You can shoot aliens now. Since the graphics is retro style, I decided to explode the alien’s large pixels (I draw aliens using large zoom tool in Gimp, and then I enlarge the image 5x without any interpolation). I wrote a custom particle manager code and use built in tweening in libGDX to send each piece in a random direction away from center.

You may notice that there is no you on the screen. This is on purpose. In case you did not realize yet, this is a first person shooter. ROFL. Well, at least technically, it is. You don’t get to see yourself, you only shoot at enemies. In some test version I also tried to scale the aliens to give a feeling of depth and them coming from far away, but it’s hard to shoot small sprites on Android using your finger, so I gave up on the idea.

To make the game more interesting, the laser gun you’re using would need reloading. You got 10 shots and then you need to hit the Reload button at lower left corner of the screen. I’m still not sure about this feature – needs testing.

As I was testing this, one thing bothered me a lot: While I shoot the aliens, my index finger is all over the screen and it’s hard to see what’s going on. Then I looked at different Android games on my phone and realized that it would be much better if screen was oriented in portrait mode. When in portrait mode, your index finger does not come from below, but from right side (if you’re right-handed, of course). Most of the screen is still visible in this case. I’m also changing the flying direction. Instead of going from left to right, aliens are coming from the top of the screen.

Because of this, I’m also changing the main game concept. Instead of playing a fixed amount of time, you would play until you allow one of the aliens to get past you. My initial idea was that you would play for one minute and score as many points possible during that time (something like fruit ninja arcade mode). But now I’m thinking you could have 3 lives or something like that, and if you let some aliens pass, it’s game over.

I also changed the nebulas in the background. I wrote before about that tutorial how to draw a night sky with stars and nebulas in Gimp, but I had to experiment a bit to get the look I wanted. It works by using Subtract layer effect on two layers with rendered Solid Noise, and then colored using Overlay with a single color and a gradient. The problem is that Subtracting those two layers always created a “small” nebula, while I wanted the whole screen to be full with color. I draw the stars by placing a bunch of random dots using pencil and a couple of different colors. I separated the stars in 3 layers. On one of the layers I added a 2px drop shadow (with no offset), on second one I used blur and I left the third one as it is. The trick to nice stars is that those drawn close to each other should always be different color or have different sharpness. This is the way it is on the real sky. The stars that look close together are lightyears away and only appear close from Earth.

(Copied from my blog)

Hey everyone,

I created itch.io, the indie game marketplace. It’s kinda like Steam but there’s no client and it’s completely open. Anyone can start selling a game immediately from anywhere in the world. People buying your game can pay what they want above a minimum price too. Traditionally itch.io has taken a 10% cut of all transactions to pay for itself, but in celebration of the October Challenge itch.io will be taking no money. That means you get all the features of itch.io and you get to keep most of your profit. I say most because the payment provider (Amazon/PayPal) still takes their cut. If there was a way to disable that I would :).

If you’ve never seen itch.io before I suggest you check out the developers page to see what it’s all about. Some of the features it provides are free file hosting, game landing page designer, download and purchase analytics, Flash/Unity/jar support and the ability to host your own indie game sale. If you’ve created a game then you can use itch.io to quickly create a webpage for it where people can buy it (or you can give it away for free!). If you’ve ever seen Bandcamp before then you can think of itch.io as the same idea but applied to indie games.

Thanks!

P.S. I’m always working on itch.io and adding new features, if you’re interested in updates then you can follow the site on twitter: @itchio

Tags: itchio

This is it! I am entering for the first time. The October Challenge gave me the extra motivational boost I needed!

My game will be a roguelike-like/strategy/sim game where you manage your medieval kingdom. The game will be played from a side on perspective versus the traditional top down used by strategy and sim games.

I will be building the game with my own engine Gloves which is built on top of the fantastic Love2D and Lua.

(Copied from my blog, www.photongamedev.wordpress.com):

Definitely missed a couple days of updates, but I’m back. Don’t worry, I haven’t given up!

So I’m finally getting to the point where I’ve started some actual work on the game; not much, but I’ve finally pulled all the resources for my old Pixel Ninja off my old computer and onto my new computer. I did some level sketches and I’m fascinated with some of the possibilities I can implement with this “reset” function. In general, the player can put himself in positions and even let himself get trapped in pursuit of completing a level, and then hit reset to throw everything back at default. Some levels will probably be designed to make the player do just that. At the same time, as I highlighted previously in another post, the reset itself may cause the player to trap himself. Be careful!

In other news, I’m going to use some Pixel Ninja assets at least initially, but I’m debating on whether or not I’m going to just go with a whole new theme and look this time around. It’ll depend on how involved I want to get with the graphics, as I’m not terribly strong in it and I may be getting busy here soon with life. We’ll see. At any rate, I’m not losing much time even I decide to switch, since I already have some assets ready to go and drawing any new ones for this particular art style isn’t too heavily involved.

So I’m excited! Stay tuned for more updates!

I’m looking for a new title for the game. Got one, but need to research more to see if it’s available: STAR DUST. I tried some fonts and I think I’ll use the one called Ruslan Display.

I polished the algorithm for alien explosions today. I’m also thinking how will the enemy waves look like. There would be 10 waves of enemies, and then a boss and after that the game would speed up a little bit and some new enemies would be introduced. At each tenth level (10,20,30…) there would be a new, unique boss. This algorithm would repeat until player dies. The speed would be capped at 2x starting speed as it seems to me that takes a lot of effort to play if you want to destroy all aliens.

And then, there will be powerups. Here are current ideas:

Time limited, collectible during game:

• shield (sits at bottom of the screen, protects against one alien going through)
• score multiplier boost (x2)
• rapid fire (just hold your finger down and move around)
• mega bomb (destroy all aliens on screen)
• hyperdrive (skip 10 waves of enemies, but gain points as if you destroyed them)
• gallactic ninja (cut enemies with a jedi sword – fruit ninja style)
• auto reload (auto reload lasers)
• spread fire (fire 3 or 4 lasers at the same time)
• extra life (start game with 4 lives)

Permanent, can be upgraded between plays:

• rapid fire duration
• shield duration
• galactic ninja duration
• auto reload duration

There are two sides to what Stargazing is for me: on one hand it is something of an educational toy presenting a genuine layout of stars and constellations to play at identifying; but it has always also carried with it a story. This is something I want to preserve and build on in this extended version.

The first “stage” in Stargazing, introducing the concept and story

This would be somewhat unfair without giving the player a way of knowing what constellations might be available in this particular part of the sky so I am hoping, if I can fit it in, to include some sort of celestial atlas screen for reference, roughly depicting constellations as they were classically envisaged.

There are only three weeks of work left to complete this challenge and there is undoubtedly a lot still to do here. This week’s focus will be on more content – I have the “stages” planned out there just needs to be a bit of tedious work translating these into the game. I’m absolutely itching to give the game a visual makeover too and hopefully I can get into that quite soon.

I have chosen that the game I’m writing (which I will reveal more of coming soon) will feature a multiplayer option. I’m going to use a UDP server/client setup and its going to relay instructions in XML (if i can find a way to make this work without trouble), also note this will not be the first multiplayer game I’ve made.

Now that I know my goals, I can start coding seriously. The game, CELLVENTURE will be a 2D adventure game, where you have to evolve a cell in order to survive. It can also be associated with an 2D SPORE, but without the freedom to make your own custom cell.

I currently have 7 diferent species, but I am planning more in the game. There are two major branches, one where you cell is like a snake and one that looks like an octopus that will shrink its tentacles and become a bipedal creature.

The majority of the in-game time will be spent in some sort of liquid. I think that will some sort of goo made in a laboratory that grows by drinking water from lakes.

I am quite in a bad mood when I think of time, because I have a lot of homework.

If I will have enough time, I think I will implement multiplayer too.

P.S. Sorry if I have grammar mistakes – english is not my language

I’ve slowed down a little recently, but every thing is still moving forward! There are still somethings that must be done to complete the game (main menu, score, lose condition, sound effects, music fading in and out…), but the engine is almost “complete”! Though it’s far from finished…

Here’s a image of a test I’ve just made:

I disabled collision until there were more than a thousand sprites on the screen (every one moving around). It run, on 30 FPS, with no problems ranging from 16% to 24% CPU* usage (more or less… it floated a lot more, but that was the mean I noticed). Then, when I enabled collision once again… over 90% CPU usage. xD Colliding every sprite with each other was really stupid… but when most of them weren’t active, it run smoothly once again! (even with more than a thousand sprites on memory)

Well, I’ll implement collision using a quad-tree eventually, but I’ll try yo finish the game before! And then I want to do another game for the October challenge using this engine! (this game isn’t something that would sell…)

Now, back to work…

*Two notes here:

• My computer is an AMD Athlon 64 TF-20 (1.6GHz), so I found this result quite great! I can only imagine it running on a better computer (and at 60 FPS).
• All those 11 threads weren’t explicitly instantiated by me. Before I added the audio sub system, there were 4 threads: the main one, one for the SDL Timer, and another two for who knows what (something related with graphics, since I’m also using OpenGL and the glew lib). Every other thread was created after the audio sub system began running. So, except for using something I don’t completely understand, I’m not doing any crazy stuff with 11 threads! xD

(Copied from my blog: www.photongamedev.wordpress.com)

……

Oh, what’s that? Oh right, there’s another game I should be talking about other than Mighty No. 9. Or maybe not. Well, anyway…

Actually, I’m feeling a bit more motivated (slightly because of the latter; see my tactly entitled post “?!?!?!”). I got a rough version of the reset power working today. With Stencyl, it’s pretty easy to get what I’m going for by using scene reloads and then properly accounting for the new player position. I’ll have to think about non-resettable key items later as well. I’ll probably work on fine-tuning some physics-related parts of the game before I progress too much farther on actual level building, of course.

So yeah, progress. So… can I go back to posting about Mighty No. 9 now? Haha…

Heya guys! I recently dove into python with a few education sources, and found myself beginning to love the language and the pygame library too! I found this website by pure chance, and whaddya know? The October challenge was only 2 hours old at that time and seemed like a cool way to expand my knowledge and get the encouragement, motivation and support that I knew I would need, So here we are just over a week into October, and I am more motivated than ever to learn the language. Being knew to word-press too, I figured I would take the time out to type up a little about what I aim for.

Some of my favourite games have a few common traits. The Binding of Isaac, Nethack, and various other Roguelikes of which I have countless games all appeal to me because they are different each time I play them. I like the random nature of them but the complexity can be off-putting. BoI however does away with much of the complexity in favour of fluidity, so something in the same vein ( I would like to think) would be kind of fun.

Another favourite of mine is the stalkers series. The gritty survival horror and post apocalyptic story and art-style are awesome, keeping track of food and ammo makes things interesting, and the feeling of satisfaction when a little planning around what you take with you while exploring and playing it safe pulls you out of a tight situation is one of my favourite elements of gameplay. SO

I’m gonna try and converge the two ideas. 2d survival, inventory management, and a little bit of randomisation, all with gritty Russians, AK’s and Vodka.  This would definitely have been too ambitious for a regular LD event. Its probably too ambitious for the October Challenge. It sure as HELL is too ambitious for me. You know what? I’m gonna do it anyway! I figure the higher I set the bar, the more Inclined I will be to reach it. Even if I don’t finish it, I figure I’ll have something playable by the end anyway. To all fellow LD October challenge participants I wish good luck, and hope that they wish luck upon me.

Greetings hard-working game people!

I know your all working on the October Challenge, but I just wanted to give some news.

The Arbitrary Game Jam is beginning its’ 3rd contest in 2 days, and all are welcome!

Its a more laid back game jam with looser deadlines and submission rules than Ludum Dare, but the core idea is the same: Finish a game. If you are itchin’ to participate in a game jam, or if you want to brush up on your skills as a game maker, come check it out.

Looks like I’ll have a hard time classifing this game when I talk to people. I could say it’s a “retro arcade”. Although, it differs from retro arcades where you move your ship around and it fires bullets straight. Here your position is static, and gun fires wherever you tell it to. Come to think of it, I’ve never seen a game that plays exacly like this, so don’t try to classify it in some existing genre. The closest I got was “it’s like Space Invaders, but without a ship”. This got people completely confused.

Today I reworked the alien spawning code. I also redraw all the aliens in white color, so that I can change color at runtime using the same sprite. In case you didn’t notice, aliens are single-color. I’m thinking to leave it this way, except for bosses. Maybe just add some glow animation or something like that. Who knows, maybe some artist will see a potential this game has and create some cool graphics. Feel free to contact me about this.

I’m thinking there could be an event in the game when enemies would “upgrade” to better graphics. Accompanied with a message “Aliens have evolved”, which would bring in some metallic look and feel, for example.

Explosion code is also unified, so now I just supply a 2D array of “pixels” and enemies get blown to pieces. This has been working for some time, but now I got that code clean and universally usable for any kind of alien. Except maybe bosses, which might fall apart in stages. I still need to ponder on that one.

Anyway, if you’re interested in playing, here’s an .apk file of what I’ve done so far. Features are obviously missing, but you can see what I’m up to.

That’s how we are doing our levels, and we plan to insert it in the final game, with the possibility to share levels and even connect them with doors:

Don’t forget to vote us on greenlight 😉

Hey,

It’s time for some challenge ? I think it’s a good excuse to make my ludum dare 26 better, and to finish it! I started on the first of October, I just didn’t write a post.
My game is a shoot’em up, I’m still in reflexion for the gameplay, but I’m also working of fixing some bugs there were in the project. Now the sprites are drawing correctly, I clarified some code, and added persistance for the bullets , so they’ll still exist when the enemy die.
I’m also adding a gamepad support ( That’s weird to play my own game with a controller ^^ ), but it’s a lot of work to rethink the movements, and to implement them without bugs.

I still have performance issues, it becomes laggy when there is more than 40 bullets on the screen, and I have absolutely no idea why…

By the way, I’m pleased to to this, and I hope I’ll finish in time, even if I have work to do for school and stuffs. *fingers crossed*

More informations soon, stay tuned!

Oh, and you can also check my blog: here

We just published two article here in Ludum Dare blog and the homepage of my android game that is coming soon went crazy.

The october stats of my website are these:

They are strange, for so many clicks I should have at last one +1 on one social network, but nothing. So I think it’s spam? So many? O.O
It all started on October and seems so strange to me.

Any analytic here? What do you think?

A real next TreeVolve update is coming soon, I’m working very hard to add a premium feature and some banner for free users that will not hurt the gameplay.

I will just remember anyone my social networks if you want to support our project:

Contatti GetFun

E-mail: info@getfun.it
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/getfunIndie
Twitter: https://twitter.com/getfunindie
Google+: https://plus.google.com/100386666059538322642
YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbGttWmqa38CG-WO796hjMg

(Copied from my blog: www.photongamedev.wordpress.com)

Today’s progress:

I plopped down a quick little test level for my ninja to run around in and started tweaking collision and physics stuff. The challenge is to kind of give this sensation of floating that a ninja might experience while keeping the actual handling clean and crisp. I’m thinking I’m just about there. I’ve got gravity about where I want it in terms of force and I think its just a matter of giving the ninja’s personal forces like walking a little extra “crispness”.

Either way, I think I can begin actually laying out the levels here soon in Stencyl. Exciting! Chugging along at a small pace perhaps, but I’m moving. I’m thinking I’m going to stick with this art style now too, as I will probably focus more on game coding this time around and, again, I need to be conscious of the timeframe allotted for the challenge.

Hello everyone. I’m the guy that made that pretty mediocre, but kind of funny little 2d stealth game Going in for Seconds for the last Ludum Dare.

Well I made a game that is completely different (and hopefully much better) for the Indie Speed Run! Unfortunately, that 48 hour competition is not as awesome as Ludum Dare, and does not provide a way for people to give feedback.

This game is a 3d horror-adventure game about bad habits and circus acrobats. The game play is similar to Slender with some extra elements and story (and some 48 hour cutbacks).

I am planning on creating a game for the horror themed Asylum Dare this weekend and would love some feedback on this game (and maybe after combine elements from both games to try and fullfill the October challenge).

My game, Cirque du Accro, can be played here on the escapist. I would love some feedback before the next event this weekend, and if you want to rate the game that would be awesome too (maybe get my one dollar from being a finalist in that competition). Thanks everyone!

Hello All!

Here’s a quick update on my October Challenge progress with Sky Hawks.  I’m getting close to finishing this up. I’ve decided to release this game, with a few levels on Kongregate. I originally aimed for PC/iPad etc. It’s probably better to focus on one area for now. Kongregate is the easiest, and requires the least amount of tweaking to get this to a polish state. Hopefully I can get enough people to play the game to equal a dollar.

New Boss: I’ve been creating a second boss for the rail yard area of the game.

New Enemies: I’ve added a second air enemy to the rail yard area. The Mig 27 fires two bullets, and features a new zig zag pattern.

I also added a turret that shoots missiles that follow the player.

Screens: I continue to play with the UI component of the game. I added a mission briefing screen before the start of each new mission. This gave the game a more complete feel.

I’m having doubts whether the current concept is fun enough to play longer. Maybe it would be better if aliens would move left and right as well. I implemented that now for two new attack formations and it looks and feels much better. I also added the camera shake code when you hit an alien and it explodes. The game feels more alive now. The reload button works, so now you can empty your 10-bullet clip and have to reload. Makes the gameplay more interesting as you have to break from shooting spree to reload the gun. I replaced the ugly magenta color of some aliens with cold, whiteish blue. It looks much better.

I’m thinking maybe it would be better if player could only touch the lower part of the screen – area within his shield. This way the upper part would always be visible – not hidden underneath player’s finger as it happens often now. Maybe if shield is half screen size at start and as enemies hit it, it reduces until the gun is naked and vunerable. Although, this would mean having to draw a gun as well. Probably not a bad idea though, I might try this.

Star Dust name is taken, I tried some 20+ others, but it seems that it’s really hard to find a free name, as there are many space-theme games.

(copied from my blog)