The celebratory beer has been opened – though it’s more bitter than I had hoped for. I finally caved around the four-hours-to-go point. We’ll put this one down to inexperience – I’ve participated in a Jam as part of a threesome once before, but I’ve never gone at Ludum Dare alone until now. My idea was overly ambitious – well beyond the scope of the bizarre, simplistic concepts I was throwing around before the theme was announced. Yes, the theme threw me, but I’m done making excuses. Yesterday was a lot of fun, and it’s been a good lesson to me about just how much you can get done in a short time if you really apply yourself. Today… well today has been ups and downs – I think my biggest pitfall was spending so long spriting and working on the player mutation graphics, but that was the core of my idea! I’ll lay out my concept for you below and you can think what you will. I’m going to take some much deserved recreational time now.

1. Boy is in bed, mother tells him she’s sorry it’s so hot but she doesn’t feel safe leaving a window open because who knows what creatures are living in that forest across the bridge.
2. Mother leaves boy in room, something opens the window – curtains blowing, boy out of bed.
3. Player walks to window, climbs out or closes it.
4. If the player closes the window, they go back to bed and the game ends.
5. If they climb out, they start the game proper.
6. The game is a load of top-down obstacle avoiding levels, with some enemies later on.
7. The player encounters statues along the way which he can use to mutate himself and gain an edge, but this is never necessary to complete the game.
8. Depending on the player’s mutation choices, events change towards the end of the game.
9. The player often spies a masked creature moving around in the levels.
10. When the player catches up with this creature at the end, based on their mutations, it will either a) be a boss fight, b) give the player a mask like it’s and talk to him c) look and the player, then leave
11. If the player beats the creature it will drop it’s mask. If the player takes the mask the game ends
12. If the player talks to the creature and decides to stay with it the game ends.
13. Otherwise, the player must return home.
14. The boy’s mother will hear him return. Based on the player’s mutations a) the boy’s father is a boss fight, b) the boy kills both his parents, c) the boy’s mother kisses him goodnight then leaves, d) the boy’s mother screams, his father runs in and shoots him, e) the boy’s mother screams, the game ends.

Well, that was easier than last time. I decided, ultimately, not to include the music as it becomes very repetitive and grates the ears. Finished it all in a total of 16 hours, so the result I’ve managed is ok enough in my opinion. The rest about it is in the description, so please, give it a go and please rate fairly(i.e. please no ‘THIS GAME SUCKS CUZ GRAPHICS AND NO MUSIC : I RATE 0/>9000) and constructive critisism is always welcome, gameplay wise that is.

I’m kinda in a hurry, but I managed to, kinda, finish my game. I’m not sure yet whether I’m more or less happy with it than I was with my LD23 game.

But I have to go to a dinner, and when I’m back I’ll try to write a post-mortem.

In the meanwhile, check out my game!

My entry was pretty much done about 2 hours ago, I’ve just been polishing since then.

I’m very pleased with what I accomplished this year!

Anyway, my entry: Game-Age: A visual evolution of gaming

Tags: finished, happy, progress update

Ot is done! I managed to complete most of my poor schedule!

There are 8 levels and the game is perfectly beatable within 3 minutes. Play it and move on! There are tons of awesome games out there!

Play and rate!

Didn’t finish my game.  Spent too much time making it space.

See ya around.

My game is finished. I’m done. Deployment was my biggest problem, I hope to be able to fix that tomorrow. You know, give a proper web version.

But anyway, I give you: Revolvolution

Hope you enjoy. No mac version because of my aforementioned deployment problems. Also, I just decided to continue this into something more than a Ludum Dare game.

Tags: evolution, finished, game, revolvolution

As I didn’t have much spare time to write this game, I didn’t want to waste it with writing posts – especially that I wasn’t absolutely sure that it will be done.

But it is now, and the entry is posted. I hope you will like it.

http://e-volve.appspot.com/

Sadly i wont be able to finish because i was away for some personal reason, but ppl can see what i did :D! , (not playable)  , please leave commnets 😀

https://www.dropbox.com/s/emdz1rm26on954w/ld48v2.jar

Yeah I failed there. But, I tried the whole community thing before. Post your lunch, dinner, breakfast, your first level screenshot, your first sketch, your first enemy. The player controls, yadda yadda. But, I had a problem. I’d pay more attention to doing the community stuff then finding out what to do on my game. But I yeah. I’ll tell you what. I’ve uploaded the source too. That like a fair trade? Anyways.

Good luck everyone!

Just submitted my entry! http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=1572

It was really fun to integrate genetic algorithms, neural networks and games, pretty much everything I love 😀 Also, I could experiment with the Crafty JS/HTML5 engine and concluded that it has a lot of potential, but it’s really in an early development stage yet, with some bugs and strange design decisions. Besides that, JS/HTML5 still sux a lot… I thought that by now it would be pretty standarized within all browsers, but actually there is still a lot of hacks needed to make something crossbrowser.

Tags: Crafty, Genetic Algorithms, html5, javascript, ld24, Neural Networks

After posting the game up on Twitter

I am blown away by the sheer determination of people to beat the top scores. Its been an hour and over 20k blocks have been blown up (an average game lasts 1 minute and you blow up 300~ blocks..), Thank you Ludum Dare for giving me the chance to make a game like this!

I am now quite sleepy, my hand is killing me (managed to cut it open the night before) and I really could use some food. But thank you for entertaining me this weekend! Happy LD guys and gals!

TONE Gameplay on YouTube

TONE entry on Ludum Dare

ludum dare community, i just wanted to say how fun it seemed this ludum. i hope everybody had a happy ludum, and as you know, school is probably starting back up this week, and i came here to say goodbye. mabye you dont understand,but this may be my first, and last ludum. because school is starting up,my father is planning to get rid of the house computer that i use to program my games on and probably seperate me from a computer compleatly. thats why, although i failed, wanted to show what i could before it ended, but with my parents minimizing and opressing me by going out, that failed, and so, with my final words, i say goodbye to the ludum dare community, and those that i can remember of it through tough times, and how this may be my final message to all:

“although i failed, fight for what you want, and prove that you want it. because i will try” ~mohammad

i ask for no stmhpany,as i want this community to be strong without me…..i hope you continue to advance the world ludum, because when the time comes, i will…

till next time…i hope.

you can still remember me by visiting my website and downloading my work…if i continue i hope.

https://sites.google.com/site/mohammadgamescom/home/blog

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 26th, 2012 at 8:35 pm 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.

I’m glad I somehow ‘finished’ something, even if it missed 60% of the whole (small) game I wanted to do…

My HTML5/JS game is named “PixelVolution”d

Even if I didn’t go as far as I wanted to, it was great fun ! I will do more game jams, this is sure !

PixelVolution entry

Sleeping time now !

Tags: entry, finish, finished, First entry

My game, Biovolve is now finished! It’s my first full game using Stencyl, and I think it went well!

View the entry here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=7468

Play it on the Stencyl Arcade here: http://www.stencyl.com/game/play/14360

Or be kind and play it on Kongregate here: http://www.kongregate.com/games/cryptixdev/biovolve (Please rate!)

Phew. It’s been two long days. But we’re done and you can now play our game there : http://www.reuno.net/balance/ I was in charge of the “cute” assets, the splashscreen, the website, and a few other things. Here’s some of it :

I hope you’ll like it!

My buddies links :

Abe – http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/author/abe
Reuno – http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/author/reuno
Kuru – https://www.facebook.com/pages/Art-of-Kuru/177891188907256
Mr_Hk_ – http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/author/mr_hk_

For anyone curios about how I made my game “Death Cell”, here’s a short post on that subject and how the game works technically.

Tools

• Unity 3.5.5 with MonoDevelop
• Ableton Live 8 Suite
• Native Instruments Komplete
• Pixelmator
• as3sfxr

Cellular Automata

I wanted to do something with cellular automata (CA) and somehow I got this idea of a scrolling Shoot ‘Em Up. I was originally planning on having the CA rules evolve over time by having different parts of the level, or different levels, with different rules visualized by changing color schemes. I wanted to have the player try to figure out the rules in each part of the game as the game progressed.

Time as you know is quite limited, and since I wasn’t an expert on Unity setting everything up took longer than expected, and I settled for just implementing the basic rules of Conway’s Game of Life, which turned out pretty good.

There is support for a full CA simulation in the code though, but it isn’t used. Game of Life only needs a binary state but the code has integer states if I would ever get to try out something else.

Instead I tried exploring what I could do with Game of Life and I found some really interesting parts in the gameplay that I wasn’t expecting. The first sign of emergent behavior was that the square blocks were totally indestructible, which makes them perfect for level design. Secondly, shooting things such as the glider may cause it to mutate into a square block which often results in death if you’re not careful.

This allowed for a somewhat interesting level design in the game. The large explosions in the game are simply a single glider crashing into a set of 2-3 stationary objects. Still, quite impressive, and very deadly.

Unity

At first I was unsure of how to implement a scrolling CA field in Unity as this is something you usually do in code, not with game objects and components. The way I ended up implementing it might not be the best way, but it works better than I expected it to.

Each cell is actually a prefab with a single rectangle (among other things) and a cell script. This is what performs the actual CA simulation. The cell changes the color of the material according to its state.

There is also a cell row prefab which just spawns a number of cell columns in that row. These rows are in turn spawned by a cell manager script and object which handles much of the game logic. The cell manager communicates hierarchically with the rows and then in turn with the cells.

There is a fixed set of rows and cells, initialized at startup, including neighborhood lists for the cells. When the screen scrolls the cell rows are used in a ring buffer fashion, i.e. the lowermost row is reinitialized and moved to the top.

There’s also a “scroller” object in the scene which tracks the movement and everything else is parented to this object, including the ship and the collision trigger. The ship itself is a separate prefab and is instanced as a separate game object. The ship fires bullets that also are separate from the CA simulation. Scrolling the world down and moving things up in the CA system simultaneously didn’t work like I was hoping for. The ship and spawned bullets instead check against the cell manager for collisions.

To have a level and be able to do level design, there is a “spawner” prefab with a collider which triggers a moving box collider parented to the “scroller” object. When one of these spawners are hit by the moving world trigger a shape, described by the spawner, is inserted into the CA system state at the x coordinate where the spawner was found. An enemy appears at the top of the screen at that position.

Results

The whole thing seems to work pretty good on my system. I experimented with different grid resolutions but larger grids seems to slow down on my machine, which I suspected. The final size is an acceptable tradeoff between speed and playability I think.

We have two great news…
– first: our game has a name, will be: A.G.A.I.N.
– Second: we want to show U one of the soundtracks of the game,

Soundtrack – A.G.A.I.N. – Last Passage – LudumDare #24

so, one more day to work.

I’m too tired right now to write a postmortem, also I first want to see what will be happening tomorrow and how my game is being received.

So instead I’m going to post 2 game ideas that didn’t make it beyond conception. I’m interested in what you think of them:

I. Evolution vs. Creationism

This was my first idea. In this game you play a demonstrant who rallies for the teaching of Creationism in school. The gameplay is more like a mini game in which you have to convince pedestrians to join your cause.
The bigger your group, the more points you get. Also there are special characters who give certain bonuses, like polititians, famous people and “experts”.
After a certain time of demostrating you get to the end screen where you, depending on how you did, get one of 3 endings (creationism wins, evolution wins or both will be taught).
But in the end I didn’t like the concept. It was too stupid and the theme of evolution was only a set up for the background story and not part of the actual gameplay. So this game idea stayed just a theroy.

II. Stellar Evolution

I liked this idea more but I couldn’t get any solid gameplay out of it, so this one failed, too.
The game is about the creation, life and death of a star. You start of as a giant gas cloud and evolve to some form of sun. Depending on your actions you could become a red dwarf or end up as a black hole. The gameplay would be based around the interaction between gravity and pressure of the gases to from the different star types, maybe something with mouse control, like fusing molecules.

And than I got my last idea for Super Robocade. IT’s not the type of game I usually like to make. I like to have some more meaning to my game than “Shot all the bad things!”, but for a little side project done in 48 hours I’m pretty proud of it.
You can still plya it here and give me some feedback, if you like: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=12412

Hey, after two days of a lot of work, finally finished my first LD48.

Althought not have had time to do everything I would like, (try other gameplays, make a tutorial and levels not procedurally generated), I’m very proud of myself for having succeeded to finish something in such a short time.

I saw that a lot of people made games about ants, so mine is one more.

You can check it here.

I want to thank the flashpunk crew. This was my first project in AS3 and the engine help me a lot.

See you in the next ludum dare!

Giordano.

Tags: ants, evolution, first-timer, ld48

This is a small 3D-platformer with puzzle elements. Try to finish it!
Made with unity Wings 3D, Paint.NET , GIMP, bfxr.net and music with a python script

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=11043

After creating and submitting a game for LD23, I played a _TON_ of games.  I strove to get my “Coolness” score to 100%.  I forget what was required 100% coolness, but I had a great time getting there.

One problem, on a Mac, I was not able to play many many games because they required windows.  Every time I picked an interesting looking screenshot, stupid windows binary; no dice.  Ugh.  Cmon, give me flash, give me java.

I finished a game for LD24, and attempted to play one of the early submitters games… and wouldn’t you know it, windows binary.

I’m not going to be stopped so easily this time!  I’ve got a fresh install of VMWare and I’m not afraid to use it.

Lets rock some games like it’s 1998!

check it out: link

My Missing Links game is finished to the point where I have no problem submitting it. I suppose I could spend the last couple of hours adding/enhancing the animation and fine-tuning the game map but I figured it would be best to make sure it was submitted in case the servers go down or something right near the end. As everyone else seems to be sharing screenshots of their games, I figure I would try that.

Good luck everyone who hasn’t finished yet.

Well, I managed to make something!

In my game you play as Darwin’s ghost and you have to rearrange fossils consistent with evolution in order to test the faith of scientists. lulz :p

Congrats to everybody who participated. It is worth it, even if you don’t finish.

I submitted about fifteen minutes ago, so I don’t have any feedback rolling in yet. I think this is a great time to write a post-mortem before the details are lost. I can do another one after my game is rated.

What went great

• I knew my strengths and weaknesses when I went in. Specifically, I knew that I was poor at art, AI, animation and music. This helped me direct my game ideas away from genres where I’d be weak. Knowing I was bad at art and music informed my aesthetic decisions too.
• Doing a puzzle game for LD was a great choice. A puzzle game has depth when it has as few pieces/behaviours as possible. This directly worked against feature creep. My experience with 2D arrays from another project also came in handy with this one (or really any other puzzle game played on a board).
• I used a notebook. I got myself a visual arts diary with unlined pages, and I had some colored pencils. It helped me figure things out and allowed me make to-do lists that were serious business, and not just scrawled on the back of scrap paper.
• I set some time aside to brainstorm ideas. When the theme was announced I put everything aside and made a mind map of all the things associated with the theme. I latched on to the idea of evolution being a gradual change in anything, not just biological, and trying to fit this into a puzzle game resulted in my concept.
• I made a level creation pipeline. And by ‘pipeline’, I mean it loaded a .txt file and parsed it into tiles. Much better than doing things in the editor, though.
• I didn’t drink much coffee. I found that it just made me feel a bit ill.

What went poorly

• Designing puzzle levels is painful. If I do another puzzle game, I will do mathematical puzzles so that I can generate them procedurally. I ended up arranging cutouts of color names on grid paper, working backwards from a semi-solved state.
• Not colorblind-friendly. I’m really, really sorry. The next puzzle game I make will be based on symbols, I pinky-promise.
• Not enough time to deepen the mechanics. I think the behaviours of the tiles are too similar, but I didn’t have time to iterate over changes.

Conclusion

Until now I’ve only finished one crappy minigame. This was my first LD, and I delivered a polished game within 45 hours that I am really quite pleased with. I couldn’t be happier!

Well, here we are.  End of another awesome LD.

Got about half the ideas implemented!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=6492

It finally all works. The enemies, the chromosomes, the cross-over, the mutation, everything! Hooray!
The only problem is that now I don’t have much time to make it into a real game.

It doesn’t bother me, though. I think what I built is pretty fun and pretty cool. I wanted the GA and game system to be good, and I think it is. It took a lot of work to get it all to work recursively through the body parts, but it’s worth it.

Now I have 2 hours to make things pretty.

I managed to get ColourTron finished! This is my second attempt at Ludum Dare and the first time I had to concede defeat, so I’m really pleased to have completed this with a few hours left over.

This is the menu and how to play information for ColourTron.

The game play revolves around the evolution of coloured blocks. The blocks merge and change colour, or destroy each other, depending on the RGB values of the colour. The player follows the same rules so can absorb some blocks but is hurt by others.

The final level in the game and the most complicated.

The player has to destroy barriers and cross to the other side of the screen to complete the level. The ‘health’ of each barrier is it’s RGB colour value. Blocks can pass through a barrier if their colour value is higher than the barrier, they can damage the barrier or bounce off harmlessly. Damage is applied separately by comparing the RGB values of the barrier and block. This works in a similar fashion with blocks bouncing off other blocks and the player.

The player can also shoot at barriers but this isn’t as effective as hitting it with a block.

There’s a hacking mode to the game, which allows you to modify the colour and rate of the blocks created.

I wanted to add a different mode to the game to make it more than just a 2D shooter. The hacking mode allows you to change the types of blocks created. Given more time I’d like to expand on this.

The soundtrack was provided by the 80’s!

You can play a demo of the game on my site.

Blog Link : http://keysstudios.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/ludum-dare-24.html

[11:45 PM GMT]

Just 2 hours left before dare ends. Managed to complete the game, not exactly with the initial game design but pretty close i think.

You can play the game here http://keysgamestudios.com/LD/WebPlayer.html

And rate me here http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=14244.

Will be writing a detailed postmortem of the game soon. Bye for now and thanks.

[11:00 AM GMT]

Introduced carnivores and made major tweaks of game design, still deciding on the final gameplay. Starting to look like a actual playable game :).

[12:30 AM GMT]

Most of the time is gone with modeliing and some silly errors with AI. Here is the updated vid.

Should Finish up UI and rest of gameplay by 12 Noon tommorow if i want to make a playable game :|.

Some creature blends

[DAY2]

[4:40 PM GMT]

Spent a little time on modelling and a lot of time on core AI. Here is the results

Right now the creatures are multiplying like crazy, have to tune the reproduce function 😛

[12 PM GMT]:

Initial Camera and creature movement complete. Long way to go.

Talking short break from programming, moving to art :).

[9AM GMT] : Fnially decided on a game play.

Evolution NExtinction

1) Simple Creatures will be scattered on a flat world.They wander in search of food and water.

2) When a creature finds food, it eats it and we as a player gain evolution points.

3) We need to restock the food by speding some evolution points.

4) We can also choose to evolve a particular creature to NEXT level. We have a choice to choose its evolution path Strong or Smart or Fast.

5) Creatures reproduce if it is alive for a particular amount of time.

6) Higher level creatures can damage lower level creatures.

7) Natural calamities(Earthquake, fire, flood, cold etc) occur periodically which can endanger a particular species.

7) It is our task to make as many creatures survive by managing our world and saving creatures from natural calamities.

Such a monumental game play to do in 41hrs. But i can give it a try.

[8 AM GMT] – Woke up just now after a long sleep. Got some random ideas in head, trying to pickup something which is both fun and doable in next 42 hours.

[2 AM GMT] – Theme is Evolution. Just looked at the theme and i am strait off to bed, hoping my brain can churn up some ideas during the sleep :).

[DAY1]

All set for ludum dare 24, will be posting my journey for the rest of the 48hrs here. Wish me luck.

Blog Link : http://keysstudios.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/ludum-dare-24.html

I wanted to post my game in compo for this LD (my first), but well, I’ll be jammin’ x)
So now I take my time and I’ll be able to finish my game the way I wanted it to be.

I’m changing some evolution mechanics, but here’s a [kinda] playable version :
http://ks354906.kimsufi.com/LD24/
Only “Level A” is available. Use arrows to move, space bar to shoot. The game isn’t really balanced yet, so it’s hard 😉

And hmm… a screenshot I forgot to post 😉

Crap name for a crap game. Downloaded the JAR on my Mac to test… didn’t work. ;___; Downloaded the OSX .app, didn’t work. ;___;

Recompiled for Java 1.6 and now it works properly. At this point I have no idea if the .exe, .app and .jar versions are all working but I’m tired and want to go to bed. I’ve also realised the game is incredibly easy to win… almost without actually ‘playing’.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=15902

Nitey nite everyone.

Here is the link to the source code.  Scripts

Finished my first #ld48 compo entry.  It’s been a long couple days.  Little sleep, but I’m glad I did it.

Next year maybe I’ll choose to leverage some sort of framework to handle collisions and animations.  I wanted to do it from scratch and it made things really stressful.  I’m happy with the way it came out though, check it out! http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=14011

Ping me at @scottrehlander on Twitter with any comments/feedback.

Want to kick some dinosaur butt?
click HERE for more info!
It was once again a great experience. Thanks for the compo, folks!

Yey, submited!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=14195

I’m looking forward to playing all your games, just as soon as my eyes gain their moisture back, midnight here to calling it a night, see you 2mo

I am tempted to say that I am “finished”, but I actually think I could take this game much further. I think my concept works really well, and I have a bunch of other ideas to improve on it. So after a bit of rest, and some time playing everybody’s game, I might just have to see what else I can do.

The game is definitely challenging to play. I have noticed that not being able to turn in mid air, makes it very tricky.

Give it a try here: R/evolution

My first idea for the jam is taking way too long. so i’m making it simpler… I hope I finish!

Due to various reasons (glitches, focusing on the wrong things, general lack of productivity) I’m not going to be able to finish my game.  Maybe next time.

I’m done. As ‘done’ as could be given the circumstances.

After forcing myself to drop several cool but not too clear ideas, I went with a small puzzle game that seemed even too simple to be a challenge, but at the end I’ve barely had enough time to get it to a playable state. And that while missing any music or sound whatsoever and with near to no balance in the gameplay.

Love2d is a pretty good tool, but after a few small prototypes I still have issues but lua’s logic, maybe it’s time to check another library for a language that makes things more similar to how my brain works.

An inspiring and learning experience all thing considered, looking forward to check other participants’ entries.

Good luck to those squeezing the last minutes!

… and tired. My first ludum dare experience, only goal that I had is done – to FINISH the game (quality aside) . Also I think I’m the only one from Bosnia and Herzegovina around here

Here’s my  http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=16038. Good night and good luck to everyone.

Finally my project is finished. I worked hard and it was really enjoyable and unforgetable experience. I’m certainly looking forward to the next Ludum Dare.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=8792

Hexarden is a gardening puzzle game, played on a hexagon grid.

Here’s My Entry

Try to maximize your points and evolve your fledgeling garden into something great!
Ok, so its adherence to the theme is perhaps a bit loose

The logo for ‘Bacon’

The game is finished, although there are some things I would have liked to add. I wanted to add another enemy, so the game is very short. I didn’t add sound because it would most likely have ruined the feel of the game.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=3221

I don’t want to write a long postmortem, but I do want to write something…

Upside(s):

• The style is distict and consistent
• I think the game is as polished as it could be
• I finished the important elements
• I’ve had a lot of fun

Downside(s):

• I didn’t add audio
• The game is missing a lot of content
• I wasn’t as efficient as I should have been

The main menu of ‘Bacon’

I knew that I wasn’t going to finish this game in 48h. I tried anyway so that I have a chance to finish in 72

So here’s a new screenshot showing the main character and the rabbit!

Derpy rabbit FTW!

Tags: screenshot, wip

In two days, I went from this:

To this:

It’s actually simpler than it looks, but trust me, just as difficult. I feel sorry for you for having to play this without a proper manual, and for myself for having to write one (or better, to make an educational gameplay video).

I’ll submit it in just a second, it’ll show up here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=rate&uid=5551

Adapt for life! Evu to live!

View LD entry.

I did something last night and I can’t figure out what the heck is wrong with my game. I wrote a destructible blocks class and it worked last night, when i got developing this morning the entire game was broken, Link errors, Resource Manager Errors.. ‘The works’ I was hoping to enter the jam but if I cannot figure out what is wrong, I’ll probably cry.

Well, I’ve run out work to do on my game (I’m gonna be honest: these graphics are about the best I can do for fish…), which means it’s time to submit! Click me if you want to see it. The game still has a really prototype-y feel to it, which is a shame, but there’s not much to help it other than going almost back to the drawing board. I’m still proud of it though – in terms of “how much fun users will have with this” or “how pretty it looks”, it can’t hold a candle to my submission from LD23, but in terms of how original it is, this submission wins out. I think I’ve got an interesting start, but a good execution of this idea was infeasible from the start; although I avoided anything nasty like evolutionary algorithms, I ran into having a system which is hard for users to play with. Really, there needs to be more depth in the ecosystem to pull the idea off – right now, there’s no way the herbivores will ever find a niche and live unless they drive their predators to extinction, and that’s a problem. I’d love to pursue this idea further, but it’s not a project for 24 hours.

This is it. My first LD is over now, and I almost had everything maybe ready in time.

I could’ve added some little details like main menu and music, but who needs those, right? 😀

Good night everyone. I’m looking forward to play all your games.

My compo entry is done! You can find it here

I loved working on it, and I hope you guys will love playing it 😀

First map is now decorated and nearly finished (2 or 3 items need to be placed and we need more monsters !!).

Joshua seems to be happy here :)…

What is this ?! OH F*CK NO !

Or not… Hum… You don’t find that he looks like a piece of meat on legs ?

A video of the gameplay so far (no sound in the recording, but it has beepy bloopy bits in reality):

click here

Yeah, the torrential downpour is a bug. I hope I can fix it in time…

Haha, the build kicks my ass, but it’s wonderful seeing things gradually come to life. We’re on the jam, so we still feel the pressure of that impending deadline!

Tags: evolution, gamemaker, html5, ld24, Ludum Dare, newt, pixelart, salamander, sidescrolling, tank, underwater

I came into the competition not expecting much. I was excited, but not too confident. I have never done any coding in such a limited timeframe. The amazing thing is that I pulled basically all my code together on Sunday. Friday night I had a concept and a menu, but no gameplay. I couldn’t work on Saturday, and spent it doing homework so I could grind to the finish today. In one day I got a functional game. It may not be a world-class game, but I am proud of it, especially for a single day’s work.

I just remembered my statistics from earlier. Time for the final ones:

[Items on this side are the commands I used]

Number of lines: 1253

wc -l src/*.as

Source files: 13

Modified lines: 14201

hg churn

Commits to repository: 90

hg log -l 1

Reverted changes: 2

Size of repository: 14MB

du -hc

The source code added to my submission contains my Mercurial repository, so anyone who knows how to use mercurial can download my source and see how the game changed during the course of the last two days.

This time I had enough time for SFX and even Music ! Giving SunVox Synth a try, great experience so far. Not much time to experiment with it, but should be enough to make a small loop.

Well, with the patient support of my wife and kids, I gave it a go, but I’m not going to be able to finish for the compo. I may be able to finish in time for the jam.

I will leave you with this sprite:

I feel like before exam in university

the game is ready on 90%

I know i still have more than a day left, but because my idea didn’t work out, I lost of every drop of motivation i had…. Hopefully next time I’ll be able to finish.

I will not finish on time but that did I know yesterday ;D
Post-mortem coming soon..

Anyway! Thanks to LD I have learned a lot. Before this weekend I had just played around with OpenGL and never tried any advanced stuff.

So yeah.. Thanks again Ludum for an awesome weekend! Too bad I can’t rate any games, but I”m looking forward to play all your games.

PS, now I got a cool Voxel level editor to play around with 😉

Peace

I made a game! Try Ztoday today!

No way I’m getting this done in time. Spent too long on the background under-the-hood code. Possibly because that’s the part of coding I personally always have the most fun. Probably why I’m on the Platform team at work, we make the system and make it work. Let the Application team worry about the best shade of Cornflower Blue

On the bright side my design turned out rather modular and flexible, and I am definitely going to create something properly using a more refined variation on this design at a later date (and the lack of time limit will let me use proper TDD and the like). I’d try and push for the Jam but tomorrow I have plans unfortunately.

If I take part in the next LD, I’ve learnt a lot here and had fun, even if I have nothing to demo by the end of it but a sprite moving around the screen, even if it is a reasonably well coded sprite, with an Entity-Component system and Endpoint -> Service -> Data architecture rolled out entirely in these two days. I learnt from my mistakes and will hopefully have more to show in the future.

Major respect for the other LDers who actually get something done without getting lost in background implementation details, as I did.

If I could do it again, I’d pick a pre-existing “engine” (hate that term) instead of writing my own. I just can’t write fast and hackish code without feeling unclean, but for rolling things yourself I’m not experienced enough to do anything but in the timeframe. I fought against that, and it took me too long.

Also I’d impose a much stricter “sprint” system, planning out from the start goals on an hour-by-hour basis (using hourly iterations) with a set of things that needed doing I could pull from. I tried this by the end, where I started to pick up the pace, but it was too little too late.

Code by the end is on github for the curious. https://github.com/MorleyDev/ld24Evolution

tl;dr – I failed hard, but had a blast doing so.

Success is a relative  term here, of course. I actually managed to complete and submit a game in time!

The game is called alteration, and it’s about evil alien slimes, dino eggs, and the time police. While the mechanics themselves are very limited, I feel like it leaves a good skeleton for a potentially more exciting and longer game. Being that this was my first compo, and that I did not really know the engine and some of my tools as well as I thought I did (oops), I’m very pleased with the result!

Give the game a try, if you are so inclined. I can’t promise much, but it’s mine, and I’m proud of what I have.

Game is here.

So, I’m done! My second Ludum Dare has been a success, as I managed to complete a game again. This time I didn’t go all in on innovation, though I think at least the evolution part of my game is pretty original.

I was worried when I saw the theme, and it took me several hours to come up with an idea I could make playable in less than 48 hours. What I came up with, was the idea that your spaceship (in a shmup) would evolve depending on how you played. If you shoot a lot, your spaceship gets better at shooting. Same for movement. I would have had the shields and thrusters evolve too, but I didn’t have time for that. Still, I think the idea gets out.

I have had great fun creating my first ever shmup, and it has been a pleasure following you all on Twitter (#LD48). I can’t wait to play what everyone has created!

Here is a link to my entry:

Wow, what a trip! Can’t describe how proud I am to just have finished this. Although in the back of my head I’m aware of a whole bunch of things that woudl still need tweaking. Nevertheless, now looking forward to what everyone made (20 pages of contributions so far, insane!)

Mine is called Survivalism, feel free to check!

http://walterdruck.wordpress.com/

Well, I’ve probably worked a total of like 21 hours on the game, and a lot of that was experimenting and refactoring code.

@__@

I think at some point, it (d)evolved into a coding exercise instead of a game.

Hooray for composition and XML-based levels?

Not sure if I’ll extend this into a Jam game since I’ll have no time to work on it tomorrow :/

the game has looked like this (while changing in the back-end) for at least 5 hours.

Hi friends (Gosh I wish I knew all of you.  Imagine the kind of games we could make if we combined our powers?)

So I’ve looked at a few of the games so far and I’m impressed!  This is my first time taking part in a full Ludum Dare competition.  I hope I do well, and of course I hope everyone else does too.  It’s quite a bit of work to finish in 2 days, am I right?

I was able to influence two of my closest friends (Jawn and GhostID) to join Ludum Dare this time.  It helps so much having friends by your side.  It’s nice to see the Ludum Dare competitors grow.  As a side-note, I was a bit disappointed that Notch didn’t join this time.

Anyhoo, how, and way,
Here’s my Ludum Dare submission.  I must say, I underestimated how long it would take me to finish.  It kind of makes me think, if there were no cats on the internet, would we all be this productive every day?

I’d Change the World For You

Yep that’s the title.  It’s a bit long, but it’s the best I could come up with.  So check out that link to open the submission page.  It’s a relaxed platformer, so I think it should be fun for all ages and people.

Wish you guys luck! ;D
– Zanzlanz

Screenshot of part of the level.

Tags: done, evolution, submission, zanzlanz

I started late, but managed to get quite far with my game “Primordial Soup”, written in Common Lisp with SDL.

The aim of the game is to tweak the performance of your cellula automata through “mutations” you earn for surviving longer. I can’t get the balance right, and it’s no fun to play at all right now.

I’m too tired to keep going, so giving up now. It’s been awesome fun, though!

Whew! I made it just under the wire with my entry “Selectra”. The whole idea is pretty bizarre, but I had a ton of fun with the theme and working on some of the art and music. I certainly had  no intention of making anything riske or funny, it just kinda turned out that way. Good times 😉

Stop on by and check it out!

Link to Selectra: http://bit.ly/PHCcwz

Thanks for playing!

-Johnny B.

Pasting description here:

The game is called Dissolution. It doesn’t have a genre and combines various elements of platformer, adventure, RPG and puzzle. The protagonist (his name is the Dude) is an amorphous creature with mentality of Max Payne who once wakes up in a cheerful and colorful world and can’t stand it the least bit. Dude tries to find his way out and fights various obnoxious unicorns and fairies while trying not to be consumed by this inhospitable environment.

The world is constantly in motion, as black-and-white (part of which is the protagonist) does its best to consolidate its efforts and gather up enough resources to defeat the vicious creatures of light.

As Dude moves across the terrain, he slowly submerges in the flowers and grasses, so the player’s task is to find sources of black and gray and munch them to develop some kind of resistance and eventually evolve into something bigger and stronger.

Get ready to witness a page in the history of Peanus, a forgotten race by many, a beloved treat by others.

You will get to acompany the perils and adventures of these wonderfull creatures, so… stay tuned for more of Peanus.

Tags: peanus peanuts runner side scroller

I am done with my very first entry to Ludum Dare!  I haven’t been able to get on the internet for long enough to post about it until now.  If this disqualifies me from the competition, so be it, I still want to share this idea.  I started it last night.  It’s called: Sweepers! Tools used: Love2D with the HUMP library, http://www.bfxr.net/ for sound effects, and very primitive vector graphics.  Screenshots:

The premise:

The game resets if you lose.  I did not have time to do proper scoring or persistent high scores, and evolution does not work at all after the reset occurs.  You will have to start the program again if you want to play without the bugs.  It’s a .love package, so you will need Love2D 0.8.0 to play.  Enjoy!  It’s here.

I am overall pleased with the mechanic, but that’s about all I’m pleased with.  I don’t really think I will win (or even come close), but this is one of the best experiences I’ve had in a long time.  I will be participating (correctly :P) just about every time from now on.

I haven’t slept properly for last 48 hours, and I’m just realizing that the weekend is over for real

This was my first LudumDare, and I’m quite satisfied with myself that I made the game. YeaH!!

I started out with a game where there would be millions of species living and fighting for survival, and here is the snapshot of it:

The game that just didn’t work

You see each block represents an organism. And then there was this algorithm that each organism was just to reproduce. The chances of reproduction was based on three core factors: The attractiveness, the reachability and the force of nature

You can guess a lot just by looking at the statistics being displayed at bottom.

But, sooner I realized that this game was a shit, there was nothing for you to play in it. It was more like watching Discovery channel.

So, I just simply carped it out and went to sleep. I woke at least 3 times at night brainstorming some idea for ‘Evolution’. At one point I even googled the word ‘Evolution’ to get some idea. But everywhere were the parody of that ape-to-man image.

Then, I finally decided to make this another game, where we play the role of God on some creatures of some world.

The idea seemed awesome to me. The job of God was decided to be The Natural Selector, to avoid congestion and/or extinction.

At the beginning, there were infinite organisms of random species. Each one had its own skin color. Then I thought of doing something more simpler. Why not just create 5 species, with each species having a square shape. I even thought of one species eating other one when they collide, but I was getting too lazy and too late to do any heavy computational work.

From then on I just did cropping of ideas, making it more and more simpler. Settling with just 5 species having a color code. Each one splitting into 2-3 at the end of its lifetime.

The I worked on adding a single bullet, when you fired you had to wait for it to cross the screen – the reload time. But while testing, many times I just wish I had more bullets. Bombarding the world seemed quite interesting.

But, that added one more bug, now a user could just close the eyes nuke the world. So I decided to keep a count of bullets, like if you fire something more than 1000 bullets you loose, and then to like if you fire 10 bullets within a minute you loose. But still nothing could hold me from shooting on the screen.

So, I added the logic if at any given time you make a species extinct by killing everyone you loose and that made a lot of sense.

And with that implemented, the game was done. I was about to post it when I realized that I hadn’t added sounds to it. And I wasn’t even sure if SFML supported the sound format sfxr exported to. They had nothing mentioned in the documentation, I went to the header file and  there was that awesome comment about all the formats supported and I was quite relived to see the wav format.

And, while I’m writing about the music and sound I just realize that I forgot to release the Music objects. But, I’m not going to fix it now. I’m too tired, and that wont be a big problem as those objects are always alive, they die and become zombie when the program quits..

And, that’s it I think. First Ludum Dare awesome. I guess from now on I will participate everytime. I learned a hell lot of things. I made a Mac game for the first time. I used so much C++ for the first time, I used so much SFML for the first time, I made a game in few hours for the first time. There are so many first times. Awesome experience, thank you Ludum Dare.

And, if you’re reading still to this point please go and check out my game, code or snapshots. Snapshots were the hardest thing to take, as any key press resulted in going into the game. I had to comment some code and rewrite some just to take screenshots of the launch and the game over screen.

Tags: postmortem

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=14242

It’s now 12:30. I need to get some sleep.

I’ve ironed out pretty much all the bugs I spotted, and the game has a “proper” soundtrack!

I’m hoping all those particles will cover up how bad my art skills are ;3

At the moment, I’m happy to call it “complete”. Sure, it could do with some better sprites, online multiplayer, better saving, maybe even achievements, but it works and it’s fun.

Tomorrow morning, I’ll get on my Mac so I can get to work porting this. I’ll see if Winetricks manages to support SuperSound alright.

How much time we have AFTER the 48th h to submit our work? I’ve been running on some building issues…

Eventually finished, I’m uploading it and then I’ll go to bed.

After 2 days of hard w0rk, our game seems to be coming together. There’s still a lot of work to be done, but I think were gonna be able to finish our game off.

Concept: Your trapped in a room with an ancient plant which keeps evolving each time you kill it. The gameplay is a mix of a boss battle in Zelda and Geometry Wars. We would like to get a 2-4 player multiplayer mode, but it probably won’t make the Ludum Dare cut.

Oh, what a lovely flower!

OHHH GOD, WTF!!!

In my game you play as a small fish who must grow and evolve in order to get to the surface before the time runs out.

I’m pretty proud of it, I guess.

I’ll do a proper postmortem when I wake up.

Game is here.

Hahah.. ahahah… hahahah… its finally done.  Perhaps with the most sickening drum beat sound track ever, and some truly godless vocal performances from myself, I present to you, the good people of Ludum Dare, Battle – Arena – Evolution!

Competition link: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=10967

Direct web link: http://mkv25.net/ludum/ld24/preview/

Enjoy. I dare you ; )

Well done everyone for making it through, and if you’re not there yet, good luck to finishing!

After a lot of hours and lot of bugs… The final release of my game is over http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=14354

It was a beautiful weekend for my first LD 😀

46 some hours and we – me and my kitten – are done!  Despite him occasionally laying on my keyboard and shutting down my displays by leaning onto the buttons, I have a game.

It’s been a blast and hopefully it shows, this is no doubt my most complete entry so far.  Let’s keep it going.

Here’s the World Tree

PR mode on The World Tree is a platforming adventure in a mystical setting. You, as the spirit of unevolved lands, must face dangers of Deconstruction as you collect the six artifacts required to evolve the World Tree in to its true state as the focus of all evolution!

And here’s my kitten buddy.

See you at LD25!

Congrats to everyone who finished a game today for LD24!

I crashed and burned early this time round…

On a positive note, though, I just found out that my LD22 entry, “Quiet, Please!” went live tonight in the iOS App Store.

If you look back at my journal history, you can see the evolution of “Quiet, Please!” from the initial Ludum Dare entry, to the post-compo version, to an Xbox Indie Games release and then to Android.

I want to encourage people who have created games in the last 48 hours to not just leave it at that.

Put some more work in. Expand the game. Polish it. Release it to a wider audience.

You might just find that there is an audience for your game outside of the Ludum Dare community.

Making a game in 48 hours is hard – so if you do end up coming out of it with a game on your hands, considering moving forward with it.

Tags: SuccessStory

Well I finished… er… came to a stopping point… This was my first Ludum Dare and I had a blast. I am looking forward to playing everyone’s games. My game is called Sustenance, you can check it out here.

So basically I made a game at first that had a pretty complicated concept. It didn’t work out, so I started over and made a simpler concept that was easy to implement but I don’t know what to do with it so right now it’s basically just a generic collect-a-thon 3d platformer.

Here’s the current version, I’m turning this into a Jam game instead. Tomorrow is for music, title screen and making the gameplay more fun https://dl.dropbox.com/u/679615/ld24/WebPlayer/WebPlayer.html

Hello, you happy people!

I decided that the game´s done for now, since I realistically won´t have time to do much more on monday evening.

You find the binaries here:
http://codemachinery.net/files/LudumDare24/MorphVirusMorph_Bin_v0.3-final.zip

And the sources here:
http://codemachinery.net/files/LudumDare24/MorphVirusMorph_Src_v0.3-final.zip

BTW: that´s the first time, I actually composed music for a game myself. In the past I always used to fetch nice CC tracks from other people. Hopefully the sound does not make your ears bleed 😀

Morph, Virus, Morph!

…and now for something totally different: me.sleep().

Happy coding & cu  next time?! 😉

Tags: compo, done, game, ld24, submitted, unity3d

Finally I’ve finished my first Ludum Dare 48 entry.

Unfortunatly I haven’t had quite that much time as I expected for the weekend. That said, the game still needs some polish, AI is stupid as intended but some minor tewaks would have been neat, graphics are due to time problems very basic, and were the last thing made.

Also I wanted to create a timelapse/screencast – but I had to develop on my laptop instead my ac (as said, weekend turned out not as I expected) so no timelapse, I am very sorry. : /

The overall result is still a sweat little arcade game I enjoyed making, and I hope you enjoy playing it aswell.

I find it way better than my previous Ludum Dare entry, I am esecially proud of the graphics. Any oppinions are more than welcome.
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=8391

Now sleep. A lot of it!

On the final stretch. Here’s a game about creating a mathematical garden.

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/98668/AscensionGarden/1/index.html

this is my first time participating at LD.. it was an awesome experience.. here it is:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=16445

Finished the Interactive Fiction itself, now all that remains to be done is as much polish as possible up to the deadline.

1. Get the basic story and structure finished.
2. Enhance and embellish all of the prose where necessary.
3. Add lovely black and white pictures.
4. Create CSS styling for the pages.

I’ll be doing those objectives probably in that order, at any rate.

I suppose a briefing of the project itself would be in order, since I ave posted no such thing so far:

Set in the future, 2052 is set in a dystopian world where megacorporations have evolved to the point of controlling and shaping all of the world around them through their tight grip over the media and police, while humanity as a whole is mired in a state of dependency to its corporate masters and the population grows ever more destitute.

…I think I tried to sell it too hard there, but you get the idea. I hope?

Time is running out and I’ve hit some issues with JavaScript. It wouldn’t have been particularly flashy, although it probably would have been fun for a few minutes. Since I’m covering for a co-worker on vacation it will be a while before I pick this up again, not even the jam is an option. Considering I had to think of something during my shift yesterday, and only had three hours to work on this today, I’m somewhat happy with myself.

Maybe the next LD will coincide with my days off.

And congrats to everyone who’s wrapping up and submitting their work!

I just submitted my game “DrinkMilk”. This has been one crazy weeken, barely any sleep, and programming/drawing ~20 hours/day.. Well, I must admit, my game looks and feels great, at least now in my half-awake state..

You can get the game here : DrinkMilk

I just had a glass of milk in celebration, because what could be more fitting?

Well, it’s done.

Just looking at some of the posts on the LD homepage, I can tell my game is inadequate. But you know what? I don’t feel inadequate. Like I say on the submission page for my entry, I love Ludum Dare. It’s so much work, but at the end of it I come out with something I’m tremendously proud of. Working hard on something and then seeing the fruits of your labour is profoundly beneficial for your self esteem.

So, I bring you Darwin’s Odyssey. I don’t even know if I spelled ‘odyssey’ right. I don’t want to look it up just in case I was wrong. Ignorance is bliss. I’m looking forward to getting feedback and playing as many of the other games as I can during my work breaks.

Here’s a screenthing:

Did anyone made game about Neil Armstrong on LD24?

Well, I’m done.

In the end, it’s still a game about dots.

Changelog:

• Hard mode is now more challenging, but fair.
• Fixed screen resolution
• Fixed mutation mode map.

This was my first Ludum Dare! I have worked as an animator for a few years in the games industry, but I recently quit and started a 2-person company with a software engineer from my former office (our devblog for our first game is here: http://www.troubleimpact.com – if you’re interested!) My partner does the programming, but I’ve been trying to learn over the last 6 months or so, so I thought this would be a great opportunity to get in some C# practice (I have previously only coded one small game by myself).

Of the two ideas I liked, I decided on the one that seemed less crazy, since it’s my first solo jam. The idea was to do a 4 stage (haha) endless runner style game – where you jump over/slide under obstacles & one hit kills you. If you survive to the end of stage one (amoeba), you progress to stage two (fish), then amphibian, then lizard. I started with the lizard and got the build below – but at the end of the night I felt like the bulk of the work was going to be art, whereas I wanted to practice coding. Because of this, on day two I played around with the other idea I had brainstormed. You can see that I didn’t get very far with it, but I learned a ton. All you can do is use the up & down arrow keys to move the character – but try it and see what happens!

CLICK TO PLAY!

CLICK TO PLAY

Well hello, I’ve officially uploaded what I’ve done this ludum dare, and I’m quite proud of it.
Yes, the usual “I’ve could have done sooooouhhh much moooaaar” is still ringing in my head, just like it’s doing in everyone else’s now, as the end of LD24 draws near.

But it’s still way better than my previous two entries, which crashed and burned pretty badly, so I’m happy. And I feel like the code I wrote is much more elegant, and far cleaner than before. It’s actually… it feels quite strange to say this… reusable. (of course after I get rid of the public markers on 75% of the fields, heehee)

Equip a minotaur and help him get the phat lewtz!

Make shiny combos and clothe a naked minotaur, while helping him take over a castle in this (slightly) evolution-themed game! What could be more fun than that?

Try it now (in new window/tab), and if you’d like to leave some, I’d be delighted by some feedback!

And to the ones still crunching:
CRUNCH CRUNCH CRUNCH
1:15 hours to go + 1 more for late entries + a couple of days for ports and stuff

All the best,
Andrei

Well I have failed, completely and utterly.  I know what you’re thinking, “you still have an hour and a half, keep working!” but no, let me give you a rundown of what needs to be accomplished just to get the game in a semi-playable state:

-Fix an error where some of my files in the level editor save nonsense rather than what they are meant to.  At this stage this is the kind of thing that might make your manager shrug and say, “cut that feature completely,” but (admittedly do to a poor decision on my part) without the ability to use this editor I can’t create levels for my game, without saving there is no editor, and without levels there is no game.  The poor decision on my part was to design my game in such a way that writing the levels “by hand” in a .txt is, while technically possible, not feasible.  It could literally take me half an hour to write one level.

-While I do have AI routines for movement through the levels, I have no levels.  So I have never tested this feature, and we all know a feature you haven’t tested is a feature you never added.  So even if I fixed my problem with my files, I’d have to inevitably fix the problems here.

-Design more than one enemy.  OK, here we’re starting to get into territory of what are technically luxuries.  If my goal here was to just release a game of any sort to say, “Yes I submitted something to Ludum Dare,” then I would only need one enemy.  Frankly, for the last three hours that was my goal.  Still, there’s no real game here with only the one enemy I do have, even the “enemy” I have would need some tweaking before he even becomes a threat.  I do not consider a game with no challenge to be a game.

-Give the player some options.  Currently all my player can do is move in the x and y coordinates.  There’s literally nothing to this game if that is all the player can do.

-Program in a win condition.  I have a win condition, in my head and on paper, but it isn’t there yet.

I don’t think I need to go on.  I know this pretty much makes me a quitter, but I don’t see the point in working on this game any more than I have tonight.  I’m going to continue on with the project as I would have after a successful Ludum Dare, but not tonight.  I need to stop coding for a while.  Even with that being said, I didn’t do as good a job keeping in touch about what I was making, so if it ever gets released in any form, you’re not going to recognize it.  Oh well.

Despite all of my defeatism above, I’m very happy I entered this contest.  I learned a lot over the last two weeks, and I have some direction for where to go in the future.  What I did manage to make was something I could never have made two weeks ago, and given just a little more time I might have actually had something worth submitting.  That alone is a very good feeling.  I might not enter the next Ludum Dare (we’ll see where I feel I am when the time comes) but someday I’m going to be back here again someday, and that’s when I’ll succeed.

Thank you for your time.