We’re in for this year’s October Challenge. We’re planning to release our Ludum Dare 23 entry (with a variety of tweaks, additions, and improvements) No Air Out Here.  We’re aiming for both a PC release, and either shortly after, or at the same time, releasing an Xbox Live Indie Game version. We already have the project finished to our liking, and we’re currently working on producing the game trailer, and doing the other work necessary for it’s release. We’re hoping to have the trailer finished by the end of next week, and would submit for release shortly after.

 

As always, the best of luck to our fellow developers and their projects.

To sign off, here’s the box art design for our release.

 

Well, for LD#23 I created a game based on the theme “Tiny World” which was essentially a 2D RTS. Similar to the Stronghold series of games…

 

It was NOT successful at all, in fact I ended the third day having not completed the project to a degree where I was  happy with it.

It was ended with unpolished features and hacky code.

 

This October challenge I’m going to take SmallVille, polish it beyond belief, then publish it.

Thank you Ludum Dare for encouraging me again!

I doubt I’ll participate in October Challenge, but I’m not being idle this month. I’m working on a project, thought I’ll not release it for these reasons:

• It’s not a game. Yes, MiniLD #37 is over, but I need it by myself.
• It’ll consist of parts those will be hard to assemble. Something will be made with Construct Classic, something with Phyard Builder, maybe part with Construct 2.
• It’ll be hard to customize for other users. They just won’t understand anything.

It’ll be related to music and videos. I don’t know fully yet. Anyway, it’s my chance to learn file manipulating.

Summary: this post was made just for a notification that I’m not idle.

Yep, that is my dimensional-with colours-game-thing. Eventually improve. Patience.

Tags: Game Maker, october challenge

Bloblocks is nearly nearly nearly complete!

Only 21 puzzles to create… at least that’s a concrete count down.

I had this nice feeling today, that the end is really only a few days ahead, and not in a virtually infinite future!

If only there wasn’t all the marketing tasks lurking in the dark

I wrote a more complete post on my blog…

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This entry was posted on Friday, October 5th, 2012 at 8:06 am and is filed under October Challenge 2012. 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.

Bam!  First screenshot.  I know it looks a bit shabby, but hopefully things will look better once I start working on the art.  Also, I’ve started a dev blog, because I’m told that the thing to do.

I had a really productive coding session I got my reload animations and ammo count working. My Zombie Dollars are ticking over, and my most favourite of all the rag doll deaths actually works in the iPad 2 and iPhone 4s just fine. It’s too much fun check out the video

This October Challenge will be my first, and if everything runs okay, it will be my actual startup.

My plan:

1. Publish my portfolio page that I finished recently
2. Finish, polish and publish not just one but TWO of my nearly finished games

And which games I want to finish?

• Chemistry Lab – my first almost finished game. The player has to collect a certain elements and avoid others. It’s quite simple, but very catching and fun.

• Little Farmer – I started working on this game mainly in order to repeat all the useful features and learn ActionScript 3 properly (I worked in ActionScript 2 long time ago). On the occasion of my sister’s birthday, I decided to expand it, put it into farming environment and dedicate it to her at last. I admit that this game isn’t very fun yet, but I’ve learned soo much with it.

 

Hopefully I will be able to make the October challenge this year. I have two games currently under development right now – a construction and management simulation game, and some not-yet-categorized game where you fly a ship around planets and stuff. I hope to use the latter for October challenge. Development is going well with it. The ship now turns, can accelerate, deccelerate and coast to a stop. Collision detection isn’t up yet, and won’t be for a while, since I will be writing the infinite map o’ planets now.(sorta like minecraft seeds for world gen, except with planets.)

If you look at it a certain way, then I’m almost done. If you look at it the real way, then all that’s left is the stuff I’m not good at.

Squares!

More details on my dev blog.

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This entry was posted on Friday, October 5th, 2012 at 9:22 pm and is filed under October Challenge 2012. 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.

Hi guys,

Rialgar and I really enjoyed developing HTML5 games during the past LD compos, but we were curious what could be achieved with more time than just one weekend. So we gave us some months and developed an HTML5 MMO demo.

The terrain is generated procedurally by a Java server and transmitted via a WebSocket. The whole scenery is rendered by the awesome three.js library I also used for my last LD entry. The server takes care of client synchronization so you can see other players moving around. We also implemented a rudimentary combat system.

To make the world a little bit more interesting, we added an editor so that players can create own structures like houses or trees and add them to the world.

It’s not a complete MMO though as it is missing features like a level system, quests or dungeons, but we think it shows what HTML5 is capable of.

Play it here: http://shards-game.net (best played with Google chrome)

Yep, Ive been absent for quite a while.

But  coincidently, I just got my publishing keys to Google Play, so, why not try my hands at this challenge?

Firstly, I’m imposing myself a challenge inside this challenge: how fast can I code a simple game like a minesweeper? I should handle this easily, after all, until some 6 months ago, for almost 3 years, I was a professional casual game developer.

And so, I sat yesterday to start it. In a very TDD way, I wrote most of the premise code, some simple framework to the Android Activity flux. Right now, I have most of the code in place, but not everything is plugged in, since it still require some refactoring to conform to everything else.

Now, the oblig. screenshot:

Of course, this is very wrong, from a minesweeper point of view. But I must tell you the tiles are reversed. And everything behind the “unrevealed” tiles are being rendered the same.

I plan to release this TODAY.

My second project for this month, and I’m going to work on it next weekend, is a life-game-based arcade game: You shoot goo ( gosper gliders ) and you must erradicate all remaining goo.

I wrote this game before, I must admit. It was the very first thing I wrote when my former boss (from the game studio) gave me some time to acquaint myself with the iPhone SDK. It was cool, but buggy as hell. Now I want to write it in Java for Android, with proper graphics and everything.

My third project for the month is GOOD remake in Android for my MiniLD#26 game: Knights of Alentejo. Currently, it works in a very flawed state, but requires a keyboard and lacks menus and everything else. I will make it into a POLISHED game.

My final (and very unlikely) project for the month is to take my pet project, a 3D game engine I’m writing in Android Java and make a simple “Stealth Spy” game out of it. Since it has sort of dynamic lightning, I want to make something different out of it, other than another FPS.

And thats pretty much all I want to do. Of course, everything will be free, ad-free and open source. Hope you guys enjoy it!

 

UPDATE:

Things look a little more promising. But of course, I need better. BADLY.

Gonna ask my GF to make me something better. She’s a really good artist.

It’s screenshot Saturday, and you know what that means. Screenshots! Last weekend, I improved the look and feel of the GUI system, and this morning, I added in tooltips. http://isotower.com/media/tooltips.png

This is also my official entry post to the 2012 October Challenge. Technically, I’ve already sold a few copies of Isotower, but it’s not much, and it needs to be more. Way more. This month, my goal is to get more of the game finished, and do some advertising and campaigning to get some more notice of the game out there, and hopefully get some sales to happen. This is basically me dusting off a game I haven’t touched in a little while and spending my time working on it, in earnest.

I had a good couple of dev session, added more geometry and got my blood HUD working. And my Zombies can now actually attack and hurt you! It’s feeling pretty fun to play now.

More screenies at www.zombietales.net

^ This is my game‘s status on FGL. I’ve set it for bidding 2 days ago, but it hasn’t been approved yet by the FGL Staff. Below, there is some more info:

“Your game is awaiting approval and analysis by our team before it will be visible to potential sponsors. This usually takes 3 to 5 days.“

Most probably it depends on the actual workload, but according to my own experience so far, FGL used to be pretty much quick. They used to answer questions within a day, and once I ordered a pre-review, it was done within an hour – despite they say a pre-review takes about a week. They are really great guys!

Though as far as I know, they don’t work on weekends – my previous experience backs it up: they never answered to me during weekends. Since they didn’t approve my game on Friday, they surely won’t do it until Monday. I don’t want to be impatient, but still, this is the very first game I ever sell. Of course, I’m excited – what happens? What will sponsors think about my game? What bids will I receive? So I can’t wait my game being approved. I should be patient…

Anyway, how do you set an avatar for your Ludum Dare profile?

After some work, I managed to get a test build of the game running and connected to the Kongregate API (for leaderboards and badges or whatever):

And here is Ethereal Isles running on a Nexus 7, for deployment via Google Play.

Now that those test developments work, I need to fill out the paperwork for an LLC. Why? I could just take all this income as myself (sole proprietorship essentially) but I might as well get started on setting a real business. Unfortunately, the filing for an LLC might take up to 20 days! Yikes! I should still get it by the end of month if I’m lucky.

I also put up a test build of Ethereal Isles for your playtesting pleasure using the Unity Web Player plugin. There is only a “sandbox level” available. If you try it, let me know which monsters and abilities did or didn’t seem worth the effort to use, and if it is too hard or too easy to defeat all the enemies on the island.

 

 

Please have a look at this gallery from nearly all the entries for the Mini Ludum Dare 37.

#gallery-1 { margin: auto; } #gallery-1 .gallery-item { float: left; margin-top: 10px; text-align: center; width: 14%; } #gallery-1 img { border: 2px solid #cfcfcf; } #gallery-1 .gallery-caption { margin-left: 0; } /* see gallery_shortcode() in wp-includes/media.php */

Bigger versions of the screenshots and a short summary can be found on my blog:

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3

I hope you all enjoyed the themes “not-games” and “real real-time” as much as I did. I wanted people to think about the rigid definitions of what games are and if those definitions even are necessary to create interesting and compelling experiences. And yes, most of the entrants succeeded in surprising and entertaining me – for that I want to thank you all, and also for forgiving the somewhat too long theme announcement.

Tags: gallery, not-games, real-time, screenshots, summary

As we are getting ready to finish the game, we put together a trailer to showcase the gameplay to you guys:

Evo Dash Trailer

Hope you like it! The game right now is mostly feature-complete, and we are working on fixing bugs, taking care of resolution issues, optimizing for older iOS devices, etc. After the release on iTunes, we will see how the game does and if it pays off enough, we will get to work on an Android version, which should be ready in a couple of weeks.

I got sick since the last post thus I couldn’t work for 2 days. “Dude you could have been working the 2 days you where sick!”… No I couldn’t have, I was so sore on Friday and couldn’t move anything without feeling a numbness or slight pain and yesterday I just didn’t feel like working at all. So I have today and tomorrow(Canadien Thanks Giving) to do as much work as I can. I’ll see what I can do to show you something by tonight.

Since I can’t really figure out some Story generating problems I guess I’ll work on combat. Ya…. combat in a text adventure game… Awesome…

Have a good one. :3

I will try to do the October challenge! This will be my first game. I hope to use Java 2d rather than html5 because I want to make the $1 off sales rather than adds on a website not to mention buying the domain. I guess the hardest part of this will be finding a place to sell… Perhaps you guys have some ideas? The game will be a space shooter if you were wondering.