I finally have an idea and decided to keep it as simple as possible. Currently, I’m trying to get the mechanics and controls in working order before I move onto graphics and audio. Audio and graphics will follow the same idea as far as keeping them simple.
Hopefully, I’ll have something to show before the day is over and it’s somewhat enjoyable as far as gameplay goes.
I wanted to make a quick post about my game so far. I have kind of settled with a first person shooter with some evil sharks you must destroy. I might call it something like Shark Attack 9 from Outer Space. I have two sharks so far, one that is just a shark that will go around the map. I might add some guns on his side later. I also have a shark that wheels around on a cannon that will fire at the player. So far I have the basic physics that let the player and the enemies walk around any arbitrary curve. Right now I am just using a sphere for the level, but I might try and create a more interesting shape later. Plus I will try and make it more sea themed or something.
I also created the basic gun for the game. It has a normal shot just by clicking, but by holding down the shot button the orb bullet gets bigger and I will hopefully make it deal more damage. It also has some bounce effect to allow bounce shots
Unfortunately my heart is not into creating this weekend, but I am trying to force myself to put out something. Hopefully I can create something somewhat fun and complete by tomorrow night.
Wow, so glad I just checked the site.
Shark theme sounds awesome. Why couldn’t an actual ludum dare be that cool!
No idea what I’m going to make yet but I think it will be based about sharks getting revenge on the evil, evil people that take part in shark finning.
The sharks are going to have metal fins and jet propulsion.
Small wip:
Shark jam has been tight – ironically – I’ve spent a quarter of the first day of jam laying block wall for a pond. Luckily I’m using LibGDX, Opal, Demina, and whatever random existing code makes sense. Opal is really making the process faster than I’d expect.
Main menu (title is a working title) – everything except the title and background move (the fish buttons wobble and the seaweed waves back and forth):
For the time being I’m referring to the project as “Pistris” which is apparently one of the ‘two thousand’ latin words that can mean shark. I chose it because it’s cuter and more feminine sounding than anything else I found.
Pistris is an adorable anthromorphic Lemurian shark-girl exploring her abandoned home-land that she’s never seen. Shoggoths and Old-ones to be found.
At this point it’s mostly about testing that the code I’ve written works and creating/finding the graphics and sound to make it all happen (main character is about 75%) while filling in the puzzles and implementing the bosses.
Target quota is for 4 or 5 regular enemies, 3 bosses and 8 maps, 4 of which have puzzles and the other three are for exploration (yes I said 3 – not 4 – that means 1 secret level hiding around). Trying to make the puzzles have multiple solutions where possible (ie you can grab the invincibility Starfish and just ram through the hopeless gauntlet or you can find the Quad-Damage and just gun your way through – similar though different ways to get to through a “you’re screwed” situation.
In research I’ve learned that apparently no one has ever drawn a Shoggoth in its’ home environment (which would be underwater).
The biggest time sync so far ended up being screen-filters tied to area triggers which I’ve stripped out and replaced with a much simpler approach that should still allow for a fair bit of dramatic flare as you navigate the underwater corridors.
Had a great first day, here is a screenshot of what I got so far:
click for animation.
Good luck to everyone throughout the rest of the weekend!
As I am pretty sure I will not have time to work on improving my entry during Sunday, I have decided to post it, as it is relatively complete, if quite bland…
I participated in the 0h jam by making a game where you collect blue squares while avoiding red rectangles.
Here is the timelapse: 0h Jam Timelapse
I’m going to go catch up on sleep now so that I can finish my Shark game! Night 😀
Just finished it. I hope you all enjoy this game. Any feedback or comment would be highly appreciated. Thanks ^-^
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-46/?action=preview&uid=26150
Today is my birthday!
OK, this is going to be tricky. But I can do it, right ? I had to start everything from scratch twice now. I got some parts of the game working, but I really need to improve graphics and do some music. I think I’ll do everything with my voice, I don’t have time or talent at all to do stuff on any software. Anyways, I still don’t have a name for Sharkie and I went a little bit crazy last night. I’ll be glad to sleep, tonight.
Love you all, keep doing awesome games.
For a long time I’ve had plans to create a game engine entirely based on cellular automata which is universally applicable to different game genres. Somehow I never got round to it, until now.
Cellular automata (aka cellular spaces or CA) are found in various games. For example, games like the powder game and sand physics games can be built using CA. It can also be used for simple fire and water physics, as is for example found in Minecraft.
There have been several attempts at CA game engines that I know of. There is Rocks ‘n Diamonds, which is a sort of ultimate Boulderdash clone where you can define your own rules, Hacktile, which is probably the closest to what I want, but is very old and seems to have been abandoned, and the recent Puzzlescript, which looks like a promising project, but not targeted toward action games.
I created my own CA engine called CellSpace, which is just now in a state that you can actually define a complete game with it. It still has many limitations, but in the spirit of “release early, release often” I released a first version with a tutorial and two example games.
Candy Cane Dash, a Boulderdash-like game with some interesting game mechanics written in CellSpace
As an example of how it works, here’s how you specify falling and rolling boulders, Boulderdash-style:
The 3×3 grids represent 3×3 tile areas on the screen. Left is the pattern that it tries to find on the screen, and right is the pattern it rewrites to when it matches the pattern on the left. Black squares indicate “don’t care” values, grey ones indicate an “empty space” tile, and the boulders represent “boulder” tiles.
At this stage, you can define a game using a textual language called CellScript. I’m still experimenting with the engine’s expressive power vs ease of use, but I already found the current version enables easy creation of various interesting game mechanics. Ideal for whipping up a prototype of an original puzzle/action game.
Check out the CellSpace engine, including two examples and a tutorial.
OK… now I have this little idea involving fish and CA style water physics, so let’s see if I still have time to create a shark game for MiniLD #46 with this engine!
Hey, I’m jefery5678… I’m sort of new to this whole Ludum Dare thing… anyways, I submited my game, UFO: THE SEARCH FOR COWS to the October Challenge 4. The site that I posted it on is called Game Jolt (http://gamejolt.com/). Technicallyall of the games on Game Jolt are free to play, but the site owner gives every developer 1/3 of the profit he makes off of the adds on my page. So far, on jst UFO: THE SEARCH FOR COWS I have successfully made 5 cents… (I submitted my October game on the 8th) Through Game Jolt, ever since I signed up in like April or March of this year, I have made a successful dollar off of all my games combined… the thing is, my games to have many views/comments/downloads/ratings as these other games on Game Jolt that people get a couple hundred – maybe a thousand bucks off of a game that doesn’t even cost money for people to play… so I just wanted to share this with the community because it’s just another way that indie game devs can make money (very slowly, but still money). So go make an account on Game Jolt.
I’m kinda late but… I was messing a bit with Unity3D and 2D Toolkit, and decided to do something simple for this jam, while I learn it.
Will I be able to complete a game? I hope so. Anyway, my tools will be Unity 3D, 2D Toolkit, Paint.net, Inkscape, and anything I can use to make sound, if there’s enough time. Wish me luck!
Even though this was a mini-LD, this is definitely my best game so far! I proudly present my work:
In Shark Hunt, you are a shark who hunts fish. You must avoid starving, while avoiding extinction by the fishermen who hunt fish and sharks with harpoons! You can slow the extinction by tearing apart the boats, which your shark comrades will help you with.
At the end you get some stats, a score, and a rank. Play it and let me know what you get! http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-46/?action=preview&uid=15753
I just finished my mini LD #46 submission “Bloodshark”.
I was a blast to make and hopefully ya’ll have fun playing it!
Here are some things I wanted to add but didn’t have enough time to add:
Unlockable sharks
Cruise ships that could crash and spill lots of people into the waters
Giant Turtles
Giant Crabs
Shark Hunters that tossed electrical traps into the water
Oil rigs that could spill oil everywhere
I tried to fit as much in as I could, next time I’ll work on some time management.
I finished Shumping as part of a continued foray into the world of learning Unity. Here is my entry page.
There are two central mechanics in addition to the standard platforming ones. The first is that your character can stand on water and pressing down (or x) allows them to jump downwards. The second is that going through portals changes the rules so you can now fall through water and jump about two times as high.
There are a lot of things I would like to add and change, such as the “please kill me” design of the main character and almost complete absence of sound, but of course this is how a 48-hour game works. It’s a concept I wouldn’t mind returning to in a less rushed manner as I could see some interesting platforming being made with it.
That’s what I could do with the few hours between deciding to join and now. It was fun, I learnt a lot, and got some experience with Unity3D and 2D Toolkit. As an unexpected extra, also discovered cgMusic for procedural music generation. As an extra, it’s my first time doing everything alone on a jam. Oh god, how I appreciate artists a lot more, now.
That was fun! I can’t wait for the next time! You can play Swim for your Life here.
Entry link: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-46/?action=preview&uid=21137
This is my second LD entry, and I can’t say I’m dissappointed with the result. In the end I massively ran out of time, and finished it literally last minute, so a lot of planned features where missing. But at least it’s a somewhat complete product. Just like last time I spent way too much time on polishing and graphics, and because of that I didn’t have a concrete gameplay idea until +- 36 hours in.
Despite the stress at the end it was still an enjoyable experience building this silly game. Can’t wait till December 13th!
I was too tired last night to write anything, here is my game:
Click me to play!
The premise is that you’re a shark that has been finned. Shark meat is pretty much worthless, however shark fins are worth a lot. So certain fishermen catch sharks, cut the valuable fins off, then throw the still living shark into the sea where it can’t swim. It dies.
Sharkorghini was victim to such an atrocity. However he was saved and given fins and a turbo engine to get his revenge.
The game didn’t get as far as I would have liked. It is currently an endless runner. Don’t hit the mines, eat boats.
After each wave of mines you’ll speed up. I didn’t have time to add in-game ui.
Nevertheless it was fun. Also it is the first ludum dare game that I’ve put a menu on.
Sharks was an awesome theme. Hopefully December’s ludum dare comes close.
It’s already in the description but I’ll write it here as well : basically, I took part in the Art Game WeekEnd this weekend (we made this : https://vine.co/v/hjg2Te7a1we), but I really wanted to take part in this jam too because SHARKS. When I came back home , I saw the deadline was smoother than expected and that I still had 3 hours to make something. So here you go.
GOD I AM SO TIRED. FAK.
Sharkinacho in space!!!!!1
I’ve spend all night coding this game, and at last, here it is. Let me introduce you to Sharkinacho!
It has been an incredible experience. I’ve been struggling for hours, but, I had a lot of fun, and I’ll do whatever I can to take part in the Ludum Dare which will occur in December.
I’ll later on post a What went good/What went wrong about the game making process, I’m just waiting for some feedbacks from the game… and some well deserved sleep.
I love you all, I can’t wait to play your games.
Zephyr Raine.
Tags: Sharkinacho