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

What about yours?

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

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

Update on my game:

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

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

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

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

This is one of the shots from my instagram

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here the pic:

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

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

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

www.splitbitgames.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anyways heres the final product

Basic Engine and moving mechanics. Everything’s up from here! #gallery-1 { margin: auto; } #gallery-1 .gallery-item { float: left; margin-top: 10px; text-align: center; width: 33%; } #gallery-1 img { border: 2px solid #cfcfcf; } #gallery-1 .gallery-caption { margin-left: 0; } /* see gallery_shortcode() in wp-includes/media.php */

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

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

Prototype Play.

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

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

As always, Mohammad Mohammad of Mohammadgames signing off.

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

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

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

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

Thanks,

Keith aka Uhfgood

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

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

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

What is your opinion of this?

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

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

(original title screen)

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

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

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

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

This update includes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I wish everybody good luck for your projects !!

Dear mum,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I cried a little.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Laurent

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy Gaming, Ludum Dare <3

Tags: game, gamepad, thoughts, unity, unity3d

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

Link to the bet.

Hey everyone! We are trying to get money to build our game. It’s kindof like making money off an release… except it’s like raising funding to make the game.

We can get a grant if we get enough votes in this competition we are in.

It’s quick and free for you guys just help us with a vote:

http://www.saltvalleytally.com/campaign/detail/272

Cape Chronicles is a fantasy platformer where heroes battle beastly minions using elemental powers of fire, lightning, ice and more to carve through perilous 2.5D interactive castles. Cape Chronicles is a hybrid of classic platform gaming with modern gameplay concepts. Bravely risk all unaided or encounter new adventures through multiplayer co-op.

As a company, we are making a FPS nick named project alien fortress for now.
for the challenge, we are still in early development so we won’t be selling the game
but we are going to try to accomplish the rest of the core game before the month is over.
Be sure to follow development at these links!:
youtube: http://www.youtube.com/user/LittleWoodGames2?feature=mhee
twitter: https://twitter.com/LittleForestG

I’m super excited Zombie Tales got a little write up in Indie Game Mag Mobile!!!!

Charles Ferrendelli really did dig below the surface of what looks like a generic Zombie shooter and understood my philosophy behind making this game. Now I’m starting work on porting across the [tesseract] level editor so there is a lot more to come.

Anyways back to blogging my progress:

I spent a few hours atlas mapping some of the stock models I have – so re uvmapping 14 War torn buildings with 14 2048×2048 textures down to 14 buildings into 2 1024×1024 textures. They are a bit soft when you get close to them, but it will have to do for the moment.

I’ve started work on the level editor, and the first step is building the GUI interface… and thats a bit boring working out all the logic for the menus. But I did have to make a few buttons, and one little tip.

I can never figure out what to use for a main menu button, a home button or something else. This time I used 3 “i”s lying on their side Arial Rounded font… and I thought “that’ll do nicely!”

Hopefully that makes sense to most people, I’d love to know what you think some of these icons mean below??

and checkout www.zombietales.net for a more detailed blog, I didn’t want to bombard the Ludum Dare site with too much of my ranting.  

I’m seriously surprised with how fast Apple approved my game.

It went live around 8hours ago, so go check it out. Spread the word and help me make my $1, a bit more if possible 😛

Considering the proceedings from Apple I need to sell at least 2 copies of the game to make $1.

So help me spread the word.

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/puwang/id566365237?l=en&mt=8

Here are a couple of screenshots:

Tags: complete, puwang

So, I decided to create an account here and start a little game project. I had heard previously about ludum dare and their 3 days game developing compos and wanted to try. Then I discovered the October challenge which is much better with my limited time or laziness and I thought it would be a good motivation to start me with an android minigame and try the market. I don’t expect anything and the game might be simple and get no bucks (I am wondering if adds count or asking your friends to buy it count :). It’s just a nice opportunity to finally get into the thing and see how the android market works.

So, here I have a screenshot from an OpenGL ES1.1 test I have been working so far, a procedural landscape, and I’ve decided this will be the base for my game entry. I am thinking something along the lines of controlling a UFO that has to abduct cows or something

I just hope I won’t be lazy and update my posts with some progress soon..

And I’ll be streaming it for a while!
www.livestream.com/imprevaj/

Tags: October Challenge 2012, streaming

Well, first of all this is my first Ludum Dare.

Lately I’ve been thinking about quitting my daily job and start making a living from my own games

I saw this October challenge and I said “It’s time!”

I’ll be working on a mobile game, I’ll try to bring it to these platforms:

Mobile HTML5/Sponsorship

IOS/Android

Windows 8 Marketplace

I’ll be using these tools:

Construct 2 (I’m new to mobile game development in general, so I have to use an engine that can export to the platforms I want to target)

Inkscape (I’ll be working with multiple screen sizes and resolutions so I’m going to make vectors)

Music (Still not sure)

I hope you like my game guys!

Tags: html5, journal, progress

Hello folks.

I had a few hiccups with my ISP (I’m ready to take legal actions and I’m already subscribing to another), so I could not really post here.

The minesweeper game in 24 hours was a success! I had to make a few more tweaks, but all in all, 95% of the damn thing went by on the first few hours. Got it into Google Play a few hours ago. It’s not polished and hardly stands against the quality standards of a LudumDare game you guys pull around here. But I guess it’s good sign when you’re addicted to your own game. I guess this is my first game that I consistently can’t stop playing a game authored by me.

Looks like crap, but my girlfriend will make me some better art: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=br.odb.sonarminefield&feature=search_result#?t=W251bGwsMSwyLDEsImJyLm9kYi5zb25hcm1pbmVmaWVsZCJd

That was a warm-up. Now, for the really cool games. My #2 project is called “Kill the Conwoids”.

I guess anyone that has ever implemented a Conway’s game of life has once wondered about using it on a game. As I said before, I actually did implement this as a game while working as a intern on a small game studio in Rio de Janeiro. Now I want to make it a better game.

Work has already commenced. Stay tuned.

Ooops, just was McFunkypants (hilarious) presentation on the challenge. The only way to comply to it is to make a lite version and a full version.

Personally, I don’t like using adsense. It disrupts the whole experience. Maybe I will try it too. Who knows. Luckly, I already have everything set up.

It’s already the 10th, and I still hadn’t made a post about my october challenge. Some weeks ago, when I heard about it, I wasn’t sure what to do… So instead of rushing, I prefered to work on an idea, code it and see if it has some potential, and then talk about it. If you see this post, it means that my project got somehow serious.
To be honest, I don’t think I will be able to finish this project by the end of the month. Instead, I will just use it as a deadline and if I manage to make something nice, I will put it on the market.

My game is code-named “Guardian Angels Alpha”.
I had so many idea for this game, but I will just code and polish one small part and release it as something like version 1. If it works, I will think about a sequel with other features (eg. campaign/story mode, coop, pvp…) but it’s the next step, just an idea on a paper.

My strategy is to release the game on Kongregate to get some user feedback (and hope for ads revenue). Then, I will make a release on Android (classical “free version with ads” and “paid version ad-free”).

Screenshots from the prototype (no background yet) :
#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 */

I’ve had a bit of a tough coding session getting the level editor working, I just feel like everything is broken and I don’t know where to start to fix it. I still have a long way to go and if I burn too many days on it I may just release a boring Zombie wave mode game in the interim  

I’m happy with my button layout and how it handles the different screen resolutions between iPhone and iPad, here are some pics that might give you an idea of how the editor works.

iPad 1 and 2

Touch the blocks to create your basic environment

Select the texture of North, South, East, West walls and Floor and Ceiling surfaces.

iPhone 3GS and 4 layout

Last week I submitted the iOS Version of Captain Backwater to the App Store. I really hope it will be live by the weekend (Go, Apple, go!). During this time I prepared everything for the Android port.

I’m also working on a flash-based version for Kongregate and Mochi right now. I really hope that a browser-based port will help to spread the word. We’ll see…

I also cleaned up my working desk:

I have decided to join the October challenge with my game Metallum! I have never really been a part if anything like this before so yeah, i’m excited!

Well onto my game:

Metallum is a 2D Mining game sorta like terraria. I have been working on it for about a month outside of the October challenge to get it to what it is today. Metallum is completely made in Java with no external libraries (But I might be using KryoNet for networking soon). I’ve been working on this game for quite a bit (or so it seems) and i’m not too sure that im actually getting much work done :/ but I hope that the October comp will help me get back into it! Also Metallum is on indieDB for anyone who wants to check it out! http://www.indiedb.com/games/metallum

Features so far:

Mining

Building

Item Stacks

Crafting

Mobs

Random Generation

Caves

Trees

Tools

Menus

Oceans

And some other Features. Here is a screeny:

Also My work space:

Look who decided to pay me a visit! (after i went for dinner i came back to this :/ )

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 11th, 2012 at 2:09 am and is filed under October Challenge 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

I know I’m a few days late to the “pictures of my workspace” party, but I’ve been busy. I work on a MacBook either at a cafe or on my balcony overlooking Sacramento, CA.

And here’s a screenshot of my recent progress with saving, continuing, and plant lifecycle on my October game. Details on on my dev blog.

Preliminary plants and animal squares.

So I took a few days off. I had to take care of some school things as well as get the tickets for me and my friends to got to PAX east for spring break. We are all really exited and cant wait! Finally, having everything out of the way I looked over my project and asked myself; “Is this really the game I want to push for October Challenge?”, I looked at all of the projects that I have put on hold for other projects, I finally got to my first Project , Space Game. I seen a lot of potential in Space Game, I reviewed the code, and realized that since I started programming at the begging of the summer and by August made the a large leap from just making simple calculators to.. making a game. I shouldn’t have to explain what its about or what you do in it because the title should say it all! Space Game is to be honest one of my life achievements, don’t get me wrong, Space Game when I first made it was the most simple thing ever, but it pushed me ahead and made me want to keep keeping on with learning Java and game programming all together.

As much as I would hate to do it… I’m putting Never Distant End away. I’m just going to use October as a continuation for Space Game. I aim to have it finished by December. I’m going to set a few goals for October Challenge though.

• Fix the state finding and loading system(I was originally using booleans… not good Idea)
• Finish the GUI
• Fix ALL of the level generation (ambient stars, planets and Mobs)
• add a few creatures
• Get started with on land generation(on planets and such)

This is my progress up until I stopped working on this a month ago(I named it Build 2.2):

So that’s currently all I have to show you for now. Till next time.

I’m so happy, as I mentioned yesterday my game Puwang was released on the App Store.

The first “easier” step was done, making the game and releasing it, now to make some money. This morning I checked my App Sales Report and I made ~$5, which is 5 times more the initial amount, and it’s great.

Now, my next goal is to reach the $10 amount, and eventually recouping the $99 I spend on the Developer Subscription on Apple.

And, with luck, if I ever reach the $100, I will then have $1 of profit 😀

Anyways, since we are still on day 11 of the month I decided, why stop here? I’m going to tackle another mini-game. I have a idea, doing some concepts right now, and I’ll post when I have something watchable.

Another cool thing was people tweeting that they were having fun, and trying to beat leaderboards scores, which where like this last night:

So once again here’s the link to Puwang, spread the word 😀

Tags: puwang

11 days in, 20 days to go. Brad (PrePixel) and I have made some great progress. Brad has been tightening up the controls and graphics code, while I’ve been making some fast paced music and designing graphics for the game.

The music

The music needed to be full of energy and varied enough so that it wouldn’t be repetitive. The original idea was something quirky and almost comical. I loved the idea of starting the theme with a lo-fi retro melody, similar to something you would hear in an old adventure game, like Space Quest or King’s Quest. Then quickly dropping into something dirty like dubstep.

The first idea:

http://soundcloud.com/farcloud/ld48-wip01

As the game evolved, so did the music. I soon realised that I wanted the music to be darker and more serious, to create tension and a sense of urgency. We knew we wanted the game to accelerate in speed the longer you survived to add challenge and variety. Because of this, I decided that the music too should increase in tempo with the game. This also made me realise that as the tempo increased, the style of the music could change and evolve.

I am currently working on a piece of music that starts at around 120 bpm, and ends at 170 bpm. Starting with a classical piece for the first 120 to 130 bpms, from there I will start to add a dance beat. I can nicely add in genres as the tempo increases. Dubstep is almost always 140 bpm, Hardcore Techno is around 160 bpm (although can reach up to speeds of 300 bpm), and Drum and Bass is averaged at around 170 bpm.

Next week I’ll talk more about designs and graphics for the game!

here! here! here!

I just shared my first prototype with my team. It is in rough shape, so I want to pretty that up before sharing with this group. So far this week has been about functionality. My main programmer is working on a tiling system for the background. This will allow us to ‘stream’ in tiles as the level progresses, thus giving the sense of an infinite level. I did create some environment art for this game last year, part of my weekend will be spent giving the background some proper (programmer) art. The stretch goal is to share a slightly less rough build here (or at least some screenshots) For now though, here’s a very WIP shot of the first stage..

I’m in October Challenge as well! The game i started working on will be a dual-stick/bullet hell shooter for PC with a minimalistic graphical style – it’ll be composed only of squares.

I’ve got the basics working – there’s a player square that can fly around and shoot, and i’ve implemented a way to fluently change colors (this looks really nice, will be another key feature of graphics)

I want this game to be an arena shooter – in main menu you choose your weapons and such, pick a level and upon completion you get rewarded (new weapons and shit).

What i want to fit in this game:

» large variety of enemies

» quite a big amount of levels (so you don’t finish in 5 minutes or so)

» varying weapons

» bosses

Oh, and the name will be SquareShot.

Progress is going great for my entry. I ditched the last idea I had and revived an old one that I was poking around with a few years ago.

Here’s the mock-up I’ve made:

Everything will make sense when you get to see it in action soon

So I went ahead and coded like hell for the past two weeks. Here’s how it looks like now.

Those different colored blocks signify progress.

It may not seem like it but there are a lot of progress on the screenshot above. For one, the different colors signify different objects and all of them are working perfectly and can be interacted with.

I’ve also finished working on a basic 2d tile based level editor in Unity. This will help speed level creation when I get to doing the puzzles.

My to do list:

• Basic levels
• Sprite / graphics implementation
• More levels
• Gameplay optimization
• Map editing optimization

May not seem like a lot but I bet it would take me until the end of the month to finish all of these.

Awesome. Now back to coding.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 12th, 2012 at 9:18 pm and is filed under October Challenge 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

The old world will burn in the fires of industry. Forests will fall. A new order will rise. We will drive the machine of war with the sword and the spear and the iron fist of the orc. – Saruman, The Lord of The Rings

That’s right, progress is being made on the newly-named Turing. After a brief attempt at using CL-OPENGL that led to inexplicable heap corruption, I switched back to full SDL. I decided that for ease of development I was just going to be lazy and blit everything to a buffer, and then draw a region of that buffer in order to implement scrolling. Unfortunately, Lispbuilder-SDL doesn’t have support for that like PyGame does. I don’t really see why not: It’s part of the native C SDL. Anyway, after messing with (sdl:cell)’s for a while, I wondered what would happen if I just tried drawing the buffer to a negative index, and lo and behold, it worked. Yay! Ten hours of debugging OpenGL code down the drain, but yay. Screenshot:

Will take a picture of my workspace soon, but software-wise, see if you can guess from the screenshot. All my fellow Lispers saying I need to use Emacs, bah. Old habits never die. Vim is better anyway.

tl;dr: Things got done.

Since Kickstarter has made ‘stretch goals’ popular, I’m giving myself two stretch goals for this challenge. They are both ipad games that are close to release that I worked on. Both are going to give me a  chance to work on my marketing skills. Game 1 is a game completed for IGDA Chicago’s Game Jam. We had so much fun making it, that we decided to make it a full featured game. The theme was sacrifice, so naturally we made a game where you defend santa from space aliens… With suicide bombing elves. We made the whole thing in Game Salad, and will probably just add a few levels, and clean up a few code issues. Right now, the biggest challenge is just figuring out how to monetize it. We can just put it out for a buck… Luckily the holidays are coming so $1 should be ‘easy’. It’s probably just the lack of sleep, but we thought the game was funny as hell. You can play a demo of our work now. Here: http://arcade.gamesalad.com/game/106271

Here’s a write up on the Jam itself here: http://marvinhawkins.wordpress.com/blog/

The Second Game is Steam Golf. I’ve actually been working with a couple of industry veterans on a second ipad game.  The game is like Angry Birds mixed with Platfomers, Mixed with golf. I guess it’s simpler to just call it a golf platformer.   I did game/level design. For October, the push will be to finish a website, get a trailer going, and write up copy for iStores, and probably the IGF. Ironically, its just as much work as level design. What’s great is, I’ll get a chance to work on my game marketing skills. Here’s a screenshot, hope to post a trailer soon.

I knew that October would be a big month, I’m hoping this challenge is just what I need to have a portfolio of 3 games out in the wild, no longer trapped on my hard drive for all to enjoy.

Oh! We also have a PartlyCrazy Facebook page. I will start to post stuff there (as opposed to spamming you fine folks)

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Partly-Crazy/108604482556646

A bit of progress – i’ve added enemies (they don’t interact yet though).

http://youtu.be/g0fSdBwUnl4

Basic mechanics and scoring are implemented. Game is surprisingly fun already. I just need to add a menu screen, perhaps even a screen with my twitter handle or something, make the game more replayable(level up, other guns ect.), and obviously make a name for it, suggestions?!

hi y’all im new to to ludum dare but i hope one of my games will win something at least! good luck to all and may the best win.

i’ll post updates every 3 or 4 days so i can let y’all know what im doing and how far i haven’t gotten. ill try not to bitch too much :^D

I set up my website, got hosting and all that, have a PayPal account.

How do you sell games with PayPal? Only way I can see would be to have people pay and then be linked to a download page hosted by the server. But then anybody can just go straight to that download page and get the game without paying.

How do you solve this problem? I’m open to any other solutions, including non-paypal ones, as long as they aren’t very expensive.

My game, Avoider nears completion, I need people to test it. The details and download link are over here: https://jacobwgames.wordpress.com/2012/10/14/avoider-android-test/

I’d appreciate it if you let me know what you think!

I also got my Google Play account set up, so I’m ready to distribute the game when it is done.

Tags: android, haXe

I submitted our first ever game to the Win 8 store last night.

If anything else, I can say I’ve submitted a game to a store before in my life now, which is a major personal milestone.

If I can make $1 from this whole exercise then it will be yet another milestone

Anyway next mission is to figure out how to release to the iOS app store!

Well, here is my plan. I’ve got basic mechanics down, like I said in my last update. That means that It’s likely I get out of Beta and release somewhere in the semi-near future. With that said, how am I going to release the game? + datails about the game that other programmers want to know.

Info for programmers

The game is written in Java and will be distributed with the .Jar format. I’ve used paintbrush and eclipse so far. I’ve TRIED to use a professional coding process (organized classes, making variables private, ect.). My #1 tip for new programmers (like me) is that you MUST break the game into steps. EXP: instead of “Do game, ” “Create advanced spawn system,” and to narrow it down even more, “write if statements in Bullet.class to help with spawning.”

Release details + How? and When?

How? – I PLAN to release first, on the chrome web app store through making the icon a download link for a .zip folder. It will cost the high, bank-breaking, infinitely times larger than free, price of 99c.  The game will hopefully have some kind of arcade, replayable, fun aspect. I have the arcade and fun down, its just the longevity of “Mom, can I stay on a little longer, please?.” My stretch goal is to have the game on the Mac app store as a .app obviously.

Hey guys!

I’m a bit late, but I want to say that I will maybe participate in the challenge with html5.

I have a few started games, but none of them are in a good state, and I know their code is REALLY messy, so I thought it would be easier starting a new one. It’s a casual game about squashing pumpkins in an infinite field. In pseudo-3d. Since it is Halloween related, I better finish for next week.

Also, what’s up with HTML5? Is anybody else making their game in HTML5? Can they be profitable?

Finally, it would be hard for me to really participate since I am in sec 5 here in Quebec and our teachers are overwhelming us with projects for our first reportcard. So maybe… maybe?

haven’t actually done anything yet, but have ideas down on paper. im currently in the pre-development stage. mostly sketches and concept art. i would upload some but my scanner is on the fritz and currently wont even turn on. i’ll update ya when i got more done. till then, good luck all!

Just a second ago I saw “I’m in” post from another user and I just realized I haven’t post mine :). So here it is. I’m working on puzzle game…That’s all I can say for now :).

I started the same day as October challenge started and it’s mostly finished. My Google Play dev account is setup already. I’m developing in Unity (not pro version ) so it’s probably going to Apple App Store 1-2 weeks after releasing it on Google Play.

I have tons of new ideas per day so after finishing this one I’m finishing my previous project that I started writing in Android Native. I’m still porting it to Unity now.

My goal: earn 1$, 10$ … X bucks needed for unity pro version + android/ios

I’ve still not decided if I should distribute only paid version for like 0.25 – 1$, or two versions: FULL + LITE with ads and some limitations.

Whether it makes a buck is up to you, I guess.

Platform: Android
Technology: Flash / Air for Android
Started: 18 months ago
Launched: 12 Hours ago
Site: http://www.mallowdrop.com
Android Play Market Link:
http://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=air.net.gritfish.mallowdrop
Free Demo on the Android Play Market:
http://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=air.net.gritfish.mallowdropdemo
Soundtrack: http://music.brainfed.net/

Mallow Drop is a unique puzzle-platformer for mobile that draws its inspiration from the sliding-across-ice puzzles found in many classic games, and ‘traffic jam’ style sliding block puzzles.

Mallow Drop started as the physics sandbox for Gritfish’s game engine, ‘Boxy2D’. As more objects and physics ideas were toyed with, the sandbox became more game-like, and was eventually given sprite-based graphics and adapted into a larger mobile puzzle game based around altering the gravity of the game by rotating the phone.

SCOPE CREEP AND TIMELINES
Mallow Drop suffered from the ‘first game syndrome’ of a scope that was way outside my ability to produce. The actual production occurred in several jam-like bursts of energy spread out weeks and sometimes months apart. The lack of continuity led to needing to re-aquaint myself with the code base several times. The level design stage (which I had wrongly thought would be simple and quick, once the engine worked) took about 3/4 of the total time, including several rewrites of the game engine in order to make the game work better with the eccentricities of the level design needs (the way the game plays requires large amounts of level geometry to be interesting, which quickly hits some performance problems on low-end devices. This is why I’m not going with iOS just yet). In the end there were about 115 working levels, which were culled down to 100 for the final game.

THE RENDERING ENGINE
Prior to Mallow Drop, I’d never worked with sprite sheets, tile maps, or really any kind of graphics in flash beyond basic MovieClips. I started by making one big spritesheet with basic artwork, and copying regions of that into the MovieClips on the stage. Later I added in functions to draw larger objects, and adapted the rendering class to even parse CSV data taken out of the tile maps I made with Tiled. When we did Lighthouse for LD #23, we even plugged in 3D transformations and re-rendering separate to the objects the sprites were attached to.

Screenshot from 6 months ago

Screenshot from release build

THE SOUND AND MUSIC
Mallow Drop’s sound and music were provided by my colleague and collaborator Matt Hamm (@brainfed). I think he did a great job, but I know he had difficulty ‘letting go’ of the tracks, and letting them be ‘finished’. His words below:

I started with mostly “chiptune” tracks but as the game, and the art specifically, evolved so did the music. The only track that’s remained relatively unchanged is “Beep Boop”, which is the music for the science levels and I always liked, even though it’s quite short. The others were all slowly expanded upon until they became what they are now. I think Trees best represents what I was trying to do, blending chip arpeggios with recorded and sampled instruments.

GETTING IT DONE
I think the biggest challenge in getting the game done in time for the October Challenge was the huge amount of dev time that’d already gone into the project. The scope was far too big, and took long for a first game. But the rewards have been worth the investment. The 18 months I worked on this game now and then in my spare time have left me with:

A working, stable engine that has been used for 5 game jams so far in puzzles, platformers, and top-down zelda-likes.
A sprite rendering system that has allowed me to make flash games that’ll run on a phone.
Knowledge of tools and techniques that were way outside my previous experience like tile maps, quad-trees and object pooling
A massive lesson in scope and project management, both in terms of taking an axe to dream features in order to make it polished and stable for release, and in terms of stepping back, and seeing where the real problems that need addressing are.
Most importantly, learning that you meet the best people making games. I can honestly say that no group of people I’ve met is more interested in each others work, or more honest critics, as game designers and developers.

WHAT’S NEXT?
Well, in addition to making Mallow Drop, I’ve also started doing some rough video game reviews at http://www.treadmillgamer.net (My xbox and pc are hooked up to a treadmill, and it kinda changes the way you play games a bit – you can read all about that on the site). Game-wise, we’re looking at taking ‘A Theft of Colours’, the game we did for the ‘contrast’ mini LD game, to a full release.

Tags: challenge, flash, music, october, postmortem, screenshot

Tags: deskphoto, Game Maker, October Challenge 2012

I’m feeling so proud right now. It is such an amazing feeling when something goes live where you put  so much effort and time into.

Captain Backwater is live. Available for free on iTunes and Google Play (Android).

Now please help to spread the word: On Facebook, on Twitter, but most important: Have fun playing the game.

What’s next? I’m also nearly finished with the Flash-Version I will submit to Kongregate and Mochimedia. Oh, and let me know what you think as I will try to update the game on a regular base.

New monster and zone almost done!
Check out the video:

I’ve been working with physics and lighting.
I had some problems to optimize the entire theme of light and shadow with the mobile hardware, because some older devices do not support anything but OpenGL1.1 and the ones supporting OpenGL2 only have two lights (hardware acceleration) dynamics, and are directional.
I also had a hard time trying to coordinate all the events of the generation systems and balance enemy load, these are synchronized via environment variables with the AI, once you load the level you meet certain standards for each part phase, it run macros that direct action through the gaming experience.

I made ​​several models in 3DStudio and Maya, textures with Photoshop and it has been more difficult than I thought, but also a lot of fun

I’m making a summary of what I’ve done since the last update:
– Added a compass (triangle in front of the avatar) to know where to go next
– Creation of optimized materials compatible with light and shadow
– Creating a new enemy: mini skeleton, with its animations, etc..
– Creation of a series of doors with different animations, particle systems and so on, that are synchronized to provide a consistent flow to the game
– Including transients and environmental sound effects are played according to a given priority
– resource optimization: its a need to use the least number of objects in memory and AI’s possible, it’s an art to know how to do this and mantain the FPS high, almost between 40-60+

In six days I have to submit the game to the markets.
And it is working in Blackberry PlayBook, iPhone4+, iPad (1,2,3), Pc (win,linux,mac), etc

Tags: action, adventure, challenge, dynamics, egypt, environment, FPS, hack & slash, october, RPG, wizard game, wizards games

Just mere moments ago I clicked submit on Ubuntu Software Center with my October challenge game. Motivated by the challenge I finally got around finishing a game I’ve been working on since Ludum Dare #21 (its actually post compo version of the game).

The game has been pretty much ready for a quite long time, but needed new levels and polish which I constantly put off by bad excuses :).
For now the game is Linux only, but the code is written in crossplatform way and I’ve compiled few test versions in Windows using MinGW.

Fingers crossed the game actually gets accepted to the store.

About the game:
-Sliding block puzzle game with twist
-Includes fully featured level editor and online hi-scores

Screenies:

YouTube “Trailer”
(for some reason YouTube really killed the quality of the video)

Tags: game, garden, october challenge, puzzle, submitted, tiny

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now, back to work!

Tags: progress, screenshot, unity3d

Hi folks!

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

So what is PowerUp?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s a shot of the dorm:

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

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

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

And here’s a link to the marketplace:

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

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

Still not 100% but getting there –

Click the image to watch the video.

Aloha from Montana!

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

Toolset:

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

Existing code:

• Ussuri Engine written specifically for Ludum Dare 25.

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

What I learned from last time:

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

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

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

Tags: LD # 25, ld25, ld48

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

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

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

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

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

Comments and feedback are definitely welcome.

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

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

Here is a screenshot of the title screen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sorry for your time and space.

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

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

2 Thirds October Challenge

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

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

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

Week 1

Idea

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

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

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

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

Platform

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Phone Gap
• Unity

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

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

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

Time to get started.

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

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

Week 2

Rebuild!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Back to the Phone Gap test. It works!

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

Coded my new view class and test it.

It works!

but…

slowly.

Well.. that sucked.

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

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

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

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

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

Week 3

Hey that’s this week!

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

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

• Game Loop
• Game Logic
• Game Rendering

The things that were different were;

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

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

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

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

So that’s where I’m at right now.

Things on my to do list:

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

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

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

There should be screenshots of the progress.

Oh and the name of my game will be Panda7.

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

Hey there ladies and gentlemen,

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

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

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

Regards,
Midgard (@MidgardT).

Hi to All.

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

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

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

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

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

– jujule

screenshots :

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

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

AI

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

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

Skill tree

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

This is only an example

Comic and story

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

Social network

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

Thanks everyone for the great support you are giving us.

GetFun to all!

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 18th, 2012 at 3:40 am and is filed under October Challenge 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks in advance for anyone who can help.

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

– Topaz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

http://lifelessboring.com/shooty

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

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

I’m in the same boat as everyone here…
4 hours of sleep a night for 2 weeks straight…
I’m so tired I feel drunk…
My coding skills are starting to deteriorate…
My family and friends are all saying,
“you really don’t need to push yourself so hard. I’m worried about you”

But we all soldier on!!  

I thought I’d share my app icon evolution – its close – not perfect, but it’ll have to do for the moment. I’ll probably go with one of the last 2. I’ve blogged/rant my 5 rules for icon design at ZombieTales.net for those interested?

and I’ve been STILL heavily working on the level editor here are some screen grabs of some fancy doors in game.
    

Thats all for now.

Good luck everyone, and be comforted in the knowledge that there are people all over the world feeling the same dev pain you’re feeling now!!

It seems that I am falling out of the challenge. I’m in 11th grade, and lately, our teachers have been buriing us in projects. English, French, History, Ethics(lol) not counting all the exams.

Since my game is a Halloween theme game, I wouldn’t probably have time to finish it, challenge or no challenge.:(

And then, as to add, I have been arguing pretty severally with the JavaScript garbage collector, I don’t even know what is the reason. And yeah, I am making an html5 game, that should be ported to mobile, so performance is key. And anyway who makes such a stupid language where the garbage collector causes more problems than solutions? Why do garbage collectors even exist? Aarghghg!!1!!!!1!11!!RAGE QUIT!!!!

Hi All! So I’ve been hustling everyday. (Cue Rick Ross) But it’s not looking like I will finish by the end of october. I am getting some great progress. My goal is at least an alpha by the end of this month. I’m still laying down a lot of foundation. This contest is still providing me with that fire under my butt that i I desperately needed.

So for context: Sky Hawks is an arcade shooter. The game is a fixed scrolling game that is reminiscent of 1942. The funny thing is, I started this project as a way to finish something with a more manageable scope. (This was 2009.)  A lot of this project has been solving problems that I assumed would be easy. The first large one was dealing with off screen enemies. Having enemies in the game world was one thing, but they would be long gone by the time the player arrived. The solution was to place the enemies inside of a trigger. When the player was close enough, the enemies would appear in the world.  My coder is a rockstar, he got a level tiling system to work. This will allow us to swap out different art titles. This will also make it easy for us to have a level that lasts forever.

I’m rambling, this weekend is all about incorporating  more gameplay stuff: Turrets, Getting the bomb working better, and maybe sounds. Overall, it IS starting to come  together, but we haven’t even touched the boss routines yet. I’ll also post some of the art that the art guys have been working on. For now, here’s a link of an older build. I’d love some feedback. Thanks!

http://marvinhawkins.com/SkyHawksv10.html

So after stripping out some extra abilities and monsters, I have six monsters and six abilities. Now I need some levels! I have the randomly generated “sandbox” levels but I figure some tutorial levels would be good since the mechanics are non-trivial.

Each tutorial only has a few monsters and/or abilities to avoid user overload. I’m going with the “explain everything as if you were talking to a 5-year-old” method. Players can always just skip the tutorial levels and each level only takes about 30 seconds anyways so even if some players find it too easy they can quickly go on to harder levels.

One problem I had was with transparency of the icons; this wasn’t obvious when monster icons were placed on the bright buttons, but viewed over the dark help window they showed some obvious fringing…

Can’t see it? Let me zoom that in for you

Yeah, that’s not good. It turns out my original drawing in Inkscape had the background set to transparent white instead of transparent black. Switching to transparent black helps a lot here:

The real fix to this problem is to use  premultiplied alpha but I wasn’t about to start fiddling with that right now. In any case the background should be transparent black anyways since it is easier to work with in other contexts.

k, I’m out of October Challenge. Change of interests and a still broken GPU diverted my plans. I did some experiments with Web Audio though and started working on a library which I will probably use in future projects. I’m also going to continue creating new Web Audio experiments which I will post on this site:

http://www.cappel-nord.de/webaudio/

By the way: My Adsense earnings on this site is > 1€, so in the end I achieved the October Challenge goal without even a finished product 😉

For this year’s “October Challenge” I am proud to present Mars Orbital, a 3d platformer game with “skateboarding-in-space” physics. I had so much fun making this game, and I’m really happy with the result.

BUY IT HERE! PAY WHAT YOU WANT!

It should run great on any Windows machine, old or new. The game uses the openGL fixed-function rendering pipeline, which means that it should run fine even on laptops or older PCs that can’t handle today’s advanced shaders. Playtesters have reported framerates as high as 300 FPS when running on a modern gaming rig at full HD (1920×1080) resolution!

It uses PhysX for realistic rigid-body physics simulation. It even supports non-convex solids, which was essential for proper handling of snowboarding or skateboarding-style “half-pipes” and level geometry with rounded corners.

The game consists of 12 levels, including a hidden “bonus level” (hint – do a blind jump to the left on the first level), a “speed round” (where you try to collect as many powerups as possible in a limited time), even even a simple “boss battle” (where a ball of electricity tries to push you off the ledge).

Trailer video:

Use the arrow keys to move. Collect as many powerups as you can and avoid falling into space. Find the teleporter to warp to the next level.

With the right amount of momentum, you can pull off insanely big jumps between platforms!

Gameplay footage:

Screenshots:
                   

Tags: McFunkypants

This entry was posted on Friday, October 19th, 2012 at 8:09 am and is filed under October Challenge 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

I think I’ve completed the october challenge as I’ve earned the first dollars on iTunes and Google Play.

I’ve also created a flash version and submitted it to Kongregate. I hope this will drive some traffic to the app stores via cross promotion. You can play it here.

I just updated Another Castle to 0.03. This version adds in a sword, pellet gun, falling spikes, slimes, and some nicer backgrounds. All of the basic weapon types are done, so next on the list are some basic magic and clothing items.

You can play the prototype at http://www.AnotherCastleTheGame.com

I am entering the October Challenge. Better late then never. One week of vacation should give me enough focus to complete something that is publishable, I hope. I am planing to port my LD24 entry to the android platform as I have been getting my first company smartphone lately and would like to tinker with it anyway.

As my LD24 entry was using only plane Java JDK APIs and pushing every pixel to the screen manually (a raycasting-based software renderer) there was suprisingly no big effort to get the code running on my Galaxy S3. Only the speed was really bad due to not leveraging the GPU in any way. 5 fps made it clear that even some optimization would not get me to a smooth 60 fps easily. So, I am planning to reuse the general game-idea and architecture to build a simple 3D game using OpenGL ES 2.0. I am not sure if the theme will keep the same, but I am planing on mainly tinkering with some lighting, shadowing and physics. Whatever theme will make good use of the technical things I come up with will be fine. Learning something new is still the focus; earning money is only secondary for now.

Main tools will be as usual eclipse, Java. MS.Paint and Bfxr. Additonally, I will put libGDX for rapid development on the desktop and iNudge for some music into the mix for the first time.

Well, things have been going well. I problem solved and retextured the spaceship. Here’s a screenshot to show some progress. 

I posted a larger update here: But as to yesterday’s word, here’s some media on my project. Again, my focus now is build the foundation. We’re close to getting close to a playable demo. This week’s update is more art heavy. We are getting some good contributions from the art team. My challenge this weekend is to start to get that in the game. The biggest indicator of progress is the main player ship (above) is close to ready. It’s an exciting moment!

In the mean time, here’s  some photos. By the end of the month, I want to have an alpha done. I might try to get preorders (thus fulfiling the challenge) But I want to make sure I’m doing it right. My thought is, I’m making a  single player game, what can you give a player in that case? its not a game like mine-craft or some other sandbox experience. I welcome any insights. Either way, Sky Hawks will be released soonsih. If not by November, then by December. If anyone has any insights on how Alpha Funding works for non multiplayer games, I’m all ears.

Here’s some pics:

I’m often too lazy to do anything, but yesterday and today i worked on SquareShot. I’ve made a few additions, but none of them are big ones. Anyway, here’s the video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hypK53iSvNI

So, more progress is being made on my space shooter game.  Thanks to a very funny bug that resulted in a ship being spawned every time an enemy hits the player ship while the player ship is invincible, I now have a really fun idea for a powerup:

This powerup will cause maybe 20 ghost ships to appear out of your one ship and collectively allow you to destroy every enemy on screen with a powerful barrage of thousands of bullets!

And yes, there are less than 0 lives remaining in the screenshot.

I can’t make good graphics, sound effects, or music. The code is good, the ideas are interesting (to me at least) but it’s time to cut my losses and get back to the giant piles of laundry, dishes, and junk mail that I’ve been neglecting the last few weeks.

Retrospective and thoughts about next time on my dev blog.

Here’s some pictures of procedurally generated plants I was working on. Each row is a bunch of individuals from the same species.

im sorry to say i wont be able to participate in this months ludum dare due to family issues. the drama is getting to extreme levels and is hindering my performance. again, i apologize. see yall next time! good luck to all!!!

It’s week 3 already? Wow.

I’ve done a lot of progress over the past week. Most of my days were spent working on my very own 2D Tile-Based level editor in Unity.

This has sped up the level creation as the editing and the testing can now be done simultaneously. No more pausing the game just to change stuff and then playing again.

Here’s a full list of stuff I’ve made this week:

• Level editor
• Map saving and loading
• Sprite animation manager (not seen in screenshot but def working)
• 25 basic (easy) levels

• More levels
• Basic menus and GUI
• Sprites and Art assets

• Playtesting system
• Optimizations
• Release of level editor

I’ve thought of putting up the game on Steam Greenlight. Will read up on the steps needed to make it happen.

Ciao!

Hey folks!

There are quite a lot of updates about my game.

First and foremost, I had to rethink the storyline, streamline it to make it fit in with the visuals and gameplay. Therefore I also had to change it’s name again… “Closer to You” was definitely chosen way too hastily. I’m learning valuable lessons here!

Anyway, the game is now called Memory Inc. and here’s what it’s about:

Memory Inc. is a 2D platformer with a mixture of quick jump n’ run action, a metroidvania progression and memento-like storytelling.

You’re an agent being sent into a guys subconscious by Memory Inc. – a company hired to help people remember. On your journey through the mind you set free the supressed memories about a long lost love, causing your host unbearable agony and leaving you to deal with a more and more hostile environment. The only way to heal your clients pain is to get to the bottom of it, whether he wants it or not.

It’d be real awesome if you could tell me what you think about that story setup.

Here’s some more stuff that I worked on:

I’ve made some more visual updates, added new sprites.

The slightly updated menu screen.

Updated the agents (players) sprite to fit in with the slightly altered scenario.

Made a little Illustration for the title screen (probably).

Also, I’ve started working on my homepage and naively hope to finish it today.

Remember to hit me up on Twitter for pizza and snacks!

So, I’m 14 and I don’t really have a lot of time, I’m not sure if I’ll even get the game finished by the end of October, however, the development is going pretty well, the multi-player doesn’t work yet, but I might scrap that, I have saving and loading, an inventory and some crafting!

Here’s a link to anyone who wants to play the current version: Download

Also, to anyone interested here’s my development Twitter

I am open to any suggestions for items and mobs, also the character sprites are not mine and just place holder, the rest are done by me.

Fighting the Skeletons

The bouncing Pumpkins

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 21st, 2012 at 9:29 am and is filed under October Challenge 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Firstly here is a video of the current state of my game – warts and all. (Sorry about the music it’s a lot louder and cheesier than I realised at 2am when I uploaded the vid)

After 3 weeks of hardcore developing I’ve come to the conclusion that a full release version is not possible to submit by the end of the month. I hate it when reality slaps you in the face.

But I have deceied to soldier on and still try to do a staggered release

Here is the plan:

$0.99 – Public Alpha for Oct challenge includes
killZ wave mode – You start with 1 bullet. Kill a wave of Zombies then choose to either return to the safehouse and bank everything you have earned or continue to the next wave. If you die you loose everything you earned.
Stories – 2 pre-made levels to play through and earn Zombie dollars from.
Create – (testing mode) build 1 level that you can walk around and shoot. 9 Skyboxes
Practice – A level with unlimited ammo but you don’t earn any Zombie dollars

$1.99 – Public Beta (TBA) includes
killZ wave mode
stories – 4 pre-made levels
share stories – download user vreated levels, upload and share your levels. Detailed search engine to focus on levels you’d like to play. Earn Zombie dollars for uploading and downloading.
create – 4 spare level slots to save WIP levels. More game asset sets to choose from.
practice
your loot – manage what you take with you into a level you play through.

$2.99 – Full release (TBA)
All of the above without the bugs and more level packs.

$2.99 – future releases (TBA)
I’ll be working on this game probably for the rest of my life because I’ve made it in such a way that when I feel like making specific style of FPS I can just make new game assets and release a new pack with some pre made levels. That could be a Dead Space style game, Western Zombies or even a Slender Man pack. And then the player can make those levels too.

I guess what I’d really like to know is are people willing to get in early, save a couple of bucks, play and contribute feedback to a paid public alpha?

Mechanics and monsters are done, so I’m finalizing the level design. There are three tutorial levels, three “standard” levels, and two special levels. I may have time to add more levels but this is the amount that I think I can actually finish. The special islands include a randomly-generated island layout and a “time attack” level.

Of course, zombies are mandatory so I added a zombie summoner “boss”. The zombies need a bit of fiddling, but they basically function correctly.

The final “standard” level features two zombie summoners, so use of AOE is key to conquering that island. I usually clone the dragon for the extra AOE damage, but some other approaches should work as well.