I don’t really know why butI guess I’m doing a dungeon crawler. Nice tiles, eh? Pixel-artists will see some mistakes over here and there but anyways.

Good luck to all!

Got boooritts!!

PLAY:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/21495867/LD24/Saturday1pm/WebPlayer/WebPlayer.html

LOOKY:

Kaiji has finally pinpointed his game idea and relayed some placeholder art on the screen! The towers, enemies, and basic user input are functional!

DAGA! SHIKASHI!

The two core mechanics, related to evolution and electricity, are yet nowhere to be seen! He must have at least their prototypes finished today to stay on schedule!

Will he succeed?!?!?!??! Or will Ludum Dare swallow him whole?!?! Will there be setbacks or jetpacks on his path?!!!?! THIS IS FAINARU BOSSU!!!!!!!!

RUDUMU DEERU!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

*gong*

*ending theme*

Progress is slow because I spent a lot of time cleaning the code. Now the little pink creature start wandering on the map and eat those yellow food.

Tomorrow I’ll start working on the creature evolution part. Those tiny creatures gains new ability by evolution, and that’s the key to survive on this land.

Live code.

Might be broken.

I’m a bit late to start but now is better then never.

I will make my game in html5/javascript and graphics in paint.net.

I will post some work in progress later.

For having worked a few hours last night, I should farther along than this. It probably doesn’t help that I changed frameworks and languages at the last minute, I’m now trying out Cocos2d-html5. This what I’ve got so far – the white box moves when you press the arrow keys.

I feel my brain turning off so I switched over to art work. I completed all the sprites for the space worm, here is a screen shot:

playable build is here:
http://www.monkeydev.com/unity/ld24/index.html

Good night

This is going to be my first Ludum Dare. So excited. Going to use MMF2 for game and Paint for graphics. Yeah!

Pretty-fy. Yeah, I made that up.

Added a visor and some particle effects for the coin.

I’ll be working on a model for the coin as soon as my download of Google Sketchup is finished. I forgot my laptop doesn’t have blender. Pif.

I’ve got my idea to start with. You play as a sapient flan fighting sapient kittens to save his flan village.

Evolution, you ask? Well, it’s a post-apocalyptic world where life has recovered without humans. Domestic animals and gelatinous desserts have evolved to sapience and their society as at the medieval stage.

So, again, the player character is a sapient dessert. No one said that the evolution has to happen during play, after all! 😀

Time to get to work!

I’m just getting started, don’t you worry about that!

– Henry

I’m working on this evolving ham eating tongue ham with cute eyes…in space.

This is going to be interesting.

It’s gonna be coo’.

As I suspected the theme would be a “easy” one like Kittens, I wasn’t expecting Evolution to come out of the high hat.

Thinking about the movie as @jwaaaap suggested, I didn’t come up with a shred of ideas to start of with.

And then it hit me (apple falling from the tree idea), Evolution is about life as well.

So, I have decided to take my main character through his own life, as he’s growing older and hopefully wiser.

Next update will be tomorrow, now back to the coding

A bit late, but I’ve been waiting for evolution for a long time, so I’ve gotta try. I will be using Unity and Blender.
Unfortunately, I have to help someone move tomorrow afternoon, so we shall see whether I can actually get anything finished or not.

I’ve been doing some modelling in Blender so far, perhaps a little bit to much actually. Instead of doing game mechanics I’ve been doing the basic two models I need in the game, and spent just a tad bit too much time on them. But I’m moving on now! Going to import the models and do basic set up up my world, including the movement of player. Wish me good luck!

I think my food is a little bit different from most of the other LudumDarers

Some scrambled eggs with full-fat cream, a load of cottage cheese, a couple of cherry tomatoes and milk. Mmmgood!

I’ve decided to create a game, where you start as a worm, collect food, coins, lives and most importantly DNA, which can be used to evolve to fish, then crocodile and then monkey. I’ve finished most of art, level loader & worm.

Working demo(requires java 6+, needs download): https://dl.dropbox.com/u/29628587/LifeOfWorm_dev.jar

Well, we have some models modeled, some 2d assets created for our first stage and some code written. Now it’s time for me (Thomas) to take a 5 hour nap so I am not totally useless after being up for 20 hours already! The team is still working though on other things.

Skypeians Team Members are:

Thomas L. (Programmer), San Diego, CA
Alex M. (Programmer), San Diego, CA
Chris F. (Artist), San Diego, CA
Joe K. (Artist), Dover, DE
Austin (Artist), Orlando, FL

Well, yeah… I made some progress for just 1 hour so far.
I wasted 2 hours, one hour of that is trying to fix my mouse.

Gonna have to go to bed though. Here in the Philippines, it’s 1 AM. I need sleep~

Can’t spoil stuff yet but have a title screen!

Take a look at the current video (4 hours development time), click on screenshot:

The Evolution of the beetle is represented by eating colorful objects that affect the beetles’ color. The beetle evolves a color to avoid being seen by an enemy at the end of the level. (Sorry, I can’t speak properly now, hehe).

Had around 6 hours of broken sleep, and scrapped all of my ideas from last night as unworkable in the time I’m going to have this weekend and with my artistic ability, or lack thereof.

After breakfast (sorry, forgot to photograph it, but it was just some golden syrup porridge and tea) I opened up GIMP and did what I swore I’d not do this time around – started messing around trying to come up with graphical ideas. I regularly waste far too much time doing this rather than coding and am never overly happy with the results anyway, however, today, my procrastinating paid off, and whilst doodling I came up with an idea which has been evolving (see what I did there?) for the past hour or so.

Whilst there’s a lot more sketching out of design details to do, and plenty more art needed, I’m pretty happy with how this developing. Here’s a bit of a teaser, which really doesn’t give anything away:

Not giving much away.

My fiance Kell picked me up some if my favourite snacks earlier, and as you’ll see it’s probably not going to be the healthiest of weekends for me, especially as I’ll be missing the gym, but a high carb diet is essential for this kind of thing:

Some snacks for the weekend.

Before I went to bed, I started working on getting a skeleton project up and running.

I know. I know. It’s supposed to be one of my pre-compo checklist items: “Is your build environment working? I’m using CMake, and I should probably prepare an LD24 project beforehand so I’m not wasting time trying to get the build scripts to work when I could have a buildable project with a blank window from the start.”

Well, I didn’t. So I spent the first few hours getting a window up. Basically, I took existing scaffolding code (a basic Game class, Command/Event interfaces, stuff like that) and slapped it together as minimally as possible until it could build successfully and leave me with a window that shows a title screen and can exit properly.

The title is…evolving.

But the actual game design? Still only ideas right now.

I figured that a lot of people might try to make a Spore clone. I’ve seen quite a few screenshots with little primordial oozes as playable characters, and presumably you gain abilities, appendages, and interact with other units that might be more or less evolved than you. While I’m excited to play some of these games, I’m not sure Yet-Another-Variation would be interesting to work on.

I like the idea of an evolving landscape. A tile-based world that starts out with only one kind of tile with certain attributes, but as you explore it, you come across evolved tiles which might have new attributes or changes to existing ones that might impact movement, health, sight, sound, etc. And if I do it right, no two play sessions will be the same.

In terms of engineering, experimenting with neural networks might be fun. Maybe let the player pick a trait, and then have the system go through a few iterations to find out how healthy it is compared to others. On the other hand, that sounds like a lot of uncertainty and an unfinished compo entry.

Anyway, I’ll think about it some more over breakfast.

What is working:
– Dynamic portrait
– Mood bars
– Walkin player

After a terrible age of single threaded games, i finally found out how to use multiple threads! I have googled many hours before, but today i found an open source engine called Jrabbit I didn’t look at it to much but i found their javadoc while i was googling, and found the object WatchableGLThread An that is exactly what i was looking for! You can find the source code or use the engine itself.

This is just i message for al LWJGL Developers who had problems with this. I think there are alot of people who had trouble with this! Good luck developing!

I’ve barely coded anything yet, but I have got a small town drawn out. This will the place to buy your upgrades. it looks awful to me but with 36 hours to go I don’t think I will improve it :/

Now on to adding some actual gameplay. But first: lunch!

Hey all! I hope everything is going well for everyone so far; I’ve been coding like mad so far, and there’s still a lot more to go! I’d like to share my game idea as well as my recent progress:

Static is a game about chaos. Starting with a television screen full of static, the player uses different buttons on the remote to pause, fast-forward, rewind, and color different sections of the screen. With random static generating constantly, the player must choose when to pause which sections in order to create their masterpiece. This is a sandbox game with no particular goal other than exploring ideas, creativity, and the evolution of form from randomness.

So far, I’ve finally gotten the static to work with libGDX, and by lowering the rate of change, I’ve gotten the frame rate up to a consistent 30 FPS from 5.

Also,here’s my breakfast of champions that got me started:

It was delicious!!!

If you knew me, you’d know that I’d try to work in a yellow dog somewhere…

I’ve got an overall concept down, but I’ll save that for another post. Today will be a long day. This morning I’m in the process of building graphics, and setting up an engine to support collision detection (the dog gets stupid around walls) as well as the passage of time.

You can see some of the basic animations of the yellow dog by following this link. Click elsewhere in the scene to get the dog to move around.

http://barrysfarm.com/ld24/

This Ludum Dare is going great

What I have so far:

• An idea.
• An character
• Swining arms.
• A world place holder
• Great music to listen too while I’m programming (http://open.soundrop.fm/s/WHptOvYcN72xhXlJ)

You can play my begin over here: http://games.corne.info/LD/LD24/1/bin/index.html

[](/e15)

You play as an organism “floating” in your environment, surrounded by other organisms (like Spore).  You fight them with attacks and abilities and gain exp for killing. When you reach a next level a boss appears. When you kill him you transfer to next game level.

With each level-up you can spend one point to upgrade your organism. The are different branches. You can be aggressive fighter, defence-oriented “tank”, evasive assassin etc.

I’ll be streaming the process of development here: http://www.justin.tv/ayumukasuga

Looks good right? That’s probably as good as it will get…

It’s 2 hours into Ludum Dare for me. Well, actually more. I woke up at 5-6 AM and checked out the theme and went to sleep. My unconscious mind started working on an idea.

I was toying with an idea to publish a Unity game with just a cube in it. Nothing more. Call it a game, and then evolve the cube and environment from your feedback. What does the cube do, what should I turn it into. A kind of play on “4th/5th wall”, but in game design. I’m not going to do this. This is a fun idea but not for Ludum Dare.

What I’m going to pursue is going to be a bit more classical.

Have you played Swarm? Have you played SimLife? Have you played flOw? I’m making a game inspired by these three.

My plan so far:

• The player will get a swarm of creatures of different features and behaviors to control.
• The player will control the swarm, not individual creatures.
• The creatures will just follow the hints given by the player (the general direction player chooses), but their exact behavior will be affected by their features like: size, speed, acceleration, laziness, curiosity, hunger, energy, motivation, attraction towards a specific terrain feature, etc.
• The goal of the game is to move a number of creatures from the Spawn Point to the Breed Point.The level areas will have different features like: temperature, light, humidity.
• There will be many levels in the game.
• At the end of each level, some stats of survivors and non-survivors will be displayed.
• In the first Spawn Point, the creatures are generated at random, with random features.
• In all the Breed Points, the creatures that got there will get to breed. Features of the survivors will have the best chances to be picked from in the next Spawn Point.
• In the subsequent Spawn Points, the creatures will be generated at random, but with features biased towards those of survivors.
• The controls will be simple WASD/Arrows and maybe some mouse clicking.
• The player will be given tools to kill off creatures he doesn’t like, but only during the level playthrough.
• The graphics are going to be simple, just to illustrate different features of the creatures. So, probably abstract cubes or spheres with add-ons.
• Focus on the behaviors. I can churn out code quickly, I suck at graphics.
• There will be food and predators that will affect how the swarm behaves.

I’m going to use Unity3D.

Tags: evolution

My game will finally be talking about a cell (wow!).

This cell is very egocentric and narcissic. Located on the human brain, she is thinking about looking for a new body (yes, this cell can control bodies), becauseshe finds the human body nod good enough for her.

So she jumps of the human, and accidentally gets on a rat. For her, controlling a rat is horrible, so she begins running and searching a new body.

After one level, she finds a rabbit. She continues to search a better body, though.

She will find a new body at the end of each level.

Oh, and here is a screenshot of the game:

What ? No, I’m not late…

Oh, and I’m streaming here: http://fr.twitch.tv/adbook

I’ve spent way too much time writing an auto-tiler, something I should have done before LD! Maybe I can start figuring out what my game is now.

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 25th, 2012 at 10:35 am and is filed under LD #24. 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.

Its not a very fun game yet.

But I need feedback on whether its working or not on different computers.

Just follow the simple install instructions!

http://www.mediafire.com/?p3mk2yloh4thrn3

I hate dealing with rotations and that quaternion black magic T_t

I have no screen shots as there are no real art in the game yet.  The story is progressing nicely.  The Chose your own adventure seems to be working for me and here is a link to dl what I’ve got going on so far.  I hope you enjoy.

BMS Download

My old idea sucked. It was going to be some kind of “evolution of a game development”, where you start as just a player then the world builds up and more features are added. But, after starting it, I found it was pretty much only a content themed game which I cannot make well enough. So, I’ve thought of a good actual gameplay idea, and shall make that. It’s only 3 hours

Hello people!

I am Tom and this is my first ludum dare but not my first games jam, I’ve been in three global games jams and worked as a team in them. This time I’m on my own.

Ok, for the theme, evolution, I am going to do a game on evolving industry, mining in particular, cube mining….

You start off as a simple single cube miner and from there you evolve! lets see how far I get with this, but I at least want to evolve from one manual labour method to full on factory methods. The player will make many key decisions and respond to events which will ultimately evolve your mining operation one way or another.

The reasons for this choice:

• I love management games that react to the players input
• I want stories to be made in the players head from this, about there own little cube mining adventure
• I want to demonstrate how industry has evolved, from a single person with rock chipping out materials to massive factories mining up the earth
• Cubes are easy to model XD

The graphics won’t be amazing, a lot of it will be text, in fact I’m debating on whether to do graphics much at all (static scenes kind of thing) just because I am no artist.

I will be using Unity3D, it’s my tool of choice and a brilliantly flexible one at that.

If you wish to follow me:

I will be tweeting here: https://twitter.com/DraXoV

I’m streaming here: http://www.twitch.tv/draxov

and of course, blogging right here.

Lets see what I can make! 😀

Good luck to everyone else! thanks for reading

Having slept on the problem, I think I’ve come up with an idea that’s not too terrible. Evo-Poker! Kind of a cross between video poker and the wonderful evolution card game Quirks.

I was hoping to try my hand at a Flash game, but it looks like I’ll be using Adventure Game Studio instead. Oh well.

The real fun is going to be juggling the game with actual paying work that I also need to complete over the weekend! So if I drop out, you’ll know why.

I’ve got my terrain renderer working, and I can now add trees randomly to the world, between specific heights. And I’ve got a player character, obviously with full body awareness, as you can see above. 😀

I’m making a photography game. The idea is that you have to take pictures of different animals. Then you have to classify them. Some animals will have slight variations, meaning they’re a new species. Or something like that. My plan is to make the player go from island to island, find x animals, photograph them, then move on to the next island. Then you can look at the photo’s you’ve taken, and group them according to species. A scoring mechanism will be based on the amount of species you’ve photographed, and how many you had wrongly classified. Or just an endless mode with no real goal.

It’s a bit ambitious, as I’d like to get procedurally generated islands in the game, in addition to procedurally generated animals. I’m still a bit unsure how I’m going to pull that off, as I’m most comfortable with my crappy 2D textured billboard sprites. And I have to figure out how to make a ‘photo’. But hey, at least I’ve got a decent looking world, and legs 😀

The first map.:)

Yeah i have worked about 2-3 hours on the game now and it is going quite well. (Damn i started way to late :/)

I have my idéa done and are doing game functionality now.

Behold my beautiful game so far 😛

So, I know what’s going to happen, and written some basic conversations, but I’m having issues with how to instance my environment for decisions. May have to build a machine with RAM modules to save decision state between instances (or the passing of time, so conversations don’t execute more than once.

Else I think things are going smoothly, I have 2 and a half days (with Monday as a bank Holiday in the UK). Would ideally want Monday for polishing, but I should make it successfully for the Jam deadline.

Next Job, building! May use WorldEdit to make literal copies of each instance to save time/avoid Slimes on a superflat world.

Tags: minecraft adventure story

I did great last time so I’m a bit nervous to enter, especially since I don’t have a lot of time to work on my game… again.

The main thing I’m going to do differently this time is that I’m going to make a windows downloadable as well as a html5 version. I also want to make something less complicated this time, but the concepts I’m coming up with so far don’t fit that requirement… as always. Why is coming up with something simple so hard!

What always seems to work out for me is doing the music first, so that’s what I did.

Listen to the song I composed here >  Hey, listen!

Good thing is that this is just the prototype of a galaxy map…

Almost a quarter of the way through and I have no idea what I’m doing! My game vaguely involves a sort of tower defence type thing where different towers fire different blocks so you sort of have to make the blocks hit each other, then they merge into better blocks and hopefully destroy your enemy… Sort of.

The green blocks have merged to make yellow blocks. But I think I may have that the wrong way around.

Woke up, felt great and continued working. On just two hours I’ve got the bullets working, a properly scrolling background, a zombie (just a immobile dummy for now) and particles. Gotta love ’em particles!

Fresh from the primordial ooze!

After a little more than 10 hours, we can see the main character’s face ! (Actually, it’s a she.)

For once, it’s a heroine who saves the world !
Made me think about games nowadays with female main character. Metroid… ? Portal… ?

I had a vague idea of what my game would be when I started, bit I’m mostly letting it “evolve” as I create it. It started out as being a growing tree or plant, for which you can guide the growth of the plant to a goal by choosing which branches would continue to grow. After one growth cycle, several flowers appear on a limited number of branches. You choose a flower based on the growth direction of the branch it’s connected to. Eventually the plant will have grown in the proper direction and made it to it’s goal.

Beyond that, I’m thinking that you will have to grow flowers that defend against enemies, like a tower defense game. Perhaps the type of enemies that appear in each wave is determined by the color of flower you clicked to continue growing the plant. The player has to then think about which flower to click to move the growth of the plant towards the goal, but at the same time, choose the color of flower carefully since they will have to deal with a more challenging enemy wave or wave type depending.

I’m working to design something a little more dynamic, but I’m starting to program these basic components, and improve the plant/tree growth procedure.

Finished the menu system and basic movement

Link to most recent version

The first lunch of the compo:

That’s a peanut butter, banana, and raisin sandwich. It also has some cinnamon sprinkled inside. And some carrots and broccoli on the side.

As for the project, here’s what I’m planning:

– get the player’s character in the game
– make it controllable
– add obstacles (most likely boulders)
– make collisions between the player and obstacles deadly
– add an enemy
– create a wave of enemies
– create a way to modify the wave of enemies so each enemy evolves in some way

That last bit hopefully doesn’t become too ambitious. There’s a lot that could be decided here. For instance, maybe the attributes of every enemy that makes it past the player or causes the player damage more heavily inspire the evolution of later waves.

But besides that, I should probably figure out exactly the kinds of things that can be evolved. Here’s where I worry about how limited the evolutionary changes can be. There’s only so much procedural work I can leverage. There’s still the decisions I have to make for what that procedural

For instance, enemy health can increase as new waves arrive. What about enemy armor? Should I include it, or is it just the equivalent of more health? Weapons could get stronger and faster, but what about allowing angles? Homing missiles? Spray guns vs lasers vs explosives?

If I decide to include explosives, then the radius could be one of the attributes that changes, but the decision to allow explosives in the first place means that the potential for evolutionary changes is limited by what I can implement on my own, and the procedural stuff is less interesting than merely tweaking some values.

But I’ll worry about it all once I get something playable.

Hello! The contest started for me at 4am so i began with .. sleep.. but also with enlightenment

This is my first Ludum Dare attempt but not first game competition at all, here’s my recent: 4kb game contest on FGL

I’ll keep my progress here.

(for now it’s just some tiled display meaning some kind of puzzle made in 2 hours)

Good Luck all !!

Since I’ll only be free on Sunday anyway so might as well go for compo instead.

I’ll be using enchantJS and plugins/libraries they provide on the site at www.enchantjs.com

Sound effect is probably non-existence or by sfxr.

Music might be made by mixing song from MusicShake and pay $0.99 to download it.

Might make a text adventure game or little graphic. I spent the whole day teaching so I really need to hurry and keep up with this. 12 hours has already gone! >_<

Firat update of all, we changed the name of the game for something more abstract 😛 here are the main changes :
– map definition in a text file
– load map prefabs based on text
– end level prefab
– level elapsed time counting
– character controler add to the char prefab

next steps
– show level timer
– add some models to the level
– think about background image for the levels
– make some creative credits scene

some screenshots
the level build by 3D tiles

level definition file

link for the current release on web
http://apps.vacavitoria.com/ludumdare24/build2/build2.html

Tags: character controller, endlevel, escape evolution, file, map, map definition, timer, txt

After much deliberation and several hours brainstorming/planning, i’ve finally decided to begin. I have a general idea for a game, however it is… ambitious, to say the least. Given that this is my first LD and i’ll have started late, I doubt i’ll finish. But i’ll never know if I dont try!

Programs being used:
Game Maker 8 Pro
Paint.NET
FL Studio
sfxl
Audacity
Coffee

i hope that i get finish the game 😀

It has been 12 hours. On my first jam. With 1 hour of coding done(Went shopping with dad for a long time, and slept). And i got rendering working!

This picture does not show off much, but it perfectly reads a level off a bitmap and draws it in realtime with 600 fps. Time to fix some stuff:

The level bitmap was made for the old scale. I now have a smaller scale on the screen, so yeah. Need to fix that. Work!

Since slow progress is progress too, I’ll show you what I have.

Click the image to “play” (html5)

Left and right or A and D to walk

Up, W, X or Alt to jump

Space, Z, Control or Shift to shoot.

Finally I got something barely playable!
My game is inspired by Pikmin, and tower defence games. You control a swarm of minions that you must use to protect something (not sure yet). The catch is that they will reproduce themselves (and die) a lot and each generation will have slightly different attributes then the previous one, I hope some natural selection (and evolution) will occur based on this:D

You can play the latest build HERE

… and here’s my lunch photo

Tags: food

Up to the announcement of the theme and the start of the comp I’d been drawing up ideas for almost every theme in the list (at least the ones i voted for) but when evolution was announce I was stumped.

Looking at IRC, other people seemed to have the same reaction.

This was a good thing, it’s a challenge and its why we’re all here (except for those that are here to make kitten-related games)

It’s 11pm in Australia (Sydney) right now, and because of the timezone difference, I’ll be at work while most are finishing their works of art (no sarcasm).

Anyway, I followed a few dead ends, had a few BSOD’s, and now I have a walk cycle for a guy (Ferdinand) wielding a carrot (there is more..):

As always, I look forward to seeing what others make out of this theme

I have tons of inspiration but all of my ideas are either too complex or way too simple…

So waiting for an idea to pop I made a cellular automaton…

And it works!

Ok…after brainstorm, sleep shower, eating, and a few hours of coding, here it is :

The game is gonne be named “PixEvolution” !

Your character is a pixel, a simple one at first, then he can evolve, and so do the gameplay, and the music..gonna make about 3 or 4 evolution if I can..

First 2 gameplay are almost done, basic tilemap with horrible assets is setup, tweaking time now !!

Ludum Dare is coming along… Slowly. The rust on me is probably so brown it’s nearly black. But I have an idea and it might be good, all I need to do is execute it. Right?

Programmer graphics coming to take you away!

Anyway it’s going to be a risk-like game with a twist: you can change all the rules and victory conditions. I played a pretty cool card game where changing the rules was the core of the game, pretty neat idea actually. As for the theme I wanted to do something with robots taking over the world – it’s only the next logic evolution of computers anyway.

Not sure if the game is going to be anything to celebrate over, but I’m having fun at least. Except for getting annoyed about C++ missing all my favourite features from other languages… But in time I’ll be in love with it anyway.

Wait what am I saying, it’s all your fault :p

The theme just didn’t inspire me at all.  Shame really.  I had firm ideas on about 5 themes that I could have lived with but 3 of the themes I absolutely hated actually inspired another idea that would have been perfect unfortunately none of those got voted in and Evolution did

Apart from the two ideas I bought up in a previous post everything, and I mean everything, I came up with was derivative and/or too vast in scope for one man to do over about 12-14 hours available to me at the weekend.  So it’s with a heavy heart that I’m bowing out of LD yet again.

At some point I’ll have both the time and a doable idea for a LD but this isn’t that time so yet again it’s fairwell and good luck to everyone involved.

Until next time.

So im doing development video log vlog things, this is my first one.

thanks heaps to everyone who watches it, good luck.

Oh dear. If you run past 2158 metres in our game, nothing spawns and the timer stops.

Its been 12 hours. The game is fun to play, if only rudimentery. Heres another screenshot, but hopefully next update we could get a video. Maybe.

Comment if you want to know more.

This is the stuff! I feel the urge to experiment, to breathe the true spirit of the Ludum Dare, and push myself into a realm I have never before dealt: the isometric map. Spent the hours I had this morning figuring out how to best render an isometric grid, and now…SUCCESS! Step one complete, I shall move on to some placeholder graphics and start the control scheme.

Tags: isometric, map, progress, proud feelings, success

I know it’s rude, but I think it’s some sort of my style (i cann’t make better visual in narrow time).

I hope it look like old movie poster.

I was going to make my own simple GUI, and I might still end up doing so, but at least for now, I am using Quickie, and Immediate Mode GUI for LOVE.

https://github.com/vrld/Quickie

We have got the basics up and functioning now! The game idea is simple but hopefully unique!
You can follow the stream here :  http://sv.twitch.tv/dals132# and test the progress  so far here : https://dl.dropbox.com/u/5470325/Site/index.html

/DalsGames

Since we’re participating from Europe, we received the theme at 3am and slept on it 😉 This morning I had a great idea based around the Bacterial Resistance: enemies will have 3 resistances display in their R, G and B channels. They will mutate with each generation, but by and large should become harder to kill simply because of natural selection.

The goal is to exterminate them all before they reach plague proportions!

Obviously it would be boring to wipe out germs, so instead we’ll be exterminating kittens. Hurrah!

Want to stay up to date with development? Go to my Ludum Dare game page: there are links to the base-code I’m using, github repository, my (real) website and and rolling-release version of the game itself (so far pretty basic).

Tags: exterminate, flamethrower, kittens, napalm

It is the year 2050. Mankind has finally achieved an elusive goal: interplanetary travel. Our hero was selected over thousands of similarly skilled volunteers for this one-way journey to Mars. After a year of spaceflight, he prepares to touch down on the alien planet, only to learn that a critical landing thuster has not survived the journey.

Our hero survives a crash landing on the Martian surface, but the ship doesn’t. The ship’s nuclear core is leaking onto the Martian soil, endangering Martians. The creatures who have been exposed to the spilling nuclear core are mutating! Mutated Martians are now becoming violent. Our hero must contain the spill to save himself, the mission, and Mars!

I just got back from Judo, finally get to start coding. I’ve got two potential ideas at the moment, and I need somewhere to use as a sounding board to pick between them. So here we go:

Evolution Of Enemies

The premise of this one is fairly simple, and has the benefit of being actual evolution rather than intelligent design. On the other hand  I think everyone might be planning some variation on this. Essentially, a bunch of enemies with totally random traits spawn, you get to go beat them up. Every so often two of the living enemies get to breed with each other, creating a new enemy with both of the parents traits, plus or minus a few mutations. Over time as you inevitably kill the weakest of the enemies first the average quality of the enemies gets better and winning becomes increasingly hard. The other main problem with this is that I don’t know exactly how I’d make the traits system work, which would be a major factor.

Build an organism

Played on a 2D grid, spanning the entire window. You start with a single nucleus right in the center. Various environmental hazards then proceed to walk onto the screen which are all capable of ripping your nucleus to shreds. Fortunately for you, just before they walked on screen you had the importunity to build yourself a few phagocytes, into which the unwitting hazards walk getting themselves killed. This repeats with increasingly vicious hazards that you have to wrestle with, including such scary things as pathogens (which can pathfind around defenses), carcinogens (which takes over a square you control, turning it into a useless tumor) and toxins (which spread out like a liquid until they are absorbed by liver cells). At the same time you have to expand your organism to defend itself against these new attackers using extra phagocytes, lymphocytes (which act as antibody turrets), mitochondria (which make everything they touch more powerful), and chloroplasts (which make mitochondria even more effective).

Okay, having typed that out, even though that later one isn’t actually evolution it’s a lot more fun sounding, and I’m sure I’ll be able pass it off somehow as being the same *goal* as evolution, even if it’s not driven by natural selection

And BOOM, an idea is formed. I wonder how much of it I’ll actually get done in time…

EDIT: Change of plan. Going back to idea 1, but in a 2D dungeon crawler-like thing (similar gameplay to legends of yore), you win if you wipe all the enemies out, you lose if they kill you. The more rounds you survive the better. Simples (I think…)

Earlier I’ve decided not to enter this Luudum dare due to a lack of time, but when reading others entries I suddenly had a small idea for a game and I might actually enter with a small game.
The game is about 2 races – red and blue, each race controls a ‘town’ and have 3 types of units which are stronger against some units but weaker against the other like in Rock-paper-scissors game:

you control one town and choose what units to produce, when one type of units defeats enough opponents this type of units evolves and it’s race will now produce an upgraded units of this type which will be faster or something, and when all units evolves ? times you can create the ultimate unit that defeats everything.
Gonna make this in ‘game maker 8 pro’ and ‘paint’.
Good luck.

So My game is nowhere near as good as half the ones I’ve seen on here. I love seeing all the inovation going on.

I’ll be blogging and giving download links to my entry

Here
http://torqscrewsoftware.co.uk/ludum-dare-24/

The idea I’m running with might be a mistake. But who cares? I love it. It’s very experimental, and I’ve never tread upon “experimental game” ground. One thing in my favor, and this is the biggest hint I’ll give, is that the game would literally be ruined if the graphics were any more than rectangles. So graphics will be fast.

To finish this thing, I’ll have to break a few of my own rules. But, again, who cares? Rules are meant to be broken!

After dealing with some problems and RL  I’m back

The next things to do are animations and music then I will make some more levels.

You can download the updated version here:  https://dl.dropbox.com/u/74944797/GrowUp%21.rar

Very basic things done, some GUI elements and stub graphics. I’m taking a break now. Need to think about gameplay.

I’m not really happy with what I’ve done so far. Oh well, at least the cats are smiling.

Tags: progress

OK, here’s what I’m working with at the moment. Totally open to critique!

(The dot is you.)

It’s a set-pace side-scrolling “runner” (sorta) where you are some type of organism (undefined, may keep the whole thing abstract) traveling at a constant speed toward the right. The controls available to the player are the up and down keys, which they use to move between three different lanes.

There are two “phases” of the game: constructive, and destructive.

In the constructive phase, the player is picking up dots that will  change the composition of its organism. There’s nothing that harms the player. By picking up lots of a certain color of dot, they develop greater immunity to that color.  Switching to picking up different colored dots will give an increased immunity to that color dot, but result in decreased immunity to other colors. Immunity is expressed as a percentage, so you could be 20% immune to red, 20% immune to blue, and 60% immune to green, for example. If you then changed to an all-red lane for the entirety of the rest of the phase, it might result in an organism 100% immune to red, and 0% immune to blue and green.

In the “destructive” phase, every dot that the player runs over that the player does not have 100% immunity to will do a little bit of damage, (inversely?) proportional to the player’s immunity. Therefore, the player wants to strategically switch between lanes so that they’re running over mostly dots that they’ve developed an immunity to.

These two phases presumably repeat, but to what effect, I’m not sure.

I’m hoping to make the game a little more interesting by having, in lieu of music, a background drone, and then having the dots play different notes within a chord as the player picks them up (although time will tell if I even have time to attempt that).

The part that scares me most is that this is probably going to involve A Lot of Math. Not hard math, but math. And I’m not sure I’ve ever done anything even vaguely resembling procedural generation before. But that’s what LD is for, hooray!

(I would post a picture of my breakfast, since that’s apparently a thing, but I haven’t eaten it yet. Going to go do that now.)

A tower defense where your enemies constantly observe your strength and make it your weakness. Enemies grow resistant to turret types that kill them, so your task is to keep the board evolving all the time.

If that’s too many words for you, just watch this pretty picture (animated .gif of it in action): http://i.imgur.com/FkZNS.gif

(Of course, I sped up mutation quite a lot just for the sake of this 10-second .gif; things would get pretty hectic if your turrets were eaten at that pace right away.)

You see how there’s no green enemies at the start, but they gradually become more common once the other enemies get killed by green turrets. Green enemies cannot be harmed by green turrets, so the tables get turned, and a smart player will quickly start building red/blue turrets, to which the enemies start growing resistant again…

Well, that’s the basic idea, but it gets more complicated with upgrades, color-specific bonuses, and an electronic wiring system you use to “juggle” active turrets (supposed to be your primary way of interaction and it’s not even shown here).

This one’s not too difficult coding-wise, so hopefully I can focus on the actual game design instead of endless physics/AI bugs.

I’m making some progress on my project! Unfortunately, I’ll be out for most of today but I do have a general plan of attack:

1. Get the basic story and structure finished.
2. Enhance and embellish all of the prose where necessary.
3. Add lovely black and white pictures.
4. Create CSS styling for the pages.

Hope I can get this done! 😛

With 12 hours down I finally have my idea

I had a neat idea for a logical puzzle game, but it didn’t seem very fun, and a smart interface would have been really tricky to come up with. The idea was that you essentially have to work out the evolution backwards. So you’re given a modern creature, and you’re shown the earth’s “original creatures”, and you have to work out how the original creatures combined over time to form that modern creature. It’d be played with these “cards” that represent each creature.

Anyway, my new idea is more of an homage to an old Starcraft custom map called “Evolves Madness”. Basically it’s gonna be an super-simplified RTS game that takes place on a small map with 3 players, where each player’s base is constantly spawning creatures, and once in a while you send them to attack other players… As you rack up kills, you can upgrade your creatures, research special abilities, and do other fun stuff(?). Your goal is to destroy the both of the other bases. I don’t know how far I’m gonna get, but it’s gonna be a good stress test for my Futile engine at the very least.

So while working away (not done any art yet so there isn’t really much I can show that looks nice) I had a spot of dinner which is a five bean soup that’s been bubbling away in the slow cooker since yesterday evening with a nice crusty bread roll.

Followed by a naughty massive London cheesecake and with that I’m about to explode while writing up lots of different variable combinations

I’ll probably be snacking on the soup for the rest of LD.

Tags: dinner, foodphoto, LD #24

Just a simple platforming screen for now, we’ll start doing the level design later also the design for the different evolution stages of Cat.

Lunch Time!! :P!

Okay wow. It’s about 6am. I’ve basically been programming for 10 hours straight and I have… well, not a lot to show for it. Yet.

First off: Man I didn’t make this easy on myself. In order to model things the way I imagined them, I needed to make a huge architecture of stats for each creature. Actionscript 3 doesn’t support enum for some dumb reason, so I needed to name indices for each of these stats manually. Then, I made vectors of multipliers to determine how each stat will affect each other stat- NONE of which is actually being used yet.

So what do I have to show for it so far? DOTS! BEHOLD!!!

They actually do chase each other around a bit now, which meets my minimum requirements for the day of having some creatures which interact with each other. Not exactly what I’d hoped for, but I spent a lot of time laying additional groundwork.

What sort of groundwork you may ask?

So far I have:

1) A Creature class with 34 unique statistics, most of which I have a pretty good idea of how to implement. The mechanisms for these statistics interacting with each other is IN PLACE, but uninitialized.

2) The creatures can perceive each other and react accordingly, running towards creatures they believe to be their own species (based on color) and running away from others. The fear and skittishness levels of each species will determine the severity of their reaction, but right now all of these dots are statistically identical

3) An efficient method for breaking the play area into grids so that the creatures don’t need to iterate through the entire entity list to perceive each other. I haven’t done this method before, since it was easy enough to just brute force it in the past, but since this game will have thousands of entities (ideally) it seemed vital. It was surprisingly easy! I will be reusing this technique in the future, I’m certain.

Tomorrow’s tasks: Implement terrain, food. Make creature behaviors more robust. Create player interactions with world (probably will be going with hunter model). Possible additions: scrollable map, basic graphics, sound effects, menus.

Wahey an update (my first one)!

Things… aren’t looking too well. My game concept isn’t original, probably not even fun (which is kind of essential for a game right?) and I think I won’t be able to finish even half of the planned content. I have some collision issues which I can’t seem to fix, I don’t think I have the time to create the essential art assets and I feel the urge to just stop working on this project and call it quits, but I made an agreement with myself that I would finish ‘something’ this weekend. So I’m still going to try to make at least a part of the game I had in mind, even if it’s boring to play.

Mandatory screenshot of the game in its current state below. Yes, I know.

Oh and wow most of you guys have posted some interesting looking screenshots! Looking forward to playing your final product, looks like there are some great ideas out there.

Time to work on the actual gameplay. Which is way more important but I needed time to think of things anyway, so I did the ‘boring’ part in the meantime.

The cube-planet rotates with 46 frames of rotation for a really nice old school cube look (like here http://youtu.be/LCAMdOlZVV0?t=5m38s), and the stars move parralax-ish for a nice feel of the planet rotating around you.

(Right-click the image and open in a new tab to see full-size)

This is our beginning, ideas on the table. Now hand in the mass, then we’ll talk about the mechanics of the game.
Hugs. #gallery-1 { margin: auto; } #gallery-1 .gallery-item { float: left; margin-top: 10px; text-align: center; width: 33%; } #gallery-1 img { border: 2px solid #cfcfcf; } #gallery-1 .gallery-caption { margin-left: 0; } /* see gallery_shortcode() in wp-includes/media.php */

Update #2 on our untitled game. More info in the image.

Graphic in-game

What do you think? =)

Any feedback is appreciate

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 25th, 2012 at 11:31 am and is filed under LD #24. 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 LUDUMDARE 24 LIVE! Watch me at,

http://www.twitch.tv/ghostid_

Really struggling to keep going at the moment – got a lot of things that I just don’t really want to do.

Basically my innate procrastination is kicking in fierce.

Just a bit over 5 hours in – I’m quite satisfied with the progress so far. A single screenshot can’t really capture it, so here are (parts) of three:

The descriptions and screenshots you guys are posting are really exciting. Evolution seems like a pretty cool theme, after all. I’m already looking forward to playing all those games!

Tags: ihavenoideawhatimdoing, mywristshurtalready, progress

Here is my badass progress report of my badass game ‘Badass’! It’s a game about a badass!

See cool parallax here! (not playable yet)

Oh, and I didn’t forget to eat too!

After 5 hours of drinking coffee I made my descision.

I thought that a “War Of Elements” could be a nice idea.
Every element has other properties. Someone are faster, others are harder in damage and so on…

In this version are only 3 elements. I will add more after a short break 😉

So I’m pulling out before this gets hairy.

I’ve spent the last 12 hours trying to get this game going, but I’ve just run into brick wall after brick wall with no end in sight.

I wanted to get a fluid game going with some nice GLSL dynamic lighting and physics, but just starting at the lighting threw me off. I’ve done some GLSL lighting before, but everything I tried to do this time just had something wrong with it. The first problem was Slick not rendering it’s first loadded texture for some (still) unknown reason. Second problem being the point lighting (based off the mouse position) not lining up the the display area – so when the mouse was at 0,0 the light was at 0,0; but when the mouse was at 400,400, the light was at 800,600.

Once I hit this wall I just decided to crap what I had and start fresh so I could see where I went wrong with the lighting positions. That has just led me around in circles for the last 3 hours to the point where the light just isn’t rendering at all.

I’m going to keep working on this, and probably extend everything into a framework so I’m not pissing around with it all for the next LD – but I won’t be entering anything this time around unfortunately.

I think I need a drink.

This is my first Ludum Dare, and I want the game to be good. I’m not focusing on the graphics too much, but I want them to be OK. I’m focusing on the gameplay more than anything. The game is going to be a little like the cell stage of spore. You swim around in the sea, eating other cells while avoiding some other cells, and add parts to yourself to survive. My game is going to be a little like that, but once you evolve legs I might make so the game stops there.

Anyway, here’s the unfinished menu:

Some graphical placeholders for now in-game so I can get the gameplay worked out and kill all the bugs before I waste my time on graphics.

The files need to be imported into eachother still. I can’t put this off for too long otherwise if I import it -last minute, that is- I won’t have enough time to put everything on the screen where it should be.

I have a background! Bit concerned with how long it took to get to this stage, but I’m sure it’ll be fine…

Finally pulled together some sort of idea for Species. The gist is:

“Humans have evolved into 2 separate species. The aggressive, dominant species are keeping the good natured species imprisoned underground working for them. You lead the rebellion!”

Ok needs a bit of work but enough to make a start.

Will use the following tools/libs:

• ActionScript 3
• Starling framework (http://gamua.com/starling/)
• Artemis component framework (my own rough AS3 port https://github.com/alwaysinbeta/artemis-as3)
• Flash/PhotoShop/TexturePacker (for my terrible programmer GFX)
• Audacity/TBC (for SFX)

I’ll post the code as it progresses on GitHub: https://github.com/alwaysinbeta/species

To work!

Oh well… I didn’t like any ideas that have show up in my mind so far…

I’m going to a friend’s BBQ, maybe some good idea are awaiting me there! =)