So this was an interesting dare.

The theme made for a very difficult start to the weekend and I was simply not ready.

I’m usually really good with coming up with an idea at the very least, but this time was different. I kept thinking of totally new things, none of which were amazing.

I spent the first two hours drafting my first idea, and the next six working on it before hitting a snag and deciding that no, this idea will not do. Panicking I began a new project based on a backup idea I had from a while back. But that turned out just as bad with me abandoning it just after the 24 hour mark.

Just when I was ready to give up a new idea hit me, not bad I thought, and got to work. If this was a Hollywood film, there’d be a montage scene for my next six hours, where I powered through and coded like a madman. With under 12 hours to go I had the basis for my game and just needed some graphics, sounds, and UI.

This was my first major attempt at making a game without a large engine (such as Unity), using Processing for graphics (Java) all I had to do was…everything else. And it was a blast.

Things that went right:

• The theme allowed me to not worry too much about graphics and sound, I could make some small stuff and call it a day.
• Developing without an engine allowed me to have much greater control over development, it’s a lot of work but quite rewarding.
• I like Java programming.

Things that went wrong:

• It took less than 12 hours to make this game, but I really wish I came up with this idea at the start.
• Even thought I made what I wanted, it was originally a slightly different idea and had to be adapted when certain things just didn’t work (and when I didn’t have the time to fix said bugs)

My game, Don’t Get Wet, is available here, and I hope to soon have an Android port up and running.

Tags: Don't, game, GET, LD#26, ld48, minimalism, Wet

www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJrN71aE2vI

It’s a shame that it can’t be embedded in the notes section of my game’s page, not sure why that is. Anyway if you haven’t given it a look before, now is the perfect time to check out Zephyr.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=22192

So I made a whack-a-mole game this time around.  Was it my original Idea? NOPE!.

You can try my game at http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=16392

I can get to level 8 because I am a fan of Tontie.  I don’t think anyone can survive level 9.

What went wrong?

– Minimalism didn’t suit my over the top tower defense game idea that I wanted to write.  fooey.- I spent nearly 20 hours of the competition sleeping or doing other things because I was more anxious about a font system than I should have been.  In the remaining time, I spent nearly 20 hours building my framework and only 8 hours on gameplay and media creation and testing the core components to be sure the game performed well.

– This was my first time using SDL and I got stuck in the mindset of using colorkeyed bitmaps to do transparency.  In this age of anti-aliasing and alpha blending being prevalent in tools, this didn’t work out well as there were some artifacts left around the edges of my images.  As I added all of them late in the last day, there was not much time left to fix them.  I know SDL supports alpha channels in bitmaps but didn’t spend the time to simply convert the source gimp files into rgba bitmaps.

– Sound was a last minute endeavour as well, throwing in SDL_Mixer and some non-optimal BFXR sounds in over the last 20 minutes of the competition time.

– As it turns out, many people use laptops!  What a bad combination with a game that requires a number pad for optimal play!  ouch!  Lesson learned!

What went right?

– the framework appears to run solid with rendering tied at 60 fps and the logic running at 30 fps.

-I have a framework to build on/improve that I may use for the next LD!

– I am a fan of games that push a player into overload with a simple mechanic, not many mechanics that overload from the get go.  I am a fan of progressive difficulty and my game sits perfectly in this paradigm as it increments the level of difficulty every 30 seconds you survive.  I am still quite pleased with it, even if some say it doesn’t have the depth of some of the other games.   Who said games always have to have a story!?

What would I do differently?

– visuals and sound

– code wise: plan ahead more.  never really built texture animation into a game, or had to write my own font loader/text to screen stuff.

– in future, consider having a framework ready or using potentially something like unity that can offer web play.  Even as a windows game, the download and play bit is probably much more hassle than some want.

– google drive didn’t make the download button (bottom right) so readily apparent for people.  maybe I’ll use drop box next time.

– plan implementational details for my game more than just “this should do that” design.  knowing what lower level functions need to be added to the framework or 3rd party engine to support your game ahead of time can really shorten dev time in the compo.

TLDR:  first completed LD48, graphics and sound suffered. core performance is high.  DON’T agonize over things like “I have to build a font system?”  just sit down and start designing/coding it, it will go easier and faster than you expect!

Again, please try my game! http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=16392

Ingame View

Tags: postmortem

After a little problem with kongregate API I managed to make the score works, but I didn’t notice this problem until minutes ago so everyone who played my game until now didn’t have the score to show. So I’m still hold the first place with a miserable score e_e

 

I really hope to be beaten in my own game ^^

 

Also, I’m making the post mortem version with more levels, new gameplay and new score modes
The first level will include an explosive kitten:

You can play/rate the compo version here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=11711

I hope you enjoy it!

Help me to escape from the tower! I do not know how to get out!

If you want to help click here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=22476

What I learned from writing an HTML5 game:

• Test on the major browsers before releasing – you never know what will break
• Using <audio> tags will break the game on mobile browsers – use an alternative for sound
• Get the game playable ASAP – I wasted time planning features that I never implemented
• Use a JavaScript linter if possible
• Take the time to write a one-step deploy script
• It’s awesome to be able to render controls off of the main game canvas
• Debugging with the Chrome developer tools is fantastic

Tools & software used:

• Jetbrains WebStorm – Programming
• Sublime Text 2 – Python and Bash scripting
• Google Chrome – Debugging & Testing
• Pixelmator – Art
• BFXR – Sound
• Git – Version control
• JSHint, UglifyJS, and custom build scripts – Testing & Deployment

Submission and source below:

• Minimalist RTS
• Source

Screen:

 

This was my second Ludum Dare and I gotta say it went pretty well. I made the 48 hour mark and made something that I was pretty satisfied with.

Things that went right:

1. Scope: I decided I wanted to make a simple game with easy mechanics because they fit the theme. That allowed me to create a lot of levels and plan out the difficulty curve of the game. I was programming something I already knew how to do very easily. As the game went on the rules became more minimal – you can jump more, you can’t move left, you can only jump etc.

2. Art: I went with an artistic style of Piet Mondrian because it was the first thing I saw when I google minimalism. Also I really like his work. Making the art was SUPER easy because they were just basic blocks and lines. Creating the lines in the levels was almost therapeutic for me. It was nice to just listen to some music and draw out some lines.

3. Content: The game is pretty long and consists of 25 levels. This game has the most amount of levels of any game I’ve created which I’m pretty happy about.

4. Ending: At the end of the game you can create your own Mondrian style art by clicking anywhere on the stage. It will either spawn a line or a square. People really enjoyed this ending and it was cool to see what some of my friends made with it. If I knew how to I should’ve added a tweet your art button / feature.

5. Sound: People seem to really enjoy the simple beeps and boops of the game. I basically recorded C, E, G notes using garageband and the game randomly plays one. This fit the theme well because the sounds were pretty minimal, but enjoyable.

What went wrong:

1. Difficulty: Although the game has a lot of levels. Most people quit halfway through because of the game’s difficulty. This is probably because of the Level Design and lack of variable jumps. Also I really wanna make a game that my mom would be able to play and finish.

2. Programming: Ok so technically the game was easy to program which was good, but most of the code was copy+paste I could’ve written it a bit more efficiently. But maybe good code isn’t really the point of a game jam

3. Outside the Box: I could’ve pushed myself to do something different and in some ways I did (multiple levels). But I’ve worked with platformers before especially with flixel. Hopefully I’ll use Unity for the next LD which I’m definitely going to do!

4. Keep it simple: So the game is pretty simple, but I’ve realized I should’ve made it shorter so people are introduced to a new mechanic maybe every 3 to 4 levels instead of putting a bunch of filler levels in there. My next LD game should be clear and concise. Most people won’t spend more than 5 minutes playing some of these games so it’s best to convey the concept to the player as quick as possible.

5. Humor: The game isn’t funny at all…. My last LD game had some funny characters and text. I think humor really makes a game stand out.

Overall I’m glad I participated in Ludum Dare again. I was pretty apprehensive like I was the first time. But after about an hour I had a clear vision of what the game would be and executed it. Next time I really want to push myself creatively and try using Unity. I think I made something that was familiar with me because I wanted to make something that was well polished and doable. Hopefully next time I won’t be afraid to fail and try something risky. Well that’s all for now…I’m gonna go play and rate some more games. Oh and you should try out mine!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=18047

Bit late in making a post on this, but I’ll do it anyway.

Dodge is my entry to Ludum Dare 26. After receiving a few feedback comments about it, I can now analyze the merits and problems with this game:

Merits:

It runs on a very simple concept: Dodge enemies. However, you are limited to motion in a very small area (There are only 9 possible places you can be).

The graphical style certainly fits the theme of minimalism. As much as I despise the theme, I think it’s brought out some of the best in my graphical ability.

I seem to find it difficult to resist playing again after failure. And seeing as one playthrough usually takes under a minute, it’s very hard not to. I don’t know if it’s just me though.

Pitfalls:

By far the main complaint I receive is that the sounds are too harsh. I agree with this (althouhgh I can’t fathom why they don’t just turn the sound down.)

Also, it’s a bit lacking in content and variety. Even though there are three difficulty levels to try, it still becomes repetitive fairly quickly. (Again, not sure if it’s just me.)

Do feel free to give it a go, if you so desire. I’ll see you again next Ludum Dare (Or the one after.)

Justice is a game. Barely. It is as little of a game as it is possible to make while still technically being a game. I made it in around 20 hours in Unity. It contains seven sprites and one sound. It has received a vast array of responses, from frustration to deep engagement.

Objective and reasoning:

The idea (inspired by several of the possible themes) was to make a game in which the player  has to make a decision about whether or not to sentence somebody to death in the American justice system. This has to relationships to minimalism. Firstly, the justice system theoretically wants to minimize its invasiveness, so the discussion of whether or not ending a criminal’s life is one of deciding how much punishment is “the smallest effective amount”. Secondly, if we accept capital punishment as a theory we also need to decide when we have enough information to justify an execution. Since we cannot possibly know everything, me must decide what is “the least fair amount of information that is relevant”.

The Game:

There is some fairly ridiculous setup that puts the player in a situation where they have limited time to ask questions before making the final decision about putting a woman named Fadiyah to death. They cannot possibly ask all of the available questions in that time, and they have a piece of evidence that changes the answers which they may introduce at any time. After the questioning period they have a small amount of time to think and then they are asked to make a decision.

Success of the Mechanics:

The biggest problem that users mentioned was pacing. Some people enjoyed it , but most people were frustrated by the amount of time it took for new text to come up. This is something that I was concerned about, and it’s not as easy to solve as one might think. The pacing serves two purposes: it makes questions take longer which runs down the timer (you cannot “listen faster ” as my dad once wrote on his office wall), and it provides valuable information about the tension in the room when somebody says something. If somebody has to wait 5 seconds to say something, they are probably (but not always) hiding something. I clearly need to do something about this, but I don’t have a solution yet. The answer might lie in giving the player some minor distraction to keep them from getting bored after they have finished reading the content of a sentence.

Some players also did not realize that Fadiyah’s answers changed after the player introduced the previously mentioned piece of evidence. I tried to make this clear in the writing, but that obviously didn’t work for everyone. I think the answer here is a better method for displaying the question list: I didn’t make it clear enough that questions the player had previously asked were re-added to the list.

The overall structure and theme seems to have been successful with all of the players, the major issue was pacing.

Success of the Writing:

Most users applauded the writing as a high point. I was originally positive about it, but ultimately feel that it was a bit too utilitarian (this is good for the game mechanically, but makes it feel a bit less reactive).

More interesting is the question of how sympathetic to make Fadiyah. I tried to write her so that, knowing the answers to all of the questions, I was unable to make a decision. While I don’t fall hard either way, I am generally anti-capital punishment and so probably made her a little bit too easy to dislike. One user accused me of writing her as an Arab stereotype, and it didn’t occur to me until after I responded that he may have been referring to her fairly violent reaction to external pressure. The two aspects of her were created separately: She needed to be fairly cold for the crime to play out as I wanted, and I made her an Arab primarily because it’s something different and provides some reason for her to be sympathetic: cultural differences and racism make for a difficult living situation, particularly for expatriate Arabs in the United States.

In the end, people didn’t seem to sympathize with Fadiyah much.  It’s hard to judge this since few people directly commented on it, but that was the impression I got. The fact that people only got the information that they felt was important enough to ask about probably influenced this as well, since the most obvious question (how the crime was committed) has an answer that is difficult to forgive.

Looking Forward:

I don’t want to redo this exact game, because I think that I explored the death penalty as well as I can with this particular toolset and this moment in time. This may not be the last you see of Ben McCoy though. Of course, I might give him a less copyright infringing name next time >_>

This is my #LD48 entry as 1st time participation.
You can play this on browser(HTML5) instead of installing. Enjoy!

go to my LD entry

Screenshot taken from my game. The eye is the “main character” you controll.

MONO is an art inspired game that I think is pretty relaxing. You control an eye through a series of levels which feature puzzle and skill based elements.

You can watch a video at the end of the post or play it on my entries page.

So here’s how it went for me:

Day 1:

---

I had a really hard time to come up with a good idea. I changed my game-mechanic again and again because several times I felt like hitting a wall. This was until the end of the first day when I decided to use all the features that I had implemented during the first day and to make the best of it. Not the best way to do a game.

But in retrospective that was the best thing I could do because I had quite some stuff working already.

So what I had were some not too exciting level elements like bouncy walls, gravity zones (that’s probably one of the more interesting elements), teleporters and triggerable spinning doors. So all I could do is some best-I-can level design to turn it into something good.

I really hated my game, and the theme, and everything by that time. Luckily that did change.

I started to use Tiled as my level editor but didn’t use the tiles at all. But it also has some nice meta layer facilities to create objects that are not tile based. I created layers for all kind of objects and was able to get up a level design workflow by the end of the day.

A screen showing the map in tiled and the final result with lighting on the right.

Day 2:

---

I had an amazing amount of time left to do level design, music and sounds and polishing. So my goal was to have a few levels that aren’t repetitive and I wanted each of them to look like a painting that fits the theme. The “main character” became an eye as I imagined the level to be a painting.

So it’s like the viewers eye in the painting is starring back at the viewer, cause it’s all about reflection. Or something like that 😉

Being in that mood I started recording the music that you can hear in the game with my Korg e-piano, Reaper and the awesome Sonatina Symphonic Orchestra VST. I could have used just an actual recording of the e-piano instead of MIDI and VST but that wouldn’t have been so easy to edit. I jammed like 3 hours and ended up using the recordings that I did in the first minutes of the music session. But it was a lot of fun

I spent the rest of the time with level design and exploration of good looking color palletes. I did a lot of polishing and minor tweeks to give the game a nice feeling and I am quite content with the result. Most people who played it think so too, I am really happy about that.

Some screenshots and menu gfx from MONO

Bottom line

---

I used
libgdx, artemis entity framework,box2dlights,universal tweenengine,sfxr, reaper, cosmigo pro motion,tiled and a bunch of energy drinks.

What was bad:

• I had the very strong intent to know what the gameplay exactly will be, before I start coding. That didn’t work.
• I was in a rather bad mood on the later part of the first day.
• I wish I had been able to do a more clever game for the theme.
• There’s one or two places in the levels that are unnecessarily hard. But the game has no unlocking system or linear progression so you could just skip a level if you find it too frustrating.

What was good:

• Entity systems rock in so many ways!
• I was able to bring together all the parts and make a game I like
• I think the game fits the theme very well as the game elements, the art, as well as the controls are quite minimal and basically it was all inspired by minimalistic art.
• My game has no level that is white, has black lines and red and blue rectangles. Still it has Mondrian elements.
• LD reminded me once again how unbelievable much one can do in 48h.
• I made it so that the player can choose the sequence he/she wants to play the levels in. So if you can’t beat a level or don’t like it, choose a different one. I think that many games should do it like this especially in something like LD where time to rate is short and you want people to see as much of a game as possible. I think that avoids a lot of frustration and if your game allows for it, do it.

So here is a short video showing small parts of the game and if you like you can play it

on my entries page.

Going by the comments, it seems a lot of people like the music in The Sentient Cube, so I decided to post them online.

Enjoy!

Tags: cube, music, sentient, soundtrack, The Sentient Cube

Hi!
I’m Sakuyan, creator of DeaN! (and LimiT)

I’m back again for my second LD48!

Po-Mo

I really had fun doing LD again, but I wasn’t too proud of my work for this LD competition :c
My coding skills really lack and I should really plan ahead bettter…

Some things I could’ve done better…

I don’t want to be “that guy”, but I really thought the theme was difficult and ridiculous for a 2D artist 😡
It took me about 14-16 hours to actually decide on a topic/graphic scheme/idea for the game…
In here, I probably could have managed my time a bit better.
I mentioned that I wasn’t as confident on this competition, because my game keeps bugging out on me! >_<

Here’s the storymode video that should’ve worked…

It works fine when I run it on my computer, but som#*$(@#$–You know what I don’t know ;-;
Someday I’ll actually learn programming… :I

Some of the stuff that was cool!

So me and two of my other LD48 compo buddies (doing our own game ofc) were on skype, keeping each other awake by talking about stuff was super cool.

If you have a buddy doing the compo, call them up and just chat! I promise you, the work will feel so much easier! ( But keep your games secret ;3 )
It made this game jam like 10x cooler!

 

Finally to close it off…
Ludum Dare is probably the coolest thing that’s ever happened to me! I would like to thank all the creators/moderators of Ludum Dare for giving all of us indies an opportunity to shine
Thanks~

Sakuyan
Twiiter – @hyungkim7

I was scrambling to come up with a suitably minimal idea to make tonight, so I could have a game out for April and keep to my #onegameamonth challenge.

After playing Bladeless and Potato Dungeon, I realized how much I liked the idea of a minimal swordfighting game, and spent most of my evening trying to figure out how I could do that without resorting to ragdoll physics.

I didn’t come up with anything, so I ended up thinking about the simplest possible game design I could imagine, where all you do is press a button at the right time to win, and otherwise you’d lose. It could be a sort of meditation game, where you just have to sit there attentively and wait for the signal to press the button. If you succeed, you move on to the next level. The time before the signal appears is random, but the maximum time keeps increasing with every level, so you have to be more and more patient to progress further.

I remembered that the word “ninja” means “one who waits”, and I thought it could be fun to theme this as a ninja game, where you have to wait for a long time for the right moment to strike.  But I was having trouble thinking of how this would actually look on the screen, especially if I was going to make this happen tonight.

Of course, then I realized this could simply be a samurai dueling game like Bladeless, where you stand facing your opponent, and you must press the button to draw your sword immediately after your opponent does. Or maybe it would make a bit more sense as a cowboy duel, but I like swords better. Still, it would have to be samurai, as no self-respecting ninja would stand around in the open, waiting to strike second.

So I tried drawing a person holding a sword.

…

Okay, yeah. This isn’t going to happen. I give up. I’m way too tired, I feel terrible, and there is no creativity left in my body.

So much for one game a month.

Join me tonight (10:00 PM CET), when i review some of the best games of Ludum Dare #26
Let´s take notes and learn together!

EVENT TIME: 1. Mai 2013 10:00 PM CET
Check your local event time here:
https://plus.google.com/u/0/events/cuvsjc4302k3u03sl69rek22dbo

WATCH IT HERE:
http://www.twitch.tv/oliviosarikas

 

A video of my entry Tulip:

The tulips along the bottom represent my previous deaths. As you can see I’ve been playing it a fair bit!

Earth Defender is my entry to Ludum Dare 26 (my first LD ever).  I really loved the theme “Minimalism” and it was a challenge for me creating for the first time a game with this theme, for this reason i decided to enter in the Jam competition so i could have a little more time to make Earth Defender ^.^

What happened?

I’ve been programming since last year almost in JAVA, my favourite language, so i’ve chosen to create a game in java within 72 hours using Eclipse as IDE and Graphics Gale to make the pixel art. When the competition has started it was night in my time zone, for this reason i could start working on my game only after 7 hours from the begin! But i got immediately an idea “Make a classic space game where you are the hero and you have to save the world from an alien invasion!“, i was pretty lucky ^.^!

First i started working on the collision detection (1st day) and i finished to code the game within about 30 hours! Then, using Graphics Gale, i made the pixel art, the sprites and the background! I made first the spaceship and the background (with a pixelated earth) and then the alien ships, it was very funny and exciting making the “Actors” of my own game!Finally after less than 50 hours i submitted Earth Defender as a jam entry, Ludum Dare 26 was certainly an unforgettable experience.

To play and rate Earth Defender go here ^.^

Well, because I wanna make a web version for my game but I have no friggin clue how to do it.

I’ve already made everything in my game GM:S compatible but then I’m stuck…..

…and then I completely forgot about posting something about the finished game.

Well, I’ll do that now:

Here is Rocky Flight Balloon!

I ran short on time, so I had to scrap the not-so-perfectly working bramble code and replace it with some simple rocks, which is also the reason for the new name.

But overall, that’s not necessarily a bad thing: I really like the new direction which also offered me a rather simple Background Story.

From the first feedback I got here and off-site, I’m quite tempted to port the whole game to mobile platforms — namely Android — because I can imagine it working rather well to pass some time on a touch screen device.

I tried recording me solving the “Impossible” difficulty, yet I just couldn’t pull it off (one attempt I’ve been off the goal by about one screen…) and at once another hour had passed…

Feel free to try it, if you manage to solve “Impossible”, make sure to record it, I’d like to see. But don’t be disappointed if you can’t pull it off: the “level generation” is completely random, so this game requires perception, planning, reaction, and luck.

 

A short post-mortem

I had quite some fun participating this time, despite being rather short on time. Finding some idea to do has been rather hard for me (“Minimalism” is sooo minimalistic idea wise and so generic!).

At first I haven’t been 100% sure about the art style, which is completely different from my last entry, Black Knight Blockade. Especially with a white unicolored background the game looked just too simple.

Fortunately, adding the sunset as well as the mountain range solved this problem rather well.

The player character works rather nice, considering his simple design; someting that really got me by surprise. I might adapt that style for future games.

Not being able to create some mean looking collidable brambles has been a small bummer, but as mentioned above, the rocks work rather well, too.

I’ll most likely spend next weekend looking for opportunities to port the whole thing to Android (I’m not really a big fan of Java). If this is successfull, I’m definitely going to add more things to the game like different obstacles (birds? brambles?) and make the game more configurable, possibly even adding some way to speed up or slow down the game also providing some kind of highscore.

Some people suggested adding some kind of progress or score display, but I’m not really sold on this. I tried to keep the UI minimalistic (i.e. non-existant) to have a clean and clear look. I don’t think I’ll depart from that. Also, just to mention it, the mountain range works as some kind of hidden progress indicator. The smallest mountain disappears once you’ve reached the goal. Just have a look yourself using the easiest difficulty.

 

One more last thing…

I’m still looking for a cute name for this still nameless hero(ine):

So, if you want, get creative: I don’t want him/her to stay nameless I think.

Tags: a flight of thorns, postmortem, rocky flight balloon

This is a slightly modified version of a post I originally made over on the Beercave Games blog : http://www.beercave.co.uk/2013/04/30/ludum-dare-26-1gam-april-gunboat

“Hey, weren’t you making some kind of OutRun-inspired racing game?”, you’re no doubt wondering. Well yes, that was indeed the plan – but as (according to the internets) every famous military leader in history* said, “No battle plan ever survived contact with the enemy.”

So yeah, that game’s not by any means dead yet, but with the end of the month approaching far too quickly it was becoming apparent that I wasn’t going to get it anywhere near done in time., Too much time spent twatting around trying to get the rendering perfectm not enough spent making it actually playable.

Fortunately, last weekend was Ludum Dare 26, which gave me an excuse to temporarily shelve the racer and get down to some Jammin’. The theme this time around was “minimalism”, and I conveniently had an idea lying around that I reckoned would more or less fit.

Enough already – show me the damn game!!!

So where did this one come from? Well, weirdly enough I had a dream last week where I was playing a 3D boat-shooting game with nicely animated waves. Woke up around 4am and thought “thanks, subconscious – that’s a great idea”, and promptly emailed it to myself. This living in The Future thing comes in handy sometimes So early Saturday I got up, checked the theme and thought “yeah, I can use that”.

Visually, I wanted something fairly retro, with a call-out to the old UKResistance blue skies aesthetic, because far too many LD entries seem to go down the “must make art. must be depressing” route. So job number one was making a nice sunny day…

Yeah, that’ll do nicely

Next job was getting the sea in place. Basically each layer is just a row of blocks in a sine wave, with the amplitude and frequency scaled relative to the z distance so that they don’t all sync up.

Quite relaxing, isn’t it?

After that, I needed some happy little boats sailing on the peaceful seas.

One might even say “picturesque”

Yeah, sod that. Eat laser, you bastards!

And a sod-off big gun, because hey, videogames. Sod-off big guns kind of go with the territory.

So, if we’re going to be shooting things they should probably explode. If only there was somewhere I could learn all about how to do explosions.

OK, that might be a little *too* much explosion

That’s a bit more like it

So with that lot done, Saturday was drawing to a close and I was feeling pretty confident about getting something finished. Clearly there was nothing else for it but to catch an early showing of Evil Dead on Sunday. Wow – they did not fuck around with that one…

OK, back to it and it’s Sunday evening, I’ve got most of a game, it just needs a little polish. Titles, level transitions, being able to lose. You know – the boring stuff 😉 So I stuck on my hacking hat**and just barely managed to bash something together before bedtime. There was just one thing missing…

The People’s Theme : “Potato”

So what are you waiting for – go play and rate GunBoat now!

* Seriously – I’ve seen that quote attributed to everyone from Patton to Napoleon to Sun-Tzu to, I dunno, some fucking Klingon dude. It gets around.

** OK, not literally. I’ve got a Viking hat and a cowboy hat but no hacking hat. Maybe I should get one…