i will make a game with
keo
and
ssjmetroid

gl hf

First, a moment of silence for my wife’s phone, which we failed to retrieve from the canal after the dog did a sweet spin move and kicked it in there. I like to think that our attempt was inventive, at least.

In a similarly genius move, I’ve convinced my wife Angie to jam with me for this. She’s well versed with MATLAB and I explained “what the dot does” yesterday, so this’ll work out great! It’ll probably be quite a bit slower than otherwise, but it’ll be great to work together on something. Or horrible. Probably great!

We’re doing some tabletop gaming with friends right now, but here’s our plan for a “You’re the Villain” themed game that we’ll start tomorrow… eventually, after The Hobbit, I guess:

A beat ‘em up base expansion game where you expand outward while defending your base and building walls/bombs/golems out of your defeated enemies for fun and profit!

While there are other things eating my time and family to factor in as well, I’ll be trying to field an entry for this LD after intending to a number of times before. The tools and libraries I use will depend on how the theme shakes out, but here’s the general list:

Engine: Unity
Graphics: Photoshop CS5, Paint.net
Music: Renoise, Audio Tool
Sfx: sfxr, Renoise
Libraries: Simplex Noise (Peter Eastman/Stefan Gustavson) – ported to C# for Unity

Good luck to all involved!

And I am in. First time. Will be usng html5 and javascript. Paint.net and sfxr on top the text editor. Did not have much time to prepare, but very excited.

I’m participating in the Jam with a friend.

We will be using HTML/CSS/Javascript/JQuery for the game. Other tools may or may not involve using photoshop or illustrator for art and garageband for audio.

My friend and I are going to be doing this with Multimedia Fusion 2. This is his first ham and my second. No pygame for me this time but hopefully a better game than MiniCity

Tags: compo, countdown, duran, jam, Ludumdare, MMF2, nick

I’ll be doing the Jam with one other person. We’ll be using Slick2D and LWJGL, and possibly Phys2D. Can’t wait to get started!

This will be my fifth attempt, going to try and make it the third completion. Using flash profession and trying out Pixen for graphics. We’ll see how it goes.

Supposing I like the theme,

I’m going to VS2010 with SFML as the code base,

With a touch of Paint.NET maybe some GIMP for some art,

And sprinkle of Audacity and  BFXR for some sound.

I’m making a game about a bridge who happens to be trying to collapse itself. You try to stop a bunch of engineers from fixing you by flinging them away and using powerups.

Programmer art title screen:

Everything is going much smoother than last time around, and I have a game that has gameplay!

Hey folks! I have a livestream here: www.twitch.tv/ThunderAwesome

We’re doing the Ludum Dare Jam. I will be using Flashpunk inside FlashDevelop and the Ogmo Editor (for levels). So, ActionScript 3.0. I got some teammates: two artists, one sound designer. I’m the programmer. The artists will be using Photoshop and Illustrator. The sound designer is using Cubase 6 and SoundForge and a fancy Yamaha keyboard.

We’re also doing the Indie Speed Run, so we’ll be blending the themes and elements. It should be a fun and interesting challenge! Especially since we all want to see The Hobbit…haha.

-ThunderAwesome

What will I be using?  Let’s see here…

• Eclipse Juno for the IDE
• Java/LibGDX for the code framework
• Blender – though I will likely render these models to sprites like in my other game.
• Photoshop CS2 (stop laughing)
• Inkscape
• Hiero font tool
• GoldWave for audio processing
• Android testing will be on my Acer A100 (see my desktop shot)

Will use Game Maker, paint.net for art and sfxr we will see what I can bring gl too all and have fun =).

so we have no theme.

I guess I’ll just make a game, and since there is no way to NOT make a game with the theme “You are the villian”  it will fit.

this sucks. I was going to do something, and now… well, fuck it.

Got my source code, got my theme, LET’S GO. I’ll be using a combination of Unity, Blender, Pencil, Paint Tool SAI, GIMP and Audacity for this. Here’s hoping my first time bears fruit <3

So the theme has been announced as “You are the Villain”.  Straight away I am going to have trouble with this theme…. wait that is somebody else.

My play either way was to create an adventure game, I just need to jam this theme into place. Maybe a large hammer will help with that. Hopefully as the villain no one will try and steal our kittens or attack us with goat.

I am not sure whether the best move is to start moving stuff in the engine. There is still some house keeping code that needs to be written. Or to start trying to pin down an overall idea for the game. I already have some thoughts to do with an evil genius, an air ship and a pesky spy.

Its time to start coding. First with your bare hands, then with what ever keyboard you can find first.

For Ludum Dare 25 I will be using:

• Processing/Processing.js
• ASEPRITE
• My game base, linked here (Tile importer, game states, basic collisions)

A warm up made in a few hours over a few nights.  If you don’t disdain black & white box Pong quality graphics:

Press LEFT or RIGHT to keep the white “car” in the middle of the gray buildings.

Download the SWF here and drag into a browser:

https://github.com/ethankennerly/turn-here/blob/master/bin/turn_here.swf?raw=true

I just got referred here by my friend Jordan
I registered with like 2 minutes to go
And the only language I know is TI-BASIC for the TI 83
Let’s see how this goes!

Here’s a few pictures of my work station

Cough, it seems the least wanted theme to me has been picked, I’ll need some time to figure it out.

Since you can’t _not_ fit the chosen theme to any game or any idea ever, I’m going to use one of the creative ones – I’ll go for colonization.

I don’t care if it doesn’t get ‘judged’ or whatever, the idea is to make something in 48 hours with a theme, and since there ISN’T a theme this time, I’ll use ‘colonization.’

Now I will sleep.

Hey guys, 3 guys in for the jam.

Code: Flash Develop + Flashpunk
Graphics: Paint.Net, GraphicsGale, Pyxeledit
Sound: LMMS or Musagi, BFXR

I wish everyone good luck!
You are the villain!

Tags: flashpunk, im in

I’ll give it a go this time.

I’ll be using https://www.panda3d.org/ because I’ve been using it a lot lately and in theory it’s reasonably cross-platform.

So!  More news as it happens and all that.

Almost forgot, I’ll be using my “Show Controls” unity package, for displaying controls to the user. Quick & Easy!

https://github.com/Beanalby/ShowControls/downloads

Hey there folks! So i’ve got a joke for you; an englishman, a swede and an american walk into a Ludum Dare. They join a competition and then make a videogame! Okay, that was a horrible non-joke and i’m really sorry for making it, but that doesn’t change the fact that this very thing is taking place!!!

Like the many esteemed and extremely talented game-makers also in the competition, we’re gonna be working around the clock to try and produce the most interesting thing we can for you. This team has already started producing a 3D platformer in the spirit of Psychonauts and Jak & Daxter, and seems to be doing alright so far (check it out HERE). But I guess our entry’s quality will hopefully be able to speak for itself in the coming days! Good luck to everyone else and may the best videogame win.

I DO have an idea, though, and if anyone would like to execute it, maybe we could work as some sort of mismatched team?

Idea is this: You play as a semi-omnipotent evil being. You have a grid of destruction points (squares, maybe a 10 by 10 grid). people wander around the screen, your goal is to kill them all. You have minions, which take 5 seconds to destroy everything in a destruction point. These minions can be overpowered, however, by 3 people. So you must strategically send minions to kill people, but that would make noise, attracting people in adjacent destruction points. Maybe people could reproduce, and it’s a survival type game where you last as long as possible until 100 people roam the screen. But i don’t know. If there’s time, maybe things could be upgraded.

Anyway, if people like that idea, let me know!!! Maybe i could handle sound or something.

~Evan

Gonna kind of remake an old game with some own ideas:

Tools:

HTML5/JavaScript

Photoshop for textures,  modo and/or gmax,  and buzztracker/audacity/whatever for audio (maybe i need a mic!)

Lib:

Gonna re-use my webGL code done earlier  the sources are available if you peek on the html

I actually -1’d this theme, so I was surprised this got picked. Anyway, it’s sketching time!

Getting my work place ready.

Snacks [*]

Water[*]

Earl Grey Tea + Fancy tea set [*]

It’s how I roll.

Travled to a friends place for a little LD action this weekend.

Tools:
* Unity3D 3.5
* Photoshop
* Maya

-Visual Studio 2012
-C#

-as3sfxr

It’s snowy this weekend. So it’s great to be trapped at home and attend my 5th LD game jam. I wish I could have the following improvements this time:

• Better time management
• Simpler gameplay
• Better music & SFX
• Timelapse
• Better sleep
• A fire dragon

My tools: Unity, Photoshop, SFXR, Audacity, 3DS Max

I’ll use some of my Unity C# base code libraries in this jam.

Tags: spotlightor

Even with such a flexible and amazing theme as ‘You Are The Villian’ I can’t come up with a conept!

As I get my work station prepared with

[*]Water

[*]Snacks

[*] Favorite show on netflix going

Lets get this started!

First time game jammer, and I’m ready for action! 😀
I thought i might post a pic of my setup before I start!

Good Luck!
-Thomas.

Had a rough day painting my grandparents living room after having been awake for 24 hrs already. I stayed up now just long enough to see the theme, and now I’m going to spend the first 8 (probably more like 12) hours  snoring in a new pillow which is, far too comfortable (add 3 hours).

Second time entering Ludum Dare, I got in late on the last one (evolution) and didn’t get to finish my game to the extent that I was hoping. Now that I know what it’s all about, and I was aware of the event ahead of time, I think I’ll manage to finish a proper game this time.

I’m joining the 48 hr compo like I did last time. I’ll be dreaming of ideas for my game, and when I emerge from my slumber, tea and clicking noises on the keyboard.

I’ll be making a game for the jam, in HTML5/Javascript, and maybe  a little PHP. Wish me luck!

Hello, this will be my first entrance in Ludum Dare and I’m very excited. It’s the perfect excuse to finally make a game in a reasonable time frame.

I’ll work with pygame for the programming in Geany, MyPaint and GIMP for graphics and probably Audacity for my music, probably to make some mellow guitar tunes.

Looking forward to a very productive weekend with a lot of challenges, ideas, Earl Grey and Grateful Dead.

Willow

New to LudumDare, just here hoping that I can finish a game 😛

I might have a group to be in… or maybe not. If not, I’m sad to know that my game will feature cubes with mean eyes. But hey, maybe people can just enjoy it and ignore the graphics! XD

This theme is hard, but I have a plan!

Let’s see how the feudal lords would do it! 😉

The theme has me stumped a lot earlier than usual. There were some really interesting themes up for voting this time around, and I honestly don’t know how this one made it through the slaughter.

I’m completely stumped for ideas currently. Its going to be a LONG 48 hours.

Between family fun times I am going to try and put something together. I’ll be using jsGameSoup of course!

Yep! I’m working together with my 2 friends to do the Jam.

I was going to livestream it, but I was having difficulties. My friend is livestreaming his part. (which is level design, and all that stuff)

http://www.justin.tv/skullbot10

It’s being made in ActionScript3 with Flash Builder, with the Flixel library. I, personally, am doing the programming.

I have an exceptionally busy weekend coming up with a Christmas Party, Hobbit viewing, and shopping day over Sat and Sun, but I just can’t resist!  I might be able to squeeze about 2-4 hours of work out before the deadline, so we’ll see what I can do.  I don’t know what framework I’ll be using, but I have a number of options for reasonably rapid dev.  Thought I wouldn’t enjoy this theme, but I do have an idea that excites me and is doable within the scare time I’ll have.

Game. On.

Looks like I will be giving this a go this weekend as my quarter just finished up. No idea what kind of game I’m making yet for the theme, but tonight will be spent figuring that out! I’ll be using Unity 4.0 along with Blender and Gimp. Might not look pretty though as I’m a programmer.

I look forward to seeing everyone’s entries. Good luck and have fun!

Hey, this is my ludum dare.. In fact, my first game competition.. So, I’m just so excited – I’ve been up all night for this, maybe I should have slept, but either way, I’m still feeling quite fresh and hopefully, I’ll be able to complete this first compo…

I’ll also be uploading timelapse video, updates and workspace pics later…

Currently, I have this idea- You’ll be playing with two characters and ultimately one of them betrays.. And the secret is- you get to choose the betrayer is and you’ll have to play as that character at last. Also, this will be a platformer game with both puzzles and killing.

Game engine: Pygame/Python

Sound: FL Studio, maybe bfxr also.

Graphics: Inbuilt sprite editor of Gamemaker.

No code base to share, I’ll be starting with a blank screen 😀

Plans to release it as open-source game.

Tags: 2D, LD # 25, platformer, pygame, python

Hi, this is my first time participate in Ludum Dare Comp

[code base]:flashpunk

[mapeditor]:ogmo

[graphics]:pyxel edit, aseprite

Wish everybody good luck. Also wish me good luck!

I came up with this idea before the competition, and have secretly been hoping that this would be the theme so I could put it into action. The player takes the role of the villain in a generic, original Super Mario Bros.-styled game. In the setup for each stage, you can pan around the level and place a limited amount of enemies, platforms, and other objects from an inventory. Once you hit the “Start” button, the dopey, Mario-style platform hero appears at the left side of the stage, and runs through. He’d have very predictable AI — always jumping on enemies and flying a specific height from their heads, always slowing down before a pit, always leaping for powerup blocks, etc. It’s your job to set up the enemies and objects so he dies every time. If he runs out of lives, it’s Game Over, which means you win! (You’d have to kill him more than once so that you can’t just win with a random fluke.)

I’ll be joining the Ludum Dare compo for the first time! My tools will be:

• Tech: LÖVE, Lua and some unfinished framework code I got lying around
• Graphics: GrafX2 and Pinta? We’ll see.
• Sound: Sfxr for audio, Google for music.
• Motivation: Espresso!

Step one will be to come up with a fun concept that doesn’t rip off the gameplay in Overlord too much. 😉

Hi, Jishaxe here again!

Looks like we won’t be working on anything tonight because Aster decided to take a nap, promised to set his alarm and then didn’t wake up.

Blame Aster’s alarm. Stupid alarms nowadays.

Anyway, me being left on my own I have to think of some ideas. I’m exhausted, but here are a few I was considering.

• You play as the slenderman and scare other people. Maybe multiplayer.
• You are a pig and go around taking revenge on humanity for all the bacon eaten.
• You are a giant plate-throwing monster out to kill everything.
• You play as the boss of a big company and go around demoting your employees while laughing manically.

Okay, these ideas suck, I know. I’m barely awake. And I feel delusional.

Hopefully, when we’re both awake tomorrow, we can actually get some work done.

DOWN WITH THE ALARM CLOCKS!

Here’s a cat:

You’re welcome.

— Jishaxe

This is my first LD, I’ll be using Javascript with Createjs.

I  already had an idea about a game were you can play as a final boss of a shooter.

Alright, I was hoping for a different theme, but I can work with this.

Spent a few minutes whiteboarding, here’s the results!  I have a bit of an idea, so this can work.

I’m late to the party, but I like the theme.
There’s a horrific plague circulating in my home though, so my progress will be inversely proportional to the amount of vomit produced by my loved ones, and potentially myself, should I contract it.

Since it’s late and I’m completely unprepared, I’ll probably go with html5 and jQuery.

Huh, who knew. I bet many were suspecting (hoping) that “End of the World” theme would win. Either way, I have my game idea and a work plan set out. Time to start working! (At 4:30 AM mind you :P)

I was out to eat while the LD was just starting, but I’m in!

TOOLS:

Photoshop CS4

FlashDevelop + FlashPunk

GarageBand

No time to say anything now …. Go go go

Tags: jam, ld25

I have created the basic movement code for my character! The character doesn’t hook or snag on any of the terrain so it plays quite well. This is a good start to the next 48 hours 😀

YOU ARE THE VILLAIN.

I had a couple of ideas, but I decided to scrap them in favor of a more interesting/easier to implement one.  Hopefully I can get it done.

I decided that I would be better off to use AS3 and flixel this time around– Boo will have to wait until I can build an engine that suits my needs.

Good to see everyone’s progress, and I hope you’re having as much fun as I am!

Tags: Beef Pop, ld25, progress

Usually, this is a bad thing.

Ludum Dare 25 ~ BEGIN!

Welp, a Tower Defense map wasn’t quite what I thought would fit within the realm of “You Are The Villain” but I think I’ve found a great idea!  In Tower D’s, generally you strike a balance between upgrading your current arsenal, or advancing your technology to get access to better weapons.  Well, being a fan of the Fantasy genre, I’ve decided to make a dungeon crafting tower defense.

Dwarves love digging, and digging always gets you to the heart of something evil.  We’ll start out our tower defense with basic towers (rock throwers, hammer traps), and as the game progresses the Dwarves dig deeper.  An unknown evil resides within the earth and at some point you gain access to eeevil towers.  The deeper you dig, the better towers you get!

Unfortunately, all that digging releases demons that try to escape into the world.  If you don’t kill them, you end up losing the eeevil essence they took with them.

Let’s do up some art and see what my crappy dwarves look like!

“My basic goal in voting was, if I could think of many games with that theme right off the bat, then vote down.” – anonymous chatter

There aren’t many, but there are a few villainous games. Quick rundown on what’s been done in the Canon of Villainous Gamery:

• Dungeon Keeper – construct a dungeon that can sustain the spelunkery of know-nothing do-gooders (also, see: Overlord)
• Ghost Master – haunt a house, creep out the inhabitants
• Bioware games – Choose the jerk choice and earn evil points, perchance to shoot force lightning or earn Assassin’s Guild faction points
• Evil Genius – Sierra’s quirky mastermind simulator. Play Dr. Evil.
• Tropico – City building as a dictator
• Syndicate/Syndicate Wars – The carry out the missions of amoral agents, as assigned by evil corporations
• Jaws Unleashed – Play as Jaws.
• Command and Conquer NOD disc: RTS from Kane’s point of view.

Some of these are twists on standard genres–and the villainy is in the premise–while others have you doing uniquely villainous thing.

I think our challenge is to think of games with villainy in their bones. Pong could be a villainous game if victory ends with a Mortal Kombat fatality…but that’s too easy. Can we make a game where we empathize with the good guys even as we smite them to reach the next level?

Let’s see if I can top last LD’s effort, my evolving music beat game Evophonia.

after having a rather bad “oh shit someone is going to do shooting kids at an elementary school”  (and they will.) moment, I went back to irc for more brainstorming (which is mostly me trying to defeat the issue of this “theme” being far too broad.

asteriscus came up with an idea of world generation and death.

I will modify this idea slightly and make it competitive.

In the first few minutes, I wrote code that loads an image, and sets a tile in the world based on the color.

Here is the world:

And if you zoom in, you can see what the texture for each tile is:

I’m happy it worked first time!

Back to work…

I will show you my idea soon.

basicly, i have got a stable idea, and gonna go with it.

here it is. you ready, get your mind blown in 5…4…3…2…1…

YOU PLAY AS A  CROCODILE NAMED JESUS WHO LIKES TO SCARE AND KILL THE ANIMALS AWAY.

There is no other story line, you just do that. As long or as short as you want, there will be other things like…

*lazOrz

*cheats.

*stores

*skins

*GIGANTIC MECH THINGY.

*and im time lapsing this -.-

Well see ya! hope to see all yo projects later!

For anyone using the old version you might want to just save and upgrade, the new version here is 100% backwards compatable with the old project files.  By popular demand I’ve added a classic tool select alongside the autotool for people more comfortable working with that, plus the spritesheet export and palette ripper are somewhat improved.

http://www.midnightfragfest.com/sprite-editor/

Very short on time this weekend, but with such an awesome theme I have to make something

I think I will be working with the tried and true:

ImpactjJS (html5)

Paint.net

Audacity (for converting audio)

Not quite the theme that I was hoping for, but I’ll try not to overscope my prototype too much 😛

I’ll be pooling objects similar to what I did here: https://github.com/jeffjcheng/simple_shooter

I should be eating soon.

This looks like a good theme! My friend and I will be entering the jam this time around, making this my second LD.

My Idea is Tailgater, you have to tailgate a car and don’t let it get too far ahead of you, and GO TIME!

Here’s my late “I’m in” post. 😀
I’ll be participating in the Jam with thegreenfish.
Tools for me: Visual Studio Web Express 2010

GHLF!

Desk pic

Hawk’s desk pic Dec 2012

I really like this theme! Looking forward to seeing what peeps make out of it.

Going with Game Maker 8 and sfxr as usual. Time to make a video game.

It’s the first time I read the topic of the LD so soon and before I read it I knew what I wanted to do, in fact, some of you said to me that in my previous game, from the #LD24, the protagonist was a demon god o_O, I thought it is a bit ironic and funny at the same time I must say, that I know what I’ll do now, but hey, here it’s almost 4 am and I have to go to sleep to be healthy tomorrow, and I catch a cold! atcwahhh
Well, so far, stay well!

after my other program broke on my i guess im using Game maker studio this time

ill be surprised if anything comes out of this

Well, definitely not the one that I was hoping for. Which would have been “The End of the World” for which I had what I thought of as a fairly sad tale to tell through a puzzle/exploration platformer.

So I’m left with “You are the Villain”, which always makes me want to go a different direction. When you’re playing the Villian, it’s typically because you want to have fun being bad. You want to wreck stuff and feel a sense of domination over the weak. You want to be in control.

So, my idea is:

“Ransom from Space”: You are the leader of a interstellar crime syndicate, who use extortion, smuggling and other tactics, to make money from the various planets in your part of the arm. While smuggling and the other tactics are good for business, you’re a right bastard and prefer to use extortion.

So, you do things like:

Position meteorites into orbit around the planet, with the threat that you might bring them raining down upon the planet.

Threaten to release a plague upon a world.

Send out propaganda that you have a planet buster that you’ll use.

Of course, it’s a balance issue. If you follow through with a threat, planets will fear you more, but they’ll also be more willing to send their military after you. If you don’t follow through, people won’t fear you as much because you’ve got no spine.

This will be my second Compo rund and second game competition, and then with this them ow god help me what can i do with this, guess the player will be a villain >.<. Language up this year : Java with some slick, OpenJWGL n stuff wish me luck!

Goodluck to you all and remember enjoy!

Here is the livestream of my progress

http://ld25.tgtamedev.net

Hi there everyone. Exophesis here reporting for Team Callex. I promised to give you an update on our project so here it is:

Our project is called “Assault!”. It’s a multiplayer tank based game much like the Tanks minigame from Wii Play. We plan to incorporate multiplayer soon but at the moment the movement and shooting aspects are finished (within the first hour as well :D). Users will be able to host their own servers easily and the game will allow up to 4 players to compete with each other in many different gamemodes and maps. We also plan to have 2 official servers running all the time when we first add multiplayer into the game and we will release both stable and unstable updates of the game as we make our progression. As well as all this, we plan to have a working website up for the project by the end of tomorrow so you can download these game updates and help give us feedback and suggestions.

Anyway, we are finished for tonight (as we live in the UK and it’s 3am here). But join us again tomorrow when we will hopefully have multiplayer working and the base game working as a whole. From there it will just be adding powerups, sounds, multiplayer gamemodes, etc.

Don’t forget to follow @TheBoothy on twitter for project updates and we will still be posting daily updates here on Ludum Dare. Night everyone.

– Exophesis (Team Callex)

My first idea is based on one thing that was never so good explained for me. The vilains always create one enviroment that let the player grow while he gets through the levels. In this idea, you need to make the hero suffer the maximum possible, but without letting he die. He gets stronger based on the dificult that you create and you earn villain points for it, as the real objective for a vilain is to fight the strongest hero(those things about gold, power or rule the world are obviously fakes).

There is a lot of work to be done to try to make this theme into a game, but looks like this time the cylinder guy will be in the charge.

Tags: concept

The theme is pretty generic and I have a simple idea, simple language, and simple hardware target… though I will be working a fair bit this weekend I might be able to squeeze something out

Tools: Visual bB (batari Basic)

Platform: Atari VCS/2600

Tags: im in

Mmmmm, I think I got the idea overall.

Now, villains, let’s see…

Last minute join. This is going to be my first ludum dare competition. Not sure if I’ll even be mentioned, but cannot wait to see what other come up with. Using Game Maker 8.1 for this thing!

Here’s my idea.

Simple RTS. You play as a barbarian clan. Take over villages to gain your numbers, to take over the city.

Random world gen. You have to get resources by killing the villagers. You can’t get resources yourself.

When taking over a village, you can rape it, for more units, pillage it for more gold, or slaughter it for more meat.

It’s kinda dark. But isn’t that the point?

As a first timer, I really should have prepared better for this competition. I will be starting tonight with absolutely nothing at all – no previous code base, no tools, no knowledge of how to program in Flash or any of the other common game-making languages. It’s going to be a trip.

Slow down. Take a deep breath. It’s not that big a deal.

Count your blessings.

My greatest asset here is likely to be my creativity – ideas for games won’t stop coming. So there won’t be any trouble with writer’s block. I’ve got plenty of previous coding experience, so hopefully picking up another language won’t take too long. I’ll be coding alongside (though not actually working with) a very good friend of mine, whose wisdom I may be able to draw on in times of need (but  he’s competing too, so I should try to limit how much I do this).

If you couldn’t tell, this competition is pretty intimidating for me… whew. Here we go.

I made a title screen and some basic tiles to work with, as well as a cursor.  Here’s the title screen!

Alright, I wasn’t really hoping for this theme to win, but it did.. D:

Anyway, things are nice and set up. Here’s what I have so far:

Of course, I’m just coding the basics into place. I have NO IDEA what I want to do yet! I think that will come to me as I sleep, because I’m going to bed now. Good night Ludum, see you tomorrow!

“You are the enemy” is an amazing theme, but not necessarily one that is easy to do.

The simple way to do it is to simply create a game where your character is the bad guy. This sort of “theme as dressing” can work if you are very good at designing a theme and a feel to go around it. But if you aren’t, it will just look boring: Packman with a goth, furious pacman? Karateca with an bloody evil karateka?

A second way is to design your game around the concept of evilness. “Infectionator” of ludum dare fame, or “dungeon keeper” are two such examples. Your game becomes a bit more complex this way though.

A third and harder way is to take a common game, and change it so that you control the enemies, instead of controlling the hero. Space invaders, where you actually control the invaders, or pacman where you actually control the ghosts. This can be very interesting, but like all interesting things, can be hard. The big problem is that most games are designed so that the player has many choices, and has to rely on his skill and decision making, while the enemies often rely on numbers, so making the player control the enemies in an interesting way, and making the computer controlled hero behave in a challenging way can be quite difficult.

With all this in mind, the first thing that I thought for the theme was to make a “reverse-QIX”. In this reverse QIX, you control the QIX, and the computer controls the spaceship trying to fence you in. Since QIX has one enemy and one player, it makes sense to switch them around. However, making a competent AI for a QIX ship seems like a hard programming challenge.

Since my initial idea for this LD was “a simple action game”, I have to think of a few more things. One thing that immediately springs to my head is a “You’re a shark and you have to eat people”. This is a great idea, but has already been done before.

Another idea would be a “reverse missile command”, where you can throw missiles at a city protected by turrets. This time, the challenge would be A) making the gameplay interesting to the player, and B) balancing the turret AI (it is very easy to make a super strong AI in this game).

I will go cut my hair, make a decision, and begin coding… so far I’m favoring the reverse QIX game.

Tags: Planning, theme

More then an hour after it starts, and I just barely got my concept out.

With about, 20+ minutes on open office’s draw, here’s what I was able to show.

All right, I’ve got my story, my levels, enemies, mechanics etc. laid out all neatly in a notebook. Now to get cracking on actually making all this =P Maybe I’ll go for a walk first.

The main thing giving me trouble is that I obligatorily have three mains to switch between, and I may not have enough time to give each one the special custom level they deserve. Ah well, I can always do an add-on after, right? >3>;;

I hoped for inspiration, but here’s the thing. I’m on a plane most of Sunday, and the VP of SW is expecting me to have a Simon Says game running on an embedded system by Monday. So I guess (for the sake of my job) I’m out. Next time. Have fun, I’m rooting for everyone.

Good luck.

Not exactly a theme I like… And I’m kinda busy this weekend…

I’m using C++, SFML (2.0), my utility library, etc. etc.

I’ll try keeping all my code in a single file and see if it’s faster for development for a rough game…

This isn’t going to turn out so well, is it? 😛

I had absoulutely nothing for End of the World, so I’m glad that this one won out. After an hours hard thinking, going through wikipedia’s list of crimes, I’ve decided on arson!

(Wikipedia’s list of crimes is pretty decent for inspiration here I reckon).

Oh also, I’m totally in, using FlashDevelop and probably bfxr!

If so, why do they commit crimes? What is their inner theme? Get some brainstorms yet?

Yum. Yogurt. My webcam makes my hand look weird. I am not a martian IRL.

Delicious EGAF brand yogurt.

Ideas I’ve had so far!

1. Something to do with suffering consequences from your actions. Specifically, something where the ONLY way to do anything is to do something currently which will incur some consequence later. So, the past you is your enemy. This could be sort of like an arcade game with some character who, to be upgraded, agrees to be attacked by N enemies in one minute. Then, to survive, one must advance fast enough to handle the enemies, but not so fast as to spawn a deadly wave of enemies.
2. Some sort of traditional game, except you play as the enemy instead. I’m pretty sure this idea has already been had by, say, everyone else, so I’m not going to do it.
3. A sort of “puzzle” where there are mirrors and other objects that make copies of you, reflected and perhaps in a location with some differences. For instance, mirror you might be next to a box of TNT (conveniently), but you might not be, so if you punch it, “KAPLOW!” goes mirror you.
4. A game where one has to fight against a lot of “good” people who think you’re the villain in order to… to do something.

I like the first one the most because it is totally within the scope of a Ludum Dare and uses the theme in gameplay. Maybe I could play with the idea of you being a villain more than just to yourself – maybe you’re in a position of power over others or something. E.g. you have to guard them, but you’re a really crappy guard who also spawned the monsters. I shall get down to business tomorrow after the magic of sleep (or, a variant of sleep I like, waiting in bed, thinking about stuff) has made my mind clearer and chewed over this idea.

Here’s what I got. You control a demon fire warrior(angel) that wields an ax and your goal is to  destroy as much stuff  as possible. It will probably have a better plot later. I won’t be available for most of tomorrow though, so I might not get as much time to work as I hoped…

Title screen

5:00 in the morning, fresh as a peach!

I will be relying on Flash, Box2D and Bsfxr.

This is the second Ludum Dare for me and I am definitely finishing this one. Good luck to all and have fun!

I love the theme this time. As first step I’ve been doing some brainstorming on paper to get some ideas.

I want to do something simple, because my main goal is to finish the game. I wanted something like Space Invaders, but playing the aliens. I’m going to mix something of tower defense to the game.  Now, let’s start coding!

After consulting with my artist (who I am capable of interacting with only through text for tonight) we came up with the epic idea that… well if I told you now it would ruin the surprise.  But it involves space rockets, which are always fun.

       the main map will be much bigger than this. trust me.

Idea is in the bag.

I sleep now.

Just decided I’m doing this LD!
I’ll be using Construct 2, Photoshop, sfxr, and FamiTracker x)

Making good progress. I still don’t really know what my goals are with this, but I got basic gameplay working. Flying around killing enemies and stuff.

Just trying to figure out how to make it fit my vision.