Here is how mine looks like after one week of LD october challenging

What about yours?

As suggested by Dir3kt, take this photo of my current coding castle (nice alliteration… note to myself: pat myself on the back):

As chaotic as always… OctoberChallenge or not, doesn’t matter 😉

Update on my game:

I’ve done mostly under the hood work in the last couple of days, added support for different resolutions and fullscreen, added my menu framework, support for multiple gamestates (which was desperately needed) and a basic scripting system. I’m pretty happy with the progress so far. Sometime next week I will probably start doing some actual gamedesign work again (note to myself: pat myself on the crotch!).

If you like to stay updated, you can also follow me on Twitter, where I’ll try to ramble a bit more often about my game and games in general (and it is also heartbrakingly lonely there :'( …).

I thought I’d join in and post a photo of mydesk in the corner of my lounge room. My 2nd hand mac running Unity, notepad full of awesome game ideas!!! and a couple of children’s blocks – which they keep giving me in an attempt to get my attention…. my poor neglected bubs.

I’ve started a fun instagram feed @zombietales with screen grabs and little stories, and I’ve got way more updates and screen grabs on my twitter feed @dougalicious (I too am feeling a bit lonely on like MortalWombat)

This is one of the shots from my instagram

First off, I want to get involved with this desk posting fun. So here goes. 

It’s a little messy, I guess that means the real work is yet to come. SkyHawks is a top down shooter similar to games like 19xx or 1942. It’s something I’ve been working on for a while. It’s time to push it to at least Alpha. The plan is to finish ‘episode 1’ and release with some type of donations, or pay for episode 2 now model. Either way, I’ve got some more things on dev side to figure out before the business model.  There’s a ton to do, but here’s what we have so far:

• A few models done
• A home screen
• A Gamecontroller that allow us to set the number of lives, levels, etc.
• Enemy spawn points
• Enemies follow a path
• My coder is a genius, and is getting an procedural tiling system going.

• Texturing Enemies
• Making a graphical representation of player lives
• Incorporating the start screen from the previous build
• making a ‘basic’ level
• Handle ‘player death’

I’m trying to essentially incorporate a bunch of things from an old build, to a new build.

The Big B is a bomb, I’m going to need to put this with the new build which has working splines, and less errors.

I’m reading a book to know more about RPG classes, the name is “Programming Role playing Games With DirectX” from André LaMothe – CEO Xtreme Games. Although I’m writing the game in Shiva with Lua and exporting with C,C++,OBJC,and so on, I love the way it handles the kernel of a RPG game, my game is special kind of hack & slash, with magic spells, mages, etc. so this book is helping me to focus on the balance and the classes definitions, AI and so on.

Here the pic:

I’m learning a lot of 3D and positioning, timing, frame syncing, fx creation, 3d art, …still a newbie crazy and hunger for more!

Tags: 3D, books, creation progress, desk, game creation, hack & slash, RPG

Finally got all our hosting issues resolved, uploaded most of the website.

www.splitbitgames.com

Feel free to go ahead and check it out!
Make sure you DON’T buy anything yet – the files are way out of date. Don’t wanna rip you off.

No coding today but I did knock up this trailer with iMovie(trailer template) on my iPad so you’ve probably seen it all before.

I thought everyone might be interested in how I captured the video because getting good quality iPhone footage is a pain! The video was captured from my iPhone 4S with a HDMI output at a friends place using his Blackmagic Intensity pro card.

Originally captured at 1080p 30fps as a motion jpg avi, I then converted the video also cropping out the black from the original to a 720p 30fps for iPad format.

I’ve spent many dollars and gone to many troubles trying to film iPad/iPhone footage for trailers and believe me the Blackmagic card is the only one I’ve had success with.

Because the iPhone only outputs 1080p 30fps – I’ve bought a couple of recorder boxes that claim they can record HD but they usually only max out at 1080i 25fps. Including the AvermediaHD box that alot of gamers use to record xbox360/ps3 games. But the consoles you can set the out put to match the recorder.

Anyways heres the final product

Basic Engine and moving mechanics. Everything’s up from here! #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 */

So, here is a first prototype of my audiovisual web thingy. It only runs in Chrome or Safari 6 but then again it doesn’t need Flash ;-). I also added some AdSense to see how well it performs.

The main idea is to pimp up the visuals with WebGL (I had to use Canvas for the prototype) and create stages with 2-3 mini games like these. The “Jam” mode is also a good idea, because you can easily create 2 experiences for the development price of 1.3.

Prototype Play.

Hello guys, it Mohammad again, and this time I came back to do the October challenge. Well…Sorta wanted to do it. Christ  I don’t think i’ll get it done being locked in a classroom for 6 hours from Monday to Friday. But, since I had a project I was doing I decided to put it out of its misery. YES! Bells© The video editing program. But that’s not all, I remember clearly how I said i’ll do it in GameMaker right? Well… That dropped a SH** HARD! So instead i’ll be pissing myself off with stress and please you guys by learning C++ Visual. Yes, you heard me, the same one they used to make Sony Vegas Pro© and Adobe After Effects©. I looked into them a few weeks ago, and I thought Sony Vegas Pro© isn’t too hard but ADOBE WILL BE A F*** CHALLENGE. So its good to be back, and its good to learn another scripting language, so all in all it’ll be a good month for me and you guys.

The comments are open FOR GOOD and i’ll be looking at each and every comment. You guys are a valuable resource for anything I need and I can always trust your guys opinion. So if your reading this post do me a favor and put a comment for me to review and look at. It’ll mean alot.

As always, Mohammad Mohammad of Mohammadgames signing off.

Okay so for those not familiar with the bet… I bet people 1 dollar (US) that I could make my October Challenge game to alpha by the end of the month.  If I lose I would pay each person who took me up on it 1 US Dollar – in addition to giving them free copies of the finished game as well as all the updates from alpha to finish for free.  If I won each of you who participated would pay me a dollar and you would still get all the updates as well as the finished game for a buck.  As I see it it’s a win/win for everyone.  I had only 7 people take me up on the offer.  I think I know why… it’s because I intimated that I would only use paypal.  Well  I’ve since looked at a number of options and can say that you do not have to pay via paypal should you lose.  We will work something out, I’ll either get something that will only take a buck, or we’ll use good old fashioned snail mail, or whatever is convenient for you.  If you win we will also work something out there too — it might mean only get a dollar bill through the mail from the U.S.  In any case don’t feel you can’t participate because of lack of paypal.  Also if you can’t do it digitally I will take paper money in your currency of choice… but that’s if you can’t do it digitally.

if you want to follow the game’s progress just go to my website by clicking HERE!

If you want to read the original Challenge post  CLICK HERE!

P.S. I’m still open for accepting participants — just leave a comment to this post to make it official.

Thanks,

Keith aka Uhfgood

So I have an idea for a game development jam (or compo). Quite simple: the declared themes would be tropes to follow. One thing is sure: any games you ever made do have tropes – it couldn’t be anyway. Any time you designed a video game, you did think with tropes – whether you did it consciously or not. What if you had to use tropes very consciously? In every round of the game jam, you were given a specific trope to focus on. This trope could be a video game trope (of course), an illustration (art) trope or a plot/narrative trope or basically, any kind of trope which can be somehow applied to a video game.

For example, once you had to make a game which features Item Get, the next time you would focus on Deliberately Monochrome, and then you would make a story-based game with a Heroic BSOD. 😉

If you’re not familiar with the terminology, visit TVtropes.org to get educated!

What is your opinion of this?

Probably it would be a problem that since I have no reputation as an indie game developer, no one would join my jam. So I could use a little help there… Since myself don’t have much (enough) free time, I would most probably have a hell simple submission system like the Experimental Gameplay Project has. But it could be fun anyway. 😉

Announcing my work on the October challenge, I was slammed with work last week (and the next couple days as well really) but going to go ahead and start putting a bunch of time into getting this working. I am reworking an old game in order to sell, I’ll have to recode everything from scratch but it’s a semi-basic top down arcade style space combat game so not particularly complicated.

(original title screen)

I am building it in Flash so I can cross-compile to web, android, iOS . I particularly would like to see how to make a good iPad version even though I don’t have an iPad. I would like to include multiplayer co-op games but since I’m starting this kinda late to get to market I think I’ll release a single player version first. For the single player version I’ll probably release a free version with a few ‘campaigns’ and a $1 version with a couple more extensive ones. For the more advanced multiplayer capable I want to release I’d like to do paid unlocks so you can customize your ship and create your own campaigns.

In a couple days when I can really dive into this more I’m going to setup a dev blog

Play here: http://www.simianlogic3d.com/fun/mesh/updates/002/

I put it down for a few weeks to tinker on something else, but came back to Mesh a couple of days ago. I imagine the development for this game will continue to proceed in fits and starts. It’s not the best idea I have for a game right now, but it’s a fairly known amount of work and it’s an interesting problem space.

This update includes:

• mesh editor!
  • from the main menu, press ‘u’ to enter the 5×5 editor
  • click to add/remove pixels
  • invalid placements get an ‘X’ over them–all PixelSlots must be connected to the main brain
  • press ‘esc’ to return to the main menu
• data persistence: grabbed a datamanager from a previous project and set it up to save your edits
• free pixels now fade after a couple of seconds, which gets rid of some clutter
• added a bunch of board constants (with an eye towards much larger play spaces)
• the board will now expand to the next logical size if your starting mesh would go “out of bounds”
• added “breakage” — if a mesh pixel loses its connection to its brain, all of those pixels will break off

This mesh editor will serve as the basis for a couple more editors to come. Though the one presented to the player is 5×5, it can support any dimensions. With a little more work I can retire my google doc and just edit enemies directly in the game. The next step will be to build a path editor, which is essentially the same thing but with more restrictions (consecutive moves must be adjacent and backtracking is legal).

Once I’m happy with the mesh and path editors for creating enemies, I’ll try to go nuts and get the level count up to 20-25 or so with “basic” enemies in various board sizes. The next big chunk of work is sub-meshes, which are essentially the AI enemy meshes, but attached to another mesh. To start players will probably be limited to predefined behaviors (i.e. horizontal and vertical oscillators, spinners,  patrol loops), but at some point I’d like to let players design their own submesh behaviors. I’m hoping the addition of sub-meshes will make the game dramatically more interesting and sandboxy.

Outside of the core mechanics, some design ideas are starting to gel as well. I’m thinking the player will start on this micro 5×5 editor, but unlock larger editors as they progress. A sub-mesh would be limited to the next editor down (so a 10×10 mesh can hold a 5×5 sub-mesh, which might be able to hold a 3×3 sub-mesh). Each “arena” will have an entry fee and a reward ($$$). That’s enough structure to build a pretty massive upgrade cycle—-purchase more pixels, new pixel types, unlock larger editors, unlock new sub-mesh behaviors.

Ultimately I’d love to put in a PvP mode. I looked into various flash socket servers and Node.js, but the amount of work just to do a proof of concept would be pretty substantial. I’m going to focus on “finishing” the single player prototype before I even consider tackling multiplayer.

Hey all! Syntactic Sugar Studio (me and some friends) is participating in a competition to win a small grant from a university here in Utah. We need your help to make it to the top five, we just need a vote! Click “Vote for This Campaign”, enter your email, then click the confirmation link they send you. Voting gets you a bunch of perks, like a mention in our game!

If you share the link to this post or the site on any social platform, you’ll be entered to win a $50 American Express giftcard! Just show proof in the comments below. Thanks everyone!

http://www.saltvalleytally.com/campaign/detail/198

Hi all, I’m In for the October Challenge !

I have been working hard the whole summer to release my new game : Strange Masks. Now I’m struggling to get the lasts bits  – which are always the one which take the longest time – finished.

I plan to release the game on the Ubuntu Software centre, on the mac osx app store, on iOS, android and of course windows (but not metro).

Of course to target all these platforms I use Haxe and NME

More information will be provided on my blog this month and on Ludumdare as well as I begin to reach my target.

I wish everybody good luck for your projects !!

Dear mum,

Yesterday I made 11 levels for my little game. You know Bloblocks, the game I told you about.

I could not resist adding a little feature: a block which destroys blocks, some kind of black hole.

I know… I said I would not add features. But this one made level creation more interesting and it helped me create at least 7 new levels in a blitz.

Today I worked on the promotional text for the stores (You can read it here). I hope people will like the text and then will buy the game and then will like the game and then will make love to each others.

I know a lot of them won’t… I’ll have to deal with it.

I also set up my google account so I will be able to sell the game on Google Play Store. It was somewhat easier than the App store but I felt a little bit poorer along the way.

This afternoon I tried to test the game on an android emulator since I don’t have a device.

I cried a little.

I am also afraid of all this devices. The minimum playable resolution for the game is 700×600 pixels. But it is not really helpful since I have to speak DPI for touch controls. I’ll start with xlarge and find a way to widen devices support later.

Testing a game on the simulator (a game made using haxe + flex + starling) is just hell on earth. That’s why I decided to order a Nexus 7. I wanted to do this anyway but not so soon. I felt poorer of 200€…

I hope I will sell enough Bloblocks to overcome the cost.

I must say I felt happier yesterday than today. I think I will create more levels tomorrow to cheer me up and may be reach the 50 levels objective.

I also have to translate all the game texts so you can understand it. It’s written in english for some unknow reason.

The children are happy and so is the wife. They don’t play Bloblocks yet but a family test is planned for this week. I think that 3 years old is not old enough to play this game… but Joseph still enjoys the explosions and touching colored blocks.

I hope you and grandma are doing well. I hope to see you both soon and I’ll send you more screenshots soon.

Laurent

Hello! A few friends and I will be making a top-down cyberpunk turn-based strategy game for the 2012 October challenge. I’m a game developer myself, although I primarily focus on low-level programming work, and they have no experience with development whatsoever, but they DO play a lot of games ;). Just to be cool I’ll be working in Common Lisp using the Lispbuilder-SDL library. Good luck everyone!

My game, Isolated Assault 2, is being built for computer. When my friend asked to play it, he tried to make it work with a gamepad, and it didn’t…

I never thought about people who use gamepads, but I figured “why not add support anyways?” I started testing with my own gamepad to see how my game actually played…

Turns out, my game was TOTALLY DIFFERENT. Playing with a controller feels more compact and comfortable, but reduces accuracy and precision. Keyboard and mouse are generally better because of the amount of buttons and precision, but I can see how people got used to FPS’s on the xbox.

The second problem that came up was the fact that my gamepad had only 1 analog stick, but my friend had 2. (using an xbox controller I think) It was impossible for me to look around.

How do you solve these? Well, for looking around, we can see that Lucasart’s Battlefront 4 for the PSP used the x, square, circle, and triangle for the looking around buttons. And for other actions it had to incorporate the back buttons and arrow keys which a strong selection system. I tried using this for my gamepad, and it actually worked pretty well. However, for some reason, Unity defaults some buttons to keyboard buttons to “make it easier”. In the end, you have to change almost every single control to fit the gamepad, but I think it’s worth it 😉

For the precision problem, the only thing that could make it easier is adjusting the sensitivity (which is already an option) but there is no way to navigate the menus without a mouse, so the game isn’t completely gamepad compatible, but it’s enough to work, and as long the instructions are clear, I think this system works. I mean, who runs a computer without a mouse? 😛

Happy Gaming, Ludum Dare <3

Tags: game, gamepad, thoughts, unity, unity3d

Here it is, folks sloping tiles! — It works, now all I need is gravity and jumping.

Link to the bet.