A part of Ludum Dare culture has been to update the community with your progress as you go. We have been rather busy, none of use know Javascript or webdev and we decided to make a HTML5 game from scratch.

Without further wordwrangling have a screenshot:

Nothal

We are at the stage of rapid improvements, so this is not really a good view of a final product, but it is proof one exits.

Nothal is hopefully going to be a game about you, the Ship AI, who has been recently burdened by the knowledge from you corporate sponsors that your crew is so unprofitable that it would be better to kill them and collect

You new job is to find ways to kill the crew without violating your core programming, and without arousing the suspicion of the crew all while preforming the mundane daily tasks required of you.

HERE have a tech demo.

This is the amazing theme music our sound artists (who will likely carry the project)

Finally, if you made it this far, leave your name (or a nice pseudonym) we will add it to our random name generator library!

This way there will be around a 1 in 1000 chance of you having to kill yourself in game!

Give us names!

They look better sideways.

What a weekend. This is surely the best jam game I ever created. Srsly.

It’s a simple rogue-like, you must stop the adventurer from collecting all the treasures and exploring your lair.

Downloads for Mac, Windows and löve2d.

Tags: downloads, Kollum, screenshots

That was way more intense than my first entry, but I think I’m done now.

You can play it online with here:littleball.co.uk/ludumdare/ld25/

It runs well on Chrome and Safari. Firefox runs a little slower, but works just fine.

LD25 is over and as always i’m half dead (in a good way!).

I believe this is my fourth ludumdare and this time i decided to make a copy of a popular game, but with the twist that you play as the villain (I wonder where i got that from!). I really wanted to think outside the box and pick a game that hopefully no one else would choose. I ended up going with Tetris!

Now you must be thinking, there is no villain in Tetris, are you mad? The answer to that question is yes, i am quite mad, and i guess you’ll have to play the game if you want to find out who the villain is! Tetris proved to be a perfect challenge for a semi-hardcore ludumdare session and i had my fair share of up and downs. At one time i was stuck for hours and ended up rewriting almost everything, just to end up with even more messed up code! (turned out i had misspelled a variable).

I must say i’m quite satisfied with the results. It’s not that innovative but it still looks neat and works, which is most important! I hope you enjoy playing it as much as i did making it!

P.S No Goats

Well I finished my first LD entry.

It is nothing special, but since I wasted entire day yesterday with idea that was way to much work I had to scrape something.

You can test it here

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=18306

It was great and exhausting experince, and I’m hooked on LD

Hopefully for next LD I’ll organize better

See you all next time, cheers!

What a weekend! I feel knackered, my bones ache, I have ran out of coke, my bed feels unused and my sofa feels worn out… was it worth it, I finished the game, so yes! This is my first LD and I think I have done it justice, I’m happy with what I made, I had time to polish it and get all the little bits in, including fixing the bugs I spotted.

In terms of following the theme, I think I was a little loose, I found the theme a difficult one to go for, so I just headed for my first instinct “Make a game in space, that way I don’t have to animate anything” and then worked out some way to fit the theme into it.

My design process was definitely “fluid” in that I simply spent the first day, playing and adding features one by one, with only the vaguest of overviews of what I wanted to make and nothing written down, most mechanics came about simply by thinking to myself “It would be cool if…” and then going ahead and doing it, for once I wasn’t winging when a designer came up with an obscene idea… because I was the designer! I’m not sure if this is the best way to develop a game, perhaps (definitely) for a large project it isn’t, however for such a small tight project I think it worked well, I was never sat twiddling my thumbs “thinking” (a.k.a procrastinating), I was always doing something.

I chose to make the game black and white on purpose, I’m no artist so black and white meant I was guaranteed colors that worked well together and would look like they were meant to be, I then added splashes of bold color for variety and to add interest… I don’t think that turned out too badly!

Here’s a rundown of the tools I used in the end:

• Code – C# & XNA 4.0, chosen because I know it well and knew it would give me the ability to make whatever I wanted.
• Art – Photoshop, the standard really.
• Audio – BFXR for sound effects, Background music was made using an android app called “Plasma Sound”.
• Google Code & SVN for hosting, regular commits in case anything went wrong.
• A cafetiere for copious amounts of coffee.

And the finished product:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=7049

+1 goat (take a look in the screenshot above)

I have a reasonably fun game. I think that’s a significant success!

The downside is that I’m getting stuck trying to package it up. For Windows I’ll distribute the .exe, three required .dll’s and all the assets (.png, .ogg). For Linux the best I can do is tell people to install Allegro 5.0.8, otherwise they probably won’t have all the dependencies the game needs. Static linking isn’t possible with the official Go compiler.

I’ve submitted what I have so far. I just hope enough people can get it working and vote on it.

– CLICK TO LOCK AND LOAD –

I have added a reference to goats 😀

Good luck to everbody still going!

Current build of my Ludum Dare entry:

http://sarah.draknek.org/Games/TrollWIP2/

I’m pretty pleased with how this turned out but I have plenty of time to make some changes.

Feedback is very welcome!

Princess and the Villain – Menu

Princess and the Villain – Game Play

With my limited time, father of 3 kids its a surprise that I’ve been able to make anything at all, but here it is.

I decided to give Game Make a go and focus on the game creation rather than writing c#.  First time using Game Maker and found it rather fun and I may even consider purchasing a copy for future compos.  Great for quickly getting something running and that is vital when you have less than 10 hours in the 48.

Submission coming shortly….

Here is the town so far, with all of the villagers exterminated shortly before taking this photo. Rest assured, there are villagers!

I just finished my game !

You control a monster. You have to scare children in a dormitory.

Hard arcade style ! Avoiding the light is not easy, you have to think about your route ! (Pro tips : start from the beds on the right).

Have fun every one !

I vowed I would not fail two Ludum Dares in a row, but here I sit again, four hours to go, with the realization that while what I have could be brought to some stage of completion, it would not be in any way fun, and I would not enjoy finishing it.
I could write a long, ranty post about what went wrong at this point, but I’d only be echoing a lot of other posts, so here’s a description of my concept instead:

What I’ve got at the end of it all:
My concept was a reverse, SNES-style RPG, ‘Willful Encounter’, where instead of ‘random encounters’ you control ‘willful encounters’, pitting monsters against the heroes without warning. You would receive tokens for every tile the ‘player’ walks his party across, which you can spend creating a group of monsters to assail him. Stronger monsters would cost more tokens and different environments would give attack and defense modifiers to different monsters.

An expansion of the concept might involve detailed AI controlling the movements of the player’s party, the ability to spawn loot to attract his attention, and the ability to select a sub-set from a vast array of creatures at the start of the game.

But with only four hours to go I have yet even to implement the battle system, and the monster party construction. These are essentially the meat of the gameplay, and could only be finished in a really rough un-fun form in the time that remains. So what do I have?

• Tile loading from an image
• A player party that walks north to your tower
• The ability to initiate a battle
• A nice transition to the battle scene and back
• Battle environments based on the player party’s location
• The beginnings of a really terrible battle system

Oh, and good luck to the rest of you!

so much to do still

Almost there….

In hindsight, maybe trying to make a game in just 24 hours wasn’t such a good idea.

I now have the bare bones of something basically playable. A bit more code and it’ll be playable and ready for balancing and playtesting – but as is, it’s not something that I’d be happy putting in front of the public, even for a game jam entry. So the new plan is to finish off the game over Monday, take the full 48 hours over it, and release it as a Ludum Jam entry.

The good news is, now I can spend a bit more time on polish. I can give the game a main menu, some sort of tutorial, maybe some sound effects, maybe even add other players. And it gives me time to figure out how on earth I’m going to include goats.

Finally!

EVIL SOUL EATING DEMON LORD FROM HELL in HAPPY KINGDOM is ready.

PLAY

I wanted this game to be much, much bigger than it is. Unfortunately, as usual I ran out of time and I had to throw stuff out.  Nevertheless I’m happy, tired but happy.  Good luck to all who are still working and see you in next LD

My ICE HOCKEY fisticuffs simulation is done. Thank god!

Pussies vs Dicks?

Of couse, this is not team america ;-).

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=10298

My game is a twist on mario from the enemy’s perspective.  I wanted to experiment with making the player feel bad about their actions.  I am running out of time to polish so I can’t talk much now, but if anyone wants you can check out my first playable here…

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/42191645/DarkWorld_Beta.zip (Windows download)