Hi! This is my 1st LD and here’s the game I’m working on

I’ve been working on this game on and off for a while so I thought it was the perfect candidate for this October challenge. In fact I’m not starting now with the challenge, I started the 1st of October but didn’t have much time to post til now…

This is going to be a platformer for desktop + mobile (Android). You’ll control a little robot that has to save his fellow brother which is kept captive and is in danger.

I already have a bunch of stuff done, but a lot more awaits…

Here you have a screenshot of the current state of the game:

Yes, the tile-flipping is a homage to Maze Mania!

Now, back to work!

Tags: progress, screenshot, unity3d

Hi folks!

So here I’m after 15 days of hard work on PowerUp, I actually started on the 1st of October so I’m kind of jamming here I have to say that between programming at my day job (non-game related) and programming during the evening I start to feel a bit tired. Coffee is doing wonders though. But enough about myself let’s speak about interesting stuffs!

So what is PowerUp?

Well it’s a tablet multiplayer shooter with power up gathering awesomeness, juicy shooting and dodging craziness!

The basic idea is that each player (between 2-4) controls a ship that he can steer using a joystick. By moving you ship around you can gather power-ups which come in 3 colors. Each color gives a distinct ability and requires a adequate game style. By quickly collecting power-ups of the same color you can accumulate power which dramatically increases the ability. However:

• accumulated power is slowly lost over time so you have to always keep gathering.
• gathering a power-up of another color makes you loose all accumulated power.

With this basic ruleset I’m hoping to create a fast paced game where tides can change at any time and comebacks are possible. I have to say I’m quite happy about the progress so far even if I sometime get depressed when looking at my task list

It will be sent to the app store the 31 of October (had to repeat that 30 times to convince myself) and available on the iPad. Android port will follow after.

I am not really sure this qualifies as an October challenge for me, as I worked on it through the summer off and on.

I started with my LD21 entry escape from cube mountain, which was a game about making a run to the edge of the map with big crazy cubes chasing you, and ported it to the xbox for the indie games channel.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=preview&uid=5649

I took the basic perlin style terrain square and made a better fractal style terrain with an atlas of several different types of ground and rock, texturing on steepness and elevation.  I do a distance from center based vertical falloff with a sharp edge at the sides to give it an island look, and then do a soft particle cloud layer based on elevation in the shaders.

Shadows turned out to be a big pain.  With the soft particles and the main view I had very little EDRam left for the rendertargets.  The xbox only has 10 megs, so I had to make the shadow targets small, which can make the shadows quite blocky if the onscreen stuff is very spread out.  I have two best fit targets for objects and enemies and one fixed size for the avatar.

Also there are no custom shaders for the avatars, so I used some wacky stencil buffer tricks to get it to work with the shadows and soft particle cloud layer.

To fight back a bit I added magic spells bound to the ABXY buttons and usable items bound to the shoulders and dpad.  The items are researched sort of xcom style, and then once known can be manufactured and used up.  Most of them are consumed on use.

For spells I had this whole big story and a bunch of extra needed art and animation that I ultimately ended up cutting.  But I kept in the idea that you are at a magical school, and you learn a new spell every semester.  As soon as I put the magic in though the game just became too easy.  It was missing the original feel and I wanted to stay true to the original game.

I ended up making a big blue obelisk that covers the island with an anti-magic field.  If you can find it and knock it over, magic is on and you can go nuts with spells.  If you never run across it though you have to rely on your feet and any items you might have.  This turned out to be VERY confusing to people when I was going through reviews, so I will do an update soon to put some onscreen help for it.  Nobody reads the how-to-play or loading screens.

For traditional “Gear” I instead had a wacky idea of putting bonuses on items in your dorm room.  I didn’t think of it at the time but it sort of turned it into a consumerist rpg.  Furniture and microwaves and tvs all give you bonuses to stats.  There’s no hidden meaning or deep thought behind it, It just sort of accidentally happened.

Here’s a shot of the dorm:

There’s a whole bunch of stuff you can collect, this is just the basic stuff.  And there’s a menu option to change the colors of everything so you can make it look however you want.  As a programmer I think I didn’t do a very good job on the art here.  It is very difficult to make a scene match the xbox avatar’s look.  In the Island gameplay it is so distant that it doesn’t really clash but in a close up scene, it needs to have the same style.

It went up on the indie channel tonight after languishing forever in reviews.  The most difficult part of this whole process was not having any feedback, but I got plenty when the reviews started.  I really hope that the future consoles will allow some form of early build testing for normal users.

Here’s a gameplay trailer.  Since I made it I’ve made a few changes to controls and made all the on ground stuff much bigger, all based on review feedback.

And here’s a link to the marketplace:

http://marketplace.xbox.com/en-US/Product/Sky-Islands/66acd000-77fe-1000-9115-d80258550c0f

Hope you guys like it!  Cube mountain is my lowest rated Ludum Dare entry, but my favorite of the lot.

Still not 100% but getting there –

Click the image to watch the video.

Aloha from Montana!

It’s time to celebrate two things! I’m going to do Ludum Dare 25, regardless of when in December it is! Secondly, I’ve got an upgrade of tools!

Toolset:

• Language: Lua
• Framework: LÖVE
• Code Editor: Sublime Text 2
• Music Composition Software: MuseScore
• Audio Editor: Adobe Audition/Encore CS6
• Image Editor: Adobe Photoshop CS6

Existing code:

• Ussuri Engine written specifically for Ludum Dare 25.

Note: I’ll lock my code in officially as Ludum Dare 25 approaches, but the GitHub links above will provide a snapshot of what I’m working on.

What I learned from last time:

• You don’t have time to recreate Unreal Engine 4.
• Gameplay is kinda important.
• If you aren’t focused or you aren’t having fun, take a break.
• Vote as early after submission ends as possible — it killed my ranking last time around because I slept for 4 days following the competition.
• Remember that it isn’t about ranking, it’s for yourself.

In preparation I’ve been making a series of awful short timespan games I’m calling “S-Games” (take a guess as to why, screenshot) so I can practice finishing things, even though I finished in LD #24, it didn’t feel like I would. Two weekends before I’ll probably do a full-on practice with a few friends.

I do guess this is a little early, but to all those who think that they might do this upcoming Ludum Dare, do it! It’s a lot of fun even if it does drain your energy completely for a weekend.

Tags: LD # 25, ld25, ld48

Ok — I hadn’t made any plans at all to participate in the October challenge, but I’ve had a project sitting around for something like 2 years now (a full-time job thingy got in the way of it being finished) and it seems like maybe this is a good opportunity to force myself to get the thing wrapped up and online somewhere.

I’ve always thought block pushing puzzles in other games were interesting (I particularly liked how devious La Mulana was with a couple of its block puzzles), so a while back I made a Flash game devoted entirely to a those sorts of puzzles. It got a small sponsorship and some people seemed to like it (of course, some people hated it too ^_^b), and ultimately I decided I wanted to make a sequel.

So, that’s what I’m hoping to get finished this month. It’s built on Flash + flixel, with a tilemap editor I had built myself to help develop an earlier game (actually, much of the art is also from that earlier game, but it seems to fit the block puzzle theme just fine). Many puzzle rooms are already completed, but I have a handful left to finish and lots of polishing to do.

I’ll probably try to pickup a small sponsorship for it if I do finish it (or, failing that, just toss it online with some ads).

In the meantime, here’s a very little three-room demo, if anyone feels like pushing some blocks around for a while: http://www.thewasabiproject.com/flash/BPBP2/

Comments and feedback are definitely welcome.

I think I’ve hit a wall with my game.  I elaborate more in my devblog, but here’s the gist of it: I have most of the core gameplay in place…and things aren’t working as expected.  A lot of tweaking (some things may need to be drastically changed) will be required before I’m happy with things.  Not to mention I still haven’t work on the graphics, UI, full controller support, etc.  My point: it’s becoming increasingly unlikely that I will get this done in 16 days.  But I still plan on finishing this and selling it at some point.  The October Challenge will become the Eventually Challenge.  When is eventually?  Maybe January-ish 2013?  How much will I charge?  I’m not sure.  I’m debating whether to go the pay-what-you-want route or just charge $1.  But first, I have to finish this game and figure out what to call it.  I can’t sell a game called “Space Game!”

It’s half way through the month now and I just finished the interface for my game. For now I am calling it Bridge captain as you are the captain of the bridge of a space ship. You can read more about it at my blog.

Here is a screenshot of the title screen

The title screen is from a game I was making where a hole in the universe is eating a galaxy. I stopped making that game, but I am going to make this game into a spin off of that one.

Here is a screenshot of the game so far. The first version will be released on the Android

It took some doing but I finally got the interface working for the game. It’s mostly menu and story driven. You will be talking to many ships and aliens in order to accomplish your missions. However you will have many choices including attacking and stealing as well as helping and trading.

Here is a video I made to show how the interface works so far video

I must say I’m quite sad to announce this: I’m out of the challenge.

It seems my Google Wallet can’t be configured properly with my current credit card, as it is not accepted worldwide. In Brazil, to make a new International card would take too long. Without a card, I can’t take payments from sold games.

This is specially sad since I got a MASSIVE speed improvement on my 3D game engine this weekend and successfully implemented the Game-Of-Life for my little “arcade game”. It even fires gosper gliders into the big bacteria blob!

I still plan to finish the said games, but I will keep it free, as said on my first post of the challenge.

Sorry for your time and space.

This October challenge I have gained a myriad of information and experience on game making and developing.

My no-named game is now nearing completion. I have just put a game, I made roughly a month ago, on the indievania store as a test. During this month I now can, sort of, say I have experience on a “shipped” game. The game I’ve made may not be the next angry birds or zelda, but this process will help me make more complex games in the future. The game that is in Alpha 0.0.2 is a simple arcade game that is designed to be addictive and time-consuming fun. Although I think the best platform is mobile, I can’t at this time. When my new game is “*music* out of beta and releasing on time *music*” It will have one more main feature.

2 Thirds October Challenge

At the time of writing this, we are 2/3 of the way through October.

I started developing my game on October 1st and I would say I’m am actually about 2/3 of the way to completing the game.

This is a sort of log of what I went through to get to this stage.

Week 1

Idea

Not much time was spent thinking of an idea. I was determined this time to make a game that I myself want to play even if it was an existing game. With that in mind, I chose the game mechanic (drop7 by Zynga, originally from area/code) and thought about what I’d like it to have to be more appealing to me.

• More colour
• More character
• More particles
• Adventure Mode

The first 3 are just visual things, but they make a difference to the feel of the game and as a graphic designer/illustrator it’s kind of important to me.

Adventure mode: I’ve yet to implement this as I’ve had many many ideas on how to do it. I know how I want the player to feel. I want them to want to progress, to want to beat levels and explore the world I’ll make for the game.

Platform

It’s definitely a mobile game. I intend it to be played in short bursts, 5 minutes here or there. Options:

• iOS (iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch)
• Android (Phones, Tablets)
• Windows Phone

These were the 3 platforms I was thinking of. I’d love to do a windows phone, but not owning one means testing is just can’t happen.

That leaves iOS and Android. Now, I have a couple of really old iOS devices to play with but developing for iOS will cost me $99. That is $99 I don’t have. So, we’re down to Android, a mere $25.

So I’m developing for Android. That will require me to know Java. Which I don’t know well.

There are a few other options for developing for Android, the 2 I looked at were

• Phone Gap
• Unity

I don’t know Unity and I don’t want to spend too much time learning something new when I only have 1 month to complete my game.

From what I understand about PhoneGap, it throws HTML5/JS into a webkit browser on your phone as if it were it’s own app.

Well, I’m very familiar with javascript, so I’ll give PhoneGap a go. (Spoiler: it doesn’t work out)

Time to get started.

Coding went pretty smooth for my first prototype. I had much of the game working by the end of the week.

The code itself was a huge mess. I was just learning about MVC architecture and attempted to implement it as I went  along. BAD MOVE. The code just got worse and worse and became unworkable.

Week 2

Rebuild!

My code was a mess. At this stage in my life as a game developer, I’ve gotten accustomed to re-writing all my code from scratch and that’s exactly what I did.

I re-coded the whole thing in about a day. It went amazingly well. I changed the grid model from something overcomplicated (list of tile entities) to something super simple (jagged array with integers) and wow was that the best thing I ever did. Coding from here on out was a breeze.

By the end of the week, the game was working and had the added benefit of being able to change the grid size on the fly. I played around with 4-10 grid sizes. Funny thing, 7 grid spaces was the magic number in terms of fun and difficulty.

I tested the game on various browsers and touch device browsers. Turns out Safari is a dick and doesn’t support “.bind()” which a significant part of my event system. That was a pain to sort out, but I ended up adding some code so that it would work on browsers that don’t support it.

Weird thing, the game worked super fast on my old iPad 1 (Safari) but slow on my Nexus S (Chrome). Craziness.

Time to test out Phone Gap. I copied my files over into Eclipse. Tested it. It didn’t work. Crap.

Turns out, requestAnimationFrame won’t work. That’s an easy fix, I switched over to my teeny setTimeout loop.

(function loop(){ setTimeout(function(){update(), draw(), loop()}, 1000/FPS)})();

It is my prototyping game loop. If I have to write something from scratch really quickly, I use this.

Back to the Phone Gap test. It works!

I started working on the graphics, which took no more than an hour or so. (It is my speciality after all).

Coded my new view class and test it.

It works!

but…

slowly.

Well.. that sucked.

I implemented all the performance improving hacks I could think of (FYI working in canvas no CSS3).

• ~~ Double Not. Rounded out all my draws coords (canvas hates decimal numbers)
• Pre-rendering. All my sprites were resized and pre-rendered into their own canvases.
• Non-full screen clearRects. I only re-drew things on the screen that changed.
• Layered Canvas and draws on their own layers. Turns out this actually made things slower despite there being significantly less re-draws.
• Frame skipping. Well.. this really had the same effect, everything was just as choppy as before.

Well, clearly javascript was just not going to cut it.

Now, this isn’t to say PhoneGap is terrible for games (it is), I had right from the very beginning a particle system that I was unwilling to part with. It added some 100+ particles on the screen every time something happened and is the sole reason for laggy perfomance.

oh and I want my game to run at 60 FPS. None of this flimsy 30 FPS.

Week 3

Hey that’s this week!

I decided to re-write the whole thing over in Java.

I knew that the hardest part of this would be getting the thing up and running because really, to me, regardless of the language, all games are the same thing.

• Game Loop
• Game Logic
• Game Rendering

The things that were different were;

• Game Loop Code. Involves pausing threads and what not.
• Event system. Turns out you can’t pass a method reference as an argument. There are work arounds and I ended up passing anonymous functions but I wasn’t happy with it and ended up scrapping my whole event system. I didn’t actually need, it was more a proof of concept.

As for the game logic, it just so happens I write my Javascript like I write my C#/Java. So it was mostly just copying and pasting with some type declarations.

I’ve just finished writing much of the code for rendering/drawing.

It works! and fast! and that’s just in the emulator, on my crappy old phone it’s super awesome.

So that’s where I’m at right now.

Things on my to do list:

• Particle system
• Title Screen
• Score Keeping/Submission
• Implementing ads for free version
• Adventure Mode
• Hats

I expect to have the game ready for submission some time next week. Initial version won’t have adventure mode. It’s not a vital part of the game, just a bit of variety/fun.

So yep, this has been my process for making one of the simplest of simple game development over-complicated.

There should be screenshots of the progress.

Oh and the name of my game will be Panda7.

Tags: 7, app, chrome, dare, development, drop7, game, gamedev, Google, iOS, iPad, java, javascript, ludum, nexus, october challege, panda, particles, PhoneGap, play, port, safari, screenshots, store, windows phone

Hey there ladies and gentlemen,

I have been working on a game project for the October Challenge and I come to give you some screenshots of the game

That is the result of ~2 weeks of work (not final, ofcourse):

Do you like it? Give me some feedback at this first screenshots impressions, please!

Regards,
Midgard (@MidgardT).

Hi to All.

My entry for the October Challenge is called The Princess Digs Zombies. I originally started this game for the MiniLD #34 which theme was “dare”. I love RTS games but suck at them so I dared to mix a RTS game and a Tetris / Columns game. I couldn’t finish in time but I felt I had to get back to it somehow. The October Challenge was the perfect incentive.

The game is developed with Unity. So far, I have rewritten the whole game from javascript to c# and strongly rationalized gameplay which made programming so much easier. In the process, I am also testing my handcrafted ASCII console package ( which I plan to release on the Unity asset store later, but I guess middleware is an alternate way to monetize your game ).

I’d say the game is 90% finished when it comes to code, graphics and story. I plan to spend the end of the week balancing units and maybe adding a final boss : the Zombie Lord himself ! My plan is therefore to release the game on Kongregate by next monday. I have no idea if I can make a dollar within the 10 days or so remaining.

What I’d love to do is to add an iOS version with a two players mode but I’m also not sure I can do that within the time I’ll have left…

As usual, I am amazed at what some other contestants have already manage to pull out. Congrats.

– jujule

screenshots :

Progress is being made! First, there are now units! And, and, you can select them, and then move them, and attack things with them! YAY! Kinwoop, one of my collaborators on this, made some awesome music, and sprite art is forthcoming from Plague8908. In general, good things are happening. I’m implementing AI now, along with Fog of War and the HUD, so I have enough on my plate. If you wouldn’t mind, I’m taking suggestions for the HUD: Wesnoth-style or Fire Emblem-syle?

We are still working hard on Treevolve, but we have still a lot of work to be done for a full release. Our aim is to release the beta this Monday (22. October). This beta will contain only the first level and some features blocked. We don’t want to spoil you all the game

AI

As you may know in the game you have to defend your Helpers. They are your friends and are crucial to get more points. In some level with the old AI they were not working well, too many on one resource node and sometimes they didn’t know what to do and went trough each other too much, so in the last days I decided to rewrite it from scratch.
Now, making an example for the first level (in every level they have a different objective), they go 3 by 3 gathering on one node, if no node is free they wait at home and run when it is their turn.
I was stress testing the new code (spawning dozen of Helpers) and it was so fun to watch that I decided to make a video.

Video Link click
ALERT:This is only a stress test, not really a game mechanic 

Skill tree

This is a feature we still haven’t announced. We will have a skill tree! On every finished stage you get some points to spend to raise your skill or unlock some new skills.

This is only an example

Comic and story

We have finished discussing the first stage of the story, the full story with a great ending.
Kristian is helping us with drawing a comic. I can tell you, it’s a massive work from him and it’s coming out very good. A big thanks to Kristian for the help!

Social network

We have created the official pages of GetFun on Google+, Twitter and Facebook. If we get 100+ likes/+1/followers we will release the first little comic! So share it to help us!

Thanks everyone for the great support you are giving us.

GetFun to all!

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 18th, 2012 at 3:40 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.

Wow, this has been a wild ride! Halfway there and we have done a huge amount of work. FlyCraft is now playable and we spend lots of time playing which takes toll on development! The game is starting to shape up and it’s good! (by my totally unbiased opinion)

FlyCraft is a game about crafting flying machines. You take up the role of Herbie, a chubby Ladybug, who is too bored to fly by himself and creates whatever wild contraption you can imagine to fly from one flower to the other. You get to utilize wood boards, steel plates, soda cans, firework rockets, propellers, and other wild items that you can combine in any creative way you can conceive. Will it fly or it will fall like a brick? There is only one way to know: throw it off a cliff 😀

We have just setup a launch page for the game here: http://www.flycraftgame.com/ where you can sign up and get updates. We will also be featuring in the game’s credits the top 5 referrers! So after you sign up don’t forget to send the link to your friends! Who knows maybe you will find yourself featured in a true game!

Tags: blackberry, casual, craft, flight, fly, game, playbook, sandbox

Just started the October challenge. Decided to be really punk rock anarchy and start half way through. Decided to make a simple on-line zombie shooter because that shouldn’t take more than a week to get up and running. Then with my second week I will set up a page were you can play with a donation button, hopefully some one will donate my precious dollar!

Using unity’s basic networking system I am not to sure how many players it can support, I assume it will also rely on the host-ees internet speed but I don’t plan on capping the limit of players. Hopefully by the end I have a fast based frantic shooter that people can enjoy. Wish me luck!

Hi guys, you may have heard before that I was writing a game on the federation of Australia for my SOSE/history assignment. Well, it’s done for the time being. Just wondering if anyone would be interested in testing it for me, that would be a great help. Any feedback would be appreciated.

Just so you know, it’s written in Python with PyGame, so if it’s too much trouble to install these, then don’t worry about it; I’m happy to hand my game in as-is. This runs on Windows 7, and from my experience in LD23, it should run on Linux (Debian, at least). I believe it’s possible to get both Python and PyGame for Macs so you can probably try it on them too if you have one.

If anyone is interested, I can try to compile an executable for Windows, but for the time being, it’s not one of my priorities.

Headphones or at least a way of hearing the sound is somewhat necessary for the end cut-scene.

Thanks in advance for anyone who can help.

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/75311676/Race%20for%20Federation%201_6_1%20release%20minimal%20files.zip

– Topaz

We started the October Challenge during LD #24 by participating in the Kongregate competition. We won 2nd place there (after a long wait), but I am more interested in getting everything sorted for obtaining ad revenue.
The problem is, you need an U.S. tax id for that, which takes a very long time if you’re not from the U.S. Estimation? 4-8 weeks and a bunch of paperwork. I hate paperwork. I’ve filled in the documents but I do not have my passport nearby, soonest I will be able to send it out is next Saturday, which is way too late to succeed in this challenge. But at least I set the wheels in motion, that has to count for something, right?

I’m now in the works of sorting everything for the company I started in March this year, more paperwork and more reading. Have I mentioned my hatred towards paperwork?

To round up, here’s the balance so far:

(Shameless self promotion) If you want to give it a go, here’s the link:

http://www.kongregate.com/games/Aceria620/go-back

In the past my game attempts have been foiled by being too ambitious.  So for the October Challenge I’ve decide to try a different approach: make something very simple but highly polished.  As such, I’ve settled on a space shooter, currently codenamed Shooty.  Unfortunately, there are quite a few other space shooter games called Shooty or something similar, so I’m still deciding on a name.  I’m writing it in Impact.js, which is turning out to be the best Javascript game engine I’ve used.  In past competitions I’ve tried to make canvas games from scratch or from other lesser-known engines, but I haven’t made nearly as fast of progress.

I’ve got a page with Google ads up, which will be my method of monetization.  If you’d like to try it out, go to:

http://lifelessboring.com/shooty

Any and all feedback is appreciated.  Currently you use WASD or the arrow keys to move your ship around and the mouse to aim.  At this point, if you die, refresh the page.

I’m optimistic about at least finishing this game to a playable state by the end of October.  If I make it that far this will be my first completed game!