For a very first Ludum Dare, I think i get out pretty well !
Anyway, here’s the link to the chef-d’oeuvre : http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=14410
You’ll see that for the name, i came up with Gr0wth… cool uh ?
And here’s a little screenshot ’cause a post without screenshot is a sad post :
Enjoy ! (dare you don’t, I’ve spent so many time on those characters movements…)
I think I will not be able to finish. I will try as far as possible. So exciting!
Some experimentation with game world objects and terrain.
Saturday was spend experimenting with the game world and the dynamic terrain generation. Christian finished up a terrain generation script while Rob created several models to populate the world. Zenas worked on getting a menu system set up for the game. The highlight for the day came when Rob stumbled upon a crazy looking world where the trees, instantiated at a huge size relative to the player were randomly rotated and thrown down upon the landscape. Needless to say, we were so impressed with how it looked that we decided to keep further experiment along this path to really awesome results.
My Entry is finished, a shoot em’ up type game about inserting DNA into monkeys to transform them into humans. You are a Infected Cell sent back in time with human DNA and must fight the cells to implant Human DNA, whlist evolving yourself. Pretty happy with the result as i didn’t spent as much time as I would have liked to on this.
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=13768
Finally done!
Get on the TOP!
Choose your salvation.
Be a Monkey or a wussy Astronaut!
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=10298
this was so fun. now i can read the blogposts you all did the whole time. i’m enjoying it.
good night!
Tags: html5, javascript, MelonJS, schattenkind.net
I think I take the record at being at the most coffee shops; currently at 5th one; still cursing not having a non-initial latency audio solution for pure AS3. (Must… resist… Flash IDE .SWC encoding…)
OK, I have added all the functionality to the engine except the HUD and possibly a game menu. All tiles and sprites are done. Here is some proof:
*No I didn’t wanted seamless texture!
See the previous post for a video of the features! 😉
Next is the HUD, game menu, and maybe some sfx.
Tags: done, gfx, screenshot
Wow, I can’t wait to do a post-mortem on this round. I think this is the best experience I’ve had yet, even if the game isn’t the most flashy or intellectual.
Here is my entry: And Thus She Spake
I’ve also been updating a post on my own blog with updates throughout the compo.
Oh, also there is an easter egg
It’s time for some quick food.
And here is a new screenshot. I’m making 10 levels for the game.
Bah, things have not gone as smoothly today as yesterday. I should hopefully be able to get a simple game together but it’ll be style over substance. Here’s zombie Darwin walking on the collision mesh (I made a simple level editor to help me make it).
Darwin throws books, there’s one enemy type you can kill. I’ve gone for a big drawing for the level … it’s about 1/2 a meg which I guess is nothing these days.
I’ve added 1 module to my engine to handle the keyboard and 3 extra functions around the rest of the place one for opening an url using the OS (windows only) and some for moving the 2d camera around. This is stuff that’s eaten into game dev time!
(First time I’ve done a 2d collision mesh, it’s worked out ok.)
7 hours left and I’m designing the first few levels. Wooo. Never working in C++ again.
#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 */
As expected i didn’t have time to finish a games, but i publish the contents so far anyway. It’s written in JavaScript and runs in your average browser (all my nice trials with WebkitAudio is removed).
The idea of the game is that you have couple of organsims with some random traits (size, speed and leakrate) and you chose 3 of them to try to guid to the pond in the middle where they can procreate. Each specimen that reaches the pond gives you three offspring which inherits it’s parents traits.
…but Primordial Smackdown is going great. Almost done. It isn’t my best work, but it should be alright. Currently, you have to evolve between levels by selecting one of 3 offspring, each of which has a random combination of increased or decreased attack defense or vision.
Thank goodness we’re doing the Jam; that extra day proved to be a perfect match for our (admittedly undertested) libraries.
So it didn’t support alpha in images. That’s OK, 4 hours later a large portion of the graphics library that handles bitmap loading/drawing has been rewritten to use GDI+ Bitmap::Bitmap objects rather than GDI bitmaps. What surprised me most was that it works at all now; to my tired eyes it looks like a jumble of alphabet soup I spilled on the screen.
If I learned one thing from this experience, it would be make sure your foundation is solid before building a house on top of it.
Now, back to adding content!
I want to sneak a kitten in my game and have an awesome idea. I was going to put a Nyan cat in there, using the original graphic and just let it fly by… is that violating the rules of me having to have created all content in these 48 hours?
Thanks 😀
I finished my game yesterday, and now i want to show you timelapse of whole process! Of course if you want to waste 0.72%(21 min) of your time!
This time around, I decided to make a game for the jam rather than the competition. My sister came up with the idea for the game, and I taught her how to make the graphics for me. We worked for most of the afternoon and evening yesterday, and I finally have something working.
I’m writing the game in JavaScript and HTML5, and my sister is using Paint.NET for the graphics. I plan to use Audacity and my Rock Band mic to record some music. I’m not sure how much time I’ll have to work on this tomorrow, so I will have to see how far I get today.
Just a final play through to do, but other than that it’s all complete. Time for some food…
The boss fight’s pretty much done!
Now all I need to do is the final scene (the ending) and then all the little tweaks and gimmicks I can fit in.
Aiming to submit around 2 hours before the deadline.
Dragon boss fight
I’m way more happy about actually finishing this than the project itself, which was too much being squeezed into just a day of work, most of what I planned didn’t go into the game. I also changed the direction of the game somewhere in the coffee-haze.
Here it is, playable from start to finish, physics will without a doubt bug out and leave the game broken!
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=3145
after long 2 days – I’m done!
check it out: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=10771
They appear in groups – that can’t be good!
Set on a evolutionary adventure where you must devour the weak and survive against
the strong so you may evolve and reach the top of the food chain!
In this game, you must travel the stages and eat creatures that are smaller than you. After you have eaten
enough, you are ready to evolve and you need to find the stage exit to proceed to the next level.
Phew! It was a close call, but I managed to finish my Ludum Dare entry in time! Had to work like crazy, it’s very late and I have work tomorrow, but screw that! It was worth it! Play it here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=rate&uid=11391 If you rate and leave a comment, I make sure to play, comment and rate your game as well!
I didn’t have the energy to put in all the hours over the weekend like on my first LD48. I originally wanted to have my spin on a promethean theme by first planting life (via a Game of Life implementation) and then doing my little Breakout clone on top of that. It would have been fun, no doubt! Prometheus: “Because I can.” >B-)
Suffice to say I am still by far not fast enough in Javascript therefore I will try to focus on simply polishing my little Breakout clone, while hopefully finishing it without losing too much sleep. Excuses, excuses… better get back to work right now. Hang in there good people, we can do it!
Finally I finished it!
Due to work, I have to start on Saturday’s evening. Still, it’s my first LD and I don’t want to give up. It’s an interactive fiction, nothing technically fancy, but I hope it’s enjoyable. At least the story and all the possible ideas were fun to come up with! Until I realized I didn’t have time to implement them all. D:
Just submitted my entry. Hopefully it’ll be up soon
I’m now on my last session, need to get this finished!
In the mean time, I finished the first part of the story and added a tutorial, so I’ve built a demo: http://www.mediafire.com/file/ke1s47i11jeiqw4/Kill_It_v2.jar
Hey LDers!
Well, if we end up running out of time and can’t get our platformer going how we want, we’ll at least have a really fun brawler for you to play. If we resorted to this Plan (B)rawler, it’d hurt our rankings a bit cause of the game play, but it’d be mindless fun. haha.
Falcon….
Enjoy, guys.
~ScreamRawr & Jif
They don’t move at the moment, but the program sees the input…
So things started out well for me. I came up with a decent idea out of the gate: You play as a group of neanderthals, the Stone Age evolutionary also-ran competitor to Homo sapiens. Using Civilization-style turn, movement and combat mechanics, you’re given an increasingly hostile environment you will inevitably succumb to the forces of natural selection against the better-equiped Homo sapiens, so the goal is simply to survive as long as possible. Play continues either until you run out of food and starve (prey animals like mammoths wander the map) or are killed off. I knew I don’t have enough coding experience to be able to pull off some of the fancy mechanics other people are doing, so contained within one map, this seemed doable.
Well coding experience still bit me in the ass. Here’s how things have gone down so far:
6 pm: LD Starts.
8 pm: Decide that I have a good enough sense of the mechanics that I can at least start writing code, so fire up the python editor and lay out the basic Pygame framework, some sprite classes. Look on the web for advice on making tile-based maps which I haven’t done in my practice.
9 pm: I’ve thrown together some stick-figure placeholder graphics and decided to go with random map generation that I can fine-tune later. Hello 2d arrays, my old nemesis.
12:30 pm: Victory! My map generator is working, and can translate grid coordinates into tile placement coordinates. I’ve earned myself some sleep.
4 am: FFFFFFFFFF- This sleep thing isn’t working out well tonight. Pull down some podcasts to in an attempt distract my brain from the fact I can’t sleep.
6 am: Damnit, this isn’t working. Make a pot of oatmeal for early breakfast.
6:3o am: Eating the oatmeal had made me sleepy enough to fall over and actualy sleep somewhat
8 am: Wake up about when I had planed to. Make a pot of tea and open Photoshop to work on proper tile art until the left side of my brain wakes up enough to deal with code.
10 am: Ok, let’s try to get these neanderthal sprites working with turn-based movement.
2 pm: It seems I don’t really know how to deal with state management very well. My loops are spinning without regard for whose turn it is and aren’t receiving input consistently. I’m geting to the point where I’m starting at the screen for long periods of time without work.
5:30 pm: Wake up from a nap. My code is glaring at me defiantly.
7:30 pm: Talking through the current tangled mess that is my code with my boss suggests that my way forward is going to involve a lot of refactoring. Here we go…
11:30 pm: After a slow and tedious refactoring process I realize that one of my big assumptions about how Pygame, looping, event.wait() and the Clock() works was wrong, and suddenly my event handler is behaving, even if the refactored movement code doesn’t yet. By this point the lack of sleep has me pretty braindead and I know from previous game jams that not having my base code working by several hours ago doesn’t bode will for me finishing anything playable for the competition.
So in exchange for settling on going for the Jam deadline, I got a proper amount of sleep last night, for I knew without it I would only make myself miserable and even less competent. And being miserable defeats much of the purpose of doing LD in the first place.
With a clear head now, once more into the breach!
What sound does a platypus make? I don’t even know. But here, art.
I still can’t draw circles
And spent way too much time working on base code. Now I have ~6 hours to go, and I have…physics working. Not even player control! xD On the bright side my architecture is pretty sweet. At the top level you have two concepts:
View | End-Point
The View is what the computer sees and feels. It’s your display, your audio and your inputs.
The End-Point is the logical steps the program must update. AI, Players, Physics and Collisions.
Beneath these, you have Services
Services are the “business logic” of the system, they manage all discrete calculations and the movement of data. So the Physics End-Point will use the Entity Service to get all Entities with the Physical component, and then pass those Entities into the Physics Service in order to update them to the next frame of physics. Same things apply to AI and Players, the End-Points tie the Services together. You get the idea (I hope).
And then you have the bottom, Data
Data is where all information is stored and accessed through Repositories. So you have (for example) an Entity repository, a Sprite repository and an Audio repository. These are accessed through services.
Nothing knows about anything above it in the hierarchy, and it’s turned out to be flexible enough that I can almost dream of getting it finished in the next 6 hours. Unless something else distracts me.
Probably should of used a premade Engine…but where’s the fun in that?
Ive taken to watching my creation evolve, problem is alter ego has just given me a disciplinary 
back to work then …
I caved and made the camera a bit better and did some tweaking, the biggest change is probably the addition of health packs dropped by enemies. I didn’t fix what is probably the biggest problem, which is that at the ‘edge’ of the arena all that happens is the camera stops moving, you can happily fly off with no repercussions. The reason for this is that if it wrapped around (probably the best solution) I’d have to incorporate that into the AI calculations and that would be a lot of brain work, and if it just killed you it would be a bit too easy to die like that (and I’d have to make AI rules to avoid the sides).
It’s not often you get to write code as ugly as this (unless you’re me that is, in which case it’s very often):
for(GeneBlock block : this.geneBlocksInPlay){
if(block != currentBlock){
List neighbouringBlocks = new ArrayList();
int[][] tiles = block.getTiles();
for(int t = 0; t < tiles.length; t ++){
int locX = block.getX() + tiles[t][0];
int locY = block.getY() + tiles[t][1];
for(int x = -1; x <= 1; x ++){
for(int y = -1; y <= 1; y ++){
if(!(x == 0 && y == 0)){
int realX = Math.min(this.geneBlocksWidth,Math.max(0,locX + x));
int realY = Math.min(this.geneBlocksHeight,Math.max(0,locY + y));
GeneBlock neighbourBlock = this.geneBlocks[realX][realY];
if(neighbourBlock != block){
neighbouringBlocks.add(neighbourBlock);
}
}
}
}
}
block.registerNeighbours(neighbouringBlocks);
}
}
The Sky in the Room is done
Twine game, 91 nodes, on body romance, adaptation through implantation, Italian pop songs, junky dread
All the game mechanics are in and (reasonably) tuned. It looks like so:
By “it looks like so” I really mean “it looks like butt”, so now is the time to begin an epic CONTENT BLITZ to cram in as much graphics hotness as I can muster in the next four or five hours.
This one’s really coming down to the wire…
Once again I have failed. I really didn’t like the theme so I decided to just try to make something I wanted to make and try to fit the theme around it, but the two didn’t mesh well together.
The idea was a C&C-style RTS, but where you grow sort of Pokemon-like units a a cloning tank. You would capture small animals to study their genes, then splice those genes together to make bigger, meaner creatures. There would be traits like fire breathing and such.
Of course all this is massively over-ambitious, and I couldn’t finish in time. Here’s what I have at this stage…
I managed to get the basic RTS mechanics in place, and started adding buildings and some units, but the whole gene splicing thing just never happened. I suppose I could have just made it so you build your creatures directly from your base without the whole genetics thing, but I felt like that would be straying even further from the theme.
I suppose the whole RTS thing was a bit over the top, but I feel like it could have worked if I had just ignored the theme altogether.
Never mind. I still had fun.
I have something that would be playable… Just needs some polish and a scoring system. I’m feeling pretty darn good given this is my first Ludum Dare.
My semi-live screen shot stream is still running, will make a video once I’m done.
see it at http://www.kins-home.net/ludum/
I reckon I’m only about half way to where I would’ve needed to be at this point to get my idea realised, but I thought I’d post the first shot of my game where you can actually do something. It’s not very much, but still – jump! Collect! Jump again! Wooo! (:
Development screen shot of “Radiation Man”
This is where I’m up to. It’s the beginnings of a game – but I’ll need to be unbelievably productive from here to get something good done in time. Oh well (: It’s been fun – other than the far too many hours of “Why isn’t WebGL drawing anything? Aargh!” – and there’s still a bit more time left!
My super simple game is becoming just a little (seriously, very small) less like its namesake.
Changelog:
This may or may not be the final version, with a tweak or two to the mutation map (I left the brown dot in which doesn’t really matter, but is bound to irk me/some people).
I spent the morning coding up this awesome platformer engine in Flixel! 😀 It’s got the best platformer controls I’ve made yet, with variable-height jumping, wall sliding, wall jumping, and even punching and kicking. No shooting yet, but that can wait.
If this were Friday night, that would be great, and I could go to sleep ready to start coding the actual game on Saturday. However, it’s Sunday at noon and I have less than five hours to go…
Ahh, pushing the submit button feels good.
I hadn’t been aware that there was an LD this weekend until like 9 hours ago… and I figured why the hell not try make something despite the, ah, let us say tighter schedule.
This also happens to be my first LD entry ever. And to be honest I don’t think my project, EvoTD – tower defense with evolution! – didn’t end up being all bad. We’ll see how it does though.
Oh, and you know, go this way! EvoTD
Now for sprites, hurrrrgh…
https://www.dropbox.com/s/jubvjo5tkrj5pl2/ld24.zip
Just got art and a little more gameplay to do
edit:
In case that didnt work try this one
https://www.dropbox.com/s/ms3r5tet8m31onx/ld24-1.zip
I’m getting to the final stages of my game. I’m currently making the end game screen, which needs a lot of statistics.
I also went and got some more beverages for the night.
Go and watch me stream if you have a free space on your second monitor
Particles and stuff
Mountain Dew and Monster
Here you can find nice ones: http://www.squidfingers.com/patterns/3/
Hey, does anyone know a good place where I can upload a web version of my flash game?
A simple site, not like a major portal newgrounds or co. Something like mediafire but for flash.
Just submitted my game with about an hour to spare. Managed to stick some simple analytics grabbing people’s scores and posting them to a DB so I can see just how unbalanced and easy my game is 😛
It was pretty cool for my first ever LD, definitely will do another one some time. My only gripe was that I had ideas for several of the themes but not Evolution and couldn’t think of anything for hours (but that’s my fault anyway hehe).
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=14880
p.s. I also completed the kitten challenge
Tags: as3, final, flash, flashpunk, kitten-challenge
All the game mechanics and graphics are done.
Now all i have to do is some testing and bug fixing. Maybe some music too.
<—Sprites
Here is the game at it’s current state.
Ok, I decided to take a crack at LD24 anyway. Honestly though, I couldn’t really think of much I would be able to do for Evolution, so instead I did what I apparently do best: worked on a short, scary game.
As an absolute stretch, the ‘evolution’ in the game is the gradual change in overall mood and visual style as you walk through the endless hallways of wherever it is you’re at. It goes from just walking to (I hope) a scary situation.
The only major problem I have so far is that I don’t do well with graphics. By that I mean textures and models and such. So the scare at the end is kind of silly-looking, but hopefully it won’t matter.
Unity Webplayer: http://www.parsecproductions.net/games/whereami.html
Will make a Windows download shortly. Does anyone know how to include the source code from Unity? Are we talking just the scripts are needed, or do I need to include the entire project bundle?
I finished with fixes and gameplay tweaks a few hours ago and I’m into polishing now. Spent an enjoyable 15-20 minutes playing with SFXR (actually BFXR) to give a bit more feedback when you click buttons, or more importantly, kill baddies.
My IDE has developed a bizarre ‘feature’ whereby if I cut and paste code from one file to another (note: I’m cutting, not copying! – no hideous code duplication going on here), it randomly swaps around all the type names. Even annotations (e.g. @Override) get swapped with other classes from my game or its libraries that are referenced in the file. Despite this, and some confusion of LibGDX’s Actor classes (resizing only has an effect if you invalidate the object’s layout), I’ve been making pretty good progress today.
I’m actually pretty happy with the gameplay now, although I’m worried it might be completely inaccessible, so I’m working on a tutorial to guide people in a bit. I also simplified the controls slightly (dropped one of the two action buttons).
I have about half a dozen parameters to the game, which can affect the difficulty dramatically. I’ve found quite nice set of defaults for now, but I’m planning to provide an options screen for tweaking them. I had a possibly neat (or alternatively, unworkable) idea of taking the ‘evolution’ theme further by ‘evolving’ the default set of options, via a web-based port of the game. That’s not going to happen today though, and I’m not exactly sure what the fitness function would be anyway.
Beginning to get a bit tired now, and making the tutorial isn’t as fun as some of the other game code. The game overall is starting to look pretty complete though and I’m feeling optimistic.
My game still doesn’t *look* much different, but here’s the new start screen (the options button is disabled since the screen isn’t implemented yet):
Well, I’ve been struggling to get things done these past few hours, but it’s just not happening for me this evening, so…
…I’ve decided that I’m going to take the Javascript/Canvas library I developed yesterday, and spend the remaining six hours improving this. Of course I’ll carry on doing this well beyond the deadline.
I’m still actually quite happy with my game design for this challenge, but nowhere near as happy as I am with the game engine (and more importantly the potential I think it has) and as the game’s just not going to be anywhere near a playable or even presentable state before the deadline, I think I’d rather avoid the stress and frustration and just concentrate on something which I think will be much more beneficial in the long run.
The engine’s already pretty cool as it stands. It makes use of standard DOM features combined with decent flexible multi-layer tile and sprite engines to get great performance. Once it’s (mostly) complete I’ll of course release the source, so it’ll be available for the next LD, when I’ll be able to concentrate on the actual game. That said, no doubt I’ll still spend 50% of the time messing around in GIMP trying to ge the ideas in my head onto the screen.
Good luck to everyone still working hard on their games. Some of them look absolutely stunning, and I can’t wait to play them all.
overworld with horizontal-scrolling , and the different dungeons placed on it can be entered, the further you go the harder the enemies.
No wall-collision so far, and only one simple room per dungeon so far.
Still plenty of time to make fancy random dungeon generation after i finish the respawn-as-offspring-with-gene-bonus mechanic. I think…. XD
I really didn’t think I would make it in time. It is a small game. But hey, it can be fun anyway.I’m celebrating this with my childrens CANDY!!! (They are asleep).
Here is another screenshot of the final build.
Still have to polish my game off and create/add sounds, menu, and a score system. This is easy!! If not for the sounds part…
But alas, this is ohcrapohcrapohcrap mode. I shouldn’t even be pausing to write this post.
I’ve been spending most of Sunday trying to fix the vile bugs in my puzzle game- of which I have only 1 level of the 5 roughly coded… with 6 hours left. I vastly underestimated the amount of time this project would take and didn’t prepare for any problems or other events that would take away time. And I had a great vision for this project. I decided to go back to an earlier project I had thought of that was MUCH more simple than my puzzle game- a cell-eating multiplayer game. Much, MUCH more simple and not new, innovative, or interesting at all, but at least I’ll have something I can call my own.
I’ve been tearing away at code for the past 30 hours, gone through 3 different prototypes for a game befitting of this theme and I’m just, stumped. I know for sure I won’t be able to make the deadline sadly, but it certainly has opened a few things I have to work on. There are two major points as to why I’ve just crashed and burned this time around, it’s a little sad for me, as I had made it like a ritual of mine to try and participate within every LD from my first one – Enemies as Weapons. Oh well, ya live, ya learn, ya rise again. D:
Out of all the factors, these two were the ones that effectively killed me this time around. I’ll see you guys around for next LD!
Good luck to everyone and I hope your projects have gone smoother than mine! Have fun!
My game is done, or at least, as done as it is going to get. If anyone would like to check it out, I’ve submitted it on the submissions page. I will try my best to incorporate any last minute feedback!
Surrounded
Also wow – 190 entries already. How cool is that?
Oh my! only 5 and a half hours left, guess its time for my last meal, and time to crack on with my list of points left to finish.. not doing anywhere near as badly as I though, and I’ve only 5 art issues, 4 code issues and 3 bugs left to sort out, hopefully I get a little time for polish eh!
I’m quite pleased with my game so far, who knows maybe a screenshot will work its way onto here!
Tags: foodphoto
I’m sooo tired T___T
Now for the third and final level ….
PS: Shooting with the bow is actually fun!
Tags: motivation
Well, as much as I want to continue working on my game, I can’t find a reason to. I am out of inspiration as well as motivation and definitely not in the mood to make games after yesterday. No one showed up to the Hacker Dojo Ludum Dare meetup I had set up and I passed on many opportunities that came by when I started to make my game.
I will enter the next Ludum Dare, but this time I am out, despite the 5.5 hours left. I leave you with a picture of a pigeon sprite I was going to use.
Yeah… I will finish this at some point, but for now, sleep and homework.
Woah. I can’t do it anymore. I will be writing a followup Post-Mortem, BUT NOT NOW! I’m happy that I actually managed to finish something playable (quicklink), but to tell you the truth, I feel like I’m dying. Getting old? Uwahhhhhhh
So here’s the main screen of the game. Feel free to call me nuts when you play it ;). There are a few bugs, but I’ve done enough debugging this weekend, I don’t wanna anymore……….
And here’s an ingame picture. Yep, the background spells ‘LD’. Yay, LD 4evaaaaar!!
My pixels walks on the ground! At now, I start making a gameplay. I have no idea it will be. I’ll try to make something interesting. Time goes so fast.. I wasn’t ready for that.
Menu screen pimped – looks nice and:
Game graphics also polished – time to upload the whole thing into the world
Still 5 hours to go – maybe I’ll start porting the game to android when “Death Hockey” is uploaded. In the last 10 hours the code quality went to hell – so many global variables and all the resources declared static. Uff
Bonsoir, jamers!
I think it’s time to reveal our very first screenshot. Yes, we are kind of slow to make the game but, after all, we have all the time we need, isn’t it?
Yes yes we know… Another game with kittens which are evolving. But this time, you can soak your pets in a big uranium barrel. What a good life 😀
Screenshot of 5 players (I’m the one nearest the camera) doing mock dogfights in the cage. We had 12 players, 10 simultaneously. Even without the combat bit yet it’s great fun to play, and not too easy either!
The space ships are currently drawn a bit small plus other issues but well on the way again!
We were having a lot of trouble with a bug in the flight dynamics that threatened to kill the project, but thanks to a volunteer from GameDev forum at StackOverflow we got through that. He has helped tremendously and deserves full mention in the credits. The multiplayer is working, obviously. Just need the combat.
Feels really good to finish my first ludum dare compo, can’t wait for the next time
I wanna thanks my girlfriend for the supporting me
And goog luck to everybody
FronSkratx – Evolve de game from scratch to a game with sounds, music, sprits and enemys, then see how much time do you survive
Yay, I have something playable and somewhat done now.
So, I’ll polish and add features and gimmicks until midnight, then publish!
Nearing the end. We have some new features:
– More enemy states
– Musics
– More levels
– New art (not much better than old art but what do you expect from a programmer?)
Must … have … more … levels …
All right, that’s it – for better or for worse, I’m out of time. There were several major features in my game that I didn’t finish, but the end result is actually playable, so I consider it a wild success!
For a description of the game and screenshots, take a look at the project page here: Conway’s Revenge. Also, here is my official Ludum Dare entry page.
I originally had big plans for a procedurally generated soundtrack. It would be based off the action currently happening on the screen – each tribe of cells would be a different instrument/sound, and the x,y positions would determine the pitch somehow. For example, if green was winning on the top side you might hear a lot of higher pitched trumpets.
This turned out to be too ambitious for the limited time frame. I think somewhere deep inside I knew this, and that’s why I left it until last and implemented other, more key, features first.
Campaign mode was the way I envisioned turning Conway’s Revenge from more of a toy into an actual game. I had in mind a set of puzzle levels where you face off against progressively more difficult enemy formations. You would have to experiment to find the fastest growing formations with a limited amount of cells to place.
Unfortunately it took me too long to finish everything else, and I never did get started on this.
Two more minor features I wanted to get done were: allowing the player to place all 4 (or more) cell colours, and giving them a score. I had thought about assigning points for each enemy cell you kill. This would give you more points for longer games, so instead of rewarding you for dominating your opponent it rewards you for judging the minimum amount of force necessary to eliminate them, which I thought was kind of interesting.
Quite a lot, considering how unfamiliar with my tools I was. I came up with a modified live/die algorithm that I’m actually quite happy with. It suits multiple players well, has a tendency to grow and eat up space, avoids deadlock/tie scenarios, still allows for stable formations and spinners, and can generate some lovely-looking ‘explosions’.
I implemented two game modes, Sandbox and Battle Royale. They’re pretty similar internally, but different enough to the user that it makes sense to separate them in the UI.
I made a craptastic main menu and instruction screens. My idea was small enough in scope that I had time to do these, which I’m happy about.
Finally, I learned a bit about flash development, and discovered that I actually quite like it. Combined with a good game framework (I used FlashPunk) it gives you a lot of help, and makes common tasks really easy.
I couldn’t make up my mind on what set of development tools to use – I picked FlashPunk on my third attempt. Before the competition started I decided to use Unity and read few tutorials and created a small sample project. When I finally decided on my idea I realized that it would be using exactly zero of Unity’s strengths and decided to change to something that made simple things easier. I initially tried XNA, downloaded it and installed Visual Studio Express, etc. then suddenly changed my mind because it would make running my game more of a pain and because people in the Ludum Dare chat were talking about how much of a pain XNA was to use.
In the end Flashpunk was a good choice (I almost used Flixel, and may try it next time), but it took me too long to make and I jumped into it several hours late without knowing the slightest thing about using it. Not the best strategy.
I took my time coming up with a good idea. I must have thrown out the first ten or so I had for various reasons (unoriginal, not fun, too nebulous to implement). I personally find this idea really interesting, and it was small enough in scope that it fit my ability to implement it in less than 48 hours.
Another thing I did right was prioritizing tasks and cutting down on scope at more or less the right times. I don’t have a lot of half-done things left in the game – what is there is mostly complete (with a few exceptions of course). I focused on what I thought was possible to do within the limited time frame and deferred the rest until later (after the competition, even).
Of course, if I had more experience, everything would look more polished and I might have been able to finish a few more of those missing bits, but the most important stuff got done. And that’s what counts.
I really enjoyed doing this. Quite a few times over the last few years I’ve watched this event happen and thought I wasn’t skilled enough to take part. I’m glad I decided to join in anyway. Before the event started I was full of trepidation and self-doubt, but now that I’m finished I feel exhilarated, exhausted, and I have a great feeling of accomplishment. I learned a lot of new skills, had fun with other people (I recommend joining in on the IRC channel), and I even have a cool new project to show off for it!
If you’re on the sidelines trying to decide whether to take part next time, I heartily recommend it. I know I will be.
(This post was originally published on my blog, here).
So game ended up crazy short.
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=14308
Will try to add some depth till Jam finishes. I must say that I love whole LD experience 
Will do those 48 h marathons more offen for sure.
Finally! I can’t make music to save my life, but there’s sound effects!
All is fair with love and jealousy
Hi there is no time to explain!
This is a very few hours project, so short and quick:
This is the thing I will be working on the next 4/5 hours.
This is what I ate when making this (Well I ate all cookies before the snapshot, I am a bad boy :P).
Greetings!!!
So it may be my last Ludum Dare meal…or maybe not? It all depends on these last five hours. I’m busy working away on the art after having made a simple but tasty baked bean pie
Which may look a little sloppy but I can assure you its tasty, and I’ve still got two thirds of it left so I can guess what’ll be reheated for tomorrow!
Anwyho the game, I ironed out a lot of the code related issues I had, I still have about 4 code issues I need to work on, three bugs and a lot of art. In the meantime here’s a puddle for your enjoyment!
The chances of another update before the compo is ended is slim, however if I don’t get everything finished my work shall leak into the Jam to make sure I have something finished
Okay — so got testable play & level prototype earlier:
And have since been working on systems, some of which can be seen here:
Taking a short break now, then it’s on to level progression / load; score increments; general juiciness (inc some more sfx & music), and, er; some basic levels.
G.
Tags: progress, screenshots, update
I’m admitting defeat this time. Have to admit, didn’t care for the theme. I think a lot of people didn’t like the theme. The problem isn’t coming up with great ideas to fit ‘Evolution’, its that 95% of those ideas are way too ambitious for a 48-hour project. They’re either a content-sinkhole or require some serious programming for things like mutation/adaptation etc. I guess I was paralyzed by trying to come up with something feasible that was still a really good fit for the theme, when what I should have done is just make a game I wanted to make and worry about making the theme fit after. In addition to being frustrated/uninspired this time around was trying to do this from home with family responsibilites, kids whining “Why are you on the computer for so long Daddy???”. Next time I’ll be sure to lock myself away at the office or hopefully there’s a jam site so I can actually do this.
http://www.ryanmalm.com/Rybar-LD24/
I’d post a screenshot but… er… it’s a Twine online text adventure-y type of game and a screenshot would be pointless. Still, just hammering out the coding for the multiple endings (good lord, I think I have nearly ten different endings written up… yeesh) and find a good spot to host it online and I’m done!
I had already committed to two long form birthday parties this weekend, so when I realized that this weekend was also Ludum Dare I sort of cheaped out and went the Twine rout. It’s interesting, and it really only barely relates to the theme… I doubt I’ll win any awards for this. But it will be a game and it will be done and I will have done it.
It’s about cheese. Making evolutionary cheese. Sounds odd, reads even odder, but I doubt it’ll take the even the slowest reader more than 5 minutes to hit an ending. The fun I guess would be seeing all the endings. Maybe.
It very likely will be crap. But it will be *finished* crap. Next time, make sure my calendar is clear for the entirety of the game jam, heh.
Sincerely,
ABPos
Im throwing in the towel!
I simply have not had enough time (yet again) to get something done. I had a rather unexpected busy day yesterday where I was out of the house from around 8am until early hours this morning. I thought today would be a free 24-hours, however again, I simply have been far too busy to sit down and get some programming done. I spent about an hour this morning trying to make a little game where you have a horde of zombies who you have to evolve so that the entire population of the earth becomes infected, but the scope of the game is too large to get done, especially as the main compo ends in just under 5 hours. I will see if I can maybe enter it as a Jam entry, but im a bit bummed out that for about the 3rd time now, Ludum Dare has landed on a weekend which ends up being the busiest weekend of the month. RAGE!
The idea is to evolve a bacterial population. The population is simulated as a bunch of spheres in a 3D physics engine. The goal is to achieve certain color requirements.
However, this game turns out to be much more of a browser-bug-finder than I anticipated… Just beware…
Well, i’ll have to aim fo the Jam now. But the game is coming nicely. But it’s better not to slack off.
Done ! The final final polish took some time, but now I’m done !
Play it there
Time to get some sleep ! It’s already 3am in France…
Hi guys,
long time ago I made a little tutorial respective publishing a XNA game to Ludum Dare which covers stupid mistakes I made: You can find it here.
If you use things like RenderTarget or other HiDef-specifics, you can skip the part with the built profile… Visual Studio will let you know it. Here you find more information.
I simply can’t see a reachable goal from where I’m at. Working on my game is not fun anymore, and I can’t see how it’ll be fun to play. It’s definitely an idea to revisit more slowly and analytically. For now, I’m going to redeem the time for projects I can see being worthwhile and not ruin my weekend my stressing about LD.
I might still submit my progress since I do care about the voting process.
So long, and ’till next time! It was fun while the magic lasted! 😀
more ants with BRAINS. harrhrr.
PLAY: MatterSplatter
I’ll write it up next week…
Way tired now.
But it has been fantastic. The whole community have been AWESOME!!! You lot are the best.
Take it easy, and good luck…!
…so pour yourself a stiff drink and get to it.
Yay!!!! The game is playable!
I have submitted my entry, and now I’m gonna eat something, so I can have energy to make the finishing touches!
Okay, the project is done now. Not the thing I wanted it to be, but working no matter what. The player character evolves to gain legs for jumping and a gun for shooting. Also added a level editor to the project, but didn’t have time to add more levels (due to a bug that appeared after last build). Anyway, it is up for testing. One day, I will finish it to be something better. Pretty good for a short 20 hour job 😉
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=3210
I did it! I finished my game! It’s called Shroom and It’s pretty cool!
LD page for voting. (fixed link)
Well i started really late yesterday,and today i recap late too, not too much progress but really happy how’s working 😀 , as a you see is a “Tamagochi” like game, so the idea is take care of him and make him evolve
So after I pretty much screwed over a whole day of coding yesterday, I’ve managed to get much further along today.
I’ve got graphics and interactivity, and by 4AM here (the 48 hour mark) I hope to be “feature complete”.
And now, a screenshot!
“Wait what? What does this have anything to do with evolution!”
Well: between stages the player gets to chose mutations. So that by stage two this lonely game of paddle v wall becomes –
Pong!
And of course you can go really crazy.
Hopefully by 4AM here I’ll finally be done with all the specific “gene features” (as in walls, paddles, etc’ and I’ll get the chance tomorrow to work on the “meta” game (menus, gene selection, saving), if I have any time left I’ll try and work in some mutations I had to cut (colors more likely, if I end up with allot of free time I might just bring story back into the fold).
-Sam
