My game is beginning to shape up. I hope I will be able to make it in time!

…don’t mind the numbers in the pic 😀

I just named my game Astronautics. Just came up. And I have drawn my first little planet, I like it 😀 pretty good with my drawing skills. I have created it in Inkscape. Did the logo in inscape too. Here a little gallery for what I have at the moment.

It works!

Currently it’s a flat round planet with cubes for buildings etc, and the entities will be 2D billboards. I’m now going to focus on phyiscs and collision, and once that’s done, I can turn it into a game :D! I still don’t know what game I want to make with it, though, but I’m glad I have this working.

The player and his grandfather.

Aiming for a little adventure game. Talking, inventory etc.

Gameplay today, art/sound/dialogue tomorrow.

As usual I’m nowhere near getting 48 hours into this, but I’ll try nevertheless. Nothing ground breaking, just a simple rogue like.

Let’s see if I manage to cram some innovation in there.

My game now ‘officially’ has a monolith!

The caveman dude can get smarter now and start hunting zombies/aliens/random hostiles xD

Decided to track my work, and then realised with google docs I can let people see it – like a text only version of a webcam. So pretty dull then Here’s the link:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cPx6tPQtEwR–WubBR0XSHKSfjrwgj80hRa54wosOBI/edit

I made some music for my game. I don’t know if its any good though and I’m having troubles uploading it to this website. I guess I will but it up later.

After waking up and taking an hour to think about what my idea could be I started work.

The basic idea is that you’re own planet has become uninhabitable and your people have moved out into space looking for a new planet to settle on. The only solar system they can find is one filled with tiny planets and tiny inhabitants. After landing to try and negotiate some sort of agreement the indigenous take great offence to your height and become extremely hostile, leaving you with the only choice of taking the tiny bastards out.

The game will hopefully have both space and land combat but as I’m using unity and I doubt I’ll be able to have time for that.

I’m awake now. Coffee. Pondering on theme. Tiny World. Dreamt of spiders, coincidence? Hardly.

7 hours in! This is what I’ve done so far:

• I’ve more or less scoped down a game concept, which can be summarized in the following sentence:  “Run, jump and shoot around tiny worlds as an inter-galactic archer” 

• I’m both live-streaming everything at: http://www.livestream.com/oddgoo and recording a time lapse to post after the game is done.

• Orbital movement is done, as well as shifting planets! This was made easy thanks to some public code by generous users at the Unity3d forum

• Nailed down a planet-making workflow with Sculptris, and a pixelated style using Rage-Pixel.

Overall I feel like I am on track. Not intensely ahead or cocky, but not frustrated or desperate either. I have the basics down, the tools, the means, and the concept to move ahead, now its just a matter of seeing how far I can take it and with how much polish, which is of course the most important thing.

So, this’ll be some kind of shmup.
First early screenshot, with some beautiful boxes:

I came into this project thinking I wouldn’t have enough time to finish and now I kinda feel ahead. I still have a lot of work to do, though. This is my first time participating and I’m feeling really good about my progress.

First screenshot of my game

So at the 41 hour point, I wanted to do a quick summary of where Im at (with some pictures!)

The initial creepy/horror game I wanted to make was made difficult by the theme selection (in typical Ludum Dare style), but one small detail of the game stood out – the little bugs and critters I wanted to make which randomly scurried around the floors in a medieval style abandoned(?) dungeon. So, this is where ‘Tiny World’ comes into it, and I think Ill be able to work with the theme nicely.

A slight bug problem

Anyway, Ive got most of my checklist from this morning finished so far, with a few features left to implement later tonight, finished things are as follows:

• Cockroaches ( basic behavior programmed and simple model – others will be based off this) – Cockroaches turned out more complicated than planned but it was good fun, currently they all spawn with a unique amount of health and move in a random fashion relative to all the others, they can detect a collision with an object and turn away from it, and can be squished if you step on them too many times and deplete their health too far. They also vary in speed, sometimes dashing around, then calming down and either stopping for a bit or moving slower
• Basic test area for testing features
• Player setup and physics (basic walking animations, movement, physics (you can fall over) and camera look done so far)
• Dynamic lighting initial setup (dynamic shadows working)

What I want to have done by the time I get some sleep later on:

• The start of a sound system to handle sfx and music/ambience and some initial sounds
• Text system (talking to characters and player instructions etc)
• Basic inventory system
• The players ‘magic power’ in the game
• Some kind of recovery for when the player falls over

Some more screenshots:

Some trampled... messy

looking better with proper lighting and dynamic shadows

After not being able to settle on an idea I finally picked one and started development. Not sure yet if it was a good choice but getting something done for my first #LD48 is the priority now.

Game is going to be a simple platformer in the tiny world of bacteria. First artwork below (created in Inkscape).

I got an idea. You are a professor/scientist/doctor who accidentally either shrunk or enlarged yourself, so the world is either tiny or looks tiny. It will be a platformer and I’ll probably make it so you die often as that seems popular. I’ll as previously declared be using löve and notepad++ on my crappy windows 7 laptop and I’ll be basing it on my löve platformer previous code. I have installed photoshop cs6 beta so I’ll probably use that too. I discovered GreaseMonkey’s music generation tool so I’ll be using that alongside sfxr for sound and music.

That said… lets see the photos

My battlestation

Breakfast: Porridge with apple sauce and milk

I got a dslr but I'll be using my galaxy s2 since it syncs with my computer without cables

Game concept/skethes

Tags: battlestation, computer, concept, deskphoto, foodphoto

The good news is, I’m able to use internet on my laptop with my 3G android hotspot. The bad news is, I have to use this tiny screen, and my eyes aren’t so good. Anyway, here are the pictures that I’ve been promising.

Sitting down for some NOM NOMs.

The ideas I came up with at breakfast.

This is my workspace. There are many like it, but this one is mine.

This is me. Your standard nerd.

Right, after staying up for the theme (not sooper thrilled btw ), brainstorming a few ideas and a decent amount of sleep it’s time to get started!

Got what I think is a pretty good idea, been a while since I tried to make a platformer though :S

Well, here goes!

Dexter

Whew! That was close. I’ve been looking at the site all week but forgot to post, it seems.

I’ll probably be using Java + LWJGL, maybe Java + Slick2D, or just go back to Processing.

Art will probably be done in GIMP for 2D, Blender for 3D

Sound will be a microphone, Audacity and bfxr. Maybe Musagi.

What I use depends on the game idea, so that’s mostly just things to insure everything is covered.

“Tiny World”… I have to admit at first I was at loss. I only had one idea : a tiny planet with a man running/jumping around it but wasn’t satisfied with that. And with thinking, other ideas came, and I remembered a game concept I had last year about nuclear fission and atoms and neutrons and chamber of reactions, etc… So I thought “that’s my tiny world! The worlds of little particules trapped in a chamber of chimical & physic reactions.

Here is the plot : A mad scientist decided to take revenge on the whole scientist community. He works secretly on crafting the ultimate weapon, making electrical/chemical/physic chain reactions betweens atoms, electrons, neutrons, protons…

What you’ll have to do : In the chamber of reactions, you’ll move differents blocks of various material to make bouncing or not your reactive elements. The more collisions between reactive elements you make, the more powerful your weapon will be.

Gameplay : you can only control 2 cursors with Z(or W)/Q(or A)/S/D and UP/LEFT/DOWN/RIGHT to move reflective blocs. Those blocs have different physics property making them more or less bouncy.

Here is my gameplay-check test : http://ailys.fr/LudumDare/LD23-TINYWORLD/

Screenshots : https://plus.google.com/photos/110762901602170067395/albums/5733701130733892801

Feel free to give me feedback. Now I’m going to graph this then it will be feedback and level design time \o/

Oh, by the way, it’s not bug-proof so… if the game freeses, let’s say it’s a feature :p

Tags: LD #23, screenshot, wip

My first ludum dare. I’m using processing. So far I have an odd game where you are a maroon square on a grid and pinks squares move randomly. You can place blue blocks on grid, and if the pink squares’ path is blocked they die. Yes it is a weird game, but that’s what I puked out of my head so far. Hopefully it will turn out to be an interesting game.

It’s 10 in the morning here in Germany, and my alarm clock woke me up at 6 for me to get the theme of this LD. till now it was enough time for me to continue sleeping plus think about an idea while i was still groggy

Tiny world it is? What I get from that is King Kai from DragonBall, the guy that lives on a small planet

Anyhow, obligatory food image!

So I figured out a consumption model for the world, which is about a third of what needs to be sorted before implementation.

Consider the world, all of existance, a zero-sum game. When something is consumed, something else is produced. Not everyone would agree that the product is always desirable, but it’s there, none the less. Using this assumption, consider all entities in the world a combined consumer and producer. A farmer produces wheat and consumes foodstuffs (for example wheat). When he consumes food, he regains energy which is depleted when producing more wheat.

This results in a cycle slightly more complex than the one depicted above, but it conveys the thought. Wheat produces something that has, among other things, a nutritional value (it also has health benefits and can make you fat). The farmer will consume and the changes brought on by the nutrition will be applied to the farmer.

Beyond this I need to figure out a simplified “belief” model so you as a player have an active stake in the game. I’m thinking something in the lines of “do nothing or be monotonous and lose faith”. It’s very simple, yes, but hopefully the overall management will be so abundant that striking the balance will be difficult.

Finally, I need to implement AI in the form of intelligent agents, self-managing entities within the game world. People need goals they want to achieve, split up into smaller tasks that will achieve that goal (for example, having children means getting a spouse and having the energy to handle them). I want to put in a bit of learning behaviour, so they can appreciate a sudden appearance of wheat from above.

Now, enjoy a screenshot that is almost like the original one, only this time all people are rendered properly (an out-of-bounds error was not being cast in the previous build). Notice their three-layer appearance. The top colour shows their race, the torso their job and the leggings their sex (male/female). I hope to make sufficiently clear colours to make it clear what kind of people you’re dealing with.

Fully imagine idea. Lots of work. Thinking of make graphics and engine. Music, debug and other pretty stuff will be made on the next day, I think…

I can pick up atoms in the queues now and drop them on the grid. Woo!

Now Listening To: Lullaby of Open Eyes – NicolArmarfi & CplCrud [Katawa Shoujo Enigmatic Box of Sound]

Update post – Taiwan (+8GMT) Sunday 22 April – 22h41)

Timelapse Link

Update post – Taiwan (+8GMT) Sunday 22 April – 16h51)

Ludum Dare 23 Compo Ends in 16 hours, 8 minutes, 32 seconds

Ludum Dare 23 Jam Ends in 1 day, 16 hours, 8 minutes, 32 seconds

Well, I will finish my part on the contest here. Its too late to change the tool and also I think that I don’t have enough time to finish the rest of the game (more art, audio and the mobs logic).

As my first Ludum Dare, I have to say that this is a big challenge. I wasn’t well prepare for the competition (Was planning in use Cocos2D with Objective-C and decide to change to Java because I need to port to windows. On the way, I had lost my HDD and everything that I had in the computer. So I just use pure Java – and PaulsCode for audio).

But I learn a lot. A learn a lot about bitmaps and tiles (because I need to create a engine to break bitmaps and cut in tiles). Remember a lot of things in Java and learn also that I need to put my weaknesses and strengthens during the design phase. I am very good in programming, but I suck in Art, that’s the result of the game. I look to my sprites and Tiles and I lost the will to play.

Next time I will also want to use a library or a Graphic Engine to build the game faster. I am uploading the timelapse video of this adventure (26 hours) and I hope that before the next Ludum Dare I look back to this post and remember everything that I felt, so next time I can enter in the competition as a true winner candidate!!!

BTW, thank you Ludum Dare and all the friend from the IRC channel.

Update post – Taiwan (+8GMT) Sunday 22 April – 16h43)

Ludum Dare 23 Compo Ends in 16 hours, 16 minutes, 36 seconds

Ludum Dare 23 Jam Ends in 1 day, 16 hours, 16 minutes, 36 seconds

Now I change some test tiles that I had for real tiles. In that activity I remember something abou me: I SUCK ON DRAW!!!!

Really, my Tiles and arts are horrible. Next LD or MiniLD I need to consider it when I start to design the game. Even I don’t wanna play my game 😛

Update post – Taiwan (+8GMT) Sunday 22 April – 15h49)

Ludum Dare 23 Compo Ends in 17 hours, 10 minutes, 1 second

Ludum Dare 23 Jam Ends in 1 day, 17 hours, 10 minutes, 1 seconds

Yey, the game is running!

Yeah, it doesn’t look the most pretty thing in the world. I know. This numbers are the indetifiers of my Tiles, what means
that now I only need to worry about my art, the code is running. Later after have all the tiles I can test the game with more  accuracy.

You can see that I am using the font that I created to send messages to the user.

Update post – Taiwan (+8GMT) Sunday 22 April – 15h37)

Ludum Dare 23 Compo Ends in 17 hours, 22 minutes, 24 seconds

Ludum Dare 23 Jam Ends in 1 day, 17 hours, 22 minutes, 24 seconds

Well, even with the slow job, I think that some stuffs have some great quality. Like this, I made my own font for the game (but I was lazy to do the “&”. You can download and modify the colors, if you want:

Update post – Taiwan (+8GMT) Sunday 22 April – 12h58)

Ludum Dare 23 Compo Ends in 20 hours, 1 minute, 42 seconds

Yeah, finally I can export my art to the game. Of course, poor art. I want to test if my classes are reading the images and buffering to present on image. I also achieve 60 fps (but its easy because I am not calculating nothing until now.

Update post – Taiwan (+8GMT) Sunday 22 April – 10h32)

Ludum Dare 23 Compo Ends in 22 hours, 27 minutes, 9 seconds

Well, I feel that I slept to much. Now I need to finish the art and sound, and I really need to be fast so I can test the code and also send releases to the IRC Channel.
Later I also have some meetings and I won’t be able to use all my day to work on the game, so I have to carefully use my time now!

Update post – Taiwan (+8GMT) Sunday 22 April – 03h29)

Ludum Dare 23 Compo Ends in 1 day, 5 hours, 30 minutes, 55 seconds

Well, finally I finish most part of the programming and was able to launch the Applet!!

You can see that the Applet start but it don’t show nothing and the console show some errors. The console show erros because from the sound library (Pauls Code) because it didn’t find the sound files (I didn’t made any sound file yet). The Applet don’t show anything because I also didn’t start the Art part.

For now I will sleep and tomorrow I will focus hard on the Art and some sound effects. I hope that I can finish this on time. Now I am again excited with the project.
PS: Normally I sleep to much during weekend, I hope that tomorrow I wake up early to continue the project!!!

Update post – Taiwan (+8GMT) Saturday 21 April – 22h21)

Ludum Dare 23 Compo Ends in 1 day, 10 hours, 38 minutes, 30 seconds

Just come back from dinner. During the dinner I noticed that I was doing a game with a wrong theme. The theme is “Tiny World”, but in my game the player was tiny and world was big. I didn’t had notice this before. At least I still have time to change some classes and begin the art and sound with this in mind.
I also create 3 different styles of gameplay. Of course I will focus on the easier one until have a release (that is just a survival game based on waves), but if I finish and still have time I will try to implement the others (that have stages and a “end”).

Update post – Taiwan (+8GMT) Saturday 21 April – 21h47)

Ludum Dare 23 Compo Ends in 1 day, 11 hours, 12 minutes, 13 seconds

The game is starting to create a shape. Unfortunately I am still in the programming part and didn’t even began the Art and Sound. I don’t know if I will be able to finish the game in time :/

I am already ing programming for almost 7 hours. So now I will take a break to have dinner and will take my notebook (paper + pen) with me to see what will be the next step and also to plan it.

Update post – Taiwan (+8GMT) Saturday 21 April – 17h01)

Ludum Dare 23 Compo Ends in 1 day, 15 hours, 56 minutes, 25 seconds

I finally finish the classes that will take care of the graphics on screen (I will read the pixels, bitmaps and tiles to throw on screen).

The problem is that I am more used to Objective-C, but I was afraid of many people don’t test my game (because Objective-C is for iOS and Mac OS X) so I am using Java. But in Java I don’t know ANY game framework So I am building somethings from scratch…I hope I have time to finish everything.

I am still not able to produce a on screen result. I will try to release a Applet so I can put in my site and sent the link to people test it.

Initial Post – Taiwan (+8 GMT) Saturday 21 April – 15h57

This is the first post for my Journal. The time is:

Taiwan (+8 GMT) Saturday 21 April – 15h57 and I still have 1 day, 17 hours, 2 minutes, 33 seconds to finish the game to the compo.

I had some problem before yesterday and yesterday when I lost my macbook HDD and had to re-download everything and prepare the ambient. Worst than that, some project from my work was in the HDD and had no backup (noob) and I lost everything. For luck I could recover most of the files with a HDD recover system, but that was a pain in the ass and I didn’t had time to prepare for the compo (and I have a meeting with the client on monday lol because this project was concluded on Thursday….and now is lost >D. But ok, yesterday I took most of the files back).

Now I am focus on the development of the game. As I am good in programming and bad in art and sound, I am focus on the Java Code of the project. I am programming the entities, math resources, logic of the HP and other stuffs. I am trying to make everything the minimum possible to have a good gameplay and later I will to put some art on it and throw the alpha version in the IRC.

Yes, I think that is a bad strategy, but I am quite desperate here to achieve at least a playing thing.

BTW, I have a rival in this competition. Is a friend of mine that is in his house also making a game (and he have a very good art background!!)

this is his post!

Ok, lets come back. Cheers!

My first two hours were quite productive. I knocked off some concept sketches which finalized my plans. It also lead to some light narrative development and a title: Beyond Balnibarbi. I then designed a quick title screen and went to bed.

Unfortunately that only yielded  3 quick hours of sleep before waking up and lying restlessly in bed for two hours thinking about my game and trying without any luck to go back to sleep. I couldn’t really get up and start working since my bed is right next to my computer and my mechanical keyboard would make it shitty for my girlfriend sleeping there.

Ill get back to it soon though, and I’ll post my concepts.

Hi,

so I’ll be doing this for the first time. And, unfortunately, I won’t have the total of 48 hours. So we’ll see how it’ll turn out.

The idea: A tiny island with tiny people. You have to guide them to do necessary work to survive.

I’m gonna do it with JS, HTML5 maybe Kinetic.JS and maybe something for sound, I don’t know what, yet.

Have fun everyone!

Good morning everybody and a happy 10th anniversary to Ludum Dare!

ckaotik and I started about a couple of hours ago, did a bit of brainstorming for ideas and set up our Base Drupal Page. We’re about ready to start hacking away but wanted to let you all know that during the course of this Ludum Dare, you can always visit http://ld23.pastaandcode.de and check out the current progress.
You’ll have to create an account to actually play, but that’s later.

For now, breakfast time!

Tags: deskphoto, foodphoto

Okay, here’s what I have so far:

Not much, really. I will add cubic coloumns soon.

I was planning blue palette from the start, but wanted to try some others as well, and the result gave me an idea of “territory control”. Could be implemented, but I’m not sure about it yet.

And yes, it is water. On the sky. Uh-huh.

Just woke up and looked at the theme. Tiny World, that’s an interesting theme, but hard for those with little imagination

Anyway, I have started the stream @ http://www.twitch.tv/saur0nz (will start coding and making gfx in about 30 min, need to eat something first)

I wish luck to all the other participants! And hope all of you have a great time

About 5 hours in and I’ve got a nice little tilemap, sprite engine. I’m thinking of a sort of tower defense survival thing where waves of enemies are out to get you! But so far so good, here is a screenshot

if you can be bothered here is a link to play the current version(Not much happens)Its an executable jar so just run it and go

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/48015021/LD23/Tiny%20worlds1.jar

hope everyone else is having as much fun as me

Tags: progress, screenshot, tilemap

No idea what I will make yet… But this is going to be interesting!

(and I just woke up)

Teaming up with the great Mike Kasprzak to bring you my first ever Ludum Dare game.  This is the tileset so far. I think I have just enough to start building a level!

Ok so i’ve decided to make game where the tiny world is the inside of a computer and you are a tiny bug running around trying to break the poor programmers code! I was originally gonna do black n white hand drawn art but i really wanna use lots of green now, so that will take up most of the time! Ive already got a little dude running around, i just need to start coding the buggable components, and deciding how they work! Soo tired now i checked the result at 3am and couldnt get back to sleep!

Here’s a download link to that song I made. I don’t know if the song is any good though.

http://toofiles.com/a/287246.html

This is the first time I’m participating in Ludum Dare and I started to work on a small platformer Tiny Island Adventure. You control small mechanic girl Lydia who is bored beyond her mind in the small world she lives in. She decides to escape by finding enough scrap and tools from other tiny islands near her own so she can build a rocket and go on a huge adventure!

I’ve finished most of the tileset and hopefully I can start making the actual game soon. Besides her home island she can jump on other tiny islands nearby and enter small dungeons to collect scrap and tools.

I use Stencyl for the game, it’s a neat game developing tool for graphics artists like myself who know nothing about coding. I’ve made games with it before and it’s very easy to use. I use BFXR for sounds and I try to compose something simple with PXTone, but I’m no musician so I try to aim for something small.

Tiny Island Adventure

I’ll post updates here and to my Twitter: @AdventIslands

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 21st, 2012 at 6:13 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.

Demo!
Roads are now in! They generate randomly and junk. Press space to generate a new batch.

I went to bed at 11pm, woke up at 2:05am (British time) to check the theme, and went back to sleep.  No dreams of inspiration about Tiny Worlds unfortunately – but now, at least, having a relatively good night’s sleep, I can get started on some brainstorming and tapping away at some code.

Looks like many of you are well on your way.  Keep up the good work! (:

http://www.livestream.com/grimpunchtv

Hello. This is my first serious Ludum Dare attempt; I have almost participated numerous times however.

I am using Haxe for code (with swf target), and Photoshop for visuals. I’m (quite) new to Haxe, never having completed something that could be called a “game” in it before, so I don’t use any haxelib libs as I don’t orientate well yet in that domain. There’s no music in the game, since I’m far better at creating graphics than at creating sounds, so my time is much better spent elsewhere.

Progress:

• Game mechanics idea: 80%
• Code: 5%
• Layout design: 60%
• Graphics: 20%

The player controls the King, who lives alone on a tiny planet. The planet’s tinyness is embodied in that it consists of a 3×3 grid of tiles (mountain/grass/water), and in that it’s devoured by larger monsters who come close to it – which is the (main?) loss condition. The King can’t leave the planet. The game is turn-based. Every turn the king can either move to another tile on the 3×3 planet map, or commit an action provided by the current tile. He can shoot with the laser-cannon at gigantic space monsters, he can mine rubies from the mountain to power the laser, he also needs to drink water once in a while from the lakes, he can open up hidden regions of the starmap with the telescope to see monsters better, etc. Each turn, various relatively gigantic monsters move around in space, rather randomly, and they give birth to new monsters.

Layout early mockup :

The main character (like Le Petit Prince in that he lives & operates alone on a tiny planet (theme! I imagine that will go for many(most?) entries) – but different enough that he does not infringe on any laws of intellectual property):

Finally, an initial idea.

You play a spider (either a jumping one, or a weaving one) – in each level you need to get to the fly. The thing is that everything will be from the spider perspective, so the world rotates such that the spider is always facing UP on screen, but gravity is always in the same absolute direction. You will be able to jump/send web upwards (relative to the spider) – and you need to think of how to do that to get to the fly. Things may kill you on the way, not sure what, exactly.

Hope it’ll work out, here’s an inital sketch:

See you later!

Daniel

Ok let’s go for this day…

http://www.livestream.com/lionshouse

I have the lever renderer finished (i mean it takes a PNG and renders a level out of it :P)

Also player movement is almost working. Pretty hard theme this is..

So…let’s just say I was *not* expecting this theme at all.  After wracking my brain for hours, I think I have something.  I lovingly call it “Cube Wars” for now.  It will be very tiny.

Sleep, and then more coding!  Best of luck to everyone else!

My computational desktop bits…

Workspace

Testing, testing, This is my first Ludum Dare here, been a long time lurker

I just started on my game. I’m currently looking at an old pathfinding system, figuring out how to rewrite it from scratch to work in 3d and within unity. Just making that work will mean this has been a succesful Ludum Dare for me, although I have my idea down on paper and there are like 20 other points to go through on my todo list after that. I’m going to stop posting and start working now. I’ll be posting screenshots as i progress, I really look forward to seeing other peoples process once the compo is over. This is going to be a lot of fun!

Started programming 2 hours and 20 minutes ago, and I’ve managed to get a lot done in that time. Right now there are a lot of placeholder images, since my friend (who will show up later) is doing the graphics. Here’s what I have so far:

Looks delicious!

Right now it’s just a grid area with land and water, with drag and drop functionality of those other two tiles. Not quite sure how the gameplay is going to evolve with this one, but I like the idea. You may also notice I took a photograph of my desk (and used Photoshop to get a flat piece of graph paper in). My friend and I are planning to have all of the graphics drawn on paper to add a little twist to this “Tiny World” theme.

Alright, breakfast, then back to it (with Pink Floyd playing in the background :P)!

Had a slow start, so figured using HTML5 would be the easiest and fastest route to having stuff moving!   (more up to date ramblings on the progress on twitter @orangepascal)

Sitting enjoying a cup of tea due to a lack of them. The ones I’m having are too large scale; entirely unfeasible for this time scale. Still, I’m certain an idea will come to me in time. If not, I’ll go for a walk and see what happens!

The game is evolving. I’m currently making spawn the ennemies randomly.

Anyway, as I mentioned before the basic premise of this game will be an RTS about taking over the other planet things.

Currently working:

• Rotating w/ angle around planet
• Selecting units
• Map movement system (Scrolling with arrow keys / WASD)
• Minimap – only shows planets (green is yours, red the enemy’s). Doubt I’ll make it show units..
• Scrolling via minimap. The view is drawn as the white rect, you can drag it around for super fast scrolling
• Icons for the cursor for moving units to a friendly planet or attacking an enemy planet

Kind of behind where I wanted to be because I spent way too long trying to get a 2 bugs sorted out… BLEH. Anyway, assuming I can get the AI working (so, actual gameplay) and some more units drawn I could probably pump out a lot of levels fairly quickly! Might have to do a level select screen w/ saving, probably going to make a quick tutorial in-game. I’d also like to make more planets (purely cosmetic) along with putting stuff on the planets… but that’s near polish on my priority queue.

sadly – because of university stuff and some private reasons I can’t participate in LD#23

have fun guys !

for protocol – here’s the idea I had:

you’re playing an insane person in an asylum and think that there’s a monster around you, trying to kill you. however, you can “shoot” mental rays or something that can scare the monster away for a short time. (of course you just imagine all of it)
so – you’re starting in a little tiny cell and have to scare the monster away from you – after some shots it disappears for a while and you’re alone in your tiny world. the only thing you can do is to shoot and jump around until you eventually realize that you can destroy the walls with your shots – and enter a “new” world, which is populated by similar monsters and the game is consisting out of 2 or 3 action platformer levels with the “monster” as your end boss, but you can’t defeat it, so it kills you.
after all of this the screen fades out and you see your character lying on the floor in your cell. a doctor comes in and diagnosis your death.
-the end

Here’s a little test-prototype I’ve done though: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2667903/test.swf

Good morning!

Just woke up because the cat was jumping on my face, eager to find out what the theme is.  (Me, that is. My cats are only eager to get me to the kitchen and feed them.)

First thought:… hmm… Well, I guess I’ll need some breakfast to get started and then the ideas will start flowing. I hope. After finishing some homework, though. And yes, feeding my cats. (To be honest, they’re the only thing keeping me sane.)

Good luck and have fun, everybody!

i cant find the upload button!!!

Hello fellow game creators!
I’m just getting started as I had to catch up on some sleep, or a lot of sleep rather. The brain-storming is ON!
My entry will be made using Python with Pygame.

/Samuel Backman

Help me to decide what to make for Ludum Dare! (youtube link)

Help me to decide what to make

Tiny World, OK, I wasn’t expecting that but an idea has formed so here we go. Yeah, shapes and colours and things!

progress

Ok so the visuals aren’t very spectacular but I managed to get my space dude moving around a room and correctly colliding with walls and such. This was all handled by Unity’s physics and the 2d toolkit.

The hardest part thus far was tweaking the physics params as it was difficult to get the right scale because I am using the 2d toolkit and that works in pixel units. I found that I had to drastically lower the mass of my player to 0.001 to get it to move. All ‘n all I’ve probably spent too long on the physics stuff but has been a good learning experience.

So I’ve got my player moving around a pretty empty room using physics but the game loop is complete and that’s the main thing.

Tomorrow enemies, gameplay, etc. Now… rest.

I probably spent too much time on perfecting the AI… and I’m still kinda not satisfied XD Well this is my first time making AI, so theres lotsa problem with it + I’m only okay with programming though >.<

A picture of Cary Cat sitting on a Tiny World.

After getting up four hours after the theme was announced, now I have an idea and I’ll try to craft something decent out of it.

You are a federation employee whose job is to track and destroy little planets that our federation does not like. In a regular day like others, you travel to the core of a mazy planet you’re going to destroy with your digger and plant your planet devouring bomb. In an unfortunate turn of events, your digger is not able to start up, so you have to work your way up to the planet surface to send a signal to your mothership before the planet gets devoured completely.

You begin in a maze. The maze shrinks from inside every second. You need to work your way outside to find the end of the level. You can’t see the whole level and obviously going in a dead end might have serious consequences. Luckily you still have some tools with you that can be useful in dire situations.

While this tiny world gets tinier every second, can you make your way out of it?

I really hope to be able to finish the game in time. See you on the next update!

LD23 started 7am local time, but since I had a rough week I decided to wake up when it’s time. This happened around two hours ago. Before having breakfast I had a peek at the theme, but decided not to think about it too much. To get my subconscious mind working or something.

Breakfast is now over and the ideas start coming, even as I am writing this. I will throw some of them at you:

1. Build circuits! In the beginning you have nothing but a NAND gate. At the end you will have a fully functional nano robot.
2. Build circuits! Synchronize the actions of your cute nano robot using a clock, gates and other components. Similar to SpaceChem, but different.
3. Quantum mechanics:  States, tunneling, entanglement, weirdness. How to get this into a game? No idea.
4. Uncertainty principle and probability distributions. Mechanics similar to the game (the name is on the tip of my tounge) where you guide a stream of particles using attractors, repellors and stuff.
5. Very many people on very little space. And then you run around and … this is going nowhere.
6. You jump from tiny planet to tiny planet. And you do stuff there. Like solving quests.
7. Biology: You are an amoeba kind of creature and your goal is to eat other creatures to gain their abilities. Like Flow or Osmos. But different somehow.

I think I will stop here and try to work out possible directions with all of the ideas. My favorites at the moment are 2., 4. and 7.  I will write again when I have my concept.

Edit: I couldn’t stop, so here’s number 8: Ants. This is my new favorite.

My first Ludum Dare Compo was the previous one, LD #22. I had a good time and I learned a ton, and have used what I learned to make several physics-based games in Processing for various jams afterwards. However, I felt that my LD22 game suffered due to my poor art skills, so I decided I wanted to team up for the jam this time with a talented artist, for maximum awesome.

I’m working on a jam entry for LD #23 with my friend Daniel. He had an idea for a metroidvania where you traverse a rather small planetoid, where the curvature is actually visible.

We’re cutting the metroidvania part and trying to make a 2d action platformer set on a very small planet. The idea is that everything conforms to the planet’s curves, even your shots.

Here are some concept sketches of the planet and possible level designs that Daniel drew, along with some of my own drawings explaining how I will set up the collision volumes (using 2D arcs) and orient sprites.

I was pleased with how much progress I made on coding tonight, especially since I have never written anything like this before. I am using a generic template I made for writing games in Processing that I am calling QEngine. I will be publishing this game on the TinyWorld branch of the QEngine git repo.

As you can see from this screenshot, I have set up a class to define an arc section in code, and draw it for debugging purposes. These will be used as collision volumes, and I will draw a sprite in the same location. I couldn’t find what the real name of this sort of shape is, it’s a sort of wide arc, or arc with a circle segment removed from it. Microsoft calls them “block arcs” in their software but I couldn’t find any references to that being a widely used term.

I vaguely remembered reading about polar coordinates, and after looking them up again concluded that they would be a perfect way to store the position of objects in this game. It should be simple to move the player around and test for collision with arc segments if everything is stored in polar coordinates. And I even found some easy trig to convert to cartesian coordinates when needed (i.e. for drawing.) Here’s a screenshot of collision in action – the player (the white dot) is inside the upper left arc segment, which is why it’s red:

To move the player, I just add or subtract from his radial coordinate (vertical position) or angular coordinate (horizontal position). I love that math is providing such an elegant solution to what I thought might be  a pretty hairy problem! It’s times like this I’m glad I’m writing the game mostly from scratch in Processing since I have the flexibility to do stuff like this with ease.

There is one bug that I know of currently, I’m not accounting for the fact that there are multiple representations of a single angle in radians, so if you rotate the player past 360 degrees, the collision basically stops working. But I think this should be fixable if I can find a function to normalize the angle or whatever, if not I can always force it to wrap around with some custom logic.

Yay math! Yay game jams!

Here’s a hopeful sign-off for a productive day tomorrow. Good luck everyone!

Tags: polar coordinates, processing

Wow,

Tonight really doesn’t seem to be working for me, I’ve done a bit of work on a idea and have found that I’ve spent so much time with very little progress. This is a combination of external noise, a cramped workspace and difficulty finding a idea worth doing.. To make matters worse another participant is doing the exact same idea I was going to do, and their progress is much much better..

Not sure If I’ll be continuing this one.

The end of first day was more productive than the end of the first day of my previous ludum dare. \o/

I came up with a title and concept for the game. The title is Aedicula which is  a small shrine within another building. See I actually learned something in architecture 😉

The premise is you’re trapped within a temple containing a demon shrine and you have to find a way out.

It’s going to be a puzzle game with Alice in Wonderland shrinking/enlarging mechanics. So when you’re large you can move obstacles or climb over obstacles that you would be unable to when you’re small. When you’re small you can fit through spaces that your large self can’t fit through.

On the right I have data import working from the level editor into flash.
On the left is color palette inspiration and towards the bottom is the design for the demon head/shrine.

Right now I’m all pumped up, have an idea and ready to go but first I’m gonna make some vegetable juice in my juicer.

See you soon

So the theme is tiny world? Need to think on this…

So I decided to get some sleep as I am based in the UK.

I have since woken and started on a “tiny” graphics / input system and then I will launch into the actual game.

Here is a very uninteresting screenshot for your eyes.

With the help of my little froggy to get me in the recursive spirit :

I have been adding some neat things to the game. Music, for one!

And an actual bitmap for another!

Both of which were created using nothing but the tablet.

I don’t anticipate that this will be the next blockbuster title, but as a proof of concept for what can be done by a person stuck on a deserted island with nothing but an Android tablet, what this game lacks in polish it makes up for in portent.

Just finished Build 01. I added a big planet object that exerts mass on the player using Newton’s Law of Gravitation with an arbitrary G:

(Source: Wikipedia)

I also implemented collisions with the planets: when you hit a planet, the large planet disappears.

This gave me a lot of trouble, because I haven’t tried to detect collisions in Unity before (not counting cases where a trigger object detects if another object enters it). For example, I couldn’t get the OnCollisionEnter function to register any collisions at all, regardless of whether I attempted to perform collisions between rigid bodies or sphere colliders. Eventually, I just told the player script to send messages to any objects that it hit via the OnControllerColliderHit function.

You can try out my latest build here: http://jceipek.github.com/LudumDare23/

I think it’s time to go to sleep for a bit.

Livestream: www.twitch.tv/jceipek

Screencast: http://students.olin.edu/2012/czwiebel/webcam/

And some progress.
The engine is still lacking… graphics. But hey, it works!

Download build 1
Features:
– Shooting (with working cooldown)
– Walls that you can’t go through (you can still leave the playing area, though)
– Example enemy (that does nothing, but you can kill him)

So we’ve just past the 8 hour mark, and my brain is slowly starting to melt.

I had a couple of hours there where stuff would just not end. I set up a system to render certain Strings on the screen, then realised I had no idea what those Strings were. from there I spent 2 hours building the framework for my game, just so I could get those strings to test it all.

Frameworks man, frameworks.

Anyway, now I have something small to show, a bit of String rendering, but it contains a good chunk of the gameplay framework just to get there

So I haven’t really said anything about this game yet, so let this be a small explanation.

It is based off a game design from 2001-ish, where you build your own ‘monsters’ and depending on the parts you use, they get certain skills that are used to battle other monsters. In my version however, the monsters are bacteria. Tiny World? Micro World!

Dinner comes soon, then I hope to get some basic battles going before I focus on rendering some ugly graphics instead of nothing.

Tags: progress

Welp, initially I was gonna go for a “you’re a little computer part that’s been dislodged from the motherboard and you have to find your way back through the various chips and stuff till you get back to your rightful place. The End” but I just hadn’t prepared myself for that type of game.

Second idea was a simplistic racing game where you were little bacteria racing around things like water bottle caps, inside crackers, etc. That started to work for a while but eventually I gave up. Now, 8 hours into the comp I have a firm idea in place and basic gameplay to go with it. Not going to be very complex so I think I can finish this if I just work at it. I’ve already learned so much just tonight. It’s amazing what a little motivation does.

So yeah, the actual game I’m going for here is you’re a little “spark” within these various tiny wires and you have to electrify the various wires inside this wire because some parts of them are dead……. or some such stuff etc etc… yeah. Not very… awesome, but at least it’s creative!

Tonight I got the basics implemented, tomorrow I will get everything working, materials, textures, all the features, hopefully a complete level.

Then of course Sunday morning/afternoon I get sounds, menus, polish it all up and boom! We’re done… I hope. 😉

Screenshot from the end of night 1!

 (Click for full size ;))

Been non-stop-Nyaning for music. I had been Muse, U2, Taylor Swift-ing, but things started getting frustrating so I went to something… er… different. 😉

http://nyan.cat/jazz.html < Link for those curious. Pick the one you like. Jazz is my favorite.

Anyway, long post is long. I hope everything is going smoothly for everyone else. Let’s get to 1,000 entries this time!

Looking at the progress reports of other people, things are looking good. A lot of these games look very promising. Anxious to see what the famous guys of the Indie scene are doing too, though.

Back in a few hours! See you then.

Late start, as always, just waked up.

Thinking about the idea, maybe something like small  planets, and you can travel between them…

Like this, but even smaller

Well, it’s been a busy 100 minutes! Using DAME and Gimp to prototype, these little chaps move around and will almost certainly start shooting at each other soon…. Well, c’est la guerre!

Okay so I got my idea
Originally posted here

Ludum Dare: Tiny World
The Life of a Mosquito

Platform: HTML + Javascript

• Egg: Break Free
• Larva: Top down hunt for Alga
• Pupa: Side on Form an Egg, then break free
• Start Life Timer
• Locate Target and Suck Blood (Blood increases egg yield, not required)
• Locate Swarm
• Ambush a Male
• Have Sex
• Find Water to Lay Eggs
• Timer Ends you Die

As in, you can click stuff.

By the way, all of these are valid combinations in the final game. Can you find out which color represent which number of binds?

Now Listening To: the Fate of Outcast – roriP

Just looking at the theme, still not sure what I am going to do; I was thinking a world protection game though, although sounds a little cliché….

I slept quite late but I have an idea for a game that matches the theme. It’s a strategy game and I’ve never made one, let’s see how this turns out. I’m going to use CoolBasic, Gimp, Audacity and Graphics Gale.

…but I may have left it to rise a bit too long*. It’s a bit of a monster:

* – Either that or I should have bought a bigger loaf tin/should have used less flour.

So, I decided to get some sleep and pick up in the morning but I have made a lot of progress on my game.

From a screenshot I took earlier in the night:

To where I am now:

Ill do a better write up tomorrow with the premise of my game and everything, but so far I have about half the classes working, a good idea of where I want to go with it and I’m happy with where it is at.

twitch.tv/rylius
Finally managed to set up the whole livestreaming thing!
I’m currently reworking the concept and will prototype soon, so if you’re interested, tune in!

If you got any questions for me please don’t use the twitch.tv chat but highlight me on the Ludum Dare irc channel

So I am done juicing




And ready to go!

Trying to get a good start this morning with my Ludum Dare tradition, buttered toast with DeRuijter sprinkles!

Chocolate + Code = Tasty Success!

Tags: foodphoto

Wonder if instead of making a looping world, I basically make a curved world in which you have to find parts to build a rocket to leave the tiny planet? [people seem to be doing this already… nvm]

After starting with one idea, then scrapping it, i’ve got a little level generator up and running, just some simple floating islands.

They obviously need a lot of tweaking to make them consistently nice, but it’ll do until i’ve got some actual gameplay up and running!

Press space to load a new island: Here

I’ll be working with Blecki and BurnZeZ on something. Having waked up 5hrs after the theme announcement, my third idea (the first two were lost in the waking haze) was to do some sort of Defender (old arcade game) game set on a curved scrolling playield, but the idea mutated into some sort of Asteroids Choplifter Thrust thing which I called Asterceptor. Having scrolled through the pages here, I see a few sort of similar playfield ideas.

However, Blecki and BurnZeZ had some headstart and were already working on a… thing with floating blocks which sort of gravitate together and snap into larger continents. We don’t really know where we’re heading with it, but it could be interesting. Here’s one idea.

We are making a mix of scorched earth and space invaders, on a spherical world

Started a few hours ago, now we have a particle and a planet, with gravitation and air resistance applied to the particle (both depending on distance from planet as well).

After some problems with the spawn of the mobs, everything (well, almost everything) is okay. Working on some features to make a more interesting game! You can destroy the monsters, but power-ups are still missing for the moment.

First part of the game is done.  A multiplatform intro screen. It doesnt do much than only show the logo and some stars. But it does work and I like that :).

You can view HTML5 version over here: http://games.corne.info/LD/LD23/html5/bin/

A photo of Android, Linux and HTML5 version:

To get this result I used haXe (http://haxe.org/) and NME (http://www.haxenme.org/). If I finish the game I will try to build a version for:

• Windows
• Linux
• Android
• Flash
• HTML5
• WebOS (maybe)

And if someone else will compile it for me:

• iOS
• OSX

Tags: haXe, html5, nme

Came across a somewhat half baked idea, but it’s enough to get started on for now. Beginning with the tileset, then I’ll make the first room of the world.

After this, I’ll need to:

1. Come up with puzzles and platforming mechanics.
2. Make more tiles! Obviously.
3. Create Music and SFX.
4. Design a Player Character.

I will say that the most likely name for my character right now is “Quark”, hopefully I’m not giving too much away there… 😉

It was 3 o’clock when I started this morning (I live in France).

Since then I have come with a quite complete gamedesign and I am currently making my way through the code.

Things seems to go quite smooth, I hope everything will remain easy

I hope things are easy for you too and you will achieve great games !

Going on the 12 hour mark and I have the engine almost complete, after that I’ll just need to build the levels and make it look good.

Just a quick question, did anyone else link Tiny World to “it’s a small world?” I don’t see any other posts relating to the song or ride.

Woke up at like 7am, checked the theme – WHOOO! I was hoping for this.  Gives me a chance to try something weird that I’ve never tried before – normally in platform games, I use a tile/grid system for everything, and it is kind of limiting so I’ve been meaning to look more at image collisions and such, so great excuse to try that out!
So the basic idea is: a mario galaxy style game, done in 2D.

Three hours-ish in, and I have the basics done.  You can walk all the way round the planets, you can jump, you can jump from one planet to another…  I’ve tried some test planets that you can actually go inside, and they work fine so long as I don’t let the player get right to the centre – then weird stuff starts happening.

Not sure entirely what the game objectives will be aside form exploring micro galaxies and tiny tiny worlds yet, getting core gameplay first… next be enemies I think =)
(mario sprite is placeholder of course)

This sketch of the game we are going to make! Die, tiny humans, die!

Morning!

I don’t have much time for this year’s LD, but I was determined not to let another pass me by. So it’s Tiny World, and I’m prototyping a game based on an idea I’ve been batting around with a friend for a few months now, as it fitted perfectly with the theme. It won’t get finished. Here’s to an optimistic 48 hours!

Tags: tiny epic, tiny world

Tiny world on a cat. That’s the idea for my game :D.

Early version of the game here:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/60485425/LudumDare/LD23FlashUpdate1/LD23.html

Concept:

Bread and salmon soup!

I started only two hours ago, so I’m a few hours behind everyone else.

Where the magic happens.

I have been making some graphics and thinking up ideas. I’m sure you all can guess the genre. This is the first time I’ve made an RPG, so I’m learning a fair bit as I go.

I’ve never really done 2D graphics before, so I chose to use a minimalist 8×8 texture. Hope it looks nice!