Here’s a little preview of my ultra-minimalist project. It features a single cube with a single collider, a single script (Unity JS), and… well, 6 sounds – but they come from a single synthesizer =P
No gameplay yet – it’s just a toy today. But tomorrow… oh, tomorrow things will be different.
I only decided to join in quite late in the day, but I’m glad I did – it’s already fun. Just wish I had pizza…
-Hadyn
With me one more
really funny i had the luke to see MONDRIAN paint in MOBA of NY (i leave in, france) just few week ago and i say to my girl friend :
“For the first time i like a minimalist art creation”
comment if you are in the MONDRIAN fan team 
My whole game will be made with this sprite sheet.
We’re getting together a tiny platformer for the jam, no screenies yet! (so far featuring pen and paper and my very own little animation set)
A wibbly wobbly fairly ambitious design document
…we’ll get her back in one piece!
Phaser didn’t work out (no tilemap collisions = no go); Ludus also wasn’t able to satisfy me, so after 8 hours of fighting against JS I switched to Unity and SketchUp. This is also the very first time I’m ever working in Unity, and damn, this thing’s a beaut. Got a small screen, too:
New weapons, new models, dynamic gravity effects:
Thai Food:
Terrible gif compression:
Angled raking is in, although the textures need some work! All the textures are currently placeholders anyway, so I’ll leave this to polish up later.
Been at it for 12h and my 8×8 pixel potato didn’t pass quality check because it looks like a slab of cheese! Other than that, player movement, level structure and collisions (mostly) done. Need to work on some enemies, items and scrolling “camera” system (half-done). I keep having problems focusing on one task. Jumping around working on various different things. I chose “minimalistic” art style with 8×8 sprites hoping it’d hide some of my crappy coder art and the game will be a generic platformer. Hoping to finish most of the major coding tasks today (2-4h more) or early tomorrow. After that, concentrating on making manu, adding levels and ironing out the details. First LD48 and I just hope I have enough time to finish this game in time.
12h status update screenshot
Walked into town to grab Lunch at Beuno y Sano. Definitely check it out if you’re ever in the Western MA area.
It felt nice to step away from the apartment/computer. Of course, I have a notebook by me so that I could continue designing more levels.
Tags: food
I just realised that I’ve written all my code thus far while confusing Φ and Σ.
So the first Day of Ludum Dare ends here (at least where I live) and I was suprisingly productive. From the graphical standpoint nothing much has changed from my last Screenshot (thats because I only worked on logic all the time). My little Persons are now getting Resources and bringing them to the construction sites. So my next target is to get a small economy into the game (wood, stone, ore, wool, grain …) that they use to produce Food and build more Houses and protect from the forces of nature/wild animals.
There are 4 key features that I hope to implement until tomorrow evening:
Sure there are other Ideas that would be quite nice but wont add much into the gameplay.
This time around I’m going full force on my strongest skills. Which will mainly be mood, graphics and writing. Also an experiment as it will be pure html, css3 and js. So far it has been going really good, and just finished my cutscene-pipeline.
So for those who want a sneak peak, here you go! Chrome and possible firefox will be needed for it to work. Also refresh the page a couple of times, as my preloader is not fully functional yet.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/3487858/LD26/2/index.html
It’s a good thing that the theme is “Minimalism” because I’ve never had this little time to work on my game (since I’ve already scheduled away tomorrow too).
So I have my protagonist, and my minimalist alien enemies with some very limited AI.. I have collision detection, I have pathfinding, I have interactions with objects, a bit of audio and a small percentage of necessary graphics.
Github lays it all out here.. 12 issues closed, 25+ to go (for perfect completion) 2660 lines of code so far.
I wish it looked more impressive!
Settled on an idea and am now working on the basics (with a bit of animation to keep myself interested).
You need to touch each of the coloured boxes while avoiding the spikes. The fewer turns used, the higher your score (possibly including a threshold which causes you to lose). Currently movement is in the cardinal directions but I plan to change it. Different stages will have different movement types such as the knight from Chess. Spikes move in real time, so hopefully it will require a bit of finesse in the later stages.
(Open image to see the animation)
Did I misread the theme? – was it supposed to be Mondrian-ism or Monochrome-ism?
Hey! My first Ludum Dare has been very productive! Knowing that you can’t really procrastinate is …effective!
Since the first time I read “Ancient ruins” and “Dig deeper“, I had this idea for a game in which you have to… build a tower! The game I am developing is called “Tower of Pixel” and, if you didn’t noticed it, the name is a witty reference to the [un]famous tower of Babel. As the player, you’ll have to use the bricks available to go as higher as you can. The objective? Reach for the heavens, of course!
My initial attempts has been with Box2D. But as soon as I realised that it would have been impossible to stack hundreds of boxes with a reasonable framerate, I switched to a more conventional platform. As announced before, I am using Flixel plus some plugins and few utility classes from R (a framework that I previously developed). Except from this, all the code and graphics has been developed today. (I am currently using a placeholder sprite for the character. Of course it will be replaced with something original and much more… MINIMALISTIC!).
And now… some screenshots of the development!
If you want to follow the development of the game, you can find me on Twitter: @AlanZucconi or on my personal website.
Wheeeeee! Arguably my favourite bit of Ludum Dare is making the music. 😀
I usually go straight for Cubase, but this feels like a Fruity Loopy sort of game. Currently using the 64bit beta of FL Studio which has some wierdness in places which hopefully they’ll sort out before they release the final 64bit FL later in the year.
Because I am challenging myself to use only the SetPixel() function for graphics, I have to write my entire graphics engine from scratch. A while ago I realized that what I had would be very difficult to get to work with polygons. So instead, I’m switching to voxels. It won’t look as nice in my opinion, but it will be much simpler and easier to code.
My games coming along alright — since it’s a text-based adventure, I don’t have much in the way of screen shots, but I can give you some statistics:
It’s a lot of fun so far! I’ve been using Twine for the first time — and, I have to say, it does make things go much quicker. I’d love to see some improvements to the tool though, like being able to click on the “canvas” area to drag it around instead of having to use the scroll bars all the time. The editor could be a little better too. I’d love to see the ability to use external editors for individual passages. I’d also really like to see a mode where I can have the compiled version of the text right next to the graphical layout — that way I could do both styles of editing in the same UI!
But the tool is still excellent, and I look forward to finishing off my poorly written adventure!
I wasn’t a big fan of the theme. It took far too long to come up with an idea. But I think I’m starting to like it…
Did you know that Canabalt was originally made for the theme of “Bare Minimum” at the Experimental Gameplay Project? Okay, yeah, I said that already.
But I think it could be a good angle to approach the theme of “minimalism”, by thinking about the bare minimum that you can scrape by with in developing your game [wow, three prepositions in a row!].
What’s the bare minimum in terms of input? That would be one button, right?
How about in terms of output? Could you make a game with only sound and no graphics? Or how about using as few pixels as possible, to maximize data-ink ratio? Could you represent a 3D space with only a few moving dots? Or lines?
Or could you use as few rules as possible? Could you keep your game systems to a bare minimum?
Maybe I’ll just make my game as quickly as I can.
Made content and screwed around with Unity in some kind of an improvisational haze. Might be a busy tomorrow.
Most importantly, I’ve managed to combine the two main ideas I had into some kind of a gardening game with environmental puzzles. I bet there’s demand for that niche somewhere. It’s a way to interpret the minimalism theme as both “zen gameplay” and “minimal actions producing complex results”. So I think I’ll roll with that one.
“Are you tree?”
“No I, am mountain”
“There is longway to enlightenment”
I’m working on some kind of 3D projected 2D sprite game. So far I have ghosts worms flying around in a cloudscape:
I’m not entirely sure where to take the game from here, maybe a 3D bullet hell shooter.
Programmer is off at a family gathering, so we couldn’t get any engine coding done this morning. Did some planning to make the boss fight interesting, and plans for reducing the Action RPG to its minimal components.
Well again… can’t believe it but things are going GREAT!!! It all works so far, the battle system in its most basic form now works! I have animated the main character fully [As fully as this engine allows] I guess now that I am sure I will be able to submitt something if i so chose I should tell everyone about my ideas!
So to fit the minimalistic theme I tried to create a very short but complete RPG game. Simple enough concept: Flare is a fire mage in training, help her practise her magic in the academies training dungeon before coming face to face with a deadly ICE DRAGON to achieve the title of Fire Mage!!!
The entire game world is 16 by 10 squares, this tiny map helps fit the theme [and gives me a better chance of making the game run!] Even in this tiny world there is a secret area, it will be all too familiar in style to anyone who has played some of the early final fantasy games!
I will update later once i have a background for the battle system so i can show it off, for now take these two pictures of the main character, one of her standing and one of her casting frame 😀
In the early evening of the first day, we get 50% of our prototype provided. The night will be long. But we were happy because the plans for the prototype were achieved. We managed to create our basic time travel … including visual effects. Yeah!
First Prototype: Time Travel with Visual Effects
I met a couple in a Facebook group which will help us in the soundtrack and art (cool these events where everyone helps everyone). However, I still set how to be minimalist art of the game.
The Minimalist Art work in progress.
I will continue developing the levels and part of “role play” in our RPG while watching the UFC Jones x Sonnen. LOL. Now women have fight. LOL.
Holy shit. Women fight on TV.
Tags: kaiporaLD26
A little progress here, salute the Island.
I have been using Twine to make games all throughout my 1 Game A Month personal challenge. When it came to doing my first ever Ludum Dare, I was a combination terrified, and excited. I had an idea ready for just about every theme. Except Minimalism.
The path of events that led to Solitary, was similar to this: panic, mild nausea, writing an idea, trying to go to bed, can’t go to bed due to a better idea, 2 hours of working on that idea, sleep, work, 6 mile walk, finish.
Solitary is not as straightforward as some of the other “Minimalism” games that have come out so far, so I thought I would share my thoughts.
Originally, the game was going to be a short, text based “Escape the room” type deal, you were given a bottle of water, and an energy bar, and that was it. The “bear minimums”. This turned out to be a terrible idea. Then I started thinking. I had played Porpentines “Howling Dogs” the other day, and what left the biggest impression on me was the sense of confusion and terror you get in the first 5 minutes. Where am I? Why am I in this room? Why am I being forced to do things? I wanted to make a game that expanded on that same sense of hopelessness, and keep people asking questions before the big reveal. The big reveal could have been done better, but the more I poked at it, the worse it got, so I kept it as it was.
The game is minimalistic by having no sound, or visuals. The hyperlinks are just bolder than the regular text. This was thanks to a CSS Stylesheet I found through Porpentines Twine resource page. The room that serves as the central hub is very minimalistic. It contains a bed, a locked door, and walls. Thats it.
Originally, there was going to be a subtle branching path system based on your daily actions in the room, but that didn’t seem to fit the theme, so it was scrapped.
I also used minimal time, the grand total worked on the project is about 6 hours, much shorter than the 48 hours.
I hope you all enjoy the game.
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=20308
i’m trying to decide: do i recycle some code from last month and just make a jam game, or do i rebuild from scratch?
i have a working FPS engine, but it wasn’t built during this LD, so i can’t use it unless i go for the jam game instead of the compo game. of course, it’s not too hard to rebuild it anyway; i built the engine in 3 hours initially, so i think i’ll just rebuild it.
So here is my new game idea. I’ve had my timelapse off the entire day because I haven’t actually been doing any programming or development yet. Just recording some sounds, and I scribbled this drawing that summarizes the game concept
You are continually on a search for pants. You need to collect the pants and then immediately run away from the enemies that come after you, to progress to the next level (which is actually the same level, but with minor random mutations to increase its difficulty). The levels are constructed such that it should always be possible to navigate, even if there are walls — since you can dig through walls. And to prevent you from spending too much time planning, there’ll be a time limit. If you take too long, the pants disappear and you need to run off the level, you don’t get any points.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/72165/JAMS/LD26/pantsquest/COLLECTTHEPANTS.wav
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/72165/JAMS/LD26/pantsquest/RUNAWAY.wav
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/72165/JAMS/LD26/pantsquest/TIMESUP.wav
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/72165/JAMS/LD26/pantsquest/GAMEOVER.wav
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/72165/JAMS/LD26/pantsquest/DUCKS.wav
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/72165/JAMS/LD26/pantsquest/COLLECT.wav
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/72165/JAMS/LD26/pantsquest/OW.wav
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/72165/JAMS/LD26/pantsquest/soundtrack.wav
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/72165/JAMS/LD26/pantsquest/SUSPENSE.wav
Actually this means part 2 is done. Those who suspect my stream maybe seen part 1 and 2 together. As for me, it`s nice.
Time to write a new theme for game.
P.S. pretty sure i`ve lost my minimalistic style since morning.
I’ve got the introductory video and gameplay all programmed, so at this point I’m designing my levels. It’s really coming together nicely. I wouldn’t be surprised if I added another gameplay mechanic before tomorrow, and might even make some changes for a sort of boss fight …
The maze is operational, has a minimum look, and you can walk around in it.
Tags: maze, toon shading, unity, unity3d
Throwing my code base up here in the off-chance that I actually manage to finish something on time. I literally only learned about this event last night, so sorry for the lateness.
Code base is for GM: Studio, it’s just a simple platforming engine, some debugging tools I wrote for myself, and an example script on paralax backgrounds that I got from the GMC example forums.
http:/dev.studioink.org/repository/project_LUDEMDARE26_base.zip
My game is nearly done. The mechanics are all there, everything is working properly, I’ve added some sound effects…
I’ll just try to add some minimalist music to go with the theme.
I am not very happy with the final product to be honest. I think I went very well with the theme, but I didn’t find the game to be lots of fun, which is what I usually aim with my games.
But I am not going to scrap what I’ve already done, nor I can see myself changing everything. And if I can actually make a good music that sounds minimalist today, I’ll have the game ready WAAAAY before the deadline 😀
Sadly, I cannot join this LudumDare. We’re celebrating my brothers birthday today and tomorrow I won’t really have time. To bad because I was really looking forward to it! :/ Oh well, maybe next time. At least it’s not like I’m not working on a game at the moment. I’ve been working really hard on this game called Fault. It’s a little 2d sandbox game like minecraft / terraria. It’s still in very early stages but it’s actually playable!
Check it out!
http://ghostid.net/play?n=fault
Sooo… It’s nearly one day that have passed and I do think it’s time to show a bit of what I’ve done.
First, I came up with the fabulous name “Escape” for my game, because the idea behind is the story of a circle in a minimalist painting in a minimalist art gallery in a minimalist town on a minimalist world in a minimalist solar system… .. . A circle that is tired of being minimalist and that try to escape its canvas, and try to fight the evil minimalist red square on his road to complexity.
Now, it’s photo time :
What I ate – Homemade Burger and… I don’t now the english name of those vegetables x)
My workspace
An in-game screen, actually the first boss fight :D
B-B-Bonus : a sheet of hand-drawn sprite of the game (*o*)
Here we go… tomorrow I’ll do the last two levels I’ve to make, and the sounds… and minor graphic revision… and sleep !
Btw, here’s my livestream : http://www.twitch.tv/colisanloveteit
We had a slow start at the beginning of the day. Minimalism isn’t exactly the theme Ziryf and I where hoping for.
But after a while we came up with a nice style to fit the theme.
For this jam Ziryf and I are both rocking the photoshop, I’ll be doing the programming in construct 2 and Ziryf is doing the audio in nanostudio, sfxr, audacity etc.
We don’t know where this is going to end really, something with a dungeon full of baddies and a sword wielding knight.
The combat is very simple, just touch the enemies with your sword and they get hurt.
The knight’s primary motivation to clear the dungeon is to save his horse and the princess. AND of course to find the magical potato of infinite power.
Well, enventhough I was anticipating LD26 since the end of LD25, I totally missed its start. But a couple of hours in I’m pretty sure this will be my most complete Ludum Dare entry yet! This is what I have so far:
Look at them colors!
…alright it’s looking pretty boring, but the theme is minimalism, so there! And hopefully it will look and play much better as progress progresses.
(also I totally didn’t rip off Luke O’Connor’s Ishihara)
Here’s a video of my progress!!
www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_ZhSNYpb8M
I’m going to have a flash testable up within the next hour. Will keep you posted.
(stop me if you’ve heard this one before)
A space man and his AI companion crash on a planet. They try to get it together.
Pretty much completely point and click, with a few mini games Really all I can manage given the time. I’d love to get some music done if I can.
2 screens of the wreck and 1 screen of the overworld map. the game resolution is tiny (minimal even). ignore the numbers. numbers will be replaced with wisecracks
This entry was posted on Saturday, April 27th, 2013 at 5:55 pm and is filed under LD #26. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
New gaem
So here is the new one I been working on, it’s a maze game combined with a ryrthm game. Pretty sure I’ll finish this one~
Well that’s all for today
Stumbled a bunch last night with Game Engines and Debuggers, but things are looking better this morning. I’ve verified that I can build to a webserver, and the app will run on IE, Firefox, Chrome and Safari to some extent or another.
IE Spams some stuff about a Audio file. Not worrying about that now.
Here’s the screen shot:
First Screen Shot from NeuronFire’s LD26 compo entry.
NF
I’ve got the core engine sorted now. Controls, collision, and the UI is now in place.
The textures, normal maps, models, and maps are working and no longer place holder!
I think I’ve had enough for one day! Busy day tomorrow 
This entry was posted on Saturday, April 27th, 2013 at 5:58 pm and is filed under LD #26. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
I’m back from break and I’m ready to get moving. Took a little bit and wrote up a to do list, and made some progress, albeit it didn’t take much.
i have quite a few things i need to learn still, so i’m going to declare resources (since i must if i’m going to work in the compo with pre-built code, and since i don’t know how to do half the things i need to so some code *will* be pre-built)
going to use the cel-shading example listed in this: http://yal.cc/gamemaker-3rd-person-camera-in-3d/
going to use my march 1gam “game” for the engine (base 3D movement/look code), so here’s the source for it: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40870733/gamemaker/march.gmz
and going to use this bones example since i’m going to need it for motion: http://yal.cc/gamemaker-basic-3d-bone-animations/
thanks yal
using GameMaker:Studio, BFXR (for both SFX and sampling), Schism Tracker (my personal favorite music program), probably WinLAME (for Schism), and possibly Paint Tool SAI (if i need to draw anything complex)
just finished my first prototype with the primary game mechanic, might be a fun game
Less than what should have been possible, but I am getting there:
Hi,
Even though minimalistic wasn’t my favorite theme, I found a nice idea for it and that is what I’m working no.
I am pretty happy about still doing something for the game
I interpreted the theme that way:
But who wants to read text, here is the Screenshot you’re waiting for:
And my ToDo-list:
But I hope I can do this stuff tomorrow but now: Good night!
Helco
Whelp, 18 hours in and I’ve got most of the basic gameplay done:
Polished up the graphics a bit, gave the character a few poses, added a tiltle screen, stuff like that.
Still to do: Game over/completion stuffs, sex up the UI, add music, do a bit of world building – “Who is this man? Why is he happy that you are destroying his blocks?”.
I’d like to add some more features to the gameplay too… just not sure what :S
Dexter
It’s been a long-ish day (feels kinda normal to me, sat at my computer all day…) and I’ve discovered that Twitch stopped streaming after about 10 hours (?) – But hey, I’ve been saving locally too. Also, I’ve never made a level before that’s as big as 4096×2048!
So far, this is what I’ve got to show you all as my 12 hour progress update (it’s more like 14 hours, but I’ve had breaks in between)
TODO:
You can play the current version I’m working on here:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/36378797/LD/minimalism_wip.exe
I spent the morning making photographs with a pinhole lens to use in my game. I have 20 photographs to work with, and it wouldn’t be hard to go and get more.
Now I will be starting a live stream to process the bulk of the photos and begin to create a game. I have all of the game systems in mind It will just be a race against the clock.
Feel free to tune in at http://www.twitch.tv/ythmevge or find it in the widget on the right.
I’m proud to present you the result of over 15 hours of hard work:
The Mission
Ta-dah!
Yeah, I know, it’s really bare bones (at least I’m getting the theme right, I guess). I sincerely hoped to get more stuff done in 15 hours. I’m kinda behind on a few things, most importantly the script! But at least the basic engine works well.
(I’m still wondering why some buttons have white font and others don’t)
My biggest waste of time was trying to do drawings with the mouse in GIMP. I probably lost a couple of hours on that alone. I was messing around, trying to make a good image, but that didn’t work as I wanted. I dropped everything in the bin and started from scratch with Inkscape. First time using it, and I’m already in love! Easy to use and extremely powerful.
I ditched the initial “save the princess” theme for something probably more misterious: a secret agent story. I won’t spoil the story much but I’ll tell that I have a few interesting ideas to put on paper.
In my last update I talked about making a different image for each choice made. I’m sincerely not sure I’ll be able to do that, especially considering I still have the whole script to do (though that won’t take much, couple of hours tops).
Aside from that, everything went rather smoothly. No major bug encountered (still). The good news is that, differently from what I predicted, I’ll probably be able to drop a (kinda) finished game before the 48 hours end. It won’t be as good and pretty as I hoped but still, it’s at least something in the plate.
Other goodies: I worked on music to detach from coding a bit and make my brain breath a little, and it came out rather cool sounding. I love synth1, that stuff really is golden (and it’s free! It feels like jackpot).
This is a screenshot of my desktop at the end of the day.
FreePlane really saved my life, it is a godsend for organizing stuff out. Highly reccomended.
Ok that’s enough for today. Now a Saturday evening out and some sleep and tomorrow we’ll start again at 6AM (ugh). Good luck to everyone!
Not much, but it serves it’s purpose :3
And yes, yes my e key is fallen off..
Another small Update 😀
This has to be the 3rd time I planned on entering the Ludum Dare, and it was going really well!
Then everything ballsed up and I realized how difficult my concept actually was and what it would require.
It turns out I know very little about vector calculus.
Well good luck to you all still competing and I’ll be here again next time!
I’m out!
I’ve got some good progress coming along for my little game. The next step will be to implement collision with the world and jumping. Then POLISH. And then add a potato.
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=7081
To everyone that is doing Ludum Dare right now
Hello haha not much to report after one day because I have been working on music. However the Game Mechanics are coming along nicely. Currently there is a chest that unlocks stuff…
I think I’ll take a break now, but first a screenshot of the title screen:
This also reveals the name of the game, so you’re getting two for the price (screenshot) of one! The mechanics are all coded and working, art is done, it’s possible to lose, and I’m happy with it so far!
After a break, I’ll finish the ending screen and win condition, and tweak the gameplay a little.
Tags: meat, screenshot, update
http://twitch.tv/ifred_qc
This is becoming something! First LD48 where the game idea comes as soon as the theme is announced, so I was able to crunch a lot of the game’s mechanics in!
The idea so far: You’re a guy who has telekinetic powers and some organisation imprisoned you in their facility. Use your powers to escape.
So far, basic telekinesis is done, so is healing and levitate. Now only pyrokinesis and cryokinesis are missing.
Come see my progress!
Plants are now growing and soon beautiful flowers will pop.:)
a few more sprites. nothing dramatic
http://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/12239448/LD26%20-%20enginedemo/index.html
Simple isometric engine + rail physics ft. ghosts
I should really get to coding the actual game part, but the engine is so much of it. Track graphics are temporary and will be replaced with isometric tiles once I set up an automation system in blender. Going fine so far!
We (@urahziel and me) are joining the Jam.
Tech will be in C#, using DirectX and my private “Engine” 😀
It will be a minimalistic space game. I would love to tell you more, but I am a bit in a hurry due to the late start.
Here’s a playable demo of what I’ve made today: http://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/23027068/ld48_day1/index.html
Controls: Minimalistic! Space and only space. Tap to move, hold to rotate, hold longer to shoot. Kill the “zombies” and avoid “lava”.
Still not sure if this has any fun potential, the controls are the only original idea, and they’re a bit frustrating.
12 hours have passed since I’ve started working on my LD entry, Gravitas, so I thought it would be time for an update. In Gravitas, your goal is to smash your enemies with a ball that is moves towards you when pressing a button. Pretty minimalistic, right? I found out that writing my own code for collision detection between circles would be too much work, so I started implementing Box2D. When that’s done, I’ll focus on getting some fun gameplay, and after that maybe some sounds and other polish.
Well.. after almost a full days work… I’m here
It looks exactly the same as it did last night… however, menus, and levels, and collisions, and powerups and a whole lot of little things are in place.
Just a couple minor things on those front to clear up tonight…
Hoping that clears the way for a full day of polish and audio tommorow.
Tags: Kitch, screenshot, xna
I almost put my head through a wall yesterday trying to brainstorm an idea for a game that fits the theme and sounded interesting as a final product. I woke up this morning and spent another hour or so remaining frustrated. This whole ordeal is a good reminder that I’m currently a much better programmer than I am a designer. However, I’ve finally stumbled upon an idea that will be easy to implement, fun, and minimal. Horray!
Dammit Jim. I’m a programmer, not a designer!
I’ve wussed out decided that my time would be better spent on ActionScript as opposed to my work-in-progress C++ engine. However, I plan to return next LD will a fully featured C++ 3D engine, and being better well versed with the content tools.
Believe it or not, I hammered out the gameplay mechanics for my first ever puzzle game, then did a Google search for light bending game. Imagine my surprise when I discovered a game quite similar to what I had written down in my notepad, Auditorium. I hope that I can make my game unique enough that I won’t bomb the originality litmus test.
What I’ve got so far: A working prototype. Next milestone includes allowing minor modifications of the gates that modify the direction of the flow, a rough art pass, and the ability to load in levels.
Prototyping-programmer art.
Depending on how I feel, I may bring my twitch stream up later.
Who put those rocks in my garden? Grr…
ok, lets look at what I’ve got:
I have a sphere rolling trough different levels, dodging the collectables (because too many will kill you) and of course dodging cliffs.
sounds easy, is far too difficult. However, it seems that I will keep the sense to a minimum … so my music doesn’t have to be fitting …
you can also see a bit gameplay, music-making and chatting from the last 30min here: http://www.twitch.tv/loyallaughter/b/396501342
Oh, I played Dwarf Fortress the whole day … now my Fortress got from 155 to 75 … I meant 74
pretty funny to look at a fortress collapsing 😀
Hope everyone has managed to make a start on their game, don’t worry though there’s still lots of time!
To wet your appetite, here’s a look at my anti-mime turret game:
I’ve decided to focus on a few things:
– Simple gameplay
– Repetition of colours
– Retro game sounds
So far I’m ironing out any bugs I find and adding a couple of extra features.
The basic game is mostly complete so I will spend the next day adding more levels and some extras.
Have a good night’s sleep! (Remember to spend at least 30 minutes without electronic equipment, it helps you to sleep better!)
My brother had a really good idea for an iOS game a while ago, but I thought I would do something with it.
As you may have seen before, my title screen:
But what does the game actually do? The premise is that there is a clickable area that you click (on iOS it would have been tap) and from there small balls scatter in every direction. Every level has an end goal area that you want at least *one* ball to touch. But as with any game, there are obstacles. Here’s the first level:
Clicking in that circle (the light circle is the only clickable area) sends balls in every direction (circularly) and as you can see some of them bounced off the walls. Clicking in that location allowed me to win on the first try. When the single ball touched the dark gray circle, the level ends and the next level begins.
I was considering giving each level a “par” a la golf, but I don’t really know how I’m going to count score yet.
Any ideas for a name? ScatterGolf? GolfScatter? ExplosionBallGame?
So it begun…
Yay! We finally have a playable demo!
You play as a robot with magnetic hands, right click activates the right hand and left click activates the left hand.
Red atracks blue but repulses red, and the same goes for blue.
You have to use your magnetic powers to traverse the level until the green tunnel at the end.
Play it in Fullscreen please!
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2481618/Build1/Build1.html
Give suggestions if you play it please!
Well, as I said, I’m in! And despite getting a late start (work intersected with the compo), I’ve managed to produce at least /something/ playable. Have a look at http://www.theonelab.com/files/ld48/26-minimalism/.
No working title yet — just using the theme name for now.
Things to add:
– Baddies
– More things to pickup and use
– Additional actions
– More levels
– Some kind of endgame
I got a crap ton of initialization code and it’s probably going to cause problems in the long run. This is probably going to be more apparent when I actually finish adding all the content I want. I would use XML tags for the rooms and whatnot I’m having but I don’t feel like I have time to learn that.
I am not very efficient.
I’m going to sleep now so here’s my third progress report, It’s been 9 hours since the last one.
Well, I’ve made a couple of cutscenes since then:
Also made a song for the title screen, I’m not really happy with it but it will have to do for now:
Other than that I made a couple more rooms and saving and loading works now. So that’s at least one improvement over the last Ludum Dare
So i have been up for more than about 15 hours just coding so i am going for a little break, but then i will come back after about half an hour! haha! But all in all its been a good day, i have got alot done in just 1 day so i am proud of that! Things i have added today:
-Random enemy movement
-different sounds
– main menu and other pages
– 7 different levels
– custom cursor
what i have got planned for either tonight or tomorrow:
– More levels(i’m going to try and bump it up to about 30-35)
-weapons(MAYBE!)
– Different enemy’s with different skills
-more sound’s
And if i have got time left over i will make a crappy game about Potato’s or something! haha!
But like i said it’s been a good day!!
😀
Yes it’s a familiar color scheme, but enjoy some still cryptic game play, I am now trying to create a good tutorial/selfexplaining curve in levels
Oh yeah, there is sound also but it’s bad so i muted it 😛
Right now we have a robot, S.A.M aboard a very rectangular and un-spaceship-like spaceship. But hey, he has a jetpack which you will eventually lose as his functionality becomes minimal.
So it’s been an entire day and my eyes are pretty much dead, probably time to take a break.
Started off with a platformer kind of thing, scrapped that and started over this afternoon with a simple top-down game, and then I got a little bored and started messing about with the colour settings…
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Distinctive…
Grayscale is nice too…
Pretty colours…
Randomly generated levels that just keep being generated as you move down the floors are a nice feature, but I still haven’t really got any idea about an objective. I’ll save as a job for later…
Accidentally deleted about 1/3 my code! Good thing the pseudocode (which was the hard part) was backed up?
After a few hours of work I am now half wishing I had stuck with the plan I had in the middle of the night to make a game full of miniature animals. Then misspell the theme, as minianimalism and see if any one noticed.
Sadly, no tiny animals in the game I am making.
I’m 90% done. Didn’t expect to finish the game so soon, just with one hand (another one broken) and using unity for the first time.
It’s completely minimalistic. Music and sound tomorrow.
Hey all, so I wanted to go ahead and show you one more thing.
Here’s what it looks like as the balls as the are speeding away from the place you clicked.
This is the third level. The green strip accelerates the balls and the gray strip slows them down.
Playable demo of latest progress: 4 levels in! http://www.mhroot.com/applets/LudumDare26/
Many features such as level creator COMING SOON!
So after abandoning our old concept (still online here) we’ve started from scratch and made this.
It’s a Zen garden with square grey divs rocks, and you can move the rake by turning it around one end or the other (but not move it in a straight line). The objective is to circumnavigate the rocks and get to the other side.
This should make for a nice relaxing puzzle game after we’ve added some levels with non-randomly placed rocks. We’ll score the player based on how much distance they needed to traverse to get to the other side. Then we want to make the rake draw pretty waves in the sand.
City/cityscape inspired games might have a lot to draw from his work.