I used a new algorithm and the coding became much faster! I made everything but menus and music piece (I don’t know if I’ll make it).

Here is a design demonstrating all the pieces: a combination lock!

Go play it! (Controls included)

The game for mini ld 35, which I am calling the uncreative name of turret defense hell, is now complete :). The game looks basically the same since the end of day one, but has stats (on kongregate), sounds, gameover, mute button.

Link: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-35/?action=preview&uid=6703

Tags: minild 35

Our maze/sliding blocks puzzle is almost done. We’ve decided not to include monsters in final release, but the rest of the planned features are done. We have 10 levels implemented. Levels are partly random (blocks are static, but their order is random), so the game should be interesting to play more then once. There is no sound yet and there few non-critical bugs, but it is playable.

Please, check it out. We will be glad to hear your comments.

Controls:

• arrows – move character;
• click on a block – move a block to a free space (only if a block is near it).

ToDo for tomorrow:

• sound;
• bugfixes.

I’ve got a really awesome idea! And some great music to go along with it.

Tags: I'm joining, ld, MiniLD35, started

We’ve completed the game, finally.

To play, download the rar : https://dl.dropbox.com/u/41565231/octopus_miniLD35.rar

The game is main.exe

For those who want to see the source, http://www.assembla.com/code/flaming-octopus-ninja-the-game/subversion/nodes (Be warned, it’s a battlefield in there)

We’ve implemented nowhere near as much as we thought we would, but we’ve managed to get a fairly polished first act out. The game is a story-based rpg. We decided to be unique by making the game playable using only one button. We made everything from scratch for the fun of it, which led to next level programmer art throughout the game. The longest part of the development was spent on the “flow-engine”, the engine that deals with config files to generate levels,  config and manage the button interrupts as well as store any decisions you make as the character.

Here’s a screenshot :

We had lots of fun and will definitely do this again, without the many distractions hopefully.

-ThatCodingGuy

Here’s my minild entry, creatively named pong-out.

Flashpunk is really awesome for LD’s i must say. Lots of fun, easy and fast.

You can read more info about the game on it’s http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-35/?action=preview&uid=5751 entry page.

or play it directly:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/12237727/Breakout/Breakout.swf

It’s like pong… with a bit of break out, and maybe some r-type.

There’s probably going to be a post-compo version with lots and lots and lots and lots of improvement and new features and eye candy and shizzle and dizzle. Oh, i will also fix whats broken eventually. :p

Had some friends over for dinner tonight, so not much time to work on this but I have added the powerup system and tweaked a couple of things.

You can now pick up powerups. They replace your current powerup.

Some powerups I have planned. Only Machinegun and Double pistols implemented at this point.

Play beta 8 here

Might get some music from another talented indie tomorrow, fingers crossed!
Prolly gonna use bfxr for sounds.

Now sleeeeep!

/Hannes

Haven’t had the chance to start on Staturday, started today, at 10am, so planning to finish this some time tomorrow.

The game is an experiment to bring a three-act story where you can decide what to do each day and get an ending associated to your actions.

Let’s see what we can do.

I’m using this as an excuse to try MOAI. It’s been great so far.

I already have a resource cache, a scene manager and one scene with background, character and objects. Oh, and the character moves arround the screen.

A screenshot of the progress so far:

Game is taking shape pretty quickly ^^ Sadly I’ll have to give up on the roguelike-ish part I was planning on doing because of the time

Got some music from http://ozzed.net/ you should check it out

Tags: 7Soul, MiniLD #35

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 17th, 2012 at 11:12 pm and is filed under MiniLD #35. 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.

I am doing very well on the way of making a new project of mine, Mars Moose. I just couldn’t get in the time this weekend to finish him though…He’s pretty cool so I will complete him and upload the link eventually…The theme was a great starting point, but I want to make this a great game with some more polish!

I think this might be the first one I backed out of, but anyways, I’ve given up on this MiniLD. This weekend got really busy and I my game idea was just really stupid. Here’s a screenshot, I have some game play and if for some reason you think I should post it, leave a comment.

Yay! Aldi joined the game.
Welcome her.

It’s our first Ludum Dare, and our first complete game. Check it out and let me know what you think.

It’s been a fun weekend, hopefully I can partake in another again sometime.

Here’s our entry!

Well, I tried my hardest, and I wasn’t able to complete my entry in time. Too many glitches, too much trouble, not enough time.  Total, I probably only had 6 hours of actual coding time available, but I’ve almost completed my game. I may submit it in 10 hours or so. Until then, I’m going to sleep.  -.-  EDIT: You know what? I give up this time. My game has far too many glitches, throws way too many exceptions, and to top that off, was poorly planned and structured. Well, I’ll take these mistakes into consideration for my next ludum dare entry.

Here’s the entry:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-35/?action=preview&uid=2490

It was the silliest game I’ve ever done, but it was a lot of fun. I think this reminded me why I enjoy making games, and I can thank miniLD for that.

Toxifulable is in here:D!!!

Well we spent about 10 hours in total on this mini-ld. The idea we had didn’t turn out as we’d hoped. So in a sense it was a failure. However, on the other hand we’re pumped with the amount of work we got done in under 10 hours.

We set out to create a fantasy Rock-Paper-Scissors. Well, and it that sense we succeeded. It’s just not as much fun as we’d envisioned 😀

But why not check it our for yourself, I’m sure you’ll get a little bit of a kick out of it: Siegfried vs. Skeletons

Either way we had a blast creating this. Until next time!

Stefan & Simon
The Grey Studios

Yesterday I finished my game for the MiniLD #35 (my first Ludum Dare!).  It’s called Human Apocalypse.

It was my first “violent” game, unfortunately.  (More specifically, run ‘n’ gun arcade game).  You’re a zombie in a human apocalypse and you have to try and flee from the humans and avoid getting caught!

It’s an infinite terrain with the following features:
– There’s bricks that you can break by shooting at them.  The humans can break through blocks also!
– There’s TNT which you can blow up (But be careful if you’re too close!).
– There’s water which slows you down.
– There’s health power-ups that restore 1/10 of your health.
– There’s a secret block that I added last minute.  It’s Notch’s Minecraft head!  (It has a .0075% chance to spawn.  I found one once!)

Here’s a screenshot:

It’s made in Flash (My first finished game using bitmapData!!).  I also added a shadow to bricks and TNT to make it have depth which is nice.

Now that I’ve actually had a good chance to play it, I’ve found that having a strategy is the best way to survive.  My strategy is to go back and forth in an area right from the start, breaking all of the blocks and shooting anything that’s in my way.  Once the humans come and start breaking the blocks, I’ll have more room to move around!  Using your enemies to work for you!  How cool?  Also, using that method, it’s easier to find hearts.

All in all, I’m very proud of it and I think it’s a pretty fun game to play.

But that’s not for me to decide!  It’s for YOU to decide!  Play it here and have fun, please:

ZANZLANZ.COM

That is my first successfull experience of fast development. About 35 hours of work to get complete game.

Now, looking back I understand that I spent too much time on small details instead of working out basic gameplay. If I’ve payed less attention to interface features, the game could become more fun and consistent.

Anyway, meet Oceanoid! (“Aquanoid” turned out to be busy :<) It ended up as arkanoid variation with experimental run-as-far-as-you-can gameplay (your score depends on the distance as well as on the number of destroyed blocks) Have fun!

Oceanoid

I just finished my electric sandbox Blueprint!

Here is a quick demonstration of the last version with menus and zooming:

Hope you’ll enjoy it!

We’ve finally finished our game. Link to the entry.

Changes from previous version:

• added sounds and awesome guitar music by my firend;
• fixed few graphics bug;
• game now works in Opera and Firefox;
• hints now more readable.

The game was tested in Chrome 19, Firefox 13, Opera 12 and Safari 5.1. It should also work on IE9-10, but I’ve not tested it.

Thanks Ludum Dare for finally pushing us to make a game.

Hope you like it!

I am finally done my entry!

I have learned from my mistakes from the previous competition I joined. This time I did not aim too high, but at least I was able to complete the whole thing. It is a replica of the game called Symon Says, only I call it Conniac Says.

It can be set to full screen, and it also contains an extreme mode where the buttons move as you try to memorize the pattern of the notes!

It also keeps track of high scores.

Here is a screen shot of what it looks like:

It might not look like much from this image, but the overall project was well over 2, 000 lines of code, and that’s not including spaces of comments. The worst part about all of this is that I started this project entirely from scratch, no re-used code from previous projects.

I hope you enjoy it!

Conniac

My game’s coming along! I had to start pretty late, but I’m quite pleased with the idea.

EDIT: Maybe I’ll leave the player to discover the most gruesome moment in the game for themselves, instead of using it as a promo pic.

UPDATE: It’s almost finished!

Here’s another screenshot:

Tags: dare, death, eternal life, madgnomegamer, MiniLD #35, originality

I was 10 lines from completion, and then an error came out of nowhere!
My aim was to submit it by tonight, but it’s late and I’m tired, and I think it’s the interpreter…

So I’ll continue it tomorrow.

*Sigh*

So, basically what’s been going on with me and Wonckay’s game is that we don’t know when to stop adding stuff. We just want to keep widening our scope, and it’s becoming a bigger and bigger project. At first, we just wanted to “The Jam” it, take an extra day, but now we can’t stop. This game is turning more and more huge, and we can’t bring ourselves to cut anything out, because well, that would be a disservice to the game, right? We talked it over, and Nick has this to say:

“It’s for the journey, not the goal.”

I think it’s better to do what makes the best game. It’s not a competition, and it’s our first time. [as a team, anyway.]

So, we’re going to take yet another day. And maybe more. And in the spirit of the MiniLD, we will break the rules to make a game of mass awesomeness.

So I recently added water to my voxel engine and have been playing around with it…. one thing I have found out is that water is sooo much fun to code, it’s tricky to get a decent simulation and hard to get something that is stable and looks nice, but once you make something you are pleased with, you just wanna play around with it so much! 😛

At this rate I might have a full voxel engine ready by the time the next LD competition drops… be able to spend the full 48 hours on actual gameplay and making a game to suit the theme…. that should be fun.

Here is the link to my article/guide/tutorial site for voxel engine resources:
https://sites.google.com/site/letsmakeavoxelengine/

AlwaysGeeky

Tags: alwaysgeeky, cubes, gamedev, indie, minecraft, progress, SuccessStory, tips, vlog, voxel engine, voxels, youtube

It’s done!

Check it out here:

This is where Death takes you to visit Metallica in a nursing home:

Tags: dare, death, eternal, eternal life, grim reaper, life, madgnomegamer, MiniLD #35, original, skullsoft, story

I’m going to be rebuilding level 2, I could have had the game released 6:00pm yesterday! *sigh*

oh, well.

Click here to Download Roof Jumper!

Thanks again Olav for the awesome dare minild!

As every Jam i’ve done, and often heard said: I didn’t get to finish it as much as I had wanted, but I learned alot.

Spent 6-8 hours over the course of two days, puttin things here and there, had a blast with designing something as simple as possible, with self imposed dares.

I DARED to :

-Compose a simple platformer where you only run and jump

-Use a very minmal pallete of 4-5 colors.

-used only 2 different platform objects.

-implement a secret cheat code. (“SREBMUN”)

-disregard deadlines, and make the game a day late, and
release it two days late.

-Collaborate with good friend @KhyleDean

-Use Music I didn’t make myself for a change.

Had a Blast with it, and learned lots of new stuff, and more importantly, got an idea of what I need to learn, and what I want to learn.
Thanks again for runnin the comp,and thanks for all the people participating,
always lookin to the next one.
-ZakChaos

Tags: Ludumdare, MiniLD, platformer, roof jumper

You guys may have heard of Darwin Tunes before. If not, it is an experiment on evolutionary computation, where small music samples are automatically generated, and evolved based on feedback from the public.

After you give feedback to any particular sound loop (follow the instructions in the side), you are given a link to download the loop you just heard. The loops are CC-BY-NC, so I guess they could be used for LD?
Most of them sound really cool, so this seems like a good alternative for those of us without great musical talents

Tags: evolution, music, tools

I just finished watching “Indie Game, The movie”, and felt like Doing something new…I really enjoyed the movie and think that anyone who has been to this website should see it…Maybe its the monster that I had but I kinda want to make a big project too.  It seems like alot of work compared to what i do now (work on something till i get bored then pretend its done), but it looks to be much more rewarding.

SO…Im really looking to see if someone thinks that this is a reasonable quest and if so what should i make and if so would you actually download this… (Im thinking along the lines of a new version of puzzle game, i like those)… If you actually read my entire rant about this I thank you very much…

My Eternal Life timelapse!

……….wtf I can’t embed the youtube video!!!!

ok here’s a link then: Eternal Life Timelapse

Tags: eternal life, jam, madgnomegamer, Mini LD #35, skullsoft, timelapse

There’s a pretty neat game jam coming soon that you should join…it needs more members!

It’s called Hack-A-Jam.

What I like about it is two things: First, there’s an ‘infinite amount of categories you can win in’ which is pretty cool, since it allows for mind-blowing originality to shine.

You also get a nice badge to brag about if you’re one of the winners; which is really cool and could also be helpful on your resume in the future.

Theme and time is voted on by the community.

check it out here!

(Also notice my overwhelming presence as FilasisNome …it really needs some more members! 70% of the people who signed up for it forgot to attend this time (?:)

Maths Rush for Windows Phone 7 is now available to download from the Windows Phone Marketplace.

Based on the stats people are playing it over and over again.  I know I am.

As with all the all the apps/games I currently make, all revenue generated will be donated to Action Duchenne.  You can find out all about Action Duchenne here.

You can find Maths Rush here.

http://windowsphone.com/s?appid=249f945d-2643-4727-8ec7-faf2e81356d7

Global high scores are in test and will be submitted for review in the next couple days.

I’ve been in the process of porting my entry (LINK HERE) to windows.

It’s going alright, just keep running into problems that take me hours to figure out.

Would the windows users here be interested in playing if I decided to finish this?

It’s screenshot Saturday and I thought I’d share this with the Ludum Dare folks:

I’ve been making some variations to some of the cubes to add some… variation. The stronger cubes will be less rare as the game progresses. And I’m currently on level 4… Which means I’ve only completed 1 level since the demo… sorry guys! :/

Looks like now I don’t want to release another level unless it really stands out. But keep checking for updates and previews – the full game will be a blast!

Tags: saturday, screenshot, SuccessStory, unity, unity3d, updates

It only took five days longer than the competition ran for, but now Mars Moose is done…with particle effects and all that fun stuff…Please feel free to PLAY it or DOWNLOAD the source code (FlashPunk). As always i can’t wait till the next ludum dare…Its coming up!!

For LD#23 I tried to create a sort of fast-paced puzzle game called Tinyville Confidential. I wasn’t really able to finish it on time for LD (here‘s my entry), but I finally got around to working on it some more! Now featuring multiple levels, the ability to win the game, and (hopefully) a time limit that’s actually fun. Give it a try!

I probably won’t work on it much more, but I’d still be happy to hear comments and suggestions. I’m really happy that LD inspired me to make this interesting game, and I’m looking forward to LD#24!

Just ported the game to windows. First time I’ve ever done this. Tested it on my computer running windows 7 and it works fine, though my friends xp machine couldn’t run it for some reason. Maybe something in the build settings of visual c++, or it’s just his computer. Feel free to try it yourself though. Just click the windows link I added to the entry http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-35/?action=preview&uid=13728 .

I’m continuing my MiniLD game. More info here

Tags: 7Soul

Kelgar is a non-linear, modern role playing game. It plays in the middle ages in a fantastic, unnamed country. The player can choose from different alternatives when acting. The world of Kelgar is not perfect, it is in war and you can see the consequences.

It’s currently in Alpha State, but already playable. The game is free to play and cross-platform (Windows and Linux).

This game started as a entry to a game contest (not Ludum Dare, though), which I won. It was a one man project in this days. Currently the team consist of Rick (Lead Developer), Michiel (Mapper), Matthew (Mapper), Corey (Music Artist) and Daniel (Music Artist).

We currently are searching for 3D Modelers & Animators ,Quest Designers and Concept Artists to complete the development team of Kelgar. If you are interested in developing a 3D RPG and in improving your skills, than send me a e-mail.

Link Sheet:
Game Design Document
IndieDB page
Old contest entry thread and current thread on PAS (=engine) forums

The official trailer for Isolated Assault 2 is here!

PLAY THE DEMO HERE

DontBeNoobish recently asked for an exclusive look at the game so far, so I gave it to him! <3

His gameplay video is now up, check it out, and don’t forget to Subscribe to him!

SOUNDCLOUD: http://soundcloud.com/robproductions-1

Game should be coming… soon. I hate to go Gabe Newell on you guys, but really there’s still a lot to do!

I’ll keep you posted, have a good one! <3

Tags: game, progress, SuccessStory, trailer, unity, unity3d, update, video

Visit here!

Hey everyone! I am glad to announce that the second Hack-a-Jam will be starting on July 14, and I am your host.

The Hack-a-Jam is a gaming jam that is different from others. Instead of one overall winner, there is an infinite amount of categories that you can win in, and there will always be multiple winners. Here are some examples of categories you can win in:

Best Graphics
Best Audio
Most extra items (dev logs, etc.)
Most Creative
Most Glitch-free
Longest Game
Shortest Game
Hardest Game
Easiest Game
Best themed
Most fun game

The amount of time given in the jam is voted on by the community, along with the theme. You can submit themes, and most of them will be sent to the Polls section, where others can vote on themes.

By winning, you will get a badge and bragging rights, along with your name listed on the website permanently as a winner. When this jam gets to be huge, you will be really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really famous! The rules are not very restricted, as the jam is purely for fun:

1. All game content must be created within the set time. Note: You can use other music, placeholder graphics, etc. as long as you are allowed to!
2. Your game is not required to follow the theme, but would greatly improve your chances of winning. Unless every other game is not following the theme, it is almost guaranteed that your game won’t win anything.
3. You must work alone, and you must create everything included in the game.
4. All game creation tools are permitted, such as GameMaker, Photoshop, Flash, Paint, etc. Note: By game creation tools, I mean any tools that can be used to create your game.
5. All game extensions/DLLs are permitted. If you want to make it multiplayer (if you are using GameMaker), go ahead and use 39dll.

The second Hack-a-Jam takes place on July 14, so you should sign up now! Good luck everyone!

Tags: competition, gamemaker, games, Hack-A-Jam, hackajam, infinite categories, jam

Actually I’m really considering using this Raspberry Pi as my new target platform for game jams like Ludum Dare. The technical specifications are rather limited which gives an extra challenge. As I’ve already been using mostly python and pygame for game development this should work without much extra effort. Next I’m going to test if my previous entries run on it. (This should not prevent me from having additional Windows builds of my games 😉 )

Raspberry Pi – Runs Linux

On other platform-related news, some French guy that goes with the webname “Loopingstar” has experimented with the basic idea of my LD23 game Bottlecolonies and made a port to Flash with some extras added. I especially like the variations in buildings and clearer visual feedbak of points earned/lost while placing buildings. You can give it a try here: http://loopingstar.fr/colonies/colonies_v2.swf

Tags: flash, pygame, python, raspberry pi

And it’s over! Thanks to the 30 guys who actually tried their hands at such a challenging theme!

THEME: Contrasts!

Happening at your house from July 9th all the way to the 15th!

What do I mean with ‘Contrasts’?
I mean everything!

Be it graphics (i. e. green on red), physics (Think magnets) or the gameplay (Die to win). Else, just go crazy and make something that’s the total opposite of a usual game!

RULES:

• Do you have that one framework you made, but couldn’t use for LD, because you didn’t want to make it public domain? Here’s your chance. Grab it and use it! (Don’t write your whole game beforehand, though.)
• No need to add your source. You can still do that, though.
• Feel free to work in a team, if you want to!
• More time. I’ll give ya a week. Really relaxed, to get warm for LD.

CHALLENGES:

One week is too easy? Well, try some of these challenges.

• Implement a single piece of everything: music, SFX, a single finished sprite  – All that stuff. Just use your skills to the fullest.
• Use at least 8 colors per sprite. (Get that thing colored!)
• Go funky – Every color used must have it’s contrasting color implemented (Use blue, get orange in there – red, green – black, white.)

And that’s about it so far.

If you have further questions, ask away in the comments or tweet me here.

All Entries

www.McPixel.net

Exactly one year ago, I quit my dayjob and went indie. Ok, perhaps it wasn’t as simple as that as I was looking for other jobs and creating a game in the mean time. This game was Thelemite and by now it has got over one million plays worldwide. But before I could manage to finish it, A WILD LUDUM DARE APPEARED!

That’s right! Right when I was running out of cash and had to finish my game ASAP, Ludum Dare 21 was taking place. And since I am a terrible compo addict, I could not let that pass, so naturally, I joined in! As I always do

And it was a success for me too! I managed to create a tiny little pseudo point’n’click adventure called McPixel! I was trying to create a failproof idea, so I thought about a series of short point’n’click puzzles based on an even simpler engine that I can create within first 24 hours and spend the entire second half on creating more levels for it. I took out my favourite gel pen and started doodling my idea.

And I started working. As planned, I managed to create a working engine within first 24 hours, and went to sleep happy!

The first level I made was totally insane, because I was actually a bit late with my 24h mark, and I was up for too long and my brain experienced a shutdown so I just drawn animations mindlessly without having any idea what I am doing. The engine I created allowed my to create levels for it involving no coding, entirely in graphics editor, reducing chances to screw stuff up.

After I was done with my almost 20 hour stretch of first-day LD work, I took a juicy 4h nap and woke up with dysfunctional brain cells only to produce more mad levels.

I am really proud of careful planning I did that time and my simple engine allowed me to succeed in creating a whole of six levels in the end and a special ending.

Play the original version here

So I decided to make McPixel into a full game and set myself a goal of 100 levels!

After Ludum Dare McPixel, along other games got some press coverage that kept me motivated to work on it more. Here is a list of McPixel related links I managed to assemble after Ludum Dare 21.

RPS comment, Oujevipo.fr, Dallas Observer, Indiegames.com, Seetio.com, Youtube LD21 video, Dogbomb’s LD21 mashup, Dealspwn.com, Indievault.it, Pixellevel.de, Retrozentrale.net, Simply-Indie.de, Superlevel.de, Chocogames, Oldpost.com (?), Ripten.com, Nerd-Age.com, Gamezone.de, Indie-Game.fr

I was crunching and creating more levels for McPixel having to occasionally release a side game in the mean time just to help me survive. The engine I created during Ludum Dare is 90% intact up to this day and I am very much proud of it. If you would like to delve into details as to how McPixel levels are made, check out McPixel Creator’s Guide.

In about 50 days, I will partake in my first Ludum Dare event.

I started making video games before I knew what a compiler was. I remember in middle school finding a book at the library that taught you to build your own games using QBASIC. I studied the lessons, and started coding my own games with pencil and paper using the syntax I learned. I didn’t actually understand what I was supposed to do with that code to make it work until high school when I took a programming class and learned all about the pieces of software that you needed to install to compile and run your code.

Since then, while I’ve dabbled with game modding, I never really completed a game worthy of any sort of attention. I was just as well enjoying the constant challenge of completing any programming project that the (revenue-generating) world would throw at me. As I honed my craft, though, I was overtaken with the fact that I wasn’t doing something right. I’ve gone through plenty of different paradigms: the procedural spaghetti code of Pascal, the Test-Driven Development-minded ideas of Inversion of Control from the ALT.NET community and C#, and the KISS of python. My work brought me from architectural overengineering in my first job out of college, to “just get it done now” in my current job as a consultant. Over time, I’ve learned lots of different possible ways to architect a solution, and am hoping to finally bring much of those lessons back to where it all began: making video games.

With 50 days out, my plan is pretty simple: work on developing the toolchain I’ll use to make my 48-hour game. While 50-days out seems like a lot, it really comes down to seven weekends of half-devoted time, plus a few days throughout the weeks after work.

These posts will detail the decisions and plans that I make in order to make this Ludum Dare successful.

Tags: introduction, ld48_24

Hey Guys,

My name is Scott Rehlander and I will be entering my first Ludum Dare Aug 24.  I have been wanting to do this forever, but the weekends have never worked out right.  I have written a couple games for Windows Phone 7 and dabbled in some game engines/graphics renderers like Axiom, Farseer, Corona and XNA.  I develop C# full time at a robotics company and have been programming my whole life.

My current project is a back to the roots 2d RPG made for win8/wp8 with a combo attack quirk built into the battle system.  Looking forward to meeting (and competing against) some of you guys.  I know I have some solid competition!!

Tags: LD #24

My first step in planning out this Ludum Dare is to analyze what I can do right now. The goal is that in the next 50 days, I can spend time between exploiting my strengths and working on my… less than ideals.

Major Strength: Programming

My biggest strength, IMO, is my programming ability. I’m constantly on the lookout for ways to reduce complexity in how I write my code. I’m not going to claim that I’m anywhere near where I want to be (the ideas of functional programming is something I’m pretty interested in learning, even if it just means bringing some good ideas over to my imperative code), but I believe I have enough experience in other programming pursuits to tie back into game development.

One thing I’ve enjoyed doing is writing code that doesn’t necessarily work, but succinctly describes what I want the program to do. In game parlance, I’m developing code that should only care about the logic of the game. Anything about sprite rendering, entity storage, etc, should be handled by some outside, magical framework that reads my mind, bakes me cookies, and does all of that boilerplate stuff for me. Then, I build that magical framework. Minus the cookies and telepathy.

It’s not much to look at, but it will do as a test case.

You can view the results as I go on my bitbucket page. Right now, there are two “games” in early development (a 1942 clone, and a physics-based platformer). They both are supported by the same Python framework, ffld (“Framework for Ludum Dare”) that I write during development. I’ll go more into detail of the framework in later posts. For now though, I will say this: while the name of the framework might seem to insinuate otherwise, the goal is not to cut corners. Instead, the goal is to allow for the modularity of common code for game essentials (e.g., physics, collision, graphics rendering, asset loading, game entity tracking) , leaving only for the custom logic that will make my game unique. Of course, to keep the scope creep down, I am adding some constraints; it will only support 2D games, and be based around pygame. At some point later, perhaps I’ll look into expanding to OpenGL, but pygame works will for my needs currently.

Hopefully, my development will be a large asset to rely upon. As far as strategy goes, this means that when coming up with a game idea, I will be better off sticking to an idea more interesting from an interaction point of view, as I have no worries with being able to throw together the strange code needed to cause it all to work right.

Major Weakness: Graphics

Not by me. Not in a million years.

As of today, I can’t build a grass texture to save my life. This is my biggest fear: that no matter how cool or unique of a game I can build from a game logic standpoint, the graphics will just look childish. I’m heartened by viewing some past Ludum Dare winners who eeked by on pretty cheesy graphics. I’m pretty sure one of the reasons that I never did more game development in the past was because it was so exhausting trying to find graphic assets. Sure, you could find a cool sprite sheet here and there, but not enough to make a full game. You want another sprite, similar to the one you found online, for the next level? Not with these two left hands abusing my gimp window (I guess one of my other weaknesses is taking the time to develop relationships with people who could help in this regard).

And so, one of my large goals that I have tasked myself with achieving over the next 50 days is to become better at making graphics. This does not mean that I plan on becoming a turtle-necker. My goal here is not Pitfall: The Mayan Adventure. Realistically, my hope is to get into a situation where I can develop graphics that pass as… well, whatever they are supposed to look like. Maybe just one step above “programmer art”? I feel that with some work, I could probably make some grass textures that are more than just surface.fill(GREEN) if need be.

The Other Attributes:

Music/Sound

I don’t have much experience generating sound, but a quick look over the various toolkits shows that it doesn’t appear to be that difficult (some of it can be randomly generated very easily with tools such as bfxr and sfxr. In the coming weeks I hope to play some more with these tools. I doubt I would want to concentrate too much on this, but I realize that music and sound will contribute to the overall atmosphere of a game in a way that could be very time-effective. Even spending a single hour making a quick song, and another for adding sound effects, could be the difference between a hack and a game.

Planning and Research

Well, considering I have a gameplan of things to do 50 days before the event, I’d like to think that this is all pretty good. At some point I like to think that I’ll do a full mapping of my time during the LD weekend (When will I sleep? How long should I spend on design? How long can I develop the game? When do I call it done and spend the rest of the time polishing? How much liberty would I allow myself to deviate from such a schedule?) I also plan on reading some more post-mortems and other tips around the LD site. Of course, I could very well go into this thinking I’ll just let my first Ludum Dare hit me like a ton of bricks and learn for the next one. I feel, however, a certain pleasure in the humility of watching my best laid plans  get absolutely destroyed.

Writing

While I don’t have a lot of writing experience, I do like to think that if I take my time I can be a pretty decent writer. That being said, LD isn’t about taking your time. I don’t plan on using writing to much effect since it is pretty time-consuming, but that might change if I find myself with an idea that doesn’t need a lot of code to do. Perhaps in a future LD, when I feel a little more comfortable, I will try to make a story share the spotlight of one of my games.

Tags: ld48_24, Planning

Oh man, Ludum Dare this year is going to be the week before PAX… and mere days before PaxDev! That being that case, I want to have something really special to bring with me to show around to all the other game developers who are also attending PaxDev.

As we all know from HUGMONSTER (-o^_^)-o and from Burning Platform that the fancy graphics just aren’t my strong suit. Therefore my grand plan is to collect some friends and co-workers who complement my weaknesses and form a team for my very first 72-hour Jam entry!

The only thing I can tell you for certain is that like last time, this entry will be another Android game. The rest we will see in good time!

Tags: LD #24, ld24

This entry was posted on Friday, July 6th, 2012 at 7:12 pm and is filed under MiniLD #36. 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.

As I discussed in my previous post, my largest perceived weakness going into an event such as Ludum Dare was my graphic-making abilities. This past weekend, I took my first step toward exercising that particular skill. Prior to this weekend, I had never created a sprite in my life (that wasn’t entirely one color). Heck, I never even doodled in my notebook in middle school.

Where to Start?

At first, I really didn’t know how I would go about improving myself. Isn’t the designing of sprites just art? Isn’t visual artistic ability just something you’re born with? My brain is so imbalanced to the left hemisphere that I’m constantly falling into traffic. What kind of fool’s errand am I going on here? However, throwing doubt to the wind, I set out to build a sprite.

The first task I gave myself was to pick a graphics tool. I tried some of the ones list in the Ludum Dare Tools section, but didn’t see anything that struck my fancy. At one point I was on Chapter Two of a PyGTK Tutorial in the hopes to build my own tool. Luckily I shut down that bit of insanity. Eventually, I decided to just work with good ole’ Gimp, which worked better than expected.

Next, I went scrounging for tutorials. I didn’t think I’d actually find anything worthwhile, but I was badly mistaken. If you’re a programmer looking to get started with Pixel Art, you MUST read Derek Yu’s Pixel Art Tutorial. It breaks things down step-by-step, which is extremely helpful. Don’t be afraid by Derek’s amazing looking image, the ideas transplanted just as easily into my practice images.

I started very simple: following the tutorial to create a dead-simple picture (a machete). It wasn’t too shabby, but it was also a pretty simple image to begin with. So I decided to go with something a little more advanced to really test myself. I already had some sprites pulled from the NES Game “1942” to use for graphics in a game I’m screwing around with, but maybe I could replace them with some sprites of my own. So, I would use the tutorial’s lessons to create my own sprite of a fighter plane.

Step One: Draw a Concept

Some Clip Art I found to use as inspiration

For me, step one was to get an idea of what I wanted to draw. For Derek, this is Part Three (yeah, I’ve purposefully renumbered the steps to make things confusing for you). First, I googled for a top-down view of a plane, and found something to use as a concept. Next, I tried to draw with pencil and paper a likeness of this plane. I’m not really sure why I decided to do this (after all, I already have some concept art in front of me) but it just felt right. Later I decided that this worked pretty well, as the image I drew was something that I knew I could at the very least draw, which gave me a boost of confidence. It also allowed me to customize the image a bit more to what I wanted. Now to be sure, my drawing abilities are very sub-par (and fortunately for you, I didn’t scan the image I drew), but by studying the original image part by part, I was able to get something decent.

Step Two: Pixel an Outline

I created a new 64×64 pixel image in Gimp, and prepared to embarrass myself. Finally, I ended up with the following:

Some things to note about this:

• Although you don’t see it in the screenshot above, when working in Gimp I made sure to enable the grids so I had lines separating pixels.
• There are some jagged lines. While I did heed the tutorial’s warning, I felt that there wasn’t much I could do about some of the jaggedness, particularly near the back of the wings. I hoped that they would come out later in the process.
• Learning how to use the various Gimp tools to draw/erase/etc in a straight line is pretty helpful. Particularly, it is faster to use this method to draw a line rather than placing every pixel with the pencil tool. Even lines that are drawn at strange angles will give you pixels to start with, and you can just fine tune the resulting line with either the pencil or erase tool
• Speaking of the erase tool, you’re obviously going to need to set it to “Hard Edge”.
• One tip is to have a second view open to see what the image looks like in it’s actual size. After you’ve opened your Gimp window and have zoomed in on the image so you can work with the pixels, click “View -> New View”, and Gimp will give you another window that you can set to a different zoom (which is probably best to keep at the default zoom)

Step Three: Add Color

The next step was to add color. I bucket-filled the areas. This was actually pretty nice, since I have always been under the impression that if you bucket-fill a sprite it’s going to look terrible, and the only way to get something decent is to color each pixel individually. You’ll also see that I decided to add a propeller blade to the front for no particular reason.

These are just three colors that I randomly picked. Some day I might actually learn about color theory and all that, but I’ll save that lesson for some other day. Already, I’m pretty darn impressed. I would be happy with this! However, there is more that can be done.

Step Four: Shading/Lighting

The next part is what really makes the image “pop”.

I’m not sure if I got it “right”, but I did get… something. Notes on this step:

• The basic idea, as explained in the tutorial, is to pretend that there is a source of light, choose the direction it’s coming from, and draw where the shadows should go. Also, lighten where the light hits directly. I sort of changed my mind up half-way through where the light was, so I might be kind of all over the place. Especially on the right side of the tail section. However, it should be pretty clear that the light is above the plane’s vertical axis, and to the left.
• Here, the dodge/burn tool is your friend. The dodge will lighten, and the burn will darken the pixel you click. Remember to set the tool to “Hard Edge” or else it will affect multiple pixels!
• Although it might be obvious to some, this wasn’t to me: if you have the default color for the pixel and you dodge (lighten) it, then decide you’d rather keep it at where it was, doing a burn (darken) will NOT get you back to your original color. You’ll need to undo, or just redraw the pixel
• I reread the tutorial after I was done, and one tip was to do the shadows (darken) first. You’ll end up drawing more shadows this way, which sounds like a good thing. Think about it: with a single point of light, you will have more areas with less light (shadows) than you will being directly hit by the light. I’ll have to keep this in mind next time.

Step Five: Selective Outlining

As you can see, the pixels that I drew for the outline back in Step Two have been dulled down to the colors that are surrounding them. This makes the image less “hard” (or using Derek’s words, “less cartoony”).

• I made use of the “Smudge” tool. As with the other tools, I made sure to set the “Hard Edge” option so that I would be affecting one pixel at a time. The way the “Smudge” tool works is you click and hold your mouse button on one area (i.e., a blueish pixel in the cockpit window ADJACENT to a black “outline” pixel in the cockpit window), and then drag the cursor INTO the black “outline” pixel. You can think of it as smudging your finger across the page, pushing some of the blue onto the black. Really, what this means is that you get some blend between the dark black and the light blue, without needing to manually pick the dark blue color. The cockpit glass is where it’s most noticeable, but I did it for the majority of the outline pixels.
• Unlike the other tools, the Smudge tool requires a bit more finesse, since you have to “drag” color from the correct source pixel into the correct destination pixel. Obviously, this can be a pretty long process for all of the outline pixels. If I knew that there would be a large group of pixels in a row that would all have the same smudge source color, then I would smudge one of them. After, I would use the Color Picker tool to select the new color that was created, and use the pencil tool to draw that color onto other pixels that would do the same thing. This was especially effective for those long, straight lines of outline pixels.
• One thing I could have concentrated on more was to do the selective outlining a bit lighter on the very outside edges of the sprite, as suggested. I played around a bit with the smudge settings, but could have gone even further by using the dodge tool to lighten up these pixels even more.

I Survived!

It’s by no means worthy of the video game hall of fame, but it’s better than stick figures. Some final thoughts on this entire process:

• In total, it probably took me a bit over an hour for this one sprite. I imagine I can cut this time down by knowing the keyboard shorcuts for gimp, which I was only partially familiar with. Another was the fact that I did this using the trackpad on my laptop. A mouse on a desktop would probably be faster.
• While Gimp has great toolage for messing around with a single image, I can imagine creating animated sprites would be difficult. On the one hand, Gimp has nothing built in to animate the sprite as you’re creating it. On the other hand, it would not be too hard to write a program that simply animates the sprite for you that you can stick into one corner of the screen while Gimp is open.

Comments/criticism welcome!

Tags: GIMP, graphics, programmer art, sprites, tutorial

So here I am ready to add to the pool of “it’s my first LD” posts. Then I start scrolling through the things other people are working on… and woah. There’s the intimidation factor. Love it though. : )

I’m from a web dev background – okay that’s a lie. I’m from a communication studies background, but realized by my last year of school that I didn’t care for any of the career opportunities in my field, started taking some e-commerce electives and created an independent study in web-technologies. Long story short, I did some crappy jobs at ridiculously low rate, leveled up, and now do web-dev (almost exclusively back-end) full time.

I have not made a ‘game’ since we had to get those graphing calculators in highschool and they turned out to support BASIC like programming. I’ve talked about it a million times, but, well, I haven’t written a book yet either. ; p So I decided to do LD #24 to give myself some “sit down and do it” motivation. And also an “no see I have to work on this today, I’m doing this thing!” excuse. I’m thinking I’ll need more than a little practice time before that though.

Maybe I’ll have to do MiniLD #36 to get my feet wet.

hello, I’m thePalindrome, who would be better known in the Minecraft modding community, and I’m going to to mini-LD #36!

As those of you who would know, I have a bad history of LD’s, mostly because of my short attention span…

But I shall do this mini-LD, and I shall at come in the top 10 at something!

I have some pretty good ideas, and so I think I’ll come up with a game that will be enjoyable for everybody!

…Now just to decide if I’m going to use flash or C++, portability or familiarity…

What would you guys say?

Team Crucial

Almost time for ze Mini-LD #36!

Gamer and I are awfully pumped. We’ve come up with what we think is a pretty nifty idea.

It’s a simple enough concept: you’re an angel who’s somehow swapped places with a demon. You have a halo that you can launch around and bounce off stuff, and the real game mechanic is that you can teleport to the ball, allowing you to reach places you can’t reach just by jumping and walking about. First half you’ll play as the angel, second half as a demon (throwing a fireball instead), hence the contrast theme 😀

So here’s a list of stuff we need to implement and want to implement:

Need:
Platforming engine + teleportation
Ball physics (halo reacting realistically to slopes)
At least 10 levels
Character animations

Want:
Different halos or powerups
Having the halo/fireball “colour in” the world as it flies about.
More detailed character animations such as turning to face the mouse etc.
As many levels as possible
Nifty lighting stuff
Original music
A more coherent plot

I have a fairly solid concept of ball physics, so that’s what I’ll be working on first. The next step will be making a decent platformer engine, then fleshing it out into a proper engine.

Gamer is going to be working on a character design and perhaps an example level. The biggest challenge for him will be making nice neat character animations, so he’s probably going to be working on that initially.

Hopefully we haven’t bitten off more than we can chew. We can’t wait to get started tomorrow. Will be updating this post with progress 😀

(edit:)

DAY ONE – two initial tests finished!

So at the end of day one I’ve managed to hack together a pretty alright ball physics engine. It’s horrendously coded (entirely procedurally) and a bit buggy, but it was mostly so I can conceptualize the maths behind it.
Here it is:

http://www.fileize.com/view/3115e2b7-c5c/
(click and drag the ball to toss it around)

It’s based off some maths I read in a book a while ago about coordinate rotation. Essentially, you detect when a ball is touching a line (with basic trigonometry using the line’s x, y, and rotation), then rotate coordinates of the whole system to as if it was a flat surface, calculate how it should bounce, then rotate it back and apply the new velocities to the ball.
The next step for me is to thoroughly neaten up the code. I’ve made each line a separate instance and hard coded each in so I really need to separate it up into classes and generalize. Then I need to figure out a way of reducing the number of tests per frame. I don’t really have time to muck around with more complex systems so I think I’ll just use a basic grid and test for collisions only with objects in each section. Hopefully this’ll allow me to have a lot more lines on the stage without too much lag.

As for Gamer, he’s come up with a character design and made some pretty nifty sprites:

http://www.fileize.com/view/545c455e-776/
(arrow keys)

He wants to turn the walking animation into more of a jog, and make a proper jumping sprite, but so far the I think the character is really neat. These aren’t the final controls btw, just an example file. We’re going to make the character’s head face towards the mouse and, if you’re running the opposite direction to the direction you’re facing, you’ll face backwards.

That’s all for today!

I have officially submitted an extremely early build that whill continue to update throughout the MiniLD. This game will never become a full one. On the upside, this is literally my first ever game. 😀

In past game jam events, I have always felt the jealous stab of pride when it comes to talking about my game idea or theme. I know that when it comes to programming, ideas are cheap and success comes from perspiration, marketing and luck. The ten thousand people and five hundered fully-featured websites that came up with ‘Facebook before Facebook’ can attest to that. That doesn’t make it any easier for me to admit that nobody wants to steal my dumb idea.

So, my simple idea for MiniLD #36 is a top-down team-based military shooter. As you lose health, your display loses contrast and it become harder to tell friend from foe.

Thanks to the relaxed rules of this MiniLD, I will be ‘borrowing’ some of the graphics functions I made for my unreleased entry in MiniLD #34 ‘Aspect’.

Will this be the first game jam I actually finish? Probably not, based on my previous experience, but I hope to achieve my super-secret goal of learning how to properly package Python projects.

Hello. First, off, thanks for reading my post 😀 Today, I’m adding to the My First Ludum Dare™: Mini Edition pile.

I was always intrigued my Ludum Dare. make a game as fast as you can? Sounds awesome, and has led to some of my favorite games! I’ve never gotten in, though, for two reasons.

1. I have the attention span of-ooh, a Killing Floor update? brb
2. Lack of experience developing – the most independent thing I finished was a modification of the Game Maker Catch the Clown tutorial.

This time, however, I have a week, a theme I can use, and not much else to do (go away, Steam list with over 100 games), so here I am.

Yesterday, I was thinking of taking the concept of contrasts loosely – maybe you start out as a soldier for a Nazi like army, and slowly realize the world isn’t as black and white as your superiors put it. Unfortunately, I’ve had to reign in my thought for now – I was figuring out how to get characters in top down games to not get stuck on single pixels, so developing a platform engine on my own would be difficult (and using a tutorial or framework like the Grandma engine didn’t feel right). So, once I got home from a looong car ride, I figured I could make a basic top down shooter, where different weapons of colour destroy their respective ships. How I’ll figure that out? Weeeell, we can worry about that later…

TL:DR gonna do a top down shooter w/ coloured enemies and weapons.

I was going to tell you what my game is about. Hahaha! That’ll never happen! Guess by yourself!

Hello guys:

I am newbie in Ludum dare, its my first time i create a game for this competition. I am from Spain, I don´t have a lot of experience, but i try to do my best. . My challenge its finish this game in 48 hours, max 72 hours. The game doesn´t have a good graphics, i am pretty bad drawing, but i think the game really like people I do it around 12 hours, i want to read good & bad commentarys about my game. You can try it in: http://www.jastro.nixiweb.com/minild/

You can see the game in development in:

http://www.jastro.nixiweb.com/stream/

http://www.mediavida.com/stream/jastro

Controls:

TYPE 1:

Left Arrow && Right Arrow keys->  move.
Z -> For take control of a mob (you must hit with the mob with sprint ability)
Z-> For use mob´s ability.
C-> Destroy the mob.
R-> Restart Level

TYPE 2:

A && D->  move.
Q -> For take control of a mob (you must hit with the mob with sprint ability)
Q-> For use mob´s ability.
E-> Destroy the mob.
R-> Restart Level

Some Screenshots:

Thanks you for read & Play.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 9th, 2012 at 2:02 pm and is filed under MiniLD #36. 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.

Well, I’ve got a fairly fleshed out idea, and I’ve got a bit coded!

With the current version, you can’t really shoot, due to stupid AS3 errors…

Either way, I’ll be seeing you guys later, as I’ve got a few things I have to do!

~thePalindrome

I recently discovered Ludum Dares and other Game Jams events.

I do hope however that this would be an appropriate place to ask a question. I originally made an account and apparently I never got an email response for a password.
I made another account with a second email that I don’t use often and suddenly I get the response regarding about a password.

Who can I ask to get this thing resolved? I would like to switch emails since I use the first one more often for school/project related reason?

I’m working with a friend on this one, but we have some significant time constraints.

We’re using Flex to build a Flash game with the Flash Punk library, with Mercurial for version control shared between a Linux PC and a Windows PC.

After about four or five hours work, including setting up version control, we have some basic functionality; menus, collision, physics, weapons. Version control reports 20 revisions so far, aparently that’s 12 449 lines of changes!

It’s hardly worth posting a screenshot at this point, but I think the game is playable, save one feature and a win condition.

Roughly 2 hours ago, I randomly came up with a concept. I started working on it a bit more over an hour ago, and I’ve just finished an important part of the graphical requirements for the concept to work. Hooray!

I can’t show anything yet as it’s animated, but basically, you can only see one of three colors at the same time. I’m gonna turn it into some sort of puzzle/maze game where you can only see a part of the level at once, forcing you to memorize the layout. No idea if it’ll be fun, but at least it fits the theme 😀

Managed to get level loading up and working.

(Temp graphic)

Also got a simple little fsm up and running, a camera and an input handler. So overall it’s been a pretty good evening. Tomorrows goal: Get the player up and running and get started on the enemy AI.

So, I have wasted day 0! Yay! 😛

(btw. I just noticed that 0 (zero) and o (letter) look the same in WordPress editor… )

The only thing I managed to do is clear up the idea – seeing as the theme is “contrast” I thought of making a game in which the player has to… make a game! And then me (i.e. my “game”) will play it! I was quite excited about this, but I realised it may be a little to much for my first go, especially as I don’t have any experience in AI programming and it seems there would be to be a lot of it going around there…

So this one goes to the forever expanding idea-archive!

This is actually my biggest setback – I tend to overthink and overcomplicate my ideas and then end up leaving unfinished projects all over my drive. That’s actually one of the reasones I decided to do this mini – to man up and finish something for once.

And as for the actuall game I will be going with my second best (in my opinion of course 😀 ) idea – a tunnel obstacle avoidance game where on half of the screen your character moves the way it is supposed to, and the other way the opposite. Of course you have to try not to crash on both of the screens.

I will propably write it using Allegro 5 on Windows, and eventually port it to Linux and Java ( Processing ).

Well, if you reached this part, you may as well leave some feedback! Cheers!

Tags: progress, update

Hallo!

Some of you may remember “TRI“, the game I made for Ludum Dare #20 with Unity. The theme was “It’s dangerous to go alone, take this!”, which was good luck, as it fitted the idea I had the night before. 😛 It also was my first real Ludum Dare back then.

 The original TRI

The game was about triangles; you created them by shooting three little spheres onto gray surfaces. These triangles could then be used as platforms and reflectors. That’s about it. TRI didn’t feature any story, but some texts on walls here and there, for hints and to somewhat simulate the voice from some god-like entity, like GlaDOS. Overall it worked pretty well and there were some people who liked the game although the controls were pretty flawed.

A year later, we (my partner and me) decided to make TRI into a full commercial game. Only the idea of the triangles was adopted, so the setting, the “tri gun”, the maincharacter, the story and the everything changed, or are due to change. (We still use Unity, though.) This basically means the new TRI isn’t a sequel to the LD game.

 The new TRI – WIP

We added some gameplay elements, most prominently the wall walking. Yes, the triangles can now not only be used as platforms to walk on, they also temporarily change  the personal gravity of the player. This way, she or he is even able to jump into a hole in the ceiling – this needs a little bit of exercise though.

Walking on walls

Also, instead of deadly lasers only there are also non-fatal light rays now, with which you activate crystals in order to open doors and do other things. And then there are those little flying ghosts (the Kami), which lead the way and later can be reflected, too. They will be more important later in the game.

 Reflecting light rays

The new TRI is still named TRI, as most of the names we came up with were just too silly or too complicated (Some examples: “Trinsane”, “Trizarre” (thanks Cell), “Tri and Error”, “The Third Eye”, “Connect the dots”, “Konstrukt”, “Trigonomancer”, “Trimancy”, “Triception”, “Triplex”, “The Right Angle”, “180 degrees”, “From Point To Point”, “neuTrino”, …).

TRI can now be pre-ordered for $5, which guarantees access to the pre-alpha. The current  build has one big level (with three sub-levels) which basically serves as a tutorial. There’s also a demo, showcasing the first sub-level. Oh, and here’s a trailer:

The final version hopefully will come out end of the year, and have a price tag of $10. There are far more informations on the official website, tri-game.com, so you might want to give it a look.

Thanks for reading!
– ratking

Tags: LD20, pre-alpha, TRI, triangles, unity, unity3d

And again, good luck with guessing.

Well, it’s my first LD.  Here’s a teaser:

Basically you are a little person who gets to the other side of the screen by turning red (Red kills him) into green.

My entry for the MiniLD

My challenge for this minild, its develop the game to participate in 48 hours. I do it. Really i finished in less time, but i am happy with the game, the name´s game is “Shapeshifter”,

History:

You are the man can enter inside of anything if have life. The people calls you “Shapeshifter”, but that is the only ability you know, you don´t know jump, shoot guns, but you have friends. Take the control of your friends. You can beat the challenge with friends ability.

Some screenshots:

Controls:

TYPE 1:

Left Arrow && Right Arrow keys->  move.
Z -> For take control of a mob (you must hit with the mob with sprint ability)
Z-> For use mob´s ability.
C-> Destroy the mob.
R-> Restart Level

TYPE 2:

A && D->  move.
Q -> For take control of a mob (you must hit with the mob with sprint ability)
Q-> For use mob´s ability.
E-> Destroy the mob.
R-> Restart Level

Play:

http://jastro.nixiweb.com/minild

A number of features have been added, including a winning. Sadly the game isn’t very interesting yet as some important stuff is still missing. The graphics look nicer though.

Mercurial has proved its worth several times already, with 30 revisions and 12 863 lines changed.

Screenshot of Revision 29

So, with absolutely no work done on the first day, here I am evening of the second and I still have barely more than nothing. Just getting started.

I need a little info though. My game’s going to be based on reaction times, and for the sake of difficulty I need to get a feel for what the players average reaction times should look like.

If you’re game, go to PlusPresence.com/ludumdare/contrast.html

You’ll see a blank page. After a random amount of time (less than 15 seconds.) The word “Go!” will appear on screen in read letters. Press the space bar as fast as you can. It will tell you your reaction time. I’ll love you forever if you comment and share the result with me.

If you try it a few times, it’d be great if you could let me know what seems average or if you noticed yourself getting better with multiple tries. I’m assuming we get better with repeated attempts but don’t have a clue what the curve is like.

Thanks a bunch!

– Cody

The goal for this evening was to get the player movement done and get started on the enemy AI. I managed to get the player movement down, the getting started on AI part not so much.

Reggie got finished with most of the tiles for the games. I put together a quick little map with them (image above). Not sure if I will have time to work on the game tomorrow night. But hopefully I will manage to get started a bit on the AI.

Until then, peace out.

Well, today was an awesome day!

I’m nowhere near completion, but I have everything ready, you can move, shoot, and thanks to DAME, level making is easy!

Try it out here!  Don’t forget to let me know what you like, hate, want, etc. from it!

I read it all!

Hey Ryan here and well, this will be my first time doing an LD(mini)!
I’ve not done a game jam for almost 2 years!
University work and stuff always getting in the way. I have always loved jams,
since the first one I did, but I tend to prefer to work in teams during them.

Thats why this mini LD is perfect, I didnt need to do it solo.
I’ve  Teamed up with a good friend from Uni Grant Rule, to make this game.

The theme(Contrast) had me stumped for quite a while, and I eventually went with a fairly cliché
kind of idea to follow, which is basically run with the idea of only using black and white.
Figuring out what I could do with only two colours, I thought of the only obvious thing…
If half of the things in the game are white, and half are black, if the background is black or white, half of the things will seem invisible!

At which point My idea started coming to life and I started drawing.

I wont go into everything thats gone on from then till now, I’ll just post a public link to the (very unpolished)
prototype-y current version!

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/37694220/Contrast/contrast.html

W or UP to jump
A or LEFT to go left
D or Right to go right
and  SPACE to stop time and swap colour.

Not even sure how many people read random posts by random people, but feel free to comment etc 😛

Will make another post when I get a new build done

Is it OK to use text from www.cooltext.com in my contrast entry?  What about in the full LD’s?

You can find my entry https://www.box.com/s/5d50e355d80fb04664cd

Any suggestions are appreciated.

164 lines of code later, and the engine is complete. Took a few rewrites as I’m not quite used to the Corona SDK. Speaking of which, Android will be the target platform of Like Night & Day (working title) via the Corona SDK. Trial version as I don’t have $250 to be spending at the moment.

Windows and Linux versions will be made, both based on Python, Windows version through py2exe, though these versions will not be as well polished for the time being.

A minimal build will be available tomorrow at the earliest. In the mean time, if you’d like to help, I’m in desperate need of a female voice actor to play a lead character. I don’t want to give too much away here, but comment below and we’ll arrange something to see if you’re a good fit.

Does anyone like this music? i think it ‘s pretty bad, but if you like it feel free to use it and/or edit it. Please post your opinion! I am thinking of using it as part of my soundtrack.

http://advanced.aviary.com/artists/Testaccnt/creations/piano_fast

Actually, I wasn’t going to participate this time due to a lack of time. But relaxed rules made me to change my mind. I designed mechanics for the game from scratch and then added water (which became lava this time) and particles system from my previous miniLD game.

I use 4 contrast colors in the game – orange-blue and black-white.

So I’m coding in AS3 using FlashPunk and Dame. Music taken from some vintage keygen. I’m going to spend the rest two days on leveldesign and polishing. I will also try to add a couple of gameplay elements if I will have time for that.

So here’s quick mechanics demo with tonns of bugs of course.

Tags: DAME, flash, flashpunk, minild #36, platformer, screenshot

I have a very stable release 0.2 of my game!

You can now visit all ten levels, and everything is all set for me to add enemies!

One of the big things I wanted to make was a theme song for the game, but my music making skills are very low…

I’m not asking for free music online, but I’d like to know how the song-creators out there learned their trade!

That’s been really bugging me, because I’m a fairly decent cellist, but I can’t make music (musagi), worth crap!

~thePalindrome

Sorry for the repeated music posts but…

I FINISHED MY SOUNDTRACK!!!! (kinda)

listen to it here:

https://www.box.com/s/27278e22549a8e2639ef

I’ll most likely make better music for it sometime soon, but m3h, it’s OK.

Today saw alot of improvement!
Added a gravity shifting mechanic (took no time at all)
which had to manipulate the camera (took way more time).

Added even more block types; an always out and always blocking – type block, the gravity changing block, and a lightning covered block (kills you)

And I spent quite some time making the jumping work really nicely (was a pain in the arse using unity rigid bodies)
Lots of ray casting fun 😀

Considering this is my first time using unity, and it being a full game, Me and Grant are making amazing progress!

There are lots of polished things I would like to add / do to this game, which are out of scope really down to the limited knowledge of unity, and the fact neither me nor Grant have any art background beyond simple photoshopping.

I’d very much like to use some actual models/meshes, and not just unity balls + cubes.
And have some things normal mapped, but we’ll see  in the last day how that is looking!

For now, try the updated game : http://dl.dropbox.com/u/37694220/Contrast/contrast.html

A bit late, I know. I’ve actually been making stuff since Monday, but my internet and I fell out. Last time I did this with some friends, but as this is the mini, I’m going to go it alone.
Unfortunately, I’m neither an artist nor a musician, and some might even question my programming ability (while I’m not in the room). However, I’ve already finished all the graphics I think I’ll need, and, if I do say so myself, my clouds are pretty damn swanky:

(Hmm… check the dither on that)

I’ve started on some totally unsuitable music and sound effects, but I haven’t written a single line of code yet, so I may yet fail 😛

Try my game Here:

https://www.box.com/s/5d50e355d80fb04664cd

INSTRUCTIONS:

WASD + space = move

click = change color of object.

Red and spikes kill you, green is a jump pad.

get to the blue circle!

Comment with your best score so i can get a feel for how hard the game is.

I made all the programming (excluding menus and a tutorial) but I can’t make enough levels! I made just 2.5 levels, but I need at least twice as much! So expect me to finish a bit later.

Here is another screenshot to tease you:

Visit here!

Hey everyone! I am glad to announce that the second Hack-a-Jam will be starting on July 14, and I am your host. There are only 2 more days left until a theme is released, and the comp starts!

The Hack-a-Jam is a gaming jam that is different from others. Instead of one overall winner, there is an infinite amount of categories that you can win in, and there will always be multiple winners. Here are some examples of categories you can win in:

Best Graphics
Best Audio
Most extra items (dev logs, etc.)
Most Creative
Most Glitch-free
Longest Game
Shortest Game
Hardest Game
Easiest Game
Best themed
Most fun game

The amount of time given in the jam is voted on by the community, along with the theme. You can submit themes, and most of them will be sent to the Polls section, where others can vote on themes.

By winning, you will get a badge and bragging rights, along with your name listed on the website permanently as a winner. When this jam gets to be huge, you will be really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really famous! The rules are not very restricted, as the jam is purely for fun:

1. All game content must be created within the set time. Note: You can use other music, placeholder graphics, etc. as long as you are allowed to!
2. Your game is not required to follow the theme, but would greatly improve your chances of winning. Unless every other game is not following the theme, it is almost guaranteed that your game won’t win anything.
3. You must work alone, and you must create everything included in the game.
4. All game creation tools are permitted, such as GameMaker, Photoshop, Flash, Paint, etc. Note: By game creation tools, I mean any tools that can be used to create your game.
5. All game extensions/DLLs are permitted. If you want to make it multiplayer (if you are using GameMaker), go ahead and use 39dll.

The second Hack-a-Jam takes place on July 14, in 2 days, so you should sign up now! Good luck everyone!

My game’s name is DeathJump now.

you can play it here:

https://www.box.com/s/d92171a1e77c171dab95

Things didn’t go as planned, so we haven’t spent as much time adding to the game as I hoped, but hopefully my colleage, Alexbrainbox, will be able to continue working on it after I leave for holiday tommorrow.

I suspect LD 24 will be easier for both of us because we won’t be interrupted by other things. I look forward to it!

Screenshot of revision 35

The week is almost over, but that doesn’t keep me from entering the competition just now

My Entry It’s going to be a little puzzle game with a game mechanic based on contrast. I’ll write a little bit more about that later. I will use the rest of the evening today to setup my engine and start coding tomorrow. My goal is to get at least a working prototype with a few levels done until Sunday. Polishing can wait until after the compo.

Tags: im in, late start

I’m done! After 4 days of making this game I’m finally done. It’s amazing how much you learn, no matter how small the project is. While making this game I was worried, because the game is risky. The chances are that the player will not be able to understand the game. I just hope it won’t happen with most players.

You can play my game right here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-36/?action=preview&uid=5959

I hope you enjoy!

finnaly! hi, my name is mohammad,but im probibly on the “just another programmer on the side of the world” meter. but ill be going at it all this lundum. for now,im stuck with the minilundm.

signing off, MOHAMMAD M.

ps:my last name is mohammad 😀

open to all! 😀

this is a very complex AI engine,completly open souce,made for responces with displayed text.

how it works is that one person will enter text that wasent idenified beforehand,causing a pop-up message saying “what is the response to this statement?”, from there the player can enter in text which will then be remembered in an engine. when the player re-enters the text, the game engine will seach it up, and display the message that the player entered before. the only problem is that this can cause alot of lag, due to the amount of reponses possible. good for soical games however. BUT DONT THINK YOU CAN USE THIS FOR LUMDUM DARE, OR I WILL FIND YOUR SOURCE AND HACK YOUR GAME, AND SCREW IT UP! WATCH OUT! (however, you CAN use this AFTER the lundum dare.)

Enemies – check!

Music – check!

All that I’m missing, is proper level design, but apart from that, I’m almost done!

Check my entry out here, you will not be sorry!

CRAP, why wont my mic record?

FYI im using soundtap to record, although sound recourder could work too…

i dont get it. it was working last time.

any suggestions?

Today was a day where nothing felt like it was getting done…
I think there HAS been a lot done, it just went so fast, and felt so empty…

Fixed a whole of of bugs, created more bugs and then fixed even more.
Added a springy block to the game, feels all kinds of wrong at the moment (in my opinion)
Though Grant thinks it works allright (yay for creative difference and opinions!)

Currently 2 builds up of the game, one with an orthographic / 2d / flat camera view,
and one with a zoomed in perspective / 3D  view, will probably make an in game option to switch.

In the process of changing all the base blocks into round cornered hollow blocks with meshes inside
to denote  the block types. (I’m no 3D modeller so using blender makes my eyes bleed  )

Anyway, any comments on it would be good 😀

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/37694220/contrast/contrast.html  – FLAT 2D feel
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/37694220/contrast3D/contrast3D.html – PERSPECTIVE 3D feel

Boy, I decided to the mini LD thinking it would be easier then the full on LD since I could just “work on it in my spare time” instead of dedicating 48 straight hours to it. But apparently if you don’t make time you’ll never have time… so I’ve touched this very little. : /

At the very least, the mechanics for the level are there, and it’s possible to win. Making new levels won’t be an issue as the only difference from one to the next is the skill of the enemy.

But the framework, selecting a level, choosing a character, choosing a difficulty session, and progression through all need to be built yet.

Also there’s not a single graphic yet.

And there’s no sound.

And that’s what I’m working on this evening. Sound. Any advice on how to handle sound in JS/Canvas games? I hear HTML5’s audio element is notorious for lag, and for a reaction time based game a late sound is much worse than no sound at all…

why not make a game about oppisite day and NOT getting to school early.

Visit here!

Hey everyone! I am glad to announce that the second Hack-a-Jam will be starting on July 14, and I am your host. There is only 1 day left until a theme is released, and the comp starts!

The Hack-a-Jam is a gaming jam that is different from others. Instead of one overall winner, there is an infinite amount of categories that you can win in, and there will always be multiple winners. Here are some examples of categories you can win in:

Best Graphics
Best Audio
Most extra items (dev logs, etc.)
Most Creative
Most Glitch-free
Longest Game
Shortest Game
Hardest Game
Easiest Game
Best themed
Most fun game

The amount of time given in the jam is voted on by the community, along with the theme. You can submit themes, and most of them will be sent to the Polls section, where others can vote on themes.

By winning, you will get a badge and bragging rights, along with your name listed on the website permanently as a winner. When this jam gets to be huge, you will be really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really famous! The rules are not very restricted, as the jam is purely for fun:

1. All game content must be created within the set time. Note: You can use other music, placeholder graphics, etc. as long as you are allowed to!
2. Your game is not required to follow the theme, but would greatly improve your chances of winning. Unless every other game is not following the theme, it is almost guaranteed that your game won’t win anything.
3. You must work alone, and you must create everything included in the game.
4. All game creation tools are permitted, such as GameMaker, Photoshop, Flash, Paint, etc. Note: By game creation tools, I mean any tools that can be used to create your game.
5. All game extensions/DLLs are permitted. If you want to make it multiplayer (if you are using GameMaker), go ahead and use 39dll.

The second Hack-a-Jam takes place on July 14, in 1 day, so you should sign up now! Good luck everyone!

Hi all,

I’m a bit late to this mini LD. Oh well, better late than never! I’ve got the basics of my game done. I’m not absolutely sure what it will turn into, as I still have to fit contrast in there somewhere. Oh! Just got an idea well writing this… haha, we’ll see how this goes!

I have the basic build up just in case anyone wants to see what I have so far. It can be found by clicking here.

I’ll have a new post up when I get the contrast thing sorted out and a nice, playable build up for testing.