The most anticipated game of the year 2012, Fend off waves of zombies with your evolving gun DELUXE is released! I was too lazy to create proper sprites for zombies and player, so they’re blocky in appearance.

Anyway, the entry is here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=11033

After 3745 lines of code I have completed my game ‘Evolution Gem’

Being that its written on qbasic, an emulator (Dosbox) which I provided is needed for all windows 7 and vista users.

I also wrote out instructions for the emulator  step by step so if there are any questions please feel free to ask.

I’m happy with the finished product and I hope you all are also (Post your high scores in a reply)

http://www.filefactory.com/file/45ynvmnp8dax/n/Evolution_Gem.zip

The first screenshots are in town!

As you can see, our little hero don’t like it if you quit 😉
Sprites need to be improved, but it got time.
Finally arming him and his enemies.

So, that’s the result of 14 hours nonstop coding 😀
It’s still fun like hell, even when I got some moments when I wanted to quit.
But our hero don’t want us to quit, right?

Second day of developing and finaly we have a name. Watch the screenshot =)

This is the menu, it will have animated background taken from the level.

We are live too on youtube, Daniel (the graphic guy) is making the in game UI, enemies and tree helpers characters. Watch him working =D

link: http://youtu.be/Tw57PoYSiEk

Link to LD page!

Technically a jam entry but uh, 7 hours in and I’m done for now.

Apologies for the kinda spammy graphics, time constraints

Might drop a fullscreen version in a bit for those that want to see it a bit closer, will just be monitor stretchy 800×600 though, haha. i imagine the window is beyond tiny on modern screens, developed on 1024×768 ancient lappy though so skipped my mind.

Good luck to everyone and thanks for keeping the train of awesome rolling guys! Stay cool B^)

Made some progress on Species, although still need levels, sound and an ending.

Enemy AI needs work, at the moment they are shooting themselves!

Decided to try out Ogmo to create the levels: http://www.ogmoeditor.com/

It’s really easy to use fortunately!

Got started on GFX this morning. Nothing fancy but hopefully a step up from red and green squares:

Still working.  nothing too much new to show as far as gameplay, however I have started working on giving meaning to all the white boxes.  Oh yeah, and here’s a title screen.

The area to the left will be a new game + type mode, however I do not know if I will have time to implement it before LD ends.

So Evolution is a theme I’ve wanted since my first Ludum Dare (LD#21 – Escape), and it’s finally here!
By extension of this and a previous goal to crack the top 300/100-if-possible, I’m working as hard as I can to produce something cool.

Assimilator is the tale of a scientist who wants to view evolution in accelerated time. He created the “assimilator class” nanobot whose only goal is to adapt and outperform others – to evolve.  You play as an ordinary, boring assimilator, and your goal is to demolish others and advance through generations, upgrading on the way.

The main mechanic is your Assimilation Beam, which drains your core power when used. You’ll have to be careful – when your core power is gone, so are you. So you must choose targets you know you can kill or carefully attack an enemy strategically. Each dead enemy gives you Evo points to spend on upgrades when you advance generations and spawn the next bot.

But the environment is deadly! Other bots fight each other, all striving for your goal; domination through evolution. When you advance a generation, so does everyone else, with random scaled upgrades to attributes and abilities. Attributes include health, strength and speed, and abilities include shields, dashing and “Assimilator Buddies” who help you assimilate targets.

This action RPG is a big task for 48 hours, and I was nervous to undertake it, but good planning and regular 5-minute breaks to refresh my thinking have put me in a good position to finish. Take a look at the latest screenshots below:

The Intro Menu

A shot from in-game

First screenshot of my game Evoship

Ship will grow as you play, hope that’s evolution too 😀

Hey, you! We’re making a game about EVOLUTION. It’s not like pokemon, though. It’s like men being naked and then putting on clothes. It will be great. Who is working on this game? It’s Andrew Sum, Josh Bradbury and myself! Yeah!

The second part of my game is finished. Now you can play the full game, starting as a fish swimming in the ocean and then evolving to a dinosaur jumping and running around on the ground. All I might add is sound effects, but apart from that the game is complete. Have fun!

Download link:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=15196

Wow, just finished submitting my first LD compo entry.  It was a hard weekend, but I enjoyed every minute of it!  It didn’t feel like a great deal of time, but I’m pretty happy personally with the game I produced.  I put it together with Construct 2, which has just had it’s 100th release, and has a ton of new features including literally dozens of amazing HTML5 shader effects which I’ve also incorporated into may game.  I went for the retro feel, retro games have always been my favourite – just secretly

The funny thing about this whole experience is that making the game itself took 50% of the time, the remainder got eaten up by quite dumb peripheral things like getting the menus going, sprites, and sounds!  Uploading to Kongregate was also a bit troublesome although I got there in the end.  Overall it’s been a great first LD.  Having seen some amazing creations already, I doubt I’ll make it anywhere, but being part of this incredibly intensive, creative hub has been rewarding enough – go strong fellow indie devs!

Here’s my final submission:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=15255

(Best viewed in Chrome)

3/4 of the time limit has passed, but I think to be on time.
My game progresses gradually, here the current state of progress :

I just have to finish the code then i’ll can compose a music and enhance the graphics.

Tags: console, eldaryze, flashdevelop, Flixel, game, Game Console Story, haXe, HaXeFlixel, haxenme, nme, progress, story, wip, work-in-progress

I think it’s about time I wrote a blog update. My partner is away eating delicious cake which, alas, I don’t have. I need to ask him a question about a thing but his hedonistic lifestyle means that I will have no answer for at least ten minutes. Oh well. I’ll do an update instead.

Our video game is about a robot whose AI was designed to perform menial tasks without much input from science men. Unfortunately for said science men, you gain self awareness and proceed to go on a rampage, with humans attempting to stop you before you escape the facility. The theme of evolution ties in to the progression of the AI, as he (and by extension the player) learn to overcome obstacles that are thrown his way by the pesky humans.You also get new guns which you graft onto yourself. That’s sort of like evolution a bit maybe.

Structurally, it’s a very simple game. You use the arrow keys to move around, X to shoot. You’ll shoot in the direction you are walking in, unless you hold down Z to start strafing. That’ll lock your aiming in but allow you to move freely.

Enemy spawning is completely fixed, and is designed to kind of be a bit on the unfair side a little bit. It’s not that it is actually unfair, but the player might have to try a bit of the old trial and error to figure out how to get past some of the enemies. This was intentional, as it ties into the theme of evolution in that it is natural selection-esque. When you die, you don’t just restart the game, you jump into the body of the next robot that is hopefully better than the last one.

That’s more or less all I’ve got to say, but enjoy this HOT FRESH SICK CONCEPT ART for now.

Also, I don’t know if anyone is interested, but you can play our last Ludum Dare entry here.  Requires Flash 11.2.

Yeah, it’s a bit late, but it’s ok. Its a minimalistic puzzle.

Took me 1 hour to put together some working mechanics, now I’ll be  designing some levels.

Cheers!

Crap, that was my first music writing experience. I can not make music.

So don’t punch me, I know its noisy.

So far today i haven’t work much and the time is running away.

What i am done with:

• Upgrades or “Mutation”
• Some what HUD
• Basic enemy and AI
• I think all of player controlls

What i am not done with or want to be added:

• Boss
• Player can die
• Title screen
• Progressing difficulty
• And some more

And the name for the game will be “Geomelution” By combination Geometry and Evolution smart or what (or not ^^)
It is about a Line is evolving to more advance geometries but in this case more of an circle and the goal is an circle and it need to defeat other lines and geometries to become that circle (Most awesome story, right? :P).

Anyhow here is an screenshot

Space bunnies are irresistible.

After a highly unproductive morning (I like my bed too much), it was already time to eat.

I still managed to finish the terrain generation and most of the sprites.

The game should look something like this at the end if I don’t change the graphics:

Anyway! I’m starving!

I was about to throw the towel when I was unable to print text on the screen… but then I though that I should be more flexible and focus in what I can actually do and not in what I should like to do. And voila, here you can see this damn wolf that refuses a sheep as tribute to open the door for us.

Now it’s time to build some more rooms, more items and more crummy lines of text.

I decided to quit. I can’t finish my game, my was to complicated for 48 hours, and also now, and  i don’t really like my idea. Although, i have a new one, i can’t  make a good game mechanics.  Yes, i have more than 10 hours, but… do not want. It’s not fun anymore for me now.

So my first idea was platform game about evolving player in evolving world.  So,  harmless  creature from the start levels can evolve into really dangerous enemies.  And my second idea is sort of  planet or star  evolving . From dust to Dyson sphere, or something like that. But, as i say i have no idea about mechanics.

Maybe next LD will be better for me.

But it’s not bad at all, now i can freely play submitted games!

Healthbar icons, player&enemy damage and death, enemy returning to startpos when player out of range.

webplayer version

Hey all,

Cube miner demo has been updated here: http://draxov.com/Unity/CubeMiner/CubeMiner.html

It has random events in and more research which can build buildings and … wait for it … evolve your mine and the cube industry!

It took me a whole day to decide on an idea and get motivated. Then I had some work to do at the office this Sunday and now I’m at my mom’s house and I think I’m gonna start working. Only have about 10 hours to make a game. It is going to be interesting. Good luck everyone.

More info in my previous post! Introducing Tiny Evolution Adventure!

Today I have been working like crazy to get my Ludum entry finished on time, I think I have put over twice as much work and effort to his game then my previous entry! There are currently 2 from planned 3 levels finished where you play as a tadpole and a lizard. I’m working on the final level where the creature you control (I think I call him Munchie) evolves to walk on his back feet, running and jumping higher and faster than before.

Here are couple new Screenshots from the finished levels. It still takes couple of more hours before I can finish the third and final level and the ending, but I know I can get them done before the deadline! I’m proceeding really fast and I’m damn motivated! Stay tuned!

Hi guys!

It’s day one into our Ludum Dare jam, and here’s our game so far.

Darwin has created an experimental evolution ray, which rapidly evolves life! But something’s gone horribly wrong… The evolution ray mutates life into horrific winged tentacle beings! (coming soon)

Bat-Monkey has escaped from Darwin’s evil lair and stolen the evolution gun! Help Bat-Monkey escape while using the evolution gun to slow Darwin down.

It’s a simple chase game, where the player has to jump over rocks and tree stumps while also shooting animals to give them wings / tentacles and get in Darwin’s way. Controls are space bar and mouse to aim and fire.

I didn’t decide I was making a game till I woke up on Saturday morning, and after a strange conversation with my little brother (mainly about ribosomes) we came up with an idea.

Idea 1: Eugenics Cupid.

The game was to be about Nazi eugenics, the player controlling a kind of mechanized cupid and creating an aryan race. In case this wasn’t already distasteful enough, the player would then be ordered to create super soldiers by e.g. breeding people with tortoises to create shelled people. I spent most of the day on this before deciding to scrap it and start something that could easily be finished in time, mainly because art would have taken too long. So another conversation with my brother lead to another idea.

Idea 2: Arena shooter with evolving enemies.

The concept behind this was that every new wave of enemies would base their stats on the average stats of the last wave with some random variation, so for example killing slower enemies will lead to faster ones spawning. This is implemented, and works, but makes very little difference. I think it’s because the small variation in stats makes a negligable practical difference in how easy they are to kill. Maybe if the game was played for a very long time or there was a battle between thousands of AIs it would be apparent, but not in the minute or so the game takes to play.

Despite the ‘twist’ not working, I’m quite happy with how the game feels to play. It’s far from a complete game but the core mechanics of flying around and shooting things work as they are supposed to. There are many obvious improvements which could be made, a lot of which I could easily do before the end of the competition, but I have other things which need doing today so am submitting it as it is.

Looks like ass, but it’s a fully functioning winnable game that is fun to play.

Not a shooter or a platformer, it’s a betting game for a change. Bet on creatures that compete in running, swimming and diving events. The key to getting to 1000 coins is to pay attention to which creatures tend to excel in each sport.

Play the game.

Short postmortem

After learning the theme it took me about 30 minutes to come up with the game idea. The idea was to combine BoxCar2d with horse betting. I remember just staring at BoxCar2d hoping for the little cars to make it. I wasn’t quite sure of how the physics in it works though, so I went with what I know, which is just a bunch of vertices connected together with springs. Some strings are stronger than others (indicated by blue dots in the game) to try to maintain the overall shape of the creatures.

I didn’t use any physics engine and wasted some time trying to add angular joints in, but abandoned the feature after it seemed that it would take too long to get them working reliably. I wanted to have creatures that would have some muscles that would pulsate in unique ways and those muscles would then be inherited, the creatures getting gradually better like in boxcar2d. I abandoned the rapid evolution part and concentrated more on the betting aspects after it seemed that the engine would not be fast enough to get many iterations, and pure betting seemed to be more fun. There is still some evolution in the game though, the winning creature splits into two and mutates slightly.

What went right

I spent several evenings preparing for this LD by getting comfortable with Flash. Specifically I practiced coding stuff without looking up any function definitions or online help, starting a new project from scratch several times and trying to get sprites to move on screen, doing BitmapData manipulations, filters etc. without having to resort to docs. I felt that helped during the actual compo.

I hadn’t really used the Flash vector editing or components though, so I felt I was taking a risk in not doing everything in pure code, but it paid off. Laying out the controls using the visual editor was faster and it was easier to iterate.

 What went wrong

Things went quite smoothly. As sol_hsa warned though, tweaking physics takes time. But on the other hand, that’s the most fun I had doing this. Flattening my creatures by having too strong gravity. Having them explode because of a bug or joints being too brittle. Subtly tweaking collisions to make damage look as satisfying as possible. It took time, but didn’t feel like work really.

I wanted to livestream the coding, but CamTwist + FlashMediaLiveEncoder were taking about 75% of my CPU which made development too slow, so had to shut those down and end the stream.

I read a bunch of tutorials about choosing a color palette and trying to learn about graphics layout, but when it came time to actually make an interface, it wasn’t really clear to me how to make it look better. I ended up just forgetting about making it look good and spent the time on gameplay tweaks instead. I figured a fun shitty looking game is always better than a beautiful unplayable one.

Behind this fantastic and very original name, there is my first LD game.

It’s a sort of complicated spam game. I’m afraid we can’t finish it without four hands

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=16217

Just got back from dinner.

I’m not sure it’s really in the LD spirit to do photos of restaurant dinners, but this was with my grandparents so hopefully that’s enough of an excuse 😀 Pictured above is a bamboo clam (AKA razor clam) steamed with garlic soy sauce and glass noodles. There was more food, but I didn’t have the time to shoot the other stuff.

That, and I have a near-final prototype!

https://sites.google.com/site/ludumdare5parrowhawk/ld24—re-generation (requires Flash, tested and working on the most recent stable version of Google Chrome)

It’s probably a good sign that I got distracted into playing a whole round when I should have been finishing this post.

I just need to put in the audio and do some minor tweaks to the visuals, and I should be done. The audio files are already done (thanks to the iOS port of sfxr, I did them on the way to dinner) and ready for use.

I might add difficulty levels if I have time.

Tags: flash, Flixel, foodphoto, ld24, playable, shmup

it’s somthing… and with my great friend and partner’s assets it looks so cool.
Of course, we’v been wasting our time in this world generator, and not toched the actual game at all ><!
Still its going to be cool… or look cool anyway

(Grammar fail: AR origin, che pibe)

So, last night I napped, woke up, drew a bunch of stuff, and began working on the GUI for the game. Now I have awoken for a second time, ready to finish the GUI and finally put some gameplay into this game.

Here’s the checklist so far:

Things that are done:

-Map Generator

-Creature Sprites

-Creature Data Structures

Things that need to be done:

-GUI Interaction (the sprites are there, just no buttons)

-Creature Commands and AI Commands

-Sound/Music

This list doesn’t include all the boring backend stuff that is either done or not done yet. It’s just the highlights.

Screenshot with the new graphics. I nixed the fish that were placeholders in my last screenshot, at least:

Tags: awake, checklist, graphics, kittens, screenshot

Hi All,

12 hours left, nearly midnight here in Sydney. I don’t think i’ll have the game complete to where i would of liked it. Base gameplay is working, just haven’t implemented the evolution concept that well yet.

Feel free to check out a playable build on my blog: http://atlantianinteractive.blogspot.com.au/2012/08/ld24-12-hours-left.html The width is restricted and the GUI works better on the full size screen.

Whats left: Implementing spending the evolution points and adding audio.

Hmm, I don’t know if these progress posts are a requirement or not, but hey!

Eheh, all the ideas I could come up with that fit the theme involve AI of some sort… which I’ve never really worked with before! I don’t think I’ll be able to finish my game on time, but the dare did push me to learn a bit about AI, which is nice! If I feel motivated enough by the time the dare deadline rolls in, maybe I could try and finish it up for the Jam instead, who knows.

Hahah, so the basic idea is that you, the player, set up a dungeon and place the princess at one end of the dungeon. You then fill the dungeon up with deathtraps and stuff. The computer then generates a bunch of heroes with random attributes (such as HP, speed and jump), and then based on the valiant efforts of the last batch of heroes, generates a new and improved batch of evolved heroes! You would want to save the princess before 24 days are up, but make the dungeon hard enough that the winning hero has the highest stats possible.

I’ve got a very crude AI and evolution system going on: now it’s time to try and get the editor working, since that’s basically how the player would ‘play’ the game. Here’s a screenshot of what I have so far: if there’s time, I would also want random physical attributes like hair/shirt/skin color to ‘evolve’ on the heroes as well. ^_^ Lol, I still haven’t touched sound design yet, which I’m pretty weak at. 😛

It’s a bit clunky but it’ll do. I’ve still got so much left to add…

So, 6H left, it’s seems like we’re gonna have some extra time to polish and package the game.
Reuno is designing an awesome website and a webservice to enhance the overall experience.
Kuru is painting the intro (featuring our multi-layer god aka black budha jesus, compatible with EVERY religion !).
Abe is tuning things and stuff.

Line, my love, is baking muffins for everybody.

On my side, i’m polishing the chara designs, animations, bitmap assets and the UI.

Wanna have a sneak pick ?

Click Me !

The original game design is 90% done, we will wisely use those 6 last our.
Godspeed Ludumers !
We love you.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 26th, 2012 at 11:30 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.

Yep, some seriously unreasonable entry (yet). Developed in LOVE2D. first two hours: prototype while learning LUA and Love2d interfaces. hour 3: initial object orientation, hour 4: player interaction … and found this nice editor: Sublime (builds + runs Love2d project with Ctrl+B)

Download executable (zipped, with source) here

Only 11 hours to go, but I finally finished the hardest part – doing sprites! Check them out:

Tried to make them colorful Proud of myself as hell!

It took almost 2 hours to draw rough drafts and almost 4 hours to draw colored version. These sprites are scaled versions of source images that are 10 times larger and looking much worse. For example:

Eeew! I won’t even earn a penny if I’ll try to become an artist

Anyway, already started to integrate all these sprites to the game and it started to look much better than before! After finishing with sprites, will do some design for game screens.

Previously I was going to finish the whole game few hours before the deadline, but it seems that I’ll stay up all night polishing bugs, adding effects, and making sounds. I think that the final version won’t have any music unless the miracle happens.

Hello! I planned to post alot, and document the progress and such, but i spent simply too much time locking myself to developing. But heres a little progress recap post before the deadline later today!

The game is about a pixel. A pixel that is quite something different that all the other pixels! It has the ability to manipulate time itself, and must progress in order to uhm, evolve.

With this game i’ve tried something i’ve never done before. 90% of the art is made of square, scaleable boxes, just with different colors. It was very interesting to limit myself like this, and to see what the end results was. Still a lot of work left until its “done” though!

Test the game here! If you’re stuck, just experiment with holding [space].

Also, feel free to check out my webpage

My report of yesterday – http://fred3erick.tumblr.com/post/30239945195/ludum-dare-24-day-2-the-fall-and-rise-2

Tags: 3D, day 2, unity3d

Ludum is really fantastic, isn’t it? Well, I’m done for now. I have school in a few hours and I need some sleep

Check out my game ‘Lucid’ when you have a moment:

Click the image to play Lucid!

It’s coming together, after easily 9 hours of fluffing about with the unfamiliar parts of FlashPunk (for me the unfamiliar parts are, well – most of them)

Those are brains, you get ’em to upgrade your evolution points, which give you better skills. Skills will eventually help you avenge Darwin against the Pope’s accusations.

That’s about it in update land for a while, off to mainline coffee and finish the other 80% of the game! o_O

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=11046

Hi again ladies and gentlemen!

“Deal with It” is finally out! If you like the impossible platformer games THIS IS YOUR GAME!

You can test it HERE or see the Source HERE.

There are some screenshots

Have fun and try to not die too many times! If you like you can post your deaths in each levels in the entry comentaries!

Things are coming along well, only 11 hours left hopefully I’ll be able to get everything done and dusted!

Decided to get most of my sprites out of the way, and any sounds I may want, I usually leave all this to the last minute, but at the moment its a bit silly trying to code when the placeholders I’m using really aren’t helping. So I had some Ryvita, along with some spread, soft cheese and chocolate philadelphia… not all at the same time

Tags: foodphoto

As I woke up today, the final twelve hours of the project, I was resigned to failure.  I almost decided to sleep in, forget the contest.  I didn’t need to push myself past the limit on something I never had any hope of completing from the start.

Forget that.  No, its time to kick it to the next level.

As I have said, things look pretty bad for me right now. My level editor is only almost done, but that’s only half the project.  Currently, I can use it to place tiles on my map.  I still need to program in placing down paths (the “rails” on which the AI move around a level), as well as placing the enemies themselves.  Then I need to program in the player’s arsenal beyond just the ability to move.  I need to program in an interface to decide whether to open the level editor, play the story mode, or play a custom level.  I need to program at least two more enemies beyond the guy who can only see and move.

Oh, and I should note I wrote this at nine thirty in the morning.  My internet connection isn’t quite working right now, so on top of all that I might not even be able to turn in the damn thing on time even if I do complete it.

Let’s get to work.

(Luckily that last bit cleared up pretty quickly.)

There i was, happily finishing one of my game’s possible branches when suddenly… LE WILD MESSAGE APPEARS: “This Project Exceeds The free edition Limits”.

NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

All my ideas… crumbled to dust D:

SO. I will polish what i have so far, and THAT’S IT. Ludum Dare is over for me

Scirra… Y U SO CRUEL D:

Next time i’m gonna try Stencyl Or Unity.

Overall: i’m VERY HAPPY WITH THIS LUDUM DARE <3

Good luck brave warriors, may your games be big.

(cuz mine can't since you know… =/ )

Got stated a bit later then what I hoped, but picking up the passe! Doing a bit of a odd twist with a changing/evolving room, where you have to find a “odd-out” item betewen waves of changes (if that makes sense), so in short: a first person, find-the-lost-item game with a twist. At the moment I got a bit of a bug with forever spawning tables, but getting there! 11 hours no problem

Using the Unity creating this, with some help from the free Orthello 2d Framework. Now I just need something to eat.

Hi guys!
I almost complete my fucking weird game.
Here some screenshots:

Game is about amoebas, wich couldn’t divide inheritance. After father’s death two amoeba-brothers wanted to get heritage – eggplant farm. You are one of the brothers. You have to kill everyone, save eggplants and take them to your descendant.

Amoeba’s life cycle runs 15 seconds. In this time you need to shoot enemies wich stealing your eggplants. When time is out you are dividing in two amoebas and choose wich of them will be your descendant. You have to pick colored mutagenic pills to evolute at every division. In other case you will degenerate and eventually die. Your actions makes your smaller. To getting bigger eat blue “bagels” scattered on the field.  Coming soon)

Well I’ve tried to be in keeping with the theme. which means when you get the upgrade in my game, you EVOLVE…….kinda

I woke up with a sore back. I was lying down on the floor with my legs up on the ottoman since that’s supposed to help your muscles relax if you do it for about 30 minutes. Then I went back to bed, and I didn’t wake up for a few hours. Then it was time to go to church with my wife, and we had lunch:

That’s a Planet Veggie from Planet Sub. It has provolone, cheddar, fresh red peppers, artichoke hearts, sun-dried tomatoes, and a tangy olive spread. I washed it down with lemonade.

I wish I can say I’ve made progress, but sitting at the computer has been incredibly uncomfortable. But lying on the floor seemed to have helped, so I’ll be back at this project today.

A reminder of what I’m doing:
- get the player’s character in the game
- make it controllable
- add obstacles (most likely boulders)
- make collisions between the player and obstacles deadly
- make collisions between bullets and boulders result in bullets disappearing
- add an enemy
- create a wave of enemies
- create a way to modify the wave of enemies so each enemy evolves in some way

There’s a little over 6 hours left in the compo. I can do this.

Tags: foodphoto

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 26th, 2012 at 11:53 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.

Oh my god, is it a heart ?

Love the crazy GUI <3

I convinced some of us to get on camera and speak about their LD jamming experience. Enjoy!

And for those of you wondering what this post title is about, the answer is over here. Let’s just say, it’s kind of our sponsoring song for this levitating Ludum Dare of awesomeness!

Ok so its getting down to the wire hopefully i can finish in time.

Also the live stream is live so hop on in.

http://www.justin.tv/vurbgames

Angry God. So very very angry.

I’ve added sound effects to my game and now consider it finished. Enjoy playing!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=15196

Progress so far:

You control a creature that evolves hunting and collecting organs from other creatures controlled by AI ( that I had not time to code yet =D )

You start underwater and something is telling you that you mush reach surface, to the land and to the top of a mountain far right.

Each organ type have a power that helps you in the way.

Unlike in LD23, this time I had much much less real life issues… hope to finish for jam at least.

Hello everyone,

My game is finished and available, made with Unity 3.5.5.

Feel free to leave some feeback

Play CUBEVO

Tags: cubevo nostradamon cuby game ld 24

Ok, so far it’s hard enough so I will add one or two bossfights and a last level (which will be to hard for nearly everyone so you don’t have to play the last one)

Now you have to deal with an evolving AI, from spikes to a navmesh using, invulnerable sphere  – so thats the evolution in there

A main menu is prepared, but not integrated yet.

As soon as the new version is up I will post it here!

Ok, so now you can se a first sceeenshot of my game! I’ve worked pretty much all of the graphics, and now to program everything…  I really don’t know if i’m going at a good pace or not… I hope I can finish in time!

Finally! I now have basic AI on the creatures, they now search for food, eat, and even kill! Next is threat detection and then… mating!
Right now, level 1 creatures simply forage on tiles they can find vegetation. Level 2 and above will hunt for the next lowest tier, and will eat them until they are full or the creature is dead. I will have to do some balancing later to ensure they aren’t constantly looking for food, but for now, I will focus on the other behaviour states.

Stickmada

Music update!

Here is  a collection of songs we have made for the game.

Go listen and Enjoy!

http://soundcloud.com/minniemoog/sets/ludum-dare-2012-stickmada/

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/74944797/RedArmy.rar

Here is the nearly final version!

Name changed

some kind of AI

new levels

So I’m following more of a regular sleep schedule than I intended.

Anyway, a good night’s rest helped me figure out my sound issue.  You can’t play multiple Music(s) at once!  That was throwing me off.  So I swapped out all but one of my musics for Sound(s) and that should make it so i don’t have overlap.  Unfortunately, that now means I can’t use the fade function anymore

Here’s a screenshot!

I woke up and tried to make some music for the game I don’t know if they are usable but you can play nice solos on guitar with them as backing tracks 😀

After 5 hours of fixing a none existant bug I have finally found the bug that bugged up my movement code. I search my code countless times and revised and cleaned it entirly. No reason for the bug inside. After using the console for debugging I found that pygames collision detection only worked every third frame.  Some other image related modules messed up as well. I could not find a solution to this, so after all those hours I finally decided to move on and be able to release at least something, be it buggy or not. I finally added the time related events and as soon as I wrote the last character of Clock() it stuck me like a lightning. NO WAY o_o ! Could it Be O_O?!  I set the framerate to 60 and started the programm. EVERYTHING WORKED FINE! I just wasted 5 hours on a non existing bug, revising and rewriting all of the 400 lines I already had. Added 20 lines here, 20 lines there and removed them again because they fixed nothing.

But at the  same time I was really happy to have found the bug. It all had its upsides as well. My codebase is now perfectly tidy, dense and clean.

I will post some pics as soon as the first part of the gameplay is finished.

Good luck to all of you, especially to all the others struggeling with bugs 😉

Okay, I am quite sure I will run out of time. This Ludum Dare I only have total of around 24h to work with. Thus, this is almost my last hour going. Here’s the screenshot so far. I am wondering, whether I manage to do the evolution part ready or not. Sad

Tags: last moment, out of time

This was my first time really doing anything with 3d graphics. I’m glad I managed to get it working quickly enough!

Entry can be found HERE

I’ve got the essential features done now, fighting and making love 😉

I’ve got some small things left to implement, but it feels like I’ll be able to finish them before the deadline. First time that happens 😀

We have some cool images on the main menu, and some initial 3D models …

here are the summary of the new features :
– hit from enemies
– new level images on main menu
– respawn of the character after life goes zero
– facebook sharing

to go
– sound effects
– enemies run after character
– textures on the models
– more decoration in the levels

tip on unity web player over HTTPS
When using the unity player on a HTTPS the browser wasn’t able to load the necessary script to make it work, to solve this I just copied the unity script to same folder of the web project, so the script is load under HTTPS and no warning or security issues happens, this took me some hours to figure out !!

here is the last build to test : http://apps.vacavitoria.com/ludumdare24/build6/build6.html

now its time to eat !!

Tags: damage, evolution escape, menu, status, unity over https, unity3d

Emergent gameplay? Check!

So, I have about 34 hours left in the jam. Some of you may have seen what my game looks like so far, this is it:

The game is a town building sim where you can buy buildings which produce more money for you, allowing for even more buildings.

The thing is, there’s no difficulty. You can just build forever. And in some ways that can be a good thing (look at Minecraft Creative), but on the other hand, a bit of challenge makes everything more fun (look at, well, Minecraft Survival.) Adding difficulty, though, will be hard. I could try to make some form of enemy raid but it might not be the best plan; perhaps I should just continue to polish.

So what do you think?

Well, this is the second LD I’ve participated in. I didn’t finish last time, and this time I’m adamant I’ll make it, either within the actual compo limits or at least in the jam.

My original idea for the theme ‘evolution’ was to make an old-school space shooter where the enemies register player behavior and alter their actions accordingly. It was to be based on player weapon preference and locational preference on the screen. These elements would have been taken into account when spawning enemies, affecting both enemy type and emergence location.

Unfortunately, by the time I had a working space shooter up and running, I realized I don’t have enough time left to add this functionality. Now I’m left with a game, that while almost finished, doesn’t actually have anything to do with the running theme.

Embarrasing.

Tags: progress, screenshot

Well my neck is sore and I have a headache but I’ve got the final form complete so I can spend the rest of the day entertaining myself with silly evolutionary player traits like the following…

else if (effect == ‘poopright’)

Failed to make a game. Made a screen of tanks speeding across the screen and shooting targets for all eternity instead. Having serious problems sleeping. Just not my weekend, I suspect.

Perhaps I’ll reflect on this deeply another time, but for now I’m happy enough to call this a failed experiment. The key, I suspect, is to start by thinking of something that sounds fun or intriguing to play, not something that seems technically and thematically valid, but is barely a game.

Best of luck to all of you still plugging away, and also those who have been diligent enough to finish a game already!

Picture for posterity: TANKS! (If anyone wants to watch some tanks, https://dl.dropbox.com/u/12753061/LD24Haxe.swf )

With 10 hours to go, i finally got the AIs working as i want them to. Now they learn from previous fighters and try to figure out the best strategy to defeat you. The game is also somewhat playable and that’s always a good thing.

The current version of the game can be found here. (You need Java to play)

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/61784249/LD24/Appletsite.html

Try shooting(spacebar) those ships on the other side of the map. When the round is over, press space to move to the next round. The bots evolve every round to be more deadly (or stupid). So be careful! 😀

We finally did the animation of 3 sprites. The main character, the 2 firsts evolution. The third is in process. Those are the static sprites of the 3 animation we already did.

Main Character: The Rat

The “Tiny-Rat”

The “Lumi-Rat”

Almost there. It’s becoming a fairly simple but addictive arcade-style game where you try to keep the enemy population from becoming too specialized at killing you. No levels or anything, you just try to survive as long as you can while it gradually gets harder. I already feel sorry for you guys for having to play this without a proper tutorial/manual.

Now to get rid of the rest of that placeholder art.

Things Left to do (to be scratched off as I go):

• Texture Helpers (simple ones since you can’t really see them)
• Make/Texture Station
• Put in upgrade purchasing for helpers
• set up game over when station is destroyed
• implement music and sfx
• Test for simple bugs

Less than 10 hours to go, I’m Excited!!!

[EDIT 9:42 local time] YATTA!!!!!!!!

Just a quick shout to declare my entry is now competed! What fun!

D’evilution – Joseph Labrecque – 48 Hour Compo Entry => http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=14703 

Starting to worry about how much time I have, but the first enemy is working!

Mmmm, bacon!

Slept for longer than I thought, plus my wrist is getting a bit tense. Time is running out!

Can I assume that “java -jar mygame.jar” will work as a script on OSX? What’s the script file extension on OSX? I’ve only got Ubuntu here so I can’t test. Thanks!

So, I’ve been working on A* heuristics.

It is interesting so I wrote a visualisation tool for looking at the costs and paths.

This is a relatively large number of iterations using Manhattan Distance. The large search space is quite costly since we use the search algorithm as a fitness function to the genetic selection algorithm:

To improve the efficiency of the GA, I reduced the size of the search, and we get a similar short term prediction which is good enough:

In particular, the shorter search allows for the users location to have more of an effect on the genetic algorithm since the best possible destination will be more local.

Finally, I was interested to compare the results with Euclidean distance. We see a larger diagonal component (which is to be expected) heading towards the goal (in this case towards the lower right).

I actually found that the directionality of this cost function didn’t give as good results as the Manhattan distance allows the user to try out both horizontal and vertical paths which effectively have the same cost, where-as the Euclidian cost tends to build paths directly towards the goal diagonally.

It has been interesting to play with the parameters of the A* algorithm and visualise the results, and generally it has been very helpful. You can try out some of the visualisations in the first level here.

hey its mohammad here and just wanted to say although that theres only 10 hours left i might just get this done,

ive downloaded tutroials from gamemaker telling me what to do, and then one very useful one told me to hit the export button on the menu selection *facepalm* and hit one of the selected files. then load it onto gamemaker alter ego and the onto vmodeler and then save the poly values.

Why the hell are you going so fast???

Ok I think I’m pretty much done now.

I added some annoying noises (I need to practice sound making…)
And balance a few stuff, it’s still hard to finish but everyone loves challenge right ?

Play Here

I’m worried that people aren’t going to be able to really feel the impact of their actions on the game; it’s sometimes hard to get a good balance between the simulation and letting the player be in control. I’ve hard this problem before (See: Dwarven Isolation), but I think I’ve got a solution this time: Let the player shoot meteors!

Intro page done !

Because of my bad english language, maybe the translation of the text is not very correct…

Take a look

7:30am. About 10 hours left.

I am incredibly tired.

The absurd scope of this project becomes more apparent with each step I make. This is a concept better suited to a thesis assignment than to a 48 hour competition. It’s absolutely apparent at this point that it’s super unlikely I will manage to meet even my more modest goals.

And yet, I am proud of what I have achieved here.

The creatures wander around. They perceive each other, follow their allies, avoid their enemies, They eat, they breed, they die. The terrain is procedurally generated using layered perlin noise, and though it’s not perfect by any stretch of the imagination it is nevertheless pretty good for thirty or forty minutes work. Water and grass are added based on the heightmap thus created. Creatures consume the grass, and without it they will eventually die. They drink the water as well, but not enough to lower the level or anything. If they go into the water too deep for too long they will drown. They move more slowly uphill, which is lucky for them because before that a lot of them were starving in the mountains.

If I had the time, I could turn this into something really special.

That may or may not happen (right now I’d just as soon never look at it again). However, I’m proud of what I achieved here on a technical basis alone. Lots of people like to play up Flash’s slowness and clumsiness, but on my system I have 800 creatures with basic AI wandering around and perceiving each other and it runs fairly consistently at 30 frames per second. Many of the techniques I’ve developed here I will, I’m certain, be using in future projects. Altogether, even if I dropped the whole thing right now and gave up on developing this any further, I still think this would have been time incredibly well spent.

You can check out a working version of this thingy here. Give it a little while at the start to generate the terrain, since that’s a slow process, and try looking at the full screen version for a better idea of what’s going on. The animals are in 8 species with 100 animals per species to start with: note how they will quickly begin to gravitate towards others of the same species and away from potential enemies. Food is stripped away slowly but where they travel will become browner. These critters are too dumb to swim to shore, so you can watch entire populations die out by swimming into lakes.

There’s no mutation yet unfortunately, which undermines the entire concept of natural selection. This is the main concept I’d really like to get into the simulation that isn’t in there now, but I’m just now starting to realize what a truly tremendous amount of work it would be to realize it the way I want to. So, that very likely won’t happen. So it goes.

Now I can work to make the game fun and a logo for the title

I promised myself I would spend yesterday implementing game-play, but I was lying. I spent almost all my time yesterday making sure that there was a ui, and the usability of the small feature-list that’s actually been implemented is bang-on. With time running out, it’s become clear to me that this is the wrong approach for a jam… and maybe game development as a whole.

So, today I’m going to try again. Rectangles for graphics, trace log (as3) any variables I want to know about, and turn the bloody thing into a game! 10 hours to go, how far will I get? Only time will tell…

Try out the latest dev build here.

From 4.2MB

to 1MB

I was able to achieve this by optimizing my audio files. Especially the background music which I just changed into a loop.

Latest changes:

• Optimized the audio files for a smaller file size

To do list:

• Settings page
• Dying event
• More polish

• Player upgrades
• Evolving AI (Getting smarter as time goes by)
• Multiplayer – For more lols

Finally!

I have only 10 hours to make something for the compo, but with a lot of coffee and some hard work it should be do-able.
I have an idea, yet I’m not so much a fan of the theme. It gives me the feeling, that we might get Fishing or Kittens next. That’d be uncool. Seriously.

btw, I’ll be streaming >HERE< in horrible 5:4 resolution with tons of nasty black bars

This is going to be either a huge success or an epic failure.

Happy jammin’,
Folis

This is my first LD, and I figured I would briefly talk about what I’ve been doing with my time.

I decided that this competition would be an opportunity to motivate myself to learn more about game programming. I’ve previously worked in Unity (only once for a college project), so I’m at least vaguely familiar with some game programming concepts. So, in the spirit of learning how to do this game programming thing, I decided to work in Löve2D, with no added libraries/external code. So far my time has been spent with:

• How to define maps
• Outputting tiled maps
• Collision detection
• Player movement
• Trying to make it look purdy

Yesterday was almost entirely me fiddling with collision detection. It works now, but I suspect it’s horribly inefficient, so my plan is to clean things up after LD is done. After all the hours spent fiddling with figuring out which tile is to the left or right of the player, I took a break from programming and decided to switch to art. So I went from my early test visuals:

First tileset

To something a little more fun:

Textures!

At this point I’m thinking I’ll probably not have much of actual gameplay before even the jam deadline, but I’m not too bothered by that. I’ve learned a lot in a few days and had crazy amounts of fun doing it

Need to expand the range of mutation options, remove the debugging text and make free movement more robotron-style, but it’s actually playable.

Lawks!

http://www.mostlyharmless.co.uk/LudumDare/OntologyRecapitulatesPhylology/V4/MonkeyGame.html

Sleep #2 – I doubt I truly fell asleep in 0 minutes.

Breakfast #2 – Mini-Wheats and Iced Tea.

I’ve hit the wall.  I’ve got a bug I can’t figure out and too much to finish in order for the game to be playable.  Not sure how to change course and finish something playable.  It is very frustrating.  I don’t want to quit but I also don’t want to waste my time.

Stuck

Tags: foodphoto, sleep, wall of doom

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=10737

I am done!  My game turned out okay I hope.  Play as a slime that evolves the more it eats, and use you evolution to defeat your enemies.   Gain friends, defeat bats and alligators.  Hope you all like it!

So, in the final 10 hour home stretch, most of my code is completed, my music created and my animations done, even though they are dull. I’ve ultimately decided to create a scrolling shooter, in whith you can choose to be either an animal, a plant or bacterial. You start out as a basic cell but get upgrades and must destroy the first multiple-cell life form, to achieve evolution. I wanted to make the game large but as this is the LD, only one stage containing 3-5 levels will suffice. It’s going to be repetitive, as there are only 3 enemies, but I’ll do my best to keep it interesting.

Finally, I found a way to bring kittens into the game – I also added a janitor, which cleans the bloody mess the player creates with his circular saw. Survival of the fittest at its purest!

Tags: C++, cocos2dx, kittens