Well, still having problems tweaking networking issues … i remember some people telling me on IRC : carefull with multiplayer games, its hard to finish in time … they are correct !

But still, things are getting along.

Build your star base, chose a opponent, attack him !!!!

I didn’t finish this time and I also used some of my old (unpublished) code so I couldn’t submit it anyway. I’m pretty happy with the result though as a proof of concept.

Although it looks similar to my previous Android game Breakin, the code I used is actually from Swipe n Roll, since I wanted to use Libgdx.

It’s mainly made for Android and you can install it by downloading the apk on your phone. I haven’t published it on Google Play yet. You can also try the desktop version (Java).

Random thoughts about the game:

• People seem to like the basic idea so far.
• It’s too difficult when there are only a few tiles left. This could be solved by letting the last ones explode by themselves or just provide more balls.
• Perhaps gain one point for each tile removed and loose one point for each ball you loose.
• It’s a good start but I’m not sure I’m going to finish it.
• No goats

Anyway, I had a good time developing it and enjoyed the competition together with the other developers who gathered at Goo Technologies in Stockholm.

The Cropduster is a 2d puzzle game built in HTML5+Javascipt; the player must direct a stream of ass-gas onto the target within a crowded church and escape before the victim wretches.  Fans scattered around the church allow the player to maneuver their attacks as the Cropduster ruins baptisms, weddings, funerals and a bonus event.    Click here to play it in your browser!

Team Cropduster consisted of:

• Dan Cromer
• Larry James
•  EdgarVerona
• double051
• Robocognito
• Charlie Helman
• Aquatarkus

And yes, we know we’re going to hell for this.

Mini post-mortem:

Pro’s:  

• Great team, lots of multi-talented folks to pick up tasks on the fly.
• Lots of great ideas for the jam
• Starting at an LAN party was a fun way to get the ball rolling

Con’s:

• Went with an untested engine and tech.
• Distributed team meant harder coordination
• NEVER ENOUGH TIME!

Congrats to anyone that finished a game!  I put up a video of my game on youtube, but if you are planning on judging please play it before watching the video.  I also already have an enhanced version up for those who aren’t judging because there were a few annoying things I really had to fix.  Here’s a link to my entry.

I have a game!

Conquest Of The Mayans has been submitted, and can be found behind this elegant and finely-crafted link. I’m still not entirely sure whether it’s *winnable* yet, but it’s definitely playable.

Maybe some time in the next few days, I’ll throw together a Slightly More Polished Edition, with a main menu and some sound effects. Maybe I’ll even continue with my stretch-goal plans and put together a multiplayer version, who knows.

Hahaha … the game is funny as hell!

we did some really good job!

we will upload the game soon (Inshallah)!

Added some rocks to have things to avoid. Still needs loads of work but I’m going to submit it anyway.

It blocks you from getting outside the world, and respawns humans when eaten.  It’s a survival game.  I’m just working on the game over screen.

Thought I world post this again, updated for Ludum Dare 25.
It shows the distribution of votes and coolness for all entrants.

The graph is automatically generated so it is always up to date.

Put your username at the end of the url to mark where your entry is on the graph.

I feel really good, I managed to get an entry in.  I am going to be SO in next time, although this being my first, I don’t know how often ludum dare comes around.  Could somebody tell me?

If you saw my previous post, you would know that I got sick on day 2. I felt quite a bit better today and I decided to get to work. And I have a slight chance of finishing.

Let’s see how this turns out. Now BACK TO WORK!

Yesterday shortly after submission deadline I was too tired to post more than my post presenting a twisted side-plot about an imaginery goat in a recursive nightmare

Today after some game voting and some nice feedback on my own game I made a video with a walkthrough for easy and normal difficulty for my entry “Makarun”.

There is also a hard-mode. But I only did complete hard-mode a few times myself, and did not record it.

Game description from my entries page:
You are the bad guy, making a run (makarun) for it. On your escape from jail you have to evade the good guys or take them down brutally. It’s a stealth-action-game in 2d that makes extensive use of dynamic lights to visualize and check lines of sight. Also makes things much prettier 😉
So if you are interested, I would be happy to see your comment showing up on my entries page:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=15341
I will rate every game showing up in my comments soon or later.

Pheeeew! Finished our first Ludum Dare submission: “Dr. Vile in The Greater Good“! After working on months-long projects, it’s amazing to think that this game didn’t exist – and wasn’t even planned – 72 hours ago!

Congratulations to every Ludum Dare dev and whether you completed what you wanted to complete or not, you have much more now than what you had three days ago! 😀

Enjoy Dr. Vile in The Greater Good and please give us your feedback! We may expand this game further, add more features, and who knows what else!

Since one of us did programming (and music!) and one of us did art, we’re planning on writing two post-mortems! Stay tuned 😀

>> Dr. Vile in The Greater Good – Entry Page <<

Tags: action, evil, genius, scientist, top down

Alright, here goes:

What I did well:

• going with a really simple idea. I managed to barely finish it 30 minutes before the deadline, and I devoted enough time into polishing it.
• stocking my fridge full of food before the compo. Saved me time that would be lost during grocery trips.
• (mostly) choosing tools that I’ve been kind-of familiar with. I’ve dabbled a bit in SFML 2 before, I’m doing all of my other C++ work in VS2012, and I’m able to work efficiently in Photoshop, so I didn’t need to learn much. The only exception is in the BGM category – this was my first time creating music at all (except some prior experience with Audacity and voice recording), and I decided to go with Soundation. An hour of playing around resulted in a four seconds long loop, that – to my surprise – was actually praised in the comments. Yay for that.
• choosing an idea working for the most probable themes. This one could’ve been easily adapted to “Outer Space” (you are an alien, trying to deliver a bomb to the Earth) or “End of the World” (you’re a… actually, there wouldn’t have been any changes!). So that’s good.

(more after the break)

What I did wrong:

• little experience with creating games.  This was actually my very first self-coded and self-released game, so I had to quickly adapt to a lot of new concepts, which has also resulted in:
• messy code. I know it’s Ludum Dare and probably more than a half of submitted projects is a mess when it comes to code, but mine is like a Jenga tower that looked fine until the 36h mark, and after that the earthquake hit, causing the blocks to fly everywhere (actually, this would’ve been a pretty good metaphore if I used Code::Blocks for programming).
• procrastination. Even though I was coding hard, there were those moments of staring at walls, trying to figure out what to do. I need to work on my concentration.
• using C++. I like the language, and it’s the one I’m most fluent in, but Web is the way to go when it comes to Ludum Dare. Next time I’ll try using Unity or Flash.

What could’ve been changed if I had more time:

• mine explosion animation.
• an intro to the game (skippable, of course) that showed your submarine being lowered into the water, as the villain (you) was explaining his grand scheme.
• a satisfactory outro (and not something that was mashed up in Photoshop in five minutes right before the deadline).
• other enemies (I was on throwing in some torpedoes, or horizontal lasers for more variety)
• better enemy randomization (a matter of tweaking).
• making sure that you can’t get blocked by a wall of enemies – you should’ve been able to pass every enemy in every scenario.
• voice acting (a villain shouting “NOOOOOOOO-” during the game over screen; I was actually close to doing that).

Hey everybody, thanks for the comments, I hope to soon release a version with some new features and modifications, in the meanwhile, here it’s the game’s timelapse!

I’m having trouble adding depth to my game. There’s a basic scoring system now (just counts k/d for each team), most of the chaos spells I want are implemented, there’s a timer forcing you to act should the battle not automatically go in your favor (there are no physical differences between the two teams, they have the same amount of soldiers, spawners, and their soldiers do the same damage with the same health.) However, it isn’t very deep. You don’t really feel much motivation to do anything at all.

I’m not sure what to do to make it any more deep though. The entire goal from the start was to just create a game where you are the villain by manipulating a normal battle to work in your favor, regardless of everything that either team stands for.

My concept was created in half an hour in which I was reminded about all those bad guys always trying to destroy the Earth but always lose the game and end up in jail or something. Not this time, this time you’re the villain is the idea and a game without winning is not fun. So, this time, you, the villain, will blow up the Earth starting with the two cities on your TODO list.

I planned to create a second “how did I do it” but I couldn’t find any useful new facts since the previous.

Obviously the heroes try to interrupt your evil plans but you found a way to lock them in the dockingbay where they try to cut the door. This gives you the time to go destroying the Earth. Sadly your station is not fit for such powerful ray and it starts to collapse.

Command your drones to repair the station as you try to blast Earth back to the medieval.

Tools used: Visual studio 2012 (code/c++), Irrlicht (3d), IrrKlang (Audio), Photoshop (2d), Illustrator (2d), Anvil (Audio), Audacity (Audio)

Download and vote for the game

Tags: 2012, 25, 3D, C++, compo, Cpp, dare, december, final, Irrklang, irrlicht, ld25, ld48, ludum, Ludum Dare, ludum dare 25, microsoft, screenshot, visual studio

Alright all I have left is adding some sounds. There won’t be any music because I didn’t wanna come up with something dinky / lame in the last couple of hours.

Here’s a SS of the title screen which is also the tutorial:

Play it here, if you haven’t already.

What went well:

• Using Box2D with libGDX.  It was so easy that I’m almost ashamed I didn’t try it sooner.
• PID controllers.  The thought occurred to me from my engineering courses and I’m still surprised at how well they worked.  Three of them are used in controlling the saucer (tilt, torque, thrust), and each victim goat has one for tractor beam simulation. The camera class uses one, too.
• The little noises from the saucer?  I used my Gollum impression (yes, that’s me) and ran it through GoldWave’s mechanize filter.

What didn’t:

• An unfinished enemy (fighter jet) that was to chase the saucer around.  The code as it exists now is so hilariously unstable that it made the game nearly unplayable.  With an hour left in the compo, I had to cut it out.
• The beam visual effect.  Again, had the sprite done, didn’t have the time to get it in.
• Way too much time trying to get the terrain shader code to work…when the real problem was in how I was assembling the mesh.
• As mentioned in the comments, it definitely is more of a toy than a game right now.  The timer and score counter were quite literally added in the last minute of development.

What’s next:

• (As requested) Accelerometer-based control for the Android version.
• Better visuals.  Actually winnable gameplay.
• More victims.  And enemies.
• Google Play release…and Ouya, whenever it comes out.

Tags: post-mortem, postmortem

PC Build: http://www.mediafire.com/?a0g5a9xffe0ut16

Web Build: http://www.mediafire.com/?bd1wjhu9661knya

Resources used: Unity, some old camera code and coroutine tech

What went well:

Pathfinding, quite alot of the fun.
It finds all the squares you can walk to and the shortest path using A* in one search.

Camera Control, It seemed nasty at first but seize control of the camera to move it to characters when their turn started and moving it to follow attacks greatly improved player awareness.

What went horribly horrible wrong:

Time, this jam fell onto two work days!  and I didn’t get alot of features I wanted in. Like win conditions or death :(.

Hey I bundled together my weekend timelapse for my point-and-feel-bad game Harold is an Executioner, see below. Note quite how much time is spent faffing around with art! And any plays and feedback are much appreciated!

Entry page here