game characters : a farmer, a wood cutter and a soldier. They are animated – not very nicely, I’m not a graphics person – but it looks cute.

Will think back about some gameplay now.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 21st, 2012 at 2:40 am and is filed under LD #23. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

So, I overslept by about 2hrs. However, I don’t believe this is a disadvantage. Everyone will sleep at some point during the competition. I got most of mine out of the way before it started. Those who are planning not to sleep should read this old blog post by some guy who thinks he knows everything xD Sleep deprivation is not a badge of honor.

After waking up, I looked up the topic and hopped in the shower. The shower is where I have a lot of my big ideas, so I thought it’d be a good way to brainstorm. It was. Now I have a decent plot for the first level swimming around in my brain. Now I have to but organize it on paper.

Also, I’m hungry. My girlfriend is out with her friends tonight, but she apparently left me some Japanese Chicken Teriyaki in the fridge. Gonna heat that up and NOM it while I write. I’ll probably scan my brainstorming document in once I’m satisfied with it.

Cheers.

I have decided on an idea (a cat in a house, where the house is the “tiny world”)!

I decided to use box2das3 (actionscript 3 port of box2d) for collisions.

Had some troubles with 2d animation software. I thought ASEPRITE had onion skin… apparently it didn’t. I had to use Paint.net and set layer transparencies manually instead. It is hard to animate things this way, though. Graphics Gale just doesn’t have the brushes that I need.

Player character with idle animations (and a broken walking animation).

You can find the source here: https://bitbucket.org/toxicFork/ld23/ !

So…I hope I’m not too late…I finally decided to enter the contest for the first time

Stuff I’ll use:

Visual C++ 2010 express

SDL,OpenGL,OpenAL

Gimp,MS Paint

That’s it for now! Good luck everyone!

My first screenshot for sliders while I finish my sprites.   https://s3.amazonaws.com/data.tumblr.com/tumblr_m2tbs6qZwc1ruqefyo1_1280.png

Will be heading to bed soon(have a meeting in the morning I hope to finish early) and then I should be able to finish the last of the sprites and get back to programming.   A better end to the day than I expected.

http://lupfantomo.tumblr.com/

I added a starfield and fixed some stuff. But now I’m tired and will try to get some sleep. See you all later!

My first serious LD48 attempt. I decided to use XNA at the last moment, but I don’t have any base code at all so I’m starting completely from scratch. I will try to restrain myself from implementing robust, complex systems and instead just hack stuff together.

I’ve settled on a design. For now I’ll just say, your weapon is a virus. You use it to defeat the immune system of your victims. Sampling enemies’ DNA will allow you to adapt the virus and increase its potency. Due to time constraints it will probably end up being a twin stick shooter -_-

No screenshots yet. Getting there.

I had to transfer these screenshots to my PC before I could post them to the blog. Bummer.

But as you can see I have my idea for what to do with “Tiny World.” The world starts at about the size of the screen and shrinks over time. Wanderers will travel the land, and are in danger of falling off the edge of the world. Can you save them?

I lost two hours to that.

The things I want to do to C++ right now would be censored on cable television.

Note to self: always use std::vector::at(), never std::vector::operator[].

(old post: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2012/04/20/morgawr-point-n-click-first-ludum-dare-game-ever/ )

And here we are! Roughly 3 hours and a half have passed (maybe 4 after I submit this post) and I’m going at a steady pace…

Thanks to the underlying engine it’s pretty easy to add new content, it just takes some time cause it’s C++ (and I’m not a C++ programmer, I’m using this as an experience to learn). Here’s what I did so far:

First of all, I started with designing the level structure of the game. It’ll be a sequence of rooms (like most escape-the-room games) and I had to code them down to .lua files. After I got that to work (it took me a long time because Lua wasn’t really happy and kept giving me problems.. after 1 hour I realized I forgot a comma and it kept giving me syntax errors… damn) I implemented item placement in the world. A small screwdriver image (it’s non-allowed content, I made it prior to the competition but I’m going to swap it out with real graphics after the game works) at the center of the screen.

Tweaking here and there in the code, I then moved on to implement a simple icon (your usual Examine/Pickup/Use icon) to follow the mouse cursor while in game. This was much easier than I expected and in 10-20 minutes it was all up and running.

Now I’m currently working on events with mouse clicks on the screen, operating on items in game and in the player’s inventory. Ironically enough, one of the hardest challenges so far is figuring my way through GlCoords. AngelEngine uses world coordinates instead of screen coordinates and when placing items on the screen (especially when retrieving their coords) it can be a pain in the ass.

Anyhow, here’s two screenshots! The first one shows the screwdriver on screen and the Examine icon following my mouse (cursor doesn’t appear in screenshot), second one shows an interactable dialog screen drawn on top of the game. (linking the screenshots cause wordpress stretches them and I’m too lazy to find a way to make them look good)

Screenshot 1    Screenshot 2

I’m going to be hitting the hay in a few minutes.

The game is coming along smoothly, I’m working on the main game mechanic next, now that I have basic movement and the island done for now.  After I’m done with that, I’ll integrate the upgrades system, and then probably work on story slides for between levels.

I may program in multiple weapons, but I’m not sure, I think I’m going to keep this game simple.

I should be up bright and early, and I’ll post my first hourly once I get to work and get stuff done.  Breakfast being important and all, that’ll probably come first ;o

this is my plan, i dont excuse my handwriting IT IS WHAT IT IS!!!!!!

http://i.imgur.com/Igy1m.png

Seriously Tiny world? I thought I woke up earlier and read the theme was Parallel universes, but apparently my sleepy brain tricked me into believing that. -sigh- Fast forward. Three hours into the competition I woke up and this is the theme. Well… First things first.

I have about 4-6 ideas on paper.

1. A little kid on a train sticks  his hand out of the window and you guessed it, his thumb gets cut off. The thumb, lying in the grass, is now on a quest to get reunited with its former place, or is he going to have an identity crisis and choose for independence?
   Genre: RPG, Plattformer or Action/Adventure
2. You are a PC. Or to put it better: the intent of the game would be to deliver input bits as fast as possible to the output. While doing so the bit (or bits) might have to be processed to acquire a desired output, such as going through the ALU to get a calculation on two input bits/bytes before going to the screen output.
   Genre: Obviously a Puzzle game
3. An ant is being chased by his love rival after he got caught smooching the queen. He’s now running for his life dodging rain drops, falling cigarette buts and gum.
   Genre: Score Attack
4. TinySimCity/TinyCivilization
   Genre: RTS or TBS

Going to go away from keyboard for a bit and do some art and some basic concepts. Ahem… “art”.

I hoped just by sticking in gravity, planets would orbit a sun. Apparently I stand corrected.

I may have to cheat a bit…

I don’t have a solid idea down yet for gameplay but I’m going with the idea of a world made of tiny sprites – so the world is tiny from the perspective of the player.

Code is here: https://github.com/spilth/tinyworld

What I have so far in my Advance Wars inspired “War in a Fish Tank” web app game:

• Users can sign up
• Users can create their own maps!
• Basic combat system designed (but not implemented)
• 4 basic units programmed: Goldfish, Seahorse, Turtle, and Swordfish

It ain’t much to look at so far, but I’m loving my progress.

But now, time for bed!

EDIT:  The repo!  https://github.com/quill18/ld23-tiny-world

Hey all, hope you’re having fun so far!

I’ve been coding for about 2 straight hours now, and I have something visual enough to show! The game is based around the very tiny world of subatomic physics, a subject dear to my heart (no, really!). As I mentioned before, physics will be handled by nape.

The first bounce:

Orbiting:

And my super awesome workspace!

“WELL YOU SEE…” said my colleague, 4 hours later, “THE SPAWN RATE IS TOO OVER POWERED”

Yeah yeah… We cool. I decided that we needed something that looked nice, simplistic and fit the theme. I also wanted a highly user centralized game mechanic. The Engine is done and so we have, effectively, about 68 hours of polishing and event organizing.

Yeah yeah… We cool.

Streaming our work: (following our procurement of edibles of the McDonalds variety)

Spriting – Http://www.twitch.tv/Yahyahkeekoot

Programming –  Http://www.twitch.tv/SteveUbach

– Team Epsilon

It took me longer than I thought it would to arrive at an idea I was really feeling. I’ve been sketching on my iPad the last couple hours and decided on a simple concept I’m calling Desire. It was inspired by the small map size of the board game Smallworld. Desire is played on a small hex board with randomly generated tiles with locations and objects on them. The idea is you place people on the board until all spaces are filled up and then scoring happens. People have desires (maybe hates) and become happier when they are beside hexes with what they desire. Aim for the highest happiness you can!

Read more to see a few more sketches that lead to this design.

Pages 5 & 6 weren’t anything special.

Tags: concept

My game focuses on the “tiny world” of a small town where you have to deal with constantly shifting feuds and alliances between the residents by rearranging their houses so no one lives next to the person they dislike. At least, that’s the plan at the moment. I’m still working on a playable game so I can figure out whether this will be fun. But for now I’m going to bed so I can have lots of energy tomorrow!

Here’s a quick screenshot. I plan to redo the graphics, and probably make them a little larger than this. (And there will be more than 3 people!)

Friday’s almost over, and I can at least say I have something moving. A guy you can control and a guy which moves on its own. Radical.
It’s pretty much determined that it’s going to be a roguelike now. Have a story in mind, but it’s not final yet, so I won’t share it yet.

Tags: day1, screenshot

I started Ludum Dare an hour late :(. Silly DST
Anyway, so far I have level loading from an image. First time I’ve done something like this, very pleased with myself.
I’m planning on making a minimalistic game, in a small window because the theme is Tiny World. Also because I cannot art to save my life.

I reckon a platformer or a top-down roguelike would be fun like this, any ideas?

Naarkie

Working on game programming and sprites…
Have some graphics and story line done

It wasn’t long before I settled on a game idea – 2D gameplay on the surface of many tiny, interconnected planets in 3D space.

After an hour or two of experimenting with the concept, I wasn’t feeling the love from Unity (probably due to lack of a Pro license and wanting to render to a texture).   I  now have freeGlut and libPNG statically linking to my game, which is most of what I’ll need for assets.  I’ll probably throw a lightweight SFX lib at it tomorrow, but for now, it’s time to get gameplay implemented!

Platform: Windows (OpenGL based, libs should cleanly port to Mac after 48th hour).

Engine: Custom

Libraries: FreeGLUT, libpng, zlib (by extension).

My game is about a wizard apprentice who accidentally shrinks himself to the size of an ant and finds himself stuck on his mentor’s lawn. Side scrolling platforming/exploration based game, with spells and insect enemies to fight. I’d like to have the wizard allied with ants and use them as a way to travel safely to the mentor’s wizard abode to get unshrinked. Not so fleshed out right now and I’ll see how it turns out as I work on it.

I’m making my entry using Java’s Slick2d game library. Netbeans is my IDE for Java. Using paint.net and GIMP for image editing, and Audacity (maybe?) for making audio.

I still can’t believe I decided to do this. But here I am, about 3 hours in. Got my engine going strong. Taking a break from that and starting on the main guy’s graphics. We will see how this thing goes. Having fun regardless. Seriously, so. much. fun. :-)))

My plane doesn’t like pointing the right way. I think it has a bad case of there’s-no-up-in-space right now.

Captain Airplane reporting for duty, I am flying to the center of the planet.

Hey everyone!

This is my first ludum dare and I’m using Python/Pygame. I’m making an artificial life simulator with ascii characters as my graphics. My progress will be logged on my github account:

https://github.com/armornick/LD23

I’m also going to post milestones here whenever I have actual gameplay improvements.

Good luck!

Game concept art is done, all its left are the bad guys. Very happy how it turned out 😀
Here is the first of many images, I have to post the gun first of course.

Slaved over this for, like, 2 hours. Trying to make a turn-based game.

Right now I’m handling combat, etc. Me thinks the red guy (who you play as) should just be invincible and should be able to fuck shit up.

Either that, or he needs a sword on order to kill things. Anyway, I’m off to bed. Tired… Have this picture. Yep, you kill crudely-drawn skeletons. Because why the fuck not? BTW, Instead of Java+Slick2D, I’m using FlashPunk 😀 IT’S SO AMAZING

I will upload a pic in a few hours, after animating my character.

In the game idea, you are a person living on a very small planet. In fact, it is so small, it is not more then 2x the size of the screen. And it is recurring. If you go out of the virtual map on one side, it looks like you are just walking around the planet. To make the planet feel more tiny, there are going to be quests you have to complete. When ALL of the quests are done, you wil gain access to a dungeon where you fight against a boss and win the game.

Okay, more or less starting from scratch again as far as game development goes on the engine side – it does look like I’m going with Flashpunk this time around.

But, something did stick, and I’ll link it here:

http://active.tutsplus.com/tutorials/workflow/how-to-use-an-external-library-in-your-flash-projects/

This details how to use an external library in Flash, and it does appear to work, although the FlashPunk engine appears to want you to use it outside of the Flash CS3 environment. Currently waiting on a confirmation that I’ll need to leave it for this, although I’d like to stick within it if possible. I just have it already installed and know the system better, is all.

~~~~

In the meantime, I actually know more about the gameplay elements I want to use, and the plot of the game.

So, you’re on Pangea,  the supercontinent caused by merging all of the current continents, and a demonic meteor crashes down on the edge of the effectively one ocean, causing mass flooding, as well as melting the ice caps, thus causing extreme flooding of the world. Humans are nearly obliterated, everything up to the cockroachs are near extinction.

So clearly, it’s up to the ants to defeat the demonic presence in the meteor and restore the Earth’s natural order. So get ready to roleplay a worker ant.

A bit of Pikmin minus the Pikmin, I suppose, as you go about to various dungeons collecting materials to enhance your already super-strength and all that, until the colony can develop a boat with which you sail out and tackle the menance.

Planning to make the game at most an hour of gameplay, as the water will constantly rise and block off areas, and you need to strategically find ways to solve puzzles to get things like an ant-spear, a magnifying glass, and a piece of ant-chainmail, before you take off and fight a giant boss fight.

Mostly chose ants because of the idea that they can lift 20 times it’s weight, and wanted to make gameplay that focuses somewhat on that aspect. Either lifting rocks out of your way and/or using them to attack enemies, as well as the *completely un-researched* idea that because of this, they make great ninjas, and can jump over obstacles in their way during combat. Sort of emulating Jade Empire’s dodge mechanic in top-down form, allowing you to jump over enemies to get out of being cornered. Perhaps even tie this to the “Bonus Board” idea from Star Ocean: The Last Hope idea.

~~~~

Of course, to do this, I need to get started. But I’d thought I’d write this down for now, at least. I’ll probably start actual coding at around 10:00 a.m. PST, since I’m feeling that I may not be as productive today. But at least I have a plan, right?

Spent roughly an hour or two designing a game where you influenced a man’s mental process by bribing his organs to vote your way during cranial congress, in order to get him to walk to the couch. Mercifully decided that that was way too complicated. Wound up with this instead.

Stunning, I know. It’s about shifts in size and background/foreground. Not enough real gameplay yet, but the mechanics are there. I hope to have something more interesting and design-y tomorrow by lunch!

Ideally I wanted to stay up longer to work on my entry, but since I am not getting any flashes of inspiration about what type of game to make, I think I am going to get some sleep. Hopefully I will awake in the morning with some cool ideas.

Here is a video of the current progress on my voxel engine:

Need to improve the way that I am rendering blocks, its pretty dumb at the moment.

Tags: alwaysgeeky, blocks, ld23, tiny world, voxel engine

After brainstorming an idea, I found out that slick2d and Eclipse weren’t goint to play along. Four hours later, I have a Slick app working with Netbeans.

Urg…technical difficulties ):
Now we are even more behind…whole map erased

It’s looking good so far. I have a rendering engine and most of an animation engine. However, I’ve run into a problem art. I forgot about my animating skills. Oh well, I just need to play with it a bit more tomorrow. But for now, sleep.

Here’s what I have so far: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/8016309/ld23/index.html

I’m streaming and updating that link as I develop the game, come watch when I wake up for more development tomorrow!

Tags: demo, java, ld23, linux, progress, streaming

The topic has been announced as “Tiny World”. After a few hours of brainstorming & banging, the result I have to show for it are:

A jagged blue sphere. That’s it. But I have ideas.

I’m thinking about making a 2D shooter. You’re controlling / you’re part of / you are a tiny planet, defending yourselves against larger threats. You’ll move your tiny planet around the screen, firing your defenses, avoiding threats, etc.

In my mind, the key idea for this will be control, & feel. You’re not controlling a ship, you’re controlling a planet and I want it to feel like a planet. Control is the difference between lunging your planet across the vastness of space, and pressing a button to move a tiny blue ball across the screen.

I’m going to be doing timelapse screen captures to put together a final video when I’m done, but I managed to screw up starting Chronolapse during the first few hours, so I didn’t get all that. I should have everything else, though, and it should make a nice video.

Since more people play web games, I should make a web game. But I have very little experience in web games, so it’ll be text adventure game…

Tags: text adventure

Our first Ludum Dare attempt. We came up the the idea of small interconnected plots of land you control, your home being at the center of what is a small world. We made some classy music, decent graphics, good code and are off to a pretty good start. Heres the loading screen:

I had some trouble with the theme, so eventually I just settled on the most derivative thing I could have.

It’s a platform game, starring a little man in a big, big world. That is to say, ours.

Yes, I know I’m an innovator, thank you very much. I do have some interesting narrative twists planned that’ll hopefully make the idea less shit. You can follow development at my Tumblr, I guess, cause seriously, I hate WordPress.

Yes, I think we’re going to make some TDS games in Tiny World theme… the story has been setup earlier this morning when the theme comes out… And I just finished programming one of our AI in our game XD

Note: This isn’t like any other fast-paced TDSs, this will be very different in forms of genre combination etc. I’ll post maybe more updates later ;D See ya guys later

Game idea complete and fleshed out. I’m using ChevyRay’s missile command code and making it into a Nature at War game, it might end up with nanobots in it.

Screen Shot 1

Dinner 1

Snack 1

Tags: flashpunk, foodphoto, screenshot

Hi everyone !

It’s great to be here again, the theme was quite frightening at first as I was completely out of ideas as I woke up. But I’ll go with a small god game, which will be pretty fast paced, on multiple planets (each one with a different setting). To me it will be quite a challenge but hey, this why I’m here !

So here it is, my first try on the art for a first planet (actual made size, but it will be bigger in the game, let’s see those pixels !!) :

Let’s get some food and then to more art and code !

Art y u take so long T.T