Well, today has been great really.
Grant made some more levels (he is extremely sadistic and thinks you should all burn in his level hell)
They are pretty difficult but they incorporate the new mechanics pretty well
New blocks are: the crumble block, you can only roll on it once! then it falls appart (will change gphx soon)
Confusion block, swaps left and right around.

I finally thought of a not so hard way to make the background transition a little better!
Took me a little while to play around and implement it, was pretty cool in the end.

I construct a 4 vert plane in code (because Unity’s plane has 121 verts!)
Construct its vert positions vert UV’s and its normals.
I apply a gradient material :

And then set up the UV coords of the plane so that, if the level starts white, all 4 UV coords are along the bottom,
and if the level starts black the UV coords are along the top.

When you press space to change the colour, the UV’s lerp from one set of vector2’s to the other! 😀

It was seriously god fun implementing and finally getting it working!

Have a play around
(only the flattened version is current)
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/37694220/Contrast/contrast.html 

My flash submission  Is now on newgrounds!

Honestly, this is my first ever submission ever to leave my site!

If not for the Ludum Dare I don’t think I would ever have gotten to the point where the game would be anything considered “good enough to submit”!  So thanks!

Done a whole bunch more now.
Changed the lightning blocks, and the player, to use some cool shaders.
(cant take credit for the shaders though I found them here)
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/60844-Lightning/page2

But they make everything look a little cooler I think.
I’m a bit iffy about the lightning shader purely because I wanted to only have black and white in the game.

BUT I think if this is the only other colour in the game, it makes it stand out, and doesn’t really look out of place at all.

Things I do need to fix though, are:
The physics of the movement, it just doesnt feel right in the air…
Also get round to adding kill box / area to each side, not only the floor.

Once all this is done, I need to rejig some levels, and somehow get some music and sound effects :/
oh dear!
Heres the current build
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/37694220/Contrast/contrast.html

P.S: If the lightning blocks (level 4 has 4 of them smack right in the middle) , and the player, dont look right
or their shaders dont play nice with your GPHX card, let me know

I’ve got the basic engine behind my game done- you control a black sheep, and each level is a pasture you’re trying to escape. But the pasture also contains other sheep (and shrubs) that can get in your way. The other sheep move when you do, and different sheep can move differently (some with you, some opposite you, some always left, etc)- so you have to use the herd’s mentality against itself to get to the goal.

The pre-art version of the game looks something like this:

The trouble is, designing puzzles is REALLY HARD. I don’t know where to go from here. I have a few puzzles that explain the basic principles of the game, but I’m hitting a dead end when I try to come up with meaningful, not-too-hard, not-too-easy puzzles. I thought this would be the easy part!

Any suggestions on how to design puzzles? Any ideas come to mind that I might expand upon?

I have a menu, a tutorial, 3 levels and a name! The name is “Mad ruN”. If I’ll have the inspiration, I’ll add a level(s) tomorrow, but otherwise I have only music left.

Third and last screenshot:

Hi to all !

In deep space near the far corner of the Earth
you are the AI of a reincarnated zombie.
The council of the dead planets societies gave you
the Soul Charge Bullet weapon
to help you destroy the Soul Fire alien race of demons.
Prove your hot japanese neo-girlfriend you can do it.

All Your Base Are Belong To Us.

This is my second Ludum Dare and I may be able to deliver something by tomorrow night. I interpreted «Contrast» as one against too many. Not so original, since I believe this is true for 99% of video games.

In Soul Charge Bullet, each level pits against a manic shooter boss and you have only one bullet to take it down, only this bullet can’t be fired so easily : you have to «scratch» against the enemy’s shots to charge your own weapon. When ready, aim and fire : you have only one chance.

What I am happy with so far :

– manic mechanism is pretty robust, no crash, no slowdown ( on my 2011 MacBook Air )

– I can deliver something !

What I am not happy with :

– only one boss so far, hope for three by tomorrow.

– gameplay mechanics are really way too generic especially for such a theme.

Please give it a try. You can find it here. Windows users, please tell me if the windows version works properly since I don’t have a windows machine at hand.

Thanks for reading,

– jujule

Hey all!

I’ve finally gotten the gameplay worked out and how I wanted it to play. It is turning out very well, I think! I have some sounds in and a couple levels for play testing. I currently only have music/sound (if any more) to add as well as the start menu, a way to win and lose, a block counter, and lives. Here is a screenshot of the contrasting colors:

The main objective of the game is to get to the “LevelBlock” and move on to the next level, while collecting as many blue blocks as you can on the way there. I’d appreciate any tips / bugs to be given, and feel free to play test while I finish the game up for release by clicking here.

I should have this finished up by the end of today!

I need some help making a webstart for java. can someone point me to a tutorial?

Hi Everyone,
my game Dungeon Disarray is now almost completed.

I have completed all the programming and most of the graphics.
tomorrow i’m going to do sound effects and depending on how much
time and motivation i got left i will animate the player
and make some music.

You can check out the game in its current state here(Not tested in IE but should work in FF and Chrome):
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5526422/MiniLD36/mld36.html
Feedback is welcome.

Thanks for Reading

My MiniLD 36 entry is finished!
Okay not reaally finished, but I have to submit it…
Actually there are three levels, which didn’t come into the game because I played too much minecraft and developed not enough on these…
But here it is:

The time is over! Check your guesses!

(How the heck can I delete screenshots from the entry page?)

For a game that was all about contrast – I gave myself the challenge of working to a high-contrast, 16 colour palette, arrows, and one other button.

I started out with really quite over-the-top expectations for this mini LD. I’d planned out a game with 10 levels, with cutscenes in between telling a story. But in the end I only really got started on Thursday/Friday, and only had a working level by this afternoon. So this is the stripped down, gameplay only version of the game I’d planned to make.

There’s something about the old EGA palette that just takes me back to playing Alleycat/Commander Keen (I can’t even look at that blue/purple combination without drifting off), and I made it a little hard/tricky to try and get that feeling of nostalgia to shine through in the gameplay as well as the graphics.

Matt (@brainfed) provided music, and although he initially struggled with getting the ‘french’ sound, I think he came up with a great ‘sneaking’ theme, and two other tracks that I’ll work into the game when I finish the rest as I originally intended it. Josh (@joshuatreee) helped out too, providing in-between frames for the walk cycles, and the Eiffel tower painting. Both were great collaborators to bounce ideas off, and we might go into LD24 as a team.

This is my third Ludum Dare game, and in each one I’ve hit a massive memory management stumbling block on the last afternoon. This time, entire levels failed to unload properly, which resulted in the game running faster for some reason. Eventually I fixed it, but on the way created one of the funnier bugs I’ve caused making games – A second player would spawn in, standing on the head of the first one. You could then knock this unresponsive doppelganger flying into the oncoming guards. Matt and I both enjoyed playing around with it, so I make work that mechanic into something else down the line.

Play the game here. We’d all love some feedback, and I’m really keen to hear if any colourblind people are able to play the game and if they have any problems with the colour mechanic.

Tags: color, contrast, flash, retro, stealth

Ahoy dudes. I finished my mini-LD entry, Contraste. It’s a simple little platformer and it pretty much explains itself. Also, it’s ridiculous. Check it out:

Ok, I admit that my interpretation of contrasts idea is way too primitive. But when I designed gameplay in the begining i thought it would be more flexible and I could expand it with some contrast specific features. Well, I was wrong :< I planned to compile several colors in player’s trail  and each color would damage contrastly colored enemies. It turned out that it was bad idea, so I focused on one color with different behaviours – that makes much more fun and brings some real challenge.

So in the end, the only reference to contrast is game’s visual style and color scheme (black-white, blue-orange).

I didn’t use much code from past projects –  FlashPunk and Dame perfectly handle all routines.

Here is the first concept where gameplay is just established and then quiclky I switched on tileset and finished it in about 4 hours. Level design took major part of my time and I ended up with 7 levels. I’m not done with this project yet, I think I will spend another week on it after short rest.

Anyway, meet Eruption! Tho i don’t  like this name… probably because it sounds much like Erection =\ Opened for offers!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-36/?action=preview&uid=13909

Tags: eruption, flash, retro addicts, screenshot

You can find the entry here.

I wish I had added more patterns and make the game more relevant to the theme… Well, I’m happy I could submit something with a start screen and an end.

Please comment.

– jujule

I finished my game yesterday. Now time to chillax…

So, my game. ‘Cruithne’ (pronounced ‘croo-ih-nyuh’) is a ‘quasi-satellite’, which meany wrongly believe is the Earth’s second moon. But in my game, it is the name of a little spaceship.  That, apparently, is ridiculously hard to control. Sorry guys 😀

So, hopefully I’ll be updating it in the next few days. Probably another 5 or so levels at the beginning before it gets hard-as-nails. I’ll make them a bit more open, and a bit less hellish 😀 I’ll also give the turning and thrusting a bit of a fiddle. If and when I do update, you’ll be able to play it at the same URL.

If in the meantime you get frustrated, you can use the ‘T’ and ‘Y’ keys to shuffle through the levels.

I really enjoyed making the game. The time limit was nice, as I would never have enough time in one day. It was my first experience of coordinate geometry in programming, and hopefully next tie I’ll be able to use what I’ve learned.

But, making the levels… D: They were a pain!

It’s probably my fault. The only way I could think of writing the levels was one giant switch statement. Look on the bright side, at least it’s not a pile of if()s…

So, yeah. That was bad enough. But as for even thinking about levels, I was at a dead loss. I thought that would be the easy bit. It’s not like @KevinWorkman’s, where he has to think up of puzzles. I suddenly have a greater respect for all of those mobile games.

Does anyone have any tips on level design? Or any links to articles? I’m sure these won’t be the last levels I’ll ever need to make in my time…

EDIT: Okay, just remembered I’m going away tomorrow, so the update’ll be the end of the week at earliest.

Although saturday I did nothing, I’ve done as much as a week will let me (and Grant) do!
It’s still got some placeholder art in (neither of us are 2d or 3d artists in the slightest).
And the background music is lifted (though we intend no copyright infringement it is also merely placeholder).

The game showcases exactly what I wanted in it (and a bit more) from the very starting concept/idea.
I’ll probably continue working on it a bit now after this LD and see what I can get done with it!
Maybe (if you guys like it) Submit it to kongregate or something
Work on making some cool and mind bending levels etc !

Just compiling it all now for a web, mac, and windows version.
I’m assuming linux users will be able to use the web version, and / or the windows version under wine.

Anyway this has been a BLAST!
Got me well into making something, and getting me out of my slump of not working =p

Next will be a 48 hour attempt!

The music in the game are these two songs :

Will be submitting / uploading ASAP

Ryan (The Code Troll) + Grant 😀

I can’t for the life of me, find anywhere to submit?
I can just link the web version here :
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/37694220/Contrast/contrast.html

But I dont know where I should be looking to submit the game properly!

Edit:
Guess the deadline happened just a bit before I went to upload… Thought it would be the whole day =[

The game went well. After I got a false start and didn’t like how my game was turning out, I started over on Friday. I put in some good amount of work over the period of 72 hours, and I think my game turned out just as I wanted it to.

This was my first time using FlashPunk – and I really liked it. I read through some tutorials and documentation and I just got right into coding. It was very simple to use and I really liked it; and will hopefully use it again soon! The object of the game is just to collect as many blocks as you can, as you work through the level. You have three lives in case you get stuck in your own collected trail. WASD / Arrow keys are used to move, and shift is used to run, which is multiple blocks at once.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-36/?action=preview&uid=14072

I really enjoyed the experience of a mini Ludum Dare! I’m definitely going to try to participate in the full Ludum Dare in August, and I will be trying to be active on the IRC channel! I hope you enjoy my game, and I would appreciate any comments / feedback on the game as I will probably be fixing it up and improving it.

Thanks for any feedback and I hope you enjoy the game!

This is what I jammed with a friend (Pernille Sihm) this weekend. It’s kinda using the theme contrast since it doesn’t have a purpose… Or you could say that it’s just not done yet It wasn’t designed for the Ludum Dare theme.

It’s not really a game, just a weird place to explore and play with.  Also I apparently missed the deadline. Stupid time zones.

Play it here: http://timgarbos.dk/farfar/